Chapter 10

Interesting as was this story and others told of the past, and delightful as it was to play under the great trees, roaming at one's own sweet will all about "the Grove," better than everything else was it to be admitted into the "sanctum sanctorum" of the place,--Professor Morse's study,--where the master sat among his books and treasures, his kindly, clear-featured face and bright brown eyes, framed in by silver hair and beard, shining out from the curtained dimness of the room. There were many objects fascinating even to a child in that study, which opened out of the family library with its store of books. The library was very good, but the study was still better. There, under a glass case, was the first telegraph-instrument that had ever been made. One or two of Professor Morse's early paintings hung upon the wall, and sometimes he would display a few sketches to the older members of the party, who were naturally regardless of the fact that there was "a chiel amang 'em, takin' notes." The crowning treat offered within the study-walls, however, was to have the marvels of the Professor's immense and powerful microscope displayed before our wondering gaze. There we became acquainted with the rainbow-tinted plumes of the fly's wing and the jewels that lie hidden from ordinary ken in the pollen and petals of the simplest blossoms. And the master of it all, to whom the marvels were as familiar as the common objects themselves, seemed to derive a genuine pleasure from that which he bestowed upon his guests.

When Professor Morse purchased Locust Grove, before his second marriage, he was not aware that it had belonged to the family of the lady who was soon to become his wife. Indeed, it was not until some friend remarked, "How delightful for you to take your bride to the old ancestral place owned by her kindred for so many generations!" that he knew the home would possess any associations, save those to be formed in the future, for his _fiancée_. But no doubt at the beginning of their life there Locust Grove was thus rendered doubly dear to both. The old Livingston mansion was at that time standing, much nearer to the entrance-gates than the more modern residence inhabited by the owner's family; and the quaint well, with the stone curb, the water of which was so remarkable for its purity that travellers came from a distance to ask the privilege of drinking, formed an object of interest at least, if not of actual beauty, before the old vine-grown porch. Gradually the house fell into decay, and the greater portion was torn down, leaving but five or six rooms, with their odd, hooded windows and strangely-fashioned fireplaces and mantels, the porch, with its broad, shallow seats, and the green-painted, "divided" front doors, to tell the tale of what once had been the home of so much hospitality and happiness.

So all remained painted with unfading colors on the canvas of my memory, each object as I had known and loved it when a child. And then the child went far away and grew to womanhood, having looked on many places and "things of beauty," but, while forgetting much that belonged to the old days, never forgot Locust Grove. The scent of the new locust-blossoms, the songs of the birds, and the beauty of the lights and shadows dancing on the river were as vivid in recollection as they had been in actuality; and after a severe and tedious illness it seemed that no tonic could prove so effectual as a visit to that dear old place, not seen for years, and which I had loved so well.

There is generally experienced a vague yet bitter disappointment in returning to a spot hallowed by associations after an absence of any appreciable length of time. It is wellnigh impossible for the reality to equal what has through the filtering of fancy become scarcely more than a remembered dream.

Nothing can be as it has been; Better, so call it, only--not the same.

And yet Locust Grove in 1884 looked almost as unchanged as though it had shared the slumbers of the "Sleeping Beauty" since 1871. Only, a certain potent charm had fled with the presence of the departed master. It was now but his pictured eyes and silver hair that lit up the dimness of the room that had been sacred to him. The books and papers covering the desk belonged to a later and more careless generation. The microscope stood unused under its glass case, the sketches were lovingly laid away out of sight, and altogether a subtile change could be detected in the atmosphere. There were things, however, about the house which perhaps had always been there, and yet which I looked upon now with a new and keener appreciation. The picture of Professor Morse when a child of five or six years, standing by his father, who is clad in the quaint robes which then distinguished a Congregationalist divine, seemed to me one that might interest others besides myself. Also the portrait of his mother, with pearls in her puffed and powdered hair, and her beautiful bare arms holding the older child, Sidney (a baby in oddly-fashioned long robes), was charming to look at because of its intrinsic beauty as well as the associations attached to it. And the life-size painting of General Washington's mother,--said to be the only one of the kind in existence,--which looked down from its broad frame over the dining-room mantel, possessed a special fascination for me. One felt rather insignificant with that scornful smile and those languid eyes brooding over one as one sat engaged in the discussion of soup; and it was impossible to keep from imagining that the stiff and stately dame in her mathematically correct white and green draperies was drawing invidious comparisons between the way one did one's hair and the way in which she had considered it proper to arrange her abundant pale-brown locks.

About the place itself were more changes than at first would strike the eye. The old Livingston homestead had been razed to the ground, and smooth, emerald grass thrived upon its site, while the chief gardener, Thomas, had been promoted to a new æsthetic cottage of the latest approved colors and style. Even the famous well was no more; for a small and inconspicuous pump had been put in its stead, to save unwary children from instituting a too curious search for the "truth" popularly supposed to lie within its depths. The graperies were gone, and in their stead nourished rose-houses,--visiting the interior of which seemed fairly to transport one into the famous "Vale of Cashmere." Roses of all colors and all descriptions here found an ideal home, and with their beauty served the purses of their two young masters, who superintended their culture. It was in the early summer that I saw the place again after my long absence, and the rose-houses of course could not be seen at their best, as they can in winter. There are four large houses, opening into a long, narrow frame building, at one end of which is the office where the young gentlemen managers transact their business. Here all was--and still is, no doubt--immaculately neat, the walls adorned with colored prints and paintings of flowers, an array of books, papers, and ledgers carefully arranged in their exact places on the desk, and everything kept free from dust, swept and garnished. In the long, bare room from which the office opens are stored gardening-tools, watering-cans of all shapes and descriptions (some of which to an untutored eye present a striking resemblance to coffee-pots such as the Brobdingnag giants might have used), baskets for packing the roses, with all their paraphernalia, earthen pots for plants great and small, and many other utensils such as those unlearned in gardening lore would consider uncouth in the extreme. On one side of the room stands the big table upon which the baskets are set, and above this are ranged numerous rows of shelves. Four doors open into the rose-houses, and at the east end is the one devoted exclusively to the culture of Jacqueminots,--the "Jack"-house it is irreverently, if not slangily, styled. Here the glass roof stands open all the summer long, for the breezes to blow and the soft rains to fall upon the petted plants; and here the sunshine holds high revel, bronzing the intricate tracery of stem and branch and turning half the leaves to shining emeralds.

It was in the "Jack"-house that I one morning found Thomas Devoy, the gardener, at work with his great oddly-shaped shears or scissors, and detained him long enough to make a little sketch of him among his flowers; and while I worked with pencils and paper he told me divers anecdotes of the twenty-eight years he had spent in Professor Morse's service. "I entered service in the old country when I was very young," he said; "and even as a little boy I was fond of gardening. One time, when I was a child, I was going through some splendid greenhouses with the head-gardener who took care of them. There was one very rare plant of which he was exceedingly proud, and I begged him for a tiny slip to take home with me. But he refused; and so, in passing by, I quietly broke off one little leaf. Some time afterward I was able to show him a plant as fine as his own which I had raised from that one leaf, and then I told him its story."

All the fine, large Jacqueminots in the "Jack"-house were raised from one parent plant with cuttings made about four years or so before, the gardener told me, while I, gazing in amazement at their high-reaching branches, thought, with "Topsy," it was something to boast of that they had "jest growed."

In the winter the rose-houses become things of beauty and a joy forever, seeming to have imprisoned the very heart of summer within their walls, while outside--shut away from the warmth and glowing tints of red and pink, yellow and lustrous rosy pearl--lie the snow and the ice, and through the bare branches of the trees the wind whistles drearily.

But in the summer the aspect of the rose-houses is very different. All then is preparation and making over for the coming autumn and winter. Some of the houses are planted with tiny cuttings just lifting little tender sprays above the warm, moist soil. Men are at work here and there with hammers and nails, repairing any slight damage that may have been done in previous months. Hose-pipes coil over the floors, and one must walk by them daintily. In other houses one would exclaim with pleasure at finding one's self in a wilderness of roses, pink, yellow, and white, only to be told, rather contemptuously, "_That_ is nothing. There are no roses here now. You must wait till winter if you want something worth seeing. We have roses as large as tea-saucers then, and any quantity of them."

Outside the buildings, and fairly surrounding them, are large square beds of hybrid roses of many varieties, each sort planted in separate rows by itself. There are beds of cuttings also, and one long, narrow bed of red hybrids running the entire length of the greenhouse. "Catherine Mermet," "La Reine," "Adam," "Paul Neyron," the exquisite "La France," "John Hopper," the "Duke of Connaught," "Niphetos," and "Perle des Jardins" are here in profusion, with others of every shade and tint, too numerous almost to count, and the perfume arising from beds and hot-houses is intoxicating in its strength and sweetness. Some bushes are merely set in earthen pots out of doors; and these are supposed to be in a dormant state, undergoing the process of "drying off," or "hardening," receiving very little water, and are to be so kept until September, when they will be repotted and "started" for growing,--thus illustrating the truth of the saying that there is a blessing for those who only stand and wait. But one could not help pitying them, when one thought how their more fortunate companions with their uncramped roots were exploring underground passages and enjoying all the freedom and moisture of the rich soil.

"During the fall and winter we are very busy in a different way," said Thomas Devoy, as he displayed his treasures. And then he told me how every day in the later months all hands are occupied in tending, cutting, and packing the roses which are daily expressed to a certain New York florist. The beautiful half-blown buds are carefully cut, with long, leafy stems, and laid in the great market-baskets standing on the table ready to receive them. Row after row and layer after layer are laid in, sprinkled until leaves and petals sparkle with a diamond dew. Only buds at a certain stage of unfolding are used, and the most exquisite roses with their petals opening one pink or pearly crease too far are discarded as unfit to send away. Tissue-paper covers the flowers as they lie ready in their baskets, then oiled paper is placed on top, and finally a thin red oilcloth is fastened over all.

Thus from two to four hundred roses of almost every variety are daily put upon the New York train and expressed to the florist, at whose establishment they arrive, after a few hours, as fresh, dewy, and fragrant as when they left their parent plants.

And yet, with all these that are sent away, the home is not forgotten. Gorgeous blooms in exquisite foreign vases adorn table, cabinet-shelf, and mantel in every inhabited room in the house, where, among relics of the old time, the roses of yesterday and to-day meet in a rivalry so lovely that one is at a loss in deciding the merits of their separate claims. The roses of to-day are freshest, and it may even be fairest; yet there is a little poem which asks,--

What's the rose that I hold to the rose that is dead?

And thus, to one who has known and loved the place in days gone by, when what has become a mere association and memory now made its very life and soul, there is something in the suggestion of that verse which at least lets itself be readily understood.

ALICE KING HAMILTON.

A HOOSIER IDYL.

It was a part of the Great West which in the past fifty or seventy-five years has been transformed from unbroken forests, the home of the red Indian and the deer, to a thickly-settled farming-country, dotted with comfortable homes and traversed by railways and wagon-roads. Here and there in retired districts the log cabins of the pioneers remained, and wherever one looked an horizon of woods met his eye; but the numerous towns and villages gave evidence of a higher and ever-increasing degree of civilization.

It was a land of rich soil and lush natural growth, without rocks or hills or swiftly-running streams, a region of corn- and wheat-fields and orchards, of clover-pastures and melon-patches.

The human _physique_ showed good development and abundant nourishment, but the dwellers along the sluggish creeks sometimes had a tinge of yellow beneath the sunburn of their faces. Caste distinctions, pride of station, were unknown here; all the people, whether their possessions were great or small, drew their nurture from the soil, and greeted each other with a friendly "Howdy?" when they met, conscious of perfect equality. It was much better to be poor in a place like this than in a great city,--to have at least physical abundance if one could not have other advantages. Elvira Hill was not conscious of being poor, though just now she was anxious to get a country school to teach. All her life had been spent amid these familiar scenes, her condition in life was neither worse nor better than that of her acquaintances, and it never occurred to her to be discontented with her lot and rebel against fate. She had been brought up on a farm, had known what it was to go after the cows of an evening, to drive them to the barn-lot bars and milk them, to catch a horse in the pasture and saddle and ride it, to hunt hens' nests in the hay-mow, to churn, and wash dishes, and get vegetables from the garden, and pick the raspberries and blackberries that ripened in the fence corners along the fields and woods. But just now she was living with her grandmother in a little brown house in the cluster of houses called Hill's Station. There were two stores, a post-office, a blacksmith's shop, and a mill; the mail-trains stopped here, and a daily hack carried passengers northward two miles and a half to a larger village, Sassafrasville, where there was an excellent academy. The national pike ran through Hill's Station, and there was a great deal of travel on this road,--local travel of various kinds, peddlers' wagons which stopped in every town, and long rows of white-covered movers' wagons going West to Illinois or Iowa or Kansas. What wonder, then, that with all these advantages the people of Hill's Station thought themselves centrally located, and watched with complaisant interest the passing trains, the daily hack, and the teams going along the pike? That they were pleasantly located there was no doubt. Tall beech- and sugar-maple-trees, part of the original forest, stood singly here and there and cast pleasant islands of shade upon the expanse of sunshine, and from the fields which bordered the road came the scent of clover-blooms.

Elvira Hill had gone to the little country schools, sometimes to the one a mile west of town, sometimes to the one a mile east, and for the past three years had attended the Sassafrasville Academy: so that now, at seventeen, she was considered to have a good education, and expected to follow the example of many of the young people of that section and go to teaching. She talked it over with her grandmother, and decided that she had better try a subscription school in the country first; then, if she succeeded in giving satisfaction, she would apply in the winter for the position of assistant in the Hill's Station school.

Her grandmother, placid and fair, with a cap of sheer white muslin resting on her yet brown hair, and a pair of gold-bowed spectacles pushed up on her forehead above her kindly blue eyes, was considered a handsome old woman, and showed few traces of the life of toil through which she had passed. She read a great deal in a New Testament with large print, and often sat a long time in thought, with it open on her knees. Another work which she frequently perused was Mrs. Ellet's "Women of the Revolution," in two volumes, containing steel engravings of stately dames in laced bodices and powdered hair.

Elvira borrowed a horse of one of the neighbors, put her grandmother's much-worn red plush side saddle upon it, and started out in search of a school. She rode east and she rode north; but in the first district they had a teacher already engaged, and in the second they had concluded they wouldn't have any school that summer. Did they know of any other school where a teacher was wanted? she inquired. No, they couldn't say they did; but she might hear of one by inquiring further, the honest district trustees said. So she rode homeward again, in no wise discouraged, and asked the postmaster to inquire of the farmers who came in from other neighborhoods in regard to this matter.

He promised that he would, and a week later called her in as she was passing, and said, "There was a man here yesterday from Buck Creek district who said they wanted a teacher in their school this summer. You might try there. His name is Sapp, and he lives right by the school-house. You go two miles and a half south till you come to a mud road, then two miles and a half east till you come to a pike. You can't miss the place."

Elvira thanked him, and a little while later, when her accommodating neighbor was not using his horse, she borrowed it again and rode forth on her quest. It had been raining, the mud road was muddy, and clouds still hung in the sky; but the country through which she passed was a rich, fresh green, and the fruit-orchards were in bloom. From solitary farm-houses big dogs and little dogs issued forth to bark at the sound of her horse's feet, and bareheaded children at this signal ran out to the gate to see who was passing.

The school-house of Buck Creek district, a neat wooden building, painted white, stood in a grassy acre lot, bordered on two sides by thick woods, on the other two by the roads which crossed here. In the corner diagonally across from it stood a snug cabin, with a garden around it, a well-sweep in the rear, and a log stable not far distant. She alighted in front of it, and was proceeding to hitch her horse, when the door opened, and a man stepped out, greeting her with a friendly "Howdy?"

She responded, and asked if Mr. Sapp lived here.

"My name is Sapp," he said, and, tying her horse, invited her in.

There she found the rest of the family,--the mother, a grown daughter, and two half-grown sons: they seemed friendly, but a little shy, and stood in the background while she transacted her business.

"Yes," Mr. Sapp said, in answer to her question, "they wanted a three-months' school, but had no teacher engaged. Had she ever taught before?"

No, she had had no experience in teaching; but she had attended the Sassafrasville Academy several terms, and was qualified to teach the common branches,--arithmetic, grammar, and geography, reading, writing, and spelling.

Well, he would bring her application before the other two trustees, and guessed they would elect her: there was no other applicant. Now, about the terms: three dollars a scholar for the term of twelve weeks was the usual rate. If she would draw up a subscription-paper, he would take it round himself and get as many names as he could; thought he could get twelve scholars signed, and knew that more would be sent. The children had to be kept at home in busy times, and the farmers didn't like to bind themselves to pay the full amount for all that they would send. He himself would sign one and send two. Charley could go all the time; but Jack would have to help about mowing and reaping and threshing, and couldn't attend regularly.

So Elvira drew up the paper according to his dictation, and, leaving it with him, rode home in the dusk of the evening, feeling happy over her prospects.

Her grandmother had supper ready in the little kitchen; and it tasted so good, the salt-rising bread and butter and hash, the little tea-cakes, and the preserved pears. While the grandmother drank her cup of tea, Elvira told her the incidents of the afternoon; and the night closed around them as they sat secure and content in their humble home.

The great world was full of great problems which wearied and perplexed men's brains and seemed wellnigh unsolvable, but she had solved her own little problem in her own little way, and was at peace.

In a few days Mr. Sapp called with the subscription-paper. He had got sixteen scholars signed,--more than he expected. That was a good prospect for a summer school. They wanted her to begin on the following Monday; which she promised to do. Then she asked him if she could board at his house a week or two, until she could make some arrangements to ride from home. Yes, she could; he guessed a dollar and a half a week for board would be about the fair thing.