AMONG the treasured relics of my youth is a steel engraving in a style
fashionable sixty years agone.
It appeared in _Godey’s Lady’s Book_, then in the heyday of
well-merited popularity. My mother was one of the earliest subscribers.
Every number was read aloud in the family circle gathered on cool
evenings about my mother’s work-stand. We had no ready-made furniture.
This piece was made to order, of solid mahogany, and is, in the
seventy-fifth year of a blameless life, in active use in my eldest
daughter’s household.
Cousin Mary, living on Erin Hill, in her stepfather’s house, took
_Graham’s Magazine_—_Godey’s_ only rival. She likewise subscribed for
the _Saturday Evening Courier_, and exchanged it regularly with my
mother for the _Saturday Evening Post_—all published in Philadelphia.
The _New York Mirror_, edited by N. P. Willis, George P. Morris, and
Theodore S. Fay, was another welcome guest in both families. For
Sunday reading we had the _New York Observer_, _The Watchman and
Observer_, _The Presbyterian_—religious weeklies that circulated in the
neighborhood for a fortnight, and were then filed for future reference.
We children had _Parley’s Magazine_ sent to us, as long ago as I can
recollect, by our grandmother. After the death of her second husband,
the good old deacon, and her removal to Virginia, which events were
coeval with the Tayloe dynasty, our father subscribed for _Parley’s_.
We had all the new books that he adjudged to be worth buying and
reading, watching eagerly for anything from Dickens, Marryat, and
Cooper, and devouring with avidity not excited by any novel, Stephens’s
_Travels in Arabia Petrea_ and in _Central America_, Bruce’s _Travels
in Abyssinia_, and the no less enchanting tales Mungo Park was telling
the world of his adventures in the Dark Continent.
“The chamber” was a big room on the first floor, and adjoined the
dining-room—so big that the wide high-poster, curtained and ceiled
with gayly figured chintz, in a far corner, left three-fourths of
the floor-space unoccupied. My mother’s bureau (another heirloom)
looked small beside the bed; a lounge was between the front windows;
rocking-chairs stood here and there; thick curtains, matching the
bed-hangings, shut out wintry gusts, and a great wood fire leaped and
laughed upon the pipe-clayed hearth from the first of November to
the middle of March. A blaze of dry sticks was kindled there every
morning and evening up to July 4th. The younger children were dressed
and undressed there on cool days. Our mother held, in advance of her
contemporaries, that an open fire was a germ-killer.
Why do I single out that particular engraving for a place in these
reminiscences?
It graced the first page of the November number of _Godey’s Lady’s
Book_. The evening was wild with wind and blustering rain, the fire
roaring defiance as the loosely fitting sashes rattled and the showers
lashed the panes. There were five of us girls, and each had some bit
of handiwork. To sit idle while the reading went on was almost a
misdemeanor.
Dorinda Moody, Virginia Lee Patterson, Musidora Owen, Mea, and myself
were classmates and cronies. My mother was reader that evening, and as
she opened the magazine at the frontispiece, Virginia Patterson and I
called out:
“Why, that is a picture of Miss Wilson!”
We all leaned over the stand to look at the engraving, which my mother
held up to general view.
“It _is_ like her!” she assented.
The young lady across the table blushed brightly in uttering a
laughing disclaimer, and my mother proceeded to explain the extreme
improbability of our hypothesis. Then she read the story, which, to the
other girls, settled the matter. It was called “Our Keziah,” and began
by telling that the title of the portrait was a misnomer. It was no
“fancy sketch,” but a likeness of “Our Keziah.”
Silenced but not convinced, I restrained the impulse to tell my mates
that stories might be made out of nothing. I knew it, and so did my
only confidante, the handsome governess from Massachusetts, who had
been installed in our school-room since June.
Mr. Tayloe had gone back to the theological factory to prosecute the
studies that were to fit him to proclaim the gospel of love and peace.
On the last day of the session he had preached us a short sermon,
seated in his chair at the head of the room, twirling the seal dangling
from his watch-chain; his legs crossed, the left hand tucked between
them; his brows drawn together in the ugly horseshoe we knew well and
dreaded much.
He must have descanted darkly upon the transitoriness of earthly joys
and the hard road to heaven, for every girl in school was in tears
except Mea and myself.
As for my wicked self, as I privately confessed subsequently to my
father’s young partner, “Thad” Ivey—“I could think of nothing but
Franklin’s grace over the whole barrel.” In the ten months of his
incumbency of the tutorship, the incipient divine had never so much as
hinted to one of us that she had a soul.
“I suppose I ought to say that it is like returning thanks over the
empty barrel,” I subjoined, encouraged by my interlocutor’s keen
relish of the irreverent and impertinent comment upon the scene of the
afternoon. “Thad” and I were great friends, and I had an idea that our
views upon this subject did not differ widely.
Mrs. Willis D., our nearest neighbor, was with my mother, and when
the tear-bedraggled procession from the school-room filed into the
porch where the two friends were sitting with three other of the
villagers, and Virginia Winfree threw herself into her aunt’s arms with
a strangled sob of: “Oh, Aunt Betty, he did preach _so_ hard!”—the
dry-eyed composure of the Hawes girls was regarded with disfavor.
“Your daughters have so much fortitude!” remarked one, mopping her
girl’s eyes with a compassionate handkerchief.
Another, “They show wonderful self-control for their age.”
Even our sensible mother was slightly scandalized by what she “hoped,”
deprecatingly, “was not want of feeling.”
Tears were fashionable, and came easily in those early times, and
weeping in church was such a godly exercise that conversation or
exhortation upon what was, in technical phrase, “the subject of
religion,” brought tears as naturally as the wringing of a moist
sponge, water.
“What did you cry for?” demanded I, scornfully, of Anne Carus, when I
got her away from the porch party. “You hate him as much as I do!”
“Oh—I don’t—know!” dubiously. “People always cry when anybody makes a
farewell speech.”
So the Reverend-that-was-to-be Tayloe took his shadow from our door
and his beak from out my heart. The quotation is not a mere figure of
speech.
The handsome Yankee governess opened the door of a new life for me.
Some of the parents complained that she “did not bring the children
on as fast as Mr. Tayloe had done.” Me, she inspired. I comprehended,
as by a special revelation, that hard study might be a joy, and gain
of knowledge rapture. With her I began Vose’s _Astronomy_, Comstock’s
_Natural Philosophy_, and Lyell’s _Elements of Geology_, and revelled
in them all. Her smile was my present reward, and when she offered to
join me in my seemingly aimless rambles in the woods and “old fields,”
I felt honored as by a queen’s favor. We sat together upon mossy stumps
and the banks of the brook I had until then called “a branch” in native
Virginian dialect—talking! talking! talking! for hours, of nymphs,
hamadryads, satyrs, and everything else in the world of imagination and
nature.
She wrote poetry, and she kept a diary; she had travelled in ten states
of the Union, and lived in three different cities; and she never tired
of answering questions as to what she had seen in her wanderings. Her
nature was singularly sweet and sunny, and I never, in all the ten
months of our intimacy, saw in language and deportment aught that was
not refined and gentle.
With her I began to write school “compositions.” The “big girls” wrote
them under the Tayloe régime—neat little essays upon “The Rose,”
“The Lily,” “Morning,” “Night,” and all of the Four Seasons. Never a
syllable had I lisped to one of them of the growing hoard of rhymes,
tales, and sketches in the shabby, corpulent portfolio I had fashioned
with my own fingers and kept in the bottom of a trunk under flannel
skirts and last year’s outgrown frocks.
I brought them out of limbo to show to Miss Wilson, by timid degrees,
and new manuscripts as fast as they were written. She praised them, but
not without discrimination. She suggested topics, and how to treat
them. I never carried an imperfect lesson to her in class. Intellect
and heart throve under her genial influence as frost-hindered buds
under May sunshine.
“The Fancy Sketch” was so like her it was natural I should refuse
to believe the resemblance accidental. It was as plain as day to my
apprehension that the unknown artist had seen her somewhere, and,
unseen by her, had dogged her footsteps until he fixed her face in his
mind’s eye, then transferred it to canvas.
It was a shock when the probability of his pursuit of her to Virginia,
avowing his passion and being rewarded by the gift of her hand, was
dissipated by the apparition of a matter-of-fact personage, McPhail by
name, who was neither poet nor artist. He had been betrothed to our
governess for ever so long. He spent a fortnight at the “Old Tavern,”
opposite our house, and claimed all of the waking hours she could spare
from school duties.
The finale of the romance was that she went back to the North at the
end of her year’s engagement with us, and married him, settling, we
heard, in what sounded like an outlandish region—Cape Neddick, on the
Maine coast.