第61章

[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her face directed partly towards me.- Half-mourning now; - purple ribbon.That breastpin she wears has GRAY hair in it; her mother's, no doubt; - I remember our landlady's daughter telling me, soon after the schoolmistress came to board with us, that she had lately "buried a payrent." That's what made her look so pale, - kept the poor dying thing alive with her own blood.Ah! long illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young creature at one's bedside! Well, souls grow white, as well as cheeks, in these holy duties one that goes in a nurse may come out an angel.- God bless all good women! - to their soft hands and pitying hearts we must all come at last! - The schoolmistress has a better color than when she came.- Too late! "It might have been."- Amen! - How many thoughts go to a dozen heart-beats, sometimes!

There was no long pause after my remark addressed to the company, but in that time I had the train of ideas and feelings I have just given flash through my consciousness sudden and sharp as the crooked red streak that springs out of its black sheath like the creese of a Malay in his death-race, and stabs the earth right and left in its blind rage.

I don't deny that there was a pang in it, - yes, a stab; but there was a prayer, too, - the "Amen" belonged to that.- Also, a vision of a four-story brick house, nicely furnished, - I actually saw many specific articles, - curtains, sofas, tables, and others, and could draw the patterns of them at this moment, - a brick house, Isay, looking out on the water, with a fair parlor, and books and busts and pots of flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at the window, looking on the water, two of us.- "Male and female created He them." - These two were standing at the window, when a smaller shape that was playing near them looked up at me with such a look that I - - poured out a glass of water, drank it all down, and then continued.]

I said I should like to tell you some things, such as people commonly never tell, about my early recollections.Should you like to hear them?

Should we LIKE to hear them? - said the schoolmistress; - no, but we should love to.

[The voice was a sweet one, naturally, and had something very pleasant in its tone, just then.- The four-story brick house, which had gone out like a transparency when the light behind it is quenched, glimmered again for a moment; parlor, books, busts, flower-pots, bird-cages, all complete, - and the figures as before.]

We are waiting with eagerness, Sir, - said the divinity-student.

[The transparency went out as if a flash of black lightning had struck it.]

If you want to hear my confessions, the next thing - I said - is to know whether I can trust you with them.It is only fair to say that there are a great many people in the world that laugh at such things.I think they are fools, but perhaps you don't all agree with me.

Here are children of tender age talked to as if they were capable of understanding Calvin's "Institutes," and nobody has honesty or sense enough to tell the plain truth about the little wretches:

that they are as superstitious as naked savages, and such miserable spiritual cowards - that is, if they have any imagination - that they will believe anything which is taught them, and a great deal more which they teach themselves.

I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books and those who knew what was in books.I was carefully instructed in things temporal and spiritual.But up to a considerable maturity of childhood I believed Raphael and Michael Angelo to have been superhuman beings.The central doctrine of the prevalent religious faith of Christendom was utterly confused and neutralized in my mind for years by one of those too common stories of actual life, which I overheard repeated in a whisper.- Why did I not ask?

you will say.- You don't remember the rosy pudency of sensitive children.The first instinctive movement of the little creatures is to make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes, and terrors.I am uncovering one of these CACHES.Do you think Iwas necessarily a greater fool and coward than another?

I was afraid of ships.Why, I could never tell.The masts looked frightfully tall, - but they were not so tall as the steeple of our old yellow meeting-house.At any rate I used to hide my eyes from the sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted very long.- One other source of alarm had a still more fearful significance.There was a great wooden HAND, - a glove-maker's sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast, as it hung from a pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city.

Oh, the dreadful hand! Always hanging there ready to catch up a little boy, who would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed, - whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.

As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the same experiences.No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of OMENS as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my childhood.That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember.Stepping on or over certain particular things or spots - Dr.Johnson's especial weakness I got the habit of at a very early age.- I won't swear that I have not some tendency to these not wise practices even at this present date.[How many of you that read these notes can say the same thing!]

With these follies mingled sweet delusions, which I loved so well Iwould not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to put a momentary trust in them.Here is one which I cannot help telling you.