George Madden Martin

“ And while it almost would seem that Aunt Cordelia was being admonished too, and from the little book, in the light of what followed, it appeared that Aunt Katie, Aunt Louise, and the little book were right.
The day in question started wrong. In the act of getting out of bed, life seemed a heavy and a listless thing. If Emmy Lou, less pink-cheeked than usual if any had chanced to notice, but full as chubby, ever had felt this way before, she would have told Aunt Cordelia that her head ached. But if the head never has ached before? ”

“ The sins at seven, the chubby, endeavoring Emmy Lou's sins, her cloak on the coat-closet floor instead of the closet peg, mucilage on Aunt Katie's rug where a paper outspread before pasting began would have saved it—sins such as these have no prod to reminder more poignant than this melancholy tolling of the roundhouse bell in the night.
"It is an uneasy conscience," Aunt Cordelia invariably claimed when Emmy Lou, waking, came begging for permission to get in her bed. [104] "If your conscience was all that it should be, you'd be asleep." ”

“ She takes it without question that Emmy Lou has been dreaming.
"It is what comes of being a naughty little girl again. We never sleep well when our conscience is uneasy."
Emmy Lou lay close. Conscience! Aunt Cordelia said so!
Nor did Aunt Cordelia dream, nor Emmy Lou suspect, that the monstrous, looming shape padding along the silent street beyond the open window with its broad sill was the circus elephant making his way to the railroad yard and his traveling car, the yard where the roundhouse bell even now made melancholy tolling in the night. ”

“ When Aunt Cordelia and Uncle Charlie on their road to church met Emmy Lou this morning, her eyes, like her late accumulation of tickets, were pink. She to whom tears came hard and seldom had been crying.
"And how about the prize?" asked Uncle Charlie.
Emmy Lou, tears stoutly held back, handed it to him. He looked it over, opened it, read [220] her name in inscription within, then lifted his gaze to her.
"Well, I'll be doggoned!"
"Charlie!" from Aunt Cordelia.
"I surely will. The same to the other two?"
Emmy Lou nodded. There are times when one cannot trust oneself to speak. ”

“ Mr. Schmit was German. Mr. Dawkins is English. At Emmy Lou's, the teakettle, a vague part in family affairs, boils on the stove, but at Maud's, the teakettle, a family affair of moment, boils on the "hob," which is to say, the grate. And more, the father and mother of Maud and Albert Eddie not only have crossed that vague something, home of the little mermaid, the ocean, but their mother has all but seen the Queen. ”

“ Aunt Cordelia was authority for that.
Her concept of prayer, too, had moved forward; [171] prayer in her mind's eye now taking the form of little white cocked-hat billets-doux winging out of the postbox of the heart, and, like so many white doves, speeding up to the blue of Heaven. If God was not too busy, or too bothered, as grown people sometimes are on trying days, she even could fancy Him smiling pleasantly, if absently, as grown-up people do, when the cocked-hat billets-doux, a sort of morning mail, were brought in to Him. ”

“ If one never has been to a picnic the only premises to go on are those given you.
"You haven't a thing to do but stay with Maud and Albert Eddie, and mind Sarah," said Aunt Cordelia as she put Emmy Lou's hat on her head and its elastic under her chin, "except, of course, to look after your basket. There is pink icing on the little cakes and a good tablecloth that I don't want anything to happen to under the beaten biscuits at the bottom. There is ham and there's tongue and there's chicken." ”

“ But Aunt Cordelia, not always a free agent, was no longer permitting so much visiting.
"You are letting her actually live on the street," said Aunt Katie.
"With any sort of children," supplemented Aunt Louise.
Undoubtedly Aunt Cordelia came the nearest to understanding there is another side to these affairs. "Sometimes I think she's lonesome," she said.
"Those children who are all the day,
Allowed to wander out,
And only waste their time in play,
Or running wild about——"
said Aunt Katie. ”

“ Faithful little Sister from the alley of so long ago, gentle and loving Izzy of that same far-gone day, Hattie helping a schoolmate comrade over the hard places? This is the road whereon those older, laden souls are stealing? The road, if once gained by the pilgrim, whether he be Episcopalian, Bohemian, Presbyterian, or Afro-American, on which he will go straight onward. ”

“ The new book, for Emmy Lou is reading now, left where one begins to divine that the white cat in reality is a beautiful lady. Also at home on Aunt Cordelia's table that Sunday institution never forgotten by Uncle Charlie, the box of candy, from whose serried layers Emmy Lou may take one piece in Aunt Cordelia's absence. Furthermore at home the realm of the kitchen with its rites of Sunday preparation, Aunt M'randy its priestess, and delectable odors and savory steam arising from its altar, the cooking-stove. ”

“ Christmas Eve, the theater brilliant with lights and garlands, evergreens wreathing the box wherein she sat in her new crimson dress with Alice, Rosalie, Amanthus, and Charlotte, and Mrs. Pulteney just behind—fair and lovely Mrs. Pulteney who, like the mother of Charlotte, did not live with her husband, though Emmy Lou is doing her best to forget it. ”

“ She spoke with pride. "My mamma let me make it myself on the grate."
On the grate? Why not in the kitchen on the stove? Still that was Charlotte's own affair. More showy than tidy in her dress, she seemed one of those detached and anxious little girls hunting for friends. The kindly impulse was to respond to overtures, Emmy Lou knowing a past where she had needed friends. And besides there was the candy. Hickory-nut candy does not have to look tidy to look good. She had a liberal lunch outspread on the napkin upon her desk, but she had no candy. ”

“ Every exigency in life save one, for an Emmy Lou at six, seemingly is provided for by rules or admonition, the one which sometimes is overlooked being lack of understanding.
"'Take heed that thou no murder do,'" was the new clause of the Commandments In Verse, she had recited at Sunday school only yesterday.
"'The way of the transgressor is hard,'" said Dr. Angell from his pulpit to her down in the pew between Uncle Charlie and Aunt Cordelia an hour later. ”

“ Next door to Emmy Lou, at Izzy's, lives an old, old man. His brows are white and his beard falls on his breast. He smiles on Emmy Lou when she goes to his knee to speak to him, but he draws Izzy to him and kisses him. [39] Aunt Katie calls him beautiful. Uncle Charlie calls him a glorious old patriarch. But Izzy's Mamma calls him father.
And suddenly to Emmy Lou, there in Aunt Cordelia's lap, God is a Person! He paces his goodly walks, as Papa does the flagging from the gate to the house with Emmy Lou running to meet him. ”

“ Aunt Cordelia, even at the risk of being late to church, stopped short. She didn't see the matter in any such fashion at all! "Emmy Lou will prefer to go to her own Sunday school picnic too, I hope," decidedly. "How you distract and bother the child, Charlie!"
"I bother Emmy Lou? She and I are as near good friends as people get to be. We respect each other's honesty and go our own ways. I am going to leave the tickets where I put them yesterday. I planned to take her and the Dawkins to the circus. You and she can fight it out." ”

“ Hitherto the cook in the kitchen had been Mary, pink-cheeked [16] and pretty. Whereas now the cook in the kitchen not only is round and rolling and colored and named Aunt M'randy, but there is a house-boy in the kitchen, too, whose name is Bob. The stabilizing fact remains, however, that there is a cook, and there is a kitchen.
And now there is a little boy next door. For you to go to Sunday school with the little boy next door, holding tight to his hand, while his Mamma at his door, and your Mamma at your door, watch you down the street. ”

“ A year later Sarah, the sister of Albert Eddie Dawkins, saw him through the six weeks of the confirmation class, up the aisle of St. Simeon's and confirmed. The next day she started to England to visit her mother's people who had prospered.
"In a way I can feel he is safe now," she said to Aunt Louise at Sunday school on the day of his confirmation. "I wasn't easy about him before, if he is my brother. If he'll only go ahead now, he'll do."
Aunt Cordelia saw Emmy Lou through the same class of preparation, up the aisle and confirmed, and then came home and had a hearty cry. ”

“ Is the trouble with her who would give all she is or hopes to be in adoring offering to Papa? Can he, even in the light of what she has heard today, be open to criticism? Certainly not. Papa may be a Bohemian, and a Bohemian may not be a Christian, but what he is that shall Emmy Lou be also.
To decide is to act. Papa went down town [267] after dinner with Uncle Charlie, and Emmy Lou took her place at the piano. Ordinarily she is loath to practice, going through the ordeal because Aunt Cordelia requires it. But today she goes about it as a practical matter with a definite purpose. ”

“ Whereas Sarah [303] now had shown her what nor home, nor school, nor Sunday school, nor confirmation class had made her see, that the faithfulness with which the digit is put on the slate, the script in the copybook, and the conjugation of the verb on the tablets of the mind, is the education and the thing!
This, then, is the gate? This the way that leads thither? The sweet and common road along which the children of the Heavenly King are journeying? ”

“ Maud told Sarah. "We won't go too far or the mother of the little pigs will chase us."
"Albert Eddie, I told the ladies that you would get the wood for a fire so we can put the coffee on," said Sarah. "When you come back from that you can take the bucket and bring us the ice-water from the barrel for the lemonade."
Sarah's glance came next to Emmy Lou, no mixer in the world of Sunday school at best, as Sarah before this had observed. Sarah frowned perturbedly. Some are picnickers by intuition, for example Maud and the little girl gone off together; others come to it through endeavor. ”

“ But Aunt Cordelia, taking Emmy Lou on her lap, explained. "The man is any one of us—you, me, Uncle Charlie, your little friends Maud and Albert Eddie down at the corner, everybody. If we meet our lions as we should, with courage and the truth, they, nor anything, can prevent our going right onward." ”

“ For a day or two after Emmy Lou, four years old, came to live with her uncle and her aunties, or in fact until she discovered Izzy who lived next door and Sister who lived in the alley, Aunt Cordelia's hands were full. But it was Emmy Lou's heart that was full.
Along with other things which had made up life, such as Papa, and her own little white bed, and her own little red chair, and her own window with its sill looking out upon her own yard, and Mary the cook in Mary's own kitchen, and Georgie the little neighbor boy next door—along with these things, she wanted Mamma. ”

“ And now laughter has become a lion in Emmy Lou's path. Will Hattie, her new friend, laugh at her? One can refrain from showing [135] one's heart to Aunt Katie and Aunt Louise, but in the world of school Emmy Lou needs a friend.
Omniscience at home is strangely wanting about this world of school, perhaps because Emmy Lou's aunties in their days went to establishments such as Mr. Parson's Select Academy, where the pupil is the thing, and school and teachers even a bit unduly glad to have and hold her, whereas Emmy Lou at her school has not found herself in the least the thing. ”

“ Minnie, whose wrap is disturbingly nearer a sacque than a coat in its scant nature, takes her place on the horse-block at the curb before Izzy's house, and he and Emmy Lou take places either side of her.
Minnie, wonderful Minnie, ten years old and over, knows it all. What, for instance? Everything, anything. Such as this matter she brings up now of brothers and sisters. They are a bad lot. She says so. A sort to stop at nothing even to passing a poorer sister without knowing her on the street! ”

“ You cannot go play with anybody. No, not with Maud at the corner or anybody else." Then to Uncle Charlie, shaking his head over this unwonted friction as he rose to start back down town: "They tell me there is whooping-cough around everywhere, Charlie." Then to Emmy Lou: "Now try and be a good girl for the rest of the day, Aunt Cordelia will have her hands full. It is Bob's afternoon out. Try and be Aunt Cordelia's precious baby." ”

“ The party of five took their places about a table a few moments after. Two of them were familiar figures in the Big Room at St. Simeon's Sunday school. The three young ladies who rushed up, tray in hand, to wait on them, were far, far older—eminent representatives of that superior caste of St. Simeon's Sunday school, the Bible Class.
It was a friendly rivalry that was on among the three, each waitress of the evening endeavoring in her earnings to outstrip and eclipse all other waitresses and so carry off the glory of the occasion. ”

“ And Minnie knew about gypsies who steal little boys and girls out of their beds! Izzy is six, and Emmy Lou is four, and Minnie is ten going on eleven; can it be wondered that they looked up to her?
She speaks darkly about herself. She has brothers and sisters better off than she is, somewhere, who don't want to speak to her when she meets them on the street!
And she speaks darkly about the lady she lives with whom she calls Mis' Snoble. "When Lisa Schmit from the grocery came to play with me, she shoo'd her off with the broom," she said. ”