Elves and gnomes and air-sprites and genii were no strangers to us,for my sister Emilie--she who heard me say my hymns,and taught me to write--was mistress of an almost limitless fund of imaginative lore.She was a very Scheherezade of story-tellers,so her younger sisters thought,who listened to her while twilight grew into moonlight,evening after evening,with fasci-nated wakefulness.
Besides the tales that the child-world of all ages is familiar with,--Red Riding-Hood,the Giant-Killer,Cinderella,Aladdin,the "Sleeping Beauty,"and the rest,--she had picked up somewhere most of the folk-stories of Ireland and Scotland,and also the wild legends of Germany,which latter were not then made into the compact volumes known among juvenile readers of to-day as Grimm's "Household Tales."Her choice was usually judicious;she omitted the ghosts and goblins that would have haunted our dreams;although I was now and then visited by a nightmare-consciousness of being a bewitched princess who must perform some impossible task,such as turning a whole roomful of straws into gold,one by one,or else lose my head.But she blended the humorous with the romantic in her selections,so that we usually dropped to sleep in good spirits,if not with a laugh.
That old story of the fisherman who had done the "Man of the Sea"a favor,and was to be rewarded by having his wish granted,she told in so quaintly realistic a way that I thought it might all have happened on one of the islands out in Massachusetts Bay.
The fisherman was foolish enough,it seemed,to let his wife do all his wishing for him;and she,unsatisfied still,though she had been made first an immensely rich woman,and then a great queen,at last sent her husband to ask that they two might be made rulers over the sun,moon,and stars.
As my sister went on with the story,I could see the waves grow black,and could hear the wind mutter and growl,while the fisherman called for the first,second,and then reluctantly,for the third time:--"O Man of the Sea,Come listen to me!
For Alice my wife,The plague of my life,Has sent me to beg a boon of thee!"As his call died away on the sullen wind,the mysterious "Man of the Sea"rose in his wrath out of the billows,and said,--"Go back to your old mud hut,and stay there with your wife Alice,and never come to trouble me again."I sympathized with the "Man of the Sea"in his righteous indignation at the conduct of the greedy,grasping woman;and the moral of the story remained with me,as the story itself did.Ithink I understood dimly,even then,that mean avarice and self-seeking ambition always find their true level in muddy earth,never among the stars.
So it proved that my dear mother-sister was preparing me for life when she did not know it,when she thought she was only amusing me.
This sister,though only just entering her teens,was toughening herself by all sorts of unnecessary hardships for whatever might await her womanhood.She used frequently to sleep in the garret on a hard wooden sea-chest instead of in a bed.And she would get up before daylight and run over into the burying-ground,barefooted and white-robed (we lived for two or three years in another house than our own,where the oldest graveyard in town was only separated from us by our garden fence),"to see if there were any ghosts there,"she told us.Returning noiselessly,--herself a smiling phantom,with long,golden-brown hair rippling over her shoulders,--she would drop a trophy upon her little sisters'pillow,in the shape of a big,yellow apple that had dropped from "the Colonel's""pumpkin sweeting"tree into the graveyard,close to our fence.
She was fond of giving me surprises,of watching my wonder at seeing anything beautiful or strange for the first time.Once,when I was very little,she made me supremely happy by rousing me before four o'clock in the morning,dressing me hurriedly,and taking me out with her for a walk across the graveyard and through the dewy fields.The birds were singing,and the sun was just rising,and we were walking toward the east,hand in hand,when suddenly there appeared before us what looked to me like an immense blue wall,stretching right and left as far as I could see.
"Oh,what is it the wall of?"I cried.
It was a revelation she had meant for me."So you did not know it was the sea,little girl!"she said.
It was a wonderful illusion to My unaccustomed eyes,and I took in at that moment for the first time something of the real grandeur of the ocean.Not a sail was in sight,and the blue expanse was scarcely disturbed by a ripple,for it was the high-tide calm.That morning's freshness,that vision of the sea,Iknow I can never lose.
>From our garret window--and the garret was my usual retreat when I wanted to get away by myself with my books or my dreams--we had the distant horizon-line of the bay,across a quarter of a mile of trees and mowing fields.We could see the white breakers dashing against the long narrow island just outside of the harbor,which I,with my childish misconstruction of names,called "Breakers'Island";supposing that the grown people had made a mistake when they spoke of it as "Baker's."But that far-off,shining band of silver and blue seemed so different from the whole great sea,stretching out as if into eternity from the feet of the baby on the shore!
The marvel was not lessened when I began to study geography,and comprehended that the world is round.Could it really be that we had that endless "Atlantic Ocean"to look at from our window,to dance along the edge of,to wade into or bathe in,if we chose?
The map of the world became more interesting to me than any of the story-books.In my fanciful explorations I out-traveled Captain Cook,the only voyager around the world with whose name my childhood was familiar.
The field-paths were safe,and I was allowed to wander off alone through them.I greatly enjoyed the freedom of a solitary explorer among the seashells and wild flowers.
