A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32

The pattern that Catherine chooses for the quilt Ann sets her to make is called Mariner’s Compass, said to be made by the wives of sailors to bring their loved ones home from the sea. The quilt symbolizes two important journeys that propel Cassie toward adulthood: the self-liberated man’s journey toward Canada and Cassie’s journey to “the opposite shore” (135), or heaven.

Catherine thinks of both the man’s escape and Cassie’s death in terms of journeys. When Asa tells her that the quilt of her mother’s that she gave to the man is gone and that the stranger’s footprints have been erased, she wishes him “a safe end to his journey” (32). Later, she chooses to write a proverb that causes her to think of the man as her mind “travel[s] with him, across white fields” (36). She also describes Cassie’s death as “a greater journey” (135).

When Charles praises her choice of pattern for the quilt, he links it explicitly to the journeys of the self-liberated man and Cassie’s death. He tells her that the Mariner’s Compass pattern was an apt choice, “for are we not, all of us, wand’rers and strangers” who “travel in danger or voyage uncharted seas?” (135). Catherine understands that he is referring to both the man, traveling in danger, and Cassie, passing from life to death and the unknowable afterlife. By symbolizing these journeys, the pattern prompts Catherine to think of the stranger and Cassie together and to reach her conclusion that “we all are joined” (135). As Charles points out, everyone is on the same journey, united in the shared experiences of joy and sorrow.

Phantoms are a motif supporting the theme of The Nature of Obedience. Charles foreshadows the appearance of the self-liberated man whom Catherine will refer to as the “phantom” when he tells the girls a story about a man who was frightened in pursuit of his lost hogs by the appearance of a headless woman who turned out to be a tangle of roots. His point is that “intelligence must prevail” (7). Later, as she hears her father’s stern judgment on helping runaways, Catherine reflects on his belief that intelligence is given to humankind so that they may “distinguish right from wrong” (11).

Catherine is about to disobey her father, however, in her own encounter with a phantom. She remembers her father’s story the first time she sees the man in the woods and wonders if there was really someone there. When she sees him again, she calls him “my phantom,” and Asa also calls him “your phantom” even as he points out the man’s boot prints to Catherine. Catherine realizes that it is one thing to dismiss imaginary phantoms, but this one is a real person and one who is in need. Furthermore, his need for warmth—literally and figuratively—prompts Catherine’s first disobedience to her father and her first step on the road to maturity.

After Cassie’s death, Catherine receives two pieces of crocheted lace from the man who signs his name “Curtis”—one intended for each of the girls. Curtis’s note confirms that the man whom the girls helped was not a “phantom,” again confirming the disparity between Charles’s stern interpretation of the law and Catherine’s instinct to help a fellow human.