his horse’s.
I have but a hazy recollection of his telling me one day that I was five years old. I had had other birthdays, of course, but this was the first I remember. It was equally, of course, the 21st of December. There was no celebration of the unimportant event. If anybody was glad I was upon the earth, I had no intimation of the fact. I should not mark the anniversary as of any note, now, had not it been fixed in my brain by a present from my father of The New York Reader, a hideous little volume, with stiff covers of straw pasteboard pasted over with blue paper. My father took me upon his knee, and talked to me, seriously and sorrowfully, of my crass ignorance and disinclination to “learn.” I was five years old, and—this low and mournfully, as one might state a fact disgraceful to the family connection—I “did not even know my letters!” The dear mother, who lay sick up-stairs, had tried, over and over, to teach me what every big girl of my age ought to know. He did not believe that his little daughter was a dunce. He hoped that I loved my mother and himself well enough to try to learn how to read out of this nice, new book. Cousin Paulina Carus—a girl of sixteen, at home from school on sick-leave, indefinitely extended—had offered to teach me. He had told her he was sure I would do better than I had done up to this time. He was mortified when people asked him what books I had read, and he had to tell the truth. He did not believe there was another “nice” child in the county, five years old, who did not know her a, b, c’s.
I was wetting his frilled shirt-front with penitential tears long before the sermon was finished. He wiped them with a big silk handkerchief—red, with white spots scattered over the expanse—kissed me, and set me down very gently.
“My little girl will not forget what father has been saying. Think how pleased mother will be when she gets well to find that you can read a chapter in the Bible to her!”
The story went for fact in the family that I set myself zealously about the appointed task of learning the alphabet in consequence of this lecture. I heard it told, times without number, and never contradicted it. It sounded well, and I had a passion for heroinism, on never so small a scale. And grown people should know what they were talking of in asserting that “Virginia made up her mind, the day she was five years old, that she would turn over a new leaf, and be no longer a dunce at her books.” It may be, too, as I now see, that the solemn parental homily (I always dreaded the lecture succeeding a whipping more than the stripes)—it may be, I grant, that something was stirred in my fallow intellect akin to the germination of the “bare grain” under spring showers. If this were true, it was a clear case of what theologians term “unconscious conversion.” Were I to trust to my own judgment, based upon personal reminiscence, I should say that I went to bed one night not—as the phrase goes—“knowing B from a bull’s foot,” and awoke reading. Perhaps Dogberry was nearer right than we think in averring that “reading and writing come by nature.” And that my time was ripe for receiving them.
I had outgrown my dislike of The New York Reader, wearing most of the blue paper off the straw, and loosening not a few of the tiny fibres beneath; I could read, without spelling aloud, the stories that were the jelly to the pill of conning the alphabet and the combinations thereof; the spring had really come at last on the tardy heels of that black winter. The grass was lush and warm under my feet; the sweetbrier and multiflora roses over the Montrose porches were in bloom, and the locust-trees were white with flowers and resonant with the hum of bees, when, one day, as I played in the yard, I heard a weak, sweet voice calling my name.
Looking up, I saw my mother in a white gown, a scarlet shawl wrapped about her shoulders, leaning from her bedroom window and smiling down upon me.
I screamed with ecstasy, jumping up and down, clapping my hands, and crying to my dusky playfellows, Rose and Judy:
“Look! Oh, look! I have a mother again—as well as anybody!”
Close upon the blessed apparition came her championship of her neglected “middle child,” against the impositions of “Mea,” Anne Carus, and a bigger niece of Aunt Smith who was much at the homestead. On a happy forenoon the mother I had received back from the edge of the grave called me to her bedside, for, although convalescent, she did not rise until noon.
Pointing to a covered basket that stood by her bed, she bade me lift the lid. Within, upon white paper, lay a great handful of dried cherries, a sheet of “peach leather,” and four round ginger-cakes, the pattern and taste of which I knew well as the chef d’œuvre of the “sweeties” manufactured by Mam’ Peggy, the Montrose cook.
“I heard that the bigger children had a tea-party last night after you had gone to bed,” she said, smilingly tender. “It isn’t fair that my little daughter should not have her share. So I sent Jane”—her maid—“down for these, and saved them for you.”
No other “goodies” were ever so delicious, but their finest flavor was drawn from the mental repetition of the exultant: “I have a mother again—as well as anybody!”
V
OUR POWHATAN HOME—A COUNTRY FUNERAL—“OLD MRS. O’HARA.”
My mother’s illness of nearly four months deflected the current of our lives. My father, convinced probably of the peril to her life of a Western journey, and wrought upon by the persuasions of her relatives, bought the “good-will and fixtures” of a store at Powhatan Court House, a village seven miles nearer Richmond than Montrose, and thither we removed as soon as the convalescent was strong enough.
Her husband wrote to her from Richmond en route for “the North,” where he was to purchase a stock of the “goods” upon which the territory environing his new home was dependent for most of the necessaries and all of the luxuries of life.
“I am very solicitous as to your early restoration to health. Be careful not to rise too early, and keep a strict watch over your appetite. It is not safe to indulge it, yet there is danger in the opposite course. …
“I attended a prayer-meeting at Mr. Hutchinson’s on Thursday evening, and had the pleasure of hearing a lecture from Mr. Nettleton. It was a pleasant meeting. I wish you had been with me! To-day (Sunday) I heard Mr. Plumer and Mr. Brown, both of whom were interesting. Mr. Plumer’s subject was the young ruler running to Our Saviour and kneeling down with the inquiry, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ …
“Your brother was at church yesterday. His wife has a fine boy a month old. You have probably heard of the event, although I did not until my arrival here. I am told he says it is ‘the prettiest thing that was ever seen,’ and feels quite proud of this, their first exhibition.
“There is great difficulty in getting to New York this spring. The Delaware was closed by ice for two months, and up to the middle of March this was eighteen inches thick. Merchants have been detained in Baltimore from two to seven days, waiting for stages to go on. The number of travellers was so large that they could not be accommodated sooner. The steamboat runs from Richmond to Baltimore but once a week, and leaves on Sunday morning. Several of my acquaintances went on to-day. They were urgent that I should go with them, but my determination is not to travel on the Sabbath. I shall, therefore, take the land route to Balto. …
“Goods are reported to be very scarce and high in all the Northern cities. They are high in this place, and advancing every day. Groceries are dearer than I have seen them since 1815, and it is thought they will be yet dearer.
“ ‘That will do!’ I hear you say, ‘as I am not a merchant.’ Well, no more of
