Now, Nabby was a good-natured soul enough and in a general way fond of children; she encouraged Miss Dolly’s prattling visits to the kitchen, let her stand about surveying her in various domestic processes, and encouraged that free expression of opinion in conversation which in those days was entirely repressed on the part of juveniles in the presence of their elders. She was, in fact, fond of Dolly in a certain way, but not fond enough of her to interfere with the serious avocations of life; and Nabby was projecting very serious and delicate movements of diplomacy that night. She was going to the church with Jim Sawin, who was on the very verge of a declared admiration, not in the least because her heart inclined toward Jim, but as a means of bringing Ike Peters to capitulation in a quarrel of some weeks’ standing. Jim Sawin’s “folks,” as she would have phrased it, were “meetin’ers,” while Ike Peters was a leading member of the Episcopal choir, and it was designed expressly to aggravate him that she was to come in exhibiting her captive in triumph. To have “a child ‘round under her feet,” while engaged in conducting affairs of such delicacy, was manifestly impossible — so impossible that she thought stern repression of any such idea the very best policy.
“Now, Dolly Cushing, you jest shet up — for ‘tain’t no use talkin’. Your pa nor your ma wouldn’t hear on’t; and besides, little girls like you must go to bed early. They can’t be up ‘night-hawkin’,’ and goin’ round in the cold. You might catch cold and die like little Julia Cavers. Little girls must be in bed and asleep by eight o’clock.”
Dolly stood still with a lowering brow. Just then the world looked very dark. Her little rose-leaf of an under lip rolled out and quivered, and large bright drops began falling one by one over her cheeks.
Nabby had a soft spot in her heart, and felt these signs of affliction; but she stood firm.
“Now, Dolly, I’m sorry; but you can’t go. So you jest be a good girl and not say no more about it, and don’t cry, and I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll buy you a sugar dog down to the store, and I’ll tell you all about it to-morrow.”
Dolly had seen these sugar dogs in the window of the store, resplendent with their blue backs and yellow ears and pink tails — designed probably to represent dogs as they exist at the end of the rainbow. Her heart had burned within her with hopeless desire to call one of these beauties her own; and Nabby’s promise brought out a gleaming smile through the showery atmosphere of her little face. A sugar dog might reconcile her to life.
“Now, you must promise me ‘certain true as black is blue,’” said Nabby, adjuring by an apparently irrational form of conjuration in vogue among the children in those times. “You must promise you won’t say a word about this ‘ere thing to your pa or ma; for they wouldn’t hear of your goin’, and if they would I shouldn’t take you. I really couldn’t. It would be very inconvenient.”
Dolly heaved a great sigh, but thought of the sugar dog, and calmed down the tempest that seemed struggling to rise in her little breast. A rainbow of hope rose over the cloud of disappointment, and a sugar dog with yellow ears and pink tail gleamed consolingly through it.
CHAPTER II. DOLLY.
OUR little Dolly was a late autumn chicken, the youngest of ten children, the nursing, rearing and caring for whom had straitened the limited salary of Parson Cushing, of Poganuc Center, and sorely worn on the nerves and strength of the good wife who plied the laboring oar in these performances.
It was Dolly’s lot to enter the family at a period when babies were no longer a novelty, when the house was full of the wants and clamors of older children, and the mother at her very wits’ end with a confusion of jackets and trowsers, soap, candles and groceries, and the endless harassments of making both ends meet which pertain to the lot of a poor country minister’s wife. Consequently Dolly was disposed of as she grew up in all those short-hand methods by which children were taught to be the least possible trouble to their elders. She was taught to come when called, and do as she was bid without a question or argument, to be quenched in bed at the earliest possible hour at night, and to speak only when spoken to in the presence of her elders. All this was a dismal repression to Dolly, for she was by nature a lively, excitable little thing, bursting with questions that she longed to ask, and with comments and remarks that she burned to make, and so she escaped gladly to the kitchen where Nabby, the one hired girl, who was much in the same situation of repressed communicativeness, encouraged her conversational powers.
On the whole, although it never distinctly occurred to Dolly to murmur at her lot in life yet at times she sighed over the dreadful insignificance of being only a little girl in a great family of grown up people. For even Dolly’s brothers nearest her own age were studying in the academy and spouting scraps of superior Latin at her to make her stare and wonder at their learning. They were tearing, noisy, tempestuous boys, good natured enough and willing to pet her at intervals, but prompt to suggest that it was “time for Dolly to go to bed” when her questions or her gambols interfered with their evening pleasures.
Dolly was a robust, healthy little creature, never ailing in any way, and consequently received none of the petting which a more delicate child might have claimed, and the general course of her experience impressed her with the mournful conviction that she was always liable to be in the way — as she commonly was, with her childish curiosity, her burning desire to see and hear and know all that interested the grown people above her. Dolly sometimes felt her littleness and insignificance as quite a burden, and longed to be one of the grown-up people. They got civil answers when they asked questions, instead of being told not to talk, and they were not sent to bed the minute it was dark, no matter what pleasant things were going on about them. Once Dolly remembered to have had sore throat with fever. The doctor was sent for. Her mother put away all her work and held her in her arms. Her father came down out of his study and sat up rocking her nearly all night, and her noisy, roistering brothers came softly to her door and inquired how she was, and Dolly was only sorry that the cold passed off so soon, and she found herself healthy and insignificant as ever. Being gifted with an active fancy, she sometimes imagined a scene when she should be sick and die, and her father and mother and everybody would cry over her, and there would be a funeral for her as there was for a little Julia Cavers, one of her playmates. She could see no drawback to the interest of the scene except that she could not be there to enjoy her own funeral and see how much she was appreciated; so on the whole she turned her visions in another direction and fancied the time when she should be a grown woman and at liberty to do just as she pleased.
It must not be imagined, however, that Dolly had an unhappy childhood. Indeed it may be questioned whether, if she had lived in our day when the parents often seem to be sitting at the feet of their children and humbly inquiring after their sovereign will and pleasure, she would have been much happier than she was. She could not have all she wanted, and the most petted child on earth cannot. She had learned to do without what she could not get, and to bear what she did not like; two sources of happiness and peace which we should judge to be unknown to many modern darlings. For the most part Dolly had learned to sail her own little boat wisely among the bigger and bustling crafts of the older generation.
There were no amusements then specially provided for children. There were no children’s books; there were no Sunday-schools to teach bright little songs and to give children picnics and presents. It was a grown people’s world, and not a child’s world, that existed in those days. Even children’s toys of the period were so poor and so few that, in comparison with our modern profusion, they could scarcely be said to exist.
Dolly, however, had her playthings, as every child of lively fancy will. Childhood is poetic and creative, and can make to itself toys out of nothing. Dolly had the range of the great wood-pile in the back yard, where, at the yearly “wood-spell,” the farmers deposited the fuel needed for the long, terrible winters, and that woodpile was a world of treasure to her. She skipped, a
nd sung, and climbed among its intricacies and found there treasures of wonder. Green velvet mosses, little white trees of lichen that seemed to her to have tiny apples upon them, long grey-bearded mosses and fine scarlet cups and fairy caps she collected and treasured. She arranged landscapes of these, where green mosses made the fields, and little sprigs of spruce and ground-pine the trees, and bits of broken glass imitated rivers and lakes, reflecting the overshadowing banks. She had, too, hoards of chestnuts and walnuts which a squirrel might have envied, picked up with her own hands from under the yellow autumn leaves; and she had — chief treasure of all — a wooden doll, with staring glass eyes, that had been sent her by her grandmother in Boston, which doll was the central point in all her arrangements. To her she showed the chestnuts and walnuts; she gave to her the jay’s feathers and the bluebird’s wing which the boys had given to her; she made her a bed of divers colors and she made her a set of tea-cups out of the backbone of a codfish. She brushed and curled her hair till she took all the curl out of it, and washed all the paint off her cheeks in the zeal of motherly ablutions.
In fact nobody suspected that Dolly was not the happiest of children, as she certainly was one of the busiest and healthiest, and when that evening her two brothers came in from the Academy, noisy and breezy, and tossed her up in their long arms, her laugh rung gay and loud, as if there were no such thing as disappointment in the world.
She pursed her mouth very tight for fear that she should let out something on the forbidden subject at the supper-table. But it was evident that nothing could be farther from the mind of her papa, who, at intervals, was expounding to his wife the difference between natural and moral inability as drawn out in a pamphlet he was preparing to read at the next ministers’ meeting — remarks somewhat interrupted by reproof to the boys for giggling at table and surreptitiously feeding Spring, the dog, in contravention of family rules.
It is not to be supposed that Will and Tom Cushing, though they were minister’s boys, were not au courant in all that was going on noteworthy in the parish. In fact, they were fully versed in all the details of the projected ceremonies at the church and resolved to be in at the show, but maintained a judicious reticence as to their intentions lest, haply, they might be cut short by a positive interdict.
The Episcopal church at Poganuc Center was of recent origin. It was a small, insignificant building compared with the great square three-decker of a meeting-house which occupied conspicuously the green in Poganuc Center. The minister was not a man particularly gifted in any of those points of pulpit excellence which Dr. Cushing would be likely to appreciate, and the Doctor had considered it hitherto too small and unimportant an affair to be worth even a combative notice; hence his ignorance and indifference to what was going on there. He had heard incidentally that they were dressing the church with pines and going to have a Christmas service, but he only murmured something about “tolerabiles inepti¾” to the officious deacon who had called his attention to the fact. The remark, being in Latin, impressed the Deacon with a sense of profound and hidden wisdom. The people of Poganuc Center paid a man a salary for knowing more than they did, and they liked to have a scrap of Latin now and then to remind them of this fact. So the Deacon solemnly informed all comers into the store who discussed recent movements that the Doctor had his eyes open; he knew all about these doings and they should hear from him yet; the Doctor had expressed his mind to him.
The Doctor, in fact, was far more occupied with a certain Dr. Pyncheon, whose views of moral inability he expected entirely to confound by the aforesaid treatise which he had been preparing.
So after supper the boys officiously harnessed and brought up the horse and sleigh destined to take their parents to North Poganuc school house, and saw them set off — listening to the last jingle of the sleigh bells with undisguised satisfaction.
“Good! Now, Tom, let’s go up to the church and get the best places to see,” exclaimed Bill.
“Oh, boys, are you going?” cried Dolly, in a piteous voice. “Oh, do take me! Nabby’s going, and everybody, and I want to go.”
“Oh, you mustn’t go; you’re a little girl and it’s your bed-time,” said Tom and Bill, as with Spring barking at their heels they burst in a windy swoop of noise out of the house, boys and dog about equally intelligent as to what it was all about.
CHAPTER III. THE ILLUMINATION.
BEFORE going farther in our story we pause to give a brief answer to the queries that have risen in the minds of some who remember the old times in New England: How came there to be any Episcopalians or Episcopal church in a small Puritan town like Poganuc?
The Episcopal Church in New England in the early days was emphatically a root out of dry ground, with as little foothold in popular sympathy as one of those storm-driven junipers, that the east wind blows all aslant, has in the rocky ledges of Cape Cod. The soil, the climate, the atmosphere, the genius, and the history of the people were all against it. Its forms and ceremonies were all associated with the persecution which drove the Puritans out of England and left them no refuge but the rock-bound shores of America. It is true that in the time of Governor Winthrop the colony of Massachusetts appealed with affectionate professions to their Mother, the Church of England, and sought her sympathy and her prayers; but it is also unfortunately true that the forms of the Church of England were cultivated and maintained in New England by the very party whose intolerance and tyranny brought on the Revolutionary war.
All the oppressive governors of the colonies were Episcopalians, and in the Revolutionary struggle the Episcopal Church was very generally on the Tory side; hence, the New Englanders came to have an aversion to its graceful and beautiful ritual and forms for the same reason that the free party in Spain and Italy now loathe the beauties of the Romish Church, as signs and symbols of tyranny and oppression.
Congregationalism — or, as it was then called by the common people, Presbyterianism — was the religion established by law in New England. It was the State Church. Even in Boston in its colonial days, the King’s Chapel and Old North were only dissenting churches, unrecognized by the State, but upheld by the patronage of the colonial governors who were sent over to them from England. For a long time after the Revolutionary war the old regime of the State Church held undisputed sway in New England. There was the one meeting-house, the one minister, in every village. Every householder was taxed for the support of public worship, and stringent law and custom demanded of every one a personal attendance on Sunday at both services. If any defaulter failed to put in an appearance it was the minister’s duty to call promptly on Monday and know the reason why. There was no place for differences of religious opinion. All that individualism which now raises a crop of various little churches in every country village was sternly suppressed. For many years only members of churches could be eligible to public offices; Sabbath-keeping was enforced with more than Mosaic strictness, and New England justified the sarcasm which said that they had left the Lords-Bishops to be under the Lords-Brethren. In those days if a sectarian meeting of Methodists or Baptists, or an unseemly gathering of any kind, seemed impending, the minister had only to put on his cocked hat, take his gold-headed cane and march down the village street, leaving his prohibition at every house, and the thing was so done even as he commanded.
In the very nature of things such a state of society could not endure. The shock that separated the nation from a king and monarchy, the sense of freedom and independence, the hardihood of thought which led to the founding of a new civil republic, were fatal to all religious constraint. Even before the Revolutionary war there were independent spirits that chafed under the constraint of clerical supervision, and Ethan Allen advertised his farm and stock for sale, expressing his determination at any cost to get out of “this old holy State of Connecticut.”
It was but a little while after the close of the war that established American independence that the revolution came which broke up the State Church and gave to every man the liberty of
“signing off,” as it was called, to any denomination that pleased him. Hence arose through New England churches of all names. The nucleus of the Episcopal Church in any place was generally some two or three old families of ancestral traditions in its favor, who gladly welcomed to their fold any who, for various causes, were discontented with the standing order of things. Then, too, there came to them gentle spirits, cut and bleeding by the sharp crystals of doctrinal statement, and courting the balm of devotional liturgy and the cool shadowy indefiniteness of more ¾sthetic forms of worship. Also, any one that for any cause had a controversy with the dominant church took comfort in the power of “signing off” to another. In those days, to belong to no church was not respectable, but to sign off to the Episcopal Church was often a compromise that both gratified self-will and saved one’s dignity; and, having signed off, the new convert was obliged, for consistency’s sake, to justify the step he had taken by doing his best to uphold the doctrine and worship of his chosen church.
The little edifice at Poganuc had been trimmed and arranged with taste and skill. For that matter, it would seem as if the wild woods of New England were filled with garlands and decorations already made and only waiting to be used in this graceful service. Under the tall spruces the ground was all ruffled with the pretty wreaths of ground-pine; the arbor vit¾, the spruce, the cedar and juniper, with their balsamic breath, filled the aisles with a spicy fragrance. It was a cheaply built little church, in gothic forms, with pointed windows and an arch over the chancel; and every arch was wreathed with green, and above the chancel glittered a great gold star, manufactured by Miss Ida Lewis out of pasteboard and gilt paper ordered in Boston. It was not gold, but it glittered, and the people that looked on it were not blase, as everybody in our days is, with sight seeing. The innocent rustic life of Poganuc had no pageants, no sights, no shows, except the eternal blazonry of nature; and therefore the people were prepared to be dazzled and delighted with a star cut out of gilt paper. There was bustling activity of boys and men in lighting the windows, and a general rush of the populace to get the best seats.
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 432