Chapter XII.

THE Draytons and the Davenants

INTRODUCTORY.

Yesterday at noon, when the house and all the land were still, and the men, with the lads and lasses, were away at the harvesting, and I sat alone, with barred doors, for fear of the Indians (who have of late shown themselves unfriendly), I chanced to look up from my spinning-wheel through the open window, across the creek on which our house stands. And something, I scarce know what, carried me back through the years and across the seas to the old house on the borders of the Fen Country, in the days of my childhood. It may have been the quiet rustling of the sleepy air in the long grasses by the water-side that wafted my spirit back to where the English winds sigh and sough among the reeds on the borders of the fens; it may have been the shining of the smooth water, furrowed by the track of the water-fowl, that set my memory down beside the broad Mere, whose gleam we could see from my chamber window. It may have been the smell of this year's hay, which came in in sweet, soft gusts through the lattice, that floated me up to the top of the tiny haystack, made of the waste grass in the orchard at old Netherby Manor, at the foot of which Roger, my brother, used to stand while I turned up the hay, assisted by our Cousin Placidia (when she was condescending), and by our Aunt Gretel, my mother's sister, whenever we had need of her. Most probably it was the hay. For, as the excellent Mr. Bunyan has illustriously set forth in his work on the Holy War, the soul hath five gates through which she holdeth parlance with the outer world. And correspondent with these outer gates from the sensible world in space, meseemeth, are as many inner gates into the inner, invisible world of thought and time; which inner gates open simultaneously with the outer, by the same spring. But of all the mystic springs which unlock the wondrous inward world, none act with such swift, secret magic as those of the Gate of Odors. There stealeth in unobserved some delicate perfume of familiar field flower or garden herb, and straightway, or ere she is aware, the soul is afar off in the world of the past, gathering posies among the fields of childhood, or culling herbs in the old corner of the old garden, to be laid, by hands long since cold, in familiar chambers long since tenanted by other owners.

Wherefore, I deem, it was the new, sweet smell of our New England hay which more than anything carried me back to the old house in Old England, and the days so long gone by.

With my heart in far-off days, I continued my spinning, as women are wont, the hand moving the more swiftly for the speed wherewith the thoughts travel, until my thoughts and my work came to a pause together by the flax on my distaff being exhausted. I went to an upper chamber for a fresh stock, and while there my eye lighted on an old chest, in the depths whereof lay many little volumes of an old journal written by my hand through a series of buried years.

An irresistible attraction drew me to them; and as I knelt before the old chest, and turned over these yellow leaves, in some cases, eaten with worms, and read the writing--the earlier portions of it in large, laborious, childish characters, as if each letter were a solemn symbol of weighty import--the later scrawled hastily in the snatched intervals of a busy and tangled life--I seemed to be looking through a series of stained windows into the halls of an ancient palace. On the windows were the familiar portraits of a little eager girl, and a young maiden familiar to me, yet strange. But the paintings were also window-panes; and, after the first glance, the painted panes seemed to vanish, and I saw only the palace chambers on which they looked. Not empty chambers, or shadowy, or silent, but solid, and fresh, and vivid, and full of the stir of much life; so that, when I laid down those old pages, and looked out through the declining light over these new shores, across this new sea, towards the far-off England which still lives beyond, it seemed for a moment as if the sun setting behind the wide western woods, the strip of golden corn-fields, the reapers returning slowly over the hill, the Indian burial-mounds beside the creek, the trim new house, my old quiet self, were the shadows, and that Old World, in which my spirit had been sojourning, still the living and the real.

Neighbor Hartop's cheery voice roused me out of my dream, and I hurried down to open the door, and to set out the harvest supper.

But as I look at the old crumpled papers again to-day, the past lives again once more before me, and I will not let it die.

There is an hour in the day when the sun has set, and all the dazzle of day is gone, and the dusk of night has not set in, when I think the world looks larger and clearer than at any other time. The sky seems higher and more heavenly than at other hours; and yet the earth, tinted here and there on its high places with heavenly color, seems more to belong to heaven. The little landscape within our horizon becomes more manifestly a portion of a wider world. And is there not such an hour in life? Before it passes let me use the light, and fix in my mind the scenes which will so soon vanish into dreams and silence.

The first entry in those old journals of mine is:

"_The twenty-eighth day of March, in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and thirty-seven._--On this day, twelve years since, King Charles was proclaimed King at Whitehall Gate, and in Cheapside; the while the rain fell in heavy showers. My father heard the herald; and my Aunt Dorothy well remembers the rain, because it spoiled a slashed satin doublet of my father's (the last he ever bought, having since then been habited more soberly); also because many of the people said the weather was of evil promise for the new reign. But father saith that is a superstitious notion, unworthy of Christian people.

"Also my father was present at the king's coronation, on the 5th of February in the following year. Our French Queen would not enter the Abbey on account of her Popish faith. When the king was presented bareheaded to the people, all were silent, none crying God save the King, until the Earl of Arundel bade them; which my father saith was a worse omen than if the clouds poured down rivers."

These in large characters, each letter formed with conscientious pains.

The second entry is diverse from the first. It runs thus:

"_April the tenth._--The brindled cow hath died, leaving an orphan calf. Aunt Gretel saith I may bring up the calf for my own, with the help of Tib the dairy-woman."

The diversity between these entries recalls many things to me. On the day before the first entry, father brought to Roger my brother, my Cousin Placidia, and me, three small books stitched neatly together, and told us these were for us to use to note down any remarkable events therein. "For," said he, "we live in strange and notable times, and you children may see things before you are grown, yea, and perchance do or suffer such things as history is made of."

The stipulation was, that we were each to write independently, and not to borrow from the other; which was a hard covenant for me, who seldom then meditated or did anything without the co-operation or sanction of Roger.

After much solitary pondering, therefore, I arrived at the conclusion that history especially concerns kings and queens, and lesser people only as connected with them. That is, when there are kings and queens. In the old Greek history I remembered there were heroes who were not kings, but I supposed they did instead. But the English history was all made up of what happened to the kings. One was shot while hunting; another was murdered at Berkeley Castle; the little princes were smothered in the Tower. King Edward III. gained a great victory at Creçy in France; King Henry V. gained another at Agincourt. Of course other people were concerned in these things. Sir Walter Tyrrel shot the arrow by accident that killed King William, and some wicked people must have murdered King Edward and the little princes on purpose. And, of course, there were armies who helped King Edward and King Henry to gain their victories; but none of these people would have been in history, I thought, except as connected with the kings. At the same time I thought it was of no use to relate things which no one belonging to me had had anything to do with, because any one else could have done that without my taking the trouble to write a note-book at all. Therefore it seemed to me that my father, and even my father's slashed satin doublet, fairly became historical by having been present at the King's proclamation, and Aunt Dorothy by having commented thereon.

The second entry was caused by an entirely different theory of history, having its origin in a talk with Roger. Roger said that we never can tell what things are historical until afterwards, and that therefore the only way was to note down what honestly interests us. If these things prove afterwards to be things which interest the world, our story of them becomes part of the world's story, and, as such, history to the people who care for us. But to note down feeble echoes of far-off great events, in which we think we ought to be interested, is no human speech at all, Roger thought, but mere monkey's imitative chattering. Every one, Roger thinks, sees everything just a little differently from any one else, and therefore if every one would describe truly the little bit they do see, in that way, by degrees, we might have a perfect picture. But to copy what others have seen is simply to depart with every fresh copy a little further from the original. If, for instance, said he, the nurse of Julius Cæsar had told us nursery stories of what Julius Cæsar did when he was a little boy, it would have been history; but the opinions of Julius Cæsar's nurse on the politics of the Roman republic would probably not have been history at all, but idle tattle.

With respect to kings and queens being the only true subjects for history, also, Roger was very scornful. He had lately been paying a visit to Mr. John Hampden, Mr. Oliver Cromwell, and others of my father's friends, and he had returned full of indignation against the tyranny of the court and the prelates. The nation, he said wise men thought, was not made for the king, but the king for the nation. And, to say nothing of the Greek history, the Bible history was certainly not filled up with kings and queens, but with shepherds, herdsmen, preachers, and soldiers; or if with kings, with kings who had been shepherds and soldiers, and who were saints and heroes as well as kings.

All which reasoning decided me to make my next entry concerning the calf of the brindled cow, which at that time was the subject in the world which honestly interested me the most. If my father, or Roger, or Cousin Placidia, or Aunt Gretel, ever became historical personages (and, as Roger said, who could tell?), then anecdotes concerning the calf of the cow which my father owned and Aunt Gretel cherished, and which Cousin Placidia thought it childish to care so much about, might become, in a secondary sense, historical also. At all events, I resolved I would not be like Julius Cæsar's nurse, babbling of politics.

The next entry was:

"_August_ 4, 1637.--Dr. Antony has spent the evening with us, and is to remain some days, at father's entreaty, to recruit his strength; Aunt Dorothy having knowledge of medicinal herbs, and Aunt Gretel of savory dishes, which may be of use to him. He hath narrowly escaped the jail-sickness, having of late visited many afflicted good people in the prisons through the country, as is his custom. 'Sick and in prison,' Dr. Antony saith, 'and ye visited me,' is plain enough to read by the dimmest light, whatever else is hard to understand. He told us of two strange things which happened lately. At least they seem very strange to me.

"In the Palace Yard at Westminster, on the 30th of last June (while Roger and I were making hay in the pleasant sunshine of the orchard), Dr. Antony saw three gentlemen stand in the pillory. The pillory is a wooden frame set up on a platform, where wicked people are fastened helplessly like savage dogs, with their heads and hands coming through holes, to make them look ridiculous, that people may mock and jeer at them. But father and Dr. Anthony did not think these gentlemen wicked, only at worst a little hasty in speech. And the people did not think them ridiculous; they did not mock and jeer at them, but kept very still, or wept. Their names were Mr. Prynne, a gentleman at the bar, Dr. John Bastwick, a physician; and Mr. Burton, a clergyman of a parish in London. There they stood many hours while the hangman came to each of them in turn and sawed off their ears with a rough knife, and then burnt in two cruel letters on their cheeks, S.L., for seditious libeler. Dr. Anthony did not say the three gentlemen made one cry or complaint, but bore themselves like brave men. But the bravest of all, I think, was Mrs. Bastwick, the doctor's wife. She stayed on the scaffold, and bore to see all her husband's pain without a word or moan, lest she should make him flinch, and then received his ears in her lap, and kissed his poor wounded face before all the people. Sweet, brave heart! I would fain have her home amongst us here, and kiss her faithful hands like a queen's, and lay my head on her brave heart, as if it were my mother's! The sufferers made no moan; but the people broke their pitiful silence once with an angry shout, and many times with low, hushed groans, as if the pain and shame were theirs (Dr. Anthony said), and they would remember it. And Mr. Prynne, when the irons were burning his face, said to the executioner, 'Cut me, tear me, I fear not thee; I fear the fire of hell.' Mr. Burton spoke to the people of God and his truth, and how it was worth while to suffer rather than give up that. And at last he nearly fainted, but when he was borne away into a house near, he said, with good cheer, 'It is too hot to last.' (He meant the persecution.) But the three gentlemen are now shut up in three prisons--in Launceston, Lancaster, and Caernarvon. And father and Dr. Antony say it is Archbishop Laud who ordered it all to be done. But could not the king have stopped it if he liked?

"But will Roger and I ever turn over the hay again in the pleasant June sunshine, without thinking how it burned down on those poor, maimed and wounded gentlemen? And one day I do hope I may see brave Mistress Bastwick and tell her how I love and honor her, and how the thought of her will help me to be brave and patient more than a hundred sermons.

"Dr. Antony's other story was of one Jenny or Janet Geddes, not a gentlewoman, for she kept an apple stall in Edinburgh streets, and, moreover, does not appear to have used good language at all. The Scotch, it seems, do not like bishops, and, indeed, will not have bishops. But Archbishop Laud and the king will make them. On Sunday, the 23d of last July, a month since, one of Archbishop Laud's bishops began the collect for the day in St. Giles's Cathedral, Edinburgh. Jenny Geddes had brought her folding stool (on which she sat by her apple stall, I suppose) into the church, and when the bishop came out in his robes (which Archbishop Laud likes of many colors, while the Scotch, it seems, will have nothing but black), she took up her stool and flung it at the bishop's head, calling the service, the mass and the bishop a thief, and wishing him very ill wishes in a curious Scottish dialect, which, I suppose, I do not quite understand; for it sounded like swearing, and if Jenny Geddes was a good woman (although not a gentlewoman) she would scarcely, I should think, swear, at least not in church. Whether the bishop was hurt or not, no one seems to know or care. I suppose the stool did not reach his head. But it stopped the service. For all the people rose in great fury, not against Jenny Geddes, but against the bishop, and the archbishop, and the prayer-book, and against all bishops and all prayers in books, not in Edinburgh only, but throughout the land. Which shows, father said, that a great deal of angry talk had been going on beforehand in the streets around Jenny Geddes' apple stall. There must always be some angry person, father said, to throw the folding stool, but no one heeds the angry person unless there is something to be angry about."

A very long entry, which lost me many hours and many pages.

And about the passages in my own history which it led to, not a word. Indeed, throughout these journals I notice that it is more what they recall than what they say which brings back the past to me. I wonder if it is not thus with most diaries. For to keep to Roger's rule of writing the things which really interest us at the time seems to me scarcely possible; because at the time we scarcely know what things are most deeply interesting us, and if we do, they are the very things we cannot write about. Underneath the things we see and think and speak about are the great, dim, silent places out of which we ourselves are growing into being, and where God is at work. The things we are beginning to see we can not see, the things we are feeling without knowing what we feel, the dim, struggling thoughts we cannot utter or even think. Without form and void is the state of a world being created. When the world is created, the creation is a history, and can be written. While it is being created, it is chaos, and from without can only be described as without form and void--from within, in the chaos, not at all. The Creator only understands chaos, and knows the chaos before the new creation from the mere waste and ruin of the old.

To understand the past is only partly possible for the wisest men.

To understand the present is only possible to God.

Because to understand the present would be to foresee the future. To see through the chaos would be to foresee the new creation.

Wherefore it seems to me all diaries are of value not as records, but as suggestions. And all self-examination resolves itself at last into prayer, saying, "What I see not, teach Thou me."

"Search me and try me, and see Thou, and lead Thou me."

The passages in my history that this story of Dr. Antony led to, arise before me as clearly as if they happened yesterday, although in the Journal not a hint of them is given.

The Sunday after Dr. Antony had told us those terrible things about the sufferings in the pillory, Roger and I had gone to our usual Sunday afternoon perch in an apple-tree in the corner of the orchard furthest from the house. We had taken with us for our contemplation a very terrible delineation, which was the nearest approach to a picture Aunt Dorothy would let us have on the Sabbath-day. This she permitted us, partly, I believe, because it was not the likeness of anything in heaven or earth (nor, I hope, under the earth), and partly on account of the very awful thoughts it was calculated to inspire.

It was a huge branching thing like our old family tree. But at the root of the tree, where would be the name of Adam or Noah, or Æneas of Troy, or Cassibelaun, or whoever else was recognized as the head of the family, stood the sacred name of the Holy Trinity. From this trunk forked off two leading branches, one representing the wicked and the other the just, with the words written along them to show that the very same mercies and means of grace which produce repentance and faith and love in the hearts of the just, produce bitterness and false security and hatred of God in the hearts of the wicked. Further and further the branches diverged until one ended in an angel with wings, and the other in a mouth of a horrible hobgoblin with a whale's mouth, a dragon's claws, and a lion's teeth, and both were united by the lines,--

"Whether to heaven or hell you bend, God will have glory in the end."*

* A similar tree is to be seen in the beginning of Bunyan'a Pilgrim's Progress, in the edition of 1698.

Most terrible was this delineation to me, sitting that sunny autumn day in the apple-tree, especially because if you were once on the wrong branch, it was not at all pointed out how you were ever to get on the right. All seemed as irrevocable and inevitable as that point in our own pedigree where Edwy, the eldest son, became a Benedictine monk and vanished into a thin flourish, and Walter, the second son, married Adalgiva, heiress of Netherby Manor, and branched off into us. And it looked so terribly (with unutterable terror I felt it) as if it mattered as little to the Holy Trinity what became of any one of us, as to Cassibelaun or Noah what became of his descendants, Edwy or Walter.

So it happened that Roger and I sat very awe-stricken and still in our perch in the apple-tree, while the wind fluttered the green leaves around us, and the sunbeams ripened the rosy apples for their work, and then danced in and out on the grass below for their play. And I remember as if it were yesterday how the thought shuddered through my heart, that the same sun which was shining on Roger and me, on that last 30th of June, making hay in the orchard, was at that very same moment scorching those poor wounded gentlemen in the pillory in the Palace Yard, and not losing a whit of its glory to us by all the anguish it was inflicting, like a blazing furnace, on them. And if this fearful tree were true, did it not seem as if it were the same with God?

I sat some time silent under the weight of this dread. It made me shiver with cold in the sunshine, and at length I could keep it in no longer, and said to Roger, in a whisper, for I was half afraid to hear my own words,--

"Oh, Roger, why did not God kill the devil?"

At that moment something shook the tree, and I clung to Roger in terror. I could not see what it was from among the thick leaves where we were sitting. I trembled at the echo of my own voice. The dark thoughts within seemed to have brought night with its nameless terrors into the heart of day. But Roger leant down from the branch, and said,--

"Cousin Placidia! For shame! You shook the tree on purpose. I heard the apples fall on the ground, and you are picking them up. That is cheating."

For the fallen fruit was the right of us, children.

Said Placidia in a smooth, unmoved voice,--

"I came against the stem of the tree by accident, and perhaps I did shake it a little more than I need, when I heard what Olive said. They were very wicked words, and I shall tell Aunt Dorothy."

"You may tell any one you like," said Roger indignantly. "Olive did not mean to say anything wrong. You are cruel enough to sit in the Star-chamber, Placidia."

"She is exactly like our gray cat," he continued to me, as she glided away, "with her soft, noiseless ways, and her stealthy, steady following of her own interests. When the fowl-house was burnt down last year, and the turkeys were screaming, and the hens cackling, and every one flying hither and thither trying to save somebody or something, I saw the gray cat quietly licking her lips in a corner over a poor singed chicken. I believe she thought the whole thing had been set on foot to roast her supper. And Placidia would have done precisely the same. If London were on fire, and she in it, I believe she would contrive to get her supper roasted on the cinders. And the provoking thing is, she thinks no one sees."

Roger was not often vehement in speech, but Placidia was our standing grievance, his and mine. There were certain little unfairnesses, not quite cheating, certain little meannesses, not quite dishonesties, and certain little prevarications, not quite lies, which always excited his greatest wrath, especially when, as often happened, I was the loser or the sufferer by them.

"Do you think she will tell Aunt Dorothy?" I said, for that very morning Placidia and I had had a quarrel, she having pinched my arm where it could not be seen, and I having to my shame bitten her finger where it could be seen.

"I don't know, and I don't care," said Roger loftily. "What is the good of minding? I suppose we must all go through a certain quantity of punishment, Olive, and it is to be hoped it will do us good for the future, if we did not deserve it by the past. At least Aunt Dorothy says so. Go on with what you were saying."

So I recurred to my question.

"Oh, Roger, I wish I knew why God did not destroy the devil in the beginning, or at least not let him come into the garden. Because, then, nothing would have gone wrong, would it? Eve would not have eaten the fruit, Mr. Prynne and Dr. Bastwick would not have been set in the pillory. And I should not, most likely, have quarrelled with Placidia, because, I suppose, Placidia would not have been provoking."

"I wish I knew why my Father lets Cousin Placidia live with us, and always be making us do wrong," said Roger.

"She is an orphan, and some one must take care of her, you know," I said. "Besides, surely, Father has reasons, only we don't always know."

"And I suppose God has reasons," said Roger reverently, "only we don't always know."

"But the devil is all bad," said I, "and will never be better; and Cousin Placidia may. It could not be for the devil's own sake God did not kill him, for he only gets worse; and I do not see how it could be for ours."

"The devil was not always the devil, Olive," said Roger, after thinking a little while. "He was an angel at first."

"Then, O Roger," said I eagerly, for the perplexity lay heavy on my heart, "why did not God stop the devil from ever being the devil? That would have been better than anything."

Roger made no reply.

"It cannot be because God could not," I pursued, "because Aunt Dorothy says He can do everything. And it cannot be because He would not, because Aunt Gretel says He hates to see any one do wrong or be unhappy. But there must be some reason; and if we only knew it, I think everything else would become quite plain."

"I do not see the reason, Olive," said Roger, after a long pause. "I cannot see it in the least. I remember hearing two or three people discuss it once with Father and Aunt Dorothy; and I think they all thought they explained it. But no one thought any one else did. And they used exceedingly long and learned words, longer and more learned the further they went on. But they could not agree at all, and at last they became angry, so that I never heard the end. But in two or three years, you know, I am going to Oxford, and then I will try and find out the reason. And when I have found it out, Olive, I will be sure to tell you."

"But that is not at all the most perplexing thing to me, Olive," he began, after a little silence; "because, after all, if we or the angels were to be persons and not things, I don't see how it could be helped that we might do wrong if we liked. The great puzzle to me is, why we do anything, or if we can help doing anything we do; that is, if we are really persons at all, and not a kind of puppets."

"Of course we are not puppets, Roger," said I. "Of course we can help doing things if we like. I do not think that is any puzzle at all. I could have helped biting Placidia's finger if I had liked--that is, if I had tried. And that is what makes it wrong."

"But you did not like it," said Roger, "and so you did not help it. And what was to make you like to help it, if you did not?"

"If I had been good, I should not have liked to hurt Placidia, however provoking she was," I said.

"And what is to be good?" said he.

"To like to do right," I said. "I think that is to be good."

"But what is to make you like to do right?"

"Being good, to be sure," said I, feeling myself helplessly drawn into the whirlpool.

"That is going round and round, and coming to nothing," said Roger. "But leaving alone about right and wrong, what is to make you do anything?"

"Because I choose," said I, "or some one else chooses."

"But what makes you choose?" said he. "What made you choose, for instance, to come here this afternoon?"

"Because you wished it, and because it was a fine afternoon; and we always do when it is," said I.

"Then you chose it because of something in you which makes you like to please me, and because the sun was shining. Neither of which you could help; therefore you did not really choose at all."

"I _did_ choose, Roger," said I. "I might have felt cross, and chosen to disappoint you, if I had liked."

"But you are not cross; you are good-tempered, on the whole, so you could not help liking to please me."

"But I am cross sometimes with Placidia," I said.

"That is because, as Aunt Gretel says, your temper is like what our mother's was, quick but sweet," said he; "and that is a deeper puzzle still, because it goes further back than you and your character, to our mother's character, that is to say; and if to hers, no one can say how much further, probably as far as Eve."

"But sometimes," said I, "for instance, when you talk like this, my temper is tempted to be cross even with you, Roger. But I choose to keep my temper, and it must be I myself that choose, and not my temper or my mother's."

"That is because of the two motives, the one which inclines you to keep your temper is stronger than the one which inclines you to lose it," said he. "But there is always something before your choice to make you choose, so that really you must choose what you do, and therefore you do not really choose at all."

"But I do choose, Roger," said I. "I choose this instant to jump down from this tree--so--and go home."

"That proves nothing," said he, following me down from the tree with provoking coolness; "you chose to jump down, because there is a wilful feeling in you which made you choose it, and that is part of your character, and probably can be traced back to Eve, and proves exactly what I say."

"I am not free to do right or wrong, or anything, Roger!" I said. "Then I might as well be a cat, or a tree, or a stone."

"I suppose you might, if you were," said Roger drily.

"Is there no way out of the puzzle, Roger?" I said.

"I do not see any," he said; "at least not by thinking. But there seems to me no end to the puzzles, if one begins to think."

He did not seem to mind it at all, but rather to enjoy it, as if it were a mere tossing of mental balls and catching them.

But I, on the other hand, was in great bewilderment and heaviness, for I felt like being a ball myself, tossed helplessly round and round, without seeing any beginning or end to it, and it made me very unhappy.

We came back to the house at supper-time with a vague sense of some judgment hanging over our heads. Aunt Dorothy met us in the porch with a switch in her hand.

"Naughty children," said she, "Placidia says she heard you using profane language in the apple-tree, taking God's holy name in vain."

"I was not speaking so much of God, Aunt Dorothy," said I in confusion, "as of the devil."

"Worse again," said Aunt Dorothy, "that is swearing downright. It is as bad as the cavaliers at the Court. Hold out your hand, Roger; and, Olive, go to bed without supper."

Roger scorned any self-defence. He held out his hand, and received three sharp switches without flinching. Only at the end he said,--

"Now I shall tell my father how Placidia stole the apples and get justice done to Olive."

"You will tell your father nothing, sir," said Aunt Dorothy. "I have sent Placidia to bed three hours ago for tale-bearing, and given her the chapter in the Proverbs to learn. And you will sit down and learn the same, and both of you say it to me to-morrow morning before breakfast."

This was what Aunt Dorothy considered even-handed justice. Time, she said, was too precious to spend in searching out the rights of children's quarrels, and human nature being depraved as it is, all accusations had probably some ground of truth, and all accusers some wrong motive. And in all quarrels there is always, said she, fault on both sides. She therefore punished accused and accuser alike, without further investigation. I have observed something of the same plan pursued since by some persons who aspire to the character of impartial historians. But it never struck me as quite fair in the historians or in Aunt Dorothy. However, I must say, in Aunt Dorothy's case, this mode of administering justice had a tendency to check accusations. It must have been an unusually strong desire of vengeance, or sense of wrong, which induced us to draw up an indictment which was sure to be visited with equal severity on plaintiff and defendant. And although our sense of justice was not satisfied, and Roger and I in consequence formed ourselves into a permanent Committee of Grievances, the peace of the household was perhaps on the whole promoted by the system. The embittering effects were, moreover, softened in our case by the presence of other counteracting elements.

I had not been long in bed according to the decrees of Justice in the person of Aunt Dorothy, when Mercy, in the person of Aunt Gretel, came to bind up my wounds.

"Olive, my little one," said she, sitting down on the side of my bed, "what hast thou been saying? Thou wouldst not surely say anything ungrateful against the dear Lord and Saviour?"

Whereupon I buried my face in the bed-clothes, and sobbed so that the bed shook under me.

She took my hand, and bending over me, said tenderly,--

"Poor little one! Thou must not break thy heart. The good Lord will forgive, Olive, will forgive all. Tell me what it is, darling, and don't be afraid."

Still I sobbed on, when she said,--

"If thou canst not tell me, tell the dear Saviour. He is gentler than poor Aunt Gretel, and knows thee better. Only do not be afraid of Him, nothing grieves Him like that, sweet heart; anything but that."

Then I grew a little calmer, and moaned out,--

"Indeed, Aunt Gretel, I did not mean anything wicked. But it is so hard to understand. There are so many things I cannot make out. And oh, if I should be on the wrong side of the tree after all! If I should be on the wrong side of the tree!"

And at the thought my sobs burst forth afresh.

Aunt Gretel was sorely perplexed. She said--

"What tree, little one? Where is thy poor brain wandering?"

"The tree with God at the beginning," said I, "and with heaven at one end and hell at the other, and no way to cross over if once you get wrong, and God never seeming to mind."

"A very wicked tree," said Aunt Gretel. "I never heard of it. The only tree in the Bible is the Tree of Life. And of that the Blessed Lord will give freely to every one who comes--the fruit for life and the leaves for healing. Never mind the other, sweet heart."

"If there were only a way across!" said I, "and if I could be sure God did care!"

"There is a way across, my lamb," said she. "Only it is not a way. It is but a step. It is a look. It is a touch. For the way across is the blessed Saviour Himself. And He is always nearer than I am now, if you could only see."

"And God does care," said I, "whether we are lost or saved?"

"Care! little Olive," said she. "Hast thou forgotten the manner and the cross? That comes of trying to see back to the beginning. _He_ was in the beginning, sweet heart, but not thou or I! He is the beginning every day and for ever to us. Look to Him. His face is shining on you now, watching you tenderly as if it were your mother's, my poor motherless lamb. Whatever else is dark, that is plain. And you never meant to grieve or question Him! You did not mean to say the darkness was in Him, Olive! You never meant that. Put the darkness anywhere but there, sweet heart--anywhere but there. There is darkness enough, in good sooth. But in Him is no darkness at all." And then she murmured, half to herself, "It is very strange, Dr. Luther made it all so plain, more than a hundred years ago. And it seems as if it all had to be done over again."

"Didst thou say thy prayers, my lamb?" she added.

I had. But it was sweet to kneel down with Aunt Gretel again, with her arms and her warm dress folded around me, and say the words after her, the Our Father, and the prayer for father and Roger and all.

But when I came to ask a blessing on Cousin Placidia, my lips seemed unable to frame the words.

"Thou didst not pray for thy cousin, Olive," said Aunt Gretel.

"She is so very difficult to love, Aunt Gretel," said I; "she often makes me do wrong. And I bit her finger this morning."

Aunt Gretel shook her head.

"Poor little one," said she, "ah, yes! It is always hardest to forgive those we have hurt."

"But she pinched my arm where no one could see," said I.

"It will not help thee to think of that, poor lamb," said Aunt Gretel, "what thou hast to do is to forgive. Think of what will help thee to do that."

"I can't think of anything that helps me," said I.

"Dost thou wish anything bad to happen to thy cousin?" said Aunt Gretel, after a pause. "If thou couldst bring trouble on her by praying for it, wouldst thou do it?"

"No, not from God," said I. "Of course I could not ask anything bad from God."

"Then wouldst thou ask thy father to send her away, poor neglected orphan child that she was?"

"No, no, Aunt Gretel," I said, "not that. But I should like to see her punished by Aunt Dorothy."

"How much?" said Aunt Gretel.

"I am not sure. Only as much as she quite deserves."

"That would be a good deal for us all," said she; "perhaps even for thee a little more than going to bed one night without supper."

"Then until she was good," said I.

"Thou wishest thy cousin to be good, then?" said Aunt Gretel. "Then thou canst at least pray for that."

"It would make the house like the Garden of Eden, I think," I said, "before the tempter came, if Placidia were only not so provoking."

"Would it?" said she, gravely. "Art thou then always so good? Then, perhaps, thou canst ask that thy cousin's trespasses may be forgiven, even if _thou_ canst not forgive her, and hast _none of thine own_ to be forgiven!"

"O, Aunt Gretel." said I, suddenly perceiving her meaning, "I see it all now! It is the bit of ice in my own heart that made everything dark and cold to me. It is the bit of ice in my own heart!"

She smiled and folded me to her heart.

And then she prayed once more for Placidia the orphan, and for me, and Roger, "that God in His great pity would bless us and forgive us, and make us good and loving, and like Himself and His dear Son who suffered for us and bore our sins."

And after that I did not so much care even whether Roger brought the answer he promised from Oxford or not.

And it flashed on me for an instant, as if the answer to Roger's other puzzle might come somehow from the same point; as if it answered everything to the heart to think that light and not darkness, love and not necessity, are at the innermost heart of all. For love is at once perfect freedom and inevitable necessity.

But before I fell asleep, while Aunt Gretel was still sitting on the bedside with her knitting, I heard her say to herself--

"Not so very strange--not so strange after all, although Dr. Luther did make it all clear as sunshine more than a hundred years ago. It is that bit of ice in the heart, that bit of ice that is always freezing afresh in the heart."

But Aunt Dorothy, on a night's consideration, thought the affair of the apple-tree too important to be passed over, as most of our childish quarrels were, without troubling my father about them.

Accordingly the next morning we were summoned into my father's private room, where he received his rents as a landlord, and sentenced offenders as a magistrate, and kept his law-books, and many other great hereditary folios on divinity, philosophy, and things in general. A very solemn proceeding for me that morning, my conscience oppressed with a sense of having done some wrong intentionally, and I knew not how much more without intending it.

Gradually, Roger and I standing on the other side of the table, with the law-books and the mathematical instruments my father was so fond of between us, he drew from us what had been the subject of our conversation.

Then, to my surprise, as we stood awaiting our sentence, he called me gently to him, and, seating me on his knee, pointed out a paper spread on a huge folio volume, which lay open before him. It was a diagram of the sun and the planets, with the four moons of Jupiter, the earth and the moon, complicated by circles and lines mysteriously intersecting each other.

"Olive," said he, "be so good as to explain that to me. It is made by a gentleman who learned about it from the great astronomer Galileo, and is meant to explain how the earth and the sun are kept in their places." I looked at the complication of figures and lines and magical-looking signs, and then in his face to see what he could mean.

"You do not understand it?" he said, as if he were surprised.

"Father," said I, "a little child like me!"

"And yet this is only a drawing of a little corner of the world, Olive--the sun and the earth and a few of the planets in the nook of the world in which we live. The whole universe is a good deal harder to understand than this."

"Father," said I, ashamed and blushing, "indeed I never thought I could understand these things--at least not yet; I only thought you might, or some wise people somewhere."

"Olive," said he, in a low voice, tenderly and reverently, stroking my head while he spoke, "before the great mysteries you and Roger have fallen on, I can only wonder, and wait, and say like you, '_Father, a little child like me!_' And I do not think the great Galileo himself could do much more."

But to Roger he said, rising and laying his hand on his shoulder--

"Exercise your wits as much as you can, my boy; but there are two kinds of roads I advise you for the most part to eschew. One kind are the roads that lead to the edge of the great darkness which skirts our little patch of light on every side. The other are the roads that go in a circle, leading you round and round with much toil to the point from which you started. I do not say, never travel on these--you cannot always help it. But for the most part exercise yourself on the roads which lead somewhere. The exercise is as good, and the result better." And he was about to send us away.

But Aunt Dorothy was not at all satisfied. "That Signor Galileo was a very dangerous person," she said. "He said the sun went round, and the earth stood still, which was contrary at once to common sense, the five senses, and Scripture; and if chits like Roger and me were allowed to enter on such false philosophy at our age, where should we have wandered at hers?"

"Not much further, Sister Dorothy," said my Father, "if they reached the age of Methuselah. Not much further into the question, and not much nearer the answer."

"I see no difficulty in the question at all," said Aunt Dorothy. "The Almighty does everything because it is His will to do it. And we can do nothing except He wills us to do it. Which answers Olive and Roger at once. All doubts are sins, and ought to be crushed at the beginning."

"How would you do this, Sister Dorothy?" asked my Father; "a good many persons have tried it before and failed."

"How! The simplest thing in the world," said Aunt Dorothy. "In the first place, set people to work, so that they have no time for such foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions."

"A wholesome plan, which seems to be very generally pursued with regard to the whole human race," said Father. "It is mercifully provided that those who have leisure for such questions are few. But what else would you do?"

"For the children there is the switch," said Aunt Dorothy. "They would be thankful enough for it when they grew wiser."

"So think the Pope and Archbishop Laud," replied my Father; "and so they set up the Inquisition and the Star Chamber."

"I have no fault to find with the Inquisition and the Star Chamber," said Aunt Dorothy, "if they would only punish the right people."

"But sometimes we learn we have been mistaken ourselves," said Father. "How can we be sure we are absolutely right about everything?"

"_I am_," said Aunt Dorothy, emphatically. "Thank Heaven I have not a doubt about anything. Heresy is worse than treason, for it is treason against God; and worse than murder, for it is the murder of immortal souls. The fault of the Pope and Archbishop Laud is that they are heretics themselves, and punish the wrong people."

This was a point often reached in discussions between my Father and Aunt Dorothy, but this time it was happily closed by the clatter of a horse's hoofs on the pavement of the court before the house.

My father's face brightened, and he rose hastily, exclaiming, "A welcome guest, Sister Dorothy--the Lord of the Fens--sot the table in the wainscoted parlour."

He left the room, and we children watched a tall, stalwart gentleman, well known to us, with a healthy, sunburnt face, alight from his horse.

"The Lord of the Fens, indeed!" said Aunt Dorothy in a disappointed tone, as she looked out of the window. "Why, it is only Mr. Oliver Cromwell of Ely, with his coat as slovenly as usual, and his hat without a hat-band. I am as much against gewgaws as any one. If I had my way, not a slashed doublet, or ribboned hose, or feather, or lace, should be seen in the kingdom. But there is reason in all things. Gentlemen should look like gentlemen, and a hat without a hat-band is going too far, in all conscience. The wainscoted parlour, in good sooth! Why, his boots are covered with mud, and I dare warrant it, he will never think of rubbing them on the straw in the hall. And they will get talking, no one knows how long, about that everlasting draining of the Fens. I can't think why they won't let the Fens alone. They did very well for our fathers as they were, and they were better men than we see now-a-days; and if the Almighty made the Fens wet, I suppose he meant them to be wet; and people had better take care how they run against His designs. And they say the king is against it, or against somebody concerned in it, so that there is no knowing what it may lead to. All Scotland in a tumult, and the godly languishing in prison, and our parson putting on some new furbelow and setting up some new fandango every Sabbath; and a godly gentleman like Mr. Oliver Cromwell (for he is that, I don't deny) to have nothing better to do than to try and squeeze a few acres more of dry land out of the Fens!"

But Roger whispered to me,--

"Mr. Hampden says Mr. Cromwell would be the greatest man in England if things should come to the worst, and there should be any disturbance with the king."

At that moment my father called Roger, and to his delight he was allowed to accompany him and our guest over the farm.

And the next entry in my Journal is this,--

"Mr. Oliver Cromwell of Ely was at our house yesterday. Roger walked over the farm with him and my father. Their discourse was concerning twenty shillings which the king wants to oblige Mr. Hampden of Great Hampden to lend him, which Mr. Hampden will not, not because he cannot afford it, but because the king would then be able to make every one lend him money whether they like it or not, or whether they are able or not. They call it the ship-money. Concerning this and also concerning some good men, ministers or lecturers, whom Mr. Cromwell wishes to set to preach the Gospel to the people in places where no one else preaches, so that they can understand, but whom Archbishop Laud has silenced with fines and many threats, Aunt Dorothy thinks it a pity godly men like Mr. Hampden and Mr. Cromwell should concern themselves about such poor worldly things as shillings and pence. Regarding the lecturers, she says that they have more reason. Only, she says, it is a wonder to her they will begin with such small insignificant things. Let them set to work, root and branch (says she), against Popery under false names and in high places, and these lesser matters will take care of themselves. But father says, 'poor worldly things' are just the things by which we are tried and proved whether we will be faithful to the high unworldly calling or not. And 'small insignificant things' are the beginnings of everything that lives and endures, from a British oak to the kingdom of heaven."