THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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they mapped out in the pleasant fields and streams everything they learned, and geography became an open book.
The ravine was deep and dark, romantic and beautiful, in some places completely hidden by the overlapping branches and huge bowlders which had rolled down from the hills; again opening into a small valley dotted thick with daisies and blue forget-me- nots. Upon the steep hillsides the wake-robbins grew in the crevices of the rocks and the woodbine clambered up their sides; twenty-five or thirty varieties of flowers were often collected on a single expedition, and thus with a little help from mother or governess botany was learned without study. It needed but a small stretch of the imagination to people this weird place with elves and fairies; echo shouted to them from the hills; Narcissus smiled at his face in the brook, and Orpheus moaned among the trees for Eurydice. They learned all the myths and legends of the Ancients, for they had need of them. Having the groves, the cliffs, and the streams, they must find for them inhabitants. Oh that every child could be reared in such a paradise. While the mind thus feasts on the good things of nature and assimilates them, the body is nourished by the purest food; fresh vegetables and berries from the garden never stale or withered; fruits juicy and ripe from the orchard in summer, and the same preserved after the most approved style in winter, with only the freshest of milk, butter and eggs that never gave out.
These children of this ideal home were bound by few rules, unwholesome food and imposition on each other were almost the only things forbidden. They never seemed to be watched, guarded or chaperoned. Their wonder was how “ the umpire ” or “ the physician ” always appeared on the scene, unbidden, when a difficulty or an accident occurred; it was almost a superstitious belief with them that all trouble came bringing with it “ the remedy.”
About this old house of my dream were endless pleasant nooks and apartments; the children loved to gather in the “ family room ” and hear the old folks talk, and to sit on the straight, long seats in the high portico in front of the parlor door, shaded by the green vines, and watch the humming-birds. One place in particular the children and their visitors loved. It was a large upper room, the fartherst removed from that occupied by the heads of the family, that they might not be disturbed by the noise, full of light and sunshine and warmed by a big open wood fire, with ceiling high and white and a pretty flowered carpet. Here they played their games in winter dressed their dolls, and at the approach of the Merry Christmas season, with the door carefully locked or guarded, with an air of greatest secrecy and mystery, they contrived all kinds of surprises for the grown members of the family and the smaller children. They became adepts in the art of needlework, in the use of paste and scissors, made pincushions, ’kerchief bags, letter boxes, paper holders, pretty little chairs, etc. One old lady said admiringly: only give the little witches the material and they could make a hornet’s nest. All the interior of the house and the grounds was a faint foreshadowing of this wonderful Woman’s Building. The clay dishes and statuary, the swinging seats in the trees, the bridges over the spring branch, the curious headdresses, baskets plaited from the long trailing branches of the weeping willow, the bur baskets, the moss-covered swinging baskets for delicate vines and flowers were all the work of the feminine fingers or the inventions of feminine minds. There were just enough boys to be useful, and the girls were inclined to be a “ Board of Lady Managers.”
So ran my pleasant dream of happy childhood’s happy home.
“ But if I dream that all these are They are to me for that I dream,
For all things are as they seem to all,
And all things flow like a stream.”
Are not these things infinitely better than Fifth Avenue, the Mint, Smithsonian
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