The broad, comfortable table that fills the whole corner of my room is much older than I, in spite of its youthful collegiate air, and I can remember it from my very first years. It was a nursery table then, a conversion not the least of the changes that we five children have brought. I can see exactly how it looked in the parsonage study before it was needed in the nursery. I know how the great bronze inkstand stood dustily among the piles of tattered papers and how a pile of London Spectators was on the nearest corner. That was before we were cutting off ha'penny stamps to paste them carefully in scrapbooks improvised from old congressional reports, and when the "indignant protests of a retired Kentish gentleman" were not yet read by our wondering eyes. I know, too, how the dog-eared, little, old "Harper's Horace," that father had in college, came tumbling out when one rummaged among the papers and how it had a skeleton and a schoolboy rhyme on the fly-leaf.
Cano carmen sixpence
A corbis plena rye
Multas aves atras
Percoctas in a pie.
Ubi pie apertus
Tum canit avium grex
Eratne hoc a bonum dish
Ponere ante rex?
There was a volume of Rousseau somewhere in the wilderness of manuscript, too, and a pile of new books on sociology and ethics, a Tennyson always, a Thucydides, and a fat, little Greek Testament that was the wonder of my life.
Before long, however, the drawers exchanged their piles of sermons and pamphlets for paper dolls and instructive games. The green leather top was kept shining and bare for block-house building and early tea, and th ecorners were beginning to be dulled already with much contact with the wall. I can feel the dent still where I angrily whacked with a stone block once when Delia called me to be washed; and I know just where is the row of holes I punched with the knitting needles poor Aunt Agnes tried to teach me to use. There was a long crack, too, that was always fascinatingly full of pins except on that one Sunday afternoon when I tore up the sheet of my Catechism that defined "Effectual Calling," and systematically poked it in for stuffing.
Around the same nursery table we sat in the winter evenings and sewed and played games till bed, checkers and word-games by the hour with the gentle aunt who stayed writing in her room all day, and long guessing games with mother, after the baby was asleep. At one end of the table one of the aunts sat in her wheel chair. I remember thinking how lovely she looked while she told us one morning of the new little brother who had come in the night and gone away again directly.
One side of the table was always mother's. She sat there every evening in the high, curving rocking-chair that had been great-grandmother Payson's and read scraps from the newspaper after her long day. I can remember looking across the light and watching the delicate shadows that her beautiful hair made on her neck and the fine, clear lines of her profile. I can remember nothing more beautiful from a nearly perfect childhood, than the lingering, half-sleeping consciousness that she was leaning over me as I lay in bed, her head and arms clear against the lighted doorway and her hair brushing my face as she kissed me good-night.
Around the same table we five all sat whole afternoons in Christmas week, stuffing dates and rolling fat, misshapen pink candies. Some of them went into tissue paper wrappers and were hung on the tree, that all this time stood waiting in the corner, and some on broad platters to the shelves of the sideboard, where they diminished rapidly and not only at proper meal times At the very end of the holidays one year there was one single date left.
"That shall be Emeline's," said Miss Burton to me dictatorially. (I hated her, small as I was, for I could see Froebel behind her every action.) I said nothing, but eyed the date as it reposed on a butter-plate until the time should bring well-behaved Emeline's next legitimate opportunity. When she went for her date, however, there was only an ordinary, stale, pink wintergreen sitting there. Why I troubled to substitute, I do not know. It deceived no one, not even myself, and I had not even the satisfaction of getting a round scolding. It was too mean to talk about, mother said.
On Sunday afternoons the poor old table had its most trying times. Under it the boys and the baby built the temple in stone for perhaps the ninety-fifth time and above them Emeline carefully extra-illustrated her "Pilgrim's Progress," or illuminated a Bible scrapbook in watercolor. I, however, sat always in one particular corner most of the afternoon, learning the catechism for my sins. For me it had little of the lure that the boys' name gave it, in spite of the reward that always came after. No amount of "candy-chism" would ever atone to me for the pains of learning of "Sanctification, Justification, and Adoption." I wished then for anything that would make me grow up, that would make me old enough to do and to read the things that seemed so tempting and far away.
When I was a little older, I sat up later with the grown people. I can remember the evening stillness that was broken only by the ticking of Emeline's cuckoo clock or the cold stir and bustle of out-of-doors that came in when father brought the evening mail. I forgot then that it was not so very long before that I was playing Indian myself beneath the sturdy legs of the table, or teaching the younger children how properly to make bread pills and to administer them through the worsted nose of old Billy or rubber Polly-Dolly's broken ear.
But to-night I would give anything to be pasting kittens into a pink cambric scrapbook or painting dresses that a scrap of beeswax should hold to shapely paper shoulders. My old table looks smug and tiresome. The Wordsworth and Spenser are complacent, and the unfinished Trollope dull. Even the Oxford book of verse is unattractive, and my calendar pedantic and dictatorial. The drop-light hisses tiresomely, and I wish for the old, nickel lamp, though it never burned without a jerky flare and a vicious attempt at smoking. If I could only tear off the cover, tumble the books in a heap and sit by the old, green, leather top, I am firly believing that I should be exactly the same child again that banged the old drawers in and out. But I do not move. The Globe editions smirk securely at me, and the drop-light keeps on hissing. I cannot help it. I have grown up and not all the paper dolls I ever had can make me small again.