Bessie on Her Travels

“I wanted to save them.”

Belle was not like some children who would rather enjoy a nice thing by themselves, and the others were surprised.

Now Belle would have been ready enough to tell Maggie and Bessie why she wanted to keep the grapes, but she did not care to do so before the young visitors; lest as she afterwards said, they should think she was “proud of herself for doing it.”

“She thinks we’ll give her some of ours, and then she’ll eat up her own afterwards,” said Minnie Barlow, one of the little guests.

“I don’t either,” said Belle, flushing angrily: “I wouldn’t eat one of your old grapes, not if you begged and begged me to.”

“No,” said Bessie, putting her arm about Belle’s neck: “Belle never does greedy things. I know she has a very excellent reason if she don’t eat them. Are you sick, Belle?”

“No,” said Belle; and then she whispered in Bessie’s ear, “but poor Daphne is sick, and I am going to keep my grapes for her. She likes them very much.”

“And I’ll give you mine for her too,” said Bessie, “yours make only a few for her when she is sick.” Then she said aloud: “I’m going to keep my grapes too; and Maggie, I think you’d keep yours, if you knew the circumstance.”

“Then I will,” said Maggie; and turning to the little strangers she added, “Bessie knows what’s inside of my mind most as well as I do myself; so if she tells me I would do a thing, I just know I would.”

So Maggie, too, put by her share of the grapes, till the company had gone, and Belle felt free to tell what she wanted to do with them; when she agreed that Bessie was right, and she was quite ready to save her grapes for such a “circumstance.” It was but a small act of self-denial for these little girls to make out of their abundance; but who can tell the pleasure the gift gave to old Daphne. And verily Belle had her reward.

“Now Heaven bress my child,” said the old woman, when Belle offered the grapes, and told that she and her young friends had kept them from their play: “if she ain’t growin’ jes like her dear mamma, who was allus thinkin’ for oders.”

Nothing could have pleased Belle more than to be told she was like her dear mother; but she said, —

“I didn’t used to think for ofers much, Daphne; not till I saw Bessie do it, and Maggie too. They taught me.”

“Never min’ who taught ye, so long as you’re willin’ to learn,” said Daphne. “But I say Heaven bress them dear little girls too, as I knows it will.”

Pleased as Daphne was, she would have been better satisfied if her little mistress had taken back her gift for her own use; but Belle insisted that she should eat the grapes herself, and indeed climbed on her lap and stuffed them one after the other into her mouth, refusing to taste one herself.

“What is that, Uncle Horace?” asked Maggie, one afternoon when she and Bessie were out driving on the Avenue with Colonel Rush, Aunt Bessie, and the boys.

The object of her interest was certainly of a nature to excite curiosity. It was a round building of stone, supported by eight pillars, with open arches between. In the wall, above the pillars, were three narrow loop-holes or openings. It could scarcely have been told, however, that it was built of stone; for pillars and round walls were alike covered with beautiful green vines, just now in all their summer glory. It stood in the centre of a small park or common, where children and nurses were playing and wandering about.

“That,” said Colonel Rush, “is the old stone mill.”

“I don’t think it looks much like a mill,” said Bessie: “it don’t have any things to go round.”

“Probably it had things to go round, as you call them, once upon a time,” said the Colonel.

“I thought it was a tower built by the early settlers to defend themselves from the Indians,” said Harry. “Willie Thorn told me so.”

“Many people think so,” said the Colonel, “and some still believe that it was built by the Danes, hundreds of years ago.”

“Oh!” said Fred, “this is the tower Longfellow wrote about in his ‘Skeleton in Armor,’ isn’t it, sir?”

“The very same,” said the Colonel; “but, I believe, Fred, that it has been pretty well proved, from old papers, that it had no such romantic beginning, but was really and truly a windmill.”

“Tell me about the skeleton, Fred,” said Maggie.

So Fred told how a skeleton in armor, having been found in a place called Fall River, some miles from Newport, the poet, Longfellow, had written a ballad about it; telling how a viking, or Norwegian sailor of the olden time, had fallen in love with the daughter of a prince, who refused to give his child to the roving sailor; but they had run away together, and crossing the sea had come to this spot, where the viking had built this tower for his wife to live in.

“Here for my lady’s bower
Built I the lofty tower,
Which to this very hour
Stands looking seaward,”

chanted Fred, stretching out his hand with a magnificent air towards the old tower.

“That’s nice,” said Maggie, with a satisfied nod of her curly head. “I shall just believe that. It’s a great deal nicer than to think it was just a common old windmill for grinding up corn.”

“I shan’t,” said matter-of-fact Bessie, “not when Uncle Horace says it’s not true.”

“I don’t see that any one can be very sure what it was,” said Maggie, determined to have faith in the most romantic story, “and I shall make up my mind it was the lady’s bower. But what about the skeleton, Fred?”

“Oh! Mr. Longfellow goes on to say how the lady died, and her husband could not bear to live without her; so he went out into the woods and killed himself, and the skeleton in armor which was really found is supposed to be his.”

“He oughtn’t to kill hisse’f. He ought to wait till Dod killed him,” said Frankie, who had been listening with great interest to the story. “He could play with all these nice chillen, if he’d ’haved hisself.”

“Yes,” said Bessie, who had received the story with as much displeasure as she had done that of the “Chief’s Head,” last summer, at Chalecoo, “if God chooses people to stay here, they ought to do it, even if they are having very hard times.”

“So they ought, Bess,” said Fred; “but I guess those old vikings did not care much about playing with children. They were very brave, daring fellows.”

“People can be brave and like children,” said Bessie, slipping her little hand into that of her own hero. “Uncle Horace likes children and plays with them, and no one could be braver than he is. And besides, Fred, if people have very good courage, I should think they would be brave to bear the trouble God sends them, and not go kill themselves out of it.”

“Well reasoned, little one,” said the Colonel, bending his tall head to kiss her; “that man is certainly a coward who cannot bear what God sends to him, but takes the life his Maker has given.”

“And I shall think it is a windmill,” said Bessie, quite as resolved to stick to facts as Maggie was to believe the poet’s story.

“And I shall think it the viking’s tower, and write a story-book about it when I’m grown up,” said Maggie. “I’ll put it down for a subject.”

If Maggie lives to write a book on each “subject” she has put down for that purpose, she will be very old indeed.

Bessie said no more; for if she and Maggie differed on something which was not important, she never argued about it, and this was probably one reason why they never quarrelled; for each was content to let the other be of her own way of thinking, so long as it did no harm. If we could all learn that lesson it would save many hard words and thoughts, and the trouble which arises from such.

They all now went back to the carriage, which they had left for a closer view of the old mill, and drove on to what is called the Point, and around the north-western side of the island, from which road they gained a beautiful view of the harbor and bay.

“What is that over there, Uncle Horace?” asked Fred, “it looks like an old fort.”

“Just what it is, my boy,” replied Colonel Rush. “That point is called the ‘Dumpling Rocks,’ and that ruin is old Fort Lewis, or Fort Dumpling.”

“What a funny name,” said Maggie.

They now crossed the long stone causeway which leads to Coaster’s Harbor Island; and, as they went over this, the children were all greatly delighted with the number of pretty little birds which went whirling round them on every side, darting almost under the horses’ feet, and in their very faces; passing round and round, above and beneath the carriage. They were sand-martins, the Colonel said, and being disturbed by the rolling of the wheels, were probably trying to draw attention from their nests, which were built in the crevices of the stones that formed the causeway.

On this island stood the poor-house which they had come to visit; and here another carriage, containing several of the elders of the party, had arrived before them. Papa was there and took the little girls out of the carriage when it stopped.

“What a nice place for the poor people to be in, when they don’t have any house of their own!” said Bessie: “I s’pose they’re very grateful for it.”