How long would a mother’s patience watch my slumbers while she mused on the strange responsibility of her position! A soul given to her to form for good or evil; the potter’s clay placed in her hands to make a vessel unto honor or dishonor! How fervent her prayer: “O, Father, guide me to guide him!”
What an impostor is the slumbering babe! His tiny hand, resting in dimpled fairness on your breast, seems to lift the veil of Futurity, and open to your view the brightest paths of flowery beauty, down which his feet shall patter with the innocence of childhood, run with the eager ambition of youth, stride with the honors of manhood, and totter with the feebleness of old age into the grave o’er which towers the marble tribute of a nation’s love. Were the real curtain lifted, and Life’s true pathway shown, how Earth’s timid ones would shrink from its thorns and poisons, its bubble hopes and bitter cups. Thank God the Future is hidden, but the promise stands: “As thy days are, so shall thy strength be.”
THE year, growing old, began to feel ashamed of the jaunty green in which the spring and summer had decked him, and was laying aside his verdant garments, leaf by leaf, for the more dignified russet of autumn, when we—that is to say, father, mother and myself—prepared to return to our winter residence in Wilmington. I, of course, have no recollection of the journey, but have since been told that I stood it like a little soldier, though whether diminutive stature has anything to do with military fortitude I leave to nursery disputants to settle; as I believe their invariable encouragement to patience and endurance is the example of a fictitious officer of small size. The man has never been a child who has not been requested to take a dose of physic or bear a mustard plaster like a little captain, thereby inspiring himself with the greatest respect and admiration for the immense deglutitory capacity of that functionary, and the callosity of his epidermis.
The winter in turn passed away, and another spring and summer in the country, and we were returning again to town in the Fall, before I can begin to recollect things on my own account. What vague, undefined and grotesque memories they are! The carriage in which we travelled seems now to have been a chaos of shawls and baskets, from which father, mother and Aunt Hannah protruded helplessly, like pictures of fairies coming out of flowers. It was very cloudy, or at least everything now seems to have been gray when we started. The wheels commenced humming a drowsy tune, as they rolled through the sand, and soon hummed me to sleep; and when I awoke the carriage was going backward, and the sun had come out in the wrong place. Then we stopped at a well, near a house with a fat, wooden chimney, and an aspen tree in front, whose leaves seemed to be blinking all their eyes at me. A man in a broad-flapped hat came out with a gourd in his hand, and behind him a large yellow dog, that was tied to a piece of wood, and barked and jumped on each side of the string as if he wanted to shake it off. The well had a long pole, with a bucket at one end and a large stone at the other; and when Horace, our driver, went to it to draw some water for the horses, the stone seemed to fly up to the clouds. Then Horace filled the bucket and carried it to the horses, and I could hear them kissing it, as if they were so glad to see it; and, while I was listening at that, the man with the hat and dog handed in, at the carriage window, the great cool-looking gourd, with a long, crooked handle, down into which the water clicked, as if laughing, when father held it to me to drink.
