But consider this informal description of a singing-school-taught choir, rendering the anthem,— "No bolts to drive their guilty souls To fiercer flames below." "Off led the treble, having the air, and expending con spirito upon 'fiercer,' about fourteen quavers. After us came the tenors, in a more dignified manner, bestowing their principal emphasis on 'flames.' 'No bolts, no bolts,' shrieked a sharp counter of boys, whose voices were in the transition stage. But when a heavy bass, like claps of thunder, kept repeating 'below,' and finally all parts took up the burden, till, in full diapason, 'guilty souls' and 'fiercer flames' reverberated from wall to arch, it was altogether too much for Puritanic patience." Then there are. bits of description done with a delicacy and firmness of touch, save where marred by her foibles of style, which show that she might have been one of the idyllists of New England. In "Connecticut Forty Years Since" (1824), Mrs. Sigourney outlines the scene of a "warm spell" in winter, when spots of tufted green appear as the wet snow sinks into the black soil, and the air has again a sweet earthy smell. Then comes a blizzard. The elm trees are almost bent double under their heavy load of sleet and snow, the fences are drifted over, the housewalls banked, the windows and doors blockaded; and the road smooth and white till beaten again into pathways by heavy sledges, drawn by a score of oxen. With a loving but picturesque regard for detail, she recalls. also the living room of Mrs. Lathrop: "That low-browed apartment, with all its appointments, is before me. . . . I see its highly polished wainscot, crimson moreen curtains, the large brass andirons, with their silvery brightness, the clean hearth, on which not even the white ashes of the consuming hickory were suffered to rest, the rich, dark shade of the furniture, unpolluted by dust, and the closet where the open door revealed its wealth of silver cans, tankards and flagons." Obviously, Mrs. Sigourney was mistress of two literary styles. The one, which she naïvely terms "the language of books"; the other, which she usually introduces with the phrase,and we can imagine her coughing apologetically behind her slim hand,"to employ the vernacular speech." It happens that she describes a New England farmhouse in each style. In the chapter on "Privileges of Age," in "Past Meridian" (1854), we have it thus: "Traits of agricultural life, divested of its rude and sordid toils, were pleasantly visible. A smooth-coated and symmetrical cow ruminated over her clover-meal. A faithful horse, submissive to the gentlest rein, protruded his honest face through the barn window. A few brooding mothers were busy with the nurture of their chickens, while the proud father of the flock told, with a clarion voice, his happiness." Here is the other, from "Myrtis and Other Etchings and Sketchings": "Cousin Jehoshaphat Jones, have a little patience. Everything in its right place. I guess you had better hear first consarning my dealings at the minister's. My business was to dig in the gardin, and to chop wood, and to take care of the dumb critters, which consisted of an old horse, quite lean in flesh, and a cow with balls at her horns, 'cause she routed down fences when she could get a chance, and a flock of hens, which it was a power of trouble to watch and scare out of the neighbors' corn." The least fragmentary example of this honest style of hers, which ranks her with any realist in rural New England dialect and temper, is found in a few pages in "Connecticut Forty Years Since." The scene describes Farmer Larkin, who has returned as tenant to Mrs. Lathrop's farm, where he had "driv team when a leetle boy," coming to pay his respects to his landlady. Finding it impossible to approach her by keeping to the bare floor surrounding the rug, he exclaims, "I must tread on the kiverlid. . . Your ha-ath, too, is as clean as a cheeny tea-cup, Ma'am. I hate to put my coarse huffs on it. But I ha'n't been used to seein' kiverlids spread on the floor to walk on. We are glad to get 'em to kiver us up with a nights. This looks like a boughten 'Tis exceedin' cur'ous. They must have had a-plenty many treadles in the loom that wove this."" one. "In response to Mrs. Lathrop's inquiries as to the welfare of his family, he replies, "All stout and hearty, thank 'e, Ma'am, as plump as partridges, and swarmin' round like bees. Molly's the oldest on 'em and as fat as butter. She'll be fourteen years old, come the tenth of February, and that will be Sabba-day arter next. She weighs about twice as much as you do, ma'am, I guess. She's rather more stocky than her mother, and I hope will be as smart for bizness. She'll spin her run o' tow-yarn or woollen, afore dinner; and she has wove six yards a day, of yard-wide sheetin'. She takes in weavin', when anybody will hire it done, and so buys herself her bettermost clo'es, which is a help to me. Jehoiakim, the oldest boy --he's named after his gran-daddy-and is a stout, stirrin' youngster. He'll hoe near about as much corn in an hour as I can; and cold winter days, he'll chop and sled wood through the snow, without frettin' a bit. But I s'pose 'tain't right and fittin' to brag about my children, Ma'am. a woman--and then the younger ones go, to keep 'em out o' the way o' them who are glad to work at home. I s'pose they l'arn somethin' about readin' and sewin'. But Tim, the third child, he's the boy for l'arnin'. He took a prodigious likin' to books, when he was a baby; and if you only showed him one, he'd put it rite into his mouth and stop squallin'. He ain't but eleven year old now; and when he gets a newspaper, there's no whoa to him, no more than to the black ox when he sees the haystack, till he's read it clear through, advertisements and all. The master says that he's the smartest of all the boys about spellin', and now he takes to cipherin' marvellously. So that I don't know but that some time or other he may be hired to keep our deestrict school. But I hope my heart ain't lifted up with pride, at sich great prospects, for I know that "God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace unto the humble."" It has been said that Mrs. Sigourney's besetting sins were complacency, artificiality and vanity. In her autobiographical "Letters of Life" (1864) her attitude toward her own literary work is complacent only in viewing its accomplishment; and that results naturally from a sense of duty done, and expresses itself in a universal kindliness that is surely praiseworthy. Her artificiality, too, seems to be, as it were, itself artificial. Under her affectations lies an unimpeachable sincerity of character. Further, without tempering justice. with mercy, we may change the reproach of vanity into the more accurate inordinate love of praise. Herein lies both the weakness of her character and the consequent weakness of her work. From her babyhood she had been noted for her goodness. When a schoolgirl she was the monitress; when a young lady, a pattern of decorum; when married, a model help meet; when a writer, an authoress of whom America was proud. She was good because it was good to be good, she was good by nature, and she was good by choice; because the results of goodness brought her her dearest possession,-a meed of praise. True, she was in the main a hack writer, and the greater number of her work are potboilers. But aside from this. the star to which she hitched her wagon, in the pathless literary field which she entered as a girl of twenty and left as a woman of seventy, was approbation, popular and immediate. She did not want to obtain fame as either eccentric or strong-minded, but as a sort of literary Lady Bountiful. In her nature there was a warmth, a romanticism, an æsthetic yearning for all that is graceful and lovable, which found no other means of gratification than in being accommodating. dreaded to be called queer, and she loved to be thanked and to be called nice, with all the feminine implication of the words. So she followed the fashion of the moment with a docility broken only in a few brief passages. And she had her reward. should remember that she lived in an age characterized by production rather than by criticism, and that therefore, in spite of her occasional flashes of art, she may have been proudest of the work that we condemn; we have no reason to think that she forsook methods which she knew to be good, for those which she knew to be worthless. Whereas, we, living in an age characterized by criticism rather than by production, are judging her work by standards of whose existence she was either ignorant or oblivious, by dogmas of taste. flatly contradicted since the years when Mrs. Sigourney wrote with a care "for ears polite"; and if we laugh at her unquestioning adoption of prevailing modes, in these days when the most mild mannered of our citizens joy in the clash of swords and ring She of shield, we are laughing at ourselves. Yet, is there not a grim humor in the situation, of this dainty, plucky little lady of letters, capable of writing with simplicity and vividness and veracity, being thus influenced by a passing literary fashion? And has not the work of Mrs. Sigourney its significance in the literary history of our country? But, the pity of it! True, in our lamentations over her defects, we M A Closed Account By Helen B. Smith ISS LAVINIA sat in her favorite rocking chair rocking chair looking about her familiar room. Somehow everything looked strange to her. She had left the little gray house less than an hour before, and since then sentence of death had been pronounced upon her. Not an imminent death, but a certain one, and she sat there trying to adjust her mind to this new point of view. She had expected to live to old age, like her long-lived ancestorsher father and grandfather and mother were well in the eighties when they let go of life, and she was only fifty-five. She had always been a well, strong woman, but in the past year there had been queer flutterings and pains in her left side which had sent her at last to the doctor. After close listenings and many questions, he sat back in his chair and looked at her gravely. "Well?" she said quietly. "Miss Lavinia," he answered, in his slow, kind way, "I should answer some women differently, but I know you are a brave woman. Shall I be plain with you?" Her hands tightened on the arms of her chair, but she said instantly, "I want the truth." "You shall have it. There is a serious trouble with your heart, which means-the end. It may ccme at any time, but it will probably be delayed somewhat." "How long?" "Possibly several years. I should judge not more than two or three." Miss Lavinia was silent for a moment, then she said, fervently, "Thank the Lord! That bridge is crossed." "But I hope you will not cross the bridge for a long time. I may be mistaken." "That wasn't what I had in mind," she said briefly, but made no further explanation, only stepping back to say, "I wish you wouldn't tell anybody; I don't want to be watched and pitied.” Now, in her quiet home, she thought over her visit and rejoiced in spirit, for it meant to her a great deliverance. She looked round upon her old-fashioned belongings. "You are old, all of you," she said to them, “but there ain't going to be any old age for me, thank the Lord!" She thought of her father's and mother's lives; hard and mercilessly bare, stripped of all pleasant things, to make provision, poor at best, for the ever-threatening "old age." They had succeeded, to the extent of dying quietly in their own home in the knowledge that they could be buried by their own money, and that their daughter would inherit the little gray house, unincumbered, and six hundred dollars in the savings bank. And this was the reward for over fifty years of unremitting toil. Since their death, Miss Lavinia had faithfully served in the old bondage. There are various kinds of economy, but no one knows what the word really means, until he knows the self-respecting, soul-racking economy of our smaller New England towns, where the people are too near together for the utter going without possible to scattered farms, and not near enough together to be indifferent to each other. Miss Lavinia was past master of this sad science. She knew the very fewest pieces of kindling wood that would start her fire, and how to nurse its small life to the greatest length. She made her own lamplighters, and in winter the match which lighted her morning fire was the only one used through the day. She carefully straightened bent pins and needles, and saved every end of thread. When she had butter on her bread, which was seldom, it was spread out to a mere film, and her tea leaves were steeped again and again. Her wardrobe was the hardest to manage, but she dyed and turned and cobbled and darned, and managed to look respectable, and only those who practised the same rites recognized the signs of dis tress. By dint of this sort of thing and the doing of whatever her hands found to do, helped out by the income from her six hundred dollars, she had managed to live-rather to keep alive-without encroaching upon her principal. But she had an innate sense of breadth and beauty, and her life had been a daily crucifixion, which was now ended. She went into her tiny bedroom and took her bank book from its hiding place. What a story it toid, with its pitiful entries of two and three dollars. But when she looked at the total she was almost awed. How could she ever spend it all? The old clock slowly told off five strokes, reminding her of supper time. time. As she passed it she laid her hand on it and looked up to its familiar face. She felt a new affection for this old friend. From lifelong habit she took the smallest stick in the box to replenish her fire, but after a moment she followed it with the largest. Then she emptied the teapot, though the leaves had been steeped only twice, and brewed herself a fresh cup. It had been her custom to sit without a light until her early bedtime; but as dusk came on she lighted her lamp, turned the wick up to a generous flame, built up her fire and sat down before it with a comfortable sense of plenty. The next morning she woke as to a new life. The old grinding poverty was like a bad dream now past. She who had lived on a hundred dollars a year now had six hundred to spend in two or three years. Yes, and more, for she could raise four or five hundred on the little gray house. A thousand dollars! What wealth! She entered into the enjoyment of her prosperity at once by hailing the passing butcher cart and buying herself a bit of meat. . Later she |