Granddaughter

“ If my grandmother be still alive, she is of no service to you, for by this time she must be nearly eighty years old—too old to be cared for by one to whom she has ceased to be of service, send her to me at Rochester, or bring her to Philadelphia, and it shall be the crowning happiness of my life to take care of her in her old age. Oh! she was to me a mother, and a father, so far as hard toil for my comfort could make her such. Send me my grandmother! that I may watch over and take care of her in her old age. And my sisters, let me know all about them. ”

“ The children call her grandma, and I heard Archie explaining to the gardener’s son, the other day, that she was really his grandmother, because she was the mother of his first father!
To me the past seems all a dream, and when I look about me upon my home, and hear the voices of my children shouting on the lawn, and see their father coming up the walk, and know that he will soon be at my side, bending over me in the old, teasing, loving way, I cannot realize that I am she who once plodded so drearily through the London fog and rain, hunting for work with which to get my daily bread. ”

“ The grandmother in such homes is the real mother of the flock: the mother who bore the children has no time to manifest mother-love; it is the grandmother who nurses the stone-bruises, picks out the slivers, kisses away the sorrows, gladdens young hearts by her simple stories, and rocks in her strong, old arms the babe, as she croons and quavers a song of love and duty. ”

“ ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA. Every generation compared to the age it immediately succeeds is but a further lapse from Paradise. Every grandfather is of necessity a wiser, kinder, nobler being that the grandson doomed to follow him—every grandmother chaster, gentler, more self-denying, more devoted to the beauty of goodness, than the giddy, vain, thoughtless creature, who in her time is sentenced to be grandmother to somebody, whose still increased defects will only serve to bring out the little lustre of the gentlewoman who preceded her. ”

“ As I lay welcome kisses on baby's wee brow!
A Grandmother, I? How the bright years have flown
Since I was a child scarce to maidenhood grown!
"And now in my arms, looking up in my eyes,
With orbs that are bluer than June's sunny skies,
Behold my own grandchild! Ah, verily, youth
'On double wings flies,' Grandpa says in good truth,
"As he looks in my face where no longer the rose
In my once dimpled cheeks in its loveliness grows,
And marks the white locks mingling faster each day
With the brown that old Time is fast stealing away. ”

“ I shouldn't care to be a grandmother for more than an hour."
"But why wish to be a grandmother at all?" Mrs. Corner's curiosity was aroused. She wondered what the little girl's fancy could be. "Do listen to [Pg 300] the child, Helen," she said. "She would like to be her own grandmother."
"Oh, I'd like to be Nan's and Mary Lee's and Jean's, too," Jack told her.
"But why?"
"If I were a grandmother and had four nice little girl grandchildren," Jack went on, "I'd do something or other so they could go to the party at Judge Wise's."
"And why can't they go? What's to prevent?" Mrs. Corner asked. ”

“ My father—well you know pretty well what kind of a man your grandfather was, so it’s no use my trying to gloss over his character—and your grandmother, ah, my poor mother, I was always fond of my mother, but she had a hard life, and it made her fretful and not much of a companion for a young girl. She thought the world was a hard place for a woman to live in, and the sooner I found it out and indulged in no vain hopes the better for me. ”

“ Every time that grandmother's tears fall upon the flower, the colors become fresh again, the rose swells up and fills the whole room with its fragrance, the walls disappear, as if they were only mist, and round about her is the green, glorious wood, where the sun beams through the leaves of the trees; and grandmother is young again; a charming maiden, with full red cheeks, beautiful and innocent—no rose is fresher; but the eyes, the mild, blessing eyes, still belong to grandmother. ”

“ I do the marketing, and talk Pidgin-English to Fong, and read Emerson and Carlyle and Guizot to grandmother, and huddle in woolly shawls like an old woman to keep from congealing where I sit! When the sun shines grandmother complains of the glare, and when it's foggy she complains of the gloom, and when it rains she goes to bed to keep warm. ”

“ When you are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is nothing surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she is a person whom you knew as a little girl, it seems impossible. You say to yourself, 'How can a little girl be a grandmother.' It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter. ”

“ King and patriarch, in the midst, sitteth the true-hearted farmer.
At his side, the wife with her needle, still quietly regardeth the children.
Sheltered in her corner-nook, in the arm-chair, the post of honor,
Calm with the beauty of age, is the venerable grandmother.
Clustering around her, watching the stocking that she knits, are the little ones,
Loving the stories that she tells of the days when she was a maiden,
Stories ever mix'd with lessons of a reverent piety. ”

“ The Countess, hearing how the unfortunate girl was loved both at The Old Bleachery and the gamekeeper's, promised that she would paint for them copies of the picture that she had shown to Grandmother, in which Victorka was seen standing under a tree.
"She wants to do something for everybody, before she leaves; she would like to take all of you with her," smiled the Princess.
"What is better than to be among those that love us, what greater happiness than to make others happy?" said Grandmother. ”

“ So there were wrathful moments when you wished you might live always with Grandmother. It was so easy to be good at her house—so easy, that is, to get two pieces of cake. And when God made little boys, you thought, He must have made Grandmothers to bake sugar pies for them.
"Suppose you were a little boy like me, Grandmother?" you once said to her.
"That would be fine," she admitted; "but suppose you were a little grandmother like me?"
"Well," you replied, with candor, "I think I would rather be like Grandfather, 'cause he was a soldier, and fought Johnny Reb." ”

“ She is the grandmother par excellence, and spends her life in spoiling the little ones, cramming them with sugar-plums and rich cake whenever she has the chance, and nullifying mamma's punishments by surreptitious gifts and goodies. She is the dearly beloved of our childish recollections; and to the last days of our life we cherish the remembrance of the kind old lady with her beaming smile, taking out of her large black reticule, or the more mysterious recesses of her unfathomable pocket, wonderful little screws of paper which her withered hands thrust into our chubby fists ”

“ Sallie watched her grandmother go upstairs and then Sallie looked at the picture hanging on the wall of her great-grandmother.
"I wonder if Grandmother Great ever had to punish grandmother," thought Sallie. "I wonder if grandmothers were always very good little girls?"
Sallie looked at her Grandfather Great, too, and wondered how it was that, though the Greats were the father and mother of her own dear grandmother, they had nice black hair, all smooth and shiny, while her grandmother and grandfather, too, had white hair. ”

“ Still I resolved to make some struggles for my dignity yet, and not submit until defeat was no longer doubtful. People in talking of "unrequited affection," speak of "the knell of departed hopes," but no knell could sound more dreadful to the ears of a girl in her teens—trembling for her scarcely-fledged young-lady-hood—than did the voice of my grandmother, (and it was by no means low) , as she remarked:
"So this is Ella. Why, how the child has altered! I remember her only as a little, screaming baby, that was forever holding its breath with passion till it became black in the face. ”

“ Grandmother often received letters from her children, but none ever came before, fraught with such momentous questions for her to solve. It was from her daughter in Vienna, who told her mother that her husband had obtained service in the household of a certain princess, whose estates were but a few miles distant from the village where Grandmother lived, and that he was to be at home with his family during the summer only, while the princess lived in the country, and therefore it was their earnest desire that Grandmother should come to live with them. ”

“ Mercifully we were the first to hear about this little one; for even as a baby she was so winning that Temple people would have done much to get her, and the old grandmother would almost certainly have been beguiled into giving her to them. How often it has been so! "She will be brought up carefully according to her caste. All that is beautiful will be hers, jewels and silk raiment." The hook concealed within the shining bait is forgotten. The old grandmother feels she is doing her best for the child, and the little life passes out of her world. ”

“ And that, after all, is the secret of a grandmother's indulgence. It isn't a weakness, as your puckery, sour people pretend. Grandmother has lived. She knows what life amounts to. She knows it is nothing but broken toys from the cradle to the grave. She knows that happy, chirping, radiant little creature before her, has all this experience to go through; and so, ere it comes, she watches with jealous care that nothing shall defraud her of one sunbeam of childhood. Childhood! She strains her gaze far beyond that, away into misty womanhood. ”

“ She is a fine lady," replied Grandmother.
"The picture to the right is my grandfather, and the left one is my father," continued the Princess.
"Very nice people! Your Grace does not deny her father; and may I ask, where is your mother?"
"There is my mother and sister," said the Princess pointing to two portraits above her writing desk.
"A lovely lady, it gives one pleasure to look at her; but your sister does not resemble either her father or her mother; it is sometimes the case that a child takes after some distant relative. The face of this young man seems familiar to me ”

“ He hasn't married, because he hasn't had time. We're awfully good friends, but he doesn't know my age. He knows that I have a daughter, but not a grand-daughter. He thinks of me as a young woman—not as a grandmother-creature in black silk and mitts—"
"Mother! nobody expects you to wear black silk and mitts—"
"Well, you expect me to have a black-silk-and-mitt mind. You know you are thinking this very minute that there is no idiot like an old one—Cecily—"
The girl flushed. "I don't think you are quite kind, mother."
Mrs. Beale laughed and forgot to be cynical. ”

“ Sometimes to women, listening to the stories of their grandmothers, it seems better to have lived then than now—her grandmother was at that time a young wife. It was the day of arduous, if not of long, courtship before marriage, when every wedding celebrated the close of an original romance; and when young couples, for bridal trips, went out to settle new States, riding on a pillion generally, with their trousseaux following as best they could on sumpter mules; to hear the grandmother describe it made one long to be a bride of those days. ”

“ The girl kissed her grandmother lovingly. Then rising, she put her hat on her sun-glinted head as she replied: “It won’t be necessary, because Peg, the real waitress, will be well again tomorrow. She had one of her blind headaches today, but I did promise to go over Monday after school and do Etta’s work, preparing vegetables. You don’t mind that, do you, Granny dear. The new orphan will be there by Tuesday surely.”
“Well, well, you do whatever you think right. That heart o’ yourn won’t take you far wrong. You’re goin’ over to your school-teacher’s now, aren’t you, dearie? ”

“ You said, "Don't worry, it won't be long before you have somebody to whom she will be grandma, and you can get out of it gracefully by calling her grandma, too." Isn't it queer to think that I through my motherhood shall place you in the grandmother generation? As I look back to Cloverton days and my grandmother, I envy this baby of mine. There is something about a grandmother that is pretty fine. They thought I was a great kid at grandma's house—partly because of my unshakable [Pg 49] belief that my grandmother was beautiful. ”

“ Since then she has lived with her father and mother-in-law, tending them and her late husband's grandmother with the utmost care. They love her dearly, and are thus in a great measure consoled for the loss of their son. ”

“ And I keep grateful memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield. No other experience in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie between mother and child—a tie that in our case never relaxed and never weakened. ”

“ A lovely little babe, seven months* old, the infant daughter of Darius and Laura, died the same day her grandmother died, so that those who parted with her could but be- hold her, in their faith's vision, received into the grandmother's arms in greeting, she never having seen the child in this life. ”