Margaret Ogilvy | Page 9

the age that
they make heroines of: it was a pale blue with a pale blue bonnet, the
white ribbons of which tied aggravatingly beneath the chin, and when
questioned about this garb she never admitted that she looked pretty in
it, but she did say, with blushes too, that blue was her colour, and then

she might smile, as at some memory, and begin to tell us about a man
who - but it ended there with another smile which was longer in
departing. She never said, indeed she denied strenuously, that she had
led the men a dance, but again the smile returned, and came between us
and full belief. Yes, she had her little vanities; when she got the Mizpah
ring she did carry that finger in such a way that the most reluctant must
see. She was very particular about her gloves, and hid her boots so that
no other should put them on, and then she forgot their hiding-place, and
had suspicions of the one who found them. A good way of enraging her
was to say that her last year's bonnet would do for this year without
alteration, or that it would defy the face of clay to count the number of
her shawls. In one of my books there is a mother who is setting off with
her son for the town to which he had been called as minister, and she
pauses on the threshold to ask him anxiously if he thinks her bonnet
'sets' her. A reviewer said she acted thus, not because she cared how
she looked, but for the sake of her son. This, I remember, amused my
mother very much.
I have seen many weary on-dings of snow, but the one I seem to
recollect best occurred nearly twenty years before I was born. It was at
the time of my mother's marriage to one who proved a most loving as
he was always a well-loved husband, a man I am very proud to be able
to call my father. I know not for how many days the snow had been
falling, but a day came when the people lost heart and would make no
more gullies through it, and by next morning to do so was impossible,
they could not fling the snow high enough. Its back was against every
door when Sunday came, and none ventured out save a valiant few,
who buffeted their way into my mother's home to discuss her
predicament, for unless she was 'cried' in the church that day she might
not be married for another week, and how could she be cried with the
minister a field away and the church buried to the waist? For hours they
talked, and at last some men started for the church, which was several
hundred yards distant. Three of them found a window, and forcing a
passage through it, cried the pair, and that is how it came about that my
father and mother were married on the first of March.
That would be the end, I suppose, if it were a story, but to my mother it
was only another beginning, and not the last. I see her bending over the
cradle of her first-born, college for him already in her eye (and my

father not less ambitious), and anon it is a girl who is in the cradle, and
then another girl - already a tragic figure to those who know the end. I
wonder if any instinct told my mother that the great day of her life was
when she bore this child; what I am sure of is that from the first the
child followed her with the most wistful eyes and saw how she needed
help and longed to rise and give it. For of physical strength my mother
had never very much; it was her spirit that got through the work, and in
those days she was often so ill that the sand rained on the doctor's
window, and men ran to and fro with leeches, and 'she is in life, we can
say no more' was the information for those who came knocking at the
door. 'I am sorrow to say,' her father writes in an old letter now before
me, 'that Margaret is in a state that she was never so bad before in this
world. Till Wednesday night she was in as poor a condition as you
could think of to be alive. However, after bleeding, leeching, etc., the
Dr. says this morning that he is better hoped now, but at present we can
say no more but only she is alive and in the hands of Him in whose
hands all our lives are. I can give you no adequate view of what my
feelings are,