Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-folio.

“Is the woman respectable?” enquired Mr. Pease.

“Yes – no – not exactly,” said the poor old lady, violently agitated. “She was well brought up. She has a good heart, sir, but a bad head, and then trouble has discouraged her. Poor Mary – yes sir, it must have been the trouble– for I know her heart is good, sir. I” – tears choked the old lady’s utterance. Recovering herself; she continued:

“She had a kind husband once. He was the father of her two little girls: six years ago he died, and – the poor thing – oh, sir, you don’t know how dear she is to me!” and burying her aged face in her hands, she sobbed aloud.

Mr. Pease’s kind heart interpreted the old lady’s emotion, without the pain of an explanation. In the weeping woman before him he saw the mother of the lost one.

Yes, she was “Mary’s” mother. Poverty could not chill her love; shame and the world’s scorn had only filled her with a God-like pity.

After a brief pause, she brushed away her tears and went on:

“Yes, sir; Mary was a good child to me once; she respected religion and religious people, and used to love to go to church, but lately, sir, God knows she has almost broke my heart. Last spring I took her home, and the three dear children; but she would not listen to me, and left without telling me where she was going. I heard that there was a poor woman living in a basement in Willet street, with three children, and my heart told me that that was my poor, lost Mary, and there I found her. But, oh, sir – oh, sir” – and she sobbed as if her heart were breaking – “such a place! My Mary, that I used to cradle in these arms to sleep, that lisped her little evening prayer at my knee —my Mary, drunk in that terrible place!”

She was getting so agitated that Mr. Pease, wishing to turn the current of her thoughts, asked her if she herself was a member of any church. She said yes, of the – street Baptist Church. She said she was a widow, and had had one child beside Mary – a son. And her face lighted up as she said:

“Oh sir, he was such a fine lad. He did all he could to make me happy; but he thought, that if he went to California he could make money, and when he left he said ‘Cheer up, dear mother; I’ll come back and give my money all to you, and you shall never work any more.’”

“I can see him now, sir, as he stood there, with his eye kindling. Poor lad! poor lad! He came back, but it was only to die. His last words were, ‘God will care for you, mother – I know it – when I’m gone to Heaven.’ Oh! if I could have seen my poor girl die as he did, before she became so bad. Oh, sir, won’t you take her here? —won’t you try to make her good? —can’t you make her good, sir? I can’t give Mary up. Nobody cares for Mary now but me. Won’t you try, sir?”

Mr. Pease promised that he would do all he could, and sent a person out with the old lady, to visit “Mary,” and obtain particulars: he soon returned and corroborated all the old lady’s statements. Mr. Pease then took a friend and started to see what could be done.

In Willet street is a rickety old wooden building, filled to overflowing with the very refuse of humanity. The basement is lighted with two small windows half under ground; and in this wretched hole lived Mary and her children. As Mr. Pease descended the steps into the room, he heard some one say, “Here he comes, grandmother! he’s come – he’s come!”

The door was opened. On a pile of rags in the corner lay Mary, “my Mary,” as the old lady tearfully called her.

God of mercy! what a wreck of beautiful womanhood! Her large blue eyes glared with maniac wildness, under the influence of intoxication. Long waves of auburn hair fell, in tangled masses, over a form wasted, yet beautiful in its graceful outlines.

Poor, lost Mary!

“Such a place!” as her mother had, weeping, said. Not a table, or chair, or bedstead, or article of furniture in it, of any description. On the mantle-piece stood a beer-bottle with a half burnt candle in its nose. A few broken, dirty dishes stood upon the shelf, and a quantity of filthy rags lay scattered round the floor.

The grandmother was holding by the hand a sweet child of eight years, with large, bright eyes, and auburn hair (like poor Mary’s) falling about her neck. An older girl of twelve, with a sweet, Madonna face, that seemed to light up even that wretched place with a beam of Heaven, stood near, bearing in her arms a babe of sixteen months, which was not so large as one of eight months should have been. Its little hands looked like bird’s claws, and its little bones seemed almost piercing the skin.

The old lady went up to her daughter, saying, “Mary, dear, this is the gentleman who is willing to take you to his house, if you will try to be good.”

“Get out of the room, you old hypocrite,” snarled the intoxicated woman, “or I’ll – (and she clutched a hatchet beside her) – I’ll show you! You are the worst old woman I ever knew, except the one you brought in here the other day, and she is a fiend outright. Talk to me about being good! – ha – ha” – and she laughed an idiot laugh.

“Mother,” said the eldest child, sweetly laying her little hand upon her arm, – “dear mother, don’t, please don’t hurt grandmother. She is good and kind to us; she only wants to get you out of this bad place, where you will be treated kindly.”

“Yes, dear mother,” chimed in the younger sister, bending her little curly head over her, “mother, you said once you would go. Don’t keep us here any longer, mother. We are cold and hungry. Please get up and take us away; we are afraid to stay here, mother, dear.”

“Yes, Mary,” said the old lady, handing her down a faded, ragged gown, “here is your dress; put it on, wont you!”

Mary raised herself on the pile of rags on which she was lying, and pushing the eldest girl across the room, screamed out, “Get away, you impudent little thing! you are just like your old grandmother. I tell you all,” said she, raising herself on one elbow, and tossing back her auburn hair from her broad, white forehead, “I tell you all, I never will go from here, never! I love this place. So many fine people come here, and we have such good times. There is a gentleman who takes care of me. He brought me some candles, last night, and he says that I shan’t want for anything, if I will only get rid of these troublesome children —my husband’s children.” And she hid her face in her hands and laughed convulsively.

“You may have them,” she continued, “just as soon as you like – baby and all! but I never will go from this place. I love it. A great many fine people come here to see me.”

The poor old lady wrung her hands and wept, while the children clung round their grandmother, with half-averted faces, trembling and silent.

Mr. Pease said to her, “Mary, you may either go with me, or I’ll send for an officer and have you carried to the station-house. Which will you do?”

Mary cursed and raved, but finally put on the dress the old lady handed her, and consented to go with them. A carriage was soon procured, and Mary helped inside – Mr. Pease lifting in the baby and the two little girls, and away they started for the Five Points House of Industry.

“Oh, mother!” exclaimed the younger of the girls, “how very pleasant it is to ride in this nice carriage, and to get away from that dirty place; we shall be so happy now, mother; and Edith and the baby too: see, he is laughing: he likes to ride. You will love sister Edith and baby, and me, now, wont you, dear mother? and you wont frighten us with the hatchet any more, or hurt dear grandmother, will you?”

Arriving at Mr. Pease’s house, the delight of the little creatures was unbounded. They caught hold of their mother’s faded dress, saying, “Didn’t we tell you, mother, that you would have a pleasant home here? Only see that nice garden! you didn’t have a garden in Willet Street, mother!”

Reader, would you know that mother’s after history?

Another “Mary” hath “bathed the Saviour’s feet” with her tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Her name is no longer written Mary Magdalena. In the virtuous home of her aged mother, she sits clothed in her right mind, “and her children rise up and call her blessed.”

NANCY PRY’S SOLILOQUY

I wonder if that is the bride, over at that window? Poor thing, how I pity her! Every thing in her house so bran new and fresh and uncomfortable. Furniture smelling like a mahogany coffin; every thing set up spick and span in its place; not a picture awry; not a chair out of its orbit; not a finger mark on the window panes; not a thread on the carpet; not a curtain fold disarranged; china and porcelain set up in alphabetical order in the pantry; bureau drawers fit for a Quaker; no stockings, to mend; no strings or buttons missing; no old rag-bags to hunt over; no dresses to re-flounce, or re-tuck, or re-fashionize; not even a hook or eye absent. Sauce pans, pots, and kettles, fresh from the “furnishing house;” servants fresh; house as still as a cat-cornered mouse. Nothing stirring, nothing to do. Land of Canaan! I should think it would be a relief to her to hear the braying and roaring in Driesbach’s Menagerie.

Well, there’s one consolation; in all human probability, it is a state of things that won’t last long.

FOR LITTLE CHILDREN

“I love God and every little child.” —Richter.

I wonder if I have any little pinafore friends among the readers of Fern Leaves? any little Nellys, or Katys, or Billys, or Johnnys, who ever think of Fanny? Do you know that I like children much better than grown-up people? I should so like to have a whole lap full of your bright eyes, and rosy cheeks, and dimpled shoulders, to kiss. I should like to have a good romp with you, this very minute. I don’t always keep this old pen of mine scratching. If a bright cloud comes sailing past my window, I throw down my pen, toss up the casement, and drink in the air, like a gipsey. I feel just as you do, when you are pent up in school, some bright summer day, when the winds are at play, and the flowers lie languidly drooping under the blue, arching sky; – when the little butterfly poises his bright wings on the rose, too full of joy even to sip its sweets; – when the birds sing, because they can’t help it, and the merry little swallow skims the ground, dips his bright wing in the lake, circles over head, and then flies, twittering, back to his cunning little brown nest, under the eaves. On such a day, I should like to be your school-mistress. I’d throw open the old school-room door, and let you all out under the trees. You should count the blades of grass for a sum in addition; you should take an apple from a tree, to learn subtraction; you should give me kisses, to learn multiplication. You shouldn’t go home to dinner. No: we’d all take our dinner-baskets and go into the woods; we’d hunt for violets; we’d lie on the moss under the trees, and look up at the bits of blue sky, through the leafy branches; we’d hush our breath when the little chipmunk peeped out of his hole, and watch him slily snatch the ripe nut for his winter’s store. And we’d look for the shy rabbit; and the little spotted toad, with its blinking eyes; and the gliding snake, which creeps out to sun itself on the old gray rock. We’d play hide and seek, in the hollow trunks of old trees; we’d turn away from the gaudy flowers, flaunting their showy beauty in our faces, and search, under the glossy leaves at our feet, for the pale-eyed blossoms which nestle there as lovingly as a timid little fledgling under the mother-bird’s wing; we’d go to the lake, and see the sober, staid old cows stand cooling their legs in the water, and admiring themselves in the broad, sheeted mirror beneath; we’d toss little pebbles in the lake, and see the circles they made, widen and widen toward the distant shore – like careless words, dropped and forgotten, but reaching to the far-off shore of eternity.

And then you should nestle ’round me, telling all your little griefs; for well I know that childhood has its griefs, which are all the keener because great, wise, grown-up people have often neither time nor patience, amid the bustling whirl of life, to stop and listen to them. I know what it is for a timid little child, who has never been away from its mother’s apron string, to be walked, some morning, into a great big school-room, full of strange faces; – to see a little urchin laugh, and feel a choking lump come in your little throat, for fear he was laughing at you; – to stand up, with trembling legs, in the middle of the floor, and be told to “find big A,” when your eyes were so full of tears that you couldn’t see anything; – to keep looking at the ferule on the desk, and wondering if it would ever come down on your hand; – to have some mischievous little scholar break your nice long slate-pencil in two, to plague you, or steal your bit of gingerbread, out of your satchel, and eat it up, or trip you down on purpose, and feel how little the hard-hearted young sinners cared when you sobbed out, “I’ll tell my mother.”

I know what it is, when you have lain every night since you were born, with your hand clasped in your mother’s, and your cheek cuddled up to hers, to see a new baby come and take your place, without even asking your leave; – to see papa, and grandpa, and grandma, and uncle, and aunt, and cousins, and all the neighbors, so glad to see it, when your heart was almost broke about it. I know what it is to have a great fat nurse (whom even mamma herself had to mind) lead you, struggling, out of the room, and tell Sally to see that you didn’t come into your own mamma’s room again all that day. I know what it is to have that fat old nurse sit in mamma’s place at table, and cut up your potato and meat all wrong; – to have her put squash on your plate, when you hate squash; – to have her forget (?) to give you a piece of pie, and eat two pieces herself; – to have Sally cross, and Betty cross, and everybody telling you to “get out of the way;” – to have your doll’s leg get loose, and nobody there to hitch it on for you; – and then, when it came night, to be put away in a chamber, all alone by yourself to sleep, and have Sally tell you that “if you wasn’t good an old black man would come and carry you off;” – and then to cuddle down under the sheet, till you were half stifled, and tremble every time the wind blew, as if you had an ague fit. Yes, and when, at last, mamma came down stairs, I know how long it took for you to like that new baby; – how every time you wanted to sit in mamma’s lap, he’d be sure to have the stomach-ache, or to want his breakfast; how he was always wanting something, so that mamma couldn’t tell you pretty stories, or build little blocks of houses for you, or make you reins to play horse with; or do any of those nice little things, that she used to be always doing for you.

To be sure, my little darlings, I know all about it. I have cried tears enough to float a steamship, about all these provoking things; and now whenever I see a little child cry, I never feel like laughing at him: for I know that often his little heart is just ready to break, for somebody to pet him. So I always say a kind word, or give him a pat on the head, or a kiss; for I know that though the little insect has but one grain to carry, he often staggers under it: and I have seen the time when a kind word, or a beaming smile, would have been worth more to me, than all the broad lands of merrie England.

1

The boy employed in stores to fetch and carry change.