there was the whole darned Tucker tribe -all but Molly. Ruby'd brought 'em in. The square was packed with 'em, men, women and children and dogs; the kids squalling in their mothers' arms and hanging onto their mothers' skirts. They'd never all been to town at one time before, and some of 'em hadn't never been to town in their lives. Out in the swamp they looked reasonable, but here in town, when they was all together, I must admit they was pretty wild and shaggy. But they were having a good time, laughing and singing and talking, and some of them were jigging and playing onto mouthorgans and Jews-harps. The whole of the townspeople was gathered around the square, too, looking at them. When they seen Ruby and Jason at the window half a dozen of them yells to him: 'Which way, Gran'pap, which way? What are we, Democrats or Republicans?'

"It ain't quite settled yet, which you be,' yells Jason. 'You just hold your

horses a minute.'

"There's two hundred and eleven votes out there,' says Ruby, 'waiting to find out whether they're Democrats or Republicans.'

"Let me see that license, Ruby,' says Bill Wilson.

"And Jake and me was the witnesses. "After the ceremony Jason steps to the window and yells out: 'You're Republicans!'

"Hooray! Hooray!' yells the Tucker tribe, laughin' and dancin' and jiggin' up and down and turnin' summersets and cartwheels, and the dogs jumpin' and barkin' in the street, as they moved

towards the polling-place. 'Hooray for Gran'pap! Hooray for the Republican party! Get out of our way, here comes the Republicans! Hooray! Get out of the way! The Republicans is comin'!'

"Well,' says Judge Bill Wilson, looking out the window after them, 'it may be they'll fix this election for me. But Molly will kill me on the next one!'

"Don't worry about the next one,' says Ruby. 'You had to take a chance, and you took it.' And then she says: 'If it ever was to happen that I was the richest woman in this county, I'd maybe help you run for Congress some time, Judge.'

666

'Come on now, old Teddy Bear,' she says to Jason, and be cheerful! Your swamp isn't going to be touched as long as you live. We'll get the tribe back home and pull a barbecue. You're all invited,' she says to us.

"It was two years after that old Jason was struck by lightnin' robbin' that crow's nest, for Ruby's kid and his. And when he died he left every acre to Ruby. She give every darned Tucker family forty acres, including Molly, and she sold the rest of it for enough to make herself a rich woman. As long as he lived she never let a ditch into that old peetryarch's swamp, nor an axe into his woods. She used to say to me: 'I'm kind o' crazy about old Santy Claus, Uncle Clem! He's like some old gazookus out of a story, Jason is.'

"Where is she now?" I asked.

"In Paris," said Mr. Hawley. "And from what I've hearn from time to time she still hearkens to the turtles singin', and she's still a-takin' chances."

ISS MARY MOODY EMERSON lived in her shroud. She had stitched it all herself, and when death refused to come she had put it on as a nightgown, then as a daygown. She was even seen on horseback once, in Concord, cantering through the village street, attired for the grave, with a scarlet shawl thrown about her shoulders. Miss Emerson was the daughter of the former minister of Concord who had died in the Revolution. She was a dwarf, four feet three inches tall, with a bold pinkish face, a blue flash in her eyes, and yellow hair cropped close under a mob-cap. She was short and erect as an adder about to strike. As an infant she had beheld from a window of the Old Manse the manoeuvres of the minutemen in the meadow by the bridge; but she had been left an orphan early, and for half a century, in 1840, she had drifted about the backcountry of Maine and Massachusetts, drifted from one rustic boarding-house to another, shaking her finger, for she was an autocrat and a prophetess, and as fiery as the pit. She was poor, obscure, uncomely, but an Emerson still, of the seed of the ruling caste, the child of six generations of a sovereign priesthood. Her fellow boarders observed that her thimble was bright and unworn. She used it not for sewing but as a seal. Night and day she wrote, wrote, wrote. Letters, an interminable diary, prayers, ejaculations, mystical dreams, asseverations, exalted and melancholy, of her submission to the Eternal. She could not sit, she could not sleep; a demon drove her pen. For she had survived, a witness of the lofty and terrible religion of John Calvin, to rebuke what she regarded as the poor, pale, unpoetical humanitarianism of the new day. Her voice was the voice of a sibyl, issuing from the caves of the past.

She was queerer than Dick's hatband. She was thought to have the power of ut

tering more disagreeable things in twenty minutes than any other person living. She kept pace with nobody; she had received, she said, the fatal gift of penetration, and her mission was to undermine the vanity of the shallow. Was some high matter broached in conversation? Did some rash suppliant invite Miss Emerson's opinion? "Mrs. Brown," the sibyl replied, "how's your cat?" Was some lady praised too warmly in her presence? She pricked the panegyric: "Is it a colored woman of whom you were speaking?" ("Give us peace in our boarders," she wrote on one occasion, and, when shown the misspelling, said it would do as it was.) She tore into a chaise or out of it, her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, into the house or out of it, into the conversation, the character of a stranger, disdaining all the gradations by which others timed their steps; and if she found that anything was dear and sacred to you, she instantly flung broken crockery at it. But her oddities were never designed; they sprang from her isolation, from a certain twist in her destiny. Of Talleyrand she said: “I fear he is not organized for a future state," and of another fallen angel: "What a poet would Byron have been if he had been bred a Calvinist!" But the Byrons and the Talleyrands were the darlings of her imagination. She loved life, she loved manners, beauty, distinction, genius. She was born to command, to dictate, to inspire. "For the love of superior virtue," she said, "is mine own gift from God." And who could have numbered the waste places of her journey, "the secret martyrdom of youth, heavier than the stake, the narrow limits which know no outlet, the bitter dregs of the cup?" Loving the world, the world that had passed her by, she had fallen in love with death; no "easeful death," but the flaming death of the saints. She had her bed made in the form of a coffin. She invoked the worms as the Beatrice who would lead her to paradise.

But death was not to be wheedled. "O

dear worms!" she wrote. "Most valuable companions!" They were deaf to Miss Emerson's entreaties; she was doomed to live. "Tedious indisposition," she noted in her diary. "Hoped, as it took a new form, it would open the cool sweet grave.' ." And again: "If one could choose, and without crime be gibbeted-were it not altogether better than the long drooping away by age without mentality or devotion?" But mentality and devotion she had; and, since she was obliged to give up the prospect of dying, she continued to live with a vengeance. She carried her shroud, like Saladin, into the battle. A bread-and-water diet; an inheritance of one hundred dollars, with a small share in a farm. She had to "finger the very farthing candle-ends"-the duty assigned to her pride. But poverty was the least of her cares; she had never felt pinched as a girl, with ten dollars a year "for clothes and charity." For the rest, "I could never have adorned the garden," Miss Emerson said. "I never expected connections and matrimony. My taste was formed in romance, and I knew I was not destined to please." So she baked and swept and carded, in her lonely retreats, and toiled away at Plato and Cicero's Letters. Not for her were "the pales of the initiated by birth, wealth, talents, and patronage. As a traveller enters some fine palace," she said, "and finds all the doors closed, and he only allowed the use of some avenues and passages, so have I wandered from the cradle over the apartments of social affections, or the cabinets of natural and moral philosophy, the recesses of ancient and modern lore." She knew Plotinus and Coleridge as well as she knew her Milton and Wordsworth and Madame de Staël. And she never lost faith that, some day, she would, in spite of all failures, know true friendship. For hers was "that greatest of gifts, the capacity to love the All-perfect." (Regardless of personal happiness. "Happiness? 'Tis itself.")

What rapturous hours she experienced in these long-drawn years of seclusion! "For culture," she wrote, "can solitude be spared? Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold obscure shelter where moult the eagle wings which will bear one farther than suns and stars." In her Thebaid in Maine

-a farm called "The Vale," where she boarded with her sister-she consorted with angels and archangels; she swam in her native element, "the fiery depths of Calvinism, with its high and mysterious elections to eternal bliss, and all its attendant wonders." To be "alive with God" was enough, to be able to "wake up the soul amid the dreary scenes of monotonous Sabbaths, when Nature looked like a pulpit." And in her passionate prayers, in her visions of the dying bed that would some day reflect lustre on her darkest fate, she apostrophized Eternity. No deceitful promises there, no fantastic illusions! No riddles concealed by the shrouds of loitering Time! None of Time's Arachnean webs, which decoy and destroy! No memory of defeats in virtue ! "We exist in Eternity," she wrote. "Dissolve the body and the night is gone, the stars are extinguished, and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of virtue, the approach to God. . . . The Gray-headed god (of Time) throws his shadows all around, and his slaves catch, now at this, now at that; one at the halo he throws around poetry, or pebbles, bugs or bubbles. Sometimes they climb, sometimes creep into the meanest holes-but they are all alike in vanishing, like the shadow of a cloud."

Hours of rapture, indeed! "How many stars," she exclaimed, "have set and risen, suns perhaps expired, and angels lost their glory, since I have droned in this place!" Had she missed so much, "cowering in the nest of quiet?" "Life truly resembles a river, ever the same, never the same. And perhaps a greater variety of internal emotions would be felt by remaining with books in one place, than pursuing the waves which are ever the same. Is the melancholy bird of night, covered with the dark foliage of the willow and cypress, less gratified than the gay lark amid flowers and suns? . . . 'Tis not in the nature of existence, while there is a God, to be without the pale of excitement." But sometimes she had her doubts. She remembered her visits to Boston, in the early years of the century, her brilliant brother William-Waldo's father-her nephews in their childhood. (Heirs of the shining world that she ad

mired from afar.) And then a longing-like despair was to her farthest cavern sent. And her old desire for the worm was not so greedy as to find herself once more in these pleasurable haunts.

The curtain rose before her. It was 1810: a Sunday evening in William's cheerful parlor. A tray stood on the sideboard, with decanters of wine and spirits, tumblers and glasses. There was William himself, the minister of the First Church of Boston, tall and fair, with his large,'expressive eyes, so graceful and bland in manner. The Anthology Club was as sembling; one by one the members were dropping in. There was William Ellery Channing, already famous at thirty, the little man with the flying pulse, whose sermons were like a mountain speaking. Judge Story was there; and the shaggy Daniel Webster, the lawyer from New Hampshire; and the smiling Buckminster, elegant in face and figure, with a voice such as Boston had never heard beforeBuckminster, of whom people were saying that he "celebrated the marriage of Unitarianism with literature." For these new Unitarian doctrines, cold and weak and thin, Miss Emerson felt nothing but scorn; but literature, ah, that was another matter! And literature was the burning topic at her brother's house. They were publishing a magazine, The Monthly Anthology, to "apply caustic and lancet to the disorders of the American press"; and they met to discuss the manuscripts over their supper. On "the merits of Gray as a poet.' On "Mr. Goethe's new novel." On "Dante Alighieri, an Italian bard." (What strange names were beginning to be heard in Boston!) They were ministers, for the most part, but the magazine was not to be destitute of the manners of a gentleman, nor a stranger to genteel amusements. It was going to take note of theatres, museums, balls, and whatever polite diversions the town might afford.

Miss Emerson thought of her forebears, the godly lives and deaths of her sainted kindred. Her brother was a new shoot on this old stem! How would Peter Bulkeley have regarded him-the founder of the line, the founder of the town of Concord, whose only care had been to "excel in holiness"? And Father Moody, of York, and Joseph Emerson, of Malden, and her father, William, of Concord, the Revolu

tionary chaplain? "Painful preachers" to a man, enthusiasts like herself, "wrestling scholars," they would never have known their blood in this genial worldling. To one, as he lay on his death-bed, the Angel of Death had appeared, tapping on the window, and he had bidden the frightened family open the door. Another, when some of his parishioners had risen to leave the church in the midst of the service, cried out: "Come back, you graceless sinners, come back!" And when they ventured into the tavern of a Saturday night, he had followed them, dragged them forth and driven them home. A third, when his house was burning, stood by and sang: "There is a house not made with hands." How sombre they were, how severe in their antique Hebraism! They were associated in Miss Emerson's mind with the Fates and the Eumenides, with Nemesis, with all that was grandest in the Greek mythology.

Times had certainly changed!-with these Boston ministers, sitting over their wine, discussing books from England. And yet Miss Emerson listened like a child. Not when they spoke of theology! (This counting and weighing of texts was beneath contempt. How cold it was, how formal! To think that the faith of Calvin had led to these pale negations!) But they talked about Byron and Wordsworth and "Paradise Lost," and how destitute America was of science and curious research. They were starting an Athenæum, and Buckminster had just come home from London and Paris with a whole shipful of treasures (Chalmers's "British Essayists," a set of the British poets, topographical works on ancient Greece and Rome, The Botanical Magazine, The Naval Chronicle, books in Italian and Spanish, dictionaries of all the modern tongues). William, whose orations warmed the hearts of the Federalists, had edited a collection of hymns, taking pains to exclude those in which the voice of poetry was silent. And Judge Story had published a poem of his own. A Handel and Haydn Society was in the air, and a gallery of painting and sculpture. A new spirit was coming over Boston. might almost have thought the Periclean Age was about to be born again.

One

Miss Emerson had her doubts about all these innovations, this babel of arts and

inventions. What sort of civilization was it going to produce? One thing only she knew: the world of her fiery forebears had vanished forever, and this new world lacked the grandeur that belonged to a Doric and unphilosophical age. But it thrilled her none the less. What vistas opened before her! A world of Madame de Staëls, a world such as the Greeks and Romans had known. And then she thought of her nephews, asleep in the nursery. With a race like theirs, and with all these opportunities, what a future lay before them! The majority, she said to herself, would ever be in swaddlings, but never the children of her own tragic line. They were to be Byrons and Talleyrands, too. No mere apes of men, no crawling sycophants, but spiritual monarchs after the ancestral pattern.

In later years Ralph Waldo Emerson looked back on his Aunt Mary as the strongest influence in his early education. She had fallen in love with her nephewswith himself, eight years old at the time of his father's death, and his brothers, Charles and Edward. William, the eldest, was perhaps too sober to interest her very much. (Though even of him Miss Emerson had hoped the best; and when, years later, he had sailed away to Germany to study theology, she had begged him to repay her long affection with "one single learned letter. .. When you come to the antient MSS.," she wrote, "the Hebrew, Syriac, and rabbinical language, then remember me!" But Charles the radiant, Edward the fervent, and Waldo, shy, slow, passive, but so winning and so responsive, were her special pride. They were never to travel, she had told them, with the souls of other men. They were born to bring fire and light to the race of mortals.

The true "aunt of genius," Emerson called her later. Her language was always happy-"as if caught from some dream," and with all her penetration she combined a wit that was "subtle, frolicsome, musical, unpredictable." She reminded him of "the wild horse of the desert, snuffing the sirocco and scouring the palm-grove." Her early talk he remembered as triumphant and infectious, like the "march of the mountain-winds, the waving of flowers, or the flight of birds." She, more than any

one else, with her fund of learning, had taught him to write; she had put him on his mettle, she had supervised his studies, exhorted, rebuked, incited him. With what fervor she had reproved him in his college days because Cæsar and Cicero stirred him more than the memory of his own Revolutionary grandfather! His ancestors were the constant theme of her discourse. Not praise, not men's acceptance of their doing, had absorbed their thought, but the Spirit's errand through them. They were, these Emersons of old, or so they had seemed to the boy as he listened, awe-struck, like the noble rockmaple tree which all around their villages bled for the service of man.

He had listened then, an obscure little boy, chubby, awkward, affectionate as a puppy, with a sluggish mind, a mind heavy and overcast, like a summer sky that is charged with electricity. He listened still, a man of middle age, whenever his Aunt Mary came to Concord, for she still seemed to him, as she seemed to Henry Thoreau, the "wittiest and most vivacious woman" living. Her visits were a divided joy, for she trampled on the common humanities all day long. "You must remember, dear," she said to Mrs. Emerson, "that you are among us but not of us." And when Mrs. Thoreau came to call upon her, wearing her cap with long yellow ribbons and still longer bonnetribbons, she took this lady to task. "You may have noticed, Mrs. Thoreau," she said, "that while we were speaking of your admirable son I kept my eyes shut.""Yes, madam, I have noticed it."—"It was because I did not wish to look upon those ribbons of yours, so unsuitable at your time of life and to a person of your serious character." But who was more amusing at the tea-table? Oh, no, she never took tea. But she asked for a little cocoa. The cocoa came, and she took it because it was soothing, and put a little tea in it to make her lively; and if there was a little coffee, that was good for getting rid of the taste. Miss Emerson believed in medicine; she never threw any away, and if she found some drops of laudanum here and a pill or two there, a little quinine and a little antimony, she mixed them up and swallowed them all together.