The Portion of Labor

The Portion of Labor By Mary E. Wilkins
Author of "Jerome" "A New England Nun" Etc.
Illustrated
Harper & Brothers Publishers New York And London MDCCCCI
To Henry Mills Alden

Chapter I
On the west side of Ellen's father's house was a file of Norway
spruce-trees, standing with a sharp pointing of dark boughs towards the
north, which gave them an air of expectancy of progress.
Every morning Ellen, whose bedroom faced that way, looked out with
a firm belief that she would see them on the other side of the stone wall,
advanced several paces towards their native land. She had no doubt of
their ability to do so; their roots, projecting in fibrous sprawls from
their trunks, were their feet, and she pictured them advancing with wide
trailings, and rustlings as of green draperies, and a loudening of that
dreamy cry of theirs which was to her imagination a cry of
homesickness reminiscent of their old life in the White north. When
Ellen had first heard the name Norway spruce, 'way back in her
childhood--so far back, though she was only seven and a half now, that
it seemed to her like a memory from another life--she had asked her
mother to show her Norway on the map, and her strange convictions
concerning the trees had seized her. When her mother said that they had
come from that northernmost land of Europe, Ellen, to whose
childhood all truth was naked and literal, immediately conceived to
herself those veritable trees advancing over the frozen seas around the
pole, and down through the vast regions which were painted blue on

her map, straight to her father's west yard. There they stood and sang
the songs of their own country, with a melancholy sweetness of
absence and longing, and were forever thinking to return. Ellen felt
always a thrill of happy surprise when she saw them still there of a
morning, for she felt that she would miss them sorely when they were
gone. She said nothing of all this to her mother; it was one of the
secrets of the soul which created her individuality and made her a
spiritual birth. She was also silent about her belief concerning the
cherry-trees in the east yard. There were three of them, giants of their
kind, which filled the east yard every spring as with mountains of white
bloom, breathing wide gusts of honey sweetness, and humming with
bees. Ellen believed that these trees had once stood in the Garden of
Eden, but she never expected to find them missing from the east yard of
a morning, for she remembered the angel with the flaming sword, and
she knew how one branch of the easternmost tree happened to be
blasted as if by fire. And she thought that these trees were happy, and
never sighed to the wind as the dark evergreens did, because they had
still the same blossoms and the same fruit that they had in Eden, and so
did not fairly know that they were not there still. Sometimes Ellen,
sitting underneath them on a low rib of rock on a May morning, used to
fancy with success that she and the trees were together in that first
garden which she had read about in the Bible.
Sometimes, after one of these successful imaginings, when Ellen's
mother called her into the house she would stare at her little daughter
uneasily, and give her a spoonful of a bitter spring medicine which she
had brewed herself. When Ellen's father, Andrew Brewster, came home
from the shop, she would speak to him aside as he was washing his
hands at the kitchen sink, and tell him that it seemed to her that Ellen
looked kind of "pindlin'." Then Andrew, before he sat down at the
dinner-table, would take Ellen's face in his two moist hands, look at her
with anxiety thinly veiled by facetiousness, rub his rough, dark cheek
against her soft, white one until he had reddened it, then laugh, and tell
her she looked like a bo'sn. Ellen never quite knew what her father
meant by bo'sn, but she understood that it signified something very rosy
and hearty indeed.

Ellen's father always picked out for her the choicest and tenderest bits
of the humble dishes, and his keen eyes were more watchful of her
plate than of his own. Always after Ellen's mother had said to her father
that she thought Ellen looked pindling he was late about coming home
from the shop, and would turn in at the gate laden with paper parcels.
Then Ellen would find an orange or some other delicacy beside her
plate at supper. Ellen's aunt Eva, her mother's younger sister, who lived
with them, would look askance at the tidbit with open sarcasm. "You