Songs and Other Verse | Page 4

an observation of the dog, his only other human prop for
this enterprise was discarded. "Oh, you won't do," he said.
Christianity was increasingly dear to him as the discovery of childhood
and the unfolding of its revelations. Into what long disquisitions he
delighted to go, estimating the probable value of the idea that all
returning to righteousness must be a child's returning. He saw what an
influence such a conception has upon the hard and fast lines of habit
and destiny to melt them down. He had a still greater estimate of the
importance of the fact that Jesus of Nazareth came and lived as a child;
and the dream of the last year of his life was to write, in the mood of
the Holy-Cross tale, a sketch of the early years of the Little Galilean
Peasant-Boy. This vision drifted its light into all his pictures of children
at the last. He knew the "Old Adam" in us all, especially as he
reappeared in the little folk. "But I don't believe the depravity is total,
do you?" he said, "else a child would not care to hear about Mary's
Little One;"--and then he would go on, following the Carpenter's Son
about the cottage and over the hill, and rejoicing that, in following Him
thus, he came back to his own open-eyed childhood, "But, you know,"
said he, "my childhood was full of the absurdities and strenuosities"
(this last was his word) "of my puritan surroundings. Why, I never
knew how naturally and easily I can get back into the veins of an old
puritan grandfather that one of my grandmothers must have had--and
how hard it is for me to behave there, until I read Alice Morse Earle's
'The Sabbath in New England.' I read that book nearly all night, if
haply I might subdue the confusion and sorrows that were wrought in
me by eating a Christmas pie on that feast-day. The fact is, my
immediate ecclesiastical belongings are Episcopalian. I am of the
church of Archbishop Laud and King Charles of blessed memory. I like
good, thick Christmas pie, 'reeking with sapid juices,' full-ripe and
zealous for good or ill. But my 'Separatist' ancestors all mistook gastric
difficulties for spiritual graces, and, living in me, they all revolt and

want to sail in the Mayflower, or hold town-meetings inside of me after
feast-day."
Then, as if he had it in his mind,--poor, pale, yellow-skinned sufferer,--
to attract one to the book he delighted in, he related that he fell asleep
with this delicious volume in his hand, and this is part of the dream he
sketched afterward:
"I went alone to the meeting-house the which those who are sinfully
inclined toward Rome would call a 'church,' and it was on the Sabbath
day. I yearned and strove to repent me of the merry mood and full sorry
humors of Christmastide. For did not Judge Sewall make public his
confession of having an overwhelming sense of inward condemnation
for having opposed the Almighty with the witches of Salem? I fancied
that one William F. Poole of the Newberry Library went also to
comfort me and strengthen, as he would fain have done for the Judge.
Not one of us carried a cricket, though Friend Poole related that he had
left behind a 'seemly brassen foot-stove' full of hot coals from his
hearthstone. On the day before, Pelitiah Underwood, the wolf-killer,
had destroyed a fierce beast; and now the head thereof was 'nayled to
the meetinghouse with a notice thereof.' It grinned at me and spit forth
fire such as I felt within me. I was glad to enter the house, which was
'lathed on the inside and so daubed and whitened over workmanlike.' I
had not been there, as it bethought me, since the day of the raising,
when Jonathan Strong did 'break his thy,' and when all made complaint
that only £9 had been spent for liquor, punch, beere, and flip, for the
raising, whereas, on the day of the ordination, even at supper-time,
besides puddings of corn meal and 'sewet baked therein, pyes, tarts,
beare-stake and deer-meat,' there were 'cyder, rum-bitters, sling, old
Barbadoes spirit, and Josslyn's nectar, made of Maligo raisins, spices,
and syrup of clove gillyflowers'--all these given out freely to the
worshippers over a newly made bar at the church door-- God be praised!
As I mused on this merry ordination, the sounding-board above the
pulpit appeared as if to fall upon the pulpit, whereon I read, after much
effort: '_Holiness is the Lord's_.' The tassels and carved pomegranates
on the sounding-board became living creatures and changed themselves
into grimaces, and I was woefully wrought upon by the red cushion on

the pulpit, which did seem a bag of fire. As the minister was