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If McDonough had been waylaid and killed, she could mourn for him. If he had deserted her, she could wrap herself in her pride. But neither course lay open to her, then or afterward. In one of the Twice Told Tales Hawthorne deals with a man named Wakefield, who disappears with like suddenness, and lives unrecognized for twenty years in a street not far from his abandoned hearthside.
Yet, in the name of God, what should I know if I don't know the life of the hearth and of the smoking-room, since my whole life has been passed in those places? The warm hearthside!
She understood it somewhat imperfectly, especially when in an earnest moment he rushed his words together as if they had been soldiers he was leading at the charge-step against an enemy. His manner convinced her, even though his diction fell short. "Then we'll talk about something else," she said, laughing naturally now, and retreating to a chair by the hearthside.
She ate soberly and sparingly of her early supper, and then, leaving the lamp on a side-table, where it brought out great shadows in the room, she took a little cricket and sat down by the fire. There she had mused many an evening which seemed to her less dull than the general course of her former life, while her husband occupied the hearthside chair and told her stories of the war.
She stopped and faced him, her hands slipping out of his and creeping up to his shoulders and about his neck. "Dear lad promise me one thing! promise me we shall never forget the road! No matter how snugly we may be housed, or how close comfort and happiness sit at our hearthside we'll be faring forth just once in so often to touch earth again.
If ye kick and slap at it, 'twill hump its back and scratch at ye sure as fate; but if ye are wise and a bit patient ye can have it coaxed and smoothed down till it's purring to make room for ye at any hearthside. And there's another thing it's well to remember that folks are folks the world over, whether they are wearing your dress and speaking your tongue or another's."
But society, amused for a while at playing Cinderella, soon wearied of the hearthside role, and welcomed the Fairy Godmother in the shape of any magician powerful enough to turn the shrunken pumpkin back again into the golden coach.
When the firelight again illuminated the room there was seen, sitting gingerly on the edge of a stool by the hearthside, a swarthy little man of prepossessing appearance and dressed with faultless taste, nodding to the old man with a friendly and engaging smile. "From San Francisco, evidently," thought Mr.
Behind Charlotte and Leaver, the kindly old clergyman who had been Madam Chase's life-long friend was gently murmuring: "'Dust is dust, to dust returneth, Was not written of the soul." Upon the evening of that day, spent as such evenings are, in subdued conversation at a hearthside, Leaver came across the room and spoke to Charlotte.
There are no novel ideas in "Snow-Bound," nor is there any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to the old farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely charm, the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's genius recreated his own lost youth and painted for all time a true New England hearthside.
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