We love the donkey still,
and it always occupies a place of honor. He brought me a little
Bacchus in Parian marble, wearing a wreath of grapes, and holding a
mug on his knee, and greeting his jolly stomach with one outspread
hand, as if he were inwardly smiling as he is outwardly. This is a
vase for flowers, and the white smile of the god has gleamed through
countless of my sweetest bouquets.
My father's enjoyment of frolicking fun was as hilarious as that
accorded by some of us to wildest comic opera. He had a delicate way
of throwing himself into the scrimmage of laughter, and I do not for
an instant attempt to explain how he managed it. I can say that he
lowered his eye-lids when he laughed hardest, and drew in his breath
half a dozen times with dulcet sounds and a murmur of mirth between.
Before and after this performance he would look at you straight from
under his black brows, and his eyes seemed dazzling. I think the
hilarity was revealed in them, although his cheeks rounded in ecstasy.
I was a little roguish child, but he was the youngest and merriest
person in the room when he was amused. Yet he was never far removed
from his companion,--a sort of Virgil,--his knowledge of sin and
tragedy at our very hearthstones. It was with such a memory in the
centre of home joys that the Pilgrim Fathers turned towards the door,
ever and anon, to guard it from creeping Indian forms.
On Sundays, at sundown, when the winter rain had very likely dulled
everybody's sense of more moderate humor, the blue law of quietness
was lifted from the atmosphere; and between five and six o'clock we
spread butterfly wings again, and had blind man's buff.
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