A Little Country Girl

They had passed the first beach, which at that hour was black with bathers and by-standers, and had climbed the hill-slope which separates it from the second beach, when Marian suddenly cried, "Mamma, here we are close to Purgatory; can't we stop just a minute and show it to Candace?"

Mrs. Gray looked at her watch.

"Your minute will be at least a quarter of an hour, Marian," she said; "but I think there is time enough. Would any of the rest of you like to go?"

Girls always "want to go." There was a general disembarkation; and Mrs. Gray led the way through a gate and across a rough field which stretched along the top of a line of cliffs, steeper and bolder than those on the Newport Point, and cut here and there into sudden sharp fissures.

The scanty grass, yellow with August sun, was broken everywhere by lumps and boulders of that odd conglomerate which is known by the name of "plum-pudding stone." Golden-rod and the early blue aster were flowering everywhere. A flock of sheep fled at their approach, with a low rushing sound like the wind in boughs.

Candace walked along with the rest, in a little shiver of expectancy. The name of "Purgatory" seemed to her to suggest some terrible sort of place. Presently she saw the girls ahead, as they reached a particular point, diverge sharply to the right with little cries and exclamations; and when she advanced, she found herself on the edge of a chasm deeper and darker than any of those which they had passed. It cut the cliff from its highest point to the sea-level; and the wall-like sides receded toward their base, leaving vaulted hollows beneath, into which the eye could not penetrate. Only the ear caught the sound of thunderous murmurs and strange gurgles and hisses of spray echoing from unseen recesses far underground; and it was easy to imagine that these sounds came from some imprisoned sea-creature, hemmed in by the tide, with no chance of escape, and vexing the air with its groans.

Candace shrank away from the brink with a sensation of affright. "What an awful place!" she said, drawing a long breath. "Do you suppose any one ever fell down there?"

Every member of the party had some tradition of the sort to relate; but none of the stories seemed to rest on a very secure foundation.

"Anybody who did must be killed, I should think. I don't wonder they named it Purgatory," said Marian.

There was a fascination of horror about the spot. The girls lingered and leaned over the brink and turned back, until Mrs. Gray had to call them away; and they were all rather silent as they walked across the field to their carriages. But the impression was soon dispelled; for as they drove down the incline toward the second beach, they came upon an unexpected scene of brilliant and animated life.

The tide and the wind together were bringing ashore quantities of seaweed of the kind used in manuring fields, and all the farmers of the neighborhood had assembled to secure this heaven-planted harvest. The long curves of yellow sands which stretch from the Purgatory rocks to Sacluest Point were alive with people. Teams of mild mouse-colored or white oxen stood harnessed to heavy wagons, ready to drag the seaweed home. Out in the plunging surf men were urging horses seaward, or swimming them toward the shore, with long rake-like implements in their wake, which gathered and bore along masses of the glittering brown and rosy kelp. The splash and foam of the waves, the rearing horses, the cries of the men and of the seagulls, who seemed to resent this intrusion upon their haunts, made a vivid and fascinating picture, which seemed in keeping with the beauty of sea and sky and the freshness of the sun-warmed wind.

Then, passing the beach, the carriages drove along a smooth country road for a short distance, and turned into a narrow lane running up hill, which presently brought them to a small farm-house built on the very edge of a ravine.

"Here we take to our feet," said Mrs. Gray, jumping out of the wagonette.

The farmer and his wife, who seemed to be old acquaintances, came out to speak to her. The baskets were collected, and the carriages sent back to town, with orders to return to the same place at six o'clock.

"Oh, why six? why not stay and go home by moonlight?" urged Julia.

"My dear child, if you were in the habit of reading either the almanac or the heavens, you would know that there will be no moon to-night till after eleven o'clock," said her chaperone. "These roads will be as black as pitch by half-past seven. Now, girls, each of you take your own shawl and one of the baskets, and we will descend into Paradise. It sounds paradoxical, but you shall see."

She led the way down a steep narrow pathway on the hill-side into the valley below. The path was overhung with trees. It was necessary to put the boughs aside here and there; brambles reached from the thicket to catch at the girls' skirts as they went by; but when they had passed these trifling obstacles they found themselves safely on the level floor of a little valley below.

Such a choice little valley! It was enclosed between the line of hill from which they had just descended and another parallel line, whose top was of solid granite and whose base was walled by trees. This double barrier kept off all cold winds, and let the sunshine in from east to west to flood and foster the valley growths. To the east the eye saw only the winding of the leafy glade; the west stood open to the sea, and gave a wide vista of glittering ocean and yellow surf-fringed beach.

The ground was carpeted with the softest grass. Thickets of wild roses showed here and there a late blossom, and other thickets of alders glittered with coral-red berries. Apple-trees loaded with small crimson apples made spots of color on the hill-side. Wild-flowers grew thickly in damp spots, and mosses clustered among the stones. Birds chirped and flew from every bush and tree. All was shaded and peaceful and still. Newport, with its whirl and glitter, seemed immeasurably far away. The Paradise Valley might to all appearance have been hidden in the heart of the Alleghanies, instead of being within three miles of the gayest watering-place in America!

Mrs. Gray, with accustomed feet, led the way straight across the glade to where an old cedar-tree stood commanding the oceanward view, with a square block of stone at its foot.

"This is where we used always to come," she said, in a dreamy voice.

"What a delicious place!" cried Julia; "to think that I should have spent seven summers in Newport and never have seen it before! What shall we do with the baskets, Mrs. Gray, dear?"

"Put them here in the shade, and when you all feel hungry we will open them."

"Hungry! why, I am as hungry as a wolf at this moment. I have a gift at being ravenous. Girls, what do you say? Don't you agree with me that no time is like the present time for lunch? Hold up your hands if you do."

"Very well," said Mrs. Gray, laughing, as every hand flew up. "We will have lunch at once, then; but I warn you that there is a good deal to be done first. There," pointing to a blackened spot against a rock, "is where we always boiled our kettle. If some of you will collect some dry sticks, we will see if the present generation is capable of making a fire. I meanwhile will fetch the water."

She took a bright little copper kettle from one of the baskets, and mounted the hill with elastic footsteps, calling out, as she went, —

"Make haste, and be sure that the sticks are dry."

"I'm not sure that I know a dry stick when I see it," whispered Maud Hallett to Julia; but instinct, as often happens, took the place of experience on this occasion, and Mrs. Gray found quite a respectable pile of fuel awaiting her when she came back with her kettle full of spring water.

"Now I will show you how to swing a pot over the fire," she said; and in three minutes a rustic crane of boughs was constructed, the kettle was hanging from it, and the wood piled artistically underneath. A box of matches appeared from Mrs. Gray's pocket, which; as Marian said, was every bit as good as the "Bag" of the Mother in the "Swiss Family Robinson," and seemed to hold almost as great a variety of useful things. Presently a gay little fire was crackling and snapping against the face of the rock, and adding its smoke to the blackened stains left by those other smokes of long ago. The girls stood about, watching the blaze and listening for the first hiss of the kettle; but Mrs. Gray informed them that there was still work to be done.

"I want some new potatoes to roast, for one thing," she said. "Maud and Georgie, you might run up to the farm and ask Mr. Bacon to send me a few, say eighteen or twenty large ones, – oh, and a couple of dozen fresh eggs."

While they were absent on this errand, the other girls, under Mrs. Gray's direction, unpacked the baskets and arranged their contents on the rock beneath the cedar-tree. Mrs. Gray had taken pains to provide, as far as was possible, the same sort of food which twenty-odd years before it had been customary to take to picnics. Out of one basket came a snow-white table-cloth and napkins; out of another, a chafing-dish, a loaf of home-made brown bread, and a couple of pats of delicious Darlington butter. A third basket revealed a large loaf of "Election Cake," with a thick sugary frosting; a fourth was full of crisp little jumbles, made after an old family recipe and warranted to melt in the mouth. There was a pile of thin, beautifully cut sandwiches; plenty of light-buttered rolls; and a cold fowl, ready carved into portions. By the time that these provisions were unpacked, Maud and Georgie were seen descending the hill at a rapid walk, which, at sight of the festive preparations below, changed to what Julia Prime called "a hungry gallop." By this time exercise and fresh air had made everybody so desperately hungry that it seemed impossible to wait another moment; so, while Mrs. Gray heated the coffee and dropped the large pink potatoes into their bed of embers to roast, the younger members of the party fell to work on the sandwiches, just to take off the fine edge of their appetites till something better was ready.

When the coffee was hot, Mrs. Gray seated herself by the rock, lit the lamp under her chafing-dish, dropped in a bit of butter, sprinkled with pepper and salt, and proceeded to "scramble" a great dish of eggs. Did any of you ever eat hot scrambled eggs under a tree when you were furiously hungry? If not, you can form no idea of the pleasure which the "Early Dippers" took in theirs. But it was not the eggs only; it was everything: never was a luncheon so delicious, the girls protested. New potatoes roasted in the ashes were a feast for the gods; and as for the grandmother's cake with which the repast wound up, it baffled analysis and description.

Mrs. Gray had made this cake with her own hands, "in order to carry out the historic verities," as she said. It used to be part of the religion of New England, especially of Connecticut, she explained; and she told them how once, when she was a girl, making a visit to an old aunt in Wethersfield, she had sat up nearly all night over a "raising" of Election cake.

"But why did you do that?" asked the girls.

"Well, you see, my aunt had a sudden attack of rheumatism in her arm. She was going to have the sewing-society meet at her house; and such a thing as a sewing-society without Election cake was not to be dreamed of. So I offered to make it; and I was bound that it should be good. The peculiarity of this particular cake is that it must rise twice before it is baked. You mix half the butter and sugar, and so on, with the yeast; and when that is light, you put in the other half. Now, my first half refused to rise."

"What did you do?"

"Oh, I sat beside it with one of Scott's novels, and I waited. It was rather poky; for my aunt and her servant had gone to bed, and there were queer creaks and noises now and then, as there always are in old houses. Midnight struck, and one, and two, before the first bubbles appeared on the surface of the cake; and I had fallen asleep over my book more than once, before I could be quite sure that it was safe to stir in the remainder of the spice and fruit, and go to bed. It was just four o'clock when I finally put out my lamp; and very sleepy I was next day, as you may imagine: but the cake turned out a great success, and I had many compliments about it from the crack housekeepers in the neighborhood, when they found that it was of my making."

"Wasn't it a dreadful trouble to have to make cake and things like that at home?" asked Maud Hallett. "I think I would rather have had it not quite so good, and got it from the confectioner's, than to have all that fuss and bother."

"My dear, there were no confectioners in those days except in two or three of the largest cities, and none even then who would be thought worth speaking of in our time. It was a case of home-made cake or none; and though it was certainly a great deal of trouble, the cake was better than any confectioner's cake that I ever tasted. People took great pride in it; and recipes were copied and handed about and talked over with an interest which would be impossible now-a-days, when everything comes to hand ready made, and you can order a loaf of sponge cake by postal card, and have it appear in a few hours, sent by express from central New York, as some of us have been doing this summer."

The last crumb of the Grandmother's loaf had now disappeared, and Mrs. Gray proposed that the girls should go for a scramble on the hills while she repacked the baskets. But this division of labor was not permitted. The girls insisted that they must be allowed to stay and help, and that the scramble would be no fun at all without their matron. Julia seized the coffee-pot and chafing-dish, and ran up the hill to rinse them at the spring; the others collected forks and plates; and, many hands making light work, in a very short while all was in order, and Mrs. Gray in readiness to head the walking party.

She guided them to the top of the granite ridge which is visible from Newport, and made them observe the peculiarity of the rock lines, and the contrast between their bareness and the fertility of the little intervening glades, for which they serve as a natural conservatory. Then they dipped down into the thickets of the farther side, finding all manner of ferns and wild-flowers and shy growing things, and so to the sandy flats above the third beach, with their outlook across the river-like strait to Little Compton and up the curving shore of Newport Island, set with old farm-houses and solemn orchards of gnarled apple-trees. From thence a short walk brought them to the end of the ridge and to Bishop Berkeley's seat, with its ponderous projecting roof of rocks; and they all sat down to rest just where he is said to have sat with his books and pen, looking off toward far Bermuda, and dreaming of the "star of empire." At that time no ugly brick chimneys or artificial water-basin existed to mar the foreground; and nothing sweeter or more peaceful could be imagined than the view from the rocky shelf, – the breadth of ocean lit with clear sun, the shining capes to right and left, the yellow sand-dunes and winding creek bordered with brown grasses and patches of mallow or green rushes, and over all the arch of blue summer sky. One or two carriages rolled along the distant road as they sat there; but otherwise; the stillness was unbroken save by the twitter of birds in the woods behind them, the chirp of sand-peeps or the scream of gulls on the beach, and the soft intermittent boom of the surf.

It had been a perfect afternoon, and a great success, all the picnickers voted, as they parted in the dusk on the gravel-walk in front of Mrs. Gray's door. Yet, after all, there was much to be said for Newport and civilization, and they were not sorry to come back to them. It was all very well to play at being old-fashioned for a day; but modern times have their distinct charms and conveniences, and if the girls, on sober second-thought, preferred their own share of the centuries to any other, no one need count them blameworthy.