[Sidenote: 1880.]
A very bright and merry set of boys and girls have been invited, now
for every winter for some years, to spend their Saturday afternoons
with Col. Ingham, at his house at Jamaica Plain, near Boston. It is the
old Lady Oliver house, which was built by some West Indian grandees
before the Revolution,--from whose windows, indeed, they looked out
to smile approval on the English troops, when, in the spring of 1775,
they made their one “military promenade” out through Roxbury, and back
through Dorchester into Boston,--the only time they ever went out to
come safely back again.
The evenings of these young people at this house are generally spent
in dancing or in round games around Col. Ingham’s large tables; but a
habit has grown up, in which, if they choose, they may come as early as
half-past three o’clock, and ask Col. Ingham questions about what they
are reading, and burrow as much as they choose in the treasures of his
curious library. The “Stories of the Sea,” which has its place in this
collection, were read aloud by these young people in successive visits
of one winter,--much as they had dug out the “Stories of War,” in a
visit they made to the colonel at Little Crastis, on the Rhode Island
sea-shore, the summer before.
After a summer and autumn crowded full with hair-breadth
adventure,--stories of sea, indeed, and stories of land, though
fortunately no worse stories of war than Blanche’s encounter with a
deaf conductor, and Bedford’s somewhat doubtful encounters with quails
and partridges at Quonochontaug,--the children gathered one dark
afternoon at Col. Ingham’s, with loud mutual felicitations, and with a
cordial welcome from him. It was raining pitilessly out of doors; but
rubber boots and gossamers had emancipated these girls, and the boys,
of course, had to be out always, “weather or no.”
“No Blue Hills to-day,” said Uncle Fritz, laughing, as Blanche and May
rubbed their little hands in front of his hickory fire.
“No,” said Blanche, “the famous Alpine Club itself surrenders to this
storm. And my sketch, Uncle Fritz,--what you called my grand study for
a panorama,--will have to be finished with spring apple-blossoms on the
right hand, to patch out the sombre chestnuts and oaks I had worked in
so elaborately on the left hand; for we shall certainly have no more
alpine clubs this fall.”
The young people are fond of calling themselves the Alpine Club when
they go to the Quarries or the Blue Hills or Nahant or the Brewsters
or the Middlesex Fells or the Waverley Oaks or any of the other nice
places within an easy excursion from Boston.
“Unless, indeed,” said Col. Ingham, “unless we get a sleigh-ride
some afternoon, and I send you up to the top of the Blue Hills on
snow-shoes. I did not know how many of you might be here. I am not
jealous of Mr. Hale; but when I found you were all studying politics
over at his house, I thought there might be no time for story-telling.
Have you prepared your protocol for Russia, Blanche?”
Blanche laughed. She said the more they read of one thing, the more
they wanted to read of another; and that, for her part, she found no
one of Uncle Fritz’s rules so easy as that which bids her