emory and her pleasures of hope were
alike founded upon fact. Christ was as personal to her as her own
rheumatic frame, and heaven as positive as her kitchen. "Blessed are
they that have not seen, and yet have believed";--but for her, to
believe and to see were one. So whatever imagination she may by nature
have possessed seemed to have dwindled for lack of exercise: it was long
since she had had any use for it. She had no folk-lore, no faculty of
story-telling,--only a veracious legend or two of our family, which she
invariably related with an affidavit-like scrupulousness of
circumstance. I cannot recollect that she ever once beguiled me with a
mere nurse's tale. So when at that kitchen-table we read "The Pilgrim's
Progress" together, we presented a curious entertainment for the student
of intellectual processes,--nurse and child arriving by diverse
arguments of imagination at the same result of reality;--she knowing
that Sin was a burden, because she had borne it; I, because I had seen
it in the picture strapped to Christian's back;--she, that Despair was a
giant, because he had often appalled her soul within her; I, because in
a dream he had made me scream last night;--she, that Death was a river,
because so many of her dear ones had gone over, and because on her clear
days she could see the other shore; I, because, as I lay with my young
cheek against her old heart, I could hear the beating of its waves.

Blessed indeed is the mother who is admitted to the sanctuary of her
darling's secrets with the freedom with which Aunt Judy penetrated (was
invited rather, with parted lips and sparkling eyes) to mine,--into
whose sympathetic ear are poured, in all the dream-borne melody of the
first songs of the heart, in all "the tender thought, the speechless
pain" of its first violets, his earliest confessions, aspirations,
loves, wrongs, troubles, triumphs. Well do I remember that day when,
trembling, ghastly, faint, I fell in tears upon her neck, and poured
into her bosom and basin the spasmodic story of My First Cigar! Well do
I remember that night, when, bursting from the evening party in the
parlor, and the thick red married lady in the thin blue tarletan, and
all my raptures and my anguish, I flung myself into Aunt Judy's arms and
acknowledged the soft corn of My First Love, raving at the fatal
sandy-whiskered gulf that yawned between me and Mine thick blue Own One
in the thin red tarletan!

Well do I remember--though