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Title: Men, Women, and Ghosts

Author: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Release Date: January 18, 2004 [EBook #10744]
[Date last updated: April 24, 2005]

Language: English

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Men, Women, and Ghosts

by

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

1869.


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by FIELDS,
OSGOOD, & CO., in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the
District of Massachusetts.



University Press: Welch, Bigelow, &., Cambridge.




Note.



Of this collection of stories, "Calico," "The Day of my Death," and
"Night-Watches" (the last under the title of "Voices of the Night") have
appeared in _Harper's Monthly_; "One of the Elect," (under the title of
"Magdalene,") in _Hours at Home_; and "Little Tommy Tucker," in the
_Watchman and Reflector_.

E. S. P.

Andover, April, 1869.




Contents.



No News
The Tenth of January
Night-Watches
The Day of My Death
"Little Tommy Tucker"
One of the Elect
What Was the Matter?
In the Gray Goth
Calico
Kentucky's Ghost




No News.



None at all. Understand that, please, to begin with. That you will at
once, and distinctly, recall Dr. Sharpe--and his wife, I make no doubt.
Indeed, it is because the history is a familiar one, some of the
unfamiliar incidents of which have come into my possession, that I
undertake to tell it.

My relation to the Doctor, his wife, and their friend, has been in many
respects peculiar. Without entering into explanations which I am not at
liberty to make, let me say, that those portions of their story which
concern our present purpose, whether or not they fell under my personal
observation, are accurately, and to the best of my judgment impartially,
related.

Nobody, I think, who was at the wedding, dreamed that there would ever
be such a story to tell. It was such a pretty, peaceful wedding! If you
were there, you remember it as you remember a rare sunrise, or a
peculiarly delicate May-flower, or that strain in a simple old song
which is like orioles and butterflies and dew-drops.

There were not many of us; we were all acquainted with one another; the
day was bright, and Harrie did not faint nor cry. There were a couple
of bridesmaids,--Pauline Dallas, and a Miss--Jones, I think,--besides
Harrie's little sisters; and the people were well dressed and well
looking, but everybody was thoroughly at home, comfortable, and on a
level. There was no annihilating of little country friends in gray
alpacas by city cousins in point and pearls, no crowding and no crush,
and, I believe, not a single "front breadth" spoiled by the ices.

Harrie is not called exactly pretty, but she must be a very plain woman
who is not pleasant to see upon her wedding day. Harrie's eyes shone,--I
never saw such eyes! and she threw her head back like a queen whom they
were crowning.

Her father married them. Old Mr. Bird was an odd man, with odd notions
of many things, of which marriage was one. The service was his own. I
afterwards asked him for a copy of it, which I have preserved. The
Covenant ran thus:--

"Appealing to your Father who is in heaven to witness your sincerity,
you .... do now take this woman whose hand you hold--choosing her alone
from all the world--to be your lawfully wedded wife. You trust her as
your best earthly friend. You promise to love, to cherish, and to
protect her; to be considerate of her happiness in your plans of life;
to cultivate for her sake all manly virtues; and in all things to seek
her welfare as you seek your own. You pledge yourself thus honorably to
her, to be her husband in good faith, so long as the providence of God
shall spare you to each other.

"In like manner, looking to your Heavenly Father for his blessing, you
... do now receive this man, whose hand you hold, to be your lawfully
wedded husband. You choose him from all the world as he has chosen you.
You pledge your trust to him as your best earthly friend. You promise to
love, to comfort, and to honor him; to cultivate for his sake all
womanly graces; to guard his reputation, and assist him in his life's
work; and in all things to esteem his happiness as your own. You give
yourself thus trustfully to him, to be his wife in good faith, so long
as the providence of God shall spare you to each other."

When Harrie lifted her shining eyes to say, "I _do_!" the two little
happy words ran through the silent room like a silver bell; they would
have tinkled in your ears for weeks to come if you had heard them.

I have been thus particular in noting the words of the service, partly
because they pleased me, partly because I have since had some occasion
to recall them, and partly because I remember having wondered, at the
time, how many married men and women of your and my acquaintance, if
honestly subjecting their union to the test and full interpretation and
remotest bearing of such vows as these, could live in the sight of God
and man as "lawfully wedded" husband and wife.

Weddings are always very sad things to me; as much sadder than burials
as the beginning of life should be sadder than the end of it. The
readiness with which young girls will flit out of a tried, proved, happy
home into the sole care and keeping of a man whom they have known three
months, six, twelve, I do not profess to understand. Such knowledge is
too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. But that may
be because I am fifty-five, an old maid, and have spent twenty years in
boarding-houses.

A woman reads the graces of a man at sight. His faults she cannot
thoroughly detect till she has been for years his wife. And his faults
are so much more serious a matter to her than hers to him!

I was thinking of this the day before the wedding. I had stepped in from
the kitchen to ask Mrs. Bird about the salad, when I came abruptly, at
the door of the sitting-room, upon as choice a picture as one is likely
to see.

The doors were open through the house, and the wind swept in and out. A
scarlet woodbine swung lazily back and forth beyond the window. Dimples
of light burned through it, dotting the carpet and the black-and-white
marbled oilcloth of the hall. Beyond, in the little front parlor, framed
in by the series of doorways, was Harrie, all in a cloud of white. It
floated about her with an idle, wavelike motion. She had a veil like
fretted pearls through which her tinted arm shone faintly, and the
shadow of a single scarlet leaf trembled through a curtain upon her
forehead.

Her mother, crying a little, as mothers will cry the day before the
wedding, was smoothing with tender touch a tiny crease upon the cloud; a
bridesmaid or two sat chattering on the floor; gloves, and favors, and
flowers, and bits of lace like hoar frost, lay scattered about; and the
whole was repictured and reflected and reshaded in the great
old-fashioned mirrors before which Harrie turned herself about.

It seemed a pity that Myron Sharpe should miss that, so I called him in
from the porch where he sat reading Stuart Mill on Liberty.

If you form your own opinion of a man who might spend a livelong
morning,--an October morning, quivering with color, alive with light,
sweet with the breath of dropping pines, soft with the caress of a wind
that had filtered through miles of sunshine,--and that the morning of
the day before his wedding,--reading Stuart Mill on Liberty,--I cannot
help it.

Harrie, turning suddenly, saw us,--met her lover's eyes, stood a moment
with lifted lashes and bright cheeks,--crept with a quick, impulsive
movement into her mother's arms, kissed her, and floated away up the
stairs.

"It's a perfect fit," said Mrs. Bird; coming out with one corner of a
very dingy handkerchief--somebody had just used it to dust the Parian
vases--at her eyes.

And though, to be sure, it was none of my business, I caught myself
saying, under my breath,--

"It's a fit for life; for a _life_, Dr. Sharpe."

Dr. Sharpe smiled serenely. He was very much in love with the little
pink-and-white cloud that had just fluttered up the stairs. If it had
been drifting to him for the venture of twenty lifetimes, he would have
felt no doubt of the "fit."

Nor, I am sure, would Harrie. She stole out to him that evening after
the bridal finery was put away, and knelt at his feet in her plain
little muslin dress, her hair all out of crimp, slipping from her net
behind her ears,--Harrie's ears were very small, and shaded off in the
colors of a pale apple-blossom,--up-turning her flushed and weary face.

"Put away the book, please, Myron."

Myron put away the book (somebody on Bilious Affections), and looked for
a moment without speaking at the up-turned face.

Dr. Sharpe had spasms of distrusting himself amazingly; perhaps most men
have,--and ought to. His face grew grave just then. That little girl's
clear eyes shone upon him like the lights upon an altar. In very
unworthiness of soul he would have put the shoes from off his feet. The
ground on which he trod was holy.

When he spoke to the child, it was in a whisper:--

"Harrie, are you afraid of me? I know I am not very good."

And Harrie, kneeling with the shadows of the scarlet leaves upon her
hair, said softly, "How could I be afraid of you? It is _I_ who am not
good."

Dr. Sharpe could not have made much progress in Bilious Affections that
evening. All the time that the skies were fading, we saw them wandering
in and out among the apple-trees,--she with those shining eyes, and her
hand in his. And when to-morrow had come and gone, and in the dying
light they drove away, and Miss Dallas threw old Grandmother Bird's
little satin boot after the carriage, the last we saw of her was that
her hand was clasped in his, and that her eyes were shining.

Well, I believe that they got along very well till the first baby came.
As far as my observation goes, young people usually get along very well
till the first baby comes. These particular young people had a clear
conscience,--as young people's consciences go,--fair health, a
comfortable income for two, and a very pleasant home.

This home was on the coast. The townspeople made shoes, and minded their
own business. Dr. Sharpe bought the dying practice of an antediluvian
who believed in camomile and castor-oil. Harrie mended a few stockings,
made a few pies, and watched the sea.

It was almost enough of itself to make one happy--the sea--as it
tumbled about the shores of Lime. Harrie had a little seat hollowed out
in the cliffs, and a little scarlet bathing-dress, which was
surprisingly becoming, and a little boat of her own, moored in a little
bay,--a pretty shell which her husband had had made to order, that she
might be able to row herself on a calm water. He was very thoughtful for
her in those days.

She used to take her sewing out upon the cliff; she would be demure and
busy; she would finish the selvage seam; but the sun blazed, the sea
shone, the birds sang, all the world was at play,--what could it matter
about selvage seams? So the little gold thimble would drop off, the
spool trundle down the cliff, and Harrie, sinking back into a cushion of
green and crimson sea-weed, would open her wide eyes and dream. The
waves purpled and silvered, and broke into a mist like powdered amber,
the blue distances melted softly, the white sand glittered, the gulls
were chattering shrilly. What a world it was!

"And he is in it!" thought Harrie. Then she would smile and shut her
eyes. "And the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that Moses'
face shone, and they were afraid to come nigh him." Harrie wondered if
everybody's joy were too great to look upon, and wondered, in a
childish, frightened way, how it might be with sorrow; if people stood
with veiled faces before it, dumb with pain as she with peace,--and then
it was dinner-time, and Myron came down to walk up the beach with her,
and she forgot all about it.

She forgot all about everything but the bare joy of life and the sea,
when she had donned the pretty scarlet suit, and crept out into the
surf,--at the proper medicinal hour, for the Doctor was very particular
with her,--when the warm brown waves broke over her face, the long
sea-weeds slipped through her fingers, the foam sprinkled her hair with
crystals, and the strong wind was up.

She was a swift swimmer, and as one watched from the shore, her lithe
scarlet shoulders seemed to glide like a trail of fire through the
lighted water; and when she sat in shallow foam with sunshine on her, or
flashed through the dark green pools among the rocks, or floated with
the incoming tide, her great bathing-hat dropping shadows on her wet
little happy face, and her laugh ringing out, it was a pretty sight.

But a prettier one than that, her husband thought, was to see her in her
boat at sunset; when sea and sky were aflame, when every flake of foam
was a rainbow, and the great chalk-cliffs were blood-red; when the wind
blew her net off, and in pretty petulance she pulled her hair down, and
it rippled all about her as she dipped into the blazing West.

Dr. Sharpe used to drive home by the beach, on a fair night, always,
that he might see it. Then Harrie would row swiftly in, and spring into
the low, broad buggy beside him, and they rode home together in the
fragrant dusk. Sometimes she used to chatter on these twilight drives;
but more often she crept up to him and shut her eyes, and was as still
as a sleepy bird. It was so pleasant to do nothing but be happy!

I believe that at this time Dr. Sharpe loved his wife as unselfishly as
he knew how. Harrie often wrote me that he was "very good." She was
sometimes a little troubled that he should "know so much more" than she,
and had fits of reading the newspapers and reviewing her French, and
studying cases of hydrophobia, or some other pleasant subject which had
a professional air. Her husband laughed at her for her pains, but
nevertheless he found her so much the more entertaining. Sometimes she
drove about with him on his calls, or amused herself by making jellies
in fancy moulds for his poor, or sat in his lap and discoursed like a
bobolink of croup and measles, pulling his whiskers the while with her
pink fingers.

All this, as I have said, was before the first baby came.

It is surprising what vague ideas young people in general, and young men
in particular, have of the rubs and jars of domestic life; especially
domestic life on an income of eighteen hundred, American constitutions
and country servants thrown in.

Dr. Sharpe knew something of illness and babies and worry and watching;
but that his own individual baby should deliberately lie and scream till
two o'clock in the morning, was a source of perpetual astonishment to
him; and that it,--he and Mrs. Sharpe had their first quarrel over his
persistence in calling the child an "it,"--that it should _invariably_
feel called upon to have the colic just as he had fallen into a nap,
after a night spent with a dying patient, was a phenomenon of the infant
mind for which he was, to say the least, unprepared.

It was for a long time a mystery to his masculine understanding, that
Biddy could not be nursery-maid as well as cook. "Why, what has she to
do now? Nothing but to broil steaks and make tea for two people!" That
whenever he had Harrie quietly to himself for a peculiarly pleasant
tea-table, the house should resound with sudden shrieks from the
nursery, and there was _always_ a pin in that baby, was forever a fresh
surprise; and why, when they had a house full of company, no "girl," and
Harrie down with a sick-headache, his son and heir should of _necessity_
be threatened with scarlatina, was a philosophical problem over which he
speculated long and profoundly.

So, gradually, in the old way, the old sweet habits of the long
honeymoon were broken. Harrie dreamed no more on the cliffs by the
bright noon sea; had no time to spend making scarlet pictures in the
little bathing-suit; had seldom strength to row into the sunset, her
hair loose, the bay on fire, and one to watch her from the shore. There
were no more walks up the beach to dinner; there came an end to the
drives in the happy twilight; she could not climb now upon her husband's
knee, because of the heavy baby on her own.

The spasms of newspaper reading subsided rapidly; Corinne and Racine
gathered the dust in peace upon their shelves; Mrs. Sharpe made no more
fancy jellies, and found no time to inquire after other people's babies.

One becomes used to anything after a while, especially if one happens to
be a man. It would have surprised Dr. Sharpe, if he had taken the pains
to notice,--which I believe he never did,--how easily he became used to
his solitary drives and disturbed teas; to missing Harrie's watching
face at door or window; to sitting whole evenings by himself while she
sang to the fretful baby overhead with her sweet little tired voice; to
slipping off into the "spare room" to sleep when the child cried at
night, and Harrie, up and down with him by the hour, flitted from cradle
to bed, or paced the room, or sat and sang, or lay and cried herself, in
sheer despair of rest; to wandering away on lonely walks; to stepping
often into a neighbor's to discuss the election or the typhoid in the
village; to forgetting that his wife's conversational capacities could
extend beyond Biddy and teething; to forgetting that she might ever
hunger for a twilight drive, a sunny sail, for the sparkle and
freshness, the dreaming, the petting, the caresses, all the silly little
lovers' habits of their early married days; to going his own ways, and
letting her go hers.

Yet he loved her, and loved her only, and loved her well. That he never
doubted, nor, to my surprise, did she. I remember once, when on a visit
there, being fairly frightened out of the proprieties by hearing her
call him "Dr. Sharpe." I called her away from the children soon after,
on pretence of helping me unpack. I locked the door, pulled her down
upon a trunk tray beside me, folded both her hands in mine, and studied
her face; it had grown to be a very thin little face, less pretty than
it was in the shadow of the woodbine, with absent eyes and a sad mouth.
She knew that I loved her, and my heart was full for the child; and so,
for I could not help it, I said,--"Harrie, is all well between you? Is
he quite the same?"

She looked at me with a perplexed and musing air.

"The same? O yes, he is quite the same to me. He would always be the
same to me. Only there are the children, and we are so busy. He--why, he
loves me, you know,--" she turned her head from side to side wearily,
with the puzzled expression growing on her forehead,--"he loves me just
the same,--just the same. I am _his wife_; don't you see?"

She drew herself up a little haughtily, said that she heard the baby
crying, and slipped away.

But the perplexed knot upon her forehead did not slip away. I was rather
glad that it did not. I liked it better than the absent eyes. That
afternoon she left her baby with Biddy for a couple of hours, went away
by herself into the garden, sat down upon a stone and thought.

Harrie took a great deal of comfort in her babies, quite as much as I
wished to have her. Women whose dream of marriage has faded a little
have a way of transferring their passionate devotion and content from
husband to child. It is like anchoring in a harbor,--a pleasant harbor,
and one in which it is good to be,--but never on shore and never at
home. Whatever a woman's children may be to her, her husband should be
always something beyond and more; forever crowned for her as first,
dearest, best, on a throne that neither son nor daughter can usurp.
Through mistake and misery the throne may be left vacant or voiceless:
but what man cometh after the King?

So, when Harrie forgot the baby for a whole afternoon, and sat out on
her stone there in the garden thinking, I felt rather glad than sorry.

It was when little Harrie was a baby, I believe, that Mrs. Sharpe took
that notion about having company. She was growing out of the world, she
said; turning into a fungus; petrifying; had forgotten whether you
called your seats at the Music Hall pews or settees, and was as afraid
of a well-dressed woman as she was of the croup.

So the Doctor's house at Lime was for two or three months overrun with
visitors and vivacity. Fathers and mothers made fatherly and motherly
stays, with the hottest of air-tights put up for their benefit in the
front room; sisters and sisters-in-law brought the fashions and got up
tableaux; cousins came on the jump; Miss Jones, Pauline Dallas, and I
were invited in turn, and the children had the mumps at cheerful
intervals between.

The Doctor was not much in the mood for entertaining Miss Dallas; he was
a little tired of company, and had had a hard week's work with an
epidemic down town. Harrie had not seen her since her wedding day, and
was pleased and excited at the prospect of the visit. Pauline had been
one of her eternal friendships at school.

Miss Dallas came a day earlier than she was expected, and, as chance
would have it, Harrie was devoting the afternoon to cutting out shirts.
Any one who has sat from two till six at that engaging occupation, will
understand precisely how her back ached and her temples throbbed, and
her fingers stung, and her neck stiffened; why her eyes swam, her cheeks
burned, her brain was deadened, the children's voices were insufferable,
the slamming of a door an agony, the past a blot, the future
unendurable, life a burden, friendship a myth, her hair down, and her
collar unpinned.

Miss Dallas had never cut a shirt, nor, I believe, had Dr. Sharpe.

Harrie was groaning over the last wristband but one, when she heard her
husband's voice in the hall.

"Harrie, Harrie, your friend is here. I found her, by a charming
accident, at the station, and drove her home." And Miss Dallas, gloved,
perfumed, rustling, in a very becoming veil and travelling-suit of the
latest mode, swept in upon her.

Harrie was too much of a lady to waste any words on apology, so she ran
just as she was, in her calico dress, with the collar hanging, into
Pauline's stately arms, and held up her little burning cheeks to be
kissed.

But her husband looked annoyed.

He came down before tea in his best coat to entertain their guest. Biddy
was "taking an afternoon" that day, and Harrie bustled about with her
aching back to make tea and wash the children. She had no time to spend
upon herself, and, rather than keep a hungry traveller waiting, smoothed
her hair, knotted a ribbon at the collar, and came down in her calico
dress.

Dr. Sharpe glanced at it in some surprise. He repeated the glances
several times in the course of the evening, as he sat chatting with his
wife's friend. Miss Dallas was very sprightly in conversation; had read
some, had thought some; and had the appearance of having read and
thought about twice as much as she had.

Myron Sharpe had always considered his wife a handsome woman. That
nobody else thought her so had made no difference to him. He had often
looked into the saucy eyes of little Harrie Bird, and told her that she
was very pretty. As a matter of theory, he supposed her to be very
pretty, now that she was the mother of his three children, and breaking
her back to cut out his shirts.

Miss Dallas was a generously framed, well-proportioned woman, who
carried long trains, and tied her hair with crimson velvet. She had
large, serene eyes, white hands, and a very pleasant smile. A delicate
perfume stirred as she stirred, and she wore a creamy lace about her
throat and wrists.

Calicoes were never becoming to Harrie, and that one with the palm-leaf
did not fit her well,--she cut it herself, to save expense. As the
evening passed, in reaction from the weariness of shirt-cutting she grew
pale, and the sallow tints upon her face came out; her features
sharpened, as they had a way of doing when she was tired; and she had
little else to do that evening than think how tired she was, for her
husband observing, as he remarked afterwards, that she did not feel like
talking, kindly entertained her friend himself.

As they went up stairs for the night, it struck him, for the first time
in his life, that Harrie had a snubbed nose. It annoyed him, because she
was his wife, and he loved her, and liked to feel that she was as well
looking as other women.

"Your friend is a bright girl," he said, encouragingly, when Harrie had
hushed a couple of children, and sat wearily down to unbutton her boots.

"I think you will find her more easy to entertain than Cousin
Mehitabel."

Then, seeing that Harrie answered absently, and how exhausted she
looked, he expressed his sorrow that she should have worked so long over
the shirts, and kissed her as he spoke; while Harrie cried a little, and
felt as if she would cut them all over again for that.

The next day Miss Dallas and Mrs. Sharpe sat sewing together; Harrie
cramping her shoulders and blackening her hands over a patch on Rocko's
rough little trousers; Pauline playing idly with purple and orange
wools,--her fingers were white, and she sank with grace into the warm
colors of the arm-chair; the door was opened into the hall, and Dr.
Sharpe passed by, glancing in as he passed.

"Your husband is a very intelligent man, Harrie," observed Miss Dallas,
studying her lavenders and lemons thoughtfully. "I was much interested
in what he said about pre-Adamic man, last evening."

"Yes," said Harrie, "he knows a great deal. I always thought so." The
little trousers slipped from her black fingers by and by, and her eyes
wandered out of the window absently.

_She_ did not know anything about pre-Adamic man.

In the afternoon they walked down the beach together,--the Doctor, his
wife, and their guest,--accompanied by as few children as circumstances
would admit of. Pauline was stately in a beach-dress of bright browns,
which shaded softly into one another; it was one of Miss Dallas's
peculiarities, that she never wore more than one color, or two, at the
same time. Harrie, as it chanced, wore over her purple dress (Rocko had
tipped over two ink-bottles and a vinegar-cruet on the sack which should
have matched it) a dull gray shawl; her bonnet was blue,--it had been a
present from Myron's sister, and she had no other way than to wear it.
Miss Dallas bounded with pretty feet from rock to rock. Rocko hung
heavily to his mother's fingers; she had no gloves, the child would have
spoiled them; her dress dragged in the sand,--she could not afford two
skirts, and one must be long,--and between Rocko and the wind she held
it up awkwardly.

Dr. Sharpe seldom noticed a woman's dress; he could not have told now
whether his wife's shawl was sky-blue or pea-green; he knew nothing
about the ink-spots; he had never heard of the unfortunate blue bonnet,
or the mysteries of short and long skirts. He might have gone to walk
with her a dozen times and thought her very pretty and "proper" in her
appearance. Now, without the vaguest idea what was the trouble, he
understood that something was wrong. A woman would have said, Mrs.
Sharpe looks dowdy and old-fashioned; he only considered that Miss
Dallas had a pleasant air, like a soft brown picture with crimson lights
let in, and that it was an air which his wife lacked. So, when Rocko
dragged heavily and more heavily at his mother's skirts, and the Doctor
and Pauline wandered off to climb the cliffs, Harrie did not seek to
follow or to call them back. She sat down with Rocko on the beach,
wrapped herself with a savage hug in the ugly shawl, and wondered with a
bitterness with which only women can wonder over such trifles, why God
should send Pauline all the pretty beach-dresses and deny them to
her,--for Harrie, like many another "dowdy" woman whom you see upon the
street, my dear madam, was a woman of fine, keen tastes, and would have
appreciated the soft browns no less than yourself. It seemed to her the
very sting of poverty, just then, that one must wear purple dresses and
blue bonnets.

At the tea-table the Doctor fell to reconstructing the country, and Miss
Dallas, who was quite a politician in Miss Dallas's way, observed that
the horizon looked brighter since Tennessee's admittance, and that she
hoped that the clouds, &c.,--and what _did_ he think of Brownlow? &c.,
&c.

"Tennessee!" exclaimed Harrie; "why, how long has Tennessee been in? I
didn't know anything about it."

Miss Dallas smiled kindly. Dr. Sharpe bit his lip, and his face flushed.

"Harrie, you really _ought_ to read the papers," he said, with some
impatience; "it's no wonder you don't know anything."

"How should I know anything, tied to the children all day?" Harrie spoke
quickly, for the hot tears sprang. "Why didn't you tell me something
about Tennessee? You never talk politics with _me_."

This began to be awkward; Miss Dallas, who never interfered--on
principle--between husband and wife, gracefully took up the baby, and
gracefully swung her dainty Geneva watch for the child's amusement,
smiling brilliantly. She could not endure babies, but you would never
have suspected it.

In fact, when Pauline had been in the house four or five days, Harrie,
who never thought very much of herself, became so painfully alive to her
own deficiencies, that she fell into a permanent fit of low spirits,
which did not add either to her appearance or her vivacity.

"Pauline is so pretty and bright!" she wrote to me. "I always knew I was
a little fool. You can be a fool before you're married, just as well as
not. Then, when you have three babies to look after, it is too late to
make yourself over. I try very hard now to read the newspapers, only
Myron does not know it."

One morning something occurred to Mrs. Sharpe. It was simply that her
husband had spent every evening at home for a week. She was in the
nursery when the thought struck her, rocking slowly in her low
sewing-chair, holding the baby on one arm and trying to darn stockings
with the other.

Pauline was--she did not really know where. Was not that her voice upon
the porch? The rocking-chair stopped sharply, and Harrie looked down
through the blinds. The Doctor's horse was tied at the gate. The Doctor
sat fanning himself with his hat in one of the garden chairs; Miss
Dallas occupied the other; she was chatting, and twisting her golden
wools about her fingers,--it was noticeable that she used only golden
wools that morning; her dress was pale blue, and the effect of the
purples would not have been good.

"I thought your calls were going to take till dinner, Myron," called
Harrie, through the blinds.

"I thought so too," said Myron, placidly, "but they do not seem to.
Won't you come down?"

Harrie thanked him, saying, in a pleasant _nonchalant_ way, that she
could not leave the baby. It was almost the first bit of acting that the
child had ever been guilty of,--for the baby was just going to sleep,
and she knew it.

She turned away from the window quietly. She could not have been angry,
and scolded; or noisy, and cried. She put little Harrie into her cradle,
crept upon the bed, and lay perfectly still for a long time.

When the dinner-bell rang, and she got up to brush her hair, that
absent, apathetic look of which I have spoken had left her eyes. A
stealthy brightness came and went in them, which her husband might have
observed if he and Miss Dallas had not been deep in the Woman question.
Pauline saw it; Pauline saw everything.

"Why did you not come down and sit with us this morning?" she asked,
reproachfully, when she and Harrie were alone after dinner. "I don't
want your husband to feel that he must run away from you to entertain
me."

"My husband's ideas of hospitality are generous," said Mrs. Sharpe. "I
have always found him as ready to make it pleasant here for my company
as for his own."

She made this little speech with dignity. Did both women know it for the
farce it was? To do Miss Dallas justice,--I am not sure. She was not a
bad-hearted woman. She was a handsome woman. She had come to Lime to
enjoy herself. Those September days and nights were fair there by the
dreamy sea. On the whole I am inclined to think that she did not know
exactly what she was about.

"_My_ perfumery never lasts," said Harrie, once, stooping to pick up
Pauline's fine handkerchief, to which a faint scent like unseen
heliotrope clung; it clung to everything of Pauline's; you would never
see a heliotrope without thinking of her, as Dr. Sharpe had often said.
"Myron used to like good cologne, but I can't afford to buy it, so I
make it myself, and use it Sundays, and it's all blown away by the time
I get to church. Myron says he is glad of it, for it is more like Mrs.
Allen's Hair Restorer than anything else. What do you use, Pauline?"

"Sachet powder of course," said Miss Dallas, smiling.

That evening Harrie stole away by herself to the village apothecary's.
Myron should not know for what she went. If it were the breath of a
heliotrope, thought foolish Harrie, which made it so pleasant for people
to be near Pauline, that was a matter easily remedied. But sachet
powder, you should know, is a dollar an ounce, and Harrie must needs
content herself with "the American," which could be had for fifty cents;
and so, of course, after she had spent her money, and made her little
silk bags, and put them away into her bureau drawers, Myron never told
_her,_ for all her pains, that she reminded him of a heliotrope with the
dew on it. One day a pink silk bag fell out from under her dress, where
she had tucked it.

"What's all this nonsense, Harrie?" said her husband, in a sharp tone.

At another time, the Doctor and Pauline were driving upon the beach at
sunset, when, turning a sudden corner, Miss Dallas cried out, in real
delight,--

"See! That beautiful creature! Who can it be?"

And there was Harrie, out on a rock in the opal surf,--a little scarlet
mermaid, combing her hair with her thin fingers, from which the water
almost washed the wedding ring. It was--who knew how long, since the
pretty bathing-suit had been taken down from the garret nails? What
sudden yearning for the wash of waves, and the spring of girlhood, and
the consciousness that one is fair to see, had overtaken her? She
watched through her hair and her fingers for the love in her husband's
eyes.

But he waded out to her, ill-pleased.

"Harrie, this is very imprudent,--very! I don't see what could have
possessed you!"

Myron Sharpe loved his wife. Of course he did. He began, about this
time, to state the fact to himself several times a day. Had she not been
all the world to him when he wooed and won her in her rosy, ripening
days? Was she not all the world to him now that a bit of searness had
crept upon her, in a married life of eight hard-working years?

That she _had_ grown a little sear, he felt somewhat keenly of late. She
had a dreary, draggled look at breakfast, after the children had cried
at night,--and the nights when Mrs. Sharpe's children did not cry were
like angels' visits. It was perhaps the more noticeable, because Miss
Dallas had a peculiar color and coolness and sparkle in the morning,
like that of opening flowers. _She_ had not been up till midnight with a
sick baby.

Harrie was apt to be too busy in the kitchen to run and meet him when he
came home at dusk. Or, if she came, it was with her sleeves rolled up
and an apron on. Miss Dallas sat at the window; the lace curtain waved
about her; she nodded and smiled as he walked up the path. In the
evening Harrie talked of Rocko, or the price of butter; she did not
venture beyond, poor thing! since her experience with Tennessee.

Miss Dallas quoted Browning, and discussed Goethe, and talked Parepa;
and they had no lights, and the September moon shone in. Sometimes Mrs.
Sharpe had mending to do, and, as she could not sew on her husband's
buttons satisfactorily by moonlight, would slip into the dining-room
with kerosene and mosquitoes for company. The Doctor may have noticed,
or he may not, how comfortably he could, if he made the proper effort,
pass the evening without her.

But Myron Sharpe loved his wife. To be sure he did. If his wife doubted
it,--but why should she doubt it? Who thought she doubted it? If she
did, she gave no sign. Her eyes, he observed, had brightened, of late;
and when they went to her from the moonlit parlor, there was such a
pretty color upon her cheeks, that he used to stoop and kiss them, while
Miss Dallas discreetly occupied herself in killing mosquitoes. Of course
he loved his wife!

It was observable that, in proportion to the frequency with which he
found it natural to remark his fondness for Harrie, his attentions to
her increased. He inquired tenderly after her headaches; he brought her
flowers, when he and Miss Dallas walked in the autumn woods; he was
particular about her shawls and wraps; he begged her to sail and drive
with them; he took pains to draw his chair beside hers on the porch; he
patted her hands, and played with her soft hair.

Harrie's clear eyes puzzled over this for a day or two; but by and by
it might have been noticed that she refused his rides, shawled herself,
was apt to be with the children when he called her, and shrank, in a
quiet way, from his touch.

She went into her room one afternoon, and locked the children out. An
east wind blew, and the rain fell drearily. The Doctor and Pauline were
playing chess down stairs; she should not be missed. She took out her
wedding-dress from the drawer where she had laid it tenderly away; the
hoar-frost and fretted pearl fell down upon her faded morning-dress; the
little creamy gloves hung loosely upon her worn fingers. Poor little
gloves! Poor little pearly dress! She felt a kind of pity for their
innocence and ignorance and trustfulness. Her hot tears fell and spotted
them. What if there were any way of creeping back through them to be
little Harrie Bird again? Would she take it?

Her children's voices sounded crying for her in the hall. Three innocent
babies--and how many more?--to grow into life under the shadow of a
wrecked and loveless home! What had she done? What had they done?

Harrie's was a strong, healthy little soul, with a strong, healthy love
of life; but she fell down there that dreary afternoon, prone upon the
nursery floor, among the yellow wedding lace, and prayed God to let her
die.

Yet Myron Sharpe loved his wife, you understand. Discussing elective
affinities down there over the chessboard with Miss Dallas,--he loved
his wife, most certainly; and, pray, why was she not content?

It was quite late when they came up for Harrie. She had fallen into a
sleep or faint, and the window had been open all the time. Her eyes
burned sharply, and she complained of a chill, which did not leave her
the next day nor the next.

One morning, at the breakfast-table, Miss Dallas calmly observed that
she should go home on Friday.

Dr. Sharpe dropped his cup; Harrie wiped up the tea.

"My dear Miss Dallas--surely--we cannot let you go yet! Harrie! Can't
you keep your friend?"

Harrie said the proper thing in a low tone. Pauline repeated her
determination with much decision, and was afraid that her visit had been
more of a burden than Harrie, with all her care, was able to bear. Dr.
Sharpe pushed back his chair noisily, and left the room.

He went and stood by the parlor window. The man's face was white. What
business had the days to close down before him like a granite wall,
because a woman with long trains and white hands was going out of them?
Harrie's patient voice came in through the open door:--

"Yes, yes, yes, Rocko; mother is tired to-day; wait a minute."

Pauline, sweeping by the piano, brushed the keys a little, and sang:--

  "Drifting, drifting on and on,
  Mast and oar and rudder gone,
  Fatal danger for each one,
  We helpless as in dreams."

What had he been about?

The air grew sweet with the sudden scent of heliotrope, and Miss Dallas
pushed aside the curtain gently.

"I may have that sail across the bay before I go? It promises to be fair
to-morrow."

He hesitated.

"I suppose it will be our last," said the lady, softly.

She was rather sorry when she had spoken, for she really did not mean
anything, and was surprised at the sound of her own voice.

But they took the sail.

Harrie watched them off--her husband did not invite her to go on that
occasion--with that stealthy sharpness in her eyes. Her lips and hands
and forehead were burning. She had been cold all day. A sound like the
tolling of a bell beat in her ears. The children's voices were choked
and distant. She wondered if Biddy were drunk, she seemed to dance about
so at her ironing-table, and wondered if she must dismiss her, and who
could supply her place. She tried to put my room in order, for she was
expecting me that night by the last train, but gave up the undertaking
in weariness and confusion.

In fact, if Harrie had been one of the Doctor's patients, he would have
sent her to bed and prescribed for brain-fever. As she was not a
patient, but only his wife, he had not found out that anything ailed
her.

Nothing happened while he was gone, except that a friend of Biddy's
"dropped in," and Mrs. Sharpe, burning and shivering in her
sewing-chair, dreamily caught through the open door, and dreamily
repeated to herself, a dozen words of compassionate Irish brogue:--

"Folks as laves folks cryin' to home and goes sailin' round with other
women--"

Then the wind latched the door.

The Doctor and Miss Dallas drew in their oars, and floated softly.

There were gray and silver clouds overhead, and all the light upon the
sea slanted from low in the west: it was a red light, in which the bay
grew warm; it struck across Pauline's hands, which she dipped, as the
mood took her, into the waves, leaning upon the side of the boat,
looking down into the water. One other sail only was to be seen upon the
bay. They watched it for a while. It dropped into the west, and sunk
from sight.

They were silent for a time, and then they talked of friendship, and
nature, and eternity, and then were silent for a time again, and then
spoke--in a very general and proper way--of separation and communion in
spirit, and broke off softly, and the boat rose and fell upon the strong
outgoing tide.

"Drifting, drifting on and on," hummed Pauline.

The west, paling a little, left a haggard look upon the Doctor's face.

"An honest man," the Doctor was saying, "an honest man, who loves his
wife devotedly, but who cannot find in her that sympathy which his
higher nature requires, that comprehension of his intellectual needs,
that--"

"I always feel a deep compassion for such a man," interrupted Miss
Dallas, gently.

"Such a man," questioned the Doctor in a pensive tone, "need not be
debarred, by the shallow conventionalities of an unappreciative world,
from a friendship which will rest, strengthen, and ennoble his weary
soul?"

"Certainly not," said Pauline, with her eyes upon the water; dull
yellow, green, and indigo shades were creeping now upon its ruddiness.

"Pauline,"--Dr. Sharpe's voice was low,--"Pauline!"

Pauline turned her beautiful head. "There are marriages for this world;
true and honorable marriages, but for this world. But there is a
marriage for eternity,--a marriage of souls."

Now Myron Sharpe is not a fool, but that is precisely what he said to
Miss Pauline Dallas, out in the boat on that September night. If wiser
men than Myron Sharpe never uttered more unpardonable nonsense under
similar circumstances, cast your stones at him.

"Perhaps so," said Miss Dallas, with a sigh; "but see! How dark it has
grown while we have been talking. We shall be caught in a squall; but I
shall not be at all afraid--with you."

They were caught indeed, not only in a squall, but in the steady force
of a driving northeasterly storm setting in doggedly with a very ugly
fog. If Miss Dallas was not at all afraid--with him, she was
nevertheless not sorry when they grated safely on the dull white beach.

They had had a hard pull in against the tide. Sky and sea were black.
The fog crawled like a ghost over flat and cliff and field. The rain
beat upon them as they turned to walk up the beach.

Pauline stopped once suddenly.

"What was that?"

"I heard nothing."

"A cry,--I fancied a cry down there in the fog."

They went back, and walked down the slippery shore for a space. Miss
Dallas took off her hat to listen.

"You will take cold," said Dr. Sharpe, anxiously. She put it on; she
heard nothing,--she was tired and excited, he said.

They walked home together. Miss Dallas had sprained her white wrist,
trying to help at the oars; he drew it gently through his arm.

It was quite dark when they reached the house. No lamps were lighted.
The parlor window had been left open, and the rain was beating in. "How
careless in Harrie!" said her husband, impatiently.

He remembered those words, and the sound of his own voice in saying
them, for a long time to come; he remembers them now, indeed, I fancy,
on rainy nights when the house is dark.

The hall was cold and dreary. No table was set for supper. The children
were all crying. Dr. Sharpe pushed open the kitchen door with a stern
face.

"Biddy! Biddy! what does all this mean? Where is Mrs. Sharpe?"

"The Lord only knows what it manes, or where is Mrs. Sharpe," said
Biddy, sullenly. "It's high time, in me own belafe, for her husband to
come ashkin' and inquirin' her close all in a hape on the floor
upstairs, with her bath-dress gone from the nails, and the front door
swingin',--me never findin' of it out till it cooms tay-time, with all
the children cryin' on me, and me head shplit with the noise, and--"

Dr. Sharpe strode in a bewildered way to the front door. Oddly enough,
the first thing he did was to take down the thermometer and look at it.
Gone out to bathe in a temperature like that! His mind ran like
lightning, while he hung the thing back upon its nail, over Harrie's
ancestry. Was there not a traditionary great-uncle who died in an
asylum? The whole future of three children with an insane mother spread
itself out before him while he was buttoning his overcoat.

"Shall I go and help you find her?" asked Miss Dallas, tremulously; "or
shall I stay and look after hot flannels and--things? What shall I do?"

"_I_ don't care what you do!" said the Doctor, savagely. To his justice
be it recorded that he did not. He would not have exchanged one glimpse
of Harrie's little homely face just then for an eternity of
sunset-sailing with the "friend of his soul." A sudden cold loathing of
her possessed him; he hated the sound of her soft voice; he hated the
rustle of her garments, as she leaned against the door with her
handkerchief at her eyes. Did he remember at that moment an old vow,
spoken on an old October day, to that little missing face? Did he
comfort himself thus, as he stepped out into the storm, "You have
'trusted her,' Myron Sharpe, as 'your best earthly friend'"?

As luck, or providence or God--whichever word you prefer--decreed it,
the Doctor had but just shut the door when he saw me driving from the
station through the rain. I heard enough of the story while he was
helping me down the carriage steps. I left my bonnet and bag with Miss
Dallas, pulled my water-proof over my head, and we turned our faces to
the sea without a word.

The Doctor is a man who thinks and acts rapidly in emergencies, and
little time was lost about help and lights. Yet when all was done which
could be done, we stood there upon the slippery weed-strewn sand, and
looked in one another's faces helplessly. Harrie's little boat was gone.
The sea thundered out beyond the bar. The fog hung, a dead weight, upon
a buried world. Our lanterns cut it for a foot or two in a ghostly way,
throwing a pale white light back upon our faces and the weeds and bits
of wreck under our feet.

The tide had turned. We put out into the surf not knowing what else to
do, and called for Harrie; we leaned on our oars to listen, and heard
the water drip into the boat, and the dull thunder beyond the bar; we
called again, and heard a frightened sea-gull scream.

"_This_ yere's wastin' valooable time," said Hansom, decidedly. I
forgot to say that it was George Hansom whom Myron had picked up to help
us. Anybody in Lime will tell you who George Hansom is,--a clear-eyed,
open-hearted sailor; a man to whom you would turn in trouble as
instinctively as a rheumatic man turns to the sun.

I cannot accurately tell you what he did with us that night. I have
confused memories of searching shore and cliffs and caves; of touching
at little islands and inlets that Harrie fancied; of the peculiar echo
which answered our shouting; of the look that settled little by little
about Dr. Sharpe's mouth; of the sobbing of the low wind; of the flare
of lanterns on gaping, green waves; of spots of foam that writhed like
nests of white snakes; of noticing the puddles in the bottom of the
boat, and of wondering confusedly what they would do with my
travelling-dress, at the very moment when I saw--I was the first to see
it--little empty boat; of our hauling alongside of the tossing, silent
thing; of a bit of a red scarf that lay coiled in its stern; of our
drifting by, and speaking never a word; of our coasting along after that
for a mile down the bay, because there was nothing in the world to take
us there but the dread of seeing the Doctor's eyes when we should turn.

It was there that we heard the first cry.

"It's shoreward!" said Hansom.

"It is seaward!" cried the Doctor.

"It is behind us!" said I.

Where was it? A sharp, sobbing cry, striking the mist three or four
times in rapid succession,--hushing suddenly,--breaking into shrieks
like a frightened child's,--dying plaintively down.

We struggled desperately after it, through the fog. Wind and water took
the sound up and tossed it about. Confused and bewildered, we beat about
it and about it; it was behind us, before us, at our right, at our
left,--crying on in a blind, aimless way, making us no replies,--beckoning
us, slipping from us, mocking us utterly.

The Doctor stretched his hands out upon the solid wall of mist; he
groped with them like a man struck blind.

"To die there,--in my very hearing,--without a chance--"

And while the words were upon his lips the cries ceased.

He turned a gray face slowly around, shivered a little, then smiled a
little, then began to argue with ghastly cheerfulness:--

"It must be only for a moment, you know. We shall hear it again,--I am
quite sure we shall it again, Hansom!"

Hansom, making a false stroke, I believe for the first time in his life,
snapped an oar and overturned a lantern. Some drift-wood, covered with
slimy weeds, washed heavily up at our feet. I remember that a little
disabled ground-sparrow, chased by the tide, was fluttering and drowning
just in sight, and that Myron drew it out of the water, and held it up
for a moment to his cheek.

Bending over the ropes, George spoke between his teeth to me:--

"It may be a night's job on 't, findin' of the body."

"The WHAT?"

The poor little sparrow dropped from Dr. Sharpe's hand. He took a step
backward, scanned our faces, sat down dizzily, and fell over upon the
sand.

He is a man of good nerves and great self-possession, but he fell like
a woman, and lay like the dead.

"It's no place for him," Hansom said, softly. "Get him home. Me and the
neighbors can do the rest. Get him home, and put his baby into his arms,
and shet the door, and go about your business."

I had left him in the dark on the office floor at last. Miss Dallas and
I sat in the cold parlor and looked at each other.

The fire was low and the lamp dull. The rain beat in an uncanny way upon
the windows. I never like to hear the rain upon the windows. I liked it
less than usual that night, and was just trying to brighten the fire a
little, when the front door blew open.

"Shut it, please," said I, between the jerks of my poker.

But Miss Dallas looked over her shoulder and shivered.

"Just look at that latch!" I looked at that latch.

It rose and fell in a feeble fluttering way,--was still for a
minute,--rose and fell again.

When the door swung in and Harrie--or the ghost of her--staggered into
the chilly room and fell down in a scarlet heap at my feet, Pauline
bounded against the wall with a scream which pierced into the dark
office where the Doctor lay with his face upon the floor.

It was long before we knew how it happened. Indeed, I suppose we have
never known it all. How she glided down, a little red wraith, through
the dusk and damp to her boat; how she tossed about, with some dim,
delirious idea of finding Myron on the ebbing waves; that she found
herself stranded and tangled at last in the long, matted grass of that
muddy cove, started to wade home, and sunk in the ugly ooze, held,
chilled, and scratched by the sharp grass, blinded and frightened by the
fog, and calling, as she thought of it, for help; that in the first
shallow wash of the flowing tide she must have struggled free, and found
her way home across the fields,--she can tell us, but she can tell no
more.

This very morning on which I write, an unknown man, imprisoned in the
same spot in the same way overnight, was found by George Hansom dead
there from exposure in the salt grass.

It was the walk home, and only that, which could have saved her.

Yet for many weeks we fought, her husband and I, hand to hand with
death, seeming to _see_ the life slip out of her, and watching for
wandering minutes when she might look upon us with sane eyes.

We kept her--just. A mere little wreck, with drawn lips, and great eyes,
and shattered nerves,--but we kept her.

I remember one night, when she had fallen into her first healthful nap,
that the Doctor came down to rest a few minutes in the parlor where I
sat alone. Pauline was washing the tea-things.

He began to pace the room with a weary abstracted look,--he was much
worn by watching,--and, seeing that he was in no mood for words, I took
up a book which lay upon the table. It chanced to be one of Alger's,
which somebody had lent to the Doctor before Harrie's illness; it was a
marked book, and I ran my eye over the pencilled passages. I recollect
having been struck with this one: "A man's best friend is a wife of good
sense and good heart, whom he loves and who loves him."

"You believe that?" said Myron, suddenly, behind my shoulder.

"I believe that a man's wife ought to be his best friend,--in every
sense of the word, his _best friend,_--or she ought never to be his
wife."

"And if--there will be differences of temperament, and--other things. If
you were a man now, for instance, Miss Hannah--"

I interrupted him with hot cheeks and sudden courage.

"If I were a man, and my wife were _not_ the best friend I had or could
have in the world, _nobody should ever know it,--she, least of
all,--Myron Sharpe!_"

Young people will bear a great deal of impertinence from an old lady,
but we had both gone further than we meant to. I closed Mr. Alger with a
snap, and went up to Harrie.

The day that Mrs. Sharpe sat up in the easy-chair for two hours, Miss
Dallas, who had felt called upon to stay and nurse her dear Harrie to
recovery, and had really been of service, detailed on duty among the
babies, went home.

Dr. Sharpe drove her to the station. I accompanied them at his request.
Miss Dallas intended, I think, to look a little pensive, but had her
lunch to cram into a very full travelling-bag, and forgot it. The
Doctor, with clear, courteous eyes, shook hands, and wished her a
pleasant journey.

He drove home in silence, and went directly to his wife's room. A bright
blaze flickered on the old-fashioned fireplace, and the walls bowed with
pretty dancing shadows. Harrie, all alone, turned her face weakly and
smiled.

Well, they made no fuss about it, after all. Her husband came and stood
beside her; a cricket on which one of the baby's dresses had been
thrown, lay between them; it seemed, for the moment, as if he dared not
cross the tiny barrier. Something of that old fancy about the lights
upon the altar may have crossed his thought.

"So Miss Dallas has fairly gone, Harrie," said he, pleasantly, after a
pause.

"Yes. She has been very kind to the children while I have been sick."

"Very."

"You must miss her," said poor Harrie, trembling; she was very weak yet.

The Doctor knocked away the cricket, folded his wife's two shadowy
hands into his own, and said:--

"Harrie we have no strength to waste, either of us, upon a scene; but I
am sorry, and I love you."

She broke all down at that, and, dear me! they almost had a scene in
spite of themselves. For O, she had always known what a little goose she
was; and Pauline never meant any harm, and how handsome she was, you
know! only _she_ didn't have three babies to look after, nor a snubbed
nose either, and the sachet powder was only American, and the very
servants knew, and, O Myron! she _had_ wanted to be dead so long, and
then--

"Harrie!" said the Doctor, at his wit's end, "this will never do in the
world. I believe--I declare!--Miss Hannah!--I believe I must send you to
bed."

"And then I'm SUCH a little skeleton!" finished Harrie, royally, with a
great gulp.

Dr. Sharpe gathered the little skeleton all into a heap in his arms,--it
was a very funny heap, by the way, but that doesn't matter,--and to the
best of my knowledge and belief he cried just about as hard as she did.




The Tenth of January.



The city of Lawrence is unique in its way.

For simooms that scorch you and tempests that freeze; for sand-heaps
and sand-hillocks and sand-roads; for men digging sand, for women
shaking off sand, for minute boys crawling in sand; for sand in the
church-slips and the gingerbread-windows, for sand in your eyes, your
nose, your mouth, down your neck? up your sleeves, under your _chignon_,
down your throat; for unexpected corners where tornadoes lie in wait;
for "bleak, uncomforted" sidewalks, where they chase you, dog you,
confront you, strangle you, twist you, blind you, turn your umbrella
wrong side out; for "dimmykhrats" and bad ice-cream; for unutterable
circus-bills and religious tea-parties; for uncleared ruins, and mills
that spring up in a night; for jaded faces and busy feet; for an air of
youth and incompleteness at which you laugh, and a consciousness of
growth and greatness which you respect,--it--

I believe, when I commenced that sentence, I intended to say that it
would be difficult to find Lawrence's equal.

Of the twenty-five thousand souls who inhabit that city, ten thousand
are operatives in the factories. Of these ten thousand two thirds are
girls.

These pages are written as one sets a bit of marble to mark a mound. I
linger over them as we linger beside the grave of one who sleeps well;
half sadly, half gladly,--more gladly than sadly,--but hushed.

The time to see Lawrence is when the mills open or close. So languidly
the dull-colored, inexpectant crowd wind in! So briskly they come
bounding out! Factory faces have a look of their own,--not only their
common dinginess, and a general air of being in a hurry to find the
wash-bowl, but an appearance of restlessness,--often of envious
restlessness, not habitual in most departments of "healthy labor." Watch
them closely: you can read their histories at a venture. A widow this,
in the dusty black, with she can scarcely remember how many mouths to
feed at home. Worse than widowed that one: she has put her baby out to
board,--and humane people know what that means,--to keep the little
thing beyond its besotted father's reach. There is a group who have
"just come over." A child's face here, old before its time. That
girl--she climbs five flights of stairs twice a day--will climb no more
stairs for herself or another by the time the clover-leaves are green.
"The best thing about one's grave is that it will be level," she was
heard once to say. Somebody muses a little here,--she is to be married
this winter. There is a face just behind her whose fixed eyes repel and
attract you; there may be more love than guilt in them, more despair
than either.

Had you stood in some unobserved corner of Essex Street, at four o'clock
one Saturday afternoon towards the last of November, 1859, watching the
impatient stream pour out of the Pemberton Mill, eager with a saddening
eagerness for its few holiday hours, you would have observed one girl
who did not bound.

She was slightly built, and undersized; her neck and shoulders were
closely muffled, though the day was mild; she wore a faded scarlet hood
which heightened the pallor of what must at best have been a pallid
face. It was a sickly face, shaded off with purple shadows, but with a
certain wiry nervous strength about the muscles of the mouth and chin:
it would have been a womanly, pleasant mouth, had it not been crossed by
a white scar, which attracted more of one's attention than either the
womanliness or pleasantness. Her eyes had light long lashes, and shone
through them steadily.

You would have noticed as well, had you been used to analyzing crowds,
another face,--the two were side by side,--dimpled with pink and white
flushes, and framed with bright black hair. One would laugh at this girl
and love her, scold her and pity her, caress her and pray for her,--then
forget her perhaps.

The girls from behind called after her: "Del! Del Ivory! look over
there!"

Pretty Del turned her head. She had just flung a smile at a young clerk
who was petting his mustache in a shop-window, and the smile lingered.

One of the factory boys was walking alone across the Common in his
factory clothes.

"Why, there's Dick! Sene, do you see?"

Sene's scarred mouth moved slightly, but she made no reply. She had seen
him five minutes ago.

One never knows exactly whether to laugh or cry over them, catching
their chatter as they file past the show-windows of the long, showy
street.

"Look a' that pink silk with the figures on it!"

"I've seen them as is betther nor that in the ould counthree.--Patsy
Malorrn, let alon' hangin' onto the shawl of me!"

"That's Mary Foster getting out of that carriage with the two white
horses,--she that lives in the brown house with the cupilo."

"Look at her dress trailin' after her. I'd like my dresses trailin'
after me."

"Well, may they be good,--these rich folks!"

"That's so. I'd be good if I was rich; wouldn't you, Moll?"

"You'd keep growing wilder than ever, if you went to hell, Meg Match:
yes you would, because my teacher said so."

"So, then, he wouldn't marry her, after all; and she--"

"Going to the circus to-night, Bess?"

"I can't help crying, Jenny. You don't _know_ how my head aches! It
aches, and it aches, and it seems as if it would never stop aching. I
wish--I wish I was dead, Jenny!"

They separated at last, going each her own way,--pretty Del Ivory to
her boarding-place by the canal, her companion walking home alone.

This girl, Asenath Martyn, when left to herself, fell into a contented
dream not common to girls who have reached her age,--especially girls
who have seen the phases of life which she had seen. Yet few of the
faces in the streets that led her home were more gravely lined. She
puzzled one at the first glance, and at the second. An artist, meeting
her musing on a canal-bridge one day, went home and painted a May-flower
budding in February.

It was a damp, unwholesome place, the street in which she lived, cut
short by a broken fence, a sudden steep, and the water; filled with
children,--they ran from the gutters after her, as she passed,--and
filled to the brim; it tipped now and then, like an over-full
soup-plate, and spilled out two or three through the break in the fence.

Down in the corner, sharp upon the water, the east-winds broke about a
little yellow house, where no children played; an old man's face watched
at a window, and a nasturtium-vine crawled in the garden. The broken
panes of glass about the place were well mended, and a clever little
gate, extemporized from a wild grape-vine, swung at the entrance. It
was not an old man's work.

Asenath went in with expectant eyes; they took in the room at a glance,
and fell.

"Dick hasn't come, father?"

"Come and gone child; didn't want any supper, he said. Your 're an hour
before time, Senath."

"Yes. Didn't want any supper, you say? I don't see why not."

"No more do I, but it's none of our concern as I knows on; very like the
pickles hurt him for dinner; Dick never had an o'er-strong stomach, as
you might say. But you don't tell me how it m' happen you're let out at
four o'clock, Senath," half complaining.

"O, something broke in the machinery, father; you know you wouldn't
understand if I told you what."

He looked up from his bench,--he cobbled shoes there in the corner on
his strongest days,--and after her as she turned quickly away and up
stairs to change her dress. She was never exactly cross with her father;
but her words rang impatiently sometimes.

She came down presently, transformed, as only factory-girls are
transformed, by the simple little toilet she had been making; her thin,
soft hair knotted smoothly, the tips of her fingers rosy from the water,
her pale neck well toned by her gray stuff dress and cape;--Asenath
always wore a cape: there was one of crimson flannel, with a hood, that
she had meant to wear to-night; she had thought about it coming home
from the mill; she was apt to wear it on Saturdays and Sundays; Dick had
more time at home. Going up stairs to-night, she had thrown it away into
a drawer, and shut the drawer with a snap; then opened it softly, and
cried a little; but she had not taken it out.

As she moved silently about the room, setting the supper-table for two,
crossing and recrossing the broad belt of sunlight that fell upon the
floor, it was easy to read the sad story of the little hooded capes.

They might have been graceful shoulders. The hand which had scarred her
face had rounded and bent them,--her own mother's hand.

Of a bottle always on the shelf; of brutal scowls where smiles should
be; of days when she wandered dinnerless and supperless in the streets
through loathing of her home; of nights when she sat out in the
snow-drifts through terror of her home; of a broken jug one day, a blow,
a fall, then numbness, and the silence of the grave,--she had her
distant memories; of waking on a sunny afternoon, in bed, with a little
cracked glass upon the opposite wall; of creeping out and up to it in
her night-dress; of the ghastly twisted thing that looked back at her.
Through the open window she heard the children laughing and leaping in
the sweet summer air. She crawled into bed and shut her eyes. She
remembered stealing out at last, after many days, to the grocery round
the corner for a pound of coffee. "Humpback! humpback!" cried the
children,--the very children who could leap and laugh.

One day she and little Del Ivory made mud-houses after school.

"I'm going to have a house of my own, when I'm grown up," said pretty
Del; "I shall have a red carpet and some curtains; my husband will buy
me a piano."

"So will mine, I guess," said Sene, simply.

"_Yours!"_ Del shook back her curls; "who do you suppose would ever
marry _you_?"

One night there was a knocking at the door, and a hideous, sodden thing
borne in upon a plank. The crowded street, tired of tipping out little
children, had tipped her mother staggering through the broken fence. At
the funeral she heard some one say, "How glad Sene must be!"

Since that, life had meant three things,--her father, the mills, and
Richard Cross.

"You're a bit put out that the young fellow didn't stay to supper,--eh,
Senath?" the old man said, laying down his boot.

"Put out! Why should I be? His time is his own. It's likely to be the
Union that took him out,--such a fine day for the Union! I'm sure I
never expected him to go to walk with me _every_ Saturday afternoon. I'm
not a fool to tie him up to the notions of a crippled girl. Supper is
ready, father."

But her voice rasped bitterly. Life's pleasures were so new and late
and important to her, poor thing! It went hard to miss the least of
them. Very happy people will not understand exactly how hard.

Old Martyn took off his leather apron with a troubled face, and, as he
passed his daughter, gently laid his tremulous, stained hand upon her
head. He felt her least uneasiness, it would seem, as a chameleon feels
a cloud upon the sun.

She turned her face softly and kissed him. But she did not smile.

She had planned a little for this holiday supper; saving three
mellow-cheeked Louise Bonnes--expensive pears just then--to add to their
bread and molasses. She brought them out from the closet, and watched
her father eat them.

"Going out again Senath?" he asked, seeing that she went for her hat and
shawl, u and not a mouthful have you eaten! Find your old father dull
company hey? Well, well!"

She said something about needing the air; the mill was hot; she should
soon be back; she spoke tenderly and she spoke truly, but she went out
into the windy sunset with her little trouble, and forgot him. The old
man, left alone, sat for a while with his head sunk upon his breast. She
was all he had in the world,--this one little crippled girl that the
world had dealt hardly with. She loved him; but he was not, probably
would never be, to her exactly what she was to him. Usually he forgot
this. Sometimes he quite understood it, as to-night.

Asenath, with the purpose only of avoiding Dick, and of finding a still
spot where she might think her thoughts undisturbed, wandered away over
the eastern bridge, and down to the river's brink. It was a moody place;
such a one as only apathetic or healthy natures (I wonder if that is
tautology!) can healthfully yield to. The bank sloped steeply; a fringe
of stunted aspens and willows sprang from the frozen sand: it was a
sickening, airless place in summer,--it was damp and desolate now. There
was a sluggish wash of water under foot, and a stretch of dreary flats
behind. Belated locomotives shrieked to each other across the river, and
the wind bore down the current the roar and rage of the dam. Shadows
were beginning to skulk under the huge brown bridge. The silent mills
stared up and down and over the streams with a blank, unvarying stare.
An oriflamme of scarlet burned in the west, flickered dully in the
dirty, curdling water, flared against the windows of the Pemberton,
which quivered and dripped, Asenath thought, as if with blood.

She sat down on a gray stone, wrapped in her gray shawl, curtained about
by the aspens from the eye of passers on the bridge. She had a fancy for
this place when things went ill with her. She had always borne her
troubles alone, but she must be alone to bear them.

She knew very well that she was tired and nervous that afternoon, and
that, if she could reason quietly about this little neglect of Dick's,
it would cease to annoy her. Indeed, why should she be annoyed? Had he
not done everything for her, been everything to her, for two long, sweet
years? She dropped her head with a shy smile. She was never tired of
living over these two years. She took positive pleasure in recalling the
wretchedness in which they found her, for the sake of their dear relief.
Many a time, sitting with her happy face hidden in his arms, she had
laughed softly, to remember the day on which he came to her. It was at
twilight, and she was tired. Her reels had troubled her all the
afternoon; the overseer was cross; the day was hot and long. Somebody on
the way home had said in passing her: "Look at that girl! I'd kill
myself if I looked like that": it was in a whisper, but she heard it.
All life looked hot and long; the reels would always be out of order;
the overseer would never be kind. Her temples would always throb, and
her back would ache. People would always say, "Look at that girl!"

"Can you direct me to--". She looked up; she had been sitting on the
doorstep with her face in her hands. Dick stood there with his cap off.
He forgot that he was to inquire the way to Newbury Street, when he saw
the tears on her shrunken cheeks. Dick could never bear to see a woman
suffer.

"I wouldn't cry," he said simply, sitting down beside her. Telling a
girl not to cry is an infallible recipe for keeping her at it. What
could the child do, but sob as if her heart would break? Of course he
had the whole story in ten minutes, she his in another ten. It was
common and short enough:--a "Down-East" boy, fresh from his father's
farm, hunting for work and board,--a bit homesick here in the strange,
unhomelike city, it might be, and glad of some one to say so to.

What more natural than that, when her father came out and was pleased
with the lad, there should be no more talk of Newbury Street; that the
little yellow house should become his home; that he should swing the
fantastic gate, and plant the nasturtiums; that his life should grow to
be one with hers and the old man's, his future and theirs unite
unconsciously?

She remembered--it was not exactly pleasant, somehow, to remember it
to-night--just the look of his face when they came into the house that
summer evening, and he for the first time saw what she was, her cape
having fallen off, in the full lamplight. His kindly blue eyes widened
with shocked surprise, and fell; when he raised them, a pity like a
mother's had crept into them; it broadened and brightened as time slid
by, but it never left them.

So you see, after that, life unfolded in a burst of little surprises for
Asenath. If she came home very tired, some one said, "I am sorry." If
she wore a pink ribbon, she heard a whisper, "It suits you." If she
sang a little song, she knew that somebody listened.

"I did not know the world was like this!" cried the girl.

After a time there came a night that he chanced to be out late,--they
had planned an arithmetic lesson together, which he had forgotten,--and
she sat grieving by the kitchen fire.

"You missed me so much then?" he said regretfully, standing with his
hand upon her chair. She was trying to shell some corn; she dropped the
pan, and the yellow kernels rolled away on the floor.

"What should I have if I didn't have you?" she said, and caught her
breath.

The young man paced to the window and back again. The firelight touched
her shoulders, and the sad, white scar.

"You shall have me always, Asenath," he made answer. He took her face
within his hands and kissed it; and so they shelled the corn together,
and nothing more was said about it.

He had spoken this last spring of their marriage; but the girl, like all
girls, was shyly silent, and he had not urged it.

Asenath started from her pleasant dreaming just as the oriflamme was
furling into gray, suddenly conscious that she was not alone. Below her,
quite on the brink of the water, a girl was sitting,--a girl with a
bright plaid shawl, and a nodding red feather in her hat. Her head was
bent, and her hair fell against a profile cut in pink-and-white.

"Del is too pretty to be here alone so late," thought Asenath, smiling
tenderly. Good-natured Del was kind to her in a certain way, and she
rather loved the girl. She rose to speak to her, but concluded, on a
second glance through the aspens, that Miss Ivory was quite able to take
care of herself.

Del was sitting on an old log that jutted into the stream, dabbling in
the water with the tips of her feet. (Had she lived on The Avenue she
could not have been more particular about her shoemaker.) Some one--it
was too dark to see distinctly--stood beside her, his eyes upon her
face. Asenath could hear nothing, but she needed to hear nothing to know
how the young fellow's eyes drank in the coquettish picture. Besides, it
was an old story. Del counted her rejected lovers by the score.

"It's no wonder," she thought in her honest way, standing still to watch
them with a sense of puzzled pleasure much like that with which she
watched the print-windows,--"it's no wonder they love her. I'd love her
if I was a man: so pretty! so pretty! She's just good for nothing, Del
is;--would let the kitchen fire go out, and wouldn't mend the baby's
aprons; but I'd love her all the same; marry her, probably, and be sorry
all my life."

Pretty Del! Poor Del! Asenath wondered whether she wished that she were
like her; she could not quite make out; it would be pleasant to sit on
a log and look like that; it would be more pleasant to be watched as Del
was watched just now; it struck her suddenly that Dick had never looked
like this at her.

The hum of their voices ceased while she stood there with her eyes upon
them; Del turned her head away with a sudden movement, and the young man
left her, apparently without bow or farewell, sprang up the bank at a
bound, and crushed the undergrowth with quick, uneasy strides.

Asenath, with some vague idea that it would not be honorable to see his
face,--poor fellow!--shrank back into the aspens and the shadow.

He towered tall in the twilight as he passed her, and a dull, umber
gleam, the last of the sunset, struck him from the west.

Struck it out into her sight,--the haggard struggling face,--Richard
Cross's face.

Of course you knew it from the beginning, but remember that the girl did
not. She might have known it, perhaps, but she had not.

Asenath stood up, sat down again.

She had a distinct consciousness, for the moment, of seeing herself
crouched down there under the aspens and the shadow, a humpbacked white
creature, with distorted face and wide eyes. She remembered a picture
she had somewhere seen of a little chattering goblin in a graveyard, and
was struck with the resemblance. Distinctly, too, she heard herself
saying, with a laugh, she thought, "I might have known it; I might have
known."

Then the blood came through her heart with a hot rush, and she saw Del
on the log, smoothing the red feather of her hat. She heard a man's
step, too, that rang over the bridge, passed the toll-house, grew faint,
grew fainter, died in the sand by the Everett Mill.

Richard's face! Richard's face, looking--God help her!--as it had never
looked at her; struggling--God pity him!--as it had never struggled for
her.

She shut her hands, into each other, and sat still a little while. A
faint hope came to her then perhaps, after all; her face lightened
grayly, and she crept down the bank to Del.

"I won't be a fool," she said, "I'll make sure,--I'll make as sure as
death."

"Well, where did _you_ drop down from, Sene?" said Del, with a guilty
start.

"From over the bridge, to be sure. Did you think I swam, or flew, or
blew?"

"You came on me so sudden!" said Del, petulantly; "you nearly frightened
the wits out of me. You didn't meet anybody on the bridge?" with a quick
look.

"Let me see." Asenath considered gravely. "There was one small boy
making faces, and two--no, three--dogs, I believe; that was all."

"Oh!"

Del looked relieved, but fell silent.

"You're sober, Del. Been sending off a lover, as usual?"

"I don't know anything about its being usual," answered Del, in an
aggrieved, coquettish way, "but there's been somebody here that liked me
well enough."

"You like him, maybe? It's time you liked somebody, Del."

Del curled the red feather about her fingers, and put her hat on over
her eyes, then a little cry broke from her, half sob, half anger.

"I might, perhaps,--I don't know. He's good. I think he'd let me have a
parlor and a door-bell. But he's going to marry somebody else, you see.
I sha'n't tell you his name, so you needn't ask."

Asenath looked out straight upon the water. A dead leaf that had been
caught in an eddy attracted her attention; it tossed about for a minute,
then a tiny whirlpool sucked it down.

"I wasn't going to ask; it's nothing to me, of course. He doesn't care
for her then,--this other girl?"

"Not so much as he does for me. He didn't mean to tell me, but he said
that I--that I looked so--pretty, it came right out. But there! I
mustn't tell you any more."

Del began to be frightened; she looked up sideways at Asenath's quiet
face. "I won't say another word," and so chattered on, growing a little
cross; Asenath need not look so still, and sure of herself,--a mere
humpbacked fright!

"He'll never break his engagement, not even for me; he's sorry for her,
and all that. I think it's too bad. He's handsome. He makes me feel like
saying my prayers, too, he's so good! Besides, I want to be married. I
hate the mill. I hate to work. I'd rather be taken care of,--a sight
rather. I feel bad enough about it to cry."

Two tears rolled over her cheeks, and fell on the soft plaid shawl. Del
wiped them away carefully with her rounded fingers.

Asenath turned and looked at this Del Ivory long and steadily through
the dusk. The pretty, shallow thing! The worthless, bewildering thing!

A fierce contempt for her pink-and-white, and tears and eyelashes and
attitudes, came upon her; then a sudden sickening jealousy that turned
her faint where she sat.

What did God mean,--Asenath believed in God, having so little else to
believe in,--what did he mean, when he had blessed the girl all her
happy life with such wealth of beauty, by filling her careless hands
with this one best, last gift? Why, the child could not hold such golden
love! She would throw it away by and by. What a waste it was!

Not that she had these words for her thought, but she had the thought
distinctly through her dizzy pain.

"So there's nothing to do about it," said Del, pinning her shawl. "We
can't have anything to say to each other,--unless anybody should die, or
anything; and of course I'm not wicked enough to think of _that._--Sene!
Sene! what are you doing?"

Sene had risen slowly, stood upon the log, caught at an aspen-top, and
swung out with it its whole length above the water. The slight tree
writhed and quivered about the roots. Sene looked down and moved her
marred lips without sound.

Del screamed and wrung her hands. It was an ugly sight!

"O don't, Sene, _don't!_ You'll drown yourself! you will be drowned! you
will be--O, what a start you gave me! What _were_ you doing, Senath
Martyn?"

Sene swung slowly back, and sat down.

"Amusing myself a little;--well, unless somebody died, you said? But I
believe I won't talk any more to-night. My head aches. Go home, Del."

Del muttered a weak protest at leaving her there alone; but, with her
bright face clouded and uncomfortable, went.

Asenath turned her head to listen for the last rustle of her dress, then
folded her arms, and, with her eyes upon the sluggish current, sat
still.

An hour and a half later, an Andover farmer, driving home across the
bridge, observed on the river's edge--a shadow cut within a shadow--the
outline of a woman's figure, sitting perfectly still with folded arms.
He reined up and looked down; but it sat quite still.

"Hallo there!" he called; "you'll fall in if you don't look out!" for
the wind was strong, and it blew against the figure; but it did not move
nor make reply. The Andover farmer looked over his shoulder with the
sudden recollection of a ghost-story which he had charged his
grandchildren not to believe last week, cracked his whip, and rumbled
on.

Asenath began to understand by and by that she was cold, so climbed the
bank, made her way over the windy flats, the railroad, and the western
bridge confusedly with an idea of going home. She turned aside by the
toll-gate. The keeper came out to see what she was doing, but she kept
out of his sight behind the great willow and his little blue house,--the
blue house with the green blinds and red moulding. The dam thundered
that night, the wind and the water being high. She made her way up above
it, and looked in. She had never seen it so black and smooth there. As
she listened to the roar, she remembered something that she had
read--was it in the Bible or the Ledger?--about seven thunders uttering
their voices.

"He's sorry for her, and all that," they said.

A dead bough shot down the current while she stood there, went over and
down, and out of sight, throwing up its little branches like helpless
hands.

It fell in with a thought of Asenath's, perhaps; at any rate she did
not like the looks of it, and went home.

Over the bridge, and the canal, and the lighted streets, the falls
called after her: "He's sorry for her, and all that." The curtain was
drawn aside when she came home, and she saw her father through the
window, sitting alone, with his gray head bent.

It occurred to her that she had often left him alone,--poor old father!
It occurred to her, also, that she understood now what it was to be
alone. Had she forgotten him in these two comforted, companioned years?

She came in weakly, and looked about.

"Dick's in, and gone to bed," said the old man, answering her look.
"You're tired, Senath."

"I am tired, father."

She sunk upon the floor,--the heat of the room made her a little
faint,--and laid her head upon his knee; oddly enough, she noticed that
the patch on it had given way,--wondered how many days it had been
so,--whether he had felt ragged and neglected while she was busy about
that blue neck-tie for Dick. She put her hand up and smoothed the
corners of the rent.

"You shall be mended up to-morrow, poor father!"

He smiled, pleased like a child to be remembered. She looked up at
him,--at his gray hair and shrivelled face, at his blackened hands and
bent shoulders, and dusty, ill-kept coat. What would it be like, if the
days brought her nothing but him?

"Something's the matter with my little gal? Tell father, can't ye?"

Her face flushed hot, as if she had done him wrong. She crept up into
his arms, and put her hands behind his rough old neck.

"Would you kiss me, father? You don't think I'm too ugly to kiss,
maybe,--you?"

She felt better after that. She had not gone to sleep now for many a
night unkissed; it had seemed hard at first.

When she had gone half-way up stairs, Dick came to the door of his room
on the first floor, and called her. He held the little kerosene lamp
over his head; his face was grave and pale.

"I haven't said good night, Sene."

She made no reply.

"Asenath, good night."

She stayed her steps upon the stairs without turning her head. Her
father had kissed her to-night. Was not that enough?

"Why, Sene, what's the matter with you?"

Dick mounted the stairs, and touched his lips to her forehead with a
gently compassionate smile.

She fled from him with a cry like the cry of a suffocated creature, shut
her door, and locked it with a ringing clang.

"She's walked too far, and got a little nervous," said Dick, screwing up
his lamp; "poor thing!"

Then he went into his room to look at Del's photograph awhile before he
burned it up; for he meant to burn it up.

Asenath, when she had locked her door, put her lamp before the
looking-glass and tore off her gray cape; tore it off so savagely that
the button snapped and rolled away,--two little crystal semicircles like
tears upon the floor.

There was no collar about the neck of her dress, and this heightened the
plainness and the pallor of her face. She shrank instinctively at the
first sight of herself, and opened the drawer where the crimson cape was
folded, but shut it resolutely.

"I'll see the worst of it," she said with pinched lips. She turned
herself about and about before the glass, letting the cruel light gloat,
over her shoulders, letting the sickly shadows grow purple on her face.
Then she put her elbows on the table and her chin into her hands, and
so, for a motionless half-hour, studied the unrounded, uncolored,
unlightened face that stared back at her; her eyes darkening at its
eyes, her hair touching its hair, her breath dimming the outline of its
repulsive mouth.

By and by she dropped her head into her hands. The poor, mistaken face!
She felt as if she would like to blot it out of the world, as her tears
used to blot out the wrong sums upon her slate. It had been so happy!
But he was sorry for it, and all that. Why did a good God make such
faces?

She slipped upon her knees, bewildered.

"He _can't_ mean any harm nohow," she said, speaking fast, and knelt
there and said it over till she felt sure of it.

Then she thought of Del once more,--of her colors and sinuous springs,
and little cries and chatter.

After a time she found that she was growing faint, and so stole down
into the kitchen for some food. She stayed a minute to warm her feet.
The fire was red and the clock was ticking. It seemed to her home-like
and comfortable, and she seemed to herself very homeless and lonely; so
she sat down on the floor, with her head in a chair, and cried as hard
as she ought to have done four hours ago.

She climbed into bed about one o'clock, having decided, in a dull way,
to give Dick up to-morrow.

But when to-morrow came he was up with a bright face, and built the
kitchen fire for her, and brought in all the water, and helped her fry
the potatoes, and whistled a little about the house, and worried at her
paleness, and so she said nothing about it.

"I'll wait till night," she planned, making ready for the mill.

"O, I can't!" she cried at night. So other mornings came, and other
nights.

I am quite aware that, according to all romantic precedents, this
conduct was preposterous in Asenath, Floracita, in the novel, never so
far forgets the whole duty of a heroine as to struggle, waver, doubt,
delay. It is proud and proper to free the young fellow; proudly and
properly she frees him; "suffers in silence"--till she marries another
man; and (having had a convenient opportunity to refuse the original
lover) overwhelms the reflective reader with a sense of poetic justice
and the eternal fitness of things.

But I am not writing a novel, and, as the biographer of this simple
factory girl, am offered few advantages.

Asenath was no heroine, you see. Such heroic elements as were in
her--none could tell exactly what they were, or whether there were any:
she was one of those people in whom it is easy to be quite
mistaken;--her life had not been one to develop. She might have a
certain pride of her own, under given circumstances; but plants grown in
a cellar will turn to the sun at any cost; how could she go back into
her dark?

As for the other man to marry, he was out of the question. Then, none
love with the tenacity of the unhappy; no life is so lavish of itself as
the denied life: to him that hath not shall be given,--and Asenath loved
this Richard Cross.

It might be altogether the grand and suitable thing to say to him, "I
will not be your wife." It might be that she would thus regain a strong
shade of lost self-respect. It might be that she would make him happy,
and give pleasure to Del. It might be that the two young people would be
her "friends," and love her in a way.

But all this meant that Dick must go out of her life. Practically, she
must make up her mind to build the fires, and pump the water, and mend
the windows alone. In dreary fact, he would not listen when she sung;
would not say, "You are tired, Sene"; would never kiss away an undried
tear. There would be nobody to notice the crimson cape, nobody to make
blue neck-ties for; none for whom to save the Bonnes de Jersey, or to
take sweet, tired steps, or make dear, dreamy plans. To be sure, there
was her father; but fathers do not count for much in a time like this on
which Sene had fallen.

That Del Ivy was--Del Ivory, added intricacies to the question. It was a
very unpoetic but undoubted fact that Asenath could in no way so insure
Dick's unhappiness as to pave the way to his marriage with the woman
whom he loved. There would be a few merry months, then slow worry and
disappointment; pretty Del accepted at last, not as the crown of his
young life, but as its silent burden and misery. Poor Dick! good Dick!
Who deserved more wealth of wifely sacrifice? Asenath, thinking this,
crimsoned with pain and shame. A streak of good common sense in the girl
told her--though she half scorned herself for the conviction--that even
a crippled woman who should bear all things and hope all things for his
sake might blot out the memory of this rounded Del; that, no matter what
the motive with which he married her, he would end by loving his wife
like other people.

She watched him sometimes in the evenings, as he turned his kind eyes
after her over the library book which he was reading.

"I know I could make him happy! I _know_ I could!" she muttered fiercely
to herself.

November blew into December, December congealed into January, while she
kept her silence. Dick, in his honorable heart, seeing that she
suffered, wearied himself with plans to make her eyes shine; brought her
two pails of water instead of one, never forgot the fire, helped her
home from the mill. She saw him meet Del Ivory once upon Essex Street
with a grave and silent bow; he never spoke with her now. He meant to
pay the debt he owed her down to the uttermost farthing; that grew
plain. Did she try to speak her wretched secret, he suffocated her with
kindness, struck her dumb with tender words.

She used to analyze her life in those days, considering what it would be
without him. To be up by half past five o'clock in the chill of all the
winter mornings, to build the fire and cook the breakfast and sweep the
floor, to hurry away, faint and weak, over the raw, slippery streets, to
climb at half past six the endless stairs and stand at the endless loom,
and hear the endless wheels go buzzing round, to sicken in the oily
smells, and deafen at the remorseless noise, and weary of the rough girl
swearing at the other end of the pass; to eat her cold dinner from a
little cold tin pail out on the stairs in the three-quarters-of-an-hour
recess; to come exhausted home at half past six at night, and get the
supper, and brush up about the shoemaker's bench, and be too weak to
eat; to sit with aching shoulders and make the button-holes of her best
dress, or darn her father's stockings, till nine o'clock; to hear no
bounding step or cheery whistle about the house; to creep into bed and
lie there trying not to think, and wishing that so she might creep into
her grave,--this not for one winter, but for all the winters,--how
should _you_ like it, you young girls, with whom time runs like a story?

The very fact that her employers dealt honorably by her; that she was
fairly paid, and promptly, for her wearing toil; that the limit of
endurance was consulted in the temperature of the room, and her need of
rest in an occasional holiday,--perhaps, after all, in the mood she was
in, did not make this factory life more easy. She would have found it
rather a relief to have somebody to complain of,--wherein she was like
the rest of us, I fancy.

But at last there came a day--it chanced to be the ninth of
January--when Asenath went away alone at noon, and sat where Merrimack
sung his songs to her. She hid her face upon her knees, and listened and
thought her own thoughts, till they and the slow torment of the winter
seemed greater than she could bear. So, passing her hands confusedly
over her forehead, she said at last aloud, "That's what God means,
Asenath Martyn!" and went back to work with a purpose in her eyes.

She "asked out" a little earlier than usual, and went slowly home. Dick
was there before her; he had been taking a half-holiday. He had made the
tea and toasted the bread for a little surprise. He came up and said,
"Why, Sene, your hands are cold!" and warmed them for her in his own.

After tea she asked him, would he walk out with her for a little while?
and he in wonder went.

The streets were brightly lighted, and the moon was up. The ice cracked
crisp under their feet. Sleighs, with two riders in each, shot merrily
by. People were laughing in groups before the shop-windows. In the glare
of a jeweller's counter somebody was buying a wedding-ring, and a girl
with red cheeks was looking hard the other way.

"Let's get away," said Asenath,--"get away from here!"

They chose by tacit consent that favorite road of hers over the eastern
bridge. Their steps had a hollow, lonely ring on the frosted wood; she
was glad when the softness of the snow in the road received them. She
looked back once at the water, wrinkled into thin ice on the edge for a
foot or two, then open and black and still.

"What are you doing?" asked Dick. She said that she was wondering how
cold it was, and Dick laughed at her.

They strolled on in silence for perhaps a mile of the desolate road.

"Well, this is social!" said Dick at length; "how much farther do you
want to go? I believe you'd walk to Reading if nobody stopped you!"

She was taking slow, regular steps like an automaton, and looking
straight before her.

"How much farther? Oh!" She stopped and looked about her.

A wide young forest spread away at their feet, to the right and to the
left. There was ice on the tiny oaks and miniature pines; it glittered
sharply under the moon; the light upon the snow was blue; cold roads
wound away through it, deserted; little piles of dead leaves shivered; a
fine keen spray ran along the tops of the drifts; inky shadows lurked
and dodged about the undergrowth; in the broad spaces the snow glared;
the lighted mills, a zone of fire, blazed from east to west; the skies
were bare, and the wind was up, and Merrimack in the distance chanted
solemnly.

"Dick," said Asenath, "this is a dreadful place! Take me home."

But when he would have turned, she held him back with a sudden cry, and
stood still.

"I meant to tell you--I meant to say--Dick! I was going to say--"

But she did not say it. She opened her lips to speak once and again, but
no sound came from them.

"Sene! why, Sene, what ails you?"

He turned, and took her in his arms.

"Poor Sene!"

He kissed her, feeling sorry for her unknown trouble. He wondered why
she sobbed. He kissed her again. She broke from him, and away with a
great bound upon the snow.

"You make it so hard! You've no right to make it so hard! It ain't as if
you loved me, Dick! I know I'm not like other girls! Go home and let me
be!"

But Dick drew her arm through his, and led her gravely away. "I like you
well enough, Asenath," he said, with that motherly pity in his eyes;
"I've always liked you. So don't let us have any more of this."

So Asenath said nothing more.

The sleek black river beckoned to her across the snow as they went home.
A thought came to her as she passed the bridge,--it is a curious study
what wicked thoughts will come to good people!--she found herself
considering the advisability of leaping the low brown parapet; and if it
would not be like Dick to go over after her; if there would be a chance
for them, even should he swim from the banks; how soon the icy current
would paralyze him; how sweet it would be to chill to death there in his
arms; how all this wavering and pain would be over; how Del would look
when they dragged them out down below the machine-shop!

"Sene, are you cold?" asked puzzled Dick. She was warmly wrapped in her
little squirrel furs; but he felt her quivering upon his arm, like one
in an ague, all the way home.

About eleven o'clock that night her father waked from an exciting dream
concerning the best method of blacking patent-leather; Sene stood beside
his bed with her gray shawl thrown over her night-dress.

"Father, suppose some time there should be only you and me--"

"Well, well, Sene," said the old man sleepily,--"very well."

"I'd try to be a good girl! Could you love me enough to make up?"

He told her indistinctly that she always was a good girl; she never had
a whipping from the day her mother died. She turned away impatiently;
then cried out and fell upon her knees.

"Father, father! I'm in a great trouble. I haven't got any mother, any
friend, anybody. Nobody helps me! Nobody knows. I've been thinking such
things--O, such wicked things--up in my room! Then I got afraid of
myself. You're good. You love me. I want you to put your hand on my head
and say, 'God bless you, child, and show you how.'"

Bewildered, he put his hand upon her unbound hair, and said: "God bless
you, child, and show you how!"

Asenath looked at the old withered hand a moment, as it lay beside her
on the bed, kissed it, and went away.

There was a scarlet sunrise the next morning. A pale pink flush stole
through a hole in the curtain, and fell across Asenath's sleeping face,
and lay there like a crown. It woke her, and she threw on her dress, and
sat down for a while on the window-sill, to watch the coming-on of the
day.

The silent city steeped and bathed itself in rose-tints; the river ran
red, and the snow crimsoned on the distant New Hampshire hills;
Pemberton, mute and cold, frowned across the disk of the climbing sun,
and dripped, as she had seen it drip before, with blood.

The day broke softly, the snow melted, the wind blew warm from the
river. The factory-bell chimed cheerily, and a few sleepers, in safe,
luxurious beds, were wakened by hearing the girls sing on their way to
work.

Asenath came down with a quiet face. In her communing with the sunrise
helpful things had been spoken to her. Somehow, she knew not how, the
peace of the day was creeping into her heart. For some reason, she knew
not why, the torment and unrest of the night were gone. There was a
future to be settled, but she would not trouble herself about that just
now. There was breakfast to get; and the sun shone, and a snow-bird was
chirping outside of the door. She noticed how the tea-kettle hummed, and
how well the new curtain, with the castle and waterfall on it, fitted
the window. She thought that she would scour the closet at night, and
surprise her father by finishing those list slippers; She kissed him
when she had tied on the red hood, and said good-by to Dick, and told
them just where to find the squash-pie for dinner.

When she had closed the twisted gate, and taken a step or two upon the
snow, she came thoughtfully back. Her father was on his bench, mending
one of Meg Match's shoes. She pushed it gently out of his hands, sat
down upon his lap, and stroked the shaggy hair away from his forehead.

"Father!"

"Well, what now, Sene?--what now?"

"Sometimes I believe I've forgotten you a bit, you know. I think we're
going to be happier after this. That's all."

She went out singing, and he heard the gate shut again with a click.

Sene was a little dizzy that morning,--the constant palpitation of the
floors always made her dizzy after a wakeful night,--and so her colored
cotton threads danced out of place, and troubled her.

Del Ivory, working beside her, said, "How the mill shakes! What's going
on?"

"It's the new machinery they're h'isting in," observed the overseer,
carelessly. "Great improvement, but heavy, very heavy; they calc'late on
getting it all into place to-day; you'd better be tending to your frame,
Miss Ivory."

As the day wore on, the quiet of Asenath's morning deepened. Round and
round with the pulleys over her head she wound her thoughts of Dick. In
and out with her black and dun-colored threads she spun her future.
Pretty Del, just behind her, was twisting a pattern like a rainbow. She
noticed this, and smiled.

"Never mind!" she thought, "I guess God knows."

Was He ready "to bless her, and show her how"? She wondered. If, indeed,
it were best that she should never be Dick's wife, it seemed to her that
He would help her about it. She had been a coward last night; her blood
leaped in her veins with shame at the memory of it. Did He understand?
Did He not know how she loved Dick, and how hard it was to lose him?

However that might be, she began to feel at rest about herself. A
curious apathy about means and ways and decisions took possession of
her. A bounding sense that a way of escape was provided from all her
troubles, such as she had when her mother died, came upon her.

Years before, an unknown workman in South Boston, casting an iron pillar
upon its core, had suffered it to "float" a little, a very little more,
till the thin, unequal side cooled to the measure of an eighth of an
inch. That man had provided Asenath's way of escape.

She went out at noon with her luncheon, and found a place upon the
stairs, away from the rest, and sat there awhile, with her eyes upon the
river, thinking. She could not help wondering a little, after all, why
God need to have made her so unlike the rest of his fair handiwork. Del
came bounding by, and nodded at her carelessly. Two young Irish girls,
sisters,--the beauties of the mill,--magnificently colored
creatures,--were singing a little love-song together, while they tied on
their hats to go home.

"There _are_ such pretty things in the world!" thought poor Sene.

Did anybody speak to her after the girls were gone? Into her heart these
words fell suddenly, "_He_ hath no form nor comeliness. _His_ visage was
so marred more than any man."

They clung to her fancy all the afternoon. She liked the sound of them.
She wove them in with her black and dun colored threads.

The wind began at last to blow chilly up the stair-cases, and in at the
cracks; the melted drifts out under the walls to harden; the sun dipped
above the dam; the mill dimmed slowly; shadows crept down between the
frames.

"It's time for lights," said Meg Match, and swore a little at her
spools.

Sene, in the pauses of her thinking, heard snatches of the girls' talk.

"Going to ask out to-morrow, Meg?"

"Guess so, yes; me and Bob Smith we thought we'd go to Boston, and come
up in the theatre train."

"Del Ivory, I want the pattern of your zouave."

"Did I go to church? No, you don't catch me! If I slave all the week,
I'll do what I please on Sunday."

"Hush-sh! There's the boss looking over here!"

"Kathleen Donnavon, be still with your ghost-stories. There's one thing
in the world I never will hear about, and that's dead people."

"Del," said Sene, "I think to-morrow--"

She stopped. Something strange had happened to her frame; it jarred,
buzzed, snapped; the threads untwisted and flew out of place.

"Curious!" she said, and looked up.

Looked up to see her overseer turn wildly, clap his hands to his head,
and fall; to hear a shriek from Del that froze her blood; to see the
solid ceiling gape above her; to see the walls and windows stagger; to
see iron pillars reel, and vast machinery throw up its helpless, giant
arms, and a tangle of human faces blanch and writhe!

She sprang as the floor sunk. As pillar after pillar gave way, she
bounded up an inclined plane, with the gulf yawning after her. It gained
upon her, leaped at her, caught her; beyond were the stairs and an open
door; she threw out her arms, and struggled on with hands and knees,
tripped in the gearing, and saw, as she fell, a square, oaken beam above
her yield and crash; it was of a fresh red color; she dimly wondered
why,--as she felt her hands-slip, her knees slide, support, time,
place, and reason, go utterly out.

"_At ten minutes before five, on Tuesday, the tenth of January, the
Pemberton Mill, all hands being at the time on duty, fell to the
ground_."

So the record flashed over the telegraph wires, sprang into large type
in the newspapers, passed from lip to lip, a nine days' wonder, gave
place to the successful candidate, and the muttering South, and was
forgotten.

Who shall say what it was to the seven hundred and fifty souls who were
buried in the ruins? What to the eighty-eight who died that death of
exquisite agony? What to the wrecks of men and women who endure unto
this day a life that is worse than death? What to that architect and
engineer who, when the fatal pillars were first delivered to them for
inspection, had found one broken under their eyes, yet accepted the
contract, and built with them a mill whose thin walls and wide,
unsupported stretches might have tottered over massive columns and on
flawless ore?

One that we love may go upon battle-ground, and we are ready for the
worst: we have said our good-bys; our hearts wait and pray: it is his
life, not his death, which is the surprise. But that he should go out to
his safe, daily, commonplace occupations, unnoticed and
uncaressed,--scolded a little, perhaps, because he leaves the door open,
and tells us how cross we are this morning; and they bring him up the
steps by and by, a mangled mass of death and horror,--that is hard.

Old Martyn, working at Meg Match's shoes,--she was never to wear those
shoes, poor Meg!--heard, at ten minutes before five, what he thought to
be the rumble of an earthquake under his very feet, and stood with bated
breath, waiting for the crash. As nothing further appeared to happen, he
took his stick and limped out into the street.

A vast crowd surged through it from end to end. Women with white lips
were counting the mills,--Pacific, Atlantic, Washington,--Pemberton?
Where was Pemberton?

Where Pemberton had winked its many eyes last night, and hummed with its
iron lips this noon, a cloud of dust, black, silent, horrible, puffed a
hundred feet into the air.

Asenath opened her eyes after a time. Beautiful green and purple lights
had been dancing about her, but she had had no thoughts. It occurred to
her now that she must have been struck upon the head. The church-clocks
were striking eight. A bonfire which had been built at, a distance, to
light the citizens in the work of rescue, cast a little gleam in through
the _debris_ across her two hands, which lay clasped together at her
side. One of her fingers, she saw, was gone; it was the finger which
held Dick's little engagement ring. The red beam lay across her
forehead, and drops dripped from it upon her eyes. Her feet, still
tangled in the gearing which had tripped her, were buried beneath a pile
of bricks.

A broad piece of flooring, that had fallen slantwise, roofed her in, and
saved her from the mass of iron-work overhead, which would have crushed
the breath out of Titans. Fragments of looms, shafts, and pillars were
in heaps about. Some one whom she could not see was dying just behind
her. A little girl who worked in her room--a mere child--was crying,
between her groans, for her mother. Del Ivory sat in a little open
space, cushioned about with reels of cotton; she had a shallow gash upon
her cheek; she was wringing her hands. They were at work from the
outside, sawing entrances through the labyrinth of planks. A dead woman
lay close by, and Sene saw them draw her out. It was Meg Match. One of
the pretty Irish girls was crushed quite out of sight; only one hand was
free; she moved it feebly. They could hear her calling for Jimmy
Mahoney, Jimmy Mahoney! and would they be sure and give him back the
handkerchief? Poor Jimmy Mahoney! By and by she called no more; and in a
little while the hand was still. On the other side of the slanted
flooring some one prayed aloud. She had a little baby at home. She was
asking God to take care of it for her. "For Christ's sake," she said.
Sene listened long for the Amen, but it was never spoken. Beyond, they
dug a man out from under a dead body, unhurt. He crawled to his feet,
and broke into furious blasphemies.

As consciousness came fully, agony grew. Sene shut her lips and folded
her bleeding hands together, and uttered no cry. Del did screaming
enough for two, she thought. She pondered things, calmly as the night
deepened, and the words that the workers outside were saying came
brokenly to her. Her hurt, she knew, was not unto death; but it must be
cared for before very long; how far could she support this slow bleeding
away? And what were the chances that they could hew their way to her
without crushing her?

She thought of her father, of Dick; of the bright little kitchen and
supper-table set for three; of the song that she had sung in the flush
of the morning. Life--even her life--grew sweet, now that it was
slipping from her.

Del cried presently, that they were cutting them out. The glare of the
bonfires struck through an opening; saws and axes flashed; voices grew
distinct.

"They never can get at me," said Sene. "I must be able to crawl. If you
could get some of those bricks off of my feet, Del!"

Del took off two or three in a frightened way; then, seeing the blood on
them, sat down and cried.

A Scotch girl, with one arm shattered, crept up and removed the pile,
then fainted.

The opening broadened, brightened; the sweet night-wind blew in; the
safe night-sky shone through. Sene's heart leaped within her. Out in the
wind and under the sky she should stand again, after all! Back in the
little kitchen, where the sun shone, and she could sing a song, there
would yet be a place for her. She worked her head from under the beam,
and raised herself upon her elbow.

At that moment she heard a cry:

"Fire! _fire!_ GOD ALMIGHTY HELP THEM,--THE RUINS ARE ON FIRE!"

A man working over the _debris_ from the outside had taken the
notion--it being rather dark just there--to carry a lantern with him.

"For God's sake," a voice cried from the crowd, "don't stay there with
that light!"

But before the words had died upon the air, it was the dreadful fate of
the man with the lantern to let it fall,--and it broke upon the ruined
mass.

That was at nine o'clock. What there was to see from then till morning
could never be told or forgotten.

A network twenty feet high, of rods and girders, of beams, pillars,
stairways, gearing, roofing, ceiling, walling; wrecks of looms, shafts,
twisters, pulleys, bobbins, mules, locked and interwoven; wrecks of
human creatures wedged in; a face that you know turned up at you from
some pit which twenty-four hours' hewing could not open; a voice that
you know crying after you from God knows where; a mass of long, fair
hair visible here, a foot there, three fingers of a hand over there; the
snow bright-red under foot; charred limbs and headless trunks tossed
about; strong men carrying covered things by you, at sight of which
other strong men have fainted; the little yellow jet that flared up, and
died in smoke, and flared again, leaped out, licked the cotton-bales,
tasted the oiled machinery, crunched the netted wood, danced on the
heaped-up stone, threw its cruel arms high into the night, roared for
joy at helpless firemen, and swallowed wreck, death, and life together
out of your sight,--the lurid thing stands alone in the gallery of
tragedy.

"Del," said Sene, presently, "I smell the smoke." And in a little while,
"How red it is growing away over there at the left!"

To lie here and watch the hideous redness crawling after her, springing
at her!--it had seemed greater than reason could bear, at first.

Now it did not trouble her. She grew a little faint, and her thoughts
wandered. She put her head down upon her arm, and shut her eyes.
Dreamily she heard them saying a dreadful thing outside, about one of
the overseers; at the alarm of fire he had cut his throat, and before
the flames touched him he was taken out. Dreamily she heard Del cry that
the shaft behind the heap of reels was growing hot. Dreamily she saw a
tiny puff of smoke struggle through the cracks of a broken fly-frame.

They were working to save her, with rigid, stern faces. A plank
snapped, a rod yielded; they drew out the Scotch girl; her hair was
singed; then a man with blood upon his face and wrists held down his
arms.

"There's time for one more! God save the rest of ye,--I can't!"

Del sprang; then stopped,--even Del,--stopped ashamed, and looked back
at the cripple.

Asenath at this sat up erect. The latent heroism in her awoke. All her
thoughts grew clear and bright. The tangled skein of her perplexed and
troubled winter unwound suddenly. This, then, was the way. It was better
so. God had provided himself a lamb for the burnt-offering.

So she said, "Go, Del, and tell him I sent you with my dear love, and
that it's all right."

And Del at the first word went.

Sene sat and watched them draw her out; it was a slow process; the loose
sleeve of her factory sack was scorched.

Somebody at work outside turned suddenly and caught her. It was Dick.
The love which he had fought so long broke free of barrier in that hour.
He kissed her pink arm where the burnt sleeve fell off. He uttered a cry
at the blood upon her face. She turned faint with the sense of safety;
and, with a face as white as her own, he bore her away in his arms to
the hospital, over the crimson snow.

Asenath looked out through the glare and smoke with parched lips. For a
scratch upon the girl's smooth cheek, he had quite forgotten her. They
had left her, tombed alive here in this furnace, and gone their happy
way. Yet it gave her a curious sense of relief and triumph. If this were
all that she could be to him, the thing which she had done was right,
quite right. God must have known. She turned away, and shut her eyes
again.

When she opened them, neither Dick, nor Del, nor crimsoned snow, nor
sky, were there; only the smoke writhing up a pillar of blood-red flame.

The child who had called for her mother began to sob out that she was
afraid to die alone.

"Come here, Molly," said Sene. "Can you crawl around?"

Molly crawled around.

"Put your head in my lap, and your arms about my waist, and I will put
my hands in yours,--so. There! I guess that's better."

But they had not given them up yet. In the still unburnt rubbish at the
right, some one had wrenched an opening within a foot of Sene's face.
They clawed at the solid iron pintless like savage things. A fireman
fainted in the glow.

"Give it up!" cried the crowd from behind. "It can't be done! Fall
back!"--then hushed, awestruck.

An old man was crawling along upon his hands and knees over the heated
bricks. He was a very old man. His gray hair blew about in the wind.

"I want my little gal!" he said. "Can't anybody tell me where to find my
little gal?"

A rough-looking young fellow pointed in perfect silence through the
smoke.

"I'll have her out yet. I'm an old man, but I can help. She's my little
gal, ye see. Hand me that there dipper of water; it'll keep her from
choking, may be. Now! Keep cheery, Sene! Your old father'll get ye out.
Keep up good heart, child! That's it!"

"It's no use, father. Don't feel bad, father. I don't mind it very
much."

He hacked at the timber; he tried to laugh; he bewildered himself with
cheerful words.

"No more ye needn't, Senath, for it'll be over in a minute. Don't be
downcast yet! We'll have ye safe at home before ye know it. Drink a
little more water,--do now! They'll get at ye now, sure!"

But above the crackle and the roar a woman's voice rang out like a
bell:--

"We're going home, to die no more."

A child's notes quavered in the chorus. From sealed and unseen graves,
white young lips swelled the glad refrain,--

"We're going, going home."

The crawling smoke turned yellow, turned red. Voice after voice broke
and hushed utterly. One only sang on like silver. It flung defiance down
at death. It chimed into the lurid sky without a tremor. For one stood
beside her in the furnace, and his form was like unto the form of the
Son of God. Their eyes met. Why should not Asenath sing?

"Senath!" cried the old man out upon the burning bricks; he was scorched
now, from his gray hair to his patched boots.

The answer came triumphantly,--

  "To die no more, no more, no more!"

"Sene! little Sene!"

But some one pulled him back.




Night-Watches.



Keturah wishes to state primarily that she is good-natured. She thinks
it necessary to make this statement, lest, after having heard her story,
you should, however polite you might be about it, in your heart of
hearts suspect her capable not only of allowing her angry passions to
rise, but of permitting them to boil over "in tempestuous fury wild and
unrestrained." If it were an orthodox remark, she would also add, from
like motives of self-defence, that she is not in the habit of swearing.

Are you accustomed, O tender-hearted reader, to spend your nights, as a
habit, with your eyes open or shut? On the answer to this question
depends her sole hope of appreciation and sympathy.

She begs you will understand that she does not mean you, the be-ribboned
and be-spangled and be-rouged frequenter of ball and _soiree_, with your
well-taught, drooping lashes, or wide girl's eyes untamed and wondering,
your flushing color, and your pulse up to a hundred. You are very pretty
for your pains,--O, to be sure you are very pretty! She has not the
heart to scold you, though you are dancing and singing and flirting
away your golden nights, your restful, young nights, that never come but
once,--though you are dancing and singing and flirting yourselves
merrily into your grave. She would like to put in a plea before the
eloquence of which Cicero and Demosthenes, Beecher and Sumner, should
pale like wax-lights before the sun, for the new fashion said to be
obtaining in New York, that the _soiree_ shall give place to the
_matinee_, at which the guests shall assemble at four o'clock in the
afternoon, and are expected to go home at seven or eight. That would be
not only civilized, it would be millennial.

But Keturah is perfectly aware that you will do as you will. If the
excitement of the "wee sma' hours ayont the twal" prove preferable to a
quiet evening at home, and a good, Christian, healthy sleep after it,
why the "sma' hours" it will be. If you will do it, it is "none of her
funerals," as the small boy remarked. Only she particularly requests you
not to insult her by offering her your sympathy. Wait till you know what
forty-eight mortal, wide-awake, staring, whirring, unutterable hours
mean.

Listen to her mournful tale; and, while you listen, let your head become
fountains of water, and your eyes rivers of tears for her, and for all
who are doomed to reside in her immediate vicinity.

"Tired nature's sweet restorer," as the newspapers, in a sudden and
severe poetical attack, remarked of Jeff Davis, "refuses to bless"
Keturah, except as her own sweet will inclines her. They have a
continuous lover's quarrel, exceedingly bitter while it rages,
exceedingly sweet when it is made up. Keturah attends a perfectly grave
and unimpeachable lecture,--the Restorer pouts and goes off in a huff
for twenty-four hours. Keturah undertakes at seven o'clock a concert,--
announced as Mendelssohn Quintette, proving to be Gilmore's
Brassiest,--and nothing hears she of My Lady till two o'clock, A. M.
Keturah spends an hour at a prayer-meeting, on a pine bench that may
have heard of cushions, but certainly has never seen one face to face;
and comes home at eight o'clock to the pleasing discovery that the fair
enslaver has taken some doctrinal offence, and vanished utterly.

Though lost to sight she's still to memory dear, and Keturah penitently
betakes herself to the seeking of her in those ingenious ways which she
has learned at the school of a melancholy experience. A table and a
kerosene lamp are brought into requisition; also a book. If it isn't the
Dictionary, it is Cruden's Concordance. If these prove too exciting, it
is Edwards on the Will. Light reading is strictly forbidden.
Congressional Reports are sometimes efficacious, as well as Martin F.
Tupper, and somebody's "Sphere of Woman."

There is one single possibility out of ten that this treatment will
produce drowsiness. There are nine probabilities to the contrary. The
possibility is worth trying for, and trying hard for; but if it results
in the sudden flight of President Edwards across the room, a severe
banging of the "Sphere of Woman" against the wall, and the total
disappearance of Cruden's Concordance beneath the bed, Keturah is not in
the least surprised. It is altogether too familiar a result to elicit
remark. It simply occasions a fresh growth to a horrible resolution that
she has been slowly forming for years.

Some day _she_ will write a book. The publishers shall nap over it, and
accept it with pleasure. The drowsy printers shall set up its type with
their usual unerring exactness. The proof-readers shall correct it in
their dreams. Customers in the bookstores shall nod at the sight of its
binding. Its readers shall dose at its Preface. Sleepless old age, sharp
and unrelieved pain, youth sorrowful before the time, shall seek it out,
shall flock unto the counters of its fortunate publishers (she has three
firms in her mind's eye; one in Boston, one in New York, and one in
Philadelphia; but who the happy men are to be is not yet definitely
decided), who shall waste their inheritance in distributing it
throughout the length and breadth of a grateful continent. Physicians
from everywhere under the sun, who have proved the fickleness of
hyoscyamus, of hops, of Dover's powders, of opium, of morphine, of
laudanum, of hidden virtues of herbs of the field, and minerals from the
rock, and gases from the air; who know the secrets of all the pitying
earth, and, behold, it is vanity of vanities, shall line their
hospitals, cram their offices, stuff their bottles, with the new
universal panacea and blessing to suffering humanity.

And Keturah _can_ keep a resolution.

Her literary occupation disposed of, in the summary manner referred to,
she runs through the roll of her reserve force, and their name is
Legion. She composes herself, in an attitude of rest, with a
handkerchief tied over her eyes to keep them shut, blows her lamp out
instead of screwing it out, strangles awhile in the gas, and begins to
repeat her alphabet, which, owing to like stern necessity, she has
fortunately never forgotten. She says it forward; she says it backward;
she begins at the middle and goes up; she begins at the middle and goes
down; she rattles it through in French, she groans it through in German,
she falters it through in Greek. She attempts the numeration-table,
flounders somewhere in the quadrillions, and forgets where she left off.
She watches an interminable flock of sheep jump over a wall till her
head spins. There always seem to be so many more where the last one came
from. She listens to oar-beats, and drum-beats, and heart-beats. She
improvises sonatas and gallopades, oratorios and mazourkas. She
perpetrates the title and first line of an epic poem, goes through the
alphabet for a rhyme, and none appearing, she repeats the first line by
way of encouragement. But all in vain.

With a silence that speaks unspeakable things, she rises solemnly, and
seeks the pantry in darkness that may be felt. At the bottom of the
stairs she steps with her whole weight flat upon something that squirms,
and is warm, and turns over, and utters a cry that makes night hideous.
O, nothing but the cat, that is all! The pantry proves to be well
stocked with bread, but not another mortal thing. Now, if there is
anything Keturah _particularly_ dislikes, it is dry bread. Accordingly,
with a remark which is intended for Love's ear alone, she gropes her way
to the cellar door, which is unexpectedly open, pitches head-first into
the cavity, and makes the descent of half the stairs in an easy and
graceful manner, chiefly with her elbows. She reaches the ground after
an interval, steps splash into a pool of water, knocks over a mop, and
embraces a tall cider barrel with her groping arms. After a little
wandering about among ash-bins and apple-bins, reservoirs and coal-heaps
and cobwebs, she discovers the hanging-shelf which has been the _ignis
fatuus_ of her search. Something extremely cold crossing her shoeless
feet at this crisis suggests pleasant fancies of a rat. Keturah is
ashamed to confess that she has never in all the days of the years of
her pilgrimage set eyes upon a rat. Depending solely upon her
imagination, her conception of that animal is a cross between an
alligator and a jaguar. She stands her ground manfully, however, and is
h