Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 | Page 9

the heart of it. That's the charm of gems, after all! You feel that they are
fashioned through dissimilar processes from yourself,--that there's a

mystery about them, mastering which would be like mastering a new
life, like having the freedom of other stars. I give them more
personality than I would a great white spirit. I like amber that way,
because I know how it was made, drinking the primeval weather,
resinously beading each grain of its rare wood, and dripping with a
plash to filter through and around the fallen cones below. In some
former state I must have been a fly embalmed in amber.
"Oh, Lu!" I said, "this amber's just the thing for me, such a great noon
creature! And as for you, you shall wear mamma's Mechlin and that
aqua-marina; and you'll look like a mer-queen just issuing from the
wine-dark deeps and glittering with shining water-spheres."
I never let Lu wear the point at all; she'd be ridiculous in it,--so flimsy
and open and unreserved; that's for me;--Mechlin, with its whiter,
closer, chaste web, suits her to a T.
I must tell you, first, how this rosary came about, any way. You know
we've a million of ancestors, and one of them, my great-grandfather,
was a sea-captain, and actually did bring home cargoes of slaves; but
once he fetched to his wife a little islander, an Asian imp, six years old,
and wilder than the wind. She spoke no word of English, and was full
of short shouts and screeches, like a thing of the woods. My
great-grandmother couldn't do a bit with her; she turned the house
topsy-turvy, cut the noses out of the old portraits, and chewed the
jewels out of the settings, killed the little home animals, spoiled the
dinners, pranced in the garden with Madam Willoughby's farthingale
and royal stiff brocades rustling yards behind,--this atom of a
shrimp,--or balanced herself with her heels in the air over the curb of
the well, scraped up the dead leaves under one corner of the house and
fired them,--a favorite occupation,--and if you left her stirring a mess in
the kitchen, you met her, perhaps, perched in the china-closet and
mumbling all manner of demoniacal prayers, twisting and writhing and
screaming over a string of amber gods that she had brought with her
and always wore. When winter came and the first snow, she was
furious, perfectly mad. One might as well have had a ball of fire in the
house, or chain-lightning; every nice old custom had been invaded, the
ancient quiet broken into a Bedlam of outlandish sounds, and as
Captain Willoughby was returning, his wife packed the sprite off with
him,--to cut, rip, and tear in New Holland, if she liked, but not in New

England,--and rejoiced herself that she would find that little brown skin
cuddled up in her best down beds and among her lavendered sheets no
more. She had learned but two words all that time,--Willoughby, and
the name of the town.
You may conjecture what heavenly peace came in when the Asian went
out, but there is no one to tell what havoc was wrought on board ship;
in fact, if there could have been such a thing as a witch, I should
believe that imp sunk them, for a stray Levantine brig picked her--still
agile as a monkey--from a wreck off the Cape de Verdes and carried
her into Leghorn, where she took--will you mind, if I say?--leg-bail,
and escaped from durance. What happened on her wanderings I'm sure
is of no consequence, till one night she turned up outside a Fiesolan
villa, scorched with malaria fevers and shaken to pieces with tertian
and quartan and all the rest of the agues. So, after having shaken almost
to death, she decided upon getting well; all the effervescence was gone;
she chose to remain with her beads in that family, a mysterious tame
servant, faithful, jealous, indefatigable. But she never grew; at ninety
she was of the height of a yard-stick,--and nothing could have been
finer than to have a dwarf in those old palaces, you know.
In my great-grandmother's home, however, the tradition of the Asian
sprite with her string of amber gods was handed down like a legend,
and, no one knowing what had been, they framed many a wild picture
of the Thing enchanting all her spirits from their beads about her, and
calling and singing and whistling up the winds with them till storm
rolled round the ship, and fierce fog and foam and drowning fell upon
her capturers. But they all believed, that, snatched from the wreck into
islands of Eastern archipelagoes, the vindictive child and her quieted
gods might yet be found. Of course my father knew this, and when that
night in