their day and generation. Its appeal is not tioning eye, you spontaneously think Répin to the imagination, it is in no sense a vivid, less the painter or poet than the man of scicompelling revelation of the spirit, but rath- ence. When he came on the scene the Byer a convincing transcription of the outward ronic outbursts of Púshkin and the eloand visible. Like Turgénev, Répin is one quent heart hunger of Lermontov had long of those instinctive realists who can create since been swept away; the age of observaonly from the living model. Never, even in tion followed, carrying all before it. Imhis most powerful and concentrated mo- prisoned between Byzantine hierarchy and ments, does he wander from the wealth of Gallic prettiness, Répin boldly freed himfact always at hand. The stricken, tortured self and became a zealous apostle of nature. countenance of Iván's dying son is practi- It was the kingdom of earth which he incally a portrait of poor Garshín in the final herited, not the restless, baffling kingdom stages of insanity and suicide. The con- of dreams. In all its outlines the art of fused, haunted expression on the face of the Répin typifies the painter's own specific exile in "The Unexpected Return" was sug- epoch; it definitely incarnates the spirit of gested to the painter by the appearance of his race and his time. Like Courbet in Dostoevsky when he came home after years France, Ilia Répin has fought almost singleof Siberian imprisonment. Yet it need not handed a long, and in the end, a victorious be assumed that Répin is a slave to the liter- battle. He possesses, too, something of the al and explicit. The predominant quality primal energy of the rugged democrat of of his work is its emotional intensity. In Ornans, but to that quality adds the knowlhis feeling for nature there seems always to edge and graphic mastery of a Menzel. linger the vitalizing magic of things fecund And yet, however formidable his achieveand elemental. ment may now seem, it is by no means the final word of Russian painting. Already a younger generation is pressing close about him. Seated in his quiet studio amid the gathering twilight of late afternoon, gray, shaggy, with contracted brow and keen, ques REBECCA'S THOUGHT BOOK T THIRD REBECCA STORY By Kate Douglas Wiggin ILLUSTRATION BY F. C. YOHN HE "Sawyer girls'"" barn still had its haymow in Rebecca's time, although the hay was a dozen years old or more, and sadly juiceless in the opinion of the occasional visiting horse. It still sheltered, too, old Deacon Israel's carryall and mowing-machine, with his pung, his sleigh, and a dozen other survivals of an earlier era, when the broad acres of the brick house went to make one of the finest farms in Riverboro. There were no horses or cows in the stalls nowadays; no pig grunting comfortably of future spareribs in the sty, no hens to peck the plants in the cherished garden patch. The Sawyer girls were getting on in years, and mindful that care once killed a cat, they ordered their lives with the view of escaping that particular doom, at least, and succeeded fairly well until Rebecca's advent made existence a trifle more sensational. Once a month, for years upon years, Miss Miranda and Miss Jane had put towels over their heads and made a solemn visit to the barn, taking off the enamelled cloth coverings (occasionally called "emmanuel covers" in Riverboro), dusting the ancient implements, and sometimes sweeping the heaviest of the cobwebs from the corners or giving a brush to the floor. Deacon Israel's tottering ladder still stood in its accustomed place propped against the haymow, and the heavenly stairway leading to eternal glory scarcely looked fairer to Jacob of old than this to Rebecca. By means of its dusty rounds she mounted, mounted, mounted far away from time and care and maiden aunts, far away from childish tasks and childish troubles, to the barn chamber, a place so full of golden dreams, happy reveries, and vague longings that as her little brown hands clung to the sides of the ladder and her feet trod the rounds cautiously in her ascent, her heart almost stopped beating in the sheer joy of anticipation. Once having gained the heights, the next thing was to unlatch the heavy doors and VOL. XL.-57 give them a gentle swing outward. Then, oh, ever new Paradise! then, oh, ever lovely green and growing world! for Rebecca had that something in her soul that Gives to seas and sunset skies The unspent beauty of surprise. At the top of Guide Board Hill she could see Alice Robinson's barn with its shining weather-vane, a huge burnished fish that swam with the wind and foretold the day to all Riverboro. The meadow with its sunny slopes stretching up to the pine woods was sometimes a flowing sheet of shimmering grass, sometimes--when daisies and buttercups were blooming-a vision of white and gold. Sometimes the shorn stubble would be dotted with "the happy hills of hay," and a little later the rock maple on the edge of the pines would stand out like a golden ball against the green; its neighbor, the sugar maple, glowing beside it, brave in scarlet. (It was on one of these autumn days with a wintry nip in the air that Adam Ladd (Rebecca's favorite "Mr. Aladdin"), after searching for her in field and garden, suddenly noticed the open doors of the barn chamber and called to her. He never forgot the vision of the startled little poetess, book in one mittened hand, pencil in the other, dark hair all ruffled, with the picturesque addition of an occasional blade of straw, her cheeks crimson, her eyes shining. "A Sappho in mittens!" he cried laughingly, and at her eager question told her to look up the unknown lady in the school encyclopædia.) Now, all being ready, Rebecca went to a corner of the haymow and withdrew a thick blank book with mottled covers. Out of her gingham apron pocket came a pencil, a bit of rubber, and some pieces of brown paper, then she seated herself gravely on the floor and drew an inverted soap-box nearer to her for a table. The book was reverently opened and there was a serious reading of the extracts already carefully copied therein. Most of them were apparently to the writer's liking, 525 for dimples of pleasure showed themselves now and then, and smiles of obvious delight played about her face; but once in a while there was a knitting of the brows and a sigh of discouragement, showing that the artist in the child was not wholly satisfied. Then came the crucial moment when the budding author was supposedly to be racked with the throes of composition; but seemingly there were no throes. Other girls could wield the darning or crochet or knitting needle, send the tatting-shuttle through loops of the finest cotton, hemstitch, oversew, braid hair in thirteen strands, but the pencil was never obedient in their fingers and the pen and ink-pot were a horror from early childhood to the end of time. Not so with Rebecca; her pencil moved as easily as her tongue, and no more striking simile could possibly be used. Her handwriting was not Spencerian; she had neither time (nor patience, it is to be feared) for copybook methods, and her unformed characters were frequently the despair of her teachers; but write she could, write she would, write she must and did, in season and out; from the time she made pothooks at six, till now, writing was the easiest of all possible tasks, to be indulged in as solace and balm when the terrors of examples in least common multiple threatened to dethrone the reason, or the rules of grammar loomed huge and unconquerable in the near horizon. As to spelling, it came to her in the main by free grace, and not by training, and though she slipped at times from the beaten path, her extraordinary ear and good visual memory kept her from many or flagrant mistakes. It was her intention (especially when saying her prayers at night) to look up all doubtful words in her small dictionary before copying her Thoughts into the sacred book for the inspiration of posterity; but when genius burned with a brilliant flame, and particularly when she was in the barn and the dictionary in the house, impulse as usual carried the day. There sits Rebecca, then, in the open door of the Sawyers' barn chamber-the sunset door. How many a time had her grandfather, the good deacon, sat just underneath in his tipped-back chair, when Mrs. Israel's temper was uncertain and the serenity of the barn was in comforting contrast to his own fireside! (The open doors swinging out to the peaceful landscape, the solace of the pipe, not allowed in the "settin'-room"- how beautifully these simple agents have ministered to the family peace in days agone! "IfI hadn't had my barn and my store, I couldn't never have lived in holy matrimony with Maryliza!" once said Mr. Watson feelingly.) But the deacon, looking on his waving grass fields, his tasselling corn and his timber lands, never saw such visions as Rebecca, bright and honest as were his eyes. The child, transplanted from her homefarm at Sunnybrook, from the care of the overworked, but easy-going mother, and the companionship of the scantily fed, scantily clothed, happy-go-lucky brothers and sisters—she had indeed fallen on shady days in Riverboro. The blinds were closed in every room of the house but two, and the same might have been said of Miss Miranda's mind and heart, though Miss Jane had a few windows opening to the sun, and Rebecca already had her unconscious hand on several others. Brick house rules were rigid and many for a little creature so full of life, but Rebecca's gay spirit could not be pinioned in a strait-jacket for long at a time; it escaped somehow and winged its merry way into the sunshine and free air; if she were not allowed to sing in the orchard, like the wild bird she was, she could still sing in the cage, like the canary. If you had opened the carefully guarded volume with the mottled covers you would first have seen a wonderful title-page, constructed apparently on the same lines as an obituary, or the inscription on a tombstone, save for the quantity and variety of information contained in it. Much of the matter would seem to the captious critic better adapted to the body of the book than to the title-page, but Rebecca was apparently anxious that no cloud of doubt should rest upon the principal personages of the story: THOUGHT BOOK of Rebecca Rowena Randall The Brick House Riverboro. Own niece of Miss Miranda and Jane Sawyer Second of seven children of her father Mr. L. D. M. Randall (Now at rest in Temperance cemmetary and there will be a monument as soon as we Keep your thoughts to yourself. Aunt Jane In case of death the best of these Thoughts For the Sunday School Library To give him unless carelessly destroyed. Wrote the Thoughts. It is not now decided whether Rebecca Rowena Randall will be a painter or an author, but after her death it will be known which she has been. Finis. From the title-page, with its wealth of detail, the book ripples on like a brook, and to the weary reader of problem novels it may have something of the brook's refreshing quality. Extracts From REBECCA'S THOUGHT BOOK Our Diaries All the girls are keeping a diary because Miss Dearborn was very much ashamed. when the school trustees told her that most of the girls and all of the boys' compositions were disgraceful, and must be improved next term. She asked the boys to write let ters to her once a week instead of keeping a diary, which they thought was girlish like playing with dolls. The boys thought it was dreadful to have to write letters every seven days, but she told them it was not half as bad for them as it was for her who had to read them. To make my diary a little different I am going to call it a Thought Book (written just like that, with capitals). I have thoughts that I never can use unless I write them down, for Aunt Miranda always says lets me tell her some but does not like my queer ones and my true thoughts are mostly queer. Emma Jane does not mind hearing them now and then and that is my only chance. If Miss Dearborn does not like the name Thought Book I will call it Remerniscences (written just like that with a capital R.) Remerniscences are things you remember about yourself and write down in case you should die. Aunt Jane doesn't like to read any other kind of books but just lives of interesting dead people and she says that is what Longfellow (who was born in the State of Maine and we should be very proud of it and try to write like him) meant in his poem: Lives of great men all remind us Footprints on the sands of time. I know what this means because when Emma Jane and I went to the beach with Uncle Jerry Cobb we ran along the wet sand and looked at the shapes our boots made, just as if they were stamped in wax. Emma Jane turns in her left foot (splayfoot the boys call it, which is not polite) and Seth Strout had just patched one of my shoes and it all came out in the sand pictures. When I learned The Psalm of Life for Friday afternoon speaking I thought I shouldn't like to leave a patched footprint, nor have Emma Jane's look crooked on the sands of time, and right away I thought Oh! what a splendid thought for my Thought Book when Aunt Jane buys me a fifteen cent one over to Watson's store. REMERNISCENCES I told Aunt Jane I was going to begin my Remerniscences and she says I am full young, but I reminded her that Candace Milliken's sister died when she was ten, leaving no footprints whatever, and if I should die suddenly who would write down my Remerniscences? Aunt Miranda says the sun and moon would rise and set just the same and it was no matter if they didn't get written down, and to go up attic and find her piece-bag, but I said it would, as there was only one of everybody in the world and nobody else could do their remerniscensing for them. |