Part 4 (2/2)
He is the minister's blessing, the church's joy, a harbinger of the millennium. People come to church to have him help them up the aisle. He wears slippers. He stands or sits at the end of the church during an impressive discourse, and feels that, though he did not furnish the ideas, he at least furnished the wind necessary in preaching it. He has a quick nostril to detect unconsecrated odors, and puts the man who eats garlic on the back seat in the corner. He does not regulate the heat by a broken thermometer, minus the mercury. He has the window blinds arranged just right--the light not too glaring so as to show the freckles, nor too dark so as to cast a gloom, but a subdued light that makes the plainest face attractive. He rings the bell merrily for Christmas festival, and tolls it sadly for the departed. He has real pity for the bereaved in whose house he goes for the purpose of burying their dead--not giving by cold, professional manner the impression that his sympathy for the troubled is overpowered by the joy that he has in selling another coffin. He forgets not his own soul; and though his place is to stand at the door of the ark, it is surely inside of it. After a while, a Sabbath comes when everything is wrong in church: the air is impure, the furnaces fail in their work, and the eyes of the people are blinded with an unpleasant glare. Everybody asks, ”Where is our old s.e.xton?” Alas! he will never come again. He has gone to join Obededom and Berechiah, the doorkeepers of the ancient ark. He will never again take the dusting; whisk from the closet under the church stairs, for it is now with him ”Dust to dust.” The bell he so often rang takes up its saddest tolling for him who used to pull it, and the minister goes into his disordered and unswept pulpit, and finds the Bible upside down as he takes it up to read his text in Psalms, 84th chapter and 10th verse: ”I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my G.o.d than to dwell in the tents of wickedness!”
CHAPTER XV.
THE OLD CRADLE.
The historic and old-time cradle is dead, and buried in the rubbish of the garret. A baby of five months, filled with modern notions, would spurn to be rocked in the awkward and rustic thing. The baby spits the ”Alexandra feeding-bottle” out of its mouth, and protests against the old-fas.h.i.+oned cradle, giving emphasis to its utterances by throwing down a rattle that cost seven dollars, and kicking off a shoe imported at fabulous expense, and upsetting the ”baby-basket,” with all its treasures of ivory hair brushes and ”Meen Fun.” Not with voice, but by violence of gesture and kicks and squirms, it says: ”What! You going to put me in that old cradle?
Where is the nurse? My patience! What does mother mean? Get me a 'patented self-rocker!'”
The parents yield. In comes the new-fangled crib. The machine is wound up, the baby put in, the crib set in motion, and mother goes off to make a first-rate speech at the ”Woman's Rights Convention!”
Conundrum: Why is a maternal elocutionist of this sort like a mother of old time, who trained four sons for the holy ministry, and through them was the means of reforming and saving a thousand souls, and through that thousand of saving ten thousand more? You answer: ”No resemblance at all!” You are right. Guessed the conundrum the first time. Go up to the head of the cla.s.s!
Now, the ”patented self-rockers,” no doubt, have their proper use; but go up with me into the garret of your old homestead, and exhume the cradle that you, a good while ago, slept in. The rockers are somewhat rough, as though a farmer's plane had fas.h.i.+oned them, and the sides just high enough for a child to learn to walk by. What a homely thing, take it all in all!
You say: Stop your depreciation! We were all rocked in that. For about fifteen years that cradle was going much of the time. When the older child was taken out, a smaller child was put in. The crackle of the rockers is pleasant yet in my ears. There I took my first lessons in music as mother sang to me. Have heard what you would call far better singing since then, but none that so thoroughly touched me. She never got five hundred dollars per night for singing three songs at the Academy, with two or three encores grudgefully thrown in; but without pay she sometimes sang all night, and came out whenever encored, though she had only two little ears for an audience. It was a low, subdued tone that sings to me yet across thirty-five years.
You see the edge of that rocker worn quite deep? That is where her foot was placed while she sat with her knitting or sewing, on summer afternoons, while the bees hummed at the door and the shout of the boy at the oxen was heard afield. From the way the rocker is worn, I think that sometimes the foot must have been very tired and the ankle very sore; but I do not think she stopped for that. When such a cradle as that got a-going, it kept on for years.
Scarlet-fever came in the door, and we all had it; and oh, how the cradle did go! We contended as to who should lie in it, for sickness, you know, makes babies of us all. But after a while we surrendered it to Charlie. He was too old to lie in it, but he seemed so very, very sick; and with him in the cradle it was ”Rock!” ”Rock!” ”Rock!” But one day, just as long ago as you can remember, the cradle stopped. When a child is asleep, there is no need of rocking. Charlie was asleep. He was sound asleep. Nothing would wake him. He needed taking up. Mother was too weak to do it. The neighbors came in to do that, and put a flower, fresh out of the garden-dew, between the two still hands. The fever had gone out of the cheek, and left it white, very white--the rose exchanged for the lily. There was one less to contend for the cradle. It soon started again, and with a voice not quite so firm as before, but more tender, the old song came back: ”Bye! bye!
bye!” which meant more to you than ”Il Trovatore,” rendered by opera troupe in the presence of an American audience, all leaning forward and nodding to show how well they understood Italian.
There was a wooden canopy at the head of the old cradle that somehow got loose and was taken off. But your infantile mind was most impressed with the face which much of the time hovered over you. Other women sometimes looked in at the child, and said: ”That child's hair will be red!” or, ”What a peculiar chin!” or, ”Do you think that child will live to grow up?”
and although you were not old enough to understand their talk, by instinct you knew it was something disagreeable, and began to cry till the dear, sweet, familiar face again hovered and the rainbow arched the sky. Oh, we never get away from the benediction of such a face! It looks at us through storm and night. It smiles all to pieces the world's frown. After thirty-five years of rough, tumbling on the world's couch, it puts us in the cradle again, and hushes us as with the very lullaby of heaven.
Let the old cradle rest in the garret. It has earned its quiet. The hands that shook up its pillow have quit work. The foot that kept the rocker in motion is through with its journey. The face that hovered has been veiled from mortal sight. Cradle of blessed memories! Cradle that soothed so many little griefs! Cradle that kindled so many hopes! Cradle that rested so many fatigues! Sleep now thyself, after so many years of putting others to sleep!
One of the great wants of the age is the right kind of a cradle and the right kind of a foot to rock it. We are opposed to the usurpation of ”patented self-rockers.” When I hear a boy calling his grandfather ”old daddy,” and see the youngster whacking his mother across the face because she will not let him have ice-cream and lemonade in the same stomach, and at some refusal holding his breath till he gets black in the face, so that to save the child from fits the mother is compelled to give him another dumpling, and he afterward goes out into the world stubborn, willful, selfish and intractable,--I say that boy was brought up in a ”patented self-rocker.” The old-time mother would have put him down in the old-fas.h.i.+oned cradle, and sung to him,
”Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber, Holy angels guard thy bed;”
and if that did not take the s.p.u.n.k put of him would have laid him in an inverted position across her lap, with his face downward, and with a rousing spank made him more susceptible to the music.
When a mother, who ought to be most interested in training her children for usefulness and heaven, gives her chief time to fixing up her back hair, and is worried to death because the curls she bought are not of the same shade as the spa.r.s.ely-settled locks of her own raising; and culturing the dromedarian hump of dry-goods on her back till, as she comes into church, a good old elder bursts into laughter behind his pocket-handkerchief, making the merriment sound as much like a sneeze as possible; her waking moments employed with discussions about polonaise, and vert-de-gris velvets, and ecru percale, and fringed guipure, and poufs, and sashes, and rose-de-chene silks, and scalloped flounces; her happiness in being admired at b.a.l.l.s and parties and receptions,--you may know that she has thrown off the care of her children, that they are looking after themselves, that they are being brought up by machinery instead of loving hands--in a word, that there is in her home a ”patented self-rocker!”
So far as possible, let all women dress beautifully: so G.o.d dresses the meadows and the mountains. Let them wear pearls and diamonds if they can afford it: G.o.d has hung round the neck of his world strings of diamonds, and braided the black locks of the storm with bright ribbons of rainbow.
Especially before and right after breakfast, ere they expect to be seen of the world, let them look neat and attractive for the family's sake. One of the most hideous sights is a slovenly woman at the breakfast table. Let woman adorn herself. Let her speak on platforms so far as she may have time and ability to do so. But let not mothers imagine that there is any new way of successfully training children, or of escaping the old-time self-denial and continuous painstaking.
Let this be the commencement of the law suit:
OLD CRADLE versus PATENTED SELF-ROCKER.
Attorneys for plaintiff--all the cherished memories of the past.
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