LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2397, 8 December 1881, Page 4

LITERATURE.

SICK HEADACHE. A Hygienic Lova Stoky. [' Harper's Bazisr.'] Cooks had orowed and hens had cackled for a full hour at least. This was a world of scratching, they said to themselves, and egga were not built in a day. Karly to bed and early to rise make fowls healthy and lively and wise. The robins in the app'e trees, the swallows in the barn, the little brown phcebes that held town meetingslin the meadow, had been piping and trilling that it was day, day, day, till they half expected to hear the noon bell ringing. The shy quail in the hedge row had called their warning of " hot and dry, hot and dry,' over and over, to any ears that would listen. The spiders had long since hung out their glittering webs a drying on the wild rose bushes. The bells of the morning glory, blue and pink and purple, had swung for hours ontside the battery window, before the delinquent, Aunt Larkin, lifted the latch and entered, not as her wont was, quickly, as with desire, but on leaden feet of dull resolve, and looking white as her own linen.

There stood the row of milk pails waiting to be emptied, to be washed, to be spread in the sun, already fierce and hot outside. There was the long array of milk pans mantling with yellow cream. There, in the corner, waited the exacting churn, the dasher leaning toward her hand with what seemed a malevolent readiness. As she took up the ekimmer the kitchen clook struck six. * Oh, dear,' sighed Aunt Larkin, ' mornin lost, evenin' crossed.' Bat when, with conscientious oare, she had stripped the third pan of its rich abundance, she laid down her weapons, so to speak, and capitulated to the one foe able to conquer that resolved soul. ' Thanny,' Bhe called, at tho foot of the stairs. * Yes, mother,' answered a cheerful voioe from among the lilao bushes, and a brown curly head, set on the Blender Bhoulders of young manhood, showed itself in the doorway. ' What, another of tho evil brood! Go straight to bed, mother. I'll go right over for Obadiah's Sarah. And I'll make you some tea, and manage my own breakfast. Don't yon worry about me. Bnt you see I was right, mother. You must have a girl. Shall I help you upstairs ?' ' No, dear. You jistsoe to yourself. The ooffee's ready, and the bread's in the stone pot, and there is plenty of doughnuts, and a currant pie, and dried beef, and cheese in the buttery; and if yon want to fry yourself a slice of meat, there's the fat in the red jar, end the veal's out in the spring house. . . But, though the mother-instinct insisted on thus making the way easy for its young, human natnre shuddered at this catalogue, and poor Aunt Larkin staggered to her bed too horribly ill to speak again for hours. Sight and sound were alike dreadful. The swift jingle of the wooing bobolink swinging outside in the golden ropes of the laburnum pierced her sensitive ears like the steady clash of sworda. And the droning hum of bees, plunging deep in the white sweetness of the syringas, was as the bray of a trombone. Her heavy limbs ached, to aohe the more as she tried to rest them In the new positions. It seemed to her that the deadly nausea was in feet, in her arms, In her spine —everywhere. That the entrance of any human being, even her beloved lhanny, would |be unendurable, she knew. But oh, if some phantom, some invisible, inaudible agenoy, would but turn the swivel of the blind, where a ray of abhorrible sunlight was already creeping in! How could she ever have let that bottle of Bohemian glass stand on her bureau, even though Thanny had given it her, filled with cologne for her poor head ! Its vivid red seemed to smite her through the cloud of dull pain above her brows. And if she shut her eyes, it did but glare the redder. Thanny brought her the tea, and it was vile. Presently Obadiah's Sarah came creeping in with demonstrative quietness, in shoes that creaked and gown that crackled, to set down a tinkling tray by tne bedside. Aunt Larkin, who would have mourned over a lie as over a lost soul, had she been capable of telling one, feigned sleep to dismiss that amiable vandal. But when she opened her eyes and saw the yellow butter, the deep blue plate, the brown toast, the red milk pitcher, the black earthen tea pot Bhe felt that sex alone, not gratitude nor Christian grace, bridled her tongue from profane and vain babbling. Meantime, nature, who did not Include sick headache, or any other mortal malady, in her scheme of existence, went about her usual business. The sun mounted higher and higher, cattle browsed, sheep fattened, buds blossomed, crops grew. Among these the plantage at the village aoademy flourished apaoe. Here lay the daily toil of Mr Nathan Larkin, assistant principal, a sensitive, conscientious follow, of indomitable will, loving work, and toiling to kindle In duller brains and lighter natures his own enthusiasm and his own resolve. The Reverend Edward Granniss, D.D.. Ph. D., LL.D., Principal of the Quaboag Seminary, being a gentleman of phlegmatio temperament, much addicted to heavy dinners at noonday, was quite willing to let his esteemed young friend do most of the pulling of the double team, especially through the hard places, though simply for his own improvement, of oourse.

Thus the youth, taking no rest, spending of his intense personality with prodigal readiness, inheriting from his mother a set of tense and swift-responding nerves, found himßelf beset, once a fortnight or so by the same fiend, sick headache, which had devastated years of her useful life. He was young and heroic. Sometimes he could grapple with it, hold it still, and, thus hampered, go through the routine of hi 3 work after a dull fashion. Sometimes he yielded, undergoing tortures greater than his mother's, as his imagination was more vivid. But, either way, he counted a month out of each year an unredeemed sacrifice to this Moloch.

On this summer day he felt wonderfully alert and alive. The boys thought he made Cieaar and the Anabasis almost interesting, with his vivid sketch of the splendid life of the Bepublio, and his showing up of hotheaded Cyrus, and cool, cruel, able Artaxerxes, ' long-memoried' for his wrongs. But in secret he was much disquieted, For Miss Allis Putnam was to come that afternoon, and he felt that his poor mother would ' worry' more than was needful. Not that he had his own misgivings. A strongminded young woman who had graduated first in her class from the medical college, and walked the hospitals abroad for a year, who had written a prize treatise on some disgusting and sanguinary subject, and no doubt practiced vivisection, should be, to his thinking, though for quite opposite reasons, like Wordsworth's Lucy. 1 A maid whim there were none to praise, And very few to love.' He fancied he knew how she would look ; slight sandy-complexioned, her light characterless hair very neat and wholly uninteresting, her dress very upright and uncompromising about the biases, collars and cuffs prim and spotless—no 'sweet neglect' about her, nor even ' the adulteries of art,' which, notwithstanding Ben Jonson, he thought most bewitching. She was so distant a cousin that kinship had not made the invitation obligatory. But his mother had dearly loved her mother, and when that gentle widow wrote that her dear Allis had returned, and that she longed to have her ever-beloved Oandace know her before she settled down to her profession, the everbeloved and ever-obliging Candace replied at once that the young traveller should be made welcome.

A caravan of unexpected guests could not npset Aunt Lar kin's perfect order, nor find her garrison unprovisioned But she confided to Thanny that Bhe ' expected a girl *t had lived to Paris would find their way or livin' dreadful old-fashioned and common.' And he guessed that she secretly dreaded the incursion, as he did. Polite he would certainly be, but he thought he would move his books ont to the stable loft and live as little as possible at home while Dr. Allis remained. He wished women would keep to their own sphere, and let men's work alone. By the time the two sessions were over, the compositions inspected, all the school 'chores' done, and his face turned homeward, he was sure that he detested unwomanly women, and of those sinners he reckoned female doctors chiefest.

Aa he opened the kitchen door, Obadiah's Sarah stood revealed buxom red-armed,

good-natured, carefully straining aromatic broth into a china bowl. ''Tiraa her notion,' she explained. 'I shouldn't never have teohed tho best set — no, nor made the soup neither —'thont tellin'. 1 took her up the toast an' tea 's you said, an' she never looked at 'em. But she said she must take suthin', an' she made it herself. You never see seen a handy little tbing. My ! I guoss the full soul could eat that mess. Honeycomb's cloyin' alwuz. I never Beo the force of that tex'. An* she's gave her some sort o' revilin' medicine 't didn't have no taste or smell, 'a fur's I see, an' she's a settin' up a'ready, an' Bez her headache's most gone, an' I never knowed her out o' bed before in less'n two days, when 't re»Uy took hot on her.' What meaning even ao close a translator of difficult tongues as Mr Nathan Larkin would have distilled from this speeoh may not be known. For at this pause there appeared in the oppouito door the most satisI factory gloss imaginable. A fluffy head, all blonde curls pufld, frizzes, he knew not what; pink cheeks ; laughing brown eyes ; shining teeth; a cambric gown that might have awed him, had it not been even more picturesque than fashionable; trim slippered feet beneath its abbreviated orispness —behold the key to Sarah'a voluble obscurity ! [To he continued.)