University of Virginia Library

1. I.

No matter how ingeniously probabilities may be woven,
how cunning are plots, or effective situations, the fictitious
narrative has rarely the attractive interest of a simple statement
of facts; and every one seems to have that quick instinct which
detects the most elaborate imitations of truth, so that all the
skill of the novelist fails to win a single tribute not due merely
to his art. I cannot tell what I might be tempted to essay if
I possessed more imagination or fancy, but with a brain so
unfruitful of invention, and a heart bound as with spells to the
past, I should find myself, even if attempting a flight in the
realms of fancy, but recalling some half forgotten experience,
and making Puck or Titania discourse after the manner of our
landlord at the Clovernook Hotel, or the young women whose
histories I began to mark when we were girls together in the
district school.

It is, perhaps, seven or eight years ago—ah me, how soon
we grow old enough to look back to seven, and eight, and ten
years, as to yesterday!—since I went to spend the winter with
my cousins, Delia and Jane Peters. They lived in the neighborhood
of Elm Ridge. It is an obscure and was to me a
lonesome place, though they said they had society enough all
around them; and indeed the village meeting-house and tavern-sign
were within view, and the window lights of Abner Widdleton,
the nearest neighbor, shone across the door-yard.

The happiest occasions, if they bring change with them, are
sad; and I remember that I could not sleep well the night
previous to my setting out, though I had been for weeks talking

of the pleasure I should have in visiting uncle William's family.
The last collar was ruffled, the last strings and hooks and eyes
adjusted, my trunk packed, and my bonnet, with the green veil
pinned fast, laid on the bed, and but a night lay between me
and my little journey. Then it was, when all was ready, that
a sorrowful, half-regretful feeling came over me. I stood at
the window and looked on the way the stage-coach would come
in the morning; watched the cows as they crouched with petty
rifts of snow along their backs, and their faces from the wind;
and the chickens, as they flew into the cherry-tree, cackling
their discomfort as they settled themselves on the smoothly
worn boughs; for it was a blustery night, and these commonplaces
seemed to have in them a solemn import, all because I
was to be a dozen miles away for a few weeks!

A dozen times I said to little Dillie, with whom I slept,
“Are you awake?” before I could sleep. But I was wearied
out at last, and but imperfectly heard the speckled cock telling
his mates of midnight when a blessed wave of oblivion came
between me and Elm Ridge, and I woke not till a hand rested
lightly on my shoulder, and a familiar voice said, “I guess it 's
time.” I needed no second call, but was dressed and waiting
in a few minutes. It did not require much time for breakfast,
I think. There seemed nothing for us to say as we watched
the coming of the coach, while my baggage was carried toward
the gate that I might occasion no detention. A few repetitions
of what had been already said, a few exchanges of smiles that
faded into sighs, and the well-known rumble of the approaching
vehicle arrested our make-believe conversation.

My little baggage was hoisted to the top. I was afraid I
should never see it again. A portly gentleman, having a
round red face and pale blue eyes, reached out one hand—it
was freckled and fat, I remember—to assist me in; “All
ready?” cried the driver, and we were off. I looked back presently,
and saw them all standing just as I had left them, except
little Dillie, who had climbed on the fence, and was gazing
after us very earnestly. The coach jolted and rolled from
side to side, for the road was rough and frozen; and the plethoric
individual, who wore a tightly buttoned brown overcoat,

leaned his double chin on his round hands, which were crossed
over the gold head of a crooked but highly polished walking-stick,
and conversed with the gentleman opposite, in an easy
and complacent way that indicated a state of satisfaction with
the world and with himself. His companion was exceedingly
diminutive, having the delicate hands and feet of a child; a
mouth in which a shilling might scarcely be slipped; a little
long head, bald about the crown, and with thin brown hair
hanging far over his coat-collar, which was glazed with such
contact to the depth of half an inch, as it seemed. I soon
learned their respective homes and avocations: the fat man
proved to be a pork merchant, homeward bound from a profitable
sale; and his little fellow traveller a tailor and small
merchant of one of the western states. “There,” said he,
smiling, and pointing to a huge wagon of several tons burden,
drawn by six stout horses, wearing bells on their collars,
“there goes a little buggy that 's got a budget or two of mine
aboard.”

The fat man smiled, and every one else smiled, as they saw
the six horses straining with all their ability, slowly to drag
along the ponderous load; for the great wagon-body was heaped
and overheaped with bags, bales, and baskets, crocks, cradles,
and calicoes, in fact with all sorts of family and household utensils,
from a plow to a teapot, and with wearing apparel from
buckram and ducks to cambrics and laces.

“Two or three times a year I buy up such a little bunch as
that,” he said; and he smiled again, and so did every body else.

“That bay cretur on the off side,” he resumed, letting down
the window and looking back, “is fallen lame, I believe my
heart. Polly will be as mad as a hornet about it; it 's her riding
nag, d' ye see—that ere bay.” And as long as we could hear
the bells he continued to gaze back, tying a silk handkerchief
over his head as he did so, to protect it from the cold. Whether
the aforesaid Polly was his wife, and, if she was, whether she
was mad as a hornet, are matters of which to this day I am profoundly
ignorant; but I have hoped that if Polly were wife to
the little merchant, she was pacified with a new dress, and that
the poor beast soon got the better of the lameness.

The fat man pointed out all the places in which the hogs he
had just sold had rested of nights, and each time he concluded
with, “Well, they 'll never root any more.” It would be hard
to tell why, but all the coach passengers looked with interest at
the various fields, and woods, and pens, where the drover's
hogs had rested on their fatal journey toward the city. “Just
on this knoll, or that rise,” he would say, “a fat fellow gave
out, and we let him have a ride the rest of the way, or treated
him to a hot bath.” He occupied more than his share of room,
to the very evident annoyance of the woman who was on the
seat with him; for she had much less than half for herself and
her child, a deformed and forlorn-looking little boy of perhaps
six years of age. He was scantily, even meanly dressed, his
bare feet hanging quite below his cotton frock, and his stiff
fur hat so large as to fall over his eyes, which were remarkably
black and large. I could not but notice that the mother, as I
supposed her to be, wrapped her shawl more carefully about
herself than the child, who kept all the time moaning and fretting,
sometimes crying out bitterly. She made no effort to
soothe him, except that she now and then turned his face from
one direction to another. Once or twice she held it close against
her—I thought not fondly, but crushingly—and more than
once or twice she dashed his head against the fat man's side,
partly by way of jostling him, as I thought, and partly to
punish the child for crying. He rubbed his eyes till his little
hands were wet with tears; but never did she warm them in
her bosom or dry them with kisses. Indeed, she seemed no
more concerned than as if she had held on her lap a bundle of
sticks. A sudden cry of evident pain drew all eyes to her.
In one of the dabs at the fat man she had scratched the boy's
face with a pin sticking in his sleeve.

“Poor little beauty!” whispered a pale, lady-like looking
woman to the person beside her, a black-whiskered, well-fed
sort of man: “poor little beauty! I wish I had it.”

“Really, Nelly,” he answered, in a half kind, half mocking
way, “you are benevolent;” and in a lower voice he added,
“considering the circumstances.”

I occupied the middle seat, with the merchant, and she who

had spoken so kindly sat directly behind me, but I turned involuntarily
when I heard her voice, and saw, as I have said,
that she looked pale and delicate, and that she dropped her veil
and blushed at the gentle reproval of her companion.

With this couple sat a rosy-cheeked, middle-aged woman,
who had hitherto kept her lips compressed, but, as it appeared
to me, with difficulty. She now leaned across the lap of the
gentleman, and asked the invalid traveller if she had any children
of her own, and if she was married or single; saying she
wondered she should feel such sympathy for that “ornary child,”
for that nobody but a mother could have the feelings of a mother.
“Now I,” she added, “have left a little one at home—
six months old it was the fourteenth of last month—and I 'm
just fairly crazy, though I have n't been gone a day, as you
may say, for it was three o'clock yesterday when I started;
the baby was asleep then; I expect maybe he cried when he
waked up and missed me, but it seemed necessary for me to
go away. I had to go, in fact, as you may say. Nobody
drove me to be sure, but then we wanted a good many things
about the house that, as you may say, nobody could get but
myself, and I thought I might as well go now as ever. I knew
the baby would be taken good care of by Liddy—that 's my
oldest girl; but it seemed like I could n't get my own consent,
and I went without it at last, as you may say. Do you live in
town?” she inquired; and, without pausing for a reply, continued,
“A body sees a heap of pretty things that a body would
like to have, do n't they, if they only had plenty of money?
This is a tea-pot,” she said, holding up a carefully wrapped
parcel; “it 's a new fashion, they told me; but I think it 's a
new-fashioned old fashion; for I remember, when I was a girl,
we used to have one just a'most like it.” And she kindly tore
off a bit of the envelope, telling the lady she could see the
color, and that she had a set of things in a basket on the top of
the coach, the same color, and the make of the same man, she
supposed. Dear sakes! I hope none of them will get broken,
and won't I be glad to see my baby!” Having settled herself
in her place, she leaned forward again to say, “Just hear that

fat man! he talks about his affairs as if he thought every body
as much interested in them as himself.”

I could not help but smile at her innocent simplicity. How
quick we are to detect the faults of others—how slow to “see
ourselves as others see us.”

“Do you see that old tree with the fork split off and hanging
down?” It was the fat man who asked this question—of
nobody in particular—but every body tried to see, and most
of us did see. “One of my fellows hung himself there last
week. He was well the day before. At supper—we slept at
a tavern not half a mile away—I noticed that he did n't eat,
and seemed down-hearted like; but I did n't say nothing to
him; I wish now I had; and in the morning he could n't be
found, high nor low. Finally, we gave up the search, and got
our drovers started-along later than common. I stopped a bit
after the rest, settling with the landlord, who said to me, in a
joking way like, that he guessed he 'd have to charge me for
his wife's clothes-line; that she said she was as certain as she
was alive that it hung on a particular peg the last night, and
she thought the missing drover knew something about it; he
looked wild out of his eyes, she said. Just that way he spoke
about it; and I laughs at him, mounts my horse, and rides
away. I had just come in sight of the drove when one of my
fellers—that 's the one whose legs you see,” and he pointed to a
pair of muddy boots hanging against the window from the outside
of the coach,—“came toward me running on the full jump,
and told me they had discovered Jake hung on a tree, and
swinging in the wind, stiff as a poker.”

“Good gracious me!” exclaimed the woman with the sick
child, and giving the fat man as much room as possible, “how
did he look, and what did you do with him?”

“Look! he looked like a dead man; and as for doing with
him, we cut him down, and put him under ground by the side
of an old black log.”

“I wish I could see the one that discovered him,” the woman
said, trying to pull down the window; “is he any kin to the
man that hung himself, and had he taken the clothes-line?”

“He had taken the clothes-line, but the landlady on its being

returned to her, said it would bring bad luck to the house, and
so threw it in the fire.”

The poor child was not thrust against him any more; but it
kept crying and moaning, and rubbing its eyes and the scratch
on its face, which smarted as the tears rolled over it.

“What ails your child?” asked the fat man, who seemed
not to have noticed its crying till he turned to answer the
nurse's question.

“Nothing, only he 's ugly and cross,” she answered.

“I guess any of us would feel bad,” said the rosy-cheeked
woman with the new tea-pot, “if our bare feet hung dangling
about like his 'n, to say nothing of that scratch on his face.
Wont you be good enough, sir, to take that pin out of your
sleeve?”

“Certainly, ma'am; I was not aware”—he did n't finish the
sentence to her, for she had leaned across the coach, and was
saying to the pale lady that she never could see what a man
wanted to have pins sticking about him for.

“Naughty pin, was n't it!” said the fat man to the baby,
taking from his sleeve the offending instrument and throwing it
from the window; and he continued, putting the child's feet in
one of his mittens, “Tell him murrur she must wrap him in
her shawl.”

“You need n't look at me,” she replied; “I am not his
mother by a great sight; she 's in a mad-house; they just took
her this morning. It was a dreadful sight—she a raving, and
the children screaming and carrying on at a dreadful rate.
They say she is past all cure, and I s'pose she is. She liked to
have pulled all the hair out of my head when she saw I was
going to take the baby. I am only a distant relation, but it 's
not always near of kin that are the best to orphans. Sit up!”
she exclaimed, giving the child a rough jerk; “do n't lean against
the gentleman as heavy as a bag of mush.” The fat man had
become a lion in her estimation since she learned that one of
his drovers had hanged himself.

“He does n't disturb me in the least,” said he; and taking
off the child's hat, he smoothed its hair with his great hand.

“I guess he is a right nice man,” said the rosy-cheeked woman,

leaning toward her of the pale cheek, who was untying a
fur cape from her neck. “Put it round the little boy, my good
woman,” she said, reaching it toward her.

“Really, Nelly,” said the gentleman beside her, and he
looked at her with evident displeasure.

But the woman returned the cape, saying, “He 's got to take
the world as he can get it; there is no use of wrapping him in
a fine fur cape for an hour.”

“That fellow up there,” said the fat man, “could give
more particulars than I can about the wretched suicide I was
telling of.”

“Wretched what?” inquired the woman.

“The fellow that was so fond of swinging;” and as he spoke
he lifted the child from her knees, unbuttoned his brown coat,
and folded him warmly beneath it, resting his chin on the boy's
hair, informing him that at home he had a little boy just about
his size, and asking him if he would like to go home with him
and be his little boy.

The coach now rattled along at a lively rate, and, soothed by
the warmth and the kindliness of the drover's tone, the poor little
fellow was soon fast asleep.

I noticed that the lady in the corner looked weary; and that
once when she laid her head on the shoulder of the man beside
her, he moved uneasily, as if the weight burdened him, and
that she lifted herself up again, though she seemed scarcely
able to do so.

“That 's my house,” said the rosy-cheeked woman, “right
fernent William Peters's; and I guess I am as glad to get
home as they will be to see me—the dear knows I did n't want
to go. I would have paid anybody, and been very much
obliged to them besides, if they could have done my errands
for me.”

At the gate of her house an obedient-looking man stood in
waiting for her; and as the crockery was handed down, the good-natured
owner gathered her sundry little parcels together;
shook hands with the pale lady, saying she hoped she would
soon get the better of the ill turn she seemed to have; uncovered
the baby's face, and kissed it, dropping a tear on its

clasped hands, as she did so, and saying “Just to think if it
was mine!” I suppose by way of apology for what the world
considers a weakness; and, smiling a sort of benediction on us
all, she descended the side of the coach. I followed, for my
destination was also reached.

“You going to stop here? Well now, if that do n't beat
all! I suppose you are Mr. Peters's niece that I 've heard so
much tell of. And as I am alive, if there aint Delia, just going
away! Poor girl, I guess she leaves her heart behind her.”
This suspicion she imparted in a whisper; and having said I
must come in and see her, she flew rather than walked toward
the house, for Jane was coming to meet her with the baby. I
could only shake hands an instant with my cousin Delia, who
seemed to anticipate little happiness from her journey, as I
judged from tear-blind eyes and quivering lips. I thought she
whispered to her father something about remaining at home,
now that I was come.

“Oh, no, Dillie, I do n't think it 's worth while,” he said;
“she will stay here all winter, and you will be back in a month,
at furthest.”

The companion of the pale lady assisted Delia into the coach
with much gallantry; the driver's whip-lash made a circuit in
the air; the jaded horses sprang forward as though fresh for
the race; and the poor little child, with its bare feet and red
hands, was lost to me forever. May the good Shepherd have
tempered the winds to its needs, and strengthened it against
temptations, in all its career in this hard and so often uncharitable
world