Exults our rising soul,
Disburdened of her load,
And swells unutterably full
Of glory and of God.
This was not pleasant to our minister, nor was it pleasant to the minister’s wife. But George Butts held a responsible position in our community, and the minister’s wife held also a responsible position, so that she taxed all her ingenuity to let her friends understand at tea-parties what she thought of Mrs. Butts without saying anything which could be the ground of formal remonstrance. Thus did Mrs. Butts live among us, as an Arabian bird with its peculiar habits, cries, and plumage might live in one of our barnyards with the ordinary barn-door fowls.
I was never happier when I was a boy than when I was with Mrs. Butts at the mill, which George had inherited. There was a grand freedom in her house. The front door leading into the garden was always open. There was no precise separation between the house and the mill. The business and the dwelling-place were mixed up together, and covered with flour. Mr. Butts was in the habit of walking out of his mill into the living-room every now and then, and never dreamed when one o’clock came that it was necessary for him to change his floury coat before he had his dinner. His cap he also often retained, and in any weather, not extraordinarily cold, he sat in his shirtsleeves. The garden was large and half-wild. A man from the mill, if work was slack, gave a day to it now and then, but it was not trimmed and raked and combed like the other gardens in the town. It was full of gooseberry trees, and I was permitted to eat the gooseberries without stint. The mill-life, too, was inexpressibly attractive—the dark chamber with the great, green, dripping wheel in it, so awfully mysterious as the central life of the whole structure; the machinery connected with the wheel—I knew not how; the hole where the roach lay by the side of the mill-tail in the eddy; the haunts of the water-rats which we used to hunt with Spot, the black and tan terrier, and the still more exciting sport with the ferrets—all this drew me down the lane perpetually. I liked, and even loved Mrs. Butts, too, for her own sake. Her kindness to me was unlimited, and she was never overcome with the fear of “spoiling me,” which seemed the constant dread of most of my hostesses. I never lost my love for her. It grew as I grew, despite my mother’s scarcely suppressed hostility to her, and when I heard she was ill, and was likely to die, I went to be with her. She was eighty years old then. I sat by her bedside with her hand in mine. I was there when she passed away, and—but I have no mind and no power to say any more, for all the memories of her affection and of the sunny days by the water come over me and prevent the calmness necessary for a chronicle. She with all her faults and eccentricities will always have in my heart a little chapel with an ever-burning light. She was one of the very very few whom I have ever seen who knew how to love a child.
Mrs. Butts and George had one son who was named Clement. He was exactly my own age, and naturally we were constant companions. We went to the same school. He never distinguished himself at his books, but he was chief among us. He had a versatile talent for almost every accomplishment in which we delighted, but he was not supreme in any one of them. There were better cricketers, better football players, better hands at setting a night-line, better swimmers than Clem, but he could do something, and do it well, in all these departments. He generally took up a thing with much eagerness for a time, and then let it drop. He was foremost in introducing new games and new fashions, which he permitted to flourish for a time, and then superseded. As he grew up he displayed a taste for drawing and music. He was soon able to copy little paintings of flowers, or even little country scenes, and to play a piece of no very great difficulty with tolerable effect. But as he never was taught by a master, and never practised elementary exercises and studies, he was deficient in accuracy.
