The Gilded Age | Page 7

large."
Hawkins understood. All, eyes were turned inquiringly upon him. He
said:
"Friends, I am not very well provided for, myself, but still I would not
turn my back on a homeless orphan. If he will go with me I will give
him a home, and loving regard--I will do for him as I would have
another do for a child of my own in misfortune."
One after another the people stepped forward and wrung the stranger's
hand with cordial good will, and their eyes looked all that their hands
could not express or their lips speak.
"Said like a true man," said one.
"You was a stranger to me a minute ago, but you ain't now," said
another.
"It's bread cast upon the waters--it'll return after many days," said the
old lady whom we have heard speak before.
"You got to camp in my house as long as you hang out here," said one.
"If tha hain't room for you and yourn my tribe'll turn out and camp in
the hay loft."
A few minutes afterward, while the preparations for the funeral were
being concluded, Mr. Hawkins arrived at his wagon leading his little
waif by the hand, and told his wife all that had happened, and asked her
if he had done right in giving to her and to himself this new care? She
said:
"If you've done wrong, Si Hawkins, it's a wrong that will shine brighter
at the judgment day than the rights that many' a man has done before

you. And there isn't any compliment you can pay me equal to doing a
thing like this and finishing it up, just taking it for granted that I'll be
willing to it. Willing? Come to me; you poor motherless boy, and let
me take your grief and help you carry it."
When the child awoke in the morning, it was as if from a troubled
dream. But slowly the confusion in his mind took form, and he
remembered his great loss; the beloved form in the coffin; his talk with
a generous stranger who offered him a home; the funeral, where the
stranger's wife held him by the hand at the grave, and cried with him
and comforted him; and he remembered how this, new mother tucked
him in his bed in the neighboring farm house, and coaxed him to talk
about his troubles, and then heard him say his prayers and kissed him
good night, and left him with the soreness in his heart almost healed
and his bruised spirit at rest.
And now the new mother came again, and helped him to dress, and
combed his hair, and drew his mind away by degrees from the dismal
yesterday, by telling him about the wonderful journey he was going to
take and the strange things he was going to see. And after breakfast
they two went alone to the grave, and his heart went out to his new
friend and his untaught eloquence poured the praises of his buried idol
into her ears without let or hindrance. Together they planted roses by
the headboard and strewed wild flowers upon the grave; and then
together they went away, hand in hand, and left the dead to the long
sleep that heals all heart-aches and ends all sorrows.
CHAPTER III.
Whatever the lagging dragging journey may have been to the rest of the
emigrants, it was a wonder and delight to the children, a world of
enchantment; and they believed it to be peopled with the mysterious
dwarfs and giants and goblins that figured in the tales the negro slaves
were in the habit of telling them nightly by the shuddering light of the
kitchen fire.
At the end of nearly a week of travel, the party went into camp near a

shabby village which was caving, house by house, into the hungry
Mississippi. The river astonished the children beyond measure. Its
mile-breadth of water seemed an ocean to them, in the shadowy
twilight, and the vague riband of trees on the further shore, the verge of
a continent which surely none but they had ever seen before.
"Uncle Dan'l"(colored,) aged 40; his wife, "aunt Jinny," aged 30,
"Young Miss" Emily Hawkins, "Young Mars" Washington Hawkins
and "Young Mars" Clay, the new member of the family, ranged
themselves on a log, after supper, and contemplated the marvelous river
and discussed it. The moon rose and sailed aloft through a maze of
shredded cloud-wreaths; the sombre river just perceptibly brightened
under the veiled light; a deep silence pervaded the air and was
emphasized, at intervals, rather than broken, by the hooting of an owl,
the baying of a dog, or the muffled crash of a raving bank in the
distance.
The little company assembled on the log were all children