784
THE CONGRESS OE WOMEN.
“ We have stood many years in the sun and the rain,
And crowned many children before you came,
Our blossoms as white, their fragrance the same.
Then the noisy blackbird, raising his wing,
On the topmost branch would shout spring! spring!
The locust, our home, is king, king!
Wait, chirped the robin, you’ll see, you’ll see!
From the boughs of the black-heart cherry-tree.”
How the bodies of children grow and strengthen in such a place, ay, and their minds as well. They are laying by a fund of useful knowledge, and study ornithology and natural history fresh from Nature’s hands.
The fine old garden, which made a part of this ideal home, with its broad walks crossing at right angles in the center, was a world within itself to the children. It was as full of birds as of flowers; and the beautiful borders of blue-bells, snow-drops and lilies of the valley, the lilac, the snow-ball, and the mock orange trees, all belonged to them. They made seats in their shade and swinging shelves from their branches, which sometimes held a pitcher of cool water, sometimes mother’s knitting, and were often converted into gorgeous flower-decked tables for the marriage supper of a favorite doll. Here they made beautiful, soft, green nests for the birds, and when they had set them in the boughs wondered why, and grieved because, their little friends did not use them. Through the shady yard, which stretched out from the long back porch, where the damson and the plum trees grew, a narrow path through the grass led to a dear old lumber-house on the brink of “ Spring Hill;” three stories high it stood, with a large, round ice-house underneath, all walled up with stone, that seemed to be always about half-full of ice and pretty yellow straw. Inside there were old looms, those clumsy devices of a past age, curious little spindles, broaches, quills, shuttles, bits of woven cloth, moth-eaten balls of yarn, wheels to turn and cords to twist, the cast-off occupation of a people who were now devoting all their time and abilities to the new business of voting. These happy children had fallen heirs to the whole, together with some little black children which their aspiring and ambitious parents had left behind. The first they put to uses new and strange, the last they taught to love them, and for the sake of that love, to make themselves useful then and in after years. Many bright winter days were there, but summer-time brought them to the orchard just beyond, the finest in all the country round, and which furnished apples through all the autumn and winter. At the foot of the hill was the stone walled spring and milk house, from which milk and water seemed to flow with like abundance. Below the spring a huge, flat rock, tilted up on the hill at just the right angle for sliding on boards from top to bottom, affording a trial of skill and good muscular exercise to climb to the top again. Oh, happy time! Oh, charming place! Was there ever a better one for children? On the banks of the artificial pool, below this gushing underground spring, were molded from the fine blue and white clay marvelous tea-pots, all kinds of dishes, horses, camels and buffaloes with humps on their backs that would make the originals blush for shame. No sculptor whose works now adorn the Art Palace was ever prouder of his achievements than these who molded blue clay at the foot of “ Spring Hill.”
Sometimes wandering down the spring branch through the beds of mint dipping in the cool water, and chewing the fragrant leaves, they came to a stream of more importance in their eyes because they knew it to be the headwater of a creek not far away, which emptied into a river that flowed into the great Mississippi, then to the Gulf; and so in fancy they followed the waters all over the world, from the spring which gushed from the hillside in their own yard, and often started out a little craft talking of the possibility of its reaching the sea. Their bodies grew and their minds expanded as they wandered down the stream to where it dashed over a fall fifteen feet high, bubbled and rolled through a wild ravine. The waterfall they called the Niagara, and it was to them a veritable illustration of that wonder of creation. Thus