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THE GAY STREET HOME.
In November, 1867, the Halls bought the Captain Peters’ place, No. 18
Gay Street, Georgetown, and for twenty-five years, that is, for the rest
of Angeline Hall’s life, this was her home. The two-story brick house,
covered with white stucco, and having a shingled roof, stood in the
centre of a generous yard, looking southward. Wooden steps led up to a
square front porch, the roof of which was supported by large wooden
pillars. The front door opened into a hall, with parlor on the right
hand and sitting room on the left. Back of the sitting room was the
dining room, and back of that the kitchen. In the year of the
Centennial, 1876, the house was enlarged to three stories, with a flat
tin roof, and three bay-windows were added, one in the dining room and
two in front of the house, and the front porch was lengthened so as to
extend from one bay window to the other. The new house was heated
chiefly by a furnace and a large kitchen range, but in the dining room
and sitting room grates were put in for open coal fires. The two rooms
were thrown together by sliding doors, and became the centre of home
comfort; though the room over the sitting room, where, in a low
cane-seated rocking chair of oak, Mrs. Hall sat and did the family
sewing, was of almost equal importance. In the sitting room hung the
old-fashioned German looking-glass with its carved and gilded frame, the
gift of Dr. Powalky. Over the fire-place was an engraving of Lincoln,
and in one corner of the room was the round mahogany table where
Professor Hall played whist with his boys. Over the dining room mantle
hung a winter scene painted by some relative of the family, and in the
bay window stood Mrs. Hall’s fern table.
[Illustration: THE GAY STREET HOME]
In the front yard was a large black-heart cherry tree, where house-wrens
built their nests, a crab-apple tree that blossomed prodigiously, a
damson plum, peach trees, box-trees and evergreens. The walks were
bordered with flower beds, where roses and petunias, verbenas and
geraniums, portulacas and mignonnette blossomed in profusion. In the
back yard was a large English walnut tree, from the branches of which
the little Halls used to shoot the ripe nuts with their bows and arrows.
In another part of the back yard was Mrs. Hall’s hot-bed, with its seven
long sashes, under which tender garden plants were protected during the
winter, and sweet English violets bloomed. Along the sidewalk in front
of the premises was a row of rather stunted rock-maples; for the
Southern soil seemed but grudgingly to nourish the Northern trees.
Such, in bare outline, was the Gay Street home. Here on September 16,
1868, the third child, Angelo, was born. Among the boys of the
neighborhood 18 Gay Street became known as the residence of “Asaph, Sam,
and Angelico.” This euphonious and rhythmical combination of names held
good for four years exactly, when, on September 16, 1872, the fourth and
last child, Percival, was born. One of my earliest recollections is the
sight of a red, new-born infant held in my father’s hands. It has been
humorously maintained that it was my parents’ design to spell out the
name “Asaph” with the initials of his children. I am inclined to
discredit the idea, though the pleasantry was current in my boyhood, and
the fifth letter,—which might, of course, be said to stand for Hall,—was
supplied by Henry S. Pritchett, who as a young man became a member of
the family, as much attached to Mrs. Hall as an own son. In fact, when
Asaph was away at college, little Percival used to say there were five
boys in the family _counting Asaph_. As a curious commentary upon this
letter game, I will add that my own little boy Llewellyn used to
pronounce his grandfather’s name “Apas.” Blood is thicker than water,
and though the letters here are slightly mixed, the proper four, and
four only, are employed.
So it came to pass that Angeline Hall reared her four sons in the
unheard-of and insignificant little city of Georgetown, whose sole claim
to distinction is that it was once the home of Francis Scott Key. What a
pity the Hall boys were not brought up in Massachusetts! And yet how
glad I am that we were not! In Georgetown Angeline Hall trained her sons
with entire freedom from New England educational fads; and for her sake
Georgetown is to them profoundly sacred. Here it was that this woman of
gentle voice, iron will, and utmost purity of character instilled in her
growing boys moral principles that should outlast a lifetime. One day
when about six years old I set out to annihilate my brother Sam. I had a
chunk of wood as big as my head with which I purposed to kill him. He
happened to be too nimble for me, so that the fury of my rage was
ungratified. My mother witnessed the affair. Indeed, she wept over it.
She told me in heartfelt words the inevitable consequences of such
actions—and from that day dated my absolute submission to her authority.
In this connection it will not be amiss to quote the words of Mrs. John
R. Eastman, for thirteen years our next-door neighbor:
During the long days of our long summers, when windows and doors
were open, and the little ones at play out of doors often claimed a
word from her, I lived literally within sound of her voice from day
to day. Never once did I hear it raised in anger, and its sweetness,
and steady, even tones, were one of her chief and abiding charms.
The fact is, Angeline Hall rather over-did the inculcation of Christian
principles. Like Tolstoi she taught the absolute wickedness of fighting,
instead of the manly duty of self-defense. And yet, I think my brothers
suffered no evil consequences. I myself did. Perhaps the secret of her
great influence over us was that she demanded the absolute truth.
Dishonesty in word or act was out of the question. In two instances, I
remember, I lied to her; for in moral strength I was not the equal of
George Washington. But those lies weighed heavily on my conscience, till
at last, after many years, I confessed to her.
If she demanded truth and obedience from her sons, she gave to them her
absolute devotion. Miracles of healing were performed in her household.
By sheer force of character, by continual watchings and utmost care in
dieting, she rescued me from a hopeless case of dysentery in the fifth
year of my age. The old Navy doctor called it a miracle, and so it was.
And I have lived to write her story. Serious sickness was uncommon in
our family, as is illustrated by the fact that, for periods of three
years each, not one of her four boys was ever late to school, though the
distance thither was a mile or two. When Percival, coasting down one of
the steep hills of Georgetown, ran into a street car and was brought
home half stunned, with one front tooth knocked out and gone and another
badly loosened, Angeline Hall repaired to the scene of the accident
early the next morning, found the missing tooth, and had the family
dentist restore it to its place. There it has done good service for
twenty years. Is it any wonder that such a woman should have insisted
upon her husband’s discovering the satellites of Mars?
Perhaps the secret of success in the moral training of her sons lay in
her generalship. She was an ideal general. In house and yard there was
work to do, and she marshaled her boys to do it. Like a good general she
was far more efficient than any of her soldiers, but under her
leadership they did wonders. Sweeping, dusting, making beds, washing
dishes, sifting ashes, going to market, running errands, weeding the
garden, chopping wood, beating carpets, mending fences, cleaning
house—there was hardly a piece of work indoors or out with which they
were unfamiliar. Nor did they lack for play hours. There was abundance
of leisure for all sorts of diversions, including swimming and skating,
two forms of exercise which struck terror to the mother heart, but in
which, through her self-sacrifice, they indulged quite freely.
Their leisure was purchased by her labor; for until they were of
academic age she was their school teacher. In an hour or two a day they
mastered the three R’s and many things besides. Nor did they suffer from
too little teaching, for at the preparatory school each of them in turn
led his class, and at Harvard College all four sons graduated with
distinction. Four sons graduates of Harvard! How few mothers have so
proud a record, and how impossible would such an achievement have seemed
to any observer who had seen the collapse of this frail woman at
McGrawville! But as each successive son completed his college course it
was as if she herself had done it—her moral training had supplied the
incentive, her teaching and encouragement had started the lad in his
studies, when he went to school her motherly care had provided
nourishing food and warm clothing, when he went to college her frugality
had saved up the necessary money. She used to say, “Somebody has got to
make a sacrifice,” and she sacrificed herself. It is good to know that
on Christmas Day, 1891, half a year before she died, she broke bread
with husband and all four sons at the old Georgetown home.
Let it not be supposed that Angeline Hall reached the perfection of
motherhood. I make no such claim. The Gay Street home was the embodiment
of her spirit; and as she was a Puritan, her sons suffered sometimes
from her excess of Puritanism. They neither drank nor used tobacco; but
fortunately their father taught them to play cards. Their mother brought
them up to believe in woman suffrage; but fortunately Cupid provided
them wives regardless of such creed. She taught them to eschew pride,
sending them to gather leaves in the streets, covering their garments
with patches, discouraging the use of razors on incipient beards; but
fortunately a boy’s companions take such nonsense out of him. She even
left a case of chills and fever to the misdirected mercies of a woman
doctor, a homœopathist. I myself was the victim, and for twenty-five
years I have abhorred women homœopathic physicians.
But such trivial faults are not to be compared with the depths of a
mother’s love. To all that is intrinsically noble and beautiful she was
keenly sensitive. How good it was to see her exult in the glories of a
Maryland sunset—viewed from the housetop with her boys about her. And
how strange that this timid woman could allow them to risk their
precious necks on the roof of a three-story house!
Perhaps her passion for the beautiful was most strikingly displayed in
the cultivation of her garden. To each son she dedicated a rose-bush.
There was one for her husband and another for his mother. In a shady
part of the yard grew lilies of the valley; and gladiolas, Easter lilies
and other varieties of lilies were scattered here and there. In the
early spring there were crocuses and hyacinths and daffodils. Vines
trailed along the fences and climbed the sides of the house. She was
especially fond of her English ivy. Honeysuckles flourished, hollyhocks
ran riot even in the front yard, morning-glories blossomed west of the
house, by the front porch grew a sweet-briar rose with its fragrant
leaves, and by the bay windows bloomed blue and white wisterias. A
magnolia bush stood near the parlor window, a forsythia by the front
fence, and by the side alley a beautiful flowering bush with a dome of
white blossoms. The flower beds were literally crowded, so that humming
birds, in their gorgeous plumage, were frequent visitors. In childhood
Mrs. Hall had loved the wild flowers of her native woods and fields; and
in the woods back of Georgetown she sought out her old friends and
brought them home to take root in her yard, coaxing their growth with
rich wood’s earth, found in the decayed stump of some old tree.
Thus the following poem, like all her poems, was but the expression of
herself:
ASPIRATION.
The violet dreams forever of the sky,
Until at last she wakens wondrous fair,
With heaven’s own azure in her dewy eye,
And heaven’s own fragrance in her earthly air.
The lily folds close in her heart the beams
That the pure stars reach to her deeps below,
Till o’er the waves her answering brightness gleams—
A star hath flowered within her breast of snow.
The rose that watches at the gates of morn,
While pours through heaven the splendor of the sun,
Needs none to tell us whence her strength is born,
Nor where her crown of glory she hath won.
And every flower that blooms on hill or plain
In the dull soil hath most divinely wrought
To haunting perfume or to heavenly stain
The sweetness born of her aspiring thought.
O yearnful soul of infinite desire!
With what expectancy we wait the hour
When all the hopes to which thou dost aspire
Shall in the holiness of beauty flower.
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