Part 4

It was a late marriage, and one daughter alone came to bless them. A child lovely from her birth, bearing scarce any resemblance to either parent. A delicate, oval face, creamy complexion, soft, intelligent black eyes, a sweet mouth, and a shower of golden curls; not an angle about her, simply a beauty from babyhood to womanhood.

“You think it unaccountable,” said the father to me, “that my wife and I, who are both so plain, should have so pretty a child as Daisy. But I have studied it out, and I settle it this way. My great-grandmother was a famous beauty and a noted belle in her day, and it is _her_ features that have cropped out in Daisy.”

“And let me tell you,” I answered, with equally impressive gesture of the forefinger. “Let me tell you that both of your great-grandmothers might have been as handsome as the Venus de Medici and the Venus of Milo in one, but if you had not bestowed the most chivalrous attention on your excellent wife while she was bearing Daisy--if you had not made her so thoroughly happy by your loving words and thoughtful care, there would have been no cropping out of beauty in the little daughter. Sweet and lovely thoughts resolve themselves into symmetry of form and face. Mental and physical traits do undoubtedly reappear in the same family after a longer or shorter period, but never without the right conditions for their re-incarnation. You may take at least half the credit of Daisy’s good looks to yourself, and the other half belongs to her good mother.”

MINISTERS’ CHILDREN.

There is a common proverb which says that ministers’ children are worse than other people’s. We shall not inquire into the case, but we would suggest that there is no power without freedom, and no deep sentiment without solitude, and the minister’s wife can enjoy neither freedom nor solitude where the parishioners provide the salary; for she is considered the property of the parish--her words and actions are forever criticised. She must conciliate the easily offended, steer clear of church factions, abstain from downrightness of speech. The dangers of her situation are permanently impressed upon her, for is not the bread they eat dependent on unanimity of opinion in the society respecting their worth? If she can think her own thoughts, she certainly must not express them. If she has any doubt concerning any part of the creed, she must force it back and make believe that the strait-jacket is as easy as a knitted shirt.

Children born amid these petty oppressions are not likely to be patterns of perfection. Then they are not allowed to be bad like other children, and to get, by degrees, rid of their inharmony. If they break windows or punch noses, they are considered fearfully depraved, and to reflect on the father. So they learn to consult appearances, and give up the only experience that would make men of them. Too much catechism and formal prayer during their early years must give a disgust for the solemnities, and create a distrust of earnest living and thinking, integrity and sincerity. Just in proportion to the degree of irrationality of the creed, are the chances for damaging the characters of the minister’s children.

Love of Truth expands the soul; Fear of Evil cramps it.

The most unproductive use one can put one’s mind and heart to, is hatred of evil, of meanness, falsehood, ugliness in others. It does not even prove that we possess the opposite virtues. Especially if we would convey to our children generosity, ingenuousness, and beauty, let our hearts be filled with admiration of these divine qualities. As I have shown, we reproduce that which most impresses us. If it is ugliness, _and we hate it_, still we reproduce it, because we have dwelt on it. Do not then, when _enciente_, permit yourself to analyze or dislike imperfections of either mind or body, for this puts the unborn _en rapport_ with that imperfection.

VALUE OF TEMPORARY EFFORT.

It certainly ought to encourage any mother to know, that no matter what her particular faults may be, she can lessen if not obliterate them in her child, by making a great effort in the right direction for so short a period as nine or even six months.

That she should make _herself over entirely_ would appear a too formidable undertaking, but with such a motive she could aid her child. She may have, for instance, a quick temper, which she will determine to control; or she may lack order, or a good memory; or she may be wanting in quiet self-esteem (though she have inward self-respect). Either of these deficiences may be greatly lessened.

I will here insert a letter which I received some time ago from a young woman who had become greatly interested in the subject before us, and who was remarkably wanting in what the phrenologist calls “concentrativeness,” and also in consecutiveness of thought:

“You know what a day-dreamer I have always been. This has helped to confirm my ‘scatterbrains’ tendency. At first it did not seem to me reasonable that _intentional_ activity in any direction could have the desired effect. If circumstance _outside of one’s self_ aroused in a woman one or another set of faculties, naturally enough they might be prominent in the child. But this going to work with _malice prepense_, I feared, would avail but little. However, I made up my mind to give my child the benefit of the doubt.

“Every day I obliged myself to explain certain problems in geometry. This would favor continuity of thought, I decided. Then I began to recall continually the ideas that just flitted into my mind and out again. They would return, and I would dwell a little more on them--see other sides to them; the connection in which they stood to some other idea. Then, after a little I felt tired, and let them go, but still held my mind in readiness for their return. It really both amused and astonished me to see them come trooping back. Why, thought is a series of pictures! I exclaimed. It is all illustration. The ‘fetching myself up standing’ in this way was rather hard work the first two months, but it became easier, and I grew to enjoy my own improvement wonderfully. Of course there were interruptions and discouragements, but I held on bravely, and I am sure successfully, for Walter, at three years old, would fix his mind on a person or a picture in a book, and keep his attention on it to the amusement of all observers; and now if you tell him to make his slate full of figures, he pegs away at it till there is not room for one more.”

MUSICAL ABILITY.

During the winter which followed the summer of their union the X.’s became members of a coterie, with which dancing was held in high esteem. Mrs. X. was _enciente_, but showed her condition scarcely at all, and so danced, and afterward played for the dancers at the hebdomadal reunions, up to within a month of her confinement.

She had left school with fair musical powers fairly cultivated, and with a voice sweet, but not powerful. The lover who had praised her singing, when her husband, spoke in thoughtless, disparaging strain of its quality. This so wounded and discouraged her that no inducement could make her open her lips again. But, as I have said, she continued to play on the piano-forte, more or less on each occasion, “dance music” already at her fingers’ ends, and short, easy, gay compositions with which she was familiar before leaving school, and which needed no notes as reminders. At home she read and studied no new music, or music of a higher character. This was partly because her musical taste was uncultivated, and partly because the new draft on her energy was attended by depression, and she felt justified in yielding to her feelings, and dropping all mental and bodily effort. “I will be more studious, more orderly and hospitable after baby is born. But now I shall drop everything--let things slide.”

The boy born of these ante-natal circumstances resembled his father in his coarser mental calibre, while he lacked the ambition and steady purpose which characterized the latter. He, however, took to the keys of the piano as a duck takes to water. When a lad, his fingers grasped the chords and flew swiftly through the scales. This endless series of polkas, schottisches, and cotillions wearied the entire household. He hated classical music, and cared little for vocal melody or harmony.

Two years after the birth of this boy, a younger sister of Mrs. X. made them a visit of some months’ duration, and she insisted that Clara should take part with her in duets, notwithstanding that her unused voice and pregnant state promised little success from the effort. As soon as Mr. X. was quite out of sight on the way to his business (for the old criticism still rankled in her mind, and the mutual performance was kept a secret from him), the two would be at the instrument with Mendelssohn, Wallace, and others before them, making delicious harmony. There is nothing like singing to free the soul, and awaken its heights and depths. Nothing could have been more fortunate for little Clara, who made her entry into the world before her aunt’s departure, than the antecedent occupation of her mother. In time her voice proved to be as sweet and far stronger than her mother’s, and in all her nature she realized the inspiring effect of those hours when persuaded by her sister, her mother had lost sight of herself in the pure emotions and thoughts of those famous masters.

GRIEF.

The _cause_ of grief very seriously affects its character. If it is based on a sense of wrong, as in the case of a husband’s unfaithfulness, then indignation, anger, malice make a part of it, and a pregnant wife, distracted by these emotions, conveys to her child, as we have shown, the violent emotions she herself experienced.

If the bad, the unprincipled conduct of a son from whom we had expected reverence and manliness bows us down, a sense of wrong and shame, a feeling that it _might have been avoided_, mixes with our grief and embitters it.

But if death, from natural causes, which no woman’s eye could foresee and provide against, strikes down one near and dear to us, we simply mourn, and this grief may open the inner chambers of the soul hitherto closed.

Thus Mrs. W., an external, worldly-minded woman, not wanting in common benevolence or sense of duty, simply without dignity or elevation of character, was married to an energetic, sensible, practical man, the manager and owner of a large foundry. Their circumstances were, therefore, quite easy. An inferior kind of social life occupied much of Mrs. W.’s time, and amid these conditions their first child, a girl, was born. This child, on the principle that inferior fruit ripens early, was as mature as she would ever be at sixteen. At twenty she was shallow, pretentious, illiterate, which last her mother was not.

When five months pregnant with her second child, the news was suddenly brought to Mrs. W. that her husband, whom business had called several hundred miles from his home, had been stricken down with yellow fever, and, among total strangers, had passed away, in his delirium calling wildly on his wife for help. The loss made a more profound impression on Mrs. W. than it would have done had she not been pregnant. She had accepted Mr. W. from sentiments of gratitude, and now she was moved to make a strict self-examination as to her imperfect appreciation of his love and kindness. Worldly motives and thoughts were silenced. Conscience and finer judgment were active.

The second child, modified by these four grave, earnest months, was made up of sincerity, earnest thought, and unfailing benevolence. Her early disregard for appearances, as compared to realities, made a wide gulf that could never be bridged between the two sisters. There was absolutely no relationship between them. Marian’s plain, honest, eager, affectionate face was grand beside the empty, pretty one of her elder sister. The younger was slow in developing her whole nature, which was transcendent in its interior moral characteristics. The blow came too late to seriously injure the physical. There was just the unavoidably less degree of robustness between herself and sister, which, with the absence of hope and common gayety, favored gravity in the former.

THE BLACK SHEEP.

The black sheep of a family is to be pitied rather than hated. He is the wronged, as well as the wrong-doer. Many years ago such an one came frequently under my observation. The family consisted of five boys and three girls, all but the one in question remarkably good-looking, gentle-hearted, fairly intelligent, thoroughly temperate, and honest. The third, in order, of the boys, was a coarse, brutal, unprincipled fellow, the dread and despair of his timid mother, whose money, and even clothing, he would steal (the latter to pawn), and whose life he would constantly threaten when a mere lad. He was at home only in a groggery, and that not so much on account of a love of liquor, as from his need of companions on his own plane. He was more than once in prison; oftener escaped through the prayers and management of his mother. Who, now, was responsible for this dangerous member of society?

The father was an amiable, inefficient, illiterate, temperate man; a waster of other people’s time; an interminable talker of nothings. The mother, an amiable, industrious, capable woman, who patched and knitted and made a few dollars by nursing, at the call of the village doctor--a most tender and devoted mother, a too generous neighbor. Passing the unfinished habitation one day, I stopped to admire the double hollyhocks and breathe the perfume from the beds of herbs. At the same moment I heard a loud cry for help, and the old lady came hurriedly round the corner of the house, followed by her son, with a hoe in his hand upraised to strike her. Seeing me, he flung the hoe aside and walked sullenly out of the gate. Sitting on the doorstep wiping her tears away with the corner of her apron, the unhappy woman apologized for her evil son in this wise:

“We were always poor, living from hand to mouth. My husband never had any faculty for making a living. I strove and strove to keep my children from want, and keep them looking decent. There were now six of them, and I was nearly distracted when I found I was going to have another. At this point, late in the fall, my husband went off and stayed four months with a well-to-do uncle of his, leaving me and the six children without food or fire-wood. I had endured all patiently till then, but this made me full of bitterness and anger. I was just raving--quite beside myself all the time. A neighbor helped me, and trusted me a little, so that we kept from starving; but this did not prevent me from feeling indignation, almost _hatred_, toward a father who could be so unfatherly. Thomas showed the same disposition from a child.”

“MY CONSOLATION.”

Here is a counterpart to the preceding narrative.

We had gone to visit an invalid friend who himself had climbed these mountain heights to escape the fogs below on the sea-shore. Here, cosily sheltered by the summit, surrounded by peach and cherry-trees, and looking down on wooded heights and gorges, we found a most excellent hotel. The host, a mild, intelligent man, was himself quite delicate; his wife, on the contrary, was one of those rarely met with, magnetic, generous-natured women, whose coming affects one like the ocean breezes. She had, so she told us, nine children living and one dead. Only such a brave, bounteous creature could have been equal to this, and never in one instance bring reproach on her motherhood. It is of the tenth I would speak, now a lad of sixteen, observing whom the invalid remarked: “I shall get well just looking at that boy. What a manly, affectionate fellow!”

“I call him my consolation,” said his mother. “He can do _anything_, and he does it so easily, so quietly.” And, indeed, the way in which this refined lad handed you your plate, your glass of milk, or cup of coffee, gave a dignity to the meal, while conferring honor on all parties concerned. The phrase “menial labor” had no significance when he was basting the meat or ironing the “belated” table-cloths for his mother.

Usually, when a woman in very straitened circumstances has an extremely large family, she presently becomes oppressed and discouraged. Her ambition is foiled. She can neither clothe, educate, nor train the children properly, and the latest comers are apt to have a poorer make-up--a fag-end sort of air. Here, on the contrary, was the flower of the flock, a youth full of _faculty_, at home on the piano-forte stool as at the knife-board, _determined to sustain his mother_ at all hazards.

I sought eagerly the explanation of this phenomenon, and the happy mother in full, varied, and affectionate tones, gladly replied to my inquiries.

“When I found myself pregnant with my tenth child, the nine were living and all at home. My husband’s salary--he was a preacher--was between three and four hundred dollars a year. Fortunately, we owned the little place on which we lived, and yet, if you will recall those Eastern winters, you will realize the great difficulty I had in keeping us all clothed as well as fed. It seemed to me not a virtue, but a sin, to bring more children into the world, and I made up my mind that _this_ should be the _very last_. I would take matters into my own hands.

“But the thing now to be thought of was a little clothing for the expected baby. I had not a rag to make over, not a dollar for the purpose.

“At this juncture a gentleman, an agent for some religious publication house, called, and as the custom was, I asked him to spend the day, which he did, and I had considerable talk with him. He left, and returned while I was preparing supper, and seemed greatly surprised to find that I had no help. ‘What! _nine_ children to cook and sew for, and no help!’ He had never supposed such a thing possible. I explained that I had a _primitive_ constitution, but still I found myself giving way lately. Whenever I had a trifle ready to pay out, which was very seldom, I employed, it was true, a woman poorer than myself, but less burdened, to do the washing. His astonishment, however, continued.

“A week or two after this visit, I received a letter from a distant city, saying that my case had made a profound impression on him, and that having met with a coterie of ladies belonging to a certain congregation who were anxious to assist some missionary, or help in some other good cause, he had mentioned me and my circumstances, and they were of one mind, eager to help me, and wished to know if I would accept a present in the spirit in which it was offered; and if so, would I indicate what things would be most useful to me.

“I was glad, and willing to accept anything, and in replying mentioned infants’ wear and children’s clothes as most needed.

“In return came a large box with every sort of child’s garments, a roll of flannel, and a complete infant’s wardrobe of the nicest material and most beautifully made--embroidered flannel, dresses prettily tucked and edged--things lovely to look at.

“An immense load was taken off my mind. I was actually filled with delight whenever I thought of these delicate, pretty things, and how comfortable my baby would be. I went about my tasks after this in a spirit of love and thanksgiving. You see Paul! He has been my consolation since his babyhood. No temptation could make him less positively good, less conscientious, or less affectionate than he is.”

As this large-hearted woman related to me these interesting facts, I could not help wishing that the kind ladies who had been instrumental in bringing about so happy a result, as well as the gentleman who had given the impetus to their benevolence, could know how valuable had been the effects.

KLEPTOMANIA.

The word kleptomania is used to indicate the habit of stealing, by those persons with whom wealth precludes the ordinary temptation to the act. Certain women of position are regularly watched by clerks in stores because they are known to carry off laces, ribbons, etc., when they fancy themselves unobserved. Such women have very inferior minds independent of this one vice. In the mother of such an one the desire to get and to keep things of material value, must have been exceedingly prominent. Many an honest mother mourns over the unscrupulous dishonesty of her son, while all unwittingly she conveyed to him the overpowering impulse; or there was not rigid probity enough in her own life to overrule the dishonest tendency conveyed by her husband.

In the first case, her desire to get and to keep would be harmless and justifiable as a temporary state of mind, if she were not pregnant. She knows, although she does not often dwell on the fact, that she is working assiduously for legitimate ends. But as she is, in truth, mainly engrossed in getting and saving, thus using a very limited part of her mind, she does the harm. The selfish, grasping spirit increases on itself through generations of similar experience. On the same principle, the _remarkable_ singer is the product of two or three generations of love of song.

A childish inclination to appropriate that which belongs to another, yields readily to wise treatment, where the intellect, the nature, is not cramped and dull.

SPECULATIVE INTELLECT.

The habit of reasoning independently, of investigating without reference to authority, is by no means a common one. Most people have their thinking done for them, and are content to quote their clergyman, their doctor, or their great-grandmother, as the case may require. We say a man or woman is “original” when they seek Truth wherever she may be found, regardless of popular opinion.

My friend, though quite practical, loved dearly to wander in the higher regions of thought. Such an one is apt to suffer for the want of sympathy, and situated as she was in an obscure inland town, where living literature was unappreciated and congenial companionship did not exist, her first year of married life was not all that she had anticipated. Her husband was “_all business_,” but he wanted his wife to be happy, and he induced her to send for an old schoolmate “for company.”

After Miss Wood’s arrival there was no time for morbid regrets or dissatisfaction. She brought a year’s later news of the old circle of friends, was full of piquant personal reminiscence, could discuss the merits of the latest noteworthy literature, and entered heartily into the political reform movements of England and Italy. The days were now only too short for the duties and sympathy that had to be crowded into them.

After the birth of Mrs. Roche’s first child her friend married, and moved on to a farm some miles away. Mrs. R. had more domestic occupation, but a close communication was kept up. Then the anti-slavery agitation was beginning to be felt all over the country, and Mr. R., to his wife’s great delight, flung himself with all his compact executive energy into it. During this period another child, a girl, was born. Suddenly and unexpectedly business losses occurred, which obliged a removal to a new place.