NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA

CONTENTS

First Chronicle
Jack O'Lantern

Second Chronicle
Daughters of Zion

Third Chronicle
Rebecca's Thought Book

Fourth Chronicle
A Tragedy in Millinery

Fifth Chronicle
The Saving of the Colors

Sixth Chronicle
The State of Maine Girl

Seventh Chronicle
The Little Prophet

Eighth Chronicle
Abner Simpson's New Leaf

Ninth Chronicle
The Green Isle

Tenth Chronicle
Rebecca's Reminiscences

Eleventh Chronicle
Abijah the Brave and the Fair Emma Jane




First Chronicle. JACK O'LANTERN


I

Miss Miranda Sawyer's old-fashioned garden was the pleasantest spot in
Riverboro on a sunny July morning. The rich color of the brick house
gleamed and glowed through the shade of the elms and maples. Luxuriant
hop-vines clambered up the lightning rods and water spouts, hanging
their delicate clusters here and there in graceful profusion. Woodbine
transformed the old shed and tool house to things of beauty, and the
flower beds themselves were the prettiest and most fragrant in all
the countryside. A row of dahlias ran directly around the garden
spot,--dahlias scarlet, gold, and variegated. In the very centre was a
round plot where the upturned faces of a thousand pansies smiled amid
their leaves, and in the four corners were triangular blocks of sweet
phlox over which the butterflies fluttered unceasingly. In the spaces
between ran a riot of portulaca and nasturtiums, while in the more
regular, shell-bordered beds grew spirea and gillyflowers, mignonette,
marigolds, and clove pinks.

Back of the barn and encroaching on the edge of the hay field was a
grove of sweet clover whose white feathery tips fairly bent under the
assaults of the bees, while banks of aromatic mint and thyme drank
in the sunshine and sent it out again into the summer air, warm, and
deliciously odorous.

The hollyhocks were Miss Sawyer's pride, and they grew in a stately line
beneath the four kitchen windows, their tapering tips set thickly with
gay satin circlets of pink or lavender or crimson.

"They grow something like steeples," thought little Rebecca Randall, who
was weeding the bed, "and the flat, round flowers are like rosettes; but
steeples wouldn't be studded with rosettes, so if you were writing about
them in a composition you'd have to give up one or the other, and I
think I'll give up the steeples:--

Gay little hollyhock
Lifting your head,
Sweetly rosetted
Out from your bed.

It's a pity the hollyhock isn't really little, instead of steepling up
to the window top, but I can't say, 'Gay TALL hollyhock.'... I might
have it 'Lines to a Hollyhock in May,' for then it would be small; but
oh, no! I forgot; in May it wouldn't be blooming, and it's so pretty
to say that its head is 'sweetly rosetted'... I wish the teacher wasn't
away; she would like 'sweetly rosetted,' and she would like to hear me
recite 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!' that I learned
out of Aunt Jane's Byron; the rolls come booming out of it just like the
waves at the beach.... I could make nice compositions now, everything
is blooming so, and it's so warm and sunny and happy outdoors. Miss
Dearborn told me to write something in my thought book every single day,
and I'll begin this very night when I go to bed."

Rebecca Rowena Randall, the little niece of the brick-house ladies, and
at present sojourning there for purposes of board, lodging, education,
and incidentally such discipline and chastening as might ultimately
produce moral excellence,--Rebecca Randall had a passion for the rhyme
and rhythm of poetry. From her earliest childhood words had always been
to her what dolls and toys are to other children, and now at twelve she
amused herself with phrases and sentences and images as her schoolmates
played with the pieces of their dissected puzzles. If the heroine of
a story took a "cursory glance" about her "apartment," Rebecca would
shortly ask her Aunt Jane to take a "cursory glance" at her oversewing
or hemming; if the villain "aided and abetted" someone in committing
a crime, she would before long request the pleasure of "aiding and
abetting" in dishwashing or bedmaking. Sometimes she used the borrowed
phrases unconsciously; sometimes she brought them into the conversation
with an intense sense of pleasure in their harmony or appropriateness;
for a beautiful word or sentence had the same effect upon her
imagination as a fragrant nosegay, a strain of music, or a brilliant
sunset.