Lucy Fitch Perkins Class 5"--^ Book T^^- Ciopyri^ht}!^. COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. A BOOK OF JOYS By Mrs. Perkins. The Goose Girl. A Mother's Lap Book of Rhymes and Pict- | ures. With 40 full- page draw- ings. Small quarto, §1.25. A. C. McCuRci & Co , Publishers " I'll I. \\ MX i\\ I 111, I, "" |l'v..i: >1] A BOOK OF JOYS THE STORY OF A NEW ENGLAND SUMMER BY LUCY FITCH PERKINS AUTHOR OF "the GOOSE GIRL," EDITOR AND ILLUSTRATOR OF " THE DANDELION CLASSICS," ETC. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR BY THE AUTHOR CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG ."v CO. 1007 Copyright A. C. McClurg & Co. 1907 Published October 19, 1907 LtSRAHY Bf C0NGRE:5S Iwu Cooies Received OCT 24 IPOI" CLASS fl- XXc, Wo. COPY B. Ct)( lahrsttit l^uti . R. DONNELLtY 4; SONS COMPANY CHICAGO V TO D. H. P. FOR WHOM THIS RECORD OK A HAPPV NEW ENGLAND SUMMER WAS WRIITEN CONTENTS CHAPTER I. ]May in New England PAGE . 11 II. A Solitary Sunday . 21 III. An Indoor Day .... . 42 IV. Society Notes .... . 57 V. An Outdoor Day . 67 VI. Nature Study and Profanity . 76 VII. The Means of Grace . . 94 VIII. Viewpoints ..... . 114 IX. Intermezzo ..... . U7 X. The Old Homestead . . . . . m XI. Work and Play . . . . . 154 XII. A Day in Arcady . . . . . 172 XIII. A Meditation on Marriage . 189 XIV. The Wedding . . , . . 206 ILLUSTRATIONS I'AGE " The Widow Hill " Frontispiece " ' Skittering Along under the Fence, ' carrying a Pasteboard Box of Cookies" . ... 32 " I ASKED HIM if HE CONSIDERED MiLKING ON SUNDAY A Work of Necessity or Mercy" . . .106 "He DATED A Broken Spirit from that Hour" . 136 " She said, 'What do you say to you and me gettin' MARRIED?'" 1^^ A BOOK OF JOYS CHAPTER I MAY IN NEW ENGLAND A ND to begin, such a morning as it is! As if it ^/"\^ were the first that dawned — I had almost said bloomed — in Paradise ! And I, look- ing out upon it, feel like Eve returned to Eden, only with Adam left still without the gate to earn his bread — and mine — "by the sweat of his face." Could any one, I wonder, sit by this window, on this day of the world, and look out upon a New England orchard in bloom, with birds nesting and singing among the fragrant boughs, and not brim over with the joy of it ? I am not the first to observe that Nature is a delight at all seasons of the year; but just now and here she is a delirium, and I marvel that I do not spon- taneously gush poetry from the wells of feeling witliin me! If it is true, as the philosopher asserts, that speech is silver and silence golden, then I am sure of my verbal policy. I am a bimetallist, and believe in the free and unlimited coinage of silver in the ratio of sixteen to one, — that is, sixteen speeches to one silence, 11 A BOOK OF JOYS at least at such times as this, when the joy of living makes more silence than that quite impossible. I have been counting my Springs — not all of them — and it is quite ten years since I was in the country, especially this dear New England country, at this season of the year. To be sure, my Adam and I have had each Spring a few rapturous hours with the apple blossoms in our private Paradise of crab trees and hawthorns in the woods; but to live in an orchard during the bridal season of the year, — that comes but seldom in the life of a city woman, and alas! almost never to a city man. If only my Adam could per- suade that severe angel with the flaming sword, whose name is Necessity, to look the other way for a mo- ment while he crept past into Paradise with me, my cup of joy would be as full as the Psalmist's; and his ran over. To come directly from the noise and confusion of the city to this rural loveliness, is like going from a sick bed straight to heaven, only to a much nicer heaven than some saints have pictured; for I never could understand why the Christian heaven should be described as a city. My Little Maid once expressed her views and mine on this subject: "Heaven," she said with conviction, "is not in the city; it is in the country." 12 MAY IN NEW ENGLAND I suppose the idea of a celestial city may have been natural enough to a shepherd nation; or possibly to John on lonely Patmos the city presented a symbol of the companionship without which heaven cannot be; but what are pearly gates and golden streets com- pared with garden walks and the smell of apple orchards in bloom ? It is but a sort of artificial Alad- din's palace of a heaven to which some of us look forward. For my part, I prefer a heaven paved with such turf as I look out upon now — all spangled with buttercups and broidered with violets, with the shad- ows of apple boughs dancing over it, and living silence all about, the stillness of singing birds and humming bees. Bird songs and pleasant barnyard music mingle so sweetly in my happy ear, that this morning I could even find room in my heaven for less ethereal birds than those admitted in poetry to be fit for Paradise. So hospitable is my mental state indeed, that I think I should like a few barnyard fowls there, fowls that need never minister to carnal appetites nor be looked upon as subjects for culinary art, but peaceful biddies which might be allowed to wander unmolested, lead- ing their downy broods through bypaths of the Elysian fields. I think too, that I should miss the sleepy afternoon 13 A BOOK OF JOYS crowing of cocks in an ultra-refined heaven where only song birds were admitted! Perhaps I might advance into more exalted circles after a time, but I am sure I should like a good many of the dear com- monplaces of earth at first to make my progress more easy and gradual. Hens are not so obviously suited, perhaps, to the spiritual sphere as the lark which already at heaven's gate sings, but they have their own place in the invisible universe; and I believe with George Eliot that many a lesson of quiet con- tent in limiting circumstances may be learned from an old hen clucking to her brood or sunning herself in a dust pile, that we cannot get from more ambi- tious fowls. This plebeian taste in paradises may result from my ancestry having been uncompromisingly Amer- ican for many generations, or it may be natural to wish to include in the vision of the Ideal, the sweet features of the Actual. At any rate my conception of heaven is distinctly democratic, a place where all birds are born free and equal, and brought up with- out invidious social distinctions. We shall surely need some such world in which to perfect the demo- cratic ideals so sadly shattered in this. But this savors of politics, for which there is no room in any kind of a paradise, so I come back to my 14 MAY IN NEW ENGLAND window, from which 1 can look out over the pinky- white tops of the orchard trees to the hills beyond which border the river. They too are clad with blossoms and verdure in all the tender spring shades of celestial millinery, and when the sunshine sifts through it in the early morning, the whole land- scape melts into a golden mist that makes it seem like a tapestry woven of the stuff of dreams. I am, I fear, quite out of harmony with it all, clad in this too, too solid flesh — not to mention a woollen dress, — for it is still cool, and I long for a garment woven of spindrift, and a less carnivorous appetite, and specific levity instead of specific gravity, as the appropriate animating force for us all. To suit this environment one should be, indeed, but a very little lower than the angels. From the window I see my Little Maid placidly digging in a garden bed, while my cousin Henrietta, whose love for this old home makes one forget that there are such things as flats and rented houses in the world, instructs her in the alphabet of gardening. It seems impossible, as I look out upon this serene loveliness, to believe that such a place as the metro- polis exists, or that man could have used his heaven- born gift of ingenuity to invent such a chaos of life. I even found myself a moment ago checking the A BOOK OF JOYS thought of the city — any city — as if it were im- proper out of its context, — like profanity in church. Though I am a woman, I have enough of the doublet and hose in my disposition to concede that there are occasions when profanity is fitting and perhaps necessary. I am willing to admit that cities also have their uses. But in the country, in May, they seem to the normal life of man as an orphan asylum to a home, or as comic opera to real life. Among other pleasures and emancipations of this happy holiday, I rejoice to find that I am not in a mood to think seriously of Modern Problems, that unfailing diversion of the conscientious modern woman. One could scarcely, indeed, take them into a blossoming orchard! So I am thankful to forget them and to rest for a brief space from worrying about the world ; in fact, I have almost made up my mind to let the universe run itself this Summer, and to "let my own orbit be all my task." I think per- haps the reason we of the city feel so much respon- sibility about the world ordinarily, is because it is difl^cult to believe that God can be in the city at all. Yet I suppose His purposes are no more to be thwarted in city life than in the rest of the natural world: what is needed is the insight to see in ex- perience the unalterable beneficence that science 16 MAY IN NEW ENGLAND reveals in the order of nature. In a May orchard, at any rate, it is easy to believe "that we cannot escape from our good." This beautiful old home where my Little Maid and I are happy guests is locally known as Marston Hill. Its broad acres were yielded to the forbears of the present owners by the Indians, and have been handed down from father to son through all the generations since. Mr. Marston, the last of a vigor- ous line, was born here, and has never known any other home. Here he brought Cousin Henrietta as a bride, from a similar home in Massachusetts, and here they have lived through all the quiet years since that happy event. In England this would not be noteworthy, but the migratory instinct of Ameri- cans is too pronounced not to make it a distinctive circumstance. Whether the estate was originally acquired by criminal aggression or by benevolent assimilation, it is impossible now to state; but if the latter, it is certain that the Indians were completely assimilated long since, for the place bears unmis- takable marks of its two centuries of loving home life. The house itself is more than a hundred years old, and has sheltered so many generations of iNIarstons that family associations are grown like lichens all 17 A BOOK OF JOYS about. This succession of owners may be chrono- logically traced through the portraits upon the walls, and the furniture is an accumulation of choice old mahogany that radiates memories of all the former owners of the place. If one were gifted with the powers of a psychometrician, what histories these old sideboards and tall clocks, high-boys and spidery tables, might reveal! The house, sheltered behind elms and pines, stands back from the street in dignified seclusion, while its generous expanse of terraced lawn gives a soothing expression of comfort and accustomed leisure. Old-fashioned flowers crop out here and there in the turf about it, the survivors of a long-past garden where now the green lawn slopes down to the or- chard's edge. Great lilacs, almost as high as the apple trees themselves, mingle the winy scent of their white and purple flowers with the odor of the orchard blooms, and near by are titan bushes of the African rose, a flowering shrub that looks like a rocket, as it bursts and falls in a shower of gold. There are hundreds of these graceful sprays, and the flowers have a delicate old-time fragrance that makes one think of the dear old-fashioned ladies who wore mitts and carried sprigs of things to church, and who made this home what it is. 18 MAY IN NEW ENGLAND All the delights of Spring crowd themselves through my open window, and first of all pleasures is the open window itself; for what a sense of freedom conies to one who has been shut in behind storm sash all winter, when it is first possible to throw everything open and invite the outdoors in! And it comes in — the blessed air of heaven — without a cinder in it, blowing straight from Arcady into my room, laden with the fragrance of a blossoming world, and the songs of the feathered bridegrooms in the trees. It brings, too, softened by distance, the cries of men to their oxen as they plough in a neighboring field, the lowing of cattle, and the crowing of cocks. In the immediate foreground of sound is the clucking of Old Betty White, the setting hen, who is taking her morning exercise followed by an imaginary brood. Everything speaks of love and promise. " We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing That skies are clear and grass is growing." The cardinal virtues of faith and love are easy in a May orchard, and I find myself thinking more severely of Adam and Eve than I have done heretofore. There might have been ample excuse for the fall if our first parents had been thrust into a city environ- ment with all its complexities, but it should have been 19 A BOOK OF JOYS comparatively easy to stay good in a garden, where Nature seems seeking by every beautiful device to express the beneficence of the divine plan. Standing as we do between the infinitesimal and the infinite, with capacity to appreciate the perfection which ex- presses itself in both worlds, the understanding of it becomes a cumulative experience and the natural human being must be reverent. Yesterday I showed the Little Maid a wonderful new world which we entered by way of the micro- scope. A speck of vegetable mould was magnified to many times its size and revealed a field of delicate green upon which grew plant forms as complex, perfect, and beautiful as the trees and plants of our larger world. To-day I could understand the growing revela- tion which caused her to say solemnly, as she looked at the bees humming ecstatically above a blossom- ing apple tree, "I believe God has more power than I thought he had!" And as the speck of mould is to our world, so is our world to the universe. What words shall we have when that, too, is revealed! 20 CHAPTER II A SOLITARY SUNDAY IF ALL Sundays could be like this one I am sure I should like to go "where Sabbaths have no end," for a surfeit of such loveliness could not be imagined. I might find some difficulty in be- coming reconciled to the former proposition of that hymn, "Where congregations ne'er break up," however; for to go into a church filled with what Charles Dudley Warner called "old Gothic air," to hear about God, when every twig, branch, and visible object, sparkling in the sunshine and bathing in the breeze, speak of His love so unmistakably without, seems a sheer perversion to me, I had the firmness to adhere to this point of view at church time this morning, which was a test of con- viction, if not of piety, since the trend of public opinion is the other way here. But how could I miss two hours of such heavenly solitude as this, there being no human being anywhere about, except the dogs and myself, since the family drove away. My Little Maid begged to go to church "to hear the music," she said, but intuition tells me that her new pink-flowered gown added some persuasions of its 21 A BOOK OF JOYS own. At any rate, she went, and I am ^ow seated in state upon the veranda with my writii^ materials before me, and my Wordsworth to tak/ occa^mial refreshment from when I can no longer endure^-feing unable to write poetry myself. c^^jSP An orchestral concert is going on in the air about me, and as I sit here lost in a paradise of s^jwfe, I feel like Psyche in the Palace of Eros, the ^5^1 in the House of Love, served with every desirable^iing to the sound of invisible music. The bees rjawmur a soft accompaniment to the songs of robins, m^aHow- larks, bluebirds, orioles, and tanagers, each carolling his favorite melody in an independent obligato manner, destructive to one's ideas of musical form, possibly, but very satisfying to the ear. Even the occasional harmonic note of a mosquito does not disturb my serenity on this day "crammed with heav- en," and the crowing of the cock in the barnyard positively adds to the effect of the cluster of sweet sounds wrapped around with silence. Now the bells of the village church three miles away gently break the living stillness with their stately invitation. I like the bells the best of anything about a country church; their melody seems to belong with the gentle landscape and the peaceful day; but to be quite truthful, "I like a church, 1 22 A SOLITARY SUNDAY like a cowl," in perspective only on such a day as this. On dark winter days, when it requires rose-colored spectacles with telescopic lenses to see the beauty of life at all through the drifted miseries of the city, the church service reminds us of the welcome truth that after all we are but pilgrims and strangers here — that heaven is our home. But on such a day as this, intoxicated with the loveliness of life, I feel no more need of the consolations of theology and the doctrine of renunciation than a young-eyed cherubin does of a doctor, for to-day I can agree with Omar that '*I myself am heaven." It is well, no doubt, that some days should be so filled with the actual Presence that seeking becomes unnecessary, and we may *'sit at home with the Cause." One's impulses in the matter of church-going or home-staying are not, however, easily accounted for, and it is some- thing more than easy to convict oneself merely of a feeble appreciation of the means of grace. Possibly, however, the means of grace may track me to my joyous and pagan lair; for be it confessed, last week the minister called, bringing his Easter sermon in his pocket, which at Cousin Henrietta's request he read aloud with the silent illustration of a re-born Earth all about him. 23 A BOOK OF JOYS I like the old-fashioned relation of minister and people which is still possible in rural life. It makes the ministry more personal in character, more like spiritual healing — a veritable cure of souls. The minister here is an agreeable Englishman who must find much to remind him of home in the pictur- esque country life about him. He and his sweet- faced wife and five happy children live together in a dear old gabled parsonage across the street from the village church. This yellow parsonage in its setting of lilacs and elms is a real heart picture, and I tantalize myself by imagining the impossible in the form of the discovery of some such ideal spot near the me- tropolis, and our appropriating it at once and living there happily ever after. This makes me long for the faith that removes mountains. If I had it I should pray, not for a mountain, for whicli I have no immediate use, but for the removal to the city of a dear old empty house and several acres of abandoned land near here, which would exactly suit our practical and aesthetic require- ments. These old New England homes are so roomy and cosy, so homelike and domestic, that I do not see how the expression of them could be improved. 24 A SOLITARY SUNDAY In the West, alas, tradition does not hallow old houses as it does here. Though I am a loyal West- erner, candor compels me to admit that old houses there shock my a?sthetic sensibilities. They are too often high and narrow, with ugly humpy roofs and sides shingled in a manner to suggest eczema. Merely to look at one invites symptoms of acute nostalgia. There our oldest houses are apt to be but degenerate survivors of the Queen Anne period, mongrel descendants of a noble race. Their ori- ginal lack of dignity becomes with advancing years a hopeless combination of folly and decay — like an old woman with kittenish manners and a black false front. The Westerner who comes East is bound to grow idolatrous before these dignified remnants of ances- tral days, and with characteristic zeal returns home to call upon his architect for a reincarnation of some fine old elm-shaded New England home, which, stripped of its surroundings and imitated in a city street, is as forlorn a spectacle as that of a widowed grandmother living in a family of her Things-in- Law. My cousin Henrietta tells me about the people who live in the quaint old houses we pass in our drives, and her tales impress me anew with the 25 A BOOK OF JOYS thought that whether it be desirable or not, people have room for individuality in the country. Cities have a graded-school effect upon society, for people of the same class all know the same things, and make it a point of etiquette to act as much like one another as possible. In rural New England, at least, there still remains a commendable indepen- dence of character, and a notable pride in eccentrici- ties. This was plainly indicated by the complacent comment of a neighbor with whom we stopped to chat on our drive yesterday. "My sister and me," she explained, "ain't no more alike than if we was n't us! She 's just as dif- ferent as I be the other way." Just "to be different" seems to satisfy a New England appetite for distinction, and as an appetite it has certain advantages over that for conformity. Here peculiar people mature and go to seed and then, as Mrs. Stowe has said, "go on lasting"; for it is a place where people never die and are seldom born. The air seems an excellent preservative — possibly because there is so much salt in it, and every one has a reasonable chance of attaining the prestige of the oldest inhabitant. One of our nearest neighbors is the Widow Hill, a hearty old lady of ninety, who is interested in 26 A SOLITARY SUNDAY everything that goes on in her world, and who still walks about with all the energy and vigor of a young woman of seventy-five. We called upon her yesterday, and I shall never forget the charming picture she made as we passed between the borders of box to her Colonial front door, where she stood as in a frame, waiting to greet us. She wore a snowy cap, with strings of the finest muslin hanging over the little cape which covered her shoulders, and her white apron was as immaculate as her cap. She ushered us into a parlor with paper on the walls of a pattern half a century old, and seated herself in a high-backed chair which had belonged to one of the ancestors w'hose silhouettes hung in oval frames above her head, while Cousin Hen- rietta and I found seats on a horsehair-covered davenport opposite her. As she sat with her blue- veined hands crossed over the white handkerchief in her lap, she made a striking resemblance to Whistler's portrait of his mother. To see her, and to hear her quaint comments uj^on the events of her world, was like stepj)ing directly into a descriptive passage of a historical novel. I always skip them in books, but it was a pleasure to traverse the seventy-five years which stretched between the gate and her front door, and to live 27 A BOOK OF JOYS for a little while a contemporary of my own ances- tors. The widow lives with a female dragon known as Hannah Ann, who keeps her in perfect if uncom- fortable order, and guards the flickering flame of life with the faithful zeal of a vestal virgin. Hannah Ann is " a housekeeper by the wrath of God " — a Cal- vinist in kitchen management; and the widow evi- dently holds her in an esteem not unmixed with awe. The smell of soap pervaded the rooms, and the sound of a scrubbing brush was heard in the nether portion of the house, where, as the widow explained, "Hannah Ann was purifyin' her kitchen in prep- aration for the Sabbath." As she opened a door leading into the front hall to wash the threshold, the odor of baked beans and brown bread came in an appetizing gust from the kitchen. The widow sniffed it appreciatively. "Seems 's if we shouldn't hardly know 'twas Saturday without the smell of beans in the house," she said; "Hannah always has 'em for supper same as we always did when I was a girl at home." Who shall say we have no traditions in America ? Without his Saturday night beans no New Englander feels really prepared for his religious privileges on Sunday. 28 A SOLITARY SUNDAY From the windows of the Widow Hill's house I could see a charming cluster of buildings in the dis- tance, and when we stepped from her front gate into this century once more, I asked Cousin Henrietta if we might not drive that way home. The buildings proved to be an old mill, a printing office, and a country store, picturesquely grouped upon the bank of a mill-pond. The pretty mill-stream at this point spreads into a quiet pool, filled with reflections of the group of gray buildings on its banks, and then dashes im- patiently over the dam, and hurries on to join the river two miles away. The printing office was as neat as wax, and advertised its owner's New Eng- land conscience to such a degree that at a glance I guessed him to be a descendant of Jonathan Ed- wards, at least. The press, the mill, and an ad- joining store are all owned and operated by different members of one family, living in a comfortable white house near by. The father of this industrious family, whom we found sitting in a depressed atti- tude beside the door, is described by Cousin Henrietta as a professional invalid and hypochondriac. Some- times he goes from house to mill backwards and on crutches; at other times in a normal manner, look- ing forward and not back; while at other times he 29 A BOOK OF JOYS refuses to speak for days together. One son has dyspepsia and symptoms of melancholia, and the other members of the family display varying de- grees of deflection from the paths of health in the midst of an extravagantly healthful environment. Here is a situation to puzzle an evolutionist; and the explanation offered by Cousin Henrietta is a devoted, hard-working, self-sacrificing New Eng- land mother, who cooks griddle-cakes for the family breakfast every single day in the year, unless, possibly, she makes an exception of Fast Day, and it would certainly seem that that day might well be spent in fasting and prayer for the gastronomic sins of the rest of the year. I could but admire the heroic remnants left in the composition of this family which enable them to carry on three industries in spite of such diet. In a picturesque old house farther down the hill two women live who might have stepped bodily from the pages of one of Mrs. Freeman's stories of New England life. They are not to be classed among the "lovely baubles" of their sex, but are of that more austere feminine type described by Henry James as "spinsters by every implication of their being." Untoward circumstances make it neces- sary for them to eke out a scanty income by baking 30 A SOLITARY SUNDAY cakes and cookies to sell, and this occupation so olTends these old aristocrats that they try to keep it a profound secret from their little world. If in the early morning one should pass their tiny gambrel- roofed cottage, half buried among riotous peren- nials, one may catch a glimpse of them furtively digging in their bit of garden, or "skittering along under the fence" carrying a pasteboard box of cookies to the village. The townspeople tacitly accept their view and maintain a polite and official ignorance of this pursuit. There was a time in New England when such skill in cookery would have been a point of honest pride, but in spite of sturdy traditions it would seem that the attitude toward work in New England is not quite what it was in the days of the fathers. New England's worship of the head has lessened her appreciation of skill of hand, and has tended to develop class distinctions, and an undemocratic respect for the aristocracy as such. In fact, one of the proudest boasts of this dear old Eden is that it has a " leisure class." Distinctions of nationality are also more sharply felt here than we feel them in the West, and the preservation of democratic ideals is one of the great compensations in living nearer to the present location of the Star of Empire. Since I 31 A BOOK OF JOYS am in love with life, I am glad not to have missed knowing well that great City of the West where women have more opportunities, I believe, than in any other place in the world. It is wonderful to me to see the patient women who live lonely yet cheerful lives in these old-fashioned New England towns, shut in with few interests, limited means, and little companionship through the long winter months. To one surrounded with nor- mal family life their conditions appear intolerable; yet their interest in life seems unflagging, and they carry on their round of duties with as fatiguing a zeal as if the comfort of others depended upon their efforts. Moreover, they keep in their houses an expression of quiet comfort which renders them home- like in appearance, however lonely they may be in fact. Among the virtuous ornaments of their sex, there are no more uncompromising feminine types to be found in this region than Dr. Mary Brown and her sister, two women who perform the miracle of making money by farming, and are said to be com- pounded of the hardiest elements in human nature. Cousin Henrietta and I drove up the lonely road on which they live, in quest of ferns, and when we reached their rambling brown house, I begged her 32