A New England Girlhood | Page 9

And she always brought out some book or picture for me?from her quaint old-fashioned chest of drawers. I still possess the " Children in the Wood," which she gave me, as a keepsake, when I was about ten years old.
Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood. We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years. Those larger planets held our little one to its orbit, and lent it their brightness. Happy indeed is the infancy which is?surrounded only by the loving and the good!
Besides those who were of my kindred, I had several aunts by courtesy, or rather by the privilege of neighborhood, who seemed to belong to my babyhood. Indeed, the family hearthstone came near being the scene of a tragedy to me, through the blind?fondness of one of these.
The adjective is literal. This dear old lady, almost sightless, sitting in a low chair far in the chimney corner, where she had been placed on her first call to see the new baby, took me upon her lap, and--so they say--unconsciously let me slip off into the coals. I was rescued unsinged, however, and it was one of the earliest accomplishments of my infancy to thread my poor, halfblind Aunt Stanley's needles for her. We were close neighbors and gossips until my fourth year. Many an hour I sat by her side drawing a needle and thread through a bit of calico, under the delusion that I was sewing, while she repeated all sorts of juvenile singsongs of which her memory seemed full, for my?entertainment. There used to be a legend current among my?brothers and sisters that this aunt unwittingly taught me to use a reprehensible word. One of her ditties began with the lines:--
"Miss Lucy was a charming child;?She never said, 'I won't.'"
After bearing this once or twice, the willful negative was?continually upon my lips; doubtless a symptom of what was dormant within--a will perhaps not quite so aggressive as it was?obstinate. But she meant only to praise me and please me;?and dearly I loved to stay with her in her cozy up-stairs room across the lane, that the sun looked into nearly all day.
Another adopted aunt lived down-stairs in the same house. This one was a sober woman; life meant business to her, and she taught me to sew in earnest, with a knot in the end of my thread,?although it was only upon clothing for my ragchildren - absurd creatures of my own invention, limbless and destitute of?features, except as now and then one of my older sisters would, upon my earnest petition, outline a face for one of them, with pen and ink. I loved them, nevertheless, far better than I did the London doll that lay in waxen state in an upper drawer at home,--the fine lady that did not wish to be played with, but only to be looked at and admired.
This latter aunt I regarded as a woman of great possessions. She owned the land beside us and opposite us. Her well was close to our door, a well of the coldest and clearest water I ever drank, and it abundantly supplied the whole neighborhood.
The hill behind her house was our general playground; and I supposed she owned that, too, since through her dooryard, and over her stone wall, was our permitted thoroughfare thither. I imagined that those were her buttercups that we gathered when we got over the wall, and held under each other's chin, to see, by the reflection, who was fond of butter; and surely the yellow toadflax (we called it "lady's slipper") that grew in the rockcrevices was hers, for we found it nowhere else.
The blue gill-over-the-ground unmistakably belonged to her, for it carpeted an unused triangular corner of her garden inclosed by a leaning fence gray and gold with sea-side lichens. Its blue was beautiful, but its pungent earthy odor--I can smell it now -- repelled us from the damp corner where it grew. It made us think of graves and ghosts; and I think we were forbidden to go there. We much preferred to sit on the sunken curbstones, in the shade of the broad-leaved burdocks, and shape their spiny balls into chairs and cradles and sofas for our dollies, or to "play school" on the doorsteps, or to climb over the wall 1, and to feel the freedom of the hill.
We were a neighborhood of large families, and most of us enjoyed the privilege of "a little wholesome neglect." Our tether was a long one, and when, grown a little older, we occasionally asked to have it lengthened, a maternal "I don't care" amounted to almost unlimited liberty.
The hill itself was well-nigh boundless in its capacities for juvenile occupation. Besides