ON THE ADVANTAGE OF TWINS
February 2. Candlemas
and mild, gray weather. If the woodchuck stirs
up his banked life-fire and ventures forth, he will
not see his shadow, and must straightway arrange with
winter for a rebate in our favour. To-day, however,
it seems like the very dawn of winter, and as if the
cloud brooms were abroad gathering snow from remote
and chilly corners of the sky.
Six years ago I began the planting
of my garden, and at the same time my girlish habit
of journal keeping veered into the making of a “Garden
Boke,” to be a reversible signal, crying danger
in face of forgotten mistakes, then turning to give
back glints of summer sunshine when read in the attic
of winter days and blue Mondays. Now once again
I am in the attic, writing. Not in a garden diary,
but in my “Social Experience Boke” this
time, for it is “human warious,” and its
first volume, already filled out, is lying in the
old desk. Martin Cortright said, one stormy day
last autumn when he was sitting in the corner I have
loaned him of my precious attic retreat, that, owing
to the incursion of the Bluff Colony of New Yorkers,
which we had been discussing, I should call this second
volume “People of the Whirlpool,” because ah,
but I must wait and hunt among my papers for his very
words as I wrote them down.
My desk needs cleaning out and rearranging,
for the dust flies up as I rummage among the papers
and letters that are a blending of past, present,
and future. All my pet pens are rusty, and must
be replaced from the box of stubs, for a stub pen
assists one to straightforward, truthful expression,
while a fine point suggests evasion, polite equivocation,
or thin ideas. Even Lavinia Dorman’s letters,
whose cream-white envelopes, with a curlicue monogram
on the flap, quite cover the litter below, have been,
if possible, more satisfactory since she has adopted
a fountain stub that Evan gave her at Christmas.
There are many other things in the
desk now beside the hickory-nut beads and old papers.
Little whiffs of subtle fragrance call me backward
through time faster than thought, and make me pinch
myself to be sure that I am awake, like the little
old woman with the cutabout petticoats, who was sure
that if she was herself, her little dog would know
her, but then he didn’t!
I am awake and surely myself, yet
my old dog is not near to recognize me. This
ring of rough, reddish hair, tied with a cigar ribbon
and lying atop the beads, was Bluff’s best tail
curl. Dear, happy, brave-hearted Bluff with the
human eyes; after an honourable life of fifteen years
he stole off to the happy hunting grounds of perpetual
open season, quail and rabbit, two years ago at beginning
of winter, as quietly as he used to slip out the back
door and away to the fields on the first fall morning
that brings the hunting fever. For a long while
not only I, but neither father nor Evan could speak
of him, it hurt so. Yet by a blessed dispensation
a good dog lives on in his race, and may be renewed
(I prefer that word to replaced) after a season,
in a way in which our best human friends may not be,
so that we do not lack dogs. Lark is senior now,
and Timothy Saunders’s sheep dog, The Orphan,
is also a veteran; the foxhounds are in their prime,
while Martha Corkle, as we shall always call her,
is raising a promising pair of collie pups.
Beside the curl, and covering mother’s
diaries, lies a square white volume, the first part
of my “Experience Boke” before mentioned,
and upon it two queer fat little pairs of bronze kid
shoes, buttonless and much worn on the toes, telling
a tale of feet that dragged and ankles that wobbled
through inexperience in walking. Ah yes!
I’m quite awake and the same Barbara, though
looking over a wider and eye-opening horizon, having
had three rows of candles, ten in a row, around my
last birthday cake and one extra in the middle, which
extravagance has constrained the family to use lopsided,
tearful, pink candles ever since.
And the two pairs of feet that first
touched good earth so hesitatingly with those crumpled
shoes are now standing firmly in wool-lined rubber
boots topped by brown corduroy trousers, upon the winter
slat walk that leads to the tool house, while their
owners, touched by the swish of the Whirlpool that
has recently drawn this peaceful town into its eddies,
are busy trying to turn their patrol wagon, that for
a year has led a most conservative existence as a
hay wain and a stage-coach dragged by a curiously
assorted team of dogs and goat, into the semblance
of some weird sort of autocart, by the aid of bits
of old garden hose, cast-away bicycle gearing, a watering-pot,
and an oil lantern.
I have wondered for a week past what
yeast was working in their brains. Of course,
the seven-year-old Vanderveer boy on the Bluffs had
an electric runabout for a Christmas gift, also a
man to run it! Corney Delaney, as Evan named
the majestic gray goat of firm disposition
blended with a keen sense of humour that
father gave the boys last spring and who has been
their best beloved ever since, has for many days been
left in duress with the calves in the stack-yard, where
the all-day diet of cornstalks is fatally bulging
his once straight-fronted figure.
In fact, it is the doings of these
two pairs of precious feet, with the bodies, heads,
and arms that belong to them, that have caused the
dust to gather in my desk, and the “Garden Boke,”
though not the garden, which is more of a joy than
ever, to be suspended and take a different form.
Flesh-and-blood books that write themselves are so
compelling and absorbing that one often wonders at
the existence of any other kind, and, feeling this
strongly, yet I turn to paper pages as silent confidants.
Why? Heredity and its understudy, Habit, the two
h’s that control both the making of solitary
tartlets as well as family pies.
So the last entry in the “Garden
Boke” was made a week before the day recorded
in the white book with the cherubs’ heads painted
on it that underlies the shoes.
It seems both strange and significant
to me now that this book chanced to be given me by
Lavinia Dorman, mother’s school friend and bridesmaid,
a spinster of fifty-five, and was really the beginning
of the transfer of her friendship to me, the only
woman friendship that I have ever had, and its quality
has that fragrant pungence that comes from sweet herbs,
that of all garden odours are the most lasting.
I suppose that it is one of the strongest
human habits to write down the very things that one
is least likely to forget, and vice-versa; for
certainly I shall never forget the date and double
record on that first fair page beneath the illuminated
word Born, yet I often steal up here
to peep at it, and live the intervening
five years backward for pure joy. January 10,
189-, Richard Russell-- and John Evan--.
Every time I read the names anew I
wonder what I should have done if there had been a
single name upon the page. I must then have chosen
between naming him for father or Evan an
impossibility; for even if the names had been combined,
whose should I have put first?
No, the twins are in every way an
advantage. To Evan, in providing him at once
with a commuted family sufficient for his means; to
father, among other reasons, by giving him the pleasure
of saying, to friends who felt it necessary to visit
him in the privacy of his study and be apologetically
sympathetic, “I have observed that the first
editions of very important books are frequently in
two volumes,” sending them away wondering what
he really meant; to me by saving the rack of argument,
the form of evil I most detest, and to their own chubby
selves no less, in that neither one has been handicapped
for a single day by the disadvantage of being an only
child!
It doubtless seems very odd for me
to feel this last to be a disadvantage, being myself
an only child, and always a happy one, sharing with
mother all the space in father’s big heart.
But this is because God has been very good to me,
leaving me safe in the shelter of the home nest.
Suppose it had been otherwise and I had been forced
to face the world, how it would have hurt, for individual
love is cruelly precious sometimes, and an “onliest”
cannot in the very nature of things be as unselfish
and adaptable as one of many.
I was selfish even when the twins
came. I was so glad that they were men-children.
I could not bear to think of other woman hands ministering
to father and Evan, and I rejoiced in the promise of
two more champions. I often wonder how mother
felt when I was born and what she thought. Was
she glad or disappointed? I wish that she had
left written words to guide me, if ever so few, they
would mean so much now; and let me know if in her
day social things surprised and troubled her as for
the first time they now stir me, and therefore belong
to all awakening motherhood. Her diaries were
a blending of simple household happenings and garden
lore, nothing more; for when I was five years old and
her son came, he stayed but a few short hours and
then stole her away with him.
I wonder if my boys, when they are
grown and begin to realize woman, will care to look
into this book of mine, and read in and between the
lines of its jumble of scraps and letters what their
mother thought of them, and how things appeared to
her in the days of their babyhood. Perhaps; who
knows? At present, being but five years old, they
are centred in whatever thing the particular day brings
forth, and but that they are leashed fast by an almost
prenatal and unconscious affection, they are as unlike
in disposition, temperament, and colouring as they
are alike in feature. Richard is dark, like father
and me, very quiet, except in the matter of affection,
in which he is clingingly demonstrative, slow to receive
impressions, but withal tenacious. He clearly
inherits father’s medical instinct of preserving
life, and the very thought of suffering on the part
of man or beast arouses him to action. When he
was only a little over three years old, I found him
carefully mending some windfall robins’ eggs,
cracked by their tumble, with bits of rubber sticking-plaster,
then putting them hopefully back into the nest, with
an admonition to the anxious parents to “sit
very still and don’t stwatch.” While
last summer he unfortunately saw a chicken decapitated
over at the farm barn, and, in Martha Corkle’s
language, “the way he wound a bit o’ paper
round its poor neck to stop its bleedin’ went
straight to my stummick, so it did, Mrs. Evan;”
for be it said here that Martha has fulfilled my wildest
expectations, and whereas, as queen of the kitchen,
she was a trifle unexpected and uncomfortable, as
Mrs. Timothy Saunders, now comfortably settled in
the new cottage above the stable at the north corner
of the hayland, she is a veritable guardian angel,
ready to swoop down with strong wings at a moment’s
notice, in sickness or health, day or night, and seize
the nursery helm.
It is owing to her that I have never
been obliged to have a nursemaid under my feet or
tagging after the boys, to the ruin of their independence.
For the first few years Effie, whose fiery locks have
not yet found their affinity, helped me, but now merely
sees to buttons, strings, and darns.
I found out long ago that those who
get the best return from their flower gardens were
those who kept no gardeners, and it is the same way
with the child garden; those who are too overbusy,
irresponsible, ignorant, or rich to do without the
orthodox nurse, never can know precisely what they
lose. To watch a baby untrammelled with clothes,
dimple, glow, and expand in its bath, is in an intense
personal degree like watching, early of a June morning,
the first opening bud of a rose that you have coaxed
and raised from a mere cutting. You hoped and
believed that it would be fair and beautiful, but
ah, what a glorious surprise it is!
And so it is at the other end of day,
when sleep comes over the garden and all the flowers
that have been basking in sun vigour relax and their
colours are subdued, blended by the brush of darkness,
and the night wind steals new perfumes from them,
and wings of all but a few night birds have ceased
to cleave the air. As you walk among the flowers
and touch them, or throw back the casement and look
out, you read new meanings everywhere. In the
white cribs in the alcove the same change comes, bright
eyes, hair, cheeks, and lips lie blended in the shadow,
the only sound is the even breath of night, and when
you press your lips behind the ear where a curl curves
and neck and garments meet, there comes a little fragrance
born of sweet flesh and new flannel, and the only motion
is that of the half-open hand that seems to recognize
and closes about your fingers as a vine to its trellis,
or as a sleeping bird clings to its perch.
A gardener or a nurse is equally a
door between one and these silent pleasures, for who
would not steal up now and then from a troubled dream
to satisfy with sight and touch that the babes are
really there and all is well?
Richard has a clinging way even in
sleep, and his speech, though very direct for his
age, is soft and cooing; he says “mother”
in a lingering tone that might belong to a girl, and
there are what are called feminine traits in him.
Ian (to save confusion, we called
him from the first by the pretty Scotch equivalent
of Evan’s first name) is of a wholly masculine
mould, and like his father in light hair, gray eyes,
and determination. His very speech is quick and
staccato, his tendency is to overcome, to fight rather
than assuage, though he is the champion of everything
he loves. From the time he could form distinct
sounds he has called me Barbara, and no amount of
reasoning will make him do otherwise, while the imitation
of his father’s pronunciation of the word goes
to my heart.
Recently, now that he is fully able
to comprehend, Evan took him quietly on his knee and
told him that he must say “mother” and
that he was not respectful to me. He thought
a few minutes, as if reasoning with himself, and then
the big gray eyes filled with tears, a very rare occurrence,
as he seemed to feel that he could not yield, and
he said, trying very hard to steady his voice, “Favver,
I truly can’t, I think it muvver_ inside,
but you and I, we must say it Barbara,”
and I confess that my heart leaped with joy, and I
begged Evan to let the matter end here. To be
called, if it so may be, by one name from the beginning
to the end of life by the only true lovers that can
never be rivals, is bliss enough for any woman.
Equally resolved, but in a thing of
minor importance, is Ian about his headgear.
As a baby of three, when he first tasted the liberty
of going out of garden bounds daily into the daisy
field beyond the wild walk, while Richard clung to
his protecting baby sunbonnet, Ian spurned head covering
of any kind, and blinked away at the sun through his
tangled curls whenever he had the chance, in primitive
directness until his cheeks glowed like burnished
copper; and his present compromise is a little cap
worn visor backward.
When the twins were very young, people
were most funny in the way in which they seemed to
think it necessary to feel carefully about to make
sure whether condolence or congratulations were in
order. The Severely Protestant was greatly agitated,
as, being himself the possessor of an overflowing
quiverful, his position was difficult. After making
sure which was the right side of the fence, and placing
himself on it, he tugged painfully at his starved
red beard, and made an elaborate address ending in
a parallel, the idea of the complete Bible
being in two volumes, the Old and New Testament, each
being so necessary to the other, and so inseparable,
that they were only comparable to twins!
Father and Evan were present at the
time, I dared not look at either, and
as soon as we were again alone, the room shook with
laughter, until Martha Corkle, who was then in temporary
residence, popped in to be sure that I was not being
unduly agitated.
“The Old and New Testament,
I wonder which is which?” gasped father, going
upstairs to look at the uninteresting if promising
woolly bundles by light of this startling suggestion.
Now, however, the joke has developed
a serious side, as their two characters, though in
no wise precocious, have become distinctive. Ian
represents the Old, primitive and direct, the “sword
of the Lord and Gideon” type, while Richard
is the New, the reconciler and peacemaker.
The various congratulations that the
twins were boys, from my standpoint I took as a matter
of course, even though I had always heard that boys
gave the most worry and girls were referred to among
our friends and neighbours as the greatest comforts
in a home unless they did something decidedly unusual,
fitting into nooks, and often taking up and bearing
burdens the brothers left behind. But when many
people who had either daughters or nieces of their
own, and might be said to be in that mystic ring called
“Society,” congratulated me pointedly about
the boys, I began to ponder about the matter mother-wise.
Then, three years ago the New York Colony seized upon
the broad acres along the Bluffs, and dotted two miles
with the elaborate stone and brick houses they call
cottages; not for permanent summer homes (the very
rich, the spenders, have no homes), but merely hotels
in series. These, for the spring and fall between
seasons and week-end parties and golfing, men and girls
gay in red and green coats, replaced the wild flowers
in the shorn outlying fields. I watched these
girls, and, beginning to understand, wondered if I
had grown old before my time, or if I were too young
to comprehend their point of view, for, to their strange
enlightenment I was practically as yet unborn.
Lavinia Dorman says caustically that
I really belong with her in the middle of the last
century, and she, born to what father says was really
the best society and privilege of New York life, like
his college chum Martin Cortright, is now swept quite
aside by the swirl.
“Yes, dear child,” she
insists (how different this use of the word sounds
from when the Lady of the Bluffs uses the universal
“my dear” impartially to mistress and
maid, shopgirl and guest), “you not only belong
to the last century, but as far back in it as myself,
and I am fifty-five, full measure.
“The new idea among the richer
and consequently more privileged classes is, that
girls are to be fitted not only to go out into the
world and shine in different ways unknown to their
grandmothers, but to be superior to home, which of
necessity unfits them for a return trip if the excursion
is unsuccessful.
“What with high ideas, high
rents, and higher education, the home myth is speedily
following Santa Claus out of female education, and,
argue as one may, New York is the social pace-maker
‘East of the Rockies,’ as the free delivery
furniture companies advertise. I congratulate
you anew that the twins are boys!”
I laughed to myself over Miss Lavinia’s
letter; she is always so deliciously in earnest and
so perturbed over any change in the social ways of
her dearly beloved New York, that I’m wondering
how she finds it, on her return after two years or
more abroad (she was becoming agitated before she
left), and whether she will ask me down for another
of those quaint little visits, where she so faithfully
tours me through the shops and a few select teas,
when, to wind it up, Evan buys opera box seats so
that she may have the satisfaction of having her hair
dressed, wearing her point lace bertha and aigret,
and showing us who is who, and the remainder who are
not. For she is well born, intricately related
to the original weavers of the social cobweb, and
knows every one by name and sight; but has found lately,
I judge, that this knowledge unbacked by money is
no longer a social power that carries beyond mixed
tea and charity entertainments. Never mind, Lavinia
Dorman is a dear! Ah, if she would only come
out here, and return my many little visits by a long
stay, and act as a key to the riddle the Whirlpool
people are to me. But of course she will not;
for she frankly detests the country, that
is, except Newport and Staten Island, is
wedded even in summer to her trim back-yard that looks
like a picture in a seed catalogue, and, like a faithful
spouse, declines to leave it or Josephus for more than
a few days. Josephus is a large, sleek, black
cat, a fence-top sphinx, who sits all day in summer
wearing a silver collar, watching the sparrows and
the neighbourhood’s wash with impartial interest,
while at night he goes on excursions of his own to
a stable down a crooked street in “Greenwich
Village,” where they still keep pigeons.
Some day he won’t come back!
Yet Martin Cortright, the Bookworm,
was a pavement worshipper too, and he came last fall
for over a Sunday to wake father up; for I believe
men sometimes need the society of others of their
own age and past, as much as children need childlife,
and Martin stayed a month, and is promising to return
next spring. I wonder if the Sylvia Latham who
has been travelling with Miss Lavinia is any kin of
the Lathams who are building the great colonial home
above the Jenks-Smiths. I have never seen any
of the family except Mrs. Latham, a tall, colourless
blonde, who reminds one of a handsome unlit lamp.
She seems to be superintending the work by coming
up now and then, and I met her at the butcher’s
where she was buying sweetbreads “a
trifle for luncheon.” Accusation N,
against the Whirlpoolers: Since their advent
sweetbreads have risen from two pairs for a quarter,
and “thank you kindly for taking them off our
hands,” to fifty cents to a dollar a “set.”
We no longer care for sweetbreads!
I was therefore amused, but no longer
surprised, at the exaggerated way in which the childless
Lady of the Bluffs, her step-daughter having
ten years back made a foolish foreign marriage, gave
me her views upon the drawbacks of the daughters of
her world, when she made me, on her return from a
European trip, a visit upon the twins’ first
birthday, bearing, with her usually reckless
generosity, a pair of costly gold apostle spoons,
as she said, “to cut their teeth on.”
I admired, but frugally popped them into the applewood
treasure chests that father has had made for the boys
from the “mother tree,” that was finally
laid low by a tornado the winter of their birth and
is now succeeded by a younger one of Richard’s
choice.
“My dear woman,” she gasped,
turning my face toward the light and dropping into
a chair at the same time, “how well you look;
not a bit upset by the double dose and sitting up
nights and all that. But then, maybe, they sleep
and you haven’t; for it’s always the unexpected
and unusual that happens in your case, as this proves.
But then, they are boys, and that’s everything
nowadays, the way society’s going, especially
to people like you, whose husband’s trade, though
pretty, is too open and above-board to be a well-paying
one, and yet you’re thoroughbreds underneath.”
(Poor vulgar soul, she didn’t in the least realize
how I might take her stricture any more than she saw
my desire to laugh.)
“Of course here and there a
girl in society does turn out well and rides an elephant
or a coronet, of course I mean wears a coronet, though
ten to one it jams the hairpins into her head, but
mostly daughters are regular hornets, that
is, if you’re ambitious and mean to keep in
society. Of course you’re not in it, and,
being comfortably poor, so to speak, might be content
to see your girls marry their best chance, even if
it wasn’t worth much a year, and settle down
to babies and minding their own business; but then
they mightn’t agree to that, and where would
you and Evan be?
“This nice old house and garden
of yours wouldn’t hold ’em after they got
through with dolls, and some girls don’t even
have any doll-days now. It would be town and
travel and change, and you haven’t got the price
of that between you all, and to keep this going, too.
You’d have to go to N’York, for a couple
of months at least, to a hotel, and what would that
Evan of yours do trailing round to dances? For
you’re not built for it, though I did once think
you’d be a go in society with that innocent-wise
way, and your nose in the air, when you don’t
like people, would pass for family pride. I’d
wager soon, in a few years, he’d stop picking
boutonnières in the garden every morning and sailing
down to that 8:15 train as cool as if he owned time,
if those boys were girls! Though if Jenks-Smith
gets the Bluff Colony he’s planned under way
next spring, there’ll soon be some riding and
golfing men hereabouts that’ll shake things
up a bit, bridge whist, poker, and perhaps
red and black to help out in the between-seasons.”
(I little thought then what this colony and shaking
would come to mean.)
“Money or not, it’s hard
lines with daughters now work and poor pay
for the mothers mostly. You know that Mrs. Townley
that used to visit me? He was a banker and very
rich; died four years ago, and left his wife with
one son, who lived west, and five daughters, four that
travelled in pairs and an odd one, all
well fixed and living in a big house in one of those
swell streets, east of the park, where never less than
ten in help are kept. Well, if you’ll believe
it, she’s living alone with a pet dog and a
companion, except in summer, when the Chicago son and
his wife and babies make her a good visit down at
North East, the only home comfort she has.
“All the girls married to foreigners?
Not a blessed one. Two were bookish and called
literary, but not enough to break out into anything;
they didn’t agree with society (had impossible
foreheads that ran nearly back to their necks, and
thin hair); they went to college just to get the name
of it and to kill time, but when they got through they
didn’t rub along well at home; called taking
an interest in the house beneath them and the pair
that liked society frivolous; so they took a flat (I
mean apartment a flat is when it’s
less than a hundred a month and only has one bathroom),
and set up for bachelor girls. The younger pair
did society for a while, and poor Mrs. Townley chaperoned
round after them, as befitted her duty and position,
and had gorgeous Worth gowns, all lace and jets, that
I do believe shortened her breath, until one night
in a slippery music-room she walked up the back of
a polar bear rug, fell off his head, and had an awful
coast on the floor, that racked her knee so that she
could stay at home without causing remark, which she
cheerfully did. The two youngest girls were pretty,
but they were snobs, and carried their money on their
sleeves in such plain sight that they were too suspicious,
and seemed to expect every man that said ‘good
evening’ was waiting to grab it. So they
weren’t popular, and started off for Europe
to study art and music. Of course when they came
back they had a lot of lingo about the art atmosphere
and all that; home was a misfit and impossible, so
they went to live in a swell studio with two maids
and a Jap butler in costume, and do really give bang-up
musicals, with paid talent of course. I went
to one.
“That left Georgie, the odd
one, who was the eldest, with poor Mrs. Townley.
By this time the old lady was kind of broken-spirited,
and worried a good deal as to why all her girls left
her, ’she’d always tried to
do her duty,’ and all that. This
discouraged Georgie; she got blue and nervous, had
indigestion, and, mistaking it for religion, vamoosed
into a high-church retreat. And I call it mighty
hard lines for the old lady.”
I thought “too much money,”
but I didn’t say it, for this brutally direct
but well-meaning woman could not imagine such a thing,
and she continued: “Yet Mrs. Townley had
a soft snap compared to some, for she was in the right
set at the start, with both feet well up on the ladder,
and didn’t have to climb; but Heaven help those
with daughters who have thin purses and have to stretch
a long neck and keep it stiff, so, in a crowd at least,
nobody’ll notice their feet are dangling and
haven’t any hold.
“Ah, but this isn’t the
worst yet; that’s the clever ‘new daughter’
kind that sticks by her ma, who was herself once a
particular housekeeper, and takes charge of her long
before there’s any need; regulates her clothes
and her food and her callers, drags her around Europe
to rheumatism doctors, and pushes her into mud baths;
jerks her south in winter and north in summer, for
her ‘health and amusement,’ so she needn’t
grow narrow, when all the poor soul needs and asks
is to be let stay in her nice old-fashioned country
house, and have the village children in to make flannel
petticoats; entertain the bishop when he comes to confirm,
with a clerical dinner the same as she used to; spoil
a lot of grandchildren, of which there aren’t
any; and once in a while to be allowed to go into
the pantry between meals, when the butler isn’t
looking, and eat something out of the refrigerator
with her fingers to make sure she’s got them!
“No, my dear, rather than that,
I choose the lap dog and poor relation, who is generally
too dejected to object to anything. Besides, lap
dogs are much better now than in the days when the
choice lay only between sore-eyed white poodles and
pugs. Boston bulls are such darlings that for
companions they beat half the people one knows!”
I am doubly glad that the twins are
boys! Well, so be it, for women do often frighten
me and I misunderstand them, but men are so easy to
comprehend and love. While now, when Richard and
Ian puzzle me, all I need to do is to point to father
and Evan, and say, “Look! ask them, for they
can tell you all you need to know!”
Almost sunset, the boys climbing up
stairs, and Effie bringing a letter? Yes, and
from Lavinia Dorman, pages and pages the
dear soul! I must wait for a light. What
is this? she wishes to see me will
make me a long visit in May if
I like has no longer the conscience to ask
me to leave the twins to come to her boys
of their age need so much care then something
about Josephus! Yes, Sylvia Latham is the daughter
of the new house on the Bluffs, etc. You
blessed twins! here is another advantage I owe to
you at last a promised visit from Lavinia
Dorman!
Ah, as I push my book into the desk
the reason for its title turns up before me, worded
in Martin Cortright’s precise language:
“Everything, my dear Barbara,
has a precedent in history or the basis of it.
It is well known that the Indian tribes have taken
their distinctive names chiefly from geographical
features, and these often in turn control the pace
of the people. The name for the island since called
New Amsterdam and York was Mon-ah-tan-uk, a phrase
descriptive of the rushing waters of Hell Gate that
separated them from their Long Island neighbours,
the inhabitants themselves being called by these neighbours
Mon-ah-tans, anglice Manhattans, literally,
People of the Whirlpool, a title which, even
though the termagant humour of the waters be abated,
it beseems me as aptly fits them at this day.”