The Passing of Emily Ruggles's

AUTUMN has come and school has opened, yet no tops have appeared in our town. These be degenerate days! In the New England village where I live there is not a top to be had. Neither are there marbles in the spring, nor hoops, nor paper soldiers, nor slingshot elastic, nor — but let us simply say we have no Emily Ruggles’s.

Miss Emily Ruggles kept the little notion store in the Massachusetts town where my boyhood was spent. She was almost as terrifying as her store was alluring. She must have been nearly six feet tall, and she had a deep bass voice and a forbidding manner. It was said that she wore a ramrod in the back of her dress, and on Sunday when she was sitting very straight in her pew across the aisle from ours, wrapped in her best Paisley shawl, I used furtively to watch for some visible confirmation of this rumor. I thought the ramrod might slip up and show at the back of her neck. It was also said, I believe on sound authority, that she sent a substitute to the Civil War, and was highly indignant that she was n’t allowed to go herself. For us youngsters who scrambled every Memorial Day for the cartridgeshells ejected by the G.A.R. firing squad after the salute, this was a thrilling fact about Miss Emily.

Her little store was in Lyceum Hall Block, close to the Post Office, and you climbed four steps to enter it, by a single heavy door without any slam-absorber. When you had pushed open this door and entered the somewhat dim interior, you looked toward the back of the room between two parallel counters, and behind a third counter which connected them at the rear you saw Miss Emily sitting, swathed in her weekday shawl. She looked at you sternly, to see if you were going to shut the door, and shut it quietly, and after you had done so, she demanded, in her deep bass voice, ‘Which side, young man?’

This question had much point, for on the right side of the store, both in the counter and on the shelves behind it, were the notions — spools, needles, calico, garter elastic, and a hundred other things your mother was always wanting; while on the left side were kept marbles, paper soldiers, lead soldiers, slingshot elastic, air-guns, bows and arrows, slates, whistles, school pencils, compasses, paint-boxes, and a hundred other things you were always wanting. Miss Emily sat strategically at the rear of the store, and did not move till she knew for certain what it was you were after. Nowadays this would be called efficiency. In those days our parents called it crankiness.

When Miss Emily took your pennies for an ‘aggie’ or a ‘snapper’ or a big glass ‘popper,’ she did so sternly, and she always examined them closely as if she expected counterfeits. She never smiled sweetly on you, and called you ‘Sonny’ or ‘Little boy.’ She never smiled at all. She called you, invariably, ‘Young man,’ in her aggressive bass. But the fact remained that she invariably kept on hand just the kind of marbles and toy soldiers and paper soldiers and dolls and pencils and paints the heart of youth desired, and slingshot elastic of pure rubber, which nobody else ever kept and which is quite unprocurable to-day; and she always put in an extra marble or two with a ten-cent purchase, and she never stretched the elastic on the yard-stick when she measured it, and the steps to her shop were worn hollow by the tread of children’s feet. That was her prim New England way of expressing her affection. She studied for weeks to procure a window display which would delight the hearts of all the youngsters, and then she thundered at the first child who entered, ‘Shut the door, young man — and don’t slam! ’

She knew the season for every game. She knew when marble time was due, and the appearance of glittering ‘aggies’ in her window invariably preceded by one day the drying up of the sidewalk along the Common. She knew when top time had arrived, and when the tops filled her window, then we laid aside our other sports and obeyed the call. At Valentine time her window was full of the most ravishing confections of paper lace and pink cupids and amorous poetry — but never a ‘ comic.’ The nefarious trade in ‘comics’ was carried on by a druggist who also was suspected of selling something stronger than soda. Miss Emily would have nothing to do with such iniquitous things as ' comics.’ And all the time the left-hand window was constantly changing its display, the right-hand window contained the same bales of calico and boxes of spools, till they were faded and dusty and fly-specked. Miss Emily’s real interest was in the children’s trade.

Long ago Miss Emily joined her fathers. Her store passed with her. There is none in that town to take its place, nor in other towns, either. No doubt most of the things she sold (except that marvelous sling elastic of pure rubber three quarters of an inch wide) can still be bought, some in one store, some in another. But they cannot be bought from the same counter. They are not assembled together for the eye of childhood to gloat over, not even in the occasional toy store of the large cities. Certainly there are no such shops any more in the villages and smaller towns, their steps worn hollow by the tread of little feet. Spinsters we have with us still, and children, too; but one form of mutual dependence between the two seems to have gone forever.

I have wondered sometimes if that is the reason the boys in the town where I live now never play marbles, or spin tops. In the past five years I have not seen a single game of marbles or once heard the shrill request, ‘Gimme a peg at yours!’ It is not strange that the slingshot has vanished, for automobile tires use up all the available rubber. But why should tops and marbles vanish from the earth? They have gone the way of the delightful children’s matinees at the old Boston Museum, no doubt, and the Kate Greenaway books, and the jack-stones little girls used to toss by the hour, sitting on the front steps. It makes one feel middleaged and mournfully reminiscent.