and his successor in the presidency of the Jamestown colony.
The emigrants had a temporary home in Neponset Village, prospering so far in worldly substance as to justify the erection of the substantial house upon the hill overlooking the “village,” ten years after the landing. So substantial was it, and so honest were the builders, that it has come down in a direct line from father to son, and been inhabited by ten generations of thrifty folk who have left it stanch and weatherproof to this day.
My father’s mother, a handsome, wilful girl of seventeen, ran away to be married to one whom her father—“Squire Pierce”—considered a presumptuous adventurer. He was from Maine, a stranger in the neighborhood, and reputed (justly) to be wild and unsteady. When he asked for the girl’s hand he was summarily commanded to hold no further communication with her. He had served as a private in the Revolutionary War; he had winning ways and a good-looking face, and Ann had a liberal spice of her sire’s unbending will. She would have him, and no other of the youths who sued for her favor.
The family genealogy records that “Squire Pierce,” as he was named by his neighbors, received a captain’s commission from the parent government at the outbreak of the Rebellion, and on the self-same day one from the Continental Congress appointing him as a colonel in the Massachusetts forces. As “Colonel Pierce,” he fought throughout the eight bloody years to which we owe our national life.
In his home he was a despot of the true Puritan, patriarchal type.
For three years after the elopement the name of his daughter’s husband was never uttered in his hearing. Nor did she enter the house, until at twenty, her proud spirit bowed but not broken by sorrows she never retailed, she came back to the old roof-tree on the eve of her confinement with her first and only child. He was born there and received the grandfather’s name in full. From that hour he was adopted as a son of the house by the stern old Puritan, and brought up at his knees.
With the shrewd sense and sturdy independence characteristic of the true New-Englander, the mother was never forgetful of the fact that her boy was half-orphaned and dependent upon his grandfather’s bounty, and began early to equip him for a single-handed fight with the world.
Within a decade I have studied an authentic and detailed genealogy of the Hawes stock from which my grandfather sprang. It is a fine old English family, and the American branch, in which appear the birth and death of Jesse Hawes, of Maine, numbers many men of distinction in various professions. It is a comfort to a believer in heredity to be assured that the tree was sound at heart, in spite of the warped and severed bough.
By the time my father was fourteen, he was at work in a Boston mercantile house, boarding with his employer, Mr. Baker, a personal friend of the Pierces. The growing lad walked out to Dorchester every Saturday night to spend Sunday at home and attend divine service in the “Dorchester Old Meeting-House,” the same in which I first saw and heard Edward Everett Hale, over forty years later. The youth arose, in all weathers, before the sun on Monday morning in order to be at his place of business at seven o’clock. When he was sixteen, his employer removed to Richmond, Virginia, and took his favorite clerk with him. From Boston to the capital of the Old Dominion was then a fortnight’s journey by the quickest mode of travel. The boy could hardly hope to see his mother even once a year.
At twenty-five he was an active member of the First Presbyterian Church in Richmond, established and built up by Rev. John Holt Rice, D.D., who was also the founder of Union Theological Seminary, now situated in Richmond. The young New-Englander was, likewise, a teacher in the Sunday-school—the first of its kind in Virginia, conducted under the auspices of Doctor Rice’s church—a partner in a flourishing mercantile house, and engaged to be married to Miss Judith Anna Smith, of Olney, a plantation on the Chickahominy, five miles from the city.
I have a miniature of my father, painted upon ivory a few years after his marriage. It is that of a handsome man, with deeply set gray eyes, very dark hair, and a well-cut, resolute mouth. The head is nobly shaped, the forehead full and broad. His face was singularly mobile, and deeply lined, even in youth.
In intellect he was far above the average business man. His library, at that early date, was more than respectable. Some of the most valuable early editions of the English classics that enrich my book-shelves have his book-plate upon the fly-leaves. He had, moreover, a number of standard French books, having studied the language with a tutor in the evenings. The range of his reading was wide and of a high order. Histories, biographies, books of travel, and essays had a prominent place in his store of “solid reading.” That really good novels were not included in this condemnation we learn from a brief note to his betrothed, accompanying a copy of Walter Scott’s Pirate. He apologizes for the profanity of certain characters in semi-humorous fashion, and signs himself, “Your friend, Samuel.”
Doctor Rice, whose wife was my mother’s first cousin, appreciated young Hawes’s character and ability; the parsonage was thrown open to him at all times, and within the hospitable precincts he first met his future wife.
She was a pretty, amiable girl of eighteen, like himself an omnivorous reader, and, like him also, a zealous church-worker.
Her father, Capt. William Sterling Smith, was the master of the ancestral estate of Olney, rechristened in the latter part of the eighteenth century by an ardent admirer of William Cowper. I am under the impression that the change of name was the work of my grandmother, his second wife, Miss Judith Smith, of Montrose, and a second cousin of “Captain Sterling,” as he was familiarly called.
Late in the seventeenth century, William Smith, of Devonshire, a lineal descendant of the brother and heir of Capt. John Smith of Pocahontas fame, married Ann Sterling in England, and, emigrating to America, pitched his moving tent, first in Gloucester, then in Henrico County. His cousin, bearing the same name, took up land in Powhatan, naming his homestead for the hapless Earl of Montrose. The questionable custom of the intermarriage of cousins prevailed in the clan, as among other old Virginia families.
My maternal grandmother was petite, refined in feature, bearing, and speech, and remarkable in her day for intellectual vivacity and moral graces. Her chief associates of the other sex were men of profound learning, distinguished for services done to Church and State. Among them were the founders of the Presbyterian Church in Virginia. The Smiths had seceded from the Established Church of England before Thomas Jefferson rent it from the State.
There lies at my elbow a time-worn volume bound in unpolished calf-skin, and lettered on one side, “D. Lacy’s Letters”; on the reverse, “Friendship Perpetuated.” It contains one hundred and forty-two letters, copied from the original epistles and engrossed in exquisitely neat and minute characters. They represent one side of a correspondence maintained by the scribe with my grandmother before and after her marriage. The writer and copyist was the Rev. Drury Lacy, D.D., then a professor in Hampden Sidney College, and destined to become the progenitor of a long line of divines and scholars. The Hoges, Lacys, Brookeses, and Waddells were of this lineage. The epistles are Addisonian in purity of moral teaching and in grammatical structure, Johnsonian in verboseness, and interfused throughout with a pietistic priggishness all their own. We are glad to carry with us through the perusal (in instalments) of the hundred and forty-two, the tales current in that all-so-long-ago of the genial nature and liveliness of conversation that made him a star in social life. One wonders, in hearing of the “perpetuation” of the brotherly-and-sisterly intimacy, begun months before he wedded the “Nancy” of the Montrose group, who, from all I have been able to gather, was a very commonplace personage by comparison with “Judith”—one marvels, I say, that the affection never ripened into a warmer sentiment. They had themselves better in hand evidently than the “affinities” of the twentieth century.
Old people I knew, when a child, delighted in relating how, when “Mr. Lacy” held meetings
