THREE GENERATIONS

THREE
GENERATIONS

BY
MAUD HOWE ELLIOTT
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1923

Copyright, 1923,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved
Published October, 1923
Printed in the United States of America

To
JOHN ELLIOTT

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THREE GENERATIONS

CHAPTER I
The Twilight of the Gods

March 1st, 1916.

Henry James is dead. The news came to-day. A sudden warmth of old friendship, a kindness of other years leaps up within me, and the memory of how he looked at our house in Rome on a certain birthday of his that corresponds to my own latest milestone.

It was a warm day in mid-April. We were lunching on the terrace of the Palazzo Rusticucci, among the roses that shielded us from the windows of the Vatican. We drank his health in his favorite vino di Orvieto; he bowed with that exquisite courtesy of his and said in answer to our congratulations:

“This is the time when one lights the candle, goes through the house, and takes an account of stock!”

I can hear that slow, careful, hesitating voice of his and catch the keen shy glance he gave me as he spoke.

The words come back to me with a new meaning; they seem like a legacy from an old friend. It is high time that I, too, should light the candle, go through the house, and take an account of stock.

What’s here worth saving?

Love and friendship, a treasure piled high as the rafters of the house of life. To be of any value, an accounting must be honest; this I shall remember in taking my account of stock and in telling how I acquired it.

I was born near midday on the ninth of November, 1854, in a large room in the apartment familiarly known as “Doctor’s Part”, at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, South Boston. My first friend, Mrs. Margaret MacDonald, familiarly called D.D., presided at this, my earliest introduction to society.

“Your mother was out walking. Much as ever she got up the long Institution steps before you came, sooner than we expected you. Your little clothes had not come home, so I wrapped you up, first along, in an old flannel petticoat of your mother’s.”

If I am somewhat of a vagrant in habit and overfond of wandering, haven’t I a good warrant for it? From my first hour I was wrapped in a fragment of my mother’s garment. If her mantle cannot truthfully be said to have fallen upon me, I have at least contrived to creep under a corner of it, and it has kept me warm all my days!

“You were lying in a green cardboard box in papa’s arms the first time I saw you. ‘Come and see little sister Polly,’ he called to us in the nursery.” This, from sister Laura, is corroborative evidence that I hurried into this world sooner than I was looked for, without even giving them time to get the old cradle down from the attic.

On hearing of my birth, Theodore Parker rode post-haste to the Institution to see my father. Their conversation was, in substance, as follows:

“Another little girl?”

“So it seems.”

“A fourth daughter, a fifth child! You and Julia have your hands full already. Give the baby to my wife and me; we’ll bring her up as our own, call her Theodora, and make her our heir!”

“My dear fellow, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

When the proposal was repeated to my mother, she exclaimed:

“Parker certainly can have no idea what it means to have a child!”

What an escape! If they could have given me to any one, it would have been to this beloved friend, who longed, above all else, for a child of his own. He put this catechism daily to his wife:

Question. What are you?
Answer. A bear.
Question. What must this bear do to be saved?
Answer. Have pups.

The pups, alas, never came to the poor “bear”, remembered as far more like a dove.

My first home was a public institution, but I had more right to it than most of those who lived there, for the Perkins Institution was founded and built by my father, Samuel Gridley Howe.

The Institution was a large brick building, with a classic façade and big white Doric columns. It stood on an elevated plateau above Broadway. Its windows looked out over Boston Harbor; you could see the Cunard steamers as they started on their trips to Europe, or returned, their red smokestacks covered with snow and icicles, after a winter passage. Strangers, noticing the blind boys and girls pacing up and down the wide piazzas that faced seaward, often spoke of the irony of fate that gave the school for the blind such a view. The rooms were large and well proportioned, with extra high ceilings. The corridors were paved with squares of gray and white marble. An imposing staircase rose, circling round and round a deep central well, to the giddy height of five tall stories; it still remains to me a triumph of architectural splendor. There was a polished mahogany handrail; to the daring, no sport was comparable to “sliding down the banisters.” This was of course strictly forbidden. It was held among us that a slip must prove fatal; one would fall down, down, and crash horribly upon that cold marble pavement at the bottom.

Till little Sam was born, I was the youngest of five children; during his short life of less than four years there were six of us: Julia, called Romana, in memory of her birthplace, Rome; Florence, named for our parents’ friend, Florence Nightingale; Henry Marion, in memory of our many times great-uncle, General Francis Marion of the Revolution; Laura, for Laura Bridgman; and little Sam, for his father. My name was given me for no better reason than that my mother fancied it. There had been a deal of discussion about the matter; when Tennyson’s Maud was published, my mother clinched it by naming me for the heroine of the poem, a fashion her friends, the William Hunts, followed by naming their first and second daughters Elaine and Enid.

The first distinct memory I have of my father is of waking one Christmas morning and finding myself lying in the big mahogany bed in his room. I knew I had gone to sleep in my black walnut crib, drawn close beside my mother’s bed in the next room. He came dancing in, with a small bundle of clothes in his arms.

“Here is a little monkey for your Christmas present,” he cried.

The little monkey was my brother Sammy, born soon after midnight, Christmas morning. Until his advent, I had always slept close to my mother. I remember now the chill of disappointment, if I ever, on waking in the dimly-lighted room, put out my hand to feel for her and found her bed empty and cold, as on some night when she had stayed out late. The desolate sense of her absence at first overwhelmed me; than came a shiver of fear of the dark corners of the room, inhabited by a strange breed of nocturnal foxes.

I did not speak till I was two years old, never so much as saying “mama”; then suddenly I pronounced a complete sentence, “See that little dog.” To help me learn to tell the time, my father contrived a large white cardboard dial with movable hands, like the face of a clock. This soon solved the mystery of hours. It must have been at about this period that some malicious governess taught me a bitter adage, which to this day I repeat, as a penitent plies the scourge on his lacerated back:

Lost, a golden hour, set with sixty diamond minutes.
No reward is offered, for it can never be recovered!

Neither of my parents believed in the saying, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” They had both been rather strictly brought up and, as so often happens, in avoiding the extreme of severity they themselves had known, they perhaps went to the other extreme of indulgence with their children. On second thought, and to be quite honest, I was the only spoilt child in the family; the charge cannot fairly be brought against the others. When the youngest child dies, and the next youngest becomes the baby, as in my case, everybody knows what happens! Not only the parents but the older children are as wax in those baby hands.

Of the little anecdotes every mother treasures about every child, the following was the one that Mama liked best to tell of her “stormy petrel.” One day, in that blessed period of silence before I had begun to talk, she found me eating the wild cherries that grew at Lawton’s Valley. Taking the forbidden fruit from me, she showed me a little stick and said:

“If you eat those cherries again, I shall slap your hands with this stick.”

The next day I came up to her, at about the same hour, one hand grasping a fistful of wild cherries, the other holding the switch. Looking her squarely in the eyes, I put the cherries in my mouth, handed her the stick, and held out my hand. The whipping? She only caught, kissed, and hugged me to her bosom.

My earliest friends were all more or less connected with the Institution, where my first years were passed. My father was a good judge of character, and the teachers and attendants he chose to help him in his great task were all rather exceptional people.

Daniel Bradford, the Institution steward, was my father’s right-hand man, and my most intimate friend. When young, he had been a ship’s carpenter; the flavor of the sea was in his talk, the roll of it in his legs. He was a short, stout man, full of a merry friendship for all mankind. On Sundays he wore a gorgeous, flowered velvet waistcoat, a full set of false teeth, and the most brazen scratch wig I ever saw. On week days he was frankly bald and toothless as a new-born baby.

“Bradford, come and make the rounds!” my father called out one morning, looking into the office, where the steward sat, laboriously making up his accounts.

They started on their tour of inspection, my father striding ahead, Braddie trotting after him, two steps to his one, and I tagging on behind. I kept very close to them that day, for Braddie needed my sympathy. Had he not that very morning confided in me?

“Old Turk, I’m going to get married. The Doctor’ll take on like the Old Scratch. You get your Ma to put in a word for me.”

I told my mother; she looked grave.

“Yes, your father will feel the loss of his faithful Sancho Panza.”

“Braddie’s not going away,” I protested; “they’ll live right on here—”

“It won’t be the same; he can’t be ready at five minutes’ notice to start for the ends of the earth at any hour of the day or night!”

There was a good deal of “taking on” about the lady who had “caught” the old steward, and in order to get it over and done with, the marriage was promptly arranged. It took place in our rooms and I was one of the wedding party. There was another guest, Laura Bridgman, my father’s famous pupil. I can see her white intense face, the sightless eyes hidden by a green silk shade, the delicate fingers—that saw more than some eyes—touching the bridal gifts, hear her plaintive cry of pleasure, like the note of some forest bird, as she felt the large blue cut-glass vase that she and I admired far more than such useful presents as butter knives and pickle forks.

“Laura Bridgman—and who was she?” some one is sure to ask.

Who could have believed then that such a question would be possible? In those days her name was known all over the civilized world. Laura was the blind deaf mute for whom my father devised the marvelous scheme of education which redeemed her from the awful loneliness of her isolation, taught her language, and made her a happy and useful member of the human family. Her education was hailed as a miracle all over Europe, and to this day teachers and thinkers are still amazed by the patience and ingenuity of the man to whom Helen Keller and scores of other educated blind deaf mutes owe their deliverance from a living tomb.

Thursday was always “Exhibition Day” at the Institution. Boston people took great pride in their School for the Blind, and by eleven o’clock the visitors’ seats were filled. The pupils, dressed in their best, gathered in the great hall, the boys on one side of the big organ, the girls on the other. They occupied benches placed in tiers, one above the other, so that you saw their faces rising row behind row; between them shone the tall gold organ pipes, with the name of the donor on a blue scroll: “The Gift of George Lee.” A blind musician sat at the organ; sometimes it was my friend, Joel Smith, and sometimes William Reeves, the leader of the band. The exercises opened with an organ solo, while the visitors settled themselves in their places, facing the pupils. As the deep organ tones thundered through the hall, Laura Bridgman sounded her little ecstatic note of pleasure. She felt the vibration from the organ and was thrilled by what she called “hearing the music.” The exercises included reading aloud from the raised type of books, printed in our own press; singing, violin and piano solos by the most gifted scholars; and “selections” by our brass band, made up of the larger boys. The finale was a chorus of all the scholars. The organist struck a soaring melody, the blind boys and girls rose to their feet, their young passionless voices ringing out:

“From all that dwell beneath the skies, let the Creator’s praise arise.”

If there were a stranger present—there usually was—he was sure to be deeply moved, often to tears. Music, their greatest earthly pleasure, brings to the blind a supreme delight, whose reflection can be caught in the rapture of those upturned faces.

My father’s was a restless temperament; as far back as I can remember, our family life was diversified by frequent “movings.” “Green Peace”, our own home, was only five minutes’ walk from the Institution in which we lived part of the time; in these early days I am trying to recall, we moved perhaps every six months from one habitat to the other. There was, besides, the regular hegira to our summer home, Lawton’s Valley, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. At that time few Boston people moved out of town before July. I can date our own summer flitting by the fact that it immediately followed the Fourth. I find a confusion of the most exquisite memories connected with this day, beginning with an early waking to the sound of bells, whistles, guns, and firecrackers. The bells were our own South Boston bells; the guns, from Fort Independence, which we felt in some special sense belonged to us. Next comes a dim memory of the procession of the “Antiques and Horribles” and the dreadful fright produced by those grotesque masks. I was allowed all the torpedoes I wanted, but forbidden firecrackers—vainly forbidden, alas! I have the feel of them yet in my fingers—those small, furry scarlet crackers with their white string fuses—and smell the good acrid smell of the gunpowder, as they popped, popped, in those early morning hours, when Papa was taking his ride, and Mama slept beside the baby that had kept her awake till all hours. After these early adventures of the pearly dawn came scorching midday hours on the wide yellow sanded paths of Boston Common. Here we bought bunches of fragrant water lilies, holding their long cool stems in our hot little hands, as we stood watching the parade of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company.

The drum major struts like a glorified turkey cock, swinging his great staff. The band! Oh! the band! How our spirits rise to the crisp notes of “Yankee Doodle”; how our hearts melt within us as the gay tune changes to a minor air:

We are tenting to-night on the old camp ground, give us a song to cheer,
Tenting to-night, tenting to-night, tenting on the old camp ground!

It is afternoon. We have moved with the crowd to the lower end of the Common, just above the old cow path, where men I have known remember driving their fathers’ cattle along the way now called “Charles Street.” The balloon ascension is set for five o’clock; we are in good time, together with hundreds of other eager spectators. We catch our breath as the immense pink silk globe, in its coffee-colored network, sways above our heads, the daring aëronaut striking an attitude in the car, a straw basket which hangs four or five feet below.

“He’s off!”

No attitudinizing now. Very carefully the gallant aëronaut lowers the grapnel over the side of the car, as the great balloon rises slowly, slowly, into the burning blue. We watch it until it becomes a speck over our heads. I am so filled with forebodings about the perilous journey that my nurse seeks out a man who has helped prepare the balloon for the ascension.

“This little girl,” she says, “is afraid that Mr. Wise will never come down alive.”

“Not a mite o’ danger, miss, on a day like this. Didn’t you see all them bags of ballast? And the valve rope? When he wants to go up, he chucks out a few of the sandbags. When he wants to come down, he pulls that there valve-string and lets out the gas, see? Just you look in the Boston Advertiser to-morrow morning and that will tell you where the balloon landed.”

There is an interval between this thrilling experience and the final rapture of the day. I am in the house of my Uncle and Aunt Wales, on Boylston Street, opposite the Public Gardens, where I am put to sleep in a big four-poster and later fed upon strawberries and sponge cake. This quiet interlude between the excitements of the day seems a sad waste of time. At half-past eight, thanks to the rest, I am fresh and eager for the crowning event, “Fireworks on the Common.” I can hear now the hiss of the rockets, the long-drawn “Ah!” of the multitude that follows each fresh display. How clear it all is! Our elders’ fear of the crowd is a slight shadow on our ecstatic happiness.

“Don’t let go the child’s hand!” seems a useless warning—the crowd is so friendly, so cheerful, so full of an almost solemn excitement. How we cheer the portraits of George and Martha Washington! When the last set piece goes off, the final bouquet flares above the elms of the mall, how quickly the great crowd melts and flows off in dark currents and eddies, and how tightly now I cling to my nurse’s hand, lest I be swept away and lost!

How cleverly Papa marshals us out of the crowd and down the side street, where Billy Glass, our coachman, waits with the carryall to drive us home, a tired happy crew of young patriots, who have survived the dangers of firecrackers, giant torpedoes, and skyrockets. The latter fear was ever present with Mama, who shuddered at the thought that one of us might be blinded by a falling rocket stick. Papa made light of her terrors with the epitaph:

Here lie I
Killed by a sky
Rocket in my eye.

It was not by accident that Papa kept us in Boston over the Fourth. He must have longed, as elders do to-day, to be out of the hot city on Independence Day. He knew the risks of city streets to his “young barbarians”, and made it his business to minimize those risks, because he also knew the value of those early impressions upon a child’s imagination. Whatever his children might or might not turn out to be, he took good care that they should all grow up red-hot patriots.

Looking back upon the first six or seven years of my life, I find myself in a dim enchanted land, which I have come to think of as “The Twilight of the Gods”, for the figures that peopled it were, indeed, heroes and demigods. They drop easily apart into two groups, Mama’s friends and Papa’s friends. Mama’s friends—we called them “The Owls”—were poets, philosophers, and theologians, speculative men who sat long and discussed abstract things. Papa’s friends were statesmen, soldiers, militant philanthropists, men of action whose time was too precious for long visits, but who came and went with a certain tense purpose in strong contrast to those others. Such scraps of their talk as one overheard one understood more or less; one at least had some idea of “what they were driving at”, whereas the Owls talked rank nonsense, “about objectivity and subjectivity, Kant and ‘Dant’ and all the rest of them!”

Theodore Parker with his “hammer of Thor” was friend to both parents. I cannot remember him; he lives for me in a sort of dim limbo behind the Twilight of the Gods, peopled by men and women whom my parents had known before I was born and of whom I had heard them talk. Here lives Lafayette, who had signed himself in a letter to Papa (still preserved) “your forever friend”, and Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, Maria Edgeworth, Florence Nightingale, and a host of others. To this day I am linked to these great shadows by my parents’ friendship, as with some subtlest bond of sympathy and understanding. If I ever meet them, I shall surely know them.

John Brown is perhaps the most real of all these shadowy figures. My mother tells in her Reminiscences of her first meeting with him. My father had warned her of his coming to our house, with these words: “Do you remember that man of whom I spoke to you—the one who wished to be a saviour for the negro race? That man will call here this afternoon; you will receive him.”

The old house at Green Peace holds no more vivid memory than of that visitor who must be secretly admitted by its mistress lest some gossipy servant whisper. She stands, a slight gracious figure at the threshold, gazing earnestly at the stranger, “A Puritan of the Puritans, forceful, self-contained, with hair and beard of amber streaked with gray.”

In “The First Martyr”, one of the best of her patriotic poems, my mother tells the story of an incident of which I have no memory, but which has had its influence upon me for all that.

Returning from a visit to John Brown’s wife, a few weeks before his execution by the Commonwealth of Virginia, my mother came into my nursery and took me on her knee, hoping to distract her thoughts by playing with me. Some sense of what she was suffering was borne in upon me, for I questioned her closely: Why was she so sad? Where had she been that afternoon? Who had she seen? Bit by bit, I got the story from her. The poem, from which I quote the following verses, may be found in “Later Lyrics”:

My five-years’ darling on my knee,
Chattered and toyed and laughed with me;
“Now tell me, mother mine,” quoth she,
“Where you went i’ the afternoon?”
“Alas! my pretty little life,
I went to see a sorrowing wife,
Who will be widowed soon.”

“Now, Mother, what is that?” she said,
With wondering eyes and restless head.

“He lies upon a prison bed
With sabre gashes on his head;”

“But, Mother, say what has he done?
Has he not robbed or murdered one?”
“My darling, he has injured none.
To free the wretched slaves
He led a band of chosen men,”

“O, Mother! let us go this day
To that sad prison, far away;
Some comfort we can bring him, sure:
And is he locked up so secure,
We could not get him out?”

“No, darling, he is closely kept.”
Then nearer to my heart she crept,
And, hiding there her beauty, wept
For human misery.

So it is something to be thankful for, that at the age of five I volunteered for active service, in the forlorn hope of rescuing John Brown.

Charles Sumner, dear as a brother to my father, is a very distinct figure in the Twilight of the Gods, towering in mind, character, and stature above other men.

Some ancestral trait of worldliness must have “got by” my parents (the most unworldly people I have ever known) and down to me, for I was rather a mundane youngster. I was much impressed by a certain dignified splendor in Mr. Sumner’s bearing and clothing, which, together with his single eyeglass, like those of “swells” in Punch, made me regard him as the social superior of most of our intimates.

What a contrast to Charles Sumner was John Albion Andrew, the great war governor of Massachusetts and one of Mr. Lincoln’s firm supporters in the darkest days of the Civil War! To me, he was “Edith Andrew’s father”, the cherubic, adorable parent of my intimate friend. The mention of his name evokes memories of the Andrew house at 110 Charles Street. The living room, with its worn leathern sofa where the children were always welcome, was on the ground floor next the dining room. The drawing-room was up one flight; it contained some fine old pieces of colonial furniture, some good pictures, a strong charcoal drawing by William Hunt, a brilliant painting of a troubadour by Babcock, a genre by Elihu Vedder, a number of Japanese cabinets and bibelots.

There were four Andrew children: Bessie, who looked like her father, a studious girl and a good musician; Forrester, a slender blond youth, who later married Hattie Thayer and died young, leaving two charming daughters; Edith, my friend and playmate, who looked like her pretty mother; and a younger son, Harry. Governor Andrew was short and stout, with very curly brown hair and a florid complexion. He had round eyeglasses, from behind which shone kind blue eyes like a baby’s. He wore a black soft felt hat and a black Inverness cape, with a military cord and tassel that took my fancy. I shared many privileges with the Andrew children, among them Sunday-morning excursions to the School Ship, a training ship for juvenile offenders, where we looked curiously at the young sailor boys and wished it was not forbidden to make friends with them. We had the run of the State House, where we spent happy hours romping in the Senate Chamber, under the big codfish. The Seal of State was familiar to us; and one long rainy afternoon, when we waited while the Governor and my father held an endless conference with other serious looking men, we made free with the official pencils and notepaper and made archaic drawings of men and horses. How lightly we flitted and frolicked about the halls and corridors! And yet we had a certain sense of the tense situations which every day faced the Governor and those who labored with him for State and country. Andrew had no easy task, for the pacifists were busy in those days as in these. A letter to “Frank” Bird from my father, written at the time when war was imminent but not declared, contains this sentence:

“Andrew is like a noble horse, harnessed in with mules; how long he will retain his virility, I know not.”

On the thirteenth of April, 1861, the day when the news came that Fort Sumter had been attacked, my father wrote the Governor:

“Since they will have it so, in the name of God, Amen. Now let all the governors and chief men of the people see to it that war shall not cease until Emancipation is secure. If I can be of any use, anywhere, in any capacity (save that of spy), command me.”

I remember the thrill of horror that shook my small person on hearing my father say:

“The Rebels have sent a box of live copperheads and rattlesnakes to Andrew, but fortunately there was something suspicious looking about the box, and no harm is done!”

On another occasion I was shocked at hearing of a case of clothing or bedding, infected with yellow-fever germs, that had been sent to Mr. Lincoln at the White House. Libby Prison seemed very real to us when Alexander MacDonald, D.D.’s son, came home an exchanged prisoner, a shadow of himself, wasted to a skeleton, and with a cough which soon proved fatal. He brought with him a napkin ring made from a piece of meat bone by one of his fellow prisoners. I took this in my hands with a sense of awe; it seemed like a relic.

The Governor took full advantage of my father’s offer of service, and during the next four years he was constantly going back and forth between Boston and Washington. Among his many labors of that time was the work of the Sanitary Commission, of which he was one of the founders and most earnest workers.

His own experience as a young man, when he fought with the hardy mountaineers of Crete in the campaign for Greek independence, fitted him particularly well for the work. It made him, also, rather impatient at the well-meant efforts of the Boston people who, in the kindness of their hearts, sent cargoes of superfluities to the embarrassment of the ill-prepared commissariat department. He writes to Andrew from Washington, soon after the departure of the first Massachusetts regiments:

“You may depend upon it that when our boys come back, they will laugh heartily at the recital of the fears and sorrows excited among their papas and mamas by the stories of their privations and sufferings on their first march to Washington. The invoice of articles, sent by the Cambridge and other vessels for our troops, contains articles hardly dreamed of even by general officers in actual wars. Hundreds of chests of Oolong tea, tons of white crushed sugar, and then a whole cargo of ice! Many of these things will have to be left behind when the troops go into the field. Their principal value (which is priceless) is as a testimony of the patriotism, zeal, and generosity of the men and women, who felt that they must do something for the cause.”

In speaking of the health of the troops, he writes:

“There is more need of a health officer than of a chaplain; but the U. S. knows no such officer. Soap! Soap! Soap! I cry but none heed. I wish some provision could be made for army washerwomen; they are more needed than nurses.”

I ought to remember far more about the Civil War than I do, for I was six years old when it was declared. On the nineteenth of November of the same year my mother, before dawn, received the inspiration of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, but I never heard of this till many years later. Two strong impressions of the wartime remain with me. Coming into the breakfast room one morning, I found my brother Harry standing on his chair, fluttering the newspaper over his head, the rest of the family waving their napkins and crying:

“Hurrah! Hurrah! Vicksburg has fallen!”

Harry was then going to Boston Latin School and held a commission in the school regiment.

I shall surely never forget a certain Sunday morning, when I was walking with my father across Boston Common, to get the mail from the post office. It was a lovely spring day; the elms on the Mall wore the softened look that just precedes the time of leafage. We had stopped to scatter some nuts for the squirrels, when a perfect stranger ran up to my father, grasped him by the arm and panted in his ear:

“Doctor Howe, they have killed the President!”

My father staggered as if he had been struck and sank down on a bench, with a cry:

“God Almighty!”

The anguish of his face and voice impressed me quite as much as the fact that President Lincoln had been murdered.

CHAPTER II
The Owls

Among my mother’s welcome visitors was Henry James the elder, father of Henry, the novelist, and of William, the philosopher. She thought Mr. James Senior a greater man than either of his more famous sons and was a little jealous for her old friend’s reputation. Henry, Junior, understood this and loved her for it.

Mr. James ranked among us as chief of Owls. He was very lame and used a great cane with a yellow ivory handle. He had a long gray beard, piercing eyes that looked you through and through, and a laugh so hearty, so contagious that it healed the stab of the too bright eyes. I was at once fascinated and frightened by him. My mother was in terror lest I should find out that he had a wooden leg, for he often took me on his knee and quizzed me. Once when I had been haled in from a romp in the garden with a torn pinafore and a general devil-may-care look about me, Mr. James said quite seriously:

“Maud, you are the wickedest-looking thing I have seen for a long time.”

I took this literally, brooded over the affront, and gave him a Roland for his Oliver:

“You are the ugliest man I have ever seen!”

Mr. James was hurt; this troubled my mother; but my own feelings had been outraged. Wounded in my self-esteem, I had instinctively “struck back”, as a child or savage does. He was so wise, so tender, that I believe he forgave me, though I have never forgiven myself.

In these early memories, the “James boys” figure as the friends of my older sisters. I have no recollection of them in connection with myself till much later. I have, however, a clear impression of their cousin, Minnie Temple, with whom Henry James, the younger, was said to be in love. I think of her delicate face, luminous eyes, and expression of haunting melancholy, as of things seen in a dream. Willie and Wilkie; Henry and Bobby; their names fit into the picture of this time, because my elders talked so much of them. Two went to the war, Wilkie and Bobby; one was wounded.

It probably was about this time that Henry and Willie were studying art in the Newport studio of William Hunt, with John La Farge and Theodora Sedgwick for fellow pupils. This studio still survives. It stands back from Church Street, just behind what is now the Hill Top Inn, then the home of the William, and later of the Richard, Hunts. Until quite lately, I should have said I had no recollection of Mrs. James, wife of the first Henry and mother of the second, but I happened to pass a night at Concord, in the house of Mrs. Robertson James, and there I recognized a portrait of Mrs. James. The face is calm, motherly, and, above all, aristocratic.

The Radical Club, which met on the first Monday of every month, was one of the chief gathering places of the Owls. I remember my mother’s interest in these meetings, and little bits of her talk about them:

“To-day Mr. Emerson read a paper on Religion. He told this anecdote: ‘Somebody said to the Reverend Dr. Payson of Portland, “How much you must enjoy religion, since you live always administering it,” he replied that nobody enjoyed religion less than ministers, as nobody enjoyed food less than cooks.’”

William Rounseville Alger, prince of Owls, was tolerated by me as the father of my dear friend, Kitty Alger, a handsome girl, with fine black hair which she wore “down her back” in three thick braids. She was like her mother, gentle and domestic. The elder daughter, Abbie, was more like her father. She was intelligent, with a gift for languages, which she put to good account in translating foreign books for the Boston publishers.

Children take grown people for granted, accept them as fixed facts like the earth, the heaven, and the stars. They do not analyze them as they do their contemporaries. It was only in later years that I gained a sense of the incongruity of the union between Mr. and Mrs. Alger. They had a large family, and their marriage was, I believe, a happy one in spite of—perhaps on account of—the strong contrasts of tastes and character.

Mr. Alger was a pedantic Unitarian clergyman, and a student of metaphysics. He never, if he could avoid it, used a word of less than five syllables. I remember him at his own house, silent and abstracted; when he was at our house, consorting with other Owls, his language was splendid and free, if a thought paradoxical. A favorite word of his was ratiocination, which Mother once caricatured, exclaiming:

“Ours is indeed a ratty ’orssy nation!”

I was once at the Algers’ when a company of the elect gathered to hear him read from his latest work, “The Poetry of the Orient.” A few of us juveniles sat on the stairs, waiting till the reading should be over and the vanilla ice cream and escalloped oysters appear. Among the grown-up guests were the brilliant Choate sisters, Mrs. Bell, and Mrs. Pratt, cousins of Mrs. Alger’s. In discussing the reading with Mama, Mrs. Pratt exclaimed:

“Brother Alger has his limités and his extensés!” A phrase my mother quoted all her life.

I learned one lesson from “Brother Alger” that I never forgot. I was dining with them one Sunday and, as Mr. Alger plunged the carving fork into the breast of a prodigious turkey, he asked me what part of the bird I preferred. Meaning to be polite, I said I had no choice.

“Then you shall have the drumstick,” was the carver’s answer.

At one time Mr. Alger preached on Sunday mornings at the Music Hall, as years before Theodore Parker had done. He had large audiences—there was too little of ritual to warrant the term “congregation”—chiefly of men. I often went with Kitty to these services; though I did not understand much of what the speaker said, there was something democratic in the large Sunday gathering that appealed to me.

Mr. Edwin Whipple, the brilliant essayist and lecturer, was held to be a very important Owl; because he looked more like Minerva’s bird than any of the others, his solemn expression and round eyes gave him, above all, a claim to the title. There was nothing derogatory in being an Owl; indeed, it was rather “swell” than otherwise. Not all of Mama’s companions were Owls; some of the most learned of them were quite outside the group. The jovial Louis Agassiz, for instance, genial James T. Fields, our dear minister, James Freeman Clarke: these were all intimates and intellectuals, but they lacked something that Frederick Hedge, for example, possessed to a very high degree; just what this essential quality was, I despair of making any grown-up person understand. Though I have mentioned Mr. Emerson as being present at a meeting of that resort of Owls, the Radical Club, he too lacked the subtle characteristic and, though he might at times consort with Owls, he was not of them.

The only female Owl I remember was Miss Elizabeth Peabody, called the grandmother of Boston, one of the most guileless human beings that ever lived. Everybody loved Miss Peabody and, loving her so much, everybody talked about her. Some of the things they said were tender, some were funny, but none were slighting, none bitter.

There was the tradition that Miss Peabody had been affianced to the great romancer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who soon after their engagement discovered that her younger sister, Sophia, was his true affinity. With perfect sweetness and generosity, Elizabeth yielded her lover to her sister and, as long as they lived, devoted herself to the Hawthornes and their children.

It takes a pretty big woman to do that!

A friend of Miss Peabody’s once dreamed that she had a baby, which she soon mislaid, finding it long after shut up between the pages of a big volume, where she had put it for a bookmark. In her later years, she looked like a female Pickwick; you could read the record of her blameless life in her benign face. Though she was a hard worker, she was never able “to put anything by”, probably because so much of her work was for the causes and reforms she served so whole-heartedly. In her last years, when she was too feeble to work, my mother was very anxious about her future. Miss Peabody reassured her, however.

“My dear friend,” she began, “I have been thinking to-day how much better off I am than Croesus (a well-known millionaire). He and I left the country town where we were both born, on the same day, and came to Boston to seek our fortunes. Croesus made a great deal of money, but in such a questionable manner that he no longer finds it pleasant to live in Boston and has moved to a distant state where public opinion doesn’t trouble itself about the origin of his fortune. I, on the other hand, live on happily in Boston, supported by an income provided by my old scholars.”

Croesus probably would not have agreed with her summing up of the case, but, as their two faces rise out of the limbo of these early memories, old Elizabeth’s, all alight with innocence and enthusiasm, smiles at me, while Croesus looks coolly and cannily at me, with the hard eyes and tight mouth of a miser.

The Hawthornes were very poor in their early married life at Concord. They could not afford to keep a servant, and divided the housework between them. One day Mrs. Hawthorne, happening to be near the pantry, where her husband was doing his share of the morning’s work, heard him exclaim, as he threw down the knife he had been cleaning:

“Thank God, that’s the last of those damned knives!”

This impressed the young wife so much that she managed soon after to employ a domestic. Shortly after, Pegasus, released from the butcher’s cart, spread his wings and carried Hawthorne far above household drudgery, for not long after this “The Scarlet Letter” was written.

I do not remember ever having seen Hawthorne, but I have a strong impression of how he looked, from my mother’s description of him. She spoke of his great reserve and shyness, of his beauty and especially of his eyes, “like blue-gray sapphires.”

The spell he cast over my childhood is strong as ever. He first introduced me to the friends from Hellas and made me free of the enchanted circle of Greek mythology. For many years I held the absurd belief that his genius created the characters in Tanglewood Tales, where I first read of Midas and the Golden Touch, of Perseus, Medusa, the Graiae, and Bellerophon. Nowhere, I still believe, is the story of Baucis and Philemon and their immortal guests more beautifully told than in Tanglewood Tales. These two volumes, in Ticknor and Field’s familiar brown bindings, were in the nursery bookcase, and made me early familiar with Hawthorne’s name. Chancing upon “The Scarlet Letter” one day in my father’s library, I read the great romance with the same avidity with which I had devoured the children’s stories. I was too young to understand the significance of the Letter itself; the story held me no less entranced because I missed the inner meaning. It is a great mistake to think that children must understand things to enjoy them; mystery, above all else, appeals to them.

Una Hawthorne, the eldest daughter, once made us a visit at Lawton’s Valley. She was tall and handsome, with a skin like alabaster and masses of red-gold hair. Julian, the only son, was of the same type. He was one of the handsomest young men I ever saw,—tall, athletic, romantic-looking, with a touch of unconventionality in his dress that was very becoming. Later in life, I met Julian Hawthorne, when I visited my sister Florence in Plainfield, where he lived for some years. One remark of his I have always remembered. We had been speaking of the elder Hawthorne, and Julian said, with a sigh: “My father is the worst enemy I have. It would not be so bad if I had chosen a different calling, but whatever I write must always be compared with what he wrote!”

I felt a certain sympathy with him; a great name is very hard to “live up to.”

The mention of the nursery bookcase recalls certain priceless volumes I do not often find to-day in the nurseries I visit. As our books were chosen by my mother with greatest care, I hope by mentioning some of my earliest book friends to hand on a good tradition:

“The King of the Golden River” by Ruskin; Hans Andersen’s “Little Rudy”; “The Huggermuggers and Kobbletozo” by Christopher Cranch; Grimm’s Tales; Mrs. Barbauld’s Poems; Bulfinch’s “Age of Fable”; Edward Lear’s immortal “Book of Nonsense”; “Alice in Wonderland”, “The Bab Ballads”, the Franconia Stories, and Kingsley’s “Water Babies”; to the authors of every one of these books I owe an imperishable debt. If you have never read them there is still time, for they are for every age and condition!

CHAPTER III
Green Peace

“This is green peace!” Mama exclaimed that July day she took possession of our South Boston home. The title clung, like many of her nicknames, snapped out on the spur of the moment.

What other six acres ever held such wonders as Green Peace? The house, full of odd turns and stairways, was “built on” piecemeal to the original cottage, as the family increased. The big living room, with the conservatory on the south side, had a mighty fireplace on the north, where for nine months of the year cannel coal sputtered or pine knots flared. Papa was a fire worshiper; the flame on our hearthstone was rarely quenched. The floor was covered by the Gobelin carpet from the old Joseph Bonaparte house at Bordentown. The central medallion inclosed a profile portrait of a royal couple of that short-lived dynasty; in the corners heraldic fishes disported themselves, surrounded by a pale strawberry ribbon on a ground of soft gold. Near the fireplace stood the tall sixteenth century cabinet from the Palace of the Popes at Avignon, purchased by our parents on their wedding journey, together with the Roman cabinet and the oak and ebony prie-dieu, and brought home from Europe to set up housekeeping in South Boston; this was in the year 1844, before the craze for old Italian furniture had struck our country.

A few rods from the house, halfway across the garden, gleamed the white columns of the greenhouse and bowling alley. Here reigned Mr. Arrow, guardian of Muscat and Black Hamburg grapes, Maréchal Niel and Banksia roses, starry jasmines, camellias white and red and mottled. At Green Peace time was not reckoned by weeks or months, but by the successive blooming of tree, plant, and flower.

“When did we have the first party last year?”

“The day the pink hawthorn came out.”

There were many parties for us, especially in the spring, when city folks like to go into the country.

The hawthorns, pink and white, were first to blossom, closely followed by the scarlet pyrus japonica, the snowballs, yellow laburnums—sweet as honey—acacias, lilacs, syringa, and spiraea. The beds were filled with old-fashioned flowers,—roses, mignonette, peonies, verbenas, love-lies-bleeding, mourning bride, and lilies, lilies, lilies, from the early lily-of-the-valley to the latest hardy variety. What strawberries grew here! Papa quoted with the opening of each season the bishop’s saying:

“Doubtless God might have made a better berry; doubtless He never did!”

What cherries he raised for us, black hearts and white hearts. What peaches, apricots, plums, apples, pears,—especially pears; Green Peace pears were famous. The fruit room at the top of the house was a pleasant place in the autumn when the pears were gathered, sorted, and placed on narrow shelves to ripen. Has my memory kept their sequence aright? Bartlett, Seckel, Beurré Bosc, Duchesse d’Angoulême, Louise bonne—prized for its single scarlet cheek—Winter Nelis—they lasted into spring—and the Vicar of Wakefield; I could not like the Vicar, he was so ugly!

Mrs. George Sage, a friend of these days, lately said to me:

“Your father gave me the most delicious pear I ever tasted, in the Green Peace garden. Do you remember the Chinese junk?”

Do I remember!

Listen to the song of the junk, as its great hulk swings faster and faster, back and forth, back and forth, while the passengers, twoscore tatterdemalions, sing riotously:

“Here we go up, up, up; now we go down, down, downey!”

The junk creaks and grumbles a minor accompaniment, accentuated by Friskey’s staccato “Bow, wow, wow!”

Friskey was a short-haired Irish terrier, with an expressive stump of a tail; Fanny and Lion were big Newfoundlands, and Brownie was the great St. Bernard, bred at the famous Hospice and educated at a Swiss dog school. These are the Green Peace dogs I best remember. Brownie was not of this time, but of many years later; I speak of him now, lest I forget. He was the handsomest, best, most intelligent dog I ever knew. Compared to other dogs, he was what a highly polished university man is to a rough day laborer. Brownie was a hero, too; he saved the life of Honey-pot—but that’s another story.

In the cow barn lived the red cow and her calf. She was a famous milker, giving her sixteen quarts regularly. In the stable there were horses. Papa rode like a centaur. To see him mounted on his black mare Breeze, cantering along Bird Lane, was a revelation of grace and skill I have yet to see surpassed by Bedouin of the desert or Hyde Park dandy.

My little brother is closely linked with these memories of Green Peace. Can I remember it, or do I remember my mother’s telling me of this conversation between her and me?

“Mama, I am sorry you are so old!”

“Why, darling?”

“Because you cannot play with me!”

This was just before little Sam’s birth, when she, nimblest of playfellows, was weary with carrying her precious burthen:

“The hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn well might break and April bloom.”

His little life, four short years, has been told by his mother in what I believe to be a unique biography. He was a large handsome boy, full of vitality and charm. His death of diphtheritic croup, at the age of four, brought a desolation to our house, which, after all these years, I recall as if it had lately happened. My clearest memory of him is lying surrounded by flowers, a beautiful little marble figure, with lovely, half-closed violet eyes. A portrait preserves this last look. It always hung, framed by a wreath of thorns, in his mother’s room. There is frequent mention of him in her diary; until the end of her long life, she saw him in her dreams. Her poems show the closeness of the bond between her and—

The love that never leaves me,
The child that never grieves me.

We had been three pairs; Julia and Flossie, Harry and Laura, Maud and Sam. I was now left an odd number. The elder children seemed much older; later the dividing years shrank to nothing. They were all precocious; I was the reverse. My mother used to comfort me by saying, “The oak is a tree of slow growth!”

They all talked glibly together in Sdrawkcab (“Backwards”) a language I could not understand. The compensation for all this was that I was a great deal with both parents and their friends, though I remember Mama’s sometimes “borrowing a child” to play with me. The earliest letter I have from my father is written in sdrawkcab. To this day I am unable to understand the words, but the thought is plain: he was trying to help his youngest to enter into the elder children’s play. A letter from him to my Aunt Annie Mailliard written in 1864, describes us at this time.

“Julia does not grow older.

“Dudekins (Julia Romana) is in perfect and brilliant health and has grown so affectionate and loving to me that she seems more angel than human. Flossie grows in grace and good sense, and is as ever an upright and downright honest soul. Harry is a hobbledehoy—que voulez vous—of one who is neither man nor boy? Laura is not so robust as the others, but she is very handsome, graceful, intelligent, and good. Maud the Flibberty-gibbet is a nugget—solid, heavy, elastic, indefatigable. She promises to be the brightest, handsomest, and wildest of all. There, dear Annie, I have mentioned all—all but the one who has gone before us, the best beloved; of whom I never think without suffering anguish: you and those who know the same mystery of sorrow understand—but which to all others is inexplicable.”

In these early years I knew nothing of my mother’s people, but was on good terms with my father’s. His sister, my aunt Jeannette, and her husband, Thomas B. Wales, lived at the time I am writing of at the Tremont House, a sober granite building, on the corner of Tremont and Beacon streets, whose windows looked out on the Old Granary Burying Ground on one side, and the King’s Chapel graveyard on the other. Aunt Jeannette was a large handsome woman, with blue eyes like Papa’s, thick, classically waved, gray hair, and a closely corsetted figure. She was a shy and silent person. When Papa took me to see her on Sunday afternoons, there was little conversation between them. She kept a supply of brittle molasses and pink cinnamon candies for visiting nieces and nephews. If I were left alone with her, she would startle me with the question:

“Do you love your father?”

I adored my father; the question was nettling as implying doubts, I could not be made to answer it.

The Howes are reserved and silent people, little given to talking of themselves or their concerns. How sorry I am that I did not learn more about my father’s youth and ancestry from Aunt Jeannette. When my sister Laura came to write my father’s life, she gathered some interesting facts concerning his descent:

“His grandfather, Edward Compton Howe, was one of the ‘Indians’ of the Boston Tea Party. His father, Joseph Neals Howe, was a maker of ropes and cordage, and had a large ropewalk near the site of the present Public Garden. This business was, at one time, extremely profitable, and my grandfather prospered in it; but in the War of 1812 he had the misfortune to supply the United States Government with large quantities of ropes and cordage, for which he was never paid.... His mother was of the family of Jeremy and Richard Gridley, the former attorney-general of the royal province of Massachusetts Bay, who served at the taking of Louisburg, fortified Bunker Hill the night before the battle, and, under Washington’s orders, aided in preparing the siegeworks which finally drove the British from Boston.”[1]

My father’s only living brother was Joseph Howe, spoken of as Uncle Hpesoj (the h mute as in hour) according to the rules of Sdrawkcab. He was a tall fair man who wore a high collar, an imposing stock, ruffled shirts, elaborate waistcoats, a handsome fob and seals attached to a great gold warming-pan of a repeater, which rang the hours with a delicate chime. He was a successful merchant, and at this time president of the Sandwich Glass Company. He lived in a fine house, Number 4 Ashburton Place, where he reigned supreme over Aunt Eliza and “the girls”, my three Howe cousins, Anjie, Eliza, and Maria. Martha, his eldest daughter, by a former marriage, was the wife of the genial Austin Parks and the mother of the dear Parks cousins: William, known as Mungo; Maud, my particular crony; and Lilian, then a baby. Uncle Hpesoj lived in far greater state than the rest of the family. His house, his dress, everything that was his had the stamp of sober wealth. He owned a pew in King’s Chapel; his wife and daughters took their exercise in a fine barouche, drawn by two stout horses. The atmosphere of the house at Ashburton Place was as different as possible from our own ambiente. The storeroom was an impressive cave; the upper shelves laden with neatly labeled jars of jams, syrups, and preserves. On the lower shelves stood japanned boxes containing stores, and large blue paper cones called sugar loaves. Saturday morning the week’s supply of loaf sugar was cut up with a sharp little saw and the house was filled with the aroma of roasting coffee.

This was a perfectly kept house, where the domestic arts were carried to a high degree of perfection. My father coveted for his daughters all these niceties of housewifery and tried—oh, how he tried—to have us learn them! Julia Romana, our eldest, would have learned these things, had it been possible for her to do so; there was no sacrifice she would not have made for her father. Her nature was a straight blend of her parents; poet and philanthropist. Like Mama, she was a passionate student, wrote verses, plays, romances, because she could not help it. Like Papa, she devoted her life to the education of the blind. Watch a mother duck with her brood, and you will see how the young get their education, by imitation. The children of eagles are eaglets; eagle parents cannot hope to raise a brood of doves!

On Thanksgiving we dined at Ashburton Place. The extension mahogany table filled the great room, for the family gathering was a large one. After the opening course of oyster soup, an immense roast turkey was placed at one end of the table before Uncle Hpesoj, a twin bird, boiled, with white sauce before Aunt Eliza. The third course, like the third act in a play, brought the psychological moment; a lighted silver blazer was placed before each guest, who proceeded to cook his own venison, with currant jelly and other condiments to taste.

The table was decorated with glass flagons and goblets, rose, ruby, pale and dark green, some covered with gold arabesques, triumphs of the Sandwich Glass Factory. With dessert came the thin pink finger bowls; the children dipped their fingers and rubbed them round and round the rims, producing a faint elfin music I never hear without a vision of the Ashburton Place dining room, my tall dignified uncle, his little silver-haired mate, and Eliza, the beauty of the family.

A few years ago, motoring from Newport to Buzzard’s Bay, the way led through a fine old town, full of colonial houses and wide streets lined by magnificent elms.

“What’s this place?” I asked.

“East Sandwich”, the name blew back from the lips of our host, who drove the machine. Soon we passed a huge brick factory, with broken windows, smokeless chimneys, deserted, forlorn, yet with something that spoke of past greatness.

“Uncle Hpesoj’s glass factory!”

Whirling along the sand dunes, I have no eyes for the scenery; I see the old factory alive again, with smoking chimneys, glowing forges, swarms of swarthy Bohemians. A dark-eyed hairy man dips a blowpipe in a molten mass, twirls it quickly in both hands till a sort of blob forms at the end, puts the tube to his mouth and blows a rainbow bubble, to show a group of wondering children how Bohemian glass is made.

Uncle Hpesoj was a stockholder in the Boston Theater and often allowed our family the privilege of using his excellent seats. Mama, who as a child had been forbidden the theater, took great pains that we should see the best plays and best acting of our time. Wednesday and Saturday matineés at the Boston are among the most vivid memories of these years. The splendors of the great theater were still undimmed. The drop curtain, representing the Lake of Lugano, gave me so high an idea of Italian scenery that when I saw the real Lake of Lugano I was, somehow, disappointed.

My first play was “Jocko, the Brazilian”, a pantomime, acted by the Ravels. Jocko, the hero, a wise brown ape, saves the heroine from drowning, only to be rewarded by a careless bullet that ends his life. When dear brown Jocko fell mortally wounded to the ground, his life blood—a bunch of scarlet cotton wool—ebbing from his side, I fell into such a paroxysm of weeping that I still remember the pain of it, when some real sorrows are forgotten. My first opera was “Norma”; all I remember is my amazement when the stout Italian prima donna, over whose death I had shed such bitter tears, came before the curtain at the end of the performance to receive her share of the applause. I have had many such shocks since and have still to be convinced that anything so inartistic is pardonable.

My first tragedy was “The Iron Chest”, with Edwin Booth in the part of Edward Mortimer. I have seen most of the great actors of my time, and I have never seen one who equaled Booth, in tragedy, comedy, or melodrama.

“I do remember an apothecary—and hereabouts he dwells!”

Orlando Tompkins, the intimate friend of Booth, kept an apothecary shop at the corner of West and Washington streets, close by the Boston Theater. Booth was then the matinée idol; and the young ladies, who wrote him poems and letters, often left them at the apothecary’s, where he usually dropped in after the play. One day a silly woman sent him a gold chain in a letter, telling her messenger to wait outside and see what happened. Booth strolled in at the usual time, found the letter, broke the seal, read the contents, tossed the letter into the stove; twirling the chain in his hand for a moment, as if puzzled what to do with it, he strode across the shop and fastened it round the neck of the great Maltese cat that lay asleep in the window.

Next to Green Peace and the Boston Theater, I felt more at home at the Boston Music Hall than in any other place of my small world. To-day Boston has a fine Symphony Hall, an admirable Opera House; to some persons of my generation, neither compares in importance to the Music Hall, built two years before I was born, by that pioneer society, the Harvard Musical Association. The same year, 1852, Dwight’s Journal of Music was founded. In both enterprises the leading figure was John Sullivan Dwight, president of the association, editor of the journal. There is a certain romance connected with the very inception of Music Hall. Jenny Lind was coming to Boston; the city had no fitting auditorium for so great an artist. A few lovers of music got together, raised the money, and built the hall in what was then “record time.”

Between the ages of six and twenty years, I haunted the Music Hall, in company with my adopted son, John Dwight. At the time of his adoption I was seven, and Mr. Dwight was fifty years old. We celebrated the event by going to the dedication of the great organ at the Music Hall. For me it is still the greatest of organs, though I have been to Haarlem and Freiburg. I recognized in the crowd that filled the hall some of the “founders”; Charles C. Perkins, blue-eyed, golden-haired, seraphic in temper as well as face; Doctor Baxter Upham, Mr. Robert Apthorp, Mr. George Derby, and the architect, our friend, George Snell, an Englishman who lived many years in Boston.

For months we had watched the slow upbuilding of the organ, seen the golden pipes unpacked, tested, and laid

EDWIN BOOTH

in a row on the stage. Now everything was in place, the mouths of the painted singing women seemed ready to breathe out music. A pair of mighty colossi bore the weight of the massive front on their bowed heads and shoulders. Before the organ stood the bronze statue of Beethoven, now in Symphony Hall.

“Crawford’s statue seems to be listening to the music,” my mother whispered, as the organist struck the keys and a lovely air of Palestrina’s rolled from the organ, shaking the souls of the men and women gathered in this temple of the arts. Music must have its commercial side, like all other arts; but in those days, if it were there, it was hidden. The men who built the Music Hall, and who made Boston the musical center it still remains, were true servants of Apollo.

Mr. Dwight had access to Music Hall at all times. So devouring was his thirst for music that it was not enough to hear all the concerts by the Handel and Hayden, Harvard Musical, Cecilia, and other societies; he must hear all the rehearsals too. Not finished performances, like the so-called Friday afternoon rehearsals of the present Boston Symphony orchestra, but the working rehearsals, when Carl Zerrahn, our favorite leader, schooled his musicians, scolded his chorus, and made them repeat difficult passages over and over again. Mr. Dwight’s attitude towards his fellow man was one of gentle toleration, with one exception,—for those who set up false gods in the house of music, he had no mercy. He drove them from the temple with the scourge of his bitter pen. Dwight’s Journal arrived at our house every Saturday; its contents were discounted by those who had sat beside the oracle at the week’s concerts and already knew his opinion of artists and composers. It developed, even to my intelligence, that the oracle was but yet a man. When he wrote about a pretty woman, like that bewitching girl pianist, Adelaide Topp, his style showed a warmth that was lacking when he spoke of the black-avised Fraulein Osterauer, with nothing but her technique to recommend her. During intermissions, or at close of concerts, we went to the greenroom, to meet the artists. In this way, I have shaken hands with most of the great artists of the time. To see Christine Nilsson close, and catch the strange glint in those eyes of heavenly blue, was an unforgettable experience. Her pale gold hair was more beautiful even than on the stage; her beauty, like her voice, spoke of her own northland, gleaming ice peaks, frozen fiords, diamond-bright winter stars, moonlight upon snow.

Madame Essipoff—Russian, I think—though not beautiful, had a sympathetic personality.

“No woman ever had such a left hand for the piano,” our Nestor said of her. We highly approved of Camilla Urso, then in her early fame, and Theresa Carreño, a beautiful young woman, who fingered her instrument with the grace of a Fra Angelico angel. The oracle set his face sternly against certain male virtuosi; musical fireworks were not tolerated by Dwight’s Journal. When I hung entranced upon Ole Bull’s playing of some composition, written expressly to show the amazing dexterity of his bowing, the oracle frowned and exclaimed, “Claptrap!”

Mr. Dwight was severely classical in his taste and admitted new composers grudgingly. He lived in a world created by the early composers and loved, I think, above all others, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. To opera, he was not only indifferent, but hostile; unless it was “Don Giovanni”, “Fidelio”, the “Magic Flute”, or “Orpheus and Eurydice.” He spoke of the opera as the “siren.” Ravenously as I devoured the immense store of musical knowledge he so generously shared with me, I could not stop my ears to the siren’s voice. He never forgave me for going to “Ernani”, when he had invited me to Bach’s “Passion Music.” As an exception to his rule, Mr. Dwight took the keenest interest in a performance of “Oberon”, at the Music Hall, with Madame Parepa in the soprano part. We went to all the rehearsals. In the overture, “the horns of elfland faintly blowing” are heard, first at a great distance, then nearer, and last, just outside the castle gate. To produce the effect of distance, the trumpeter was sent to a remote part of the building to sound his horn. At the first rehearsal there was a pause at this point; Zerrahn looked up to the part of the balcony where we sat, and asked:

“How was that?”

“Not quite faint enough,” said the oracle. “No, no, not half faint enough,” murmured his adopted mother, much puffed up with pride.

There were other occasions at Music Hall even more exciting than the oratorios and symphony concerts,—the prize drills and declamations of the Boston Latin School. As my father and my brother Harry were both Latin School boys, we felt bound to uphold this institution and look down upon its upstart rival, the English High School.

On the floor of the Music Hall, the boys in blue presented arms, carried arms, shouldered arms, wheeled and marched, and wheeled again. I see their shining schoolboy faces, set and serious, their slim young bodies strained and alert, moving in perfect rhythm to the word of command. The galleries bloomed with schoolgirls in fresh Easter finery, gazing eagerly down at the marching lads. The battalion had four companies that drilled regularly during the autumn and winter, in the armory over the old Boylston Market. In the spring the drilling took place on the Common. The Prize Drill of the year 1871 was of especial interest on account of the officers. The Colonel was Lester W. Clark; Adjutant, George Monks; First Lieutenant, Francis Dumaresq; Second Lieutenant, Henry Warren. The Colonel had borrowed, for the occasion, a gold-mounted sword and a crimson sash; I well remember how becoming they were!

Girls who had brothers sometimes attended the monthly Public Saturday at the old Latin School on Bedford Street. At the end of the hall stood an allegorical figure by my friend, the sculptor, Mr. Richard Greenough, commemorating the graduates who fell in the Civil War. The speaker’s platform was just in front of this memorial. Parents, friends, and girls occupied the benches, facing the rostrum. I remember one of the Saturday mornings, when Lester Clark recited Mrs. Norton’s “Bingen on the Rhine” and Frank Dumaresq gave, with great effect, the Tower Scene from “King John.”

A program of the Prize Declamation of May 27th, 1871, has been preserved. The opening number was “Harold the Dauntless”, given in great style by “Carty” Fenno. My kinsman, Morton Prince, recited William Everett’s “Themistocles.” The “Daughter of Herodias” was sympathetically interpreted by Dumaresq; and the “Burial of Dundee” by Colonel Lester Clark. After the award of prizes, Gilmore’s Band played “Fair Harvard.”

We sometimes condescended to attend the Chauncy Hall School’s “Declamations”, to hear George Riddle’s fine recitations. Riddle was a beautiful boy, with a poetic face and fiery brown eyes. I was present when he won his first prize by his recitation of the Dagger Scene from “Macbeth.” Riddle became a professional reader later on, and I never missed an occasion to hear him recite. As an actor he had no success, with one great exception: his acting in “Oedipus Tyrannus”, at Harvard, was a notable dramatic achievement.

The chief figure at all public functions of Latin School was the head master, Francis Gardner, tall, thin, spectacled, with eyes that looked a boy through and through and an uncanny flair for mischief. It was said that he ruled “with a rod of iron and a cotton umbrella.” Though the boys feared, hated, and talked flippantly of him as “Old Gardner”, after they left school they were apt to confess to a sneaking fondness for their old master. When they had sons of their own, they have been known to declare that they loved and honored him. William Hunt’s portrait shows the man exactly as I remember him,—tall, gaunt, severe, lovable too, and at the first glance recognizable as a splendid specimen of the schoolmaster of fifty years ago. The modern educators, I know, have many qualities that he lacked; but they have lost something that Mr. Gardner possessed. They rule with the olive branch, where he ruled with the birch rod. Boston Latin School, under Francis Gardner, was a very different place from the Happy Valley of Rasselas schools, where to-day most of my young friends receive their education. These schools are delightful places for parents and aunts to visit; but are they not a trifle “soft” to fit a youth for the rough and tumble of the great world?

CHAPTER IV
Schools and Teachers

My first school was the pioneer Kindergarten of America, established and taught by Miss Elizabeth Peabody, in a house on Pinckney Street, near the corner of Joy Street. Miss Peabody was an enthusiastic follower of Froebel, and did much to introduce his system of education into this country. My fellow pupils were many, but I only remember Kitty Alger and Frankie Watson, later the distinguished surgeon, Doctor Francis Sedgwick Watson. We sat on tiny chairs, around a fascinating low table, where we modeled birds’ nests in clay and filled the nests with tiny eggs. Another useful art was the weaving of patterns with narrow strips of colored paper. My first lessons in arithmetic were had at the Kindergarten, with the help of a frame strung with red, green, and yellow beads. The system by which addition and subtraction were taught has passed from my mind, but the pleasure of juggling with the pretty colored balls remains.

My sister Flossie, trying to help me with my arithmetic, set me a simple sum, using as a textbook “Greenleaf’s Arithmetic.” After a stormy argument, the ink bottle was hurled against the nursery wall, with the passionate exclamation:

“Greenleaf is a liar!”

On leaving Miss Peabody’s Kindergarten, I went to Mr. Henry Williams’ school in Temple Place. The entrance was extremely mysterious to me. To reach the classrooms, we passed through a paved inclosed court and up a long flight of stairs, to a shadowy corridor that always depressed me. I was not exactly afraid of it, as of the passage outside my room inhabited by the foxes, nor did any hairy beast lurk there, as under the staircase at Number 13 Chestnut Street, but it was uncanny and I took care not to pass in or out alone.

I remember little of what I learned at the Temple Place School but a deal about Mr. Williams, a commanding figure, in spite of such personal defects, as a lump on his forehead and a missing forefinger. He had a musical voice and a sort of masterful sweetness that won the heart of every child. On Sundays he led the singing at the “Indiana Place Chapel”, the first home of the Church of the Disciples, where my mother’s beloved friend, James Freeman Clarke, was the pastor. The older girls were taught by Mr. Williams, but I was in the primary department, presided over by Miss Paul, a little lady who looked more like a brown wren than a schoolma’am.

For me, the school of schools was the Hilliards’ at Number 113 Mount Vernon Street, kept by Miss Julia and Miss Miriam Hilliard. Their mother, one understood, had met with “reverses.” Whatever their nature, they had left her dependent on her daughters. Mrs. Hilliard was super-stately, remote, kindly, and painstaking in her dealings with us. She wore stupendous corkscrew ringlets that must have taken hours every morning to arrange. She gave me music lessons. Half-past nine found me in the Hilliard “best parlor”, seated on an embroidered revolving stool before the square piano, with the metronome tick-tacking beside me.

“One, two, three—keep the wrists low, raise the fingers high; one, two, three; one, two, three!” I can feel the touch of the bamboo rod now, as she places my hands in the proper position above the keyboard.

After the music lesson came arithmetic.

“No, Maud, seven times nine do not make fifty-four. Try again!”

This from Miss Julia, firmly holding my wandering gaze with her great smoldering eyes. I can only look and look, with almost a lover’s gaze, at the glorious wave of her dusky hair swept back from the perfect brow, and calculate the weight of the great shining coil at the nape of her neck. When she smiles, the sight of her small perfect teeth, and the dimple that breaks the oval of her olive cheek, stir me to a mighty effort. For her—not for Greenleaf—I master the multiplication table; for her bend the full force of my will to make a fair copy of the wise sentences, written out in her neat pointed hand. On Saturday mornings, I am the first to arrive and place my little chair close to hers for the sewing lesson.

“There is no choice; the thimble always on the third finger of the right hand. Do not pucker the cloth; hold the two edges firmly together, the stitch not too deep.” So Miss Julia exhorts, while I bend my obstinate fingers in a desperate effort to sew a fine seam; and in the end learn, after a fashion, to hem, over and over, stitch, backstitch, buttonhole, darn,—all, all for her!

“Half-past eleven. Recess. Have a good play; bring me back some roses in your cheeks!”

So she dismisses us to those quiet streets of Beacon Hill, where we are safe in our romping as in a walled garden. Those in funds rush round the corner, to break breathlessly into Marm Horn’s tiny shop on Charles Street; she is waiting for us, her eye on the clock. The Marm wears shining brown side curls, that fit neatly into the hollows of her sallow cheeks. She is slim and rather elegant in her stiff alpaca apron and black silk half-mits.

“What’s the good word to-day?” Her invariable greeting.

The best word was “Jessups”, but that implied five cents in your pocket, which purchased a very thick stick of candy, done up in brown paper, stamped chocolate, lemon, or strawberry. For two cents, you got a stick of black molasses candy and a pickled lime from the big bowl, like a goldfish’s, in the window. It took courage, as well as bravado, to eat that bitter lime, bought solely because at home all pickled “abominations” were forbidden.

Our pennies safely invested, the whole troop rushes headlong uphill, to Louisburg Square, the nerve-center of the great game of “I spy.” The first to arrive takes possession of the granite doorsteps of Number One (the Russell house); the others stand on the pavement in a circle, to be “counted.” As soon as “It” is chosen, she takes her place on the doorsteps, and, with closed eyes, recites in a loud singsong:

“Eeny meeny mony my, Barcelony bony stry, kay, bell, broken well, harryky, warryky, we woe, wack!”

While these words are slowly chanted, the other children scatter and hide. The moment “It” pronounces the final “wack”, the chase begins. Never were such wonderful houses for hiding as those in Louisburg Square and Mount Vernon Street. The Thayer, Sears, Hemenway, Warren, Paine, and Gray houses have fine vestibules, with outer doors hospitably ajar, or at least unlocked. Their owners are ranked as public benefactors. It is a matter of honor that their hospitality must never be abused, and no crumb of bread or scrap of orange peel be allowed to drop on their immaculate steps. One child in one hiding place is the rule of the game, and the competition is keen for certain favorite “hidey holes.”

Up and down the steep streets, we tore and ramped, in all weathers, gathering Miss Julia’s roses. On zero days, when the sidewalks were sheets of glare ice, sliding in a row, with hands on each other’s shoulders, took the place of all other games. When spring came, and the melancholy black trees in Louisburg Square broke out of bounds and waved their slender branches in the world-ecstasy of the new birth, skipping ropes appeared, as if by magic, governed by the same occult law that on a certain day produces marbles among men children. With April, when the streets were finally clear of ice and snow, mysterious hieroglyphics in white chalk were sketched upon the sidewalks, and hop-scotch became the only sport worthy of the name.

I am often asked in these days to subscribe money for a playground, attendant guardians and new-fangled apparatus for play. At such times I am glad that I was young when I was! No playground could ever make up for the splendid freedom of those old Boston streets, where the children of my time were turned loose to amuse themselves. When the old games, played by the girls of Athens and Rome, grew stale, we invented new games of our own.

Certain bolder spirits formed a secret society, called “the Rovers of Boston.” Dinner, at this time, was commonly eaten at two or half-past two o’clock, though some “fashionable” families dined at three. After dinner the Rovers met at the Joy Street entrance of the Common, to plan the afternoon adventures. At the time I am now speaking of, we were living in Boston in one of the various houses my father either rented or owned. The elder children were growing up and, for their sakes, he reluctantly closed the Green Peace home and moved into the city, which my mother greatly preferred. We enjoyed for several seasons the Sargent house, Number 13 Chestnut Street, for many years the home of the Radical Club.

As founder and leader of the Rovers, I had a sense of responsibility for the afternoon’s fun. Life has brought me few sensations more thrilling than the peculiar musical sound that, on certain cold winter mornings, roused me from sleep. Metallic, muffled, rhythmic, all-pervading, a solo under my window, and a distant chorus thundering from every street and alley on Beacon Hill.

“The Snow Shovels!”

Out of bed in a flash and to the window, to see if it has stopped snowing yet; or whether the snow is coming down in sharp small crystals, which mean intense cold, or in great kindly flakes that settle gently upon the earth and transform it into a wonderful white paradise. The little spiteful flakes make the best sleighing and coasting, for they pack harder and firmer; but for fortifications, snowballing, snow statues, and snow ice cream, give me the big gentle flakes, that oftenest bring a peculiar bracing ecstatic thrill to the air, without the sting of extreme cold. On such a day as this, the Rovers’ best sport was to see how many “rides behind” they could coax from the good-natured hackmen, as the great booby-hucks swung slowly up and down the hill of Chestnut Street, a secluded thoroughfare between Mount Vernon and Beacon streets, which the children were allowed to make their very own. The people who lived there seemed all to be parents, or grandparents, and mothered and fathered each other’s children.

The Reverend Cyrus Bartol, of whom Phillips Brooks once spoke as “that little old moth-eaten angel”, lived just below us, and Mr. Patrick Grant a few doors above. On the opposite side of the street was the fine old double house, with wide brownstone steps, divided by the families of Mr. Patrick Jackson and Doctor Luther Parks. Doctor Lothrop lived a few doors off, and the Jere Abbotts next door but one. The Grant boys, Pat, Harry, and Bob, probably had no idea with what longing eyes the little girl at Number 13 watched them, wishing above all else to be invited to join their play. They took no more notice of me than if I had not existed, looking through me as if I had been glass. They were merry lads and famous snow architects. The moment the snow stopped, they were out with their shovels, clearing the steps and the sidewalk. That duty over, they were free for snowballing, building snow bastions, coasting on great “double-runners”, or hiking off to Jamaica Pond with their skates under their arms. Like many other little girls, I wanted to be a boy and play with boys. I did not like dolls, doll houses, or any of the pleasures which at that time little girls were supposed to content themselves with. Later in life, I grew to have a pleasant acquaintance with Judge Robert Grant, distinguished as a jurist and author.

My mother felt an old-fashioned obligation of courtesy toward her neighbors. Just because they were neighbors, they had an almost sacred claim that must never be neglected. They were always included in her entertainments; and as they often had little in common with the other guests, it came about that there was great variety in the people who came to our parties. We did not belong to any set, while people from every set came to our house. I have always been grateful to my parents for this catholicity, for I have felt at home in whatever company I have found myself. I had a smiling acquaintance with most of the neighbors, not only in our own, but in the adjacent streets. One figure, however, filled me with a blind panic, a pale man, who wore black-rimmed spectacles and used two stout canes when he walked. I can see him now, tramping with a sort of desperate energy for a few blocks, and then sitting down to rest. To come upon him unexpectedly, lying in wait for me on a doorstep, or walking along at a terrific clip as if some demon were after him, curdled my blood. I have never feared any mortal as I feared that pale specter. The terror lay far too deep for words, like that other fear of the hangman that haunted my youth. One day, walking with my mother, my heart stood still, for she stopped and spoke to the sinister figure.

“I am glad to see you out again, Mr. Parkman. You look much better than when I last saw you.”

They shook hands, he remaining seated, she leaning over him with gentle friendliness in face and voice.

“You know him?” I whispered, as we walked on together.

“Very well. That is the father of your friend Katie. He has been so ill that he can only walk a little distance without resting. He is writing a very important book, but he can only work at it twenty minutes at a time.”

Years afterward, I learned that the man with the two sticks was Francis Parkman, the great historian, who at that time was at work upon his “Pioneers of France in the New World.”

At the time I am writing of, the early sixties, the houses of Beacon Street extended only a short distance beyond the Public Garden. We went for long walks, across what is now the Back Bay, to the Milldam. The Brighton Road was the stretch where the Boston horse fanciers showed the paces of their famous trotters. When the sleighing was good, it was crowded of an afternoon with stately family sleighs, filled with young people, old people, and children. A prettier carnival scene it would be hard to imagine than a bright Saturday afternoon on the Brighton Road in sleighing season. Up and down the middle, the jaunty cutters raced back and forth, to the delight of the youngsters, and to the scandal of the elders; for many of them were driven by sporting characters, who had no relation with good society, as represented by the wealthy merchants and manufacturers and their families, who kept demurely to the outer edges of the “Road.” I owe these glimpses of the sleighing carnival to kind Mrs. William Gray, the mother of my playmate, Ellen, who sometimes took me in her handsome sleigh, filled with buffalo robes and children. I never remember taking a mere pleasure drive with either of my own parents. We kept horses and were all taught to ride; my father rode every day for his health, taking one of his daughters with him. He found that he could get the greatest amount of exercise in the shortest time on horseback. When he drove, it was to get somewhere, to accomplish some specific thing. I have been thankful all my life that I was not born of the class to whom the afternoon drive is as much a part of life’s daily routine as eating or sleeping.

“The Rovers of Boston” was not a long-lived society; its membership was fluctuating, but it was extremely active during the few years of its life. How the city streets belonged to us! How jealously we watched any change or innovation! How we raged when the noble old Hancock House was torn down. How faithfully we reported to our elders any over vigorous pruning of city trees, or any abuse of city property. We had a sense of citizenship, of holding a stake in the community, sometimes lacking in “grown-ups.” Arlington and Berkeley streets already existed, and we waited impatiently for the naming of the other streets, which were to follow an alphabetical sequence. To us, there was something romantic in the plan. We hailed every new name as each street came into being,—Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Hereford, Gloucester; each one brought a new thrill. They were such distinguished names, familiar too, if one had studied English history, and so well suited to the population that was to inhabit them.

On Monday and Thursday afternoon, I went to Papanti’s dancing school, on Tremont Street, nearly opposite the old Boston Museum. You entered a narrow door, walked past a dentist’s showcase filled with dreadful grinning false teeth, mounted two flights of stairs, and made your way into the ladies’ dressing room. Here you took off your wraps, hung them up, put your snow boots in the locker below, and waited your turn before the long cheval glass to see if your curls were in order, your guimpe straight, your sash properly spread out. I remember my first dancing lesson well. Clinging to my mother’s hand, I was led into the most magnificent ballroom in the world. It was surrounded on two sides with raised benches; the third was filled with long gilded mirrors, the fourth by a “Minstrel’s Gallery.” The benches and hangings were neatly covered with brown holland, the great crystal chandelier veiled by a bag sheer enough to give a glimpse of its glories. Kitty Alger held my hand as we were presented to that distinguished Neapolitan Maestro di Ballo, Signor Lorenzo Papanti.

He was in evening dress, with black silk stockings, patent-leather pumps, and his historic snuff-colored wig. He laid his hand on his heart, as he bowed low to my mother, greeting her in Italian:

“Signora, è un honore di farla, la benvenuta!” Then turning to the two trembling children, he said:

“And these I shall call my leetle vite mice!”

One little white mouse was frightened as she rarely remembers having been.

If Papanti’s biography has not been written, it should be. He was the Czar of dancing masters, a stern but beneficent despot; the inventor of the classic Boston waltz, the best of all round dances. While he lived and ruled, Boston girls and boys had the name of being the best dancers in the country; he taught at least five generations of us, and is gratefully remembered by many elderly beaux and belles. With shy, heavy-footed, or awkward children, he was satirical to the verge of cruelty,—a cruelty that was really kindness, for he labored with that biting satire of his to make the children committed to his care little ladies and gentlemen with good manners, as well as twinkling feet. I cannot remember Mr. Papanti without the fiddle, on which he played for us beginners. I can feel the tip of his bow against my toes, as he tapped my feet into the “first position.” How he labored to teach Kitty and me to make a proper courtesy.

“’Eels together, slide ze right foot to ze right, left foot out be’ind, one, two, t’ree; one, two, t’ree; one, two, t’ree!”

We were taught the waltz, galop, polka, lancers, and quadrille. The best dancers learned the gavotte and shawl dance, to the secret envy of the others. The Burgess boys, Sydney and Edward (the famous yacht builder) and one or two more brothers, wonderfully turned out lads, with immaculate clothes and tightly curling hair, were the champion dancers among the boys; Annie Merwin, Susie Spring, and Fannie Bartlett among the girls. On the wonderful “last day”, the dancing class was transformed into a real party. The boys wore white kid gloves—on ordinary days only the girls sported them. The brown holland disappeared from benches and wall hangings, revealing a handsome dark-blue brocade. The crystal chandelier came out of its chrysalis and became a blaze of glory. There was a real orchestra in the “Minstrel’s Gallery”; the mysterious double doors leading to the supper room were thrown wide, the boys coerced into offering ice cream and cake to their partners before falling-to themselves. The benches were crowded with admiring parents; some, to encourage the youngsters, “took a turn” with the dancing master or his assistant, Miss Hunt, a correct lady in brown silk, gloves to match, and bronze slippers!

Most of the children came from the exclusive quarter known as “Beacon Street” and belonged to the conservative class called by the Young Whigs, “Hunkers.” On a certain afternoon, soon after my introduction to Papanti’s, I came running home, weeping bitterly, and threw myself into my mother’s arms, crying out:

“Mama, Mama! What is an abolitionist? Are we that sort of thing? The big girls at the dancing school wouldn’t speak to the Andrew children and me; they said we were nasty little abolitionists.”

This was the first, but not the last time that I have been made to suffer for holding a minority opinion. I connect this incident with General McClellan’s visit to Boston, in the year of emancipation, 1862. Feeling ran very high over the question of McClellan’s loyalty. My father, Governor Andrew, and Charles Sumner thought little of him, but the Hunkers made much of him, invited him to Boston, where they held a great reception for him and presented him with a sword, though he had but lately been relieved from his last command in the Union Army; and from a military point of view, at least, his career was over.

My last school was Miss Wilby’s, on Bowdoin Street. During my time, the old régime changed, Miss Wilby retiring, full of honors, after a long useful career, and Miss Hubbard taking over the school. The teacher I remember with the most affection here was Mr. Theodore Weld, with whom we read Shakespeare. We prepared for our lessons by marking in the text lines that, for us, contained passages of especial beauty, or references we did not understand. Among my fellow students were Effie Bird, later Mrs. Linzee Tilden, and Alice Kent Robertson-Quimby. Alice Kent became a professional reader and Effie an amateur of distinction. Often in after years, while enjoying the acting of these two friends, I have remembered our old master with gratitude.

Mr. George Bradford, who taught me history and astronomy, was a Transcendentalist and, I believe, a member of the Brook Farm Colony. I once overheard my mother say that he was “Bourbon faced.” His features certainly did suggest an affectionate sheep. His clothes were unlike any I have ever seen. On reading Thoreau’s account of a conversation between himself and his tailoress, the mystery of Mr. Bradford’s garments was explained; I believe that, like Thoreau, he employed a tailoress. The dear quaint old pedagogue succeeded in interesting me more in my work than most of my teachers. His method of teaching ancient history had one feature that I hope survives in some educational backwater.

“You will find in this,” he said at our first lesson, handing me a long, narrow, green volume, “charts of all the centuries. Each page stands for one century and is subdivided with a space for every year. After each lesson you will make an illustration in water color, with the tints indicated, of the events that have most impressed you, using your own fancy and judgment.”

At our next lesson I submitted the book to Mr. Bradford, who ran over my illustrations encouragingly:

“Here we have the siege of Troy, 1180 B.C., a walled town well indicated. This illustrates the Passage of the Israelites across the Red Sea, quite clear, well colored and striking. This marks the year when Tiglath-Pileser was at the height of his power and suggests Hosea’s bribe of gold and silver talents, happily thought out!”

If I were asked to name the man with whom I had most enjoyed “star-gazing”, I could not hesitate for one moment,—George Bradford, of course!

With great patience he strove to give me some knowledge of astronomy, and, because he so loved his subject, succeeded in imparting a rudimentary understanding of the science. The indoor lessons, with books and plates of the firmament, had a romantic interest; we believed in the Nebular Hypothesis then; it has doubtless long since been superseded. Mr. Bradford was at his best in the lessons in practical star-gazing. At night he wore a curious close-fitting cap. If the weather were cool, he wrapped a green knitted scarf about his neck and buttoned the tailoress’s coat over it. Walking by his side, up and down the garden at Green Peace, I made those lifelong friends, Sagittarius, Corona, Aquila, Cassiopeia, the greater and the lesser Dipper.

In spite of my affection for several of my teachers, I did not love my lessons; life was so tremendously interesting, such great affairs were always going on about me! Much as I regret the wasted hours, I cannot think it strange that I began to live at a period when I ought to have been learning how to live.

Writing of his own childhood, Henry James the elder says:

“I am satisfied that, if there had been the least spiritual Divine leaven discernible within the compass of the family bond; if there had been the least subordination in it to any objective or public and universal ends, I should have been very sensitive to the fact. But there was nothing of the sort. Our family righteousness had as little felt relation to the public life of the world, as little connection with the hopes and fears of mankind, as the number and form of the rooms we inhabited, and we contentedly lived the same life of stagnant isolation from the race which the great mass of modern families live, its surface never dimpled by anything but the duties and courtesies we owed our private friends and acquaintances.”

Our home was the exact opposite of this. A swift current of the world’s life flowed through our house. Great public questions, the causes of freedom, education, and the succoring of the weak and afflicted of our own and other lands took precedence over all private affairs. Among our guests were distinguished European travelers, political exiles, Greeks, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, who had sought refuge in our country and were made welcome at our table.

“To ride the errand of the hour,” is a phrase my mother used in speaking of my father’s restless activity. Whether the errand took him to President Lincoln in Washington with a message from John Andrew, or to Crete with a shipload of food and clothing from Boston to help the Cretans in their fight for liberty, he was ready, booted and spurred for action. In his youth, he was given a Greek decoration, carrying the title of Chevalier. His friends gave him the nickname of “Chev”; I never heard my mother address him by any other name.

In thinking back over my first decade, I realize that my best teachers were my father, my mother, and my sister Julia. One of my early memories is of an evening when I was allowed to sit up to see Julia dressed for a party. She wore a white tarletan dress; Madame Canagalli, the Italian hairdresser, and my mother had a discussion as to which camellia they should place in her beautiful black hair, fine as a baby’s and softer than any other! I remember noticing that the white camellia was the same color as her smooth forehead “that looked like marble and smelt like myrrh”, that the red camellia matched the color in her cheeks and lips. This is the first impression I have of personal beauty. The vision persists, clear-cut as it was that night, when I first realized that some people are better to look at than others.

Julia read me all the Waverley novels and all of Dickens. I have often read them since, but that first impression remains the strongest. Julia, who introduced me to this company, was the intimate of my childhood, but I remember a curious withdrawal the moment my feet touched the threshold of girlhood. She had been the beneficient and adored elder sister of my childhood, but when I braided my tawny mane and “put up” my hair like a big girl, I lost something that had been an intrinsic part of our comradeship. I understand it all now, I could not then.

In the evening my father read us the poems of Byron, Scott, and Macaulay. He had a fine voice and read—recited rather, for he knew them by heart—many a stirring poem in the hour of rest he allowed himself after the evening meal. I can hear his voice now, reciting a line he always gave with great spirit:

“Roderick Vich Alpin Dhu, ho ieroe!”

While my father was teaching me to love poetry, my mother was teaching me to love good music. At dusk we gathered around the Chickering grand piano, while Mama sang to us. She had a beautiful, cultivated voice, and the flexible hands of the trained pianist, which she kept to the end of her life. Her repertoire was immense; she sang the florid arias of Bellini, the grand recitatives of Handel, folk-songs of France and Italy, Scotch and English ballads, German lieder, plantation melodies. We all joined in the chorus of these polyglot songs,—Irish, Polish, and Russian!

Beside a taste for poetry and music, the most valuable life asset I acquired in these days was a love of art. Our house was filled with pictures and statuary. While I do not remember either parent talking to me about them, their influence was none the less powerful. A copy of the Greek Clytie stood on the stairs; I loved her so much that on going up to bed, after having kissed all the family good night, I would pause and, if nobody were looking, reach up and kiss the cold lips of the marble woman. A set of engravings of the Greek temples hung in my father’s study; long before I knew what they were, I had learned to love the Parthenon, the Temple of Victory, the Erectheum, so that when I first saw the Acropolis at Athens I was well prepared for its glories. Mama had inherited a number of old masters from her father’s gallery, remembered as the first private picture gallery in the country. Of these I liked best the Velasquez portrait of the Little Prince. There were a dozen good Italian and Dutch pictures, all of which I studied thoroughly, if unconsciously, for when I went to live in Italy, I found no difficulty in attributing these pictures to their proper schools.

CHAPTER V
Uncle Sam Ward

While proud of being a Bostonian, I had from the beginning a sort of sneaking affection for New York. My mother, though of mixed New England and Southern descent, was born and bred a New Yorker. Some consciousness of these different strains of blood made me resent equally the disparagement with which Bostonians spoke of New York, and the condescension with which New Yorkers mentioned Boston. Like Annie in Enoch Arden, I wanted to be “little wife to both.”

My first visit in New York was in the spring of 1863. My mother and I stayed at Number 8 Bond Street, the home of her uncle, John Ward. Bond Street was already unfashionably downtown, though still dignified; its stately houses had immaculate white doorsteps. The rooms of Number 8 were large and high, the doors of heavy Santo Domingo mahogany, the furniture Georgian, in keeping with the rest.

Uncle John was adored by my mother and her sisters, to whom he was a second father; to me he is but a shadowy memory, not so distinct as his brother, Uncle Richard, who lived with him. Both were very tall men; Uncle Richard was slender, Uncle John heavily built, with a clean-shaven face, rare in those days when the moustache was almost universal. He was the President of the New York Stock Exchange, where his portrait by Wensler may still be seen. Did I hear Uncle Richard say to my mother, speaking of himself and his five brothers, all men over six feet tall?

“They were fine men, dearie! I am the least of them!”

“The Corner”, the house Grandfather Ward built on the corner of Bond Street, with the picture gallery extension running along Broadway, was still standing, a handsome house of soft-toned brick with white marble “trimmings.” The gallery had no windows, the lighting being from the top. The other day a gentleman said to me à prôpos of the extension:

“When I was a boy, I thought that was the city treasury and that all the money in New York was kept there, because there were no doors or windows for robbers to break in!”

“The Corner” was now owned by Mr. Sampson, from whom my mother got permission to show me the home of her youth. I received an impression of greater state than I had before known; it pleased me to think of my mother as a girl receiving her guests in the long drawing-rooms, one hung with blue, one with yellow, brocade. I admired the mantelpieces, with graceful sculptured figures, the work of Thomas Crawford, while still the marble cutter’s apprentice. There was ample space in the entrance hall and well-balanced stairway, that might have been planned by our own Boston architect, Bulfinch. We were not asked to go upstairs; I never saw the room where my mother sat “tied to her chair”, studying hour after hour. Was she thinking of that time of severe study when she wrote?

Who sows in tears his early years
May bind the golden sheaves;
Who scatters flowers in summer bowers
Shall reap but their withered leaves.

At Number 23 Bond Street lived Aunt Henry, widow of my mother’s uncle, Henry Ward, and mother of Cousin Henry.

“Mis’ Henry Ward will be pleased to see ye, Mis’ Julia,” the old negro butler exclaimed, as he opened the door, grinning until he showed all his ivories. In the darkened parlor I was startled by a savage cry:

“Good-by!”