Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  In a similar manner we performed a patriotic drama, entitled “The Battle of Bunker Hill,” in which a couple of old guns that we found in the garret produced splendid effects, and salvoes of artillery were created by the rolling across the garret of two old cannon-balls; but this was suppressed by order of the authorities, on account of the vigor of the cannonade. Tina, by the by figured in this as the “Genius of Liberty,” with some stars on her head cut out of gilt paper, and wearing an old flag which we had pulled out of one of the trunks.

  We also acted the history of “Romulus and Remus,” with Bose for the she-wolf. The difference in age was remedied by a vigorous effort of the imagination. Of course, operations of this nature made us pretty familiar with the topography of the old garret. There was, however, one quarter, fenced off by some barrels filled with pamphlets, where Polly strictly forbade us to go.

  What was the result of such a prohibition, O reader? Can you imagine it to be any other than that that part of the garret became at once the only one that we really cared about investigating? How we hung about it, and considered it, and peeped over and around and between the barrels at a pile of pictures, that stood with their faces to the wall! What were those pictures, we wondered. When we asked Polly this, she drew on a mysterious face and said, “Them was things we must n’t ask about.”

  We talked it over among ourselves, and Tina assured us that she dreamed about it at nights; but Polly had strictly forbidden us even to mention that corner of the garret to Miss Mehitable, or to ask her leave to look at it, alleging, as a reason, that “’twould bring on her hypos.”

  We did n’t know what “hypos” were, but we supposed of course they must be something dreadful; but the very fearfulness of the consequences that might ensue from our getting behind those fatal barrels only made them still more attractive. Finally, one rainy Saturday afternoon, when we were tired of acting plays, and the rain pattered on the roof, and the wind howled and shook the casings, and there was a generally wild and disorganized state of affairs out of doors, a sympathetic spirit of insubordination appeared to awaken in Tina’s bosom. “I declare, I am going inside of those barrels!” she said. “I don’t care if Polly does scold us; I know I can bring her all round again fast enough. I can do about what I like with Polly. Now you boys just move this barrel a little bit, and I ‘ll go in and see!”

  Just at this moment there was one of those chance lulls in the storm that sometimes occur, and as Tina went in behind the barrels, and boldly turned the first picture, a ray of sunshine streamed through the dusky window and lit it up with a watery light.

  Harry and Tina both gave an exclamation of astonishment.

  “O Tina! It ‘s the lady in the closet!”

  The discovery seemed really to frighten the child. She retreated quickly to the outside of the barrels again, and stood with us, looking at the picture.

  It was a pastel of a young girl in a plain, low-necked white dress, with a haughty, beautiful head, and jet-black curls flowing down her neck, and deep, melancholy black eyes, that seemed to fix themselves reproachfully on us.

  “O dear me, Harry, what shall we do!” said Tina. “How she looks at us! This certainly is the very same one that we saw in the old house.”

  “You ought not to have done it, Tina,” said Harry, in a rather low and frightened voice; “but I ‘ll go in and turn it back again.”

  Just at this moment we heard what was still more appalling, – the footsteps of Polly on the garret stairs.

  “Well! now I should like to know if there ‘s any mischief you would n’t be up to, Tina Percival,” she said, coming forward, reproachfully. “When I give you the run of the whole garret, and wear my life out a pickin’ up and puttin’ up after you, I sh’d think you might let this ‘ere corner alone!”

  “Oh! but, Polly, you ‘ve no idea how I wanted to see it, and do pray tell me who it is, and how came it here? Is it anybody that ‘s dead?” said Tina, hanging upon Polly caressingly.

  “Somebody that ‘s dead to us, I ‘m afraid,” said Polly, solemnly.

  “Do tell us, Polly, do! who was she?”

  “Well, child, you must n’t never tell nobody, nor let a word about it come out of your lips; but it ‘s Parson Rossiter’s daughter Emily, and where she ‘s gone to, the Lord only knows. I took that ‘ere pictur’ down myself, and put it up here with Mr Theodore’s, so ‘t Miss Mehitable need n’t see ‘em, ‘cause they always give her the hypos.”

  “And don’t anybody know where she is,” said Tina,” or if she ‘s alive or dead?”

  “Nobody,” said Polly, shaking her head solemnly. “All I hope is, she may never come back here again. You see, children, what comes o’ follerin’ the nateral heart; it ‘s deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. She followed her nateral heart, and nobody knows where she ‘s gone to.”

  Polly spoke with such sepulchral earnestness that, what with gloomy weather and the consciousness of having been accessory to an unlawful action, we all felt, to say the least, extremely sober.

  “Do you think I have got such a heart as that?” said Tina, after a deep-drawn sigh.

  “Sartain, you have,” said the old woman. “We all on us has. Why, if the Lord should give any on us a sight o’ our own heart just as it is, it would strike us down dead right on the spot.”

  “Mercy on us, Polly! I hope he won’t, then,” said Tina. “But, Polly,” she added getting her arms round her neck and playing with her gold beads, “you have n’t got such a very bad heart now; I don’t believe a word of it. I ‘m sure you are just as good as can be.”

  “Law, Miss Tina, you don’t see into me,” said Polly, who, after all, felt a sort of ameliorating gleam stealing over her. “You must n’t try to wheedle me into thinking better of myself than I be; that would just lead to carnal security.”

  “Well, Polly, don’t tell Miss Mehitable, and I ‘ll try and not get you into carnal security.”

  Polly went behind the barrels, gently wiped the dust from the picture, and turned the melancholy, beseeching face to the wall again; but we pondered and talked many days as to what it might be.

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  HOW WE KEPT THANKSGIVING AT OLDTOWN.

  ON the whole, about this time in our life we were a reasonably happy set of children. The Thanksgiving festival of that year is particularly impressed on my mind as a white day.

  Are there any of my readers who do not know what Thanksgiving day is to a child? Then let them go back with me, and recall the image of it as we kept it in Oldtown.

  People have often supposed, because the Puritans founded a society where there were no professed public amusements, that therefore there was no fun going on in the ancient land of Israel, and that there were no cakes and ale, because they were virtuous. They were never more mistaken in their lives. There was an abundance of sober, well-considered merriment; and the hinges of life were well oiled with that sort of secret humor which to this day gives the raciness to real Yankee wit. Besides this, we must remember that life itself is the greatest possible amusement to people who really believe they can do much with it, – who have that intense sense of what can be brought to pass by human effort, that was characteristic of the New England colonies. To such it is not exactly proper to say that life is an amusement, but it certainly is an engrossing interest that takes the place of all amusements.

  Looking over the world on a broad scale, do we not find that public entertainments have very generally been the sops thrown out by engrossing upper classes to keep lower classes from inquiring too particularly into their rights, and to make them satisfied with a stone, when it was not quite convenient to give them bread? Wherever there is a class that is to be made content to be plundered of its rights, there is an abundance of fiddling and dancing, and amusements, public and private, are in great requisition. It may also be set down, I think, as a general axiom, that people feel the need of amusements less and less, precisely in proportion as they have solid reasons for bein
g happy.

  Our good Puritan fathers intended to form a state of society of such equality of conditions, and to make the means of securing the goods of life so free to all, that everybody should find abundant employment for his faculties in a prosperous seeking of his fortunes. Hence, while they forbade theatres, operas, and dances, they made a state of unparalleled peace and prosperity, where one could go to sleep at all hours of day or night with the house door wide open, without bolt or bar, yet without apprehension of any to molest or make afraid.

  There were, however, some few national fêtes: – Election day, when the Governor took his seat with pomp and rejoicing, and all the housewives outdid themselves in election cake, and one or two training days, when all the children were refreshed, and our military ardor quickened, by the roll of drums, and the flash of steel bayonets, and marchings and evolutions, – sometimes ending in that sublimest of military operations, a sham fight, in which nobody was killed. The Fourth of July took high rank, after the Declaration of Independence; but the king and high priest of all festivals was the autumn Thanksgiving.

  When the apples were all gathered and the cider was all made, and the yellow pumpkins were rolled in from many a hill in billows of gold, and the corn was husked, and the labors of the season were done, and the warm, late days of Indian Summer came in, dreamy and calm and still, with just frost enough to crisp the ground of a morning, but with warm trances of benignant, sunny hours at noon, there came over the community a sort of genial repose of spirit, – a sense of something accomplished, and of a new golden mark made in advance on the calendar of life, – and the deacon began to say to the minister, of a Sunday, “I suppose it ‘s about time for the Thanksgiving proclamation.”

  Rural dress-makers about this time were extremely busy in making up festival garments, for everybody’s new dress, if she was to have one at all, must appear on Thanksgiving day.

  Aunt Keziah and Aunt Lois and my mother talked over their bonnets, and turned them round and round on their hands, and discoursed sagely of ribbons and linings, and of all the kindred bonnets that there were in the parish, and how they would probably appear after Thanksgiving. My grandmother, whose mind had long ceased to wander on such worldly vanities, was at this time officiously reminded by her daughters that her bonnet was n’t respectable, or it was announced to her that she must have a new gown. Such were the distant horizon gleams of the Thanksgiving festival.

  We also felt its approach in all departments of the household, – the conversation at this time beginning to turn on high and solemn culinary mysteries and receipts of wondrous power and virtue. New modes of elaborating squash pies and quince tarts were now ofttimes carefully discussed at the evening fireside by Aunt Lois and Aunt Keziah, and notes seriously compared with the experiences of certain other Aunties of high repute in such matters. I noticed that on these occasions their voices often fell into mysterious whispers, and that receipts of especial power and sanctity were communicated in tones so low as entirely to escape the vulgar ear. I still remember the solemn shake of the head with which my Aunt Lois conveyed to Miss Mehitable Rossiter the critical properties of mace, in relation to its powers of producing in corn fritters a suggestive resemblance to oysters. As ours was an oyster-getting district, and as that charming bivalve was perfectly easy to come at, the interest of such an imitation can be accounted for only by the fondness of the human mind for works of art.

  For as much as a week beforehand, “we children” were employed in chopping mince for pies to a most wearisome fineness, and in pounding cinnamon, allspice, and cloves in a great lignum-vitæ mortar; and the sound of this pounding and chopping re-echoed through all the rafters of the old house with a hearty and vigorous cheer, most refreshing to our spirits.

  In those days there were none of the thousand ameliorations of the labors of housekeeping which have since arisen, – no ground and prepared spices and sweet herbs; everything came into our hands in the rough, and in bulk, and the reducing of it into a state for use was deemed one of the appropriate labors of childhood. Even the very salt that we used in cooking was rock-salt, which we were required to wash and dry and pound and sift, before it became fit for use.

  At other times of the year we sometimes murmured at these labors, but those that were supposed to usher in the great Thanksgiving festival were always entered into with enthusiasm. There were signs of richness all around us, – stoning of raisins, cutting of citron, slicing of candied orange-peel. Yet all these were only dawnings and intimations of what was coming during the week of real preparation, after the Governor’s proclamation had been read.

  The glories of that proclamation! We knew beforehand the Sunday it was to be read, and walked to church with alacrity, filled with gorgeous and vague expectations.

  The cheering anticipation sustained us through what seemed to us the long waste of the sermon and prayers; and when at last the auspicious moment approached, – when the last quaver of the last hymn had died out, – the whole house rippled with a general movement of complacency, and a satisfied smile of pleased expectation might be seen gleaming on the faces of all the young people, like a ray of sunshine through a garden of flowers.

  Thanksgiving now was dawning! We children poked one another, and fairly giggled with unreproved delight as we listened to the crackle of the slowly unfolding document. That great sheet of paper impressed us as something supernatural, by reason of its mighty size, and by the broad seal of the State affixed thereto; and when the minister read therefrom, “By his Excellency, the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a Proclamation,” our mirth was with difficulty repressed by admonitory glances from our sympathetic elders. Then, after a solemn enumeration of the benefits which the Commonwealth had that year received at the hands of Divine Providence, came at last the naming of the eventful day, and, at the end of all, the imposing heraldic words, “God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” And then, as the congregation broke up and dispersed, all went their several ways with schemes of mirth and feasting in their heads.

  And now came on the week in earnest. In the very watches of the night preceding Monday morning, a preternatural stir below stairs, and the thunder of the pounding-barrel, announced that the washing was to be got out of the way before daylight, so as to give “ample scope and room enough” for the more pleasing duties of the season.

  The making of pies at this period assumed vast proportions that verged upon the sublime. Pies were made by forties and fifties and hundreds, and made of everything on the earth and under the earth.

  The pie is an English institution, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old traditional mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum pies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies – pies with top crusts, and pies without, – pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when once let loose in a given direction.

  Fancy the heat and vigor of the great pan-formation, when Aunt Lois and Aunt Keziah, and my mother and grandmother, all in ecstasies of creative inspiration, ran, bustled, and hurried, – mixing, rolling, tasting, consulting, – alternately setting us children to work when anything could be made of us, and then chasing us all out of the kitchen when our misinformed childhood ventured to take too many liberties with sacred mysteries. Then out we would all fly at the kitchen door, like sparks from a blacksmith’s window.

  On these occasions, as there was a great looseness in the police department over us children, we usually found a ready refuge at Miss Mehitable’s with Tina, who, confident of the strength of her position with Polly, invited us into the kitchen, and with the air of a mistress led u
s around to view the proceedings there.

  A genius for entertaining was one of Tina’s principal characteristics; and she did not fail to make free with raisins, or citron, or whatever came to hand, in a spirit of hospitality at which Polly seriously demurred. That worthy woman occasionally felt the inconvenience of the state of subjugation to which the little elf had somehow or other reduced her, and sometimes rattled her chains fiercely, scolding with a vigor which rather alarmed us, but which Tina minded not a whit. Confident of her own powers, she would, in the very midst of her wrath, mimic her to her face with such irresistible drollery as to cause the torrent of reproof to end in a dissonant laugh, accompanied by a submissive cry for quarter.

  “I declare, Tina Percival,” she said to her one day, “you ‘re saucy enough to physic a horn-bug! I never did see the beater of you! If Miss Mehitable don’t keep you in better order, I don’t see what ‘s to become of any of us!”

  “Why, what did become of you before I came?” was the undismayed reply. “You know, Polly, you and Aunty both were just as lonesome as you could be till I came here, and you never had such pleasant times in your life as you ‘ve had since I ‘ve been here. You ‘re a couple of old beauties, both of you, and know just how to get along with me. But come, boys, let ‘s take our raisins and go up in the garret and play Thanksgiving.”

  In the corner of the great kitchen, during all these days, the jolly old oven roared and crackled in great volcanic billows of flame, snapping and gurgling as if the old fellow entered with joyful sympathy into the frolic of the hour; and then, his great heart being once warmed up, he brooded over successive generations of pies and cakes, which went in raw and came out cooked, till butteries and dressers and shelves and pantries were literally crowded with a jostling abundance.

  A great cold northern chamber, where the sun never shone, and where in winter the snow sifted in at the window-cracks, and ice and frost reigned with undisputed sway, was fitted up to be the storehouse of these surplus treasures. There, frozen solid, and thus well preserved in their icy fetters, they formed a great repository for all the winter months; and the pies baked at Thanksgiving often came out fresh and good with the violets of April.