I know there are those who will kindly regard these reminiscences of
things, trifling, it may be, in themselves, but affording a glimpse of
manners perhaps already forgotten by most or all of those who were
formerly more or less conversant with them, and which may prove of some
interest in the future. We had spent our Thanksgiving at home, in the
year 18--, but went all together to the farm of our uncle Richard, who
was of the Episcopal Church, for the celebration of Christmas; for many
of his persuasion, at that time, regarded "Thanksgiving" pretty much as
the Highlander, in Scott's novel, did "ta little government Sunday, tat
tey call ta Fast." He was a well-to-do farmer, at a place within easy
reach of the town in which we lived, and where very few were at all
rich, even according to the former moderate standard of wealth, and most
people were poor, or at least depended on their daily labor for their
daily bread. Those were very hard times following upon the war; and that
had followed fast upon the Great Fire, which reduced to ruin almost the
entire central business part of the town. Our family had suffered private
losses, too, by a swindling failure on an extensive scale,--a rare
incident in those days;[7] and again by the embargo and the war, most
of my mother's limited means having been invested in one vessel after
another, employed in the coasting trade, and this source of income at
length stopped altogether. Still, people bore up bravely against these
misfortunes, and showed quite as much spirit and hardihood as in these
latter times, and got along decently, after a fashion. To be sure, the
proclamation of Peace, a few years before, had revived all hearts; though
I heard of a washerwoman engaged in her avocation, while the bells were
ringing, who, on learning the cause of jubilation, peevishly
exclaimed,--"Peace! peace! what's peace, when there's no water?"[8] Our
Thanksgiving had been a cheerful one, though colored, as such
anniversaries are likely to be, with recollections of the absent, or the
dead; for the memory of my father was always present to my mother, then
and during a long widowhood of almost half a century, and my older
brothers were at sea. My mother was an excellent housekeeper, and we had
plenty of the usual belongings of the festival, so eagerly looked forward
to by the young, and something to bestow upon others not so well
supplied. It was the practice of some of this class to knock at the doors
of those thought to be better off, on the evening before, begging
"something for Thanksgiving;" and, by way of a joke, the children of
comfortable neighbors and friends would often array themselves in
cast-off bizarre habiliments, and come in bands of three or four to the
houses of those whom they knew, preferring the same request. Ordinarily,
the disguise was readily detected. Sometimes the little mimics would come
in, and keep up the show and the fun for a while; but for the most part
their courage failed them at the threshold, and they scurried away,
shouting for glee, almost before they got any answer to their mock
petitions. It was a queer fancy, thus to simulate poverty; but kings have
sometimes done so. Did not James of Scotland find amusement in roaming
through a portion of his domain, as a "gaberlunzie-man?" Yes--and even
composed a famous ballad to celebrate his exploits in this humble way. In
the evening, we had a lively company, regaled with nuts, apples, and
cider; and my grandmother, who indulged in the old-fashioned practice,
that is for females, of smoking a pipe, sat in the chimney-corner, where
a genial wood-fire was brightly blazing, for coal was then a thing
unknown in family consumption, duly furnished with the implement, and
sometimes called out to us,--"A-done, children, a-done," when in anywise
annoyed by us, and occasionally would sing us an old song, of which I
remember only "Robert Kid" and "A galliant ship, launched off the stocks,
from Old England she came," etc.; and, often when a storm was raging
without, repeating to us the rhymes,--
"How little do" (pronounced doe) "we think, or know,
What _the_ poor sailors undergo."
But we had a livelier time at Uncle Richard's; for there were more of us
and merrier. Of course, those of the household who could be spared from
domestic duties had attended service in the morning, and some of us from
the town had also appeared at church; for though our branch of the
family were now Presbyterians, we remembered that our common ancestor and
the company who came over with him, a couple of centuries and more before
that time, were of the Church of England, only protesting against the
abuses which had crept into it; and Uncle Richard carefully preserved,
with the genealogy of the family on this side the water, the Orders in
Council, prescribing for the passengers, by the "Mary and John," of which
my ancestor was one, then lying in the Thames, in the year 1633, amongst
other regulations, the daily service to be observed on board, according
to the ordinances of the Prayer Book.
No doubt the dinner was all which the domestic celebration of the
festival imports, for the farm was well stocked with every description of
creature, and with most other things needful for the purpose; but I may
be excused if I remember none of the particulars, now that so many years
have intervened. I know that Uncle Richard always prided himself upon his
excellent cider, and there is little question that there was a due
allowance of spirits, which most persons of fair means kept, in those
days, in decanters openly ranged upon the parlor sideboard. Indeed, about
the same period, while I was a student at a famous Academy not many miles
distant from our own home, the English teacher, an orthodox clergyman of
high repute, who cultivated a few acres of land at the place where he
lived on the outskirts of the town, invited a few of the pupils, myself
in the number, to assist him in making hay, one play-afternoon. The boys
had a good frolic, and, after work was ended, our master treated us to
milk-punch, a highly agreeable, but rather exhilarating beverage. Our
uncle's house was of the old-fashioned New England description,
pleasantly facing the south, with a high-peaked roof, which descended,
in the opposite quarter, to not much more than a man's stature from the
ground. In front was a spacious green yard, leading on one side to the
garden for vegetables and trees of the choicer kinds of fruit, and
sprinkled here and there with bunches of gay flowers; and at the entrance
gate by the road two magnificent elms, of an age and height which denoted
that they must have given shade to several past generations from the
summer heat, flung out drooping branches which extended a very great
distance from the parent trunks. After dinner, our host entertained us
with a narrative of his recent visit to the capital town of Boston, to
testify, in company with a former neighbor, now resident there, in behalf
of his hired man, Jasper Towne, of English birth, who having, duly and at
a long term beforehand, declared his intention, in proper form, was at
length, after a continuous residence of fourteen years in the United
States, admitted by the Federal Court to all the rights and privileges
which free citizenship could confer upon him. The scene in court my uncle
thought peculiarly solemn and impressive. The candidate for the franchise
was strictly questioned by the presiding justice, in open court, with
regard to his origin and his past life. The witnesses were subjected to a
similar scrutiny as to his character and habits, and their judgment of
his fitness for the responsible position and the new duties he was about
to assume. When this part of the transaction was completed, the oaths of
renunciation of allegiance to every foreign power, prince, or potentate
whatsoever, and the oath to support the Constitution of the United States
were administered to him by the clerk in a manner to fix it in his mind
that it was a very serious business, indeed, in which he had just been
engaged. Thereupon, the judge addressed him in language of congratulation
and counsel, and our newly-made fellow-countryman respectfully departed
from the tribunal, conscious that he had attained no mean privilege and
had secured a safeguard, like that, by the declaration of which the
Apostle of the Gentiles stayed the uplifted hands of his persecutors, and
caused them to tremble at the thought of misuse or degradation inflicted
upon a Roman citizen. Now, I believe, whatever is left of the ceremony
upon such occasions is slurred over in a clerk's office, or the part
performed in court scarcely attracts the attention of the magistrate upon
the bench. The moral of this change of practice may be left to the
reflection of the judicious reader. But it was something then to be, or
to be made an American citizen.
Not long before this, there had been an earthquake, which, though of
brief duration, had caused no little alarm,--a terrific sound always,
however slight the shock,--and in this instance making houses tremble
and shaking down various articles from their places of deposit. In the
early days of the colony, these phenomena were not uncommon, and are said
to have been of no little power in this part of New England. Uncle
Richard described the recent one as rumbling under the frozen ground
leading to his barns, as if a line of heavily-loaded wagons had rolled
over it. Being something of a philosopher, and better educated than usual
at the time, he explained the cause of such physical occurrences to us
young ones.
"The fact is," he said, "the water in certain parts of the earth becomes
intensely heated and lets off a quantity of steam of amazing expansive
power. It is like a tea-kettle, which if you shut the nozzle tight, may
either throw off the lid with great force, or the kettle itself bursts
with the strain upon it. So the steam, under the earth, heated by central
fires, and gaining immense volume and power, seeks the hollows in its
neighborhood, and rushes into them with a force which produces the
concussion and the rumbling sound; and the shaking of the surface which
we perceive is really like the commotion in the tea-kettle and the
trembling of the vessel when the steam has no vent. It is an awful
thought that we thus live over the action of these subterranean fires;
but they are in the control of the Almighty, and all we have to do is to
submit to God's will and merciful providence."
St. Paul's Church, of which Uncle Richard was a vestryman, owed its
origin to the separation of certain persons from the Congregational mode
of worship, and the formation of a society for the resumption of the
Protestant Episcopal pattern, as long ago as the year 1712. Their place
of worship they named Queen Anne's Chapel,[9] in honor of the
sovereign "at home," the last of the direct Stuart line, whose royal
person, it is said, having grown too unwieldy to permit horseback
exercise, she was in the habit of following the hunt, of which she was
passionately fond, driving herself, helter-skelter, in a one-horse
chaise. She has the credit of having bestowed some endowment upon the
Chapel, and the Bishop of London presented it with a bell; which, if all
accounts be true, still hangs in the steeple of a congregational
meeting-house within the precinct of the "Plains," where the Chapel once
stood. For that edifice, probably not having been very substantially
built, and being situated on a barren tract of land, afterwards known as
"Grasshopper Plains," and, for the convenience of the scattered
parishioners, placed at a distance from every one of them, and hence
subject to various causes of dilapidation, especially when St. Paul's,
within the town, was in process of construction, at length fell to ruin;
and the bell was carried privately away--so runs the tale--and was long
buried in the ground, but has now for many years summoned the people to a
style of worship which would have appealed in vain to the good Bishop of
London for any such donation. It may be supposed that it could not be
identified, after its interment, and perhaps the obliteration, naturally
or otherwise, of its peculiar marks; or the successors of Queen Anne's at
St. Paul's, built about thirty years after the former, would have
reclaimed their property.
The motives of those who thus revived the relation of their ancestors
with the Established Church were not altogether pious; but the fact
incontestably proves, that after nearly a century of separation from that
establishment, the objections to it, in the minds of many of the children
of the colonists, were by no means insurmountable. Indeed, it was about
a question of parish taxation that they differed with their
co-religionists. The place selected for the meeting-house was so far
distant from the homes of many of the parish, that they could not attend
without great inconvenience, and yet they were required to pay the parish
rates for the support of the minister. They remonstrated and appealed in
vain to the civil authorities in the colony and to those in England, for
relief; for the law was clearly against them, unless they chose to
conform to the doctrines and discipline of the Established Church.
Finding nothing in the Thirty-nine Articles inconsistent with the faith
they professed, they easily reconciled themselves to the ceremonies, and
thus succeeded in their object of removing from their shoulders an
involuntary burden.
As may be imagined, at first and for years afterwards, they remained but
"a feeble folk," regarded with suspicion and dislike by the more
narrow-minded of their contemporaries, though the days were long gone by,
when an Episcopalian, especially if suspected of a leaning towards
Popery, was set in the pillory or the stocks. The Church, however, had
been long flourishing, in my youth, and I was always particularly
impressed when I attended service there, as I always did on Christmas
Day, with the organ, an instrument utterly unknown in our other places of
public worship, and with the comfort diffused by the large Russian stove
which projected from a corner of the building; while we, for long years
afterwards, shivered in our meeting-houses of a cold Sunday. To be sure,
the younger children carried their mothers' hand-stoves, constructed of
tin in a frame of wood and pierced with holes in the top, to let out such
heat as could be communicated by a small pan of coals covered with ashes.
But for the male part of the congregation, who despised such a luxury,
it was almost impossible to avoid occasionally striking the benumbed feet
together, and sometimes the clatter was almost as considerable, as in
letting down the seats after the long prayer, especially if that proved
to be a very protracted exercise. But I have known young ladies so
indifferent to the severity of the weather, as to attend meeting, on very
cold days of winter, with bare arms. What would delicate ladies, who,
wrapped in warm furs, listen to service in a heated church, think of such
exposure now? On one particular occasion, however, our minister announced
the text,--"Who can stand before His cold?" and closed the services with
the usual blessing, a little to the dissatisfaction, I think, of the more
staid members of the congregation, who having come through cold and snow,
or a furious wintry storm, it might be, to hear a sermon, were not
altogether contented to miss the expected edification, or perhaps the
opportunity of criticising the discourse. Indeed, I know not what my
respected great grandsire, an elder of the church in his day, would have
said to such defection from spiritual needs towards indulgence in carnal
comfort. For it is said, that when some less searching and thorough-going
preacher of the word exchanged with our minister, or casually officiated
for him, the old gentleman tottered out of the meeting-house, leaning on
his staff, and with elevated eyebrows muttered pretty audibly to those
near him,--"Peas in a bladder--thorns under a pot--no food to-day!" And
however it might be with many of his neighbors, not the minutest particle
of the quality of original Puritanism had been shaken out of his system
by the changes of the times. The family tradition is, that before the
sunset of Saturday everything necessary for the support of nature upon
the Sabbath was cooked and in readiness. Whether he allowed the
accustomed beans and rye and Indian bread to remain in the oven subject
to the working heat, over Saturday night, I am not able to certify. But
in the intervals of public worship on Sunday,--a term, by the way, which
he would have scorned to employ,--the family was assembled and ranged
around the walls of the room, and the reading of Scripture, or of some
well-worn book of devotion, was proceeded with, while the head of the
family sat in the centre, with a stick in his hand long enough to reach
the head and shoulders of any inattentive or unquiet child.
-----
[7] When a trader failed, as was rarely the case at that
primitive period, his sign was taken down at night, to
the wonder of the public in the morning, and he remained
fast locked from the sheriff, or too inquisitive
callers, in his house, until the disposition of his
creditors became known,--dependent upon their confidence
in his good intentions, or their sympathy with his
unexpected misfortunes.
[8] An anecdote quite parallel to this is to be found in the
now late lamented Dean Ramsay's "Reminiscences." He
relates, as a specimen of the cool Scottish
matter-of-fact view of things, the following
communication of a correspondent:--
"The back windows of the house where he was brought up
looked upon the Greyfriars' Church that was burned down.
On the Sunday morning in which that event took place, as
they were all preparing to go to church, the flames
began to burst forth; the young people screamed from the
back part of the house, 'A fire! a fire!' and all was in
a state of confusion and alarm. The housemaid was not at
home, it being her turn for the Sunday 'out.' Kitty, the
cook, was taking her place, and performing her duties.
The old woman was always very particular on the subject
of her responsibility on such occasions, and came
panting and hobbling upstairs from the lower regions,
and exclaimed, 'Oh what is't, what is't?' 'O, Kitty,
look here, the Greyfriars' Church is on fire!' 'Is that
a', Miss? What a fright ye geed me! I thought ye said
the parlor fire was out.'"
[9] It was, I believe, the oldest Episcopal Church in
Massachusetts, with the exception of King's Chapel, in
Boston, a small wooden structure, which stood upon the
place where the stone edifice of that name is now
situated.