A Chance to Die by Elisabeth Elliot (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

time, her mother said, to purchase a few pretty dresses—among them, of course, an evening dress for parties. They went to the shop. The shopman displayed his loveliest things. Suddenly Amy decided she could not have them. She was now, in the language of the apostle Paul as interpreted by the Keswick people, “dead to the world.” To Amy, the world meant fashion, finery, luxury of any sort. She would follow Him who had no home, no earthly possessions beyond the bare minimum. She would be “dead to the world and its applause, to all its customs, fashions, laws.” For a girl with her eye for beauty, it is the measure of her commitment that she did not hesitate to relinquish all that seemed to her inimical to the true life of discipleship.

Entertaining her brothers and sisters was certainly not inimical in Amy’s mind to that life. Bursting with vitality, she went skating with them on the ponds of the Royal Botanical Gardens. She taught them to identify the orchids in the conservatories, and conceived the idea of helping them to establish a shop in which they learned about money through the sale of small items to other members of the family: pencils (halfpenny each), india rubbers (one penny), blotters, pens, paper (“cream laid, superfine”). Another project was a family magazine, Scraps. Volume 1, number 1, page 1, reads:

As it is usual in publishing the first issue of any journal to give the reasons for beginning it, together with its politics etc. we will try to relate the circumstances which led up to the existence of Scraps. By having a family paper it was thought that a great deal of pleasure as well as profit might be the result, and that by spending an evening now and then in reading and discussing the items which might appear in such a paper a great deal of amusement and perhaps a little instruction might be gained. It was therefore proposed by Amy and seconded by Norman that such a paper should be at once begun.

The handwriting is Norman’s, elegant and sweeping. A list of rules follows, including the requirement that each member must pay an annual subscription rate of six pence, and must choose a nom de plume. Norman became “Namron,” Ernest “Oddfellow,” Eva “Lulu,” Ethel “Atom,” Walter “Blanco,” Alfred “S.S.I.” (for Silly Silly Idiot), and Amy, not surprisingly, “Nobody.” Mother was elected president, Amy editor.

The pages of Scraps were decorated with cartoons, illuminated headings, and delicate pen-and-ink drawings. None is signed, but Amy’s later drawings on her missionary letters lead me to assume that the finer work in Scraps is hers—exquisitely detailed ferns, cattails, grasses, flowers. There are several watercolors (one shows a shoreline with cottage and trees, masts and sailboats on the water) and a beautiful oil of autumn leaves. Alfred contributed ink drawings—one shows the cook, “Queen of the Kitchen,’’ a dour woman with warts and hairy moles, standing on a stool, a band around her tight curls, an apron pinned to her dress, sleeves rolled up, laced boots; another a “Mill Girl” swathed in a voluminous black shawl; a third a drawing of the cover of a book, Mill Girls and All About Them, by Amy Carmichael.

The editor saw to it that there was, in addition to whimsy and humor, plenty to edify. She reported her conversation with a Bible scholar about soul and spirit. She quotes Shakespeare, Dryden, Kingsley, and Coleridge, includes a vocabulary study with the etymology of tantalize, burglar, and pecuniary. Some of her early efforts in poetry appear, ranging from doggerel:

Oh we are a jolly family

We are, we is, we be—

And very wise and careful

And exemplary are we!

to:

Think truly, and thy thoughts shall be

Spotless with God’s own purity.

On every thought-bud let us bear

The stamp of truth, and love and prayer.

From Scraps we learn that the usual rising time was 4:50 A.M. and that for breakfast the Carmichaels ate brown bread, white bread, bacon, toast, oatcake, marmalade, and tea, with finnan haddie and soda bread added for Sundays. All were expected to dress for tea, to respond when the tea bell rang, and to remain afterwards for prayers. “Tea,” the evening meal, usually meant potatoes, bread, perhaps a bit of sausage or fish, and, of course, pots and pots of tea. No wonder the Christmas hamper from Grandmother in Portaferry was welcomed—she sent turkey, geese, and vegetables. Mice and cockroaches also lived in the house, we find, in spite of various cats and a dog named Scamp.

It was a pious Presbyterian home, and the children’s language was strictly watched. “Queen Motherie” remonstrated upon Eva’s “most inelegant exclamation, ‘Cricky!’ ““But there’s nothing nice left to say, so I can’t help saying it!” was Eva’s defense. The others, sympathetic to the urge to swear, offered alternatives. Why not “Beetles!” or “Earwigs!”? Ernest wrote when April Fool’s fell on a Sunday, “Of course we were all very pious, doubly so as we would not have a chance of being ever so pious on a Sunday for another seven years.”

The Christmas number of 1887 carries a set of character sketches of the family, by “Nobody.” Namron is a sweet child, kindly, loving, unselfish, “in short, very dear in every way. As for faults—a difficulty in believing himself to be mistaken is about all I can say, and this fault is so overruled by good-temperedness that it is almost indeed dormant. When his beloved sister Nobody was ill he nearly carried her upstairs.” Oddfellow was “one of those youths to whom absence makes the heart grow fonder. When you are away from him you realize that you are worth something to him. . . . I think I won’t name his faults, for since beginning to write, I have become conscious that my own are so numerous and so far outweigh other people’s, that the less I say about them the better. Eva: dear, frisky, amusing, loving, innocent, “has a large stock of love ready to draw upon for Birthdays, Christmas, etc.