The Promised Land Part 16

It was Rachel Goldstein who provoked my avowal of atheism. She asked if I wasn't going to stay out of school during Pa.s.sover, and I said no. Wasn't I a Jew? she wanted to know. No, I wasn't; I was a Freethinker. What was that? I didn't believe in G.o.d. Rachel was horrified. Why, Kitty Maloney believed in G.o.d, and Kitty was only a Catholic! She appealed to Kitty.

"Kitty Maloney! Come over here. Don't you believe in G.o.d?--There, now, Mary Antin!--Mary Antin says she doesn't believe in G.o.d!"

Rachel Goldstein's horror is duplicated. Kitty Maloney, who used to mock Rachel's Jewish accent, instantly becomes her voluble ally, and proceeds to annihilate me by plying me with crucial questions.

"You don't believe in G.o.d? Then who made you, Mary Antin?"

"Nature made me."

"_Nature_ made you! What's that?"

"It's--everything. It's the trees--no, it's what makes the trees grow.

_That's_ what it is."

"But _G.o.d_ made the trees, Mary Antin," from Rachel and Kitty in chorus. "Maggie O'Reilly! Listen to Mary Antin. She says there isn't any G.o.d. She says the trees made her!"

Rachel and Kitty and Maggie, Sadie and Annie and Beckie, made a circle around me, and pressed me with questions, and mocked me, and threatened me with h.e.l.l flames and utter extinction. I held my ground against them all obstinately enough, though my argument was exceedingly lame. I glibly repeated phrases I had heard my father use, but I had no real understanding of his atheistic doctrines. I had been surprised into this dispute. I had no spontaneous interest in the subject; my mind was occupied with other things. But as the number of my opponents grew, and I saw how unanimously they condemned me, my indifference turned into a heat of indignation. The actual point at issue was as little as ever to me, but I perceived that a crowd of Free Americans were disputing the right of a Fellow Citizen to have any kind of G.o.d she chose. I knew, from my father's teaching, that this persecution was contrary to the Const.i.tution of the United States, and I held my ground as befitted the defender of a cause.

George Was.h.i.+ngton would not have treated me as Rachel Goldstein and Kitty Maloney were doing! "This is a free country," I reminded them in the middle of the argument.

The excitement in the yard amounted to a toy riot. When the school bell rang and the children began to file in, I stood out there as long as any of my enemies remained, although it was my habit to go to my room very promptly. And as the foes of American Liberty crowded and pushed in the line, whispering to those who had not heard that a heretic had been discovered in their midst, the teacher who kept the line in the corridor was obliged to scold and pull the noisy ones into order; and Sadie Cohen told her, in tones of awe, what the commotion was about.

Miss Bland waited till the children had filed in before she asked me, in a tone encouraging confidence, to give my version of the story.

This I did, huskily but fearlessly; and the teacher, who was a woman of tact, did not smile or commit herself in any way. She was sorry that the children had been rude to me, but she thought they would not trouble me any more if I let the subject drop. She made me understand, somewhat as Miss Dillingham had done on the occasion of my whispering during prayer, that it was proper American conduct to avoid religious arguments on school territory. I felt honored by this private initiation into the doctrine of the separation of Church and State, and I went to my seat with a good deal of dignity, my alarm about the safety of the Const.i.tution allayed by the teacher's calmness.

This is not so strictly the story of the second generation that I may not properly give a brief account of how it fared with my mother when my father undertook to purge his house of superst.i.tion. The process of her emanc.i.p.ation, it is true, was not obvious to me at the time, but what I observed of her outward conduct has been interpreted by my subsequent experience; so that to-day I understand how it happens that all the year round my mother keeps the same day of rest as her Gentile neighbors; but when the ram's horn blows on the Day of Atonement, calling upon Israel to cleanse its heart from sin and draw nearer to the G.o.d of its fathers, her soul is stirred as of old, and she needs must join in the ancient service. It means, I have come to know, that she has dropped the husk and retained the kernel of Judaism; but years were required for this process of instinctive selection.

My father, in his ambition to make Americans of us, was rather headlong and strenuous in his methods. To my mother, on the eve of departure for the New World, he wrote boldly that progressive Jews in America did not spend their days in praying; and he urged her to leave her wig in Polotzk, as a first step of progress. My mother, like the majority of women in the Pale, had all her life taken her religion on authority; so she was only fulfilling her duty to her husband when she took his hint, and set out upon her journey in her own hair. Not that it was done without reluctance; the Jewish faith in her was deeply rooted, as in the best of Jews it always is. The law of the Fathers was binding to her, and the outward symbols of obedience inseparable from the spirit. But the breath of revolt against orthodox externals was at this time beginning to reach us in Polotzk from the greater world, notably from America. Sons whose parents had impoverished themselves by paying the fine for non-appearance for military duty, in order to save their darlings from the inevitable sins of violated Judaism while in the service, sent home portraits of themselves with their faces shaved; and the grieved old fathers and mothers, after offering up special prayers for the renegades, and giving charity in their name, exhibited the significant portraits on their parlor tables. My mother's own nephew went no farther than Vilna, ten hours'

journey from Polotzk, to learn to cut his beard; and even within our town limits young women of education were beginning to reject the wig after marriage. A notorious example was the beautiful daughter of Lozhe the Rav, who was not restrained by her father's conspicuous relation to Judaism from exhibiting her lovely black curls like a maiden; and it was a further sign of the times that the rav did not disown his daughter. What wonder, then, that my poor mother, shaken by these foreshadowings of revolution in our midst, and by the express authority of her husband, gave up the emblem of matrimonial chast.i.ty with but a pa.s.sing struggle? Considering how the heavy burdens which she had borne from childhood had never allowed her time to think for herself at all, but had obliged her always to tread blindly in the beaten paths, I think it greatly to her credit that in her puzzling situation she did not lose her poise entirely. Bred to submission, submit she must; and when she perceived a conflict of authorities, she prepared to accept the new order of things under which her children's future was to be formed; wherein she showed her native adaptability, the readiness to fall into line, which is one of the most charming traits of her gentle, self-effacing nature.

My father gave my mother very little time to adjust herself. He was only three years from the Old World with its settled prejudices.

Considering his education, he had thought out a good deal for himself, but his line of thinking had not as yet brought him to include woman in the intellectual emanc.i.p.ation for which he himself had been so eager even in Russia. This was still in the day when he was astonished to learn that women had written books--had used their minds, their imaginations, unaided. He still rated the mental capacity of the average woman as only a little above that of the cattle she tended. He held it to be a wife's duty to follow her husband in all things. He could do all the thinking for the family, he believed; and being convinced that to hold to the outward forms of orthodox Judaism was to be hampered in the race for Americanization, he did not hesitate to order our family life on unorthodox lines. There was no conscious despotism in this; it was only making manly haste to realize an ideal the n.o.bility of which there was no one to dispute.

My mother, as we know, had not the initial impulse to depart from ancient usage that my father had in his habitual scepticism. He had always been a nonconformist in his heart; she bore lovingly the yoke of prescribed conduct. Individual freedom, to him, was the only tolerable condition of life; to her it was confusion. My mother, therefore, gradually divested herself, at my father's bidding, of the mantle of orthodox observance; but the process cost her many a pang, because the fabric of that venerable garment was interwoven with the fabric of her soul.

My father did not attempt to touch the fundamentals of her faith. He certainly did not forbid her to honor G.o.d by loving her neighbor, which is perhaps not far from being the whole of Judaism. If his loud denials of the existence of G.o.d influenced her to reconsider her creed, it was merely an incidental result of the freedom of expression he was so eager to practise, after his life of enforced hypocrisy. As the opinions of a mere woman on matters so abstract as religion did not interest him in the least, he counted it no particular triumph if he observed that my mother weakened in her faith as the years went by.

He allowed her to keep a Jewish kitchen as long as she pleased, but he did not want us children to refuse invitations to the table of our Gentile neighbors. He would have no bar to our social intercourse with the world around us, for only by freely sharing the life of our neighbors could we come into our full inheritance of American freedom and opportunity. On the holy days he bought my mother a ticket for the synagogue, but the children he sent to school. On Sabbath eve my mother might light the consecrated candles, but he kept the store open until Sunday morning. My mother might believe and wors.h.i.+p as she pleased, up to the point where her orthodoxy began to interfere with the American progress of the family.

The price that all of us paid for this disorganization of our family life has been levied on every immigrant Jewish household where the first generation clings to the traditions of the Old World, while the second generation leads the life of the New. Nothing more pitiful could be written in the annals of the Jews; nothing more inevitable; nothing more hopeful. Hopeful, yes; alike for the Jew and for the country that has given him shelter. For Israel is not the only party that has put up a forfeit in this contest. The nations may well sit by and watch the struggle, for humanity has a stake in it. I say this, whose life has borne witness, whose heart is heavy with revelations it has not made. And I speak for thousands; oh, for thousands!

My gray hairs are too few for me to let these pages trespa.s.s the limit I have set myself. That part of my life which contains the climax of my personal drama I must leave to my grandchildren to record. My father might speak and tell how, in time, he discovered that in his first violent rejection of everything old and established he cast from him much that he afterwards missed. He might tell to what extent he later retraced his steps, seeking to recover what he had learned to value anew; how it fared with his avowed irreligion when put to the extreme test; to what, in short, his emanc.i.p.ation amounted. And he, like myself, would speak for thousands. My grandchildren, for all I know, may have a graver task than I have set them. Perhaps they may have to testify that the faith of Israel is a heritage that no heir in the direct line has the power to alienate from his successors. Even I, with my limited perspective, think it doubtful if the conversion of the Jew to any alien belief or disbelief is ever thoroughly accomplished. What positive affirmation of the persistence of Judaism in the blood my descendants may have to make, I may not be present to hear.

It would be superfluous to state that none of these hints and prophecies troubled me at the time when I horrified the schoolyard by denying the existence of G.o.d, on the authority of my father; and defended my right to my atheism, on the authority of the Const.i.tution.

I considered myself absolutely, eternally, delightfully emanc.i.p.ated from the yoke of indefensible superst.i.tions. I was wild with indignation and pity when I remembered how my poor brother had been cruelly tormented because he did not want to sit in heder and learn what was after all false or useless. I knew now why poor Reb' Lebe had been unable to answer my questions; it was because the truth was not whispered outside America. I was very much in love with my enlightenment, and eager for opportunities to give proof of it.

It was Miss Dillingham, she who helped me in so many ways, who unconsciously put me to an early test, the result of which gave me a shock that I did not get over for many a day. She invited me to tea one day, and I came in much trepidation. It was my first entrance into a genuine American household; my first meal at a Gentile--yes, a Christian--board. Would I know how to behave properly? I do not know whether I betrayed my anxiety; I am certain only that I was all eyes and ears, that nothing should escape me which might serve to guide me. This, after all, was a normal state for me to be in, so I suppose I looked natural, no matter how much I stared. I had been accustomed to consider my table manners irreproachable, but America was not Polotzk, as my father was ever saying; so I proceeded very cautiously with my spoons and forks. I was cunning enough to try to conceal my uncertainty; by being just a little bit slow, I did not get to any given spoon until the others at table had shown me which it was.

All went well, until a platter was pa.s.sed with a kind of meat that was strange to me. Some mischievous instinct told me that it was ham--forbidden food; and I, the liberal, the free, was afraid to touch it! I had a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, self-contempt; but I helped myself to a slice of ham, nevertheless, and hung my head over my plate to hide my confusion. I was furious with myself for my weakness. I to be afraid of a pink piece of pig's flesh, who had defied at least two religions in defence of free thought! And I began to reduce my ham to indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it than anybody at the table.

Alas! I learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy as to talk. I ate, but only a newly abnegated Jew can understand with what squirming, what protesting of the inner man, what exquisite abhorrence of myself. That Spartan boy who allowed the stolen fox hidden in his bosom to consume his vitals rather than be detected in the theft, showed no such miracle of self-control as did I, sitting there at my friend's tea-table, eating unjewish meat.

And to think that so ridiculous a thing as a sc.r.a.p of meat should be the symbol and test of things so august! To think that in the mental life of a half-grown child should be reflected the struggles and triumphs of ages! Over and over and over again I discover that I am a wonderful thing, being human; that I am the image of the universe, being myself; that I am the repository of all the wisdom in the world, being alive and sane at the beginning of this twentieth century. The heir of the ages am I, and all that has been is in me, and shall continue to be in my immortal self.

CHAPTER XIII

A CHILD'S PARADISE

All this while that I was studying and exploring in the borderland between the old life and the new; leaping at conclusions, and sometimes slipping; finding inspiration in common things, and interpretations in dumb things; eagerly scaling the ladder of learning, my eyes on star-diademmed peaks of ambition; building up friends.h.i.+ps that should support my youth and enrich my womanhood; learning to think much of myself, and much more of my world,--while I was steadily gathering in my heritage, sowed in the dim past, and ripened in the sun of my own day, what was my sister doing?

Why, what she had always done: keeping close to my mother's side on the dreary marches of a humdrum life; sensing sweet gardens of forbidden joy, but never turning from the path of duty. I cannot believe but that her sacrifices tasted as dust and ashes to her at times; for Frieda was a mere girl, whose childhood, on the whole, had been gray, while her appet.i.te for happy things was as great as any normal girl's. She had a fine sense for what was best in the life about her, though she could not articulate her appreciation. She longed to possess the good things, but her position in the family forbidding possession, she developed a talent for vicarious enjoyment which I never in this life hope to imitate. And her simple mind did not busy itself with self-a.n.a.lysis. She did not even know why she was happy; she thought life was good to her. Still, there must have been moments when she perceived that the finer things were not in themselves unattainable, but were kept from her by a social tyranny.

This I can only surmise, as in our daily intercourse she never gave a sign of discontent.

We continued to have part of our life in common for some time after she went to work. We formed ourselves into an evening school, she and I and the two youngsters, for the study of English and arithmetic. As soon as the supper dishes were put away, we gathered around the kitchen table, with books borrowed from school, and pencils supplied by my father with eager willingness. I was the teacher, the others the diligent pupils; and the earnestness with which we labored was worthy of the great things we meant to achieve. Whether the results were commensurate with our efforts I cannot say. I only know that Frieda's cheeks flamed with the excitement of reading English monosyllables; and her eyes shone like stars on a moonless night when I explained to her how she and I and George Was.h.i.+ngton were Fellow Citizens together.

Inspired by our studious evenings, what Frieda Antin would not be glad to sit all day bent over the needle, that the family should keep on its feet, and Mary continue at school? The morning ride on the ferryboat, when spring winds dimpled the river, may have stirred her heart with nameless longings, but when she took her place at the machine her lot was glorified to her, and she wanted to sing; for the girls, the foreman, the boss, all talked about Mary Antin, whose poems were printed in an American newspaper. Wherever she went on her humble business, she was sure to hear her sister's name. For, with characteristic loyalty, the whole Jewish community claimed kins.h.i.+p with me, simply because I was a Jew; and they made much of my small triumphs, and pointed to me with pride, just as they always do when a Jew distinguishes himself in any worthy way. Frieda, going home from work at sunset, when rosy buds beaded the s.h.i.+ning stems, may have felt the weariness of those who toil for bread; but when we opened our books after supper, her spirit revived afresh, and it was only when the lamp began to smoke that she thought of taking rest.

At bedtime she and I chatted as we used to do when we were little girls in Polotzk; only now, instead of closing our eyes to see imaginary wonders, according to a bedtime game of ours, we exchanged anecdotes about the marvellous adventures of our American life. My contributions on these occasions were boastful accounts, I have no doubt, of what I did at school, and in the company of school-committee men, editors, and other notables; and Frieda's delight in my achievements was the very flower of her fine sympathy. As formerly, when I had been naughty and I invited her to share in my repentance, she used to join me in spiritual humility and solemnly dedicate herself to a better life; so now, when I was full of pride and ambition, she, too, felt the crown on her brows, and heard the applause of future generations murmuring in her ear. And so partaking of her sister's glory, what Frieda Antin would not say that her portion was sufficient reward for a youth of toil?

I did not, like my sister, earn my bread in those days; but let us say that I earned my salt, by sweeping, scrubbing, and scouring, on Sat.u.r.days, when there was no school. My mother's housekeeping was necessarily irregular, as she was pretty constantly occupied in the store; so there was enough for us children to do to keep the bare rooms s.h.i.+ning. Even here Frieda did the lion's share; it used to take me all Sat.u.r.day to accomplish what Frieda would do with half a dozen turns of her capable hands. I did not like housework, but I loved order; so I polished windows with a will, and even got some fun out of scrubbing, by laying out the floor in patterns and tracing them all around the room in a lively flurry of soapsuds.

There is a joy that comes from doing common things well, especially if they seem hard to us. When I faced a day's housework I was half paralyzed with a sense of inability, and I wasted precious minutes walking around it, to see what a very hard task I had. But having pitched in and conquered, it gave me an exquisite pleasure to survey my work. My hair tousled and my dress tucked up, streaked arms bare to the elbow, I would step on my heels over the damp, clean boards, and pa.s.s my hand over chair rounds and table legs, to prove that no dust was left. I could not wait to put my dress in order before running out into the street to see how my windows shone. Every workman who carries a dinner pail has these moments of keen delight in the product of his drudgery. Men of genius, likewise, in their hours of relaxation from their loftier tasks, prove this universal rule. I know a man who fills a chair at a great university. I have seen him hold a roomful of otherwise restless youths spellbound for an hour, while he discoursed about the respective inhabitants of the earth and sea at a time when nothing walked on fewer than four legs. And I have seen this scholar, his ponderous tomes shelved for a s.p.a.ce, turning over and over with cheris.h.i.+ng hands a letter-box that he had made out of card-board and paste, and exhibiting it proudly to his friends. For the hand was the first instrument of labor, that distinctive accomplishment by which man finally raised himself above his cousins, the lower animals; and a respect for the work of the hand survives as an instinct in all of us.

The stretch of weeks from June to September, when the schools were closed, would have been hard to fill in had it not been for the public library. At first I made myself a calendar of the vacation months, and every morning I tore off a day, and comforted myself with the decreasing number of vacation days. But after I discovered the public library I was not impatient for the reopening of school. The library did not open till one o'clock in the afternoon, and each reader was allowed to take out only one book at a time. Long before one o'clock I was to be seen on the library steps, waiting for the door of paradise to open. I spent hours in the reading-room, pleased with the atmosphere of books, with the order and quiet of the place, so unlike anything on Arlington Street. The sense of these things permeated my consciousness even when I was absorbed in a book, just as the rustle of pages turned and the tiptoe tread of the librarian reached my ear, without distracting my attention. Anything so wonderful as a library had never been in my life. It was even better than school in some ways. One could read and read, and learn and learn, as fast as one knew how, without being obliged to stop for stupid little girls and inattentive little boys to catch up with the lesson. When I went home from the library I had a book under my arm; and I would finish it before the library opened next day, no matter till what hours of the night I burned my little lamp.

What books did I read so diligently? Pretty nearly everything that came to my hand. I dare say the librarian helped me select my books, but, curiously enough, I do not remember. Something must have directed me, for I read a great many of the books that are written for children. Of these I remember with the greatest delight Louisa Alcott's stories. A less attractive series of books was of the Sunday School type. In volume after volume a very naughty little girl by the name of Lulu was always going into tempers, that her father might have opportunity to lecture her and point to her angelic little sister, Gracie, as an example of what she should be; after which they all felt better and prayed. Next to Louisa Alcott's books in my esteem were boys' books of adventure, many of them by Horatio Alger; and I read all, I suppose, of the Rollo books, by Jacob Abbott.

But that was not all. I read every kind of printed rubbish that came into the house, by design or accident. A weekly story paper of a worse than worthless character, that circulated widely in our neighborhood because subscribers were rewarded with a premium of a diamond ring, warranted I don't know how many karats, occupied me for hours. The stories in this paper resembled, in breathlessness of plot, abundance of horrors, and improbability of characters, the things I used to read in Vitebsk. The text was ill.u.s.trated by frequent pictures, in which the villain generally had his hands on the heroine's throat, while the hero was bursting in through a graceful drapery to the rescue of his beloved. If a bundle came into the house wrapped in a stained old newspaper, I laboriously smoothed out the paper and read it through. I enjoyed it all, and found fault with nothing that I read. And, as in the case of the Vitebsk readings, I cannot find that I suffered any harm. Of course, reading so many better books, there came a time when the diamond-ring story paper disgusted me; but in the beginning my appet.i.te for print was so enormous that I could let nothing pa.s.s through my hands unread, while my taste was so crude that nothing printed could offend me.

Good reading matter came into the house from one other source besides the library. The Yiddish newspapers of the day were excellent, and my father subscribed to the best of them. Since that time Yiddish journalism has sadly degenerated, through imitation of the vicious "yellow journals" of the American press.

There was one book in the library over which I pored very often, and that was the encyclopaedia. I turned usually to the names of famous people, beginning, of course, with George Was.h.i.+ngton. Oftenest of all I read the biographical sketches of my favorite authors, and felt that the worthies must have been glad to die just to have their names and histories printed out in the book of fame. It seemed to me the apotheosis of glory to be even briefly mentioned in an encyclopaedia.

And there grew in me an enormous ambition that devoured all my other ambitions, which was no less than this: that I should live to know that after my death my name would surely be printed in the encyclopaedia. It was such a prodigious thing to expect that I kept the idea a secret even from myself, just letting it lie where it sprouted, in an unexplored corner of my busy brain. But it grew on me in spite of myself, till finally I could not resist the temptation to study out the exact place in the encyclopaedia where my name would belong. I saw that it would come not far from "Alcott, Louisa M."; and I covered my face with my hands, to hide the silly, baseless joy in it. I practised saying my name in the encyclopaedic form, "Antin, Mary"; and I realized that it sounded chopped off, and wondered if I might not annex a middle initial. I wanted to ask my teacher about it, but I was afraid I might betray my reasons. For, infatuated though I was with the idea of the greatness I might live to attain, I knew very well that thus far my claims to posthumous fame were ridiculously unfounded, and I did not want to be laughed at for my vanity.

Spirit of all childhood! Forgive me, forgive me, for so lightly betraying a child's dream-secrets. I that smile so scoffingly to-day at the unsophisticated child that was myself, have I found any n.o.bler thing in life than my own longing to be n.o.ble? Would I not rather be consumed by ambitions that can never be realized than live in stupid acceptance of my neighbor's opinion of me? The statue in the public square is less a portrait of a mortal individual than a symbol of the immortal aspiration of humanity. So do not laugh at the little boy playing at soldiers, if he tells you he is going to hew the world into good behavior when he gets to be a man. And do, by all means, write my name in the book of fame, saying, She was one who aspired. For that, in condensed form, is the story of the lives of the great.

Summer days are long, and the evenings, we know, are as long as the lamp-wick. So, with all my reading, I had time to play; and, with all my studiousness, I had the will to play. My favorite playmates were boys. It was but mild fun to play theatre in Bessie Finklestein's back yard, even if I had leading parts, which I made impressive by recitations in Russian, no word of which was intelligible to my audience. It was far better sport to play hide-and-seek with the boys, for I enjoyed the use of my limbs--what there was of them. I was so often reproached and teased for being little, that it gave me great satisfaction to beat a five-foot boy to the goal.

Once a great, hulky colored boy, who was the torment of the neighborhood, treated me roughly while I was playing on the street. My father, determined to teach the rascal a lesson for once, had him arrested and brought to court. The boy was locked up overnight, and he emerged from his brief imprisonment with a respect for the rights and persons of his neighbors. But the moral of this incident lies not herein. What interested me more than my revenge on a bully was what I saw of the way in which justice was actually administered in the United States. Here we were gathered in the little courtroom, bearded Arlington Street against wool-headed Arlington Street; accused and accuser, witnesses, sympathizers, sight-seers, and all. n.o.body cringed, n.o.body was bullied, n.o.body lied who didn't want to. We were all free, and all treated equally, just as it said in the Const.i.tution! The evil-doer was actually punished, and not the victim, as might very easily happen in a similar case in Russia. "Liberty and justice for all." Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue!

There was one occasion in the week when I was ever willing to put away my book, no matter how entrancing were its pages. That was on Sat.u.r.day night, when Bessie Finklestein called for me; and Bessie and I, with arms entwined, called for Sadie Rabinowitch; and Bessie and Sadie and I, still further entwined, called for Annie Reilly; and Bessie, etc., etc., inextricably wound up, marched up Broadway, and took possession of all we saw, heard, guessed, or desired, from end to end of that main thoroughfare of Chelsea.

Parading all abreast, as many as we were, only breaking ranks to let people pa.s.s; leaving the imprints of our noses and fingers on plate-gla.s.s windows ablaze with electric lights and alluring with display; inspecting tons of cheap candy, to find a few pennies' worth of the most enduring kind, the same to be sucked and chewed by the company, turn and turn about, as we continued our promenade; loitering wherever a crowd gathered, or running for a block or so to cheer on the fire-engine or police ambulance; getting into everybody's way, and just keeping clear of serious mischief,--we were only girls,--we enjoyed ourselves as only children can whose fathers keep a bas.e.m.e.nt grocery store, whose mothers do their own was.h.i.+ng, and whose sisters operate a machine for five dollars a week. Had we been boys, I suppose Bessie and Sadie and the rest of us would have been a "gang," and would have popped into the Chinese laundry to tease "c.h.i.n.ky Chinaman,"

and been chased by the "cops" from comfortable doorsteps, and had a "bully" time of it. Being what we were, we called ourselves a "set,"

and we had a "lovely" time, as people who pa.s.sed us on Broadway could not fail to see. And hear. For we were at the giggling age, and Broadway on Sat.u.r.day night was full of giggles for us. We stayed out till all hours, too; for Arlington Street had no strict domestic programme, not even in the nursery, the inmates of which were as likely to be found in the gutter as in their cots, at any time this side of one o'clock in the morning.