The Female Prose Writers of America/Emily C. Judson/My First Grief
I laughed and crowed above this water, when I was a baby, and, therefore, I love it. I played beside it, when the days were years of summer-time, and the summers were young eternities of brightness, and, therefore, I love it. It was the scene of my first grief, too. Shall I tell you? There is not much to tell, but I have a notion that there are people above us, up in the air, and behind the clouds, that consider little girls doings about as important as those of men and women. The birds and the angels are great levellers.
It was a dry season; the brook was low, and a gay trout in a coat of golden brown, dotted over with crimson, and a silver pinafore, lay, weather-bound, on the half-dry stones, all heated and panting, with about a tea-spoonful of lukewarm water, turning lazily from its head, and creeping down its back at too slow a pace to afford the sufferer hope of emancipation. My sympathies—little girls, you must know, are made up of love and sympathy, and such like follies, which afterwards contract into—n’importe! I was saying, my sympathies were aroused; and, quite forgetting that water would take the gloss from my new red morocco shoes, I picked my way along, and laying hold of my fine gentleman in limbo, succeeded in burying him, wet face and all, in the folds of my white apron! But such an uneasy prisoner! More than one frightened toss did he get into the grass, and then I had an infinite deal of trouble to secure him again. His gratitude was very like that of humans’, when you do them unasked service.
When I had reached a cool, shaded, deep spot, far adown, where the spotted alders lean, like so many self-enamoured narcissuses, over the ripple-faced mirror, I dropped my apron, and let go my prize. Ah! he was grateful then! He must have been! How he dived, and sprang to the surface, and spread out his little wings of dark-ribbed gossamer, and frisked about, keeping all the time a cool, thin sheet of silver between his back and the sun-sick air! I loved that pretty fish, for I had been kind to it; and I thought it would love me, too, and stay there, and be a play-fellow for me; so I went every day and watched for it, and watched until my little eyes ached; but I never saw it again. That was my first grief: what is there in years to make a heart ache heavier? That first will be longer remembered than the last. I dare say.