Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 115.djvu/49

All liars shall have their part. Jonathan Edwards.

And let him that is athirst come. Jesus.

She furthered our childish love of mystery and innocent intrigue on every occasion. With a box of maple sugar purloined for us from the family supply, she sent these laconic instructions,

Omit to return box. Omit to know you received box. Brooks of Sheffield.

The drollery of Dickens was congenial to her own taste and she was much fascinated with David Copperfield, published when she was twenty-one; many quotations from it became household words. I have often heard her fling back over her shoulder, as she fled from unwelcome visitors, 'Donkeys, Agnes!' And 'Barkis is willin'' is a message that I have carried from her to my mother, before I was old enough to understand what it meant to them.

Again, with stolen sweets smuggled over to us, she wrote, 'The joys of theft are two: first, theft; second, superiority to detection.' Again, under the same piratical circumstances, 'How inspiring to the clandestine mind those words of scripture, "We thank thee, Lord, that thou hast hid these things!"'

She did a deal of brilliant trifling in these notes of hers. Here is her comment on the death of the wife of a local doctor whom she disliked:—

Dear Sue,

I should think she would rather be the Bride of the Lamb than that old Pill-box! Emily.

After meeting a friend she had not seen for some years she wrote,

I saw that the flake was upon it,
But plotted with Time to dispute,
'Unchanged,' I urged,
With a candor
That cost me my honest heart.
'But you,' she returned, with a valor
Sagacious of my mistake—
'Have altered,—
Accept the pillage
For the progress' sake!'

Emily.

With a Cape jasmine sent to a guest of our inner circle, she wrote,—

'M —— will place this little flower in her friend's hand. Should she ask who sent it, tell her as Desdemona did when they asked who slew her—Nobody—Myself.'

After the death of a strictly dull acquaintance of no vital essence, she wrote,—

'With Variations—

'Now I lay thee down to sleep
I pray the Lord thy dust to keep,
If thou should live before thou wake,
I pray the Lord thy soul to make!'

This scrap is Emily at her most audacious:

My Maker, let me be
Enamoured most of Thee—
But nearer this
I more should miss!

With the gift of a young chicken from the family poultry yard, she sends,—

Accept this Firstling of my flock, to whom also the Lastling is due. To broil our benefits perhaps is not the highest way? Emily.

In a panic lest some cherished plan fall through, she sends this. 'Boast not myself of to-morrow, for "I knowest" not what a noon may bring forth.'

This too is Emily to the core: 'Cherish power, dear; remember that it stands in the Bible between the kingdom and the glory because it is wilder than either.'