But Edward Sylvester with that black line across his life cutting past from present, what makes him think of his mother tonight; and the cottage door upon the hillside where she used to stand with eager eyes looking up and down the road as he came trudging home from school, swinging his satchel and shouting at every squirrel that started across the road or peeped from the branches of the grand old maples overhead! And the garret-chamber under the roof, the scene of many a romp with Elsie and Sonsie and Jack, neighbors’ children to whom the man of today would be an awe and a mystery! And the little room where he slept with Tom his own blue-eyed brother so soon to die of a wasting disease, but full of warm blood then and all alive with boyish pranks. He could almost hear the wild clear laugh with which the mischievous fellow started upon its travels, the rooster whose legs he had tied a short space apart with one of Sonsie’s faded ribbons, a laugh that became unrestrained when the poor creature in attempting to run down hill, rolled over and over, cutting such a figure before his late admirers, the hens, that even Elsie smiled in the midst of her gentle entreaties. And Jocko the crow, whom taming had made one of the boys! poor Jocko! is it nearly thirty years since you used to stalk in majesty through the village streets, with your neat raven coat closely buttoned across your breast and your genteel caw, caw, and condescending nod for old acquaintances? The day seems but as yesterday when you marred the stolen picnic up in the woods by flying off with a flock of your fellow black-coats, nor is it easy to realize that the circle of towheaded fellows who hailed with shouts your ignominious return after a day or so’s experience of the vaunted pleasures of freedom, are now sharp featured men without a smile for youth or a thought beyond the hard cold dollar buried deep in their pockets.
And the church up over the hills! and the long Sunday walk at mother’s side with the sunshine glowing on the dusty road and beating on the river flowing far beyond! The same road, the same river of Monday and Tuesday but how different it looked to the boy; almost like another scene, as if Sunday clothes were on the world as well as upon his restless little limbs. How he longed for it to be Monday though he did not say so; and what a different day Saturday would have been if only there was no long, sleepy Sunday to follow it.
But the mother! She did not dread that day. Her eyes used to brighten when the bell began to ring from the old church steeple. Her eyes! how they mingled with every picture! They seemed to fill the night. What a sparkle they had, yet how they used to soften at his few hurried caresses. He was always too busy for kisses; there were the snares in the north woods to be looked after; the nest in the apple-tree to be inquired into; the skates to be ground before the river froze over; the nuts to be gathered and stored in that same old garret chamber under the eaves. But now how vividly her least look comes back to the tired man, from the glance of wistful sympathy with which she met his childish disappointments to the flash of joy that hailed his equally childish delights.
And another scene there is in the embers tonight; a remembrance of later days when the mother with her love and yearning was laid low in the grave, and manhood had learned its first lessons of passion and ambition from the glance of younger eyes and the smile of riper lips. Not the picture of a woman, however; that was already present beside him, shining from its panel with an insistence that not even the putting out of the lights could quite quench or subdue, but of a child young, pure and beautiful, sitting by the river in the glow of a June sunshine, gazing at the hills of his boyhood’s home with a look on her face such as he had never before seen on that of child or woman. A simple picture with a simple villager’s daughter for its centre, but as he mused upon it tonight, the success and triumph of the last ten years faded from his sight like the ashes that fell at his feet, and he found himself questioning in vain as to what better thing he had met in all the walks of his busy life than that young child’s innocence and faith as they shone upon him that day from her soft uplifted eyes.
He had been sitting the whole warm noontide at the side of her whose half gracious, half scornful, wholly indolent acceptance of his homage, he called love, and enervated by an atmosphere he was as yet too inexperienced to recognize as of the world, worldly, had strolled forth to cool his fevered brow in the fresh autumn breeze that blew up from the river. He was a gay-hearted youth in those days, heedless of everything but the passing moment; nature meant little to him; and when in the course of his ramble he came upon the form of a child sitting on the edge of the river, he remembers wondering what she saw in a sweep of empty water to interest her so deeply. Indeed he was about to inquire when she turned and he caught a glimpse of her eyes and knew at once without asking. Yet in those days he was anything but quick to recognize the presence of feeling. A face was beautiful or plain to him, not eloquent or expressive. But this child’s countenance was exceptional. It made you forget
