The Baldwin Library KiB & PBT ated V bee. W. V. HER BOOK And Various Verses OTHER BOOKS BY SAME AUTHOR ‘THE INVISIBLE PLAYMATE” ‘CA LOST EPIC AND OTHER. POEMS”” “ Thank you, Mr. Oakman” W. V. HER BOOK And Various Verses BY WILLIAM CANTON With T-wo Illustrations by C. E. Brock NEW YORK STONE & KIMBALL M DCCC XCVI1 COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY STONE AND KIMBALL Contents W. V., HER BirTHDAY . Her Boox The Inquisition . The First Miracle By the Fireside. I. By the Fireside. II. The Raider Babsie-Bird ‘ The Orchard of Stars . The Sweet Pea . Brook-side Logic Bubble-Blowing . New Version of an Old cae The Golden: Swing-Boat Another Newton’s Apple . Naturula Naturans . Wings and Hands Flowers Invisible - Making Pansies . Heart-ease : ‘¢Si f avais un arpent”” Her Frienp LITr.tejoHn Her BeED-TIME . vil PAGE Contents Various VERSES Ce Bastvote Eden: ays mrcite eens tween .3) GoodwinvSands |) suis) Gea ee 2 Dra tell ora typeeeeve net te rateegat eet alice) 7 VIGNETTES adie Wena, UG 6° 6 oo a 0 ROR The Wanderer. ID. . . . . . . 4204 pishesScarecrowiersj)- 9.) sy tions ft ie OO The Haunted Bridge . . . «© . ~ 108 ania Qiome aig 9G 6 6 Ja io 8 0 RHO Seas Picturess lees alee sh ony ee menTcl2, Sea=Picturesss lly ei ien et epee one eA II@OnNENE G6 9g 16 10 5-6, a. 9-0 BHO Green Pastures Riirea cach ee iierak romance TLIO The Little Dipper. . . . « «. « 4420 retire sELill siemens cue rtes oe ope eran Tso 7 Nature’s Magic ee ae 122 April Voices . . . + + 6 «© « 123 Green Sky . - 5 + 6 «© + © + 128 Susp Umsra Crucis The Shepherd Beautiful . . . . . (131 AMG IMIG 5 660 6 6 6 oo HD PAG Garoleaiis =e. apes etek elt a3 O When Snow Lies Deen 5 6 6 oo BGS sc Trees of ees Sauer er O The Comrades. . Soi eee eerl 42) «¢ Crying, Abba, F ther”? See aie RAS This Grace Vouchsafe . . . . + I50 viii HER BIRTHDAY HER BIRTHDAY 7" are still on the rosy side of the apple; but this is the last Saturday in September, and we cannot expect many more golden days between this and the cry of the cuckoo. But what a summer we have had, thanks to one of W. V.’s ingenious sug- gestions! She came to us in April, when the world is still a trifle bare and the wind somewhat too bleak for any one to get com- fortably lost in the Forest or cast up on a coral reef; so we have made her birthday a movable feast, and whenever a fine free Saturday comes round we devote it to thankfulness that she has been born, and to the joy of our both being alive together. W. V. sleeps in an eastern room, and accordingly the sun rises on that side of the house. Under the eaves and just above her 3 Ww. V. window the martins have a nest plastered against the wall, and their chattering awakens her in the first freshness of the new morning. She watches the black shadows of the birds fluttering on the sunny blind, as, first one and then another, they race up to the nest, and vibrate in the air a moment, before dart- ing into it. When her interest has begun to flag, she steals in to me in her nightdress, and tugs gently at my beard till I waken and sit up. Unhappily her mother wakens too. “What, more birthdays!’ she exclaims in a tone of stern disapproval; whereat W. V. and I laugh, for evasion of domestic law is the sweet marjoram of our salad. But it zs possible to coax even a Draconian parent into assent, and oh! Flower of the may, If mamsie will not say her nay, W. won’t care what any one may say! We first make a tour of the garden, and it is delightful to observe W. V. prying about with happy, eager eyes, to detect whether nature has been making any new thing during the dim, starry hours when people are too 4 Her Birthday sound asleep to notice; delightful to hear her little screams of ecstasy when she has discovered something she has not seen be- fore. It is singular how keenly she notes every fresh object, and in what quaint and pretty terms of phrase she expresses her glee and wonderment. “ Oh, father, have n’t the bushes got their hands quite full of flowers?”? “Aren’t the buds the trees’ little girls?” This morning the sun was blissfully warm, and the air seemed alive with the sparkle of the dew, which lay thick on every blade and leaf. As we went round the gravel walks we perceived how completely.all the earlier flowers had vanished ; even the lovely sweet peas were almost over. We have still, how- ever, the single dahlias, and marigolds, and -hasturtiums, on whose level leaves the dew stood shining like globules of quicksilver ; and the tall Michaelmas daisies make quite a white-topped thicket along the paling, while the rowan-berries are burning in big red bunches over the western hedge. In the corner near the limes we came upon a marvellous spectacle —a huge old 5 W. V.«. spider hanging out in his web in the sun, like a grim old fisherman floating in the midst of his nets at sea. A hand’s breadth off, young bees and new-born flies were busy with the low perennial sunflowers ; he watch- ing them motionlessly, with his gruesome shadow silhouetted on a leaf hard by. In his immediate neighbourhood the fine threads of his web were invisible, but a little distance away one could distinguish their concentric curves, grey on green. Every now and then we heard the snapping of a stalk overhead, and a leaf pattered down from the limes. Every now and then, too, slight suzges of breeze run shivering through the branches. Nothing distracted the intense vigilance of the crafty fisherman. Scores of glimmering insects grazed the deadly snare, but none touched it. It must have been tantalising, but the creature’s sullen patience was invinci- ble. W. V. at last dropped a piece of leaf- stalk on his web, out of curiosity. In a twinkling he was at the spot, and the frag- ment was dislodged with a single jerk. This is one of the things in which she delights — the quiet observation of the ways 6 Her Birthday of creatures. Nothing would please her better, could she but dwarf herself into an ‘“‘aglet-baby,” than to climb into those filmy meshes and have a chat in the sunshine with the wily ogre. She has no mistrust, she feels no repulsion from anything that has life. There is a warm place in her heart for the cool, dry toad, and she loves the horned snail, if not for his own sake, at least for his * darling little house ” and the silver track he leaves on the gravel. Of course she wanted a story about a spider. I might have anticipated as much. Well, there was King Robert the Bruce, who was saved by aspider from his enemies when they were seeking his life. “And if they had found him, would they have sworded off his head? Really, father? Like Oliver Crumball did Charles King’s?” Her grammar was defective, but her surmises were beyond dispute; they would. Then there was the story of Sir Samuel Brown, who took his idea of a suspension bridge from a web which hung — but W. V. wanted something much more engrossing. 7 Ww. V.~. “Wasn’t there never no awful big spider that made webs in the Forest?” “And caught lions and bears?” She nodded approvingly. Oh, yes, there was — once upon a time. “ And was there a little girl there?” There must have been for the story to be worth telling ; but the breakfast bell broke in on the opening chapter of that little girl’s incredible adventures. After breakfast we followed the old birth- day custom, and “ plunged” into the depths of the Forest. Some persons, I have heard, call our Forest the “East Woods,” and report that though they are pleasant enough in summer, they are rather meagre and limited in area. Now, it is obvious that it would be impossible to “ plunge” into any- ‘thing less than a Forest. Certainly, when W. V. is with me I am conscious of the Forest —the haunted, enchanted, aboriginal Forest; and I see with something of her illumined vision, the vision of W. V., who can double for herself the comfort of a fire on a chilly day by running into the next room 8 Her Birthday and returning with the tidings, “It’s very cold in the woods!” If you are courageous enough to leave the paths and hazard yourself among the under- wood and the litter of bygone autumns, twenty paces will take you to the small Gothic doors of the Oak-men ; twenty more to the cavern of the Great Bruin, and the pollard tree on the top of which the foxes live ; while yet another twenty, and you are at the burrows of the kindliest of all insects, the leaf-cutter bees. Once —in parenthesis —when a little maid was weeping because she had lost her way at dusk in the Forest mazes, it was a leaf-cutter bee that tunnelled a straight line through the trees, so that the nearest road lamp, miles away, twinkled right into the Forest, and she was able to guide her- self home. Indeed, it will only take ten min- utes if you do not dawdle, to get to the dread- ful webs of the Iron Spider, and when you do reach that spot, the wisest thing you can do is to follow the example of the tiny flame-elf when — match is blown out — clap on your cap of darkness and- scuttle back to fairyland. W. V«. What magical memories have we two of the green huddle and the dreamy lawns of that ancient and illimitable Forest! We know the bosky dingles where we shall find pappa trees, on whose lower branches a little girl may discover something to eat when she is good enough to deserve it. We know where certain green-clad foresters keep store of fruits which are supposed, by those who know no better, to grow only in orchards by tropical seas. Of course every one is aware that in the heart of the Forest there is a granite fountain; but only we two have learned the secret that its water is the Water of Heart’s-ease, and that if we con- tinue to drink it we shall never grow really old. We have still a great deal of the Forest to explore; we have never reached the glade where the dog-daisies have to be chained because they grow so exceed- ingly wild; nor have we found the blue thicket — it is blue because it is so distant —from which some of the stars come up into the dusk when it grows late; but when W. V. has got her galloping-horse- bicycle we shall start with the first sun- 10 Her Birthday shine some morning, and give the whole day to the quest. We lowly folk dine before most people think of lunching, and so dinner was ready when we arrived home. Now, as decorum at table is one of the cardinal virtues W. V. dines by proxy. It is her charming young friend Gladys who gives us the pleasure of her company. It is strange how many things this bewildering daughter of mine can do as Gladys, which she cannot possibly accom- plish as W. V. W. V. is unruly, a chatter- box, careless, or at least forgetiul, of the elegances of the social board; whereas Gladys is a model of manners, an angel in a bib. W. V. cannot eat crusts, and rebels against porridge at breakfast ; Gladys idolises crusts, and as for porridge— “I am sur- prised your little girl does not like porridge. It is so good for her.” After dinner, as I lay smoking in the gar- den lounge to-day, I fell a-thinking of W. V. and Gladys, and the numerous other little maids in whom this tricksy spirite has been II Ww. V. masquerading since she came into the world five years ago. She began the small comedy before she had well learned to balance her- self on her feet. As she sat in the middle of the carpet we would play at looking for the baby— where has the baby gone? have you seen the baby?—and, oddly enough, she would take a part and pretend to wonder, or perhaps actually did wonder, what had be- come of herself, till at last we would discover her on the floor —to her own astonishment and irrepressible delight. Then, as she grew older, it was amusing to observe how she would drive away the naughty self, turn it literally out of doors, and return as the “Smiling Winifred.” I presume she grew weary, as human nature is apt to grow, of a face whichis wreathed in amaranthine smiles ;.so the Smiling Winifred vanished, and we were visited by various ‘sweet children with lovely names, of whom Gladys is the latest and the most indefatiga- ble. I cannot help laughing when I recall my three-year-old rebel listening for a few moments to a scolding, and when she con- sidered that the ends of justice had been 12 Her Birthday 1? served, exclaiming, “I put my eyes down —which meant that so far as she was concerned the episode was now definitively closed. My day-dream was broken by W. V. flying up to me with fern fronds fastened to her shoulders for wings. She fluttered round me, then flopped into my lap, and put her arms about my neck. “If I was a real swan, father, I would cuddle your head with my wings.” “Ah, well, you are a real duck, Diddles, and that will do quite as well.” She was thinking of that tender Irish legend of the Children of Lir, changed into swans by their step-mother and doomed to suffer heat and cold, tempest and hunger, homelessness and sorrow, for nine hundred years, till the sound of the first Christian bell changed them again —to frail, aged human creatures. It was always the sister, she knows, who solaced and strengthened the brothers beside the terrible sea of Moyle, sheltering them under her wings and warm- ing them against her bosom. In sucha case 13 Ww. V. as this an only child is at a disadvantage. Even M’rao, her furry playmate, might have served as a bewitched brother, but after many months of somnolent forbearance M’rao ventured into the great world beyond our limes, and returned no more. Flower of the quince, Puss once kissed Babs, and ever since She thinks he mzzs¢ be an enchanted prince. In a moment she was off again, an angel, flying about the garden and in and out of the house in the performance of helpful offices for some one; or, perchance, a fairy, for her heaven is a vague and strangely-peopled region. Long ago she told me that the moon was “put up” by a black man—a saying which puzzled me until I came to understand that this negro divinity could only have been the “divine Dark” of the old Greek poet. Of course she says her brief, simple prayers ; but how can one con- vey to a child’s mind any but the most provisional and elemental conceptions of the Invisible? Once I was telling her the story of a wicked king, who put his trust in a fort 14 Her Birthday of stone on a mountain peak, and scoffed at. a prophet God had sent to warn him. “He was n’t very wise,” said W. V., “ for God and Jesus and the angels and the fairies are cleverer’n we are; they have wings.” The * cleverness ’’ of God has deeply impressed her. He can make rain and see through walls. She noticed some stone crosses in a sculptor’s yard some time ago, and remarked : “ Jesus was put on one of those ;” then, after some reflection: “Who was it put Jesus on the cross? Was it the church people, father??? Well, when one comes to think of it, it was precisely the church people — “not these church people, dear, but the church people of hundreds of years ago, when Jesus was alive.” She had seen the world’s tragedy in the stained glass windows and had drawn her own conclusion — the people who crucified would be the most likely to makea picture of the crucifixion ; Christ’s friends would want to forget it and never to speak of it. In the main she does not much concern herself with theology or the unseen. She lives in the senses. Once, indeed, she 15 Ww. V. began to communicate some interesting re- miniscences of what had happened “ before she came here,” to this planet; but some- thing interrupted her, and she has not attempted any further revelation. There is nothing more puzzling in the world to her, I fancy, than an echo. She has forgotten that her own face in the mirror was quite as bewildering. A high wind at night is not a pleasant fellow to have shaking your window and muttering down your chimney; but an intrepid father with a yard of brown oak is more than a match for Azm. Thunder and lightning she regards as “ great friends ; they always come together.” She is more per- ceptive of their companionship than of their air of menace towards mankind. Darkness, unless it be on the staircase, does not trouble her: when we have said good-night out goes the gas. But there seems to be some quality or influence in the darkness which makes her affectionate and considerate. Once and again when she has slept with me and wakened in the dead of night she has been most apologetic and self-abasing. She is so sorry to disturb me, she knows she is a 16 Her Birthday bother, but wold I give her a biscuit or a drink of water? She has all along been a curious combina- tion of tenderness and savagery. In a sudden fit of motherhood she will bring me her dolly to kiss, and ten minutes later I shall see it lying undressed and abandoned in a corner of the room. She is a Spartan parent, and slight is the chance of her chil- dren being spoiled either by sparing the rod or lack of stern monition. It is not so long ago that we heard a curious sound of distress in the dining-room, and on her mother hurrying downstairs to see what was amiss, there was W. V. chastising her recalcitrant babe —and doing the weeping herself. This appeared to be a good opportunity for point- ing a moral. It was clear now that she knew what it was to be naughty and dis- obedient, and if she punished these faults so severely in her own children she must expect me to deal with her manifold and grievous offences in the same way. She looked very much sobered and concerned, but a few moments later she brought me a stout oak walking-stick: “ Would that do, 2 14 W. V. father?’”? She shows deep commiseration for the poor and old; grey hairs and penury are sad bed-fellows; but for the poor who are not old I fear she feels little sympathy. Perhaps we, or the conditions of life, are to blame for this limitation of feeling, for when we spoke to her of certain poor little girls with no mothers, she rejoined: “Why don’t you take them, then?” Our compassion which stopped short of so simple a remedy must have ‘seemed suspiciously like a pretence. To me one of the chief wonders of child- hood has been the manner in which this young person has picked up words, has learned to apply them, has coined them for herself, and has managed to equip herself with a stock of quotations. When she was yet little more than two and a half years old she applied spontaneously the name Dapple- grey to her first wooden horse. Then Dapple-grey was pressed into guardianship of her sleeping dolls, with this stimulative quotation: “Brave dog, watching by the baby’s bed.” There was some vacillation, I recollect, as to whether it was a laburnum or 18 Her Birthday a St. Bernard that saved travellers in the snow, but that was exceptional. The word “twins ’’ she adapted prettily enough. Try- ing once in an emotional moment to put her love for me into terms of gold currency, she added: “And I love mother just the same ; you two are twins, you know.” A little while after the University boat race she drew my attention to a doll in a _ shop-window: “Ts n’t it beautiful? And look at its Oxford eyes!” To “fussle one,” to disturb one by making a fuss, seems at once fresh and use- ful; “sorefully” is an acutely expressive adverb; when you have to pick your steps in wet weather the road may be conveniently described as “ picky ;” don’t put wild roses on the cloth at dinner lest the maid should “crumb” them away; and when one has a cold in the head how can one describe the condition of one’s nose except as “‘ hoarse”? “Lost in sad thought,” “ Now I have some- thing to my heart’s content,” “ Few tears are my portion,” are among the story-book phrases which she has assimilated for week- day use. When she was being read to out of Kingsley’s “Heroes,” she asked her uo) Ww. V. mother to substitute “the Ladies’’ for “ the’ Gorgons.” She did not like the sound of the word; “it makes me,” drawing her breath with a sort of shiver through her teeth, “it makes me pull myself together.” Once when she broke into a sudden laugh, for sheer glee of living I suppose, she explained : “Tam just like a little squirrel biting myself.” Her use of the word “live” is essential poetry; the spark “lives” inside the flint, the catkins “live” in the Forest; and she pointed out to me the “lines” down a horse’s legs where the blood “lives.” A sign-board on a piece of waste land caused her some perplexity. It was not “ The pub- lic are requested ” this time, but “ Forbidden to shoot rubbish here.” Either big game or small deer she could have understood ; but — “Who wants to shoot rubbish, father?” Have I sailed out of the trades into the doldrums in telling of this commonplace little body ? — for, after all, she is merely the average healthy, merry, teasing, delightful mite who tries to take the whole of life at once into her two diminutive hands. Ah, 20 Her Birthday well, I want some record of these good, gay days of our early companionship ; something that may still survive when this right hand is dust ; a testimony that there lived at least one man who was joyously content with the small mercies which came to him in the beaten way of nature. For neither of us, little woman, can these childish, hilarious days last much longer now. Five arch, happy faces look out at me from the sections of an oblong frame; all W. V.’s, but no two the same W. V. The sixth must go. into another frame. You must say good-bye to the enchanted Forest, little lass, and travel - into strange lands; and the laws of infancy are harder than the laws of old Wales. For these ordained that when a person remained in a far country under such conditions that he could not freely revisit his own, his title to the ancestral soil was not extinguished till the ninth man; the ninth man could utter his “cry over the abyss,” and save his portion. But when you have gone into the world beyond, and can no more revisit the Forest freely, no ear will ever listen to your ‘cry over the abyss.” 21 Ww. V. When she had at last tired herself with angelic visits and thrown aside her fern wings, she returned to me and wanted to know if I would play at shop. No, I would not play at shop; I would be neither pur- chaser nor proprietor, the lady she called “Cash” nor the stately gentleman she called “Sion.” Would I be a king, then, and refuse my daughter to her (she would be a prince) unless: she built a castle in a single night; “better’n’t” she bring her box of bricks and the dominoes? No, like Cesar, I put by the crown. She took my refusals cheerfully. On the whole, she is tractable in these matters. “Fathers,” she once told me, “know better than little girls, don’t they?” “Oh, dear, no! how could they? Fathers have to go into the city; they don’t go to school like little girls.” Doubtless there was something in that, but she per- sisted, ‘Well, even if little girls do go to school, fathers are wiser and know best.” From which one father at least may derive encouragement. Well, would I blow soap- bubbles? I think it was the flying thistledown in 22 Her Birthday June which first gave us the cue of the soap- bubbles. What a delightful game it is; and there is a knack, too, in blowing these spheres of fairy glass and setting them off on their airy flight. Till you have blown bubbles you have no conception how full of . waywardness and freakish currents the air is. Oh, you who are sad at heart, or weary of thought, or irritable with physical pain, coax, beg, borrow, or steal a four or five year old, and betake you to blowing bubbles in the sunshine of your recluse garden. Let the breeze be just a little brisk to set your bubbles drifting. Fill some of them with tobacco smoke, and with the wind’s help bombard the old fisherman in his web. As the opaline globes break and the smoke escapes in a white puff along the grass or among the leaves, you shall think of historic battlefields, and muse whether the greater game was not quite as childish as this, and “sorefully ”’ less innocent. The charges of smoke are only a diversion ; it is the crystal balls which delight most. The colours of all the gems in the world run molten through their fragile films. And what visions they 23 Ww. V. contain for crystal-gazers! Among the gold and green, the rose and blue, you see the dwarfed reflection of your own trees and your own home floating up into the sunshine. These are your possessions, your surroundings —so lovely, so fairylike in the bubble; in reality so prosaic and so inadequate when one considers the rent and rates. To W. V. the bubbles are like the wine of the poet —