When he put the question, I was representing the need of an assistant,
since I was getting twenty letters per diem. Four years later, a
secretary and a stenographer shared the labor of keeping in touch with
writers who poured in upon my desk an average mail of one hundred
letters a day. Two years afterward, the average was over a thousand a
week.
I have been asked often why I expend energies and fill my days in what
my critics are pleased to depreciate as “hack-work.” Nobody believes
my assertion that I heartily enjoy being thus brought into intimate
association with the women of America. The Syndicate has extended its
territory into twenty-five States, and it is still growing. Women,
boys, and girls, and housefathers—no less than housemothers—tell me of
their lives, their successes, their failures, their trials, and their
several problems. From the mighty mass of correspondence I select
letters dealing with topics of general interest, or that seem to call
for free and friendly discussion, and base upon them daily articles for
the Syndicate public. Thousands of letters contain stamps for replies
by mail. Out of this germ of “hack-work” has grown “The Helping-Hand
Club,” an informal organization, with no “plant” except my desk and
the postal service that transports applications for books, magazines,
and such useful articles as correspondents know will be welcome to the
indigent, the shut-in, the aged, charitable societies and missions
in waste places. Quietly, and without parade, our volunteer agents
visit the needy, and report to us. We distribute, by correspondence,
thousands of volumes and periodicals annually; we bring together supply
and demand, “without money and without price,” and in ways that would
appear ridiculous to some, and incredible to many.
“For Love’s Sake” is our motto, and it is caught up eagerly, from
Canada to California. “The Big Family,” they call themselves—these dear
co-workers of mine whose faces I shall never see on earth. When, as
happens daily, I read, “Dear Mother of us all,” from those I have been
permitted to help in mind, body, or estate, I thank the Master and take
courage.
After eight years’ active service in the field so strangely appointed
to me that I cannot but recognize (and with humble gratitude) the
direct leading of the Divine Hand, I say, frankly, that I have never
had such fulness of satisfaction in any other sphere of labor.
“But it is not Literature!” cried a friend to me, the other day,
voicing the sentiment of many.
“No,” I answered, “but it is _Influence_, and that of the best kind.”
I have, with all this, made time—or it has been made for me—to write
half a dozen books in the last ten years.
_Where Ghosts Walk_ (1898) was a joy in the writing, as was the
collection of material. It reproduces for me—as I turn the pages, in
maternal fashion, lingering upon a scene here, and snatching a phrase
there—our strayings in storied climes, rambles into enchanted nooks
untrodden by the conventional tourist, but full of mystery and charm
for us. In those dim paths I still walk with the ghosts that were once
visible and sentient things like ourselves.
_Literary Hearthstones_ (1899-1902) was, even more emphatically, a
labor of delight. I had made studies of Charlotte Brontë and Hannah
More, of John Knox and William Cowper, in the homes and haunts they
glorified into shrines for the reading and the religious world. Other
hallowed names are yet on my memorandum-book, and in my portfolio are
the notes made in other homes and haunts, and pictures collected for
the illustrations of four more volumes of the series.
If I live and hold my strength and health of body and of mind, I shall,
please God, complete the tale of worthies I have singled out for study.
If not—they are yet mine own brain-children. None may rob me of the
pleasure of having and of holding them—until death us do part.
I should be ungrateful, and do my own feelings a wrong, were I to fail,
in this connection, to acknowledge my obligations to those who kindly
seconded my efforts to accumulate the material for the _Hearthstones_.
Our pilgrimages to Haworth, Olney, Wrington, and Edinburgh, are
starred in the reminiscence by hospitable intent and deed, by such
real sympathy in my mission, and friendly aid in the prosecution of my
design, that I cannot pass them over with casual mention.
For Charlotte Brontë I had, since my early girlhood, nourished
admiration that ripened into reverence, as I read with avidity every
page and line relating to the marvellous sisters. I had conned her
books until I knew them, from cover to cover. Her _dramatis personæ_
were friends more familiar to the dreaming girl than our next-door
neighbors. It was a bitter disappointment to me that the unforeseen
miscarriage of our plans frustrated my longing to go to Haworth, at our
first visit to the Old World. So, when my son and I set out for our
Eastern trip, Haworth stood first upon our memorandum of places that
_must_ be seen in England. I had letters from four men who had engaged
to facilitate my attempts to enter the Parsonage. One and all, they
assured me that I would find the door inhospitably closed in my face.
Nevertheless, they advised me to go to Haworth, and put up at “that
resort of the thirsty—the Black Bull.” Thus one of the quartette, and
who had lately published a book on the Brontës:
“The present incumbent of the parish is an ogre, a veritable dragon!”
he went on to say. “He savagely refused to let me set foot upon his
threshhold, and he turns hundreds of pilgrims away empty every year.
But go to Haworth, by all means! Put up at the ancient hostelry; walk
about the old stone house and tell well its windows, and take pleasure
in Emily’s moors. The dragon has restored (?) the Brontë church, and
consigned the remains of the wonderful family to a genteel crypt under
the renovated pavement. All the same, go to Haworth! The hills and the
moors and the heather are unchanged.”
In my _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, I have related how I fared in the
pilgrimage that stands out clearly in my memory as one of the sunniest
spots of that memorable seven months’ tour. I have not told how simple
and direct were the means by which I gained the fulfilment of my
desires. Within an hour after we had registered our names in the shabby
book kept for guests and transients at the Black Bull, I wrote a note
to Mr. Wade, the rector of Haworth Church, asking permission to “stand,
for a few minutes, within the doors of the house that had been the home
of Charlotte and Emily Brontë.” I added that I should not blame him if
he objected to the intrusion of strangers upon domestic privacy.
The messenger returned speedily with word that Mr. Wade had that
hour returned from London, and that he could not then write a note.
He would, however, be happy to see me at the Rectory on the morrow
(Sunday), and would write in the morning, naming the hour for our call.
His note came while we were at breakfast, to say that he would be at
liberty to receive us between services. We attended morning service,
but, when it was over, refrained from making ourselves known to the
rector, lingering, instead, in the church to see the tablet above the
Brontë vault, and the fine window, set in the restored wall by an
anonymous American, “To the glory of God, and in pleasant memory of
Charlotte Brontë.” Emerging from the church, with the intention of
strolling up to the Parsonage, we were met by Mr. Wade, who had gone
home, expecting to find us there, and was on his way to the inn to
look us up. His cordial hand-clasp and genial smile were so opposed to
our preconceptions of the “dragon,” that we exchanged furtive glances
of relief. He took us back to the Parsonage, and showed us everything
we had wished to see, with much we had not thought of, telling us, in
the same hospitable way, that, although he was the only member of the
family at home that day, he would be happy to have us partake of a
bachelor’s luncheon. When we declined, gratefully, he accompanied us
to the church, and unlocked the case in which is kept the register of
Charlotte Brontë’s marriage, signed by herself—the last time she wrote
her maiden name.
Several letters passed between us, in the course of the next four
years, and he opened to me, on our second visit to Haworth, in 1898,
unexpected avenues of information respecting her whose biography I
was writing, which were of incalculable value to me. When he retired
from the active duties of his profession to Hurley, in another county,
he wrote to me a long, interesting letter, enclosing a copy of the
resolutions passed by the Yorkshire parish he had served faithfully for
forty-seven years.
Besides the precious stock of building “material” for the construction
of my story of Charlotte, which I could have gained in no other way
than through his kindly offices, this odd friendship taught me a lesson
of faith in my kind, and of distrust of hearsay evidence and of popular
disfavor, that will last me forever. I dedicated the biography to
“Rev. J. Wade, for forty-seven years incumbent of Haworth, in cordial
appreciation of the unfailing courtesy and kindly aid extended by him
to the American stranger within his gates.”
A dedication that brought me many letters of surprised dissent from
English and American tourists, and writers whose experience was less
pleasant than my own. I tell the tale, in brief, as an act of simple
justice to a much-abused man.
“You have been told that I am a vandal and a bear,” he said to me on
that Sunday. “I found church and Parsonage almost in ruins. I was not
appointed to this parish as the curator of a museum, but to do my best
for the cure of souls. When I tell you that, for ten years after Mr.
Brontë’s death, the average number of sight-seers who called at the
Parsonage was three thousand a year, and that they still mount up to
a third of that number, you may be more lenient in judgment than the
touring public and the press proved themselves to be.”
From Rev. Mr. Langley—incumbent of Olney, and resident in the quaintly
beautiful parsonage that was the home of Lady Austin, Cowper’s friend
and disciple—we met with courtesy as fine. And in seeking details of
Hannah More’s private life, I found an able and enthusiastic assistant
in Rev. Mr. Wright, of Wrington, in the church-yard of which the “Queen
of Barleywood” is buried.
Cherished reminiscences are these, which neither the mists of years nor
the clouds of sorrow have dimmed. In dwelling upon them, as I near the
close of my annals of an every-day woman’s life, I comprehend what the
Psalmist meant when he said, “They have been my song in the house of my
pilgrimage.”
Perhaps I erred in writing, “every-day life.” Or, it may be because
so few women have recorded the lights and shadows of their lives as
frankly and as fully as I am doing, that I am asking myself whether it
may not be that the chequered scene I survey from the hill-top—which
gives me on clear days a fine view of the Delectable Mountains—has been
exceptionally eventful, as it has been affluent in God’s choicest gifts
of home-joys and home-loves, and in opportunities of proving, by word
and in deed, my love for fellow-travellers along the King’s Highway.
The reader who has followed me patiently, because sympathetically, from
the beginning of the narrative, will comprehend, through the depth
of that sympathy, why I now leave to other pens the recital of what
remains to be said. The hands that guided the pen were tender of touch,
the hearts were true that dictated the report of the Golden Wedding and
the abstract of a noble life, now developing throughout the ages into
the stature of the Perfect Man. The voluntary tributes they combined to
offer are dear beyond expression, to wife and children and to a great
host of friends.