Harper's Round Table, July 16, 1895 Part 7

And again he rolled, his long legs beating the air.

"I think you are mean, Jack, when you were the one that made me go!"

exclaimed Cynthia, indignantly. Then she relapsed into silence. How could she ever confess to Aunt Betsey?

Miss Trinkett hastened the climax.

"I don't know why Jack finds this so amusing. It is not so to my mind; but if you are quite sure that I was not here, and that I did not call upon Mrs. Parker, I must ask you to drive down with me at once and state the facts to her. I cannot have it insinuated that I am no longer capable of judging for myself, and of knowing what I do and what I don't do. She actually told me to my face that I was getting childish. What _would_ Silas say? But I'll never tell him that. I would like to go at once."

Alas, there was no help for it. Cynthia must confess. If only Jack had not been there!

She rose from the step where she had been sitting, and standing in front of her little grandaunt she spoke very rapidly.

"You are right, and so is Mrs. Parker. You weren't here, but I dressed up and went to see her. I pretended I was you. I found your other false--I mean your new hair. You left it in the drawer. I looked just like you, and we thought it would be such fun. I'm awfully sorry, Aunt Betsey, indeed I am. It wasn't such great fun, after all."

At first Miss Betsey was speechless. Then she rose in extreme wrath.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "CYNTHY FRANKLIN, IT IS MORE THAN TIME YOU HAD A MOTHER."]

"Cynthy Franklin, it is more than time you had a mother. I never supposed you could be so--impertinent; yes, impertinent! Made yourself look like me, indeed, and going to my most intimate friend! Poor Mrs.

Parker. There's no knowing what she might have said, thinking it was I.

And I telling her to-day she was out of her mind, and various other things I'm distressed to think of. Why, _Cynthy_!"

"Oh, I'm _so_ sorry," cried Cynthia, bursting into tears. "Do forgive me, Aunt Betsey."

"I am not ready to forgive you just yet, and whether I ever will or not remains to be proved. I am disappointed in you all. Edith going and shutting herself up when I come, because she doesn't want a step-mother, and you making fun of an aged aunt--not so very aged either. Why, when Silas hears this I just dread to think what he'll say. I am going home at once, Jack. You are the only well-behaved one among them. You may drive me to the train."

"Oh, Aunt Betsey, not to-day! Please don't go."

"I couldn't answer for my tongue if I staid here to-night. I had best go home and think it out. When I remember all I said to Maria Parker, and all she said to me, I'm about crazy, just as she said I was."

And presently she drove away, sitting very stiff and very erect in the old buggy that had held her prototype two weeks before, and Cynthia was left in tears, with one more calamity added to her already burdened soul.

Why had she ever played a practical joke? If she lived a hundred years she never would again.

Edith heard the news of Aunt Betsey's sudden departure in silence, and Cynthia received no sympathy from her. And very soon it was temporarily forgotten in preparations for the advent of the bride.

The day came at last, a beautiful one in June. The house was filled with lovely flowers which Cynthia had arranged--Edith would have nothing to do with it--and the supper-table was decked with the finest China and the old silver service and candelabra of their great-grandmother.

The servants, who had lived with them so long, could scarcely do their work. They peered from the kitchen windows for a first sight of their new mistress, and wondered what she would be like.

"These are sorry times," said Mary Ann, the old cook, as she wiped her eyes with the corner of her ap.r.o.n.

Outside the place had never looked so peacefully lovely. It was late, and the afternoon sun cast long shadows from the few trees on the lawn.

In the distance the cows were heard lowing at milking-time. At one spot the river could be seen glinting through the trees, and June roses filled the air with fragrance.

All was to the outward eye just as it had always been, summer after summer, since the Franklins could remember, and yet how different it really was.

Jack had gone to the station to meet the travellers. Edith, Cynthia, Janet, and w.i.l.l.y were waiting on the porch, all in their nicest clothes.

The children had been bribed to keep their hands clean, and up to this moment they were immaculate. Ben and Chester lay at full length on the banking in front of the house; they alone did not share the excitement.

The sound of wheels was heard.

"They are coming," whispered Cynthia.

As for Edith, she was voiceless.

And then the carriage emerged from the trees.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

STORIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE.

BY HENRIETTA CHRISTIAN WRIGHT.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

In the old seaport town of Salem, with its quaint houses with their carved doorways and many windows, with its pretty rose gardens, its beautiful overshadowing elms, its dingy court-house and celebrated town pump, Hawthorne pa.s.sed his early life, his picturesque surroundings forming a suitable setting to the picture we may call up of the handsome imaginative boy whose early impressions were afterward to crystallize into the most beautiful art that America has yet known. Behind the town stood old Witch Hill, grim and ghastly with the memories of the witches who had been hanged there in colonial times. In front spread the sea, a golden argosy of promise, whose wharves and store-rooms held priceless stores of merchandise.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ONE OF THE BOY'S FAVORITE OCCUPATIONS.]

Hawthorne's boyhood was much like that of any other boy in Salem town.

He went to school and to church, loved the sea, and prophesied that he would go away on it some day and never return, was fond of reading, and was not averse to a good fight with any of his school-fellows who had, as he expressed it, "a quarrelsome disposition." He was a healthy, robust lad, and life seemed a very good thing to him, whether he was roaming the streets of Salem, sitting idly on the wharves, or at home stretched on the floor reading one of his favorite authors. As a rule all boys who have become writers have liked the same books, and Hawthorne was no exception. When reading, he was living in the magic world of Shakespeare and Milton, Spenser, Froissart, and _Pilgrim's Progress_. This last was a great and special favorite with him, its lofty and beautiful spirit carrying his soul with it into those spiritual regions which the child mind reverences without understanding.

For one year of his boyhood he was supremely happy in the life of the wild regions of Sebago Lake, Maine, where the family moved for a time.

Here, he says, he lived the life of a bird of the air, with no restraint, and in absolute supreme freedom. In the summer he would take his gun and spend days in the forest, shooting, fis.h.i.+ng, and doing whatever prompted his vagabond spirit at the moment. In the winter he would follow the hunters through the snow, or skate till midnight alone upon the frozen lake, with only the shadows of the hills to keep him company, and sometimes pa.s.sing the remainder of the night in a solitary log cabin, whose hearth would blaze with the burning trunks of the fallen evergreens.

He entered Bowdoin in 1821, and had among his fellow-students Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States, and several others who distinguished themselves in later life.

Long afterward Hawthorne recalls his days at Bowdoin as among the happiest of his life, and in writing to one of his old college friends speaks of the charm that lingers around the memory of the place, where he gathered blueberries in study hours; watched the great logs drifting down from the lumbering districts above along the current of the Androscoggin, fished in the forest streams, and shot pigeons and squirrels at odd hours which ought to have been devoted to the cla.s.sics.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.]

After leaving Bowdoin, Hawthorne returned to Salem, where he pa.s.sed the next twelve years of his life, and during which he must have marked out authors.h.i.+p as his profession, as he attempted nothing else. Here he produced, from time to time, stories and sketches which found their way to the periodicals of the day, and which won for him a reputation among other American writers. But it is remarkable that the years which a man devotes usually to the best work of his life were spent by Hawthorne in a contented half-dream of what he meant to accomplish later on; for exquisite as is some of the work produced at this time, it never would have won for the author the highest place in American literature. These stories and sketches were collected later on, and published under the t.i.tles _Twice-Told Tales_ and _Snow Image_. They are full of the grace and beauty of Hawthorne's style, but in speaking of them Hawthorne himself says that there is in this result of twelve years little to show for its thought and industry. But whatever may have been the cause of delay, the promise of his genius was fulfilled at last. In 1850, when Hawthorne was forty-six years old, appeared his first great romance. In writing this book Hawthorne had chosen for his subject a picture of old Puritan times in New England, and out of the tarnished records of the past he created a work of art of marvellous and imperishable beauty.

In the days of which he wrote a Puritan town or village was exactly like a large family bound together by mutual interests, in which the acts of each life were regarded as affecting the whole community. In this novel Hawthorne imprisoned forever the spirit of colonial New England, with all its struggles, hopes, and fears; and the conscience-driven Puritan, who lived in the new generation only in public records and church histories, was lifted into the realm of art.

In Hawthorne's day this grim figure, stalking in the midst of Indian fights, village pillories, town meetings, witch-burnings, and church councils, was already a memory. He had drifted into the past with his steeple-crowned hat and his matchlock. He had left the pleasant New England farm-lands with their pastures and meadows, hills and valleys and wild-pine groves, and lurked like a ghost among the old church-yards and court-houses where his deeds were recorded.

Hawthorne brought him back to life, rehabilitated him in his old garments, set him in the midst of his fellow-elders in the church, and gave him a perfect carnival of trials and worries for conscience' sake.

He made the old Puritan live anew, and never again can his memory become dim. It is embalmed for all time by the cunning art of this master-hand.

This first romance, published under the t.i.tle _The Scarlet Letter_, revealed both to Hawthorne himself and the world outside the transcendent power of his genius.

Hawthorne, when the work was first finished, was in a desperate frame of mind, because of the little popularity his other books had acquired, and told his publisher, who saw the first germ of the work, that he did not know whether the story was very good or very bad. The publisher, however, perceived at once the unusual quality of the work, prevailed upon Hawthorne to finish it immediately, and brought it out one year from that time, and the public, which had become familiar with Hawthorne as a writer of short stories, now saw that it had been entertaining a genius unawares.