Marion Harland's Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life

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Title: Marion Harland's Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life

Author: Marion Harland

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARION HARLAND'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE STORY OF A LONG LIFE ***

MARION HARLAND’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

THE STORY OF A LONG LIFE

[Illustration]

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMX

_Printed in the United States of America_

WITH
REVERENT TENDERNESS
THIS SIMPLE STORY OF MY LONG LIFE
IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
MY FATHER

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE
I. FOREBEARS AND PATRON SAINT 1
II. LAFAYETTE; REVOLUTIONARY TALES; PARENTS’ MARRIAGE 16
III. A COUNTRY EXILE; DEATH OF THE FIRST-BORN; CHANGE
OF HOME; A FIRESIDE TRAGEDY; “COGITO, ERGO SUM” 27
IV. A BERSERKER RAGE; A FRIGHT; THE WESTERN FEVER;
MONTROSE; A MOTHER REGAINED 37
V. OUR POWHATAN HOME; A COUNTRY FUNERAL; “OLD MRS.
O’HARA” 52
VI. OLD-FASHIONED HUSBAND’S LOVE-LETTER; AN ALMOST
HOMICIDE; A “SLAUGHTERED MONSTER”; A WESLEYAN
SCHOOLMISTRESS 61
VII. MY FIRST TUTOR; THE REIGN OF TERROR 70
VIII. CALM AFTER STORM; OUR HANDSOME YANKEE GOVERNESS;
THE NASCENT AUTHOR 84
IX. A COLLEGE NEIGHBORHOOD; THE WORLD WIDENS; A
BELOVED TUTOR; COLONIZATION DREAMS AND
DISAPPOINTMENT; MAJOR MORTON 90
X. FAMILY LETTERS; COMMENCEMENT AT HAMPDEN-SIDNEY;
THEN AND NOW 104
XI. BACK IN POWHATAN; OLD VIRGINIA HOUSEWIFERY;
A SINGING-CLASS IN THE FORTIES; THE
SIMPLE LIFE? 110
XII. ELECTION DAY AND A DEMOCRATIC BARBECUE 117
XIII. A WHIG RALLY AND MUSTER DAY 129
XIV. RUMORS OF CHANGES; A CORN-SHUCKING; A NEGRO
TOPICAL SONG 143
XV. THE COUNTRY GIRLS AT A CITY SCHOOL; VELVET HATS
AND CLAY’S DEFEAT 149
XVI. HOME AT CHRISTMAS; A CANDY-PULL AND HOG-KILLING 162
XVII. A NOTABLE AFFAIR OF HONOR 171
XVIII. THE MENACE OF SLAVE INSURRECTION 186
XIX. WEDDING AND BRIDESMAID; THE ROUTINE OF A LARGE
FAMILY; MY FIRST BEREAVEMENT 196
XX. OUR TRUE FAMILY GHOST-STORY 203
XXI. TWO MONUMENTAL FRIENDSHIPS 218
XXII. THE “OLD AFRICAN CHURCH” 227
XXIII. HOW “ALONE” CAME TO BE 237
XXIV. THE DAWNING OF LITERARY LIFE 246
XXV. BROUGHT FACE TO FACE WITH MY FATE 254
XXVI. LITERARY WELL-WISHERS; GEORGE D. PRENTICE; MRS.
SIGOURNEY; GRACE GREENWOOD; H. W. LONGFELLOW;
JAMES REDPATH; THE “WANDERING JEW” 262
XXVII. MY NORTHERN KINSPEOPLE; “QUELQU’UN” AND LIFELONG
FRIENDSHIP 270
XXVIII. MY FIRST OPERA; “PETER PARLEY”; RACHEL AS
“CAMILLE”; BAYARD TAYLOR; T. B. ALDRICH;
G. P. MORRIS; MARIA CUMMINS; MRS. A. D. T.
WHITNEY 280
XXIX. ANNA CORA (MOWATT) RITCHIE; EDWARD EVERETT;
GOVERNOR WISE; A MEMORABLE DINNER-PARTY 288
XXX. A MUSICAL CONVENTION; GEORGE FRANCIS ROOT; WHEN
“THE SHINING SHORE” WAS FIRST SUNG; THE
HALLELUJAH CHORUS; BETROTHAL; DEMPSTER IN HIS
OLD AGE 297
XXXI. WEDDING BELLS; A BRIDAL TOUR; A DISCOVERED
RELATIVE; A NOBLE LIFE 304
XXXII. PARSONAGE LIFE; WILLIAM WIRT HENRY; HISTORIC SOIL;
JOHN RANDOLPH; THE LAST OF THE RANDOLPHS 313
XXXIII. PLANTATION PREACHING; COLORED COMMUNICANTS; A
“MIGHTY MAN IN PRAYER” 325
XXXIV. MY NOVITIATE AS A PRACTICAL HOUSEWIFE; MY COOK
“GETS HER HAND OUT”; INCEPTION OF “COMMON SENSE
IN THE HOUSEHOLD” 333
XXXV. THE STIRRED “NEST AMONG THE OAKS”; A CRUCIAL CRISIS 346
XXXVI. MIGRATION NORTHWARD; ACCLIMATION; ALBERT EDWARD,
PRINCE OF WALES, IN NEW YORK; POLITICAL PORTENTS 355
XXXVII. THE PANIC OF ’61; A VIRGINIA VACATION; MUTTERINGS
OF COMING STORM 363
XXXVIII. THE FOURTEENTH OF APRIL, 1861, IN RICHMOND 370
XXXIX. “THE LAST THROUGH TRAIN FOR FOUR YEARS” 382
XL. DOMESTIC SORROWS AND NATIONAL STORM AND STRESS;
FRIENDS, TRIED AND TRUE 389
XLI. FORT DELAWARE; “OLD GLORY”; LINCOLN’S
ASSASSINATION; THE RELEASED PRISONER OF WAR 399
XLII. A CHRISTMAS REUNION; A MIDNIGHT WARNING; HOW A
GOOD MAN CAME TO “THE HAPPIEST DAY OF HIS LIFE” 408
XLIII. TWO BRIDALS; A BIRTH AND A PASSING; “MY LITTLE
LOVE”; “DRIFTING OUT”; A NONPAREIL PARISH 417
XLIV. TWO YEARS OVERSEAS; LIFE IN ROME AND GENEVA 427
XLV. SUNNYBANK; A NEW ENGLAND PARISH; “MY BOYS”; TWO
“STARRED” NAMES 436
XLVI. RETURN TO MIDDLE STATES; THE HOLY LAND; MY FRIENDS
THE MISSIONARIES; TWO CONSULS IN JERUSALEM 448
XLVII. LUCERNE; GOOD SAMARITANS AND AN ENGLISHMAN; A
LECTURE TOUR; OHIOAN HOSPITALITY; MR. AND MRS.
MCKINLEY 457
XLVIII. THE CLOUDS RETURN AFTER THE RAIN; ABROAD AGAIN;
HEALING AND HEALTH; IDYLLIC WINTER IN FLORENCE 470
XLIX. THE GOING-OUT OF A YOUNG LIFE; PRESENT ACTIVITIES;
“LITERARY HEARTHSTONES”; GRATEFUL REMINISCENCES 481
APPENDIX 491
A FRATERNAL TRIBUTE
THE GOLDEN WEDDING

FOREWORD

FROM the time when, as a mere baby, I dreamed myself to slumber every
night by “making up stories,” down to the present hour, every human
life with which I have been associated, or of which I had any intimate
knowledge, has been to me a living story. All interest me in some
measure. Many enlist my sympathy and fascinate the imagination as no
tale that is avowedly fictitious has ever bewitched me.

I hold and believe for certain that if I could draw aside the veil of
conventional reserve from the daily thinking, feeling, and _living_
of my most commonplace acquaintance, and read these from “Preface” to
“Finis,” I should rate the wildest dream of the novelist as tame by
comparison.

My children tell me, laughingly, that I “turn everything into a story.”
In my heart I know that the romances are all ready-made and laid to my
hand.

In the pages that follow this word of explanation I have essayed no
dramatic effects or artistic “situations.” “The Story of My Long Life”
tells itself as one friend might talk to another as the two sit in
the confidential firelight on a winter evening. The idea of reviewing
that life upon paper first came to me with the consciousness—which was
almost a shock—that, of all the authors still on active professional
duty in our country, I am the only one whose memory runs back to
the stage of national history that preceded the Civil War by a
quarter-century. I, alone, am left to tell, of my own knowledge and
experience, what the Old South was in deed and in truth. Other and far
abler pens than mine have portrayed scenes of those days with skill I
cannot emulate. But theirs is hearsay evidence—second-hand testimony
as truly as if they wrote of Shakespeare’s haps and mishaps in the
grammar-school at Stratford-on-Avon, or of Master George Herbert’s
early love affairs.

True, the fathers told it to the generation following, and the
generation has been faithful to the traditions committed to it. What I
have to say in the aforesaid gossip over the confidential fire is of
what I saw and heard and did—and _was_ in that hoary Long Ago.

Throughout the telling I have kept the personal touch. The story
is autobiography—not history. I began it for my children, whose
importunities for tales of the olden—and now forever gone—“times” have
been taken up by the least grandchild.

It was my lot to know the Old South in her prime, and to see her
downfall. Mine to witness the throes that racked her during four black
and bitter years. Mine to watch the dawn of a new and vigorous life and
the full glory of a restored Union. I shall tell of nothing that my
eyes did not see, and depict neither tragedy nor comedy in which I was
not cast for a part.

Mine is a story for the table and arm-chair under the reading-lamp in
the living-room, and not for the library shelves. To the family and to
those who make and keep the home do I commit it.

MARION HARLAND.

NEW YORK CITY, _November, 1909._

MARION HARLAND’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

FOREBEARS AND PATRON SAINT

MY father, Samuel Pierce Hawes, was born in the town of Dorchester,
Massachusetts, July 30, 1799.

The homestead, still standing and reckoned among the notable sites of
the region, was built in 1640, by Robert Pierce, who emigrated to the
New World in 1630, having sailed from Plymouth, England, in the _Mary
and John_, in company with others of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On
the voyage, he married Ann Greenaway—registered as “Daughter of Goodman
Greenaway,” a fellow-passenger.

The family trace their descent, by old domestic and town records, from
the Northumberland Percies. Traditions, cherished by the race, affirm
that Godfrey of Bouillon was a remote ancestor. It is unquestionably
true that “Robert of Dorchester,” as he is put down in the genealogy of
the Percies, was a blood relative of Master George Percy, John Smith’s
friend, and his successor in the presidency of the Jamestown colony.

The emigrants had a temporary home in Neponset Village, prospering so
far in worldly substance as to justify the erection of the substantial
house upon the hill overlooking the “village,” ten years after the
landing. So substantial was it, and so honest were the builders,
that it has come down in a direct line from father to son, and been
inhabited by ten generations of thrifty folk who have left it stanch
and weatherproof to this day.

My father’s mother, a handsome, wilful girl of seventeen, ran away
to be married to one whom her father—“Squire Pierce”—considered
a presumptuous adventurer. He was from Maine, a stranger in the
neighborhood, and reputed (justly) to be wild and unsteady. When he
asked for the girl’s hand he was summarily commanded to hold no further
communication with her. He had served as a private in the Revolutionary
War; he had winning ways and a good-looking face, and Ann had a liberal
spice of her sire’s unbending will. She would have him, and no other of
the youths who sued for her favor.

The family genealogy records that “Squire Pierce,” as he was named
by his neighbors, received a captain’s commission from the parent
government at the outbreak of the Rebellion, and on the self-same day
one from the Continental Congress appointing him as a colonel in the
Massachusetts forces. As “Colonel Pierce,” he fought throughout the
eight bloody years to which we owe our national life.

In his home he was a despot of the true Puritan, patriarchal type.

For three years after the elopement the name of his daughter’s husband
was never uttered in his hearing. Nor did she enter the house, until
at twenty, her proud spirit bowed but not broken by sorrows she
never retailed, she came back to the old roof-tree on the eve of her
confinement with her first and only child. He was born there and
received the grandfather’s name in full. From that hour he was adopted
as a son of the house by the stern old Puritan, and brought up at his
knees.

With the shrewd sense and sturdy independence characteristic of the
true New-Englander, the mother was never forgetful of the fact that her
boy was half-orphaned and dependent upon his grandfather’s bounty, and
began early to equip him for a single-handed fight with the world.

Within a decade I have studied an authentic and detailed genealogy of
the Hawes stock from which my grandfather sprang. It is a fine old
English family, and the American branch, in which appear the birth and
death of Jesse Hawes, of Maine, numbers many men of distinction in
various professions. It is a comfort to a believer in heredity to be
assured that the tree was sound at heart, in spite of the warped and
severed bough.

By the time my father was fourteen, he was at work in a Boston
mercantile house, boarding with his employer, Mr. Baker, a personal
friend of the Pierces. The growing lad walked out to Dorchester every
Saturday night to spend Sunday at home and attend divine service in
the “Dorchester Old Meeting-House,” the same in which I first saw and
heard Edward Everett Hale, over forty years later. The youth arose, in
all weathers, before the sun on Monday morning in order to be at his
place of business at seven o’clock. When he was sixteen, his employer
removed to Richmond, Virginia, and took his favorite clerk with him.
From Boston to the capital of the Old Dominion was then a fortnight’s
journey by the quickest mode of travel. The boy could hardly hope to
see his mother even once a year.

At twenty-five he was an active member of the First Presbyterian Church
in Richmond, established and built up by Rev. John Holt Rice, D.D.,
who was also the founder of Union Theological Seminary, now situated
in Richmond. The young New-Englander was, likewise, a teacher in the
Sunday-school—the first of its kind in Virginia, conducted under the
auspices of Doctor Rice’s church—a partner in a flourishing mercantile
house, and engaged to be married to Miss Judith Anna Smith, of Olney,
a plantation on the Chickahominy, five miles from the city.

I have a miniature of my father, painted upon ivory a few years after
his marriage. It is that of a handsome man, with deeply set gray eyes,
very dark hair, and a well-cut, resolute mouth. The head is nobly
shaped, the forehead full and broad. His face was singularly mobile,
and deeply lined, even in youth.

In intellect he was far above the average business man. His library, at
that early date, was more than respectable. Some of the most valuable
early editions of the English classics that enrich my book-shelves
have his book-plate upon the fly-leaves. He had, moreover, a number
of standard French books, having studied the language with a tutor in
the evenings. The range of his reading was wide and of a high order.
Histories, biographies, books of travel, and essays had a prominent
place in his store of “solid reading.” That really good novels were
not included in this condemnation we learn from a brief note to
his betrothed, accompanying a copy of Walter Scott’s _Pirate_. He
apologizes for the profanity of certain characters in semi-humorous
fashion, and signs himself, “Your friend, Samuel.”

Doctor Rice, whose wife was my mother’s first cousin, appreciated young
Hawes’s character and ability; the parsonage was thrown open to him at
all times, and within the hospitable precincts he first met his future
wife.

She was a pretty, amiable girl of eighteen, like himself an omnivorous
reader, and, like him also, a zealous church-worker.

Her father, Capt. William Sterling Smith, was the master of the
ancestral estate of Olney, rechristened in the latter part of the
eighteenth century by an ardent admirer of William Cowper. I am under
the impression that the change of name was the work of my grandmother,
his second wife, Miss Judith Smith, of Montrose, and a second cousin
of “Captain Sterling,” as he was familiarly called.

Late in the seventeenth century, William Smith, of Devonshire, a lineal
descendant of the brother and heir of Capt. John Smith of Pocahontas
fame, married Ann Sterling in England, and, emigrating to America,
pitched his moving tent, first in Gloucester, then in Henrico County.
His cousin, bearing the same name, took up land in Powhatan, naming his
homestead for the hapless Earl of Montrose. The questionable custom of
the intermarriage of cousins prevailed in the clan, as among other old
Virginia families.

My maternal grandmother was petite, refined in feature, bearing, and
speech, and remarkable in her day for intellectual vivacity and moral
graces. Her chief associates of the other sex were men of profound
learning, distinguished for services done to Church and State. Among
them were the founders of the Presbyterian Church in Virginia. The
Smiths had seceded from the Established Church of England before Thomas
Jefferson rent it from the State.

There lies at my elbow a time-worn volume bound in unpolished
calf-skin, and lettered on one side, “D. Lacy’s Letters”; on the
reverse, “Friendship Perpetuated.” It contains one hundred and
forty-two letters, copied from the original epistles and engrossed in
exquisitely neat and minute characters. They represent one side of a
correspondence maintained by the scribe with my grandmother before
and after her marriage. The writer and copyist was the Rev. Drury
Lacy, D.D., then a professor in Hampden Sidney College, and destined
to become the progenitor of a long line of divines and scholars.
The Hoges, Lacys, Brookeses, and Waddells were of this lineage. The
epistles are Addisonian in purity of moral teaching and in grammatical
structure, Johnsonian in verboseness, and interfused throughout with
a pietistic priggishness all their own. We are glad to carry with us
through the perusal (in instalments) of the hundred and forty-two,
the tales current in that all-so-long-ago of the genial nature and
liveliness of conversation that made him a star in social life. One
wonders, in hearing of the “perpetuation” of the brotherly-and-sisterly
intimacy, begun months before he wedded the “Nancy” of the Montrose
group, who, from all I have been able to gather, was a very commonplace
personage by comparison with “Judith”—one marvels, I say, that the
affection never ripened into a warmer sentiment. They had themselves
better in hand evidently than the “affinities” of the twentieth century.

Old people I knew, when a child, delighted in relating how, when “Mr.
Lacy” held meetings in country churches in Powhatan and Prince Edward,
and his sister-in-law was in the congregation, everybody listened for
the voices of those two. His was strong, flexible, and sweet, and he
read music as he read a printed page. While she, as an old admirer—who
up to his eightieth year loved to visit my mother that he might talk
of his early love—used to declare, “sang like an angel just down from
heaven.”

She added all womanly accomplishments to musical skill and literary
tastes. An embroidered counterpane, of which I am the proud owner, is
wrought in thirteen varieties of stitch, and in patterns invented by
herself and three sisters, the only brother contributing what may be
classed as a “conventional design” of an altar and two turtle-doves
perched upon a brace of coupled hearts—symbolical of his passion for
the beauty of the county, Judith Mosby, of Fonthill, whom he married.
Our Judith held on the peaceful tenor of her way, reading all the
books she could lay her shapely hands upon, keeping up her end of
correspondences with Lacys, Rices, Speeces, Randolphs, and Blaines,
and gently rejecting one offer after another, until she married at
thirty-three—an advanced stage of spinsterdom, then—honest Capt.
Sterling Smith, the widower-father of three children.

Her husband was the proprietor of broad acres, a man of birth and fair
education, high-minded, honorable, and devoted to his delicate wife.
Nevertheless, the dainty _châtelaine_ must, sometimes, have missed her
erudite admirers, and wished in her heart that the worthy planter were,
intellectually, more in tune with herself.

My own mother’s recollections of her mother were vivid, and I never
wearied of hearing them. My grandmother’s wedding night-gown, which I
have, helps me to picture her as she moved about the modest homestead,
directing and overseeing servants, key-basket on arm, keeping, as
she did, a daily record of provisions “given out” from store-room
and smoke-house, writing down in her hand-book bills-of-fare for the
week (my mother treasured them for years), entertaining the friends
attracted by her influence, her husband’s hospitality, and his two
daughters’ charms of person and disposition.

This gown is of fine cambric, with a falling collar and a short,
shirred waist. The buttons are wooden moulds, covered with cambric, and
each bears a tiny embroidered sprig. Collar and sleeves are trimmed
with ruffles, worked in scallops by her deft fingers. The owner and
wearer was below the medium height of women, and slight to fragility.
Her love of the beautiful found expression in her exquisite needlework,
in copying “commonplace-books” full of poetry and the music she loved
passionately, and most healthful of all, in flower-gardening. Within my
memory, the white jessamine planted by her still draped the window of
“the chamber” on the first floor. Few Virginia housewives would consent
to have their bedrooms up-stairs. “Looking after the servants” was
no idle figure of speech with them. Eternal vigilance was the price
of home comfort. A hardy white-rose-tree, also planted by her, lived
almost as long as the jessamine—her favorite flower.

In the shade of the bower formed by these, Mrs. Judith Smith sat with
her embroidery on summer days, her little name-daughter upon a cricket
beside her, reading aloud by the hour. It was rather startling to me to
learn that, at thirteen, the precocious child read thus _Pamela_, _The
Children of the Abbey_, and _Clarissa_ to the sweet-faced, white-souled
matron. Likewise _The Rambler_, _Rasselas_, Shakespeare, and _The
Spectator_ (unexpurgated). But Young’s _Night Thoughts_, Thomson’s
_Seasons_, _Paradise Lost_, Pope’s _Essays_, and the Book of Books
qualified whatever of evil might have crept into the tender imagination
from the strong meat, spiced. Cowper was a living presence to mother
and girl. My mother could repeat pages of _The Tas_ from memory fifty
years after she recited them to her gentle teacher, and his hymns were
the daily food of the twain.

The Olney family drove in the heavy coach over heavy roads five miles
in all weathers to the First Presbyterian Church of Richmond. My
grandfather had helped raise the money for the building, as his letters
show, and was one of the elders ordained soon after the church was
organized.

Thither they had gone on Christmas Sunday, 1811, to be met on the
threshold by the news of the burning of the theatre on Saturday night.
My mother, although but six years old, never forgot the scenes of that
day. Doctor Rice had deviated from the rutted road of the “long prayer”
constructed by ecclesiastical surveyors along the lines of Adoration,
Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication (“A, C, T, S”)—to talk as man to
man with the Ruler of the universe of the terrible judgment which had
befallen the mourning city. He had even alluded to it in his sermon,
and it was discussed in awe-stricken tones by lingering groups in the
aisles when service was over. Then, her little hand locked fast in that
of her mother, the child was guided along the valley and up the steep
hill to the smoking ruins, surrounded by a silent crowd, many of them
in tears. In low, impressive accents the mother told the baby what had
happened there last night, and, as the little creature began to sob,
led her on up the street. A few squares farther on, my grandfather and
a friend who walked with him laughed slightly at something they said or
saw, and my grandmother said, sorrowfully:

“How can you laugh when sixty fellow-creatures lie dead over there—all
hurried into Eternity without warning?”

I have never passed the now-old Monumental Church without recalling the
incident engraved upon my childish mind by my mother’s story.

In the volume of “D. Lacy’s Letters” I found, laid carefully between
the embrowned leaves for safest keeping, several letters from Capt.
Sterling Smith to his “dear Judy,” and one from her to him, written
while she was on a visit to Montrose, her birthplace, with her only
son. We have such a pretty, pathetic expression of her love for husband
and child, and touches, few but graphic, that outline for us so clearly
her personality and environment, that I insert it here:

“MONTROSE, _September 5th, 1817._
“(Ten o’clock at night.)

“MY DEAR MR. SMITH,—I am sitting by my dear Josiah, who
continues ill. His fever rises about dark. The chills are
less severe, and the fever does not last as long as it did a
week ago. Still, he suffers much, and is very weak. He has
taken a great deal of medicine with very little benefit. His
gums are sore. The doctor thinks they are touched by the
calomel. He was here this morning, and advised some oil and
then the bark.

“We have been looking for you ever since yesterday. Poor
fellow! He longs to see you—and so do I! I was up last
night, and I have been to-night very often—indeed, almost
constantly—at the door and the window, listening for the
sound of your horse’s feet. I have written by post, by John
Morton, and by Mr. Mosby. I think if you had received either
of the notes I should see you to-night, unless something
serious is the matter. I am so much afraid that you are ill
as to be quite unhappy.

“My love to my dear girls and all the family. My dear! my
heart is sore! Pray that God may support me. I am too easily
depressed—particularly when you are not with me. I _long_ to
see you! I hope I shall before you receive this. God bless
you!

“Your very affectionate—your own

JUDY.

“(Saturday morning.)

“We are both better. Josiah’s fever is off, but he is very
weak.”

That the wife should begin the love-full epistle, “My dear Mr. Smith,”
and sign it, “your own Judy,” seems the queerer to modern readers when
it is considered that her husband was also her cousin, and had married
her niece as his first wife. Few wives called their lords by their
Christian names a hundred years back, and the custom is not yet fully
established in the Southern States.

The few letters written by my grandfather that have been preserved
until now show him to have been a man of sincere piety, sterling sense,
and affectionate disposition. One herewith given betrays what a wealth
of tenderness was poured out upon his fairy-like wife. It likewise
offers a fair sketch of the life of a well-to-do Virginia planter of
that date.

His wife was visiting her Montrose relatives.

“OLNEY, _March 30th, 1814._

“With inexpressible pleasure I received yours by Mr. Mosby.
I rejoice that the expected event with our dear sister has
turned out favorably, and that you, my dear, are enjoying
better health.

“I hope that you will not be uneasy about my lonely
situation. Every one must know that it cannot be agreeable,
but when I consider that you may be benefited by it, and
even that your health may be restored (which we have reason
to hope for), what would I not forego to secure so great a
blessing!

“I have kept close at home, except when I went to meeting
on Sabbath, and to town to-day to hear from you. During the
day I have been busy, and at night have enjoyed the company
of good books until ten or eleven o’clock, then gone to bed
and slept tolerably well. I eat at the usual times, and have
as good health as usual. Thus situated, I will try to be as
comfortable as I can until God shall be pleased to bring us
together again.

“Some of our black people are still sick. Amy is much
better, and speaks plainly. Rose is but poorly, yet no
worse. Nanny is in appearance no better. Becky has been
really sick, but seems comfortable this evening. The doctor
has ordered medicine which will, I hope, restore her to
health. Oba was a little while in the garden on Monday, but
has been closely housed ever since. His cough is very bad,
and I suppose him unable to labor.

“I wish to come for you as soon as possible, and I would,
if I could, rejoin you to-morrow. The election would not
keep me, but I have business I wish to attend to this week,
and also to attend the meeting of the Bible Society at the
Capitol on Tuesday. I hope to see you on Wednesday. I wish
you to be prepared to come home with me soon after that.
With regard to Betsy, I don’t expect she will be ready to
come home with us, and, if she could, I dread riding an
ill-gaited horse thirty miles. Mr. Mosby’s carriage is to go
to Lynchburg in a few days, and he talks of returning home
by way of Prince Edward, and bringing the two Betsies home.
The carriage will be empty. I shall persuade him to be in
earnest about it.

“Now, my dear, I must conclude with committing you to the
care of our Heavenly Father. May He keep you from every
evil! Give my love to the dear family you are with. May you
be a comfort to them, and an instrument in the hands of God
to do them good! Kiss my little ones for me, and tell them I
love them!

“Your own affectionate,
“WM. S. SMITH.”

The matter-of-fact manner in which the writer hints at the ride of
thirty miles upon the ill-gaited horse he would have to bestride
if the women, babies, and maid filled the family chariot, and his
intention of making Mr. Mosby “earnest” in the scheme of despatching
his empty carriage to Lynchburg—a distance of one hundred and forty
miles—returning by way of Prince Edward, eighty miles from Olney—to
fetch “the two Betsies” home, was a perfectly natural proceeding in the
eyes of him who wrote and of her who read. There was not so much as a
stage-coach route between the two towns. Heavy as were the carriages
that swung and creaked through the red mud-holes and corduroy roads
that did duty for thoroughfares all over the State, they were on the go
continually, except when the mud-holes became bottomless and the red
clay as sticky as putty. Then men and women went on horseback, unless
the women were too old for the saddle. The men never were.

It was, likewise, an everyday matter with our planter that five of his
“black people” should be down “sick” at one time. The race had then, as
they have to our day, a penchant for disease. Every plantation had a
hospital ward that was never empty.

A letter penned three years earlier than that we have just read:

“We are going on bravely with our subscription for building
a meeting-house. Yesterday was the first of my turning out
with subscription-paper. I got 162 dollars subscribed, with
a promise of more. We have now about 1800 dollars on our
subscription-list, which sum increases at least 100 dollars
a day. I hope, with a little help that we have reason to
expect from New York, we shall soon be able to begin the
work, which may the Lord prosper in our hands!”

The “meeting-house,” when constructed, was popularly known as the
“Pineapple Church,” from the conical ornament topping the steeple.
As Richmond grew westward and climbed up Shockoe Hill, the First
Presbyterian Church was swept up with the congregation to another site.
The deserted building was bought by the Episcopalians, and christened
“Christ Church.” As long as it stood it was known by the “old-timers”
as the “Old Pineapple.”

The daughters of Captain Sterling’s first wife were Mary and Elizabeth
(the “Betsy” of his letters). She married Rev. Thomas Lumpkin, whom
she met on one of her visits to Prince Edward County, where her aunt,
Mrs. James Morton, lived in the vicinity of Hampden Sidney College. Her
husband lived but seven months from the wedding-day, and she returned
to Olney and the fostering care of her father and the second mother,
who was ever her fast and tender friend. There, in the house where she
was born, she laid in her stepmother’s arms a baby-girl, born four
months later. The posthumous child became the beloved “Cousin Mary” of
these memoirs. She had been the petted darling of the homestead five
years when her mother married again, and another clergyman, whom I
shall call “Mr. Carus.” He was a Connecticut man who had been a tutor
in the Olney household before he took orders. For reasons which will
appear by-and-by, I prefer to disguise his name. Others in his native
New England bear it, although he left no descendants.

From my mother I had the particulars of the death-scene in that
first-floor “chamber” in the homestead, when, on a sultry August
day (1820), “the longest, saddest day I have ever known”—said the
daughter—the dainty, delicate creature who was soul and heart to the
home passed away from earth.

My mother has told me how the scent of white jessamine flowed into the
room where grief was hushed to hearken for the failing breath.

Dr. Rice’s niece leaned over the pillow in which the girl of fourteen
smothered her sobs in clinging to the small hand so strangely cold.

“She does not breathe!” the weeper heard the friend whisper. And in a
moment more, “Her heart does not beat!”

I have dwelt at length upon the character and life of my maternal
grandmother because of my solemn conviction that I inherit what humble
talent is mine from her. I cannot recall the time when everything
connected with her did not possess for me a sweet and weird charm; when
the fancy that this _petite_ woman, with a heart and soul too great for
her physique, was my guardian angel, did not stay my soul and renew my
courage in all good emprises.

Her profiled portrait hangs before me as I write. The features are
finely chiselled and high-bred; the expression is sweet. She wears a
close cap with a lace border (she was but fifty-three at death!), and a
crimped frill stands up about a slender neck.

My fantasy may be a figment of the imagination. I cherish it with a
tenacity that tells me it is more. That my mother shared it was proved
by her legacy to me of all the books and other relics of her mother
she possessed at the time of her own decease, and the richer legacy of
tales of that mother’s life and words, her deeds of mercy and love,
which cannot but make me a better woman.

The mortal remains of my patron saint lie in the old family
burying-ground. War, in its rudest shape, swept over the ancestral
acres for two years. Trees, centuries old, were cut down; ruffian
soldiery camped upon and tramped over desolated fields; outbuildings
were destroyed, and the cosey home stripped of porches and wings,
leaving it a pitiful shell. Captain Sterling had fought at Germantown
and Monmouth, leading his Henrico troopers in the train of Washington
and Gates. And Northern cannon and Southern musketry jarred his bones
after their rest of half a century in the country graveyard!

Yet—and this I like to think of—the periwinkle that opens its blue eyes
in the early springtime, and the long-stemmed narcissus, waving its
golden censers above the tangled grasses, spring from the roots _her_
dear hands buried there one hundred years ago.

LAFAYETTE—REVOLUTIONARY TALES—PARENTS’ MARRIAGE

MY father’s wooing, carried on, now at Dr. Rice’s house in town, now
at Olney, progressed propitiously. During the engagement, Lafayette
visited Richmond. My father was a member of the once-famous volunteer
company, the Richmond Blues, and marched with it when it was detailed
as a body-guard for the illustrious guest of the nation. My mother
walked at the head of her class of Sunday-school children in the
procession of women and girls mustered here to do him honor, as was
done in Trenton and other towns. She kept among her treasured relics
the blue-satin badge, with Lafayette’s likeness stamped on it in
silver, which she wore upon her left shoulder. The Blues were arrayed
in Continental uniform, with powdered hair. So completely was my father
metamorphosed by the costume that, when, at the close of the parade, he
presented himself in Dr. Rice’s drawing-room to pay his devoirs to his
fiancée, she did not recognize him until he spoke.

I have heard the particulars of that day’s pageant and of Lafayette’s
behavior at the public reception awarded him by a grateful people,
so often that I seem to have been part of the scene in a former
incarnation. So vivid were my reminiscences that, when a bride and
a guest at Redhill, the former home of Patrick Henry, I exchanged
incidents and sayings with the great orator’s son, Mr. John Henry, who
had been on the Committee of Reception in 1824. In the enthusiasm of
his own recollections of the fête he inquired, naïvely:

“Do you, then, remember Lafayette’s visit to America so well?”

The general burst of merriment that went around the table, and Wirt
Henry’s respectful, half-distressed—“Why, father! she wasn’t born!”
brought both of us back to the actual and present time and place.

A large platform erected upon the Capitol Square was filled with
distinguished guests and officials. From this Lafayette reviewed the
regiments of soldiers, and here he stood when the schools of the city
sent up as their representative a pretty little girl, eight or ten
years of age, to “speak a piece” written for the occasion by a local
bard. The midget went through the task bravely, but with filling eyes
and trembling limbs. Her store of factitious courage exhaled with the
last line reeled off from the red lips, and, with a scared, piteous
look into the benign face brought upon a level with hers by the table
upon which she had been set, like an animated puppet, she cast herself
upon the great man’s decorated breast and wept sore. He kissed and
cuddled and soothed her as he might pet his own grandchild, and not
until she could return his smile, and he had dried her tears upon his
laced handkerchief, did he transfer her to other arms.

Major James Morton, of “Willington,” Prince Edward County, who married
my grandmother’s sister Mary, of Montrose, had served under Lafayette
and came down to Richmond to do honor to his former chief. The Major’s
_sobriquet_ in the army was “Solid Column,” in reference to his
“stocky” build. Although he had been on Washington’s staff, he did not
expect to be recognized, after the lapse of thirty years and more, by
the renowned Frenchman, who had passed since their parting through a
bloodier revolution than that which won freedom for America.

General Lafayette was standing at the head of the ball-room (which was,
I think, in the Eagle Hotel), where he received the crowds of citizens
and military flocking to pay their respects, when he espied his whilom
comrade on the outskirts of the throng. Instantly stepping outside of
the cordon of aids and attendants, the Marquis held out both hands with:

“Vy, old So_lee_d Col_uu_me! I am ’appy to see you!”

A marvellous memory and a more marvellous facile tongue and quick
wit had the distinguished leader of freedom-lovers! There lived in
Richmond, until the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, a stately
gentlewoman of the very old school whom we, of two younger generations,
regarded with prideful veneration, and with reason. For Lafayette, who
had seen her dance at the aforesaid ball, had pronounced her, audibly,
“the handsomest woman he had seen in America.” Time had handled her
disrespectfully by the time I heard the tale. But I never questioned
the truth of it until I found in three other cities as many antique
belles upon whom he had set a seal of the self-same pattern.

We were generously fed with authentic stories of Revolutionary days in
my far-off childhood. I have sat at Major Morton’s feet and learned
of the veteran much that nobody else wots of in our rushing times. I
recall his emphatic denial of the assertion made by a Fourth-of-July
orator to the effect that so grievous was the weight of public cares
upon the Commander-in-Chief, he was never seen to smile during those
eventful eight years of struggle and suspense.

“Not a word of truth in it, sir!” Thus old Solid Column to the man
who reported the speech to him. “I was with him at Valley Forge, sir,
and nobody there tried harder to keep up the spirits of the men. I
recollect, particularly, one bitter cold day, when a dozen or so of the
officers were amusing themselves and trying to get warm by jumping up
and down, leaping high up in the air and trying to clap their heels
together twice before they struck the ground in coming down. General
Greene was sure he could do it, but he was fleshy and never light on
his feet, besides being naturally sober. He was a Quaker, you know,
and was turned out of meeting for joining the army. Well, on this
particular day he took his turn with the others in jumping. And a
poor hand he was at it! He couldn’t clap his heels together once on
the way down, let alone twice. By-and-by he made a tremendous effort
and pitched over, head down and heels up—flat on the snow. General
Washington was watching them from where he stood in his tent door, and
when General Greene went down—how the General laughed! He fairly held
his sides!

“‘Ah, Greene!’ he called out. ‘You were always a lubberly fellow!’

“I am not saying he wasn’t one of the gravest men I ever saw, as a
rule, but he often smiled, and he did laugh sometimes.”

My grandfather’s uncle and godfather, Sterling Smith, was one of our
family Revolutionary heroes. My mother, who had a fair talent for
mimicry, had an anecdote of the old war-horse’s defence of Washington
against the oft-repeated charge of profanity upon the field of Monmouth:

“‘He did not swear!’ the veteran would thunder when irreverent
youngsters retailed the slander in his hearing—and with malice
prepense. ‘I was close behind him—and I can tell you, sir, we rode
_fast_—when what should we meet, running away, licketty-split, from the
field of battle, with the British almost on their heels, but Gen’ral
Lee and his men?

“‘Then, with that, says Gen’ral Washington, speaking out loud and
sharp—says he, “Gen’ral Lee! in God’s name, sir, what is the meaning of
this ill-timed prudence?”

“‘Now, you see, Gen’ral Lee, he was mighty high-sperrited always, and
all of us could hear what was going on. So he speaks up as haughty as
the Gen’ral had done, and says he:

“‘“I know of no one who has more of that most damnable virtue than your
Excellency!”

“‘So, you see, young man, it was Gen’ral Lee that swore, and not
Gen’ral Washington! Don’t you ever let me hear that lie again!’”

A Revolutionary reminiscence of my mother’s (or mine) is always renewed
by the sight of an Old Virginia plantation-gate, swinging gratingly on
ponderous hinges and kept shut by the fall of a wooden latch, two yards
long, into a wooden hook set in the gate-post. This latch is usually
nearly half-way down the gate, and a horseman approaching it from the
outside must dismount to lift the heavy bar, or be practised in the
trick of throwing himself well over the top-rail to reach the latch and
hold it, while he guides his horse through the narrow opening.

My grandfather, “Captain Sterling,” was at the head of a foraging-party
near Yorktown when they were chased by British troopers. The Americans
scattered in various directions and escaped for the most part, being
familiar with the country by-ways and cross-roads. Their captain was
closely pursued by three troopers to a high plantation-gate. The
Virginian opened it, without leaving the saddle, shot through, shut the
gate, and rammed down the latch into the socket _hard_. The pursuers
had to alight to raise the latch, and the delay gave the fugitive time
to get away.

My parents were married at Olney, in Henrico County, January 25, 1825.

The bride—not yet nineteen years of age—wore a soft, sheer India
muslin, a veil falling to the hem of the gown, and white brocade
slippers embroidered with faint blue flowers. The bridegroom’s suit
was of fine blue cloth, with real silver buttons. His feet were clad
in white-silk stockings and low shoes—“pumps” as they were called—with
wrought-silver buckles. Those shoes and buckles were long preserved in
the family. I do not know what befell them finally. The ceremony was
performed by the brother-in-law whom I have called, for the sake of
convenience, the Reverend Mr. Carus.

The girl had laughingly threatened that she would not promise to
“obey,” and that a scene would follow the use of the obnoxious word in
the marriage service. The young divine, with this in mind, or in a fit
of absent-mindedness or of stage-fright, actually blundered out, “Love,
honor—and obey, _in all things consistent_!”

As may be imagined, the interpolation produced a lively sensation in
the well-mannered company thronging the homestead, and took rank as a
family legend. How many times I have heard my mother quote the saving
clause in playful monition to my masterful father!

The bride’s portion, on leaving home for the house her father had
furnished for her in town, was ten thousand dollars in stocks and
bonds, and two family servants—a husband and wife.

The following summer the wedded pair visited the husband’s mother in
Roxbury, Massachusetts. The journey from Richmond to New York was by
a packet-ship, and lasted for two weeks. My poor little mother was
horribly seasick for a week each way. To her latest day she could not
hear of “Point Judith” without a qualm. She said that, for a time,
the association “disgusted her with her own name.” The mother-in-law,
hale and handsome at forty-five, had married, less than a year before,
Deacon John Clapp, a well-to-do and excellent citizen of Roxbury, and
installed the buxom, “capable” widow, whose father was now dead, as
the mother of four children by a former marriage, and as mistress of
a comfortable home. She had not come to him portionless. The sturdy
“Squire,” mindful of her filial devotion to him in his declining
years, had left her an equal share of his estate with her sisters. The
brother, Lewis Pierce, had succeeded to the homestead.

Mrs. Clapp appeared in the door of her pretty house, radiant in her
best black silk and cap of fine lace (she never wore any other), her
husband at her side, the little girls and the boy in the background, as
the stage bringing her son and new daughter from Boston stopped at the
gate.

At their nearer approach she uttered an exclamation, flung up her hands
before her eyes, and ran back into the house for the “good cry” the
calmest matron of the day considered obligatory upon her when state
family occasions demanded a show of “proper feeling.”

The worthy Deacon saved the situation from embarrassment by the
heartiness of his welcome to the pair, neither of whom he had ever met
before.

The second incident linked in my mind with the important visit is of
a more serious complexion. I note it upon Memory’s tablets as the
solitary exhibition of aught approaching jealousy I ever saw in the
wife, who knew that her lover-husband’s heart was all her own, then and
as long as it beat. I give the story in her own words:

“A Miss Topliffe and her mother were invited to take tea with us one
evening. I had gathered from sundry hints—and eloquent sighs—from your
grandmother that she had set her heart upon a match between her son
and this young lady. She even went to the length of advising me to pay
particular attention to my dress on this evening. ‘Miss Topliffe was
very dressy!’ I found this to be true. She was also an airy personage,
talkative to your father, and supercilious to me. A few days afterward
we were asked to tea at the Topliffes. I had a wretched evening! Miss
Topliffe was rather handsome and very lively, and she was in high
feather that night, directing most of her conversation, as before,
to my husband. She played upon the piano, and sang love-songs, and
altogether made herself the attraction of the occasion. I felt small
and insignificant and dull beside her, and I could see that she amused
your father so much that he did not see how I was pushed into the
background.

“I said never a word of all this to him, still less to my
mother-in-law, when she told me, next day, that ‘every one of his
friends had hoped my son would marry Miss Topliffe. The match would
have been very agreeable to both families. But it seems that it was not
to be. The ways of Providence are past finding out!’

“Then she sighed, just as she might have mourned over a bereavement in
the family. I have _hated_ that girl ever since!”

“But, mother,” I essayed, consolingly, “you knew he loved you best all
the time!”

“Of course, child, but _she_ didn’t! There was the rub!”

I can respond now. It always is the bitter drop at the bottom of the
cup held to the lips of the wife who cannot resent her lord’s innocent
flirtation with “that other woman.” She knows, and he is serenely
conscious of his unshaken loyalty, but the other woman has her own
beliefs and hugs them.

In May, 1826, my brother William Edwin was born in the cosey home on
the slope of Church Hill overlooking the “Pineapple Church.” More than
forty years afterward, in the last drive I had with my mother, she
leaned forward in the carriage to point out the neat three-story brick
dwelling, now in the heart of the business section of the city:

“That was the house in which I spent the first three years of my
married life!”

Then, dreamily and softly, she related what was the peaceful tenor of
those first years. Her father was alive, and she saw him often; her
sister, “Aunt Betsy,” and her children kept the old home-nest warm for
him; the young couple had hosts of friends in town and country, and
both were as deeply interested, as of yore, in church-work.

Edwin was two years old when a single bolt from the blue changed life
for her.

My father’s partner was a personal and trusted friend before they went
into business together. They had kept bachelor’s hall in partnership
up to the marriage of the junior member of the firm. It transpired
subsequently that the senior, who was the financial manager of the
concern, had “cooked” accounts and made up false exhibits of the status
of the house to coax the confiding comrade to join his fortunes with
his. The tale is old and as common to-day as when my father discovered
that his own savings and my mother’s wedding-portion would be swallowed
up in the payment of his partner’s debts.

It was dark and bitter weather that swept down upon the peaceful home
and blighted the ambitions of the rising young merchant.

The man who had brought about the reverse of fortune “took to drink.”
That was likewise as common then as now. My father paid his debts,
wound up the business honestly, and braced himself to begin the world
anew.

In his chagrin at the overthrow of plans and hopes, he somewhat rashly
accepted the proposal that the fresh beginning should be in the
country. Richmond was full of disagreeable associations, and country
merchants were making money.

Country “storekeeping” was then as honorable as the calling of a
city merchant. In fact, many town-houses had rural branches. It was
not unusual for a city man to set up his son in one of these, thus
controlling the trade of a larger territory than a single house could
command. There were no railways in Virginia. Merchandise was carried
all over the state in big, covered wagons, known in Pennsylvania as
“Conestogas.” Long-bodied, with hooped awnings of sail-cloth lashed
over the ark-like interior to keep out dust and rain, and drawn by six
powerful draught-horses, the leaders wearing sprays of bells, they
were a picturesque feature of country roads. Fortunes were amassed by
the owners of wagon-lines, the great arks keeping the road winter and
summer, and well laden both ways. Planters had their teams and wagons
for hauling tobacco and other crops to town, and bringing back stores
of groceries and dry-goods at stated periods in the spring and autumn;
but between times they were glad to avail themselves of the caravans
for transportation of butter, eggs, poultry, potatoes, dried fruits,
yarn, cotton, and other domestic products to the city, to be sold or
bartered for articles they could not raise.

In such a wheeléd boat the furniture and personal belongings of our
small family were transported from Richmond to Dennisville, Amelia
County, a journey of two dreary days.

Husband, wife, and baby travelled in their own barouche, my father
acting as coachman. Sam and Milly, the colored servants, had preceded
them by two days, taking passage in the Conestoga. One November
afternoon, the carriage drew up at the future home of the three
passengers. The dwelling adjoined the store—a circumstance that shocked
the city woman. The joint structure was of wood, mean in dimensions and
inconvenient in plan. Dead leaves were heaped about the steps. As Baby
Edwin was lifted from the carriage to the ground, he stood knee-deep in
the rustling leaves, and began to cry with the cold and the strangeness
of it all. Not a carpet was down, and the efforts of the faithful
servants to make two rooms home-like for “Miss Jud’ Anna” increased
the forlornness of the situation by reminding her of the habitation and
friends she had left behind.

It was a comfortless winter and spring. I fancy it was as delightless
to the husband as to the wife—just turning her twenty-first year,
and learning for the first time in her sheltered life the taste of
privation. She loved her church, her father and her sister and dear
old Olney—unchanged while she dwelt so far apart from them and it
and home-comforts; she was fond of society, and in Richmond she had
her merry circle close at hand. In Dennisville she had, literally,
no neighbors, and without the walls of her house no palliatives of
homesickness. The cottage was small; her servants were trained,
diligent, and solicitous to spare her toil and inconvenience; her
husband and her distant friends kept her supplied with books, and as
the period of her second confinement drew near she yielded more and
more to natural lassitude, spent the summer days upon the sofa or in
bed, reading, and rarely left the house on foot.

In direct consequence, as she ever afterward maintained, of this
indolent mode of life, she went down to the gate of death when her
first daughter, Ann Almeria (named for two grandmothers), was born in
June.

Providentially, an able specialist from another county was visiting a
friend upon a neighboring plantation, and the local practitioner, at
his wits’ end, chanced to think of him. A messenger was sent for him in
hot haste, and he saved the life of mother and child. The baby was puny
and delicate, and was a source of anxiety throughout her childhood.

III

A COUNTRY EXILE—DEATH OF THE FIRST-BORN—CHANGE OF HOME—A FIRESIDE
TRAGEDY—“COGITO, ERGO SUM.”

I, the third child born to my parents, was but a few months old when my
little brother was taken by my father to Roxbury and left there with
his grandmother.

This singular and painful episode in our family history illustrates
more clearly than could any mere description, the mode of thought and
action prevalent at that date respecting the training and education of
children.

Our parents lived in an obscure country village, a mere hamlet,
destitute of school and social privileges. The few families who, with
them, made up the population of the hamlet were their inferiors in
breeding and education; their children were a lawless, ill-mannered
set, and the only school near them was what was known as “an old field
school” upon the outskirts of a plantation three miles away. Little
Edwin, a bright, intelligent laddie, was taught to read and write by
his mother before he was five. He loved books; but he was restless
for the lack of playfellows of his own age. His father was bent upon
giving him all the learning that could be crammed into one small
head, and cast about for opportunities of carrying out the design.
The grandmother begged to have one of the children for a long visit;
schooling of an advanced type was to be had within a stone’s-throw
of her door, and the boy, if intrusted to her, would have a mother’s
care. My father urged the measure upon his weaker-willed wife. She
opposed it less and less strenuously until the boy came in from the
street one day with an oath in his mouth he had learned from one of the
Dennisville boys.

“That night, upon my knees, and with a breaking heart, I consented to
let him go North,” the mother told me, falteringly, when I was a woman
grown.

The father hurried him off within the week—I imagine lest she might
change her mind—and remained in Roxbury three weeks with him to
accustom him to his new abode. His letters written during this absence
are cheerful—I am disposed to say, “obstinately optimistic.” I detect,
too, a touch of diplomacy in the remarks dropped here and there, as to
his mortification at finding Edwin so “backward in his education by
comparison with other children of his age,” and the bright prospects
opening for his future in the “excellent school of which everybody
speaks highly.”

The day before his father left him, Edwin accompanied him to Boston,
and books were bought for his sister, with a pretty gift for his
mother. He had grown quite fond of his grandmother, so the father
reported when he arrived at home, and the kind-hearted “Deacon was as
good as another boy.”

Letters came with gratifying regularity—fortnightly—from Roxbury.
The boy was going to school and making amends for his “backwardness”
by diligence and proficiency. I have laid away in our family Bible
quaintly worded “Rewards of Merit”—printed forms upon paper which
crackles under the fingers that unfold it—testifying to perfect
recitations and good behavior. The boy’s name and the testimonials
are filled in by his woman teacher in legible, ladylike script. The
fortnightly epistles told of the child’s health and “nice” behavior. I
fancy that more stress was laid upon the last item by his grandmother
than upon the first. My father expressed himself as satisfied with the
result of the experiment. The mother mourned secretly for the merry
voice and bonny face of her darling. At the end of three months the
longing leaped the bounds of wifely submission, and she won from her
husband the admission that home was not home without his boy. They
would go in company to Roxbury next summer and bring him back with
them. If he were to be sent from home to school, they would commit him
to the Olney or Richmond kinspeople. Roxbury was a cruel distance from
central Virginia.

A month later two letters were brought to my father’s counting-room
with the Richmond mail. One told of Edwin’s dangerous illness, the
second of his death and burial. His malady—brain-fever—was set down
by the grandmother to “the visitation of God.” In view of his rapid
progress in learning, and the strict discipline of the household in
which he studied the lessons to be recited on the morrow, and without a
blunder, we may hold a different opinion, and one that exonerates the
Deity of direct interference in the work.

Be this as it may, the precious five-year-old had died so far from his
mother’s arms that, had she set out immediately upon receipt of the
news of his illness, a month would have elapsed between the departure
of the letter from Roxbury and her arrival there, if she had travelled
day and night. His earthly education was finished.

The stricken father, staring at the brace of fatal letters—couched, you
may be sure, in duly pietistic phrase and interlarded with Scripture
texts—had the terrible task of breaking the news to the mother whose
happy dream and talk were all of “when we go North for our boy.”

He carried the letters home. His wife was not in “the chamber,” where
a colored nurse—another family servant—was in charge of the two little
girls. Hearing her footsteps approaching presently, the strong man’s
heart failed him suddenly. He retreated behind the open door, actually
afraid to face the gentle woman to whom his will was law.

Suspecting a practical joke, my light-hearted mother pulled back the
door, the knob of which he had clutched in his desperate misery, saw
his face and the letters in his hand, and fell in a dead faint at his
feet.

In the summer of 1863 I visited the little grave with my husband. Civil
War raged like a sea of blood between North and South. The parents had
not seen Edwin’s last resting-place in several years. I knew the way
to the secluded corner of the old Dorchester Cemetery where, beside
the kind old step-grandfather who loved the boy while living, lies the
first-born of our Virginia home. The stone is inscribed with his name
and the names of his parents, the dates of his birth and death, and
below these:

“Our trust is in the Lord.”

None of our friends in Roxbury and Dorchester knew so much as the
child’s name. The headstone leaned one way, the footstone another,
and a desolate hollow, telling of total neglect, lay between. Yet
right above the heart of the forgotten boy was a tumbler of white
flowers, still fresh. By whom left we never knew, although we made many
inquiries. Dr. Terhune had the grave remounded and turfed, the stones
cleaned and set upright, and at the second visit that assured us this
was done, we covered the grave with flowers.

In my next “flag-of-truce” letter, I wrote to let his mother know what
we had seen and done, and of the bunch of white flowers left by the
nameless friend.

Our grandmother treasured and sent home to his mother, after a while,
the child’s clothing and every toy and book that had been his, even a
hard cracker bearing the imprint of the tiny teeth he was too weak to
set firmly in the biscuit.

The preservation of the odd relic was the only touch of poetry I ever
discerned in the granite nature of my father’s mother.

With him the sorrow for his boy lasted with his life. Thirty years
afterward I heard Edwin’s name from his lips for the first time.

“No other child has ever been to me what he was!” he said. “And the
pain is as keen now as it was then.”

Then he arose and began pacing the room, as was his habit when strongly
moved, hands behind his back, head depressed, and lips closely folded.

He loved the child so passing well that he could sacrifice his own joy
in his companionship to what he believed to be the child’s better good.

After this bereavement the Dennisville life became insupportably sad. I
think it was more in consequence of this than for pecuniary profit that
my father, the next year, removed his family to Lunenburg.

My mother could never speak of her residence in Amelia County without
a pale shudder. Yet that it was not wasted time, I have evidences from
other sources.

Part of a letter written to her at Olney in the early spring succeeding
the removal to Dennisville shows with what cheerful courage my father
set about church and neighborhood work. Next to his home and the loved
ones gathered there, the church of which he was a loyal son had his
best energies and warmest thought.

“You cannot imagine how solitary I am. I could not have
thought that the absence of my dear wife and child would
create so great a vacuum in my life. I do not wish to hasten
your return from your friends, but you may rest assured
that I shall be heartily glad when you come home. I got
home on Sunday morning, and found Mr. White here in quiet
possession of the house. His wife did not come with him on
account of the bad roads.

“He gave us for a text John xv: 25:—‘They hated me without a
cause.’

“The congregation was nearly, if not quite, as large as when
he preached the first time, and very attentive. Many express
a wish to hear him again. He gave notice that he would on
the third Sunday in March preach, and also mentioned that
an effort would be made to establish a Sabbath-school and
Bible-class. It is really encouraging to see how readily
many of the people fall into the measure, without going from
home, too. Fathers have given their names to me, wishing to
send their children, and several others I have heard of who
appear anxious to embrace the opportunity. Doctor Shore and
Mr. White dined with me yesterday, and quite unexpectedly
I had the pleasure of Doctor Shore, Mr. Bland, and Mr.
Lancaster at dinner with me to-day. So you see that I now
get the society of all the good folks while you are away.
But do not be jealous, for Doctor S. had not heard of your
absence, and apologized for Mrs. Shore and Mrs. Hardy not
calling on you, saying that he considered it as his and
their duty so to do, and they would not be so remiss for the
future. You cannot imagine what a rain we have had for the
last twelve hours, accompanied with thunder and lightning.
All the creeks about us are impassable, so that we live, I
may say, in a corner with but one way to get out without
swimming, and that is to go to Prince Edward. We can get
there when we can go nowhere else. I have got a hen-house
_full_ of eggs, and have been working right hard to-day to
make the hens and an old Muscovy set on them, but they are
obstinate things, and will have their own way, so I have
given it up as a bad job. Don’t forget to ask Mr. Carus for
some of the _big_ pumpkin seed. By-the-by, Mrs. Branch had
found out before I returned who I was, where I lived, what
I did, and, in fact, knew almost as much about me as I did
myself. These wagoners are great telltales! To-morrow I pen
a pig for you. The calves and cows are in good order. I will
try to have some fresh butter for you. _Bose is in excellent
health_, and the rats are as plentiful as ever. You must
kiss our little one for me, and take thousands for yourself.
I again repeat that time hangs heavy on my hands when you
are away, but I would not be so selfish as to debar you the
pleasure of a few days’ society with those who are dear to
us both.”

The “Mr. White” mentioned in this letter became an eminent clergyman
as Rev. William Spotswood White, D.D. The services described here
were held in a private house in Dennisville, for the nearest place of
regular worship was some miles away in Nottoway County. In this church
my father was ordained an elder. He was, also, superintendent of the
Sunday-school established through his personal influence. The pupils
and teachers were collected from the surrounding plantations, and the
new-comer to the sleepy neighborhood made life-long friends with the
“best people” of the region.

Quite unconsciously, he gives us, in this résumé of every-day
happenings, glimpses into a life at once primitive and refined. The
roads are all afloat, but three men draw rein at his door on one day,
and dine with him while his wife is away—“an unexpected pleasure.” He
busies himself with chickens, eggs, and pigs, cows and calves, reports
the health of the house-dog, the promise of Sabbath-school and church,
and runs the only store in that part of the county successfully. And
this was the first experience of country life for the city-bred man and
merchant!

The Lunenburg home was not even a “ville.” A house that had been a
rural inn, and, across the road, a hundred yards down its irregular
length, “the store,” formed, with the usual outbuildings, the small
settlement three days distant from Richmond. My father and mother
boarded for a few months with Captain and Mrs. Bragg, who lived in the
whilom “House of Entertainment” on the roadside.

I was but two years old when there occurred a calamity, the
particulars of which I have heard so often that I seem to recollect
them for myself:

One cold winter day my mother left her little daughters with their toys
at the end of the large bedroom most remote from a roaring wood-fire;
told them not to go nearer to it, and took her work down to Mrs.
Bragg’s chamber. The gentle hostess had a baby but a week old, and her
boarder’s call was one of neighborly kindness. On the stairs she met
Lucy Bragg, a child about my sister’s age—five—a pretty, merry baby,
and our only playfellow. My mother’s discipline was never harsh. It was
ever effectual, for we seldom disobeyed her. She stopped Lucy on the
stairs to warn her not to play near the fire.

We played happily together for an hour or two, before Lucy complained
of being cold and went up to the fireplace; stood there for a moment,
her back to the fire and hands behind her, prattling with the children
at the other end of the room. Suddenly she screamed and darted past us,
her clothing on fire.

My mother heard the shrieks from the distant “chamber” on the ground
floor, and, without arousing the sleeping patient, slipped noiselessly
from the room and ran with all her might toward the stairs. Half-way up
she met a child wrapped in flames, which she was beating with her poor
little hands while she shrieked for help. My mother flashed by her,
escaping harm on the narrow stairway as by a miracle. One glance into
her own room showed her that her girls were safe; she tore a blanket
from the bed and was back so quickly that she overtook the burning
figure on the lowermost stair, and wrapped her in the blanket. Captain
Bragg appeared below at the same instant, wound the cover about the
frantic, struggling creature, and extinguished the fire.

Little Lucy died that night. Her mother and the baby followed her to
the grave in a week.

The tragedy broke up the Bragg household, and we found a temporary home
in the family of Mr. Andrew McQuie (pronounced “McWay”), two miles from
the store. The McQuies were prosperous planters, and the intimacy begun
that winter continued as long as the older members of the clan lived.
We girls learned to call her “Grandma,” and never remitted the title
and the affection that prompted it.

Our apartments were in the “Office,” a detached brick building
in the corner of the house-yard—a common appendage to most
plantation-homesteads. At some period of the family history a father or
son of the house had practised law or medicine, and used the “office”
in that capacity. It never lost the name.

And here, on a windy wintry evening, I awoke to the consciousness of my
Individuality.

I do not know how better to express the earliest memory I have of
being—and thinking. It was a living demonstration of the great truth
shallow thinkers never comprehend—“_Cogito, ergo sum_.”

I had fallen asleep, tired with play, and lulled into drowsiness by the
falling rain outside. I lay among the pillows of the trundle-bed at
the back of the room, and, awakening with a cry of fright at finding
myself, as I thought, alone, was answered by my mother’s voice.

She sat by the fire in a low rocking-chair, and, guided by her
reassuring tone, I tumbled out of bed and ran toward her. In the area
lighted by the burning logs, I saw her, as in another sphere. To this
hour I recall the impression that she was thinking of something besides
myself. Baby as I was, I felt vaguely that she was not “all there,”
even when she took me upon her lap. When she said, kindly and in her
own sweet way, “Did my little girl think her mother had left her alone
in the dark?” she did not withdraw her eyes from the ruddy fire.

Something warned me not to speak again. I leaned my head against her
shoulder, and we studied the fire together. Did the intensity of her
musing stir my dormant soul into life? I cannot say. Only that I date
my conscious personal existence from that mystic hour. The picture is
before me to-night, as I hear my daughter singing her boy to sleep in
the next room, and the lake-wind rattles the vines about my window. The
sough of the heated air over the brands and embers; the slow motion of
the rocker as we swayed to and fro; my mother’s thoughtful silence,
and my small self, awed into speechlessness by the new thing that had
come to me; my pulpy brain interfused with the knowledge that I was a
thinking entity, and unable to grapple with the revelation—all this is
as distinct as things of yesternight.

I have heard but one experience that resembled this supreme moment of
my infancy. My best-beloved tutor related to me when I was twelve years
old that he “recollected when he began to think.” The sensation, he
said, was as if he were talking to himself and could not stop. I had
that day heard the epigrammatic “_Cogito, ergo sum_,” and I told of my
awakening from a mere animal to spiritual and intellectual life.

I do not comprehend the mystery better now than on that
never-to-be-forgotten evening. I but know that the miracle _was_!

A BERSERKER RAGE—A FRIGHT—THE WESTERN FEVER—MONTROSE—A MOTHER REGAINED

UP to this point of my story, what I have written is hearsay. With the
awakening recorded in the last chapter, my real reminiscences begin.

The next vivid impression upon my plastic memory has its setting in
the McQuie yard. My mother had been to Richmond on a visit and brought
back, as a present from a woman who was said to be “good,” a doll for
my sister. Perhaps she considered me too young to be intrusted with the
keeping of the rare creation of wax and real hair. Perhaps she did not
recollect my existence. In either case, as I promptly settled within
myself, she was not the good woman of my mother’s painting.

Not that I had ever cared for “dead dolls.” When I could just put
the wish into words, my craving was for a “real, live, _skin_ baby
that could laugh and talk.” But this specimen was so nearly alive
that it opened its eyes when one pulled a wire concealed by the satin
petticoat, and shut them at another tweak. Moreover, the (alleged) good
woman in the beautiful city I heard as much of as of heaven, had sent
my sister the gift, and none to me. Furthermore, and worst of all, my
sister paraded the gift before my angry, miserable eyes, and, out of
my mother’s hearing, taunted me with the evident fact that “nobody
cared for a little girl whose hands were dirty and whose hair was never
smooth.” I was barely three years old. My sister was a prodigy of
learning in the estimation of our acquaintances, and nearer six than
five. I took in the case with extraordinary clearness of judgment and
soreness of heart, and meditated revenge.

Watching an opportunity when mother, nurse, and sister were out of
the way, I stole into the office-cottage, possessed myself of the
hated puppet, who had been put into my bed for an afternoon nap—lying
there for all the world like “a sure-enough baby,” with her eyes fast
shut—and bore her off behind the house. There I stripped off her
gay attire; twisted a string about her neck; contrived—nobody could
ever tell how—to fasten one end of the cord to the lowest bough of a
peach-tree, armed myself with a stout switch, and lashed every grain of
sawdust out of the dangling effigy.

I recollect that my sister, rushing to the scene of action, dared not
approach the fury into which I had been transformed, but stood aloof,
screaming and wringing her hands. I have no recollection of my mother’s
interference, or of the chastisement which, I have been told, was
inflicted with the self-same rod that had mangled the detested doll
into a shapeless rag. In my berserker rage I probably did not hear
scolding or feel stripes.

My father rented the house vacated by the Braggs, finding the daily
ride to and from the store too long in the short winter days. Soon
after our return to our old quarters, another boy was born to the
bereaved parents—my brother Herbert. He was but a few days old when
“Grandma” McQuie and her two daughters called to inquire after mother
and child, and carried me off with them, I suppose to get me out of the
way of nurse and mother. My whole body was a-tingle with excitement
when I found myself snugly tucked up in shawls on the back seat of the
roomy chariot, beside the dear old lady, and rolling down the road. We
had not gone far before she untied and took off my bonnet, and tied
over my curly head a great red bandanna handkerchief “to keep your ears
warm.” The warm color and the delicious cosiness of the covering put
an idea into my head. I had heard the story of Red Riding Hood from
my colored nurse, and I had already the trick of “playing ladies,” as
I named the story-making that has been my trade ever since. I was Red
Riding Hood, and my grandmother was taking me away from the wolf. The
woods we presently entered were full of fairies. They swung from the
little branches of shrubs that brushed the carriage-windows, and peeped
at me from behind the boles of oak and hickory, and climbed to the top
of sweetbrier sprays writhing in the winter wind. One and all, they did
obeisance to me as I drove in my state coach through the forest aisles.
I nodded back industriously, and would have kissed my hand to them had
not Grandma McQuie told me to keep it under the shawl.

My companions in the carriage paid no attention to my smiles and
antics. They were busy talking of their own affairs, and probably did
not give the silent child a look or thought. A word or a curious glance
would have spoiled the glorious fun that lasted until I was lifted in
Mr. McQuie’s arms at his hospitable door.

I never spoke of the “make believe.” What child does?

The Bragg house was roomy and rambling, and nobody troubled herself to
look after me when I would steal away alone to the stairs leading to
the room we had occupied while Mrs. Bragg and Lucy were alive, and sit
on the steps which still bore the stains of the scorching flames that
had licked up poor Lucy’s life, and dreaming over the details as I had
had them, over and over, from my sister and ’Lizabeth, the colored girl
whose life-work was to “look after” us three.

Just opposite the door of our old room was one that was always closed
and locked and bolted. It shared in the ghoul-like interest I gave to
the scorched stairs, and there was reason for this. The furniture of
Mrs. Bragg’s chamber was stored here. Through a wide keyhole I could
espy the corner of a bureau, and all of a Boston rocker, cushioned and
valanced with dark-red calico. This, I assumed in the fancies which
were more real than what I beheld with the bodily eyes, had been the
favorite seat of the dead woman.

One wild March day, when the rain thundered upon the roof over my head,
and the staircase and hall echoed with sighs and whistlings, my eye,
glued to the awful keyhole, saw the chair begin to rock! Slowly and
slightly; but it actually swayed back and forth, and, to the horrified
fancy of the credulous infant without, there grew into view a shadowy
form—a pale lady about whose slight figure flowed a misty robe, and who
held a baby in her arms.

One long, wild look sufficed to show me this. Then I sped down the
stairs like a lapwing, and into the dining-room, where sat ’Lizabeth
holding my baby brother. I rushed up to her and babbled my story
in panting incoherence. I had seen a ghost sitting in Mrs. Bragg’s
rocking-chair, getting a baby to sleep!

The exemplary nurse was adequate to the occasion thrust suddenly upon
her. Without waiting to draw breath, she gave me the lie direct, and
warned me that “Mistis wouldn’t stan’ no sech dreadful stories. Ef so
be you wan’ a whippin’ sech as you never had befo’ in all yer born
days, you jes’ better run into the chamber an’ tell her what you done
tole me, Miss Firginny!”

I did not go. Suppression of the awful truth was preferable to
the certainty of a chastisement. Our parents were strict in their
prohibition of all bugaboo and ghost stories. That may have been the
reason we heard so many. It certainly accounts for our reticence on
subjects that crammed our brains with fancies and chilled the marrow
in our young bones.

The wind, finding its way between sashes and under the ill-fitting
doors of the old house, no doubt set the chair in motion. My heated
imagination did the rest. Five minutes’ talk with my mother or one
hearty laugh from my father would have laid the spectre. She loomed up
more and more distinctly before my mental vision because I kept the
awesome experience locked within my own heaving heart.

Another thrilling incident, framed in memory as a fadeless fresco
upon the wall of a locked temple, is the Bragg burial-lot, in which
lay Lucy, her mother and baby-brother, and Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Bragg’s
mother, who had followed her daughter to the grave a few weeks before
we returned to the house. A low brick wall enclosed the plot, which was
overgrown with neglected shrubbery and briers. On a certain day I set
my small head like a flint upon the execution of no less an enterprise
than a visit to the forbidden ground and a peep through the gates at
the _graves_! I had never seen one. I do not know what I expected to
behold of raw-head-and-bloody-bones horror. But ’Lizabeth’s hobgoblin
and vampire recitals had enkindled within me a burning curiosity to
inspect a charnel-house. Visions of skeletons lying on the bare ground,
of hovering spectres and nameless Udolphian marvels, wrought me up to
the expedition. The graveyard was a long way off—quite at the bottom
of the garden, and the walk thither was breast-high in dead weeds. I
buffeted them valiantly, striding ahead of my companions—my protesting
sister, ’Lizabeth, and the baby borne upon her hip—and was so near the
goal that a few minutes would show me all there was to see, when I
espied _Something_ gliding along the top of the wall! Something that
was white and stealthy; something that moved without sound, and that
wore projecting ribbon bows upon a snowy head!

’Lizabeth emitted a bloodcurdling shriek:

“Ole Mis’ Moore! Sure’s you born! Don’ you see her cap on her hade?”

We fled, helter-skelter, as for our four lives, and never stopped to
look behind us.

The apparition did resemble the crown of a mob-cap with knots of black
ribbons at the sides. I saw, almost as plainly as I had beheld her
daughter’s wraith, the form hidden by the wall, picking her way over
the brier-grown enclosure.

I do not know how much longer we lived at the Bragg house. Sure am I
that I never paid a second call upon the denizens of the half-acre
defended by the brick wall.

Years afterward, my mother told me the true tale of the old lady’s
pet cat that would not leave her mistress’s grave, having followed
in the funeral train down the long alley, and seen the coffin laid
in the ground on the day of the funeral. The dumb beast haunted the
burying-ground ever after, living on birds and field-mice, and starved
to death in a deep snow that lay long on the frozen ground the second
winter of her watch.

Why the four-year-old child did not lose what wits were hers by nature,
or become a nerveless coward for the rest of her days, under the stress
of influences never suspected by her parents, was due, probably, to
a strain of physical and mental hardihood inherited from a dauntless
father.

It must have been shortly after this incident that, coming into the
dining-room one morning, I heard my mother say to my father:

“My dear, Frank has the Western fever!”

Frank Wilson, a nice boy, the son of a neighboring planter, was my
father’s bookkeeper and an inmate of our house. He was very kind to
me, and had won a lasting place in my regard as the maker of the
very best whistles and fifes of chincapin bark of any one I had ever
known. They piped more shrilly and held their shape longer than those
turned out by my father and by various visitors who paid court to my
young lady cousins through me. So I looked anxiously at the alleged
sufferer, startled and pained by the announcement of his affliction.
He was eating his breakfast composedly, and answered my father’s
“Good-morning—and is that true, my boy?” with a pleasant laugh. There
was not a sign of the invalid in look, action, or tone.

“I can’t deny it, sir!”

I slipped into my chair beside him, receiving a caressing pat on the
hand I laid on his arm, and hearkened with greedy ears for further
particulars of the case, never asking a question. Children of that
generation were trained to make their ears and eyes do duty for the
tongue. I comprehended but a tithe of the ensuing conversation. I
made out that the mysterious fever did not affect Frank’s appetite
and general health, but that it involved the necessity of his leaving
us for a long time. He might never come back. His proviso in this
direction was, “If I do as well as I hope to do out there.”

When he had excused himself and left the table, my father startled me
yet more by his answer to my mother’s remark: “We shall miss him. He is
a nice boy!”

Her husband stirred his coffee meditatively for a moment before saying,
without looking up:

“I am not sure that I have not a touch of that same fever myself.”

With the inconsequence of infancy, I did not connect the speech with
our breaking up the Lunenburg home the next autumn and setting out
for what was explained to us girls as a round of visits to friends in
Richmond and Powhatan.

We call ours a restless age, and the modern American man a predatory
animal, with an abnormal craving for adventure. Change and Progress are
the genii who claim his allegiance and sway his destiny. In sighing for
the peace and rest of the “former times” we think were “better than
these,” we forget (if we ever knew) that our sires were possessed by,
and yielded to, unrest as intense and dreams as golden as those that
animate the explorer and inventor of the twentieth century. My father
was in no sense a dreamer of day dreams of the dazzling impossible.
He was making a fair living in the heart of what was, even then, “Old
Virginia.” He had recouped his shattered fortunes by judicious business
enterprise, and the neat share of her father’s estate that had fallen
to my mother at his demise in 1829, placed her and her children beyond
the reach of poverty. The merchant was respected here as he had been in
Amelia, for his intelligence, probity, courtesy, and energy. His place
in society and in church was assured. Yet he had caught the Western
fever. And—a mightier marvel—“Uncle Carus,” the clerical Connecticut
Yankee, the soul of conservatism, who had settled in the downiest of
nests as the incumbent of Mount Carmel, a Presbyterian church built
upon the outskirts of the Montrose plantation, and virtually maintained
by that family—sober, ease-loving Uncle Carus—had joined hands with his
wife’s brother-in-law in the purchase of Western lands and the scheme
of emigration.

The two men had travelled hundreds of miles on horseback during
the last year in quest of a location for the new home. My
father’s letters—worn by many readings, and showing all over the
odd and unaccountable brown thumbmarks of time—bear dates of
wayside post-offices as well as of towns—Lynchburg, Staunton, and
Charlottesville. Finally they crossed the Ohio line, and after
due deliberation, bought a farm in partnership. The letters are
interesting reading, but too many and too long to be copied in full.

Every detail of business and each variation of plans were communicated
as freely as if the wife were associated with him in commercial as in
domestic life.

Once, when he is doubtful what step to take next, he writes, playfully:
“Some men need a propelling power. It might be well for you to exert a
little of the ‘government’ with which some of our friends accredit you,
and move _me_ in the right direction.”

When, the long journey accomplished and the purchase of the farm
completed, he returned home, he encountered no opposition from his
wife, but much from neighbors and friends. A letter written to her from
Lunenburg, whither he had returned to close up his affairs, leaving
her with her brother at Olney, describes the numerous tokens of regret
and esteem of which he is the recipient. The climax of the list comes
in the humorous tale of how an old-fashioned neighbor, Mrs. L——, “says
it troubled her so much on New Year’s night that she could not sleep.
She actually got up after trying vainly to court slumber, _lighted her
pipe_, and smoked and thought the matter over. She was not reconciled,
after all.... When I take my departure it will be with feelings of
profound regret, and full confidence in the friendship of those I leave
behind.”

The land bought in Ohio by the two victims of the “Western fever” is
now covered by the city of Cleveland. If the two New-Englanders could
have forecast the future, their heirs would be multi-millionaires.

Behold us, then, a family of two adults and three babies—the eldest not
yet seven years old—_en route_ from Richmond to Montrose, travelling in
a big barouche, with a trunk strapped on the rack behind, in lumbering
progress over thirty-seven miles of execrable roads, just now at their
worst after a week of autumnal rains.

The damp discomfort of the journey is present with me now. The sun did
not shine all day long; the raw air pierced to the bones; the baby was
cross; my mother was not well, and my sister and myself were cramped by
long sitting upon the back seat. Our horses were strong, but mud-holes
were deep, the red clay was adhesive, and the corduroy causeways jarred
us to soreness. It was late in the day when we turned from the highway
toward the gate of the Montrose plantation. We were seen from the
house, and a colored lad of fifteen or thereabouts ran fleetly down the
avenue to open the great outer gate. He flung it wide with a hospitable
intent that knocked poor Selim—the off-horse—flat into the mud. Once
down, he did not offer to arise from the ruddy ooze that embedded
one side. He had snapped the harness in falling, but that made no
difference to the fagged-out beast. The accident was visible from the
porch of the house, an eighth of a mile away, and four men hastened to
the rescue.

The foremost was, I thought, the handsomest man I had ever seen.
He was tall, young, as dark as a Frenchman (having Huguenot blood
in his veins), and with a marvellously sweet smile. Coming up to
my pale mother, as she stood on the miry roadside, he kissed her,
picked up the baby, and bade “Cousin Anna” lean upon his other arm.
My father insisted upon relieving him of the child; but the picture
of my delicate mother, supported in the walk up the drive by the
gallant youth—her favorite cousin of all the clan—Josiah Smith, of
Montrose—will never leave the gallery of pictures that multiplied fast
from this date.

I did him loving honor to the best of my poor ability as the “Uncle
Archie” of “Judith.” I cannot pass him by without this brief tribute.

A second and younger cousin, who seemed uninteresting beside my new
hero, took charge of my sister and myself, and we trudged stiffly on
to the ancient homestead. An avalanche of feminine cousins descended
upon us as we entered the front gate, and swept us along through
porch and hall and one room after another, to the “chamber,” where a
beautiful old lady lay in bed.

Her hair was dark as midnight; so were her eyes; her cap, pillows,
gown, and the bed-coverings were snowy white. Her face was that of a
saint. This was “Aunt Smith,” the widowed mistress of Montrose. She
was of the Huguenot Michaux stock, the American founders of a colony
on James River. During a widowhood of twenty years she had, by wise
management, relieved the estate from embarrassment, brought up and
educated six children, and established for herself a reputation for
intelligence, refinement, and piety that is yet fragrant in the minds
of those who recollect Montrose as it was in its palmy days.

She was often ailing, as I saw her now. Accustomed as I am to the
improved physical condition of American women, I wonder _what_ was
amiss with the gentlewomen of that generation; how they lived through
the protracted seasons of “feeling poorly,” and their frequent
confinement to bed and bed-chambers. The observation of that winter
fixed in my imagination the belief that genteel invalidism was the
normal state of what the colored servants classified as “real ladies.”
To be healthy was to approximate vulgarity. Aunt Smith was as much
in her bed as out of it—or, so it seemed to me. Her eldest child, a
daughter and the most brilliant of the family, had not had a day of
perfect health since she had an unhappy love-affair at twenty. She was
now nearly forty, still vivacious, and the oracle of the homestead. My
dearest “Cousin Mary,” resident for the winter at Montrose with her
mother, was fragile as a wind-flower, and my own mother fell ill a few
days after our arrival at her mother’s birthplace, and did not lift her
head from the pillow for three months.

I have no data by which to fix the relative times of any happenings
of that long, long, dreary winter. It dragged by like an interminable
dream. My father was absent in Ohio for some weeks of the first month.
He had set out on a second journey to his Promised Land when his wife
fell ill. He hurried back as soon as the news overtook him. But it took
a long time for the letter of recall to find him, and as long for him
to retrace his steps—or his horse’s.

I have but a hazy recollection of his telling me one day that I was
five years old. I had had other birthdays, of course, but this was the
first I remember. It was equally, of course, the 21st of December.
There was no celebration of the unimportant event. If anybody was
glad I was upon the earth, I had no intimation of the fact. I should
not mark the anniversary as of any note, now, had not it been fixed
in my brain by a present from my father of _The New York Reader_, a
hideous little volume, with stiff covers of straw pasteboard pasted
over with blue paper. My father took me upon his knee, and talked to
me, seriously and sorrowfully, of my crass ignorance and disinclination
to “learn.” I was five years old, and—this low and mournfully, as one
might state a fact disgraceful to the family connection—I “did not even
know my letters!” The dear mother, who lay sick up-stairs, had tried,
over and over, to teach me what every big girl of my age ought to know.
He did not believe that his little daughter was a dunce. He hoped that
I loved my mother and himself well enough to try to learn how to read
out of this nice, new book. Cousin Paulina Carus—a girl of sixteen, at
home from school on sick-leave, indefinitely extended—had offered to
teach me. He had told her he was sure I would do better than I had done
up to this time. He was mortified when people asked him what books I
had read, and he had to tell the truth. He did not believe there was
another “nice” child in the county, five years old, who did not know
her a, b, c’s.

I was wetting his frilled shirt-front with penitential tears long
before the sermon was finished. He wiped them with a big silk
handkerchief—red, with white spots scattered over the expanse—kissed
me, and set me down very gently.

“My little girl will not forget what father has been saying. Think how
pleased mother will be when she gets well to find that you can read a
chapter in the Bible to her!”

The story went for fact in the family that I set myself zealously about
the appointed task of learning the alphabet in consequence of this
lecture. I heard it told, times without number, and never contradicted
it. It sounded well, and I had a passion for heroinism, on never so
small a scale. And grown people should know what they were talking of
in asserting that “Virginia made up her mind, the day she was five
years old, that she would turn over a new leaf, and be no longer a
dunce at her books.” It may be, too, as I now see, that the solemn
parental homily (I always dreaded the lecture succeeding a whipping
more than the stripes)—it may be, I grant, that something was stirred
in my fallow intellect akin to the germination of the “bare grain”
under spring showers. If this were true, it was a clear case of what
theologians term “unconscious conversion.” Were I to trust to my own
judgment, based upon personal reminiscence, I should say that I went to
bed one night not—as the phrase goes—“knowing B from a bull’s foot,”
and awoke reading. Perhaps Dogberry was nearer right than we think in
averring that “reading and writing come by nature.” And that my time
was ripe for receiving them.

I had outgrown my dislike of _The New York Reader_, wearing most of the
blue paper off the straw, and loosening not a few of the tiny fibres
beneath; I could read, without spelling aloud, the stories that were
the jelly to the pill of conning the alphabet and the combinations
thereof; the spring had really come at last on the tardy heels of that
black winter. The grass was lush and warm under my feet; the sweetbrier
and multiflora roses over the Montrose porches were in bloom, and the
locust-trees were white with flowers and resonant with the hum of bees,
when, one day, as I played in the yard, I heard a weak, sweet voice
calling my name.

Looking up, I saw my mother in a white gown, a scarlet shawl wrapped
about her shoulders, leaning from her bedroom window and smiling down
upon me.

I screamed with ecstasy, jumping up and down, clapping my hands, and
crying to my dusky playfellows, Rose and Judy:

“Look! Oh, look! I have a mother again—as well as anybody!”

Close upon the blessed apparition came her championship of her
neglected “middle child,” against the impositions of “Mea,” Anne Carus,
and a bigger niece of Aunt Smith who was much at the homestead. On a
happy forenoon the mother I had received back from the edge of the
grave called me to her bedside, for, although convalescent, she did not
rise until noon.

Pointing to a covered basket that stood by her bed, she bade me lift
the lid. Within, upon white paper, lay a great handful of dried
cherries, a sheet of “peach leather,” and four round ginger-cakes, the
pattern and taste of which I knew well as the _chef d’œuvre_ of the
“sweeties” manufactured by Mam’ Peggy, the Montrose cook.

“I heard that the bigger children had a tea-party last night after
you had gone to bed,” she said, smilingly tender. “It isn’t fair that
my little daughter should not have her share. So I sent Jane”—her
maid—“down for these, and saved them for you.”

No other “goodies” were ever so delicious, but their finest flavor was
drawn from the mental repetition of the exultant: “I have a mother
again—as well as anybody!”

OUR POWHATAN HOME—A COUNTRY FUNERAL—“OLD MRS. O’HARA.”

MY mother’s illness of nearly four months deflected the current of our
lives. My father, convinced probably of the peril to her life of a
Western journey, and wrought upon by the persuasions of her relatives,
bought the “good-will and fixtures” of a store at Powhatan Court House,
a village seven miles nearer Richmond than Montrose, and thither we
removed as soon as the convalescent was strong enough.

Her husband wrote to her from Richmond _en route_ for “the North,”
where he was to purchase a stock of the “goods” upon which the
territory environing his new home was dependent for most of the
necessaries and all of the luxuries of life.

“I am very solicitous as to your early restoration to
health. Be careful not to rise too early, and keep a strict
watch over your appetite. It is not safe to indulge it, yet
there is danger in the opposite course....

“I attended a prayer-meeting at Mr. Hutchinson’s on Thursday
evening, and had the pleasure of hearing a lecture from Mr.
Nettleton. It was a pleasant meeting. I wish you had been
with me! To-day (Sunday) I heard Mr. Plumer and Mr. Brown,
both of whom were interesting. Mr. Plumer’s subject was the
young ruler _running_ to Our Saviour and kneeling down with
the inquiry, ‘What must I do to be saved?’...

“Your brother was at church yesterday. His wife has a fine
boy a month old. You have probably heard of the event,
although I did not until my arrival here. I am told he says
it is ‘the prettiest thing that was ever seen,’ and feels
quite proud of this, their first exhibition.

“There is great difficulty in getting to New York this
spring. The Delaware was closed by ice for two months, and
up to the middle of March this was eighteen inches thick.
Merchants have been detained in Baltimore from two to seven
days, waiting for stages to go on. The number of travellers
was so large that they could not be accommodated sooner. The
steamboat runs from Richmond to Baltimore but once a week,
and leaves on Sunday morning. Several of my acquaintances
went on to-day. They were urgent that I should go with them,
but my determination is not to travel on the Sabbath. I
shall, therefore, take the land route to Balto....

“Goods are reported to be very scarce and high in all the
Northern cities. They are high in this place, and advancing
every day. Groceries are dearer than I have seen them since
1815, and it is thought they will be yet dearer.

“‘That will do!’ I hear you say, ‘as I am not a merchant.’
Well, no more of it! I must charge you again to be very,
_very_ careful of yourself. Kiss our little children for
father. I shall hurry through my business here as soon as
possible and hasten my return to my home.

“May the Lord bestow on you His choicest blessings and grant
a speedy return of health! Remember me in your prayers.
Adieu, my Love!

“Your own S.”

The sere and yellow sheet is marked on the outside, in the upper
left-hand corner, “_Single_,” in the lower, “_Mail_,” and in the upper
right-hand, “12 _cents_.”

This was in the dark ages when there was but one steamer per week to
Baltimore, and there were not stages enough to carry the passengers
from the Monument City to New York; when the railway to Fredericksburg
was a dream in the minds of a few Northern visionaries, and the
magnetic telegraph was not even dreamed of. My mother has told me that,
in reading the newspaper aloud to her father in 1824, she happened
upon an account of an invention of one George Stephenson for running
carriages by steam. Captain Sterling laughed derisively.

“What nonsense these papers print! You and I won’t live to see that,
little girl!”

I heard the anecdote upon an express train from Richmond to New York,
his “little girl” being the narrator.

In those same dark ages, strong men, whom acquaintances never
accused of cant, or suspected of sentimentality, went to evening
prayer-meetings, and accounted it a delight to hear two sermons on
Sunday; laid pulpit teachings to heart; practised self-examination, and
wrote love-letters to their own wives. If this were not the “Simple
Life” latter-day philosophists exploit as a branch of the New Thought
Movement, it will never be lived on this low earth.

Our first home in the little shire-town (then “Scottville”) was at
“Bellevue,” a red brick house on a hill overlooking the hamlet.
Separated from Bellevue by two fields and the public highway, was “Erin
Hill,” built by one of the same family, which had, it is needless to
observe, both Irish and French blood in it.

Erin Hill was for rent just when Uncle Carus decided to bring his
family from Montrose—where they had lived for ten years—to the village.

This is the fittest time and place in which to sketch the pastor of
Mount Carmel Church. _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was not written until a score
of years later. When it was read aloud in our family circle, there was
not a dissenting voice when my mother uttered, in a voice smothered by
inward mirth, “Mr. Carus!” as Mr. Pecksniff appeared upon the stage.

The portrait was absurdly striking. The Yankee Pecksniff was
good-looking after his kind, which was the dark-eyed, well-featured,
serenely-sanctimonious type. He wore his hair longer than most laymen
cut theirs, and it curled naturally. His voice was low and even, with
the pulpitine cadences hit off, and at, cleverly by Doctor Holmes as “a
tone supposed by the speaker to be peculiarly pleasing to the Almighty.”

His smile was sweet, his gait was felinely dignified, and a pervasive
aroma of meekness tempered his daily walk and conversation. His wife,
“Aunt Betsy,” was the saintliest soul that ever rated herself as the
least important of God’s creatures, and cared with motherly tenderness
for everything else her Creator brought within her modest sphere of
action. In all the years of our intimate association I never saw her
out of temper or heard a harsh word from the lips in which nestled
and abode the law of kindness. She brought him a tidy little slice of
her father’s estate, which he husbanded wisely. He was economical to
parsimony, and contrived to imbue wife and children with a lively sense
of the need of saving in every conceivable way “against a rainy day.”

At ten years of age I asked my mother, point-blank, what salary the
church paid Uncle Carus. She answered as directly:

“Three hundred dollars a year. But he has property of his own.”

Whereupon, without the slightest idea of being pert, I remarked, “If
we were to get a _really_ good preacher, I suppose he would have to
be paid more.” And my mother responded as simply: “No doubt. But your
Uncle Carus is a very faithful pastor.”

I put no questions, but I pondered in my heart the purport of a
dialogue I got in snatches while reading on the back porch one
afternoon, when a good-hearted neighbor and my mother were talking of
the school to be opened in the village under the tuition of Cousin
Paulina, the eldest daughter of Aunt Betsy and her second husband.

She was now in her eighteenth year, a graduate of a somewhat noted
“female” seminary, decidedly pretty, with a quick temper and a talent
for teaching.

“It is a pity,” said the friendly visitor, “to tie her down to a
school-room when she is just at the age when girls like to see company
and go round with other young people. It isn’t as if they were obliged
to put her to work.”

My mother replied discreetly, yet I detected a sympathetic tone in her
speech.

The talk came into my mind many a time after the sessions of the school
began, and I saw, through the window, young men and girls walking,
riding, and driving past, the girls in their prettiest attire, the
young men gallantly attentive, and all enjoying the gala-time of life
that comes but once to any of us.

If the dark-eyed, serious, eighteen-year-old teacher felt the
deprivation, she never murmured. I think her mother had taught her,
with her first word and trial-step, to believe that her “father knew
best.”

The school—the first I ever attended—was in the second story of an
untenanted house on a side-street, rented from a villager. It was kept
for ten months of the year. A vacation of a month in May, and another
in September, divided two terms of five months each. I climbed the
carpetless stairs to the big upper room six or eight times daily for
five days a week, for forty weeks, and never without a quailing of
nerve and sinking of heart as I strode past a locked door at the left
of the entrance.

Inside of that door I had had my first view of Death.

I could not have been six years old, for it was summer, or early
autumn, and I was walking my doll to sleep up and down the main alley
of the garden, happy and bareheaded, and unconsciously “feeling my life
in every limb,” when my mother called to me from the window to “come
and be dressed.”

“I am going to take you and your sister to a funeral,” she continued,
as a maid buttoned me up in a clean white frock, put on my Sunday
shoes, and brushed the rebellious mop of hair that was never smooth for
ten minutes in the day.

“May I take my doll?” asked I, “sh-sh-ing” her in a cuddling arm. I was
trying very hard to love lifeless dolls.

“Shame on you, Miss Firginny!” put in the maid, for all the world as if
I had spoken in church. “Did anybody ever see sech another chile fur
sayin’ _things_?” she added to my mother.

Mea looked properly shocked; my mother, ever light of heart, and
inclined to let unimportant mistakes pass, smiled.

“We don’t take dolls to funerals, my daughter. It would not be right.”

I did not push inquiries as to the nature of the entertainment to
which we were bound, albeit the word, already familiar to me by reason
of two or three repetitions, was not in my vocabulary an hour ago.
Content and pleased in the knowledge that an outing was on foot, I put
my doll to bed in a closet under the stairs used by Mea and myself
as a “baby-house,” shut the door to keep Argus and Rigo—sprightly
puppies with inquisitive noses—from tearing her limb from limb, as they
had rent her immediate predecessor, and sallied forth. The roadside
was thick with sheep-mint and wild hoarhound and tansy. I bruised
them in dancing along in front of my mother and my sober sister.
The bitter-sweet smell arose to my nostrils to be blent forever in
imagination with the event of the day.

A dozen or more carriages were in the road before the shabby frame
house I had heard spoken of as “old Mrs. O’Hara’s,” but which I had
never entered. Eight or ten horses were tethered to the fence, and a
group of men loitered about the door. As we went up the steps I saw
that the parlor was full of villagers. Some were sitting; more were
standing in a kind of expectant way; all were so grave that my spirits
fell to church-temperature. Something solemn was going on. Just inside
of the parlor door the mother of my most intimate girl-friend sat in
a rocking-chair. She had on a black silk dress and her best bonnet.
Every woman present wore black. I saw Mrs. D. beckon up Major Goode, an
elderly beau who was a notable figure in the neighborhood, and whisper
audibly to him, “If you want more chairs, you may send over to our
house for them.”

It was evidently a great function, for Mrs. D. was a notable
housekeeper, and her furniture the finest in the place. Her
drawing-room chairs were heavy mahogany, and upholstered with black
horsehair. Her house, altogether the best within a radius of several
miles, was not a hundred yards from the O’Hara cottage; but that she
should make the neighborly offer thrilled me into nameless awe.

My mother moved forward slowly, holding my hand fast in hers, and I
was led, without warning, up to a long, black, open box, set upon two
chairs, one at each end. In the long, black box lay a woman I had never
seen before. She was awfully white; her eyes were shut; she looked
peaceful, even happy; but she was not asleep. No sleeping creature was
ever so moveless and marble-pale. Her terrible stillness impressed me
most painfully by its very unlikeness to the heaving, palpitating crowd
about her. A mob-cap with a closely fluted border framed the face; she
was dressed in a long cambric gown of a pattern entirely new to me. It
lay in moveless plaits as stiff as paper from her chin to her feet,
which it hid; it was pinked in tiny points at the bottom of the skirt
and the cuffs; the hands, crossed at the wrists as no living hands are
ever laid, were bound at the crossing with white satin ribbon. Under
the moveless figure was a cambric sheet, also pinked at the edges, that
fell straight to the floor over the sides of the coffin.

I must have pinched my mother’s hand with my tightening fingers, for
she eyed me in grave surprise, not unmixed with reproof, in taking a
seat and drawing me to her side. There was no place for children to sit
down. I am sure that she had not an inkling of the unspeakable fright
that possessed my ignorant mind.

From that day to this I have never gone to a funeral when I could
possibly keep away from it upon any decent pretext. When constrained
by circumstance to be one of the party collected about a coffin, I
invariably have a return, in some measure, of the choking horrors of
that awful day. For days, sometimes for weeks afterward, the dread is
an obsession I cannot dispel by any effort of will. Argue and struggle
as I may, I am haunted night and day by the memory of the woman whom I
never saw while she lived.

As if the brooding hush, so deadly to my childish senses; the funeral
sermon, delivered in Uncle Carus’s most sepulchral chest tones, and the
wild, wailing measures of

“Why should we mourn departing friends?”

sung to immemorial “China”—were not enough to rivet the scene forever
upon my soul, a final and dramatic touch was superadded. Two men
brought forward a long, black top, which they were about to fix in
place upon the dreadful box, when a young woman in black rushed from a
corner, flung herself upon her knees beside the coffin, and screamed:
“Mother, mother! You sha’n’t take her away!” making as if she would
push back the men.

“Harriet! Harriet!” remonstrated a deep voice, and Major Goode, the
tears rolling down his cheeks, stooped and lifted the daughter by main
force. “This won’t do, child!”

Fifteen years later, sitting in the calm moonlight upon the porch-steps
at “Homestead,” the dwelling of my chum, Effie D., I heard from Mrs.
D.’s lips the story of Mrs. O’Hara. Her cottage, subsequently our
school-house, had been pulled down long ago as an eyesore to the
fastidious mistress of Homestead. At least I got that section of the
old lady’s life that had to do with the gray-haired Major Goode, a
veteran of the War of 1812. Both the actors in the closing scene
seemed, in the review of my childish impressions of the funeral, to
have been too old to figure in the tale.

“You can understand why nobody in the village could visit her,”
concluded the placid narrator to whom I am indebted for numberless
traditions and real life-romances. “The funeral was another matter.
Death puts us all upon a level.”

There was the skeleton of a _chronique scandaleuse_ in the bit of
exhumed gossip.

OLD-FASHIONED HUSBAND’S LOVE-LETTER—AN ALMOST HOMICIDE—“SLAUGHTERED
MONSTER”—A WESLEYAN SCHOOLMISTRESS.

“ROXBURY, _July 26th, 1838._

“MY DEAR WIFE,—Your esteemed letter of the 20th is at
hand, and it has relieved my mind to hear that you are
all doing so well. I suppose you expect a history of my
movements here. Well, on Saturday morning went to Boston;
in the evening took mother and called on all my Dorchester
friends—stayed with some five minutes, with others fifteen,
etc. Sunday, went to church; very dry sermon in morning;
evening attended Mr. Abbot’s church; was much pleased with
the preaching—text—‘And there came one running and kneeling
to Him, and said,’ etc. At night attended at same place
what they call a ‘Conference Meeting’—quite an interesting
time. Monday, went to Brookline—visited sisters. Tea at
Mr. Davis’s; music of the best kind in abundance. Tuesday
to Boston in morning, evening at home to receive company.
Quite a pleasant afternoon; a good many Dorchester friends
calling. Wednesday morning as usual in the city; evening
held a grand _levee_: the street filled with chaises and
carriages; some twenty or more to tea. Really, my visit has
created quite a sensation among our good friends; some met
yesterday afternoon who have not seen each other for ten or
more years. Don’t you think I had better come here oftener
to keep up the family acquaintance? for it seems to require
some extraordinary event to set these good folks to using
their powers of locomotion. By-the-by, you must not be
jealous, but I had a lady kiss me yesterday, for the first
time it was ever done here, and who do you think it was? My
cousin Mary, of whom you have heard me speak. I have so
much love given in charge for you, my own dear wife, that
it will be necessary to send a part of it in this letter
for fear that I should not be able to travel with it all.
I am especially directed to bear from a lady two kisses to
you from her, and they shall be faithfully delivered when
we are permitted to meet. You don’t know how many inquiries
have been made after you, and regrets expressed that you
did not come on with me. Mother says, ‘Tell Anna I should
like for Samuel to stay longer, but know that he is wanting
at home, so will not say a word at his leaving.’ She sends
much love to her daughter Anna. Father keeps coming in, and
from his movements I judge he is waiting for me to finish.
You know he is clock-work, so adieu once more. Give my love
to the girls, and all at the parsonage. Kiss the children
for father. I must now close my letter by commending you to
the care and protection of Him who preserves, guides, and
directs us in all things. May His choicest blessing rest on
you, my dear wife, and on the children of our love! Adieu,
my dear wife.

“Your husband,
“SAMUEL.”

Thus cheerily runs the old-fashioned family epistle. The writer, who
never demitted the habit of going to church twice every Sunday, and
sometimes thrice, does not comment upon the coincidence that he hears
again a sermon from the text used and “improved” by a Virginia divine,
two years ago. His mind was full of other things just now. This one of
his annual visits to his mother was a glad holiday. The world was going
smoothly with him, and the hearty congratulations of townspeople and
kindred were a-bubble. His mother was happy in her second marriage. The
good deacon was “father” to her son and his wife, and filled the rôle
well.

My father’s namesake son, Samuel Horace, was born earlier in the summer.

Although the month was June, the weather must have been cold or damp,
for a low wood fire burned upon the hearth one afternoon as I crept
into the “chamber” to get a peep at the three-days-old baby, and
perchance to have a talk with my mother. The nurse, before leaving the
room on an errand, had laid the infant upon a pillow in a rocking-chair
(I have it now!) There was no cradle in the house, and one had been
ordered from Richmond. My mother was asleep, and, I supposed, had the
baby beside her. Stealing noiselessly across the floor, I backed up
to the Boston rocker, in childish fashion, put my hands upon the arms
of the chair, and raised myself on tiptoe, when the child (aroused, I
fancy, by his guardian angel, prescient of the good he would accomplish
in the world he had just entered, and compassionate of the remorseful
wight whose life would be blighted by the impending deed) stretched
out his arms and yawned. I saw the movement under my lifted arm, and
dropped flat upon the rug. I must have crouched there for half an hour,
a prey to horrible imaginings of what might have been. My mother did
not awaken, and the baby went to sleep again. The shock would have
been terrific to any child. To a dreamer like myself, the visions
that flitted between me and the red embers were as varied as they
were fearful. Lucy Bragg’s tragic death had killed her mother and the
baby-boy. If I had crushed our new baby, my own sweet mother would have
died with him. I saw myself at their funeral, beside the coffin holding
them both, and my father shrinking in abhorrence from the murderess.
Forecasting long years to come, I pictured a stricken and solitary
woman, shunned by innocent people who had never broken the sixth
commandment, and cowering beside a brier-grown grave, crying as I had
read somewhere, “Would to God I had died when I was born!”

I do not think I shed a tear. Tears were dried up by the voiceless
misery. I know I could not sleep that night for hours and hours. I
know, too, that I never told the shameful thing—the almost murder—to a
living creature until it was ten years old.

I appreciate, most clearly of all, that my baby-brother became from
that hour, in some sort, my especial property. The peculiar tenderness
that has characterized our feeling for each other, the steadfast
affection and perfect confidence in our mutual love that have known no
variableness or shadow of turning, for all our united lives, may not
have been rooted in the vigil of unutterable horror and unspeakable
thankfulness. I look back upon it as a chrism.

Later in the year, another incident that might have been a tragedy,
stirred the even flow of domestic life. We had finished prayers and
breakfast, and my father was half-way down the avenue on his way to the
village when we saw him stop suddenly, retrace his steps hurriedly,
enter the yard, and shout to the colored butler who was at the
dining-room window. The man ran out and came back shortly, dragging
Argus and Rigo into the hall with him, shutting the front door. My
father was taking down his gun from the hooks on the wall of the hall,
and, without a word, began to load it.

One of the earliest of our nursery lessons was, “Never ask questions of
busy people!” My mother set the example of obedience to this precept
now by silence while her husband, with set lips and resolute eyes,
rammed down a charge of buckshot into the barrel, and, saying, “Keep
the children in the house!” ran down the steps and down the avenue
at the top of his speed toward the big gate opening upon the village
street a hundred yards away.

From the front windows we now saw a crowd of men and boys, tramping
down the middle of the highway, firing confusedly and flinging stones
at a great yellow dog trotting ahead of them, and snapping right and
left as he ran. Before my father reached the gate, the dog had turned
sharply to the right down a cross-street skirting our lower grounds.
A low fence and a ditch divided the meadow from the thoroughfare. My
father kept on our side of the fence, raising his gun to cover the
brute, which, as we could now see, was slavering and growling hoarsely.
A cry arose from the crowd, and my mother groaned, as the dog, espying
the man across the ditch, rushed down one side of it and up the other,
to attack the new foe. My father held his hand until the dog was within
a few feet of him, then fired with steady aim. The brute rolled over to
the bottom of the ditch—dead.

That evening we were allowed to walk down the field to see the
slaughtered monster. That was what I named him to myself, and forthwith
began a story in several chapters, with my father as the hero, and an
astonishing number of beasts of prey as _dramatis personæ_, that lasted
me for many a night thereafter.

The title I had chosen was none too large for the dog as he lay, stark
and still, his big head straight with his back, his teeth showing
savagely in the open jaws. A trickle of water was dammed into a pool by
his huge bulk.

I held my father’s hand and laid my cheek to it in reverence I had not
words to express, when my mother said:

“You ran a terrible risk, love! What if your gun had missed fire, or
you had not hit him?”

“I had settled all that in my mind. I should have stood my ground and
tried to brain him with the butt.”

“As your forefathers did to the British at Bunker Hill!” exulted I,
inwardly.

Be sure the sentence was not uttered. The recollection of the inner
life, in which I was wont to think out such sayings, has made me more
tolerant with so-called priggish children than most of their elders are
prone to be.

One paragraph of our next letter has a distinctly modern flavor. By
substituting millions for thousands in the estimate of the defalcation,
we might date it in this year of our Lord.

“RICHMOND, _April 11th, 1839._
“(Saturday night.)

“MY DEAR WIFE,—The general subject, and, in fact, the only
one which at present occupies the minds of the citizens
here, is the late discovery of defalcations of my old friend
D., first teller of the Bank of Virginia, for the sum, as
reports say, of nearly, or quite half a million. He has
absconded, but some individuals here have had part of the
cash; among the number is the great speculator, W. D. G.,
who has ruined and also severely injured many persons in
this place by borrowing, or getting them to endorse for
him. I never have before witnessed so general an excitement
here. Mr. G. has been arrested to-day, and taken before the
mayor. It is now nine o’clock, and the court is still in
session. It is probable he will be sent to the higher court
for trial, etc. I expect a good many of our plain country
folks will be afraid of Bank of Virginia notes when they
hear of the loss. I hope it will make some of them shell
out and pay me all that they owe. I should like to find a
few thousands waiting for me on my return home. I expect
to-morrow to attend the Sabbath-school at the Second Church,
conducted by Mr. Reeve. It is said to be the best school in
the city. Tell Herbert I have bought a book called _Cobwebs
to Catch Flies_, and I hope it will be the means of catching
from him many good lessons. He must learn fast, as I have
bought for him _Sanford and Merton_, with plates, and when
he can read he shall have it for his own. May I not hope for
a letter from you on Tuesday?—for it seems a long time since
we parted.”

Mrs. Bass, the meek widow of a Methodist clergyman, succeeded the
eighteen-year-old girl in the conduct of the neighborhood school. It
is doubtful if we learned anything worth relating from her. I am sure
we learned nothing evil. She was very kind, very gentle, very devout;
she wore a widow’s cap and a bombazine gown, and she was the only
woman I ever heard pray until I was over fourteen years of age. There
were a dozen girls in the class, which met in a one-roomed building in
a lot adjoining her garden. We had no public schools at that date in
Virginia. We were all paid pupils, and carefully selected from families
in our own class. Those from Presbyterian families outnumbered the
rest, but no objection was made by our parents to the “methods” of the
Wesleyan relict. The tenets of the two churches were the same in the
main. Discrepancies in the matter of free agency, predestination, and
falling from grace were adjudged of minor importance in the present
case. Mrs. Bass was not likely to trench upon them in the tuition of
pupils of tender age. I more than suspect that there would have been
a strong objection made to intrusting us to a Baptist, who would not
lose an opportunity of inculcating the heresy that “baptize” meant,
always and everywhere in the Bible, immersion. And every school was
opened daily by Bible-reading. To this our black-robed, sweet-faced
instructress joined audible petitions, and in our reading and the
lessons that followed she let slip no chance of working in moral and
religious precepts.

Let one example suffice:

One of our recitations was spelling, with the definitions, from
Walker’s Dictionary. Betty Mosby, a pretty girl with a worldly father
and a compliant mother, had learned to dance, and had actually attended
a kind of “Hunt Ball,” given in the vicinity by her father’s sister.
She had descanted volubly upon the festivities to us in “play-times,”
describing her dress and the number of dances in which she figured with
“grown-up gentlemen,” and the hearts of her listeners burned within us
as we listened and longed.

On this day the word “heaven” fell to me to spell and define. This
done, the “improvement” came in Mrs. Bass’s best class-meeting tone:

“Heaven! I hope and pray you may get there, Virginia! You ought not to
fail of the abundant entrance, for your parents are devout Christians
and set you a good example, but from him to whom much is given shall
much be required. Next! ‘Heavenly!’”

Near the foot of the column stood “Hell.”

Anne Carus rendered it with modest confidence, spelling and defining
in a subdued tone befitting the direful monosyllable. That she was
a minister’s daughter was felt by us all to lend her a purchase
in handling the theme. Mrs. Bass was not to be cheated of her
“application”:

“HELL!” she iterated in accents that conveyed the idea of recoiling
from an abyss. “Ah-h-h! I wonder which of my little scholars will lie
down in everlasting burnings?”

“Mercy! I hope I won’t!” cried Betty Mosby, with a shiver of well-acted
terror.

She was a born sensationalist, and quick to voice sensation.

The teacher’s groan was that of the trained exhorter:

“I can’t answer for that, Betty, if you _will_ dance and go to balls!”

That was her “Firstly.” There were at least six heads and two
applications in the lecture “in season” trailing at its heels.

We took it all as a matter of course. Each teacher had ways of his,
and her own. Those of our relict were innocent, and our parents did
not intermeddle. We were very happy under her tutelage. On Saturdays
she had a class in “theorem painting.” That was what she called it,
and we thought it a high-sounding title. Decorators know it as one
style of frescoing. Pinks, roses, dahlias, tulips, and other flowers
with well-defined petals, also birds and butterflies, were cut out
of oiled paper. Through the openings left by removing the outlined
pattern, paint was rubbed upon card-board laid underneath the oiled
paper. I have somewhere still a brick-red pink thus transferred to
bristol-board—a fearful production. I knew no better than to accept it
thankfully when Mrs. Bass had written on the back, “To my dear pupil,
M. V. H., from her affectionate Teacher,” and gave it to me with a kiss
on the last day of the term.

She gave up the school and left the county at the close of that term,
going to live with a brother in another part of the State. I heard,
several years later, that she had “professed sanctification” at a
Lynchburg camp-meeting. Nowadays, they would say she “had entered upon
the Higher Life.”

She must have found, long ago, the abundant entrance into that
Highest Life where creeds and threatenings are abolished. Her benign
administration was to me a summer calm that held no presage of the
morrow’s storm.

VII

MY FIRST TUTOR—THE REIGN OF TERROR

LATE in the October vacation the tranquil routine of our household was
stirred by news of import to us children. We were to have a tutor of
our own, and a school-room under our roof in true Old Virginia style—a
fashion transplanted from the mother-country, eight generations before.

Our father “did not believe in boarding-schools,” holding that parents
shirked a sacred duty in putting the moral and mental training of their
offspring into the hands of hirelings, and sending them away from home
at the formative age, just when girls and boys are most in need of the
mother’s love and watchful care of their health and principles. Yet he
fully appreciated the deficiencies of the small private schools we had
attended, and would not hearken for a moment to the suggestion that
we should be entered as day-scholars in the “Old-Field School,” which
prefigured the Co-educational Institute of to-day. “Nice” girls and
well-born boys attended a school of this kind, and lads were prepared
for college there. The master was himself a college graduate. And the
school was within easy distance of Scottville.

“Too much of an _omnium gatherum_ to suit my taste!” I had overheard
my father say to a friend who urged the advantages of this place,
adding that B. L. was “a good teacher and fair classical scholar.” “He
may be proficient in the classics, but he spells the name of one dead
language, ‘Latten.’ I saw it in his own handwriting. I doubt not that
he can parse in that tongue. _I_ believe him capable of talking of the
‘three R’s.’ My children may never become accomplished, but they shall
be able to write and speak—and _spell_—their mother-tongue correctly!”

Besides Mea and myself there were to be in the home-class ten other
pupils, the daughters of personal friends of like mind with the
independent thinker, and my brother Herbert, lately inducted into the
integuments distinctive of his sex, was to have his trial taste of
schooling. Our mother had taught us all to read and to write before
committing our scholastic education to other hands. I fancy we may
attribute to her training in the rudiments of learning the gratifying
circumstance that one and all of her children have spelled—as did both
parents—with absolute correctness.

The big dining-room in the left wing of the rambling house to which we
had removed from Bellevue when the owner desired to take possession of
it, was to be divided by a partition into school-room and hall; a room
opening from the former would be the tutor’s chamber, and an apartment
in another wing was to be the dining-room. Among other charming changes
in house and family, Dorinda Moody, a ward of my father’s of whom I was
particularly fond, was to live with us and attend “our school.”

I trod upon air all day long, and dismissed the fairy and wonder
tales, with which I was wont to dream myself to sleep nightly, for
visions of the real and present. “Our Tutor”—a title I rolled as a
sweet morsel under my restless tongue—was a divinity student from
Union Theological Seminary, in Prince Edward County. The widow of the
founder of this school of the prophets, and the former pastor of my
parents, lived in the immediate neighborhood of the seminary, and was
the intermediary in the transaction. Through her my father was put
into communication with the faculty—scholars and gentlemen all of
them!!—who agreed in recommending the student whom I have dubbed “Mr.
Tayloe” in my _Old-Field School-Girl_. (The significance of the twin
exclamation-points will be manifest in the next few pages.)

The sun had shivered out of sight below the horizon on a raw November
day when I returned home after a tramp over soaked and sere fields,
attended by my young maid and her elder sister—“bright” mulattoes—and
was met in the end-porch by their mother, my mother’s personal
attendant and the supervisor of nursery-tenants. She was the prettiest
mulatto I have ever seen, owing her regular features and long hair, as
she was proud of telling, to an Indian ancestor. He had entailed upon
her the additional bequest of a peppery temper, and it was on deck now.
She was full of bustle and tartly consequential.

“Lordy, Miss Virginny! whar have you been traipsin’ so late with jus’
these chillun to look after you? It’s pretty nigh plum dark, an’ you, a
young lady, cavortin’ roun’ the country like a tom-boy!”

She hauled me into the house while she talked, and pulled off my shawl
and hood, scolding vehemently at the sight of my muddy shoes, and
promising Molly and Paulina a whipping apiece for not bringing me back
sooner.

I cared not one whit for her scolding after I heard the news with which
she was laden.

Mr. Tayloe had come! My dream-castle had settled into stability upon
rock bottom.

Ten minutes afterward the school-room door was pushed open timidly,
and a childish figure appeared upon the threshold. I was rather tall
for my years, and as lean and lithe as a greyhound. My touzled hair
had been wet and sleeked by Mary Anne’s vigorous fingers. I wore a
brown “Circassian” frock and a spandy clean white apron. The room was
comfortably furnished with desks and chairs, now pushed to the wall,
the carpeted area about the hearth being intended as a sitting-room for
the tutor. There were a table, a desk, and four or five chairs. The
room was bright with lamp and firelight. In front of the red hearth sat
my father and a much smaller man.

His diminutive stature was the first of a series of shocks I was
destined to receive. I had expected him to be tall and stately.
Village wags—with none of whom he was popular—spread the story that he
intermitted his studies for a year in the hope that in the interim he
might grow tall enough to see over the front of a pulpit.

My father looked over his shoulder and held out his hand.

“Come in, my daughter,” in kindly, hearty accents. And, as I obeyed,
“Mr. Tayloe, this is my second daughter—Miss Mary Virginia.”

The hero of my dreams did not rise. There was naught amiss or unusual
in the manner of the introduction. I was “Miss Virginia” to men of my
father’s age, as to youths and boys. I was used to see them get up from
their seats to speak to me, as to a woman of treble my years. I looked,
then, almost aghast at the man who let me walk up to him and offer
my hand before he made any motion in recognition of the unimportant
fact of my presence. His legs were crossed; his hands, the palms laid
lightly together, were tucked between his legs. He pulled one out to
meet mine, touched my fingers coldly, and tucked both hands back as
before.

“How do you do, Mr. Tayloe?” quoth I, primly respectful, as I had been
trained to comport myself with strangers.

He grunted something syllabic in response, and, chilled to the backbone
of my being, I retreated to the shadow of my father’s broad shoulder.
He passed his arm about me and stroked what he used to call my
“Shetland pony mane.” He seldom praised any one of us openly, but he
was a fond father, and he and the “tom-boy” were close comrades.

“I hope you will not find this young lady stupid, Mr. Tayloe,” he went
on, the strong, tender hand still smoothing the rebellious locks. “She
is a bit flighty sometimes, but she has packed away a good deal of
miscellaneous information in this curly pate. I hope she may become a
steady student under your care. What she needs is application.”

Receiving no answer beyond a variation of the grunt, the tutor staring
all the time into the heart of the fire, the dear man went on to tell
of books that had been read aloud in the family, as a supplementary
course to what we had learned in school, referring to me now and then
when he did nor recall title or subject. I fancy, now, that he did this
to rid us both of the embarrassment of the first interview, and to draw
out the taciturn stranger who was to guide my mind in future. Loyal
as was my worshipful admiration of my father, I could not but feel,
although I could not have formulated the thought, that the trend of
talk was not tactful.

Nevertheless, I glowed inwardly with indignation that the third person
present never once took his eyes from the roaring fire, and that his
face, round, fair, and almost boyish in contour, wore a slight smile,
rather supercilious than amused, his brows knitting above the smile in
a fashion I was to know more of in the next ten months.

I have drawn Mr. Tayloe’s portrait at full length in _An Old-Field
School-Girl_, and I need not waste time and nervous tissue in
repetition of the unlovely picture. He was the Evil Genius of my
childhood, and the term of his tutelage may be called the dark
underside of an otherwise happy school-life. Looking back from the
unclouded heights of mature age, I see that my childish valuation of
him was correct. He was, in his association with all without the walls
of the school-room—always excepting the servants, who took his measure
amazingly soon—a gentleman in bearing and speech. He was, I have heard,
well-born. He had gained rank as a student in the university of which
he was a graduate.

At heart and in grain he was a coarse, cruel tyrant, beloved by none of
his pupils, hated by my brother Herbert and myself with an intensity
hardly conceivable in children of our tender years. I owe him one
evil debt I can never forget. Up to now I had had my little gusts of
temper and fleeting grudges against those who angered me. Save for the
episode of the doll-whipping recorded in an earlier chapter, I had
never cherished—if I had felt—an emotion of vindictiveness or a desire
for revenge. This man—this embryo minister of the gospel of love and
peace—aroused in me passions that had slumbered unsuspected by all—most
of all, by myself.

From the beginning he disliked me. Perhaps because he chose to assume,
from the manner of my introduction to him, that I was a spoiled,
conceited child who ought to be “taken down.” Perhaps because, while I
flushed up hotly under rebuke and sarcasms that entered lavishly into
the process of “taking down,” I never broke down abjectly under these,
after the manner of other pupils. Our father had the true masculine
dislike for womanish tears. He had drilled us from babyhood to restrain
the impulse to cry. Many a time I was sent from the table or room when
my eyes filled, with the stern injunction, “Go to your room and stay
there until you can control yourself!” I thought it harsh treatment,
then. I have thanked and blessed him for the discipline a thousand
times since. Our tutor, I verily believed then, and I do not doubt now,
gloated in the sight of the sufferings wrought by his brutality. I can
give it no milder name. I have seen him smile—a tigerish gleam—when he
had scolded the ten outsiders—the “_externes_,” as the French call
them—into convulsive weeping. Mea and I felt the lash of his tongue
quite as keenly as the rest, but our home-drill stood us in good stead.

He rarely found fault with her. She was a comely girl, nearly fourteen,
and womanly for that age, exemplary in deportment, and an excellent
student. It could never be said of her that she “lacked application.”
If one thing were more hateful to me than his surliness and sneers to
me, it was his cubbish gallantry to my pretty sister. He pronounced
her openly the most promising of his scholars, and volunteered to give
her private lessons in botany. Such tokens of preference may have been
the proof of a nascent attachment on his part, or but another of his
honorable ways of amusing himself. It was a genuine comfort to me to
see that she met his gallantries with quiet self-possession and cool
indifference remarkable in a country girl who knew nothing of “society”
and flirtation.

I was the black sheep of the flock, as he took pains to say twice or
a dozen times a week, in the hearing of the school. To me he imparted
privately the agreeable information that I “would never be anything
but a disgrace to my parents; that, in spite of what my father might
say to the contrary, I was stupid by nature and incorrigibly lazy.”
He rang the changes upon that first unfortunate interview until I was
goaded to dumb frenzy. The persecution, begun with the opening day of
the term, was never abated. He would overhear from his chamber window
snatches of talk between my mates and myself, as we played or sat in
the garden below—merry, flippant nothings, as harmless as the twitter
of the birds in the trees over our heads. When we were reassembled
in the school-room he would make my part in the prattle the text of
a lecture ten minutes long, holding the astonished, quivering child
up to ridicule, or stinging her to the quick with invectives. When he
lost his temper—which happened often—he spared nobody. He went out of
his way to attack me. Lest this should read like the exaggeration of
fancied slights to the self-willed, pert youngling he believed me to
be, let me cull one or two sprigs of rue from the lush growth that
embittered ten months of my existence:

I cut my finger to the bone one morning (I carry the scar still). My
mother bound it up in haste, for the school-bell was ringing. I got
into my seat just in time for the opening exercises. A chapter was
read—verse by verse—in turn by the pupils, after which the prospective
divine “offered” a prayer. He stood with his eyes shut and his forehead
knitted into a frown. We knelt with our backs to him before our chairs
around the room. It seems but natural to me, in reflecting upon that
perfunctory “exercise,” that our reading “in course” should never,
during Mr. Tayloe’s reign, have gone beyond the Old Testament. We read
that exactly as it came—word for word. There was nothing of the New
Testament in his walk or conversation.

On this day we had a chapter in Kings—First or Second—in which occurred
a verse my father would have skipped quietly at our family worship.
Sarah L. was the biggest girl in the class—in her sixteenth year, and
quite grown up. She dexterously slipped past the bit of Bible history,
taking the next verse, as if by accident.

“Go back and read your verse!” thundered the young theologue. “I will
have no false modesty in my school.”

My cheeks flamed as redly with anger as Sarah’s had with maiden shame,
as I followed suit with the next passage. I resented the coarse insult
to a decent girl, and the manner thereof. I was faint with the pain of
the wounded finger, and altogether so unnerved that my voice shook and
fell below the pitch at which we were taught to read aloud.

Out barked the bulldog again over the top of the open Bible he held:

“What ails Miss High-and-Mighty to-day? In one of your tantrums, I see.
Read that verse again, and loud enough to be heard by somebody besides
your charming self!”

Where—will be asked by the twentieth-century reader—was parental
affection all this while? How could a fearless gentleman like your
father submit for an hour to the maltreatment of his young daughter and
the daughters of friends who confided in his choice of a tutor?

My answer is direct. We never reported the worst of our wrongs to
our parents. To “tell tales out of school” in that generation was
an offence the enormity of which I cannot make the modern student
comprehend. It was a flagrant misdemeanor, condemned by tradition, by
parental admonition, and by a code of honor accepted by us all. I have
known pupils to be expelled for daring to report at home the secrets
of what was a prison-house for three-fourths of every working-day.
And—strangest of all—their mates thenceforward shunned the tale-tellers
as sinners against scholastic and social laws.

“If you get a flogging at school, you will get another at home!” was a
stock threat that set the seal of silence upon the culprit’s lips. To
carry home the tale of unjust punishment meted out to a school-fellow
would be a gross breach of honorable usage.

The whole system smacked of inquisitorial methods, and gave the
reactionary impetus to the pendulum in the matter of family discipline
and school jurisdiction which helped on the coming of the Children’s
Age in which we now live.

The despotism of that direful period, full of portents and pain, may
have taught me fortitude. It awoke me to the possibilities of evil
hitherto undreamed of in my sunny life. I have lain awake late into the
night, again and again, smarting in the review of the day’s injuries,
and dreading what the morrow might bring of malicious injustice and
overt insult, and cudgelling my hot brain to devise some method of
revenge upon my tormentor. Childish schemes, all of them, but the
noxious seed was one with that which ripens into murder in the first
degree.

One absurd device that haunted and tempted me for weeks was that I
should steal into the tutor’s room some day, when he had gone to ride
or walk, and strew chopped horsehair between the sheets. The one
obstacle to the successful prosecution of the scheme was that we had
no white horses. Ours were dark bay and “blooded chestnut.” No matter
how finely I might chop the hairs, which would prick like pins and bite
like fleas, the color would make them visible when the sheets were
turned down.

It was a _crime_!—this initiation of a mere infant into the mysteries
of the innate possibilities of evil in human nature. I had learned
to _hate_ with all my heart and soul. In all my childish quarrels I
had never felt the temptation to lift my hand against a playmate. I
understood now that I could smite this tyrant to the earth if I had the
power and the opportunity. This lesson I can never forget, or forgive
him who taught it to me. It was a new and a soiled page in the book of
experience.

Despite the continual discouragement that attended the effort to keep
my promise to study diligently, I worked hard in school, partly from
love of learning, partly to please my parents—chiefly, it must be
confessed, because I shrank, as from the cut of a cowhide, from the
pitiless ridicule and abuse that followed upon the least lapse from
absolute perfection in recitation.

Mathematics was never my strong point, and the tutor quickly detected
this one of many weak joints in my armor. There was meaning in the grin
with which he informed me one day, not long after Christmas, that he
had set a test-sum for each of the second class in arithmetic.

“If you can do that sum without, any, help, from, anybody,” slowly,
the grin widening at each comma, “you may go on with the next chapter
in arithmetic. If not, you will be turned back to Simple Division. Of
course, _you_ will do yours, if nobody else can work out the answer!”

Sneer and taunt stung and burned, as he meant they should. I took the
slate from his hand, and carried it to my desk before glancing at it.
It was a _horrible_ sum! I knew it would be, and I forthwith made up my
mind not to try to do it. He might turn me back to Addition, for all I
cared. The worm had turned and stiffened in stubborn protest.

At recess I discovered that not another girl of the six in our class
had an imposition half so severe as my enemy had set for me. The effect
was totally unlike what he had anticipated. My spirit leaped to arms. I
would do that sum and keep up with my class—or _die_!

I bore the slate off to my room as soon as school was out that
afternoon, and wrought mightily upon the task until the supper-bell
rang. My work covered both sides of the slate, and after supper I
waylaid my sister in the hall and begged her to look at what I had
done. She was the crack arithmetician of the school, and I could trust
her decision. She sat down upon the stairs—I standing, wretched and
suspenseful, beside her—and went patiently over it all.

Then she said, gently and regretfully: “No, it is not right. I can’t,
of course, tell you what is wrong, but you have made a mistake.”

With a hot lump in my throat I would not let break into tears, I rushed
off up-stairs, rubbed out every figure of my making, and fell to work
anew upon the original example. Except when I obeyed the summons
to prayers, I appeared no more below that night. My sister found me
bent over the slate when she came up to bed, and said not a word to
distract my attention. By ten o’clock the room was so cold that I got
an old Scotch plaid of my father’s from the closet, and wrapped myself
in it. Still, my limbs were numb and my teeth chattered when, at _one
o’clock_ in the morning, I laid the slate by, in the joyous conviction
that I had conquered in the fight. I had invented a proof-method of
my own—truly ingenious in a child with no turn for mathematics—but
this I did not suspect. I honestly believed, instead, that it was an
inspiration from Him to whom I had been praying through all the hours
of agonized endeavor. I thanked the Author before I slept.

When the class was called upon to show their sums next morning, it
appeared, to my unspeakable amazement and rapture, that my example and
one other—that done by Sarah L., who was backward in figures, although
advanced in years—were right, and all the others wrong.

The gentle shepherd of our fold took up my slate again when the
examination was over, and eyed it sourly, his head on one side, his
fingers plucking at his lower lip, a trick which I knew prefaced
something particularly spiteful. Surely I had nothing to fear now?
Having wrung from him the reluctant admission that my work was correct,
I might rest upon my laurels.

I had underrated his capacity for evil-doing. When he glared at me over
the upper frame of the big slate, the too-familiar heart-nausea got
hold upon me.

“_You_”—he seldom deigned to address me by my proper name—“pretend to
tell me that nobody helped you with this sum?”

“Nobody!” I uttered, made bold by innocence.

“Ha-a-a-a!” malevolence triumphant in the drawl waxing into a snarl.
“As I happened to see you and your sister last night in the hall, and
heard you ask her to show you how to do it, that tale won’t go down, my
lady.”

“She didn’t help me—” I began, eagerly.

“_Silence!_” thumping the slate upon the table, and scowling
ferociously. “How dare you _lie_ to me?”

I glanced at Mea in an agony. She arose in her place, pale to the lips,
albeit she had never felt his wrath, but her voice was firm:

“I only told her the sum was not right. I did not tell her what part of
it was wrong.”

The blending of snarl and smile was something to be recollected for all
time. The smile was for her, the snarl for me.

“It is natural that your sister should try to defend you. But will you
please tell me, Miss Pert, what more help you could have wanted than
to be told by somebody who knew—as your sister did—that your sum was
wrong? Of course, you could rub out and begin again. But for her you
would not have tried a second time. Bring that sponge here!”

I obeyed.

“Take that slate!”

He made as if he would not contaminate his hand by passing it to me,
laying it on the table and pointing a disdainful finger at it.

Again I obeyed.

“Now, Miss Deceitful, wipe every figure off that slate, and never try
any such cock-and-bull story upon me again as long as you live! I am
too old a bird to be caught with _your_ chaff!”

He laughed aloud in savage glee, dismissed the class with a wave of his
hand, and called up the next.

I was turned back to Short Division, with the added stigma of
intentional deception and cheating shadowing me.

Nearly fifteen years after our first tutor withdrew his baleful
presence from our home, my husband was urging upon my brother Herbert
the claims of the ministry of reconciliation as the profession to which
the younger man was evidently called by nature and by Providence.
Herbert looked up with the frank smile those who knew him will never
forget. It was like the clear shining of the sweetest and purest soul
ever committed to mortal keeping.

“‘Plato! thou reasonest well!’ There is but one argument you have not
bowled over. I registered an oath—as bitter as that Hamilcar exacted of
Hannibal—when I was a boy, that I would thrash that cur Tayloe within
an inch of his life as soon as I should be big enough to do it. And it
wouldn’t be quite the thing to flog a brother clergyman. If anything
could keep me out of the pulpit, it would be the fact that he is in it.
That fellow’s cruelties scarred my memory for life, although I was not
seven years old when I knew him.”

In dismissing the disagreeable theme, I offer this bit of testimony
to the truth of my story of the reign of terror neither of us ever
forgave.

VIII

CALM AFTER STORM—OUR HANDSOME YANKEE GOVERNESS—THE NASCENT AUTHOR

AMONG the treasured relics of my youth is a steel engraving in a style
fashionable sixty years agone.

It appeared in _Godey’s Lady’s Book_, then in the heyday of
well-merited popularity. My mother was one of the earliest subscribers.
Every number was read aloud in the family circle gathered on cool
evenings about my mother’s work-stand. We had no ready-made furniture.
This piece was made to order, of solid mahogany, and is, in the
seventy-fifth year of a blameless life, in active use in my eldest
daughter’s household.

Cousin Mary, living on Erin Hill, in her stepfather’s house, took
_Graham’s Magazine_—_Godey’s_ only rival. She likewise subscribed for
the _Saturday Evening Courier_, and exchanged it regularly with my
mother for the _Saturday Evening Post_—all published in Philadelphia.
The _New York Mirror_, edited by N. P. Willis, George P. Morris, and
Theodore S. Fay, was another welcome guest in both families. For
Sunday reading we had the _New York Observer_, _The Watchman and
Observer_, _The Presbyterian_—religious weeklies that circulated in the
neighborhood for a fortnight, and were then filed for future reference.
We children had _Parley’s Magazine_ sent to us, as long ago as I can
recollect, by our grandmother. After the death of her second husband,
the good old deacon, and her removal to Virginia, which events were
coeval with the Tayloe dynasty, our father subscribed for _Parley’s_.

We had all the new books that he adjudged to be worth buying and
reading, watching eagerly for anything from Dickens, Marryat, and
Cooper, and devouring with avidity not excited by any novel, Stephens’s
_Travels in Arabia Petrea_ and in _Central America_, Bruce’s _Travels
in Abyssinia_, and the no less enchanting tales Mungo Park was telling
the world of his adventures in the Dark Continent.

“The chamber” was a big room on the first floor, and adjoined the
dining-room—so big that the wide high-poster, curtained and ceiled
with gayly figured chintz, in a far corner, left three-fourths of
the floor-space unoccupied. My mother’s bureau (another heirloom)
looked small beside the bed; a lounge was between the front windows;
rocking-chairs stood here and there; thick curtains, matching the
bed-hangings, shut out wintry gusts, and a great wood fire leaped and
laughed upon the pipe-clayed hearth from the first of November to
the middle of March. A blaze of dry sticks was kindled there every
morning and evening up to July 4th. The younger children were dressed
and undressed there on cool days. Our mother held, in advance of her
contemporaries, that an open fire was a germ-killer.

Why do I single out that particular engraving for a place in these
reminiscences?

It graced the first page of the November number of _Godey’s Lady’s
Book_. The evening was wild with wind and blustering rain, the fire
roaring defiance as the loosely fitting sashes rattled and the showers
lashed the panes. There were five of us girls, and each had some bit
of handiwork. To sit idle while the reading went on was almost a
misdemeanor.

Dorinda Moody, Virginia Lee Patterson, Musidora Owen, Mea, and myself
were classmates and cronies. My mother was reader that evening, and as
she opened the magazine at the frontispiece, Virginia Patterson and I
called out:

“Why, that is a picture of Miss Wilson!”

We all leaned over the stand to look at the engraving, which my mother
held up to general view.

“It _is_ like her!” she assented.

The young lady across the table blushed brightly in uttering a
laughing disclaimer, and my mother proceeded to explain the extreme
improbability of our hypothesis. Then she read the story, which, to the
other girls, settled the matter. It was called “Our Keziah,” and began
by telling that the title of the portrait was a misnomer. It was no
“fancy sketch,” but a likeness of “Our Keziah.”

Silenced but not convinced, I restrained the impulse to tell my mates
that stories might be made out of nothing. I knew it, and so did my
only confidante, the handsome governess from Massachusetts, who had
been installed in our school-room since June.

Mr. Tayloe had gone back to the theological factory to prosecute the
studies that were to fit him to proclaim the gospel of love and peace.
On the last day of the session he had preached us a short sermon,
seated in his chair at the head of the room, twirling the seal dangling
from his watch-chain; his legs crossed, the left hand tucked between
them; his brows drawn together in the ugly horseshoe we knew well and
dreaded much.

He must have descanted darkly upon the transitoriness of earthly joys
and the hard road to heaven, for every girl in school was in tears
except Mea and myself.

As for my wicked self, as I privately confessed subsequently to my
father’s young partner, “Thad” Ivey—“I could think of nothing but
Franklin’s grace over the whole barrel.” In the ten months of his
incumbency of the tutorship, the incipient divine had never so much as
hinted to one of us that she had a soul.

“I suppose I ought to say that it is like returning thanks over the
empty barrel,” I subjoined, encouraged by my interlocutor’s keen
relish of the irreverent and impertinent comment upon the scene of the
afternoon. “Thad” and I were great friends, and I had an idea that our
views upon this subject did not differ widely.

Mrs. Willis D., our nearest neighbor, was with my mother, and when
the tear-bedraggled procession from the school-room filed into the
porch where the two friends were sitting with three other of the
villagers, and Virginia Winfree threw herself into her aunt’s arms with
a strangled sob of: “Oh, Aunt Betty, he did preach _so_ hard!”—the
dry-eyed composure of the Hawes girls was regarded with disfavor.

“Your daughters have so much fortitude!” remarked one, mopping her
girl’s eyes with a compassionate handkerchief.

Another, “They show wonderful self-control for their age.”

Even our sensible mother was slightly scandalized by what she “hoped,”
deprecatingly, “was not want of feeling.”

Tears were fashionable, and came easily in those early times, and
weeping in church was such a godly exercise that conversation or
exhortation upon what was, in technical phrase, “the subject of
religion,” brought tears as naturally as the wringing of a moist
sponge, water.

“What did you cry for?” demanded I, scornfully, of Anne Carus, when I
got her away from the porch party. “You hate him as much as I do!”

“Oh—I don’t—know!” dubiously. “People always cry when anybody makes a
farewell speech.”

So the Reverend-that-was-to-be Tayloe took his shadow from our door
and his beak from out my heart. The quotation is not a mere figure of
speech.

The handsome Yankee governess opened the door of a new life for me.
Some of the parents complained that she “did not bring the children
on as fast as Mr. Tayloe had done.” Me, she inspired. I comprehended,
as by a special revelation, that hard study might be a joy, and gain
of knowledge rapture. With her I began Vose’s _Astronomy_, Comstock’s
_Natural Philosophy_, and Lyell’s _Elements of Geology_, and revelled
in them all. Her smile was my present reward, and when she offered to
join me in my seemingly aimless rambles in the woods and “old fields,”
I felt honored as by a queen’s favor. We sat together upon mossy stumps
and the banks of the brook I had until then called “a branch” in native
Virginian dialect—talking! talking! talking! for hours, of nymphs,
hamadryads, satyrs, and everything else in the world of imagination and
nature.

She wrote poetry, and she kept a diary; she had travelled in ten states
of the Union, and lived in three different cities; and she never tired
of answering questions as to what she had seen in her wanderings. Her
nature was singularly sweet and sunny, and I never, in all the ten
months of our intimacy, saw in language and deportment aught that was
not refined and gentle.

With her I began to write school “compositions.” The “big girls” wrote
them under the Tayloe régime—neat little essays upon “The Rose,”
“The Lily,” “Morning,” “Night,” and all of the Four Seasons. Never a
syllable had I lisped to one of them of the growing hoard of rhymes,
tales, and sketches in the shabby, corpulent portfolio I had fashioned
with my own fingers and kept in the bottom of a trunk under flannel
skirts and last year’s outgrown frocks.

I brought them out of limbo to show to Miss Wilson, by timid degrees,
and new manuscripts as fast as they were written. She praised them, but
not without discrimination. She suggested topics, and how to treat
them. I never carried an imperfect lesson to her in class. Intellect
and heart throve under her genial influence as frost-hindered buds
under May sunshine.

“The Fancy Sketch” was so like her it was natural I should refuse
to believe the resemblance accidental. It was as plain as day to my
apprehension that the unknown artist had seen her somewhere, and,
unseen by her, had dogged her footsteps until he fixed her face in his
mind’s eye, then transferred it to canvas.

It was a shock when the probability of his pursuit of her to Virginia,
avowing his passion and being rewarded by the gift of her hand, was
dissipated by the apparition of a matter-of-fact personage, McPhail by
name, who was neither poet nor artist. He had been betrothed to our
governess for ever so long. He spent a fortnight at the “Old Tavern,”
opposite our house, and claimed all of the waking hours she could spare
from school duties.

The finale of the romance was that she went back to the North at the
end of her year’s engagement with us, and married him, settling, we
heard, in what sounded like an outlandish region—Cape Neddick, on the
Maine coast.

A COLLEGE NEIGHBORHOOD—THE WORLD WIDENS—A BELOVED TUTOR—COLONIZATION
DREAMS AND DISAPPOINTMENT—MAJOR MORTON

“RICEHILL, _February 3d, 1843._

“DEAR DORINDA,—I suppose mother has told you of our
privileges and pleasant situation. I only want some of my
friends to enjoy it with me to make me perfectly happy. Oh,
how I wish you were here to go to the debating society with
me and to hear the young men preach! I went to college last
night to hear some speeches delivered by the Senior Class.
They have questions given, and one takes one side and one
another. The two best speeches were made on the question
‘Is a love of fame more injurious than beneficial?’ One
young man took the affirmative, and one the negative. They
made the best speeches. Then the question was whether ‘the
execution of Charles I. was just or not.’ Both of these
speakers needed prompting; that is, one of those who had
spoken or was to speak took the speaker’s speech which he
had written off, and, if he forgot, set him right again. The
young man who performed this office was very well qualified
for it; he spoke in a low, distinct tone, and seemed to find
no difficulty in reading the writing. They speak again in
about six weeks. But the chief enjoyments I have are the
religious privileges. I can go to the prayer-meeting at the
Seminary every Wednesday, and can hear three sermons every
Sunday. Don’t you wish you were here, too? Aunt Rice and
sister went to the Court House last Sunday evening to hear
Mr. Ballantine’s lecture, and as they did not come back very
soon the young men came in to supper. While sister and Aunt
Rice were away I wrote an account of Mr. Hoge’s and Mr.
Howison’s sermons. Well, when Mr. Howison came in, ‘Well,
Miss Virginia, have you been by yourself all this evening?’
‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Did you not feel very lonely?’ ‘Not at all.’
‘Why, what have you been doing?’ ‘I have been writing.’ He
paused, laughed, and then said, ‘And what have you been
writing?’ And when I told him, I wish you could have seen
him! He looked at me for a while as if he did not understand
me, and then laughed heartily. He is very easy to laugh, but
his manners are as different from Mr. Tayloe’s as can be—but
hush! what am I drawing comparisons for? I do not feel in
the least restrained where he is, and can talk to him better
than to any other gentleman here. Would not you like to have
such a teacher?

“_Feb. 6th._—I wonder when father will come up; I have
been looking for him every day for more than a week. Mr.
Nevius was here the other day. I inquired after you, but
he had never seen you when he went to Mr. Miller’s. I was
quite disappointed, and I wish you would show yourself next
time—that is, if you can.

“I very often think of the times we ate roasted corn and
turnips in the midst of the corn-field; don’t you remember
the evening when the supper-bell rang and we hid our corn
among the leaves of the corn that was growing? I never
knew how much I loved you or any of my friends until I was
separated from them. Mr. Nevius brought a letter for sister
from Anne Carus. She still writes in that desponding style
you know she was so remarkable for in school, but I am glad
to see from her letter that she has come to the conclusion
to be contented with her lot.

“I hope you do not indulge in such feelings, and, indeed,
you have no reason to do so, for you are only six miles from
your mother and friends, and you are with your brother, and
I think you will find a valuable friend in Malvina. How do
you like your new teacher and situation? If you are ever
home-sick, study hard and forget it.

“I have made many pleasant acquaintances here, and among
them Mr. Tayloe’s flame! I do not think they are engaged,
but he goes there very frequently, and the students plague
him half to death about her, and he never denies it. He
boards here. She has a fair skin, blue eyes, and almost red
hair, but she is very pretty ‘for all that.’ She is about
seventeen. There is a little girl about my own age here, who
takes your place in my affections while _here_; she is a
granddaughter of Professor Wilson, and lives in his house.
Her name is Louisa Caruthers. I will speak to Lou about you,
for you _must_ be acquainted. But a truce to this nonsense!
Do not show this letter to any one of Mr. Miller’s family,
for I feel restrained if I think that my letters are to
be shown to any except my particular friends. I will not
show yours. Show this to mother, your mother, E. D., and V.
Winfree. Give my respects to all Mr. M.’s family, take some
of my best love for yourself, and divide the rest among my
friends.

“Now farewell, do not forget me, and I will ever be

“Your sincerely attached friend,
“M. V. H.”

The foregoing priggish and stilted epistle begins the next chapter of
my life-story.

After Miss Wilson’s departure, and divers unsuccessful attempts to
obtain a successor to his liking, my father determined upon a bold
departure from the beaten path of traditional and conventional usage in
the matter of girls’ education.

The widow of Reverend Doctor Rice lived in the immediate neighborhood
of Union Theological Seminary, founded by her husband, and of which
he was the first president. The cluster of dwellings that had grown
up around the two institutions of learning—Hampden-Sidney College and
the School of Divinity—made, with the venerable “College Church,” an
educational centre for a community noted for generations past for
intelligence and refinement. Prince Edward, Charlotte, and Halifax were
closely adjacent counties peopled by what nobody then ridiculed as some
of the “first families” of the state. Venables, Carringtons, Reades,
Bouldins, Watkinses, Randolphs, Cabells, Mortons, Lacys—had borne a
conspicuous part in state, church, and social history. The region was
aristocratic—and Presbyterian. There was much wealth, for tobacco was
the most profitable crop of Central and Southern Virginia, and the
plantations bordering the Appomattox River were a mine of riches to
the owners. Stately mansions—most of them antedating the Revolutionary
War—crowned gently rolling hills rising beyond the river, each, with
its little village of domestic offices, great stables, tobacco-barns,
and “quarters,” making up an establishment that was feudal in character
and in power.

Every planter was college-bred and a politician.

The local atmosphere of “College Hill” was not unlike that of an Old
World university town. The professors of the sister institutions of
learning occupied houses in the vicinity of seminary and college, and
the quaint church, the bricks mellowed to red-brown by time stood
equidistant from both.

One feature of the church impressed my youthful imagination. “Cousin
Ben,” of Montrose—afterward the senior professor in the seminary, and
as Rev. B. M. Smith, D.D., known throughout the Southern and Northern
Presbyterian Church as a leader in learning and in doctrine—had,
when a student of Hampden-Sidney, brought from Western Virginia a
sprig of Scotch broom in his pocket. “The Valley”—now a part of West
Virginia—was mainly settled by Scotch-Irish emigrants, and the broom
was imported with their household stuff. The boy set the withered slip
in the earth just inside of the gate of the church-yard. In twenty
years it encompassed the walls with a setting of greenery, overran the
enclosure, escaped under the fence, and raced rampant down the hill,
growing tall and lush wherever it could get a foothold. In blossom-time
the mantle of gold was visible a mile away. The smell of broom always
brings back to me a vision of that ugly (but dear) red-brown church
and the goodly throng, pouring from doors and gate at the conclusion
of the morning service, filling yard and road—well-dressed, well-born
county folk, prosperous and hospitable, and so happily content with
their lot and residence as to believe that no other people was so
blessed of the Lord they served diligently and with godly fear. Without
the church-yard were drawn up cumbrous family coaches, which conveyed
dignified dames and dainty daughters to and from the sanctuary.
Beyond these was a long line of saddle-horses waiting for their
masters—blooded hunters for the young men, substantial cobs for their
seniors. None except invalided men deigned to accept seats in carriages.

As may be gathered from the formally familiar and irresistibly funny
epistle, indited when I had been four months an insignificant actor
in the scene I have sketched, “religious privileges” was no idle term
then and there. Our social outings were what I have indicated. There
were no concerts save the “Monthly Concert of Prayer for Foreign
Missions” (held simultaneously in every church in the state and
Union); not a theatre in Virginia, excepting one in Richmond, banned
for the religious public by the awful memories of the burning of
the playhouse in 1811. “Dining-days,” which their descendants name
“dinner-parties,” were numerous, and there was much junketing from one
plantation to another, a ceaseless drifting back and forth of young
people, overflowing, now this house, now that, always certain of a
glad welcome, and contriving, without the adventitious aid of cards or
dancing, to lead joyous, full lives.

Once a week the community turned out, _en masse_, for church-going.
They were a devout folk—those F. F. V.’s, at which we mock now—and
considered it a public duty not to forsake the assembling of themselves
together for worship, prayers, and sermons. These latter were
intellectual, no less than spiritual pabulum. Oratory had not gone out
of fashion in these United States, and in Virginia it was indigenous
to the soil. Pulpit eloquence was in its glory, and speech-making at
barbecues, anniversaries, and political gatherings, in court-rooms and
upon “stumps,” was an art learned by boys in roundabouts and practised
as long as veterans could stand upon their shrunken calves.

People flocked to church to attend reverently upon divine service, and,
when the benediction was pronounced, greeted friends and neighbors,
cheerily chatting in the aisles and exchanging greetings between the
benches they had occupied during the services—men and women sitting
apart, as in the Quaker meeting-house—as freely as we now salute and
stroll with acquaintances in the _foyer_ of the opera-house.

Such were some of the advantages and enjoyments included in the
elastic phrase “religious privileges,” vaunted by the epistolary
twelve-year-old.

“Rice Hill” was a commodious dwelling, one mile from the seminary, and
not quite so far from the college. Doctor Rice had literally spent and
been spent in the work which had crowned his ministry—the foundation
and endowment of a Southern School of Divinity. At his death, friends
and admirers, North and South, agreed that a suitable monument to him
would be a home for the childless widow. She had a full corps of family
servants, who had followed her to her various residences, and she eked
out her income by supplying table-board to students from college and
seminary. Thus much in explanation of the references to the coming in
of “the gentlemen” in the “evening”—rural Virginian for afternoon.

A kindly Providence had appointed unto us these pleasant paths at the
impressionable period of our lives. The goodliest feature in that
appointment was that Robert Reid Howison, subsequently “LL.D.,” and
the author of a _History of Virginia_, and _The Student’s History of
the United States_, became the tutor of my sister and myself.

He came to us at twelve o’clock each day, and we dined at half-past
two. Hence, all our studying was done out of school-hours. The
arrangement was eccentric in the extreme in the eyes of my father’s
acquaintances and critics. Other girls were in the class-room from
nine until twelve, and after recess had a session of two hours more.
That this, the most _outré_ of “Mr. Hawes’s experiments,” would be
a ludicrous failure was a foregone conclusion. Whereas, the cool
brain had reckoned confidently upon the fidelity of the tutor and the
conscientiousness of pupils accustomed to the discipline of a home
where implicit obedience was the law.

Never had learners a happier period of pupilage, and the cordial
relations between teacher and students testified to the mutual desire
to meet, each, the requirements of the other party to the compact.

To the impetus given our minds by association with the genial scholar
who directed our studies, was added the stimulus of the table-talk that
went on in our hearing daily. It was the informal, suggestive chat of
men eager for knowledge, comparing notes and opinions, and discussing
questions of deep import—historical, biological, and theological. In
the main, they were a bright set of fellows; in the main, likewise,
gentlemen at heart and in bearing. It goes without saying that the
exception in my mind to the latter clause was our late and hated tutor.
I might write to Dorinda, in constrained goody-goodyishness, of the
impropriety of “drawing comparisons” between him and Mr. Howison,
whose “easy” laugh and winning personality wrought powerfully upon my
childish fancy. At heart I loved the one and consistently detested the
other.

To this hour I recall the gratified thrill of conscious security and
triumph that coursed through my minute being when, Mr. Tayloe having
taken it upon himself to reprove me for something I said—pert, perhaps,
but not otherwise offensive—Mr. Howison remarked, with no show of
temper, but firmly:

“Mr. Tayloe, you will please recollect that this young lady is now
under _my_ care!”

He laughed the next moment, as if to pass the matter off pleasantly,
but all three of us comprehended what was implied.

We began French with our new tutor, and geometry! I crossed the _Pons
Asinorum_ in January, and went on with Euclid passably well, if not
creditably. Mathematics was never my strong point. The patience and
perfect temper of the preceptor never failed him, no matter how far I
came short of what he would have had me accomplish in that direction.

“Educate them as if they were boys and preparing for college,” my
father had said, and he was obeyed.

Beyond and above the benefit derived from the study of text-books
was the education of daily contact with a mind so richly stored with
classic and modern literature, so keenly alive to all that was worthy
in the natural, mental, and spiritual world as that of Robert Howison.
He had been graduated at the University of Virginia, and for a year or
more had practised law in Richmond, resigning the profession to begin
studies that would prepare him for what he rated as a higher calling.
My debt to him is great, and inadequately acknowledged in these halting
lines.

Were I required to tell what period of my nonage had most to do with
shaping character and coloring my life, I should reply, without
hesitation, “The nine months passed at Rice Hill.” A new, boundless
realm of thought and feeling was opened to the little provincial from
a narrow, neutral-tinted neighborhood. I was a dreamer by nature and
by habit, and my dreams took on a new complexion; a born story-maker,
and a wealth of material was laid to my hand. We were a family of mad
book-lovers, and the libraries of seminary and college were to my eyes
twin Golcondas of illimitable possibilities. Up to now, novel-reading
had been a questionable delight in which I hardly dared indulge freely.
I was taught to abhor deceit and clandestine practices, and my father
had grave scruples as to the wisdom of allowing young people to devour
fiction. We might read magazines, as we might have confectionery, in
limited supplies. A bound novel would be like a dinner of mince-pie and
sweetmeats, breeding mental and moral indigestion.

So, when Mr. Howison not only permitted, but advised the perusal of
Scott’s novels and poems, I fell upon them with joyful surprise that
kindled into rapture as I became familiar with the Wizard and his work.
We lived in the books we read then, discussing them at home and abroad,
as we talk now of living issues and current topics. _The Heart of
Midlothian_, _Marmion_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, _Peveril of the
Peak_, and _Waverley_ were read that winter on stormy afternoons and
during the long evenings that succeeded the early supper. Sometimes Mr.
Howison lingered when his comrades had gone back to their dormitories,
and took his part in the fascinating entertainment. Usually the group
was composed of Aunt Rice, her sister (Mrs. Wharey, lately widowed, who
was making arrangements to settle upon an adjoining plantation), Mrs.
Wharey’s daughter, another “Cousin Mary,” my sister, and myself.

Aunt Rice was a “character” in her way and day; shrewd, kindly
sympathetic, active in church and home, and with a marvellous
repertoire of tale and anecdote that made her a most entertaining
companion. “The Seminary” was her foster-child; the students had from
her maternal interest and affection. Like other gentlewomen of her
time and latitude, she was well versed in the English classics and in
translations from the Latin and Greek. Pope, Swift, and Addison were
household favorites, and this winter she was reading with delight the
just-published _History of the Reformation_, by Merle d’Aubigné. She
always wore black—merino in the morning, black silk or satin in the
afternoon—and a regulation old lady’s cap with ribbon strings tied
under a double chin, and I think of her as always knitting lamb’s-wool
stockings. Hers was a pronounced individuality in every capacity she
assumed to fill—mistress, housewife, neighbor, and general well-wisher.
She never scolded, yet she managed the dozen or more servants that
had come down to her by ordinary generation—seven of them men and
boys—judiciously and well. Even then she was meditating a scheme she
afterward put into successful execution—namely, liberating all her
slaves and sending them to Liberia. To this end she had taught them
to read and write, and each boy was trained in some manual trade.
She superintended their religious education as faithfully. Every
Sunday night all the negroes who were beyond infancy assembled in the
dining-room for Scripture readings expounded by her own pleasant voice,
and for recitations in the Shorter Catechism and Village Hymn-book.
They were what was called in the neighborhood vernacular, “a likely
lot.” The boys and men were clever workers in their several lines of
labor. The women were skilled in the use of loom, spinning-wheel, and
needle, and excellent cooks. One and all, they were made to understand
from babyhood what destiny awaited them so soon as they were equipped
for the enterprise.

I wish I could add that the result met her fond expectations.
While the design was inchoate, her example served as a stock and
animating illustration of the wisdom of those who urged upon Virginia
slaveholders the duty of returning the blacks to the land from which
their fathers were stolen. Colonization was boldly advocated in
public and in private, and the old lady was a fervent convert. In the
fulness of time she sent out five families, strong and healthy, as
well-educated as the average Northern farmer and mechanic. She sold
Rice Hill and well-nigh impoverished herself in her old age to fit
out the colony with clothes and household goods, and went to spend
the few remaining years of her life in the home of her sister. The
great labor of her dreams and hope accomplished, she chanted a happy
“Nunc Dimittis” to sympathizer and to doubter. She had solved the Dark
Problem that baffled the world’s most astute statesmen. If all who
hearkened unto her would do likewise, the muttering of the hell that
was already moving from its depth under the feet of the nation, would
be silenced forever.

The competent colonists had hardly had time to send back to their
emancipated mistress news of their safe arrival in the Promised Land,
when they found themselves in grievous straits. These, duly reported
to Aunt Rice, were African fevers that exhausted their strength
and consumed their stock of ready money; the difficulty of earning
a livelihood while they were ignorant of the language and customs
of the natives; lack of suitable clothing; scarcity of provisions,
and a waiting-list of etceteras that rent the tender heart of the
benefactress with unavailing pity. She was importuned for money, for
clothes, for groceries—even that she would, for the love of Heaven and
the sake of old times, send them a barrel of rice—which, infidels to
her faith in colonization did not fail to remind her, was to be had in
Liberia for the raising.

The stout-hearted liberator never owned in word her disappointment
at the outcome of long years of patient preparation and personal
privation, or gave any sign of appreciation of the truth that her
grand solution of the Dark Problem was the song of the drunkard and a
by-word and a hissing in the mouth of the unbeliever. But she ceased
long before her death, in 1858, to tax her listeners’ patience by
setting forth the beauties of colonization as the practical abolition
of negro slavery in America. If her ancestors had sinned in bringing
the race into bondage, and her teeth were thereby set on edge, she hid
her hurt. This significant silence was the only token by which her best
friends divined her consciousness of the humiliating revelation which
had fallen into the evening of a well-spent life. She had exchanged for
the five families born and reared in her home, dependence, comfort, and
happiness, for freedom, pauperism, and discontent. The cherished bud
had been passing sweet. The fruit was as bitter as gall.

At the time of which I am writing, the dream-bubble was at the
brightest and biggest. She was in active correspondence with the
officers of the Colonization Society; subscribed to and read
colonization publications, and dealt out excerpts from the same to all
who would listen; was busy, sanguine, and bright, beholding herself,
in imagination, the leader in a crusade that would wipe the stain of
slavery from her beloved state.

One event of that wonderful winter was a visit paid to Aunt Rice by her
aged father, Major James Morton, of High Hill, Cumberland County, the
“Old Solid Column” of Revolutionary story. The anecdote of Lafayette’s
recognition of his former brother-in-arms was related in an earlier
chapter. It was treasured in the family as a bit of choice silver
would be prized. I had heard it once and again, and had constructed my
own portrait of the stout-hearted and stout-bodied warrior. Surprise
approximated dismay when I behold a withered, tremulous old man,
enfeebled in mind almost to childishness, his voice breaking shrilly as
he talked—a pitiable, crumbling wreck of the stately column.

He had definite ideas upon certain subjects still, and was doughty in
their defence. For example, during this visit to his daughter, he sat
one evening in the chimney-corner, apparently dozing, while a party of
young people were discussing the increasing facilities of travel by
steam, and contrasting them with the slow methods of their fathers. The
Major drowsed on, head sunken into his military stock, eyes closed, and
jaw drooping—the impersonation of senile decay—when somebody spoke of a
trip up the Hudson to West Point the preceding summer.

The veteran raised himself as if he had been shaken by the shoulder.

“That is not true!” he said, doggedly.

“But, Major,” returned the surprised narrator, “I did go! There is a
regular line of steamers up the river.”

The old war-horse reared his head and beat the floor with an angry heel.

“I say it is not true! It could not be true! General Washington had a
big chain stretched across the river after Arnold tried to sell West
Point, so that no vessel could get up to the fort. And, sir!” bringing
his cane down upon the hearth with a resounding thump, his voice clear
and resonant, “there is not that man upon earth who would dare take
down that chain. Why, sir, _General Washington put it there_!”

A fragment of the mighty chain, forged in the mountains of New Jersey,
lies upon the parade-ground at West Point.

Forty years thereafter I laid a caressing hand upon a huge link of
the displaced boom, and told the anecdote to my twelve-year-old boy,
adding, as if the stubborn loyalist had said it in my ear,

“And there it stands until this day,
To witness if I lie.”

We read _Ivanhoe_ in the open air when the spring wore into summer.
The afternoons were long, and when study-hours were over we were wont
to repair to the roomy back-porch, shaded by vines, and looking across
a little valley, at the bottom of which were a bubbling spring, a
twisting brook, and a tiny pool as round as a moon, to the hill crowned
by “Morton,” a plain but spacious house occupied by the Wharey family.

Not infrequently a seminary student, attracted by Mary Wharey’s
brunette comeliness and happy temper, would join our group and lend a
voice in the reading. Moses Drury Hoge, a cousin of my mother and of
Aunt Rice, was with us at least twice a week, basking in the summer
heat like a true son of the tropics. He was a tutor in Hampden-Sidney
while a divinity student, and, as was proved by his subsequent
career, was the superior of his fellows in oratorical gifts and other
endowments that mark the youth for success from the beginning of the
race. I think he was born sophisticated. Already his professors yielded
him something that, while it was not homage in any sense of the word,
yet singled him out as one whose marked individuality and brilliant
talents gave him the right to speak with authority. At twenty-three,
without other wealth than his astute brain and ready wits, his future
was sure.

He won in after years the title of “the Patrick Henry of the Southern
Pulpit.”

Of him I shall have occasion to speak further as my story progresses.

FAMILY LETTERS—COMMENCEMENT AT HAMPDEN-SIDNEY—THEN AND NOW

“RICHMOND, _June 10th, 1843._

“MY DEAR WIFE,—After a fatiguing day it is with great
pleasure I sit down to have a little chat with you, and to
inform you of our progress. Were I disposed to give credit
to lucky and unlucky days, a little incident occurred on
our way down which would have disturbed me very much. We
were going on at a reasonable rate when, to our surprise,
the front of the ‘splendid line of coach’ assumed a strange
position, and for a moment I thought we should be wrecked,
but it was only minus a wheel—one of the front ones having
taken leave of us and journeying, ‘singly and alone,’ on the
other side of the turnpike. We were soon ‘all right,’ and
arrived here in good health but much fatigued. Mother has
hardly got rested yet, but thinks another quiet day will be
sufficient, and that she will be ready to start on Monday
morning and be able to hold out to go through without again
stopping. We have passed over the most fatiguing part of our
journey. We shall leave on Monday morning by the railroad,
and, unless some accident should happen on the way, expect
to be in Boston on Wednesday about 9 o’clock A.M. It is my
intention to keep on, unless mother should require rest,
more than can be had on the line of travel.... Well, love,
are you not tired of this overparticularity about business?
I will not weary you any longer with it. I have never left
home with a stronger feeling of regret than at the present
time, and it appears that the older I get, the greater the
trial to stay away. Now you will say that it is because you
become more and more interesting. Well, it must be so, for
I cannot discover any other cause. Do not let it be long
before you write.

“The heat, wind, and dust of the city to-day have put me
entirely out of trim for writing, and my talent is but small
even under the most favorable circumstances. By-the-bye,
called on Mrs. D. last evening to deliver a message from Mr.
D. _Quite_ a pleasant ten minutes’ affair, and was excused.
Herbert must save some of those nice plants for that box to
be placed on a pole, and tell him if he is a good boy we
will try and have a nice affair for the little birds. My
_man_ must have a hand in the work, if it be only to look
on, and Alice can do the talking part. Don’t let Virginia
take to her chamber. Keep her circulating about the house in
all dry weather; the wind will not injure her, unless it be
quite damp, at least so I think.

“_Sunday, 11th._—Attended Doctor Plumer’s church this
morning, and heard a young man, the son of one of the
professors at Princeton, preach. The sermon was good, but
should have preferred the Doctor. Morning rainy and no one
in from Olney.

“_Evening._—Attended Mr. Magoon’s church. He preached from
the words, ‘Be not deceived, God is not mocked,’ etc. A
good, practical sermon; he alluded to ministers and church
members away from home, and showed them in many cases to
be mockers of God, and instanced inconsistencies, all of
which he termed ‘mockery.’ Expect to-night to hear Doctor
Plumer. Now, love, you have a full history up to the time of
our departure. Write to me soon, and, after telling about
yourself, the children, and servants, give me an account
of store, farming, and gardening operations. Those large
sheets will hold a great deal, if written very close. Kiss
Alice and the baby for father. Tell Herbert and Horace that
father wishes them to be good boys and learn fast. And now,
dear Anna, I must bid you adieu, commending you and our dear
ones to the care of Him whose mercies have been so largely
bestowed on us in days past. May He preserve you from all
evil and cause you to dwell in perfect peace.”

The foregoing extracts from a letter written by my father during the
(to us) “wonderful summer” of our sojourn in Prince Edward had to do
with the periodical visit paid by my grandmother to her Massachusetts
home. I am deeply impressed in the perusal of these confidential
epistles with the absolute dependence of the strong man—whom mere
acquaintances rated as reserved to sternness, and singularly
undemonstrative, even to his friends—upon the gentle woman who was,
I truly believe, the one and only love of his lifetime. He talked
to her by tongue and by pen of every detail of business; she was
the confidante of every plan, however immature; she, and she alone,
fathomed the depths of a soul over which Puritan blood and training
impelled him to cast a veil. In all this he had not a secret from her.
Portions of the letter which I have omitted go into particulars of
transactions that would interest few women.

No matter how weary he was after a day of travel or work, he had always
time to “talk it out” with his _alter ego_. The term has solemn force,
thus applied. In the injunction to write of domestic, gardening, and
farming affairs, he brings in “the store,” now of goodly proportions
and “departments,” and into which she did not set foot once a week, and
then as any other customer might. “Those large sheets will hold a great
deal if written very close,” he says, archly. They had evidently been
provided for this express purpose before he left home.

One paragraph in the exscinded section of the letter belongs to a day
and system that have lapsed almost from the memory of the living.

An infant of Mary Anne, my mother’s maid, was ill with whooping-cough
when the master took his journey northward.

“I am quite anxious to hear how Edgar is,” he writes. “I fear the case
may prove fatal, and am inclined to blame myself for leaving home
before it was decided. Yet I know he is in good hands, and that you
have done and will do everything necessary for his comfort. Also that,
in the event of his death, all that is proper will be attended to. When
I get home the funeral shall be preached, of which you will please
inform his parents.”

No word of written or spoken comfort would do more to soothe the hearts
of the bereaved parents than the assurance that the six-months-old baby
should have his funeral sermon in good and regular order. The discourse
was seldom preached at the time of interment. Weeks, and sometimes
months, intervened before the friends and relatives could be convened
with sufficient pomp and circumstance to satisfy the mourners. I have
attended services embodying a long sermon, eulogistic of the deceased
and admonitory of the living, when the poor mortal house of clay had
mouldered in the grave for half a year. I actually knew of one funeral
of a wife that was postponed by untoward circumstances until, when
a sympathizing community was convoked to listen to the sermon, the
ex-widower sat in the front seat as chief mourner with a second wife
and her baby beside him. And the wife wore a black gown with black
ribbon on her bonnet, out of respect to her predecessor!

They were whites, and church members in good and regular standing.

Little Edgar died the day after my father took the train from Richmond
for the fast run through to Boston—in two days and two nights! When
the master got home after a month’s absence, the funeral sermon was
preached in old Petersville Church, three miles from the Court House,
on a Sunday afternoon, and the parents and elder children were conveyed
thither in the family carriage, driven by Spotswood, who would now be
the “coachman.” Then he was the “carriage-driver.” They took time for
everything then-a-days, and plenty of it.

In September,

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