Chapter III: Part II: The School-Mistress (1)

I

THE OLDER LETITIA

Precisely at half-past seven there was a faint rustling on our staircase and a moment later Letitia Primrose appeared at our breakfast-table smiling "Good-morning." She was dressed invariably in the plainest of black gowns with the whitest of ruching about her wrists and throat, and at the collar a pin which had been her mother's, a cameo Minerva in an antique setting of vine leaves wrought in gold. The gown itself--I scarcely know how to style it, for no frill or foible of the day was ever visible in its homely contour, or if existing there, had been so curbed by the wearer's modesty as to be quite null and void to the naked eye. Every tress of her early whitening hair lay smoothly back about her forehead, and behind was caught so neatly beneath her comb, it might be doubted how or if she ever slept upon it. Just so immaculate, virginal, irreproachable did the older Letitia come softly down to us every week-day morning of her life, and taking her chair between Dove's seat and mine, she would adjust her gold-rimmed glasses to better see how the night had dealt with us, and beaming upon us with one of the pleasantest of inquiring smiles, would murmur--

"Well?"

She ate little, and that so unobtrusively, I used to wonder if she ate at all. I can remember her lifting her cup, but do not recall that it ever reached her lips. She had, I think, some trick of magnetism, some power of the eye that held yours at the crucial moment, so that you never really saw her sip or bite, and she never chewed, I swear, yet I never heard of her bad digestion. Eating in her was a chaste indulgence common only, I believe, to spinsterhood--a rite, communionlike, rather than a feast.

When the clock struck eight, we would rise together--I for my office, Dove for farewells, Letitia for the school-room; I with a clattering chair, Dove demurely, Letitia noiselessly, to put on a hat as vague and unassuming as that decorous garment in which she cloaked herself from the outer world--a kind of cape and jacket, I think it was, in winter, but am not quite sure. In summer it was a cashmere shawl. Then slipping on a pair of gloves, black always and always whole, however faded, she would take up her small pearl-handled parasol, storm or shine, and that linen bag of hers, a marvellous reticule for books and manuscripts with a separate pocket in the cover-flap for a comb and mirror and extra handkerchief--though not to my knowledge; I am merely telling what was told. Nor am I telling all that was said of Letitia's panoply and raiment, the manner of which at every season, at every hour of the night and day, was characterized--if I have understood the matter--not so much by a charm of style as of precaution, a modest providence, a truly exquisite foresight and readiness for all emergencies, however perilous, so that fire nor flood nor war's alarms nor death itself, however sudden, should find her unprepared. Fire at night would merely have illumined a slender, unobtrusive figure descending a stair or ladder unabashed, decently, even gracefully arrayed in a silk kimono which hung nightly on the foot-board of her bed; and since for other purposes it was never worn, it remains unscorched, and, indeed, unblemished, to this very day. But for that grim hand the moment of whose clutch can never be foretold with certainty, nothing could exceed Letitia's watchfulness and care. She dressed invariably, I have said, in the plainest black, but I have heard, and on authority I could not question, that however simple and inexpensive those outer garments were, the inner vestments were of finest linen superimposing the softest silk. Thus--for a tendency to some heart-affection was hereditary in the Primrose family--thus could no sudden dissolution or surrender, such as might occur in an absence from home and the ministration of loving friends, be attended ever by any _post-mortem_ embarrassment or chagrin, but rather would disclose a pride and delicacy of taste and consideration, the more remarkable and worthy of approval and regret, because it could never otherwise have been revealed. Nothing I know of in the way of gifts was more acceptable to Letitia Primrose than those black silk ones which she took such pains to purchase and secrete.

It was a wondrous reticule, that linen pouch of which I spoke, bearing "L. P." embroidered on its outer side. I say its outer, for so she carried it always; and in years, so many I will not count them, I never knew that monogram turned in, or down. She met me with it in the doorway from which Dove watched us till we had left the gate. Mornings, for years, we went to our work together, save when an urgent matter summoned me earlier or compelled me, against my will and exercise, to drive. Morn after morn we walked together to the red brick school-house, talking of village news and the varying moods of our fickle northern weather, or perhaps of books, old ones and new ones, or of those golden memories that we shared. They were not perfunctory as I recall them, those morning dialogues. There was no abstraction about Letitia, no cursory, unweighed chattering of things so obvious as to need no comment. Every topic might be a theme for her mild eloquence. It might be of Keats that she discoursed to me, or Browning or Alfred Tennyson or perhaps the Corsican, whom she hated, partly for tyranny, partly because he made her "look at him," she said; it might be the Early Church, whose records she had read and read again, though not one-half so much for Cuthbert's holiness, I told her, as for Fuller's quaintness, which she loved; or it might be a March morning that we walked together, while she spoke like a poet's daughter of the first pink arbutus some grinning farm-boy had laid but yesterday upon her desk.

Why no one ever wooed and won such fervor seemed passing strange to Dove and me. With all the grace of goodness and gentle courage in which she faced the world alone, in all those years which had followed her father's death, she had never, to Dove's ken or mine, won a single suitor. Those burdens of care and sacrifice laid too soon upon her frail, young shoulders had borne early fruit--patience, wisdom, and a sweet endurance beyond her years--but on such harvest young men set small store. A taste for it comes late. It made her pleasing to her elders, but those of her own years shrank instinctively from its very perfectness. She had matured too soon. How then should any one so coolly virtuous know trial or passion? Surely so young a saint could have no warm impetuous hours to remember, no sweet abandonment, no pretty idyls--had she even a spring-time to recall?

Men admired her for her mind and heart, but in her presence secretly were ill at ease. Her self-dependence rendered useless their stronger arms accustomed to being leaned upon. She smiled upon them, it is true, but not as men like to be smiled upon--neither as a child, trustingly, nor as a queen, confident of their homage and gallant service. She appealed neither to their protection nor to their pride. She awoke the friend, but not the lover, in them; and so the years slipped by and she won no chivalry, because she claimed none. She had but asked and but received respect.

Our raillery, harmlessly meant, was not always kind, as I look back at it. It is scarcely pleasant to be reminded that among one's kind one is not preferred, yet Letitia bore all our jesting with steadfast pleasantry.

"Do I look forlorn? Do I look so helpless?" she would ask. Her very smile, her voice, her step, seemed in themselves an answer. "What do I want with a husband then?"

"Why," Dove would say, "to make you happy, Letitia."

"You child: I am perfectly happy."

"Well," Dove would answer, stubbornly, "to make you happier, then."

I have forgotten Letitia's answers--all but one of them:

"I lived so long with my scholar-love," she once said, sweetly, of her father, "I fear I never should be content with an ordinary man."

Dove declared that no one in Grassy Fordshire was half worthy of her cousin; at least, she said, she knew but one, and he was already wedded--and to a woman, she added, humbly, not half so good or wise or wonderful as Letitia. Dove stoutly held that Letitia could have married, had she wished it, and whom she would. Father would shake his head at that.

"No," he would say, "Letty is one of those women men never think of as a bride."

"But why?" Dove would demand then, loyally. "She is the very woman to find real happiness in loving and self-sacrifice. Adversity would never daunt her, and yet," my wife would say with scorn rising in her voice, "the very men who need such help and comprehension and comradeship in their careers, would pass her by, and for a chit of girl who would never be happy sharing their struggles--but only their success!"

"My dear," father would reply, sagely, "a man glories in his power to hand a woman something she cannot reach herself. Letty Primrose has too long an arm."

"But if a man once married Letitia--" Dove would protest, and father would chuckle then.

"Ah, yes, my dear, if one only would! But there's the rub. Doubtless he would find Letitia much like other women, quite willing he should reach things down to her from the highest shelf. But he must be a wise man to suspect just that--to guess what lies beneath our Letty's apparent self-sufficiency."

"An older man might," Dove once suggested. "A general, or a great professor, or a minister plenipotentiary."

"Doubtless," he answered, "but our Grassy Ford is a narrow world, my dear. The young sprigs in it are only silly lads, and the elder bachelors are very musty ones, I fear--and not an ambassador among them. I doubt very much if Letitia will ever meet him--that man you mean, who might choose Letty's love through wisdom, and whose wisdom she might choose through love."

Dove's answer was a sigh.

"Bertram," she said, "you must make some real nice, elderly bachelor doctor friends, and we'll ask them to visit us."

It seemed a likely plan, but nothing came of it, and the silly lads and the musty ones alike left our Letitia more and more to friendships beyond her years. From being so much in the company of her elders, she grew in time to be more like them. Her modesty became reserve; reserve, in turn, a certain awkwardness or shy aloofness in the presence of the other sex--primness, it was called. She had not forgotten how to smile; her talk was blithe enough with those she knew, and was still colored by her love for poetry, but it fast grew quainter and less colloquial; there was a certain old-fashioned care and subtlety about it, a rare completeness in its phrases not at all like the crude, half-finished ones with which our Grassy Ford belles were content. It added to her charm, I think, but to the evidence as well of that maturity and self-complacency which all men seemed to fear and shun, not one suspecting that the glow beneath meant youth--youth preserved through time and trial to be a light to her, or to Love belated.

Her brown hair turned to gray, her gray to white, and she still came down to us smiling good-morning; still worshipped Keats, still scorned the upstart who made her look; taught on, year after year, in the red brick school-house, wearing the wild flowers farm-boys gathered in the hills. Her life flowed on like a stream in summer, softly in shadow and in sun. She seemed content--no bitter note in her low voice, no glance of envy, malice, or chagrin in those kind gray eyes of hers, which beamed so gently upon others' loves; we used to wonder how they might have shone upon her own.

One day in August--it was again that anniversary birthday around which half my memories of her seem to cling--she gave me a copy of _In Memoriam_, and bought for herself the linen for another reticule. Neatly, and in the fashion of our grandmothers' day, she worked upon it her initials, L. and P., in Old-English letters, old-rose and gold.

"What," I asked, "is the figure meant for?"

"The figure? Where?"

"In the background there--the figure seven, in the lighter gold."

She bent to study it.

"There _is_ a seven there," she said. "I must have used a lighter silk."

"Then shall you alter it?" I asked.

"No," she answered. "It is now too late."

"She means the figure," I explained to Dove.

"The letters also," Dove murmured, softly, as we turned away.

II

ON A CORNER SHELF

At five minutes to four o'clock the red school-house gave no sign of the redder life beating within its walls. The grounds about it, worn brown by hundreds of restless feet and marked in strange diagrams, the mystic symbols of hop-scotch, marbles, and three-old-cat, were quite deserted save for sparrows busy with crumbs from the mid-day luncheon-pails. Five minutes later, one listening by the picket-fence might have heard faintly the tinkling of little bells, and a rising murmur that with the opening of doors burst suddenly into a tramping of myriad feet, while from the lower hallway two marching lines came down the outer stair, primly in step, till at the foot they sprang into wild disorder, a riot of legs and skirts, with the shouts and shrieks and shrill whistlings of children loosed from bondage. When the noisy tide had swept down the broad walk into the street, Letitia might be seen following smilingly, her skirts surrounded by little girls struggling for the honor of being nearest and bearing her reticule.

At the end of happy days Letitia's face bore the imprint of a sweet contentment, as if the love she had given had been returned twofold, not only in the awkward caresses of her little ones, but in the sight of such tender buds opening day by day through her patient care into fuller knowledge of a great bright world about them. She strove earnestly to show them more of it than the school-books told; she aimed higher than mere correctness in the exercises, those anxious, careful, or heedless scribblings with which her reticule was crammed. In the geography she taught there were deeper colorings than the pale tints of those twenty maps the text-book held; greater currents flowed through those green and pink and yellow lands than the principal rivers there, and in the plains between them greater harvests had been garnered, according to her stories, than the principal products, principal exports--principal paragraphs learned by rote and recited senselessly.

Drawing, in Letitia's room, it was charged against her by one named Shears, who had the interests of the school at heart and jaw, had become a subterfuge for teaching botany as well.

"For draggin' in a study," as he told a group on the corner of Main and Clingstone streets, "not _in_cluded in the grammar-grade curriculum!"

He paused to let the word have full effect.

"For wastin' the scholars' time and gettin' their feet wet pokin' around in bogs and marshy places, a-pullin' weeds! And for what?--why, by gum, to _draw_ 'em!"

His auditors chuckled.

"What," he asked, "are drawin'-books _for_?"

His fellow-citizens nodded intelligently.

"And even when she _does_ use the books," cried Mr. Samuel Shears, "she won't let 'em draw a consarned circle or cross or square, without they tell her some fool story of Michael the Angelo!"

The crowd laughed hoarsely.

"And who _was_ Michael the Angelo?" asked Mr. Shears, screwing his face up in fine derision and stamping one foot, rabbit-like, by way of emphasis to his scorn. "Who _was_ this here Michael the Angelo?"

Four men spat and the others shuffled.

"A _Dago_!" roared Shears, and the crowd was too much relieved to do more than gurgle. "What does my son care about Michael the Angelo?"

Letitia admitted, I believe, that _his_ son didn't.

"And further_more_," said Mr. Shears, insinuatingly, "what I want to know is: why has she got them pitchers a-hanging around the school-room walls? Pitchers of Dago churches and Dago statures--and I guess _you_ know what Dago statures are--I guess you know whether they're dressed like you and me!--I guess you fellows know all right--and if you don't, there's them that do. And, in conclusion, I want to ask right here: who's a-payin' for them there decorations?"

Mr. Shears spat, the crowd spat, and they adjourned.

Now, there may have been a dozen prints relieving the ugliness and concealing the cracks in the school-room walls, but all quite innocent, as I recall them: "Socrates in the Market-Place," "The Parthenon," "The Battle of Salamis," "Christian Martyrs," a tragic moment in the arena of ancient Rome, "St. Peter's," I suppose, "St. Mark's by Moonlight," and of statues only one and irreproachable, the "Moses" of Michael Angelo. His "David" was Letitia's joy, but she never dreamed, I am sure, of its exhibition in a grammar-school, though I have heard her declare (shamelessly, Mr. Shears would say) that were it not for a Puritan weakness of eyesight hereditary in Grassy Ford, that lithe Jew's ideal figure would be a far better lesson to her boys than all the text-books in physiology.

"Might it not incite them to sling-shots?" queried Dove, softly.

"I don't agree with you," said Letitia, lost in her theme, and noting only the fact, and not the nature, of the opposition. "I don't agree with you at all. It would teach them the beauty of manly--Why do you laugh?"

If Shears could have heard her! His information, such as it was, had been derived from his only son, a youth named David, "not by Angelo," Letitia said, and hopelessly indolent, whose only fondness was for sticking pins into smaller boys. He was useful, however, as a barometer in which the rise or fall of his surly impudence registered the parental feeling against her rule.

Shears and his kind held that the proper study of mankind was arithmetic. What would he not have said at the corner of Main and Clingstone streets, had he known that Letitia was trifling with Robinson's Complete?--that between its lines, she was teaching (surreptitiously would have been his word), an original, elementary course in ethics, a moral law of honesty, fair-dealing, and full-measure, so that all examples, however intricate, were worked out rigidly to the seventh decimal, by the Golden Rule!

Red geraniums bloomed in her school-room window, and on a corner-shelf, set so low that the children easily might have leaned upon it, lay Webster and another book--always one other; though sometimes large and sometimes small, now green, now red, now blue, now yellow, but always seeming to have been left there carelessly. Every volume bore on its fly-leaf two names--"David Buckleton Primrose," written in a bold, old-fashioned script in fading ink, and below it "Letitia Primrose," in a smaller, finer but no less quaint a hand. That book, whatever its name and matter, had been left there purposely, you may be sure. Letitia remembered how young Keats drank his first sweet draught of Homer and became a Greek; how little lame Walter poured over border legends to become the last of the Scottish minstrels; and how that other, that English boy, swam the Hellespont in a London street, to climb on its farther side, that flowery bank called poesy. It was her dream that among her foster-children, as she fondly called them, there might be one, perhaps, some day--some rare soul waiting rose-like for the sun, who would find it shining on her school-room shelf. So she dropped there weekly in the children's way, as if by accident, and without a word to them unless they asked, books which had been her father's pride or her own young world of dreams--books of all times and mental seasons, but each one chosen with her end in mind. They were beyond young years, she admitted frankly, as school years go, but when her Keats came, she would say, smiling, they would be bread-and-wine to him; milk and wild-honey they had been to her.

"Suppose," said Dove, "it should be a girl who bears away sacred fire from your shelf, Letitia?"

"Yes, it might be a girl," replied the school-mistress. "Perhaps--who knows?--another 'Shakespeare's daughter'!" And yet, she added, and with the faintest color in her cheeks, knowing well that we knew her preference, she rather hoped it would be a boy.

Few could resist that book waiting by the dictionary; at least they would open it, spell out its title-page, flutter its yellowing leaves, looking for pictures, and, disappointed, close it and turn away. But sometimes one more curious would stop to read a little, and now and then, to Letitia's joy, a lad more serious than the rest would turn inquiringly to ask the meaning of what he found there; then she would tell its story and loan the volume, hoping that Johnny Keats had come at last.

No one will ever know how many subtle lures she set to tempt her pupils into pleasant paths, but men and women in Grassy Ford today remember that it was Miss Primrose who first said this, or told them that, and while her discipline is sometimes smiled at--she was far too trusting at times, they tell me--doubtless, no one is the worse for it, since whatever evil she may have failed to nip, may be balanced now by the good of some lovely memory. Bad boys grown tall remembering their hookey-days do not forget the woman they cajoled with their forged excuses; and it is a fair question, I maintain, boldly, as one of that guilty clan, whether the one who put them on an honor they did not have, or, let us say, had mislaid temporarily--whether the recollection of Letitia Primrose and her innocence is not more potent now for good than the crimes she overlooked, for evil.

Sometimes I wonder if she was half so blind as she appeared to be, for as we walked one Sabbath by the water-side, with the sun golden on the marshes, and birds and flowers and caressing breezes beguiling our steps farther and farther from the drowsy town, I remember her saying:

"It is for this my boys play truant in the spring-time. Do you wonder, Bertram?"

For the best of reasons I did not. I was thinking of how the springs came northward to Grassy Fordshire when I was a runaway; and then suddenly as we turned a bend in Troublesome, there was a splash, and two bare feet sank modestly into the troubled waters. There was a bubbling, and then a head emerged dripping from all its hairs. Young David Shears had dived in the nick of time.

III

A YOUNGER ROBIN

When our boy was born we named him Robin Weatherby, after that elder Robin who had charmed my youth. If his babyhood lacked aught of love or discipline, it was neither Dove's fault nor Letitia's, for Robin's mother had ideas and a book on childhood, and dear Letitia did not need a book. In fact, she clashed with Dove's. I, as physician-in-ordinary to my child--for in dire emergencies in my own family I always employ an old-fogy, rival--was naturally of some little service in consultation with the two ladies and the Book. Of the characters of these associates of mine, I need only say that Dove was ever an anxious soul, the Book a truthful but at times a vague one, while Letitia was all that could be desired as guide, philosopher, and friend. Alarming symptoms might puzzle others, but never her; they might, even to myself, even to the Book, bode any one of twenty kinds of evil; to her they pointed solely, solemnly to one--that one, alas! which had carried off some dear child of her school.

Dove, I am sure, had never been impatient with Letitia, but now, such was the tension of these family conferences and such the gravity of the case involved, there were times, I noted, when the cousins addressed each other with the most exquisite and elaborate courtesy, lest either should think the other in the least disturbed. For example, there was that little affair of consolation--a sort of rubber make-believe with which young Robin curbed and soothed his appetite and invited pensiveness. Microbes, Letitia said, were--

Dove interposed to remind her that the things were boiled just seven--

Germs, Letitia argued, were not to be trifled with.

"Just seven times a week, my dear," said Dove, triumphantly.

"And besides," Letitia continued, undismayed, "they will ruin the shape of the child's mouth."

"But how?" cried Dove. "Pray tell me how, my love, when they are made in the very identical im--"

"And modern doctors," Letitia stated with some severity, "are doing away with so many foolish notions of our grandmothers."

"Yet our fathers and mothers," Dove replied, "were very fair specimens of the race, my dear. Shakespeare, doubtless, was rocked in a cradle, and his brains survived. They were quite intact, I think you will admit. _He_ wasn't joggled into--"

"Yet who knows what he might have written, dear love," answered Letitia, "if he had been permitted to lie quite--"

"_You_ try to make a child go to sleep, my darling, without _something_!" my wife suggested. "Just try it once, my dear."

"Cradles," said Letitia--but at this juncture I stepped in, authoritatively, as the father of my child. It is due to Dove, I confess gladly, and partly to Letitia also, that this fatherhood has been so pleasant to look back upon. Robin's mouth is very normal, as even Letitia will admit, I know, as she would be the last person in the world to say that his brains had suffered any in the joggling. Somehow, by dint of boiling the consolation I suppose, and by what-not formulæ, we got him up at last on two of the sturdiest, little, round, brown legs that ever splashed in mud-puddle--Dove's Darling, my Old Fellow, and Letitia's Love.

Love she called him in their private moments, and other names as fond, I have no doubt; publicly he was her Archer, her Bowman, her Robin Hood. She, it was, who purchased him bow-and-arrows, and replaced for him without a murmur, three panes in the library windows and a precious little wedding vase. The latter cost her a pretty penny, but she reminded us that a boy, after all, will be a boy! She took great pride in his better marksmanship and sought a suit for him, a costume that should be traditional of archers bold.

"Have you cloth," she asked, "of the shade called Lincoln green?"

The clerk was doubtful.

"I'll see," she said. "Oh, Mr. Peabody! Mr. Peabody!"

"Well?" asked a man's voice hidden behind a wall of calicoes. "Well? What is it?"

"Mr. Peabody, have we any cloth called Abraham--"

"Not Abraham Lincoln," Letitia interposed, mildly. "You misunderstood me. I said Lincoln green."

"Same thing," said the clerk, tartly.

Mr. Peabody then emerged smilingly from behind his wall.

"How do you do, Miss Primrose," said he. "What can we do for you this morning?" Letitia carefully repeated her request. He shook his head, while the young clerk smiled triumphantly.

"No," he said. "You must be mistaken. I have never even heard of such a color--and if there was one of that name," he added, with evident pride in his even tones, "I should certainly know of it. We have other greens--"

Letitia flushed.

"Why," she explained, "the English archers were accustomed to wearing a cloth called Lincoln green."

Mr. Peabody smiled deprecatingly.

"I never heard of it," he replied, stiffly; "and, as I say, I have been in the business for thirty years."

"But don't you remember Robin Hood and his merry men?"

"Oh!" exclaimed the merchant, a great light breaking in upon him. "You mean the fairy stories! Ha, ha! Very good. Very good, indeed. Well, no, Miss Primrose, I'm afraid we can hardly provide you with the cloth that fairies--"

"Show me your green cloths--all of them," said Letitia, her cheeks burning.

"Certainly, Miss Primrose. Miss Baggs, show Miss Primrose all of our green cloths--_all_ of them."

"Light green or dark green?" queried Miss Baggs, who had been delighted with the whole affair.

Letitia pondered. There had been some reason, she reflected, for Robin Hood's choice of gear.

"Something," she said, at last--"something as near to the shade of foliage as you can give me."

"I beg pardon?" inquired Miss Baggs.

"The color of leaves," explained Letitia.

"Well," Miss Baggs retorted, smartly, "some leaves are light, and some are dark, and some leaves are in-between."

There was a dangerous gleam in Letitia's eyes. "Show me _all_ your green cloths," she requested, curtly--"all of them." Miss Baggs obeyed.

"I suppose it really isn't Lincoln green, you know," Letitia said, when she had brought the parcel home with her and had spread its contents upon the sofa, "but I hope you'll like it, Dove. It is the nearest to tree-green I could find."

It was, indeed.

Now, Dove had never heard of a boy in green, and had grave doubts, which it would not do, however, to even hint to dear Letitia; so made it was, that archer-suit, though by some strange freak of fancy that caused Letitia keen regret, Robin, dressed in it, could seldom be induced to play at archery, always insisting, to her discomfiture, that he was Grass!

"When you grow up, my bowman," she once told him, "I'll buy you a white suit, all of flannel, and father shall teach you to play at cricket in the orchard."

"But crickets are black," cried Robin, whose eye for color, or the absence of it, I told Letitia, was bound to ruin her best-laid English plans.

It was good to see them, the Archer Bold and the Gray Lady walking together, hand-in-hand--the one beaming up, the other down; the one so subject to sudden leaps and bounds and one-legged hoppings to avoid the cracks, the other flurried lest those wild friskings should disturb the balance she had kept so perfectly all those years till then.

In their walks and talks lay many stories, I am sure--things which never will be written unless Letitia turns to authorship, for which it is a little late, I fear; but even then she would never dream of putting such simple matters down. She does not know at all the delicious Lady of the Linen Reticule, who, to herself, is commonplace enough. She might, perhaps, make a tale or two of the Archer in Lincoln Green, but what is the romance of an archer without the lady in it?

One drowsy afternoon on a Sunday in summer-time I stretched myself in my easy-chair with another for my slippered feet. My dinner had ended pleasantly with a love-in-a-cottage pudding which had dripped blissfully with a heavenly cataract of golden sauce. Dove had gone out on a Sabbath mission, rustling away in a gown sprinkled with rose-buds--one of those summer things in which it is not quite safe for any woman to risk herself in this wicked world.

Such shallow thoughts were passing through my mind as Dove departed, and when the front gate clicked behind her, I opened a charming novel and went to sleep. I know I slept, for I walked in a path I have never seen. I should like to see it, for it must be beautiful in the spring-time. It was a kind of autumn when I was there. I was dragging my feet about in the yellow leaves, when a senile hollyhock leaned over quietly and tickled me on the ear. As I brushed it away I heard it giggling. Then a twig of pear-tree bent and trifled with my nose, which is a thing no gentleman permits, even in dreams, and I brushed it smartly. Then I heard a voice--I suppose the gardener's--telling something to behave itself. Then I swished again among the leaves. How long I swished there I have no notion, but I heard more voices by-and-by, and I remember saying to myself, "They are behind the gooseberries." They did not know, of course, that I was there, else they had talked more softly.

"No," said he, "you be the horsey."

"Oh no," said the other, "I'd rather drive."

"No, _you_ be the horsey."

"Sh! Let me drive."

"I said _you_ be the horsey."

"I be the horsey?"

"Yes. Whoa, horsey! D'up! Whoa! D'up!"

Then all was confusion behind the gooseberries and the horsey d'upped and whoaed, and whoaed and d'upped, till I all but d'upped. I _did_ move, and the noise stopped.

How long I slept there I do not know, but I heard again those voices behind the vines, though more subdued now, mere tender undertones like lovers in a garden seat. Lovers I supposed them, and, keeping still, I listened:

"But I'm not your little boy," said one, "because you haven't any."

"Oh yes, you are," replied the other, confidently. "You're my little boy because I love you."

"But why don't you ask God to send you a little boy all your own, just four years old like me, so we could play together? Why don't you?"

"Because," the reply was, "you're all the little boy I need."

"But if you _did_ ask God and the angel brought you a little boy, then his name would be Billie."

"Oh, would it?"

"Yes, his name would be Billie, because now Billie is the next name to Robin."

"What do you mean by the next name to Robin?"

"Why, 'cause now, first comes Robin, and then comes Billie, and then comes Tommy, or else Muffins, if you turn the corner--unless he's a girl--and then he's Annie."

"What?" gasped the second voice. "I don't understand."

"Well, then," the first voice answered, wearily, "call him Johnny."

I know at the time the explanation seemed quite clear to me, as it must have been to the second speaker, for the colloquy ended then and there. I might have peeked through the gooseberries and not been discovered, I suppose, but just then I went out shooting flamingoes with a friend of mine, and when I got back, some time that day, the gooseberry-vines were thick with rose-buds. And while I was gone a brook had come--you could hear it plainly on the other side--and I was surprised, I remember, and angry with my aunt Jemima (I never had an Aunt Jemima) for not telling me. I listened awhile to the tinkle-tinkling till presently the burden changed to a

"Tra, la, la,
Tra, la, la,"

over and over, till I said to myself, "These are the Singing Waters the poets hear!" So I tiptoed nearer through the crackling leaves, and touching the rose-vines very deftly for fear of thorns, again I listened. My heart beat faster.

"It is an English linn!" I said, astonished, for there were words to it, English words to that singing rivulet! I could make out "gold" and "rue" and "youth."

"Some woodland secret!" I told myself; so I listened eagerly, scarcely breathing, and little by little, as my ears grew more accustomed to the sounds, I heard the song, not once, but often, each time more clearly than before:

"Many seek a coronet,
Many sigh for gold,
Some there are a-seeking yet--
(Never thought of you, my pet!)
--Now they're passing old.

"Many yearn for lovers true,
Some for sleep from pain,
Seeking laurel, some find rue--
(Oh, they never dreamed of you!)
--Now want youth again.

"Crown and treasure, love like wine,
Peace and laurel-tree,
Have I all, oh! world of mine--
(Soft little world my arms entwine)
--Youth thou art to me."

It seemed familiar, yet I could not place the song, till at last it came to me that Dr. Primrose wrote it for his only child, a kind of lullaby which he used to chant to her.

Then I remembered how all that while I had been listening with my eyes shut, and so I opened them to find the singer--and saw Letitia with Robin sleeping in her arms.

IV

HIRAM PTOLEMY

One afternoon in a spring I am thinking of, passing from my office to the waiting-room beyond it, I found alone there a little old gentleman seated patiently on the very edge of an old-fashioned sofa which occupied one corner of the room. He rose politely at my entrance, and, standing before me, hat in hand, cleared his throat and managed to articulate:

"Dr. Weatherby, I believe."

I bowed and asked him to be seated, but he continued erect, peering up at me with eyes that watered behind his steel-bowed spectacles. He was an odd, unkempt figure of a man; his scraggly beard barely managed to screen his collar-button, for he wore no tie; his sparse, gray locks fell quite to the greasy collar of his coat, an antique frock, once black but now of a greenish hue; and his inner collar was of celluloid like his dickey and like the cuffs which rattled about his lean wrists as he shook my hand.

"My name is Percival--Hiram De Lancey Percival," he said. "De Lancey was my mother's name."

"Will you come into my office, Mr. Percival?" I asked.

"No--no, thank you--that is, I am not a patient," he explained. "I just called on my way to--"

He wet his lips, and as he said "New York" I fancied I could detect beneath the casual manner he assumed, no inconsiderable self-satisfaction, accompanied by a straightening of the bent shoulders, while at the same moment he touched with one finger the tip of his collar and thrust up his chin as if the former were too tight for him. With that he laid his old felt hat among the magazines on my table and took a chair.

"The fact is," he continued, "I am a former protégé of the late Rev. David Primrose, of whom you may--"

He paused significantly.

"Indeed!" I said. "I knew Dr. Primrose very well. He was a neighbor of ours. His daughter--"

My visitor's face brightened visibly and he hitched his chair nearer to my own.

"I was about to ask you concerning the--the daughter," he said. "Is she--?"

"She lives with my family," I replied. "Letitia--"

"Ah, yes," he said; "Letitia! That is the name--Letitia Primrose--well, well, well, well. Now, that's nice, isn't it? She lives with you, you say."

"Yes," I explained, "she has lived with my family since her father's death."

"He was a remarkable man, sir," Mr. Percival declared. "Yes, sir, he was a remarkable man. Dr. Primrose was a pulpit orator of unusual power, sir--of unusual power. And something of a poet, sir, I believe."

"Yes," I assented.

"I never read his verse," said the little old gentleman, "but I have heard it said that he was a fine hand at it--a fine hand at it. In fact, I--"

He paused modestly.

"I am something of a writer myself."

"Indeed!" I said.

"Oh yes; oh yes, I--but in a different line, sir, I--"

Again he hesitated, apparently through humility, so that I encouraged him to proceed.

"Yes?" I said.

"I--er--in fact, I--" he continued, shyly.

"Something philosophical," I ventured.

"Yes; oh yes," he ejaculated. "Well, no; not that exactly."

"Scientific then, Mr. Percival."

He beamed upon me.

"Well, now, how did you guess it? How did you guess it?" he exclaimed.

"Oh, I merely took a chance at it," I replied, modestly.

"Well, now, that's remarkable. Say--you seem to be a clever young fellow. Are you--are you interested--in science?" he inquired, sitting forward on the very edge of his chair.

"Well, as a doctor, of course," I began.

"Of course, of course," he interposed, "but did you ever take up ancient matters to any extent?"

"Well, no, I cannot say that I have."

"Latin and Greek, of course?" suggested Mr. Percival.

"Oh yes, at college--Latin and Greek."

"Dr. Weatherby," said my visitor, his eyes shining, "I don't mind telling you: I am a--"

He wetted his lips and glanced nervously about him.

"We are quite alone," I said.

"Dr. Weatherby, I am an Egyptologist!"

"You are?" I answered.

"Yes," he replied! "Yes, sir, I am an Egyptologist."

"That," I remarked, "is a very abstruse department of knowledge."

"It is, sir," replied the little old gentleman, hitching his chair still nearer, so that leaning forward he could pluck my sleeve. "I am the only man who has ever successfully deciphered the inscriptions on the great stone of Iris-Iris!"

"You don't say so!" I exclaimed.

"I do, Dr. Weatherby. I am stating facts, sir. Others have attempted it, men eminent in the learned world, sir, but I alone--here in my bosom--"

He tapped the region of his heart, where a lump suggested a roll of manuscript. "I alone, Dr. Weatherby, have succeeded in translating those time-worn symbols. Dr. Weatherby"--he lowered his voice almost to a whisper--"it has been the patient toil of seven years!"

He sprang back suddenly in his chair, and drawing a red bandanna from his coat-tails proceeded to mop his brow.

"Mr. Percival," I said, cordially, looking at my watch, "won't you come to dinner?" His eyes sparkled.

"Well, now, that's good of you," he said. "That's very good of you. I _was_ intending to go on to New York to-night by the evening-train, but since you insist, I might wait over till tomorrow."

"Do so," I urged. "You shall spend the night with us. Letitia will be delighted to see an old friend of her father, and my wife will be equally pleased, I know. Have you your grip with you?"

"It is just here--behind the lounge," said Mr. Percival, springing forward with the agility of a boy and drawing from beneath the flounce of the sofa-cover a small valise of a kind now seldom seen except in garrets or in the hands of such little, old-fashioned gentlemen as my guest. It had been glossy black in its day, but now was sadly bruised and a little mildewed with over-much lying in attic dust. In the very centre of the outer flap, which buckled down over a shallow pocket, intended, I suppose, for comb and brush, was a small round mirror, dollar-sized, which by some miracle had escaped the hand of time.

"By-the-way," I said, as we entered my buggy, "you haven't told me--"

He interrupted me, smiling delightedly.

"Why I am going to New York?"

"Yes," I said.

"Well, sir, I'll tell you. I'll tell you, doctor, and it's quite a story."

"Where is your home, Mr. Percival?"

"Sand Ridge," he said, "has _been_ my home, but I expect to reside hereafter in--"

He wetted his lips and pulled at his collar again--

"In New York, sir."

On our drive homeward he told his story. Early in manhood he had been a carpenter by day, by night a student of the ancient languages, which he acquired by dint of such zeal and sacrifice that Dr. Primrose, then in the zenith of his own career, discovering the talents of the poor young artisan, urged and aided him to obtain a pulpit in a country town. He proved, I imagine, an indifferent preacher, drifting from place to place, and from denomination to denomination, to become at last a teacher of Greek and Latin in the Sand Ridge Normal and Collegiate Institute. Whatever moments he could spare from his academic duties, he had devoted eagerly to Egyptian monuments, and more particularly to that one of Iris-Iris which had baffled full half a century of learned men.

"But how did you do it?" I inquired. He wriggled delightedly in the carriage-seat.

"Doctor," he said, "how does a man perform some marvellous surgical feat, which no one had ever done, or dreamed of doing, before? Eh?"

"I see," I replied, nodding sagely. "Such things are beyond our ken."

"I did it," he chuckled. "I did it, doctor. And now, sir--"

He paused significantly.

"You are going to New York," I said.

"Exactly. To--"

"Publish," I suggested.

"The very word!" he cried. "Doctor, I am going to give my discovery to the world--to the world, sir!--not merely for the edification of savants, but for the enlightenment of my fellow-men."

"By George!" I said, "that's what I call philanthropy, Mr. Percival."

"Well, sir," he replied, modestly, "all I ask--all I ask in return, sir, is that I may be permitted to spend the remainder of my days, rent free and bread free, in some hall of learning, that I may edit my books and devote myself to further research undismayed by the--the--"

"Wolf at the door," I suggested.

"Exactly," he replied. "That's all I ask."

"It is little enough," I remarked.

"Doctor," he said, solemnly, "it is enough, sir, for any learned man."

When I reached home with my unexpected guest, Dove and Letitia smilingly welcomed him; I say smilingly, for there was that about the little old gentleman which defied ill-humor. He seemed shy at first, as might be expected of a bachelor-Egyptologist, but the simple manners he encountered soon reassured him. I led him to our best front bedroom, where he stood, dazzled apparently by the whiteness and ruffles all about him, and could not be induced to set down his valise till he had spread a paper carefully upon the rug beneath it.

"Now, I guess I'll just wash up," he said, "if you'll permit me," looking doubtfully at the spotless towels and the china bowl decorated with roses, which he called a basin. I assured him that they were there to use.

It was not long before we heard him wandering in the upper halls, and hastening to his rescue I found him muttering apologies before a door through which apparently he had blundered, looking for the staircase. Safe on the lower floor again, Letitia put him at his ease with her kind questions about Egyptology, and the delighted scientist was in the midst of a glowing narrative of the great stone of Iris-Iris when dinner was announced. It was evident that Dove's table quite disconcerted him with its superfluity of glass and silver, and dropping his meat-fork on the floor, he strenuously resisted all Dove's orders to replace it from the pantry.

"No, no, dear madam," he exclaimed, pointing to the shining row beside his plate, "do not disturb yourself, I pray. One of these extras here will do quite as well."

During the dinner Letitia plied him with further questions till he wellnigh forgot his plate in his elation at finding such sympathetic auditors. Dove considerately delayed the courses while he talked on, bobbing forward and backward in his chair, his slight frame swayed by his agitation, his face glowing, and his beard bristling with its contortions.

"Never," he told me afterwards, as we passed from the dining-room arm-in-arm--"never have I enjoyed more charming and intelligent conversation--never, sir!"

I offered him cigars, but he declined them, observing that while he never used "the weed," he had up-stairs in his valise, if we would permit him--

We did so, though none the wiser as to what he meant, for he did not complete his sentence, but, bowing acknowledgment, he briskly disappeared, to return at once without further mishap in our deceitful upper hallway--reappearing with a paper bag which he untwisted and offered gallantly to the ladies.

"Lemon-drops," he said. "Permit me, Mrs. Weatherby. Oh, take more, Miss Letitia--do, I beg; they are quite inexpensive, I assure you--quite harmless and inexpensive. Help yourself liberally, Mrs. Weatherby. Lemon-drops, as you are doubtless aware, doctor, are the most healthful of sweets, and as a--have another, Miss Primrose, do!--as a relaxation after the day's toil are much to be preferred, if you will pardon my saying so, Dr. Weatherby--much to be preferred to that poisonous cigar you are smoking there."

"Quite right, Mr. Percival," I assented.

"They are very nice," Dove said.

"Oh, they are delicious!" cried Letitia.

"Are they not?" said the little man, delighted with his hospitality, and so I left them--two ladies and an Egyptologist sucking lemon-drops and talking amiably of the great stone of Iris-Iris--while I attended on more modern matters, but with regret. I returned, however, in time to escort the scientist to his bedroom, where he opened his valise and took from it a faded cotton night-gown, which with a few papers and a Testament seemed its sole contents. His books, he explained, had gone on by freight. As I turned to leave him he said, earnestly:

"Doctor, my old friend's daughter is a most remarkable woman, sir--a most remarkable woman."

"She is, indeed," I assented.

"Why," said he, "she evinced an interest in the smallest detail of my work! Nothing was too trivial, or too profound for her. I was astonished, sir."

"She is a scholar's daughter, you must remember, Mr. Percival."

"Ah!" said he. "That's it. That's it, doctor. And what an ideal companion she would make for another scholar, sir!--or any man."

Next morning I was called into the country before our guest had risen, and when I returned at noon he had gone, leaving me regretful messages. I heard then what had happened in my absence. Hiram Ptolemy--it is the name we gave to our Egyptologist--had awakened soon after my departure and was found by Dove walking meditatively in the garden. After breakfast, while my wife was busy with little Robin, Letitia listened attentively to a further discourse on the Iris-Iris, which, she was told, bore on its surface a glorious message from the ancient to the modern world.

"It will cause, dear madam," said the scientist, his eyes dilating and his voice trembling with emotion, "a revolution in our retrospective vision; it will bring us, as it were, face to face with a civilization that will shame our own!"

Letitia told Dove there was a wondrous dignity in the little man as he spoke those words. Then he paused in his eloquence.

"Miss Primrose," he said, "permit me to pay you a great compliment: I have never in my life had the privilege--of meeting a woman--of such understanding as your own. You are remarkably--remarkably like your learned and lamented father."

"Oh, Mr. Percival," Letitia said, flushing, "you could not say a kinder thing."

"And yet," said the scientist, "you--you are quite unattached, are you not?"

"Quite--what, Mr. Percival?"

"Unattached," he repeated, "by ties of--the affections?"

"Oh, quite," she answered, "quite unattached, Mr. Percival."

"But surely," he said, "you still have--"

He paused awkwardly.

"Oh," said Letitia, "I shall never marry, Mr. Percival--if you mean that."

He bowed gravely.

"Doubtless, dear madam--you know best."

V

A. P. A.

One spring a strange infection spread through the land and appeared suddenly in our corner of it. First a rash became a matter of discussion in our public places, but was not thought serious until the journals of the larger cities brought us news that set our town aflame with apprehension. Half our citizens broke out at once in a kind of measles, not, however, of the common or school-boy sort--that speckled cloud with a silver lining of no-more-school-till-it's-over--nor yet that more malignant type called German measles. It was, in fact, quite Irish in its nature, generally speaking, and in particular it was what might be termed anti-papistical--for, hark you! it had been discovered that the Catholics were arming secretly to take the world by storm!

There are many Romanists in Grassy Ford. St. Peter's steeple, tipped with its gilded cross, towers higher than our Protestant spires, and on the Sabbath a hundred farmers tie their horses beneath its sheds and follow their womenfolk and flocks of children in to mass. In those days Father Flynn was the priest, a youngish, round-faced man, who chanted his Latin with a rich accent derived from Donegal, and who was not what is called militant in his manner, but was, in fact, the mildest-spoken of our Grassy Ford divines. He held aloof from those theological disputes which sometimes set his Protestant brethren by the ears, declining politely all invitations to attend the famous set debates between our Presbyterian and Universalist ministers, which ended, I remember, in a splendid God-given victory for--the one whose flock you happened to be in. Father Flynn only smiled at such encounters; he was not belligerent, and while his parish might with some good reason be described as coming from fine old fighting stock, it had never given evidence, so far as I am aware, of any desire to use cold steel, its warm, red, hairy fists having proven equal to those little emergencies which sometimes arise--more particularly on a Saturday night, at Riley's. But when it was whispered, then spoken aloud, and finally charged openly on the street corners and even in letters to the _Gazette_, then edited by Butters's son, that Father Flynn was training a military company in the basement of St. Peter's church, that the young Romanists had been armed with rifles, and that ammunition was being stored stealthily and by night under the very altar!--and this by order from the Vatican, where a gigantic plot was brewing to seize the New World for the Pope!--then it was shrewdly observed by those who held the rumors to be truth that Father Flynn _did_ have the look of a conspirator and that he walked with a military ease and swing.