Meadow Grass | Page 5

the end of the summer
term. She was evidently absorbed in love of it, and sat, smoothing its
shiny surface with her little cracked hand, so oblivious to the
requirements of the occasion that she only looked up dazed when the
teacher told her to describe the Amazon River, and unregretfully let the
question pass. The lady meant to take Polly away with, her, but she fell
sick with erysipelas in the face, and was hurried off to the city to be
nursed, "a sight to behold," as everybody said. And whether she died,
or whether she got well and forgot Polly, none of us ever heard. We
only knew she did not return, bringing the odor of violets and the rustle
of starched petticoats into our placid lives.
But all these thoughts of Polly would be less wearing, when they come
in the night-time knocking at the heart, if I could only remember her as
glowing under the sympathy and loving-kindness of her little mates.

Alas! it was not so. We were senseless little brutes, who, never having
learned the taste of misery ourselves, had no pity for the misfortunes of
others. She was, indeed, ill-treated; but what were we, to translate the
phrase? She was an under dog, and we had no mercy on her. We
"plagued" her, God forgive us! And what the word means, in its full
horror, only a child can compass. We laughed at her cudbar petticoats,
her little "chopped hands;" and when she stumbled over the arithmetic
lesson, because she had been up at four o'clock every morning since the
first bluebirds came, we laughed at that. Life in general seems to have
treated Polly in somewhat the same way. I hear that she did not marry
well, and that her children had begun to "turn out bad," when she died,
prematurely bent and old, not many weeks ago. But when I think of
what we might have given and what we did withhold, when I realize
that one drop of water from each of us would have filled her little cup
to overflowing, there is one compensating thought, and I murmur,
conscience-smitten, "I'm glad she had the pink dress!"
And now the little school is ever present with us, ours still for counsel
or reproof. Its long-closed sessions are open, by day and night; and I
suppose, as time goes on, and we drop into the estate of those who sit
by the fireside, oblivious to present scenes, yet acutely awake to such
as
"Flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude,"
it will grow more and more lifelike and more near. Beside it, live all the
joys of memory and many a long-past pain. For we who have walked in
country ways, walk in them always, and with no divided love, even
though brick pavements have been our chosen road this many a year.
We follow the market, we buy and sell, and even run across the sea, to
fit us with new armor for the soul, to guard it from the hurts of years;
but ever do we keep the calendar of this one spring of life. Some
unheard angelus summons us to days of feast and mourning; it may be
the joy of the fresh-springing willow, or the nameless pain responsive
to the croaking of frogs, in the month when twilights are misty, and
waves of world-sorrow flood in upon the heart, we know not why. All
those trembling half-thoughts of the sleep of the year and its

awakening,--we have not escaped them by leaving the routine that
brought them forth. We know when the first violets are blowing in the
woods, and we paint for ourselves the tasselling of the alder and the red
of maple-buds. We taste still the sting of checkerberry and woodsy
flavor of the fragrant birch. When fields of corn are shimmering in the
sun, we know exactly how it would seem to run through those dusty
aisles, swept by that silken drapery, and counselled in whispers from
the plumy tops so far above our heads. The ground-sparrow's nest is not
strange to us; no, nor the partridge's hidden treasure within the wood.
We can make pudding-bags of live-forever, dolls' bonnets, "trimmed up
to the nines," out of the velvet mullein leaf, and from the ox-eyed
daisies, round, cap-begirt faces, smiling as the sun. All the homely
secrets of rural life are ours: the taste of pie, cinnamon-flavored, from
the dinner-pails at noon; the smell of "pears a-b'ilin'," at that happiest
hour when, in the early dusk, we tumble into the kitchen, to find the
table set and the stove redolent of warmth and savor. "What you got for
supper?" we cry,--question to be paralleled in the summer days by
"What'd you have