"
Her mother's health, which always had been perfect, broke about the
time of the author's first remembrance due to typhoid fever
contracted after nursing three of her children through it. She
lived for several years, but with continual suffering, amounting at
times to positive torture.
So it happened, that led by impulse and aided by an escape from the
training given her sisters, instead of "sitting on a cushion and
sewing a fine seam"--the threads of the fabric had to be counted
and just so many allowed to each stitch!--this youngest child of
a numerous household spent her waking hours with the wild. She
followed her father and the boys afield, and when tired out slept
on their coats in fence corners, often awaking with shy creatures
peering into her face. She wandered where she pleased, amusing
herself with birds, flowers, insects, and plays she invented. "By
the day," writes the author, "I trotted from one object which
attracted me to another, singing a little song of made-up phrases
about everything I saw while I waded catching fish, chasing
butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird with a hair in
its beak; much of the time I carried the inevitable baby for a
woman-child, frequently improvised from an ear of corn in the silk,
wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets."
She had a corner of the garden under a big Bartlett pear tree for
her very own, and each spring she began by planting radishes and
lettuce when the gardening was done; and before these had time to
sprout she set the same beds full of spring flowers, and so
followed out the season.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25