Part 2 — AN OCTOBER REVERIE.

This most golden of all the bright October days, why are we not, as we fain would be, on a brown hill-side, yielding care to whispered persuasions of the wind, or afloat on waters that reflected our sky, when—if it was not always without clouds—its clouds were tinged with glory, or lying upon a shore where we built sand castles in play—alas! for castles we built in earnest, to hold treasures of hope—and laughed to see them dissolve in the laughing waves.

We have no wish to pluck the hill-side flowers; we shall never build castles again, never chase back the encroaching waves, which, while they seemed to recede, rose till they buried our castles and swept away our treasures.

But it will be something to share the repose of nature; to lie on her lap lulled by the requiem of the past, chanted by the voice that sang the anthem of the future. For we—her deluded children—are weary, and only ask of her a foretaste of the rest we hope to find by and by in her bosom.

How weary we are! Of strivings from which we have no power to cease! Of reachings, from which we cannot withhold our hands, toward objects that elude us or turn worthless in our grasp! Weary of our own and others' weakness and meanness! Of lying lives; of suspicions, envyings, and covetings! How tired of homely work; oppressed by narrow rooms, vexed by noises of neighbors separated from us only by the legal number of inches in brick and mortar—a loud-talking, stamping family on one side, and on the other the household of Widow Smith, who keeps boarders and a piano!

By sounds that come up through the open window, I know that the widow is in her kitchen helping to get the dinner. I seem to see her, hot and worried. She is always worried. Her face would be a sad one if she had time to let it settle into its proper expression. As she never has time, it is anxious and fretful, and older than her years. In the parlor, so near that the jangling of untuned wires sets my whole being on edge, her daughter is playing the piano as she sings, I dreamt that I dwelt in Marble Halls. Poor child! Yet dream on. Who could undeceive thee, knowing that there is woven into thy dream the pious resolve to win out of that discordant instrument money wherewith to buy thy mother ease? Heaven help thee and bring to naught the spite of the bachelor boarder in the room above, who, instead of employing his grizzly brain with the plan gossips have devised, by which he might brighten her life and thine, and his own most of all, paces up and down, cursing the noise, and consigning "that old tin pan" to a place his imagination keeps in a blaze with fuel of whatsoever offends him. He hates "that eternal thrumming," hates "genteel daughters of working mothers. Teach music! Better dismiss Nora and make Miss Julia help in the kitchen!"

It might be as well, but it is no affair of his.

Moreover, the mother has her dream. In it she sees her daughter less hard-worked than she has been, and higher in the social scale than she ever hopes to rise; except, perhaps, when that daughter shall have exchanged Smith for Smythe.

But of all the vexations of our life here, the most persistent is the row of houses across the way. Beset by so many things that offend the other senses, we think it hard that our sight should be so meanly thwarted. I grow angry whenever I look out, and wish that I could push those houses down. I pine to see beyond them the curve of a bay bounded by hills, a stretch of river with steamboats and sails, and of shore with a village and farms on its slope, distant mountains blending with sky, or outlined against piled thunder-caps. Or a harbor with ships; some at anchor, some bound outward, and some coming in from strange countries.

I keep fancying that the houses hide these sights, though I know there is nothing behind them but row on row, more brown, stony, and dull. These are low, and shut out less of the sky. The veneering, which is of plaster instead of stone, is falling off, here and there, to save it from monotony. The uniform dwellings, with their line of connecting porches, remind one of the inside of a fort, and of careless, gossiping, uncertain sojourn in quarters.

Widow Smith does not mind the wall that offends us. She told me her story the other day; all she had gone through. What grieves her most, as nearly as I could make it out, is living in a house that is not high. "For," said she, as with a little tearful burst of eloquence she ended her tale, "I hev lived in a three-story and basement, all to ourselves, and always kept a girl, and the folks next door didn't let out ther floors. Though," (wiping her eyes,) "I've nothin' aginst them Browns. They behave themselves as well as some" (Mrs. Green, over the way, who keeps two servants, and does not visit Mrs. Smith and me) "thet's hed more advantages."

I answered, "These houses might do while rents are so high, if the partitions were thicker, and if that row opposite did not hide the view;" meaning the view in my mind. Mrs. Smith could not have seen it; for she replied that "We mustn't be notional; real troubles come fast enough without borrowin'. Since Smith died," she had "hed her share, the Lord knew." If she "let sech things" make her "mis'rable," she should think that she was "goin' contrary to Scripter, wich speaks aginst the sight of the eyes." Then, "of all things, a place not built up was the forlornist." Besides, she liked "neighbors." Good soul! so she does; loves them, too. I have known her to do "them Browns" more than one kind turn; and to us, when we came, poor, discouraged, and unused to city ways, she was guide, philosopher, and guardian angel, in the guise of a lugubrious little woman in a rusty mourning gown and yarn hood. She taught us to market, urged upon us the importance of asking the price before buying, and of counting our change afterward; encouraged us to resist the aggressions of "the girl," enlightening us at the same time as to the amount of service we might require of that personage; stood up for us with the milk-man, ice-man, and man that peddles every thing, and made them give us weight and measure.

But notwithstanding that Mrs. Smith is so sympathizing, it would not have been worth while to return her confidence by telling her of our former affairs—pleasant places where our lot was cast; the old house beautiful we were born in; the hills, and and the river that bathes their feet; purple ridges that lie eastward, blue mountains that hide the west—scenes so changeless in form that memory does not err in always showing them the same; so changeful in aspect that they never wearied even our accustomed eyes.

We cannot talk of these things to one whose world is the city. Yet there are in that world many who will understand us—living in high houses and low ones; on floors, in garrets and dens; walking in rich attire, shrinking in garments worn and unseemly; mingling with others in the mart, lying on sick-beds, shut up in prisons—men for whom fame blows glorious bubbles, but hollow and frail, as none know better than themselves.

Devotees of science whose Eurekas sound more faintly at every step as they mount her endless ladders; not because they fall from such altitudes, but because they become discouraged as the conviction dawns on them that all they have gained amounts to little.

The trader whose vessels dot the seas, who is not so elate with fortune that he never sends a sigh after earlier ventures—ships of bark with freight of sand, on waters the width of a boy's stride.

The gambler in the bread of the poor, not so callous that he never feels a twinge of the old wound, the stab conscience gave the first time he played "pitch and toss" on the blind side of the school-house and won foolish Richard's penny. He remembers that Richard went crying to his father for redress, and his mother came and told the master, who would not believe foolish Richard's story against "the smartest boy and the best at cypherin' in his school." He escaped, but Richard was whipped by his father for losing his money and telling a lie. He distrusts conscience. Why smite so then, why touch so lightly now, if she can find the difference between that childish sin and this wringing hard-earned pence from thousands of simple ones?

And the Father to whom the wretches clamor so does not seem to be a credulous father to them. Perhaps, after all, he does not hear; or is, like the master, on the side of those who can help themselves. At any rate, his mills grind so slowly that it would hardly pay to compute the time one's turn would take to come. It may be that the wheels stand still, waiting for all his floods to gather.

The politician, not so lost in tortuous ways that the man depicted in his first piece to speak, (it was chosen by his good mother, and often said over to her for fear of "missing" on the momentous Friday,)

does not still stand on the old pedestal in his secret heart.

Absent-eyed women, automatic figures in collections of cabinet-work, upholstery, pictures, and marbles, to which no memories of theirs have grown, lending attention to formal visitors while their thoughts stray to the play-house under a tree, where they used to receive little friends in calico sun-bonnets. The house of which they themselves laid the moss carpet and chose and placed the ornaments, deserted bird's-nests filled with speckled Solomon's Seal, curiosities from the wood, and pretty stones from the brook. For paintings, they had green vistas and glimpses of village, water, and sky. The service, of acorn cups and bits of colored glass and "chaney," was daily polished and set out by their own hands on the flat rock they "made believe" was a table.

Women shawled with fabric of Cashmere, borne above the envious street, but heeding neither its shifting crowd nor its shows. They are thinking of chances enjoyed the more for their unexpectedness, and paid in "kerchies" and "thank'ee, sirs" they used to "catch," when they went to the district school wrapped in homespun shoulder blankets that took caressing softness from fingers—cold alas! now—that pinned them on. Of balmy, luxurious rides on the heaped hay-rigging. Slow, never to be forgotten cart rides in back-woods, where wintergreen and princess-pine send up aromatic odors from beneath the oxen's feet; with wheels now sinking in moss, now craunching the pebbles of the stream, now swept by ferns, and anon pressing down saplings that, released, spring back with a jerk and an impatient protest of leaves. Onward, through sun-glorified arcades, listening to comments of birds that are all about, though each one seems solitary, startled by the beat of a partridge, or catching a sight of her nest. Bending low to escape unbending arms of patriarchs of the wood that fend the way. Peering anxiously into the gathering night; coming out upon the clearing, where skeletons of forest trees, martyrs to progress, that perished by her axe or her flames, lie dimly outlined amid shadows, or stand gaunt against the sky, with charred arms outstretched in motionless appeal.

Or of rides in the lumber-wagon, when grandfather—whom we cannot describe from lack of words sufficiently expressive of venerableness and benignity—held the "lines," and "Tom and Jerry," in sympathy with childish impatience and delight, sped up hill and down, till, amid clatter and rattle, and excited barkings, and joyful exclamations, and a peremptory "whoa!" and "stand there, you Jerry!" (Jerry never would stand there, nor anywhere, he was such a horse to go,) followed by a volley of juvenile "whoas!" and "stand, Jerrys," the wagon drew up before the house, and a young aunt ran to lift the children out, while grandmother stood in the door beaming on them a smile whereof the warmth has passed down through the folds of years, and glows still on hearts from which time has shut out the light of ardent fires.

Did I say that crowd and shows were unheeded? That elegant leader and lawgiver of society, Mrs. Augustus Jonesnob, who glides along in an emblazed carriage, behind those splendid ponies, would not pass, if she knew that she and her "turnout" elicited only a vague, half pitying recollection of a "they say" that gives her the keeper of a junk-shop for grandfather, making it likely that she has no heirloom of tapestry, in fadeless azure, and green, and gold, wherewith to hang the halls she always dreamed of, without dreaming how bare she would find them.

Young Augustus—"Point-Lace Jonesnob," the girls call him—rides beside his mother's carriage, well-dressed, well-mounted, smiling complacently, for he knows that he looks about the thing; and the day being neither too cold nor too warm, nor muddy, dusty, windy, nor too early in the season, he thinks it will do to show himself. Does any one suppose his smile to be the emanation from some reminiscence of "taking the horses to water" in boyhood? The riding-master's hand, and not the proud father's, held him on the first time he was mounted. He has no breezy remembrances of free gallops whither he would; no pensive memories of solemn rides across lonesome barrens, where heavenward-pointing pines worship God with ceaseless harmonies and unfailing incense.

Men whose life, sold for a salary, is the property of others; who spend the hours they ought to have for recreation in street-cars, while ill-used brutes drag them from and to homes in comfortless suburbs, where faded wives, worn with housework that never ends, busy over piles of mending that never diminish, wait, uncheerfully ruminating devices and economies by which they are for ever trying to make ends approach that are fated never to meet.

Broken-spirited gentlemen in threadbare black, worn and brushed till the seams, notwithstanding the times they have been inked, are gray, walking, walking, in search of employment; asking it deprecatingly, for they are honorable, and are beginning to realize—others have long seen it—their incapacity. Returning faint—the bite at the baker's counter is beyond their means—to pale wives, who meet them with smiles that are more sad than tears, and talk, while their hearts belie their tongues, of better luck to-morrow. Perhaps children, too, with eyes that ask—they are too well trained by their mother to demand with their lips.

Women that have seen better days, paying their last dollar—it will bring no return—for the ambiguous announcement that makes known their willingness to accept any position not menial.

Elderly women, delicately bred, once sheltered and inclosed by refined prejudices and conventionalisms, obliged, who knows by what stress, to step out of the sacred (to them; they are old-fashioned ladies) retirement of home. If we must refuse to buy the petty stationery, print, or book they so courteously proffer, let it be seen that we do it with pain; let us not shut the door against these timid sparrows till they have flitted from the steps. They are not of those to whom compassionate hesitation suggests importunity.

Women narrow-chested and grim-visaged, in whom there is no beauty or charm left—pupils of virtue, to whom she gives neither holiday nor reward—toiling up steep flights with bundles of shop-work.

Bedraggled women, that lug heavy baskets down wet area steps into sunless abodes, where they wash all day, while the babes they have not time to fondle want care and comforting, and must want these or bread.

Sinful women, at whom, since Christ is dead in the souls of men, all may cast stones. For them there is but little help or hope in a righteous world.

Those who, by hallowed memories of purer scenes, have been kept from evil.

Those who, though fallen and fouled, still guard, fair and apart, pictures that fill their eyes with tears and their hearts with yearnings—visions of morning stepping down the cliffs into valleys where they dwelt; of sunsets in mountain countries; tropical lands planted with palms that incline exile-ward; snowy regions where blazing hearths and true hearts keep the place of the wanderer warm.

Home dwells pictured in their soul. It is an unpainted road-side house. Sweet-pinks, marigolds, and holly-hocks grow in the front-yard; morning-glories creep up the clap-boards, festoon the windows, and peep into the wren's nest under the eve-trough. In the maple by the doorstep a pair of robins have made their habitation, and amid the green of the elm that roofs the spring and wash-block—the stump of a former mighty tree—is seen the glint of a fire-bird's wing.

Or a farm-house, with gardens and rows of hives, and barns with their swallows, fields of corn and stubble, and upland pasture where cattle are feeding. In "the new piece," between the pasture and higher woodland, buckwheat blossoms for the bees, as it climbs perseveringly up the ridge to overtake the poke, that, bending to its weight of berries, mingles dawning crimson with changing hues of blackberry-vines which hide the rocks. Along stone fences, golden-rod and wild-aster still mingle their blooms untouched, though autumn has reached stained fingers forth to trifle with the leaves of his favorite sumach. In the swamp below, the scarlet lobelia burns amid clumps of green and brown sedge. Beyond the swamp and meadow, and wind-whitened willows by the creek, hills rise and bound the view.

Or it is a homestead, with venerable trees shading a lawn that slopes to a lake in which house and trees lie mirrored. They are playing with their brothers on the lawn, while their mother watches them from her window; or gliding on the lake with companions and loves of youth, steering their boat for a distant headland.

These are living pictures. Their woods sing Eolian measures; their brooks talk of childhood and innocence; their clouds and seasons are always changing; their swallows ever flying homeward, whither the trees beckon. Miraculous pictures! their sun always shines on our brides; their skies rain constant tears on our dead. Yea, in them the dead are risen, and eyes long sealed look down on us with love.

But beyond the headland the lake has its outlet into a stream that winds and tarries, all the while widening, till it empties into the harbor, where ships, laden with costly merchandise, are spreading sails for havens of uncertain promise. They fade along the fading coast; glide across the dim belt that separates land's end from sky; like phantoms disappear. And watchers turn, with a foreboding chill, from windy piers, to confront dirty waterside stores, and pick their way amid trucks and bales that obstruct broken side-walks, between tall warehouses that glower at each other across lanes, to meet odors of fish and oils, and spices and drugs, and countless other fœtid smells; to enter dull, ledger-lined offices, or seek, through jostling ways, ticketed dwellings that are as alike as prison-cells.

Along the track that divides the farm, and cuts the hill in two, shrieks a train, grudging its passengers the glimpse of beautiful places of the rich; slackening its pace to prolong the dreariness of the ugly outskirts, and, lo! dead rows of houses; long thoroughfares; mean streets, with vile shops and squalid swarms; the clash of vehicles; confusion of cries; rush of multitudes—the city.

From the small house the by-road leads to a turnpike that speeds dustily on to a cobble-paved town by the river. The river flows down to the city; where all night long, hungrily lapping slimy piers, with dark hints of oblivion, with winks and gleams that the wretched interpret, with noiseless, snaky undulations, and the fascinating glitter of its thousand eyes, it charms the lost to loathsome death.

Would we, if cares did not bind us, go back to the scenes of those pictures? If our mother's face had not gone from the window? If the farm had not been sold? If alien hands had not cut down the maple and the elm, and strange faces and the burr of unknown voices had not scared the wrens from their nest? If we had money or time for the journey? If we did not feel too much ashamed or disgraced—we have been so unsuccessful, or false to early promises—to meet the pitying or contemptuous looks of our acquaintance? For did they not know how it would be? Did not they too, in youth, scent from afar the battle they knew better than to enter without the certainty of winning?

If we have, or seem to have won it, is there not something in ourselves that holds us back? We have now no desire for sports of childhood. We are not sorry that our mother faded from her window before we got hurts that her kisses could not make well. The halo that surrounds venerated figures would pale in the broad light of mid-life. We are not so forbearing with the old who are with us that we could trust ourselves to have the departed back.

Do we recognize the boys and girls who lived in the small house by the road, who used to get up early and run laughing to the spring to take turns washing in the tin basin that hung against the elm? And the faces mirrors now show us—are they the same that rose radiant from that bath? Could we sleep soundly in a garret, and wake delighted to see snow sifting through the roof? Or relish the food we thought it neither shame nor labor to carry when, bare-footed in summer and shod in calf-skin in winter, we walked a mile to the red school-house down by the 'pike? Would we feel honored if the madam were now to visit us in the modest dress that we once thought the perfection of taste?

When it was our week to conduct her home, we neither hunted bird's-nests, nor swung upon low branches of the "mill-pines," nor dipped our feet in mud-puddles to get "wedding-shoes" on, nor sought berries along the fences, unless it was to string them on timothy-rods and present them shyly for her acceptance.

Have we strength or inclination for harvest work? Then to leaden hearts and sluggish blood what pleasure in moonlight sail, or midnight sleigh-ride, or mad gallop over lift and level!

Let us guard our sacred pictures. To their scenes we will not return. For if, instead of patches of sky, the circle of the firmament were ours, with changing glory of dawn, and noon, and sundown, and deeps gleaming with stars, yet our spirits would not soar with their swallows. Their mountains would not draw our feet as they did when we believed that every summit reached was a height gained, knew not that the peaks which pierced the clouds hid higher ranges, yet no nearer the heaven of hope than those which limited our sight.

Is there no spot, dear friend, that you and I would revisit?

Behold a worn foot-path in which we may walk and gather immortelles! It leads to a city whereof the houses are low and hide none of the sky; narrower than these, but straitness does not inconvenience dwellers who have no call to go to and fro; not uniform—the occupants' names are cut into fronts of marble and granite and mossy red sand-stone. Some are marked by columns, others by crosses. Around many plants are set. But here are others. The tenants were poor or friendless folk, or strangers; they have only clay walls and roofs of sod, upon which every blade, green or sere, all day long and all night, bending lightly to airs of summer or swept low by winter winds, keeps sighing, "May he rest in peace."

Old neighbors are here; but no looks of theirs question us as to what we have done in the world, or in what failed.

Did the sight of these at last turn inward? and did lips that were so ready with the Pharisee's prayer close with the cry of the publican?

Old friends! But their hands are cold and will never clasp ours again. Enemies! Between them and us may judgment be the offspring of Christian kindness!

And here, hedged with arbor-vitæ, is the place of our kin. Those of them who passed hither before our time we could never realize. Others are dim remembrances; like the baby sister that came one wild winter night, to our great wonder, and, to our equal sorrow, left us in spring for this small habitation.

These were not long separated. Dear old folks! one roof and one tablet for two who had but one mind and one heart. Here lies the little cousin we quarrelled with at evening, to shed over her in the morning our first remorseful tears. Look through the break in the hedge, on that square slab—

Evelyn Grant. Aged 35.

Our first school-mistress. We hated her with the impotent bitterness of childish hearts outraged. For did she not show partiality to the dullest scholar she had?—because his father was rich, the big boys said; and thus we repeated it to our fond if not judicious friend, old Diana, when we complained to her of Miss Evelyn's injustice in sending Alf Whitfield up head every Monday.

"He is the oldest," she would say. "As if oldness is any reason why a great fellow like that should have a better chance than the rest," we would think. If we had understood how much of Miss Evelyn's support depended upon the favor of rich Squire Whitfield, we might have felt differently. They say that Alf's mother used to beg of the mistress to encourage and make much of the bashful half-wit, who often wept because he could not learn like the others.

We will pull the old weeds from her grave. They shall not choke flowers planted by the orphan nephews she worked so hard to bring up respectably—worked without a complaint long after the cough we mocked behind our primers had hacked into her vitals.

Let us follow this road, beyond the pines—a little higher—here. The spot we have thought and dreamed about but never before seen.

If any one should ask why we came, hardly pausing, by so many mounds of soldiers who died in the same cause, as may be read on their tablets, we would answer that, with the soul of this one, all glory for us passed out of our marvellous sunsets, warmth from the color of our autumns, charm from our ice-bound winters, sweetness from the breath of our springs.

Down there, bordering this field consecrated to Catholic dead, is the "colored folks' ground."

How tidy it looks. Formerly it was a huddle of neglected hillocks; many of them sunken as if they who, deprecating scorn, had crept through the world in the shadow of the wall, shrank even here from obtruding.

How many of us Catholics, of the thousands that crowd that church of which we see the cross above the hill-top, or lie here with hands crossed to God, ever offered a prayer for those neglected souls, living or dead?

Before that church was built there came from the West Indies, following the fortunes of an exiled family, a gray-haired negro. He did not persevere in hearing Mass because the children insulted him on the street—waited for him with stones in their hands at the corners of the church. He died, and, to fulfil his last wish, some of his people planted a cross upon his unsodded grave.

I used to know every mound, from that Egyptian-faced vault,

to the cheerful nook where the nurseryman's children sleep under their coverlet of flowers. From the hero's pillar by the highway, with the record,

to the monument of the beloved woman whose husband and daughters came every year from distant homes to add a tribute of plants and garlands to the granite offering they had raised to her memory.

Here, broken and half buried, is the old slab with death's-head and bones, and the verse exhorting all Christians to pray for the soul of Peter Curran.

Under this willow—she that planted it, in the belief that it would shade her rest, lies far away—our patriarch is buried: a father to orphans; to the poor a brother. That memorial in the stranger's ground—the only one—he caused to be placed above the remains of the decayed gentleman he entertained so many years and laid to rest at his own cost. Another, to whom he gave shelter, lies beside "the chevalier." The droll Swede, the whaleman, is buried behind them both. In our village foreigners were not looked upon with favor in those ante-emigration times; and this one was so blundering that no one would give him work after his honesty was proved. They were going to send him to jail as a vagrant, when Uncle Allan made up his mind that he needed just such a man for odd jobs. Bastian never learned enough English to thank him, but the tears that wet his parchment cheeks the day they brought his benefactor here were expressive.

Figures homely yet gracious, how they rise in memory!

Some fell asleep in hope; others drew back in doubt, or struggled with doom. Some, having done their best, lay down, offering it and that wherein they had failed to God, beside others who had nothing to offer but remorse.

All these yet speak to us, with more significance on this October afternoon in the October of our life than they did in past autumns; while to every one, according to his need, they teach a lesson.

They say to the covetous, "Not one of your things shall pass through the gate of this city."

To the envious, "Behold the state of him you wished to change places with yesterday."

They promise those who are kept awake by care "a blessed sleep."

They speak of rest to the world-weary; to the good, of beatitude; to the bad, of judgment; to all, of the end that is hastening on swift wings.