Twice-told tales
abidest with me.”
“Let us go boldly, both one and the other,” rejoined his companion. “It
is not fitting that thou or I should shrink.”
They therefore proceeded through the entry to the door, which they
opened, bidding the applicant “Come in, in God’s name!” A furious blast
of wind drove the storm into their faces and extinguished the lamp;
they had barely time to discern a figure so white from head to foot
with the drifted snow that it seemed like Winter’s self come in human
shape to seek refuge from its own desolation.
“Enter, friend, and do thy errand, be it what it may,” said Pearson.
“It must needs be pressing, since thou comest on such a bitter night.”
“Peace be with this household!” said the stranger, when they stood on
the floor of the inner apartment.
Pearson started; the elder Quaker stirred the slumbering embers of the
fire till they sent up a clear and lofty blaze. It was a female voice
that had spoken; it was a female form that shone out, cold and wintry,
in that comfortable light.
“Catharine, blessed woman,” exclaimed the old man, “art thou come to
this darkened land again? Art thou come to bear a valiant testimony as
in former years? The scourge hath not prevailed against thee, and from
the dungeon hast thou come forth triumphant, but strengthen, strengthen
now thy heart, Catharine, for Heaven will prove thee yet this once ere
thou go to thy reward.”
“Rejoice, friends!” she replied. “Thou who hast long been of our
people, and thou whom a little child hath led to us, rejoice! Lo, I
come, the messenger of glad tidings, for the day of persecution is
over-past. The heart of the king, even Charles, hath been moved in
gentleness toward us, and he hath sent forth his letters to stay the
hands of the men of blood. A ship’s company of our friends hath arrived
at yonder town, and I also sailed joyfully among them.”
As Catharine spoke her eyes were roaming about the room in search of
him for whose sake security was dear to her. Pearson made a silent
appeal to the old man, nor did the latter shrink from the painful task
assigned him.
“Sister,” he began, in a softened yet perfectly calm tone, “thou
tellest us of his love manifested in temporal good, and now must we
speak to thee of that selfsame love displayed in chastenings. Hitherto,
Catharine, thou hast been as one journeying in a darksome and difficult
path and leading an infant by the hand; fain wouldst thou have looked
heavenward continually, but still the cares of that little child have
drawn thine eyes and thy affections to the earth. Sister, go on
rejoicing, for his tottering footsteps shall impede thine own no more.”
But the unhappy mother was not thus to be consoled. She shook like a
leaf; she turned white as the very snow that hung drifted into her
hair. The firm old man extended his hand and held her up, keeping his
eye upon hers as if to repress any outbreak of passion.
“I am a woman—I am but a woman; will He try me above my strength?” said
Catharine, very quickly and almost in a whisper. “I have been wounded
sore; I have suffered much—many things in the body, many in the mind;
crucified in myself and in them that were dearest to me. Surely,” added
she, with a long shudder, “he hath spared me in this one thing.” She
broke forth with sudden and irrepressible violence: “Tell me, man of
cold heart, what has God done to me? Hath he cast me down never to rise
again? Hath he crushed my very heart in his hand?—And thou to whom I
committed my child, how hast thou fulfilled thy trust? Give me back the
boy well, sound, alive—alive—or earth and heaven shall avenge me!”
The agonized shriek of Catharine was answered by the faint—the very
faint—voice of a child.
On this day it had become evident to Pearson, to his aged guest and to
Dorothy that Ilbrahim’s brief and troubled pilgrimage drew near its
close. The two former would willingly have remained by him to make use
of the prayers and pious discourses which they deemed appropriate to
the time, and which, if they be impotent as to the departing
traveller’s reception in the world whither he goes, may at least
sustain him in bidding adieu to earth. But, though Ilbrahim uttered no
complaint, he was disturbed by the faces that looked upon him; so that
Dorothy’s entreaties and their own conviction that the child’s feet
might tread heaven’s pavement and not soil it had induced the two
Quakers to remove. Ilbrahim then closed his eyes and grew calm, and,
except for now and then a kind and low word to his nurse, might have
been thought to slumber. As nightfall came on, however, and the storm
began to rise, something seemed to trouble the repose of the boy’s mind
and to render his sense of hearing active and acute. If a passing wind
lingered to shake the casement, he strove to turn his head toward it;
if the door jarred to and fro upon its hinges, he looked long and
anxiously thitherward; if the heavy voice of the old man as he read the
Scriptures rose but a little higher, the child almost held his
dying-breath to listen; if a snowdrift swept by the cottage with a
sound like the trailing of a garment, Ilbrahim seemed to watch that
some visitant should enter. But after a little time he relinquished
whatever secret hope had agitated him and with one low complaining
whisper turned his cheek upon the pillow. He then addressed Dorothy
with his usual sweetness and besought her to draw near him; she did so,
and Ilbrahim took her hand in both of his, grasping it with a gentle
pressure, as if to assure himself that he retained it. At intervals,
and without disturbing the repose of his countenance, a very faint
trembling passed over him from head to foot, as if a mild but somewhat
cool wind had breathed upon him and made him shiver.
As the boy thus led her by the hand in his quiet progress over the
borders of eternity, Dorothy almost imagined that she could discern the
near though dim delightfulness of the home he was about to reach; she
would not have enticed the little wanderer back, though she bemoaned
herself that she must leave him and return. But just when Ilbrahim’s
feet were pressing on the soil of Paradise he heard a voice behind him,
and it recalled him a few, few paces of the weary path which he had
travelled. As Dorothy looked upon his features she perceived that their
placid expression was again disturbed. Her own thoughts had been so
wrapped in him that all sounds of the storm and of human speech were
lost to her; but when Catharine’s shriek pierced through the room, the
boy strove to raise himself.
“Friend, she is come! Open unto her!” cried he.
In a moment his mother was kneeling by the bedside; she drew Ilbrahim
to her bosom, and he nestled there with no violence of joy, but
contentedly as if he were hushing himself to sleep. He looked into her
face, and, reading its agony, said with feeble earnestness,
“Mourn not, dearest mother. I am happy now;” and with these words the
gentle boy was dead.
The king’s mandate to stay the New England persecutors was effectual in
preventing further martyrdoms, but the colonial authorities, trusting
in the remoteness of their situation, and perhaps in the supposed
instability of the royal government, shortly renewed their severities
in all other respects. Catharine’s fanaticism had become wilder by the
sundering of all human ties; and wherever a scourge was lifted, there
was she to receive the blow; and whenever a dungeon was unbarred,
thither she came to cast herself upon the floor. But in process of time
a more Christian spirit—a spirit of forbearance, though not of
cordiality or approbation—began to pervade the land in regard to the
persecuted sect. And then, when the rigid old Pilgrims eyed her rather
in pity than in wrath, when the matrons fed her with the fragments of
their children’s food and offered her a lodging on a hard and lowly
bed, when no little crowd of schoolboys left their sports to cast
stones after the roving enthusiast,—then did Catharine return to
Pearson’s dwelling, and made that her home.
As if Ilbrahim’s sweetness yet lingered round his ashes, as if his
gentle spirit came down from heaven to teach his parent a true
religion, her fierce and vindictive nature was softened by the same
griefs which had once irritated it. When the course of years had made
the features of the unobtrusive mourner familiar in the settlement, she
became a subject of not deep but general interest—a being on whom the
otherwise superfluous sympathies of all might be bestowed. Every one
spoke of her with that degree of pity which it is pleasant to
experience; every one was ready to do her the little kindnesses which
are not costly, yet manifest good-will; and when at last she died, a
long train of her once bitter persecutors followed her with decent
sadness and tears that were not painful to her place by Ilbrahim’s
green and sunken grave.
MR. HIGGINBOTHAM’S CATASTROPHE
A young fellow, a tobacco-pedler by trade, was on his way from
Morristown, where he had dealt largely with the deacon of the Shaker
settlement, to the village of Parker’s Falls, on Salmon River. He had a
neat little cart painted green, with a box of cigars depicted on each
side-panel, and an Indian chief holding a pipe and a golden
tobacco-stalk on the rear. The pedler drove a smart little mare and was
a young man of excellent character, keen at a bargain, but none the
worse liked by the Yankees, who, as I have heard them say, would rather
be shaved with a sharp razor than a dull one. Especially was he beloved
by the pretty girls along the Connecticut, whose favor he used to court
by presents of the best smoking-tobacco in his stock, knowing well that
the country-lasses of New England are generally great performers on
pipes. Moreover, as will be seen in the course of my story, the pedler
was inquisitive and something of a tattler, always itching to hear the
news and anxious to tell it again.
After an early breakfast at Morristown the tobacco-pedler—whose name
was Dominicus Pike—had travelled seven miles through a solitary piece
of woods without speaking a word to anybody but himself and his little
gray mare. It being nearly seven o’clock, he was as eager to hold a
morning gossip as a city shopkeeper to read the morning paper. An
opportunity seemed at hand when, after lighting a cigar with a
sun-glass, he looked up and perceived a man coming over the brow of the
hill at the foot of which the pedler had stopped his green cart.
Dominicus watched him as he descended, and noticed that he carried a
bundle over his shoulder on the end of a stick and travelled with a
weary yet determined pace. He did not look as if he had started in the
freshness of the morning, but had footed it all night, and meant to do
the same all day.
“Good-morning, mister,” said Dominicus, when within speaking-distance.
“You go a pretty good jog. What’s the latest news at Parker’s Falls?”
The man pulled the broad brim of a gray hat over his eyes, and
answered, rather sullenly, that he did not come from Parker’s Falls,
which, as being the limit of his own day’s journey, the pedler had
naturally mentioned in his inquiry.
“Well, then,” rejoined Dominicus Pike, “let’s have the latest news
where you did come from. I’m not particular about Parker’s Falls. Any
place will answer.”
Being thus importuned, the traveller—who was as ill-looking a fellow as
one would desire to meet in a solitary piece of woods—appeared to
hesitate a little, as if he was either searching his memory for news or
weighing the expediency of telling it. At last, mounting on the step of
the cart, he whispered in the ear of Dominicus, though he might have
shouted aloud and no other mortal would have heard him.
“I do remember one little trifle of news,” said he. “Old Mr.