第34章 BEGINNING TO WORKA (2)

One question in this connection puzzled me a good deal.Were people going to be made good in spite of themselves,whether they wanted to or not?And what would be done with the bad ones,if there were any left?I did not like to think of their being killed off,and yet everybody must be good,or it would not be a true millennium.

It certainly would not matter much who was rich,and who was poor,if goodness,and not money,was the thing everybody cared for.Oh,if the millennium would only begin now!I felt as if it were hardly fair to me that I should not be here during those happy thousand years,when I wanted to so much.But I had not lived even my short life in the world without leading something of my own faults and perversities;and when I saw that there was no sign of an approaching millennium in my heart I had to conclude that it might be a great way off,after all.Yet the very thought of it brought warmth and illumination to my dreams by day and by night.It was coming,some time!And the people who were in heaven would be as glad of it as those who remained on earth.

That it was a hard world for my mother and her children to live in at present I could not help seeing.The older members of the family found occupations by which the domestic burdens were lifted a little;but,with only the three youngest to clothe and to keep at school,there was still much more outgo than income,and my mother's discouragement every day increased.

My eldest brother had gone to sea with a relative who was master of a merchant vessel in the South American trade.His inclination led him that way;it seemed to open before him a prospect of profitable business,and my mother looked upon him as her future stay and support.

One day she came in among us children looking strangely excited.

I heard her tell some one afterwards that she had just been to hear Father Taylor preach,the sailors minister,whose coming to our town must have been a rare occurrence.His words had touched her personally,for he had spoken to mothers whose first-born had left them to venture upon strange seas and to seek unknown lands.

He had even given to the wanderer he described the name of her own absent son Benjamin."As she left the church she met a neighbor who informed her that the brig "Mexican"had arrived at Salem,in trouble.It was the vessel in which my brother had sailed only a short time before,expecting to be absent for months."Pirates"was the only word we children caught,as she hastened away from the house,not knowing whether her son was alive or not.Fortunately,the news hardly reached the town before my brother himself did.She met him in the street,and brought him home with her,forgetting all her anxieties in her joy at his safety.

The "Mexican"had been attacked on the high seas by the piratical craft "Panda,"robbed of twenty thousand dollars in specie,se fire,and abandoned to her fate,with the crew fastened down in the hold.One small skylight had accidentally been overlooked by the freebooters.The captain discovered it,and making his way through it to the deck,succeeded in putting out the fire,else vessel and sailors would have sunk together,and their fate would never have been known.

Breathlessly we listened whenever my brother would relate the story,which he did not at all enjoy doing,for a cutlass had been swung over his head,and his life threatened by the pirate's boatswain,demanding more money,after all had been taken.AGenoese messmate,Iachimo,shortened to plain "Jack"by the "Mexican's"crew,came to see my brother one day,and at the dinner table he went through the whole adventure in pantomime,which we children watched with wide-eyed terror and amusement.

For there was some comedy mixed with what had been so nearly a tragedy,and Jack made us see the very whites of the black cook's eyes,who,favored by his color,had hidden himself--all except that dilated whiteness--between two great casks in the bold.

Jack himself had fallen through a trap-door,was badly hurt,and could not extricate himself.

It was very ludicrous.Jack crept under the table to show us how he and the cook made eyes at each other down there in the darkness,not daring to speak.The pantomime was necessary,for the Genoese had very little English at his command.

When the pirate crew were brought into Salem for trial,my brother had the questionable satisfaction of identifying in the court-room the ruffian of a boatswain who had threatened his life.This boatswain and several others of the crew were executed in Boston.The boy found his brief sailor-experience quite enough for him,and afterward settled down quietly to the trade of a carpenter.

Changes thickened in the air around us.Not the least among them was the burning of "our meeting-house,"in which we had all been baptized.One Sunday morning we children were told,when we woke,that we could not go to meeting that day,because the church was a heap of smoking ruins.It seemed to me almost like the end of the world.

During my father's life,a few years before my birth,his thoughts had been turned towards the new manufacturing town growing up on the banks of the Merrimack.He had once taken a journey there,with the possibility in his mind of making the place his home,his limited income furnishing no adequate promise of a maintenance for his large family of daughters.From the beginning,Lowell had a high reputation for good order,morality,piety,and all that was dear to the old-fashioned New Englander's heart.

After his death,my mother's thoughts naturally followed the direction his had taken;and seeing no other opening for herself,she sold her small estate,and moved to Lowell,with the intention of taking a corporation-house for mill-girl boarders.