complimented in the
I have selected several specimens of this higher type of humor.
Mrs. Ellen H. Rollins was pre-eminently gifted in this direction. The humor in her exquisite “New England Bygones” is so interwoven with the simple pathos of her memories that it cannot be detached without detriment to both. But I will venture to select three sketches from
OLD-TIME CHILD LIFE.
BY E.H. ARR.
Betsy had the reddest hair of any girl I ever knew. It was quite short in front, and she had a way of twisting it, on either temple, into two little buttons, which she fastened with pins. The rest of it she brought quite far up on the top of her head, where she kept it in place with a large-sized horn comb. Her face was covered with freckles, and her eyes, in winter, were apt to be inflamed. She always seemed to have a mop in her hand, and she had no respect for paint. She was as neat as old Dame Safford herself, and was continually “straightening things out,” as she called it. Her temper, like her hair, was somewhat fiery; and when her work did not suit her, she was prone to a gloomy view of life. If she was to be believed, things were always “going to wrack and ruin” about the house; and she had a queer way of taking time by the forelock. In the morning it was “going on to twelve o’clock,” and at noon it was “going on to midnight.”
She kept her six kitchen chairs in a row on one side of the room, and as many flatirons in a line on the mantelpiece. Everything where she was had, she said, to “stand just so;” and woe to the child who carried crookedness into her straight lines! Betsy had a manner of her own, and made a wonderful kind of a courtesy, with which her skirts puffed out all around like a cheese. She always courtesied to Parson Meeker when she met him, and said: “I hope to see you well, sir.” Once she courtesied in a prayer-meeting to a man who offered her a chair, and told him, in a shrill voice, to “keep his setting,” though she was “ever so much obleeged” to him. This was when she was under conviction, and Parson Meeker said he thought she had met with a change of heart. Father Lathem’s wife hoped so too, for then “there would be a chance of having some Long-noses and Pudding-sweets left over in the orchard.”
It was in time of the long drought, when fire ran over Grayface, and a great comet appeared in the sky. Some of the people of Whitefield thought the world was coming to an end. The comet stayed for weeks, visible even at noon-day, stretching its tail from the zenith far toward the western horizon, and at night staring in at windows with its eye of fire. It was the talk of the people, who pondered over it with a helpless wonder. I recall two Whitefield women as they stood, one morning, bare-armed in a doorway, staring at and chattering about it. One says they “might as well stop work” and “take it easy” while they can. The other thinks the better way is to “keep on a stiddy jog until it comes.” They wish they knew “how near it is,” and “what the tail means anyway.”
Betsy comes along with a pail, which she sets down, and then looks up to the comet. The air is dense with smoke from Grayface, and the dry earth is full of cracks. Betsy declares that it is “going on two months since there has been any rain.” Everything is “going to wrack and ruin,” and “if that thing up there should burst, there’ll be an end to Whitefield.”
Then she catches sight of me listening wide-mouthed, and she tells me that I needn’t suppose she is “going home to iron my pink muslin,” for she thinks the tail of the comet “has started, and is coming right down to whisk it off from the line.” I believe her, and distinctly remember the terror that took hold of me as I rushed home and tore the pink muslin from the line, lest it should be whisked off by the comet’s tail.
When the drought broke, a single day’s rain washed all the smoke from the air. Directly, the tail of the comet began to fade, and all of a sudden its fiery eye went out of the sky.
Some of the villagers thought it had “burst,” others that it had “burned out.” Betsy said: “Whatever it was, it was a humbug;” and the wisest man in Whitefield could neither tell whence it came nor whither it went. One thing, however, was certain: Farmer Lathem said that never, since his orchard began to bear, had he gathered such a crop of apples as he did, despite the drought, in the year of the great comet.
MRS. MEEKER.
BY E.H. ARR.
When I read of Roman matrons I always think of Mrs. Meeker. Her features were marked, and her eyes of deepest blue. She wore her hair combed closely down over her ears, so that her forehead seemed to run up in a point high upon her head: Its color was of reddish-brown, and, I am sorry to say, so far as it was seen, it was not her own. It was called a scratch, and Betsy said Mrs. Meeker “would look enough sight better if she would leave it off.” Whether any hair at all grew upon Mrs. Meeker’s head was a great problem with the village children, and nothing could better illustrate the dignity of this woman than the fact that for more than thirty years the whole neighborhood tried in vain to find out.
PARSON MEEKER.
BY E.H. ARR.
Every Sunday he preached two long sermons, each with five heads, and each head itself divided. After the fifthly came an application, with an exhortation at its close. The sermons were called very able, or, more often, “strong discourses.” I used to think this was because Mrs. Meeker had stitched their leaves fast together. Betsy said they were just like Deacon Saunders’s breaking-up plough, “and went tearing right through sin.” The parson, when I knew him, was a little slow of speech and dull of sight. He sometimes lost his place on his page. How afraid I used to be lest, not finding it, he should repeat his heads! He always brought himself up with a jerk, however, and sailed safely through to the application.
When that came, Benny almost always gave me a jog with his elbow or foot. Once he stuck a pin into my arm, which made me jump so that Deacon Saunders, who sat behind, waked up with a loud snort. The deacon was always talking about the sermons being “powerful in doctrine.” When Benny asked Betsy what doctrines were, she told him to “let doctrines alone;” that they were “pizen things, only fit for hardened old sinners.”
There are many delightful articles which must be merely alluded to in passing, as the “Old Salem Shops,” by Eleanor Putnam, so delicate and delicious that, once read, it will ever be a fragrant memory; Louise Stockton’s “Woman in the Restaurant” I want to give you, and Mrs. Barrow’s “Pennikitty People;” a chapter from Miss Baylor’s “On This Side,” and the opening chapters of Miss Phelps’s “Old Maids’ Paradise;” also the description of “Joppa,” by Grace Denio Litchfield, in “Only an Incident.” There are others from which it is not possible to make extracts. Miss Woolson’s admirable “For the Major,” though pathetic, almost tragic, in its underlying feeling, is, at the same time, a story of exquisite humor, from which, nevertheless, not a single sentence could be quoted that would be called “funny.” Her work, and that of Frances Hodgson Burnett, as well as that of Miss Phelps and Mrs. Spofford, shine with a silver thread of humor, worked too intimately into the whole warp and woof to be extracted without injuring both the solid material and the tinsel. To appreciate the point and delicacy of their finest wit, you must read the whole story and grasp the entire character or situation.
Mrs. E.W. Bellamy, a Southern lady, published in last year’s
