THE GOING-OUT OF A YOUNG LIFE—PRESENT ACTIVITIES—“LITERARY
HEARTHSTONES”—GRATEFUL REMINISCENCES
AS upon our return from foreign lands nearly twenty years before this
home-coming, Sunnybank was now our _pied á terre_. Our daughter, Mrs.
Van de Water, and her family had occupied it during our absence. It
was, therefore, not merely swept and garnished for our reception, but
the spirit of Home, sweet, radiant, and indescribable, was in full
possession. We were settled in the nest within an hour after we drove
up to the open door. A week later, the happy circle was widened by the
arrival of our son and his young wife from the Adirondacks. A second
attack of appendicitis had made an operation imperatively necessary. It
was performed in July, and as soon as the patient was strong enough to
travel, he was sent to the mountains for recuperation. The pair were
our guests for four weeks. Then they returned to town to prepare for
the housekeeping upon which they had planned to enter in October. Happy
letters, telling of the preparations going briskly forward, and filled
with domestic details, than which nothing in the wide world was more
fascinating to the little wife, reminded us of the contented cooings
of mating pigeons, or, as I told the prospective housewife, of the
purring of the kittens she loved to fondle under the honeysuckles of
the veranda, while with us.
On October 5th an unexpected telegram brought the news of the
premature birth of a baby daughter, and that “mother and child were
doing well.” Four days later, a second dispatch summoned us to New
York. The tiny girl was but four days old when her gentle mother passed
quietly out of the life, so rich in love and hope that, up to the hour
when she laid herself down cheerfully upon her couch of pain, she was,
to use her own words, “almost frightened at her own happiness.”
She was married on January 10, 1898. We bore her to her last home
October 12th of the same year. She sleeps in the quiet “God’s Acre,”
back of the old colonial church in Pompton, in the heart of the
fairest of New Jersey valleys. A peaceful spot it is, cradled by the
everlasting hills. There were but three graves in our family plot when
we took her there. There are five, now.
We spent that winter in the city, and our boy was again one of our
small household. But for the care and the blesséd comfort of the
baby daughter, the light and life of hearts and house, we might
have fancied the events of the last five years a dream, and that we
were once more the busy trio with whom time had sped so swiftly and
brightly while “Bert” was in college. We were busy now as then. Doctor
Terhune preached with tolerable regularity in different churches,
and he was ever a diligent student. Bert wrought faithfully in his
chosen profession of journalism, and I accepted in, 1901, the charge
of a Woman’s Syndicate page established by _The North American_, in
Philadelphia. I had never been idle. Month after month, work was laid
to my hands that pleased my taste, and occupied all the time I could
devote to literary tasks. When I agreed to take on the new burden, it
was with no forecasting of what proportions it might assume.
“What do these women write to you about?” asked the proprietor of the
paper under the auspices of which the syndicate was carried on.