Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/45

Rh grain and fruits. Within the kitchen, mother and daughters worked not less continuously, laundry and dairy, needle and loom, claiming the attention in rhythmic succession. And of all these workers one knows the mother was earliest astir and latest to rest.

And so Mary Baker grew through infancy at her grandmother's knee and imbibed her grandmother’s stories and songs; her grandmother’s recollections and store of spiritual wisdom were poured into the hungering mind agape like a young robin's mouth. And what stories these were and how they thrilled the awakening imagination! for this grandmother, descended from the Scotch Covenanters, could tell dramatic tales of a land torn by religious dissensions for nearly a century.

We can imagine the little Mary on a certain day taken by her grandmother to visit the garret. Up the steep stairs they climb together, the baby hand confidingly in the brown and wrinkled one. Up here under the low-slanting roof, amidst odors of lavender, catnip, and sage, in a dusty gray twilight, weird because of the stray sunbeams that pierce it, grandmother takes from the depths of an old chest the sword of a far-away Scottish ancestor, the blade rusting in its brass scabbard. The child is allowed to handle it, tries to draw the blade, and with great eyes hears its history. Then as she still tugs at it, grandmother kneeling back on her heels sings in quavering accents, “Scots who hae wi’ Wallace bled.”

“How long ago was it that Sir William Wallace