Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/59



UNT PENELOPE'S girlhood began in those rare old times, those simple, curious old times, whose charm eludes the patient, literal plodder, and is preserved for us in quaint, poetic chronicles that blossom like flowers along the dull highways of history, and whose delicious freshness, in contrast with musty binding and crabbed text, delight and surprise; it lingers, too, in the memories of ancient story-tellers, like Aunt Penelope, from whom we get glimpses of a real life; a life vivid as our own with the joy of love, the sorrow of loss, the balefulness of sin, the grandeur of aspiration,

"When I was a girl" is Aunt Pen's usual exordium—it may be of a sharp sarcasm upon the degeneracy of the present age, or of a delightful old-time story, that holds us in a charmed circle and keeps our hands idle and our hearts eager in pursuit of hero and heroine through perils of misunderstanding and love unrequited or hardly won, and the bafflings of cruel Fate, to safe anchorage in the haven of marriage. And then, of courecourse [sic], the interest suddenly dies, for are not the storms overpast, and the waves conquered, and does not satiety wait, as usual, upon unalloyed content?

Aunt Pen, you perceive, is no more philosophic than those other raconteurs who tell their stories to a wider audience. The true seers are wiser. Was it not Goethe who, defending himself for crossing that magical rubicon with his hero, said that, at marriage, he deemed a man's life but just begun?

But to return to Aunt Pen. She is a lovely, bright, kindly old lady. There are traditions of her having been very beautiful in her youth, and for my part I think her so still.

Her complexion, a wonderfully pure blonde in her girlhood, is quite smooth and fair yet; her brown eyes are keen, and merry, and tender; and her own soft, wavy brown hair is put back, Madonna-wise, over a calm forehead, and if time has stolen its luxuriance you scarcely guess it. When she is dressed in black silk, as she almost always is of an afternoon, with her lace kerchief crossed at her throat, and is throned in her own arm-chair, with some pretty work in her white, unwrinkled old hands, I think she makes a picture sweet enough to allure the eye of man or woman.

I would rather look at her then than at any young girl whom I know; and yet, on one of the golden days just passed, with pomp, and ceremony, and thankfulness, and a tender, solemn awe, we celebrated Aunt Pen's hundredth birthday!

There is a portrait in our parlor, a little hard and crude in coloring, yet so striking, and so manifestly true to life, that strangers never fail to notice it. It is a girl of about twenty; the face is proud, spirited, noble; the mouth red and smiling; the eyes laugh at you and challenge aquaintance; the gold-brown hair is dressed at each side in two puffs, whose amplitude testifies to the wealth of that beautiful adornment, for in the old times the shams of rats and cushions