as soon as possible and hasten my return to my home.
“May the Lord bestow on you His choicest blessings and grant a speedy return of health! Remember me in your prayers. Adieu, my Love!
“Your own S.”
The sere and yellow sheet is marked on the outside, in the upper left-hand corner, “Single,” in the lower, “Mail,” and in the upper right-hand, “12 cents.”
This was in the dark ages when there was but one steamer per week to Baltimore, and there were not stages enough to carry the passengers from the Monument City to New York; when the railway to Fredericksburg was a dream in the minds of a few Northern visionaries, and the magnetic telegraph was not even dreamed of. My mother has told me that, in reading the newspaper aloud to her father in 1824, she happened upon an account of an invention of one George Stephenson for running carriages by steam. Captain Sterling laughed derisively.
“What nonsense these papers print! You and I won’t live to see that, little girl!”
I heard the anecdote upon an express train from Richmond to New York, his “little girl” being the narrator.
In those same dark ages, strong men, whom acquaintances never accused of cant, or suspected of sentimentality, went to evening prayer-meetings, and accounted it a delight to hear two sermons on Sunday; laid pulpit teachings to heart; practised self-examination, and wrote love-letters to their own wives. If this were not the “Simple Life” latter-day philosophists exploit as a branch of the New Thought Movement, it will never be lived on this low earth.
Our first home in the little shire-town (then “Scottville”) was at “Bellevue,” a red brick house on a hill overlooking the hamlet. Separated from Bellevue by two fields and the public highway, was “Erin Hill,” built by one of the same family, which had, it is needless to observe, both Irish and French blood in it.
Erin Hill was for rent just when Uncle Carus decided to bring his family from Montrose—where they had lived for ten years—to the village.
This is the fittest time and place in which to sketch the pastor of Mount Carmel Church. Martin Chuzzlewit was not written until a score of years later. When it was read aloud in our family circle, there was not a dissenting voice when my mother uttered, in a voice smothered by inward mirth, “Mr. Carus!” as Mr. Pecksniff appeared upon the stage.
The portrait was absurdly striking. The Yankee Pecksniff was good-looking after his kind, which was the dark-eyed, well-featured, serenely-sanctimonious type. He wore his hair longer than most laymen cut theirs, and it curled naturally. His voice was low and even, with the pulpitine cadences hit off, and at, cleverly by Doctor Holmes as “a tone supposed by the speaker to be peculiarly pleasing to the Almighty.”
His smile was sweet, his gait was felinely dignified, and a pervasive aroma of meekness tempered his daily walk and conversation. His wife, “Aunt Betsy,” was the saintliest soul that ever rated herself as the least important of God’s creatures, and cared with motherly tenderness for everything else her Creator brought within her modest sphere of action. In all the years of our intimate association I never saw her out of temper or heard a harsh word from the lips in which nestled and abode the law of kindness. She brought him a tidy little slice of her father’s estate, which he husbanded wisely. He was economical to parsimony, and contrived to imbue wife and children with a lively sense of the need of saving in every conceivable way “against a rainy day.”
At ten years of age I asked my mother, point-blank, what salary the church paid Uncle Carus. She answered as directly:
“Three hundred dollars a year. But he has property of his own.”
Whereupon, without the slightest idea of being pert, I remarked, “If we were to get a really good preacher, I suppose he would have to be paid more.” And my mother responded as simply: “No doubt. But your Uncle Carus is a very faithful pastor.”
I put no questions, but I pondered in my heart the purport of a dialogue I got in snatches while reading on the back porch one afternoon, when a good-hearted neighbor and my mother were talking of the school to be opened in the village under the tuition of Cousin Paulina, the eldest daughter of Aunt Betsy and her second husband.
She was now in her eighteenth year, a graduate of a somewhat noted “female” seminary, decidedly pretty, with a quick temper and a talent for teaching.
“It is a pity,” said the friendly visitor, “to tie her down to a school-room when she is just at the age when girls like to see company and go round with other young people. It isn’t as if they were obliged to put her to work.”
My mother replied discreetly, yet I detected a sympathetic tone in her speech.
The talk came into my mind many a time after the sessions of the school began, and I saw, through the window, young men and girls walking, riding, and driving past, the girls in their prettiest attire, the young men gallantly attentive, and all enjoying the gala-time of life that comes but once to any of us.
If the dark-eyed, serious, eighteen-year-old teacher felt the deprivation, she never murmured. I think her mother had taught her, with her first word and trial-step, to believe that her “father knew best.”
The school—the first I ever attended—was in the second story of an untenanted house on a side-street, rented from a villager. It was kept for ten months of the year. A vacation of a month in May, and another in September, divided two terms of five months each. I climbed the carpetless stairs to the big upper room six or eight times daily for five days a week, for forty weeks, and never without a quailing of nerve and sinking of heart as I strode past a locked door at the left of the entrance.
Inside of that door I had had my first view of Death.
I could not have been six years old, for it was summer, or early autumn, and I was walking my doll to sleep up and down the main alley of the garden, happy and bareheaded, and unconsciously “feeling my life in every limb,” when my mother called to me from the window to “come and be dressed.”
“I am going to take you and your sister to a funeral,” she continued, as a maid buttoned me up in a clean white frock, put on my Sunday shoes, and brushed the rebellious mop of hair that was never smooth for ten minutes in the day.
“May I take my doll?” asked I, “sh-sh-ing” her in a cuddling arm. I was trying very hard to love lifeless dolls.
“Shame on you, Miss Firginny!” put in the maid, for all the world as if I had spoken in church. “Did anybody ever see sech another chile fur sayin’ things?” she added to my mother.
Mea looked properly shocked; my mother, ever light of heart, and inclined to let unimportant mistakes pass, smiled.
“We don’t take dolls to funerals, my daughter. It would not be right.”
I did not push inquiries as to the nature of the entertainment to which we were bound, albeit the word, already familiar to me by reason of two or three repetitions, was not in my vocabulary an hour ago. Content and pleased in the knowledge that an outing was on foot, I put my doll to bed in a closet under the stairs used by Mea and myself as a “baby-house,” shut the door to keep Argus and Rigo—sprightly puppies with inquisitive noses—from tearing her limb from limb, as they had rent her immediate predecessor, and sallied forth. The roadside was thick with sheep-mint and wild hoarhound and tansy. I bruised them in dancing along
