Sea-gift. Fuller Edwin Wiley
and Aunt Hannah protruded helplessly, like pictures of fairies coming out of flowers. It was very cloudy, or at least everything now seems to have been gray when we started. The wheels commenced humming a drowsy tune, as they rolled through the sand, and soon hummed me to sleep; and when I awoke the carriage was going backward, and the sun had come out in the wrong place. Then we stopped at a well, near a house with a fat, wooden chimney, and an aspen tree in front, whose leaves seemed to be blinking all their eyes at me. A man in a broad-flapped hat came out with a gourd in his hand, and behind him a large yellow dog, that was tied to a piece of wood, and barked and jumped on each side of the string as if he wanted to shake it off. The well had a long pole, with a bucket at one end and a large stone at the other; and when Horace, our driver, went to it to draw some water for the horses, the stone seemed to fly up to the clouds. Then Horace filled the bucket and carried it to the horses, and I could hear them kissing it, as if they were so glad to see it; and, while I was listening at that, the man with the hat and dog handed in, at the carriage window, the great cool-looking gourd, with a long, crooked handle, down into which the water clicked, as if laughing, when father held it to me to drink.
After I had been bidden to “thank the kind gentleman, Johnnie,” and done so, Horace strapped the bucket again under the carriage, got up to his seat, and the house and well moved back out of sight, just as the man sent the stone flying up again to the sky. All is a blank for a long time – till Horace drives over a snake, and they hold me up to the window to see it. My eyes can discover nothing but the shadow of the bucket swinging between the wheels; and ever afterwards a bucket, under one of the old fashioned carriages, is associated with a dead snake and a hot, sandy road. There is another sleepy blank, and I drowsily rouse up, as we drive into town, to find it dark, and the lights all in a hurry to go somewhere, chasing each other by the carriage window, till one bold blaze stops right in front of it, and father exclaims, “Here we are!”
We get out, shawls, chaos and all, and I am carried up some broad stone steps, into a large hall with bright lights, and on through to a strange room, where there are new faces among the servants, a little excrescence of a fireplace, filled with red coals, and a large table steaming with good smelling dishes. Everything, for an indefinite period after this, is confused and unsatisfactory, and I can eliminate nothing into distinct recollection but two series of events, which, from their frequent repetition, have become facts of memory, viz., rides in my little carriage, and, in educational phrase, corrections; more plainly, whippings.
What tortures I suffered in my carriage, children alone know. Enclosed on three sides by the leather curtains, I was confined in front by a strap, which was buckled across my breast, to keep me from falling out, and, thus cooped up like a criminal, I would sit, listening to the grinding, gritty sound of the wheels as they rolled over the flag stones, bumping my head against the framework, knocking my cap awry, and not knowing how to put it straight again, and suffering the misery of whining without being noticed – a source of much affliction, by the way, to many grown-up children – my nurse all the while walking behind, and pushing me along, engaged in too deep a conversation with other nurses to heed my murmuring!
One of my sorest trials was to pass the stores, and have some pert clerk stop my carriage and say:
“Hello! Auntie, whose child is that?”
“Col. Smith’s, sir.”
“Why,” coming to me, and squatting down by the carriage, “I’ll declare, he’s a fine little fellow. How d’ye do, sir.”
“Tell the gentleman how d’ye,” persuades Aunt Hannah, who, like all nurses, is flattered by compliments to her protégé; but, before I can turn away in disgust, his tobacco-smelling moustache scratches my face. My greatest consolation, in all this persecution, was to meet little Lulie Mayland, my assigned sweetheart, though I was rather young for the blind god’s arrow. Our nurses would lift us from our carriages and hold us up to kiss each other; and I would be in a perfect glee as she tried to put her little plump fingers into my eyes, and I felt her moist little mouth on my cheek. Putting me down in the foot of her carriage, we would be rolled home together, as happy and joyous as children only can be.
The other series of events to which I have alluded were, from their very frequency, fixed still more indelibly upon my mind; though the intense activity of certain cognitive faculties, during their occurrence, may have contributed somewhat to their retention. They were the immediate and inevitable consequence of any recusancy, on my part, in regard to the rules of the bath. I possessed the usual hydrophobic prejudice of extreme youth, and dreaded morning ablutions as Rome did the Gauls. Had I been old enough to have managed the bath myself I should not have cared, but to be washed like a dish, put into the tub, and spongeful after spongeful squeezed over me, was more than my good nature could submit to. Mother, finding her reasoning wasted, and her commands disregarded, would send for switches, and laying me across her lap, pour hot embers, as it seemed to me, on my naked legs. I did not stop to debate, which I might have done with propriety, whether the friction developed the latent heat of the rods, or whether they were actually set on fire and then applied; I simply recognized the fact, that unless the bath came the fire did, and I wisely chose the former. The embers’ influence would last, on an average, about two days, when they would have to be again applied.
CHAPTER IV
I had been disturbing the centre of gravity of our globe for nine years, and had grown up into a mischievous, fun-making urchin – always out of the way when wanted, and in the way when not. I would have passed any committee on “boys,” and probably taken the medal as the best specimen. I had fulfilled all the requisites of custom. I had torn out all my pockets with loads of marbles, knives, strings, stones, buttons, nails, &c. I had cut my hands and fingers, and fallen out of doors perhaps even more than was necessary. I could soil a ruffle with all the facility of contempt for such a feminine ornament. I could wear out shoes and tear a hat as quickly as the most reckless, and I had a real, first class aversion to “trying on” clothes in process of making; the rough edges of an unfinished jacket, rubbed into my neck by the fingers of the seamstress, not at all according with that placidity of temperament I had been advised to cultivate by the dogs-and-bears poetry, while the rapidity with which I could cover clean clothes with mud was, I fear, a matter of peculiar pride, as it was of certain punishment. My most perfect attribute of boyhood, however, was the devotion I bore my sweetheart, and the utter apathy and indifference with which I regarded all other girls.
Being such an one, I was highly gratified when mother said to me one day:
“Johnnie, we are going to give a dinner party next week, and as you will be without company, you may go over and invite Lulie Mayland.”
“Oh! I’m so glad, I’m so glad,” I sung out; “and I mean to go over right now, and tell her to come.”
“No, no,” said mother, smiling, and taking me by the jacket button, “we have not sent out our cards yet. Wait till Monday, then you may go.”
I was disposed to whine at the delay, but she pinched my cheek as she got up from her chair, and said:
“No, you must do as I say, sir;” and left me, full of impatience for the advent of Monday. During the remainder of the week I exercised fully the child’s faculty of being ubiquitous at home. The kitchen, however, received the largest share of my attention. I was around every table, dipping in every dish, and in the cook’s way, to my fullest extent. If she turned around with a pan in her hand, it was sure to thump my head, and my anger thereat could only be appeased by letting me have a piece of dough to feel or a bowl to scrape. If eggs were to be beaten, I must try to froth them, till I was as full of foam as a half born Aphrodite; if flour was to be sifted, I was sure to get whitened; if spices were to be pounded I was certain to have my fingers mashed; and the burns I received, in trying to cook little dabs of cake, would have discouraged Mucius Scævola. Then my insatiate curiosity, and constant inquiries in regard to the numerous articles scattered around, would have worried out a less irascible nature than that of our cook; and by a final appeal to mother, and a command from headquarters, I would be forced to raise the siege, and retire from the field, with a jacket full of sugar and flour, sullenly licking my fingers in defiance.
Verily, children prove the old adage true: “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to