A New England Girlhood | Page 8

many of its ways of doing and thinking, that it almost seems as if that tender poem of hearth-and-home life had been written for us too. I can see the features of my father, who died when I was a little child, whenever I read the familiar verse:--
"The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face?They round the ingle form a circle wide:?The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace,?The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride."
A grave, thoughtful face his was, lifted up so grandly amid that blooming semicircle of boys and girls, all gathered silently in the glow of the ruddy firelight! The great family Bible had the look upon its leathern covers of a book that bad never been new, and we honored it the more for its apparent age. Its companion was the Westminster Assembly's and Shorter Catechism, out of which my father asked us questions on Sabbath afternoons, when the tea-table had been cleared. He ended the exercise with a prayer, standing up with his face turned toward the wall. My most vivid recollection of his living face is as I saw it reflected in a mirror while he stood thus praying. His closed eyes, the?paleness and seriousness of his countenance, awed me. I never forgot that look. I saw it but once again, when, a child of six or seven years, I was lifted to a footstool beside his coffin to gaze upon his face for the last time. It wore the same?expression that it did in prayer; paler, but no longer care-worn; so peaceful, so noble! They left me standing there a long time, and I could not take my eyes away. I had never thought my?father's face a beautiful one until then, but I believe it must have been so, always.
I know that he was a studious man, fond of what was called "solid reading." He delighted in problems of navigation (he was for many years the master of a merchant-vessel sailing to various European ports), in astronomical calculations and historical computations. A rhyming genius in the town, who undertook to hit off the?peculiarities of well-known residents, characterized my father as
"Philosophic Ben,?Who, pointing to the stars, cries, Land ahead!"
His reserved, abstracted manner,--though his gravity concealed a fund of rare humor,--kept us children somewhat aloof from him; but my mother's temperament formed a complete contrast to his. She was chatty and social, rosy-cheeked and dimpled, with bright blue eyes and soft, dark, curling hair, which she kept pinned up under her white lace cap-border. Not even the eldest child?remembered her without her cap, and when some of us asked her why she never let her pretty curls be visible, she said,--?"Your father liked to see me in a cap. I put it on soon after we were married, to please him; I always have worn it, and I always shall wear it, for the same reason."
My mother had that sort of sunshiny nature which easily shifts to shadow, like the atmosphere of an April day. Cheerfulness held sway with her, except occasionally, when her domestic cares grew too overwhelming; but her spirits rebounded quickly from?discouragement.
Her father was the only one of our grandparents who had survived to my time,--of French descent, piquant, merry, exceedingly polite, and very fond of us children, whom be was always treating to raisins and peppermints and rules for good behavior. He had been a soldier in the Revolutionary War,--the greatest?distinction we could imagine. And he was also the sexton of the oldest church in town,--the Old South,--and had charge of the winding-up of the town clock, and the ringing of the bell on week-days and Sundays, and the tolling for funerals,--into which mysteries he sometimes allowed us youngsters a furtive glimpse. I did not believe that there was another grandfather so?delightful as ours in all the world.
Uncles, aunts, and cousins were plentiful in the family, but they did not live near enough for us to see them very often, excepting one aunt, my father's sister, for whom I was named. She was fair, with large, clear eyes that seemed to look far into one's heart, with an expression at once penetrating and benignant. To my childish imagination she was an embodiment of serene and lofty goodness. I wished and hoped that by bearing her baptismal name I might become like her; and when I found out its signification (I learned that "Lucy" means "with light"), I wished it more?earnestly still. For her beautiful character was just such an illumination to my young life as I should most desire mine to be to the lives of others.
My aunt, like my father, was always studying something. Some map or book always lay open before her, when I went to visit her, in her picturesque old house, with its sloping roof and tall wellsweep.