A New England Girlhood Part 13

"The blessings which the weak and poor can scatter, Have their own season.

It is a little thing to speak a phase Of common comfort, which, by daily use, Has almost lost its sense; yet on the ear Of him who thought to die unmourned 't will fall Like choicest music."

A very familiar extract from Carlos Wilc.o.x, almost the only quotation made nowadays from his poems, was often on my sister Emilie's lips, whose heart seemed always to be saying to itself:--

"Pour blessings round thee like a shower of gold!"

I had that beside me, too, and I copy part of it here, for her sake, and because it will be good for my girl readers to keep in mind one of the n.o.blest utterances of an almost forgotten American poet:--

"Rouse to some work of high and holy love, And thou an angel's happiness shalt know; Shalt bless the earth while in the world above.

The good begun by thee shall onward flow.

The pure, sweet stream shall deeper, wider grow.

The seed that in these few and fleeting hours Thy hands, unsparing and unwearied sow, Shall deck thy grave with amaranthine flowers, And yield thee fruits divine in heaven's immortal bowers."

One great advantage which came to these many stranger girls through being brought together, away from their own homes, was that it taught them to go out of themselves, and enter into the lives of others.

Home-life, when one always stays at home, is necessarily narrowing.

That is one reason why so many women are petty and unthoughtful of any except their own family's interests. We have hardly begun to live until we can take in the idea of the whole human family as the one to which we truly belong. To me, it was an incalculable help to find myself among so many working-girls, all of us thrown upon our own resources, but thrown much more upon each others' sympathies.

And the stream beside which we toiled added to its own inspirations human suggestions drawn from our acquaintance with each other. It blended itself with the flow of our lives. Almost the first of my poemlets in the "Lowell Offering" was ent.i.tled "The River." These are some lines of it:--

"Gently flowed a river bright On its path of liquid light, Gleaming now soft banks between, Winding now through valleys green, Cheering with its presence mild Cultured fields and woodlands wild.

"Is not such a pure one's life?

Ever shunning pride and strife, Noiselessly along she goes, Known by gentle deeds she does; Often wandering far, to bless, And do others kindnesses.

"Thus, by her own virtues shaded, While pure thoughts, like starbeams, lie Mirrored in her heart and eye, She, content to be unknown, All serenely moveth on, Till, released from Time's commotion, Self is lost in Love's wide ocean."

There was many a young girl near me whose life was like the beautiful course of the river in my ideal of her. The Merrimack has blent its music with the onward song of many a lovely soul that, clad in plain working-clothes, moved heavenward beside its waters.

One of the loveliest persons I ever knew was a young girl who worked opposite to me in the spinning-room. Our eyes made us friends long before we spoke to each other. She was an orphan, well-bred and well-educated, about twenty years old, and she had brought with her to her place of toil the orphan child of her sister, left to her as a death-bed legacy. They boarded with a relative. The factory boarding-houses were often managed by families of genuine refinement, as in this case, and the one comfort of Caroline's life was her beautiful little niece, to whom she could go home when the day's work was over.

Her bereavements had given an appealing sadness to her whole expression; but she had accepted them and her changed circ.u.mstances with the submission of profound faith which everybody about her felt in everything she said and did. I think I first knew, through her, how character can teach, without words. To see her and her little niece together was almost like looking at a picture of the Madonna. Caroline afterwards became an inmate of my mother's family, and we were warm friends until her death a few years ago.

Some of the girls could not believe that the Bible was meant to be counted among forbidden books. We all thought that the Scriptures had a right to go wherever we went, and that if we needed them anywhere, it was at our work. I evaded the law by carrying some leaves from a torn Testament in my pocket.

The overseer, caring more for law than gospel, confiscated all he found. He had his desk full of Bibles. It sounded oddly to hear him say to the most religious girl in the room, when he took hers away, "I did think you had more conscience than to bring that book here." But we had some close ethical questions to settle in those days. It was a rigid code of morality under which we lived. n.o.body complained of it, however, and we were doubtless better off for its strictness, in the end.

The last window in the row behind me was filled with flouris.h.i.+ng house-plants--fragrant leaved geraniums, the overseer's pets. They gave that corner a bowery look; the perfume and freshness tempted me there often. Standing before that window, I could look across the room and see girls moving backwards and forwards among the spinning-frames, sometimes stooping, sometimes reaching up their arms, as their work required, with easy and not ungraceful movements. On the whole, it was far from being a disagreeable place to stay in. The girls were bright-looking and neat, and everything was kept clean and s.h.i.+ning. The effect of the whole was rather attractive to strangers.

My grandfather came to see my mother once at about this time and visited the mills. When he had entered our room, and looked around for a moment, he took off his hat and made a low bow to the girls, first toward the right, and then toward the left. We were familiar with his courteous habits, partly due to his French descent; but we had never seen anybody bow to a room full of mill girls in that polite way, and some one of the family afterwards asked him why he did so. He looked a little surprised at the question, but answered promptly and with dignity, "I always take off my hat to ladies."

His courtesy was genuine. Still, we did not call ourselves ladies. We did not forget that we were working-girls, wearing coa.r.s.e ap.r.o.ns suitable to our work, and that there was some danger of our becoming drudges. I know that sometimes the confinement of the mill became very wearisome to me. In the sweet June weather I would lean far out of the window, and try not to hear the unceasing clash of sound inside.

Looking away to the hills, my whole stifled being would cry out

"Oh, that I had wings!"

Still I was there from choice, and

"The prison unto which we doom ourselves, No prison is."

And I was every day making discoveries about life, and about myself. I had naturally some elements of the recluse, and would never, of my own choice, have lived in a crowd. I loved quietness. The noise of machinery was particularly distasteful to me. But I found that the crowd was made up of single human lives, not one of them wholly uninteresting, when separately known. I learned also that there are many things which belong to the whole world of us together, that no one of us, nor any few of us, can claim or enjoy for ourselves alone. I discovered, too, that I could so accustom myself to the noise that it became like a silence to me. And I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough. Even the long hours, the early rising and the regularity enforced by the clangor of the bell were good discipline for one who was naturally inclined to dally and to dream, and who loved her own personal liberty with a willful rebellion against control. Perhaps I could have brought myself into the limitations of order and method in no other way.

Like a plant that starts up in showers and suns.h.i.+ne and does not know which has best helped it to grow, it is difficult to say whether the hard things or the pleasant things did me most good. But when I was sincerest with myself, as also when I thought least about it, I know that I was glad to be alive, and to be just where I was.

It is a conquest when we can lift ourselves above the annoyances of circ.u.mstances over which we have no control; but it is a greater victory when we can make those circ.u.mstances our helpers, when we can appreciate the good there is in them. It has often seemed to me as if Life stood beside me, looking me in the face, and saying, "Child, you must learn to like me in the form in which you see me, before I can offer myself to you in any other aspect."

It was so with this disagreeable necessity of living among many people.

There is nothing more miserable than to lose the feeling of our own distinctiveness, since that is our only clue to the Purpose behind us and the End before us. But when we have discovered that human beings are not a mere "ma.s.s," but an orderly Whole, of which we are a part, it is all so different!

This we working-girls might have learned from the webs of cloth we saw woven around us. Every little thread must take its place as warp or woof, and keep in it steadily. Left to itself, it would be only a loose, useless filament. Trying to wander in an independent or a disconnected way among the other threads, it would make of the whole web an inextricable snarl. Yet each little thread must be as firmly spun as if it were the only one, or the result would be a worthless fabric.

That we are entirely separate, while yet we entirely belong to the Whole, is a truth that we learn to rejoice in, as we come to understand more and more of ourselves, and of this human life of ours, which seems so complicated, and yet is so simple. And when we once get a glimpse of the Divine Plan in it all, and know that to be just where we are, doing just what we are doing just at this hour because it is our appointed hour,--when we become aware that this is the very best thing possible for us in G.o.d's universe, the hard task grows easy, the tiresome employment welcome and delightful. Having fitted ourselves to our present work in such a way as this, we are usually prepared for better work, and are sent to take a better place.

Perhaps this is one of the unfailing laws of progress in our being.

Perhaps the Master of Life always rewards those who do their little faithfully by giving them some greater opportunity for faithfulness.

Certainly, it is a comfort, wherever we are, to say to ourselves:--

"Thou camest not to thy place by accident, It is the very place G.o.d meant for thee."

IX.

MOUNTAIN-FRIENDS.

THE pleasure we found in making new acquaintances among our workmates arose partly from their having come from great distances, regions unknown to us, as the northern districts of Maine and New Hamps.h.i.+re and Vermont were, in those days of stage-coach traveling, when rail-roads had as yet only connected the larger cities with one another.

It seemed wonderful to me to be talking with anybody who had really seen mountains and lived among them. One of the younger girls, who worked beside me during my very first days in the mill, had come from far up near the sources of the Merrimack, and she told me a great deal about her home, and about farm-life among the hills. I listened almost with awe when she said that she lived in a valley where the sun set at four o'clock, and where the great snowstorms drifted in so that sometimes they did not see a neighbor for weeks.

To have mountain-summits looking down upon one out of the clouds, summer and winter, by day and by night, seemed to me something both delightful and terrible. And yet here was this girl to whom it all appeared like the merest commonplace. What she felt about it was that it was "awful cold, sometimes; the days were so short! and it grew dark so early!" Then she told me about the spinning, and the husking, and the sugar-making, while we sat in a corner together, waiting to replace the full spools by empty ones,--the work usually given to the little girls.

I had a great admiration for this girl, because she had come from those wilderness-regions. The scent of pine-woods and checkerberry-leaves seemed to bang about her. I believe I liked her all the better because she said "daown" and "haow." It was part of the mountain-flavor.

I tried, on my part, to impress her with stories of the sea; but I did not succeed very well. Her princ.i.p.al comment was, "They don't think much of sailors up aour way." And I received the impression, from her and others, and from my own imagination, that rural life was far more delightful than the life of towns.

But there is something in the place where we were born that holds us always by the heartstrings. A town that still has a great deal of the country in it, one that is rich in beautiful scenery and ancestral a.s.sociations, is almost like a living being, with a body and a soul. We speak of such a town, if our birthplace, as of a mother, and think of ourselves as her sons and daughters.

So we felt, my sisters and I, about our dear native town of Beverly.

Its miles of sea-border, almost every sunny cove and rocky headland of which was a part of some near relative's homestead, were only half a day's journey distant; and the misty ocean-s.p.a.ces beyond still widened out on our imagination from the green inland landscape around us. But the hills sometimes shut us in, body and soul. To those who have been reared by the sea a wide horizon is a necessity, both for the mind and for the eye.

We had many opportunities of escape towards our native sh.o.r.es, for the larger part of our large family still remained there, and there was a constant coming and going among us. The stagedriver looked upon us as his especial charge, and we had a sense of personal property in the Salem and Lowell stagecoach, which had once, like a fairy-G.o.dmother's coach, rumbled down into our own little lane, taken possession of us, and carried us off to a new home.

My married sisters had families growing up about them, and they liked to have us younger ones come and help take care of their babies. One of them sent for me just when the close air and long days' work were beginning to tell upon my health, and it was decided that I had better go. The salt wind soon restored my strength, and those months of quiet family life were very good for me.

Like most young girls, I had a motherly fondness for little children, and my two baby-nephews were my pride and delight. The older one had a delicate const.i.tution, and there was a thoughtful, questioning look in his eyes, that seemed to gaze forward almost sadly, and foresee that he should never attain to manhood. The younger, a plump, vigorous urchin, three or four months old, did, without doubt, "feel his life in every limb." He was my especial charge, for his brother's clinging weakness gave him, the first-born, the place nearest his mother's heart. The baby bore the family name, mine and his mother's; "our little Lark," we sometimes called him, for his wide-awakeness and his merry-heartedness.(Alas! neither of those beautiful boys grew up to be men! One page of my home-memories is sadly written over with their elegy, the "Graves of a Household." Father, mother, and four sons, an entire family, long since pa.s.sed away from earthly sight.)

The tie between my lovely baby-nephew and myself became very close. The first two years of a child's life are its most appealing years, and call out all the latent tenderness of the nature on which it leans for protection. I think I should have missed one of the best educating influences of my youth, if I had not had the care of that baby for a year or more just as I entered my teens. I was never so happy as when I held him in my arms, sleeping or waking; and he, happy anywhere, was always contented when he was with me.

I was as fond as ever of reading, and somehow I managed to combine baby and book. d.i.c.kens's "Old Curiosity Shop" was just then coming out in a Philadelphia weekly paper, and I read it with the baby playing at my feet, or lying across my lap, in an unfinished room given up to sea-chests and coffee-bags and spicy foreign odors. (My cherub's papa was a sea-captain, usually away on his African voyages.) Little Nell and her grandfather became as real to me as my darling charge, and if a tear from his nurse's eyes sometimes dropped upon his cheek as he slept, he was not saddened by it. When he awoke he was irrepressible; clutching at my hair with his stout pink fists, and driving all dream-people effectually out of my head. Like all babies, he was something of a tyrant; but that brief, sweet despotism ends only too soon. I put him gratefully down, dimpled, chubby, and imperious, upon the list of my girlhood's teachers.