One result of my infantile novel-reading was that I did not like to look at my own face in a mirror,because it was so unlike that of heroines,always pictured with "high white foreheads"and "cheeks of a perfect oval."Mine was round,ruddy,and laughing with health;and,though I practiced at the glass a good deal,Icould not lengthen it by puckering down my lips.I quite envied the little girls who were pale and pensive-looking,as that was the only ladyfied standard in the romances.Of course,the chief pleasure of reading them was that of identifying myself with every new heroine.They began to call me a "bookworm"at home.Idid not at all relish the title.
It was fortunate for me that I liked to be out of doors a great deal,and that I had a brother,John,who was willing to have me for an occasional companion.Sometimes he would take me with him when be went huckleberrying,up the rural Montserrat Road,through Cat Swamp,to the edge of Burnt Hills and Beaver Pond.
He had a boy's pride in explaining these localities to me,making me understand that I had a guide who was familiar with every inch of the way.Then,charging me not to move until he came back,he would leave me sitting alone on a great craggy rock,while he went off and filled his basket out of sight among the bushes.
Indeed,I did not want to move,it was all so new and fascinating.The tall pine-trees whispering to each other across the sky-openings above me,the graceful ferns,the velvet mosses dotted with scarlet fairy-cups,as if the elves had just spread their table for tea,the unspeakable charm of the spice-breathing air,all wove a web of enchantment about me,from which I had no wish to disentangle myself.The silent spell of the woods held me with a power stronger even than that of the solemn-voiced sea.
Sometimes this same brother would get permission to take me on a longer excursion,--to visit the old homestead at "The Farms."Three or four miles was not thought too long a walk for a healthy child of five years;and that road,in the old time,led through a rural Paradise,beautiful at every season,--whether it were the time of song-sparrows and violets,of wild roses,of coral-hung barberry-bushes,or of fallen leaves and snow-drifts.The wildness of the road,now exchanged for elegant modern cultivation,was its great charm to us.We stopped at the Cove Brook to hear the cat-birds sing,and at Mingo's Beach to revel in the sudden surprise of the open sea,and to listen to the chant of the waves,always stronger and grander there than anywhere along the shore.We passed under dark wooded cliffs out into sunny openings,the last of which held under its skirting pines the secret of the prettiest woodpath to us in all the world,the path to the ancestral farmhouse.
We found children enough to play with there,--as numerous a family as our own.We were sometimes,I fancy,the added drop too much of already overflowing juvenility.Farther down the road,where the cousins were all grown-up men and women,Aunt Betsey's cordial,old-fashioned hospitality sometimes detained us a day or two.We watched the milking,and fed the chickens,and fared gloriously.Aunt Betsey could not have done more to entertain us,had we been the President's children.
I have always cherished the memory of a certain pair of large-bowed spectacles that she wore,and of the green calash,held by a ribbon bridle,that sheltered her head,when she walked up from the shore to see us,as she often did.They announced to us the approach of inexhaustible kindliness and good cheer.We took in a home-feeling with the words "Aunt Betsey"then and always.She had just the husband that belonged to her in my Uncle David,an upright man,frank-faced,large-hearted,and spiritually minded.
He was my father's favorite brother,and to our branch of the family "The Farms"meant "Uncle David and Aunt Betsey."My brother John's plans for my entertainment did not always harmonize entirely with my own ideas.He had an inventive mind,and wanted me to share his boyish sports.But I did not like to ride in a wheelbarrow,nor to walk on stilts,nor even to coast down the hill on his sled and I always got a tumble,if I tried,for I was rather a clumsy child;besides,I much preferred girls'quieter games.
