Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/37

Rh upbringing, Austin's wife, with her broader youth and fulfilled happiness.

There is an artless painting of the three children, done by some itinerant painter, that gives them all three, at about the time their father's letters began to mention them by name as little individuals; hoping "Emily took care of her baby sister"—a hope faintly to be justified, perhaps—and "that Austin filled the wood box as he was told."

In the portrait Emily holds a book, but if her gaze was sibylline, it was beyond the vagrant artist's power to portray, and she stares out as frankly as her younger sister, who clutches a stiff rose, and leans against her rather indifferent red-lipped brother with his jaunty air of superior pleasure in being the boy of the trio. Just the real New England family, one sees them, a young father and mother, with perhaps a degree more of prosperity and education and noble ideals to bless themselves with than the majority of those about them, and an endowment of native refinement deeply engrained.

The children went to the public schools like all the other children of their time in New England towns. Helen Fisk, the daughter of Professor Fisk, and later to be known as "H. H." ("Helen Hunt"), so familiar in American literature, was their favorite playmate. There is a note still extant from Mrs. Fisk, in reply to one from Emily's mother, begging that Helen may play with Emily and Vinnie under the syringas. It reads:

Professor Fisk will lead Helen over to play with Emily beneath the syringas, this afternoon. In case it prove not convenient to send her home, he will call for her in the chaise toward nightfall, before the dew falls.