The Project Gutenberg eBook of Memories and Anecdotes, by Kate Sanborn

AUTHOR OF "ADOPTING AN ABANDONED FARM," "ABANDONING AN
ADOPTED FARM," "OLD-TIME WALL PAPERS," ETC.

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1915

ALL MY FRIENDS EVERYWHERE

WITH GRATEFUL REGARDS TO THOSE DARTMOUTH GRADUATES
WHO, LIKING MY FATHER, WERE ALWAYS GIVING HIS
AMBITIOUS DAUGHTER A HELPING HAND

My Early Days—Odd Characters in our Village—Distinguished Visitors to Dartmouth—Two Story-Tellers of Hanover—A "Beacon Light" and a Master of Synonyms—A Day with Bryant in his Country Home—A Wedding Trip to the White Mountains in 1826 in "A One-Hoss Shay"—A Great Career which Began in a Country Store

A Friend at Andover, Mass.—Hezekiah Butterworth—A Few of my Own Folks—Professor Putnam of Dartmouth—One Year at Packer Institute, Brooklyn—Beecher's Face in Prayer—The Poet Saxe as I Saw him—Offered the Use of a Rare Library—Miss Edna Dean Proctor—New Stories of Greeley—Experiences at St. Louis

Happy Days with Mrs. Botta—My Busy Life in New York—President Barnard of Columbia College—A Surprise from Bierstadt—Professor Doremus, a Universal Genius—Charles H. Webb, a truly funny "Funny Man"—Mrs. Esther Herman, a Modest Giver

Three Years at Smith College—Appreciation of Its Founder—A Successful Lecture Tour—My Trip to Alaska

Frances E. Willard—Walt Whitman—Lady Henry Somerset—Mrs. Hannah Whitehall Smith—A Teetotaler for Ten Minutes—Olive Thorn Miller—Hearty Praise for Mrs. Lippincott (Grace Greenwood.)

In and near Boston—Edward Everett Hale—Thomas Wentworth Higginson—Julia Ward Howe—Mary A. Livermore—A Day at the Concord School—Harriet G. Hosmer—"Dora Distria," our Illustrious Visitor

Elected to be the First President of New Hampshire's Daughters in Massachusetts. Now Honorary President—Kind Words which I Highly Value—Three, but not "of a Kind"—A Strictly Family Affair—Two Favorite Poems—Breezy Meadows.

ILLUSTRATIONS

MEMORIES AND ANECDOTES

CHAPTER I

My Early Days—Odd Characters in our Village—Distinguished Visitors to Dartmouth—Two Story Tellers of Hanover—A "Beacon Light" and a Master of Synonyms—A Day with Bryant in his Country Home—A Wedding Trip to the White Mountains in 1826 in "A One Hoss Shay"—A Great Career which Began in a Country Store.

I make no excuse for publishing these memories. Realizing that I have been so fortunate as to know an unusual number of distinguished men and women, it gives me pleasure to share this privilege with others.

One summer morning, "long, long ago," a newspaper was sent by my grandmother, Mrs. Ezekiel Webster, to a sister at Concord, New Hampshire, with this item of news pencilled on the margin:

"Born Thursday morning, July 11, 1839, 4.30 A.M., a fine little girl, seven pounds."

I was born in my father's library, and first opened my eyes upon a scenic wall-paper depicting the Bay of Naples; in fact I was born just under Vesuvius—which may account for my occasional eruptions of temper and life-long interest in "Old Time Wall-papers." Later our house was expanded into a college dormitory and has been removed to another site, but Vesuvius is still smoking placidly in the old library.

Mine was a shielded, happy childhood—an only child for six years—and family letters show that I was "always and for ever talking," asking questions, making queer remarks, or allowing free play to a vivid imagination, which my parents thought it wise to restrain. Father felt called upon to write for a child's paper about Caty's Gold Fish, which were only minnows from Mink Brook.

"Caty is sitting on the floor at my feet, chattering as usual, and asking questions." I seem to remember my calling over the banister to an assembled family downstairs, "Muzzer, Muzzer, I dess I dot a fezer," or "Muzzer, come up, I'se dot a headache in my stomach." I certainly can recall my intense admiration for Professor Ira Young, our next door neighbour, and his snowy pow, which I called "pity wite fedders."

As years rolled on, I fear I was pert and audacious. I once touched at supper a blazing hot teapot, which almost blistered my fingers, and I screamed with surprise and pain. Father exclaimed, "Stop that noise, Caty." I replied, "Put your fingers on that teapot—and don't kitikize." And one evening about seven, my usual bedtime, I announced, "I'm going to sit up till eight tonight, and don't you 'spute." I know of many children who have the same habit of questions and sharp retorts. One of my pets, after plying her mother with about forty questions, wound up with, "Mother, how does the devil's darning needle sleep? Does he lie down on a twig or hang, or how?" "I don't know, dear." "Why, mother, it is surprising when you have lived so many years, that you know so little!"

Mr. Higginson told an absurd story of an inquisitive child and wearied mother in the cars passing the various Newtons, near Boston. At last the limit. "Ma, why do they call this West Newton?" "Oh, I suppose for fun." Silence for a few minutes, then, "Ma, what was the fun in calling it West Newton?"

In spring, I remember the humming of our bees around the sawdust, and my craze for flower seeds and a garden of my own.

Father had a phenomenal memory; he could recite in his classroom pages of Scott's novels, which he had not read since early youth. He had no intention of allowing my memory to grow flabby from lack of use. I often repeat a verse he asked me to commit to memory:

In reading authors, when you find
Bright passages that strike your mind,
And which perhaps you may have reason
To think on at another season;
Be not contented with the sight,
But jot them down in black and white;
Such respect is wisely shown
As makes another's thought your own.

Every day at the supper table I had to repeat some poetry or prose and on Sunday a hymn, some of which were rather depressing to a young person, as:

When shrivelling like a parched scroll
The flaming heavens together roll
And louder yet and yet more dread
Swells the high Trump that wakes the dead.

Great attention was given to my lessons in elocution from the best instructors then known, and I had the privilege of studying with William Russell, one of the first exponents of that art. I can still hear his advice: "Full on the vowels; dwell on the consonants, especially at the close of sentences; keep voice strong for the close of an important sentence or paragraph." Next, I took lessons from Professor Mark Bailey of Yale College; and then in Boston in the classes of Professor Lewis B. Monroe,—a most interesting, practical teacher of distinctness, expression, and the way to direct one's voice to this or that part of a hall. I was given the opportunity also of hearing an occasional lecture by Graham Bell. Later, I used to read aloud to father for four or five hours daily—grand practice—such important books as Lecky's Rationalism, Buckle's Averages, Sir William Hamilton's Metaphysics (not one word of which could I understand), Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, and Spencer, till my head was almost too full of that day's "New Thought."

Judge Salmon P. Chase once warned me, when going downstairs to a dinner party at Edgewood, "For God's sake, Kate, don't quote the Atlantic Monthly tonight!" I realized then what a bore I had been.

What a treat to listen to William M. Evarts chatting with Judge Chase! One evening he affected deep depression. "I have just been beaten twice at 'High Low Jack' by Ben the learned pig. I always wondered why two pipes in liquid measure were called a hogshead; now I know; it was on account of their great capacity." He also told of the donkey's loneliness in his absence, as reported by his little daughter.

I gave my first series of talks at Tilden Seminary at West Lebanon, New Hampshire, only a few miles from Hanover. President Asa D. Smith of Dartmouth came to hear two of them, and after I had given the whole series from Chaucer to Burns, he took them to Appleton & Company, the New York publishers, who were relatives of his, and surprised me by having them printed.

I spent a pleasant hour last evening over the charming little volume, Home Pictures of English Poets, which thou wast kind enough to send me, and which I hope is having a wide circulation as it deserves. Its analysis of character and estimate of literary merit strike me as in the main correct. Its racy, colloquial style, enlivened by anecdote and citation, makes it anything but a dull book. It seems to me admirably adapted to supply a want in hearth and home.

I lectured next in various towns in New Hampshire and Vermont; as St. Johnsbury, where I was invited by Governor Fairbanks; Bath, New Hampshire, asked by Mrs. Johnson, a well-known writer on flowers and horticulture, a very entertaining woman. At one town in Vermont I lectured at the large academy there—not much opportunity for rest in such a building. My room was just off the music room where duets were being executed, and a little further on girls were taking singing lessons, while a noisy little clock-ette on my bureau zigzagged out the rapid ticks. At the evening meal I was expected to be agreeable, also after the lecture to meet and entertain a few friends. When I at last retired that blatant clock made me so nervous that I placed it at first in the bureau drawer, where it sounded if possible louder than ever. Then I rose and put it way back in a closet; no hope; at last I partially dressed and carried it the full length of the long hall, and laid it down to sleep on its side. And I think that depressed it. In the morning, a hasty breakfast, because a dozen or more girls were waiting at the door to ask me to write a "tasty sentiment" before I left, in their autograph albums, with my autograph of course, and "something of your own preferred, but at any rate characteristic."

My trips to those various towns taught me to be more humble, and to admire the women I met, discovering how seriously they had studied, and how they made use of every opportunity. I remember Somersworth, New Hampshire, and Burlington, Vermont. I lectured twice at the Insane Asylum at Concord, New Hampshire, invited by Dr. Bancroft. After giving my "newspaper wits" a former governor of Vermont came up to shake hands with me, saying frankly, "Miss Sanborn, your lecture was just about right for us lunatics." A former resident of Hanover, in a closed cell, greeted me the next morning as I passed, with a torrent of abuse, profanity, and obscenity. She too evidently disliked my lecture. Had an audience of lunatics also at the McLean Insane Asylum, Dr. Coles, Superintendent.

I think I was the first woman ever invited to make an address to farmers on farming. I spoke at Tilton, New Hampshire, to more than three hundred men about woman's day on the farm. Insinuated that women need a few days off the farm. Said a good many other things that were not applauded. Farmers seemed to know nothing of the advantages of co-operation, and that they were as much slaves (to the middlemen) as ever were the negroes in the South. They even tried to escape from me at the noise of a dog-fight outside. I offered to provide a large room for social meetings, to stock it with books of the day, and to send them a lot of magazines and other reading. Not one ever made the slightest response. Now they have all and more than I suggested.

When but seventeen, I was sent for to watch with Professor Shurtleff, really a dying man, and left all alone with him in the lower part of the house; he begged about 2 A.M. to be taken up and placed in a rocking-chair near the little open fire. The light was dim and the effect was very weird. His wig hung on one bedpost, he had lost one eye, and the patch worn over the empty eye socket had been left on the bureau. My anxiety was great lest he should slip from the chair and tip into the fire. I note this to mark the great change since that time. Neighbours are not now expected to care for the sick and dying, but trained nurses are always sought, and most of them are noble heroines in their profession.

Once also I watched with a poor woman who was dying with cancer. I tried it for two nights, but the remark of her sister, as I left utterly worn out, "Some folks seem to get all their good things in this life," deterred me from attempting it again.

Started a school a little later in the ell of our house for my friends among the Hanover children—forty-five scholars in all. Kept it going successfully for two years.

I dislike to tell a story so incredible and so against myself as this. One evening father said, "I am going to my room early tonight, Katie; do not forget to lock the back door." I sat reading until quite late, then retired. About 2.30 A.M., I was startled to hear someone gently open that back door, then take off boots and begin to softly ascend the stairs, which stopped only the width of a narrow hall from my room. I have been told that I said in trembling tones, "You're trying to keep pretty quiet down there." Next moment I was at the head of the stairs; saw a man whom I did not recognize on the last step but one. I struck a heavy blow on his chest, saying, "Go down, sir," and down he tumbled all the way, his boots clanking along by themselves. Then the door opened, my burglar disappeared, and I went down and locked the back door as I had promised father I would. I felt less proud of my physical prowess and real courage when my attention was called to a full account of my assault in the college papers of the day. The young man was not rooming at our house, but coming into town quite late, planned to lodge with a friend there. He threw gravel at this young man's window in the third story to waken him, and failing thought at last he would try the door, and if not locked he would creep up, and disturb no one. But "Miss Sanborn knocked a man all the way downstairs" was duly announced. I then realized my awful mistake, and didn't care to appear on the street for some time except in recitation hours.

The second time I lectured in Burlington, I was delayed nearly half an hour at that dreadful Junction, about which place Professor Edward J. Phelps, afterwards Minister to England, wrote a fierce rhyme to relieve his rage at being compelled to waste so much precious time there. I recall only two revengeful lines:

Oh, yes, I do remember his idea that the cemetery near the station contained the bodies of many weary ones who had died just before help came and were shovelled over.

It happened that Mrs. Underwood, wife of the demented governor, who had alluded so truthfully to my lecture, was in the audience, and being gifted with genuine clairvoyant powers, she rose and begged the audience not to disperse, as she could distinctly see me pacing nervously up and down the platform at the Junction in a long sealskin coat and hat trimmed with band of fur. I arrived at last with the sealskin and the hat, proving her correct, and they cheered her as well as myself.

Our little village had its share of eccentric characters, as the old man who was impelled by the edict of the Bible to cut off his right hand as it had "offended him." But lacking surgical facilities, the effort left one hand hanging limp and useless. His long white beard, how truly patriarchal!

Poor insane Sally Duget—a sad story! Her epitaph in our cemetery is pathetic. With all her woe she was quick at repartee. A man once asked her, "Shall you ever marry, Sally?" "Well, yes, if you and I can make a bargain."

Rogers, who carried the students' washing home to his wife on Sunday afternoons for a preliminary soak. The minister seeing him thus engaged, stopped him, and inquired:

"Where do you think you will go to if you so constantly desecrate the Holy Sabbath?"

The aged janitor who, in a brief scare about smallpox, was asked if he had ever had it: "No, but I've had chances."

An old sinner who, being converted, used to serve as a lay evangelist at the district schoolhouse where in winter religious meetings were held. Roguish lads to test him sprinkled red pepper, a lot of it, on the red hot stove. He almost suffocated, but burst out with: "By God, there's enemies to religion in this house! Hist the winders!"

The rubicund butcher of that period (we had no choice) was asked by a long-time patron how he got such a red face. "Cider apple sass." The same patron said, "You have served me pretty well, but cheated me a good deal." "Yes, sir, but you have no idea how much I've cheated you."

Our one milliner, positively brilliant in her remarks, when a lady sent back her bonnet twice on the ground that it was not becoming, said, "Remember you have your face to contend with."

After the death of a physician, his wife gave a stained-glass window to the Episcopal Church of St. Luke, the beloved physician. She asked Jason if he liked it. He said, "It don't strike me as a particular speaking likeness of Dr. Tom."

To one of the new professors who ventured to make a few suggestions, "Who be yaou anyway?"

He enjoyed buttonholing people he met in our "graveyard" and pointing out where they "must shortly lie."

Our landlord—who that ever saw Horace Frary could forget him? If a mother came to Hanover to see her boy on the 2.30 P.M. train, no meal could be obtained. He would stand at the front door and explain, "Dinner is over long ago." He cared personally for about thirty oil lamps each day, trimmed the wicks with his fingers, and then wiped them on his trousers. Also did the carving standing at the table and cleaning the dull knife on the same right side—so the effect was startling. One day when he had been ill for a short time his wife said: "Dr. Dixi Crosby is coming this way now, I'll call him in." "Don't let him in now," he begged, "why d—— it, I'm sick!"

I must not omit the strictly veracious witness who was sworn to testify how many students were engaged in a noisy night frolic at Norwich. "As fur as I know, there was betwixt six and seven."

"Webb Hall," who today would figure as a "down and out," made many amusing statements. "By the way I look in these ragged clothes, you might take me for a Democrat, but I'm a red hot Republican."

He was obsessed by the notion that he had some trouble with a judge in Concord, New Hampshire. He said fiercely, "I will buy two guns, go to Concord, kill Judge Stanton with one, and shoot myself with the other, or else wait quietly till spring and see what will come of it." A possible precursor of President Wilson's Mexican policy.

He was accused by a woman of milking a cow in her pasture; pleaded guilty, but added, "I left a ten-cent piece on the fence."

An East Hanover man is remembered for his cheek in slyly picking lettuce or parsley in the gardens of the professors and then selling them at the back door to their wives.

And a farmer from Vermont who used to sell tempting vegetables from his large farm. He was so friendly he cordially greeted the ladies who bought from him with a kiss. Grandmother evaded this attention by stating her age, and so was unmolested. The names of his family were arranged in alphabetical order. "Hannah A., give Miss Kate another cup of coffee; Noah B., pass the butter; Emma C., guess you better hand round the riz biscuit."

Life then was a solemn business at Hanover. No dancing; no cards; no theatricals; a yearly concert at commencement, and typhoid fever in the fall. On the Lord's Day some children were not allowed to read the Youth's Companion, or pluck a flower in the garden. But one old working woman rebelled. "I ain't going to have my daughter Frances brought up in no superstitious tragedy." She was far in advance of her age.

I have always delighted in college songs from good voices, whether sung when sitting on the old common fence (now gone) at the "sing out" at the close of the year, or merrily trolling or tra-la-laing along the streets. What a surprise when one glorious moonlight night which showed up the magnificent elms then arching the street before our house—the air was full of fragrance—I was suddenly aroused by several voices adjuring me, a lady of beauty, to awake. I was bewildered—ecstatic. This singing was for me. I listened intently and heard the words of their song:

Then two other sweets I could not quite catch, and the last lines sung with fervor:

But sweeter still is the charming voice
Of Professor Sanborn's daughter.

The prettiest girl on Hanover Plain is
Professor Sanborn's daughter.

Hot is the sun whose golden rays
Can reach from heaven to earth,
And hot a tin pan newly scoured
Placed on the blazing hearth,
And hot a boy's ears boxed for doing
That which he hadn't orter,
But hotter still is the love I bear
For Professor Sanborn's daughter.

I threw down lovely flowers and timidly thanked them. They applauded, sang a rollicking farewell, and were gone. If I could have removed my heart painlessly, I believe that would have gone out too. They had gone, but the blissful memory! I leaned on the window sill, and the moon with its bounteous mellow radiance filled my room. But listen, hark! Only two doors beyond, the same voices, the same melodious tones, and alas, yes, the same words, every verse and the same chorus—same masculine fervour—but somebody else's daughter.

A breakfast comment: "It's a terrible nuisance this caterwauling in the middle of the night in front of the house!" For once I was silent.

Many distinguished men were invited to Dartmouth as orators at commencement or on special occasions, as Rufus Choate, Edward Everett, John G. Saxe, Wendell Phillips, Charles Dudley Warner, and Dr. Holmes, whom I knew in his Boston study, overlooking the water and the gulls. By the way, he looked so young when arriving at Hanover for a few lectures to the Medical School that he was asked if he had come to join the Freshman class.

There were also Edwin P. Whipple, the essayist, and Walt Whitman, who was chosen one year for the commencement poet. He appeared on the platform wearing a flannel shirt, square-cut neck, disclosing a hirsute covering that would have done credit to a grizzly bear; the rest of his attire all right. Joaquin Miller was another genius and original.

Another visitor was James T. Fields of Boston, the popular publisher, poet, author, lecturer, friend, and inimitable raconteur, who was always one of my best friends.

When Mr. and Mrs. Fields were invited to Hanover, he and his beautiful wife were always guests at our home. Their first visit to us was an epoch for me. I worked hard the morning before they were to arrive, sweeping, dusting, polishing silver, and especially brightening the large, brass andirons in father's library. I usually scoured with rotten stone and oil, but on this great occasion, adopting a receipt which I had happened to see in a newspaper, I tried vinegar and powdered pumice-stone. The result at first was fine.

I had barely time after all this to place flowers about the house and dress, and then to drive in our old carryall, with our older horse, to the station at Norwich, just across the Connecticut River, to meet the distinguished pair and escort them to our house. As I heard the train approaching, and the shrill whistle, I got nervous, and my hands trembled. How would they know me? And what had I better say? My aged and spavined horse was called by father "Rosinante" for Don Quixote's bony steed, also "Blind Guide" and "Heathen Philosopher." He looked it—and my shabby carryall! But the train was snorting for a stop, and the two guests soon came easily to my vehicle, and Mr. Fields seemed to know me. Both shook hands most cordially and were soon in the back seat, full of pleasant chat and the first exciting ordeal was over. At tea table Mr. and Mrs. Fields sat on either side of father, and the stories told were different from any I had ever heard. I found when the meal was over I had not taken a mouthful. Next we all went to the College Church for the lecture, and on coming home we had an evening lunch. All ate heartily but me. I ventured to tell one story, when Mr. Fields clapped his hands and said, "Delightful." That was food to me! I went to bed half starved, and only took enough breakfast to sustain life. Before they left I had written down and committed to memory every anecdote he had given. They have never been printed until now, and you may be sure they are just as my hero told them. My only grief was the appearance of my andirons. I invited our guests to the open fire with pride, and the brass was covered with black and green—not a gleam of shine.

Often Mr. Fields's jokes were on himself—as the opinion of a man in the car seat just beyond him, as they happened to be passing Mr. Fields's residence on the Massachusetts coast. The house was pointed out on "Thunderbolt Hill" and his companion said, "How is he as a lecturer?"

How comically he told of a country druggist's clerk to whom he put the query, "What is the most popular pill just now?" And the quick answer, "Schenk's—they do say the Craowned Heads is all atakin' of 'em!"

Or the request for his funniest lecture for the benefit of a hearse in a rural hamlet!

His experience in a little village where he and Mrs. Fields wanted to find a boarding-house: The lady of the house demurred; she had "got pretty tired of boarders," but at last capitulated with, "Well, I'll let you come in if you'll do your own stretching." This proved to mean no waitress at the table.

The morning after their arrival, he went out for a long walk in the mountain air, and returning was accosted by his host: "I see you are quite a predestinarian." As he was resting on one of the wooden chairs, the man said: "I got those chairs for piazzary purposes," and enlarged on the trouble of getting good help in haying time: "Why, my neighbour, Jake Stebbins, had a boy in his gang named Henry Ward Beecher Gooley. He was so dreadful pious that on extra hot mornings he'd call 'em all together at eleven o'clock and ask 'em to join in singing, 'Lord, Dismiss us with Thy Blessing.'"

All these anecdotes were told to me by Mr. Fields and I intend to give only those memories which are my own.

Mr. Fields was wonderfully kind to budding authors. Professor Brown sent him, without my knowledge, my two-column appreciation of dear Tom Hood, after his memorials were written by his son and daughter. And before many weeks came a box of his newest books for me, with a little note on finest paper and wide margin, "hoping that your friendship may always be continued towards our house."

I cannot speak of Mr. Fields and fail to pay my tribute of loving admiration to his wife, Annie Fields. When I first met that lady in her home at 148 Charles Street, she was so exquisitely dainty, refined, spirituelle, and beautiful, I felt, as I expressed it, "square-toed and common." She was sincerely cordial to all who were invited to that sacred shrine; she was the perfect hostess and housekeeper, the ever-busy philanthropist, a classic poet, a strong writer of prose when eager to aid some needed reform. Never before had I seen such a rare combination of the esthetic and practical, and she shone wherever placed. Once when she was with us, I went up to her room to see if I could help her as she was leaving. She was seated on the floor, pulling straps tightly round some steamer rugs and a rainy day coat, and she explained she always attended to such "little things." As one wrote of her, after her death, she made the most of herself, but she made more of her husband. Together they went forward, side by side, to the last, comrades and true lovers.

Two of all the wonderful literary treasures in their drawing-room produced a great impression on me, one a caricature of Thackeray's face done by himself with no mercy shown to his flattened, broken nose. A lady said to him: "There is only one thing about you I could never get over, your nose." "No wonder, madam, there is no bridge to it." The other was an invitation to supper in Charles Lamb's own writing, and at the bottom of the page, "Puns at nine."

Two famous story-tellers of the old-fashioned type were Doctor Dixi Crosby of Hanover, and his son "Ben," who made a great name for himself in New York City as a surgeon, and also as a brilliant after-dinner speaker. Doctor Crosby's preference was for the long-drawn-out style, as this example, which I heard him tell several times, shows:

A man gave a lecture in a New England town which failed to elicit much applause and this troubled him. As he left early next morning on the top of the stage-coach, he interviewed the driver, who seemed not anxious to talk. "Did you hear much said about my lecture last night? Do you think it pleased the audience?"

"Now you have aroused my curiosity. I must beg you to let me know. Who criticized it, and what did they say? It might help me to hear it."

"Well, Squire Jones was the man; he does not say much one way or other. But I'll tell you he always gets the gist of it."

"If you must know, Squire Jones he said, said he, he thought 'twas—awful shaller."

Doctor Ben's Goffstown Muster was a quicker tempo and had a better climax. 'Twas the great occasion of the annual military reviews. He graphically described boys driving colts hardly broken; mothers nursing babies, very squally; girls and their beaux sitting in the best wagon holding hands and staring about (as Warner said to me, "Young love in the country is a solemn thing"); the booths for sale of gingerbread, peanuts, cider, candies, and popcorn; the marshal of the day dashing here and there on his prancing steed. All was excitement, great crowds, and the blare of the band. Suddenly an aged pair, seemingly skeletons, so bony and wan were they, were seen tottering toward the fence, where they at last stopped. They had come from the direction of the graveyard. The marshal rushed forward calling out, "Go back, go back; this is not the general resurrection, it is only the Goffstown Muster."

Doctor Ben Crosby was one of the most admirable mimics ever known and without a suspicion of ill-nature. Sometimes he would call on us representing another acquaintance, who had just left, so perfectly that the gravest and stiffest were in danger of hysterics. This power his daughter inherited.

John Lord, the historical lecturer, was always a "beacon light" (which was the name he gave his lectures when published) as he discussed the subjects and persons he took for themes before immense audiences everywhere. His conversation was also intensely interesting. He was a social lion and a favourite guest. His lectures have still a large annual sale—no one who once knew him or listened to his pyrotechnic climaxes could ever forget him or them. It was true that he made nine independent and distinct motions simultaneously in his most intense delivery. I once met him going back to his rooms at his hotel carrying a leather bag. He stopped, opened it, showing a bottle of Scotch whiskey, and explained "I am starting in on a lecture on Moses." There was a certain simplicity about the man. Once when his right arm was in a sling, broken by a fall from a horse, he offered prayer in the old church. And unable to use his arm as usual, he so balanced his gyrations that he in some way drifted around until when he said "Amen" his face fronted the whitewashed wall back of his pulpit. He turned to the minister standing by him, saying in a very audible whisper, "Do you think anybody noticed it?"

He was so genuinely hospitable that when a friend suddenly accepted his "come up any time" invitation, he found no one at home but the doctor, who proposed their killing a chicken. Soon one was let out, but she evaded her pursuers. "You shoo, and I'll catch," cried the kind host, but shrank back as the fowl came near, exclaiming: "Say, West, has a hen got teeth?" At last they conquered, plucked, and cooked her for a somewhat tardy meal, with some potatoes clawed up in the potato field. Once, when very absent-minded, at a hotel table in a country tavern, the waitress was astonished to watch him as he took the oil cruet from the castor and proceeded to grease his boots.

Doctor John Ordronaux, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Dartmouth and various other colleges and medical schools, was another erudite scholar, who made a permanent impression on all he met. While yet at college, his words were so unusual and his vocabulary so full that a wag once advertised on the bulletin board on the door of Dartmouth Hall, "Five hundred new adjectives by John Ordronaux."

He was haunted by synonyms, and told me they interfered with his writing, so many clamouring for attention. He was a confirmed bachelor with very regular habits; wanted his bed to be left to air the entire day, he to make it himself at precisely 5.30 P.M., or as near as possible. His walk was peculiar, with knees stiffly bent out and elbows crooked as if to repel all feminine aggression, "a progressive porcupine" as someone described his gait. His hour for retiring was always the same; when calling leaving about 9.30. Rallied about his methodical habits, he was apt to mention many of his old friends who had indulged themselves in earthly pleasures, all of whom he had the sad pleasure of burying.

He was a great admirer of my mother for her loveliness and kind interest in the students; after her death he was a noble aid to me in many ways. I needed his precautions about spreading myself too thin, about being less flamboyantly loquacious, and subduing my excessive enthusiasm and emotional prodigality. Once after giving me a drive, he kindly said, as he helped me out, "I have quite enjoyed your cheerful prattle." Fact was, he had monologued it in his most sesquipedalian phraseology. I had no chance to say one word. He had his own way of gaining magnetism; believed in associating with butchers. Did you ever know one that was anæmic, especially at slaughtering time? From them and the animals there and in stables, and the smell of the flowing blood, he felt that surely a radiant magnetism was gained. Those he visited "thought he was real democratic and a pleasant spoken man." He told of an opportunity he once had for regular employment, riding on the stage-coach by the side of a farmer's pretty daughter. She suggested that he might like a milk route, and "perhaps father can get you one." So formal, dignified, and fastidious was he that this seems improbable, but I quote his own account.

Doctor Ordronaux visited at my uncle's, a physician, when I was resting there from overwork. After his departure, uncle received a letter from him which he handed to me saying, "Guess this is meant for you." I quote proudly:

I rejoice to have been permitted to enjoy so much of Miss Sanborn's society, and to discover what I never before fully appreciated, that beneath the scintillations of a brilliant intellect she hides a vigorous and analytic understanding, and when age shall have somewhat tempered her emotional susceptibilities she will shine with the steady light of a planet, reaching her perihelion and taking a permanent place in the firmament of letters.

I visited his adopted mother at Roslyn, Long Island, and they took me to a Sunday dinner with Bryant at "Cedarmere," a fitting spot for a poet's home. The aged poet was in vigorous health, mind and body. Going to his library he took down an early edition of his Thanatopsis, pointing out the nineteen lines written some time before the rest. Mottoes hung on the wall such as "As thy days so shall thy strength be." I ventured to ask how he preserved such vitality, and he said, "I owe a great deal to daily air baths and the flesh brush, plenty of outdoor air and open fireplaces." What an impressive personality; erect, with white hair and long beard; his eyebrows looked as if snow had fallen on them. His conversation was delightfully informal. "What does your name mean?" he inquired, and I had to say, "I do not know, it has changed so often," and asked, "What is the origin of yours?" "Briant—brilliant, of course." He told the butler to close the door behind me lest I catch cold from a draught, quoting this couplet:

and informing me that this advice was found in every language, if not dialect, in the world. He loved every inch of his country home, was interested in farming, flowers, the water-view and fish-pond, fond of long walks, and preferred the simple life. In his rooms were many souvenirs of early travel. His walls were covered with the finest engravings and paintings from the best American artists. He was too willing to be imposed upon by young authors and would-be poets. He said: "People expect too much of me, altogether too much." That Sunday was his last before his address on Mazzini in Central Park. He finished with the hot sun over his head, and walking across the park to the house of Grant Wilson, he fell down faint and hopelessly ill on the doorstep. He never rallied, and after thirteen days the end came. An impressive warning to the old, who are selfishly urged to do hard tasks, that they must conserve their own vitality. Bryant was eighty-four when killed by over-exertion, with a mind as wonderful as ever.

I will now recount the conditions when Ezekiel Webster and his second wife took their wedding trip in a "one hoss shay" to the White Mountains in 1826.

Grandma lived to be ninety-six, with her mind as clear as ever, and two years before her death she gave me this story of their experiences at that time. My mother told me she knew of more than thirty proposals she had received after grandfather's death, but she said "she would rather be the widow of Ezekiel Webster, than the wife of any other man." The following is her own description.

The only house near the Crawford Notch was the Willey House, in which the family were living. A week before a slide had come down by the side of the house and obstructed the road. Mr. Willey and two men came to our assistance, taking out the horse and lifting the carriage over the débris.

They described the terrors of the night of the slide. The rain was pouring in torrents, the soil began to slide from the tops of the rocks, taking with it trees, boulders, and all in its way; the crashing and thundering were terrible. Three weeks later the entire family, nine in number, in fleeing to a place of refuge, were overtaken by a second slide and all buried.

The notch was then as nature made it; no steam whistle or car clatter had intruded upon its solitude. The first moving object we saw after passing through was a man in the distance. He proved to be Ethan Crawford, who kept the only house of entertainment. He was walking leisurely, drawing a rattlesnake along by its tail. He had killed the creature and was taking it home as a trophy. He was a stalwart man, who had always lived among the mountains, and had become as familiar with the wild beasts as with the cat and dog of his own home. He said that only a few days before he had passed a bear drinking at a spring. He led the way to his house, a common farmhouse without paint, or carpet, or cushioned seat. The landlady was spinning wool in the kitchen.

Mr. Crawford supplied the table when he could by his gun or fishing-rod; otherwise the fare was meagre. When asked for mustard for the salt meat, they said they had none, at least in the house, but they had some growing.

A young turkey halted about in the dining-room gobbling in a noisy way, and the girl in attendance was requested by Mr. Webster, with imperturbable gravity, either to kindly take it out or to bring its companion in, for it seemed lonely. She stood in utter confusion for a minute, then seized the squawking fowl and disappeared.

When Mr. Crawford was asked if ladies ever went up Mount Washington, he said two had been up, and he hoped never to see another trying it, for the last one he brought down on his shoulders, or she would have never got down alive.

The first night I asked for a change of bed linen. No attention was paid to my request, and after waiting a long time I found the landlady and asked her if she would have the sheets changed. She straightened up and said she didn't think the bed would hurt anybody, for only two ministers from Boston had slept in it. We stayed some days and although it was the height of the season, we were the only guests. Nothing from the outside world reached us but one newspaper, and that brought the startling news of the death of Adams and Jefferson on the fourth of July, just fifty years after their signing the Declaration of Independence.

The large leghorn bonnet which Mrs. Webster wore on that eventful journey hangs in my collection of old relics. She told me it used to hit the wheel when she looked out. And near it is her dark-brown "calash," a big bonnet with rattans stitched in so it would easily move back and forward. Her winter hood was of dark blue silk, warmly wadded and prettily quilted.

Who would not wish to live to be a hundred if health and mental vigour could be retained? This rare old lady wrote lively, interesting letters on all current topics, and was as eager to win at whist, backgammon, or logomachy as a child. Her religion was the most beautiful part of her life, the same every day, self-forgetting, practical Christianity. She is not forgotten; her life is still a stimulus, an inspiration, a benediction. The love and veneration of those who gathered about her in family reunions were expressed by her nephew Dr. Fred B. Lund, one of the most distinguished surgeons of Boston:

To her who down the pathway of the years
Serene and calm her blessed way she trod,
Has given smiles for smiles, and tears for tears,
Held fast the good in life, and shown how God

Has given to us His servants here below,
A shining mark to follow in our strife,
Who proves that He is good, and makes us know
Through ten decades of pure and holy life

How life may be made sweeter at its end,
How graces from the seasons that have fled
May light her eyes and added glory lend
To saintly aureole about her head.

We bring our Christmas greeting heartily,
Three generations gathered at her feet,
Who like a little child has led, while we
Have lived and loved beneath her influence sweet.

THE STREET FRONTING THE SANBORN HOME AT HANOVER, N. H.

Levi Parsons Morton, born at Shoreham, Vermont, May 16, 1824, was named for his mother's brother, Levi Parsons, the first American missionary to Palestine. He was the son of a minister, Reverend Daniel Morton, who with his wife Lucretia Parsons, like so many other clergymen, was obliged to exist on a starvation salary, only six hundred dollars a year. Among his ancestors was George Morton of Battery, Yorkshire, financial agent in London of the Mayflower. Mr. L.P. Morton may have inherited his financial cleverness from this ancestor.

After studying at Shoreham Academy, he entered a country store at Enfield, Massachusetts, and was there for two years, then taught a district school, and later entered a general store at Concord, New Hampshire, when only seventeen. His father was unable to send him to college, and Mr. Estabrook, the manager of the store, decided to establish him in a branch store at Hanover, New Hampshire, where Dartmouth College is located, giving him soon afterward an interest in the business. Here he stayed until nearly twenty-four years old. Mr. Morton immediately engaged a stylish tailor from Boston, W.H. Gibbs, or as all called him, "Bill Gibbs," whose skill at making even cheap suits look smart brought him a large patronage from the college students. Once a whole graduating class were supplied with dress suits from this artist. Mr. Morton had a most interesting store, sunny and scrupulously clean, with everything anyone could ask for, and few ever went out of it without buying something, even if they had entered simply from curiosity. The clerks were trained to be courteous without being persistent. Saturday was bargain day, and printed lists of what could be obtained on that day at an absurdly cheap rate were widely distributed through the neighbouring towns. People came in large numbers to those bargains. Long rows of all sorts of odd vehicles were hitched up and down the street. A man would drop in for some smoking tobacco and buy himself a good straw hat or winter cap. A wife would call because soda was offered so cheaply and would end by buying a black silk dress, "worth one dollar a yard but selling for today only for fifty cents." Mr. Morton was perhaps the original pioneer in methods which have built up the great department stores of the present day. If he had received the education his father so craved for him he would have probably had an inferior and very different career.

Mr. Morton greatly enjoyed his life at Hanover; he was successful and looking forward to greater openings in his business career. My father, taking a great fancy to this enterprising, cheery young man, invited him to dine each day at our house for nearly a year. They were great friends and had a happy influence upon each other. There were many jolly laughs and much earnest talk. He met Miss Lucy Kimball of Flatlands, Long Island, at our house at a Commencement reception, and they were soon married. She lived only a few years.

Mr. Morton was next in Boston in the dry-goods house of James Beebe Morgan & Company, and was soon made a partner. Mr. Morgan was the father of Pierpont Morgan. It is everlastingly to Mr. Morton's honour that after he failed in business in New York he was able before long to invite his creditors to dinner, and underneath the service plate of each creditor was a check for payment in full.

Preferring to give money while living, his whole path has been marked by large benefactions. My memory is of his Hanover life and his friendship with my father, but it is interesting to note the several steps in his career: Honorary Commissioner, Paris Exposition, 1878; Member 46th Congress, 1879-81, Sixth New York District; United States Minister to France, 1881-85; Vice-President of the United States, 1889-93; Governor of New York, 1895-6.

Mr. Morton recently celebrated at his Washington home the ninety-first anniversary in a life full of honours, and what is more important—of honour.

CHAPTER II

Next a few months at Andover for music lessons—piano and organ. A valuable friend was found in Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who had just published her Gates Ajar. She invited me to her study and wanted to know what I meant to accomplish in life and urged me to write. "I have so much work called for now that I cannot keep up my contributions to The Youth's Companion. I want you to have my place there. What would you like to write about?"

And so I was roused to try "Our Rab and His Friends," which was kindly mailed by Miss Phelps to Mr. Ford, the editor, with a wish that he accept the little story, which he did, sending a welcome check and asking for more contributions. I kept a place there for several years.

In Miss Phelps's case, one must believe in heredity and partly in Huxley's statement that "we are automata propelled by our ancestors." Her grandfather, Moses Stuart, was Professor of Sacred Literature at Andover, a teacher of Greek and Latin, and a believer in that stern school of theology and teleology. It was owing perhaps to a combination of severity in climatic and in intellectual environment that New England developed an austere type of scholars and theologians. Their mental vision was focused on things remote in time and supernatural in quality, so much so that they often overlooked the simple and natural expression of their obligation to things nearby. It sometimes happened that their tender and amiable characteristics were better known to learned colleagues with whom they were in intellectual sympathy, than to their own wives and children. Sometimes their finer and more lovable qualities were first brought to the attention of their families when some distinguished professor or divine feelingly pronounced a funeral eulogy.

It's a long way from the stern Moses Stuart, who believed firmly in hell and universal damnation and who, with Calvin, depicted infants a span long crawling on the floor of hell, to his gifted granddaughter, who, although a member of an evangelical church, wrote: "Death and heaven could not seem very different to a pagan from what they seem to me." Her heart was nearly broken by the sudden death of her lover on the battlefield. "Roy, snatched away in an instant by a dreadful God, and laid out there in the wet and snow—in the hideous wet and snow—never to kiss him, never to see him any more." Her Gates Ajar when it appeared was considered by some to be revolutionary and shocking, if not wicked. Now, we gently smile at her diluted, sentimental heaven, where all the happy beings have what they most want; she to meet Roy and find the same dear lover; another to have a piano; a child to get ginger snaps. I never quite fancied the restriction of musical instruments in visions of heaven to harps alone. They at first blister the fingers until they are calloused. The afflicted washerwoman, whose only daughter had just died, was not in the least consoled by the assurance that Melinda was perfectly happy, playing a harp in heaven. "She never was no musicianer, and I'd rather see her a-settin' by my tub as she used to set when I was a-wringin' out the clothes from the suds, than to be up there a-harpin'." Very different, as a matter of fact, were the instruments, more or less musical, around which New England families gathered on Sunday evenings for the singing of hymns and "sacred songs." Yet there was often real faith and sincere devotion pedalled out of the squeaking old melodeon.

Professor Stuart's eldest daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, married Austin Phelps in 1842; who was then pastor of Pine Street Church in Boston. Their daughter was born in Boston in 1844, and named Mary Gray Phelps. They moved to Andover in 1848, where two sons were born. Mrs. Phelps, who died when Mary was seven years old, was bright, interesting, unusual. She wrote Tales of New England, chiefly stories of clerical life; also Sunnyside Sketches, remarkably popular at the time. Her nom de plume was "Trusta." Professor Phelps married her sister Mary, for his second wife. She lived only a year, and it was after her death that Mary changed her name to that of her mother, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Professor Phelps had a most nervous temperament, so much so that he could not sleep if a cricket chirped in his bedroom, and the stamping of a horse in a nearby stable destroyed all hope of slumber.

Miss Phelps inherited her mother's talent for writing stories, also her humour and her sensitive, loving nature, as is seen by her works on Temperance Reforms, Abuses of Factory Operators, and her arraignment of the vivisectionist. Later, when I was living at the "Abandoned Farm," she had a liking for the farm I now own, about half a mile farther on from my first agricultural experiment. She called on me, and begged me as woman for woman in case she bought the neighbouring farm, to seclude all my animals and fowls from 5 P.M. till 10 A.M. each morning, as she must get her sleep, for, like her father, she was a life-long sufferer from insomnia. I would have done this if it were possible to repress the daybreak cries natural to a small menagerie which included chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese, besides two peacocks and four guinea fowls.

But to return to the Youth's Companion. When I found it impossible to write regularly for Mr. Ford, he made a change for the better, securing Mr. Hezekiah Butterworth, a poet, historian, and author of the Zigzag Series, which had such large sales. Happening to be in Boston, I called at the office and said to Mr. Ford: "It grieves me a bit to see my column taken by someone else, and what a strange pen name—'Hezekiah Butterworth.'"

When we had gone up one flight, Mr. Ford opened a door, where a gentle, sweet-faced young man of slender build was sitting at a table, the floor all around him literally strewn with at least three hundred manuscripts, each one to be examined as a possible winner in a contest for a five-hundred-dollar prize story. Both English and American authors had competed. He was, as De Quincey put it, "snowed up." Then my friend said with a laugh, "Miss Sanborn has come to see Hezzy whom she fancies she shall hate." A painfully awkward introduction, but Mr. Butterworth laughed heartily, and made me very welcome, and from that time was ever one of my most faithful friends, honouring my large Thanksgiving parties by his presence for many years.

I shall tell but two stories about my father in his classroom. He had given Pope's Rape of the Lock as subject for an essay to a young man who had not the advantage of being born educated, but did his best at all times. As the young man read on in class, father, who in later years was a little deaf, stopped him saying, "Sir, did I understand you to say Sniff?" "No, sir, I did not, I said Slyph."

In my father's Latin classes there were many absurd mistakes, as when he asked a student, "What was ambrosia?" and the reply was, "The gods' hair oil," an answer evidently suggested by the constant advertisement of "Sterling's Ambrosia" for the hair.

I will now refer to my two uncles on my father's side. The older one was Dyer H. Sanborn, a noted educator of his time, and a grammarian, publishing a text-book on that theme and honouring the parts of speech with a rhyme which began—

A noun's the name of anything,
As hoop or garden, ball or swing;
Three little words we often see
The articles, a, an, and the.

Mrs. Eddy, of Christian Science fame, spoke of him with pride as her preceptor. He liked to constitute himself an examining committee of one and visit the schools near him. Once he found only five very small children, and remarked approvingly, "Good order here." He, unfortunately, for his brothers, developed an intense interest in genealogy, and after getting them to look up the family tree in several branches, would soon announce to dear brother Edwin, or dear brother John, "the papers you sent have disappeared; please send a duplicate at once."

My other uncle, John Sewall Sanborn, graduated at Dartmouth, and after studying law, he started for a career in Canada, landed in Sherbrooke, P.Q., with the traditional fifty cents in his pocket, and began to practise law. Soon acquiring a fine practice, he married the strikingly handsome daughter of Mr. Brooks, the most important man in that region, and rose to a position on the Queen's Bench. He was twelve years in Parliament, and later a "Mr. Justice," corresponding with a member of our Federal Supreme Court. In fact, he had received every possible honour at his death except knighthood, which he was soon to have received.

My great-grandfather, on the paternal side, was always called "Grandsir Hook," and Dr. Crosby assured me that I inherited my fat, fun, and asthma from that obese person, weighing nearly three hundred pounds. When he died a slice had to be cut off, not from his body, but from the side of the house, to let the coffin squeeze through. I visited his grave with father. It was an immense elevation even at so remote a date. David Sanborn married his daughter Hannah Hook, after a formal courtship. The "love" letters to "Honoured Madam" are still preserved. Fortunately the "honoured madam" had inherited the sense of humour.

A few words about Mr. Daniel Webster. I remember going to Marshfield with my mother, his niece, and sitting on his knee while he looked over his large morning mail, throwing the greater part into the waste basket. Also in the dining-room I can still recall the delicious meals prepared by an old-time Southern mammy, who wore her red and yellow turban regally. The capital jokes by his son Fletcher and guests sometimes caused the dignified and impressive butler to rapidly dart behind the large screen to laugh, then soon back to duty, imperturbable as before.

The large library occupied one ell of the house, with its high ceiling running in points to a finish. There hung the strong portraits of Lord Ashburton and Mr. Webster. At the top of his own picture at the right hung his large grey slouch hat, so well known. In the next room the silhouette of his mother, and underneath it his words, "My excellent mother." Also a portrait of Grace Fletcher, his first wife, and of his son Edward in uniform. Edward was killed in the Mexican War.

There is a general impression that Mr. Webster was a heavy drinker and often under the influence of liquor when he rose to speak; as usual there are two sides to this question. George Ticknor of Boston told my father that he had been with Webster on many public occasions, and never saw him overcome but once. That was at the Revere House in Boston, where he was expected to speak after dinner. "I sat next to him," said Ticknor; "suddenly he put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, 'Come out and run around the common.'" This they did and the speech was a success. There is a wooden statue of Daniel Webster that has stood for forty years in Hingham, Massachusetts. It is larger than life and called a good portrait. It was made more than sixty years ago as a figurehead for the ship Daniel Webster but never put on. That would have been appropriate if he was occasionally half seas over. Daniel's devotion to his only brother "Zeke" is pleasant to remember. By the way, there are many men who pay every debt promptly and never take a drop too much, who would be proud to have a record for something accomplished that is as worth while as his record. When Daniel Webster entered Dartmouth College as a freshman directly from his father's farm, he was a raw specimen, awkward, thin, and so dark that some mistook him for a new Indian recruit. He was then called "Black Dan." His father's second wife and the mother of Zeke and Dan had decidedly a generous infusion of Indian blood. A gentleman at Hanover who remembered Webster there said his large, dark, resplendent eyes looked like coach lanterns on a dark night.

Mrs. Ezekiel Webster told me that her husband asked her after their marriage to allow his mother to come home to them at Boscawen, New Hampshire. She said she was a strikingly fine-looking woman with those same marvellous eyes, long straight black hair, high cheekbones; a tall person with strong individuality. Mrs. Webster was sure where the swarthy infusion came from. This mother, who had been a hard worker and faithful wife, now delighted in sitting by the open fire evenings and smoking an old pipe she had brought with her.

Webster saved his Alma Mater, and after the favourable decision on the College Case, Judge Hopkinson wrote to Professor Brown of Dartmouth suggesting an inscription on the doors of the college building, "Founded by Eleazer Wheelock, refounded by Daniel Webster." These words are now placed in bronze at the portals of Webster Memorial Hall.

To go back, as I did, from Andover to Hanover, I pay my tribute to Professor John Newton Putnam, Greek Professor at Dartmouth. His character was perfect; his face of rare beauty shone with kind and helpful thought for everyone. I see him, as he talked at our mid-week meetings. One could almost perceive an aura or halo around his classic head; wavy black hair which seemed to have an almost purple light through it; large dark eyes, full of love. What he said was never perfunctory, never dull. He was called "John, the Beloved Disciple." Still he was thoroughly human and brimming over with fun, puns, and exquisitely droll humour, and quick in seeing a funny condition.

It is said that on one occasion when there happened to be a party the same night as our "Thursday evening meeting," he was accosted by a friend as he was going into the vestry with the inquiry, "Are you not to be tempted by the social delights of the evening?" To which he replied, "No, I prefer to suffer affliction with the people of God, rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season." The college inspector reported to him that he was obliged to break into a room at college where a riot was progressing and described a negro's efforts to hide himself by scurrying under the bed.

Once he was found waiting a long time at the counter of a grocery store. A friend passing said, "You've been there quite a while, Putnam."

Expecting "Help" from Norwich, he was gazing in that direction and explained, "I'm looking unto the hills whence cometh our help."

We often diverted ourselves at his home with "Rounce," the duplicate of euchre in dominoes. And we were startled by a Madonna dropping to the floor, leaving its frame on the wall. Instantly Professor Putnam remarked: "Her willing soul would not stay 'in such a frame as this.'" And when called to preside at the organ when the college choir was away, he whispered to me, "Listen to my interludicrous performance."

How sad the end! A delicate constitution conquered by tuberculosis. With his wife he sought a milder climate abroad and died there. But no one can compute the good accomplished even by his unconscious influence, for everything was of the purest, highest, best.

Soon after my return from St. Louis, I received a call from Packer Institute in Brooklyn, to teach English Literature, which was most agreeable. But when I arrived, the principal, Mr. Crittenden, told me that the woman who had done that work had decided to remain. I was asked by Mr. Crittenden, "Can you read?" "Yes, I think so." "Then come with me." He touched a bell and then escorted me to the large chapel capable of holding nearly twelve hundred, where I found the entire faculty assembled to listen to my efforts. I was requested to stand up in the pulpit and read from a large Bible the fourteenth chapter of John, and the twenty-third psalm. That was easy enough. Next request, "Please recite something comic." I gave them "Comic Miseries." "Now try a little pathos." I recited Alice Cary's "The Volunteer," which was one of my favourite poems. Then I heard a professor say to Mr. Crittenden, "She recites with great taste and expression; what a pity she has that lisp!" And hitherto I had been blissfully unaware of such a failing. One other selection in every-day prose, and I was let off. The faculty were now exchanging their opinions and soon dispersed without one word to me. I said to Mr. Crittenden, as I came down the pulpit stairs, "I do not want to take the place." But he insisted that they all wanted me to come and begin work at once. I had large classes, number of pupils eight hundred and fifty. It was a great opportunity to help young girls to read in such a way that it would be a pleasure to their home friends, or to recite in company, as was common then, naturally and without gestures. I took one more class of little girls who had received no training before in that direction. They were easy to inspire, were wholly free from self-consciousness, and their parents were so much pleased that we gave an exhibition of what they could do in reading and recitation in combination with their gymnastics. The chapel was crowded to the doors. A plump little German girl was the star of the evening. She stood perfectly serene, her chubby arms stuck out stiffly from her sides, and in a loud, clear voice she recited this nonsense:

If the butterfly courted the bee,
And the owl the porcupine;
If churches were built on the sea,
And three times one were nine;
If the pony rode his master,
And the buttercups ate the cows;
And the cat had the dire disaster
To be worried, sir, by a mouse;
And mamma, sir, sold her baby,
To a gypsy for half a crown,
And a gentleman were a lady,
This world would be upside down.
But, if any or all these wonders
Should ever come about,
I should not think them blunders,
For I should be inside out.

I offered to give any in my classes lessons in "how to tell a story" with ease, brevity, and point, promising to give an anecdote of my own suggested by theirs every time. This pleased them, and we had a jolly time. The first girl who tried to tell a story said:

I don't know how; never attempted any such thing, but what I am going to tell is true and funny.

My grandfather is very deaf. You may have seen him sitting on a pulpit stair at Mr. Beecher's church, holding to his ear what looks like a skillet. Last spring we went to the country, house-hunting, leaving grandfather to guard our home. He was waked, in the middle of the night as he supposed, by a noise, and started out to find where it came from. It continued; so he courageously went downstairs and cautiously opened the kitchen door. He reached out his skillet-trumpet before him through the partly opened door and the milkman poured in a quart of milk.

This story, I am told, is an ancient chestnut. But I used to see the deaf grandfather with his uplifted skillet on the steps of Beecher's pulpit, and the young lady gave it as a real happening in her own home. Did anyone hear of it before 1868 when she gave it to our anecdote class? I believe this was the foundation or starter for similar skillet-trumpet stories.

The girl was applauded, and deserved it. Then they asked me for a milk story. I told them of a milkman who, in answer to a young mother's complaint that the milk he brought for her baby was sour, replied: "Well, is there anything outside the sourness that doesn't suit you?" And Thoreau remarked that "circumstantial evidence is sometimes conclusive, as when a trout is found in the morning milk."

This class was considered so practical and valuable that I was offered pay for it, but it was a relief, after exhausting work.

We had many visitors interested in the work of the various classes. One day Beecher strolled into the chapel and wished to hear some of the girls read. All were ready. One took the morning paper; another recited a poem; one read a selection from her scrapbook. Beecher afterward inquired: "Whom have you got to teach elocution now? You used to have a few prize pumpkins on show, but now every girl is doing good original work." Mr. Crittenden warned me at the outset, "Keep an eye out or they'll run over you." But I never had anything but kindness from my pupils. I realized that cheerful, courteous requests were wiser than commands, and sincere friendship more winning than "Teachery" primness. I knew of an unpopular instructor who, being annoyed by his pupils throwing a few peanuts at his desk, said, "Young men, if you throw another peanut, I shall leave the room." A shower of peanuts followed.

So, when I went to my largest class in the big chapel, and saw one of my most interesting girls sitting on that immense Bible on the pulpit looking at me in merry defiance, and kicking her heels against the woodwork below, I did not appear to see her, and began the exercises, hoping fervently that one of the detectives who were always on watch might providentially appear. Before long I saw one come to the door, look in with an amazed expression, only to bring two of the faculty to release the young lady from her uneasy pre-eminence.

I hardly knew my own name at the Packer Institute. The students called me "Canary," I suppose on account of my yellow hair and rather high treble voice; Mr. Crittenden always spoke to me as Miss "Sunburn," and when my laundry was returned, it was addressed to "Miss Lampoon."

Beecher was to me the clerical miracle of his age—a man of extraordinary personal magnetism, with power to rouse laughter and right away compel tears, I used to listen often to his marvellous sermons. I can see him now as he went up the middle aisle in winter wearing a clumsy overcoat, his face giving the impression of heavy, coarse features, thick lips, a commonplace nose, eyes that lacked expression, nothing to give any idea of the man as he would look after the long prayer. When the audience reverently bowed their heads my own eyes were irresistibly drawn toward the preacher. For he prayed as if he felt that he was addressing an all-powerful, omnipresent, tender, loving Heavenly Father who was listening to his appeal. And as he went on and on with increasing fervour and power a marvellous change transfigured that heavy face, it shone with a white light and spiritual feeling, as if he fully realized his communion with God Himself. I used to think of that phrase in Matthew:

I never heard anyone mention this marvellous transformation. But I remember that Beecher once acknowledged to a reporter that he never knew what he had said in his sermon until he looked at the résumé in Monday's paper.

During the hard days of Beecher's trial a lady who was a guest at the house told me she was waked one morning by the merry laughter of Beecher's little grandchildren and peeping into their room found Mr. Beecher having a jolly frolic with them. He was trying to get them dressed; his efforts were most comical, putting on their garments wrong side out or buttoning in front when they were intended to fasten in the back, and "funny Grandpa" enjoying it all quite as sincerely as these little ones. A pretty picture.

Saxe (John Godfrey) called during one recess hour. The crowds of girls passing back and forth interested him, as they seemed to care less for eating than for wreathing their arms round each other, with a good deal of kissing, and "deary," "perfectly lovely," etc. He described his impressions in two words: "Unconscious rehearsing."

Once he handed me a poem he had just dashed off written with pencil, "To my Saxon Blonde." I was surprised and somewhat flattered, regarding it as a complimentary impromptu. But, on looking up his poetry in the library, I found the same verses printed years before:

"If bards of old the truth have told,
The sirens had raven hair;
But ever since the earth had birth,
They paint the angels fair."

When a friend joked him about his very-much-at-home manner at the United States Hotel at Saratoga, where he went every year, saying as they sat together on the upper piazza, "Why, Saxe, I should fancy you owned this hotel," he rose, and lounging against one of the pillars answered, "Well, I have a 'lien' on this piazza."

His epigrams are excellent. He has made more and better than any American poet. In Dodd's large collection of the epigrams of the world, I think there are six at least from Saxe. Let me quote two:

AN EQUIVOCAL APOLOGY

Quoth Madame Bas-Bleu, "I hear you have said
Intellectual women are always your dread;
Now tell me, dear sir, is it true?"
"Why, yes," answered Tom, "very likely I may
Have made the remark in a jocular way;
But then on my honour, I didn't mean you!"

TOO CANDID BY HALF

As John and his wife were discoursing one day
Of their several faults, in a bantering way,
Said she, "Though my _wit_ you disparage,
I'm sure, my dear husband, our friends will attest
This much, at the least, that my judgment is best."
Quoth John, "So they said at our marriage."

When Saxe heard of a man in Chicago who threw his wife into a vat of boiling hog's lard, he remarked: "Now, that's what I call going too far with a woman."

After a railroad accident, in which he received some bruises, I said: "You didn't find riding on the rails so pleasant?" "Not riding on, but riding off the rail was the trouble."

He apostrophized the unusually pretty girl who at bedtime handed each guest a lighted candle in a candlestick. She fancied some of the fashionable young women snubbed her but Saxe assured her in rhyme:

"There is not a single one of them all
Who could, if they would, hold a candle to you."

He was an inveterate punster. Miss Caroline Ticknor tells us how he used to lie on a couch in a back room at the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, at a very early hour, and amuse the boys who were sweeping and dusting the store until one of the partners arrived. I believe he never lost a chance to indulge in a verbal quibble. "In the meantime, and 'twill be a very mean time."

I often regret that I did not preserve his comical letters, and those of Richard Grant White and other friends who were literary masters. Mr. Grant White helped me greatly when I was doubtful about some literary question, saying he would do anything for a woman whose name was Kate. And a Dartmouth graduate, whom I asked for a brief story of Father Prout, the Irish poet and author, gave me so much material that it was the most interesting lecture of my season. He is now a most distinguished judge in Massachusetts.

After giving a lecture in the chapel of Packer Institute at the time I was with Mrs. Botta in New York, I was surprised to receive a call the next morning from Mr. Charles Storrs of 23 Monroe Place, Brooklyn, asking me to go to his house, and make use of his library, which he told me Horace Greeley had pronounced the best working and reference library he had ever known. A great opportunity for anyone! Mr. Storrs was too busy a man to really enjoy his own library. Mrs. Storrs and Miss Edna Dean Proctor, who made her home with them, comprised his family, as his only daughter had married Miss Proctor's brother and lived in Peoria, Illinois. Mr. Storrs had made his own fortune, starting out by buying his "time" of his father and borrowing an old horse and pedlar's cart from a friend. He put into the cart a large assortment of Yankee notions, or what people then called "short goods," as stockings, suspenders, gloves, shoestrings, thread and needles, tape, sewing silk, etc. He determined to make his own fortune and succeeded royally for he became a "merchant prince." His was a rarely noble and generous nature with a heart as big as his brain. Several of his large rooms downstairs were crammed with wonderfully beautiful and precious things which his soul delighted in picking up, in ivory, jade, bronze, and glass. He was so devotedly fond of music that at great expense he had a large organ built which could be played by pedalling and pulling stops in and out, and sometimes on Sunday morning he would rise by half-past six, and be downstairs in his shirt sleeves hard at work, eliciting oratorio or opera music for his own delectation. A self-made man, "who did not worship his creator." He was always singularly modest, although very decided in his opinions. Men are asking of late who can be called educated. Certainly not a student of the ancient Assyrian or the mysteries of the Yogi, or the Baha, or the Buddhistic legends, when life is so brief and we must "act in the living present." But a man who has studied life and human nature as well as the best form of books, gained breadth and culture by wide travel, and is always ready for new truths, that man is educated in the best sense, although entirely self-educated. Greeley used to say, "Charles Storrs is a great man."

Greeley used to just rest and enjoy himself at Mr. Storrs's home, often two weeks at a time, and liked to shut himself into that wonderful library to work or read. Once when he returned unexpectedly, the maid told Miss Proctor that Mr. Greeley had just come in from the rain and was quite wet, and there was no fire in the library. He did not at first care to change to Mr. Storrs's special den in the basement. But Miss Proctor said "It is too cold here and your coat is quite wet." "Oh, I am used to that," he said plaintively. But his special desk was carried down to a room bright with an open fire, and he seemed glad to be cared for.

Whitelaw Reid was photographed with Greeley when he first came on from the West to take a good share of the responsibility of editing the Tribune. He stood behind Greeley's chair, and I noticed his hair was then worn quite long. But he soon attained the New York cut as well as the New York cult. Both Reid and John Hay were at that time frequent guests of Mr. Storrs, who never seemed weary of entertaining his friends. Beecher was one of his intimate acquaintances and they often went to New York together hunting for rare treasures.

I have several good stories about Mr. Greeley for which I am indebted to Miss Proctor who told them to me.

1. He used to write way up in a small attic in the Tribune building, and seldom allowed anyone to interrupt him. Some man, who was greatly disgusted over one of Greeley's editorials, climbed up to his sanctum, and as soon as his head showed above the railing, he began to rave and rage, using the most lurid style of profanity. It seemed as if he never would stop, but at last, utterly exhausted and out of breath and all used up, he waited for a reply.

Greeley kept on writing, never having looked up once. This was too much to be endured, and the caller turned to go downstairs, when Greeley called out: "Come back, my friend, come back, and free your mind."

2. Mr. Greeley once found that one of the names in what he considered an important article on the Board of Trade had been incorrectly printed. He called Rooker, the head man in the printing department, and asked fiercely what man set the type for this printing, showing him the mistake. Rooker told him, and went to get the culprit, whom Greeley said deserved to be kicked. But when he came, he brought Mr. Greeley's article in his own writing, and showed him that the mistake was his own. Mr. Greeley acknowledged he was the guilty one, and begging the man's pardon, added, "Tom Rooker, come here and kick me quick."

3. Once when Greeley was making one of his frequent visits to Mr. and Mrs. Storrs, the widow of the minister who used to preach at Mansfield, Connecticut, when Mr. Storrs was a boy, had been invited by him to spend a week. She was a timid little woman, but she became so shocked at several things that Greeley had said or written in his paper that she inquired of Miss Proctor if she thought Mr. Greeley would allow her to ask him two or three questions.

Miss Proctor found him in the dining-room, the floor strewn with exchange papers, and having secured his consent, ushered in the lady. She told me afterward that she heard the poor little questioner speak with a rising inflection only two or three times. But Mr. Greeley was always ready to answer at length and with extreme earnestness. He said afterwards: "Why that woman is way back in the Middle Ages."

When she came away from the interview, she seemed excited and dazed, not noticing anyone, but dashed upstairs to her room, closed the door, and never afterward alluded to her attempt to modify Mr. Greeley's views.

4. A little girl who was visiting Mr. Storrs said: "It would never do for Mr. Greeley to go to Congress, he would make such a slitter-slatter of the place."

Miss Proctor published A Russian Journey after travelling through that country; has published a volume of poems, and has made several appeals in prose and verse for the adoption of the Indian corn as our national emblem. She is also desirous to have the name of Mount Rainier changed to Tacoma, its original Indian name, and has a second book of poems ready for the press.

When I first met her at the home of Mrs. Storrs, I thought her one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen—of the Andalusian type—dark hair and lustrous starry eyes, beautiful features, perfect teeth, a slender, willowy figure, and a voice so musical that it would lure a bird from the bough. She had a way all her own of "telling" you a poem. She was perfectly natural about it, a recitative semi-tone yet full of expression and dramatic breadth, at times almost a chant. With those dark and glowing eyes looking into mine, I have listened until I forgot everything about me, and was simply spellbound. Mr. Fields described Tennyson's reciting his own poems in much the same way. Whittier once said to a friend, "I consider Miss Proctor one of the best woman poets of the day," and then added, "But why do I say one of the best; why not the best?"

Miss Proctor has always been glad to assist any plan of mine, and wrote a poem especially for my Christmas book, Purple and Gold. Mr. Osgood, the publisher, when I showed him the poem, said, "But how do I know that the public will care for your weeds?" (referring to the asters and goldenrod). He said later: "The instant popularity and large sale of that booklet attested the happiness of Miss Sanborn's selection, and the kind contributions from her friends." Miss Proctor's contribution was the first poem in the book and I venture to publish it as it has never been in print since the first sale. My friend's face is still beautiful, her mind is as active as when we first met, her voice has lost none of its charm, and she is the same dear friend as of yore.

GOLDENROD AND ASTERS

The goldenrod, the goldenrod,
That glows in sun or rain,
Waving its plumes on every bank
From the mountain slope to the main,—
Not dandelions, nor cowslips fine,
Nor buttercups, gems of summer,
Nor leagues of daisies yellow and white,
Can rival this latest comer!

On the plains and the upland pastures
Such regal splendour falls
When forth, from myriad branches green,
Its gold the south wind calls,—
That the tale seems true the red man's god
Lavished its bloom to say,
"Though days grow brief and suns grow cold,
My love is the same for aye."

And, darker than April violets
Or pallid as wind-flowers grow,
Under its shades from hill to meadow
Great beds of asters blow.—
Oh plots of purple o'erhung with gold
That need nor walls nor wardens,
Not fairer shone, to the Median Queen,
Her Babylonian gardens!

On Scotia's moors the gorse is gay,
And England's lanes and fallows
Are decked with broom whose winsome grace
The hovering linnet hallows;
But the robin sings from his maple bow,
"Ah, linnet, lightly won,
Your bloom to my blaze of wayside gold
Is the wan moon to the sun!"

And were I to be a bride at morn,
Ere the chimes rang out I'd say,
"Not roses red, but goldenrod
Strew in my path today!
And let it brighten the dusky aisle,
And flame on the altar-stair,
Till the glory and light of the fields shall flood
The solemn dimness there."

And should I sleep in my shroud at eve,
Not lilies pale and cold,
But the purple asters of the wood
Within my hand I'd hold;—
For goldenrod is the flower of love
That time and change defies;
And asters gleam through the autumn air
With the hues of Paradise!

Shortly before the Civil War, I went with father to St. Louis, he to take a place in the Washington University, while I was offered a position in the Mary Institute to teach classes of girls. Chancellor Hoyt of the university had been lured from Exeter, New Hampshire. He was widely known in the educational world, and was one of the most brilliant men I ever knew, strong, wise, witty, critical, scholarly, with a scorn of anything superficial or insincere.

I had thought of omitting my experience in this city, to me so really tragic. Just before we were to leave Hanover, a guest brought five of us a gift of measles. I had the confluent-virulent-delirious-lose-all-your-hair variety. When convalescent, I found that my hair, which had been splendidly thick and long, was coming out alarmingly, and it was advised that my head be shaved, with a promise that the hair would surely be curly and just as good as before the illness. I felt pretty measly and "meachin" and submitted. The effect was indescribably awful. I saw my bald pate once, and almost fainted. I was provided with a fearsome wig, of coarse, dark red hair, held in place by a black tape. Persons who had pitied me for having "such a big head and so much hair" now found reason for comment "on my small head with no hair." The most expensive head cover never deceived anyone, however simple, and I was obliged to make my début in St. Louis in this piteous plight.

We then had our first taste of western-southern cordiality and demonstrativeness. It occurred to me that they showed more delight in welcoming us than our own home folks showed regret at our departure. It was a liberal education to me. They all seemed to understand about the hideous wig, but never showed that they noticed it. One of our first callers was a popular, eloquent clergyman, who kissed me "as the daughter of my mother." He said, "I loved your mother and asked her to marry me, but I was refused." Several young men at once wanted to get up a weekly dancing class for me, but I was timid, fearing my wig would fall off or get wildly askew. Whittier in one of his poems has this couplet, which suggests the reverse of my experience:

At bedtime my wig must come off and a nightcap take the place. In the morning that wig must go on, with never one look in the glass. Soon two persons called, both leaders in social life, one of them a physician, who had suddenly lost every spear of hair. I was invited by the unfortunate physician and his wife to dine with them. And, in his own home, I noticed in their parlour a portrait of him before his experience. He had been blessed with magnificently thick black hair, a handsome face, adorned with a full beard and moustache. It was an April evening and the weather was quite warm, and after dinner the doctor removed his wig, placing it on a plaster head. He was now used to his affliction. He told me, as he sat smoking, looking like a waxwork figure, how several years ago he awoke in the dead of the night to find something he could not understand on his pillow. He roused his wife, lit the gas, dashed cold water on his face to help him to realize what had happened and washed off all the rest of his hair, even to eyebrows and eyelashes. That was a depressing story to me. And I soon met a lady (the Mayor's wife) who had suffered exactly in the same way. She also was resigned, as indeed she had to be. I began to tremble lest my own hair should never return.

But I should be telling you about St. Louis. We were most cordially received by clergymen from three churches and all the professors at the university, and the trustees with their wives and daughters. Wyman Crow, a trustee, was the generous patron of Harriet Hosmer, whose Zenobia was at that time on exhibition there. The Mary Institute was founded in remembrance of Rev. Dr. Eliot's daughter Mary, who while skating over one of the so-called "sink-holes," then existing about the city, broke the ice, fell in, and the body was never recovered. These sink holes were generally supposed to be unfathomable.

Since I could not dance, I took to art, although I had no more capacity in that direction than a cow. I attempted a bunch of dahlias, but when I offered the result to a woman cleaning our rooms she looked at it queerly, held it at a distance, and then inquired: "Is the frame worth anything?"

I acknowledge a lifelong indebtedness to Chancellor Hoyt. He was suffering fearfully with old-fashioned consumption, but he used to send for me to read to him to distract his thoughts. He would also criticize my conversation, never letting one word pass that was ungrammatical or incorrectly pronounced. If I said, "I am so glad," he would ask, "So glad that what? You don't give the correlative." He warned against reliance on the aid of alliteration. The books read to him were discussed and the authors praised or criticized.

St. Louis was to me altogether delightful, and I still am interested in that city, so enlarged and improved. I used to see boys riding astride razor-back hogs in the street, where now stately limousines glide over smooth pavements.

I have always had more cordiality towards strangers, homesick students at Dartmouth, and the audiences at my lectures, since learning a better habit. Frigidity and formality were driven away by the sunshine that brightened my stay at St. Louis.

I do not wish to intrude my private woes, but I returned from the West with a severe case of whooping-cough. I didn't get it at St. Louis, but in the sleeping-car between that city and Chicago. I advise children to see to it that both parents get through with all the vastly unpleasant epidemics of childhood at an early age. It is one of the duties of children to parents.

CHAPTER III

I was obliged to give up my work at Packer Institute, when diphtheria attacked me, but a wonderful joy came to me after recovery.

Mrs. Vincenzo Botta invited me to her home in West Thirty-seventh Street for the winter and spring. Anne C. Lynch, many years before her marriage to Mr. Botta, had taught at the Packer Institute herself, and at that time had a few rooms on West Ninth Street. She told me she used to take a hurried breakfast standing by the kitchen table; then saying good-bye to the mother to whom she was devoted, walked from Ninth Street to the Brooklyn ferry, then up Joralemon Street, as she was required to be present at morning prayers. Her means were limited at that time and carfare would take too much. But it was then that she started and maintained her "Saturday Evenings," which became so attractive and famous that N.P. Willis wrote of them that no one of any distinction thought a visit to New York complete without spending a Saturday evening with Miss Lynch. People went in such numbers that many were obliged to sit on the stairs, but all were happy. Her refreshments were of the simplest kind, lemonade and wafers or sandwiches. It has often been said that she established the only salon in this country, but why bring in that word so distinctively belonging to the French?

Miss Lynch was just "at home" and made all who came to her happy and at their best. Fredrika Bremer, the celebrated Norwegian writer, was her guest for several weeks at her home in Ninth Street. Catherine Sedgwick attended several of her receptions, wondering at the charm which drew so many. There Edgar Poe gave the first reading of "The Raven" before it was printed. Ole Bull, who knew her then, was a life-long friend to her. Fanny Kemble, Bryant, Halleck, Willis were all devoted friends.

After her marriage to Professor Vincenzo Botta, nephew of the historian Botta, and their taking a house in Thirty-seventh Street, she gathered around her table the most interesting and distinguished men and women of the day, and the "Saturday Evenings" were continued with increasing crowds. She had a most expressive face and beautiful blue eyes. Never one of the prodigious talkers, dressed most quietly, she was just herself, a sweet-faced, sincere woman, and was blessed with an atmosphere and charm that were felt by all.

At one of her breakfasts I recollect Emerson, who often visited there, Bryant, Bayard Taylor, and Grace Greenwood. At another, John Fiske, President Andrew D. White, and other men interested in their line of thought. I must mention a lady who in the midst of their inspiring conversation broke forth in a loud tone to Mrs. Botta: "I found a splendid receipt for macaroni; mix it, when boiled, with stewed tomatoes and sprinkle freely with parmesan cheese before baking."

One evening Whitelaw Reid brought John Hay. He beckoned to me to come to him, and presenting Mr. Hay said: "I want to make a prediction in regard to this young man. If you live long enough you will hear of him as the greatest statesman and diplomat our country has ever had." A few evenings after, at a Dramatic Club of great talent, I saw Mr. Hay figuring as Cupid in Mrs. Jarley's wax-work show. He looked and acted his part, turning gracefully on his toes to show his wings and quiver of arrows. And Mr. Reid, mounted on a step-ladder behind a draped clothes-horse, represented the distressed Lord Ullin whose daughter was seen eloping in a boat with her Highland chief, the tossing waves being sheets in full motion.

For years it seemed as if this were the one truly cosmopolitan drawing-room in the city, because it drew the best from all sources. Italy and England, France and Germany, Spain, Russia, Norway and Hungary, Siam, China, India, and Japan sent guests hither. Liberals and Conservatives, peers and revolutionists, holders of the most ancient traditions, and advocates of the most modern theories—all found their welcome, if they deserved it, and each took away a new respect for the position of his opponent.

Madame Ristori, Salvini, Fechter, Campanini, and Madame Gerster were honoured with special receptions. Special receptions were also given in honour of George P. Marsh, on the occasion of his appointment as Minister to Turin in 1861, and to the officers of the Royal Navy of Italy when they came to this country to take possession of two frigates built by an American ship-builder for the Italian Government.

MRS. ANNE C. LYNCH BOTTA

Emerson appreciated Mrs. Botta as a hostess. He enjoyed being in her home, saying it "rested him." "I wish that I could believe that in your miles of palaces were many houses and house-keepers as excellent as I know at 25 West 37th Street, your house with the expanding doors." He speaks of her invitation as "one of the happiest rainbows." "Your hospitality has an Arabian memory, to keep its kind purpose through such a long time. You were born under Hatem Yayi's own star, and like him, are the genius of hospitality." (Haten Yayi was a celebrated Oriental whose house had sixteen doors.)

I always wish I had had my photograph taken when Mr. Emerson was staying in my house. Everyone felt his influence, even the servants who would hardly leave the dining-room. I looked like a different being, and was so happy I forgot to see that he had enough to eat.

Early in her time some of her friends—such as Ripley, Curtis, and Cranch—had joined a small agricultural and educational association, called the "Brook Farm," near Roxbury, Massachusetts. She visited them once or twice, and saw Mr. Curtis engaged in washing dishes which had been used by "The Community." She remarked to him that perhaps he could be better employed for the progress of his fellow-men than in wasting his energy on something more easily done by others.

At one time she invited Bronson Alcott, one of the leaders of a similar movement, to preside over some conversazioni in her parlours, where he could elucidate his favourite subject. On one occasion, a lady in the audience, impressed by some sentiments uttered by the lecturer, inquired of him if his opinion was that we were gods. "No," answered Mr. Alcott, "we are not gods, but only godlings," an explanation which much amused Mrs. Botta, who was always quick in perceiving the funny side of a remark. (I timidly suggest that s be substituted for d.)

Mrs. Botta having promised to see Mr. Greeley, and urge him to give a favourable notice in the Tribune of the concert where a young singer was to make her début, went down to his office to plead for a lenient criticism. But not one word appeared. So down she went to inquire the reason. She was ushered into the Editor's Sanctum, where he was busily writing and hardly looked up. She asked why he was so silent; it was such a disappointment. No reply. She spoke once more. Then came the verdict in shrill tones: "She can't sing. She can't sing. She can't sing."

New Year's calls were then the custom, and more than three hundred men paid their respects to Mr. and Mrs. Botta on the New Year's Day I spent with them. And everyone looked, as Theodore Hook said, as if he were somebody in particular. At one of these "Saturday Evenings," a stranger walked through her rooms, with hands crossed under his coat and humming execrably as he wandered along. The gentle hostess went to him with her winning smile and inquired, "Do you play also?" That proves her capacity for sarcasm and criticism which she seldom employed. She conversed remarkably well, but after all it was what she did not say that proved her greatness and self-control.

Mrs. Botta had talent in various directions. She made portrait busts in plaster that really were like the subjects, with occasionally an inspired success, and that without any teaching. She showed genius in this work. When a bust of her modelling was sent to Rome to be put into marble, the foremost of Italian sculptors, not knowing the maker, declared that nothing would be beyond the reach of the artist if he would come to Rome and study technique for a year. Mrs. Botta asked me to let her try to get my face. That was delightful. To be with her in her own studio and watch her interest! Later some discouragement, and then enthusiasm as at last the likeness came. She said she took the humorous side of my face. The other side she found sad. My friends not only recognized my face, but they saw my mother's face inwrought.

Mrs. Botta had talent in various directions. She published a large book, The Hand Book of Universal Literature, once used at Harvard and other colleges, and hoped to prepare one of similar style on Universal History. She also wrote a small volume of poems, but her days were given to the needs of others. Only a few mornings were we able to work on her Universal History. There were too many calls for advice, sympathy, or aid; the door-bell rang too often. I heard a young girl once say of her: "She is great enough to have been an inspired prophetess of olden times, and tender enough to have been the mother of our Dear Saviour." Such were the words of impassioned praise that fell from the lips of a young, motherless, Roman Catholic girl, one of the many whom Mrs. Botta had taught and befriended. Once, when reading to Mrs. Botta in connection with her "History," a man called to see her about getting material for her biography. To my surprise, she waved her hand to me saying, "This young lady is to be my biographer." As I felt entirely unable to attempt such a work I told her it should be made up of letters from a host of friends who had known her so well and so long. This pleased her, and after her death her husband wrote me urging me to edit such a composite picture, but knowing his superior fitness for the work, I thanked him for the compliment, but declined. What a delightful result was accomplished by his good judgment, literary skill, and the biographical notes gladly given by her intimate friends. I will give a few quotations from the tributes:

To me—as to others—her conversation was singularly inspiring; it suggested to a man his best trains of thought; it developed in him the best he had; it made him think better of himself and of mankind; it sent him away stronger for all good work.

She seemed to me capable of worshipping in equal fervour with Roman Catholics or with Unitarians—in a cathedral or in a hovel; and this religious spirit of hers shone out in her life and in her countenance. Very pleasant was her optimism; she looked about her in this world without distrust, and beyond her into the next world without fear.

She had a delightful sense of humour—so sweet, so delicate, so vivid. She had a gift of appreciation which I have never seen surpassed.

If Mrs. Botta found more in society than most persons do, it was because she carried more there.

Horace Greeley once said to me, "Anne Lynch is the best woman that God ever made."

Few women known to me have had greater grace or ease in the entertainment of strangers, while in her more private intercourse, her frank, intelligent, courteous ways won her the warmest and most desirable friendships.

The position of the Bottas in the literary and artistic world enabled them to draw together not only the best-known people of this country, but to a degree greater than any, as far as I know, the most distinguished visitors from abroad, beyond the ranks of mere title or fashion. No home, I think, in all the land compared with theirs in the number and character of its foreign visitors.

I should like to introduce you to her home as it was—the hall, with its interesting pictures and fragrant with fresh flowers; the dining-room, the drawing-rooms, with their magnetized atmosphere of the past (you can almost feel the presence of those who have loved to linger there); her own sanctum, where a chosen few were admitted; but the limits of space forbid. The queens of Parisian salons have been praised and idealized till we are led to believe them unapproachable in their social altitude. But I am not afraid to place beside them an American woman, uncrowned by extravagant adulation, but fully their equal—the artist, poet, conversationist, Anne C. L. Botta.

She was absolutely free from egotism or conceit, always avoiding allusion to what she had accomplished, or her unfulfilled longings. But she once told me:

Sandy (short for old, red sand stone), I would rather have had a child than to have made the most perfect statue or the finest painting ever produced. [She also said]: If I could only stop longing and aspiring for that which is not in my power to attain, but is only just near enough to keep me always running after it, like the donkey that followed an ear of corn which was tied fast to a stick.

Mrs. Botta came of a Celtic father, gay, humorous, full of impulsive chivalry and intense Irish patriotism, and of a practical New England mother, herself of Revolutionary stock, clear of judgment, careful of the household economy, upright, exemplary, and "facultied." In the daughter these inherited qualities blended in a most harmonious whole. Grant Allen, the scientific writer, novelist, and student of spiritualistic phenomena, thinks that racial differences often combine to produce a genius.

I often think of that rarely endowed friend in full faith that she now has the joys denied her here, and that her many-sided nature is allowed progress, full and free and far, in many directions. I am also sure that Heaven could not be Heaven to Mrs. Botta if she were not able to take soul flights and use wireless telegraphy to still help those she left behind, and hope that she can return to greet and guide us as we reach the unknown land.

Through the kind suggestions of Mrs. Botta, I was asked to give talks on literary matters at the house of one of New York's most influential citizens. This I enjoyed immensely. Soon the large drawing-rooms were too small for the numbers who came. Next we went to the Young Women's Christian Association, to the library there, and later I decided to engage the church parlours in Doctor Howard Crosby's Church, Fourth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, New York. When I realized my audacious venture, I was frightened. Ten lectures had been advertised and some not written!

On the day for my first lecture the rain poured down, and I felt sure of a failure. My sister went with me to the church. As we drew near I noticed a string of carriages up and down the avenue. "There must be a wedding or a funeral," I whispered, feeling more in the mood of the latter, but never dreaming how much those carriages meant to me. As I went timidly into the room I found nearly every seat full, and was greeted with cordial applause. My sister took a seat beside me. My subject was "Spinster Authors of England." My hands trembled so visibly that I laid my manuscript on the table, but after getting in magnetic touch with those before me, I did not mind.

The reading occupied only one hour, and afterwards I was surrounded by New Hampshire women and New Yorkers who congratulated me warmly. There were reporters sent from seven of the best daily papers, whom I found sharpening their pencils expectantly. They gave correct and complimentary notices, and my success was now assured.

Mr. James T. Fields not only advised his New York friends to hear me, but came himself, bringing my father who was deeply gratified. Mr. Fields told father that I had a remarkably choice audience, among the best in the city. My father had felt very deeply, even to tears, the sharp, narrow and adverse criticism of one of his associates who considered that I unsexed myself by daring to speak in public, and who advised strongly against encouraging me in such unwomanly behaviour.

I was a pioneer as a lecturer on literature quite unconsciously, for I had gone along so gradually that I did not realize it—taken up and set down in a new place with no planning on my part.

Invited by many of the citizens of Hanover, New Hampshire, my old home, to go there and give my lecture on "Lady Morgan," the Irish novelist, for the purpose of purchasing a new carpet for the Congregational Church, I was surprised to feel again the same stern opposition; I was not permitted to speak in the church, but immediately was urged to accept the large recitation hall of the Scientific School. It was crowded to the doors and the college boys climbed up and swarmed about the windows. The carpet, a dark red ingrain, was bought, put down, and wore well for years.

Now came a busy life. I was asked to lecture in many places near New York, always in delightful homes. Had a class of married ladies at the home of Dr. J.G. Holland, where I gave an idea of the newest books. Doctor Holland gave me a department, "Bric-à-brac," in his magazine—Scribner's Magazine; and I was honoured by a request from the editors of the Galaxy to take the "Club Room" from which Mark Twain had just resigned. Meeting him soon after at a dinner, he said with his characteristic drawl: "Awful solemn, ain't it, having to be funny every month; worse than a funeral." I started a class in my own apartment to save time for ladies who wanted to know about the most interesting books as they were published, but whose constant engagements made it impossible to read them entirely for themselves. I suggested to the best publishers to send me copies of their attractive publications which I would read, condense, and then talk them over with these friends. All were glad to aid me. Their books were piled on my piano and tables, and many were sold. I want to say that such courtesy was a rare compliment. I used to go to various book stores, asking permission to look over books at a special reading table, and never met a refusal. I fear in these days of aiding the war sufferers, and keeping our bodies limber and free from rheumatism by daily dancing, this plan would not find patrons.

I was often "browsing," as they call it, at the Mercantile Library. At first I would sit down and give the names of volumes desired. That took too long. At last I was allowed to go where I liked and take what I wanted. I sent a pair of handsome slippers at Christmas to the man who had been my special servitor. He wrote me how he admired them and wished he could wear them, but alas! his feet had both been worn to a stub long ago from such continuous running and climbing to satisfy my seldom-satisfied needs. He added that several of the errand boys had become permanently crippled from over-exertion. I then understood why he had married a famous woman doctor. It is hard to get the books asked for in very large libraries. Once I was replying to an attack on Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's style by Miss Dodge, well known under the pen name Gail Hamilton, and I gave this order: "Complete works of Miss Abigail Dodge—and please hurry." After intolerable waiting, two boys appeared looking very weary, bearing the many sermons and heavy memoirs of the Reverend Narcissus Dodge.

In my special class at home I begged my friends to ask questions in an off-hand way, and to comment upon my opinions. That was stimulating to all. One morning my theme was "Genius and Talent." I said Genius was something beyond—outside of—ourselves, which achieved great results with small exertion. Not by any means was it a bit of shoemakers' wax in the seat of one's chair (as Anthony Trollope put it). Talent must work hard and constantly for development. I said: "Genius is inspiration; Talent is perspiration." I had never heard that definition and thought it was mine. Of late it has been widely quoted, but with no acknowledgment, so I still think it is mine. Are there any other claimants—and prior to 1880?

There were many questions and decided differences of opinion. At last one lady said: "Please give us examples of men who possess genius rather than talent." As she spoke, the door opened, and in walked Mrs. Edmund Clarence Stedman, wife of the poet, and with her a most distinguished-looking woman, Mrs. William Whitney. I was a little embarrassed, but replied sweetly, "Sheets and Kelley," meaning "Keats and Shelley." Then followed a wild laugh in which I joined.

Dr. John Lord once told me he had a similar shock. He spoke of "Westford and Oxminster," instead of "Oxford and Westminster," and never again could he get it correctly, try as he would. Neither his twist nor mine was quite as bad as that of the speaker who said: "I feel within me a half-warmed fish; I mean a half-formed wish."

All genius [continued Lady Henrietta], whether it is artistic, or literary, or spiritual, is something given from outside. I once heard genius described as knowing by intuition what other people know by experience.

Something, or, I should say, somebody, for it involves intelligence and knowledge, tells you these things, and you just can't help expressing them in your own particular way, with brush, or pen, or voice, whatever your individual instrument may be.

It was a pleasure to see that my theory of Genius was the same as Lady Henrietta's in that charming book Patricia. I have enough collected on that subject to give me shivers of amazement as I read the mass of testimony. The mystery of Inspiration has always enthralled me.

I was invited to so many evenings "at home," dinners and luncheons, that I decided to reciprocate and be surely at home on Tuesday evenings. These affairs were very informal and exceedingly enjoyable. There were many who gladly entertained us by their accomplishments. Champney the artist, sent after blackboard and chalk, and did wonderfully clever things. Some one described a stiff and stupid reception where everyone seemed to have left themselves at home. Those who came to me brought their best. Mrs. Barnard, wife of President Barnard of Columbia College, urged me to give three lectures in her parlour. I could not find the time, but her house was always open to me. To know Mr. Barnard was a great privilege. When called to Columbia, it was apparently dying from starvation for new ideas, and stagnant from being too conservative and deep in set grooves. His plans waked up the sleepers and brought constant improvements. Though almost entirely deaf, he was never morose or depressed, but always cheerful and courageous. I used to dine with them often. Tubes from each guest extended into one through which he could hear quite well. He delighted in discussion of current events, historical matters, politics of the day, and was apparently well informed on every question. Unlike Harriet Martineau, who always put down her trumpet when anyone dared to disagree with her opinions, he delighted in a friendly controversy with anyone worthy of his steel. He fought with patience and persistence for the rights of women to have equal education with men, and at last gained his point, but died before Barnard College was in existence. Every student of Barnard ought to realize her individual indebtedness to this great educator, regarding him as the champion of women and their patron saint.

PRESIDENT BARNARD OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE

He was blessed in his home life. Mrs. Barnard was his shield, sunshine, and strength.

I send you "Ovis Montana" or Mountain Sheep, who never enjoyed the daily papers or devoured a scrap of poetry. The only civilized thing he ever did was to give his life for a piece of cold lead and got swindled at that.

This gift was a big surprise to me. I was then corresponding with two Boston papers and one in the West. I thought it discourteous in the artists of the new Impressionist school, to sneer a little at Bierstadt's great paintings, as if he could ever be set back as a bye-gone or a has-been. And it gave me great pleasure to say so. I sent several letters to him, and one day I received a card asking me to call at his studio to look over some sketches. He said he wanted me to help him to select a sketch out of quite a pile on the table, as he wished to make a painting of one for a friend. I assured him I did not know enough to do that, but he insisted he was so busy that I must tell him which I thought would be most effective. I looked at every one, feeling quite important, and at last selected the Mountain Sheep poised on a high peak in a striking pose. A rare sight then.

At Christmas that splendid picture painted by Bierstadt was sent to our apartment for me. Never before had I received such appreciation for my amateur scribbling.

Ah, me! I was both complimented and proud. But my humiliation soon came. When I called to thank the kind donor and speak of the fine frame the mountain big-horn was now in, I was surprised to have Mr. Bierstadt present to me a tall, distinguished-looking foreigner as Munkacsy, the well-known Hungarian artist. He was most cordial, saying in French that he was glad to meet an American woman who could doubtless answer many questions he was anxious to ask. I could only partially get his meaning, so Bierstadt translated it to me. And I, who could read and translate French easily, had never found time to learn to chat freely in any language but my own. I could have cried right there; it was so mortifying, and I was losing such a pleasure. I had the same pathetic experience with a Russian artist, Verestchagin, whose immense picture, revealing the horrors of war, was then on exhibition in New York.

Again and again I have felt like a dummy, if not an idiot, in such a position. I therefore beg all young persons to determine to speak and write at least one language beside their own.

"Never go to France
Unless you know the lingo
If you do, like me,
You'll repent by jingo."

But it's even worse to be unable in your own country to greet and talk with guests from other countries.

I should like to see the dead languages, as well as Saxon and Sanscrit, made elective studies every where; also the higher mathematics, mystic metaphysics, and studies of the conscious and subconscious, the ego and non-ego, matters of such uncertain study. When one stops to realize the tragic brevity of life on this earth, and to learn from statistics what proportion of each generation dies in infancy, in childhood, in early maturity, and how few reach the Biblical limit of life, it seems unnecessary to regard a brain-wearying "curriculum" as essential or even sensible. Taine gives us in his work on English Literature a Saxon description of life: "A bird flying from the dark, a moment in the light, then swiftly passing out into the darkness beyond."

And really why do we study as if we were to rival the ante-diluvians in age. Then wake up to the facts. I have been assured, by those who know, that but a small proportion of college graduates are successful or even heard of. They appear at commencement, sure that they are to do great things, make big money, at least marry an heiress; they are turned out like buttons, only to find out how hard it is to get anything to do for good pay. One multi-millionaire of Boston, whose first wages he told me were but four dollars a month, said there was no one he so dreaded to see coming into his office as a college man who must have help,—seldom able to write a legible hand, or to add correctly a column of figures. There is solid food for thought.

Lowell said that "great men come in clusters." That is true, but it is equally true that once in a great while, we are vouchsafed a royal guest, a man who mingles freely with the ordinary throng, yet stands far above them; a man who can wrest the primal secrets from nature's closed hand, who makes astounding discoveries, only to gladly disclose them to others.

Such an unusual genius was Professor Robert Ogden Doremus, whose enthusiasm was only matched by his modesty. In studying what he accomplished, I wonder whether he was not sent from the central yet universal "powers that be" to give us answers to some of the riddles of life; or had he visited so many planets further advanced than our own—for as Jean Paul Richter wrote "There is no end"—that he had learned that the supposedly impossible could be done. He assisted John W. Draper in taking the first photograph of the human face ever made. Science with him was never opposed to religion. His moving pictures and spectral analysis were almost miracles at that time. He delighted to show how the earth in forming was flattened at the poles, and he would illustrate the growth of the rings of Saturn. As a lecturer he was a star, the only chemist and scientist to offer experiments. His lectures were always attended by crowds of admirers. As a toxicologist he was marvellous in his accuracy; no poisoner could escape his exact analysis. His compressed cartridges, made waterproof and coated with collodion, were used in the blasting operations at the Mont Cenis tunnel through eight miles of otherwise impenetrable stone, solid Alpine rock, between France and Italy.

When the obelisk in Central Park showed signs of serious decay, he saved the hieroglyphics by ironing it with melted parafine. He makes us think of the juggler who can keep a dozen balls in the air as if it were an easy trick, never dropping one.

PROFESSOR R. OGDEN DOREMUS

But I forget to give my own memories of Dr. and Mrs. Doremus in their delightful home on Fourth Avenue between 18th and 19th Streets,—a home full of harmony, melody, peace, and love. Vincenzo Botta called Dr. Doremus the "Mæcenas of New York," and his beautiful wife, the ideal wife and mother, was named by her adoring husband the "queen of women." Mrs. Doremus was prominent in New York's various societies and charities, but the interests of her own family came first. One of her sons said: "She never neglected her children; we were always loved and well cared for." Both Dr. Doremus and his wife were devoted to music, always of the best. He was the first president of the Philharmonic Society who was not a musician by profession. All the preceding presidents had been selected from the active musicians in the society. One evening he was serenaded by the Philharmonic Society under the leadership of Carl Bergman, the recently elected president of the society. After the classic music had ceased, Dr. Doremus appeared and thanked the society for the compliment. All were invited into the house, where a bountiful collation was served and speeches made. If you could see the photograph of the Philharmonic Society serenading Dr. and Mrs. Doremus at their home, you would get a rare insight into the old New York life, as compared with the present, in which such a thing would be impossible. He said that his mother used to take a cup of tea at the Battery afternoons with her sons.

He was a lifelong friend of Christine Nilsson whom he considered the greatest vocal and dramatic genius of the age. He wrote: "Never did mortal woman sing as she sang that simple song that begins:

I saw Nilsson and Parepa introduced there, who were to sail on the same steamer in a few days. Nilsson made the banjo fashionable in New York society, accompanying herself charmingly. All the famous opera singers regarded the house of Dr. Doremus a place where they were thoroughly at home, and always welcome. Ole Bull was for many years his most devoted friend. Dr. Doremus writes:

I recall that once when I was dining with Ole Bull, at the house of a friend, our host said: 'Doctor, I don't think much of Ole Bull's fiddling; you know what I mean—I don't think much of his fiddling as compared with his great heart.'

Mr. Edwin Booth, once walking with me, dropped my arm and exclaimed with a dramatic gesture: "Ole Bull wasn't a man—he was a god!"

The last time I had the privilege of listening to Ole Bull's witchery with his violin, he gave an hour to Norwegian folk-songs, his wife at the piano. She played with finish, feeling, and restraint. She first went through the air, then he joined in with his violin with indescribable charm. Critics said he lacked technique. I am glad he did: his music went straight to the heart. At the last he told us he would give the tune always played after a wedding when the guests had stayed long enough—usually three days—and their departure was desired. We were to listen for one shrill note which was imperative. No one would care or dare to remain after that.

In Ole Bull's last illness when he no longer had strength to wind his watch, he asked his wife to wind it for him, and then send it to his best friend, saying: 'I want it to go ticking from my heart to his.'

That watch magnetized by human love passing through it is now in the possession of Arthur Lispenard Doremus, to whom it was left by his father. It had to be wound by a key in the old fashion, and it ran in perfect time for twenty-nine years. Then it became worn and was sent to a watchmaker for repairs. It is still a reliable timekeeper, quite a surprising story, as the greatest length of time before this was twenty-four years for a watch to run.

I think of these rare souls, Ole Bull and Dr. Doremus, as reunited, and with their loved ones advancing to greater heights, constantly receiving new revelations of omnipotent power, which "it is not in the heart of man to conceive."

LINES

Read at the Celebration of the Seventieth Birthday
of DOCTOR R. OGDEN DOREMUS, January
11th, 1894, at 241 Madison Avenue,
by LUTHER R. MARSH.

What shall be said for good Doctor Doremus?
To speak of him well, it well doth beseem us.
Not one single fault, through his seventy years,
Has ever been noticed by one of his peers.

How flawless a life, and how useful withal!
Fulfilling his duties at every call!
Come North or come South, come East or come West,
He ever is ready to work for the best.

In Chemics, the Doctor stands first on the list;
The nature, he knows, of all things that exist.
He lets loose the spirits of earth, rock or water,
And drives them through solids, cemented with mortar.

How deftly he handles the retort and decanter!
Makes lightning and thunder would scare Tam O'Shanter;
Makes feathers as heavy as lead, in a jar,
And eliminates spirits from coal and from tar.

By a touch of his finger he'll turn lead or tin
To invisible gas, and then back again;
He will set them aflame, as in the last day,
When all things are lit by the Sun's hottest ray.

With oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen,—all—
No gas can resist his imperative call—
He'll solidify, liquefy, or turn into ice;
Or all of them re-convert, back in a trice.

Amid oxides and alkalies, bromides and salts,
He makes them all dance in a chemical waltz;
And however much he with acids may play,
There's never a drop stains his pure mortal clay.

He well knows what things will affect one another;
What acts as an enemy, and what as a brother;
He feels quite at home with all chemic affinities,
And treats them respectfully, as mystic Divinities.

His wisdom is spread from far Texas to Maine;
For thousands on thousands have heard him explain
The secrets of Nature, and all her arcana,
From the youth of the Gulf, to the youth of Montana.

In Paris, Doremus may compress'd powder compound,
Or, at home, wrap the Obelisk with paraffine round;
Or may treat Toxicology ever anew,
To enrich the bright students of famous Bellevue.

He believes in the spirits of all physical things,
And can make them fly round as if they had wings;
But ask him to show you the Spirit of Man—
He hesitates slightly, saying, "See!—if you can."

Wherever he comes there always is cheer;
If absent, you miss him; you're glad when he's near;
His voice is a trumpet that stirreth the blood;
You feel that he's cheery, and you know that he's good.

No doors in the city have swung open so wide,
To artists at home, and to those o'er the tide;
As, to Mario, Sontag, Badiali, Marini,
To Nilsson and Phillips, Rachel and Salvini.

Much, much does he owe, for the grace of his life,
To the influence ever of his beautiful wife;
She, so grand and so stately, so true and so kind,
So lovely in person and so charming in mind!

I had the pleasure of being well acquainted with Mr. Charles H. Webb, a truly funny "funny man," who had homes in New York and Nantucket. His slight stutter only added to the effect of his humorous talk. His letters to the New York Tribune from Long Branch, Saratoga, etc., were widely read. He knew that he wrote absolute nonsense at times, but nonsense is greatly needed in this world, and exquisitely droll nonsensical nonsense is as uncommon as common sense. The titles of his various books are inviting and informing, as Seaweed and What We Seed. He wrote several parodies on sensational novels of his time. Griffith Gaunt, he made fun of as "Liffith Lank"; St. Elmo, as "St. Twelmo." A Wicked Woman was another absurd tale. But I like best a large volume, "John Paul's Book, moral and instructive, travels, tales, poetry, and like fabrications, with several portraits of the author and other spirited engravings." This book was dedicated, "To the Bald-Headed, that noble and shining army of martyrs." When you turn to look at his portrait, and the illuminated title page, you find them not. The Frontispiece picture is upside down. The very ridiculosity of his easy daring to do or say anything is taking. He once wrote, in one of those trying books, with which we used to be bored stiff, with questions such as "What is your favourite hour of the day? He wrote dinner hour; what book not sacred would you part with last? My pocket-book. Your favourite motto? When you must,—you better." I especially liked the poem, "The Outside Dog in the Fight." Here are two specimens of his prose:

The fish-hawk is not an eagle. Mountain heights and clouds he never scales; fish are more in his way, he scales them—possibly regarding them as scaly-wags. For my bird is pious; a stern conservator is he of the public morals. Last Sunday a frivolous fish was playing not far from the beach, and Dr. Hawk went out and stopped him. 'Tis fun to watch him at that sort of work—stopping play—though somehow it does not seem to amuse the fish much. Up in the air he poises pensively, hanging on hushed wings as though listening for sounds—maybe a fish's. By and by he hears a herring—is he hard of herring, think you? Then down he drops and soon has a Herring Safe. (Send me something, manufacturers, immediately.) Does he tear his prey from limb to limb? No, he merely sails away through the blue ether—how happy can he be with either!—till the limb whereon his own nest is built is reached. Does the herring enjoy that sort of riding, think you? Quite as much, I should say, as one does hack-driving. From my point of view, the hawk is but the hackman of the air. Sympathize with the fish? Not much. Nor would you if you heard the pitiful cry the hawk sets up the moment he finds that his claws are tangled in a fish's back. Home he flies to seek domestic consolation, uttering the while the weeping cry of a grieved child; there are tears in his voice, so you know the fish must be hurting him. The idea that a hawk can't fly over the water of an afternoon without some malicious fish jumping up and trying to bite him!

If a fish wants to cross the water safely, let him take a Fulton ferryboat for it. There he will find a sign reading:

"No Peddling or Hawking allowed in this cabin." Strange that hawking should be so sternly prohibited on boats which are mainly patronized by Brooklynites chronically afflicted with catarrh!

Never shall it be said that I put my hand to the plow and turned back. For that matter never shall it be said of me that I put hand to a plow at all, unless a plow should chase me upstairs and into the privacy of my bed-room, and then I should only put hand to it for the purpose of throwing it out of the window. The beauty of the farmer's life was never very clear to me. As for its boasted "independence," in the part of the country I came from, there was never a farm that was not mortgaged for about all it was worth; never a farmer who was not in debt up to his chin at "the store." Contented! When it rains the farmer grumbles because he can't hoe or do something else to his crops, and when it does not rain, he grumbles because his crops do not grow. Hens are the only ones on a farm that are not in a perpetual worry and ferment about "crops:" they fill theirs with whatever comes along, whether it be an angleworm, a kernel of corn, or a small cobblestone, and give thanks just the same.

THE OUTSIDE DOG IN THE FIGHT

You may sing of your dog, your bottom dog,
Or of any dog that you please,
I go for the dog, the wise old dog,
That knowingly takes his ease,
And, wagging his tail outside the ring,
Keeping always his bone in sight,
Cares not a pin in his wise old head
For either dog in the fight.

Not his is the bone they are fighting for,
And why should my dog sail in,
With nothing to gain but a certain chance
To lose his own precious skin!
There may be a few, perhaps, who fail
To see it in quite this light,
But when the fur flies I had rather be
The outside dog in the fight.

I know there are dogs—most generous dogs
Who think it is quite the thing
To take the part of the bottom dog,
And go yelping into the ring.
I care not a pin what the world may say
In regard to the wrong or right;
My money goes as well as my song,
For the dog that keeps out of the fight!

Mr. Webb, like Charles Lamb and the late Mr. Travers, stammered just enough to give piquancy to his conversation. To facilitate enunciation he placed a "g" before the letters which it was hard for him to pronounce. We were talking of the many sad and sudden deaths from pneumonia, bronchitis, etc., during the recent spring season, and then of the insincerity of poets who sighed for death and longed for a summons to depart. He said in his deliciously slow and stumbling manner: "I don't want the ger-pneu-m-mon-ia. I'm in no ger-hurry to ger-go." Mrs. Webb's drawing-rooms were filled with valuable pictures and bronzes, and her Thursday Evenings at home were a delight to many.

How little we sometimes know of the real spirit and the inner life of some noble man or woman. Mrs. Hermann was a remarkable instance of this. I thought I was well acquainted with Mrs. Esther Hermann, who, in her home, 59 West fifty-sixth Street New York, was always entertaining her many friends. Often three evenings a week were given to doing something worth while for someone, or giving opportunity for us to hear some famous man or woman speak, who was interested in some great project. And her refreshments, after the hour of listening was over, were of the most generous and delicious kind. Hers was a lavish hospitality. It was all so easily and quietly done, that no one realized that those delightful evenings were anything but play to her. She became interested in me when I was almost a novice in the lecture field, gave me two benefits, invited those whom she thought would enjoy my talks, and might also be of service to me. There was never the slightest stiffness; if one woman was there for the first time, and a stranger, Mrs. Hermann and her daughters saw that there were plenty of introductions and an escort engaged to take the lady to the supper room. Mrs. Hermann in those early days, often took me to drive in the park—a great treat. We chatted merrily together, and I still fancied I knew her. But her own family did not know of her great benefactions; her son only knew by looking over her check books, after her death, how much she had given away. Far from blazoning it abroad, she insisted on secrecy. She invited Mr. Henry Fairfield Osborn to call, who was keenly interested in securing money to start a Natural History Museum, he bringing a friend with him. After they had owned that they found it impossible even to gain the first donation, she handed Mr. Osborn, after expressing her interest, a check for ten thousand dollars. At first he thought he would not open it in her presence, but later did so. He was amazed and said very gratefully: "Madam, I will have this recognized at once by the Society." She said: "I want no recognition. If you insist, I shall take back the envelope." Her daughter describes her enthusiasm one very stormy, cold Sunday. Stephen S. Wise, the famous rabbi, was advertised to preach in the morning at such a place. "Mother was there in a front seat early, eager to get every word of wisdom that fell from his lips." Mr. Wise spoke at the Free Synagogue Convention at three o'clock P.M. "Mother was there promptly again, in front, her dark eyes glowing with intense interest." At eight P.M. he spoke at another hall on the other side of the city, "Mother was there." At the close, Mr. Wise stepped down from the platform to shake hands with Mrs. Hermann, and said, "I am surprised at seeing you at these three meetings, and in such bad weather." She replied,

She had a long life of perfect health and never paid the least attention to the worst of weather if she had a duty to perform.

There was something of the fairy godmother in this large-hearted woman, whose modesty equalled her generosity. She dropped gifts by the way, always eager to help, and anxious to keep out of sight. Mrs. Hermann was one of those women who sow the seeds of kindness with a careless hand, and help to make waste places beautiful. She became deeply interested in education early in life, and her faith was evidenced by her work. She was one of the founders of Barnard College. Her checks became very familiar to the treasurers of many educational enterprises. She was one of the patrons of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and many years ago gave one thousand dollars to aid the Association. Since then she has added ten thousand dollars as a nucleus toward the erection of a building to be called the Academy of Science. With the same generous spirit she contributed ten thousand dollars to the Young Men's Hebrew Association for educational purposes. It was for the purpose of giving teachers the opportunity of studying botany from nature, that she gave ten thousand dollars to the Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

Her knowledge of the great need for a technical school for Jewish boys preyed on her mind at night so that she could not sleep, and she felt it was wrong to be riding about the city when these boys could be helped. She sold her carriages and horses, walked for three years instead of riding, and sent a large check to start the school. It is pleasant to recall that the boys educated there have turned out wonderfully well, some of them very clever electricians.

I could continue indefinitely naming the acts of generosity of this noble woman, but we have said enough to show why her many friends desired to express their appreciation of her sterling virtues, and their love for the gentle lady, whose kindness has given happiness to countless numbers. To this end, some of her friends planned to give her a a testimonial, and called together representatives from the hundred and twenty-five different clubs and organizations of which she was a member, to consider the project. This suggestion was received with such enthusiasm that a committee was appointed who arranged a fitting tribute worthy of the occasion.

The poem with which I close my tribute to my dear friend, Mrs. Hermann, is especially fitting to her beautiful life. Her family, even after they were all married and in happy homes of their own, were expected by the mother every Sunday evening. These occasions were inexpressibly dear to her warm heart, devoted to her children and grandchildren. But owing to her reticence she was even to them really unknown.

I had given at first many more instances of her almost daily ministrations but later this seemed to be in direct opposition to her oft-expressed wish for no recognition of her gifts. "We are spirits clad in veils," but of Mrs. Hermann this was especially true and I love her memory too well not to regard her wishes as sacred.

GNOSIS

Thought is deeper than all speech,
Feeling deeper than all thought;
Souls to souls can never teach
What unto themselves was taught.

We are spirits clad in veils;
Man by man was never seen;
All our deep communing fails
To remove the shadowy screen.

Heart to heart was never known;
Mind with mind did never meet;
We are columns left alone
Of a temple once complete.

Like the stars that gem the sky,
Far apart, though seeming near,
In our light we scattered lie;
All is thus but starlight here.

What is social company,
But the babbling summer stream?
What our wise philosophy
But the glancing of a dream?

Only when the sun of love
Melts the scattered stars of thought,
Only when we live above
What the dim-eyed world hath taught,

Only when our souls are fed
By the fount which gave them birth,
And by inspiration led
Which they never drew from earth.

We, like parted drops of rain,
Swelling till they meet and run,
Shall be all absorbed again,
Melting, flowing into one.

Cranch's own title for this poem was "Enosis," not "Gnosis" as now given; "Enosis" being a Greek word meaning "all in one," which is illustrated by the last verse.

It was first published in the Dial in 1844. "Stanzas" appeared at the head, and at the end was his initial, "C."

CHAPTER IV

Three Years at Smith College—Appreciation of Its Founder—A Successful Lecture Tour—My Trip to Alaska.

"There is nothing so certain as the unexpected," and "if you fit yourself for the wall, you will be put in."

I was in danger of being spoiled by kindness in New York and the surrounding towns, if not in danger of a breakdown from constant activity, literary and social, with club interests and weekend visits at homes of delightful friends on the Hudson, when I was surprised and honoured by a call from President L. Clark Seelye of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, who invited me to take the position of teacher of English Literature at that college.

I accepted, and remained at Northampton for three years, from 1880-1883. It was a busy life. I went on Saturday afternoons to a class of married ladies at Mrs. Terhune's (Marion Harland) in Springfield, Massachusetts, where her husband was a clergyman in one of the largest churches in that city. I also published several books, and at least two Calendars, while trying to make the students at Smith College enthusiastic workers in my department.

Mrs. Terhune was a versatile and entertaining woman, a most practical housekeeper; and she could tell the very best ghost story I ever heard, for it is of a ghost who for many years was the especial property of her father's family.

When I gave evening lectures at Mrs. Terhune's while at Smith College, I was accustomed to spend the night there. She always insisted upon rising early to see that the table was set properly for me, and she often would bring in something specially tempting of her own cooking. A picture I can never forget is that of Doctor Terhune who, before offering grace at meals, used to stretch out a hand to each of his daughters, and so more closely include them in his petition.

I used no special text-book while at Smith College, and requested my class to question me ten minutes at the close of every recitation. Each girl brought a commonplace book to the recitation room to take notes as I talked. Some of them showed great power of expression while writing on the themes provided. There was a monthly examination, often largely attended by friends out of town. I still keep up my interest in my pupils of that day. One of them told me that they thought at first I was currying popularity, I was so cordial and even affectionate, but they confessed they were mistaken.

Under President Seelye's wise management, Smith College has taken a high position, and is constantly growing better. The tributes to his thirty-seven years in service when he resigned prove how thoroughly he was appreciated. I give a few extracts:

We wish to record the fact that this has been, in a unique degree, your personal work. If you had given the original sum which called the College into being, and had left its administration to others, you would have been less truly the creator of the institution than you have been through your executive efficiency. Your plans have seldom been revised by the Board of Trustees, and your selection of teachers has brought together a faculty which is at least equal to the best of those engaged in the education of women. You have secured for the teachers a freedom of instruction which has inspired them to high attainment and fruitful work. You, with them, have given to the College a commanding position in the country, and have secured for it and for its graduates universal respect. The deep foundations for its success have been intellectual and spiritual, and its abiding work has been the building up of character by contact with character.

Fortunate in her location, fortunate in her large minded trustees, fortunate in the loyal devotedness of her faculty and supremely fortunate has our College been in the consecrated creative genius of her illustrious president. Bringing to his task a noble ideal, with rare sagacity as an administrator; with financial and economic skill rarely found in a scholar and idealist, but necessary to foster into fullest fruitfulness the slender pecuniary resources then at hand; with tact and suavity which made President Seelye's "no," if no were needed, more gracious than "yes" from others; with the force which grasps difficulties fearlessly; with dignified scholarship and a courtly manner, the master builder of our College, under whose hand the little one has become a thousand and the small one a strong republic, has achieved the realization of his high ideal and is crowned with honour and affection.

He has made one ashamed of any but the highest motives, and has taught us that sympathy and love for mankind are the traits for which to strive. The ideals of womanly life which he instilled will ever be held high before us.

There are many distinguished qualities which a college president must possess. He must be idealist, creator, executor, financier, and scholar. President Seelye—is all these—but he had another and a rarer gift which binds and links these qualities together, as the chain on which jewels are strung—President Seelye had immense capacity for work and patient attention for details. It is this unusual combination which has given us a great College, and has given to our president a unique position among educators.

I realize that I must at times have been rather a trying proposition to President Seelye for I was placed in an entirely new world, and having been almost wholly educated by my father, by Dartmouth professors, and by students of the highest scholarship, I never knew the mental friction and the averaging up and down of those accustomed to large classes. I gained far more there than I gave, for I learned my limitations, or some of them, and to try to stick closely to my own work, to be less impulsive, and not offer opinions and suggestions, unasked, undesired, and in that early stage of the college, objectionable. Still, President Seelye writes to me: "I remember you as a very stimulating teacher of English Literature, and I have often heard your pupils, here and afterwards, express great interest in your instruction."

The only "illuminating" incident in my three years at Smith College was owing to my wish to honour the graduating reception of the Senior class. I pinned my new curtains carefully away, put some candles in the windows, leaving two young ladies of the second year to see that all was safe. The house was the oldest but one in the town; it harboured two aged paralytics whom it would be difficult, if not dangerous, to remove. Six students had their home there. As my fire-guards heard me returning with my sister and some gentlemen of the town, they left the room, the door slammed, a breeze blew the light from the candles to the curtains, and in an instant the curtains were ablaze.

And now the unbelievable sequel. The room seemed all on fire in five minutes. Next, the overhead beam was blazing. I can tell you that the fire was extinguished by those gentlemen, and no one ever knew we had been so near a conflagration until three years later when the kind lady of the house wrote to me: "Dear Friend, did you ever have a fire in your room? In making it over I found some wood badly scorched." I have the most reliable witnesses, or you would never have believed it. In the morning my hostess said to the girls assembled at breakfast: "Miss Sanborn is always rather noisy when she has guests, but I never did hear such a hullabaloo as she made last evening."

It is certain that President Seelye deserves all the appreciation and affectionate regard he received. He has won his laurels and he needs the rest which only resignation could bring. The college is equally fortunate in securing as his successor, Marion LeRoy Burton, who in the coming years may lead the way through broader paths, to greater heights, always keeping President Seelye's ideal of the truly womanly type, in a distinctively woman's college.

As the Rev. Dr. John M. Greene writes me (the clergyman who suggested to Sophia Smith that she give her money to found a college for women, and who at eighty-five years has a perfectly unclouded mind): "I want to say that my ambition for Smith College is that it shall be a real women's college. Too many of our women's colleges are only men's colleges for women."

I desire now to add my tribute to that noble woman, Sophia Smith of Hatfield, Massachusetts.

On April 18, 1796, the town of Hatfield, in town meeting assembled, "voiced to set up two schools, for the schooling of girls four months in the year." The people of that beautiful town seemed to have heard the voice of their coming prophetess, commissioned to speak a word for woman's education, which the world has shown itself ready to hear.

In matters of heredity, Sophia Smith was fortunate. Her paternal grandmother, Mary Morton, was an extraordinary woman. After the death of her husband, she became the legal guardian of her six sons, all young, cared for a large farm, and trained her boys to be useful and respected in the community.

Sophia Smith was born in Hatfield, August 27, 1796; just six months before Mary Lyon was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts, about seventeen miles distant. Sophia remembered her grandmother and said: "I looked up to my grandmother with great love and reverence. She, more than once, put her hands on my head and said, 'I want you should grow up, and be a good woman, and try to make the world better.'" And her mother was equally religious, efficient, kind to the poor, sympathetic but not impulsive. Sophia lived in a country farmhouse near the Connecticut River for sixty-eight years. She was sadly hampered physically. One of the historians of Hatfield writes me:

Her infirmity of deafness was troublesome to some extent when she was young, making her shy and retiring. At forty she was absolutely incapable of hearing conversation. She also was lame in one foot and had a withered hand. In spite of this, I think she was an active and spirited girl, about like other girls. She was very fond of social intercourse, especially later in life when my father knew her, but this intercourse was confined to a small circle. Doctor Greene speaks of her timidity also. I know of no traditions about her girlhood. As an example of the thrift of the Smiths, or perhaps I should say, their exactness in all business dealings, my father says that Austin Smith never asked his sisters to sew a button or do repairs on his clothing without paying them a small sum for it, and he always received six cents for doing chores or running errands. No doubt this was a practice maintained from early youth, for when Sophia Smith was born, in 1796, the family was in very moderate circumstances. The whole community was poor for some time after the Revolution, and everyone saved pennies.

As to her education, she used to sit on the doorsteps of the schoolhouse and hear the privileged boys recite their lessons. She also had four or five months of instruction in the schoolhouse, and was a student in Hopkins Academy for a short time and, when fourteen years old, attended school at Hartford, Connecticut, for a term of twelve weeks.

SOPHIA SMITH

Then a long, uneventful, almost shut-in life, and in 1861 her brother Austin left her an estate of about four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Hon. George W. Hubbard of Hatfield was her financial adviser. He advised her to found an academy for Hatfield, which she did; and after Doctor Greene had caused her to decide on a college for women, Mr. Hubbard insisted on having it placed at Northampton, Massachusetts, instead of Hatfield, Massachusetts. With her usual modesty, she objected to giving her full name to the college, as it would look as if she were seeking fame for herself. She gave thirty thousand dollars to endow a professorship in the Andover Theological Seminary at Andover, Massachusetts.

She grew old gracefully, never soured by her infirmities, always denying herself to help others and make the world better for her living in it.

Her name must stand side by side with the men who founded Vassar, Wellesley, and Barnard, and that of Mary Lyon to whom women owe the college of Mt. Holyoke.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

She was a martyr physically, and mentally a heroine. Let us never fail to honour the woman who founded Smith College.

Extracts from a letter replying to my question: "Is there a full-length portrait of Sophia Smith, now to be seen anywhere in the principal building at Smith College, Northampton?"

How I wish that some generous patron of Smith College might bestow upon it two thousand dollars for a full-length portrait of Sophia Smith to be placed in the large reading room, at the end of which is a full-length portrait of President Seelye. The presence of such a commanding figure seen by hundreds of girls every day would be a subtle and lasting influence.

I like to nibble at a stuffed date, but do not enjoy having my memory stuffed with dates, though I am proud rather than sensitive in regard to my age.

What has a woman to do with dates—cold, false, erroneous, chronological dates—new style, old style, precession of the equinoxes, ill-timed calculation of comets long since due at their station and never come? Her poetical idiosyncrasy, calculated by epochs, would make the most natural points of reference in woman's autobiography. Plutarch sets the example of dropping dates in favour of incidents; and an authority more appropriate, Madame de Genlis, who began her own memoires at eighty, swept through nearly an age of incident and revolution without any reference to vulgar eras signifying nothing (the times themselves out of joint), testifying to the pleasant incidents she recounts and the changes she witnessed. I mean to have none of them!

I hesitate to allude to my next experience after leaving Smith College, for it was so delightful that I am afraid I shall scarcely be believed, and am also afraid that my readers will consider me a "swell head" and my story only fit for a "Vanity Box." Yet I would not leave out one bit of the Western lecture trip. If it were possible to tell of the great kindness shown me at every step of the way without any mention of myself, I would gladly prefer to do that.

After leaving Smith College, I was enjoying commencement festivities in my own home—when another surprising event! Mr. George W. Bartholomew, a graduate of Dartmouth, who was born and brought up in a neighbouring Vermont town, told me when he called that he had established a large and successful school for young ladies in Cincinnati, Ohio, taking a few young ladies to live in his pleasant home. He urged me to go to his school for three months to teach literature, also giving lectures to ladies of the city in his large recitation hall. And he felt sure he could secure me many invitations to lecture in other cities.

Remembering my former Western experience with measles and whooping-cough, I realized that mumps and chicken-pox were still likely to attack me, but the invitation was too tempting, and it was gladly accepted, and I went to Cincinnati in the fall of 1884.

Mrs. Bartholomew I found a charming woman and a most cordial friend. Every day of three months spent in Cincinnati was full of happiness. Mrs. Broadwell, a decided leader in the best social matters, as well as in all public spirited enterprises, I had known years before in Hanover, N.H. Her brother, General William Haines Lytle, had been slain at Chickamauga during the Civil War, just in the full strength and glory of manhood. He wrote that striking poem, beginning: "I am dying, Egypt, dying." Here are two verses of his one poem:

As for thee, star-eyed Egyptian!
Glorious sorceress of the Nile,
Light the path to Stygian horrors
With the splendors of thy smile.
Give the Cæsar crowns and arches,
Let his brow the laurel twine;
I can scorn the Senate's triumphs,
Triumphing in love like thine.

I am dying, Egypt, dying;
Hark! the insulting foeman's cry,
They are coming! quick, my falchion!
Let me front them ere I die.
Ah! no more amid the battle
Shall my heart exulting swell—
Isis and Osiris guard thee!
Cleopatra, Rome, farewell!

He was engaged to Miss Sarah Doremus, a sister of Professor Doremus of New York. After the terrible shock of his sudden death she never married, but devoted her life to carrying out her sainted mother's missionary projects, once taking a trip alone around the world to visit the missionary stations started by her mother.

As soon as I had arrived at Mr. Bartholomew's, Mrs. Broadwell gave me a dinner. Six unmarried ladies and seven well-known bachelors were the guests, as she wished to give me just what I needed, an endorsement among her own friends. The result was instant and potent.

Everyone at that dinner did something afterwards to entertain me. I was often invited to the opera, always had a box (long-stemmed roses for all the ladies), also to dinner and lunches. If anyone in the city had anything in the way of a rare collection, from old engravings to rare old books, an evening was devoted to showing the collection to me with other friends. One lady, Miss Mary Louise McLaughlin, invited me to lunch with her alone. Her brother, a bachelor lawyer, had at that time the finest private library in the city. She was certainly the most versatile in her accomplishments of anyone I have ever known. She had painted the best full-length portrait of Judge Longworth, father of the husband of Alice Roosevelt. She was a china painter to beat the Chinese, and author of four books on the subject. She was an artist in photography; had a portfolio of off-hand sketches of street gamins, newsboys, etc., full of life and expression. She brought the art of under glaze in china-firing to this country and had discovered a method of etching metal into fine woods for bedroom furniture. She was an expert at wood-carving, taking lessons from Ben Pitman. Was fond of housekeeping and made a success of it in every way. Anything else? Yes, she showed me pieces of her exquisite embroidery and had made an artistic and wholly sane "crazy-quilt" so much in vogue at that time. Her own beautiful china was all painted and finished by herself. As I left her, I felt about two feet high, with a pin head. And yet she was free from the slightest touch of conceit.

Miss Laura MacDonald (daughter of Alexander MacDonald, the business man who took great risks with Mr. John D. Rockefeller in borrowing money to invest largely in oil fields) was my pupil in the school, and through her I became acquainted with her lovely mother, who invited me to her home at Clifton, just out of Cincinnati, to lecture to a select audience of her special friends.

My lectures at Mr. Bartholomew's school were very well attended. Lists of my subjects were sent about widely, and when the day came for my enthusiastic praise of Christopher North (John Wilson), a sweet-faced old lady came up to the desk and placed before me a large bunch of veritable Scotch heather for which she had sent to Scotland.

In Cleveland, where I gave a series of talks, President Cutler, of Adelbert University, rose at the close of the last lecture and, looking genially towards me, made this acknowledgment: "I am free to confess that I have often been charmed by a woman, and occasionally instructed, but never before have I been charmed and instructed by the same woman."

Cleveland showed even then the spirit of the Cleveland of today, which is putting that city in the very first rank of the cities not only of the United States but of the world in civic improvement and municipal progress, morally and physically. Each night of my lectures I was entertained at a different house while there, and as a trifle to show their being in advance of other cities, I noticed that the ladies wore wigs to suit their costumes. That only became the fashion here last winter, but I saw no ultra colours such as we saw last year, green and pink and blue, but only those that suited their style and their costume.

At Chicago I was the guest of Mrs. H.O. Stone, who gave me a dinner and an afternoon reception, where I met many members of various clubs, and the youngest grandmothers I had ever seen. At a lunch given for me by Mrs. Locke, wife of Rev. Clinton B. Locke, I met Mrs. Potter Palmer, Mrs. Wayne MacVeagh, and Mrs. Williams, wife of General Williams, and formerly the wife of Stephen Douglas. Mrs. Locke was the best raconteur of any woman I have ever heard. Dartmouth men drove me to all the show places of that wonderful city. Lectured in Rev. Dr. Little's church parlors. He was not only a New Hampshire man, but born in Boscawen, New Hampshire, where my grandfather lived, and where my mother lived until her marriage.

It is pleasant to record that I was carried along on my lecture tour, sometimes by invitation of a Dartmouth man, again by college girls who had graduated at Smith College; then at Peoria, Illinois; welcomed there by a dear friend from Brooklyn, New York, wife of a business man of that city. I knew of Peoria only as a great place for the manufacture of whisky, and for its cast-iron stoves, but found it a city, magnificently situated on a series of bold bluffs. And when I reached my friend's house, a class of ladies, who had been easily chatting in German, wanted to stay and ask me a few questions. These showed deep thought, wide reading, and finely disciplined minds. Only one reading there in the Congregational Church, where there was such a fearful lack of ventilation that I turned from my manuscript and quoted a bit from the "Apele for Are to the Sextant of the Old Brick Meetinouse by A. Gasper," which proved effectual.

A APELE FOR ARE TO THE SEXTANT

BY ARABELLA WILSON

O Sextant of the meetinouse which sweeps
And dusts, or is supposed to! and makes fiers,
And lites the gas, and sumtimes leaves a screw loose,
In which case it smells orful—wus than lampile;
And wrings the Bel and toles it, and sweeps paths;
And for these servaces gits $100 per annum;
Wich them that thinks deer let 'em try it;
Gittin up before starlite in all wethers, and
Kindlin fiers when the wether is as cold
As zero, and like as not green wood for kindlins,
(I wouldn't be hierd to do it for no sum;)
But o Sextant there are one kermodity
Wuth more than gold which don't cost nuthin;
Wuth more than anything except the Sole of man!
I mean pewer Are, Sextant, I mean pewer Are!
O it is plenty out o dores, so plenty it doant no
What on airth to do with itself, but flize about
Scatterin leaves and bloin off men's hats;
In short its jest as free as Are out dores;
But O Sextant! in our church its scarce as piety,
Scarce as bankbills when ajunts beg for mishuns,
Which sum say is purty often, taint nuthin to me,
What I give aint nuthing to nobody; but O Sextant!
You shet 500 men women and children
Speshily the latter, up in a tite place,
Sum has bad breths, none of em aint too sweet,
Sum is fevery, sum is scroflus, sum has bad teeth
And sum haint none, and sum aint over clean;
But evry one of em brethes in and out and in
Say 50 times a minnet, or 1 million and a half breths an hour;
Now how long will a church full of are last at that rate?
I ask you; say fifteen minnets, and then what's to be did?
Why then they must brethe it all over agin,
And then agin and so on, till each has took it down
At least ten times and let it up agin, and what's more,
The same individible doant have the privilege
Of brethin his own are and no one else,
Each one must take wotever comes to him.
O Sextant! doant you know our lungs is belluses
To bio the fier of life and keep it from
Going out: and how can bellusses blo without wind?
And aint wind are? I put it to your konshens,
Are is the same to us as milk to babies,
Or water is to fish, or pendlums to clox,
Or roots and airbs unto an Injun doctor,
Or little pills unto an omepath.
Or Boze to girls. Are is for us to brethe.
What signifize who preaches ef I can't brethe?
What's Pol? What's Pollus to sinners who are ded?
Ded for want of breth! Why Sextant when we dye
Its only coz we cant brethe no more—that's all.
And now O Sextant! let me beg of you
To let a little are into our cherch
(Pewer are is sertin proper for the pews);
And dew it week days and on Sundys tew—
It aint much trobble—only make a hoal,
And then the are will come in of itself
(It loves to come in where it can git warm).
And O how it will rouze the people up
And sperrit up the preacher, and stop garps
And yorns and fijits as effectool
As wind on the dry boans the Profit tels
Of.

I went as far as Omaha, and then was asked if I were not going West. The reason for this charming reception was that it was a novelty then to hear a young woman talk in a lively way on striking themes which had been most carefully prepared, and a light touch added, with frequent glints of humour. Byron declared that easy writing was very hard reading. I reversed that method, always working hard over each lecture. For instance, I spent two months in preparing "Bachelor Authors," cramming and condensing, and passing quickly over dangerous ground. With my vocal training I could easily be heard by an audience of five hundred.

A friend was eager to go to Alaska by Seattle; then, after our return, visit Yellowstone Park and San Francisco. She urged me so eloquently to accompany her, that I left my home in Metcalf, Massachusetts, taking great risks in many ways, but wonderful to relate, nothing disastrous occurred.

We scurried by fastest trains across the country to Seattle, just in time to take the Steamer Topeka from Seattle on August 8, 1899, the last boat of the season, and the last chance tourists ever had to see the Muir Glacier in its marvellous glory, as it was broken badly before the next summer.

My friend advised me kindly to ask no questions of the captain, as she knew well what a bore that was. I promised to be exceedingly careful. So, next morning, when that tall and handsome Captain Thompson came around the deck, with a smiling "Good morning," and bowing right and left, I was deeply absorbed in a book; the next time I was looking at a view; another time I played I was fast asleep. He never spoke to me, only stopped an instant before me and walked on. At last, a bow-legged pilot came directly from the captain's office to my open window, bringing to Miss Sanborn a bowl of extra large and luscious strawberries from Douglas Island, quite famous on account of the size and sweetness of this berry. With this gift came a note running thus:

I am a little puzzled by your frigid manner. Have you any personal prejudice against me? Walter Raymond wrote me before he sailed, to look you up, and do what I could for you, as you were quite a favourite on the Eastern coast, and any kindness shown to you would be considered a personal favour to him, and that he only wished he could take the trip with us.

I was amazed and mortified. I had obeyed my directions too literally, and must and did explain and apologize. After that, such pleasant attentions from him! Invited to call at his office with my friends, to meet desirable passengers, something nice provided for refreshment, and these gentlemen were always ready for cards or conversation. But the great occasion was when I had no idea of such an honour, that the captain said:

"We are soon to pass through the Wrangel Narrows, a dangerous place, and the steering through zigzag lines must be most careful. I am going to smuggle you on to the bridge to see me steer and hear me give my orders that will be repeated below. But as it is against the rule to take a woman up there at such a time, promise me to keep perfectly silent. If you make one remark you lose your life."

I agreed and kept my mouth shut without a muzzle. That "memory" is as clear today as if it had happened yesterday.

One day while reading in my fine stateroom, a lady came to the open door and asked me if I would go out with her on the deck that pleasant afternoon and meet some friends of hers. I thanked her, but refused as I was reading one of Hon. Justin McCarthy's books, and as I had the honour of meeting him and his most interesting wife in New York City at the home of Mrs. Henry M. Field, I was much engrossed in what he wrote. Again, another person came and entreated me to go to the deck; not suspecting any plot to test me, I went with her, and found a crowd gathered there, and a good-looking young man seemed to be haranguing them. He stopped as we came along and after being introduced went on with: "As I was saying, Miss Sanborn, I regard women as greatly our inferiors; in fact, essentially unemotional,—really bovine. Do you really not agree to that?" I almost choked with surprise and wrath, but managed to retort: "I am sorry to suppose your mother was a cow, but she must have been to raise a calf like you." And I walked away to the tune of great applause. It seems someone had said that I was never at a loss when a repartee was needed, and it was proposed to give me an opportunity. Next surprise: a call as we were nearing Seattle from a large and noticeable lady who introduced herself saying:

"I am the president of a club which I started myself, and feel bound to help on. I have followed you about a good deal, and shall be much obliged if you will jot down for me to read to this club everything you have said since you came on board. I know they will enjoy it." I was sorry my memory failed me entirely on that occasion. Still it was a great compliment!

But the Muir Glacier! We had to keep three and a half miles away, lest the steamer be injured by the small icebergs which broke off the immense mass into the water with a thunderous roar. A live glacier advances a certain distance each day and retreats a little. Those who visited the glacier brought back delicate little blue harebells they found growing in the clefts of ice. No description of my impressions? Certainly not! Too much of that has been done already.

We saw curious sights along the way, such as the salmon leaping into a fenced-in pool to deposit their spawn; there they could be easily speared, dried, and pitched into wagons as we pitch hay in New England. I saw the Indians stretching the salmon on boards put up in the sun, their color in the sun a brilliant pinkish red.

I saw bears fishing at the edge of water, really catching fish in their clumsy paws. Other bears were picking strawberries for their cubs. As I watched them strolling away, I thought they might be looking for a stray cow to milk to add flavour to the berries.

We stopped at Wrangel to look at the totem poles, many of which have since been stolen as the Indians did not wish to sell them; our usual method of business with that abused race. Totem poles are genealogical records, and give the history of the family before whose door they stand. No one would quietly take the registered certificates of Revolutionary ancestors searched for with great care from the Colonial Dames or members of the New England Society, and coolly destroy them. I agree with Charles Lamb who said he didn't want to be like a potato, all that was best of him under ground.

At Sitka the brilliant gardens and the large school for Indian girls were the objects of interest. It is a sad fact that the school which teaches these girls cleanly habits, the practical arts of sewing, and cooking simple but appetizing dishes, has made the girls unwilling to return to their dirty homes and the filthy habits of their parents. That would be impossible to them. So they are lured to visit the dance halls in Juneau, where they find admirers of a transient sort, but seldom secure an honest husband.

We called at Skagway, and the lady who was known by us told us there was much stress there placed upon the most formal attention to rigid conventionalities, calls made and returned, cards left and received at just the right time, more than is expected in Boston. And yet that town was hardly started, and dirt and disorder and chaos reigned supreme.

A company of unlucky miners came home in our steamer; no place for them to sleep but on deck near the doors of our stateroom, and they ate at one of the tables after three other hungry sets had been satisfied. A few slept on the tables. All the poultry had been killed and eaten. We found the Chinese cooks tried to make tough meat attractive by pink and yellow sauces. We were glad to leave the steamer to try the ups and downs of Seattle.

CHAPTER V

Frances E. Willard—Walt Whitman—Lady Henry Somerset—Mrs. Hannah Whitehall Smith—A Teetotaler for Ten Minutes—Olive Thorne Miller—Hearty Praise for Mrs. Lippincott (Grace Greenwood).

I was looking over some letters from Frances E. Willard last week. What a powerful, blessed influence was hers!

Such a rare combination of intense earnestness, persistence, and devotion to a "cause" with a gentle, forgiving, compassionate spirit, and all tempered by perfect self-control.

Visiting in Germantown, Pennsylvania, at the hospitable home of Mrs. Hannah Whitehall Smith, the Quaker Bible reader and lay evangelist, and writer of cheerful counsel, I found several celebrities among her other guests. Miss Willard and Walt Whitman happened to be present. Whitman was rude and aggressively combative in his attack on the advocate of temperance, and that without the slightest provocation. He declared that all this total abstinence was absolute rot and of no earthly use, and that he hated the sight of these women who went out of their way to be crusading temperance fanatics.

After this outburst he left the room. Miss Willard never alluded to his fiery criticism, didn't seem to know she had been hit, but chatted on as if nothing unpleasant had occurred.

In half an hour he returned; and with a smiling face made a manly apology, and asked to be forgiven for his too severe remarks. Miss Willard met him more than half-way, with generous cordiality, and they became good friends. And when with the women of the circle again she said: "Now wasn't that just grand in that dear old man? I like him the more for his outspoken honesty and his unwillingness to pain me."

How they laboured with "Walt" to induce him to leave out certain of his poems from the next edition! The wife went to her room to pray that he might yield, and the husband argued. But no use, it was all "art" every word, and not one line would he ever give up. The old poet was supposed to be poor and needy, and an enthusiastic daughter of Mrs. Smith had secured quite a sum at college to provide bed linen and blankets for him in the simple cottage at Camden. Whitman was a great, breezy, florid-faced out-of-doors genius, but we all wished he had been a little less au naturel.

To speak once more of Miss Willard, no one enjoyed a really laughable thing more than she did, but I never felt like being a foolish trifler in her presence. Her outlook was so far above mine that I always felt not rebuked, but ashamed of my superficial lightness of manner.

Just one illustration of the unconscious influence of her noble soul and her convincing words:

Many years ago, at an anniversary of Sorosis in New York, I had half promised the persuasive president (Jennie June) that I would say something. The possibility of being called up for an after-dinner speech! Something brief, terse, sparkling, complimentary, satisfactory, and something to raise a laugh! O, you know this agony! I had nothing in particular to say; I wanted to be quiet and enjoy the treat. But between each course I tried hard, while apparently listening to my neighbour, to think up something "neat and appropriate."

This coming martyrdom, which increases in horror as you advance with deceptive gayety, from roast to game, and game to ices, is really one of the severest trials of club life.

Miss Willard was one of the honoured guests of the day, and was called on first. When she arose and began to speak, I felt instantly that she had something to say; something that she felt was important we should hear, and how beautifully, how simply it was said! Not a thought of self, not one instant's hesitation for a thought or a word, yet it was evidently unwritten and not committed to memory. Every eye was drawn to her earnest face; every heart was touched. As she sat down, I rose and left the room rather rapidly; and when my name was called and my fizzling fireworks expected, I was walking up Fifth Avenue, thinking about her and her life-work. The whole experience was a revelation. I had never met such a woman. No affectation, nor pedantry, nor mannishness to mar the effect. It was in part the humiliating contrast between her soul-stirring words and my silly little society effort that drove me from the place, but all petty egotism vanished before the wish to be of real use to others with which her earnestness had inspired me.

One lady told me that after hearing her she felt she could go out and be a praying band all by herself. Indeed she was

A noble woman, true and pure,
Who in the little while she stayed,
Wrought works that shall endure.

She was asked who she would prefer to write a sketch of her and her work and she honoured me by giving me that great pleasure. The book appeared in 1883, entitled Our Famous Women.

Once when Miss Willard was in Boston with Lady Henry Somerset and Anna Gordon, I was delighted by a letter from Frances saying that Lady Henry wanted to know me and could I lunch with them soon at the Abbottsford. I accepted joyously, but next morning's mail brought this depressing decision: "Dear Kate, we have decided that there will be more meat in going to you. When can we come?" I was hardly settled in my house of the Abandoned Farm. There was no furnace in the house, only two servants with me. And it would be impossible to entertain those friends properly in the dead of the winter, and I nearly ready to leave for a milder clime. So I told them the stern facts and lost a rare treat.

This is the end of Miss Willard's good-bye letter to me when returning to England with Lady Henry:

Hoping to see you on my return, and hereby soliciting an exchange of photographs between you and Lady Henry and me,

While at Mrs. Smith's home in Germantown, both she and Miss Willard urged me to sign a Temperance Pledge that lay on the table in the library. I would have accepted almost anything either of those good friends presented for my attention. So after thinking seriously I signed. But after going to my room I felt sure that I could never keep that pledge. So I ran downstairs and told them to erase my name, which was done without one word of astonishment or reproof from either.

I wish I knew how to describe Hannah Whitehall Smith as she was in her everyday life. Such simple nobility, such tenderness for the tempted, such a love for sinners, such a longing to show them the better way. She said to me: "If my friends must go to what is called Hell I want to go with them." When a minister, who was her guest, was greatly roused at her lack of belief in eternal punishment and her infinite patience with those who lacked moral strength, he said: "There are surely some sins your daughters could commit which would make you drive them from your home." "There are no sins my daughters could commit which would not make me hug them more closely in my arms and strive to bring them back." Wherewith he exclaimed bitterly: "Madam, you are a mere mucilaginous mess." She made no reply, but her husband soon sent him word that a carriage would be at the door in one hour to convey him to the train for New York.

I remember enjoying an article on the catbird several years ago in the Atlantic Monthly, and wanting to know more of the woman who had observed a pair of birds so closely, and could make so charming a story of their love-affairs and housekeeping experiences, and thinking that most persons knew next to nothing about birds, their habits, and homes.

Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller, who wrote that bird talk, is now a dear friend of mine, and while spending a day with me lately was kind enough to answer all my questions as to how and where and when she began to study birds. She is not a young woman, is the proud grandmother of seven children; but her bright face crowned with handsome white hair, has that young, alert, happy look that comes with having a satisfying hobby that goes at a lively pace. She said: "I never thought of being anything but a housekeeping mother until I was about thirty-one and my husband lost all his property, and want, or a thousand wants, stared us in the face. Making the children's clothes and my own, and cooking as well, broke down my health, so I bethought me of writing, which I always had a longing to do."

"Well, pretty poor stuff that no one was anxious to pay for; mostly in essay form expressing my own opinions on various important subjects. But it didn't go. I was complaining of my bad luck to a plain-spoken woman in charge of a circulating library, and she gave me grand advice. 'No one cares a snap for your opinions. You must tell something that folks want to know.'"

"O no; I went into the library, read some of Harriet Martineau's talks on pottery, and told children how a teacup was made and got one dollar for that. But those pot-boilers were not inspiring, and about ten years later a second woman adviser turned my course into another channel."

"I had a bird-loving friend from the West visiting me, and took her to Prospect Park, Brooklyn, to see our birds. She pointed out several, and so interested me in their lives that from that day I began to study them, especially the wood-thrush and catbird. After I had studied them for two years, I wrote what I had seen. From that time my course has seemed marked out for me, and my whole time has been given to this one theme. I think every woman over forty-five ought to take up a fad; they would be much happier and better off."

"You told me once that three women had each in turn changed your career. Do give me the third."

"Well, after my articles and books had met with favour (I have brought out fifteen books), invitations to lecture or talk about birds kept pouring in. I was talking this over with Marion Harland (Mrs. Terhune), declaring I could never appear in public, that I should be frightened out of my wits, and that I must decline. My voice would all go, and my heart jump into my mouth. She exclaimed, 'For a sensible woman, you are the biggest fool I ever met!' This set me thinking, and with many misgivings I accepted an invitation."

"Never was scared one bit, my dear. All bird-lovers are the nicest kind of folks, either as an audience or in their own homes. I have made most delightful acquaintances lecturing in fifteen different States; am now booked for a tour in the West, lecturing every day and taking classes into the fields and woods for actual observation. Nesting-time is the best time to study the birds, to know them thoroughly."

"Yes, when I am asked to do so. Did you ever hear that Celia Thaxter, finding herself in a car with women whose head-gear emulated a bird-museum, was moved to rise and appeal to them in so kindly a way that some pulled off the feathers then and there, and all promised to reform? She loved birds so truly that she would not be angry when spring after spring they picked her seeds out of her 'Island Garden.'"

"Have you any special magnetic power over birds, so that they will come at your call or rest on your outstretched finger?"

"Not in the least. I just like them, and love to get acquainted with them. Each bird whose acquaintance I make is as truly a discovery to me as if he were totally unknown to the world."

We were sitting by a southern window that looks out on a wide-spreading and ancient elm, my glory and pride. Not one bird had I seen on it that cold, repellent middle of March. But Mrs. Miller looked up, and said: "Your robins have come!" Sure enough I could now see a pair.

"And there are the woodpeckers, but they have stayed all winter. No doubt you have the hooting owls. There's an oriole's nest, badly winter-worn; but they will come back and build again. I see you feed your chickadees and sparrows, because they are so tame and fearless. I'd like to come later and make a list of the birds on your place."

I wonder how many she would find. Visiting at Deerfield, Massachusetts, I said one day to my host, the artist J.W. Champney: "You don't seem to have many birds round you."

"No?" he replied with a mocking rising inflection. "Mrs. Miller, who was with us last week, found thirty-nine varieties in our front yard before breakfast!" Untrained eyes are really blind.

Mrs. Miller is an excellent housekeeper, although a daughter now relieves her of that care. But, speaking at table of this and that dish and vegetable, she promised to send me some splendid receipts for orange marmalade, baked canned corn, scalloped salmon, onion à la crème (delicious), and did carefully copy and send them.

She told me that in Denmark a woman over forty-five is considered gone. If she is poor, a retreat is ready for her without pay; if rich, she would better seek one of the homes provided for aged females who can pay well for a home.

Another thing of interest was the fact that when Mrs. Miller eats no breakfast, her brain is in far better condition to write. She is a Swedenborgian, and I think that persons of that faith have usually a cheerful outlook on life. She was obliged to support herself after forty years of age.

I would add to her advice about a hobby: don't wait till middle age; have one right away, now. Boys always do. I know of one young lady who makes a goodly sum out of home-made marmalade; another who makes dresses for her family and special friends; another who sells three hundred dozen "brown" eggs to one of the best groceries in Boston, and supports herself. By the way, what can you do?

Mrs. Lippincott had such a splendid, magnetic presence, such a handsome face with dark poetic eyes, and accomplished so many unusual things, that, knowing her as I did, I think I should be untrue to her if I did not try to show her as she was in her brilliant prime, and not merely as a punster or a raconteur, or as she appeared in her dramatic recitals, for these were but a small part of the many-sided genius.

When my friend, Mrs. Botta, said one evening to her husband: "Grace writes me that she will be here tomorrow, to spend the Sabbath," and then said to me, "Grace Greenwood, I mean; have you ever met her?" my heart beat very quickly in pleasant anticipation of her coming. Grace Greenwood! Why, I had known her and loved her, at least her writings, ever since I was ten years old.

Those dear books, bound in red, with such pretty pictures—History of My Pets and Recollections of My Childhood, were the most precious volumes in my little library. Anyone who has had pets and lost them (and the one follows the other, for pets always come to some tragic end) will delight in these stories.

And then the Little Pilgrim, which I used to like next best to the Youth's Companion; and in later years her spirited, graceful poetry; her racy magazine stories; her Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe; her sparkling letters to the Tribune, full of reliable news from Washington, graphic descriptions of prominent men and women, capital anecdotes and atrocious puns;—O how glad I should be to look in her face and to shake hands with the author who had given me so much pleasure!

Well, she came, I heard the bell ring, just when she was expected, with a vigorous pull, and, as the door opened, heard her say, in a jolly, soothing way: "Don't get into a passion," to the man who was swearing at her big trunk. And then I ran away, not wishing to intrude, and waited impatiently for dinner and an introduction to my well-beloved heroine.

Grace—Mrs. Lippincott—I found to be a tall, fine-looking lady, with a commanding figure and a face that did not disappoint me, as faces so often do which you have dreamed about. She had dark hair, brown rather than black, which was arranged in becoming puffs round her face; and such eyes! large, dark, magnetic, full of sympathy, of kind, cordial feelings and of quick appreciation of fun. She talked much and well. If I should repeat all the good stories she told us, that happy Saturday night, as we lingered round the table, you would be convulsed with laughter, that is, if I could give them with her gestures, expressions, and vivid word-pictures.

She told one story which well illustrated the almost cruel persistent inquiries of neighbours about someone who is long in dying. An unfortunate husband was bothered each morning by repeated calls from children, who were sent by busy mothers to find out "Just how Miss Blake was feeling this morning." At last this became offensive, and he said: "Well, she's just the same—she ain't no better and she ain't no worse—she keeps just about so—she's just about dead, you can say she's dead."

One Sunday evening she described her talks with the men in the prisons and penitentiaries, to whom she had been lately lecturing, proving that these hardened sinners had much that was good in them, and many longings for a nobler life, in spite of all their sins.

No, I was not disappointed in "G.G." She was just as natural, hearty, and off-hand as when some thirty years ago, she was a romping, harum-scarum, bright-eyed schoolgirl, Sara Clarke, of western New York, who was almost a gypsy in her love for the fields and forests. She was always ready for any out-door exercise or sport. This gave her glorious health, which up to that time she had not lost.

Her nom de plume, which she says she has never been able to drop, was only one of the many alliterative names adopted at that time. Look over the magazines and Annuals of those years, and you will find many such, as "Mary Maywood," "Dora Dashwood," "Ella Ellwood" "Fanny Forrester," "Fanny Fern," "Jennie June," "Minnie Myrtle," and so on through the alphabet, one almost expecting to find a "Ninny Noodle." Examining one of Mrs. Lippincott's first scrapbooks of "Extracts from Newspapers," etc., which she had labelled, "Vanity, all is Vanity," I find many poems in her honour, much enthusiasm over her writings, and much speculation as to who "Grace Greenwood" might really be. The public curiosity was piqued to find out this new author who added to forceful originality "the fascination of splendid gayety and brilliant trifling." John Brougham, the actor and dramatist, thus expressed his interest in a published letter to Willis:

The only person that I am disposed to think, write or talk about at present is your dazzling, bewitching correspondent, "Grace Greenwood." Who is she? that I may swear by her! Where is she? that I may fling myself at her feet! There is a splendour and dash about her pen that carry my fastidious soul captive by a single charge. I shall advertise for her throughout the whole Western country in the terms in which they inquire for Almeyda in Dryden's Don Sebastian: "Have you seen aught of a woman who lacks two of the four elements, who has nothing in her nature but air and fire?"

If to the old Hellenes
Thee of yore the gods had given
Another Muse, another Grace
Had crowned the Olympian heaven.

Whittier at that time spoke most cordially of her "earnest individuality, her warm, honest, happy, hopeful, human heart; her strong loves and deep hates."

E. P. Whipple, the Boston critic and essayist, when reviewing her poems, spoke of their "exceeding readableness"; and George Ripley, then of the New York Tribune, said:

One charm of her writings is the frankness with which she takes the reader into her personal confidence. She is never formal, never a martyr to artificial restraint, never wrapped in a mantle of reserve; but, with an almost childlike simplicity, presents a transparent revelation of her inmost thoughts and feelings, with perfect freedom from affectation.

She might have distinguished herself on the stage in either tragedy or comedy, but was dissuaded from that career by family friends. I remember seeing her at several receptions, reciting the rough Pike County dialect verse of Bret Harte and John Hay in costume. Standing behind a draped table, with a big slouch hat on, and a red flannel shirt, loose at the neck, her disguise was most effective, while her deep tones held us all. Her memory was phenomenal, and she could repeat today stories of good things learned years ago.

Her recitation was wonderful; so natural, so full of soul and power. I have heard many women read, some most execrably, who fancied they were famous elocutionists; some were so tolerable that I could sit and endure it; others remarkably good, but I was never before so moved as to forget where I was and merge the reader in the character she assumed.

Grace Greenwood probably made more puns in print than any other woman, and her conversation was full of them. It was Grace Greenwood who, at a tea-drinking at the New England Woman's Club in Boston, was begged to tell one more story, but excused herself in this way: "No, I cannot get more than one story high on a cup of tea."

Her conversation was delightful, and what a series of reminiscences she could have given; for she knew, and in many cases intimately, most of the leading authors, artists, politicians, philanthropists, agitators, and actors of her time in both her own land and abroad. In one of her letters she describes the various authors she saw while lounging in Ticknor's old bookstore in Boston.

Here, many a time, we saw Longfellow, looking wonderfully like a ruddy, hearty, happy English gentleman, with his full lips and beaming blue eyes. Whittier, alert, slender and long; half eager, half shy in manner; both cordial and evasive; his deep-set eyes glowing with the tender flame of the most humane genius of our time.

Emerson's manner was to her "a curious mingling of Athenian philosophy and Yankee cuteness."

She resided with Miss Cushman in Rome, and in London she saw many lions—Mazzini, Kossuth, Dickens and Talfourd, Kingsley, Lover, the Howellses, Miss Mitford, Mrs. Muloch Craik, George Eliot, etc.

She was the first Washington correspondent of her sex, commencing in 1850 in a series of letters to a Philadelphia weekly; was for some years connected with the National Era, making her first tour in Europe as its correspondent, and has written much for The Hearth and Home, The Independent, Christian Inquirer, Congregationalist, Youth's Companion; also contributing a good deal to English publications, as Household Words and All the Year Round.

She was the special correspondent from Washington of the New York Tribune, and later of the Times. Her letters were racy, full of wit, sentiment, and discriminating criticism, plenty of fun and a little sarcasm, but not so audaciously personal and aggressive as some letter-writers from the capital. They attracted attention and were widely copied, large extracts being made for the London Times.

She lectured continually to large audiences during the Civil War on war themes, and subjects in a lighter strain; was the first woman widely received as a lecturer by the colleges and lyceums. With a commanding presence, handsome face, an agreeable, permeating voice, a natural offhand manner, and something to say, she was at once a decided favourite, and travelled great distances to meet her engagements. She often quoted that ungallant speech from the Duke of Argyle: "Woman has no right on a platform—except to be hung; then it's unavoidable"; and by her eloquence and wit proved its falsity and narrowness. Without the least imitation of masculine oratory, her best remembered lectures are, "The Heroic in Common Life," and "Characteristics of Yankee Humour." She always had the rare gift of telling a story capitally, with ease, brevity, and dramatic effect, certain of the point or climax. I cannot think of any other woman of this country who has caused so much hearty laughter by this enviable gift. She can compress a word-picture or character-sketch into a few lines, as when she said of the early Yankee: "No matter how large a man he was, he had a look of shrinking and collapse about him. It looked as if the Lord had made him and then pinched him." And a woman who has done such good work in poetry, juvenile literature, journalism, on the platform, and in books of travel and biography, will not soon be forgotten. There is a list of eighteen volumes from her pen.

She never established a salon, but the widespread, influential daily paper and the lecture hall are the movable salon to the women of genius in this Republic.

This is just a memory. After all, we are but "Movie Pictures," seen for a moment, and others take our place.

CHAPTER VI

In and Near Boston—Edward Everett Hale—Thomas Wentworth Higginson—Julia Ward Howe—Mary A. Livermore—A Day at the Concord School—Harriet G. Hosmer—"Dora D'Istria," our Illustrious Visitor.

Edward Everett Hale was kind to me, as he was to all who came within his radius. He once called to warn me to avoid, like poison, a rascally imposter who was calling on many of the authors in and near Boston to get one thousand dollars from each to create a publishing company, so that authors could have their books published at a much cheaper rate than in the regular way. This person never called on me, as I then had no bank account. He did utterly impoverish many other credulous persons, both writers, and in private families. All was grist that came to his mill, and he ground them "exceeding small."

I met Mr. Hale one early spring at Pinehurst, North Carolina, with his wife and daughter. He always had a sad face, as one who knew and grieved over the faults and frailties of humanity, but at this time he was recovering from a severe fall, and walked with a slow and feeble step. When he noticed me sitting on the broad piazza, he came, and taking a chair beside me, began to joke in his old way, telling comical happenings, and inquired if I knew where Noah kept his bees. His answer: "In the Ark-hives, of course." Once when I asked his opinion of a pompous, loud-voiced minister, he only said, "Self, self, self!"

I wonder how many in his audiences or his congregation could understand more than half of what he was saying. I once went to an Authors' Reading in Boston where he recited a poem, doubtless very impressive, but although in a box just over the stage, I could not get one word. He placed his voice at the roof of his mouth, a fine sounding board, but the words went no farther than the inside of his lips. I believe his grand books influence more persons for better lives than even his personal presence and Christ-like magnetism.

Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson never failed me. Once only I ventured alone into the Authors' Club Saturday meeting, and none of my own friends happened to be there. Evidently I was not known. Mr. Higginson saw the situation at once, and coming quickly to me escorted me to a comfortable seat. He ordered two cups of tea with wafers, and beckoned to some delightful men and women to whom he introduced me as his friend Miss Sanborn, thus putting me at my ease. He was also ever patient about my monomania of trying to prove that women possess both wit and humour. He spoke of his first wife as the wittiest woman he had ever known, giving convincing proof. A few men were on my side, but they could be counted on one hand omitting the thumb. But I worked on this theme until I had more than sufficient material for a good-sized volume. If a masculine book reviewer ever alluded to the book, it was with a sneer. He generally left it without a word, as men still ignore the fact when a woman wins in an essay-writing competition against men in her class or gets the verdict for her powers in a mixed debate. At last Mr. Higginson wrote me most kindly to stop battering on that theme. "If any man is such a fool as to insist that women are destitute of wit or humour, then he is so big a fool that it is not worth while to waste your good brains on him. T.W. Higginson." That reproof chilled my ardour. Now you can hardly find any one who denies that women possess both qualities, and it is generally acknowledged that not a few have the added gift of comedy.

As most biographers of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe dwell on her other gifts as philanthropist, poet, and worker for the equality of women with men, I call attention to her effervescent, brilliant wit. Julia Ward Howe was undeniably witty. Her concurrence with a dilapidated bachelor, who retained little but his conceit, was excellent. He said: "It is time now for me to settle down as a married man, but I want so much; I want youth, health, wealth, of course; beauty, grace—" "Yes," she interrupted sympathetically, "you poor man, you do want them all."

Of a conceited young man airing his disbelief at length in a magazine article, she said: "Charles evidently thinks he has invented atheism." After dining with a certain family noted for their chilling manners and lofty exclusiveness, she hurried to the house of a jolly friend, and, seating herself before the glowing fire, sought to regain a natural warmth, explaining: "I have spent three hours with the Mer de Glace, the Tête-Noire, and the Jungfrau, and am nearly frozen."

Pathos and humour as twins are exemplified by her tearful horror over the panorama of Gettysburg, and then by her saying, when urged by Mrs. Livermore to dine with her: "O no! my dear, it's quarter past two, and Mr. Howe will be wild if he does not get—not his burg—but his dinner."

Mrs. Howe's wit never failed her. I once told her I was annoyed by seeing in big headlines in the morning's paper, "Kate Sanborn moralizes," giving my feeble sentiments on some subject which must have been reported by a man whom I met for the first time the evening before at a reception, though I was ignorant of the fact that I was being interviewed. She comforted me by saying: "But after all, how much better that was than if he had announced, 'Kate Sanborn demoralizes.'" Or when Charles Sumner refusing to meet some friends of hers at dinner explained languidly: "Really, Julia, I have lost all my interest in individuals." She retorted, "Why, Charles, God hasn't got as far as that yet!" Once walking in the streets of Boston with a friend she looked up and read on a public building, "Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary." She said: "I did not know there were any charitable eyes and ears in Boston." She showed indomitable courage to the last. A lady in Boston, who lived opposite Mrs. Howe's home on Beacon Street, was sitting at a front window one cold morning in winter, when ice made the steps dangerous. A carriage was driven up to Mrs. Howe's door to take her to the station to attend a federation at Louisville. She came out alone, slipped on the second step, and rolled to the pavement. She was past eighty, but picked herself up with the quickness of a girl, looked at her windows to see if anyone noticed it, then entered the carriage and drove away.

Was ever a child as unselfish as Mary Rice, afterwards Mary Livermore? Sliding on ice was for her a climax of fun. Returning to the house after revelling in this exercise, she exclaimed: "Splendid, splendid sliding." Her father responded: "Yes, Mary, it's great fun, but wretched for shoes."

Those words kept ringing in her ears, and soon she thought how her father and mother had to practise close economy, and she decided: "I ought not to wear out my shoes by sliding, when shoes cost so much," and she did not slide any more. There was no more fun in it for her.

She would get out of bed, when not more than ten years old, and beseech her parents to rise and pray for the children. "It's no matter about me," she once said to them, "if they can be saved, I can bear anything."

She was not more than twelve years old, when she determined to aid her parents by doing work of some kind; so it was settled that she should become a dressmaker. She went at once into a shop to learn the trade, remained for three months, and after that was hired at thirty-seven cents a day to work there three months more. She also applied for work at a clothing store, and received a dozen red flannel shirts to make up at six and a quarter cents a piece. When her mother found this out, she burst into tears, and the womanly child was not allowed to take any more work home. We all know Mrs. Livermore's war record and her power and eloquence as an orator.

I would not say she was a spiritualist, but she felt sure that she often had advice or warning on questions from some source, and always listened, and was saved from accidents and danger. And she said that what was revealed to her as she rested on her couch, between twilight and dusk, would not be believed, it was so wonderful.

Mrs. Livermore had a terrible grief to bear,—the lifelong illness of her daughter from a chronic and incurable disease. She told me, when I was at her house, that she kept on lecturing, and accepting invitations, to divert her mind somewhat. She felt at times that she could not leave her unfortunate child behind, when she should be called from earth, but she was enabled to drive that thought away. From a child, always helping others, self-sacrificing, heroic, endowed with marvellous energy and sympathy, hers was a most exceptional life; now "Victor Palms" are her right.

I spent one day at the famous Concord School of Philosophy during its first season. Of course I understood nothing that was going on.

Emerson, then a mere wreck of his former self, was present, cared for by his wife or his daughter Ellen. Alcott made some most remarkable statements, as: "We each can decide when we will ascend." Then he would look around as if to question all, and add: "Is it not so? Is it not so?" I remember another of his mystic utterances: "When the mind is izzing, it is thinking things. Is it not so? Is it not so?" Also, "When we get angry or lose our temper, then fierce four-footed beasts come out of our mouths, do they not, do they not?"

After Mr. Harris, the great educational light, had closed his remarks, and had asked for questions, one lady timidly arose and inquired: "Can an atom be said to be outside or inside of potentiality?"

He calmly replied that "it could be said to be either inside or outside potentiality, as we might say of potatoes in a hat; they are either inside or outside the hat." That seemed to satisfy her perfectly.

Mr. Frank B. Sanborn read his lecture on American Literature, and I ventured to ask: "How would you define literature?"

He said: "Anything written that gives permanent pleasure." And then as he was a relative, I inquired, but probably was rather pert: "Would a bank check, if it were large enough, be literature?" which was generally considered as painfully trifling.

Jones of Jacksonville was on the program, and talked and talked, but as I could not catch one idea, I cannot report.

It was awfully hot on that hill with the sun shining down through the pine roof, so I thought one day enough.

As I walked down the hill, I heard a man who seemed to have a lot of hasty pudding in his mouth, say in answer to a question from the lady with him: "Why, if you can't understand that, you can have no idea of the first principles (this with an emphatic gesture) of the Hegelian philosophy."

Alcott struck me as a happy dreamer. He said to me joyously: "I'm going West in Lou's chariot," and of course with funds provided by his daughter.

An article written by her, entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats," made a great impression on my mind.

It appeared in a long-ago Independent and I tried in vain to find it last winter. Houghton and Mifflin have recently published Bronson Alcott's "Fruitlands," compiled by Clara Endicott Sears, with "Transcendental Wild Oats" by Louisa M. Alcott, so it is brought to the notice of those who will appreciate it.

I called once on Miss Hosmer, who then was living with relatives in Watertown, Massachusetts, her old home; the house where she was born and where she did her first modelling. Recently reading in Miss Whiting's record of Kate Field's life, of Miss Hosmer as a universal favourite in Rome, a dearly loved friend of the Brownings, and associated with the literary and artistic coterie there, a living part of that memorable group, most of whom are gone, I longed to look in her eyes, to shake her hand, to listen to her conversation. Everyone knows of her achievements as a sculptor.

After waiting a few minutes, into the room tripped a merry-faced, bright-eyed little lady, all animation and cordiality as she said: "It is your fault that I am a little slow in coming down, for I was engrossed in one of your own books, too much interested to remember to dress."

The question asked soon brought a flow of delightful recollection of Charlotte Cushman, Frances Power Cobbe, Grace Greenwood, Kate Field, and the Brownings. "Yes," she said, "I dined with them all one winter; they were lovely friends." She asked if we would like to see some autograph letters of theirs. One which seemed specially characteristic of Robert Browning was written on the thinnest of paper in the finest hand, difficult to decipher. And on the flap of the envelope was a long message from his wife. Each letter was addressed to "My dearest Hattie," and ended, "Yours most affectionately." There was one most comical impromptu sent to her by Browning, from some country house where there was a house party. They were greatly grieved at her failure to appear, and each name was twisted into a rhyme at the end of a line. Sir Roderick Murchison, for instance, was run in thus:

A poor pun started another vein. "You must hear some of Miss Cobbe's puns," said Miss Hosmer, and they were so daringly, glaring bad, as to be very good. When lame from a sprain, she was announced by a pompous butler at a reception as "Miss Cobble." "No, Miss Hobble," was her instant correction. She weighed nearly three hundred pounds and, one day, complaining of a pain in the small of her back her brother exclaimed: "O Frances, where is the small of your back?"

Miss Hosmer regarded Grace Greenwood (Mrs. Lippincott) as one of the best raconteurs and wittiest women she had known. She was with her at some museum where an immense antique drinking cup was exhibited, large enough for a sitz bath. "A goblet for a Titan," said Harriet. "And the one who drained it would be a tight un," said Grace.

She thought the best thing ever said about seasickness was from Kate Field, who, after a tempestuous trip, said: "Lemonade is the only satisfactory drink on a sea voyage; it tastes as well coming up as going down."

The last years of this brilliant and beloved woman were devoted to futile attempts to solve the problem of Perpetual Motion. I wish she had given us her memories instead.

Helen Ghika was born at Bucharest, Wallachia, the 22nd of January, 1829. The Ghika family is of an ancient and noble race. It originated in Albania, and two centuries ago the head of it went to Wallachia, where it had been a powerful and ruling family. In 1849, at the age of twenty, the Princess was married to a Russian, Prince Koltzoff Massalsky, a descendant of the old Vikings of Moldavia; her marriage has not been a congenial one.

A sketch of the distinguished woman, Helen Ghika, the Princess Massalsky, who, under the nom de plume of Dora D'Istria, has made for herself a reputation and position in the world of letters among the great women of our century, will at least have something of the charm of novelty for most American readers. In Europe this lady was everywhere known, beloved by many personal friends, and admired by all who had read her works. Her thought was profound and liberal, her views were broad and humane. As an author, philanthropist, traveller, artist, and one of the strongest advocates of freedom and liberty for the oppressed of both sexes, and of her suffering sisters especially, she was an honour to the time and to womanhood. The women of the old world found in her a powerful, sympathizing, yet rational champion; just in her arguments in their behalf, able in her statements of their needs, and thoroughly interested in their elevation and improvement.

Her works embrace a vast range of thought, and show profound study and industry. The subjects are many. They number about twenty volumes on nationality, on social questions more than eight, on politics eighteen or twenty. Her travels fill fifteen books, and, beside all this, she wrote three romances, numerous letters and articles for the daily papers, and addresses to be read before various learned societies, of which she was an honoured member. M. Deschanel, the critic of the Journal des Débats, has said of her that "each one of her works would suffice for the reputation of a man." As an artist, her paintings have been much admired. One of her books of travel, A Summer on the Banks of the Danube, has a drawing by its author, a view of Borcia in Roumania. From a notable exhibition at St. Petersburg she received a silver medal for two pictures called "The Pine" and "The Palm," suggested to her by Heine's beautiful little poem:

"A pine-tree sleeps alone
On northern mountain-side;
Eternal stainless snows
Stretch round it far and wide.

"The pine dreams of a palm
As lonely, sad, and still,
In glowing eastern clime
On burning, rocky hill."

This princess was the idol of her native people, who called her, with the warm enthusiasm of their race, "The Star of Albania." The learned and cultivated also did her homage. Named by Frederika Bremer and the Athenians, "The New Corinne," she was invested by the Greeks with the citizenship of Greece for her efforts to assist the people of Candia to throw off the oppressor's yoke, this being the first time this honour had ever been granted to a woman.

The catalogue of her writings fills several pages, the list of titles given her by learned societies nearly as many more and, while born a princess of an ancient race and by marriage one also, she counted these titles of rank as nothing compared with her working name, and was more widely known as Dora D'Istria than as the Princess Koltzoff Massalsky.

There is a romantic fascination about this woman's life as brilliant as fiction, but more strange and remarkable in that it is all sober truth—nay, to her much of it was even sad reality. Her career was a glorious one, but lonely as the position of her pictured palm-tree, and oftentimes only upheld by her own consciousness of the right; she has felt the trials of minds isolated by greatness. Singularly gifted by nature with both mental and physical, as well as social superiority, the Princess united in an unusual degree masculine strength of character, grasp of thought, philosophical calmness, love of study and research, joined to an ardent and impassioned love of the grand, the true, and the beautiful. She had the grace and tenderness of the most sensitive of women, added to mental endowments rare in a man. Her beauty, which had been remarkable, was the result of perfect health, careful training, and an active nature. Her physical training made her a fearless swimmer, a bold rider, and an excellent walker—all of which greatly added to her active habits and powers of observation in travelling, for she travelled much. Only a person of uncommon bodily vigour can so enjoy nature in her wildest moods and grandest aspects.

This quotation is from a long article which Mrs. Grace L. Oliver, of Boston, published in an early number of Scribner's Magazine. I never had known of the existence of this learned, accomplished woman, but after reading this article I ventured to ask her to send me the material for a lecture and she responded most generously, sending books, many sketches of her career, full lists of the subjects which had most interested her, poems addressed to her as if she were a goddess, and the pictures she added proved her to have been certainly very beautiful. "She looked like Venus and spoke like Minerva."

My audience was greatly interested. She was as new to them as to me and all she had donated was handed round to an eager crowd. In about six months I saw in the papers that Dora D'Istria was taking a long trip to America to meet Mrs. Oliver, Edison, Longfellow, and myself!

I called on her later at a seashore hotel near Boston. She had just finished her lunch, and said she had been enjoying for the first time boiled corn on the cob. She was sitting on the piazza, rather shabbily dressed, her skirt decidedly travel-stained. Traces of the butter used on the corn were visible about her mouth and she was smoking a large and very strong cigar, a sight not so common at that time in this country. A rocking chair was to her a delightful novelty and she had already bought six large rocking chairs of wickerwork. She was sitting in one and busily swaying back and forward and said: "Here I do repose myself and I take these chairs home with me and when de gentlemen and de ladies do come to see me in Florence, I do show them how to repose themselves."

Suddenly she looked at me and began to laugh immoderately. "Oh," she explained, seeing my puzzled expression, "I deed think of you as so deeferent, I deed think you were very tall and theen, with leetle, wiggly curls on each side of your face."

She evidently had in mind the typical old maid with gimlet ringlets! So we sat and rocked and laughed, for I was equally surprised to meet a person so "different" from my romantic ideal. Like the two Irishmen, who chancing to meet were each mistaken in the identity of the other. As one of them put it, "We looked at each other and, faith, it turned out to be nayther of us."

The Princess Massalsky sent to Mrs. Oliver and myself valuable tokens of her regard as souvenirs.

CHAPTER VII

Elected to be the First President of New Hampshire Daughters in Massachusetts and New Hampshire—Now Honorary President—Kind Words which I Highly Value—Three, but not "of a Kind"—A Strictly Family Affair—Two Favourite Poems—Breezy Meadows.

On May 15, 1894, I was elected to be the first president of the New Hampshire Daughters in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and held the position for three years. Was then made Honorary President.

Hers was a notable administration, and brought to the organization a prestige which remains. Rules might fail, but the brilliant president never. She governed a merry company, many of them famous, but she was chief. They loved her, and that affection and pride still exist.

A daughter of the "Granite State," who can certainly take front rank among business women, is Kate Sanborn, the beloved president of New Hampshire's Daughters.

Another thing that has occupied Miss Sanborn's time this summer aside from farming and writing is the program for the coming winter's work for the Daughters of New Hampshire. It is all planned, and if all the women's clubs carry such a program as the one which Miss Sanborn has planned, and that means that it will be carried out, the winter's history of women's clubs will be one of unprecedented prosperity.

If New Hampshire's daughters now living out of their own State do not keep track of each other, and become acquainted into the bargain, it will not be the fault of their president, who has carried on correspondence with almost every one of them, and who has planned a winter's work that will enable them to learn something about their own State, as well as to meet for the promoting of acquaintance.

This meeting was presided over by our much loved First-President, Kate Sanborn, and it was the most informal, spontaneous, and altogether enjoyable organization meeting that could be imagined, and the happy spirit came that has guided our way and helped us over the rough places leading us always to the light.

Our first resolve was to enjoy to the utmost the pleasure of being together, and with it to do everything possible to help our native State. To these two objects we have been steadfastly true in all the years; and how we have planned, and what we have done has been recorded to our credit, so that we may now say in looking back, "We have kept the faith and been true."

At this time there are so many memories, all equally precious and worthy of mention here, but we must be brief and only a few can be recalled.

In our early years our Kate Sanborn led us through so many pleasant paths, and with her "twin President," Julia K. Dyer, brought the real New Hampshire atmosphere into it all.

That was a grand Dartmouth Day, when the good man, Eleazar Wheelock, came down from his accustomed wall space to grace our program and the Dartmouth Sons brought their flag and delighted us with their college songs.

Since then have come to us governors, senators, judges, mayors, and many celebrities, all glad to bring some story with the breath of the hills to New Hampshire's Daughters. Kate Sanborn first called for our county tributes, to renew old acquaintances and promote rivalry among the members. We adorned ourselves with the gold buttercup badges, and adopted the grey and garnet as our colors.

The first meeting of the season of New Hampshire's Daughters was held at the Hotel Vendome, Boston, Saturday afternoon, and was a most successful gathering, both in point of attendance and of general interest. The business of the association was transacted under the direction of the president, Miss Kate Sanborn, whose free construction of parliamentary law and independent adherence to common sense as against narrow conventionality, results in satisfactory progress and rapid action. The 150 or more ladies present were more convinced than ever that Miss Sanborn is the right woman in the right place, although she herself indignantly repudiates the notion that she is fitted to the position.

The Daughters declare that the rapid growth of the organization is due to Miss Sanborn more than to any other influence. Her ability, brightness, wit, happy way of managing, and her strong personality generally are undoubtedly at present the mainstays of the Daughters' organization. She is ably assisted by an enthusiastic corps of officers.

Your calendar about old age is simply au fait. After reading it, I want to hurry up and grow old as fast as I can. It is the best collection of sane thoughts upon old age that I know in any language. Life coming from the Source of Life must be glorious throughout. The last of life should be its best. October is the king of all the year. A man should be more wonderful at eighty than at twenty; a woman should make her seventieth birthday more fascinating than her seventeenth. Merit never deserts the soul. God is with His children always.

PETER MACQUEEN

The "Indian Summer Calendar" is the best thing you have done yet. I have read it straight through twice, and now it lies on my desk, and I read daily selections from it, as some of the good people read from their "Golden Treasury of Texts."

It gives me pleasure to offer my testimonial to your unique, original, and very picturesque lectures. The one to which I recently listened, in the New England Conservatory of Music, was certainly the most entertaining of any humorous lecture to which I have ever listened, and it left the audience talking, with such bright, happy faces, I can see it now in my mind. And they continued to repeat the happy things you said; at least my own friends did. It was not a "plea for cheerfulness," it was cheerfulness. I hope you may give it, and make the world laugh, a thousand times. "He who makes what is useful agreeable," said old Horace of literature, "wins every vote." You have the wit of making the useful agreeable, and the spirit and genius of it.

I published a little volume, A Truthful Woman in Southern California, which had a large sale for many years. Women tourists bought it to "enlarge" with their photographs. Stedman wrote me, after I had sent him my book:

I think it especially charming that you should so remember me and send me a gift-copy of Truthful Kate's breezy and fascinating report of Southern California. For I had been so taken with your adoption of that Abandoned Farm that I had made a note of your second book. Your chapters give me as vivid an idea of Southern California as I obtained from Miss Hazard's watercolors, and that is saying a good deal. We all like you, and indeed who does not? And your books, so fresh and sparkling, make us like you even more. Believe that I am gratified by your unexpected gift, and by the note that convoyed it.

New York Public Library,
Office of Circulation Department,
209 West 23rd Street,
February 19,1907.

You may be interested to know that your book on old wall-papers is included in a list of books specially recommended for libraries in Great Britain, compiled by the Library Association of the United Kingdom, recently published in London. As there seems to be a rather small proportion of American works included in the list, I think that this may be worthy of note.

How kind and generous you are to my books, and therefore, to me! How thoroughly you understand them and know why I wrote them!

When a book of mine is sent out into the cold world of indifferent reviewers, I read their platitudinous words, trying to be grateful; but waiting, waiting, knowing that ere long I shall get a little clipping from the Somerville Journal, written by Kate Sanborn; and then I shall know what the book is. If it's good, she'll say so, and if it isn't, I think she would say so; but that alternative never has come to me. But I would far rather have her true words of dispraise than all machine-made twaddle of nearly all the book columns of our great American press.

It is such generous minds as yours that have kept me writing. I should have stopped long ago if I had not had them.

It is impossible to give you a perfect pen picture of Breezy Meadows or of its mistress, Kate Sanborn, just as it is impossible to paint the tints of a glorious sunset stretching across the winter sky. Breezy Meadows is an ideal country home, and the mistress of it all is a grand woman—an honor to her sex, and a loyal friend. Her whole life seems to be devoted to making others happy, and a motto on one of the walls of the house expresses better than I can, her daily endeavour:

"Let me, also, cheer a spot,
Hidden field or garden grot,
Place where passing souls may rest,
On the way, and be their best."

As a lecturer, Miss Kate Sanborn is thoroughly unique. Whatever her topic, one is always sure there will be wit and the subtlest humour in her discourse, bits of philosophy of life, and the most practical common sense, flashes of laughable personal history, and gems of scholarship. It is always certain that the lecture will be rendered in inimitably bright and cheery style that will enliven her audience, which, while laughing and applauding, will listen intently throughout. No wonder she is a favourite with lecture goers, for few can give them so delightful an evening as she.—MARY A. LIVERMORE.

There is only one Kate Sanborn. Her position as a lecturer is unique. In the selection and treatment of her themes she has no rival. She touches nothing that she does not enliven and adorn. Pathos and humour, wit and wisdom, anecdote and incident, the foibles, fancies, freaks, and fashions of the past and present, pen pictures of great men and famous women, illustrious poets and distinguished authors, enrich her writings, as if the ages had laid their wealth of love and learning at her feet, and bidden her help herself. With a discriminating and exacting taste, she has brought together, in book and lecture, the things that others have overlooked, or never found. She has been a kind of discoverer of thoughts and things in the by-paths of literature. She also understands "the art of putting things." But vastly more than the thought, style, and utterance is the striking personality of the writer herself. It is not enough to read the writings of Miss Sanborn, though you cannot help doing this. She must be heard, if one would know the secret of her power—subtle, magnetic, impossible of transfer to books. The "personal equation" is everything—the strong, gifted woman putting her whole soul into the interpretation and transmission of her thought so that it may inspire the hearts of those who listen; the power of self-radiation. It is not surprising that Miss Sanborn is everywhere greeted with enthusiasm when she speaks.—ARTHUR LITTLE.

Miss Kate Sanborn is one of the best qualified women in this country to lecture on literary themes. The daughter of a Dartmouth professor, she was cradled in literature, and has made it in a certain way the work of her life. There is nothing, however, of the pedantic about her. She is the embodiment of a woman's wit and humour; but her forte is a certain crisp and lively condensation of persons and qualities which carry a large amount of information under a captivating cloak of vivacious and confidential talk with her audience, rather than didactic statement.

One of the friends I miss most at the farm is Sam Walter Foss. He was the poet, philosopher, lecturer and "friend of man." His folk songs touched every heart and even the sombre vein lightened with pictures of hope and cheer. He was humorous and even funny, but in every line there is a dignity not often reached by writers of witty verse or prose. Mr. Foss was born in Candia, N.H., in June, 1858. Through his ancestor, Stephen Batcheller, he had kinship with Daniel Webster, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Pitt Fessenden.

Mr. Foss secured an interest in the Lynn Union, and it was while engaged in publishing that newspaper that he made the discovery that he could be a "funny man." The man having charge of the funny column left suddenly, and Mr. Foss decided to see what he could do in the way of writing something humorous to fill the column. He had never done anything of this kind before, and was surprised and pleased to have some of his readers congratulate him on his new "funny man." He continued to write for this column and for a long time his identity was unknown, he being referred to simply as the "Lynn Union funny man." His ability finally attracted the attention of Wolcott Balestier, the editor of Tit-Bits, who secured Mr. Foss's services for that paper. Before long he became connected with Puck, Judge, and several other New York periodicals, including the New York Sun.

Mr. Foss's first book was published in 1894, and was entitled Back Country Poems and has passed through several editions. Whiffs from Wild Meadows issued in 1896 has been fully as successful. Later books are Dreams in Homespun, Songs of War and Peace, Songs of the Average Man.

SAM WALTER FOSS

He had charge of the Public Library at Somerville, Massachusetts, and his influence in library matters extended all over New England.

His poems are marked by simplicity. Most of his songs are written in New England dialect which he has used with unsurpassed effect. But this poetry was always of the simplest kind, of the appealing nature which reaches the heart. Of his work and his aim, he said in his first volume:

"It is not the greatest singer
Who tries the loftiest themes,
He is the true joy bringer
Who tells his simplest dreams,
He is the greatest poet
Who will renounce all art
And take his heart and show it
To any other heart;
Who writes no learnèd riddle,
But sings his simplest rune,
Takes his heart-strings for a fiddle,
And plays his easiest tune."

Mr. Foss always had to recite the following poem when he called at Breezy Meadows

THE CONFESSIONS OF A LUNKHEAD

I'm a lunkhead, an' I know it; 'taint no use to squirm an' talk,
I'm a gump an' I'm a lunkhead, I'm a lummux, I'm a gawk,
An' I make this interduction so that all you folks can see
An' understan' the natur' of the critter thet I be.

I allus wobble w'en I walk, my j'ints are out er gear,
My arms go flappin' through the air, jest like an el'phunt's ear;
An' when the womern speaks to me I stutter an' grow weak,
A big frog rises in my throat, an' he won't let me speak.

Wall, that's the kind er thing I be; but in our neighborhood
Lived young Joe Craig an' young Jim Stump an' Hiram Underwood.
We growed like corn in the same hill, jest like four sep'rit stalks;
For they wuz lunkheads, jest like me, an' lummuxes and gawks.

Now, I knew I wuz a lunkhead; but them fellers didn't know,
Thought they wuz the biggest punkins an' the purtiest in the row.
An' I, I uster laff an' say, "Them lunkhead chaps will see
W'en they go out into the worl' w'at gawky things they be."

Joe Craig was a lunkhead, but it didn't get through his pate;
I guess you all heerd tell of him—he's governor of the state;
Jim Stump, he blundered off to war—a most uncommon gump—
Didn't know enough to know it—'an he came home General Stump.

Then Hiram Underwood went off, the bigges' gawk of all,
We hardly thought him bright enough to share in Adam's fall;
But he tried the railroad biz'ness, an' he allus grabbed his share,—
Now this gawk, who didn't know it, is a fifty millionaire.

An' often out here hoein' I set down atween the stalks,
Thinkin' how we four together all were lummuxes an' gawks,
All were gumps and lunkheads, only they didn't know, yer see;
An' I ask, "If I hadn' known it, like them other fellers there,
Today I might be settin' in the presidential chair."

We all are lunkheads—don't get mad—an' lummuxes and gawks,
But us poor chaps who know we be—we walk in humble walks.
So, I say to all good lunkheads, "Keep yer own selves in the dark;
Don't own to reckernize the fact, an' you will make your mark."

THE HOUSE BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

"He was a friend to man, and lived in a house
by the side of the road."—HOMER.

There are hermit souls that live withdrawn
In the peace of their self-content;
There are souls, like stars, that dwell apart,
In a fellowless firmament;
There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths
Where highways never ran;—
But let me live by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

Let me live in a house by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by—
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner's seat,
Or hurl the cynic's ban;—
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

I see from my house by the side of the road,
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardour of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife.
But I turn not away from their smiles nor their tears—
Both parts of an infinite plan;—
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

I know there are brook-gladdened meadows ahead
And mountains of wearisome height;
That the road passes on through the long afternoon
And stretches away to the night.
But still I rejoice when the travellers rejoice,
And weep with the strangers that moan,
Nor live in my house by the side of the road
Like a man who dwells alone.

Let me live in my house by the side of the road
Where the race of men go by—
They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong,
Wise, foolish—so am I.
Then why should I sit in the scorner's seat
Or hurl the cynic's ban?—
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

Mr. Foss's attribution to Homer used as a motto preceding his poem, "The House by the Side of the Road," is, no doubt, his translation of a passage from the Iliad, book vi., which, as done into English prose in the translation of Lang, Leaf and Myers, is as follows:

Then Diomedes of the loud war-cry slew Axylos, Teuthranos' son that dwelt in stablished Arisbe, a man of substance dear to his fellows; for his dwelling was by the road-side and he entertained all men.

Sam Walter Foss was a poet of gentle heart. His keen wit never had any sting. He has described our Yankee folk with as clever humour as Bret Harte delineated Rocky Mountain life. Like Harte, Mr. Foss had no unkindness in his make-up. He told me that he never had received an anonymous letter in his life.

Our American nation is wonderful in science and mechanical invention. It was the aim of Sam Walter Foss to immortalize the age of steel. "Harness all your rivers above the cataracts' brink, and then unharness man." He told me he thought the subject of mechanics was as poetical as the song of the lark. "The Cosmos wrought for a billion years to make glad for a day," reminds us of the most resonant periods of Tennyson.

"The House by the Side of the Road," is from a text of Homer. "The Lunkhead" shows Foss in his happiest mood: gently satirizing the foibles and harmless, foolish fancies of his fellow-men. There is a haunting misty tenderness in such a poem as "The Tree Lover."

"Who loves a tree he loves the life
That springs in flower and clover;
He loves the love that gilds the cloud,
And greens the April sod;
He loves the wide beneficence,
His soul takes hold of God."

We have too little love for the tender out-of-door nature. "The world is too much with us."

It was a loss to American life and letters when Sam Walter Foss passed away from us at the height of his strong true manhood. Later he will be regarded as an eminent American.

He was true to our age to the core. Whether he wrote of the gentle McKinley, the fighting Dewey, the ludicrous schoolboy, the "grand eternal fellows" that are coming to this world after we have left it—he was ever a weaver at the loom of highest thought. The world is not to be civilized and redeemed by the apostles of steel and brute force. Not the Hannibals and Cæsars and Kaisers but the Shelleys, the Scotts, and the Fosses are our saviours. They will have a large part in the future of the world to heighten and brighten life and justify the ways of God to men.

These and such as these are our consolation in life's thorny pathway. They keep alive in us the memory of our youth and many a jaded traveller as he listens to their music, sees again the apple blossoms falling around him in the twilight of some unforgotten spring.

Peter MacQueen was brought to my house years ago by a friend when he happened to be stationary for an hour, and he is certainly a unique and interesting character, a marvellous talker, reciter of Scotch ballads, a maker of epigrams, and a most unpractical, now-you-see-him and now-he's-a-far-away-fellow. I remember his remark, "Breakfast is a fatal habit." It was not the breakfast to which he referred but to the gathering round a table at a stated hour, far too early, when not in a mood for society or for conversation. And again: "I have decided never to marry. A poor girl is a burden; a rich girl a boss." But you never can tell. He is now a Benedict.

I wrote to Mr. MacQueen lately for some of his press notices, and a few of the names which he called himself when I received his letters.

MY DEAR KATE SANBORN:—Yours here and I hasten to reply. Count Tolstoi remarked to me: "Your travels have been so vast and you have been with so many peoples and races, that an account of them would constitute a philosophy in itself."

Theodore Roosevelt said, "No other American has travelled over our new possessions more universally, nor observed the conditions in them so quickly and sanely."

Kennan was persona non grata to the Russians, especially after his visit to Siberia, but Mr. MacQueen was most cordially welcomed.

What an odd scene at Tolstoi's table! The countess and her daughter in full evening dress with the display of jewels, and at the other end Tolstoi in the roughest sort of peasant dress and with bare feet. At dinner Count Tolstoi said to Mr. MacQueen: "If I had travelled as much as you have, I should today have had a broader philosophy."

During the past one hundred years the empire of the Czar has made slow progress; but great bodies move slowly, and Russia is colossal. Two such republics as the United States with our great storm door called Alaska, could go into the Russian empire and yet leave room enough for Great Britain, Germany, and Austria.

1898—in the Santiago Campaign with the Rough Riders, and in Porto Rico with General Miles.

1899—with General Henry W. Lawton to the Philippines, returning through Japan.

In the meantime Mr. MacQueen has visited every country in Europe, completing 240,000 miles in ten years, a distance equal to that which separates this earth from the moon.

Last winter he was four months in the war zone, narrowly escaping arrest several times, and other serious dangers, as they thought him a spy with his camera and pictures. I gave a stag dinner for him just after his return from his war experiences, and the daily bulletins of war's horrors seemed dull reading after his stories.

Here is an extract from a paper sent by Peter MacQueen from Iowa, where he long ago was in great demand as a lecturer, which contained several of the best anecdotes told by this irresistible raconteur, which may be new to you, if not, read them again and then tell them yourself.

Mr. MacQueen, who is to lecture at the Chautauqua here, has many strange stories and quaint yarns that he picked up while travelling around the globe. While in the highlands of Scotland he met a canny old "Scot" who asked him, "Have you ever heard of Andrew Carnegie in America?" "Yes, indeed," replied the traveller. "Weel," said the Scot, pointing to a little stream near-by, "in that wee burn Andrew and I caught our first trout together. Andrew was a barefooted, bareheaded, ragged wee callen, no muckle guid at onything. But he gaed off to America, and they say he's doin' real weel."

While in the Philippines Mr. MacQueen was marching with some of the colored troops who have recently been dismissed by the President. A big coloured soldier walking beside Mr. MacQueen had his white officer's rations and ammunition and can-kit, carrying them in the hot tropical sun. The big fellow turned to the traveller and said: "Say, there, comrade, this yere White Man's Burden ain't all it's cracked up to be."

In the Boer war Mr. MacQueen, war correspondent and lecturer, tells of an Irish Brigade man from Chicago on Sani river. The correspondent was along with the Irish-Americans and saw them take a hill from a force of Yorkshire men very superior in numbers. Mr. MacQueen also saw a green flag of Ireland in the British lines. Turning to his Irish friend, he remarked: "Isn't it a shame to see Irishmen fighting for the Queen, and Irishmen fighting for the Boers at the same time?" "Sorra the bit," replied his companion, "it wouldn't be a proper fight if there wasn't Irishmen on both sides."

Here's hoping that during Mr. MacQueen's long vacation from sermons, lectures, and tedious conventionalities in the outdoors of the darkest and deepest Africa, the wild beasts, including the man-eating tiger, may prove the correctness of Mrs. Seton Thompson's good words for them and only approach him to have their photos taken or amiably allow themselves to be shot. The cannibals will decide he is too thin and wiry for a really tempting meal.

Doctor Edwin C. Bolles has been for fifteen years on the Faculty of Tufts College, Massachusetts, and still continues active service at the age of seventy-eight.

His history courses are among the popular ones in the curriculum, and his five minutes' daily talks in Chapel have won the admiration of the entire College.

He was for forty-five years in active pastoral service in the Universalist ministry; was Professor of Microscopy for three years at St. Lawrence University. Doctor Bolles was one of the pioneers in the lecture field and both prominent and popular in this line, and the first in the use of illustrations by the stereopticon in travel lectures.

The perfection of the use of microscopic projection which has done so much for the popularization of science was one of his exploits.

For several years his eyesight has been failing, an affliction which he has borne with Christian courage and cheerfulness and keeps right on at his beloved work.

He has been devoted to photography in which avocation he has been most successful. His wife told me they were glad to accept his call to New York as he had almost filled every room in their house with his various collections. One can appreciate this when he sees a card displayed on the door of Doctor Bolles's sanctum bearing this motto:

He has received many honorary degrees, but his present triumph over what would crush the ambition of most men is greater than all else.

Exquisite nonsense is a rare thing, but when found how delicious it is! I found a letter from a reverend friend who might be an American Sidney Smith if he chose, and I am going to let you enjoy it; it was written years ago.

I should make also better acknowledgments than my thanks. But what can I do? My volume on The Millimetric Study of the Tail of the Greek Delta, in the MSS. of the Sixth Century, is entirely out of print; and until its re-issue by the Seaside Library I cannot forward a copy. Then my essay, "Infantile Diseases of the Earthworm" is in Berlin for translation, as it is to be issued at the same time in Germany and the United States. "The Moral Regeneration of the Rat," and "Intellectual Idiosyncracies of Twin Clams," are resting till I can get up my Sanscrit and Arabic, for I wish these researches to be exhaustive.

GOLDEN ROD

O! Golden Rod! Thou garish, gorgeous gush
Of passion that consumes hot summer's heart!
O! yellowest yolk of love! in yearly hush
I stand, awe sobered, at thy burning bush
Of Glory, glossed with lustrous and illustrious art,
And moan, why poor, so poor in purse and brain I am,
While thou into thy trusting treasury dost seem to cram
Australia, California, Sinai and Siam.

And the other such a capital burlesque of the modern English School with its unintelligible parentheses:

ASTER

I kissed her all day on her red, red mouth
(Cats, cradles and trilobites! Love is the master!)
Too utterly torrid, a sweet, spicy South
(Of compositæ, fairest the Aster.)
Stars shone on our kisses—the moon blushed warm
(Ursa major or minor, Pollux and Castor!)

How long the homeward! And where was my arm?
(Crushed, crushed at her waist was the Aster!)

No one kisses me now—my winter has come:
(To ice turns fortune when once you have passed her.)
I long for the angels to beckon me home (hum)
(For dead, deader, deadest, the Aster!)

PINES AND SILVER BIRCHES

Doctor Bolles has very kindly sent me one of his later humorous poems. A tragic forecast of suffragette rule which is too gloomy, as almost every woman will assure an agreeable smoker that she is "fond of the odour of a good cigar."

When the last cigar is smoked and the box is splintered and gone,
And only the faintest whiff of the dear old smell hangs on,
In the times when he's idle or thoughtful,
When he's lonesome, jolly or blue,
And he fingers his useless matches,
What is a poor fellow to do?

For the suffragettes have conquered, and their harvest is gathered in;
From Texas to Maine they've voted tobacco the deadliest sin;
A pipe sends you up for a year, a cigarette for two;
In this female republic of virtue,
What is a poor fellow to do?

He may train up his reason on bridge and riot on afternoon tea,
And at dinner, all wineless and proper, a dress-suited guest he may be;
But when the mild cheese has been passed, and the chocolate mint drops are few,
And the coffee comes in and he hankers,
What is a poor fellow to do?

It's all for his good, they say; for in heaven no nicotine grows,
And the angels need no cedar for moth-proofs to keep their clothes;
No ashes are dropped, no carpets are singed, by all the saintly crew;
If this is heaven, and he gets there,
is a poor fellow to do?

He'll sit on the golden benches and long for a chance to break jail,
With a shooting-star for a motor, or a flight on a comet's tail;
He'll see the smoke rise in the distance, and goaded by memory's spell,
He'll go back on the women who saved him,
And ask for a ticket to Hell!

An exact description of the usual happenings at "Breezy" in the beginning, by my only sister, Mrs. Babcock, who was devoted to me and did more than anyone to help to develop the Farm. I feel that this chapter must be the richer for two of her poems.

LIGHT AND SHADE AT "BREEZY MEADOWS" FARM

This charming May morning we'll walk to the grove!
And give the dear dogs all a run;
Over the meadows 'tis pleasant to rove
And bask in the light of the sun.

Last night a sly fox took off our best duck!
Run for a gun! there a hen hawk flies!
We always have the very worst of luck,
The anxious mistress of the chickens cries.

We stop to smell the lilacs at the gate,
And watch the bluebirds in the elm-tree's crest—
The finest farm it is in all the state,
Which corner of it do you like the best?

Just think! a rat has eaten ducklings two,
Now isn't that a shame! pray set a trap!
The downiest, dearest ones that ever grew,
I think this trouble will climax cap!

At "Sun Flower Rock," in joy we stand to gaze;
The distant orchard, flowering, show so fair:
Surely my dear, abandoned farming pays,
How heavenly the early morning air!

Now only see! those horrid hens are scratching!
They tear the Mountain Fringe so lately set!
Some kind of mischief they are always hatching,
Why did I ever try a hen to pet?

Here's "Mary's Circle," and the birches slender,
And Columbine which grows the rocks between,
Red blossoms showing in a regal splendour!
We must be happy in this peaceful scene.

The puppies chew the woodbine and destroy
The dainty branches sprouting on the wall!
How can the little wretches so annoy?
There's Solomon Alphonzo—worst of all!

Now we will go to breakfast—milk and cream,
Eggs from the farm, surely it is a treat!
How horrid city markets really seem
When one can have fresh things like these to eat!

What? Nickodee has taken all the hash?
And smashed the dish which lies upon the floor!
I thought just now I heard a sudden crash!
And it was he who slammed the kitchen door!

By "Scare Crow Road" we take our winding way,
Tiger and Jerry in the pasture feed.
See, Mary,—what a splendid crop of hay!
Now, don't you feel that this is joy indeed?

The incubator chickens all are dead!
Max fights with Shep, he scorns to follow me!
Some fresh disaster momently I dread;
Is that a skunk approaching?—try to see!

Come Snip and Snap and give us song and dance!
We'll have a fire and read the choicest books,
While the black horses waiting, paw and prance!
And see how calm and sweet all nature looks.

So goes the day; the peaceful landscape smiles;
At times the live stock seems to take a rest.
But fills our hearts with worry other whiles!
We think each separate creature is possessed!

PADDLING IN CHICKEN BROOK

THE OLD WOMAN

The little old woman, who wove and who spun,
Who sewed and who baked, did she have any fun?

In housewifely arts with her neighbour she'd vie,
Her triumph a turkey, her pleasure a pie!

She milked and she churned, and the chickens she fed,
She made tallow dips, and she moulded the bread.

No club day annoyed her, no program perplext,
No themes for discussion her calm slumber vexed.

By birth D.A.R. or Colonial Dame,
She sought for no record to blazon her fame—

No Swamies she knew, she cherished no fad,
Of healing by science, no knowledge she had.

She anointed with goose grease, she gave castor oil,
Strong sons and fair daughters rewarded her toil.

She studied child nature direct from the child,
And she spared not the rod, though her manner was mild.

All honour be paid her, this heroine true,
She laid the foundation for things we call new!

Her hand was so strong, and her brain was so steady,
That for the New Woman she made the world ready.

THE ISLAND WHICH WE MADE

Here is one of the several parodies written by my brother while interned in a log camp in the woods of New Brunswick, during a severe day's deluge of rain. It was at the time when Peary had recently reached the North Pole, and Dr. Cook had reported his remarkable observations of purple snows:

DON'T YOU HEAR THE NORTH A-CALLIN'?

Ship me somewhere north o' nowhere, where the worst is like the best;
Where there aren't no p'ints o' compass, an' a man can get a rest;
Where a breeze is like a blizzard, an' the weather at its best;
Dogs and Huskies does the workin' and the Devil does the rest.

On the way to Baffin's Bay,
Where the seal and walrus play,
And the day is slow a-comin', slower
Still to go away.

There I seen a walrus baskin'—bloomin' blubber to the good;
Could I 'it 'im for the askin'? Well—I missed 'im where he stood.
Ship me up there, north o' nowhere, where the best is like the worst;
Where there aren't no p'ints o' compass, and the last one gets there first.

Take me back to Baffin's Bay,
Where the seal and walrus play;
And the night is long a-comin', when it
Comes, it comes to stay.

TAKA'S TEA HOUSE AT LILY POND

THE WOMAN WITH THE BROOM

A Mate for "The Man With The Hoe."
(Written after seeing a farmer's wife cleaning house.)

Bowed by the cares of cleaning house she leans
Upon her broom and gazes through the dust.
A wilderness of wrinkles on her face,
And on her head a knob of wispy hair.
Who made her slave to sweeping and to soap,
A thing that smiles not and that never rests,
Stanchioned in stall, a sister to the cow?
Who loosened and made shrill this angled jaw?
Who dowered this narrowed chest for blowing up
Of sluggish men-folks and their morning fire?

Is this the thing you made a bride and brought
To have dominion over hearth and home,
To scour the stairs and search the bin for flour,
To bear the burden of maternity?
Is this the wife they wove who framed our law
And pillared a bright land on smiling homes?
Down all the stretch of street to the last house
There is no shape more angular than hers,
More tongued with gabble of her neighbours' deeds,
More filled with nerve-ache and rheumatic twinge,
More fraught with menace of the frying-pan.

O Lords and Masters in our happy land,
How with this woman will you make account,
How answer her shrill question in that hour
When whirlwinds of such women shake the polls,
Heedless of every precedent and creed,
Straight in hysteric haste to right all wrongs?
How will it be with cant of politics,
With king of trade and legislative boss,
With cobwebs of hypocrisy and greed,
When she shall take the ballot for her broom
And sweep away the dust of centuries?

NEW HAMPSHIRE DAUGHTERS

New Hampshire Daughters meet tonight
With joy each cup is brimmin';
We've heard for years about her men,
But why leave out her wimmin?

In early days they did their share
To git the state to goin',
And when their husbands went to war,
Could fight or take to hoein'.

They bore privations with a smile,
Raised families surprisin',
Six boys, nine gals, with twins thrown in,
O, they were enterprisin'.

Yet naught is found their deeds to praise
In any book of hist'ry,
The brothers wrote about themselves,
And—well, that solves the myst'ry.

But now our women take their place
In pulpit, court, and college,
As doctors, teachers, orators,
They equal men in knowledge.

And when another history's writ
Of what New Hampshire's done,
The women all will get their due,
But not a single son.

But no, on sober second thought,
We lead, not pose as martyrs,
We'll give fair credit to her sons,
But not forget her Darters.

THE LOOKOUT

Delighted to welcome you dear;
But you can't have a Turkey dinner!
Those fowls are my friends—live here:
To eat, not be eat, you sinner!

I like their limping, primping mien,
I like their raucous gobble;
I like the lordly tail outspread,
I like their awkward hobble.

Yes, Turkey is my favourite meat,
Hot, cold, or réchauffée;
*But my own must stay, and eat and eat;
You may paint 'em, and so take away.

SPRING IN WINTER

A Memory of "Breezy Meadows"

'Twas winter—and bleakly and bitterly came
The winds o'er the meads you so breezily name;
And what tho' the sun in the heavens was bright,
'Twas lacking in heat altho' lavish in light.
And cold were the guests who drew up to your door,
But lo, when they entered 'twas winter no more!

Without, it might freeze, and without, it might storm,
Within, there was welcome all glowing and warm.
And oh, but the warmth in the hostess's eyes
Made up for the lack of that same in the skies!
And fain is the poet such magic to sing:
Without, it was winter—within, it was spring!

Yea, spring—for the charm of the house and its cheer
Awoke in us dreams of the youth of the year;
And safe in your graciousness folded and furled,
How far seemed the cold and the care of the world!
So strong was the spell that your magic could fling,
We knew it was winter—we felt it was spring!

Yea, spring—in the glow of your hearth and your board
The springtime for us was revived and restored,
And everyone blossomed, from hostess to guest,
In story and sentiment, wisdom and jest;
And even the bard like a robin must sing—
And, sure, after that, who could doubt it was spring!

Mr. McCarthy is associate editor of The Sacred Heart, Boston, and a most popular poet and lecturer.

His dear little book, Voices from Erin, adorned with the Irish harp and the American shield fastened together by a series of true-love knots, is dedicated "To all who in their love for the new land have not forgotten the old." There is one of these poems which is always called for whenever the author attends any public function where recitations are in order, and I do not wonder at its popularity, for it has the genuine Irish lilt and fascination:

"Ah, sweet is Tipperary in the spring time of the year,
When the hawthorn's whiter than the snow,
When the feathered folk assemble and the air is all a-tremble
With their singing and their winging to and fro;
When queenly Slieve-na-mon puts her verdant vesture on,
And smiles to hear the news the breezes bring;
When the sun begins to glance on the rivulets that dance;
Ah, sweet is Tipperary in the spring!"

I have always wanted to write a poem about my own "Breezy" and the bunch of lilacs at the gate; but not being a poet I have had to keep wanting; but just repeating this gaily tripping tribute over and over, I suddenly seized my pencil and pad, and actually under the inspiration, imitated (at a distance) half of this first verse.

How sweet to be at Breezy in the springtime of the year,
With the lilacs all abloom at the gate,
And everything so new, so jubilant, so dear,
And every little bird is a-looking for his mate.

There, don't you dare laugh! Perhaps another time I may swing into the exact rhythm.

The Rev. William Rankin Duryea, late Professor at Rutgers College, New Brunswick, was before that appointment a clergyman in Jersey City. His wife told me that he once wrote some verses hoping to win a prize of several hundred dollars offered for the best poem on "Home." He dashed off one at a sitting, read it over, tore it up, and flung it in the waste basket. Then he proceeded to write something far more serious and impressive. This he sent to the committee of judges who were to choose the winner. It was never heard of. But his wife, who liked the rhythm of the despised jingle, took it from the waste basket, pieced it together, copied it, and sent it to the committee. It took the prize. And he showed me in his library, books he had long wanted to own, which he had purchased with this "prize money," writing in each "Bought for a Song."

Dark is the night, and fitful and drearily
Rushes the wind like the waves of the sea,
Little care I as here I sing cheerily,
Wife at my side and my baby on knee;
King, King, crown me the King!
Home is the Kingdom, and Love is the King.

Flashes the firelight upon the dear faces
Dearer and dearer as onward we go,
Forces the shadow behind us and places
Brightness around us with warmth in the glow
King, King, crown me the King!
Home is the Kingdom, and Love is the King.

Flashes the love-light increasing the glory,
Beaming from bright eyes with warmth of the soul,
Telling of trust and content the sweet story,
Lifting the shadows that over us roll;
King, King, crown me the King!
Home is the Kingdom, and Love is the King.

Richer than miser with perishing treasure,
Served with a service no conquest could bring,
Happy with fortune that words cannot measure,
Light-hearted I on the hearthstone can sing,
King, King, crown me the King!
Home is the Kingdom, and Love is the King.

THE SWITCH

Breezy Meadows, my heart's delight. I was so fortunate as to purchase it in a ten-minute interview with the homesick owner, who longed to return to Nebraska, and complained that there was not grass enough on the place to feed a donkey. I am sure this was not a personal allusion, as I saw the donkey and he did look forlorn.

I was captivated by the big elms, all worthy of Dr. Holmes's wedding-ring, and looked no further, never dreaming of the great surprises in store for me. As, a natural pond of water lilies, some tinted with pink. These lilies bloom earlier and later than any others about here.

An unusual variety of trees, hundreds of white birches greatly adding to the beauty of the place, growing in picturesque clumps of family groups and their white bark, especially white.

HOW VINES GROW AT BREEZY MEADOWS

Two granite quarries, the black and white, and an exquisite pink, and we drive daily over long stretches of solid rock, going down two or three hundred feet—But I shall never explore these for illusive wealth.

A large chestnut grove through which my foreman has made four excellent roads. Two fascinating brooks, with forget-me-nots, blue-eyed and smiling in the water, and the brilliant cardinal-flower on the banks in the late autumn.

From a profusion of wild flowers I especially remark the moccasin-flower or stemless lady's-slipper.

My Nature's Garden says—"Because most people cannot forbear picking this exquisite flower that seems too beautiful to be found outside a millionaire's hothouse, it is becoming rarer every year, until the picking of one in the deep forest where it must now hide, has become the event of a day's walk." Nearly 300 of this orchid were found in our wooded garden this season.

In the early spring, several deer are seen crossing the field just a little distance from the house. They like to drink at the brooks and nip off the buds of the lilac trees. Foxes, alas, abound.

Pheasants, quail, partridges are quite tame, perhaps because we feed them in winter.

I found untold bushes of the blueberry and huckleberry, also enough cranberries in the swamp to supply our own table and sell some. Wild grape-vines festoon trees by the brooks.

Barberries, a dozen bushes of these which are very decorative, and their fruit if skilfully mixed with raisins make a foreign-tasting and delicious conserve.

We have the otter and mink, and wild ducks winter in our brooks. Large birds like the heron and rail appear but rarely; ugly looking and fierce.

The hateful English sparrow has been so reduced in numbers by sparrow traps that now they keep away and the bluebirds take their own boxes again. The place is a safe and happy haven for hosts of birds.

I have a circle of houses for the martins and swallows and wires connecting them, where a deal of gossip goes on.

The pigeons coo-oo-o on the barn roof and are occasionally utilized in a pie, good too!

GRAND ELM
(OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS OLD)

"Oh, all around about New England. I call all trees mine that I have put my wedding ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham Young has human ones." "One set's as green as the other," exclaimed a boarder, who has never been identified. "They're all Bloomers,"—said the young fellow called John. (I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by putting my wedding-ring on a tree.) "Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear, said I.—I have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New England elms and other big trees. Don't you want to hear me talk trees a little now? That is one of my specialties."

"Why, size, in the first place, and chiefly anything over twenty feet clear girth five feet above the ground and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across may claim that title, according to my scale. All of them, with the questionable exception of the Springfield tree above referred to, stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-two or twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of spread."

Three of my big elms easily stand the test Dr. Holmes prescribed, and seem to spread themselves since being assured that they are worthy of one of his wedding-rings if he were alive, and soon there will be other applicants in younger elms.

I am pleased that my memory has brought before me so unerringly the pleasant pictures of the past. But my agreeable task is completed.

The humming-birds have come on this fifteenth of July to sip at early morn the nectar from the blossoms of the trumpet-vine, now beginning its brilliant display. That is always a signal for me to drop all indoor engagements and from this time, the high noon of midsummer fascinations, to keep out of doors enjoying to the full the ever-changing glories of Nature, until the annual Miracle Play of the Transfiguration of the Trees.

GREETINGS AND WELCOME TO EVERY READER
(KATE SANBORN)

MEMORIES AND

ANECDOTES

BY

KATE SANBORN

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1915

To

ALL MY FRIENDS EVERYWHERE

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

MEMORIES AND ANECDOTES

CHAPTER I

THE STREET FRONTING THE SANBORN HOME AT HANOVER, N. H.

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

MRS. ANNE C. LYNCH BOTTA

PRESIDENT BARNARD OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE

PROFESSOR R. OGDEN DOREMUS

CHAPTER IV

SOPHIA SMITH

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

PETER MACQUEEN

SAM WALTER FOSS

PINES AND SILVER BIRCHES

PADDLING IN CHICKEN BROOK

THE ISLAND WHICH WE MADE

TAKA'S TEA HOUSE AT LILY POND

THE LOOKOUT

THE SWITCH

HOW VINES GROW AT BREEZY MEADOWS

GRAND ELM
(OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS OLD)

THE END

GREETINGS AND WELCOME TO EVERY READER (KATE SANBORN)

MEMORIES AND

ANECDOTES

BY

KATE SANBORN

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1915

To

ALL MY FRIENDS EVERYWHERE

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

MEMORIES AND ANECDOTES

CHAPTER I

THE STREET FRONTING THE SANBORN HOME AT HANOVER, N. H.

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

MRS. ANNE C. LYNCH BOTTA

PRESIDENT BARNARD OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE

PROFESSOR R. OGDEN DOREMUS

CHAPTER IV

SOPHIA SMITH

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

PETER MACQUEEN

SAM WALTER FOSS

PINES AND SILVER BIRCHES

PADDLING IN CHICKEN BROOK

THE ISLAND WHICH WE MADE

TAKA'S TEA HOUSE AT LILY POND

THE LOOKOUT

THE SWITCH

HOW VINES GROW AT BREEZY MEADOWS

GRAND ELM (OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS OLD)

THE END

GREETINGS AND WELCOME TO EVERY READER
(KATE SANBORN)

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1915

GRAND ELM
(OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS OLD)