with happy-go-lucky wagons
and harnesses that never come to grief; where they have few schools
and intermitted teaching, yet turn out, somehow, young men who work
their way into professions, and girls who take the world by
instinct, and understand a great deal perfectly well that is beyond
their practical reach; where the old Puritan stiffness keeps them
straight, but gets leavened in some marvelous way with the broader
and more generous thought of the time, and wears a geniality that it
is half unconscious of; the region where, if you are lucky enough to
get into it to know it, you find yourself, as Miss Euphrasia said,
encouraged and put in heart again about the world. Things are so
genuine; when they make a step forward, they are really there.
But Bel Bree was not very happy in her home, though she sat at the
window and made rhymes in half merry fashion; though she loved the
hills, and the lights, and the shadows, the sweet-blossoming springs
and the jeweled autumns, the sunsets, and the great rains, that set
all the wild little waterfalls prancing and calling to each other
among the ravines.
Bel had two lives; one that she lived in these things, and one
within the literal and prosaic limit of the farmhouse, where her
father, as farmers must, had married a smart second wife to "look
after matters."
Not that Mrs. Bree ever looked _after_ anything: nothing ever got
ahead of her; she "whewed round;" when she was "whewing," she
neither wanted Bel to hinder nor help; the child was left to
herself; to her idleness and her dreams; then she neglected
something that she might and ought to have done, and then there was
reproach, and hard speech; partly deserved, but running over into
that wherein she should not have been blamed,--the precinct of her
step-mother's own busy and self-arrogated functions. She was taunted
and censured for incapacity in that to which she was not admitted;
"her mother made ten cheeses a week, and flung them in her face,"
she said. On the other hand, Mrs. Bree said "Bel hadn't got a mite
of _snap_ to her." One might say that, perhaps, of an electric
battery, if the wrong poles were opposed. Mrs. Bree had not found
out where the "snap" lay in Bel's character. She never would find
out.
Bel longed, as human creatures who are discontent always do, to get
away. The world was big; there must be better things somewhere.
There was a pathos of weariness, and an inspiration of hope, in her
little
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