WE AND THE “ALIENS”

Too Long; Didn't Read

It might be thought that people who lived on Groundnut Hill, in Palmyra, would have no more story to tell than the needy knife-grinder, but as Hiram Nute, the essence-peddler, says, “Wherever there’s human nater and the Lord’s providence, there’s apt to be consid’able goin’ on.” Perhaps there was more “goin’ on” in our family from the fact that the human nature is somewhat mixed. There is sure to be an astonishing variety in any large family, I have observed, even when there are not, as in ours,[6] two sets of children. But the queer differences with us are all set down to the fact of mother’s second marriage. She was Deacon Partridge’s daughter, and she married the Rev. Cyrus Dill, who was the “stated supply” at Palmyra, the summer that she was nineteen. He received a call to a small church in a large city, and three children were born there, Cyrus, Octavia and I. I am Bathsheba. They named me after my Grandmother Dill, because she was a woman who feared the Lord. It was my father’s behest, and was so set down in his will—he died just after I was born. The will was pasted into the family Bible. Every one said it was a beautiful will, because, while he had scarcely any material possessions, he yet bequeathed so much. Grandma Partridge and my mother always cried over it on rainy Sundays, and to my infant mind it was a scarcely less sacred thing than the scriptures themselves. When I was sixteen, I was so light-minded as to wish that Grandma Dill could have been[7] a woman who feared the Lord and had a pretty name, too. Long before that time grandma had to weep alone over the will, for mother had married the young artist who had pitched his white umbrella tent all summer on the green slope of our orchard, and painted old “Blue” in its brooding stillness, and with its shifting shadows, and the beautiful vista of the river through our Norway pines. An artist! The name savored of unconventionality to grandma, and of shiftlessness as well, to grandpa. But they gave in—to mother’s dimple—stern Uncle Horace said. He declared, furthermore, this severe relative of ours, that grandpa would never have been coerced by the dimple, if he had not been enfeebled in body and mind by his inveterate foe, asthma. Grandma, we learned, as we grew up, was suspected of secretly favoring the match. She cried and feared that it was not marrying in the Lord, for the young artist had been[8] reared in a different faith from ours; but,—dear grandma!—she loved a romance. Stories were not favored in those days, by the strictest of the sect to which we belonged, and grandpa was of the strictest. She read them privately, sometimes, with a deep sense of guilt. When, by great good fortune—and some one’s oversight—I found one in the Sunday-school library, she would ask me, with wistful eagerness, if it were “a pretty story.” And although I never saw her read it, she knew “how it ended” while I was still at the beginning.