Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/38

16 What a picture of innocent pastime it leaves—little girls playing house under the sweet flowering syringa, to the hum of the bees, and safely restored to the family fold before the dew falls.

They went berrying and chestnutting; on grand occasions they drove in the pompous family cabriolet, lined with cream-colored broadcloth, with high doors and oval windows at the sides and back and framing in unexpected sections of horse and sky, as they moved, and from which the old-fashioned landscape looked formal and strange. Usually it was to spend the day with a relative at some distance or to attend a family funeral. There is no record of any less sedate amusement, but the child Emily got thrill enough out of the orioles nesting in the cherry tree, or the exploits of her pets, or the dark excitement of the great barn where in the afternoon the sunbeams piercing through a crack in the roof observed her as she hunted for the eggs hidden so skilfully from her deep eyes. The robins came back and the crows in the tall pines called to her almost by name. She was so truly one of Nature's children herself that the daffodils dancing immemorial under the apple trees on the eastern slope of the dooryard every spring were as her own little guests returning. Except for her quickened sense of all beings, all creatures, all beauty, she differed little from other little girls of her time and town.

When she was sixteen the girl who was later to become her "Sister Sue" came to visit in Amherst, and then began the life that never ceased, of budding poetry and letters, affection and art, sympathy and love that surpassed the love real sisterhood often carelessly overlooks. Henceforth in all their girlish banditry, their secret