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MARION HARLAND’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

    THE STORY OF A LONG LIFE

    HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
    NEW YORK AND LONDON
    MCMX

    Copyright, 1910, by HARPER & BROTHERS
    ————
    _All rights reserved_
    ————
    Published April, 1910

    _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

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.

II

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.

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_!

IV

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!”

V

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.

VI

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