Read Ebook: Harper's Round Table February 4 1896 by Various

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When the fortune-telling was concluded, I learned that it was already considerably beyond the time to start home, and therefore speedily made my adieux; a few moments later found me in our high-stepped carriage rapidly rolling out of the Oakland grounds.

"And thus ended the episode which I promised to tell you," said Martha Washington, the wife of the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental army and President of the United States, to the French officer De Grasse at the Peace Ball given in Fredericksburg.

"Pardon, madame; not ended, but rather begun," was the courtly response.

"Oh, what a lovely party!" was the exclamation from many of the attentive listeners. "And why couldn't we repeat it now?" was the immediate question.

"Indeed I shall," said one of the girls, with a decided shake of her long curls. "My very next party will be an old Virginia evening--dresses, dances, games, and all."

JOHNNY'S ICE-BOAT.

When Johnny was quite tired of making himself big pigs out of snowballs, and hammock-chairs for drawing the girls over the snow out of crotched sticks and old shawls, and Scandinavian skates out of barrel staves, he decided he would make an ice-boat, and all the more firmly because the whole family, except his pretty aunt Mamy, told him it was nonsense, and he never could, and an ice-boat was a dangerous thing if he could, and it was of no use anyway.

There were a lot of old skates in the garret, some big nails and some pieces of wood in the shed; his aunt Mamy could help him rig some sort of a sail. It was a pity if he couldn't make an ice-boat, and the river stretching away a glare of ice for twenty miles and more.

He ran down to the shed and chose for himself a board some five feet long, and a cross-board that he nailed on it a foot from the end. About a foot from the other end of the first board he nailed a bit of wood for a seat, the sides of it slanting out so that it was a little wider before than behind. That done, he nailed a couple of braces, slanting from just behind the seat nearly out to the ends of the cross-piece, and from the latter places two others, shorter ones, meeting on the extreme end of the long first board, beyond the cross-piece, so that the whole looked like the frame of a huge kite. He could have done without the braces, which were only stout three-inch-square sticks, but it seemed a little stronger and safer to have them, he said.

It seemed as if every one in the house had an errand for him to do that afternoon, and he almost gave up the idea of finishing his ice-boat at all. "When a fellow has such a piece of work as this in hand people might let him alone," he grumbled. And I don't know how he would have come out if he hadn't divined that his aunt Mamy was making mince patties for some use connected with himself.

But Johnny was up before the sun the next morning, and where the cross-piece of his frame rested on the longer board, in the very centre, he bored a hole for his mast--bored a lot of little holes close together, and worked them out with his jack-knife till he had one big hole. On either side of that he nailed a small block, and on the top of those he nailed a bit of board that just fitted the space, and then in the middle of that bit of board he made another hole just over the hole already bored, and there was a step for his mast, and his mast itself was ready in the shape of a good stout bean-pole that he had.

Very well pleased with himself so far, Mr. Johnny hurried through breakfast, and got out of the way before his grandmother could ask him to find her glasses, or his mother could suggest a few pages of history. His conscience was not easy, but then he would look for the glasses all a fore-noon another day, and learn a great many pages of history in the afternoon; and they really should consider, he thought, that one learns something in building an ice-boat; and if his heart smote him about the dear baby who cried for Johnny to play with him, the baby would cry at the other side of his mouth when he made a voyage in Johnny's ice-boat. So he took two of the old skates now, screwed the heel-screw of each into a bit of wood a foot long and three inches wide, and, working holes for the leathers, strapped the skates firmly, each to its own piece of wood, and then nailed the pieces securely under each end of the cross-piece, the skates there pointing forwards.

For the rudder then he took the third skate, screwed and strapped to a bit of wood as before, and nailed and screwed that bit of wood to the club end of a long round stick which he brought up through a hole already bored in the stern end of the main beam, or first long board; and he fitted this round stick to a handle by running it through a hole in something he had whittled out like the clothes-paddle or boiler-stick of washing-day.

"I've done well by the day, and the day's done well by me," said Johnny. "But now come needle and thread. I don't believe," said he, "that Aunt Mame is as hard-hearted as the rest." And by dint of hanging over the back of her chair with a good many judicious hugs and kisses--the little rogue really loved his aunt Mamy when there was nothing to gain by it--he induced her to coax a coarse and stout kitchen-table cloth from his mother's linen stores, to bind it with some strong tape, and then to cross the tape from corner to corner in order to strengthen it still more. When he had lashed his sail to his bean-pole with a stout twine, and made a gasket to hold his gaff, which was part of his bamboo fishing-rod, Johnny stopped to execute a brief war-dance, to hug his aunt again, to put on his reefer, and to stow away some mince patties. Then, securing the rope at the other corner of his sail, he dragged his tiny ice-boat free of the big blocks of ice along the shore, established himself upon the seat with his heels against the cross-piece, and waited for the wind.

It came along, with a little dust of snow upon its wings. It took Johnny's sail as if it were a puff of thistle-down; the rope slipped out through Johnny's fingers quick enough to burn them. His heart gave a great plunge, but he held fast, and the next moment a creak, a twist, a hiss, and he was moving. Moving? No--flying! Flying through the air even while he knew he was cutting with a sharp hiss into the ice--the razor-edge of the wind cutting with a sharp hiss, too, upon his cheek, and taking his breath away at first. And there he was speeding up the river so fast that his mother screamed and ran into the house, and his grandmother, looking from the window, began to blame every one else for letting him start out on such a hair-breadth undertaking, and his aunt Mamy declared it was like a great white bubble blowing up the sky, a great white spirit flashing up the river, and if he never came back she was glad to see the last of him that way--but he would be back all right. And so he was.

They said that little ice-boat went at the rate of forty miles an hour. Johnny always insists that it is eighty. But all I know about it is that the March maple-camp was twenty miles up river, and Johnny brought home a great parcel of the sweetest and richest morsels that the sunshine ever coaxed out of the earth through a maple-stem, that very sunset as he ran his ice-boat, "The Scarer," up the shore, and promised his mother he would never go half as fast as he could go in her, unless he had a mask to save his face from blistering, and his father was aboard.

THE MIDDLE DAUGHTER.

Begun in HARPER'S ROUND TABLE No. 845.

BY MARGARET E. SANGSTER.

CEMENTS AND RIVETS.

"How did we ever consent to let our middle daughter stay away all these years, mother?" said Dr. Wainwright, addressing his wife.

"I cannot tell how it happened, father," she said, musingly. "I think we drifted into the arrangement, and you know each year brother was expected to bring her back Harriet would plan a jaunt or a journey which kept her away, and then, Jack, we've generally been rather out at the elbows, and I have been so helpless, that, with our large family, it was for Grace's good to let her remain where she was so well provided for."

"She's clear grit, isn't she?" said the doctor, admiringly, stalking to and fro in his wife's chamber. "I didn't half like the notion of her giving readings; but Charley Raeburn says the world moves and we must move with it, and now that her object is not purely a selfish one, I withdraw my opposition. I confess, though, darling, I don't enjoy the thought that my girls must earn money. I feel differently about the boys."

"Jack dear," said his wife, tenderly, always careful not to wound the feelings of this unsuccessful man who was still so loving and so full of chivalry, "you needn't mind that in the very least. The girl who doesn't want to earn money for herself in these days is in the minority. Girls feel it in the air. They all fret and worry, or most of them do, until they are allowed to measure their strength and test the commercial worth of what they have acquired. You are a dear old fossil, Jack. Just look at it in this way: Suppose Mrs. Vanderhoven, brought up in the purple, taught to play a little, to embroider a little, to speak a little French--to do a little of many things and nothing well--had been given the sort of education that in her day was the right of every gentleman's son, though denied the gentleman's daughter, would her life be so hard and narrow and distressful now? Would she be reduced to taking in fine washing and hemstitching and canning fruit?"

"Canning fruit, mother dear," said Miriam, who had just come in to procure fresh towels for the bedrooms, "is a fine occupation. Several women in the United States are making their fortunes at that. Eva and I, who haven't Grace's talents, are thinking of taking it up in earnest. I can make preserves, I rejoice to say."

"When you are ready to begin, you shall have my blessing," said her father. "I yield to the new order of things." Then as the pretty elder daughter disappeared, a sheaf of white lavender-perfumed towels over her arm, he said: "Now, dear, I perceive your point. Archie Vanderhoven's accident has, however, occurred in the very best possible time for Grace. The King's Daughters--you know what a breezy Ten they are, with our Eva and the Raeburns' Amy among them--are going to give a lift to Archie, not to his mother, who might take offence. All the local talent of our young people is already enlisted. Our big dining-room is to be the hall of ceremonies, and I believe they are to have tableaux, music, readings, and refreshments. This will come off on the first moonlight night, and the proceeds will all go to Archie, to be kept, probably, as a nest-egg for his college expenses. That mother of his means him to go through college, you know, if she has to pay the fees by hard work, washing, ironing, scrubbing, what not."

"I hope the boy's worth it," said Mrs. Wainwright, doubtfully. "Few boys are."

"The right boy is," said the doctor, firmly. "In our medical association there's one fellow who is on the way to be a famous surgeon. He's fine, Jane, the most plucky, persistent man, with the eye, and the nerve, and the hand, and the delicacy and steadiness of the surgeon born in him, and confirmed by training. Some of his operations are perfectly beautiful, beautiful! He'll be famous over the whole world yet. His mother was an Irish charwoman, and she and he had a terrible tug to carry him through his studies."

"Is he good to her? Is he grateful?" asked Mrs. Wainwright, much impressed.

"Good! grateful! I should say so," said the doctor. "She lives like Queen Victoria, rides in her carriage, dresses in black silk, has four maids to wait on her. She lives like the first lady in the land, in her son's house, and he treats her like a lover. He's a man. He was worth all she did. They say," added the doctor, presently, "that sometimes the old lady tires of her splendor, sends the maids away to visit their cousins, and turns in and works for a day or two like all possessed. She's been seen hanging out blankets on a windy day in the back yard, with a face as happy as that of a child playing truant."

"Poor dear old thing!" said Mrs. Wainwright. "Well, to go back to our girlie, she's to be allowed to take her own way, isn't she, and to be as energetic and work as steadily as she likes?"

"Yes, dearest, she shall, for all I'll do or say to the contrary. And when my ship comes in I'll pay her back with interest for the loans she's made me lately."

The doctor went off to visit his patients. His step had grown light, his face had lost its look of alert yet furtive dread. He looked twenty years younger. And no wonder. He no longer had to dodge Potter at every turn, and a big package of receipted bills, endorsed and dated, lay snugly in his desk, the fear of duns exorcised thereby. A man whose path has been impeded by the thick underbrush of debts he cannot settle, and who finds his obligations cancelled, may well walk gayly along the cleared and brightened roadway, hearing birds sing and seeing blue sky beaming above his head.

"Meek souls there are who little dream Their daily life an angel's theme, Nor that the rod they bear so calm In heaven may prove a martyr's palm."

Very much astonished at her reception, she is escorted up to the serene heights by tall seraphs, who treat her with the greatest reverence. By-and-by along comes a grand lady, one of Bridget's former employers. She just squeezes through the gate, and then,

"Down heaven's hill a radiant saint Comes flying with a palm, 'Are you here, Bridget O'Flaherty?' St. Bridget cries, 'Yes, ma'am.'

"'Oh, teach me Bridget, the manners, please, Of the royal court above,' 'Sure, honey dear, you'll aisy learn Humility and love.'"

I haven't time to tell you all about the entertainment, and there is no need. You, of course, belong to Tens or to needlework guilds or to orders of some kind, and if you are a member of the Order of the ROUND TABLE, why of course you are doing good in some way or other, and good which enables one to combine social enjoyment and a grand frolic; and the making of a purseful of gold and silver for a crippled boy, or an aged widow, or a Sunday-school in Dakota, or a Good-will Farm in Maine, is a splendid kind of good.

This chapter is about cements and rivets. It is also about the two little schoolmarms.

"Let us take Mrs. Vanderhoven's pitcher to town when we go to call on the judge with father," said Amy. "Perhaps it can be mended."

"It may be mended, but I do not think it will hold water again."

"There is a place," said Amy, "where a patient old German man, with the tiniest little bits of rivets that you can hardly see, and the stickiest cement you ever did see, repairs broken china. Archie was going to sell the pitcher. His mother had said he might. A lady at the hotel had promised him five dollars for it as a specimen of some old pottery or other. Then he leaped that hedge, caught his foot, fell, and that was the end of that five dollars, which was to have gone for a new lexicon and I don't know what else."

"It was a fortunate break for Archie. His leg will be as strong as ever, and we'll make fifty dollars by our show. I call such a disaster an angel in disguise."

"Mrs. Vanderhoven cried over the pitcher, though. She said it had almost broken her heart to let Archie take it out of the house, and she felt it was a judgment on her for being willing to part with it."

"Every one has some superstition, I think," said Amy.

Judge Hastings, a tall, soldierly gentleman with the bearing of a courtier, was delighted with the girls, and brought his three little women in their black frocks to see their new teachers.

"I warn you, young ladies," he said, "these are spoiled babies. But they will do anything for those they love, and they will surely love you. I want them thoroughly taught, especially music and dancing. Can you teach them to dance?"

He fixed his keen blue eyes on Grace, who colored under the glance, but answered bravely,

"Yes, Judge, I can teach them to dance and to play, not to count or to spell."

"I'll take charge of that part," said Amy, fearlessly.

Grace's salary was fixed at one thousand dollars, Amy's at four hundred, a year, and Grace was to come to her pupils three hours a day for five days every week, Amy one hour a day for five days.

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