THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK

"We will do a book of travels," I said to the little girl. "You have done Holland; you are on China. After you have made your picture of China, I'll tell you what I saw there in part, and give you a book to read."

So often her own progress has given me a cue like this for the future work. I put The Abbot on this travel-work for a few days, starting him with Peru. He found a monastery there. In India he found monasteries, even in the northern woods of Ontario. He would shut his eyes; the setting would form, and after his period of imaginative wandering, the monastery would be the reward. I will not attempt to suggest the psychology of this, but to many there may be a link in it. In any event, the imagination is developed, and its products expressed.

The little girl was asked to write an essay on a morning she had spent along the Shore. She sat in the Study with a pencil and paper on her lap—and long afterward, perhaps ten minutes, exclaimed:

"Why, I began at the beginning and told the whole story to myself, and now I've got to begin all over and write it, and it won't be half so good."

"Yes, that's the hard part, to put it down," I said. "Write and write until you begin to dream as you write—until you forget hand and paper and place, and instead of dreaming simply make the hand and brain interpret the dream as it comes. That is the perfect way."

In these small things which I am printing of the little girl's, you will get a glimpse of her reading and her rambles. Perhaps you will get an idea, more clearly than I can tell it, of the nature of the philosophy back of the work here, but there can be no good in hiding that. All who come express themselves somehow each day. I have merely plucked these papers from the nearest of scores of her offerings. There seems to be a ray in everything she does, at least one in a paper. What is more cheerfully disclosed than anything else, from my viewpoint, is the quickening imagination. Apparently she did not title this one:

Nature is most at home where man has not yet started to build his civilisation. Of course, she is everywhere—in Germany, in Canada and California, but the Father is more to be seen with her in the wild places.

In the beginning everything belonged to Nature. She is the Mother. Flowers, then, could grow where and when they wanted to, without being placed in all kinds of star and round and square shapes. Some of their leaves could be longer than others if Nature liked, without being cut. The great trees, such as beeches, elms, oaks and cedars, could coil and curve their branches without the thought of being cut down for a sidewalk, or trimmed until they were frivolous nothings. Small stones and shells could lie down on a bed of moss at the feet of these trees and ask questions that disgraced Mr. Beech. (But of course they were young.) The flower fairies could sit in the sunlight and laugh at the simple little stones.

Oh! dear, I just read this through and it's silly. It sounds like some kind of a myth, written in the Fifteenth Century instead of the Twentieth, but I am not going to tear it up. The thing I really wanted to write about this morning was the goodness of being alive here in winter.

After a long, lovely sleep at night, in a room with wide-open windows and plenty of covers, you wake up fresh and happy. From the East comes up over the frozen Lake, the sun sending streaks of orange, red, yellow, all through the sky.

Here and there are little clouds of soft greys and pinks, which look like the fluffy heads of young lettuce.

Venus in the south, big and wonderful, fades out of sight when the last shades of night pass out of the sky.

Dress, every minute the sky growing more brilliant, until you cannot look at it. A breakfast of toast and jam—just enough to make you feel like work.

A short walk to the Study with the sweet smell of wood-smoke sharpening the air. Then in the Study, reading essays by great men, especially of our favourite four Americans, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Lincoln. A wonderful Nature essay from Thoreau!

So many things of Nature are spoiled to make more money for men; so many lambs and horses and birds are killed to make coats and hats. Horses are killed and sold as beef, and the animals are slaughtered in such hideous and vulgar ways—maddened with fear in butchers' pens before the end. Wise people know that fears are poison. Day by day and year by year these poisons are being worked into our bodies until we get used to them and then we find it hard to stop eating meat. A person in this condition is never able to associate with the mysteries of earth, such as fairies and nymphs of flowers, water and fire, nor with the real truths of higher Nature, which men should know.

In among the rocks and mountains I can imagine cross, ugly little gnomes going about their work—I mean their own work and affairs. To me it seems that gnomes are not willing to associate with people; they haven't got the time to bother with us. They go grumbling about, muttering: "Somebody sat on my rock; somebody sat on my rock."

I would like to see them and find out what they are so busy about; see the patterns of their leathery little clothes; their high hats, leathery capes and aprons. Some time I will see them. I am not familiar with all this, but I imagine very thick leather belts and buckles. Their feet are small, but too big for them, and make a little clatter as they go over the rocks. Their hands I cannot see; they must be under the cape or somewhere that I do not know of.

The Spring, I think, is the best time for the little green woodsmen. The trees are beginning to get pale-green buds, and the ground is all damp from being frozen so long. The woodsmen sing a great deal then and laugh and talk. They come to the edge of the river when a boat comes in, but if one moves quickly they all run away.

I think there must have been many happy little fairies and cross old gnomes in the northern woods where I stayed a week last summer. There were so many great rocks, so many trees and all. Many mysteries must have floated around me wanting me to play with them, but I wasn't ready. Fairies were only a dream to me then. But some time I must have been a friend of the fairies, for it seems to me that I have seen them, and spent a good deal of time with them, because the memories are still with me. I will spend most of my spare time with them next summer and learn much more about them.

... She could get no further on the Chinese picture, except that the low street lamps were shaped like question-marks. I told her there was something in that street if she could find it, suggesting that she might think hard about it the last thing at night before she went to sleep, but I have heard nothing further. On occasions I have been stopped short. For instance, yesterday the little girl began to tell me something with great care, and I was away until she was in the middle of the story, and the intimate gripping thing about it aroused me. I told her to write the thing down just as she had told it, with this result:

" ... Every little while, when I am not thinking of any one thing, there is a voice inside. It seems to be telling me something, but I never know what it says. I never wanted or tried to know until a month ago, but it stops before I can get the sense of it. It is three things, I am sure, because after the voice stops these three things run through my mind, just as quick as the voice came and went away: A thought which is full of mystery; another one that is terrible; and the third which is strange but very funny. The third seems to be connected with Mother in some way; something she said many, many years ago.... I asked Mother to talk that way, and she talked like old country women, but it was not the voice I asked for."

I have read this many times, unable to interpret. One of the loveliest things about the child-mind is its expectancy for answers, for fulfilments at once.

"I do not know what it means," I said. "If some answer came, I could not be sure that it was the perfect one, but I am thinking about it every day, and perhaps something will come."

These are serious things.... Here is one of her more recent products on Roses:

If one wants to have perfect beauty and the odour of the Old Mother herself in his yard, he will plant roses. I cannot express in words what roses bring to me when I look down at them or sniff their magnificently shaded petals. They seem to pull me right out of the body and out into another world where everything is beautiful, and where people do not choose the red ramblers for their garden favourites, but the real tea roses.

I took three roses into a house—a red one, a white one, very much finer than the first, and the third a dream-rose that takes me into the other world—the kind of yellow rose that sits in a jet bowl leaning on the cross in the Chapel room every day.

A girl that was in that house looked at the roses.

"Oh," she shouted, after a moment, "what a grand red one that is!"

"Which one do you like best?" I asked.

"The red one, of course," the girl answered.

"Why, the other two are much——" I began.

"No, they ain't," said the girl. "Don't you know every one likes them red ones best?"

I walked away. I believe that city people who never see Nature, know her better from their reading than country people who are closer to her brown body (than those who walk on pavements) but never look any higher. And I think country people like red roses because they are like them. The red roses do not know they are not so beautiful as the yellow teas; they bloom just as long and often, and often grow bigger. They are not ashamed.

A mystery to me: A tiny piece of exquisite foliage is put into the ground. After a while its leaves all fall off and it is bare and brown, like a little stick in the snow. Yet down under the snow at the roots of the brown stick, fairy rose spirits are being worked up into the small stalks. They have been waiting for a rose to be put into the ground that is fine enough for them, and it has come—and others. Months afterward, a dozen or more of pinkish yellow-golden roses come out, loosening as many fairy spirits again. Isn't it all wonderful?

I enjoyed the first reading of this which the little girl called A Grey Day:

Small, cold, happy waves constantly rolling up on the tan shore. The air is crisp and cool, but there is very little wind. Everything is looking fresh and green. The train on the crossing makes enough noise for six, with a screeching of wheels and puffing of steam. The tug and dredge on the harbour are doing their share, too. All is a happy workday scene. I started in this morning to finish an essay I had begun the day before. After a little while, I opened the window, and the happy working sounds came into the room. I could not finish that essay; I had to write something about the grey happy day.

On a grey day I delight in studying the sky, for it is always so brimming full of pictures. Pictures of every kind. It was on a grey day like this in the early Spring that "Cliff" made us see the great snow giants on the other side of the water, cleaning away all the snow and ice with great shovels and pick-axes. It was on a grey day that a Beech tree made me see that all the rocks, bugs, flowers, trees, and people are only one. These grey days that people find so much fault with, if they are not so important as the days when the sun cooks you, they are far more wonderful! One's imagination can wander through the whole universe on grey days. The pictures in the sky give one hints of other worlds, for there are so many different faces, different and strange lands and people. Far-off houses, kingdoms, castles, birds, beasts and everything else. Such wonderful things. Sometimes I see huge dragons, and then the cloud passes and the dragons go away. The sky is always changing. The pictures never last, but new ones come.

A TALK

What wonderful things come of little talks. I mean the right kind. Whole lives changed, perhaps by a half-hour's talk, or the same amount of time spent in reading. Man comes to a point in life, the half-way house, I have heard it called, when he either takes the right path which leads to the work that was made for him or he goes the wrong. Oftentimes a short talk from one who knows will set a man on the right track. One man goes the wrong way through many a danger and pain and suffering, and finally wakes up to the right, goes back, tells the others, and saves many from going the wrong way and passing through the same pain and suffering.

At breakfast this morning we were talking about the universe from the angels around the throne to the little brown gnomes that work so hard, flower fairies, and wood and water nymphs and nixies. Such a strange, wild, delightful feeling comes over me when I hear about the little brown and green gnomes or think of them. One who does not know the fairies well would think they were all brothers, but it doesn't seem so to me. When I think of the green gnomes, a picture always comes of a whole lot of beautiful springy-looking bushes. I can always see the green gnomes through the bushes. They pay no attention to me, but just go right on laughing and talking by themselves. But when I think of brown gnomes a very different picture comes. It is Fall then, and leaves are on the ground and brown men are working so hard and so fast their hands and feet are just a blur. They give you a smile if you truly love them. But that is all, for they are working hard.

If one were well and could master his body in every way, he would be able to see plainly the white lines which connect everything together, and the crowns that are on the heads of the ones who deserve them. And one could see the history of a stone, a tree, or any old thing.

What wonderful stories there would be in an old Beech tree that has stood in the same place for more than a hundred years, and has seen all the wonders that came that way. Their upper branches are always looking up, and so at night they would see all the Sleep-bodies that pass that woods. The beech trees would make the old witches feel so good and happy by fanning them with their leaves and shading them that the witches would undo all the evil spells they had cast on people, and so many other wonderful stories would there be in a Beech tree's history.