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Glimpses of Fifty years.
Cfie Etttobiogtapfis
OP
AN AMERICAN WOMAN
BY
■ ■;
I.. ■
Frances E. Wilurd.
WRITTEN BY ORDER OP THE NATIONAL WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN
TEMPERANCE UNION.
INTRODUCTION BY HANNAH WHITALL SMITH.
"Nothing makes life dreary but lack of motive."
PUBUSHBD BY THB
Woxmm'b S^mperance ^^ftcafion jHssoddtidn.
H. J. SMITH & CO.
CHICAGO, PHU^ADELPHIA, KANSAS CITY, OAKLAND, CAI^
General Agents for Unitai States ^ Canada ^ Australia, Sandwich Islands,
HV
A3
COHVKIOHTBD BT THB
Woman's Temperancb pubucation AssociAncm.
1889.
EXPLANATORY.
We wish it distinctly understood that Miss IVillard's responsibiliiy jfbr this book ended
when she /umished her man it script.
She repeatedly requested that but one picture of herself be given. This, hozuever, wotdd
leave her out of official groups where she is the central figure ^ and to preserve the unity of
these, also as illustratizie of altogether different phases of her life, we have arrange the
pictures as we believed the interests of the book and the preference of the public warranto us
in doing.
ft should also be stated that Miss Willard wrote twelve hundred pages that had to be cut
down to seven hundred, and in so doing, scores of names, facts and allusions, all of which
she ivas especially desirous to hai>e in this book, had to be omitted. To this omission the author
has kindly agreed, hax'ing written rapidly ana without calculating for the space required by
this overplus of manuscript.
Woman's T£Mpi£kanc£ Publication Association.
Chicago^ Feb. 22, 1SS9,
Betrfcators*
There is one
" Fau that duly as the sun,
Rose up /or me since life begun ;^*
ONB ROYAI, HEART THAT NEVER FAILED ME YET.
TO MOTHER,
As A Birthday Gift,
ON
January 3, 1889,
THE eighty-fifth ANNIVERSARY OF HER UNDAUNTED LIFE,
I Dedicate
HBR ELDEST DAUGHTER'S SELF-TOLD STORY,
HOUy under Satan^ s fierce control^
Shall Heaven on thee its rest bestow t
I know not^ but I know a soul
That might have fair n as darkly low.
^^ I judge thee not^ what depths of ill
Soe 'er thy feet have found or trod;
I know a spirit and a will
As weak^ but for the help of God,
** Shalt thou TvithfuU day-laVrers standi
' Who hardly canst have pruned one vine t
I know not, but I know a hand
With an infirmity like thine,
** Shalt thoUy who hadst tuith scoffers part,
E Vr wear the crown the Christian wears f
I know not, but I know a heart
As flinty, but for tears and prayers,
** Have mercy, O thou Crucified I
For even while I name Thy name,
I know a tongue that might have lied.
Like Peter* s, and am filled with shame,^^
Snttotntctfon.
I have been asked by the publishers of this Autobiography
to write the Introduction. I am very glad to be asked. There is
no woman in the world whose book I would rather introduce than
that of my friend and co-worker, Frances E. Willard. From the
first hour of my acquaintance with her, now more than sixteen
years ago, she has been to me the embodiment of all that is
lovely, and good, and womanly, and strong, and noble and ten-
der, in human nature. She has been my queen among women,
and I have felt it to be one of the greatest privileges of my life
to call her my friend. I have been inspired by her genius, I
have been cheered by her sympathy, I have been taught by her
wisdom, I have been led onward and upward by her enthusiastic
faith. We have met on almost every point of human interest,
and have been together in joy and in sorrow, in success and in
apparent failure ; she has been a member of my household for
weeks together, and I have seen her tried by prosperity and
flattery, by mistmderstanding and evil report ; and always and
everywhere she has been the same simple-hearted, fair-minded
Christian woman, whose one sole aim has been to do the will of
God as far as she knew it, and to bear whatever of apparent ill
He may have permitted to come upon her, with cheerful submis-
sion, as being His loving discipline for the purpose of making her
what, above all, she longs to be, a partaker of His holiness.
In regard to her public work she has seemed to me one of
God's best gifts to the American women of the nineteenth cen-
tur>', for she has done more to enlarge our sympathies, widen our
outlook, and develop our gifts, than any man, or any other woman
of her time. Every movement for the uplifting of humanity has
found in her a cordial friend and active helper. Every field of
inquiry or investigation has shared in her quick, intelligent sym-
pathy, and she has been essentially American in this, that she
is always receptive of new ideas, without being frightened at
« (▼)
vi Introdudum,
their newness. One saying of hers is eminently characteristic —
that we have no more need to be afraid of the step just ahead
of us tham we have to be afraid of the one just behind us ; and,
acting on this, she has always given all new suggestions a can-
did and fair-minded consideration, and has kept in the forefront
of every right movement, whether in the world of ideas or the
world of things. I have called her to myself, many times, our
**see-er,*' because, like all seers, she seems to have an insight
into things not visible to the eyes of most. We who know
her best have so much confidence, bom of experience, in these
insights of hers, that I am not sure but that something once said
about us laughingly is, after all, pretty nearly the truth : that "if
Frances Willard should push a plank out into the ocean, and
should beckon the white ribbon women to follow her out to the
end of it, they would all go without a question." The reason is
that we have discovered that her planks always turn out to be
bridges across to delectable islands which she has discerned while
yet they were invisible to us.
How such a woman came to be, is told us in this book, and
it is a story that will, I believe, be an example and an inspiration
to thousands of her fellow- women, who will learn here the vast
possibilities of a pure and holy womanhood, consecrated to God
and to the service of humanity.
How this story came to be told is as follows : As president
for nearly ten years of the great organization called the National
Woman^s Christian Temperance Union, numbering more than
two hundred thousand women, scattered all over the United
States, from Maine to Texas, and from Florida to Alaska, Frances
E. Willard has won a love and loyalty that no other woman, I
think, has ever before possessed. It was natural that the many
members of this widespread organization, who could not see their
leader, should desire to read the story of her life, and for some
time she has been besieged with requests to write her own biog-
raphy. At the annual W. C. T. U. Convention held in Nashville,
Tenn., in 1887, these desires voiced themselves in the following
resolution, unanimously adopted by the whole convention :
Resolved, That in view of the fact that the year 1889 will be the fif-
teenth of the organization of the National Woman's Christian Temperance
Union, and also that in the same year our beloved president, Miss Frances
Inirodtution, vii
B. Willard, enters upon the fiftieth year of her strong and beautiful life,
we, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union delegates, in National Con-
tention assembled, do request Miss Willard to prepare for publication an
autobiography, together with the history of the Woman's Christian Tem-
perance Union from its birth to 1889, with a collection of her addresses on
various themes.
Miss Willard was at first averse to the plan, and put off
yielding to it as long as possible. But the white ribbon women
do not generally give up an idea when once originated, and since
tkey had so often walked in unknown paths at her bidding, she
felt herself, at last, bound to walk in this path at their bidding.
Hence this book.
Furthermore, the women wanted a true story, not a story
that, out of a conventional modesty, would tell only half the truth,
in the fear of being thought egotistic and full of self. Their idea
is admirably expressed in these words of Emerson, * ' Say hon-
estly and simply that which your own experience has given you
and you will give to the world something new, valuable and last-
ing.*' Having taken, for a rarity, the authority into their own
hands, they have insisted upon having the work done in their
own way, and have required their leader to tell them all about
herself, her work, her life, the very inmost of her being, without
fear or favor, because only thus could she give them what they
desired.
Whoever reads this book, therefore, must remember that it
has been written by request of and for the women of whom Miss
Willard is the well beloved leader, the white ribbon women of
America ; if others see it, that is their own good fortune. It
is a home book, written for her great family circle, and to be
read around the evening lamp by critics who love the writer, and
who want to learn from her experience how to live better and
stronger lives. It is a woman's book, warm, sympathetic, off-
hand ; it is an object-lesson in American living and American
development, and as such can not fail to interest all those who
think American women worthy of a little study. It begins in
the West of forty years ago, picturing a pioneer farm and the
unique, out-of-door life of adventurous young Western boys and
girls. It tells of a free-spirited mother, who sympathized with
her children rather than governed them, and who, although she
would have liked her daughter to learn house work, yet did not
viii Introdudum.
force her into it, because she had the rare good sense to know
that it was far better to help her child to do the best in her own
line than to force her to do a half-best in any other line, and also
because she believed every natural gift to be God-given and
meant for divine uses in serving the world, and therefore worthy
of respect and of development. We have in the story of this
mother and daughter a glimpse into the relation between parents
and children such as it ought always to be, not one of arbitrary
control on the one hand and slavish submission on the other, but
one of cooperation, or partnership, in which each should try to
help the other to do and be their best, and should each realize
the sacred duty of leaving one another free to follow, without hin-
drance, the path which they should feel called upon to pursue.
It is no small thing to have laid open before us the methods of a
grand and truly typical mother, one who had not the help of the
usual environment, one who made herself her children's world.
Were there more such mothers as Mrs. WiUard, there would be
more such daughters as hers.
The father in this story, while more reserved, and conse-
quently less manifestly sympathetic than the mother, was a noble
and gifted man, of sterling goodness, and great power in the lives
of his children, to whom he was most devotedly attached. There
is also a sweet young sister who brightened the family life for
^* nineteen beautiful years," and then left them for the home
above, leaving with her latest breath a legacy of infinite value to
her sister Frances in the simple words, ** Tell everybody to be
good."
There is a brother, too ; a young man of great promise, en-
dowed with rare genius, and of a most lovable nature, who left
the world before he had had time to do more than make a pass-
ing mark on the annals of his own day, leaving behind him,
however, a gentle widow, whose life and work have been and
still are of great value to her family and the work of the Lord.
The book contains a history of the Woman's Crusade against
the liquor trafl&c in 1874, and of what we are accustomed to call
**its sober second thought" — the Woman's Christian Temper-
ance Union, that great organization which Mary A. Livermore
says is *' so grand in its aims, so superb in its equipment, so phe-
nomenal in its growth, and has done so much for woman as well
Introduction. he
as for temperance, that it challenges the attention of Christen-
dom, and excites the hope of all who are interested in the welfiEu:e
of hmnanity.**
Those who read between the lines of this book can not fail
to see how largely the evolution of this mighty organization has
been the work of its gentle, yet magnetic leader, whose wonder-
ful administrative talent and superb tact, have given her an
almost tmparalleled success in controlling and guiding one of the
greatest movements of modem times. Yet with all this success,
Miss Willard is, I believe, truly humble minded. When calls
come from every direction, and some seem to feel indignant, and
others accuse her of one thing, and still others of another, and
they fit her out with motives, knowing nothing whatever about
the Eaicts in the case, she writes after this fashion : ' * Am badgered
to death and am not worried a hair — ^what do you make o* that ?
I fjEuicy the explanation is that, unless I am an awfully deceived
woman, I am desirous of doing God's will, and so the clamor on
this footstool is like the humming of * 'skeeters * outside the
curtain. It rather lulls me into quiet.'* No one could realize
more deeply than she does the truth that, ' ' Except the Lord build
the city, they labor in vain that build it,'* and she has always
sought to commit her work and her ways to the keeping of the
Divine Master, in a simple, child-like faith that He would lead
her in the way she should go, and would make all her paths
straight before her. That this faith has been answered to a
remarkable degree the book before us will clearly show.
The beautiful illustrations of the book are entirely the work
of the Woman's Temperance Publication Association, which is
bringing it out. Miss Willard would not have felt willing in her
own name to send forth such personal pictures for the public
gaze, but she was obliged to yield in this, as in all else concerning
the book, to the wishes and judgment of the white ribbon women,
who, for once, have got the upper-hand of their leader, and greatly
enjoy making her do their bidding. The W. T. P. A. took the
whole responsibility of the illustrations, and has prepared this
part of the volume in an unusually original and artistic manner.
Altogether, we of the W. C. T. U. of the United States look
upon this book as a most creditable witness to the value of our
organization and to the successful working of the Woman's
X Introduction.
Temperance Publicatioo Association, which is one of our most
promising children.
I would like to tell a little story in conclusion. There is a
creature in the sea called the Octopus, with a very small body
but with immense arms covered with suckers, radiating from
every side, that stretch themselves out to indefinite length to
draw in all sorts of prey. Miss Willard seems to have the same
- characteristic of being able to reach out mental or spiritual arms
to indefinite lengths, whereby to draw in everything and every-
body that seem likely to help on the cause she has at heart.
Hence I, who have felt the grip of those arms of hers, have come
to call her in our private moments, " My beloved Ctetopus," and
myself her contented victim.
What future histories will need to be written concerning the
coming years of the life here portrayed, no one can tell. But of
this I am sure, that the same Divine Hand tliat has led her
hitherto will still lead, and will bring her in triumph to life's
close, for the motto of her heart continues more and more to be,
"This God shall be our God, even unto death."
44 Crosvenor Road, Weslminstfr FntbankmaU,
London, S. W., £ngland.
^tefatotg*
Whether for good or ill, I have set down with absolute
fidehty these recx)llections of myself. The wise ones tell us that
we change utterly once in every seven years, so that from the
vantage-ground of life's serene meridian, I have looked back upon
the seven persons whom I know most about : the welcome child,
the romping girl, the happy student, the roving teacher, the
tireless traveler, the temperance organizer, and lastly, the poli-
tician and advocate of woman's rights ! Since all these are
sweetly dead and gone, why should not their biographies and
epitaphs, perchance their eulogies, be written by their best in-
ftvmed and most indulgent critic ?
A thousand homes in as many different towns, have kindly
cherished me in my many pilgrimages. The fathers in those
homes treated me with high respect, the mothers with sacred ten-
derness ; the lads and lasses with heartiest kindness, the blessed
little children loved me for their mothers' sake.
To them all, my heart goes out with unspeakable good will
and gratitude. Perhaps the honest record of my fifty years may
give them pleasure ; perhaps it may do good. At all events they
asked for it — at least their leaders did, in the great, genial meeting
that we had down South in 1887 — so I have put it into black and
white, not as I would, but as I could, and here it is.
18S9.
illU!9trationi3«
PRONTISPIBCB.— steel Engraving, Miaa Willard.
Photogravurbs, pagb
The Office— Rest Cottage, - - - - - - 128
Kate A. Jackson, ....... 288
Anna A. Gordon — "My little Organist,'* ... ^
"The Den"— Miss Willard's Workshop, ... 544
The Parlor— Rest Cottage, -..--. 656
Rbproductions prom Photographs and Aquarei.i.bs.
I. A Welcome Child— Early Sports, - - . . i
n. A Romping Girl — Forest Home, - - - - 14
in. A Happy Student, ----.. 71
IV. A Roving Teacher — Evanston College for Ladies, • - 132
V. A Tireless Traveler, ----.- 244
VI. A Temperance Advocate and Organizer — Illinois Petition
for Home Protection, 175,000 Names, - - * 331
VII. A Woman in Politics, - ... - 374
Silhouettes, ........ 492
Homes — Birthplace, the Oberlin Residence, Forest Home, Swamps-
cott. Rest Cottage, . . . - . 8
Churches— Churchville, Ogden, Janesville, Evanston, - - 48
The Hill and Willard Homesteads, .... 64
School-buildings (Student-life) — Forest Home, Milwaukee Female
College, Northwestern Female College, - - 96
Family Group— "My Four," .-.-.- 160
School-buildings (Teacher-life) — Harlem, Pittsburgh, Lima, - 176
School-buildings (Teacher-life) — From Public School to North-
western University, Evanston, . - - - 208
Bas-relief— Miss Willard, ------ 344
Bas-relief— Madame Willard, ..... 345
Officers of the National W. C. T. U., - - - - 408
Officers of the World»s W. C. T. U., - -432
The First Composition — Fac-simile, .... 496
lUusiratians. xiii
editors of Our Day^ ....... ^x3
Officers National Council of Women, .... 592
Pictoresqne Evanston (looking toward Rest Cottage) — Rest Cot-
tage Playground, ...... 624
Lithographs.
W. C. T. U. Banners.—Ohio, Maasadinaetts, New York, The
National, The World*s, etc., ..... 456
7)1^ Oiildren*s /^^.— Father Mathew Medal, Silver Cup, Roman
Cameo, "Old Faithful," etc 680
PBN AND INK SKKTCHBS.
Seal of National W. C T. U., x
Ships of the Prairie, ....... 46
Sampler, -•..-..--61
The Master's Desk, ....... 98
Pansies, .........132
" It won't come right," 145
Silver Goblet, ........ 189
Old Oaken Bucket, ....... 197
Roll of Honor, ........ 225
College Cottage, ....... 244
"Shall we ever go anywhere?" ..... 252
En romU in Montana, ...... 330
Beer Mug from Saloon in Hillsboro, ..... 341
W. C T. U. CoflEee Cart, - - . - - 355
National W. C. T. U. Gavel, --.-.. 381
Portland (Or.) W. C. T. U. Shield, .... 409
White Cross and White Shield Emblem, .... 429
World's W. C T. U. Emblem, ..... 436
White Rose, ........ 453
Metropolitan Opera House, ...... 468
Bcmibon Jug Water-cooler (New Orleans Exposition), • - 478
Chicago Jhsi Placard, ...... 514
John B. Gongh's Gift of Tea Set, - - - 654
Mother's Scrap Books, ...... 665
"Old Rye," - - 685
Mvic— ''May de Lord," 694
Vale, - 698
wmmrA ^arm, ...... Appendix
ViHafd Coat-of-Arms, ......
Cable of (tonttnUi.
Introductory Mattbr. ------ iii-xi
I. A WELCOME CHILD.
A LlTTI^E PlI^GRIM. ------- 1-14
Heredity— Early childhood da3r»— Almost named for Queen Victoria— Not hand-
tome, to say the least— Childish sports.
II. A ROMPING GIRL.
Chapter I. My Apprenticeship to Nature. - - - 15-46
Near to Nattire's heart— Fort City— Girlish sport»— Outdoor life— Spring-time at
Forest Home— Boy comrades— The forest monarch.
Chapter II. The Artists* Ci.ub. . . - - 47-61
Mother's Eastern visit— Amateur painters and huntert— Home incidents— Presi-
dent Finney.
Chapter III. Litti.e Boats Set Out prom Shore. - 62-72
First break in the home-circle — Another Eastern visit— Prize cup — Young lady-
hood—Freedom and rebellion— Good-by to Forest Home.
III. A HAPPY STUDENT.
Chapter I. Dei.ightfui* Days at Schooi^ - - - 73-98
Mother's teachings— Early school-dasrs— First flight from home— Aunt Sarah—
Milwaukee Female College — School honors.
Chapter II. Cgi^i^EGE Days. ----- 99-123
Northwestern Female College— The grammar party— A student of Emerson-
Inquirer, not infidel—" There is a God"— Faith for doubt.
Chapter III. First Year Out of Schooi,. - - 124-132
Mfe at home— The Civil war— Neglected and forgotten— Solemn vows.
IV. A ROVING TEACHER.
Chapter I. District Schooi«, No. i. - - - 133-145
starting out— New responsibilities— Summer studies— Sabt>ath away from home—
A lonesome school-ma'am.
Chapter II. Kankakee Academy, - - - 146-161
Tell yovLT age — A sense of right and justice — Mesmerism — I^incoln- Home
again.
Chapter III. The Pubuc Schools in Harlem and in Evans-
ton. --..--- 162-168
Our first war meeting— Evanston public school— Nineteen beautiful years ended—
'* Tell everybody to be good "—A change.
Chapter IV. ** Preceptress of the Natural Sciences." 169-174
Northwestern Female College— One day's work— Teacher and pupil— "The slaves
are free."
(xiv)
Table of Contents. xv
Chaptbr V. Pittsburgh Pbmai^e Coi^i^ge. - - 175-184
First day at Pittsburgh— A botanical outing— A wordless secret— One year ago-
War rumors.
Chaptbr VL The Grove Schooi* and the Building of Heck
Haix. ------- 185-189
The Bank of Character— Word studies— Heck Hall.
Chapter VII. Genesee Wesleyan Seminary. - 190-197
First days at Lima— A chapter in Methodist history— A European trip in prospect
Chapter VIII. Evanston College for Women. - 198-205
Something new— Bishop E. O. Haven— The women's Fourth of July— The new
college building.
Chapter IX. Self-Govbrnment for Girls. - - 206-225
Original plans— Roll of Honor— The Self-governed— The Good-behavior Club— Art
and composition classes— The first Woman's Commencement— The Chicago fire.
Chapter X. Why I Left the University. - - 226-244
Puzxling questions— Union of University and College— New methods— Resignation
of positioo— Reports of committees— Trial and triumph— After fifteen years.
V. THE TIRELESS TRAVELER.
Early Journeyings. ------ 245-330
My benefactors— Itinerary— The Giant's Causeway— The Garden of Eden— St. Ber-
nard—Paris— Ecumenical Council— Pyramids— Palestine— Car-window jottings at
home.
VI. A TEMPERANCE ADVOCATE AND ORGANIZER.
Chapter L On the Threshold. - - - - 331-341
First Crusade days— A turning-point in life — Early speeches.
Chapter IL The Opening Way. - - - . 342-355
Odd fiuth test— SecreUry SUte W. C. T. U.-Sccretory National W. C. T. U.—
Woman's ballot.
Chapter IIL Moody's Boston Meetings— Oliver's Death. 356-367
Bible talks— A change of plan— A " free lance"— The great petition— Brother's
death.
Chapter IV. Conservatives and Liberals. - - 368-374
President National W. C T. U.— Mrs. Hayes' Picture— Southern trip.
vil. A WOMAN IN POLITICS.
Chapter I. The Home Protection Party. - - 375-381
Temperance in politics— Extracts from speeches— A secession that did not secede.
Chapter II- National Conventions. - - - 382-402
Our temperance round-up —World's W. C. T. U.— Memorial to National Conven-
tJoos — Nomination of Governor St. John—" Home Protection " as a name.
Chapter III. The St. Louis Convention. - - 403-409
Got^pel politics — ^The famous resolution— Call to prayer— Protest and reply.
Chapter IV. Women in Council. - - - 410-417
Pageant.*% of the New Crusade— Mrs. Margaret Bright Lucas— Address to Labor Or-
poixations — Nashville Convention.
xvi Table of Contents,
Chaptbr V. Whits Cross and Whitb Shibi«d. - 418-42
PaM Mall Gaeette diaclosures— The White Cross I«eague— Efficient help from the
Knights of Labor— MtiB. Laura Ormiston Chant.
Chaftbr VI. The World's W. C. T. U. - - 430-436
Mrs. Mary Clement Leavitt— The work in England and Canada— The world's
petition.
Chapter VII. The Greatest Party. - 437-453
The "catnip tea " resolution— The Indianapolis Convention— Nomination of Pisk
and Brooks— The Blue and the Gray— Prohibition platform— The suffrage debate—
The white rose.
Chapter VIII. The New York Convention (1888). - 454-468
Metropolitan Opera Hotise— Protests and memorials— Distinguished guests— Ad-
vancement " all along the line "—Ecclesiastical emancipation ofwomen— W. C.
T U. deaconesses.
Chapter IX. Aims and Methods op the W. C T. U. 469-478
Crusade annals— Evolution— Organization— One in Christ Jesus.
Chapter X. Miscellaneous Incidents op Temperance Work.
479-492
Pledges broken and fulfilled— Mrs. Judge Thompson— Convention episodes.— Dr.
Bushnell's pulpit— Temperance women are total abstainers.
SILHOUETTES.
What I Have Done and Suffered as a Pen-holder, - 493
People I have Met, -.--.. 515
Women Speakers— First Public Lecture, - - - 569
National Council of Women, . - . . 590
Mv Opinion of Men, --.... 597
General Conferences, . . - . - 615
God and my Heart, ..---. 622
The Gospel of Health, . . . . . 631
Mind-cure, -.----.- 636
Companionship, ------- 637
Demerits, .---.... 646
My Holidays, ----... 650
Mother, -------- 655
Father, -------- 666
Bits from biy Note-book, ------ 671
Introspective, --.-.-- 686
Finally, ......-- 695
Ancestry, -------- Appendix.
a ^msUomt «rf)Uii.
■Keep near to thv childhood, for in going from it
THOr ART going FROM THE GODS."
GLIMPSES OF FIFTY YEARS:
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AMERICAN WOMAN.
A LITTLE PILGRIM.
Mother was nearly thirty-five when I was bom, the fourth of
her five children, one of whom, the first, had passed away in
infancy, and the third at the age of fourteen months. This little
girl, Caroline Elizabeth, mother has always spoken of as the most
promising child she ever bore, or, for that matter, ever saw. " She
was a vision of delight,** with deep blue eyes and dark brown
hair ; a disposition without flaw, her nerves being so well encased
and her little spirit so perfectly equipoised that she would sit or
lie in her cradle cooing to herself by the hour, and when she rode,
the beauty of the world outdoors seemed so well apprehended by
this seraphic child that her little hands were constantly out-
stretched and her sweet eyes were full of light and comprehension,
while her silvery voice took on such an ecstasy as was remarked
by all who knew her. My little sister passed to heaven just as
she began to speak the language of this world. My mother's
first great grief then broke her heart, and as I came less than one
year afterward, the deep questionings and quivering pathos of her
spirit had their effect on mine. She lived much with her books,
especially the Bible and the poets, in this chastened interval.
Many a time has she said to me, ** Frank, above all things else
thank heaven you were a wcUome child^ for I had prayed so often
2 Heredity.
' that another little girl might come into our home for tis to love.*'
She says she hoped this also for my brother's sake, who was five
years my senior and then her only child. During this year she
often went to singing-school and there saw a young woman
with fair complexion, aubiun hair and blue eyes, moving about
among the people to take their names. Mother says she liked
the quiet, intelligent and rapid way in which the work was done,
and in her heart earnestly wished that the little one whose coming
was her constant thought, might be a girl, and might grow up to
be such a young woman as the one she watched with thoughtful
and observant eyes.
And that is all I choose to tell of my heredity.
It has been my good fortune to have an accomplished ste-
nographer always within call the last few years, and since my
mother's hand is not so steady as it once was, she often has a
sitting with Miss Mitchell, who takes down her words of remi-
niscence and of wisdom. This serves to give needed variety to
my mother's life, and also to preserve very many facts other-
wise lost.
Some notes here follow in reply to questions asked her by an
interested friend.
** What do you recall about your daughter's birth ? "
*' It occurred at eleven o'clock, Thursday morning, September
28, 1839, in our quiet home on the principal street of Churchville,
Monroe County, N. Y., fourteen miles west of Rochester. Dr.
Lillie, a refined and unusually gifted physician and a great friend
of my husband's, presided at her advent. I remember saying,
* Is it a little girl ? ' and my unspeakable joy on learning that my
long prayer was answered. * Why did you not tell her without
being asked?' said Frank's Aunt Elizabeth, who was present,
and Dr. Lillie answered, * Because I did n't choose to please her
well enough,' which was meant as a piquant little remark to
enliven me the more, for he well knew how eager were my empty
arms to clasp another g^rl-baby to my breast. Every morning the
lonesome little brother would run down-stairs without waiting to
dress, and exclaim, * Ma, is the baby dead ? ' he so much feared it,
as the sweet one had died the year before, and when he found that
Frank lived on, he still would come when he awoke and say,
* Ma, is the baby well ? '
Deacon Hairs Family. 3
"The principal family in Churchville was that of Deacon
Hall, the merchant of the village. They were Presbyterians, and
it used to be said that the Deacon extended one, two, three or four
fingers of his hand to those who came as customers, according to
his estimation of their social status. Mrs. Hall was a lovely
woman, a sort of * Lady Boimtiful.' Living just across the street
from them, we were among the very few families that were admitted
to the charmed circle of their home. It was considered a distin-
guished honor. Mrs. Hall was with me when Frank made her
first appearance, and took such a fancy to her that she used to
come across the street every morning for six weeks to give the
little baby her bath, and look after her generally. The family
consisted of five sons, four daughters and two relatives, cousins,
I think they were, of Mrs. Hall, Miss Ruth Rogers and her
brother Joshua. Miss Rogers afterward married Elisha Harmon,
a staunch young farmer and miller some few miles away, and be-
came the mother of Mrs. Folsom, who is now President Cleve-
land's mother-in-law. Miss Rogers was a handsome, well-poised,
vigorous young woman, whom I remember to have thought
specially agreeable and promising. She entered heartily into all
the work and amusements of her cousins and was greatly beloved
by them. Her granddaughter, Mrs. Cleveland, no doubt owes
to her many of the fine qualities with which she is endowed.
Deacon Hall's family were conservative in manner, and we could
but appreciate the cordial welcome they gave us when we removed
to the village. When Frank's eldest sister, Caroline Elizabeth,
died less than a year before Frank was bom, and my heart was
well-nigh broken, I prized beyond all words their active, sym-
pathy ; they neglected nothing in their power to do, that could
palliate that fearful blow or stimulate my hopes. The family all,
both young and old, evinced much anxiety for me and for the
baby's safety and welfare."
** What sort of a looking baby was Frances Elizabeth, any-
how?" pursued the questioner, whereupon, after the fashion of
mothers since the world began, this answer came : ** Very pretty,
with sunny hair, blue eyes, delicate feattues, fair complexion,
long waist, short limbs. She was called the doll-baby of the
village."
" Was she brought up by hand ? * * Answer : * * Yes, she was,
4 ** She Gives Trouble Enough, '^^
as we used to say in the old-fashioned phrase, a bottle baby,
or one * brought up by hand ' after the first four weeks, on ac-
count of my not being strong. But I ought to add for her present
reputation's sake, she had no afl5nity for the bottle — putting it
away when ten months old with no regret. She suffered very
much fi*om teething, more than any other of my children, being
of an organism remarkably susceptible to physical pain. She
always slept with both hands on my face. She was a very affec-
tionate little creature. She could talk some time before she
could walk, speaking quite wisely at fourteen months, but not
walking until twenty-four months old. As a little girl she was
very confiding and fond of her childish friends, even beyond what
one expects to see at that period.
*' Her father used to say when walking to and fro with her at
night, her vigorous lungs in full action, sending forth screams that
could be heard in the remotest part of the house, * I declare, this
young one ought to amount to something, she gives trouble
enough!' He was very kind as a care-taker of the children,
sharing with me far more than husbands usually do, or did in
those days, the work of bringing up our little ones. He would
get up at night, heat the milk for the cr>'ing baby, and do his
best to reconcile her to the hard bit of ivory now replaced by the
g^tta-percha tube.
* ' She dearly loved her brother Oliver and sister Mary, who
were ever ready to enter into her plans for pastime. They were
very much to one another always. She was mentally precocious,
but physically delicate beyond any other of my children. She
was inventive and original in her amusements. This last used
particularly to impress me. She early manifested an exceeding
fondness for books. She believed in herself, and in her teachers.
Her bias toward certain studies and pursuits was very marked.
Even in the privacy of her own room she was often in a sort of
ecstasy of aspiration. In her childhood, and always, she strongly
repelled occupations not to her taste, but was eager to grapple
with principles, philosophies, and philanthropies, and unweary-
ingly industrious along her fav^orite lines. I wonder sometimes
that I had the wit to let her do what she preferred instead of
obliging her to take up housework as did all the other girls of
our acquaintance. She was an untrained vine rambling whither-
**Sissy^s Dress Aches. ^^ 5
soever she would. When she was two years old we removed from
Churchville, to Oberlin, Ohio, her Aunt Sarah going with us.
I held Frank all the way. It was a tiresome journey, for we
went by carriage. She often put her little arms around my neck,
laid her head upon my shoulder and said, * Mamma, sissy's dress
aches ! ' It rejoices me to believe that she intuitively recognized
the fact that it is not one's real self that is ever tired, but only
this dress of mortality that aches sometimes.
** She used to see the students rehearsing their speeches and
would get up an amusing imitation of them, when but three
3'ears old. Many a time I have seen her standing on the well-
curb or on top of the gate-post imitating the gestures of some
bright young sophomore who stood there, * laying it off* for her
amusement. She was very fond of playing outdoors, indoor
amusements seeming irksome to her always. Her brother was
her favorite comrade, and his sturdy little playmates among the
boys would sometimes call her * Tomboy,* which she resented
very much and I did for her.
•*Once she ran away when about three years old, going
through the fields and creeping under the fences, so that when,
after a great fright, she was discovered, her brother said it was
pitiful to see the little creatiu-e's bravery combined with her pant-
ing fatigue, for she did her utmost not to be overtaken.
•*She used often to go with me to church where President
Finney usually preached. She said his great light eyes, white
eyebrows, and vigorous manner were to her like a combination
of thunder and lightning ; lightning in his look, thimder in his
voice. I am sure her impressionable spirit became somewhat
frightened by the thought of Christianity as administered by
that great orator, who was very much given to rehearsing in our
hearing the pains and penalties of the condemned. ' *
So much for mother's memories of my babyhood and early
years at dear old Oberlin.
The first religious teaching that I can call to mind is the
learning of this sweet prayer of every little child :
"Now I lay mc down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
And this I ask for Jesus' sake/'
6 A Frightened Child.
Mother taught me that before I can remember, but it seemisto
me I can recall, though it may be but the memory of a memory,
her sitting with a little Testament in hand and telling me it was
God's message to us, and that instinctively within my spirit rose
the thought and utterance, **How do you know?*' I was not
one who naturally took things for granted. It was intuitive
with me to seek for causes and for reasons. My faith faculty
was not natiu-ally strong, and yet when I say so, it almost seems
as if I did injustice to my gift in that regard. Mother was sur-
prised at my inquiries and called me playfully, in talking with
her friends, her ** little infidel. *' But I have always thought my
infidelity was of that harmless kind quite curiously illustrated
by an incident in my brother Oliver's foiu* years* old period.
At that date, we did not have family prayers, though I have
no recollection of such a graceless time in our family history.
When my parents took my brother to my mother's home, her
father, who was a most devout and earnest man, had prayers
both night and morning, and little Ollie, as she called him, said
to her one day, looking up with his blue eyes, so full of questions
always, ** Mamma, what does gran 'sir say to the chair when he
gets down on his legs?" The simple fact was he proposed to
investigate a phenomenon with which he was not familiar, and
this he had a most undoubted right to do.
All through my childhood I was docile toward the supernat-
ural, wondering about it, with great sighs in my little breast, but I
think I should not have feared it so much if a man who died next
door to us had not been ** laid out " in such a chilly shroud, and
had not been so repellent in death. At least, I know that the first
fright my spirit got was when my father lifted me up, a child not
five years old, and held me quite close down to see what was
inside that coffin. I never had a blow that struck so deep as did
that sight ; I never had a bum that seared so, nor a pain that
tingled like it. Young as I was, something in me akin to a high
dignity, resented this rude introduction to what then seemed the
**King of Terrors." I never said it, but I always felt I had
received an injury, suffered a wrong. On pleasant summer days,
out in the bright, sunshiny weather, thoughts **too deep for
tears" have come to me when I remembered seeing that. It
seems to me that we intrude upon the royal little heart of child-
** Talking Religion. ^^ 7
hood when we thrust upon it such a cruel blow. Always since
then, in spite of all my faith and the fervors I have known relig-
iously, there is about the thought of death the clammy horror
stamped ui>on me when I saw that face. So I mused much why
these things were, and could but wonder, if we had a God so kind,
why He should make us fair and sweet as children, bright and
happy in youth, serene and strong in middle-life and then send
us away like that ! I have often heard good people say they
** thought it necessary to take their children early to a funeral,'*
but why they must do this I can not see. If the first sight of
death could be some sweet and lovely fece, such as I have some-
times beheld since then, the impression on childhood's plastic
little nature would surely be far more in keeping with what we
believe death really is.
The years went on, and while my sister Mary was always
willing, at least, I was strongly averse when ** they came to talk
religion," as I was wont to call it. I would sit silent and let
them have their say, but seldom answered save in monosyllables,
in case I must. We could not often go to church because we
lived three miles away and the minister had to ** preach around "
at different appointments. Nor did we have much Sunday-school
instruction. I am ashamed that what we had I can not specially
recall, except that I learned by heart many chapters in the four
Gospels, the first scripture that I ever committed to memory being
what mother says is the first she ever learned, * ' In the beginning
was the Word." We always had for Sunday reading the little
Sunday-school Advocate^ so well known to Methodist Sunday-
school children, and the Myrtle, a pretty juvenile paper, the
organ of the Free- Will Baptist Sunday-schools. Besides this, we
took any number of books, sometimes five at once, out of the
Sunday-school library, and nothing was more familiar to me than
those words uixm the title page, *' Revised by D. P. Kidder."
We afterward became acquainted ^th this honored son of the
church when we came to live in Evanston. The things I
loved to read, however, in all these books and papers, were
stories of adventure, when I could get them — which was seldom —
historical facts, dialogues about nature, of which there were many,
and anything^ that taught me what sort of a world was this of
which I had become a resident. **The Slave's Friend," that
g Singing and Speaking.
earliest book of all my reading, stamped upon me the purpose to
help humanity, the sense of brotherhood, of all nations as really
one, and of God as the equal Father of all races. This, perhaps,
was a better sort of religion than some Sunday-school books
would have given. It occurs to me that I have not estimated at
its true value that nugget of a little fanatical volume published
for children by the Anti-slavery Society. Some one gave me the
** Life of Nathan Dickerman,** whose charming face as represented
in the frontispiece attracted me inmiensely, and I think it was for
its sake I read the book through. He was a dear boy, a little
saint, and I grieved over his death. The ** Children's Pilgrim's
Progress " was a charm, the sweetest book of all my childhood, and
while I loved Christiana and the boys and Mercy, how like a per-
sonal Providence grew on my fancy the character of Greatheart !
Feeling as I do even now, the impress of those earliest books, I
grieve sadly to have missed the helpfulness and sweetness of
nature I might have learned from ** Little I/)rd Fauntleroy."
Happy children of the present, do not fail to read it, every one !
After all, the best religion of a theoretical kind came to us in
our Sunday hour of song. I early learned to play on the melo-
deon, as it was called, but had no fancy for the piano, and I re-
member how much meaning, sweet and solemn, we used to find
in the deep tones of the instrument and of my father's voice as we
sang the hymns we loved.
My first appearance on any stagt was in Oberlin, Ohio, at
the age of three or foiu*, when my father used to stand me up on
a chair and have me sing for guests in my queer little voice, es-
pecially after a dinner, as I remember, and the song was always
this:
''They called me blae-e3red Mary when friends and fortune smiled.
But oh, how fortunes vary ! I now am sorrow's child ;
Kind sir, then take these posies, they're fading like my youth.
But never, like these roses, shall wither Mary's truth.''
^Vhen mother stood me up on a chair to speak, it was a more
warlike "piece." Father would have something feminine, or else
nothing at all ; but mother would let me select what I liked, and
this is a specimen of my choice at the age of ten years :
" O sacred Truth ! thy triumph ceased a while,
And Hope, thy sister, ceased like thee to smile.
tmt. Oacifun /ic^fiDt/KE
Almost Named for Queen Victoria. 9
When leagued oppression poured to Northern wars
Her whiskered pandours and her fierce hussars.
Tumultuous horror brooded o'er the van,
Presaging wrath to Poland — ^and to man !
Warsaw's last champion from her heights surveyed
Wide o'er the fields a waste of ruin laid —
• Oh, Heaven ! ' he cried, * my bleeding country save I
Is there no hand on high to shield the brave?
Yet, though destruction sweep these lovely plains.
Rise, fellowmen ! our country yet remains !
By that dread name, we wave the sword on high,
And swear for her to live ! — ^with her to die ! '
In vain, alas ! in vain, ye gallant few.
From rank to rank your volleyed thunders flew ;
Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell.
And Freedom shrieked, as Kosciusko fell ! ''
I can recall the stirring of my little heart as the drama of the
brief poem proceeded, and how almost impossible it was for me
to hold my voice steady so as to give the closing lines. Mother
taught me how to speak it, where to put in the volume of sound
and the soft, repressed utterance, and as for the pathos I knew
where to put that in myself.
In 1868, at Warsaw, the capital of Poland, I stood beside the
monument of Kosciusko, and while my tourist comrades read
about it in their guide-books, I repeated softly to myself the poem
I had learned on the Wisconsin prairies, and looked up with wor-
shipful glance at the statue of the hero for whom my heart ached
and my eyes filled with tears when I was but a child.
I came very near being named for Queen Victoria ! Indeed,
my mother was quite bent upon it. The youthful sovereign had
recently come to her throne, and the papers were full of accounts
of her earnest Christian character, while the highest expectations
were cherished of what she would accomplish for humanity. But
my father said it would look as if we, who were the most demo-
cratic people in the world, were catering to the popular idea, and,
what was worse, regarded royalty with favor, so mother did not
have her wish, but was well pleased with the name Frances
Elizabeth Caroline, which she and father, in council with my
score of uncles, aunts and cousins, concocted after much con-
saltation. Frances was a ** fancy name,'* so father said. Frances
10 Tai^es Dancing-steps to a Missionary Tune.
Bumey, the English writer, and Frances Osgood, the Amerfcan
poet, were names that had attracted his attention, and he bestowed
their Christian name upon what was then his only daughter.
Elizabeth was for my mother's third sister, described in ** Nineteen
Beautiful Years '* as one of the truest women that ever breathed,
brave, delicate, and with a piquant speech and manner. Her life
was sorrowful by reason of an unhappy marriage, and her death
in the prime of her years was a release. Caroline (so stands my
third name in thje old family Bible) was my father's youngest
sister, of whom it may justly be said,
" None knew her but to love her,
None named her but to praise.''
Blithe as the birds, refreshing as the showers of spring, she
led a rarely happy life. After the death of her noble husband,
Hosea Town, she and her brother, Zophar Willard (he being a
widower by reason of my mother's second sister's death), shared
the same house, and, having a competence of this world's goods,
were generous helpers of every worthy cause.
My mother had much care about our manners, for we saw
nothing of society, and she knew that we were missing real ad-
vantages, while at the same time we were escaping real dangers.
Of course we did not learn to dance, but mother had a whole
system of calisthenics that she learned at Oberlin, which she used
to put us through immercifuUy, as I thought, since I preferred
capering at my own sweet will, out-of-doors. There was a little
verse that she would sing in her sweet voice and have us ** take
steps " to the time ; but the droll part was that the verse was out
of a missionary hymn. And this is as near as I ever came to
dancing school ! I only remember this :
'' Bounding billows, cease thy motion,
Bear me not so swiftly o'er !
Cease thy motion, foaming ocean,
I will tempt thy rage no more.
For I go where duty leads me.
Far across the billowy deep,
Where no friend or foe can heed me,
Where no wife for me shall weep."
What a spectacle was that ! Mother teaching her children
dancing steps to words like these. She had a copy of Lord
Noi tfandsame^ to Say the Least, il
Chesterfield's letters to his son, and we read it over and over
again. We used to try and carry out its ceremonial, to some extent,
when we had our make-believe banquets and Fourth of Julys.
Our Mary carried conscientiousness to the point of morbidity.
I remember one day when I was working in my little garden
south of Forest Home, that Mary came around there, standing up
and looking so tear-stained and discontented, and said, ** Frank, ^
I have done so and so; don't you think it was wrong?" and
what she did was so infinitesimal as not to be worth the thinking
of, much less repeating. The poor little thing went on and told
me so many things, that I, who had no such ** conscientious
streak," as I used to call it, in me, said to her that I was tired
of this ; that I should have a talk with mother ; that it was moral
unhealthfiilness, and that she never would be strong and happy
if she did not give it up. I was the day-book of her ill-desert,
and mother was the ledger. The books were posted every night.
This was when Mary was about ten years of age. She afterward
outgrew the morbid part and only retained the beautiful and
lofty sense of duty in which she excelled all other persons whom
I have ever known.
We have all heard the story of that philosophical boy who,
when looking at a misshapen tree, said *' Somebody must have
stepped upon it when it was a little fellow. "
In but one particular did a calamity of this sort befall me as
a child, and that related to my personal appearance. Soothed,
praised and left at liberty by my mother, that home deity of a
sensitive child, all happy hopes were mine, save one — I was n*t
the least bit good-looking ! To make this fact more patent and
pronounced, my younger sister was remarkably attractive. She
was plump, and I was thin ; she had abundant, pretty hair of
brown ; and mine, when a little girl, was rather sparse and posi-
tively red, though my dear mother would never permit me or
anybody else to say so. When in those early days at Oberlin,
some hateful boy would call out **Red head" as I passed, or
when my quick temper had vented itself upon my brother in
some spiteful way, and he used the same opprobrious epithet, I
would run at once to mother and tell her with rebellious tears of
this outrageous treatment. Her beautiful hand would smooth
my hated hair with a tenderness so magical that under it the
td Grandfather^ s Queue.
scanty strands seemed, for the moment, turned to gold, as the
kindest of all voices said, ** Don't mind those boys, Frankie, the
poor thmgs don't know what they are saying ; you get your hair
from your Grandfiather Hill ; his was quite bright-colored (she
never would say ** red^' ) when he was a little boy, but it was a
lovely gold-brown when he grew up ; and so will yours be. I
wish you could have seen your Grandpa Hill's queue, a thick
braid smartly tied up with a black ribbon. I never saw a hand-
somer head of hair. We children cried when the fashion changed
and father's queue had to be cut off. You are like him, every
way, and he was the noblest-looking man in all the cotmtry
round."
Sweet ingenuity of mother-love ! How quickly it comforted
my heart and so transformed my thoughts that I forgot myself and
saw before me only the brave figure of my Grandpa Hill ! But
there were not wanting other witnesses who took sides with my
mirror rather than with my mother. Our first dear music teacher,
Mary King, of Milwaukee, a blind lady who had graduated fix)m
the Institute for the Blind, in New York, married an Englishman
who worked for us, and he told me repeatedly that it was a great
pity for a girl to be so ** plain looking" as I, especially when
she had a younger sister so attractive. One of two distant
relatives, a girl near my own age, said on slight acquaintance,
**Are n't you sorry to be homely, Frank?" and the other
declared **to my very face" that I was *'the drawn image of
Mrs. B.," who was the farthest from good looks of anybody,
because while, like myself, she had regular features, her eyes
were pale, her complexion was lifeless, and her hair the color of
old hay. But when I bemoaned myself to mother and Mary, of
whom I could no more have been jealous than the left hand can
be of the right, mother would say, ** Come, now, Frank, this is
getting a little monotonous. I think you wrong your Heavenly
Father who has fitted you out so well," and then she would
analyze each feature and put upon it the stamp of her approval,
while my genial-hearted sister would echo every word and say,
** Besides, you have father's nice figure and the small hands and
feet of both houses, so, as mother says, it is downright sin for
you to berate yourself in this way." Dear hearts ! If they could
but have waved a fairy wand over my head, so often bowed
a ISomping i&ixl.
*' E\'ERV PLACE IS HAfXTRD, AXD NOKE SO MUCH AS THE
ONE WHERE WE LIVED IN OUK YOUTH."
p <
Comfort From a Portland Lady, 13
because of this one grief, how soon they would have endowed
me with Diana's beauty and been far ihappier so than to have
gained it for themselves.
In my teens I became a devoted student of Emerson and
took this verse as a motto :
** I pray the prayer of Plato old,
Oh, make me beautiful within,
And may mine eyes the good behold.
In everything save sin. "
** The mind hath features as the body hath *' — ^mother used to
din that thought into my ears; ** Handsome is that handsome
does, *' was my father's frequent proverb ; ** Never mind, Frank,
if you are n*t the handsomest girl in the school, I hear them say
you are the smartest, '* were my brother's cheery words, and so
that magic tie of home love and loyalty helped me along until
the homeliest of mother's children slowly outgrew the pang
of being so.
)^Tien I was thirty-five I made my first temperance speech
away from home — Evanston and Chicago counting as home ever
since I was eighteen. It was in Portland, Maine, September 14,
1874, and years afterward a friend sent me the letter that follows,
written by a mother to her children, without a thought that it
would ever meet my eye. What I have just revealed about my
greatest personal disadvantage will make it easier to estimate the
grateful rejoicing with which I read these lines :
" Last night I attended a temperance meeting in the elegant
Baptist church here. I counted eighteen bouquets of flowers, be-
sides a handsome hanging-basket over the pulpit. Though very
large, the church was literally packed. The speakers were men
and women. Miss Frances Willard, late Dean of the Woman's
College in Northwestern University, made the speech of the
evening. Her language was remarkable for simplicity and elo-
quence. She told the story of her first awakening to the need of
women's work, in the great * Temperance Crusade.' There
was a pathos in some of the pictures which she drew that caused
even the men to weep. Having been Principal of a Ladies'
School, she was very refined and highly cultivated. She has a
straight, elegant figure, an oval face, a wealth of light brown
hair, and a clear, bell-like voice made her a very effective speaker.
She \s the first woman I ever heard in public. Four others spoke.
All wore their bonnets. "
14 Big Words — Boys^ Marbles.
Now, though I knew this dear lady must have sat far back,
so that she did n't even note my eye-glasses, I thanked God and
took courage as I read her no doubt honestly-intentioned lines.
My mother's greatest friend and solace was Mrs. Hodge,
wife of the Yale College graduate and Oberlin College tutor in
Latin, who, for his children's sake, taught our district school in
1854. Our homes were about a mile apart and their ** cheek by
jowl conferences, " as my father playfully called them, occurred
perhaps once a fortnight and related to their two favorite themes,
•' How to be Christians ourselves," and ** How to train our little
ones." Mr. and Mrs. Hodge had decided literary gifts and were
well versed in the best English authors. To her I went, by my
mother's advice, to read my compositions in verse and prose.
She was kind but not enthusiastic. From her unsparing criti-
cisms I went swiftly home to mother to get my spiritual strength
renewed. But I think now that Mrs. Hodge, who under favoring
fortunes would have been a successful literary woman, took a
wise view* of the situation. ** Frank will have a long youth, "
was one of her oracular remarks to my mother; **she matures
so slowly in body and mind. At fifteen years old she has the
physique of a girl of twelve years, and though in some things
very acute, she has the crudeness of penmanship, pastime and
manner that belong to childhood. When I hear the large words
she uses, and then see her down in the mud playing marbles with
my little boys, I can only explain the incongruity on the hypoth-
esis that she patterned her talk after that of her parents and her
play after her own childish fancy. "
CHAPTER I.
MY APPRENTICESHIP TO NATURE.
'* These as they change, Ahnighty Father, these
Are but the varied God ; the rolling year
Is full of Thee ; forth in the pleasing spring
Thy beauty walks, thy tenderness and love."
— TTiomson's Seasons,
The above lines from a book early and often read by me,
express what, from my earliest recollection, has been to me the
constant, universal voice that speaks from Nature's heart. I loved
the poets because they uttered the wonder and the worship of
which my soul was frill ; my mother's memory was stored with
their words of inspiration, and from her lips I learned much of
Coleridge, Cowper, Thomson, and other great interpreters. I
have never elsewhere heard Wordsworth's ** Intimations of Im-
mortality" repeated with the delicate appreciation that was in
her voice when she once more rendered it for me recently, on
the verge of her eighty-fifth year.
How often looking up into the heavens from the wide prairies
of our farm, I repeated, almost with tears, what she had taught
nie from Joseph Addison ;
" The spacions firmament on high
And all the blue ethereal sky
With spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their Great Original proclaim ;
The unwearied son from day to day
Doth his Creator's power display,
And publishes to every land
The work of an Almighty hand."
'* Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God,'' has always
been a truth upspringing like a prayer out of my heart, and
turning bitter things to sweet.
i6 ''Near to Nature's Heart.''
My mother says that her own mother, an unschooled but a
God-smitten natiure, who knew nothing of the poets, loved to
w^alk the woods and fields alone, and to go forth under the open
sky at night, praising with voice of rapture, the great and blessed
Spirit who had made the universe so beautifiil.
My father had a heart that beat closer to Nature's own, than
mother's, even : she felt the moral aspects of birds and woods and
sky ; he loved them simply for themselves. He felt at one with
them ; their sweet, shy secrets seemed to be open to him. The
ways of birds and butterflies, the habits of gophers, squirrels, and
ants — ^he seemed to know about them as a faun might, and he
taught us, Sunday and every day, to learn them ; to know the
various herbs and what their uses were ; to notice different grasses
and learn their names ; to tell the names of curious wild flowers.
When he found something new to him in any floral line, he
brought it home as a great curiosity to ** study up.** As a gar-
dener and pomologist, he had few equals, and, later on, he was
for years president of the State Agricultural and Horticultural
Society. He always carried his little spy-glass, folded two-foot
measure, and pocket thermometer, teaching us how to use them.
He carried a tape-line, too, and was fond of measuring the girth
of trees, and he taught us to make a thorough study of the
weather as well as of the woods.
All these observations were made at ** Forest Home ** a farm
in Wisconsin where we lived from my seventh to my nineteenth
year, a farm that we made out of the woods and prairies, little by
little, putting up all the buildings and stocking it so well that it
became the prize farm of Rock county.
The way of it was this : after four years of hard study in
Oberlin College, my father's health, which never was strong,
showed symptoms of a decline, and he decided to go West. There
was no railroad and so we put our household goods into white-
covered wagons, of which father drove one ; my brother Oliver,
twelve years old, another ; and my mother the third. In front of
her, on father's writing-desk, sat my little sister and I, aged seven
and four. The big Newfoundland dog, Fido, trotted behind this
procession. When we reached Chicago we found so many mud
holes with big signs up, *' No bottom here," that father said he
** would n't be hired to live in such a place." When we saw the
Outdoors on ** Rock Prairie.** 17
great Lake Michigan, we little girls were afraid. Oliver brought
us pretty pebbles with wave-ripples marked on them, and I threw
them away, saying they **made me hear the roaring of that
awful sea." Once the horse that mother drove went down in the
quicksand almost to the ears, and men had to come with rails
from the fences and pry him out. We never traveled on Sunday,
and it took us over three weeks to reach otir destination, and
after living in Janesville, the county-seat, a few weeks, while the
house on the farm was building, we moved into it before it had
any windows or much of any roof. But it was beautiftil June
weather, and we children thought the whole affair a sort of joke
and ** as good as a picnic." The cook-stove was set up out-of-
doors, and the shavings and bits of shingles made nice playthings.
Oliver built a play-house for his sisters, with a make-believe
oven where we could have a real fire, and also a make-believe
stable for Fido, who was our make-believe horse. Father's
tenants, who lived in a log-house by the beautiftd Rock river
near by, brought us fish and game, and vegetables from their
garden. There were calves, pigs and chickens to play with, and
we children, who had always lived in town, thought there was
never anything half so delightful as this new home in the edge of
the fine groves of oak and hickory that lined the river, and look-
ing out on the prairie that stretched away toward the east until it
met the sky.
As years passed on, we learned to love it more and more,
and never thought of being lonesome ; though, except the tenants,
we had no neighbors within a mile and never went anywhere in
general or saw anybody in particular. We had no toys except
what we made for ourselves, but as father had a nice **kit** of
carpenter's tools, we learned to use them, and made carts, sleds,
stilts, cross-guns, bows and arrows, ** darts," and I don't know
what besides, for our amusement. Oliver was very kind to his
sisters and let us do anything we liked that he did. He was not
one of those selfish, mannish boys, who think they know every-
thing and their sisters nothing, and who say, ** You're only a girl,
you can't go with me," but when he was in the fields plowing he
would let us ride on the beam or on the horse's back ; and when
he went hunting I often insisted on going along, and he never
made fan of me but would even let me load the gun, and I can
2
1 8 A City Visitor.
also testify that he made not the slightest objection to my carry-
ing the game !
Once when we had lived on the farm several years, a bright
girl came from Janesville to spend a week with us. Her name
was Flora Comfort, and she was our pastor's daughter. She told
us ** She should think we would get lonesome, away down there
in the woods.** To this remark we took great exceptions, for we
had begun to think that ** Forest Home ** was the ** hub of the
universe,** and to pity everybody who did n*t have the pleasure
of living there. So I spoke up and said, **If we ought to have
a city here, we will have one.. It won't take long to show you
how that is done. You town people depend on others for your
good times, but, as mother is always saying, we have to depend
on our own resources, and I propose now that we set at work and
have a town of our own.**
This proposition met with great favor. We told &ther of it
when he came home from Janesville, whither he went on business
almost daily, and he said, ** All right, go ahead.*'
So a consultation was held in **The Studio,** as I called a
room fitted up in the attic, where my sister and I were wont to .
mould in day, making all sorts of utensils as well as what we were
pleased to call * * statues, ' * of whose general eflfect the less said the
better. There we consulted long and loudly about the plan of a
city, and who should be the officers, who edit the paper, how the
streets should be named, and many other subjects of equal import.
At last little Mary grew tired and went to sleep on the old * *settee, * *
while Oliver, Flora and I held high discourse, the burden of
which was a name for the new city and how it should be gov-
erned. We decided at once that it should have no saloons, no
billiard halls, and that it would not need a jail. Oliver was a
great wit, and amused himself by introducing outdoor antics into
this dignified assembly, much to my disgust, and I kept telling
him that if he dropped the make-believe for a minute he would
spoil it all, whereupon he picked up a bit of light-colored clay
from my work-bench, and, taking oflf a piece, flattened it out and
clapped it across my nose, saying, *'Why, Frank, what a nice
impression I could get from this."
** Mr. Willard," I replied sternly, ** you forget the proprieties
''Fori City y 19
of the occasion ; you are not now my brother Oliver, but a gentle-
man acting ^th me in an official capacity."
A loud ha ! ha ! from the gentleman interrupted ** the pro-
prieties " still more — waked little Mary and caused the dog Fido
to set up a howl of annoyance.
* * Have n't you made any plan yet ? Am I to have an office ? * *
murmured little Mary from among her pillows.
'* Little girls should be quiet when statesmen are in conver-
sation/' said Oliver in a deep voice. Mary, being of an amiable
disposition, was easily consoled by the cooky that I placed in her
hand, and munched it contentedly, while Oliver, Flora and I con-
tinued to talk of the ** resources of the corporation." Then the
debate proceeded until at my suggestion we decided upon ** Fort
City" as the appropriate name, because we could thus com-
bine the idea of adventiure with that of life in town. At ten
o'clock, father tapped on the door as a signal that young per-
sons of our size would do well to seek *' tired Nature's sweet
restorer.
** Rome was not built in a day," neither was Fort City. We
studied careftilly the pages of father's favorite Janesville Gazette,
and copied out names for the streets. Mother said of course the
rood in front of the house must be Broadway, because that was the
most £unous street in America. So we put up a shingle painted
white, on which, from a pasteboard where our ingenious father
had cut the word in large letters, we painted the name black and
plain as print. The *' by-road " at right angles, that led to the
river, we called Market Street, because it ran along past the bam,
the cow-yard, granary, etc. The bam was '* Warehouse of J. F.
WiUard," the cow-yard, **City Market," the well, **CityFoun-
tam," the hen-house, ** Mrs. Willard's Family Supply Store ;" the
granary was ** City Elevator," and the pig-pen, '*City Stock-
Yards." We had a ** Board of Trade," and *' bought, sold and
got gain," the question of money having been at last decided in
tvor of specie payments in little round bits of tin, representing
silver ; while some handsome yellow leather, that father brought
us, was cut into circles representing gold, and stamped to stand
for any sum from one to fifty dollars. But I insisted that we * ' must
have bank notes or there was no use in pretending to be bankers,"
so the dty treasurer finally issued some handsome bills painted
20 Laws of ^*Fort Cify,**
by Mary on paper that had been nicely pasted over small strips
of cloth.
A good deal of work was done on the highways, for we were
dear lovers of old Mother Earth, and in the twinkling of an eye
would leave the editor's sanctum where we had been laboriously
printing The Fort City Tribune, and taking the fire-shovel, one
would begin spading the street up to a higher level, while the
other would fit bricks and pebbles into a queer mosaic to make it
more like the pavements of the town. A few minutes later, per-
haps, we would be walking on the ridge of the house, with an old
rake handle for our ** balance-pole," then crawling in at a dormer
window, we would scurry down the back stairs and have a shoot-
ing match out by the well, with bow and arrows. For Oliver and
Loren, a boy who worked for us, had declared that ** the girls "
liked the city part of this great ** make-believe*' too well, and
did n't seem to remember that this was, after all, only a city in a
fort, of which the fort part was by far the most important. The
boys insisted that it was high time to have an attack by Indians,
and that if we girls did n't agree to it they ** would n't play city "
any more.
Now the fact was that we girls did not at all object to a skir-
mish with the redskins, but we had played that often, while this
game of the city was new. It was agreed, therefore, that when
corn-husking was over there should be a regular Indian invasion.
I will give a few specimens of our laws, copying them from
the very book in which they were first written by me, a wee pam-
phlet bound in yellow paper:
LAWS OF PORT CITY.— VOL. L
(BT AUTHORITY.)
I. OFFICER'S I^AWS.
I. The officers shall be elected once a month by ballot
They shall consist of a Mayor, Secretary, Treasurer, Tax-gatherer and
Postmaster.
The duty of the mayor shall be to preside at all meetings of the officers.
His word during the meetings of the officers shall be perfect law. If any
of the officers shall refuse to obey him, he shall immediately turn himself
into a constable, serve a writ of attachment on said officer, and the officer
shall pay to the mayor, a fine of fiftv dollars ; one third of the same fine shall
be paid to the mayor by any officer who, on rising to speak in any of the
Famous Law of '^ T Speak for It,^* 71
meetings, does not make a bow to the mayor. The mayor shall wear a
badge at all meetings of the society, and whenever he goes on a visit to any
of the officers ; also to concerts, shows, lectures, or other performances of a
public nature. If anybody besides the mayor takes it upon himself or her-
self to wear a badge, he or she shall pay to the mayor fifty dollars for the
first offense, and fifty more for every time after the first. Before he does
snything else the mayor shall be sworn in by the secretary in the following
*' I promise faithfully to discharge the duties of my office for one
month to the very best of my ability ; this I promise on my sacred honor."
He shall stand up and hold up his right hand, and repeat this after the
secretary, and then sign his name to it, and the secretary shall keep the
paper, but the mayor may keep the secretary's oath.
n. GBNBRAI« I«AWS.
1. No officer shall go into any other officer's room without permission
from the owner, or forfeit fifty dollars for the first offense, and an additional
ten for each future offense. For the second he shall pay the fine just men-
tioned and shall have his hands tied behind him and be kept in the city
pound for five minutes in total darkness. If an officer goes into another's
room and the other does not see him, he need not pay any fine nor be put
in the pound ; or if the owner of the room be absent from the city this law
has no effiecL A person may also go into another's room provided they are
icnt there by any person whom they must obey, but they must never try to
get sent in.
2. Mrs. Mary T. Willard shall, on all occasions, act as judge in law
cases as to which side has gained the day.
5. If any person has seen or heard of a thing he wishes to have, he
shall have it for all of any officer of this city : that is, after he has said, /
%peakfor thai things or something of that sort. After that, if any officer or
signer of this book tries to get it away, or persuade the owner not to give it
to the one who spoke first, said person shall be fined two hundred dollars
for the first offense and twice as much for every future offense. Since it
may not always be some thing that the speaker wants, the law 13, that sup-
podng it is to go a walking, or a riding, or read some book or paper then in
the hands of another, whatever it is, it is secured to the one who speaks for
it first, if he can get it, for all any one else, except the owner. If, some-
times, two speak for a thing at a time, the mayor shall decide who shall
have it, only we promise never to speak for a thing that is imfair or unrea-
sonable, or that we know we can not get.
4. If any of the officers find any of the others' things, he shall imme-
diately return it without asking or expecting any pay, and show himself or
henelf a polite gentleman or lady.
Oliver wished to hasten our Indian fight and so proposed
that we girls should help him husk the com, which we were glad
to do for the outdoor 's fun of it. We were fitted out with * ' husk-
22 Tlie Indian Invasion.
ing-pins** — bits of hard wood whittled to a point and &stened
to the right middle finger by a piece of leather. With this the
tough husk was torn open and the ear of com wrenched fix)m the
stalk. I took a little cricket and seated myself beside a big
** shock** of com, resolved, to run a race with Oliver as to who
should husk the most that day, with the understanding that
Mary should be allowed to get the stalk of com ready and pass it
along to me. She was also to take care of the tassel that topped
out each ear, for they were sold as skeins of silk in mother's
handsome dry-goods store.
The dog prowled about, carrying an ear of com from one of
the rival heaps to another, following a rabbit scent, or bow-wow-
ing on general principles as best suited his notions.
** Now, as to that Indian raid,** sang out Oliver from beside
his little stack of com, ** I will head the attack from out-of-doors,
and Fido shall be with me. You may stay in the house and have
Loren to help you. Mary can look on, but must not be in the
fight ; that*s a fair divide.**
** No,'* said I, ** let it be this way : you and Loren and the
dog may club together out-of-doors. Mother, Mary and I will
defend the fort inside, and I*d like to see you * effect an entrance,*
as the war books call it.**
** Well, I*m surprised at you for being so risky,'* he replied.
** I warn you that you give all the fighting force to us at the
start, and if your defense does n*t turn out a minus quantity, I
miss my guess.**
**Very well, you*ll miss it," was my vainglorious answer,
and so the great attack was planned.
It was about four o'clock of the brief winter day. Snow
covered the ground, and the recent beginning of ,a thaw followed
by a sudden fi-eeze had made a solid, slippery crust, which I
thought to be a disadvantage to the boys in their attack. Every
door and window of the large, rambling farm-house was carefully
fastened. Mother had got her baking out of the way, and the
loaves of her toothsome ** salt-rising" bread reposed upon the
kitchen table. The fat Maltese cat, **Tmdge," purred on the
hearth, all unconscious of approaching hostilities.
Tired though she was, mother entered heartily into the
project of the hour. Bridget was gone for a week's visit at her
•' Women to the Fore^ 23
Irother-in-law's, otherwise the women would have had a force
imfEdrly strong. Mother had the brain of a statesman and the
caarage of a major-general, but it was always her plan to put her
children forward, and then to help them by her quiet counsel.
So I was leader of the forces inside the **Fort.*' I arrayed my-
self in an old coat of Oliver's, upon which Mary had sewed some
gilt paper epaulets, and I fastened a hickory sword at my side.
But all this was simply a dumb show. ** Pump the milk-pail full
of water and have the dipper handy,** was my ** general order
number one." *' Let Mary keep up a bright outlook. She's not
to fight, but she can watch out for the enemy, as Rebecca did
when she helped Ivanhoe," was number two. ** Let's have a bit
of spare-rib ready with which to coax the dog away from those
two horrid Injuns," was number three.
•* Now, mother, you keep a sharp lookout at the front door.
Take the broom for your weapon, and whenever you see a head,
hit it."
"What do you propose to do?" asked mother, laughing,
while Mary jumped up and down with glee, and flattened her
andacious little nose against the window pane, saying in mock
alarm, ** The booger-man will catch you if you don't watch out ! "
I explained as soberly as if mother and I had not talked over the
whole plan the day before : ** It is my part to generalissimo the
forces, watch the back door and have this garden syringe ready
to give those red rascals a shower bath if they dare to show
their heads."
It was now getting dark and not a sign of life was to be seen.
We could hear the sheep bleating in their fold behind the bam
and the gossip of the hen-house was faintly borne to our keen
ears, as our beloved ** Cochin Chinas," ** Polands " and '* Brah-
mapootras" clambered to their roosts. It was almost milking
time and yet no attack was made ; no bark of Fido betrayed the
wily foe. Where were those boys f
Suddenly we heard a war-whoop and a pow-wow that were
enough to make one's blood run cold. Mary shrieked in fright,
but pluckily held her post, while I muttered, ** We shall need a
gag for the spy after this ! ' '
Mother, convulsed with laughter, raised her broom with
tlireatening attitude, and called out, ** I will die at my post ! "
24 Under the Snow.
I charged the syringe and placed it over a chair-back, ready
to swing in whatever direction was most available. Another
Indian screech, and the cellar door that opened into the kitchen
fell flat (the boys had taken out all the screws but one) ; the
dog came tearing in, but received such a deluge of water that he
ran howling under the table, while the cat, fat and all, flew to
the top of the sink and hissed defiance at the invaders from her
safe perch. Oliver, with waving feather and face red with war-
paint, dashed up to me, and with a terrific whoop, knocked the
water apparatus from my hand, and waved his wooden scalp-
knife, while Mary jumped on the table and set up a wail of dis-
appointment to think I had been beaten ; but mother claimed
that the fort's garrison was not altogether defeated, because, with
her broom, she had chased Loren down cellar, and, clapping the
door into its place, was at that moment literally ** holding the
fort" against him. The struggle, like many of which we read
in more ambitious records, was ** short, sharp and decisive," for
Loren returned to the attack, and, having Oliver to help him
from within, soon succeeded in forcing the door, in spite of my
fierce deluge down my brother's spine, and mother's vigorous
flourishes impartially distributed among the two boys and their
four-footed ally.
When the Indians were finally victorious, and sat by in flam-
ing red shirts, worn over their usual garments, and with wooden
tomahawks of fiightfiil size, while their waving roosters' feathers
stuck out above their heads (though Oliver's were somewhat
lopped by reason of the water), mother said, *' You know right
well that in the open field we are a match for you. This taking
of the fort has been done by your miserable Indian strategy."
** Yes, indeed," we girls chimed in, ** you had to come sneak-
ing around so that we hadn't a fair chance."
** Of course we did," smiled Oliver ; ** that's what we're for.
You see, I had been reading in * Western Scenes ' about some
Indians that came under the snow^ so Loren and I just dug our
way under the solid crust to the cellar window, which we had
already loosened, and burst in the door, that we had fixed to our
liking, and what could you do after that ? "
Sure enough, the boys had won, '' Indian fashion," and
nobody could complain.
NeedU and Dishcloth Discounted. 25
"I don't like such plays/' said Mary, sitting on mother's
lap; **do you? " patting her cheek.
** Why, no. I like the city better than the fort," replied
mother. * * But we did this to give the boys a frolic, and as
they got the better of us, they won't want another such game
very soon."
**The trouble is," said I, not feeling very much elated just
then, ** the trouble is, not that we were outfought, but that we
were outwitted. The next time you want an Indian fight, boys,
we'll be ready for you at all points."
But the discussion of the battle ended abruptly when mother
reminded the flushed combatants of the time, and soon besiegers
and besieged were busy in removing all traces of the conflict.
Oliver began the peaceful work of mending the door and fasten-
ing the cellar window, while we quickly set all things in order in
the kitchen. Loren, after taking ofiF his Indian ''toggery,"
sped out into the darkness to do his evening chores, whistling
merrily as he went, and long before the early bed-time came, all
the inhabitants of Fort City had settled down to the peaceful
ways of civilized life.*
In all otu- plays (and we ** kept a hotel," among the rest, in
a regtdar * * shanty ' ' play-house that was built for us by a carpen-
ter when the big bam was going up), Mary was mine hostess, and
1 mine host. Mother did not talk to us aCs girls, but simply as
human beings, and it never occurred to me that I ought to
"know house- work " and do it. Mary took to it kindly by nat-
ure ; I did not, and each one had her way. Mother never said,
"You must cook, you must sweep, you must sew," but she
studied what we liked to do and kept us at it with no trying at
all. There never was a busier girl than I and what I did was
mcstly useful. I knew all the carpenter's tools and handled them :
made carts and sleds, cross-guns and whip-handles ; indeed, all
the toys that were used at Forest Home we children manufactured.
But a needle and a dishcloth I could not abide — chiefly, per-
haps, because I was bound to live out-of-doors. This was so from
the beginning, and perhaps it had something to do with our
uoble mother's willingness to live out in the country away from
everybody but her own. Anyhow, her three children were far
•Serenl " Indian stories*' are "bunched" in tiiis sketch.
26 Old-fashiofied Sunday,
better amused because left to amuse themselves. I pity the poor
little things that have so many toys all ** brand new " from the
store, and get no chance to use their own wits at invention and
to develop their own best gifts. **Fort City" taught Oliver and
his sisters a better way.
What to do on Sunday with these restless spirits was a seri-
ous question, for father and mother had the old Puritan training.
It was in their birth and bones that the Sabbath was a day holy
unto the Lord. This feeling was even stronger in my father, per-
haps, because his father was the son of Elder Elijah Willard, of
Dublin, N. H., for forty years pastor in that parish, a good man
and a righteous, who trained his children strictly in faith and
practice. Perhaps, also, the lawyer-like character of his mind had
something to do with his greater severity in holding us to the
white line of what he deemed our duty. For himself, he would
not shave or black his boots ; he would not read or write a
letter ; he would not so much as look in the dictionary for a word
upon the Sabbath day. He said, '*The children must have
habits." This was the most frequent phrase he used about their
training. He never said '* good habits," so that I grew up with
the idea that there were no habits except good ones ! He said,
** You must draw your lines and set your stakes, for if you don't
you will be just nobody." So he decided that no calls or visits
should be received on Sunday, which was easy enough to observe,
as there was nobody to come but the birds, and nowhere to go ex-
cept to the fields and pasture. He also said that no books or
papers should be read except those of a strictly religious nature.
Mother did not interfere with all this by any word, but we felt
a diflference, and had a sense of greater * * elbow room ' * with her.
A little incident illustrates her tact. In the early years of our
farm life, one New Year's eve came on Saturday and our small
presents were given and put away without waiting for morning,
because father thought it would n't be right to have them on Sun-
day. One can hardly imagine the bottled-up condition of children
in such a case. Fortunately for Oliver, he had a Sunday book,
** Austin's Voice to Youth," and little Mary had a child's edition
of Pilgrim's Progress, so they could get at work on their presents.
But, alas for poor me ! My prayer and dream had been for months,
''some pictures to look at on Sunday," and I had a slate, instead*
The Premium Coaxer, 27
To be sure 1 had devoutly desired a slate, for I had imagined any
amount of things that could be written and drawn upon it, but
the rule of the house did not permit such a week-day article to
come into use upon the Sabbath. At last I hit upon a plan, and
going to mother, — I did not dare suggest even this to the revered
** Squire," as the farmers called my father — I said, in a pleading
voice, *' Mayn't I have my new slate if I'll promise not to draw
anything but meetin ' houses f * ' (That* s what they called churches
in those days.) Mother laughed in spite of herself at this bit of
childish ingenuity, and said, *' Yes, you may, my little girl, and
mamma will make you a pattern to go by." So there was peace
and quiet, while mother, who had much skill with her pencil,
made a "meeting house," and I was the envy of my brother
and sister, who had before thought themselves the favored ones.
This is a handy place in which to mention that, though we
were all good at it, the premium coaxer of the family was little
Mary. Whenever the others wanted a master-stroke in this line,
they sent her as their ambassador at court. Mother disliked to
let us be exposed to the damp, changeable days when winter
was just giving way to spring, and as we loved ** outdoors"
better than any other place, we would send Mary, who, climbing
on mother's knee and stroking her face with her soft little hands,
would murmur in the sweetest of voices, '*Dear, nice, good,
pretty, beautiful mamma, it's warm and cool and comf table,
and won't yoxx please let us go out and play?" After which*
speech and performance mamma generally did.
But to return to the Forest Home Sunday. In the early
days, before the new bridge across Rock river, we were four
miles from church, and as we cast in our fortunes with the
Methodists (though mother was a Congregationalist), we were
"on a circuit," and the minister came only once a fortnight
or once a month. Then we were dressed in our Sunday best,
the big wagon was brought out with Jack and Gray, and family
and farm hands bundled in — the latter to be dropped at the
Catholic church. But my parents soon decided not to leave
the house alone, for -prairie fires sometimes crept unpleasantly
near, cattle broke into fields or garden, and there was no dinner
when we got home. In those days such a being as a '* tramp "
had not been heard of, and in our twelve years of isolation on
28 Down in the Pasture,
this farm, not one theft, much less any fright or danger, befell
us brave pioneers. Once a drunken man came in to warm him-
self; once we found behind a straw-stack signs of men having
slept there, and some slices of bread hidden under the stack ;
sometimes men stopped to ask about the ** river road to Beloit,**
^ or how far it was to Janesville, but that was all. The present
records of fright and peril to our country folks seem strange and
pitiful to one who remembers how safe and peaceful was their
lot long time ago.
We made this plan at Forest Home : One Sunday father
should **hold the fort,'* the next, mother, and the third, Oliver.
Whoever did this had to get the dinner ready, and as both father
and son were famous cooks, the plan worked well. Indeed, to
see my brother brandish the carving-fork in air as we ap-
proached on our return from church, and to inhale the rich
aroma of his roast chicken, nice home-raised vegetables and
steaming co£fee, was an event. Sunday dinner was to us the
central point of the day, and served to keep it in fragrant mem-
ory, notwithstanding its many deprivations.
For us it was all very well, under the peculiar circumstances,
but I do not approve of a Sunday dinner that deprives working
people of their rest and their opportunity to go to church.
Careful as he was, from training and long habit, about what
we should read upon the Sabbath day, fiither was quite easy-going
when we could once get him out-of-doors. He would whistle to the
dogs — ^for when we came to have a thousand sheep we kept three
of them — and off we would go together to the pasture, father,
we girls and the dogs, leaving Oliver lying upon his face on the
front piazza, reading his beloved ** D*Aubigne*s History of the
Reformation,** and mother with the big family Bible on her lap.
As we wended our way down by the grassy bank of the broad,
tree-shaded river, I liked to lag behind and ** skip*' a stone, in
which art I was something of an adept. But Mary would wave
her hand for me to **Come on,** and I would smilingly desist.
I liked to clip a fresh twig from the alders, or to make a ** whistle "
with my jack-knife, but father said, ** Prances, you know I
don*t allow you to keep up your carpenter work on Sunday."
Whereupon I answered with a queer pucker about the lips, that
would have been a smile, only it did n*t dare to, "But, fathefi
Out in the Orchard. 29
can't I whittle if I'll promise that I won't make anything ? " and
he agreed to that. He would even cut a chip from the gnarled old
cedar tree, and, after smoothing it, give it to us, and say, '' Did
you ever smell an3rthing more wholesome?" I liked this so
much that even now the odor of red cedar, though but in a lead
pencil's handle, brings back to me the river, softly flowing, the
sentinel trees, my father's manly figure marching at the head,
Mary and me walking demurely after, in the path the cows
had worn.
On Sunday afternoon, almost the only leisure time she had,
mother would walk a little while with us children in the orchard,
taking scissors along with her, and clipping a sprig of caraway
or fennel for ** the girls," or a bunch of sweet-smelling pinks for
Oliver, bom the pretty little beds in the heart of the orchard*
where no one was privileged to go except with mother. Here she
talked to us of God's great beauty in the thoughts He works
out for us to learn about Him by ; she taught us tenderness
toward every little sweet-faced flower and piping bird ; she made
us see the shapes of clouds, and what resemblances they bore to
things upon the earth ; she made us love the Heart that is at
Nature's heart. Thus it could not be said of us, as of poor
Peter Bell,
<^In vam through every chAngefal 3rear
Did Nature lead him as before ;
A primrose by the river's brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
But it was nothing more."
Father did not ** talk religion," as we called it, very much,
nor did our mother. They had family prayers alwa3rs, with
Scott's *• Practical Observations " at the close of the Bible read-
ing. They always had a blessing at the table, and if father did
not ask it, mother did. They did not insist that the children read
the Bible for themselves, and I was very shy about it, the ten-
dency of my mind to doubt and question revealing itself even
then ; when, at a very early age, the Testament was specially read
to me on Sunday, I had asked, " How do you know God sent it ?"
And if the family Bible was sometimes open before me, I would
say with a toss of the head, when mother expressed pleasure at
thesight, ** I'm looking at the births and deaths," or, " I'm only
30 Home Songs.
reading the Apoaypha." My mother had the good sense never
to seem shocked by this bit of bravado, but patted the busy little
head with her kind, steady hand, saying, ** My little girl will be
a missionary, yet.** She knew these symptoms were not of ugli-
ness, but just the prancing about of a mettlesome steed before it
settled to life's long and difiScult race. She knew the more she
argued and reproved, the worse the case would be, so she just
lived the gospel right along and taught its precepts and prayed '
much.
We seldom had the opportunity to attend church on Sabbath
evening, but our song service at home was, as already mentioned,
an inspiration and delight. My father had a fine bass voice and
mother a tender, well- trained soprano. There were no ** Gospel
Hymns,** but in the Mother's Assistant — a family magazine that
they subscribed to for some years — ^were sweet songs of Christian
faith, and the old Methodist hymn-book with its ** Guide me,
O Thou Great Jehovah,'* and Kirke White*s " The Star of Beth-
lehem,** used just about to break my heart in the sweet summer
twilights, though I would n*t have had anybody know, save
Mary. Fair and bright, in spite of occasional shadows, seemed
those years of childhood ; still fairer and brighter they seem now.
Father made us big paper hats, shaped like cornucopias,
trimmed with peacock feathers and painted with ** Injun fights,**
by ingenious sister Mary. Then mother sewed for us belts of
bright red flannel, in which were stuck wooden swords, bunches
of arrows, etc., as we marched away on hunting expeditions.
Father was so careful of his girls and so much afraid that harm
would come to us if we went horseback riding, that I determined
to have a steed of my own, contrived a saddle, and trained a
favorite heifer, ** Dime,** to act in that capacity. ** She can do it
if she has a mind to,** was my unvarying reply to all the ingen-
ious objections of Oliver, who said that a creature which chewed
the cud and divided the hoof was never meant for riding purposes.
He also claimed that Dime did her part when she gave milk, and
ought not to be put through at this rate. But I took the ground
that ** cows were a lazy set, and because they never had worked
was no reason why they should n't begin now. Up in Lapland
they made a great many uses of the deer that people did n't
where we live, and he was all the better and more famous animal
A Bovine Btuephalus. 31
as a result of it. So, since fether would n*t let me ride a horse, I
would make 33iiiie the best trained and most accomplished cow in
the pasture ; and Dime would like it, too, if they'd only let her
alone." So vdth much extra feeding and caressing, and no end
of curry-combing to make her coat shine, I brought Dime up to a
high degree of civilization. She would ** moo '* whenever I ap-
peared, and follow me about like a dog ; she would submit to
being led by a bridle, which Loren, always willing to help, had
made out of an old pair of reins ; she was gradually broken to
harness and would draw the hand-sleds of us girls ; but the
crowning success was when she **got wonted" (which really
meant when she willed) to the saddle, and though I had many
. an inglorious tumble before the summit of my hopes was reached,
I found myself, at last, in possession of an outlandish steed,
whose every motion threatened a catastrophe, and whose awk-
wardness was such that her trainer never gave a public exhibition
of the animal's powers, but used to ride out of sight down in the
big ravine, and only when the boys were busy in the field. Jack
and Gray were the chief farm horses, and to see Oliver and Loren
mount these, and go tearing over the prairies like wild Indians,
was my despair. This was the one pleasure of farm life that was
denied the girls, but when I was fifteen, father declared, at
mother's earnest request, that *'the girls might now ride the
horses whenever their mother thought best.'* Many a time did
she take her stand in the road and watch us while we galloped
"to the ravine" near ^^Blufi" Wood," the Hodge homestead, and
back again. To offset my ''trained cow," Mary had a goat for
which panniers (side-pockets) had been made, in one of which a
nice, toothsome lunch was often placed, which Bridget took great
pleasure in providing, and in the other, our sketching materials.
A sheep-bell was tied on the goat's neck and to see us with our
tall caps, red belts, and cross-guns on shoulder, wending our way
to the groves along the river bank, while the dog Fido scoured
the bushes for gophers, often returning to walk in the procession,
was the delight of mother's heart, for well she knew how pleasant
and how healthful all this was to her two girls. Mary wore the
official badge of '* Provider," for the practical part of the expedi-
tion was in her charge. This badge was a bit of carved pine, like
a small cane, painted in many colors and decorated with a ribbon.
32 Kindness to Anitnals.
The one who wore it had the "say," about what the Itinch should
be, and where and when it should be eaten ; also whether Fido
had behaved well enough to go along, and many other questions
not needful to repeat. When the time came, a nice white table-
cloth was spread, and some of mother's light, sweet bread, with
butter that fairly smelled of violets, and nice sugar strewn over it,
was set in order, with a piece of pumpkin pie and a few hickory
nuts. Our drink was water, bright from the crystal spring up
the bank, and we brought it in a bottle and drank it through a
clean-cut straw. We asked a blessing at the table, and acted like
grown folks, so far as we could. This generally closed the expe-
dition, but before eating we would fish, chiefly for **minnies ** (or
minnow fish), and we usually had several of these little swimmers
in dishes at home, which was a pity, for they died after a few da3rs.
We did not mean to be unkind to animals, for mother had taught
us better, but we did n't think, sometimes. One of the first bits
of verse mother ever repeated and explained to us was this, from
her favorite poet, Cowper :
*' I would not rank among my list of friends,
Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility, the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm,**
Then there were other beautiftd lines on the same subject,
by Wordsworth, I think, which closed with
«This lesson, shepherd, let us two diviae,
Taught both by what life shows and what conceals,
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
fVith sorrow of the meanest thing thai feels,**
We used to shoot at a mark with arrows and became very
good at hitting, so much so that at my request, Mary, whose
trust in her sister was perfect, stood up by a post with an auger-
hole in it, and let me fire away and put an arrow through the hole
when her sweet blue eye was just beside it. But this was wrong,
and when we rushed in ** to tell mother," she did n*t smile, but
made us promise ** never, no, never,** to do such a thing again.
Down by the river bank, Mary took her pencil and made
sketches, such as they were, while I delighted to lie stretched
out upon the grass, look up into the blue sky and *' think my
*^ Drowning OuV* a Gopher. 33
thoaglits.'* Sometimes I would reach out my hand appealingly
toward heaven, and say to her : ** See there ! could you resist a
hand that so much wanted to clasp your own ? Of course you
could n't, and God can not, either. I believe that, though I do
not see that He reaches down to me/' And lovely, trusting
Mary answered : ** I know He does, for mother says so.*'
One day when we girls were thus having our good times
down by the river, the three Hodge boys came along, hunting for
birds' nests. "But you must n't carry any away ! " said Mary,
greatly stirred. ** You may climb the trees and look, if you want
to see the eggs or little ones, but you can't hurt a birdie, big or
little, in our pasture." The boys said their mother told them
the same thing, and they only wanted to **look." So Mary
and I showed them under the leafy covert some of the brown
thrush's housekeeping, and the robin's, too, and then we told
them that since they were such kind boys, and did n't want to
kill the pretty creatures God had made, and since they had just
come West and did n't know all the ways we had out here, we
would help them to ** drown out a gopher," and they might have
it if they wanted to.
John was delighted ; Rupert's eyes fairly danced, but
thoughtful Jamie, **the preacher," as they called him, said,
*' But why do you drown out a gopher? Is that a kind thing
to do?"
** Well, it is this way," explained the Western prairie girls ;
" the gopher digs up the com and spoils the crop. Many a time
we've dropped com into the hills for Oliver or father till we've
tired ourselves out getting it tmder ground, and along would
come this black-striped yellow-coat and eat up our crop before it
was started. So father said it was our plain duty to catch as
many as we could, and we've set traps and tried all sorts of ways,
but the one the boys like best is drowning out. Father told us
that the poet Cowper, who writes so well about kindness to
animals, says ' Our rights are paramount and must extinguish
theirs ; ' that is, when they spoil our work, we are obliged to spoil
them, for the general good. ' '
The boys thought there was common sense in this, and I led
the way to a hole in the ground about as large around as an ear
of com, where Fido had been clawing for some time. *' The way
3
34 A Figure-Four Trap,
we do is to pour water into the hole, stand there with a big stick
or a shovel, and when the gopher comes crawling up, Fido
snatches him by the throat, and the poor, drenched thing does n't
have long to siiffer, you may be sure,*' said Mary. So John went
to the house for a couple of pails and he and Rupert brought
water from the river, Jamie and we watched at the hole, one with
a shovel and the others with sticks, and the dog was wild
with importance and delight. Pretty soon the poor, wet gopher
crawled to the front, his mouth open, and his long teeth in full
view. ** Whack " went the shovel, but ** snap " went old Fido's
jaws, and the *' happy corn-fields," as I said, claimed the destroyer
so unwelcome here. ** What ! you don't think that gophers will
have another life ?' ' said preacher Jamie, quite shocked by the idea.
**Ionly know that mother says John Wesley thought the
birds would go to heaven, and the Indians think that,
* Transported to that equal sky,
Their faithful dogs shall bear them company,' "
was my reply. **It is a thing that nobody can tell anything
about, but I like to think the fact of life predicts the fact of im-
mortality."
*' Did n't mother put that into your head ? " asked Mary as
we wended our way home.
I said I guessed so, for she always answered all my questions
and told me so much that I hardly knew where her thoughts
ended and mine began.
Sometimes in winter I would set a ** figure-four trap" down
in the grove south of *'Fort City," where I caught many a
plump quail. The trap was nothing but a rough box, held up
on the edge by three sticks, fitted together like the figure 4, and
having fastened to the cross bar of the figure a few grains of
wheat. When the little *'more wheat" singing quails pecked
away at the stick to knock off these grains, the whole thing fell
down and they were prisoners. I used to put on an old coat of
father's, and some droll little boots my brother had outgrown,
and, perching a soft hat on my head, wend my way over the
snow's hard crust to see my trap. But I never killed a quail. I
would bring them home and hand them over to Loren, who soon
set them free into the heavenly bird-land. Then Bridget would
** Father' s Roomy 35
pick, stuff and cook the quails, putting in flavored bread crumbs
and such delicious ** summer savory " as never was tasted before
or since, and browning the delicious game to a turn. All this
we considered a right and proper thing to do, because quails could
be eaten, and so were useful and were not killed for mere sport.
But Mary, v^hose heart was pitiful as an angel's, used to wish
that ** folks could get along without meat, and not kill the
creatures with such bright, kind eyes as calves have, and lambs,
and little birdies,'' and her older sister, who was given to
** branching out,'* would tell her she *' presumed that time would
come, and hoped it might. Anything that you could imagine
was apt to happen some day."
** Father's Room " was a sort of literary refuge to all con-
cerned. Here were his tall book-case and his desk that locked up,
with which latter no mortal ever interfered for the good reason
that its black, velvet-lined interior was never seen save when
•* the Squire " was seated there at work. He would sit for days
making out the tax list of the (real) town, writing his speech
for the fair, or his ** History of Rock County," and we would be
near him, at work with brush, or pen, or pencil, never speaking a
word to each other or to him. All other rooms in the house were
full of life and talk and music, but ** Father's " was a place of
privilege conditioned upon quiet ; therein we children were on our
best of good behavior, and even the cat, of which he was very
fond, ceased to be frisky when admitted to the room which its
owner called his ^' sanctum sanctorum.*'
My father did not believe in medicine — I mean, not as most
people do. He thought every family ought to pay so much a
year to the doctor, and then deduct for every day's illness. He
said this would soon make all the M. D.'s careful students of
how to keep folks well, instead of how to get them well when by
their own carelessness they had fallen sick. He used to say
that God had but about half a dozen laws of health, and if peo-
ple would only study these and obey them, they would have a
happy, well-to-do life. He thought it was wonderful how easy
our Heavenly Father has made it for us in this world, if we will
"only take hold of it by the right handle." Just as He made
but one law in the Garden of Eden — so easy to remember — and
in all other things Adam and Eve could act of their own free
36
How to Keep Well.
will, so in the new Garden of Eden that we called Forest
Home, and in the great world, there were few things to do, and
then all would have health. He didn't say ^'good health," for
he was not one of those who ever said, ** I enjoy bad health ! '*
In the first place, it was n't enjoyable, and in the next, there
was no kind of health but good, since the word itself meant
wholeness or holiness, — a perfect state, as compared with the
imperfect state of being sick.
In Oberlin he had been much attached to Dr. Jennings, a
cold-water physician who had written a book on right living,
which father read more than anything else except his Bible
and A. J. Downing's Horticulturist, If we had sore throats,
a cold water compress was put on ; when I stepped on a nail, and
might easily have had locked-jaw, mother lifted me into the
kitchen **sink*' and pumped water over the aching member;
when on a summer morning Oliver's leg was broken by an uglj*
ox, his mother sat beside him, attending to the cold-water band-
age by night and day for a week. And yet, in the twelve years
o^ur fJEirm life, ** The Happy Five " (as I was wont to call them)
knew almost nothing about sickness. Our golden rules were
these, worthy to be fi-amed beside the entrance door of every
home:
"GOLDEN RULES OF HEALTH."
Simple foody mostly of vegetables , fish and fowls.
Plenty of sleep, with very early hours for retiring.
Flannel clothing next the skin all the year round;
feet kept zvarm, head cool, and nothing worn tight.
Just as much exercise a^ possible, only let fresh air
and sunshine go together.
No tea or coffee for the children, no alcoholic drink
or tobacco for anybody,
TeU the truth and mind your parents.
** But yet, Fort City must have a doctor, or else, you see, it
would n't be a city," I pleaded one day. So, being told to ** go
ahead," I collected a lot of spools, whittled the projecting part
off the smaller end of each, and made a stopper for it, plugged the
other end with a bit of wood, and so had a fine outfit of bottles,
which were labeled with all the outrageous names of drugs that
Spring'Hme at Forest Home. 37
mother or I could think of, only the real contents (fortunately)
were sugar, starch, salt, flour, pepper, etc., from the store-room.
Mary made for me a large assortment of powder papers, cut in dif-
ferent sizes ; surgical instruments were shaped from bits of tin,
with handles of wood ; a tin watch was used in counting the
pulse, and poor Mary, stretched out on two chairs, obligingly
** made believe sick.*' The following extract from the journal
that I dutifully kept through all those years, will give the out-
come of my medical experience :
Sister was sick, and I brought out all my little bottles of sugar, salt
tnd floor. Besides these medicines, I dosed her with pimento pills, and
poulticed her with cabbage leaves, but she grew no better quite fast, so
mother called another doctor. Dear me, if I were my brother, instead of
being only a girl, we'd soon see whether I've talent for medicine or not
But the ** other doctor*' was pvuely imaginary, for Mary
jtmiped up and ran off with Oliver after the cows, telling me that
I could ** try my skill on the calves or the cat next time,*' and
the yoting M. D. got quite a lesson from her mother on the value
of moderation in medicine and all other undertakings.
I have said but little about winter-time at Forest Home.
The truth is, it seemed to us that when the lovely summer and
beautiful autumn days were gone, they never would come back.
And though we made sleds and went coasting, took care of our
scores of pets, set oiu figure-four traps for quails, and played ** Fort
City ' * with great zest, it remains true that we greeted the retiun
of spring with such keen delight as city children can not know.
The first flower — who should find and bring it home to mother ?
That was a question of the highest interest, and little Mary was
quite as likely as the older ones to win this beautiful distinction.
The hiU-side behind the house, the * * Big Ravine, * * and * * Whale's-
back,*' near the Hodge homestead, were the favorite hiding-,
places of the ** March flower," **wind flower,** or *' anemone,**
that hardy pioneer which ventured first to spread its tiny sail
and catch the favoring breeze. Next came the buttercups, then
the violets, and, later on, the crow*s-foot geranium, shooting star,
wild lady's slipper, wild rose and lily, and a hundred sweet, shy
flowers with tmknown names. But the spring sounds were more
to me than the spring posies-
l4ke all rural people, oiu flEunily rose at day-break in spring,
38 The Prairie Chickens^ Chorus,
in winter long before that time. Father went to his desk ; Oliver,
Loren, and the ** hired hands '* went to the cow-yard to milk, or
to the bam to feed the horses ; Mary and I cared for our special
pets, the turkeys; chickens, and pea-fowls, the rabbits, goats,
calves, colts and dogs, while mother and Bridget got the break-
fast. But when the witchery of spring-time came, we girls would
take turns about waking each other, and first of all in the house
would steal away to our best-beloved ** Outdoors. * * It seemed
to us that we learned secrets then, such as dear old Mother Nature
did not tell to most folks.
We sought the quiet dells in the *' north pasture,*' where a
sort of wild mint grew, with smell so fresh and sweet as can't
be told, and where were mosses lovelier than the velvet of the
Queen's throne. We put our ears to the ground, as Indians do,
and heard sounds afar off, or thought we did, which answered
just as well. Voices came to us as we listened, through the
woods and from the prairie near by, that thrilled our hearts with
joy. The jay, the bluebird and the robin made music vastly
sweeter than any we ever heard elsewhere or afterward. But the
* * prairie-chickens ' ' had organized the special orchestra that we
listened to with most delight in the fair spring days. It was
a peculiar strain, not a song at all, as everybody knows, but a
far-off, mellow, rolling sound, a sort of drumbeat, rising and
falling, circling through the air and along the ground, ** so near,
and yet so far," it seemed to us like a breath from Nature's very
lips. Perhaps it came so gently and with such boundless wel-
come to our hearts, because it was the rarest, surest harbinger of
spring. Now the lambs would soon be playing in the pastures ;
now the oriole would soon be flashing through the trees, the
thrush singing in the fields, and the quail's sweet note, **more
wheat, ' ' would cheer the farmer at his toil ; the river would soon
mirror the boughs that would bend over it in their rich summer
green, for winter was over and gone, fresh spring rain was often
on the roof, and the deep heavens grew warm and blue. All
these things were in the far-off, curious notes of the prairie-chick-
ens that we never saw, but only listened to with smiling faces,
while girls and chickens, after their own fashion, thanked Grod
that spring had come once more.
In the earlier years at Forest Home, prairie fires were a gor-
Fighting a Prairie Fire, 39
geous feature of the spring landscape. Only a few times did they
come near enough to make us anxious. Returning from church
one Sabbath noon with Oliver, mother saw one of her mile-away
neighbors motioning to her vigorously, — a woman, by the way,
who did n't believe in ** going to meetings,'* for which reason,
father would have nothing to do with her family outside of bus-
iness. Oliver stopped the horses, and coming out to her gate
Mrs. P. said, ** You'd better be at home 'tending to your prairie
fires ; the neighbors are fighting them for you, and trying to save
your buildings. ' '
Oliver whipped up his team, and away they flew down the
river toward Forest Home. There they found father in his shirt-
sleeves directing the forces that had already put the fire to rout.
He had strolled out with Mary and me to ** take an observation,"
as he called it, and had seen the fire bearing down in braggart
style from Mr. Guernsey's prairie toward a log tenement house
where one of our hired men was living. The house was closed,
for all the family (Catholic) had gone to church. ** Bring some
pails, girls, and follow me," said father, as he ran toward this
house, which was in danger.
** I know what he'll do," said I to Mary, as we armed our-
selves with pails, and, whistling to the dogs, scampered away
following father ; * * of course, he must fight fire with fire, or else
Ed Carey's house is gone."
It was a long run, through the orchard, across the Big Ravine
and over a stretch of prairie, but we were not far behind our
father. We found him *' back-firing, " as it was called ; that is,
setting the grass burning all along between the fire and the
house, and then, with a neighbor or two, beating it out again
when the flame grew too strong. We brought water, thrashed
away at the grass with sticks, and grew black in the face, not
fit)m work, but from the smoke and cinders. By the time Oliver
and mother appeared on the scene, the crisis was over and we
girls clambered into the democrat wagon, covered all over with
dirt and glory, and both telling at once about the hair-breadth
'scape of Edward's house. But for the most part the prairie fires
were among the pleasant features of spring, for they seldom did
any harm. In burning over a new section of land, before break-
ing it up with the plow, men would fire it from each of the four
4o The Breaking Plow.
sides and let it bum toward the center. The grass, so long,
thick, and sometimes matted, made a bright, high wall of flame,
sending up columns of smoke like a thousand locomotives blow-
ing off steam at once. At night these fires, on the distant horizon,
looked to us like a drove of racing, winged steeds ; or they swept
along, dancing, courtesying, now forward, now backward, like
gay revelers ; or they careered wildly, like unchained fiiries ; but
<*lways they were beautiful, often grand, and sometimes terrible.
Another rich experience that came to my sister and me was
following the ** breaking plow" in spring. Just after the prairie
fire had done its work and the great field was black with the car-
pet it had spread, came the huge plow, three times as large as
that generally used, with which the virgin soil was to be turned
upward to the sun. Nowadays in the far West, that keeps going
farther every year, they use steam plows. Just think of a loco-
motive out in the boundless prairie, going so fast and far that
one would n't dare tell how many miles it gets over in a day !
But away back in the fortits and fifties, so distant from these
wonderful eighties in which we live, we thought that nothing
could go beyond the huge plow, with steel ** mould-board'* so
bright that you could see yoiu: face in it; ** beam *' so long that
we two girls could sit upon it for a ride and have space for half a
dozen more ; formidable ** colter '* — a sharp, knife- like steel that
went before the plowshare to cut the thick sod — ^and eight great,
branch-homed oxen sturdily pulj'ing all this, while one man held
the plow by its strong, curving handles, and another cracked a
whip with lash so long it reached the heads of the head oxen away
at the fix>nt. As father generally held the plow, and Oliver, who
was very kind to animals, the whip, Mary and I used to enjoy run-
ning along and balancing ourselves on the great black furrow, as
it curved over fi-om the polished mould-board and lay there
smooth and even as a plank. Sometimes the plow would run
against a snag in the shape of a big ** red-root"; for, strange to
say, the prairie soil, where no tree Wiis in sight, had roots, some-
times as large as a man's arm, stretching along under ground.
Then would come a cheery ** Get up. Bill ! Halloa there. Bright !
Now's your time, Brindlel** The great whip would crack
above their heads ; the giant creatures would bend to the yoke ;
'*snap *' would go the red-root and smooth would turn the splen-
" The Eagle's Nest, Beware / '* 41
did furrow -with home and school and civilization gleaming from
its broad face, and happy children skipping, barefooted, along
its new-laid floor. These were ** great times*' indeed! As the
sun climbed higher and the day grew warm, we would go to the
house, and compound a pail of ** harvest drink,** as father called
it, who never permitted any kind of alcoholic liquor in his fields
or at his barn-raisings. Water, molasses and ginger were its in-
gredients, and "the thirsty toilers, taking it from a tin dipper,
declared it ** good enough to set before a king.**
I^ter on, we girls were fitted out with bags of com, of beans,
onion, turnip or beet seed, which we tied around our waists, as,
taking hoe in hand, we helped do the planting, not as work,
but ** just for fiin,** leaving off whenever we grew tired. We
* * rode the horse * * for Oliver when he * * cultivated com' * ; held trees
for father when he planted new ones, which he did by scores
each spring ; watched him at ** grafting time ** and learned about
** scions** and ** seedlings '* ; had our own little garden beds of
flowers and vegetables, and thought no blossoms ever were so
fair or dishes so toothsome as those raised by our own hands.
Once when I was weeding onions with my father, I pulled out
along with the grass, a good-sized snake by the tail, after which
I was less diligent in that department of industry. The flower-
garden was a delight to people for miles around, with its wealth
of rare shrubs, roses, tulips and clambering vines which mother
and her daughters trained over the rambling cottage until it
looked like some great arbor. I had a seat in the tall black oak
near the front gate, where I could read and write quite hidden
fipom view. I had a box with lid and hinges, fastened beside me,
where I kept my sketches and books, whence the * * general pub-
lic ** was warned off by the words painted in large, black letters
on a board nailed to the tree below: **The Eagle's Nest,
Beware ! " Mary had her own smaller tree, near by, similarly
fitted up.
Oliver thought all this was very well, but he liked to sit
betimes on the roof of the house, in the deep shade, or to climb
the steeple on the big bam, by the four flights of stairs, and ' * view
the landscape o*er, " a proceeding in which his sisters, not to be
outdone, frequently imitated him. Indeed, Oliver was our fore-
runner in most of our outdoor-ish-ness, and but for his bright,
4^ Outdoor Gaines for Girts.
tolerant spirit, our lives, so isolated as they were, would have
missed much of the happiness of which they were stored full.
For instance, one spring, Oliver had a freak of walking on stilts ;
when, behold, up went his sisters on stilts as high as his, and
came stalking after him. He spun a top ; out came two others.
He played marbles with the Hodge boys ; down went the girls
and learned the mysteries of " mibs," and ** alleys,*' and the rest
of it. He played ** quoits '* with horseshoes ; so did they. He
played ** prisoner *s-base" with the boys; they started the same
game immediately. He climbed trees ; they followed after. He
had a cross-gun ; they got him and Loren to help fit them out in
the same way, and I painted in capitals along the side of mine its
name, ** Defiance,'' while Mary put on hers, plain ** Bang Up ! "
After awhile he had a real gun and shot muskrats, teal, and once
a long-legged loon. We fired the gun by ** special permit," with
mother looking on, but were forbidden to go hunting and did n't
care to, anyway. Once, however, Oliver ** dared" me to walk
around the pasture ahead of him and his double-barreled gun
when it was loaded and both triggers lifted. This I did, which
was most foolhardy, and we two ** ne'er-do-weels," whose secret
no one knew but Mary, came home to find her watching at the
gate with tear-stained face, and felt so ashamed of ourselves that
we never repeated the sin — for it was nothing less. Oliver was
famous at milking cows; his sisters learned the art, sitting beside
him on three-legged stools, but never carried it to such perfection
as he, for they were very fond of milk and he could send a stream
straight into their mouths, which was greater ftm than merely
playing a tuneful tattoo into a tin pail, so they never reached
distinction in the latter art. They did, however, train the cat to
sit on the cow's back through milking time. Oliver could har-
ness a horse in just about three minutes ; his sisters learned to do
the same, and knew what *'hames" and '*tugs" and *' hold-
backs" were, as well as *' fetlock, " *'hock," and ** pastern."
There were just four things he liked that we were not allowed
to share — hunting, boating, riding on horseback and * 'going swim-
ming." But at this distance it looks to this narrator as if
hunting was what he would better not have done at all, and for
the rest, it was a pity that ** our folks " were so afraid "the two
forest nymphs " might drown, that they didn't let them learn
Boy Comrades, 43
how not to — ^which boating and swimming lessons would have
helped teach ; and as for horseback-riding, it is one of the most
noble sports on earth for men and women both. We proved it so
when (after the calf-taming episode) it was permitted us, by the
intercession of our mother, who had been a fine rider in her
younger years.
Happy the girls of the period who practice nearly every out-
door sport that is open to their brothers ; wear gymnastic suits in
school, flee to the country as soon as vacation comes, and have
almost as blessed a time as we three children had in the old days
at Forest Home. It is good for boys and girls to know the same
things, so that the former shall not feel and act so overwise. A
boy whose sister knows all about the harness, the boat, the gym-
nastic exercise, will be far more modest, genial and pleasant to
have about. He will cease to be a tease and learn how to be a
comrade, and this is a great gain to him, his sister, and his wife
that is to be.
Here are some bits from journals kept along through the .
years. They are little more than hints at every-day affairs, but,
simple as they sound, they give glimpses of real life among the
pioneers.
From Mary's :
Prank said we might as well have a ship, if we did live on shore, so we
took a hen-coop pointed at the top, put a big plank across it and stood up,
one at each end, with an old rake handle apiece to steer with. Up and
down we went, slow when it was a calm sea and fast when there was a storm,
till the old hen clucked and the chickens all ran in, and we had a lively
time. Prank was captain and I was mate. We made out charts of the sea
and rules about how to navigate when it was good weather, and how when
it was bad. We put up a sail made of an old sheet, and had great fun till I
fell off and hurt me.
To-day Frank gave me half her dog. Frisk, that she bought lately, and
for her pay I made a promise which mother witnessed, and here it is :
** I, Mary Willard, promise never to touch anything l)ang or being upon
Frank Willard's stand and writing-desk which father gave her. I promise
never to ask, either by speaking, writing or signing, or in any other way,
any person or body to take off or put on an3rthing on said stand and desk
without special permission from said F. W. I promise never to touch any-
thing which may be in something upon her stand and desk. I promise
never to put anything on it or in an3rthing on it I promise, if I am writing
or doing anything else at her desk, to go away the minute she tells me. If
I break this promise I will let the said F. W. come into my room and go to
44 Drops into Poetry and Tears,
my trunk, or go into any place where I keep my things, and take anything
of mine she likes. All this I promise unless entirely different arrangements
are made. These things I promise upon my most sacred honor.**
Mother says Frank liked to walk on top of the fence, and to chop wood
with a broken ax handle, and to get Oliver's hat while he was doing hij
sums, and put it on her head and go out to the bam.
I've made a picture of the house Frank was bom in — mother helped, of
course ; she always does. I was bom in Oberlin, and that's a nicer town than
Frank's. I remember Mr. Bronson and Mr. Frost — they were students in
Oberlin, and boarded at our house. I guess it's the very first thing I do re-
member— ^how they made us little rag dolls auv! drew ink faces on them, and
we really thought they were nice ; but we should n't now, I know, for my
doll Anna is as big as a real little girl, and father painted her with real paint
and mother fastened on real hair, and I made her clothes just like mine; but
she is a rag doll all the same, only she's good, and not proud like a wax doll.
Mr. Carver and Miss Sherbum went with us from Oberlin to Wisconsin.
They were both good Christians, and Mr. C. often led in prayer at family
worship ; but when he killed our puppies (though father told him to) I
thought he was a sort of awful man.
From mine :
I once thought I would like to be Queen Victoria's Maid of Honor ;
then I wanted to go and live in Cuba ; next I made up my mind that I would
be an artist ; next, that I would be a mighty hunter of the prairies. But
now I suppose I am to be a music teacher — ** simply that and nothing more."
When it rained and filled the stove so full of water, standing right out
on the ground, that mother could n't even boil the kettle for tea, we did n't
think it very funny. Mother hadn't any money to get us Christmas pres-
ents ; father was sick in bed with ague, and yet we hung up our stockings,
and Oliver put his.boot strap over the front door knob. So mother stirred
around and got two false curls she used to wear when it was the fashion to
wear them on a comb, and put one in my stocking and one in Mary's, with
little sea-shells that she had kept for many years, also an artificial flower
apiece ; to Oliver she gave a shell and Pollock's ** Course of Time." We
had n't a hired man, and mother and Ollie went out in the woods and
dragged in branches of trees to burn. We girls thought it great fun, but
father called it his ** Blue Christmas." Next day Oliver went to town and
hired a good, honest, Yankee fellow, whose name was John Lockwood.
Then we had Lewis Zeader, Thomas Gorry and his wife, and so on ; never
after that having to go it alone. I like farm life ; *' God made the country
and man made the town " — *' them's my sentiments."
I tried my hand at poetry. Here is a specimen written on
an occasion that afflicted me — almost to tears. A noble black
oak that grew near one of the dormer-windows of Forest Home
was heard straining and cracking in a high wind one night. It
was found to be so much injured that the order was given next
The Forest Monarch. 45
day to cut it down. This was a sort of tragedy, for father had
taught us to regard the trees as creatures almost human, and he
guarded those about the house and in the pastures as if they
bad been household pets. So when * * old Blackie ' ' was cut down,
Maiy and I were greatly wrought upon, and I penciled my
thoughts as follows :
TO AN OLD OAK.
RBCHNTI^Y PBI<I<ED AT PORKST HOME.
And so, old Monarch of the Forest, thou hast fallen !
Supinely on the ground thy giant limbs are laid ;
No more thou'lt rear aloft thy kingly head,
No more at eventide the chirping jay
Shall seek a shelter 'mid thy boughs or *mong them play.
No more the evening breeze shall through thy branches sigh,
For thou art dead. Ah, e*en to thee
How fearful 'twas to die !
Perhaps, ages ago, — for 'mong the centuries thou hast grown on, —
Some swarthy warrior of a race long past,
Some giant chieftain of an early day,
Beneath thy shade has rested from the chase,
And to thy gnarled trunk told some wild revenge.
Or gentle tale of love.
And in the dusk of the primeval times,
Some fair yotmg maid, perchance, to thee complained
Of vows unkept, or, in a happier mood.
With smile as innocent as e*er maid wore,
Has told to thee some simple happiness.
Scarce worth the telling, save that in her path
Joys were the flowers that by the weeds of care
Were overwhelmed.
Around thy base the forest children played
In days long passed away, and flowing now
In the dark River of Eternity.
The 3rears bat lately gone were waiting then to be ;
Time quickly sped, these years that were to be
Came, hastened by, and are no more ; with them,
Well pleased to go, my childish hours fled trait Vously,
Bearing to Shadeland holiest memories.
Telling of busy feet and happy heart.
Delighted eyes and all the unnumbered jo3rs
Given us but once — in Childhoo<]
Glomus were mine, old Tree !
Has the Tree a Spirit f
Biids have sung for me, flowers bright have bloomed
That had not, had I ne'er been bom to greet their beant;.
Skies wore their loveliest hues for me
Just as they do im turn for all that live,
And aa they will for happy hearts to come.
E'en when the tinj nnt that held thee first,
Dropt quietly into the rich, dark soil,
'Twaa in the plan of the great God of all,
That thy bri^t leaves, thy green crest lifted high.
Thy stnrdy tnink, and all thy noble rorm,
Should be, tome day far distant, loved by me ;
Should cause my eyes with joy to rest on thee.
And BO increase earth's gifts of God to me.
Than hast given this grace to many, thou hast granted it to me ;
But none, perhaps, besides me shall extol thy memory.
Stem Death, remorseless enemy, spares nothing that we love ;
Upon the cold, white snow to-night, lie boughs that waved above.
And I'm lonely, sad and silent, for I feel a friend is gone.
As 'mong thy great, dead boughs to-night,
I hear the strange wind moan.
Old Tree, hast thou a spirit f If so, we'll meet again !
I shall not give thee up yet, for I'll meet thee. Yonder— a/A^B t
Perchance thy leaves, etherealized, above me yet shall wave
When to bright Paradise I come, up from the gloomy grave !
So in this wistful, hopeful tone,
Farewell, old BUug of Forest Home.
CHAPTER II.
THE ARTISTS* CLUB.
In 1856 the greatest event occurred that we Forest Homers
had chronicled since the famous ** Founding of Fort City.*'
Father's only brother, who had married mother's sister, came
with his wife and our aunts Elizabeth and Caroline to "spy out
the land" and ** see how Josiah and his family had got along."
It was an unheard of thing for this quartette of Vermont-New
Yorkers to venture so far from home, and to our secret aston-
ishment they evinced no love for the Great West. "Josiah was
the only one that strayed," they said, and her sisters bemoaned
mother's long loneliness even more than she did herself, whose
isolation was, until her great bereavement came, the memorable
misfortune of her Ufe. But of all this her children knew practi-
cally nothing, so sunny was her spirit and so merged was her
life in theirs. Our " nice uncle Zophar " was a revelation to us
children. He was tall, like father, and had the same dignified
ways, but v/as more caressing toward his nieces and had one of
the kindest faces, and yet the firmest in the world. He was a
Wliig and father a Democrat, at the time of his visit, so there
was no end of argument about Webster and Clay, and the prin-
ciples they represented on the one hand, and the "grand old
Jeffersonian doctrines" on the other. He was a Congregation-
alist and father a Methodist, so there was no end of talk about
their differences in theology, and uncle Zophar liked to quote the
Ibe, "A church without a bishop and a state without a king."
But the old stone church, where both of them had once belonged,
the old stone school-house where they had been pupils, the old
neighbors who had come with them from Vermont, on runners
across the snow, about 18 15, these were subjects of which we
ne\er tired, especially when the sparkle of aunt Caroline's fun
and the bright recollections of aunts Abigail and Elizabeth were
added to the conversation.
(47)
48 Mother Goes East
These things seemed more engrossing to us than all the
wonders of the New West to them. When, in a few weeks, they
returned to the old home near Rochester, N. Y., where nearly all
our relatives of the last and present generations have remained,
they insisted on taking mother with them, for they said, ** Mary
has had a hard time of it here on the farm, a steady pull of ten
years, and she ought to have rest and a change."
After this lovely visit with our dear relatives it was very
hard, not only to have them all go at once, but, most of all, to
have them take our mother with them, who had never, that we
could remember, spent a night away from us. A big carriage
was hired to carry them to Belvidere, where they would take the
cars ; good-bys were said, with many falling tears, and away they
went, leaving little Mary with her face all swollen from crying
and her elder sister biting her lips very hard for fear she would
follow suit, and so make a bad matter worse.
**You asked dear, beautiful mamma to bring you a box,'*
sobbed Mary. ** You thought about a box when she was going
away off,'* and she cried aloud.
** Well, I was sorry enough to have her go," was my philo-
sophic answer, ** but since she had to leave us I thought I might
as well have a little something when she came back.'* All the
same, Oliver and Mary never ceased poking fun at me about that
box, which after all I did not get !
And now it was my father's turn to play consoler to his
bereft ** young hopefuls," as he often called us. Well did he
fulfill his new task. Instead of going to town almost every day
he stayed at home most of the time, for he and mother never
believed in putting their children in care of what he called ** out-
side parties. " He made each of us girls a tall, cone-shaped,
paper cap, which Mary trimmed with peacock feathers and symr
bols of hunting, according to father's directions. He fitted us out
with fresh arrows, taught us how to ** fly a dart," made a won-
derful kite and sent it up over the fields, imitated perpetual
motion by the ** saw-boy" that he carved with his ** drawing
knife, " balanced with a stone, and set at work with a wooden
saw. He went with us to watch the sheep, and to carry lunch
to the men at work in the fields, took us out to ride when he
had to go on * * school business, ' ' went- with us to visit the Whit-
Sutherland's Book Store. 49
mans and our dear teacher, Miss Burdick, — ^now ** married and
settled " ' in Janesville as Mrs. Gabriel L. Knox — and good Mrs.
Hannah Hunter, one of mother's best friends in town. He left
us at Sutherland's book store while he did his errands, and that
was our delight, for the very presence of books was a heart's ease,
so that always, next to our own home, we felt at home where
books were kept, for we knew the wisest and kindest men and
women who had lived were there in thought. Mr. Sutherland
was a dear firiend of father's. My big ** History of All Nations "
had been bought from him in monthly parts, mother paying for
it out of her ** butter and ^g^ money,'* that I might have it on
my birthday. Mr. Sutherland would let us go about at pleasure
among his handsome shelves and counters, in that cool and quiet
place — ** more like the woods than any other that we know," and
•* so diflferent from those horrid stores where you buy dresses and
gloves," I used to say.
That summer we had a new girl, Margaret Ryan, by name, for
Bridget wanted rest. She was but eighteen years old, and great
company for Mary and me. She was true and kind, very intelli-
gent, and we became much attached to her and gave her piano
lessons, read aloud to her while she was at her work, and never
learned an3rthing from her that was not good. So our memories
of ** Margie " were always pleasant. Mother was so considerate
of her helpers that she seldom changed, but in our twelve years
on the farm we had perhaps thirty or more men and women with
OS, at different times, some from Ireland, others from England,
and a few from America, while of Germans and Norwegians there
was a large representation. But Catholic or Protestant, Lutheran
or Methodist, we found good hearts in all, and made common
cause with every one, teaching them English, giving them writ-
ing lessons, and never receiving anything but loyalty and kind-
ness in return. If the foreign population of this country was
fairly represented at Forest Home, it is neither drunken, immoral
nor irreligious, but warmly responds to every helpful word and
deed, and can be Americanized if Americans will but be true to
themselves and these new friends.
In the loneliness of mother's absence, I began to write more
than ever, though I had kept a journal since I was twelve years
old. Climbing to my high perch in the old oak tree, I would
50 *' Rupert Melville and His Comrades ^
write down the day's proceedings, scribble sketches and verses,
and I even began a novel entitled, ** Rupert Melville and his
Comrades: A Story of Adventure.** Mary, too, kept a journal
and competed for a prize in the ** Children's Column** of The
Prairie Farmer. I tried for the premium offered for the best
poem at the County Fair, but it was won by Mrs. E. S. Kellogg,
the Janesville poet. This did not, however, discourage me at
all ; I wrote the harder, took my essays to Mrs. Hodge, who had
fine taste and was an uncommonly good writer herself, and made
up my mind that ** write I could and should and would, *'
My novel was a standing joke in the family. I worked at it
** off and on,** but chiefly the former. I had so many characters
that Oliver said ** for the life of him he didn't see how I expected
to get them all decently killed off inside of a thousand pages. ' '
Every day when my regular chores about the house were done,
which took only an hour or two, I got at work and insisted on
doing at least one page, from which it is plain that I had no
great inspiration in my undertaking. Perhaps nobody appre-
ciated it more than Lizzie Hawley, a bright young dressmaker
from Janesville, to whom I was wont to read each chapter aloud,
as fast as it was written. Sometimes, since, I have wondered if
the main reason why Lizzie listened so dutifully was not that she
had no choice in the matter ; there was the reader, and there was
the story, and the busy needlewoman could not get away.
Perhaps father's fitting us out with hunting implements
during mother's absence had something to do with the writing of
this story. It is more likely, however, that the irrepressible
spirit of his two daughters, drove him to allowing them to hunt,
for we seemed to have developed a passion in that direction
stronger than ever, about those days. Especially was this true
of m|2. I had got hold of a story book, **The Prairie Bird, "
another called "Wild Western Scenes," and a third, '*The
Green-Mountain Boys," and secretly devoured all three without
leave or license. They had produced on my imagination the
same effect that they would upon a boy's. Above all things in
earth or sky I wanted to be, and meant to be, a mighty hunter.
The country I loved, the town I hated and would none of it.
" Fort City " and all its belongings were no longer to be thought
of as an adequate ** sphere."
The Artists^ Club. 51
Mary shared this enthusiasm in her own more quiet way.
She had read with me, ** Robinson Crusoe" and the ** Swiss
Family Robinson," to neither of which father objected, because
they were not ** miserable love stories," as he said — ^for at these
he drew the line firmly and would not allow them in the house.
But something artistic must be connected with all of Mary's
plays, and I was strongly inclined that way, too, so we started
two clubs, one called **The Artists," and the other, **The Rus-
tic," for the purpose of combining our hunting and sketching
ideas. From some carefully preserved documents the rules of
these two are given :
I^WS OF THE ARTISTS* Cl^UB.
1. The officers shall be a president and secretary.
2. The meetings shall be held twice a week (unless unforeseen occur-
rences prevent), and shall be on Tuesday and Saturday afternoons or even-
ings, as the secretary shall direct.
3. The object of the meeting shall be the mutual improvetnent of the
artists 'who attend. The occupations of the Club at these meetings shall be
reading articles on art, reading compositions and making speeches upon the
same sabject (never on anything else), drawing, painting, modeling in clay,
conversing, singing, and encoiu*aging each other. The Club must always
open with a song.
4. There shall be an exhibition held on the last day of each month, at
which prizes shall be awarded to those artists whose works are the best. The
person to decide upon this shall be Mrs. Willard, and Mr. Willard when
she is away, and the meetings shall always be held up-stairs in the studio.
5. There shall be twenty honorary members. (Here follows a list of
every nncle, aunt and cousin that we two girls were blessed with, and Miss
Bordick from outside the family.)
6. There shall always be something good to eat and the president shall
feck after this matter, in return for which she shall have the seat of honor,
and make the first speech, etc. She shall also get things ready when the
Cub goes on an excursion ; shall see that the dog is haltered, and take a
little food along for him as well as for the rest ; shall get the gun ready and
the box in which things are carried.
7. Becanse it is hard work, the members shall take turns once a week
lii being president.
8. If any member makes or repairs any article belonging to the Club,
he sfaall*be paid one lialf the value of the same by the other member.
9. If one member goes off alone, he shall prepare his own outfit, and
kt Marvaiet Ryari Ilhow of it so that folks need n't be scared.
We ibe members of this Club, pledge ourselves to keep faithfully all
these, our own Iaw»- Frank Wii,i.ard.
Mary E. Wii,i,ard.
52 A Hunter's Costume.
We fixed up a studio behind the dormer-windows, by taking
old quilts and making a partition. We improvised an easel,
though I had never seen one, and was forced to pattern it after
pictures in books. We had benches, wooden mallets and chisels
for working in clay. We pinned up all the engravings we could
get on the quilt partition, and added our own rude drawings in
pencil, pen and ink and water-colors. We copied drawings that
father and mother had done in Oberlin, hung up our home-made
flags, and arranged all the queer collection of ** pretty stones,'*
Indian arrow-heads, curious insects, etc., which we had inher-
ited fi-om Oliver, and gathered for ourselves. So we had quite a
studio.
The very first thing we set about in the Art Club was design-
ing a * * Hunter' s Costume. ' ' No doubt I had * ' Rupert Melville, ' '
the hero of my story, in mind, for I often declared that **if I
could n't go West and be a real hunter, somebody should, and
I'd see that he did."
We agreed that it must be "none of your soft, city clothes,"
but **must stand wear and tear, not take forever to put on, and
be snake-proof" So I designed coat, trousers, hat and mittens of
calfskin, and boots of cowhide. The original drawings of these,
now in my possession, are in high colors, with emphatic directions
for the manufacture.
It was natural that two amateur hunters who could design
such a ** coat of mail" should have their own opinions about
rural sports, and the following copy of their plans casts some light
upon that subject :
RX7I3S AND RSGUI^ATIONS
OPTHB
RUSTIC CLUB.
ORGANIZED THE THIRTY-FIRST DAY OP JT7I,Y, 1854.
God made the country,
Man made the town,
The country is our choice.
1. The object of this Club is to give its members the enjoyment of
hunting, fishing^ and trapping, with other rural pleasures, at once exciting
and noble.
2. We, the members of this Club, hereby choose Fred as our dog,
although once in a while we may take Carlo ; he can go when he has senae
enough.
Sheep Bell and Dipper Handle. 53
3. The meetings shall be held (after a few days) every Wednesday and
Satorday, at snch times as shall be deemed convenient and proper. The
first one shall be held in P.'s half of the studio, and the next in M.'8 half,
and so on.
4. The object of these meetings is to relate any anecdote that pertains
to hunting, in any of its branches ; tell what great things we have done our-
selves, or that Oliver or Loren or the Hodge boys have, or Daniel Boone or
anybody else.
5. For hunting pmposes, the names of the founders of this Club shall
be Bowman and Bonny, and, as we may get a good yf2Lys apart when we are
out hunting, one of us will carry an old dipper handle to serve as a hunter's
bugle, and the other a sheep bell for the same purpose, and we will have the
following arrangement of
SIGNAI^S.
When Bowman gives-
Two blasts, that means, *' Bonny, where are you? "
Three blasts, ** Come here, quick**
Pour blasts, ** Meet me at Robin Hood's tree."
Five blasts, " Meet me on the river bank."
Six blasts, " Let's go to the house."
Eight blasts, "Yes."
Ten blasts, "No."
Twelve blasts, " Oh, doT
When Bonny gives —
One shake, '* Bowman, where are you?"
Two shakes, " Come here, quick.**
Three shakes, " Meet me at the tree."
Four shakes, " Meet me on the river bank."
Five shakes, "Yes."
Six shakes, " Let's go home."
Ten shakes, **No."
Twelve shakes, " Oh, do!**
N. B.— Any signal repeated over and over means that you request ^xxtnr
^Vluiq^ very eamesUy. fSiimedl
LOigncaj BOWMAN AND BONNV.
No doubt many of our ideas were gained from Charles Oif-
&>rd, of Milwaukee, a nursery man by profession, and an amateur
artist of rare abilities, who was father's friend and used to come
in summer to shoot prairie-chickens. He had been educated at
Brown University and Oberlin, and had traveled in Europe. His
brother was S. R. Gifford, the famous landscape artist, whose
pictures of Bg5T)tian scenery are so generally known. Charles
Gifibrd might have been as famous under equally good condi-
tioos. He was a remarkable man, and we looked upon him as a
54 Singing for Father,
sort of prince, and when he sent by express a great book of en-
gravings, with some of his own sketches and of his brother's, we
thought it the red-letter day of all, in its beautiful happenings.
(Happen comes from **haps'* and so does ** happiness.*') He
sent us Longfellow's ** Evangeline " — the first long poem we ever
read — and it was delighted in by all the club, and so impressed
me that years after, with my first ** school money" I bought a
picture of Evangeline by Faed, and to this day keep it hanging
on the walls of my room. We made a scrap-book of our draw-
ings and such pictures as we could get, in feeble imitation of Mr.
Giffbrd's elegant one.
Miss Helen Clough, of Janesville, was also an artist, and
with her and her sister we held sweet counsel as to how shading
was done and what could be accomplished in India ink, at which
work Miss Clough was an adept.
Nothing pleased father so much as to have his two daughters
sing for him when the day's work was done. He took great
pride in our musical education, and spent much money upon it.
His idea was that girls and women were to find their sphere in
the home, and not elsewhere, and that the more accomplished
they could be, the better. I did not take kindly to this, but
lovely Mary did, and was her father's favorite beyond all compe-
tition, though he was very fond of all his children. Mary had a
sweet, pure, soprano voice, and I a good, clear alto, hence we sang
well together, and Mary was excellent at keeping the time, so.
she came to be the one who played the accompaniments. We
would sing thirty songs in an evening, and often father furnished
the bass, for he **read notes" and was a good singer. Mother
was, too, and would help Mary on the ** air " when not too busy
with household duties. One of the most pathetic songs was
'* The Withered Tree":
'* I'll sing yon a song, bat not of love,
For love's bright day is past with me,
But one that shall more trnthful prove,
I'll sing you the song of the withered tree."
Folks used to laugh as the fiiesh, young voices sang these
plaintive words, but I invariably answered, **It will come true
with me ; I'm sure of it."
For one thing I was always sorry — my voice was spoiled for
<<
O Fly to the Prairie!'' 55
singing soprano, by beginning too early. My father's mother
had the finest voice in the county, and it seemed as if her grand-
daughter inherited a little of its power. I could go up very high
on the octave and father delighted to hear me. One evening I
was singing '*Mary, mavoumeen/' when, at the highest note,
my voice broke utterly and I almost cried outright. From that
day I never could sing ** air '* with comfort or success, and I am
fiiUy convinced that parents ought not to urge the voices of their
children, as it is almost sure to spoil them for singing at all.
Nothing pleased me in those days like Mrs. Hemans' song :
" I dream of all things free ;
or a gallant, gallant bark,
That sweeps through storm and sea
Like an arrow to its mark ;
Of a chief his warriors leading,
Of an archer's greenwood tree ;
My heart in chains is bleeding,
But I dream of all things free.*'
And this prairie song :
O fly to the prairie, sweet maiden, with me,
'Tis as green and as wide and as wild as the sea.
O'er its broad, silken bosom the summer winds glide,
And waves the wild grass in its billowy pride.
The fawns in the meadow fields fearlessly play ;
Away to the chase, lovely maiden, away !
There comes incense pleasant on gales from the west,
As bees from the prairie-rose fly to their rest.
Hurrah for the prairie ! no blight on its breeze,
No mist from the mountains, no shadows from trees ;
It brings incense loaded on gales from the west.
When bees from the prairie-rose fly to their rest
As Mary grew older she developed wonderful sensitiveness
of conscience, and although so much better than her sister, she
used to come to me with every little act, and say, ** Frank, do
you think that is right? '* and if I said, ** O yes, that's all right,
Tm sure," she would go away satisfied. But she would take me
to task very plainly when I did wrong. One of the customs that
grew out of this was started by my saying one night, as we two
were snugly tucked away in bed in our own pretty little room,
''Maiy, would n't it be a good plan for us to ask each other's
56 ^^ Forgive Me ^ and Thank You.**
forgiveness the very last thing before we go to sleep, for any word
or deed that was n*t just sisterly and kind, and to thank each
other for everything that was kind and sisterly ? "
** Oh, yes, that's what I should be so glad of, not only to do
this to you, Frank, but to everybody, if I could,** the gentle girl
exclaimed with joy. So it was agreed upon, and became a cus-
tom between us two, who were as one heart and soul in our mutual
love and confidence, only we used, after awhile, instead of saying
it all, to say, **for short," **I ask your forgiveness, and thank
you,*' to which the answer was, ** I freely forgive you, and wel-
come.** And this we did until, after ** nineteen beautiful years,*'
the last night on earth came to her, and I ** asked her forgiveness
and thanked her'* as of old, just before her sweet young spirit
passed away to heaven.
Never was mortal welcomed home more lovingly than dear
mother, when she came back to us after that summer* s absence.
To be sure, ** father had made it splendid for us,** so we told
her, but then, the house had but one divinity, and as we knelt
in prayer, that deep, motherly heart carried to the Heart that
** mothers '* all the world, its love, its trust and adoration. She
did not bombard heaven with requests, as many do, but **she
took a deal for granted,** as Loren used to say.
**Thou hast done us only good," so she prayed who had
been bereft of the tenderest of mothers, and had lost out of her
arms her loveliest child; **Thou dost brood over us, as the
mother bird broods over her helpless little ones," so she prayed,
who had known much about **the slings and arrows of out-
rageous fortune**; **we are often tired of ourselves, but Thy
heart is never weary of us ; Thou hast made the world so lovely
that we might love it, and Thou art preparing heaven for us
every day, even as we, by Thy blessed help, O Christ, are try-
ing to learn its language and its manners so that we shall feel
at home when we reach heaven.*'
Mother's prayers and singing always made her children
glad. In the wild thunder-storms of that new West, I was
wont to hide my face upon her knee and say, ** Sing * Rock of
Ages.' " Somehow I was never afraid while mother's soul was
lifted up to God.
She questioned us about our manners, which, as she soon
A Habit of Mindfulness. 57
perceived, had fallen away to some extent. She made us walk
with books upon our heads so as to learn to carry ourselves well,
and she went with us through the correct manner of giving and
receiving introductions, though, to be sure, ** there was nobody
to be introduced,'* as OUver said. *' But there will be,** replied
mother, with her cheerful smile.
We had a habit of mindfulness that was inherited from our
pioneer ancestors. It is said that people who have moved away
from their early homes love them better than those who stay,
because of the ** home-ache,'* as the Germans call it, that comes to
them so often. In Oregon, where for so long a time the pioneers
were cut oflF from close association with the outside world, they
have the reputation of being a very gentle sort of folk, extremely
considerate as neighbors, and specially kind to animals. In the
summer of 1883, when the Northern Pacific railroad reached them,
one often heard such remarks as, ** 1*11 go back to the old place in
Massachusetts on the first through train east,** or, **I*m just
pining for a sight of the old school-house in Vermont. 1*11
make tracks for the cars, soon as ever they heave in sight, and
will go to see my folks.'*
Well, as Wisconsin pioneers, we were very fond of old-time
talk of places and of people, and were never more interested than
when father and mother around the evening lamp would dis-
course of incidents in the past, somewhat after this fashion :
Mother: ** I don*t want our children ever to forget the story
that they've heard so often about the patriotism of my grand-
father, Nathaniel Thompson, of Holdemess, New Hampshire.**
** Hurrah for Grandfather Nathaniel — in whom there was no
guile ! " responded Oliver, looking up from Goldsmith*s '*History
of England," while I said, ** 1*11 make a note of that,** and Mary
began to draw her brave ancestor in Continental costume in the
sketch-book before her. •
*' And /want my children always to remember,** said father,
**that their great-grandfather, Elijah Willard, was a Baptist
minister forty years in the parish of Dublin, near Keene, New
Hampshire ; and that their ancestors helped to settle Concord,
Mass., where Emerson, Hawthorne and other literati live. Some
day I hope they'll go to visit Major Solomon Willard*s old farm
>s
58 ** Afraid of Snakes and Lightning. ^^
** I don*t believe I'm a worthy descendant of my great-grand-
father, for I*m afraid of snakes and lightning, and most of all, of
the dark,'' said I in a bewailing tone.
** Oh, that's all foolishness ! you'll outgrow it, my daughter ;
it's only a case of nerves," said father, consolingly. ** You were
such another screamer when a baby that I used to say to myself,
as I walked back and forth with you in the night season, ' This
young one is in duty bound to amount to something sometime,
to pay for all the trouble that she makes. ' "
** Yes, and for the blood she pricked from her forefinger when
Elizabeth Hield and mother tried to teach her to sew," remarked
my brother, adding, ** But she did make a * sampler,' though, in
silk, and I shall never be contented till it's framed and hung up
as the eighth wonder of the world."
** Well, she did it, my son, and you know my motto is, ' Do
it and be done with it,' " said mother, always ready to defend the
weaker side.
** I wish Mrs. Marks and Julia would ever come to see us,"
said I, changing the subject ; "she is such a good woman, and
* David Marks, the boy preacher,' was father's nearest friend when
we lived in Oberlin."
*'Yes, I have greatly missed Mrs. Marks," replied mother,
quietly, bending over her "sewing- work," for she never com-
plained of the loneliness from which she had so keenly suffered,
except to stir the aspirations of her children. For this purpose
she would sometimes say :
"I had many ambitions, but I've buried myself on this
farm — disappearing from the world to reappear, I trust, in my
children at some future day."
** So you shall, mother ; see if you don't ! " we used to shout
in glee.
** But thab means hard w^ork — investing your time, instead
of spending it ; earnest ways, and living up to the old Scotch
proverb, * It's dogged as does it,' " mother would reply.
"Why is anybody afraid of the dark?" I asked, in one of
these gatherings around the evening lamp.
" Because he does n't know and trust God enough," was the
reply. " If you can just once get it into your heart as well as
your head that the world lies in God's arms like a baby on its
Johnnie Hodge'' s Socks. 59
mother's breast, you'll never mind the dark again ; I don't ; I'm
not afraid to go all over the house and into the cellar when it is
dark as a pocket. I know I am infinitely safe always and every-
where. ' *
*• But, mother, I have lots of imagination, and I picture out
things in the dark."
** Why not turn your power of picture-making to a better use
and always keep in mind that you are really never in the dark at
all — ^the bright, cheery, twinkling stars are glistening with their
kind light upon your path every minute of the day and night.
UTiat if a few^ clouds get between — the stars are there all the
same — fix your ej^es on them and go ahead."
** I remember," said Mary, once on a time, ''that Frank used
to go without butter, and father gave her a cent a week for it,
which I guess is the reason she liked it so well when she grew
older. And I can say the pretty verses that Mrs. Hodge sent
hack when Frank carried the little pair of socks that mother had
fant fir John, one Christmas morning." Then she repeated these
' ' I thank you, little Frankie,
You're very kind to me.
And by and by I promise
Your little friend to be.
•* Your nice and pretty present
Keeps my little toes so warm,
And makes me good and pleasant
In all the winter storm.
•• I'm such a little boy, you know.
And oh, how I would cry
If I should freeze my tiny toes.
But I sha'n't now — good-by."
"All the same, Frank never set a stitch in those socks,*'
Rurked my t>rothe):.
••That's a fact, but I gave them to her to give to Johnnie,
ad I had a right to, had n*t I ? ** replied mother.
" Do you remember Ozias, the clerk in an Elyria store, who
Bsed to be so kind to us and give us pretty ribbons ? " chipped in
Maiy ; * • he w^as as generous as nice Mr. Hamilton Richardson,
a Jaoesville, ivho gave us the books of stories about Greece and
and Mr. Elihu Washburn who brought us the pretty
6o President Finney ** Thunders and Lightens,**
poetry books. Don*t you remember our little book-case that Frank
made out of an old box set on end, papered on the outside, and
with shelves put across, where we kept our books, in the little
cubby-place under the stairs, that we called our 'corner room,*
and how it was as dark as night except when we had a lighted
candle in it, and how Oliver bought us a pretty set of little wooden
dishes that we used to set out on a stool, with a white handker-
chief for table-cover ; and then the handsome pewter dishes father
gave us at Christmas, and how Prank made an X on her plates
and cups, to tell them from mine ? and the city that father got
for us another time that was cut out of little blocks, and the big
doll, Anna, and'* —
"Do stop and take breath or you'll be struck of aheap,"
exclaimed Oliver, putting his fingers into his ears.
"Well, let's see if you can do any better at remembering
than your sister,'* said his mother ; "just put on your thinking-
cap and try."
" Well, I can go back along the circle of years," said Oliver,
"to that distant period when Prof. James Dascomb and Prof.
George Whipple, of Oberlin College, came to see us in our
pioneer house of one room, and clambered up to the garret on a
ladder, telling next morning they never had such solid chunks
of 'tired nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep,' in all their lives
before. I can remember President Finney's preaching in the
Oberlin church, and how he moved about like a caged lion on
that great platform, his light blue eyes blazing under those
shaggy, white eyebrows, and how scared I was of my bad be-
havior when he preached."
"You don't mean that you behaved badly when he preached?"
smartly put in his sister Frank.
" No interruptions, let Oliver spin on. I loved those days
and I like him to recall them," said mother. '
"And I remember how Frank, when four years old, took
to her heels and ran away across lots, creeping through the fence,
and frightening mother almost to death, and father, too, so that
he went and looked into the well and cistern to see if she had
tumbled in, while I raced around like a crazy Jack, and dis-
covered the little minx running as if on a wager, breathing like a
steamboat, and bound to keep on, so that I had to chase her up
Un^ Zophar's Appia.
6i
for dear life, and ^irly cany hex home in my arms to her heart-
broken ma."
" Enough said under that head," I remarked, not looking up
from my book, for this exploit was one I did n't glory in,
•"That will do, for 'I remember,'" said mother, dipping
the thread at the end of the seam in her sewing-work. " Sup-
pose you go down, Loren" (for all the evening the boy had been
a docile listener, while he carved a new cross-gun for little Maty),
' ' and get us some of the apples that the children's Uncle Zophar
sent from the old place."
CHAPTER III.
LITTLE BOATS SET OUT FROM SHORE.
The first great break in our lives was when Oliver went to
Beloit, fourteen miles down the river, to finish his preparatory
studies and enter college. He had rarely spent an evening away
from home in all his life until he was eighteen. Busy with books
and papers ** around the evening lamp,** sometimes ** running a
(writing) race'* with me, going into the dining-room to teach
Mike and other **farm hands'* to read and write, cipher and
spell, busy with his chores and sports and farm work, Oliver,
with his perpetual good-humor, was a tremendous institution to
have about, and the shadow was heavy when he first started out
fix)m dear old Forest Home into the world. He was to board at
the home of Dr. Lathrop, who was Professor of Natural Science
at Beloit, and whose wife was Rev. Dr. Clement's daughter and
mother's cousin.
With his easy-going, happy nature and his dear love for the
old place, my brother would have lived on contentedly all his
days, I think, a well-to-do, industrious, and yet book-loving
farmer. But mother gave her only son no rest. He was to go
to college, carve out a future for himself, be a minister, perhaps,
that was her dearest wish and father's for the most gifted of their
children.
From the first, we had gone regularly to Beloit to " Com-
mencement," that great day when the people gathered in the
grove, and President Chapin, so stately and so handsome, sat in
the midst on the gayly festooned platform, with noble looking
Professor Emerson and the other ** college dons" beside him.
We had heard Horace White, now a famous journalist, in New
York City, pronounce his graduation speech, and I hardly knew
which most impressed my fancy, his address on ** Aristocracy," or
his lemon-colored gloves. We had rejoiced in the brass band on
these occasions, and hummed its airs for a whole year after-
(63)
The Women Folks Left Behind, 63
ward. And now ** OUie '* was to go, and sometime he would be
a port of all this pageant, but not the girls. This gave to me
those **long, long thoughts" of which my cousin Morilla Hill
had read to me in a classical book :
** A boy*s will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
(Only, when she read it, I always said ** a girl's will.'*)
So the new suit of clothes was made, the trunk packed with
ever>' good and pleasant thing that we could think of, even to a
little note from Mar>', *' just to surprise him when he's lonesome,"
and I made a pen-wiper for him — one of my very few achieve-
ments in that line. Mother put in his Bible, Watts **On the
Mind,'* and Beecher's ^^Lectin-es to Young Men," and Bridget
got up such a dinner of roast turkey as made him sigh at thought
of how much too much he had eaten, as well as at thought of
how much too little he should get in future of flavors from the
bounteous old farm.
Father and he moimted the big wagon, stored with bed, stove,
etc., for his room, and that precious new trunk ; crack went the
whip, rotmd rolled the wheels, and Oliver was gone for aye !
* * Does God want families to be broken up this way ? ' ' was
my quer\', as I watched them from the front piazza until my
brother's waving handkerchief was lost to view. **I don't be-
lieve He does, and it would be far better for Oliver and for me,
too, if we had gone together."
** Or, better still, if we could all go together, and you three
children still live on at home, until you had homes of your own,"
said mother gently, as we three women folks, feeling dreadfully
left behind, wiped our eyes and went in to help Bridget clear
away the dinner dishes.
Later, in one vacation time, Oliver went to yoke up his
'•steers," ^vhen one of them deliberately kicked him squarely
below the knee, and he fell to the ground with a broken leg — the
second in the family, for father had had the same mishap at the
Count>' Fair. Mike and Edward got a board, lifted him upon it,
brought him in and laid him on his bed, while Bridget followed
with her apron over her head, crying aloud, and his mother and
sisters threw the harness upon Jack, and got him ready for Mike
to drive to town to bring Dr. Chittenden. Our faces were white,
64 First Sight of " the East:'
but we did n't cry at all, and as for Oliver, he, who never had but
this one accident, and was almost never ill, bore the long and
painful visitation like a philosopher. Indeed, his good-nature
never forsook him, but his jokes and quaint, original turns of
expression, made bright and pleasant every place he entered.
Carried to his room now, he lay there all through the heat of
summer, his devoted mother, for the first few nights after the
accident, never undressing, but remaining all night at his bed-
side, with her hand upon his, that he might not, by moving,
hazard the successful knitting of the bone. She was the most
famous nurse in all the region round about — so firm and gentle,
with resources for every emergency, and such a heart, full of cour-
age and good cheer, that I often said : ** I have yet to hear my
mother utter the first downcast word."
We girls read many books aloud to our brother that sum-
mer: " Don Quixote," " Gil Bias," the ** Dunciad, " ** GuUiver's
Travels," and others that he liked.
One autumn, when mother had gone East once more, this
time to take care of Oliver, who had been at Oberlin in school
and went down to Churchville, where all the ** relatives" lived,
because he fell ill, father told us on very short notice, to "pack
our trunk and be ready, for he was going East to see the folks,
and we might go along."
We girls had never been on the cars in our lives, except once,
to attend the State Fair at Milwaukee and spend a day or two
at * * Rosebank," Charles Gifford's home ; and no shriek of loco-
motive had disturbed the town of Janesville until ten years after
we came to live near there. So it was with an indescribable
twittering of heart and tongue that this great news was received.
Bridget set at work to get up " such a lunch as would make your
eyes glisten." Loren wondered how **we could bear to go off
and leave the old place " ; the Hodge children bemoaned our pro-
spective absence ; Professor and Mrs. Hodge helped us to plan and
pack the new trunk father had brought us. My only thought
was to get my pet manuscripts in, and Mary, while not forgetful
of the nice new clothes that father had provided, was specially
intent upon having her sketch-board and paints along.
Mike carried our happy trio to Afton, five miles down the
river, where we took the train, and in less than a night and a
1 " «
A Wonderful Fortnight, 65
day the 'Westerners were at Churchville, a pretty little place,
fourteen miles this side of Rochester, where lived nearly every
relative -we had in the world. Here we spent a wonderful fort-
night, all our kindred gathering in the home of each for a * * visit * *
lasting all day and well into the evening. The tables groaned
under the multiplied good things that a Monroe county farm
supplies, and young folks went by themselves for fun and fix>lic
outdoors and in, while older ones talked of what had been, and
rejoiced in all the good that was.
Father's smart, witty, old mother was living, as was mother's
&ther, so mighty in prayer and exhortation. Most of our cous-
ins had been to Oberlin, or else were going there to study, and
among them all, the best and most gifted was Charlotte Gilman,
about my age, and greatly loved and admired by her Western
cousin for her gifts of heart and mind and pen — for Charlotte
was looking forward to a literary career. We two girls had no
end of talks, going oflf at every opporttmity, with arms over each
other's shoulders, to plan for what we meant to be and do, while
Ohver, the young collegian, with his gay talk, kept his sturdy
young men cousins, Willard, Wright, and James, in roars of
laughter, as they all took care of the many horses at the bam,
or led at ** playing proverbs** with their bright young lady
cousins, Mary, Emily and Sarah. Our Mary was the universal
favorite, her chubby figure, smiling blue eyes, sweet voice, and
loving spirit, winning everybody. She liked to keep pretty near
her mother, whose absence she had so keenly felt. We went
over to Uncle Aaron's and Aunt Rebecca's, and fell in love with
our quiet, gentle Cousin Catharine ; listened with reverence to
the wise words of that bom philosopher, our Uncle James ; rode
behind Uncle John*s spanking team, and marveled at Aunt Hester
Ann's immaculate housekeeping ; doted on the two old home-
steads where father and mother were brought up — so staid and
roomy, so historic-looking in contrast to the West. We visited
the old stone school-house, where our parents had been pupils,
and went to meeting in the old stone church called *' The House
of God in Ogden,** because it was a union of denominations, and
could n't take the name of any.
We drove to Rochester to see the sights, and thought it the
beautiful of cities ; listened with delight to a hundred stories
66 Rivalry of East and West,
of the olden time, and how father had started out early for him-
self, and mother had taught hereabouts ** eleven siunmers and
seven winters," beginning when she was but fifteen.
We lamented the absence of Cousin Morilla Hill, a graduate
of Elmira Female College, who was our ideal of everything gifted
and good ; but take them for all in all, those four weeks when
Aunt Caroline's home was ours and we went visiting to Uncle
Zophar*s, Uncle Calvin and Aunt Maria's, Aunt Church's, Aunt
Hill's, Cousin John Hill's and all the rest, seemed to us like a
merry-go-round that left us almost dizzy with delight. And
when we took the train for home, waving good-bys fix)m the
platform to our dear kindred, and seeing the pretty village with
bridge and creek, white church spires and fair fields, fade out of
view, we two girls were for a little while quite inconsolable.
*^*When we went East" was the most important date in
history from that time on for years. The world was wider than
we had thought, and our security in the old home-nest was never-
more so great as it had been previous to this long flight.
During the quiet evenings at Forest Home we used often to
compare views concerning East and West. Father had carried
to New York a box of the rich, coal-black soil of the Forest
Home farm, and told our cousin, Willard Robinson, that the
Eastern soil in the fields and on the roads looked **light-com-
plexioned, thin and poor." ** Never you inind," retorted the
sturdy young farmer, who was Oliver's favorite, '* you must judge
by the crops and the yield per acre. Yes, and the price, too ; we
can beat you on that, every time, and when it comes to wheat, we
beat the world at that product, as you know."
The Westerners' had to admit that there was no such variety of
foliage in Wisconsin as in Monroe county, N. Y. ; that stone fences
were more solid than **sod and ditch," or ** stake and rider," or
** log on end," or ** rail " fences, such as theirs ; that the homes
had a general look of thrift, snugness and well-to-do-ness not
found on the prairies ('* except ours," stoutly urged Oliver), and
that ** it was wonderfully nice to have a cellar full of apples." I
ran a race on apple eating with my ** York State " Cousin Sarah,
and reached in one day a figure so high that it would hardly do
to tell.
I admitted that the landscape at the East was more cozy, but
Our Numerous Pets. 67
urged that out West it was more ** outdoorsy *' and that it was
better and bigger. But Cousin Lottie insisted, ** You haven't
any history West, except as you make it yourselves, while we
have the old traditions of the early pioneers, the old stone school-
house and church ; then, too, we have that beautiful graveyard
where our dear great-grandmother lies, who was almost ninety-
seven when she died, and ever so many others of * the best and
truest hearts that ever beat.* '*
Silence vras my only response to these assertions. True, I
had seen no other cemetery, and I had a wonderful reverence for
the past, but I told Oliver later, in confidence, that **when it
Game to mentioning the graveyard as a cheerful feature of the
landscape, I "was n*t up to it.*' Poor, foolish young thing ! So
httle did I know about transition, and that *' there is no death.**
But when my heart well-nigh broke, later, at loss of the dearest
and best, then I found out, as we all do.
In studies the Easterners were far ahead of Mary and me,
but not of Oliver, which was a great help to his sisters' ** family
pride." Indeed, he had no superiors for scholarship, or writing
and speaking gifts, in college.
As regards pets, our Eastern cousins had been forced to
admit themselves outnumbered. **Simmie, the learned lamb'*;
'* Sukey, the pig that drank lye and was cured by loppered milk '* ;
** Stumpy, the chicken whose legs froze off, and which knew so
much it could almost talk " ; *' Ranger, the dog that killed sheep,
and had to be killed himself " ; * * Nig, the black goat ' * ; * * Trudge,
the Maltese kitten,** and '* Roly-poly, the tame mouse,'* passed in
review like a Noah*s ark menagerie, and formed my special list,
while Mary described the * * peacock that never was suited except
when seated on the ridge of the bam "; ** our guinea-hens that
took the prize "; **our Suffolk piggy-wiggies that can't be beat
for cunningness.**
•• And then the folks ! ** said Oliver, ** they're so big-hearted,
so progressive, and willing to live and let live. I tell you, Hor-
icc Greeley has it right — 'Go West, young man, go West." " But
the home farms were so fertile and handsome, the old places and
traditions so dear that none of our New Yorkers ever followed
tlii<i sage advice. Father and his family were the " rolling stones
that gather no moss.** **Who cares!'* Oliver used to say;
68 A Mysterious Box,
** What we want is not moss, but momentum, and a rolling stone
gets that."
Lord Chesterfield's *' Letters on Politeness, Written to his
Son," was a book read through and through at Forest Home.
Mother talked much to her children about good manners, and
insisted on our having * * nice, considerate ways, ' ' as she called
them, declaring that these were worth far more than money in
the race of life.
Oliver brought home many books from college ; indeed, while
there, he got together a library of about eight hundred volumes.
The book-case in father's room had Shakspeare, which Oliver
and I had each read before we were fifteen, and reviewed to
suit ourselves as to our favorite plays ; also the English Reader,
which we knew nearly by heart, and volumes of travel and biog-
raphy; but, after all, there were not very many books we cared
for. Newspapers and magazines were our chief reading until
this wonderful library of Oliver's began to appear upon the scene.
Here were cyclopedias, Bohn's translations of the classics, the
English poets, essayists and historians. It was a perfect revel-
ing place and revelation.
One day I noticed in the Prairie Farmer that the Illinois
Agricultural Society had offered a prize for the best essay on the
** Embellishment of a Country Home," and right away I said to
my mother, ** I'm going to compete." As usual, she encoiu*aged
me to ** branch out" and so, pencil in 4iand (for I '* could n't
think at all except thus armed and equipped "), I began my for-
midable task. I had this in my favor, that my own home was a
model, and that I had seen it grow from nothing to a bower of
beauty. What little I could do at writing or anything else, I
always did *' upon the fly," my brother said, and it was true ; so
the essay was soon ready and criticised by my four standbys,
father inserting a characteristic sentence : ' * Plant trees, and do
not fail, for health and beauty's sake, to plant the evergreen —
the emblem of perpetual life." A few months after, a small box
came through the postoffice, addressed to me. I had never before
received anything in Uncle Sam's care that looked so ominous.
Strings were cut, tissue papers removed, and behold ! there was a
handsome silver medal with my name, and the words, ** First prize
•• Choked with Ribbons:' 69
Sot essay," and a lovdy cup, besides, while under all was a note
from "S. Francis, Secretary Illinois Agricultural Society,'* con-
gratulating ** a lady so young on an achievement so creditable/*
I was of an enthusiastic nature — that was evident from the way
I went with a hop, skip and jump through every room in the
house, singing out ** Hmrah ! *' until Bridget in the kitchen, Mike
in the garden, and rollicking old Carlo took up the strain, and the
whole family laughed and shouted and rejoiced in my joy.
No girl 'went through a harder experience than I, when my
free, ont-of-door life had to cease, and the long skirts and clubbed-
np hair spiked with hair-pins had to be endured. The half of
that down-heartedness has never been told and never can be. I
always believed that if I had been let alone and allowed as a
woman, what I had had as a girl, a free life in the country, where
a human being might grow, body and soul, as a tree grows, I
would have been * * ten times more of a person, ' ' every way. Mine
was a nature hard to tame, and I cried long and loud when I
fausd I could never again race and range about with freedom.
I had delighted in my short hair and nice round hat, or comfort-
able ** Shaker bonnet,*' but now I was to be ** choked with rib-
bons'* when I went into the open air the rest of my days.
Something like the following was the '* state of mind ** that I
revealed to my journal about this time :
This is my birthday and the date of my martyrdom. Mother insists
ftatat last I «i»«j/have my hair "done up woman-fashion." She says she
en hardly forgive herself for letting me " run wild *' so long. We've had a
fRtt time over it all, and here I sit like another Samson ''shorn of my
■rcBgth." That figure won't do, though, for the greatest trouble with me is
te I never shall be shorn again. My " back" hair is twisted up like a cork-
«?ew ; I carry eighteen hair-pins ; my head aches miserably ; my feet are
cctan|ricd in the skirt of my hateful new gown. I can never jump over a
fcice again^ so long as I live. As for chasing the sheep, down in the shady
yaSiTe. it's out of the question, and to climb to my " Eagle's-nest " seat in
1^ big borr-oak would ruin this new frock beyond repair. Altogether, I
angcize the fact that my "occupation's gone."
Something^ €ise, that had already happened, helped to stir up
By spirit into a voi^Xy unrest. This is the stor>' as I told it
*flry joamal :
This B election day and my brother is twenty-one years old. How
f^ beseemed ss lie dresaed up in his best Sunday clothes and drove off in
^ ^ wa£on with fatlicr and the hired men to vote for John C Fremont,
70 Busy'ness=.Happiness.
like the sensible **Free-soiler'* that he is. My sister and I stood at the
window and looked out after them. Somehow, I felt a lump in my throat,
and then I could n't see their wagon any more, things got so blurred. I
turned to Mary, and she, dear little innocent, seemed wonderfully sober, too.
I said, "Wouldn't you like to vote as well as Oliver? Don't you and I
love the country just as well as he, and does n't the country need our
ballots ? " Then she looked scared, but answered, in a minute, *' 'Course we
do, and 'course we ought, — but don't you go ahead and say so, for then we
would be called strong-minded."
These two great changes in my uneventful life made me so
distressed in heart that I had half a mind to run away. But the
trouble was, I had n't the faintest idea where to run to. Across
the river, near Colonel Burdick's, lived Silas Hayner and several
of his brothers, on their nice prairie farms. Sometimes Emily
Scoville, Hannah Hayner, or some other of the active young
women, would come over to help mother when there was more
work than usual ; and with.Hannah, especially, I had fellowship,
because, like myself, she w^ venturesome in disposition ; could
row a boat, or fire a gun, and liked to be always out-of-doors. She
was older than I, and entered into all my plans. So we two fool-
ish creatures planned to borrow father's revolver and go oflF on a
wild-goose chase, crossing the river in a canoe and laimching out
to seek our fortunes. But the best part of the story is that we were
never so silly as to take a step beyond the old home-roof, con-
tenting ourselves with talking the matter over in girlish phrase,
and very soon perceiving how mean and ungrateful such an act
would be. Indeed, I told Mary and mother all about it, after
a little while, and that ended the only really ** wild " plan that I
ever made, except another, not unlike it, in my first months at
Evanston, which was also nothing but a plan.
"You must go to school, my child, and take a course of
study ; I wish it might be to Oberlin " — this was my mother's
quiet comment on the confession. **Your mind is active; you
are fond of books and thoughts, as well as of outdoors ; we must
provide them for you to make up for the loss of your girlish
good times ; " so, without any scolding, this Roman matron got
her daughter's aspirations into another channel. To be busy
doing something that is worthy to be done is the happiest thing
in all this world for girl or boy, for old or young.
On the day I was eighteen, my mother made a birthday
^' I Am Eighteen^ 71
cake, and I Tvas in the highest possible glee. I even went so far
as to 'write -wliat Oliver called a * * pome, ' ' which has passed into
oblivion, but of which these lines linger in memory's whispering-
gallery :
I AM EIGHTEEN.
The last year is passed ;
The last month, week, day, hour and moment.
For eighteen years, quelling all thoughts
And wishes of my own,
I've been obedient to the powers that were.
Not that the yoke was heavy to be borne
And grievous,
Do I glory that *tis removed —
For lighter ne'er did parents fond
Impose on child.
It was a silver chain ;
But the bright adjective
Takes not away the clanking sound
That follows it
There is a God - an uncreated Life
That dwells in mystery.
Him, as a part of his vast, boundless self,
I worship, scorning not, nor yet reluctantly
Paying my vows to the Most High.
And this command, by Him imposed,
•'Children, obey your parents,"
I receive and honor, for He says :
•'Obey them in the Lord,"
And He is Lord and God !
But now having thro' waitings long,
And hopings manifold.
Arrived here at the limit of minority,
I bid it now, and evermore, adieu,
And, sinful though it may be.
Weep not, nor sigh.
As it fades with the night.
The clock has struck !
O ! heaven and earth, I'm free !
And here, beneath the watching stars, I feel
New inspiratioB. Breathing from afar
And resting on my spirit as it ne'er
Could rest before, comes joy profound.
And now I feel that I'm alone and free
To worship and obey Jehovah only.
72 Freedom and Rebellion,
Glorious thought ! Maker and made,
Creator and created,
With no bonds intervening !
One free, to worship and obedience pay,
The other on His heaven-spanning throne,
Deigning to receive the homage of His child.
God will I worship then, henceforth.
And evermore ;
' Tis night, and men and angels sleep.
While I adore.
Toward evening, on this ** freedom day,*^ I took my seat
quietly in mother's rocking-chair, and began to read Scott's
** Ivanhoe.'* Father was opposed to story books, and on coming
in he scanned this while his brow grew cloudy.
** I thought I told you not to read novels, Frances,'* he
remarked, seriously.
'*So you did, father, and in the main IVe kept faith with
you in this ; but you forget what day it is."
** What day, indeed ! I should like to know if the day has
anything to do with the deed ! "
** Indeed it has — I am eighteen — I am of age — I am now to
do what / think right, and to read this fine historical story is, in
my opinion, a right thing for me to do."
My father could hardly believe his ears. He was what they
call ** dumbfounded." At first he was inclined to take the book
away, but that would do harm, he thought, instead of good, so
he concluded to see this novel action from the funny side, and
laughed heartily over the situation, Oliver doing the same, and
both saying in one breath, ** A chip of the old block."
After the visit East we began to be somewhat restive even
in our blessed old nest, and gave our father little peace till he
arranged to send us away to school, and so it came about that in
the spring of 1858 we left our Forest Home forever. Looking
back upon it in the sweet valley of memory and from the slow-
climbed heights of years, my heart repeats with tender loyalty
the words written by Alice Gary about her country home :
" Bright as the brightest sunshine,
The light of memory streams
''Round the old-fashioned homestead.
Where I dreamed my dream of dreams,^^
III.
iEri)r l^appi) Stufirnt.
"I WOl'LD STl'DV, I WOri.D KNOW, I Wnri.Ji AlnllKl': IHK-
B\'KR. These works ok THordnT iiavi-: iii:i:n thi: knti£k-
TAINMEXTS OF THK HUMAN SPIRIT IN' Al.I. AC.KS. "
CHAPTER I.
DELIGHTFUL DAYS AT SCHOOL.
" I would study, I would know, I would admire forever. These works
of thought have been the entertainment of the human spirits in all ages."
A little group around my mother's knee studying a book and
afterward going with her into my father's flower garden where
she plucked rewards of merit for us in the shape of pinks and
pansies, is my earliest memory as a student. Mary and Maria
Thome, children of our own ages, and daughters of Professor
Thome, of Oberlin College, were among the group, and my first
impressions of study take me to that fragrant garden, where
choice flowers circled around a handsome evergreen, snowdrops
and snowball bushes brightened the scene, and upon all the
diamond dewdrops glistened.
Soon after that we took our journey into a far country, five
hundred miles overland in the white ** ships of the prairie,*' and
for two years I have no special recollection of books for my
parents were very busy with the farm.
It is a curious fact that I remember distinctly the first time I
ever wrote my name, doubtless for the reason that I was late in
learning, probably nine years old. We had been kept diligently
to the writing of pot-hooks, and other iminteresting forms, filling
little copy-books with them as we sat around the table in the
large, bright kitchen at Forest Home, with all the conveniences
for the evening school that my mother maintained steadily for
her children and the hired help alike, during the long, cold
winter of 1848, while my father was at Madison, the capital of Wis-
consin, sixty miles away, attending to his duties as a legislator.
(73)
74 The Best Autograph.
A vaulting ambition entered my little head, and I said to my
indulgent teacher, **Just write my own name for me in your
nice hand, and see if I can not imitate it pretty well." So with
great care, she wrote it out, and it looked beautiful to me, stand-
ing there at the head of a fresh sheet of foolscap paper. Mother's
writing was very clear and even ; like her character, it had a cer-
tain grace and harmony. I used to think some of her capitals
were pretty as a picture. How long I gazed upon that magical
creation I can not tell, but it was imprinted so deeply on my
memory that I could not forget the incident, and looking long
and steadily upon the copy she had given me, I followed it so
well, ** the first time trying,** that I have sometimes thought the
first was the best autograph I ever wrote.
Thus, in a desultory fashion, our lessons proceeded until I
was nearly twelve years old. About this time my father brought
home from Janesville an elegant card annoimcing that a college-
bred gentleman from the East was about to open a classical
school in that town. Around the edge of the card were some
Latin words that I did not understand, but my father taught me
how to pronounce them and what they meant. They were as
follows : Scientia atidoritas est et labor vincit omnia ^ and he told
me they meant, ** Knowledge is power and labor conquers all
things.** Very many times I said them over to myself, much
more I thought about them, seriously determining that I would
attain knowledge so far as in me lay, and that I would compass
the results which labor can achieve for one who is in earnest. I
know no other road out of the wilderness. It is the straight and
narrow way, appointed in so much of kindness by Him who
knows from the beginning what we often learn only at the end,
viz., that traveling the road does us more good than all we gather
on the way or find awaiting us when we achieve the goal.
As time passed on, mother became very much in earnest for
us to go to school. But there was no school-house in our district,
so she ** put on her thinking-cap,** as we were wont to say, and,
as usual, something came of it. Once or twice she had met at
church in Janesville, a new family from the East, by the name of
Burdick. They had bought a large farm across Rock river,
hardly a mile away ** on a bee line,'* but as the river was usually
too deep to ford, it was miles around by the town bridge.
The Board of Education, 75
Still carrying out our favorite play, the ** Fort City Board of
Education'* was organized, with mother in the chair. The
meeting was regularly opened by singing and prayer, and then
mother stated the object of the assembly.
Oliver followed her, saying, ** Mrs. Chairman, I agree with
all that has been said, and so well said. If we young folks don't
amount to something when we grow up, it won't be the fault of
matcrfamilias, * *
" But,'* continued he, *' I hardly see what weVe got to make
an institution of learning out of, here in Fort City. Father and
mother know too much to go to school, and they have n't time to
do the teaching. As for me, IVe graduated, you know, from
Fort City, and am a Janesvnlleian. Loren is a hopeless case, de-
voted to his traps, and guns, and farm work. The girls have
taught Mike to read and write, and that is all he wants to know
in the way of * book-learning. ' Bridget would n't be bothered
with even that much, when we offered to teach her. So the
case narrows down to this : Frank and Mary are growing up in
heathenish darkness."
As I ** rose to a point of order " here, protesting that mother
had taught us, and taught us well, thus far, and that we were not
quite so ignorant as the speaker implied, Oliver hastened to
qualify his statement.
'*I mean," he continued, ** that Frank and Mary ought now
to have advantages greater than it is possible for you, Mrs.
Chairman, in the limited time at your disposal, to bestow upon
them. So I move that we found an academy for their special
benefit. ' '
This proposal met with unanimous approval, and the motion
was carried with enthusiasm. So resolving ourselves into a
"Committee of the Whole on Ways and Means," we began to
canvass possibilities. Where could we have the academy?
WTio would be the teacher? These were vital questions to
Mary and me, for mother was not more anxious for our educa-
tion than were we ourselves. After much talk, pro and con,
mother reminded us of our new neighbors, the Burdick family,
and we at onc6 appointed her our ** envoy plenipotentiary,"
with full powers to do whatever could be done through them.
76 Mother 's * * HamUettes, ' *
Col. Burdick had been agent for Van Rensselaer, the *' patroon"
of Central New York, and his only daughter, Rachel Burdick, a
remarkably bright and winsome girl, had been permitted to go to
school with the patroon's children and was now a young lady of
rare accomplishments, to whom her father's Western farm seemed
lonely, after spending her life thus far upon the Hudson's lovely
banks, near Albany. Mother was charmed by Miss Burdick, and
asked if she would not do her the favor to come and teach Mary
and me, Oliver having already been two winters in the ** Acad-
emy *' at Janesville, walking in and out each day. Of course he
was to go to college, but the fate of his sisters was more misty in
those days. I looked upon him as a prince, and only wished,
although I dared not say it, that I had been bom to a boy*s
chances in the world — though I never really wished to be a boy,
at least, I hope not. Miss Burdick agreed to come, and mother
began more frequently than ever to get oflF ** homilettes, * ' as father
called them, in the following strain :
** The dearest wish of my heart, except that my children shall
be Christians, is that they shall be well educated. A good edu-
cation will open the world to you as a knife opens an oyster.
Riches will not do this, because riches have no power to brighten
the intellect. An ox and a philosopher look out on the same
world, and perhaps the ox has the stronger and handsomer eyes
of the two, but the difference between the brains behind the eyes
makes a diflference between the two beings that is wider than all
the seas. I want my children's brains to be full of the best
thoughts that great minds have had in all centuries ; I want
stored away in your little heads the story of what the world was
doing before you came — who were its poets, its painters and philos-
ophers, its inventors and lawgivers. I want you to know what
is in its noblest books, and what its men of science say about their
study of the earth, the ocean and the stars. I want you taught to
be careful and exact by your knowledge of figures ; and, most of
all, I want you to learn how to speak and write your own noble
English tongue, for without the power of expression you are like an
aeolian harp when there is no breeze. Now your father and I have
assisted you and taught you imtil Oliver has already a good start
in school and Frank is twelve years old. My son takes the highest
rank as a student, just as I expected ; my elder daughter is de-
First Days Schooling, 77
voted to books and keeps a journal — ^which is a good beginning,
and my younger will follow on into all that I desire, and already
goes beyond the others in artistic taste. I have the promise of
bright Miss Burdick that she will come and teach you during the
summer, and by that time I hope your father will have a school-
house in this district. But for the present we will fit up the parlor
and the Inman girls will study with you.**
This announcement rejoiced us beyond measure, for these two
girls, living a mile away, we greatly liked, though we had seldom
seen them, as theirs was not a church-going family, and hence we
were not allowed to visit at their home.
One Monday school began. Father had made a large, ** cross-
legged ** pine table, with a place below for our books, and around
this, in the bright, fragrant June morning, sat four girls, from
eight to fourteen years of age, and at the head. Miss Burdick, our
eighteen-year-old teacher.
This first day*s schooling we had ever known we called
** the greatest kind of fun." Indeed we preferred it to any other
form of amusement, for the reason that mother had always cried
it up as the choicest experience we could possibly know, and be-
cause we had fully entered into all the other plays within our
reach. We had a zest for study that school-cloyed children can
not dream of, and learned in a year what little ones are tormented
into, now, during seven years. Effie and Mattie Inman lived over
a mile down the river and had lately come from Pottsville, Pa.
They were true, good girls, carefully reared by a Presbyterian
mother who had died just before they moved West. I greatly
admired my handsome, dark-eyed, curly-haired classmate, Effie,
whose steady sweetness of temper was so surprising to one of my
impetuous nature that I told my mother I had *' just stepped on
Effie's toes at recess to see if she would n't frown, and sure enough
she didn't." My mother replied that I had better set about
imitating Effie's lovely ways instead of carrying on any more
experiments of that sort. Mattie was more like common clay, but
was a talkative, impulsive little thing, who was to Mary very much
such an oflfeet as Effie proved to be to me. But Miss Burdick was
a whole picture gallery and musical performance in herself to us
untutored prairie girls. She had come from a city ; she knew the
world — that great, big world we had only read about in books.
78 Keeping the ** Observations.'*^
She was a lady in every utterance and motion. She had rippling
brown hair, smiled a good deal, had a silvery little laugh, and a
beautiful white hand. Her trim, graceful figure was very small,
almost fairy-like. She knew any amount of songs, and taught
them to her attentive quartette ; she was skillful with the pencil,
and we all learned to draw ; though Mary and I, especially the
former, had made some progress in this branch already. Straight-
way I fitted up some ** sketch-boards,** tacking stiflF white cloth
over pieces of pine planed thin, and tacking on another piece of
cloth, with one side open for our paper, pencils and rubber, and
out we went, after four o'clock p. m., to ** sketch fi-om nature.**
Of these sketches no extended account had best be given, but all
file same we had *' a splendid time.**
Miss Burdick was a botanist, and knew the names of more
flowers than we who had lived West so long. She taught us how
to ** analyze,** and we ransacked woods and fields to bring her
''specimens.** Miss Burdick could recite poetry by the hour, and
we gave her no rest until she had told us all she knew of Walter
Scott, Wordsworth, Cowper, and the rest. She told us of the
Hudson, and the old Knickerbockers, of Madam Emma Willard*s
school, of Washington Irving and his Simnyside home, of the
Catskills and Palisades, and the great, fascinating city beyond.
To her I used to talk of what I meant to be, and the cheery,
responsive words of my teacher were a delight. Miss Burdick
encouraged me to write, corrected my compositions carefully, re-
hearsed me on ** The Downfall of Poland,'* which was my favorite
"piece,** and chilled no tender bud of aspiration in my heart.
One of my duties was to **keep the observations,*' and Miss
Burdick helped me in this. Father had agreed to be one of the
fact-gatherers for the Smithsonian Institution at Washington,
which sent out to trusty persons all over the country instructions
for studying the weather. They were to notice three times a
day the direction of the wind, the indications of thermometer,
barometer and rain-gauge, shape of the clouds, etc., and once a
month fill out a blank report, giving all these particulars. Father
was so often absent in town or at the Institute for the Blind,
that these observations had to be left in other hands. The
** Signal Service " that has its bulletin in every morning paper
and postoflBce nowadays, and which is so great a help to the pub-
A Real School-house, 79
lie in many ways, was built upon the foundation laid by these
observers. I learned many valuable lessons in this work when I
was but a girl, as I studied the clouds and found out which were
** cirrus, " "cirro-stratus,** ** nimbus,** ** cumulus,** and so on.
We had winds on those prairies, sometimes, that came so
near canying oflF the house that father sat with Mary in his
arms, I hid my face, as usual, in mother's lap, and all expected
to be blown away. But though we had several terrific visita-
tions of this sort, no harm ever reached any of us. Oliver used to
say he believed the ** Prince of the Power of the Air** got up
those storms, and he did n*t think it was fair to *' lay them to the
Lord."
For two summers Miss Burdick carried on her institution
of four pupils, the second summer a few more coming in, and
gave an elaborate ** Exhibition ** at the close, which seemed as
great to us as the ** Commencement Exercises ** of the college
where some of us graduated in 1858-59.
Father and Mr. Inman now bestirred themselves, for their
daughters* sake, and a little school-house, belonging to the dis-
trict, was built about a mile away. It was plain and inviting,
that little bit of a building, standing under the trees on the river
bank. No paint has ever brightened it, outside or in, from that
day to the present. It looks like a natural growth ; like a sort of
big ground-nut. Inside, the pine desks were ranged around the
wall, boys on one side, girls on the other, a slight platform with
rude desk taking up the end nearest the door. But this school-
bouse was a wonder in our eyes, a temple of learning, a tele-
scope through which we were to take our first real peep at the
world outside of home.
It was too far from ** Fort City** for our ** make-believes**
to include it, and as we grew older we took life more as it really
was, because there was so much more of it to take. I was about
fourteen when the new school-house was built, and I regarded
it as the great event of my life that I was now, at least, to become
really **a scholar,'* go outside my own home and be '* thrown
upon my own resources,** as father wisely called it. Miss Bur-
dick^s had been a sort of ** play school,*' after all, for she was so
young herself and made such a companion of me that the teacher
had been lost in the fiiend.
8o Life by Rule.
Miss Burdick had listened to all the imaginings of which my
head was full, about what I was to be and to do in the world —
for I was fully persuaded in my own mind that something quite
out of the common lot awaited me in the future ; indeed, I was
wont to tell this dear teacher that I * * was bom to a fate. * ' Women
were allowed to do so few things then, that my ideas were quite
vague as to the what and the why, but I knew that I wanted to
write, and that I would speak in public if I dared, — though I
did n't say this last, not even to mother. And now here was to
be a real school and a real, live g^duate of Yale College was to
be the teacher. Mr. Hodge became ** Professor" to us chil-
dren—he had been Tutor Hodge at Oberlin College — and we
were eager for the intellectual fray.
** There will be lots of rules,*' remarked Oliver, wisely, the
evening before school was to begin. He was at home for a brief
vacation, and used many big words, among others, unique,
which, just for fun, he pronounced in three syllables, and the
example was followed by me, who gravely took up his methods
as my standards.
** What if there are lots o' rules ? " piped sweet-toned Mary,
** we sha'n*t break them, as some college boys do.**
** No, indeed,'* said I ; '*it will be a pleasant change to us
to have some rules and live up to them.**
**Do you miean to say I have given you none all these
years ? * ' asked mother, looking up from her sewing.
** Well, you*ve had mighty few, mother, I can tell you that,"
said Oliver.
** But we had to mind, you know,** chimed Mary.
** Yes, and we had a mind to,** I declared.
**That may all be. Miss Biddlecome, * * replied my brother,
who, with father, often called me by this odd name, **but when
it comes to sitting beside your favorite Effie and never speaking
a loud word for six hours per day, you won*t enjoy it. A girl
that has played Jehu to calves, reapers and plow-beams as long
as you have, won*t take kindly to sitting still all day, either,
and I prophesy there* 11 be a riot, a rumpus, a row before the
month is out.**
** Wait till you see,** I responded, with a vim, and the
discussion ended.
it
Advantages Like Other People,'^'' 8i
It was a cold winter morning when school opened. We two
girls had risen long before light, because we could n't sleep, and
packed our little tin dinner-pail with bread and butter, apples,
and some of mother's ** fried cakes " — which had already won a
reputation that has since expanded into fame. We emptied her
old satchel that we might stuff it out with school-books ; filled
our inkstand, and made all our small preparations, wondering if
it would ever be daylight, and if nine o'clock a. m. would ever
OMne. We hardly tasted our breakfast, and were so uneasy that
long before the time Loren yoked the big oxen to the long ' * bob-
sled,** and he and Oliver carried us to school. The doors were
not yet open, so we sent to Professor Hodge's, which was near
by, got the key, made the fire, and were the first to take poses-
sion. Loren stayed as a scholar, looking as if he did not like the
bargain. Oliver cracked the whip and **geed up" the oxen,
saying, ** Well, I hope you'll enjoy what you've got yourselves
into ;" and I shouted, ** We've got a Yale g^duate to teach us,
and Beloit can't beat that."
Professor Hodge's children were out in force, and made up
the majority. Effie and Mattie Inman were there, Pat O'Don-
ahue and his sisters, from two miles over the prairie, and a few
others. Loren was the big boy of the school, and behaved like a
patriarch. Jamie Hodge had already asked to have his lessons
measured off, had selected a desk with his brother John, and be-
fiore the hour for school had arrived he was studying away like a
sage. Rupert Hodge, a blithe little fellow, was coasting down
the hill with his sisters Annie and **Tottie," while Fred and
Charley Hovey, new-comers and cousins of the Hodges, looked
hke little bread-and-butter cherubs with their red cheeks and
flaxen hair. At last Professor Hodge appeared, in his long-tailed,
blue coat with brass buttons, carrying an armful of school-books
and a dinner-bell in his hand. He stood on the steps and rang
that bell long, loud and merrily. My heart bounded, as I said,
inside of it, so that nobody heard, **At last we are going to
school all by ourselves, Mary and I, and are going to * have ad-
vantages' like other folks, just as mother said we should ! O
goody— goody— ^^^ / "
Professor Hodge stepped upon the rough little platform,
opened his pocket Testament and read the first chapter of Mark ;
82 •* God Speed the Right:'
we sang ** Jesus, lover of my soul,'* and then every head was
reverently bowed, while in the simplest language the good man
asked God's blessing on the children and their homes, on their
lessons and their companionship as scholars. He was a tall man,
with strong frame, large head covered with bushy hair, piercing
blue eyes, pleasant smile, and deep, melodious voice. Accus-
tomed to teach men, he bent himself gently to the task of point-
ing out A B C's to the youngest and setting copies for them all.
He was a fine reader and his greatest pleasm-e seemed to be when
his older pupils rendered to his satisfaction some gem from the
English poets, in which he trained us carefully.
He was of English birth, and his first names. Nelson Well-
ington, united the last names of two heroes of whom he liked to
talk. He was patient to a fault, and I was glad that in my math-
ematics, which I did not like, one so considerate took my difiBcult
case in hand. He announced no rules, oflFered no prizes, but
seemed to take it as a matter of course that we would all *' be-
have.'* So passed the day — our first in the old school-house we
learned to love in spite of — nay, perhaps the better because of, its
ugliness. We had about four months of study with Professor
Hodge, and later on, in the same place, six months with Mrs.
Amelia Hovey, sister to Mrs. Hodge. This teacher was a delight
to us. Her bright face, sparkling blue eyes, voice full of rising
inflections, and her pride and pleasure in her pupils, made school
just like a play-day. She was a charming singer and we de-
lighted in her favorite song :
"Now to Heaven our prayer ascending,
God speed the right !
In a noble cause contending,
God speed the right !
Be that prayer again repeated,
Ne'er despairing, though defeated ;
Truth our cause, what e'er delay it,
There's no power on earth can stay it,
God speed the right !
Pain nor toil nor trial heeding,
And in Heaven's own time succeeding,
God speed the right ! "
These words used to ring out through the lonesome little
school-house like a clarion call, while our teacher stood before us
A Rude Awakening, 83
with an exaltation in her face that gave an uplift to each little
heart as our fresh young voices sang,
** God speed the right ! "
Mrs. Hovey's sunny nature and beautiful spirit of hope bent
like a rainbow above those happy months at school, while her
rare aptness to teach brought us on at railroad speed from title
page to ** finis ** of a half-score of knotty text-books.
There was but one blur upon the pages of that happy time.
One scholar, who has not before been mentioned, a girl older than
I, said to me at recess, ** You are the most ignorant girl I ever
saw. I don't know what to make of it. Come with me around
the comer of the school-house where no one will hear, and I will
tell you things that will make your eyes open bigger than ever.*'
Nothing could have vexed me more than to be called ' ' ignorant, ' '
and nothing could have roused my interest like the chance to get
that ii^orance cured. ** To know "had been my life's greatest
desire from the beginning. I had carried a great many curious
questions to my mother, such as every thoughtful child is sure
to ask. and ask right early, too. The reply had always been,
** Come to me when you are fifteen years old and I will tell you.
You would not understand me now, if I should try to tell."
And here was this girl, a new scholar, who was laughing at
me because I could not answer the very same questions — for she
asked them as soon as she and I were alone. Then she went on
to answer them with illustrations and anecdotes, riddles, puns and
jokes, using many words that had to be explained to me, who had
never heard their like before. My brother Oliver was a boy so
wholesome and delicate that he had almost never said a word my
mother did not know, and this strange vocabulary amazed and
disconcerted me. I never talked with this coarse girl again upon
these subjects, but afterward I felt so sorry to have talked at all.
It was a rude awakening, one that comes to many a dear little
innocent of not half my years, and is morally certain to come
if a child gro6s to school at all. But it is inevitable that children
should go and be brought up with other children, only the mother
at home ougrht, I think, to take her little one into a very tender
and sacred confidence, and in true, pure and loving words reply
to every question the thoughtful little mind can ask. A boy and
84 School Incidents,
his mother, a girl and her mother, may, and ought to speak of
anything that God has made. The ** works of darkness *' are
evil ; the secret words, the deeds previous to which some one says,
**But you must never tell** — these are wicked and dangerous.
Dear fathers and mothers who read between these lines, let me beg
you to forewarn your little ones, and to tell them, upon the high
level of your own pure thoughts and lives, what they are certain
to learn sooner than you think, when they go with other children.
There will always be some one to teach them naughty words and
deeds, unless your lessons have come first. Happily for me, I
was too well established before I heard these things to get harm
out of them, but not one home in a thousand is so isolated as was
mine. Besides, think of the pain and sense of loss that came to
me from that one miserable interview !
Louise Alden was a friend made at this school, and greatly
valued by us, especially by Mary, who was of nearly the same
age. Our coasting down the hill was wonderful to see ; our fish-
ing with a crooked pin, small bait and less fish, in the mellow-
voiced river; our climbing trees for toothsome hickory-nuts,
beating the bush for mealy hazel-nuts, and scouring the pastures
for sweet-smelling plimis that grew wild ; our play-houses, with
dishes moulded from clay in my ** china manufactory,** and dolls
for which I declined to make clothes — are not all these written
in memory's **book of chronicles**? What times we used to
have on ** composition day,** and at the ** spelling school" on
Friday afternoon, when I was at the head on one side and- Efl5e
on the other, or Pat O* Donahue and Johnny Hodge marshaled
the forces. We '*toed the line,'* and **went up head,*' and
** spelled down," after the approved, old-fashioned style. Mother
and Mrs. Hodge were ** company " on such occasions, and were
escorted to platform seats with much decorum by my sister. As
school was so far away we stayed from 9 a. m. to 4 p. m., and
made much of our dinners, setting them out on the teacher's desk
and sharing our wholesome food with many a cheery speech and
laughing reply as the noon hour, all too short, sped away. But,
most of all, we were diligent to learn, for we were behind other
scholars of our years, and were afraid, as we almost daily told
our mother, that our ** smart cousins down in York State would
get so far ahead that we never could catch up."
Oliverh Forward Step. 85
Later, our family spent one winter in Janesville and we went
to Mrs. Fonda's ** Select School,** where I especially doted on
Cutler's Physiology, and proudly took turns at editing the school
paper, while Mary drew maps so well as to astonish the natives,
and painted in water-colors after school. Here our Aunt Sarah
and Cousin Morilla, both teachers in Catharine Beecher's and
Miss Mary Mortimer's '* Female College" at Milwaukee, came
to spend the holidays, and their wise and bookish conversation
was a delight beyond words to us. Here we heard ** Elder
Knapp," the great revivalist, preach in the Baptist Church and
our hearts were deeply exercised, but we did not come out as
Christians. Still it never entered our minds not to pray, but the
sweet and simple ** Now I lay me down to sleep,** quieted our
young hearts at night, and every morning father's prayer found
an echo in our own. But Oliver, always ready for every good
word and work, went to the front with his beloved school-mate,
William Henry Brace, the two boys yielding at once to mother's
gentle invitation to **come out boldly on the Lord*s side.**
Indeed, Oliver had been converted at twelve years of age, just
before we left Oberlin, and later on he was immersed in our own
Rock River and joined the church * * on probation. ' ' When father
went to the legislature at Madison, leaving the farm folks pretty
lonesome, little Mary was sent by her brother and sister, to say to
their mother that they intended to be Christians all the while pa
was gone, and not make her any trouble, and they thought it
would comfort her to know it. " And I do, too," added the dear,
chubby-faced girl, who was not only bom "a Sunday child," but
always seemed to stay so.
Our episodes of school included a month or so of outing at
the summer home of Rev. and Mrs. Peleg S. Whitman, accom-
plished Southerners, who had driven all the way from Georgia to
Wisconsin in their own carriage on a health excursion. They
were both teachers, having a ladies' school at home, and father
meeting them at Janesville, invited them to spend some time at
Forest Home, and bought an elegant piano of their selection,
that Mrs. Whitman's masterly musical gifts and teaching might
be enjoyed by his daughters. We had been taking music lessons
for years from the teachers at the Wisconsin Institute for the
Blind, a mile away, and were quite well advanced, but played
86 First Flight.
only on the melodeon. My love for this instrument was so un-
bounded that when the piano was brought home I evinced but
little pleasure and turned to my old pet so steadily that father
saw no way but to sell it, which he did. When it was being
boxed to be carried out of the house, mother found us two girls
kissing the sweet-voiced old melodeon good-by, almost with tears.
From that time, although I still had lessons, I felt small
interest in the study of music, but Mary's dainty hands took
kindly to the piano, and she swiftly passed her sister, whose
knowledge of *' thorough bass*' had been her despair until the
instrument of wind and reeds gave place to the twanging wires
and mysterious pedals of the piano. But when Mrs. Whitman
sang some sweet Scotch ballad, or our favorite **Once more at
home," to its accompaniment, I was almost as much delighted
as my sister, and when she struck the martial notes of the ** Bat-
tle of Prague " we, like the Queen of Sheba, **had no more spirit
in us " for very wonder. I was passionately fond of martial
music, but when Mrs. Whitman rendered the cries of the
wounded and dying, both of us, to whom scenes of sorrow were
unknown, wanted to ** put our heads in mother's lap and cry."
Mrs. Whitman was a French scholar, and we were eager
to learn, so it was agreed that we might go to Mr. and Mrs.
Whitman for a few weeks' study.
**Let our birds try their wings a little before they fly far
from the old home-nest," said father, who dearly loved to have
us run to meet him when he came home from town, delighted
himself with our singing, and was grieved to the heart at the
thought that we must sometime leave him. So the greatest event
of all our lives, thus far, was going six miles from home, to stay
with the Whitmans in their pleasant rural retreat, and for the
first time to spend a night out from under the old home roof.
Father carried us over, one blithe summer day, with the trunk
which we had packed so carefully, and as we saw him drive
away, we had a most * * all-overish feeling of lonesomeness, * * as
I called it, while Mary actually had tears in her sweet blue eyes.
** For shame," I said to her in a low voice ; ** it*s only six
miles to Forest Home, and we are only away for a month. Just
think how much more we shall know when we go back."
** Yes, but I want ma to tuck me up in bed and kiss me
Novels Forbidden, 87
good-night,** she murmured, her red lips trembling as she turned
away.
Mr. and Mrs. Whitman made it very pleasant for us with
music, reading aloud, and a drive in the fields now and then.
Ollendorff s French Method was placed in my hands, and I dili-
gently conned those oldest of all questions, '^ Avez vous jaivif
Avez zHms soiff'^ while Mary sketched from nature, grieved over
English grammar and rejoiced to practice on the piano. We had
never read novels, and stories were almost unknown to us, except
the lovely story of " Outdoors," in four parts, with a new edition
every year. ** Pilgrim's Progress " we knew almost by heart, and
Bible histories were familiar — more so from mother's lips than
by our own reading, though we had regularly "read the Bible
through *' that year, at the rate of three chapters a day and five
on Sunday, and received the promised Bibles, " all our own,'* as
a reward. Miss Trumbull, a seamstress, who was also "a char-
acter,'* had told us ** Children of the Abbey " and " Thaddeus of
Warsaw, * ' after which lengthened dissipations we could ' ' hardly
sleep a wink * * — the first loss of sleep known to our happy and
well-ordered lives. We had read many biographies of great men
and much of the best in English poetry, besides Robert Ramble* s
"Stories of Greece," and Goldsmith's " History of Rome." We
knew much of mythology, but, aside from " The Shoulder Knot,**
** Norman Leslie," a religious romance, and a few hunting stories,
we were absolutely, blessedly ignorant of "novels." But our
gifted teachers were readers of the best in fiction, and here I found
"Jane Eyre," " Shirley,'* and " Villette.*' those wonderful books
by the lonesome-hearted genius, Charlotte Bront6. These opened
a new world, and to one less anchored to mother and home than
I was, they might have done untold mischief. As it was, I read
them all in feverish haste, closing with " Villette, " in the midst
of which I was, on a lovely summer evening just before twilight,
when a long shadow fell across the threshold where I was sitting,
unconscious of everything about me, and my father's tall form
bent over me ; he took the book from my hand, and as he saw
the flush on my cheeks his brow was clouded.
" Never let my daughter see that book again, if you please,
madam/* he said to the lady of the house, who, not knowing
* his rules, had hardly noted my proceedings ; the book was
88 Rays from the Past
taken from me, and to this day I have never finished reading
**Villette."
Of course I did not like this then, and was angry with my
father, although I did not dare to say so. But I learned as years
passed on how much I owed to the firm hand that held my
impetuous nature from a too early knowledge of the unreal world
of romance. Thanks to parental wisdom, I passed my childhood
and my early girlhood in perfect quietness, simplicity and the
holiness of nature's company.
But with the autumn these genial Southern friends flitted
away to their beautiful Georgia, to escape the chill of the Wis-
consin climate, and we went home enriched by their words of
grace and graciousness, and instructed by their polished manners
not less than by the books and music we had studied.
We still published, at intervals, the Fort City Tribune^ for
which mother was a frequent contributor, giving us once the
following bit of verse, she had composed especially for otir paper,
and which was intended to afibrd us some account of her own
childhood in her beloved Vermont :
RAYS FROM THE PAST.
From distant years a gentle light
Is ever brightening up my way ;
'Twill cheer me to eternal mom
By its sweet ray.
' Tis from life's dewy, radiant dawn,
That introduced my infant day.
From that sweet Eden, diamond-gemmed,
Where children play.
' Tis from my father's sheltered home,
That calm and love-illomined spot,
Where fragrant incense bathed my brow,
Not yet forgot
'Tis from the bright and purling brook,
And from the towering elm-tree's shade.
And from the pure and holy joys
For young life made.
* Tis from the thorny brier bush.
With ripe and tempting raspberries hung,
Which we on slender threads of grass
For ** Teacher " strung,
'* WboJen Bjgfigies,''' 89
To dim her youthful vision bright,
To m3rstify her opening mind.
That to our many childish faults
She might be blind.
Dainty reflections, clear and bright,
Still gleam' from the delicious past.
Cheering the traveler to her home —
That home, her last
Oliver brought any amount of books from college and read
them in vacation. He was now too much of a young man to
help on tlie fortunes of Fort City any longer. The Hodge boys
were busy "witli the farm, Bridget was less company for us than
of old, and ^^e girls turned to the blind pupils at the Institute as
our base of supplies. We had a music teacher from there, whom
we dearly loved. This was Mrs. Eliza J^ing Walls, a graduate
of the Ne'vv York Institute, a beautiful woman and an accom-
plished player. It was an event when she came to give the
weekly lessons, for she entered heartily into our plans and was
an entbusiast as to our musical abilities. Her elder sister, Miss
King, often came with her, and her lovely little girl, Mamie —
the first *• wee toddler** that we had known. I thought she
was ** enough better than a stupid doll," — indeed, except " Doll
Anna,'* I bad never cared for these ** wooden effigies," as I called
them, but gave my wax doll to my sister, with some show of
generosity, but no inward sense of sacrifice.
Mary was fond of every breathing creature — except snakes,
spiders and mosquitoes — and she liked dolls because **they re-
minded her of humans," but upon little Mamie Walls she lav-
ished her rich young heart in a manner beautiful to see. She
brought out all her small store of pretty things and placed them
at her disposal ; spread a ** playing place '* for her on a big shawl
under her favorite tree ; toyed with her soft curls, hugged her
tenderly, and even counted the days till her next music lesson,
chiefly because ** Mamie would come again."
But much as I loved Mrs. Walls and her baby, my favorite
teacher was Mr. Frank Campbell — since then a well-known Lon-
don musician, and famous as the only blind man who ever climbed
Ml Blanc ; this he did to prove how mind may triumph over
matter; his son walking ahead, and he setting his feet in the
90 Blind Teachers arid Friends.
tracks thus made. He used to come to give us girls our lessons,
over the rough country road, with its ups and downs, all alone^
except for his faithful cane, which, we declared, **had brains,
could almost talk and ought to vote."
He was a brilliant pianist — could play any piece of music, no
matter how difficult, if but once read in his hearing, and was a
most gifted as well as a most gentle-natured man. His wife was
an invalid, and I thought it a high honor when I was permitted
to write letters for him and to sit beside the sweet little lady who
was so often ill. The other teachers at the Institute were fre-
quent guests at Forest Home. Mr. P. Lane, of Mississippi, a
blind man of much culture and strong character, was Princi-
pal, and a great friend of my father. Later on, Mr. William H.
Churchman, of Indianapolis, also blind, held that position. He
was often at Forest Home and was so fine a scholar that we never
grew tired of listening to his conversation with our parents. We
had been taught that "children should be seen, not heard," and
never dreamed of speaking in the presence of our elders unless
spoken to. This early habit, with my great sensitiveness and
timidity, made me the shy one of the trio, so that my dread of
going out into " company '* was extreme. Oliver and Mary used
often to joke me about this.
Mr. Churchman's daughter Anna was about my age, and
was the most accomplished young person that we young folks
had seen, except our cousin. Miss Abby Clement, of Vermont,
who had come West with her father, Rev. Dr. Jonathan Clement,
on a visit, and, spending a week at Forest Home, had so aston-
ished us country girls by her knowledge of books and of the
world, that we almost despaired of "ever being anybody," except
as our ever cheery mother laughed at our fears. I used to think
that if I could recite Bryant's " Thanatopsis " and Campbell's
** Last Man " as Abby could, I would ask no more in this stage
of existence. The blind girls, too, were a marvel to us Forest
Homers. They were regular * ' lightning calculators ' ' in mental
arithmetic ; they could read the raised letters in the great books
printed for them ; could trace with delicate finger-tips all the
countries on the raised maps, and repeat poetry by the hour.
They were not a bit sorrowful because they could not see, but
when they came to spend an afternoon at Forest Home, would
An Unspoken ''llliy.'' 91
propose to play *' Blind Man's Buif,'' and say, merrily, **You
won't have to tie a handkerchief over our eyes ; and you'll know
for certain that we won't cheat by taking a peep on the sly."
From these experiences we learned that happiness is from
within ; that the real light shines in the heart, not in the eyes,
and that ever>'body who r*'/// be glad, may be.
At one time Prof. C. B. Woodruff and his wife had charge of
the '* Blind Institute,*" as it was oddly called, and the mathemat-
ical miracles wrought by the pupils under his care, disheartened
at least one of mother's three children about ever "cutting any
figure '• in that line, and perhaps made me the more determined
to excel in some other direction since I was so outdone in this
by my well-beloved companions. For life grew less lonely as the
years went by and neighbors were more numerous. A handsome
German gentleman called one day and proposed to buy a slice off
the most distant part of the old farm. He was Prof. Gustave
Knoepfel, of New York, since well known as an accomplished
organist. He wished to bring his old father and mother with his
many brothers and sisters, from Gennany and locate them in
peace and quiet in the "far West," which Wisconsin then was.
His father was a Lutheran minister and a " Herr Professor," be-
sides, having a title that he said meant "head covered w-ith
moss." Father thought these would be good neighbors and sold
them the land. The young professor gave music lessons to us
that summer, while he superintended the building of a house for
the family that was to come. They were a new window into
the great world, these cultured Germans with their neat, frugal
ways, pleasant manners and many accomplishments.
But I noticed that the learned Doctor did not seem to think
so much of his girls as of his boys, and that his wife had no such
place in her home as my mother had in hers. Nor did the boys
treat their sisters as their equals, as Oliver did his, and the
Hodge boys theirs. They seemed to be more like convenient
drudges — good to have about, but not companions. All this
touched my free spirit with a sense of pain and I "pondered
much why these things were."
The last teacher I had at Forest Home was mother's young-
est sister, Miss Sarah B. Hill. She had gone with us in 1841, in
the large carry-all, from Churchville, to Oberlin, Ohio. After
$2 Aunt Sarah.
study at Oberlin College she had been Preceptress of Riga Acad-
emy, New York, and Columbia Female College, Tennessee. Her
fame as a teacher had gone out far and wide, and we thought
nothing could ever give us so much pleasure as to see **Aunt
Sarah. ' * Our own dear mother had taught * * eleven summers and
seven winters,** as we had often heard her say ; but here was a
woman who had been a teacher all her life long, who was a
mathematician, an historian, a mental philosopher, and what-not,
besides ! She was to come from Buffalo to Milwaukee, ** around
the I^es,** and then by cars to Janesville, for we had the cars
at last, and the screech of the locomotive sounded as we thought
the voice of a horrid dragon might have done.
Father, who was fond of a secret, had tried to keep this
great event as a surprise, but in hunting his pockets for the latest
newspapers I had come upon my aunt's letter and shown it to
mother, who knew all about the matter, but counseled silence on
the children's part. So when he went to town one night, — a
thing he almost never did at such an hour — advising us to sit up
until his return, which was exactly opposite to his general coun-
sel, we knew very well what it meant. The usual style of chil-
dren, whose lives are so brimful of happenings that they have
learned to take almost everything as a matter of course, can
hardly imagine what it really did mean to us to have Aunt Sarah
come ! Here we had lived alone, year after year, in a place where
most people would have thought that nothing ever happened ;
hardly a person of our own blood had we seen since the white-
covered wagons started from Oberlin so long ago ; letters were
now and thSn exchanged, to be sure, but each letter cost twenty-
five cents, hence was an infrequent luxury ; and here, at last, was
coming the wonderful woman who had studied many books and
knew the world ! Loren declared that he should stay at the
bam — he did n't dare to see her. Bridget said ' * she knew enough
of great people to lay in a good stock o' provisions when they
was comin' 'round"; the Hodge children and Louise said there
would be no more fun and they wished she would n't come, and
meanwhile father rejoiced in the wonderful surprise he had in
store for all of us ! At the unheard-of late hotu" of ten, whose
clear stroke on the old brass clock we young people had almost
never listened to before, the rumble of wheels along that unfile-
Our Astronomy Lessons, 93
quented road told of Aunt Sarah's coming. Loren rushed out to
take care of the team and Oliver to help bring in the trunk.
Mother's calm face was wonderfiiUy lighted up ; how lonely she
had been and how much hard work she had done since she saw
her sister last ! Candle in hand she stepped out on the piazza ;
a tall lady in a handsome blue traveling dress threw her arms
about her and both women cried. I relieved mother of the light,
£Either and Oliver brought in the trunk, my aunt gave me a hug
and took sweet Marv on her knee.
* Well ! for country folks you don't surprise worth a cent,
that's certain," said my father, but he never knew how much we
knew, meek-eyed deceivers that we were !
It took but a short time to get acquainted. Mary said,
** Aunt Sarah is so much like mother that I'm not afraid of her."
Oliver agreed to this, and so did I, but as I was the shy one of
them all, I was on my good behavior longest. But Aunt Sarah
was such a brave and sunny spirit, that I very soon ** thawed
out," as Oliver laughingly called it, and became a walking inter-
rogation point, giving my aimt no rest in my desire to learn all
about the people, customs, etc., which the ** learned lady " had
found out in her wide experience. Teaching was such a passion
with her, that in a few days she had me studying mathematics,
derivation of English words, and history, while Mary listened to
these recitations and took another set better suited to her years.
Aunt Sarah was a devout Christian, and all her lessons led toward
God. The Bible was one of her text-books in astronomy, and
she delighted to explain its references to the Pleiades, Arctunis,
and Orion. She was very clear in everything she taught. Stand-
ing up in all her ample proportions, she said one day, ** Now I
will represent the sun ; Frank shall turn round and roimd, and
so turning shall also go in a circle around me, and while she does
this, Mary must move slowly around her ; thus Frank will repre-
sent the daily and yearly motions of the earth, and Mary of its
satellite." So she made our work seem play. She illustrated
as clearly, the tides, the zodiac, precession of the equinoxes
and many other points usually ** skimmed over," rather than
learned. Meanwhile, I read Dr. Dick's '^Christian Philosopher"
and "Future State," and was so wrought upon that when I had
to help get dinner one Sunday, I fairly cried. *' To come down
94 Milwaukee Female College,
to frying onions when I*ve been away among the rings of Saturn,
is a little too much ! " I said, impatiently. Poor ignorant child !
I had not yet learned that
*' To sweep a room as for God's laws,
Makes that and the action fine."
At the end of a delightful winter's training under our aunt,
with whom we afterward spent (before leaving Forest Home) a
term at the Milwaukee Female College, where she was Professor
of History, we girls had the sorrow of seeing her go aw^ay to her
home at the East.* After twenty years dev^oted to teaching,
almost wholly in the college grades, this dear aunt married Mr.
Ward Hall in 1862 and lives near the old home in Church-
ville, N. Y.
In the spring of 1857, when I was seventeen, our parents
sent us to Milwaukee because Aunt Sarah was then one of the
leading teachers there, and they had entire confidence in our well-
being when we were with her. We boarded in the home of Dr.
M. P. Hanson, for so many years the Dr. Dio Lewis of Milwaukee,
and found its Christian atmosphere w^as like that of our ow^n
father's house. Miss Mary Mortimer, the Principal, was absent
from the college on leave, and I have always regretted missing
the contact of a pupil with that great, philosophic soul. The
Misses Mary and Carrie Chapin, and Miss H. Huntington, all
accomplished New^ England teachers, had us in hand.
The college was Congregational in leadership, though really
unsectarian. We went with our aunt to Plymouth Church where
I greatly enjoyed the preaching of Rev. Dr. Z. M. Humphrey,
and the Bible class conducted by his accomplished wife.
I was never in an institution where the moral atmosphere was
so clear and invigorating as that of the Mihvaukee Female College.
We used to sit in the great study hall without a teacher present,
and any girl who would have misbehaved or laughed or whispered
would have been looked upon as beneath contempt. We were all
*'upon honor, '^ — the teachers trusted us. I remember on the
first day, I went to my class in geology, and, not knowing that
it was against the rule, I spoke to a classmate about the lesson
as we were climbing the stairs toward our teacher, and entirely
•Two of Miss Hill's visits are here included in one.
School Honors. 95
away from supervision ; my school-mate looked at me brightly
and kindly, evidently perceiving that I intended no harm, and
laid her taper finger on her sweet, shy lips. I could not forget
in a thousand years the majesty of the occasion, ^s it impressed
my mind, the sacred sense of truth it gave me and the determina-
tion that it deepened in my spirit to be just as trusty and con-
scientious as was she.
My admiration for Marion Wolcott, daughter of Dr. E. B.
Wolcott, the city's chief physician, was beyond words. Immac-
ulate in character, conduct and scholarship, I set her up as my
standard at once, and never rested until, like her, I heard '*Ten,
Ten,-' meaning ** perfect in punctuality, behavior and lessons,"
read out each week after my name.
My diligence in study was so great that Aunt Sarah feared
for my health. Each evening I rehearsed to her the lessons of
the coming day or wrote on my forthcoming ** composition." As
an intellectual guide, she was my greatest inspiration ; and other
pupils felt no less enthusiastic over this **bom teacher "and
devoted Christian.
Our history class was memorable. This was her favorite
branch — in teaching it she was thoroughly individual, making
the lesson \nvid, even to the dullest mind. Often she was very
humorous, at other times pathetic even to tears, as she depicted
great characters and achievements vital to the progress of hu-
manity.
The "examination flay," just previous to Commencement
was the climax of all that I had known. Our " middle class,"
was seated on the high platform of the great study hall. My aunt
went to the opposite end, and in her clear voice called out the
topics by number. We had to speak loud enough to be heard
throughout the room, or she would not allow us to proceed.
Mother was present and this was a day of joy to her, for she could
see how hard her girls had worked. I had an essa y on * * Original-
ity of Thought and Action," also a little poem, ** Lighting the
Lamps, " written on a sweet evening as I watched from my win-
dow that city sight to me so novel. This was read by my friend,
Anna Barnes, one of the leading pupils.
96 Lighting the Lamps.
Sitting by my window,
On a summer eve,
List*ning to the billow,
List'ning to the breeze ;
Dark the shadows falling.
Bright the stars and clear,
Men have ceased their toiling,
To their homes draw near ;
Hear the drowsy beating
Of the city's heart,
As the hours are fleeting,
And 'tis growing dark.
See ! a light is gleaming
Down the fading street !
Ah ! 'tis brighter beaming.
Guiding weary feet
Wake from out thy dreaming I
Wander not away !
Soul of mine, what seeming
For this night of May.
Let the light now shining.
Glistening through the gloom,
'Round thee gently twining,
Cause thee not to roam.
But notwithstanding all that is honestly avowed in the fore-
going lines, my heart ached when I left Milwaukee, and I was
downright sorry to go home.
My journal of the last days reads thus :
Milwaukee, July 16, 1857. — ^Terrible times preparing for eicamination.
I have studied hard, and ought to do weU. How will it be ? I pause /or a
reply. Practiced reading my composition on the rostrum, reviewed my his-
tory, geology and botany for examination ; meltingly warm ; all the seats
are taken out of the school-room. Father and mother came and stayed a
few moments and then went out to Mr. Gifford's. Later.— Nice times thus
far ; have recited botany, geology and history. Father only heard me in
history ; mother, in everything.
July 23. — Left the city at half-past ten. Felt fully as bad as when I left
home, even worse.
It seemed as if I had here found ** where to stand,** and
among noble mates. Marion Wolcott, Belle Flanders, Lizzie
Father at Evanston. 97
Wiley, Susie Bonnell, Abby Walton, Dora Smith — ^to these and
other leading spirits I was utterly devoted, and most of all to
Marion. It was the greatest grief my life had known up to that
time, when I learned that my father had determined not to send
us back again, because he was a Methodist and preferred a school
of that denomination. This being settled, we importuned the
good man of the house until he told us he thought more favorably
of Hvanston, a new town a few miles north of Chicago, than of
any other place. We had read in our church paper, TTie North-
western Christian Advocate, that this was to be the Methodist
Athens of the West. Dr. Clark Hinman, newly-elected president
of the University, had spoken before the Conference in our own
church. Bishop Morris presiding — ^the first **real, live Bishop"
we had ever seen, and reverenced more in those years than he
would be in these, when pew and pulpit almost meet.
Our cousin Morilla Hill came to see us at the holida3rs,
1857-58, and spoke so enthusiastically of Evanston, its present
educational advantages and its assuredly metropolitan future,
that we gave up our dream of Oberlin and our devotion to Mil-
waukee, and one day in early spring father was packed off,
by the combined energies of wife and daughters, to **spy out
the land*' at Evanston. He attended the closing exercises of
the term, was pleasantly impressed by Prof, and Mrs. Wm. P.
Jones, the united head of the school family ; Miss Luella Clark,
the poet, who had the literature department ; Miss Lydia Hayes,
teacher of mathematics ; Miss Baldwin, Miss Dickinson, and
various other leading lights of the Ladies* College. So he brought
home a good report, and we girls sang and shouted in glee ; the
spell was broken, the great world-voices charmed our youthful
ears, so long contented with the song of zephyrs among the tas-
seled com, or winds in the tall tree-tops that sheltered our sacred
altar fires ; our country life was ended, and forever ended, except
that on our return fi-om four months at Evanston, I taught a
summer term in the ** old school-house,** in which Mary did the
* art department,'* and our old playmates gathered in **for
fiin,** while six delightfiil weeks proved that we could have our
good times all the same, and yet be doing good to somebody.
The first sorrows that came into our girlish lives were caused
by the departure from this world of our gifted, fine-sotiled cousin,
98 Northwestern FemdU •College,
Charlotte GUman, and our thoughtful, gentle playmate, "Rever-
end Jamie. " " Heaven's climate must be more like home to them
than ours," said lovely Mary, herself so soon to follow. Life took
a serious color from the loss of these sweet souls, and Nature's
voices had thenceforth a minor key amid their joyfiilness.
Evaoston, twelve miles north of Chicago, on Lake Michigan,
was founded in 1854, by Dr. (afterward Governor) John Evans,
Orrington Lunt, and other leading laymen of the M. E. Church.
Here they located the Northwestern University and secured a
large tract of land for its endowment. The Garrett Biblical Insti-
tute, a theological school, was founded here also by Mrs. Eliza
Garrett, of Chicago. But the school which most interested this
&ther of young women, bent on their higher education, was the
Northwestern Female College, owned and managed by Prof,
William P. Jones, a graduate of Alleghany College, and his wife,
a graduate of Mt. Holyoke Seminary. This was the only
woman's college of high grade at this time known. Its course of
study was almost identical with that of its neighbor, the Univer-
sity, and its advantages were of a high order. It was soon
arranged that we should enter the College which was to become
the Alma Mater of us both.
CHAPTER n.
COLLEGE DAYS.
Here comes in a sketch prepared by request of ** the powers
that be " by my schoolmate, my sister Mary's classmate, and our
beloved sister-in-law, Mary Bannister Willard. Her father was
Dr. Bannister, long Principal of Cazenovia Seminary, N. Y., and
for nearly thirty years Professor of Hebrew in our Theological
Seminary at Evanston. With her two daughters, Katharine and
Mary, Mrs. Willard has been for some years in Berlin, Germany,
where she has a fine Home School for American girls :
None of the pupils who attended in the spring term of 1858
will fail to recall the impressions made by two young girls from
Wisconsin on their entrance upon this new school-life. Mary,
with her sweet, delicate face, winning, almost confidential man-
ner, and earnest, honest purpose, conquered the hearts of teachers
and pupils at once. School girls are a conservative body, reserv-
ing favorable judgment till beauty, kindliness, or fine scholarship
compels their admiration. Frances was at first thought proud,
haughty, independent — all cardinal sins, in school-girl codes.
The shyness or timidity which she concealed only too success-
fully under a mask of indifierence, gave the impression that she
really wished to stand aloof fi*om her mates. When it came to
recitations, however, all sh)mess and apparent indifference melted
away. The enthusiasm for knowledge and excellence shone from
the young girl's face on all these occasions. After *' class*' her
schoolmates gathered in groups in corridor and chapel, and dis-
cussed her perforce favorably. " My ! can't she recite ? Look
out for your laurels now, Kate!*' *'The new girl beats us
all/' — these were the ejaculations that testified of honest school-
girl opinion, and prophesied her speedy and sure success.
(99)
loo A Transition Period.
It was but a few weeks till she was editor of the College
paper, and leader of all the intellectual forces among the students.
She was in no sense, however, an intellectual '* prig.*' None of
us was more given over to a safe kind of fun and frolic ; she was
an inventor of sport, and her ingenuity devised many an amuse-
ment which was not all amusement, but which involved consid-
erable exercise of wit and intelligence — and our beloved
** Professor " soon found that he could always rely upon her influ-
ence in the school to counteract the tendency to silly escapades
and moonlight walks with the ** University boys." A young
man would have been temerity itself who would have suggested
such a thing to her. In fact she came to be something of a
** beau " herself — a certain dashing recklessness about her having
as much fascination for the average school-girl as if she had been
a senior in the University, instead of the carefully dressed,
neatly gloved young lady who took the highest credit marks in
recitation, but was known in the privacy of one or two of the
girls' rooms to assume the ** airs " of a bandit, flourish an imag-
inary sword, and converse in a daring, slashing way supposed to
be known only among pirates with their fellows. If one of those
school-mates had been called upon to sum up in a sentence a
rough estimate of her friend she would probably at this period
have given as her opinion, ** She's wild with the g^ls and does n't
care a snap for the boys."
At some ** grammar party," or sociable, she was heard to
begin a conversation with one of these ** rejected and despised "
individuals with the very nonchalant remark, ** We all seem to be
in good health, the company is pleasant and the evening a fine
one. These subjects being duly disposed of, what shall we talk
about ? " Rumor had it ever thereafter, that the young man was
so bewildered that he surrendered his heart upon the spot.
Her teachers at this time were, first of all, *' Professor," *
than whom it would seem from the speech of those days and the
girls of that time, no other ever existed. He was the moving
spirit within all the wheels ; the indomitable, unconquerable man
whose energy and perseverance had twice built the college, the
* Prof. W. P. Jones, already mentioned as the president of the Northwestern Female
CoUrge, died in the summer of 1886, at Premonti Neb., where he was president of a flour-
ishing normal school founded by himself.
Swampscott. loi
last time after a disastrous fire, and whose faithful devotion to
woman's higher education long before it became the popular,
fashionable thing it is to-day, holds all his former pupils in rever-
ent, loving admiration.
Next came his good, true wife, greatly beloved by the stu-
dents and a most conscientious teacher. One of the deepest
impressions of her school life, Frances often says, was made by
the tender appeal of this teacher-friend urging her pupil to give
heait and soul to God, and coming to her room and kneeling by
her side to pray that she might be brought to the point of yield-
ing herself in ** reasonable service *' to Him who died for her.
Miss Mary Dickinson, of Massachusetts, a women of queenly
grace and dignity, and fine abilities as an instructor, occupied the
Chair of Natural Sciences during the first year, and Miss I/)uise
Baldwin the same position during the last year of the college
course. Miss Luella Clark, loved and prized no less for her
friendly heart and beautifiil character, than for her poetic soul,
was Professor of Literature and Philosophy, and general confiden-
tial adviser of each one who made any specialty of composition.
Both Professor Jones and Miss Clark had rare ability to inspire
the literary ambition in the minds of their pupils. They pos-
sessed high ideals themselves, and knew how to place these so
attractively before the young beginner, that, without discourage-
ment, there was endless dissatisfaction with crude efibrt, and end-
less trying for better things.
In the vacation summer of 1858, on returning fi-om Kvanston
Frank (as everybody called her) took possession of the little
school-house near Forest Home, and for six weeks carried on
the school herself, with g^eat comfort and pleasure. Early in
the autumn the Willard family removed to Evanston, Tenants
were placed in charge of their beloved ** Forest Home," and
** Swampscott" became their residence — a pleasant place near
the lake, the large grounds of which became Mr. Willard' s pride
and pleasure, as he saw them, under his skillful management,
iprowing constantly more beautifiil. Nearly every tree and vine
was set with his own hands, often assisted by Frank, and all were
imported fi-om Forest Home.
The last year at school was one of great strain for Frank, for
she carried six or seven studies, and twice before graduation suf-
I02 Valedtdorian.
fered severe illnesses, interrupting her progress, but not perma-
nently interfering with her health. One of these occurred at the
time of the marriage of one of her favorite teachers, Miss Lillie
Hayes, to the Rev. J. W. Waugh, who was under appointment as
a missionary of the Methodist Church to India. This was a sore
grief, as Frances was one of her chosen brides-maids. The long
journey before her friend seemed never so weary and unending
as viewed from a sick-bed, and the parting never so final and
appalling.
Some small glimpses of her busy student life are given in the
following extracts from her journal kept in the spring of 1859.
May. — I am now in the midst of the cares, duties and troubles of my
last term at school, and you must expect less frequent visits for a few weeks,
my silent confidant
Here's a pretty thought, fix>m what source I know not "Twilight
flung her curtain down and pinned it with a star.'' *' Duties are ours;
events are God's." {The Methodist) Definition of History : ** Philosophy
teaching by example."
Dr. Foster closed the Bible, after his discourse at the University chapel •
yesterday, with these words : '* Brothers, with most men life is a failure."
The words impressed me deeply ; there is sorrow in the thought, tears and
agony are wrapped up in it O Thou who rulest above, help me that my life
may be valuable, that some human being *Shall yet thank Thee that I have
lived and toiled !
Have written my "piece" for the "Grammar party paper;" subject,
" lyiving and Existing."
" Boasts will not pillow thee where great men sit,
Would'st thou have greatness ? Greatly strive for it"
I am reading in The Methodist a new novel (religious) by Miriam
Fletcher, alias Mrs. Cruikshank, of Cincinnati. Will write what I think of
it, afterwards.
Miss G., a new pupil from Beloit, is an honest, generous, good girl (it
is refreshing to see one such), and I like her. Mr. Emery has sent me a
I>ackage of rare flower seeds and Breck's " Flower Garden. " I have planted
the seeds — have a garden of my own.
Professor detained me after devotions this morning and with his most
" engaging " smile made this announcement : " By the vote of your teachers,
you are appointed valedictorian." I was glad, of course ; 'tis like human
nature. To others it will seem a smaU thing ; it is not so to me.
Mr. Gifford came last night, left this morning. I like him. He is a
much endowed man, he is a good man. He lent me a little Swedenborgian
book, " Rays of Light," which I am to read and to write him my views upon.
I am glad he asked me, it will be a source of advancement Have just
''Lei a Man Be a Man:' 103
oommenoed to read *' The Memoirs of Margaret Poller Ossoli." Thus far I
am enchanted. I think her views are so essentially correct ; they appeal so
directly to my consdonsness of right and fitness. Oh, to have known such
a person ! Oh, to possess such a mind 1 We of the lower stratum are im-
proved, refined, by such communication. I think Margaret Puller Ossoli
would have been, could have been, was, so far as she went, the greatest of
Humboldt is dead ! He who has for a life-time ranged over the coun-
tries of the earth, is admitted to new realms of action. He has been pro-
moted. He has passed an honorable probationship in the academy of the
earth, and has entered the college of the universe. As says my friend,
H. H. B., so say I, " *Tis well when a great, good man dies.** Not well for
OS, but glorious for him.
Have finished reading story in The Methodist, It is good. Its influence
must be good. It is not so very strong. *' Buckeye'* hazarded much in
saying it was equal to "Uncle Tom's Cabin**; it is not, nearly, Harry
Bradford is a noble character, almost equal to John Halifax, but he weeps
too much, and so does Willie Hunter. Let a man be a man, I don*t like
Harry's ideas about a wife's obeying her husband. That I scout wherever I
see it. I do not think I am unreasonable ; I think I have good ground for
my belief. If I truly believed that the fifth chapter of Ephesians (twenty-
second to twenty-fourth verses) was to be understood literally and applied
to me, if ever I'm any man's wife, I should thinks the evidence sufficient
that God was unjust, unreasonable, a tyrant. But as it is I do not. This
is my opinion now ; will it change ? It may seem wrong to others. It is
my way of thinking, and I have a right to it That right I will maintain.
Study did not end with the abandonment of the class-room,
but, as she had planned, went on in new forms, and with the
intent and intensity of original research. Her school-mates when
they visited her in her quiet little room, with its bright south
and east windows brimming the cozy nook with warm sunshine,
found her always at her desk with books, paper and pen, for with
her independent mind, the thoughts and investigations of others
were not properly her own until she had fixed them in the mould
of personal judgment, and phrased them in the forceful language
of her own opinions.
While society, or the superficial intercourse known by this
name, had little charm for this studious young woman, whose
keen spirit soon pierced its disguises and rated it at its real
value, to her journal she philosophized about it in this wise:
As I gain in experience, I see more and more distinctly that a young lady
must have accomplishments to be of value in society. That august tyrant
asks every candidate for preferment in its ranks : '' What can you do for
I<>4 Happy ffome Days.
me? Can yon tell me a story, make me a joke or sing me a song? t am
to be amused ! " Society is not for scholarly discipline. Study is for private
life. Benefactions, loves, hates, emoluments, business — all these go on
behind the scenes. Men grow learned, and good, and great otherwhere than
in society. They ponder, and delve, and discover in secret places. Women
suffer and grow uncomplaining in toil and sacrifice and learn that life's
grandest lesson is summed up in four simple words — " Let us be patient " — ^in
the nooks and comers of the earth. Into society they may bring not their
labors but the fruit of their labors. Public opinion, which is the mouth-
piece of society, asks not of any man : ** When did you do this, where did
you accomplish it?" but, "What have you done? we do not care for the
process, give us the results.*'
Society is to every-day life what recess is to the school-boy. If it has
been crowded from this, its right relation, then it is for every right-thinking
member to aid in the restoration to its true position. Let no cynical philos-
opher inveigh against society. Let none say its fruits are simply heartless-
ness and hjrpocrisy. Man is a creature of habits ; when among his fellows,
he does his best studiously at first, unthinkingly afterward. I will venture to
assert that the man who was greater than any other who walked the earth
was the kindest, the best bred, the most polite. Society is not an incidental,
unimportant affair ; it is the outward sign of an inward grace. Let us, then,
if we can, be graceful ; cultivate conversational ability, musical talent ; im-
prove our manners— and our beauty, if we are blessed with it Harmonious
sounds cheer the heart Fitness is admirable. All these are means of hap-
piness to us who have sorrow enough at best. It is no light thing to
perform the duties we owe to society, and it is better to approximate than
to ignore them.
Scattered all along through this year the journal shows
many an ardent longing for the best and most symmetrical of all
lives — that of the Christian. The sacred song, the faithful ser-
mon and many an earnest conversation calls out this deep desire
and its expression.
The life of the home was a very bright and merry one at
this time, for the three children were all together, all earnestly
at work, but all as uniquely bent on enjoyment as ever they had
been in the old delightful days of Forest Home. Oliver having
finished his college studies, was preparing for the ministry ;
Mary was joyfully nearing her own g^duation day — full of en-
thusiasm for knowledge, for happiness, for all the real values of
life. Frances alone at home, deep in a young girl's philosophy
of existence, was nevertheless as fond of a romp, a joke, and a
good time, as any girl to-day of the particular fun and frolic that
young people nowadays engage in.
First Glimpse of JSvansian, I05
Deeply envious of the brothers and friends who were so fond
of their college fraternity, and so tantalizing with their half-
displayed secrets, the girls of 1859 and i860, an exceptionally
bright and clever company, organized a secret society of their
own, in which Frances and Mary were among the deepest plotters.
Since Greek letters were in order, ours was the Iota Omega fra-
ternity, or sorority ; dark and dreadful were its ceremonies, grave
and momentous its secrets. It was not allowed to degenerate,
however, into anything worse than autograph hunting, and even
in these early days of that nuisance, we received some sharp repri-
mands for our importunity. Horace Greeley, particularly, berated
us in a long letter, which, fortunately, we could not entirely
decipher, and which was so wretchedly illegible that we could
exhibit it to envious Sigma Chi brothers without fear of tatmt or
ridicule. Abraham Lincoln gave his friendly **sign manual,''
Longfellow wrote out a verse of ** Excelsior ** for the collection,
but Queen Victoria, alas ! to whom we had applied in a letter
addressed :
Victoria,
Buckingham Palace,
London,
England, The World,
never deigned us a reply.
We had a department of Notes and Queries, also, that was
given to Frank's especial charge, and she was never more herself
than when setting all of us at work with slender clues upon the
hunt for some valuable bits of information, more than she or we
knew at the time. She was our instructor and leader.
To the foregoing generous statement of my case as a student
I hold myself in duty bound to add sundry particulars. On
March 2, 1858, Mary and I left Forest Home, and that afternoon
we saw Evanston for the first time. I was nearly eighteen and a
half yesas old, and three days later my sister was sixteen.
Mary thus wrote of our new life :
March 2, 1858. — Up in the morning at three o'clock, ate breakfast, said
good-by to Forest Home with many inward sighs, and were off to Janesville
by four; took the cars and went, and went, and went, until we arrived at
Chicago about one ; took dinner at the Matteson House, started for Bvans-
ton, only twelve miles away. The college is really a beautiful building. We
are in om- own room now, tacking down the carpet, unpacking trunks, etc
io6 Day by Day.
Evening. — ^We have our room quite in order. Hope, and guess, we
shall like to live here, for our room is quite pleasantly situated, overlooking
the railroad track, where the cars pass often, on the very road that connects
us with our home. Good-night
March 3. — Got up in the morning, made toilet and bed, took our new
and beautiM silver forks and napkin rings, and went down to breakfast,
came back and arranged our room. Father gone to Chicago to get us some
necessary things. We are doing very well ; have been into the chapel, heard
the rules and regulations of the school, a good many, to be sure, but I guess
we ^all be able to keep them. Have not decided what to study yet.
Professor Jones, the president, is a noble looking man and his wife is just
as nice as he is.
March 4.— Commenced operations to-day. Study natural philosophy,
algebra, elocution and penmanship. Begin to get acquainted ; like Miss
Dickinson, our division teacher, very much. Went down to prayers. Father
expects to return home to-morrow morning. I felt very lonely this after-
noon.
March 10. — ^Went to the store and got weighed, result ninety-four pounds.
March 11. — Miss Kidder came to our room and invited us to her house
Saturday. She is a very pleasant, pretty girl. This morning, in company
with teachers and scholars, went to the lake ; it was beautiful to see the
^reat waves come riding along, then break and doff their white caps to the
lookers-on.
Sunday, March 28. — ^Pleasant day, went to church in the morning and
evening. Journal, I don't know whether I am a Christian or not. Hope I
am. I spoke in class to-day, the first time I ever did such a thing in my life.
March 31. — Frank is busy with her paper, she is editress ; my composi-
tion is about the mosquito.
April I. — Had a great time fooling people, fooled Professor ! A man
rode up and down by here dressed in woman's clothes, and right in the
midst of church to-night there was a great cry of fire, all being April-fool.
April 9. — In the afternoon we read our debates, and listened to the paper.
When we came up from chapel, what did we hear but that father and mother
had come — and were n't we glad? We put on our "best bib and tucker "
and went to the hotel as quick as we could go. They brought us cake and
oranges, nice head-dresses, and alL Oh, what pleasure it is to see home
friends!
April 12. — Had a good mind to be lonely but thought I would n't
Father thinks he shall be here in two or three weeks again ; good I
May 18. — The grammar party is the all-absorbing theme ; the boys are
going to get the evergreens ; we have collected part of the money for the
cake.
May aa — I went around to help notify the company ; such getting ready
of cake and candies, such sweeping of parlors, such arranging and hanging
up festoons of evergreens was never seen.
May 21. — The people, too, came, and kept coming until the parlors were
One Prayer-meeting. loj
jammed fnll. We promenaded, and played, and waited on the table until
twelve o'clock.
May 22. — ^Went up to the Biblical Institute and saw some idols that look
like devils.
Blay 26. — ^Have been appointed to read at Commencement, so has P. and
several of the other girls.
May 28. — Up in the teacher's room, pla3ring all sorts of games, wring-
ing water out of the handle 'of a knife, and so on.
Dear little heart ! She liked the railroad because it was a
palpable link binding us to Forest Home !
At the college in Kvanston, I at once fell in with a very bright,
attractive, but reckless young school-mate for whom I conceived
a romantic attachment, although she was **the wildest girl in
school." She was from Chicago, from an irreligious family, and
while I think she had a noble nature, her training had led her away
from the ideals that mine had always nurtured. It soon fell out
that, while my gentle sister consorted only with the ** Do-weels,*' I
was ranked with the ** Ne*er-do-weels," that is, those who did not
go to prayer-meeting on Sunday evening, when all the good stu-
dents assembled in the library ; and did not give devout attention
to the seventy rules of the institution, though I certainly started
out to do so, having copied them and hung them up on the door of
my room the very first day, that I might learn them by heart. But
this bright girl, to whom I took a fancy, poked fun at the rules,
and at me for keeping them, telling me that I was to be a law to
myself, and that if I did not disturb the order of the institution,
that was all anybody could expect and all that the spirit of the
rales required. So I used to perch myself up in the steeple of the
college building, alongside of her, during the study hours, unbe-
known to the authorities ; and once went into a girl's room and
took possession of the prayer-meeting with my ill-doing band ;
whereupon, I was promptly asked to lead the meeting, and did
so in all seriousness, for I would as soon have thought of insult-
ing my own mother as making light of religion, at least inside a
prayer-meeting. I can see now that group of sweet, true-hearted
girls, with the look of surprise that came over their pleasant faces
when half a dozen of us who belonged to the contrary part came
in. They handed me a Bible, perhaps thinking it the best way
of making us behave. It was a shrewd expedient, to say the
least. I read a chapter, commented upon it as wisely as I could.
io8 The Grammar Party.
and then said, " Let us pray." They all knelt down but one,
a harum-scarum girl, who was among my special associates.
There she sat bolt upright, with the rest all kneeling, and before
I began my prayer, which was most seriously offered, I said,
**I<ineburger'' — for we were so demoralized that we called
each other after this fashion, — ** why don't you kneel down, and
behave? If you don't, you are a disgrace to yourself and the
whole Lineburger tribe." At this nobody smiled, though when
I think of it now, it seems so whimsical that I can not help doing
so. SuflSce it that ** Lineburger " knelt, and the devotions pro-
ceeded with the utmost decorum.
One of the original features of the college was the grammar
party given toward the close of every term. For each mistake
in grammar we were fined one cent, and the pupils were constantly
on the watch for each other, memorandum-book in hand or pocket.
We were also allowed to call attention to mistakes by the teachers,
even including the professor himself, and they were charged five
cents apiece. A goodly sum was thus accumulated, to which we
added by special assessment, and the g^mmar party was thus
made of every creature's — ^worst ! But in spite of this it was the
great day of the year, almost rivaling the Commencement exer-
cises in the church. Four large parlors were arranged in delight-
ful juxtaposition for promenading, and we festooned them with
evergreens brought in great loads firom the lake shore. The
dining-room usually bore some motto like the following, " All
hail to the Queen's English ! " The **cake of errors*' was of
great size and beauty, and was metaphorically supposed to have
been purchased with our forfeited pennies. As the crowd gathered
around. Professor Jones would brandish a formidable-looking
knife above this wonderful creation, and in a witty speech descant
on the importance of language, and of good language, at that.
This feature furnished themes for conversation, so that a piece of
good fortune in the way of a topic came to the guests with every
piece of cake. I remember once being escorted by a most accom-
plished gentleman, who, as he critically tasted a slice fix>m our
cake of errors, made a familiar and witty extract fi:x>m Goldsmith's
famous poem in the words,
" And e*en their errors leaned to virtue's side."
Prefers Books to Society. 109
Turning to my journal I find these entries of school days :
The grammar party is over. There were one hundred and fifty guests,
and all passed off pleasantly. Misses Gordon, Bragdon, Atkins, Stewart,
Hattie and Julia Wood, Maggie McKee, Lizzie Wilson and myself were
waiters. My dress was nearly ruined. Mary and I were considered worthy
to " hold a candle *' to Miss Stowe and Miss Shackelford, editress and assist-
ant editress of the paper, while they read My dress was tight and I was
very faint once, in the heated rooms, but I quickly recovered. I never
enjoy " mixed society.*' I was not made, I am not fitted, for it I am, in
this one respect, like Charles Lamb. He enjoyed the society of a few per-
sons, his equals, and companions, with whom he was well acquainted and in
whom he had entire confidence. In such society he was interesting ; by
those few friends he was much beloved. Beyond that circle he was not him-
self ; appeared grave and confused and was considered uninteresting. This
is my position now, as nearly as I know how to state it. I am sorry. It is
unfortunate, it will cause me much unhappiness, but I can not help it.
Somehow, I have an unconquerable aversion to intercourse with my
superiors in position, age, or education. This is unpleasant, too. I shall
lose many opportunities for improvement by this means. I have had the
opportunity of becoming acquainted with Mrs. P., Mrs. N., and several
others, but the dread I have of such relations I can not overcome. When
speaking with such individuals I can never divest their characters, their
intellects, of the accidents of wealth, age and position, and hence I can
never be at ease. This is one reason why I like books so well. They do not
chill me, they are content that I should absorb the knowledge-nectar they
contain, without reminding me of my inferiority to them. They are great,
yet most familiar ; they say to every reader, *' I am for you, my greatest
pleasure is in having your attention.'* They are great without arrogance,
wise without hauteur ^ familiar without degradation. They are full of power
and pathos, yet not conscious of it; "they make no sign." And this is
natural, for each man gives us his best self in his books, and our best selves
are above and beyond our fortunate accidents. To books, then, let me flee.
They never frighten me. They "never molest me, nor make me afraid."
I conversed a short time with Mrs. Hayes, Lillie's mother. She is
rather aged, and is a fine, intelligent lady. She spoke of Lillie on the ocean
to-night, and while the feelings of the mother were prominent, I could also
discern the fortitude of the Christian.
I am more interested in the " Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli," than
in any other book I have read for years. Here we see what a woman
achieved for herself. Not so much fame or honor, these are of minor im-
portance, but a whole character, a cultivated intellect, right judgment, self-
knowledge, self-happiness. If she, why not we, by steady toil ?
I have my Butler's Analogy lessons satisfactorily, I think ; my astronomy
Icasoos, (whenever mathematics present themselves), awfully, I was ex-
ceedingly mortified to-day by my stupidity.
Memorandom. — To have, always, some fixed rule of action in my mind. "*
no A Lover of Knowledge.
To have two objects : A life-object and a daily, hourly object To study
systematically. To inform myself first on the subjects of importance of
which I feel most ignorant
Annie Poster called and invited Mary and me to a party at Doctor
Foster's to-uight, to which the senior and junior classes of the University
are also invited. At the appointed time we went, at twelve o'clock we re-
turned. Much as I dislike "mixed companies " in general, I enjoyed this
occasion. I made two grand discoveries. The first was this : Dr. Foster
so far understands what he is, what his position is, and how impossible it
would be to compromise his dignity by any honorable act ; in fact, he takes
such extended and (I think) correct views of facts and relations, that he
thinks it no sacrifice of dignity to talk with a school-girl, to walk with her,
to honor her with his company to supper, and to forget for awhile the
D. D., the genius, the position, the scholar and the orator, in acting the part
of a true host and a most genial gentleman. When I see his beautiful home
life and home character, when I see him leaving his guests to relieve his wife
from the care of a fretful child, when I see him rocking back and forth and
murmuring a song to soothe the child to slumber, when I see his nice appre-
ciation of the characters and abilities of those whom he is entertaining,
when I see him adjusting his conversation to their capacities, how vastly is
my reverence, my appreciation of his merit, increased. At present I have
a more exalted opinion of Dr. Foster than of any other living man.
The other revelation is that Annie Foster is, in all the respects men-
tioned, like her father, and worthy of him.
Everything humbles me, but two things in the highest degree. One is
to stand in a large library, the other to study astronomy. In both cases I
not only see how much there is to be known, how insignificant my knowl-
edge is, but I see how atomic I am, compared with other human beings.
Astronomers *' think God's thoughts after him." Alas, I can hardly think
their thoughts after them, when all is clearly represented !
After school, yesterday, I went to C. G.'s room and stayed till dark. It
was pleasant, and reminded me of the joyful old times when I, too, was a
boarder. I believe that to be connected in some capacity with a school is
what I am intended for.
Memorandum.— Margaret Fuller's *' Conversation Classes." I believe,
though not fluent in conversation, I can benefit school-girls by a similar
arrangement when I'm a teacher. C. G. is a good, sound writer and in this
respect, as in others, will be an acquisition to our school.
I have been looking over the first few days of this installment of my
journal and find that I complain bitterly of school duties and cares.
From this, hereafter, when I have forgotten, I may infer that I was so
narrow-minded as to hate study. I will defend myself. The case is this : I
truly love knowledge. I thank God most that He has made us so that we
may make ourselves great and wise and good, that we may change our-
selves in mind from helpless babes to strong, steadfast characters. At school
we acquire discipline. We learn how to use the implements with which
we are provided for *' working " the mine of truth. Along with this, rules
Emerson's Philosophy. iii
are, perhaps necessarily (I*m not certain), imposed upon ns. Rales are un-
pleasant ; and the reason why I'm glad to leave school is this : I can learn,
I truly think, as well alone, now. I shall be free from a restraint that is
irksome to me. But then, I love my teachers, the institution which has
been truly to me an "Alma Mater," the fellow-students who have been uni-
formly kind and loving. I hope I take a correct view of the case. O the
glory oikfunving always when you are in the right ! I shall arrive at it.
Nowadays and until Commencement, / am^ and am to be in a perpet-
ual furor. I have no time to think steadily or do anything carefully
and welL Consequently, I don't think. Oh, I'm tired and fretted and I
long for the rest that is to follow.
Am reading the second volume of Margaret Puller Ossoli's '' Memoirs."
Like it, even at the first ; here's an extract : '* Among this band was the
young girl who, early taking a solemn view of the duties of life, found it
difficult to serve an apprenticeship to its follies. She could not turn her
sweetness into 'manner,' nor cultivate love of approbation at the expense
of virginity of heart. In so-called society she found no sustenance for her
truest, fairest self, and so preferred to live with external Nature, a few
friends, her pencil and books. She, they say, is 'mad ! ' "
Now, in some respects, I'm like that. I've no " sweetness " to lose, 'tis
true, but I have some character, some individuality, instead. The last part
of the quotation is like me as I would be. Books I have, Nature I have. I
have no melodeon or organ — my favorite instrument ; I will learn drawing.
Then I shall have pleasure enough, except— oh, I want a young friend of
my own age, nearly, who shall love me, understand me, bear with me !
Often I have thought that I had such an one, but have found to my bitter
regret that I was mistaken.
Received letter from Oliver. He has the second " Honor " of his class,
viz., Latin oration. He is the President of the Archaean Society ; I'm glad,
of course.
"The girls " say I am fickle ; I have always had that reputation, I be-
lieve. And yet it is not my fault In Emerson's essay on " Circles " I find
the solution of the problem. Listen : " Men cease to interest us, when we
find their limitations. The only sin is imitation. As soon as you once come
up with a man's boundaries, it is all over with him. Has he talents ? Has
he enterprise ? Has he knowledge ? It boots not Infinitely alluring and
attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in ? Now
3rou have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you never
see it again." This is hard philosophy, but, with some abatement, it is true.
June 22. — Beautiful day. We should be very grateful to Him that
nileth Last night Mary and I went to hear Rev. W. McKaig lecture be-
fore the literary societies of the Garrett Biblical Institute, whose anniversary
exercises are now progressing. His subject, as nearly as I can«-emember the
wording of it, was : ** The Study of Philosophy as Necessary to Liberal Cult-
itre, and in its Application to Theology." I have heard that some of the
Hilc of the town think little of the production. In most cases the opinions
of those to whom I allude would have great weight with me, for they are
112 Inquirer ^not Infidel.
learned men, and have had experience, but in this instance my own
convictions decide so strongly, so involuntarily, that I do not regard their
decisions as material in the least For me the lecture was, without ex-
ception, the best I have ever listened to. The thoughts were original, the
language forcible Anglo-Saxon, the metaphors beautiful, and most of the con-
clusions just The word " postulate " occurred too frequently, ** mind " was
pronounced "mine." Two words were incorrectly accented, I forget what
they were ; one word was used, which, I think, the dictionary does not con-
tain, "parageum,** and one word ''dis "something, was coined. One
of the conclusions I thought incorrect, viz. : That the Bible is to stand even
in opposition to known facts ; Le., out of two cases, in one of which, the
Bible says so and so, in the other of which science plainly declares the con-
trary, the lecturer said we were to believe the Bible and disbelieve science.
This seems unreasonable ; Bishop Butler declares the contrary, and he is
good authority. Once Mr. McKaig said that men should confine them-
selves to specialties, or he made a statement very much like that ; soon after,
he accused Hugh Miller of wrong judging because he had so closely con-
fined himself to his specialty, geology. I have bluntly mentioned all the
errors I noticed. Deductions must be made for misapprehension on my
part, for the narrowness of the views which I of necessity take, for my slight
knowledge of the mighty subject considered, of the writers referred to, etc,
etc. But, letting the errors stand as I have placed them, abating nothing,
the lecture was yet a fine one. It was as refreshing to the mind to look from
the pure heights to which we were led, as to the lungs is the bland evening
breeze of the country after a dusty city day. It would be presumption and
mockery in me to attempt a synopsis, so, out of respect to the lecturer, I
forbear. God speed him always, say I. The vulgar mind will not appreci-
ate him. He will have few friends (Emersonian) because few equals among
his companions. Yet he is enough for himself. With his head among the
stars it will be nothing to him whether dogs fawn or nibble at his shoe-
ties. " lyittle he'll reck ! *' I have spoken enthusiastically, as I feeL
Memorandum. — I must study mental philosophy by myself after I leave
school. It was rather deep, and I had to keep up a terrible thinking to get
any benefit, but think I succeeded partially.
About this time, my dear friend and gifted preceptor, Prof.
William P. Jones, president of the college, stated my case in
prayer-meeting over at the church and asked prayers on my be-
half. When this came to my ears I felt considerably wrought
upon, for he had said I was an infidel, and I considered myself an
inquirer. However, he had done it in good part and I took it
the same w^y. Revival meetings were soon begun, and one Sun-
day evening Professor Jones urged some of us * * wild girls, * * as we
were called, to go to the altar. I was very loth to do this, but, to
please him, consented. Going home after the meeting I wrote
A Plain Statement. 113
the following letter, returned to me after an interval of thirty
years by Mrs. Jones :
Professor — I thank yon very much for the interest you manifest in
me and at the same time I feel very guilty.
I do not think you know how hard my heart is, how far I am from feel-
ing anything. I see I have no excuse to ofier for my conduct Three facts
stand out before me as facts, nothing more. I view them cahnly, coldly.
They are these. I am a great sinner ; it is a sin greater than I can compre-
hend to doubt God, or to refuse submission to him, for a moment I have
no excuse for dela3dngto become a Christian. The third fact is, I am as cold
as an iceberg, as unconcerned as a stone. I am not proud of it, I am not
ashamed of it I view it simply as a truth. I disconnect it from myself. I
seem to think that all these things concern others, but do not concern me.
You will say that I shall feel in hell (a hard word); I shall see that these
things did concern me, when I come to die. I acknowledge it If there is
a God, a heaven, a hell, a devil, then I am undone. I have been taught to
think that all these exist, yet from childhood I have doubted.
I have been told that man feels a lack, a longing for something not
possessed, when away from God. Candidly, honestly, I feel no lack, no
vant. I would not ask for more happiness than I have always had, if by
asking I might obtain it. You will say I ought to be thankful for this to God.
I am thankfril to something, thankful to whatever has thus blessed me, and I
wish I was as sure that a good Spirit ruling the universe had done this, as
Christians are.
If I were to pray, I should say, if I were candid^ " Oh God, if there be
a God, save my soul, if I have a soul ! **
It is humiliating for me, the child of pious parents, for whom a thousand
prayers have been offered up, to confess thus. I had thought no human
heart should be permitted to look so deeply into mine. But I think it just
that you should know.
And now, in view of aU these facts, I ask, respectfully, yet earnestly,
ooglit I to go to the altar, to kneel before the Christian's God, to hear the
Christian's prayer, careless and imconcemed ? Soon it will be expected that
I speak in church. Congratulations will be numerous, that I have '' returned
to the fold," and my dark, wicked heart alone shall know how far I have
wandered, how hypocritical I am.
I am willing to attend church, though it interferes very much with my
pfDgieas in science. I am willing to go, if you think it will do any good,
but until I feel differently, I dare not go to the altar again. When I do I
win go unasked. I am.
Gratefully and respectfully yours,
Frances E. Wh^x^rd.
During: my last year, the follies of my early days at Evans-
ton (mentioned in the sketch of Companionships), were not
9
114 No Greek and Latin.
renewed. My inamorata was in New England, and though the
reception of her letters marked the red-letter days of each week,
I had promised my mother better fashions, and consorted almost
wholly with the **good girls'* among whom my nickname was
** the favorite,** and the only escapade of which I was guilty was
having my hair neatly shingled, a rare delight, the continuance
of which until this hour would have added incalculably to the
charms of existence for me.
That last year at school, of which my sister-in-law has
spoken in her sketch, was one of unceasing application. I often
rose at four o'clock, and more than once have been found on the
sitting-room floor asleep, with my face in my ** Butler*s Analogy,**
or some other of those difiicult studies that crowded my senior
year too full for satisfaction.
My only classmate was Miss Margaret McKee, of Batavia,
111., a tall, handsome brunette. She was a young lady of the
highest character, a devoted student and an earnest Christian. We
were warm friends always, her grekt reticence of nature, and my
fiankness proving mutually attractive. We had no quarrel over
class honors, she taking the salutatory, and I the valedictory.
Up to that time, my life had known no greater disappoint-
ment than the decision of my mother that I could not study Latin
and Greek. One year longer devoted wholly to these studies, with
my habits of application, would have given me at least a rudiment-
ary knowledge of them both, but mother has always strenuously
objected to the study of the classics, believing that the time might
be far better expended in a well selected course of English liter-
ature, which she said I should have at home, free from the
trammel of rules and the unescapable bondage of the school-bell.
I think she was in error here, and that the mental gymnastics
furnished by such studies would have been incalculably valuable
to one of my tastes and temperament. I remember playing for
hours, a piece of classical music that seemed to me to express the
pathos of the situation, and, at its close, the jubilant triumph
even over this deprivation and sorrow.
July 23. — Since I last wrote in my journal, under date of June 22,
I have suffered much, physically and mentally. I have borne great disap-
pointments (for me) but, as I have suffered, I have thought, and I am the
yr^x ^d the better for my trial. I have had typhoid f^pver ; am just r^-
•• Be Resolute and Calm,^* 115
oovering. Very mndi of interest has occurred during these unchronicled
days. 1 have seen Oliver's diploma and my own. We are graduates ! How
very Ultle does the 'word mean, and yet how much ! It means years of patient,
silent brain "worlt, discipline, obedience to the will of others. It means that
ire have started on the beautiful search after truth and right and peace.
Only started — only opened the door. Thank God ! we may go on forever
alone. 1 was unable to be present or to receive my diploma and Mary took
it for me. * « « ♦ « ♦
I am very sorxy I was vexed. There was no valedictory. The examina-
tions and Commencement exercises passed off creditably to the institution, I
have been told. Oliver has gone with several classmates and friends on a
trip to Lake Superior. Of course we are anxious about him. C. G. left
school just as I was taken sick. Her mother is dead. Poor girl ! She is
having a hard trial, and a weary life, but if she bears it well, it will be better
for her. Dr. Ludlam, our honored and beloved physician, has gone to the
beautiful Land o' the Leal. What we used to see walking the streets, and
smiling pleasantly, the chrysalis he inhabited, sleeps in Rose Hill cemetery.
The spirit is happy to day with God and Christ. // is very well. If I had
had his preparation, joyfully would I have exchanged places with him.
But I have come back to life to suffer, and toil, and earn, — in some degree, —
the rest of the hereafter.
It was the disappointment of my life, that I was unable to bear my ex-
amioations, read my essay and graduate regularly. I have borne it stoically ;
I have shed no tear, and said little about it, but I have thought. His hand
has crushed me, and not without reason, not, I hope, in vain.
I shall be twenty years old in September, and I have as yet been of
so use in the world. When I recover, when I possess once more a ' ' sound
mind in a sound body," I will earn my own living ; ** pay my own way, " and
trv to be of use in the world. It will — it shall — be belter that I did not die.
My acquaintances have been kind during my illness ; especially I name with
gratitude Mary Bannister and Rowena Kidder. Mrs. Noyes has shown an
iBterest in me, and has done me a kindness which I can not forget, and for
idiich, I think, I am as thankful as I am capable of being. This verse from
aoe of Longfellow's poems has comforted and quieted me :
And thou, too, whosoe'er thou art
That readest this brief psalm,
As one by one thy hopes depart.
Be resolute and calm.
Take them all in all, my school days were a blessed time,
fill! of happiness and aspiration, having in them the charm of
success and the witchery of friendship, deepening in my heart
the love of humanity and exalting my spirit to the worship
cCGod.
I
Ii6 A Fake Sense rf Honor.
Perhaps the most unfortunate outgfrowth of the harum-scartMH
period of about four months on which I entered, as a student at
Kvanston, was the peculiar construction of the rules by the
** Ne'er-do-weels, *' and after a few weeks adopted, I grieve to
say, by me. That is, they said the rules were so numerous that
nobody could remember them all, and that if we were quiet and
orderly we should, in effect, keep the rules, because the end they
sought would be attained, even though we did not technically
observe each specification. Every night at prayers, those who
had violated the rules were to rise and report. We simply did
not rise. I think I never in my life had such a sense of ill-desert
as when at the close of the term, our beloved Professor Jones
called the names of all who had violated the rules, asking them
to rise, whereupon they reluctantly stood up, among them my
sister Mary, who was the saint of the school. He then called
the names of all who had not violated the rules, that is, who had
not reported having done so, and we stood up, none of us know-
ing to what all this was preliminary. Now came the keenest
moment of self-contempt I ever knew, for the Professor made a
beautiful speech, in which he gently labored with those who had
broken the rules, and then, with enthusiasm, thanked those who
had not, in the name of himself and the other members of the
faculty, and held them up as an example ! The fact that we
were not suspected, proves that we did not do anything partic-
ularly out of the way, and that our general reputation was good ;
but I was so disgusted with myself at this false standing, that
but for a miserable sense of what they call ** honor,** subsisting
among school-mates and thieves, I should have risen then and
there, in obedience to my strong impulse, and stated the facts in
the case. These circumstances had much to do with my radical
action when I became president of the same institution twelve
years later, and almost altogether put rules aside, having instead
a Roll of Honor, and a system of Self-government.
I wish I had not had those months as a '' law unto myself,*'
though nothing worse occurred in them than I have told, except
that one night Maggie and I dressed up as two pirates. I had
been reading that greatest of pirate stories, **Jack Sheppard,"
the only one of its kind that I had ever seen, and we were plan-
ning for the adventures that were before us as highwaymen of
MosquUoes and Smoke. 117
the sea, and were using, I am sony to say, as much of the
language that such men would have used as we knew, which
was not much, and, horrible to relate, were armed and equipped,
not only with wooden pistols and bowie-knives, but with a cigar
apiece, and I am afraid that on the table between us stood a bottle
of ginger-pop, which was as far as we dared to go in the direction
of inebriation. We were not accustomed to estimate the perme-
ating power of cigar smoke, whereby we were very soon given
away ; for there came a gentle little rap at the door, and without
waiting for any response, a tall, elegant woman came in, Miss
Mary Dickinson, my division teacher. She it was who, entering
my room each day, would run her finger along the window-
frame to see if there had been careful dusting. She was an ex-
quisite woman in look and manner, as fresh and dainty as a rose.
It must, indeed, have been a spectacle to her to see a g^rl who
never £uled in her recitation room sitting, in the character I had
assumed, beside another who was known as "the wildest girl
in school." But Miss Dickinson had remarkable clearness of
mental vision. She made no ado whatever, but said, ''Well, if
this is not fortunate ! The mosquitoes have almost driven me
out of my room this hot summer night, and if you g^rls will just
come in and smoke them out, it will be a great favor to me.'' So
we had to follow after her, in our high-top boots, and there we
mt, as imperturbable as we knew how to be, but with very height-
ened color, I am sure, and she insisted on our smoking, while
she threw up the windows and drove before her the fluttering
mosquitoes. She never alluded to the subject afterward, neither
reported nor reproved us, for she wisely reasoned that the charm
in all we were doing was the dare-devil character of the perform-
ance, and that if it was treated as a very commonplace affair, this
charm would soon be gone.
My Bible class teacher at this time was Mrs. Governor Bev-
eridge, who had a very happy way of presenting the truths of
Christianity, for she did not speak in a canting tone or use cer-
tain prescribed forms. She was so fortunate as to be able to talk
of sacred things in a pleasant, companionable way that used to
be quite rare in Christian people.
Oar Minerva Society was the literary pet of the college, and
the debates, essays and literary papers to which its '' Publics"
ii8 A Quick Temper.
gave rise, are still familiar in my memory as household words.
For these occasions I was wont to prepare the poetic effusions,
which, fortunately, were chiefly confined to that early period of
my development.
Following the fashion of my home, I asked Professor for
ground enough to make a little flower garden. The idea was
popular and soon each girl in my set had her own little garden
spot, where we worked each day like beavers, vying with each
other as to whose flowers should be the best kept and most
attractive.
I do not remember often losing my temper during my stay at
the college, and never so far as the teachers were concerned, save
when in an examination in Silliman's chemistry, after I had borne,
as I knew, a successful part in the recitation, nearly every other
member of the class was sent to the front to perform an experi-
ment, writing the formula thereof on the board. Knowing that I
was ** well up " in the entire list, I went to my room unspeakably
angry with what I considered the favoritism of the oversight, and
expressed myself with so much freedom that my sister Mary, as
usual, called me to order. Another display occurred when my
diploma came home, my sister having received it in my stead, as
I was confined to my room at the time in the convalescence that
followed an attack of typhoid fever. Finding that the diploma
was totally blank when I had been expecting to see it filled out
in due form, and counting so much on the pleasure of it all, I
tossed it out of the window with an exclamation of utter disgust.
Commencement Day in the old church was a great day in-
deed. We exhausted ourselves on decoration, a profuse growth
of evergreens in the then primitive Evanston favoring our plans.
An immense stage was built out and over the pews, and under a
beautiful arch stood the performers. I shall never forget the day
in June of 1858 when, although I was not a Senior, I was put
down on the program for an essay that I duly wrote and delivered,
nor the inward tumult of delight as the bouquets from all parts
of the house fell at my feet, the gifts, no doubt, of my loyal set of
** Ne*er-do-weels.**
An amusing letter from my father to his daughters when
they were at school in Evanston, gives a glimpse behind the
scenes :
'' tt Lacks Force:^ it^
Mary, my dear, yon will find inclosed my scribblings in response to your
request, but you most not copy, but take any thought, or suggestion, or illus-
tration, which seems to correspond with the genius of your piece. Frances
most help yon to select and arrange. I think the whole thing of '' doubtful
tendency."
Frances, your letter of eighteen dollars' notoriety nearly upset my
equanimity, and I was on the point of sending for you to come home, but
upon second thought concluded to forward six dollars to Miss Dickinson to
buy the material for your dresses, which will be amply sufficient, and more
too. As for the sashes, I shall buy them here, if necessary. I am some-
what at a loss whether or not to ask Professor Jones whether he prefers to
have your tuition and board bills paid, or to have twenty or thirty dollars
paid to fix you up in white for the Commencement ! I am quite sure what
his choice would be. The fact is, I have no money. I have sold some
wheat for fifty cents per bushel to get money for actual necessaries. '* You
can't have more of a cat than her skin." Candy ! Candy ! Candy ! Mary
looks ominous. What shall I say ? Wheat at fifty cents per bushel to buy
candy for farmers' daughters ! ! ! Eighteen dollars ! My horrors ! That is
a pretty serious prelude to the perpetuation of college honors. I am done
and say no more. Mary's letter is all right, Prances says, except that " it
lacks force." Mary, you had better write all the letters if the force comes
to me in this shape ! All in tolerable health. Bridget " sings praises " and
Mike says " Oh," and John looks amazed as they hear of all your goings on.
Your Affectionate Pather.
The various teachers that I had before I was converted, were
all excellent men and women and all Christians. I saw nothing
in their conduct to make me doubt this, but as far as I can recall
not one of them ever spoke to me on spiritual things other than
indirectly, except Mrs. W. P. Jones. She came to my room one
night when I belonged to the class of **wild girls," talked to me
in the gentlest and most tender way, not reprovingly, for I was
b>' no means an outbreaking sinner, only had a happy-go-lucky,
reckless spirit fiill of adventure, at least, as far as she knew, for
we g^rls were apt to put the best foot foremost to the teachers
always. Before leaving she asked if she might pray with me. I
told her I would be very glad to have her, whereupon we knelt
down beside my bed and with her arm around me she prayed
earnestly that I might be led to see the light and do the right.
I am sure that every school-girl if approached as wisely and
sincerely as I was by that good and noble woman, would respond
as gratefully as I did. Teachers lose very much when they fail
to utilize the good-will they have enlisted for the good of the
cause to which they are devoted.
ti6 No tnterpreter Needed,
A few years since, Professor Jones wrote out his recollections
of me as a student in respect to the vital question of Christianity.
He did this a quarter of a century after I was his pupil, and
though he is mistaken as to some of the dates, the general histor-
ical statements of his letter have aflForded me much consolation,
and I reproduce them here, disclaiming all responsibility for his
too generous and partial estimate of his old pupil. This was the
last paper penned by him :
You have requested me to contribute a few reminiscences of Miss
Frances B. Willard and her sister Mary when students at the Northwestern
Female College. Those are memories very precious to me, and some of
them I will gladly sketch, so far as I can do it in words. How certainly I
know, howeTer, that I must fail to give them to you with the freshness and
inspiration of life I
In the first of these Willard memories, I recall only the father — a man
of singularly original manner and expression. Always urbane and polite^
while always observing, he was as full of inquiry on almost every topic as a
novice, yet ready at any moment to express an opinion on nearly any sub-
ject in thought and language breathing the fragrance of originality. He
came to inspect the institution for himself before placing his daughters in
it. He had evidently caught the prophecy that they were to make the
world better, and was determined to aid them all he could. He told with
natural pride of the prize taken by Prances for the best essay read at the
State Fair of Illinois— a truly meritorious production — and described her
so fully that when she entered college I needed no interpreter of her state
of mind and character. She had reached an age when every old belief was
required to give a reason for being retained, or else was told to stand aside.
Many of father's and mother's teachings, once accepted without question,
were being quietly subjected to further inquiry. Fragments of sopho-
morean eloquence from a neighboring college, questioning nearly everything
in morals taught by college professors or believed by the Christian world,
had reached her ears and helped to excite her doubts. The parents had
hitherto attended to her instruction in a model way under their own roof; —
the mother being by heredity a teacher, and by education and experience
unusually fitted to lay the foundations of her children's education deep and
broad. But the time had come when Frances longed to go to college, and
the parents were convinced that it was fully time to place her under other
instructors than themselves, and to let her contend in all the higher
branches of study with minds of her own age.
When the daughters entered college, what I had learned of the father,
kept closely locked in my own breast, was of priceless service to me in
giving direction to other members of the faculty, as well as in my own
treatment of them.
It did not take long to discover the taste of Prances as regarded studies.
She would take mathematics as a disagreeable mental tonic recommended
''She Doubted Her Doubts ^ 121
by the learned of all ages. The sciences drew her strongly, and won close
study, but her delight was, first the Belles-lettres studies, and then, as she
advanced in her coarse, mental and moral science and the argumentative
Bntler's Analogy.
From the day she entered, she made friends rapidly. Among the sta-
dents, she was an emotional and intellectual loadstone. They loved to
dnster around her and hear her talk. She would set them to discoursing
00 snbjects quite out of the ordinary range of college girls' conversations,
interspersing her own wise, quaint and witty speeches, to the great delight
of her listeners. Possessed of a worthy ambition to live for a purpose, she
inspired the same feeling in many of her school-mates. Her lively imagina-
tion drew plans for the future, not only of herself but of those around her,
into which they entered with a spirit that showed itself in all their work.
If they built castles in Spain, they, nevertheless, laid foundations for char-
acter and future achievement in real life, which endured long after their
airy visions passed away, as their lives since have well attested.
Thongh inclined to be reticent in presence of the older teachers, it was
not \xsio% before her novel questions and original remarks in the recitation
rooms, uttered in the agreeable spirit she always manifested, won the hearts of
all the faculty. Very soon what proved to be a life-long attachment grew up
between her and one of the junior teachers, Lydia M. Hayes, subsequently
that devoted missionary to India, Mrs. Rev. Dr. Waugh. The influence of
the sweet, consistent, Christian life of this excellent woman worked as a
constant rebuke to any doubts Miss Willard might have of the truth of
Christianity.
Imagine, if possible, with what joyful surprise these two congenial spirits
met years afterwards in far-o£f Egypt, as Miss Willard was making her pil-
grimage to Palestine and Mrs. Waugh was returning with her children from
India. One moment the hotel register revealed to Miss Willard the fact
that Mrs. Waugh was under the same roof ; the next, they were in each
other's arms. There, oblivious for the time being of the monuments of fifty
centuries, eloquent with the marvelous history which fills that wondrous
land, they thought only and talked only of life in the college and Evanston,
and of the friends of college days.
From the first, I was concerned to learn whether in the gatherings of
students in her room and elsewhere Miss Willard was disseminating skep-
tical notions. I soon ascertained that her skepticism was of a mild form.
Host of all, she doubted all her doubts, and in regard to other students, was
of her own good judgment pursuing very nearly the course I would have
advised. Of course, it was impossible for one so frank as she to conceal her
donbts altogether, although she did not try to foster them in others. One
day, one of her dearest friends came to me exclaiming,
" What a queer girl Frank Willard is ! She won't confess that she
knows or believes anything. She says she does n't know whether there
is a God, and she does n't know whether the Bible is true ; — she is trying
tofindont"
*' Don't be distressed, Mattie," I said, " if she will only keep on trying
ii2 " There is a God:^
to find out, she will find out. All her friends have to do, is to pray that she
may persevere."
There were students' prayer meetings, class meetings, and missionary
meetings, revivals came and went, and few except Miss Willard failed to
take lively interest in them. Still I was confident that she was not indiffer-
ent. She never scoffed at others* piety, never sought to deter any one, but
always encouraged her friends to do what they believed was right At the
same time, it was evident that she was not one to be brought into the faith
by the mere entreaties and importunities of her friends, and I discouraged
attempts of that kind. And yet the incident so tenderly recalled by Miss
Willard in one of her addresses when she spoke of Mrs. Jones as the only
teacher who had ever gone to her room, and, putting an arm about her, asked
her to let her pray for her, shows how deeply she appreciated any manifesta-
tions of interest in her spiritual welfare.
Miss Willard grew dearer to all, and every one, teachers and students,
grew prouder of her as she moved on to what we knew would be a brilliant
graduation. Her intellectual lineaments had grown stronger, and shone
brighter, and, best of all, the unrest of doubt seemed to be disappearing.
It began to be remarked by teachers that she took more interest in the col-
lege religious meetings, attending them without solicitation.
We, were reviewing Wayland*s Moral Science, preparatory to the final
examinations. I entered the class without a book, and having occasion to
ask for one. Miss Willard handed me hers. It opened of itself at the begin-
ning of the chapter on "Virtue,'* and on the blank half page opposite, I
read (as nearly as I can recall the words) the following memorandum :
"When I began this study, I could not say whether there was a God or
no— and if there was, whether He cared for me or not. Now, thanks to
President Wayland and my faithful instructors, I can say from my heart I
believe that there is a God, and that He is my Father."
I exchanged glances with Frances, and sat silent until the mist of joy
cleared away from my eyes, and the swelling of my heart subsided enough
to allow me to proceed with the recitation. The students began to look at
each other in surprise ; then I poured questions in upon them, and in the
midst of question, answer and discussion, the unusual opening of the recita-
tion was overlooked.
Of course, I seized the first opportunity to tell Miss Willard how over-
joyed I was to learn that she had escaped from her doubts, and how much
I hoped she would soon frankly acknowledge her Heavenly Father before
the world, and zealously work for Him.
^ " She did not know that there was a God ;" " she did not know that the
Bible was true ; " "she was trying to find out." The Divine Spirit had led
her on in her search. The many influences of the college had aided her,
and the child of God had felt her way back to His arms. Father's and
mother's teachings were holy truths to her once more.
Weeks passed on — weeks full of the arduous labors preceding the col-
lege Commencement, absorbing the minds and hearts, and consuming the
Paith for Doubt. 1^3
days of teachers and students. Miss Willard was as busy as the rest, yet,
unknown to us, a subject of still greater importance commanded her chief
concern.
It was Sunday evening. A large congregation in the Methodist church
had listened to an ordinary sermon and seemed somewhat impatient for
dismissal, when the pastor, to the surprise of every one, extended an in-
vitation to those who wished to unite with the church on probation to
meet him at the altar. The revival wave of the last winter had rolled by ;
there had been no special meetings ; not a ripple of religious excitement
was discoverable on the smooth current of the church. Under the circum-
stances, no one was expected to respond to the pastor's invitation. A
moment's pause, and a single young woman moved out into the main aisle
and with a firm step approached the altar. Instantly, all eyes converged on
her. There was no mistaking that form and face ; it was Miss Willard.* No
sign or faintest token of doubt clouded that countenance now. There was
that firm expression of the features which clinches faith, and says, " Here I
stand. I can do no other." The effect on the congregation was electrical.
For a few moments the solemnity of the occasion held all other feelings in
check, but soon hundreds of faces turned to hundreds of others, filled with
surprise and joy, and many an eye was moist with tears. Some one began
the doxology, *' Praise God, from whom all blessings flow," and it was sung
as if the very stars were expected to join in the chorus.
Of Mary Willard I shall write but little. That charming memoir,
prepared by her devoted sister, through which she still lives and works
with saving power, "Nineteen Beautiful Years," reveals her pure, loving
nature so transparently and faithfully that I can not do better than refer to
the latter part of it, immediately preceding her final sickness, to point out
Mary Willard as known to her college teachers. I^rom the first, it was easy
to read in her serene, open, intelligent face that she was less troubled about
faith than works. She was a close student, ptmctual in her performance of
all her duties as the coming of the days and hours. After the parents
removed to Evanston, and she had to brave all kinds of weather between
home and college, this punctuality seemed still more remarkable. But it
was not merely her studies that engaged her mind ; ways of making others
happy — particularly her friends at home and college mates— occupied much
of her thoughts and time. If spiritual doubts came to her, she was so busy
struggling to perform what was her duty, that she had no time to pursue
them. "If everybody would only do right," she exclaimed, "that would
end all the trouble in the world, wouldn't it?" "Why don't people do
more to make the world good ?" She had an extremely sensitive conscience
rendered quicker and stronger by her constant practice. I never knew a
more endowed nature ethically, and her love of all high and beautiful
things was a perpetual delight to her teachers and friends. It is a comfort
10 know that this bright intelligence lives on " in minds made better by her
presence " the world around.
*Thtt was one year later than Profetior Jones tuppoaed.
CHAPTER III.
THE FIRST YEAR OUT OF SCHOOL
This period, often very duU and sometimes very gay, accord-
ing to the nature of the graduate and the sense or nonsense of
her family, is, perhaps, the most difficult in a young woman's life.
She has not yet found her * * vocation. ' ' Friends wait and watch.
Materfiamilias fears and paterfamilias hopes. It is a time full of
unuttered pathos for a gentle, refined and modest girl. The
truth is, she ought never to be put into a position so equivocal —
one whose tendency is to tinge her soul with at least a temporary
bitterness. Girls should be definitely set at work after their
school days end, even as boys are, to learn some bread-winning
employment that will give them an independent status in the
world of work. Better still, this education of the hand should
be carried on for both, side by side with that of head and heart
But these high views had not dawned on the world in my
day, so for two years after my graduation I stayed at home, with
three brief intervals of school teaching. My journals show that
the un£dling resource of books and pen kept me in pretty good
heart, while our delightftil home life, rounded into completeness
by my brother's return fi-om college, rose "like the swell of
some sweet tune,'' then died away forever in the pitiftd minor
strains of my sister Mary's death.
September 28, i860. — I remember that I used to think myself smart I
used to plan great things that I would do and be. I meant to become
fiunous, neTer doubting that I had the power. But it is over. The mist has
cleared away and I dream no longer, though I am only twenty-one years old.
If it be true that we have need to say, '* God help us when we think our-
(W4)
An Honest Hour. 125
•elves strong,** I believe that the opposite is equally tme ; nay, that we need
Him most when most distrusting our own capabilities. And I have come
to this point ; I think myself not good, not gifted in any way. I can not
see why I should be loved, why I should hope for myself a beautiful and
useful life or a glorious immortality at its close. Never before in all my
life have I held myself at so cheap a rate as since I came home this last
time. It is a query with me, however, whether really I amount to so little as
I think. I can not quite content myself to belong to what Dr. I<udlam once
called, much to my disgust, then, ' ' the happy mediocrity. '* Is it, then, inev*
itable that I am to account myself one of the great '' commonalty " during
life ? Let us see. Jump into the scales, P. E. W., in honesty as before God,
and, I say it reverently, you shall be weighed. WhcU you believe of your-
ulf is vital to you. Let others think as they will, if you feel " the victory
in you," as my father says, all things are possible. Then deal generously
with yourself ; let not overweening modesty (of which I think you never
have been accused) cause you to pass lightly over any redeeming traits you
may possess^ Let us have just weights and measurements in all respects.
Beginning at the lowest and yet the highest department (let the paradox
go unexplained), you are not beautiful, pretty, or even good looking.
There is the bald fact for you, make what you can of it And yet (ofiset
Na I,) you are not disagreeable nor unpleasant, either in face or figure.
You have no shocking defects in respect to personal appearance, and that is
something. Your expression is perhaps rather resolute than otherwise, and
naturally, perhaps artfully, you tell but little with your face. In manner
you are reserved toward those to .whom you feel indifferent You are too
much inclined to moods, and yet you are as a rule exceedingly careful not
to wound the feelings of others and you intend to be deferential toward
those you think superiors, kind to your inferiors and cordial with your
equals. You are hardly natural enough when in society, and have a
certain air of self-consciousness sometimes that ill becomes you. However,
ss you think much upon the subject, it is not unlikely that by and by your
manner will assume the half cordial, half dignified character that accords
best with your nature. You have a good mind, but one not evenly balanced
or developed. Your perceptions are rather quick, your memory on the
whole, unusual, imagination good, reasoning &culties very fair; your judg-
ment in practical matters not extraordinary, but elsewhere excellent Your
nature is appreciative; you are not cross-grained. You feel with a sur-
prising and almost painful quickness. An innuendo or double entendre
smites you like a blow.
Your nature, though not of an emotional cast, is not unfeeling. You
la^ the all-embracing love for man as man that is so noble and admira-
ble, yet the few friends that you count among your treasures, have more devo-
tion from you than they dream of, doubtless, for your love for them approaches
idolatry. And .yet your affections are completely under your control, are
new saflered to have "their own wild way," and they fix themselves only
upon those objects among the many that might be chosen, where they are
desired. As for your will, I can not find out whether it is strong
126 A Playful Mentor.
or weak. I hardly think it particularly powerful, and yet there is something
about you for which I hardly know how to account on any other supposi-
tion. There is a sort of independence and self-reliance that gives the idea
of will and yet is not really such. However the facts may be on this point,
I think you would not be accounted a negative character. For the religious
qualities of your mind, you are not particularly conscientious, you are
rather inclined to skepticism and sometimes haunted by thoughts of unbe-
lief. The aesthetics of Christianity have rather a large measure in your
creed, both theoretical and practical, and yet you have right wishes and
great longings after a pure and holy life.
The conclusion. Dear me, I don't make you out half as bad as I feel
you ought to be. Placed in the scale against your beautiful ideal character
by which you fain would mould yourself, you would kick the beam quickly
enough, but somehow my consciousness affirms that the picture I have drawn
hat not all the shades it merits. In a spasmodic way, you are generous, yet
beneath this, selfishness is deeply rooted in your heart. You are not a bit
natural ; you are somewhat original but have not energy or persistency
enough ever to excel, I fear. However, you have some facility as a writer ;
less, I candidly think, than you had a year or two ago (that is encouraging)!
Well, on the whole, I do not seem to make you out so poor and common-
place as I thought you to be, and perhaps if you keep your eyes wide open
to your faults, and God will help you, you may yet come to be rather good
than bad. For this, thank God and take courage. But oh, forget what you
will, Frances, my best friend in all the world, ask the mighty, infinite Helper
to model you by His plans, let them be what they will, so that every year
you may grow 'calmer and calmer,* richer in love and peacefulness, and
forgetting the poor dreams of less thoughtful years, have this and this
only for your ambition ; to be gentle, kindly and forgiving, full of charity
which suffereth long, and patience, which is pleasing in the sight of God
and man.
On the next page my sister Mary, as was her custom,
skipped into my journal without leave or license and wrote the
following paragraph :
I hope Miss Willard, though she be not conscious of it, does not hold
herself at such a low rate as some of the foregoing remarks would incline
one to think she did. When she calls herself neither beautiful, pretty nor
good-looking I think she errs, as I am of the opinion she does come under
one of these heads ; of course I shall not say which one, however. I think
she is right when she affirms that she has a good mind, but she contradicts
this in the next breath, at least this might readily be inferred. I must
say that in her dissertation on her affections, I notice nothing that would
convey to the average mind the overpowering affection she cherishes for
her sister ! It may have been modesty that prevented her from mentioning
this. I can not tell. I have a great interest in both these young ladies, Miss
W. and her younger sister, and though my heart "yearns'* more for th«
Our Room, 127
jonnger of the two, I can not say but that mj affection for both is un-
bounded. Hoping that Miss W. will take no o£fense at my remark, I remain,
hers Tcry truly.
January 19. — I have united (on probation) with the Methodist church be-
cause I like its views of the doctrines taught in the Bible better than those
of any other branch of God's church militant ; because I have been reared
in it, and for me to attach myself to any other would cause great sorrow
and dissatisfaction in quarters where I should most desire to avoid such con-
sequences, other things being equal. I honestly believe that I regard all
the churches, the branches rather of the one Church, with feelings of equal
kindness and fellowship. For myself, under existing circumstances, I pre-
fer the one to which I belong, but that a person belonged to that church and
was a true Christian, would be to me no more of a recommendation than
that he was a true Christian and belonged to any other. The churches
are all fighting nobly and zealously to make the world better and hap-
pier. Oh, I earnestly pray that as I grow older, the kindly, all-loving,
catholic spirit may more deeply ground itself in my heart ! I intend to
observe all the customs and usages of the church. I have resolved never to
be absent from Sabbath services, communion, Sunday-school, prayer-
meeting and class-meeting, save when it is unavoidable. I will talk with
any person upon the one great subject in the world whenever my prayer-
guided judgment teaches me that it will be appropriate. That is, when it
will not be so ill-timed as to jar upon the individual's prejudices and modes
of thinking, so as to be the means of ill to him rather than good.
January 50. — Mary and I have been busy from morning until three
o'clock renovating, changing and improving our room, and now I will de-
scribe it In the southeast comer between the windows, stands my desk, with
its friendly, familiar look. Once it was father's, but I have owned it many
years and it has seen hard service. On my desk lying one above another
are Butterworth's "Concordance," Niebuhr's "Life and Letters," Watts
"On the. Mind," Carlyle's "Schiller," Mercein's "Natural Goodness,"
Karnes' " Elements of Criticism, " Boswell's "Life of Johnson," Tennesson's
" Poems " and my Bible. Below them a copy of The Home^ for which I
write, cousin Lottie's portfolio that she gave me and which I use for my un-
answered letters, Webster's Dictionary and Blackwood's Magazine for May,
1S38. which contains an article relating to insects, that I wish to read ;
my sand-box, microscope, inkstand, memorandum paper, pen-wiper and
a cork bristling with beetles, "Cicindella," "Belostoma Americana,"
and many other varieties, though by the way, the last is a bug and
not a beetle. Over my desk hangs an engraving of Schiller, and
close beside, pasted to the wall, is my "program of daily occupations,"
which, I am sorry to say, is an illustration of the form without the
power. Above it is a bit of excellent advice by Dr. Todd, whose
Student's Manual I have very much enjoyed " and over all, softening, mel-
lowing," a very pretty picture of a flower-girl. Suspended from the upper
part of the casement of the east window, by a straw-colored ribbon, is
Cjpsey's cage, and its occupant is exhausting himself in a vain endeavor tQ
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The Civil War. 129
Below stairs Dr. Bannister and father are talking of secession, the cab-
inet and the prospect of civil war, topics of startling interest to every patriotic
heart. The opinion generally expressed is that a collision is inevitable,
and will occnr within a very few days. God pity us and forgive the accu-
mnlations of crime and folly that have brought so near us a result so ter-
rible as this would be.
March 5, i860. — What am I doing ? Whose cares do I relieve ? Who is
iriser, better or happier because I live ? Nothing would go on differently
without me, unless, as I remarked to-day to Mary with bitter playfulness,
the front stairs might not be swept so often ! Now these are awful thoughts.
But come, let us reason together. What more could I do if I would?
Mother does not work, she says, more than is healthful for her, keeping the
front room in order and giving instructions to " Belinda '* (father's invaria-
ble name for "a lady in a subordinate capacity *'). There are no younger
brothers and sisters to be cared for as is the case in many homes. Bvan-
ston has no poor people. Nobody seems to need me. In my present posi-
tion there is actually nothing I might do that I do not, except to sew a
little and make cake I Now that is the fact. I may acknowledge a feeling
of humiliation as I see so plainly how well the world oan spare me. But
perhaps I may be needed some day and am only waiting for the crisis.
Who can tell ? We are told that God in his wisdom makes nothing in
vain. Thus having moralized I lean back in my easy-chair and resume the
reading of Poe's ghostly tales, which, with a little twinge of conscience at
the thought of my uselessness, I laid aside a moment since.
March 15. — Let us see, mother and Mary have been sick but are get-
ting well again. Xantippe of the kitchen has left ; I have been doing the
work as well as I could for a few days, and now a gentler spirit rules over
the culinary department.
April 20. — How many unwritten romances careful observers might find
in the lives of the so-called " commonplace people '* whom one meets every
day ! A story as powerful as Rebecca Harding's '* Life in the Iron Mills "
might be woven from materials I wot of, the characters being men and
women who live and labor within a circle of a mile from where I sit this
minute, men and women whom I pass on the street now and then, or see at
church.
A hungry soul and a bruised heart are objects more pitiful, I think, than
a maimed limb or abject penury. I wish my mission might be to those who
make no sign, yet suffer most intensely under their cold, impassive faces.
The pain of a sensitive nature feeling that it does not adequately represent
itself, that it is misapprehended and placed below its deserts, that its efforts
to rise are viewed with carelessness by the most generous in the community,
that it is denied companionship with those whose society it craves or feels
that it deserves — no words can measure this. These people whose souls sit
on the ends of their nerves, and to whom a cold look or a slighting word is
like frost to the flower— God pity them ! This world is a hard place for
natures so fine as theirs. They are like the rare porcelain out of which
beautiful vases are made. The coarser natures whose nerves, after coming
9
130 Neglected and Forgotten,
to the surface, bend back again, can no more comprehend their finely con-
stituted brethren than I can conceive of a sixth sense. This non-recognition
of claims she was too sensitive to push before the public, pinched the face of
Mrs. S. and killed her at last, I steadfastly believe. This carelessness and
coldness makes B., splendid fellow as he is, reserved and untrusting ; why,
practically, no one cares for him more than if he were a dog, and his bur-
rowing place is a matter of as much indifference as a gopher's might be
Mr. A., a man of fine intellect and large cultivation, lies year in and year
out on his bed upon the "Ridge," helpless and alone. Who goes to see
him ? Who tries to make his life happier or more endurable ? Who tries
to lead him into the beautiful life of the heaven we talk about and stupidly
expect, somehow, to gain ? What wonder that he is C3mical and misan-
thropic, wasting the years of middle life when other men's pulses thrill with
strength ; shut out from active duty when his need for work is sorest ; laid
aside in the darkness of his curtained chamber and left alone while the busy
hum of life goes on as ever, and he sees he is not counted, needed nor
regarded in any way. He hears the whistle of the engine and the cars go
thundering by ; the college bell rings every hour and its tones fall on his
listless ear. Teams rumble past He hears men's voices talking with
each other. All this comes to him heavy with reproach and tatmting him
with the unfulfilled promise of his youth. In summer in the fields he hears
the click of the reaper and knows that they are using his invention ; knows
how the wonderful automatic hand stretches out and grasps the heads of
wheat that the sunshine and rain have ripened, the hand so human in its
motion that he contrived by much of thought and study. He hears quick
steps on the walk under the window, but he is a deformed man and will
never walk again ; thrown from a carriage in Chicago, years ago, he was
taken np as dead, and since then he has done nothing of the work of the
world. He looks into the fireplace where the coal is kept blazing winter
and summer — ^his only company. Does anybody think God takes no notice
of all this?
The B.'s who are kept out of the literary society by the unkindness of
some of its members and the stupidity of the rest ; Miss A., who is not asked
into the reading circle, where it is her right to be by virtue of the exertion
she has made to cultivate and enrich her intellect and character; Mrs. J.,
at whom a shallow school-girl could laugh if she attempted to recall the
music she learned years ago when better fortunes were upon her ; Mrs. M.,
who is disregarded utterly, though refined and educated ; even " Ruth Ann,"
at whom we laugh unblushingly — all the cases of these people cry to
heaven for justice and will have it, too, at last These look like little mat-
ters, yet nothing is trivial, as Mrs. Stowe has said, "since the human soul
with its awful shadow makes all things sacred." Nothing is a light matter
that makes my heart ache or the hearts of any of my human kin. God
accounts nothing slight that brings a tear to any eye, a stinging flush to any
cheek, or a chill to the heart of any creature he has thought fit to make and
to endow with body, brain and soul.
I hate the spirit in any one that seeks to gain the notice of the inflnen-
A New Don Quixote Needed. 131
Hal in society bj fawning, or undue attention of any sort. I love a brave,
strong character that walks the earth with the step of a king, and an eye
that does not quail before anything except its own dishonor. All can not
do this, but there are some who can. The man, woman or child that makes
me uncomfortable, that stabs me with an undeserved reproach or rebuke,
that dwells upon my faults like a fly upon an ulcer, that slights me or need-
leisly wounds me in any way— that man, woman or child I may forgive, but
only through God's spirit striving with my wrath. I will shun them, and in
my heart I must despise them and this, not because I am weak or clinging.
according to the views of some people, but because, be I weak or strong, I
will stand up for justice so long as I have power, and I hereby declare that I
will speak more kindly and considerately to those whose claims are unrec-
ognized by the society in which I live, than I will to any others. I will
bow more cordially to those to whom persons of position do not bow at all,
and I will try in a thousand pleasant, nameless ways to make them happier.
God help me to keep my promise good !
Another branch of this same subject relates to those who live among us
and do our work, perform the menial services for us that we think ourselves
too good to do ; who are cared for as we would care for the dogs and horses,
well fed and warmed and promptly paid, but spoken to with harshness often 1
treated with unreasonable severity as if they had not brains and souls, but
were animals conveniently gifted, somehow, with the power of speech.
Who says kind words to the man that blacks his boots, to the maid that
makes his bed and sweeps his hearth ? Who employs the graceful *' Thank
you," and ** Won't you please," that softens down the sharp tone of a com-
mand i O we forget these things ! We are just mean enough to disregard
decency and kindness in the cases where we dare to do it I have called at
houses where in the room a girl sat sewing, more beautiful, graceful and
well-bred than my hostess ever dared to be, yet she has taken no more
notice of this girl than if she were a brute, nor attracted my attention to her
by an introduction or the faintest indication of one, though descanting elo-
quently on the virtues of the sleek skye-terrier at her side. The poor and
the unlovely fare hardly in this world of ours. Climb the ladder yourself to
enviable distinction, or reach a comfortable mediocrity by your own exer-
tions, and you will be treated with all-sufficient consideration ; but while
yoa are clifnbing, look only for cold indifference, at best, and if you begin
to stagger or fall, then kicks and cufis will shower upon you with an energy
surprising to contemplate. Oh, that I were a Don Quixote in a better cause
than his, or even Sancho Panza to some mightier spirit, who I trust will
oome upon the earth some day !
April 21, 1861.— On this beautiful Sabbath day the unusual sound of the
thistle and the thimdering cars, has been heard for the first time, and our
thoughts have been more of war, I fear, than of the God of battles whom
^ tried to worship. It is twilight and soon I shall go peacefully to sleep,
Ixit while I am asleep a thousand soldiers will pass through our quiet
^Uge on their way to "the war," that terrible Something which hangs
over us black and portentous. Somewhere in Wisconsin, and on the broad,
13*
Solemn Vows.
briglit plains of Minnesota, motlien and sisters, daQgbtera and mTee wilt
be weeping and prajing to-night for tbese soldiers. God pity them and
give them peace.
April 17, 1861,— I want to tell how with all their beaatj' sadness has been
interwoven with these bright dajrs, for Oliver has signed the pledge that he
would go to the war if called upon. The students of the Theological Insti-
tute have organized a company and are drilling every day, preparing
to go if it becomes their duty. I can not tell how my heart sickened
and was rebellious for awhile as I thongbt of whet might be. Went with
mother and the other ladies to the Theological school to attend the exer-
cises in honor of the banner presented to the students by Mrs. Bishop
Simpson. We enjoyed it greatly.
May 5, 1861. — An eventful day to me. Mary and I publicly declared
our determination and endeavor, with God's help, to live as Christians. We
were baptized and received into the church and partook of the sacrament
Those were solemn vows we took ; I almost trembled as our voices mingled
in the responses to the questions asked us. I felt how solemn a thing it was,
bow awful the responsibility that would henceforth rest upon us, and yet
the ceremony seemed very beautiful to me. We knelt there at the altar, we
whose lives and hearts and thoughts bad been one ; it was most fitting that
we should in this, as in everytbing. be together.
IV.
"Talest is nurtured best in solitude, but character,
%■ LIFE'S tempestuous SEA."
CHAPTER I.
DISTRICT SCHOOL NO. i.
Not to be at all, or else to be a teacher, was the alternative
presented to aspiring young women of intellectual proclivities
when I was young.
Graduating in 1859, convalescing slowly at Forest Home
that summer and autumn, studying, reading and writing all win-
ter, I grew restive, and solemnly determined that / would teach.
Between 1858, when I began, and 1874, when I forever ceased
to be a pedagogue, I had thirteen separate seasons of teaching, in
eleven separate institutions, and six separate towns ; my pupils in
all numbering about two thousand. In my summer vacation at
Forest Home, 1858, I taught our district school ; in my own
home- town of Bvanston, I taught the public school one term ; in
Harlem, two terms ; in Kankakee Academy, one term ; in my
Alma Mater, the Northwestern Female College, two ; in Pittsburgh
Female College, three ; in the Grove School, Evanston, one year ;
in Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, at Lima, N. Y., three terms ; the
Evanston College for Ladies, two years; the ''Woman's Col-
lege,*' one year, and I was a professor in the Northwestern Uni-
versity, one. Nor did I ever relinquish any of these situations
save of my own free will, and in every case but one, I had from
the authorities a warm invitation to return. This I say very
grateftilly and gladly.
A desire to learn the methods of different institutions and to
see more of the world were the chief motives that led me into an
experience so varied.
It is also but fair to confess that routine has always been im-
mensely irksome to me, and to be " tied to a bell rope, ' * an asphyx-
iating process from which I vainly sought escape, changing the
spot only to keep the pain.
(133)
1 34 Starting Out.
I was determined to ** teach school " because I wished to be
independent, so I wrote a letter to John F. Eberhart, who was then
superintendent of Public Schools for Cook County, of which Chi-
cago is the county-seat, but it was a little late in the season, and
he replied, advising me not to begin until fall, saying he had but
one school left and it was the least desirable of all upon his list,
away on the prairie beyond Oak Park, in a little red school-house
and attended almost exclusively by the children of foreigners. I
wrote him, as soon as a letter could return, that I would take the
school. What the wages were I do not at all remember, but they
were small. He gave me a certificate based on the fact that I had
the diploma of the Northwestern Female College, asking no ques-
tions and charging no fee. This was somewhat irregular, perhaps,
but at that date these questions were not as carefully adjudicated
as they are now. Professor Eberhart, as we called him, had for
years been editor of a family journal, for which I had often con-
tributed, and he knew that I was abundantly qualified from a
literary point of view, for the position aspired to by me and
deprecated by himself. When all was settled I informed my
father, who naturally felt humiliated. He wa6 a business man
in the city, having joined S. A. Kean, now a well known banker,
in founding a brokers* office on Clark street, nearly opposite the
Sherman House ; he strongly objected, as has been said, but I
parried an argument which, while it has very little force in these
days, had a great deal in i860, and pleaded with him to let me
carry out my purpose of bearing my own weight in the world.
So the arrangement was made, and my father accompanied me
to Harlem, for with his ideas of the protection that should be ac-
corded to women, he could not conceive of my going there alone,
although I was in my twenty-first year. When we alighted at a
little wayside shed which served the purpose of a station, for
there was no town there then, a kind-faced, but rather rough-
looking man, with long, black hair, a slouched hat, a red shirt
rolled up to the elbows, and blue overalls, appeared at the car
and said, *'Is this the schoolmarm? I am school director and
came to take her over to her seminary," pointing with his finger
across the prairie at the little red ** nubbin' " of a school-house.
My father looked volumes and whispered sardonically, ** You see
what you have got yourself into.'* A return train for the cily
Novel Aristocracy. I35
passed soon after ; he took it, and I was left alone with my new
fortunes. Arriving at the school-house I found the boys had not
been idle. Among other things they had broken several windows
and engaged in sundry forms of controversy, emphasized with
fisticuffs. One or two American families were represented, the
rest were of different foreign nationalities. I knew nothing about
teaching, had been a ** probationer * * in the church only a few
weeks, but I took my little pocket Testament and went into the
school-house. The school came to order tolerably well ; I read a
few verses, led them in singing some familiar Sunday-school
hymn, which they seemed to know quite well, — I think it was,
'* I want to be an angel ! '* Its incongruity struck me so forcibly
that I could easily have laughed, but in a moment later I could
easily have cried, when I bent my head to try to pray. But to
their credit be it said, the children stood by me far better than I
had feared. The school was not large, having some fifteen or
twenty scholars, only one of whom was so insubordinate as to
require a whipping. He was a boy almost as tall as myself and
I had no small ado to hold him by the collar while he did his
utmost to show he was more of a force than his young teacher,
but without success. Fathers would come to the door with a bit
of a stick, asking me to beat their children with that particular
one, which was the only form of aristocracy recognized in my in-
stitution. However, there was small need of discipline. In a
few days the children would sit quietly at their lessons while I
solaced myself by reading Plato and other philosophical books
with which I had taken care to provide myself. I went through
several of Bohn*s translations from the classics, besides a variety
of lighter reading. In every way I could devise I tried to inter-
est the scholars, and I think they enjoyed the school, which I
certainly did, although often feeling forlorn as I opened my little
dinner-pail at luncheon time when they were all playing and
banahing outside. It was not what I would have chosen in life ;
indeed, I hardly know what it would be freely to choose what
one would like, but the next best thing is to like what one must
choose, and I think I have learned that art quite thoroughly.
Next to the New Testament, Epictetus has helped me beyond all
others to do this ; I mean all others except my mother, who,
when nearly eighty-four years of age, said to me one day, ** Did
136 A New Friend,
you ever see me forlorn?** and stoutly claimed I never had;
which is true, except in the crises of our family bereavements.
I boarded that summer in the family of David Thatcher, a
returned Califomian, who was the richest man in those parts.
He was an American, his wife was English. I have seldom seen
a finer head than his ; he was not, however, a man of education,
though he had remarkable native force of intellect, and under
happier fortunes might have been a senator. His wife was one
of the kindest, most cheery women I have ever known. Two of
his sons, George and David, were in my school and were staimch
friends of mine ; George, then sixteen years of age, being as
true and loyal as if he were my younger brother. I think his
good behavior set the key-note for the school. He was a very
bright scholar and is now a lawyer in Chicago. Mr. Thatcher's
only daughter, Clara, was at this time a student in the Chicago
High School, a girl of unusual powers of mind, and a genial,
kindly heart. When she came home on the first afternoon and
saw a demure young stranger at the supper-table, she did not
know whether she liked it or not ; on the whole, she thought she
did not, and though she said nothing, her atmosphere was some-
what chilly on that bright night of June. It is my nature to
withdraw within myself when the environment is not propitious,
so I said nothing and went to my lonely room as soon as possible.
I had brought my writing-desk, a very pretty one that had
belonged to father, and which was my most cherished earthly
possession, except a little Bible given me by a favorite aunt who
had recently died. This blessed book I read, and opening the
desk, I placed upon the shelf, near by, the pictures of my nearest
and best, and looked at them with a tugging at the heart such
as can be appreciated only by those who remember the pang it
brings when endured for the first time. Then I tried to read,
and tried to write, but the time hung heavily. I did not cr>', for
I had made up my mind that I would not. It was clearly a case
of ** mind-cure,** for the occasion certainly warranted a demon-
stration. Pretty soon there was a rap on the door and Miss Clara
came smiling in, grasped the situation at a glance, spoke to
mc with great gentleness, and said, ** You are lonesome, are n't
you ? It is too bad. I wonder if you would not rather come
into my room ? ' ' From that hour to this we have been warm
Courage Rewarded. 137
and trusty friends. I was glad to leave my bare little room for
hers, so much more tasteful and attractive, but here was a new
dilemma. I knew it was my duty to kneel in prayer before re-
tiring, as had been my custom all my life, except the few weeks
of my first term in Evanston, but I knew from various indica-
tions that Clara had not been trained to do this. She was a gay,
laughing girl, and I dreaded her criticism, but when the time
came I lifted up my heart to God and fell on my knees beside the
bed, feeling myself to be a spectacle and with a sense of sacrifice
which, absurd as it was, cost me more than anything had done
in many a year. But in a moment this generous-hearted girl had
knelt beside me with her arm around my neck, and fi-om that hour
she became thoughtful concerning spiritual things. She helped
me found a Sunday-school in the little red school-house, which
we conducted all summer long, and out of it grew the prosperous,
well-ordered Methodist church at River Forest, once Harlem, of
which my fiiend and her husband, Solomon Thatcher, well
known in Methodist circles, have been pillars for many a year.
This incident may give to some young heart the courage that
is needed in a more difficult emergency than mine.
When I went home toward the close of the term I took Clara
along and we had a delightful visit, she being henceforth endeared
to every friend of mine.
It pains me even now to remember how grieved my sister
Mar>- was that she could not teach school. She graduated the
same summer that I began my work as a teacher, and in the
autumn she had an invitation to be an assistant in a private
school, but she was the pet and darling of the house, and it was
not strange they were unwilling to have her go from home. But
I have seen her pretty face all stained with tears as she said to me,
"Oh, to have earned a little money of my own, my very own !"
and I have seen her on her knees praying to be helped and guided
out into a larger life. So she was, in 'one more year, but in a way
how different fi-om anything she dreamed I She was guided out
into the largest life of all, which is an heavenly.
The voluminous jotunals of my earliest period as teacher
have this entry :
April 27, i860. — Professor Jones informed mother in my absence last
evening, that he knew of a school which he thought I could get, and with
138 The Call of Duty.
the items of information he furnished, I sallied forth bright and earlj this
mominfj^ to learn more about the matter. The result of my investigations
was a letter duly composed, copied and mailed, inclosing a kind recom-
mendation from Professor. I hope to obtain the situation, for I have not
yet been out in the world, to ''do and dare *' for myself. Single-handed
and alone I should like to try my powers, for I*ve remained here in the
nest, a full-gro¥m bird, long enough, and too long. It is an anomaly in
natural history !
This school was at Elk Grove, a country place not far from
Chicago. The next entry says :
April 30. — On coming home from Dr. Poster's examination of his
University class in moral science — ^which^ by the way. Bishop Simpson
quizzed unmercifully — I found a letter, stating that if I*d been a very little
earlier I might have secured the situation. This was a disappointment, and
one so hard to bear that I said several harsh, un-Christian words, for which
I'm very sorry. I then wrote another school-seeking letter to Prof. J. F.
Eberhart, who is Professor Jones's friend, and superintendent of the public
schools in this county.
May I. — ^Received a letter from Professor Eberhart, which amounted to
but little.
May 22. — Another letter from Professor Eberhart saying that he
thought he had secured me a school. It is very kind of him, for I ought to
be earning money for myself and doing something useful, as every one else
is. Of course^ it will be very hard for me, for I am not " used " to care or
trouble. Evanston is a beautiful place to live in, and those I love best are
here, but I would rather go, notwithstanding, and I think God helps me to
say with truth, '* I would rather go because it is right that I should, and be-
cause of this alone."
It will be hard to leave mother, who cares for me as no other human
being ever can, and to go where everybody is indifferent to me.
The first school is a greater epoch to the young teacher than
any that can follow. I have been thus minute in its description,
hoping to cheer some * * new beginner, * ' to furnish some suggestion,
and to preserve the picture of a school within ten miles of Chi-
cago, yet primitive as any upon Western prairies. Twenty -five
years later I went back, stood upon its doorstep like one in a
dream, and had a photograph taken of *' the old place" as a new
gem in my collection of *' antiques." As my brother had taught
in the new school-house during one winter vacation (1861) of his
theological course, and I had followed him in the spring of that
year, I went there also with my kind friends, Mr. and Mrs. Solo-
mon Thatcher, and we formed another group, in which the young
Character vs. Dignity, 139
lady then teaching there, my dear friend Clara and her husband,
and Anna Gordon, standing beside me, illustrated somewhat the
developments of history.
Here follow journal extracts written just before I went to
Harlem, and while there :
May 19. — Yesterday the Republican convention at Chicago nominated
Abraham Lincoln for president of the United States. I wish I had been in
the Wigwam when this was done. The accounts that father and Oliver
give us of the excitement, the hand-shaking, handkerchief wavings, etc.,
have made us very enthusiastic They say men's hats were knocked about
like foot-balls, and one man took off his coat and waved it. They say we
most have laughed or cried if we had been there. I would like to test my-
self, to try my self-control in some such way.
May 27. — Father asked our Heavenly Father this morning to " make us
feel the responsibility that these peaceful, painless hours impose, and to
help us to prepare for the storms that will come, we can not say how soon."
I have thought much of this. But now, when there is not a grief at my heart
or a shadow on my path, I find it almost impossible to lead a Christian life.
Just what I need is discipline. Sorrow alone can melt my heart and make
God more to me than all the imiverse besides. I want to be right, at what-
ever cost, and so I feel sure that if I am ever made perfect it will be through
nifiering. I am twenty years old and I have neither dignity nor woman-
liness, I am giddy and thoughtless as much as I ever was, I verily believe.
There is something I can hardly define, but the word character seems to me
to express what I lack and what I must acquire. I am neither self-reliant
aor self-contained. There is not that about me which those of my age ought
ilwa3rs to possess and which causes people to keep their distance, a certain
well defined self-respect that is not haughtiness. Belle Stewart had it and
ihe was only twenty ; Annie Foster, and she was barely eighteen when I
used to see her last summer ; Lillie Hayes was a grand exemplification of
this element that I find missing in my nature ; I name these young ladies to
you, "myself, " for your favorable consideration. Now, while it is a shame
that I am not as they are, it is yet but little wonder, for I have not been
brought on as they have been. They have seen much of society, have at-
tended school all their lives, and been trained, possibly, to dignity of
manner, while I knew no more of society than a baby or a goose until I
came to Evanston, and I know almost nothing now. In all these twenty
years, although I have graduated after a fashion, I never spent four years in
sdiool, and I was trained to live outdoors as much as possible, ride, and
walk, and garden, and go fishing, if, peradventure, my life might be spared
to me, for I was alwa3rs " slender,** as my mother calls it I have never been
out in the world, have had no care or trouble, no grief worth mentioning, no
*' knryer '* as " Bnb " 8a3r8, nor any love affair to sober me. And so, since I am
not natnnlly a peraon of character, — ^why should I be one at all when the
artificial method has never been employed in my case ! I am determined to
HO School Plans.
be just, if not generous, with myself ; indeed, who has a better right ? Now,
.1 am sorry that I am not more like my ideal young lady, and I am anxious to
be more like her if I can. But I must get my discipline in a rougher school
than most young ladies do. I see clearly that I shall never be the grown-up
person that I ought to be until I have borne sorrows and had cares.
If I become a teacher in some school that I do not like, if I go away
alone and tiy what I myself can do and suffer, and am tired and lonesome ;
if I am in a position where I must have all the responsibility myself and
must be alternately the hammer that strikes and the anvil that bears, but al-
ways one of them, I think I may grow to be strong and earnest in practice,
as I have alwa3rs tried to be in theory. So here goes for a fine character. If
I were not intent upon it, I could live contented here at Swampscott all my
days.
It is quite curious that just as I wrote the last word, our hired man came
in with the mail, and on opening a letter addressed to myself, post-marked
"Noyesville, Harlem Postofl5ce,** I found the words, "You may consider
yourself engaged to teach our school." So I am to go this very next Satur-
day and to begin my hard battle for myself alone.
May 29. — I trained the vines this morning ; it is all the pleasanter working
aroimd home since I am to leave it so soon. Professor Eberhart, school com-
missioner for Cook county, called, and I went with him to visit Minnie Hol-
comb's schooL In the afternoon I went, under the same auspices, to visit
Miss Automaton's school. I learned very much from what I heard and saw.
The two teachers were as different as light is from darkness. Minnie was
patient, kind and slightly diffident Miss Automaton was perfectly cool,
metallic in voice and manner, and calmly despotic in government.
May 30. — I have been arranging my dear old desk and getting ready for
my departure. Will copy here what I have learned in the way of " rules for
conducting a coimtry school successfully *' :
1. Never let your pupils feel that they understand you or know what to
expect fh)m you. Be a mystery to them. Invent punishments. Resort to
expedients they least expect
2. Demand implicit obedience in small as well as great matters and
never jrield a point.
3. Introduce general exercises when practicable. This concentrates
every mind on one idea, and when they all think alike by your command, you
can do with them what you wilL
Memorandum. — Introduce g3rmnastic exercises — Miss Beecher's, as we
practiced them in Milwaukee. Ever so much singing, those chipper ' ' rounds, * '
and dear old-fashioned songs I used to sing in school. Have them sing the
multiplication table. Have them sing the capitals and bound the states so as
to make it a sort of game and less distasteful, while they point out the places
on the map, & la Mrs. Hovey. Give them all sorts of extra lessons, viz.:
have them bring flowers and name the parts ; teach them the bones of the
human body ; the rulers of all countries, and as many other things as I can
think up ; all this in concert Say to them all of a sudden, ** You see now I
Good'hy Songs. ^41
am talking, clap your hands together. Now I am silent See how quickly you
can fold your arms ; look me in the eye and be perfectly silent for one min-
ute ;'* I dick the bell and note your watch. This trains them to promptness.
4. Accustom them to take their seats for recitation at the right moment,
as indicated by the clock. This cultivates attention.
5. Give them a good deal of outside information on all sorts of topics,
to liven them up all you can. Have them spell on slates.
Miscellaneous. — Offer no prizes. Read the record of the deportment and
lessons on the afternoon of literary exercises once a week. Have the head
and foot in spelling classes, besides slate spelling, have them toe the line and
put their hands bdiind them. Have No. i take the floor and call No. 2 to
come, etc Have them number as they take their seats. Give a perfect mark
for each good lesson. Make a specialty of map-drawing. Practice reading
classes in the sounds of the letters. Have them learn abbreviations, Roman
numerals, words pronounced alike, but spelled differently, etc Draw figures
on the blackboard and let the little children copy them on their slates, to
keep them quiet Let the little ones go out and play a good deal duHng
study hours. Call the roll at the close of school and have them report
" Correct, " if they have not been absent or tardy, then let the boy nearest
the door go out when you call his name, and so on, having them leave one
at a time, that there may be no confusion. Post up an order of exercises in
a conspicuous place. Have everything systematized to the last degree.
Make only four rules, namely : "Don't be tardy ; don*t leave seats without
permission ; don't be absent ; don't whisper ;'* but wink at the latter unless it
becomes too palpable. Have the whole school as far as possible read in
concert, from time to time. -Have the more mischievous ones sit alone and
at a distance from each other. Make out a list of general questions for the
whole school to answer, propound them to two divisions, if the house has
four, and when they fail have the others respond, alternating in this way to
stir their emulation and enthusiasm.
All my friends are very kind ; they bring me flowers, write me notes, invite
me out to tea and seem to be sorry that I am going hence. Am full of errands
)md last things to be done. Mary and I had just retired on Saturday night,
when Mary Bannister and Kate, Han, and MoUie, and Charlie Smith, and
Mr. Wood, and Watson with his melodeon formed in line under our window
and they sang t>eautifully for my sake, because I am going away, " Auld Lang
Syne," "Sweet Home," "Good-by " and two or three other pieces. And I
lay there very quietly, I who have not shed a tear since last September, and
cried like a child while they sang.
Harlem, Cook County, 111., June 5. — I could not write last night, I felt too
desolate. After leaving home, walking from the Harlem station to my ugly,
dismal, red school-house, through a marsh ; riding through the flying mud,
with some kind-hearted ladies, to my boarding-place to leave my trunk ;
walking more than half a mile back to my den — for it is nothing else, it is
the most comfortless house I ever saw ; going through the tiresome routine
of teadung the A B C*s, spelling, and the like ; helping sweep out the school-
is dirty beyond description, with broken windows, baked floor,
142 Inside and Outside Life.
and cobwebs mingled ; walking home again, unpacking and arranging my
e£Eects, writing out my order of exercises, I sat down very tired and full of
heartache. It is doubly hard for me because I have been sick and have
done very little for a year, because home is so pleasant and everybody so kind
to me. My head aches as badly as my heart to-night Somehow I am afraid
I can not bear it Father came out from the city — it is only ten miles, though
it seems a hundred — ^to bring me a bundle. I took it and turned away, say-
ing in answer to his half cheerful, half sad words, " Keep up a brave heart
and don't let it discourage you," "Good-by, father, I am not afraid," but
the tears blinded me so I could hardly see to go back to my teacher's-desk
again, and yet the people here don't know. These rough school directors
don't dream that I am not exactly in ecstasy although I am teaching in
" their deestrict," and they will not know either, never fear. I turned to God,
the Heavenly Father, who presides over our destiny, with new eagerness. I
prayed last night as I have not for many days, and went to sleep in the cold
and dark and lonesomeness with a feeling that somehow the Arms that reach
arotmd the world enfolded me. If I can learn to look to Him and tiy alwa3rs
to obey Him, this bitter life will not have been in vain. Just now I took my
Bible and it opened at the passage, " Like as a father pitieth his children, so
the Lord pitieth them that fear him," and I could hardly see the words, the
page became so blurred as I tried to look at it Those who know my nature
would understand that I am indeed getting my discipline, for I almost never
cry, not once in a year, often not so frequently, and no one shall know save
God, and you, book, that the inside and the outside life are vastly different,
that while one is quiet, unaspiring and firm, the other is full of longing and
heartache and misery. All this last I shall not ¥nite even in my letters
home, for it will do me no good and will worry mother.
June 6. — Last evening had a pleasant talk with Clara Thatcher, the
daughter of the house in which I board. Congenial outside surroundings
are a great deal to me as yet Looking at the case as hopefully as possible,
I think Clara will make my boarding-place a pleasant one, for she is attract-
ive and seems kind-hearted, but my school life is almost unendurable. I
have twenty-seven scholars, five A B C-darians, the rest all under twelve
years old, except two girls and one boy. The children are more than half
German, the rest mostly Irish, except a few Americans, including Clara's
two bright brothers. I have classes in botany. United States history, alge-
bra, arithmetic and grammar. It is very cold to-day, and I have no material
for making afire. "It rains and the wind is never weary." The house
leaks, my desk is wet and I am completely chilled. I can hardly hold the
pen to write this about the life which I knew was coming to me. I must
stay three hours longer and then walk home through mud that will come
over my shoetops.
Evening, ten o'clock. — ^Am half ashamed of the dolorous tone in which
the above is written, and yet I need not be, for it is all true, and in stating it
here I made nobody unhappy with the consciousness that I was miserable.
I only wrote it down for the future. After all, I have much to be thankful
for. Billy Thatcher carried me to school and brought me back, and Clara
Summer Studies. I43
•nd I have had a very pleasant evening together. We have been talking
science, art and books as well as we were able, and I find her highly intelli-
gent Her ideas in general seem just and broad. The part of my snmmer
that I spend in her home will be pleasant and profitable. We have already
planned to pnrsue together the following studies : entomology, conchology,
aqnarinm-making, botany and herbarium-making, study of the constella-
tions, drawing from copies, and the manual alphabet. Clara is quite skillful
with her pencil, sketching from nature. I think there is something else,
but here is enough for once. Clara is a senior in the Chicago High School
diflsical couiae and we have in tastes and education many things in com-
mon. She is the last person I thought to find in this rude neighborhood,
and I thank God for it humbly and sincerely, and will try to exert a good
influence over this new friend of mine. I think she has not been reared
religiously, and so I pray here in her room even as I try to in my morning
devotions at school, and then go to sleep more peacefully and happily than
I dreamed I could two days ago, or than I shall deserve to ever.
June 7. — In the school-house, half-past eight. Am quite content this
morning and disposed to look with some complacence on my lot in life.
My school will be thoroughly organized before the end of the week, and I
shall not find it hard to teach, only wearisome. They are very kind at my
boarding-place, and I am altogether comfortable there. Wrote a cheerful
letter home last night I asked two of my pupils in the Second Reader class
why we have such a day as Christmas, when it occurs and what it commem-
orstes. They said, " It comes sometime in cold weather, and we have it so
we can hang up our stockings and get something nice." Beyond this they
had not the faintest idea of the day.
Evening, ten o'clock. — Clara and I have been having a royal time ever
since she came from the city on the six o'clock train. After supper we went
walking to the Desplaines river where Clara wished to show me some of the
scenes we are to sketch, then we walked up the railroad track and talked,
and I had a beautiful time. We gathered bouquets of roses, and rosebuds
which are better than blossoms, and after a walk of nearly two miles we re-
tsmed and found the three directors waiting to examine my certificate.
After they had dissected it, we came up to my room, traced constellations,
I learned the manual alphabet, and now I am going to bed tired, but happy
and thankfuL But before I go I shall tell my troubles and joys to God, and
pray Him to take care of all of us, especially the Four, until death us do part;
aay, until after death.
June 4. — One thing particularly troubles me. I am afraid I do not try
aio^;fa to influence Clara in the right direction. I am naturally thought-
loa, and a playful remark with a hidden meaning which is irreverent does
not meet in all cases a negative response, or silence even, but I see that I am
iadined to laugh m3r8elf if the wit of the words is sufficiently apparent. But
I have told her how I am trying, and am praying earnestly and have sincere
wishes after righteonaness in my heart. There is no church here, nor are
there any Christian people, but the Infinite One is everywhere, and " His
pcataeas flows anmnd my incompleteness."
144 Sabbath Away from Home,
Afternoon. — ^The scholars -are more vexatious than usual and I find it
rather difficult to keep my temper, though I have succeeded thus far. The
children overwhelm me with flowers, the desk is piled with them ; they
enliven this doleful place wonderfully. And alas ! for me the time even now
is when I must make comfort to myself out of roses and lilies instead of
friends and home. One of my scholars had a fit in school and we all were
frightened, but I was '' schoolma'am '* to the best of my ability.
Evening. — I have not laughed so heartily in months as over a scientific
result obtained by Clara and me this evening, and have been just as wild
and thoughtless as I ever was at home. Clara is eighteen and her enthusi-
asm on the subjects we are to investigate together, awakens mine. Perhaps
my life is not going to be so very hard, but I can not tell. One moment I
am in the sunshine and the next I am in the shade ; so delicate is my spirit-
ual thermometer that from zero to summer day a pleasant breath of the
sweet south wind will raise the mercury.
June ID. — Sabbath morning. Rose at nine o'clock, breakfasted, arranged
my room, and am wondering at the strange day that I shall spend, so differ-
ent from Evanston with all its Christian privileges. This family is not
religious. There is no church that I can attend, no outward form of worship
in which I can show the gratitude and love that fill my heart this beautiful
day. I can see father and mother, sister and brother, in the old pew. I
know they all have prayed that I might be shielded, strengthened and com-
forted by our God who is over all, blessed forever. Mother has wondered
what I was doing to-day and has hoped in her heart that I might be happy
and serene and that I might live and act like a Christian under whatever
circumstances I may be placed. The younger members of this family have
taken their pony and ridden off to the strawberry patch to spend the day.
The proprietor sits in the library below with six or seven friends who have
ridden out from the city ; they are smoking their cigars and talking of horse-
races, sporting, and the like. The mistress of the establishment is busy
superintending the preparation of the Sunday dinner, for Mr. T. is a rich
man and fares sumptuously every day. It is a queer Sabbath, I never spent
one like it. God, help me to remember Thee and heaven and holiness while
all around is of the earth, earthy. I have stayed in my room with Clara, read
a little, talked with her the rest of the time. I do not know what I should
do without her. She is a petted child, the only daughter, not used to think-
ing much of others' comfort, but she is very kind to me and marvelously
thoughtful of my happiness. Clara and I did not go down to dinner, which
was a comfort. Have read my favorite 1 19th Psalm with solid satisflUrtion.
Evening, June 11. — School has been positively zestful, my pupils enthusi-
astic and easily governed. The sun has shone and the sky has been as blue
as a violet, and, best of all, I have had four letters from home.
June 12. — My pupils have not been as studious or as easily governed as
usual, to-day, and have troubled me greatly. Have been obliged to box the
ears of two reprobates, ferule the brown palms of four, and lay violent hands
on another to coerce him into measures that did not meet his views. All this
I have done ; I am sorry it became necessary, for I feel kindly toward them all
A Lonesome " School Ma'am." 145
■nd never speak b haish word only as thej force me to do so bj the total
depnnt]' they manifest in their conduct, and yet the little creatures bring
me flowen and evince in many little actions a kind of regard for mc that is
most pleasant
I have given these extracts showing what a young teacher
once endured, because I know ten thousand others have had a
similar experience, and I have hoped to bring somewhat of good
cheer and courage to those as faint-hearted in their new endeavor
as I was in mine so many years ago.
CHAWER n.
KANKAKEE ACADEMY.
(i860).
After a few months at home I engaged to go to Kankakee, an
Illinois county-seat about sixty miles from Chicago, as assistant
teacher in an academy started by Prof. Charles B. Woodruff (the
former principal of the *' Blind Institute " at Janesville, Wis., and
my father's friend). Here I remained one term, but owing to the
urgent wishes of my parents did not return after the Christmas
holidays. My cousin. Miss Sarah F. Oilman, of Churchville,
N. Y., took my place and made a decided success of the venture,
in more ways than one, as she here made the acquaintance of Harry
Dusinbury, whom she married within the year. The story of this
second effort as a pedagogue is best given in journal language :
September 26, i860. — Very busy getting ready to go. L/etter from Pro-
fessor Woodruff in answer to my telegraphic dispatch, giving me further
particulars and saying that he will secure my boarding-place and meet me
at the night train. As nearly as I can find out, I am to teach philosophy,
history, drawing, grammar, and all the reading classes, how many soever
there may be. I received from Clara Thatcher one of her warm-hearted,
impetuous epistles. What a heroine that girl has proved herself to be !
Ri^ht on through summer's heat she has carried, all alone, the Sunday-
school we founded in the little red school-house so forlorn. She says Oliver
is to have their school, and he is glad and so are we, for the wages are excel-
lent. What an unromantic consideration ! But he will not have half so
hard a time as I had, for he will be in the nice, large, brick building instead
of my wretched little wooden house. Yet when I think of spending all the
winter there, I can but murmur, "Poor fellow,'* to myself, for Evanston is
a town that makes almost any other seem half barbarous. The fact that the
University charter forever forbids saloons tells a whole dictionary full about
our moral status.
And so I am to go from home before our dear relatives come from the
Sast, and I have not seen them in many years, not since I was a young girl,
(146)
Tell Your Age, 147
They are all very dear to me and I was especially anxious to see my Aunt
Elizabeth who is loved with more than the love of near relationship by me,
and for whom I am named. In the lonely days that will follow my going
I shall think of those whom I have left behind and the other loved ones
who are coming, as they enjoy themselves together in our home, while I
am lonesome, tired and heart-sick. In the evening Mary and I sang for
hom^ to father, who is not particular about the quality and cultivation of our
voices, it being sufificient for him that, as in the olden days, his daughters
sinjf together '* Bonnie Doon," " Come this way, my father,'* "Star-spangled
Banner,*' and the rest; when we closed with Longfellow's "Rainy Day,"
mother sat with her hand shading her eyes and a sad expression on the
dearest face in all the world to me. I knew she was thinking about my
birthday so near at hand, about my going off again, about her birds that are
making longer flights at every trial and need no more to have her bear them
up upon her wings. I knew that she was being sorry for me as only one can
be, that one my mother. Oliver and Beth Vincent were upstairs making
the library catalogue for the Sunday-school. Aunt Sarah sat with us, listen-
ing quietly to everything. Father threw in a remark now and then, some-
times lively, sometimes sad, but always quaint and curious. And thus endeth
the last home-picture I shall draw for many a day. I have been tr3ring to
think why I go away to this new work so soon. I can not tell. I only know
that I have some dim sense that it is right and best. Certainly it is not the
happiest But I have come to believe that it is well for us, well for our char-
acters, those beautiful fabrics we are weaving every day, to do those things
that do not make us happy, but only make us strong.
I have never felt reluctant to tell my age. It early came to
me that nothing was less dignified than to make a secret of one's
personal chronology. Marketable values in many instances de-
pend on freshness, and if a girl has no broader view of her rela-
tions to the world than the relation she may hold to some man
who will prize her more if she is younger, then she does well to
hide her age. But if she is a dignified human being, who has
started out, ** heart within and God o'erhead," upon an endless
voyage wherein she sails by the stars rather than by the clock,
she will never hesitate either to know or to announce just where
she is on that long voyage ; how many days out from childhood-
land. The first mention I find in my journal of this way of look-
ing at the subject is the following :
September 27, i860. — I have often wondered why it is that people gen-
^fally, and ladies especially, are so unwilling to have their ages known. We
"re immortal, and, for aught we know, eternal. We never regard Gabriel
** old, though the prophet Daniel first introduced him to us. Our baby
^^rothersand sisters who have died are babies still to us, lambs in the flock
148 Kankakee, Illinois.
that the gentle Shepherd leads. If we do not think of age when we think
about eternity, why should we in time, which is only eternity cut off at both
ends ? And yet we do regard it very much. This was accounted for to me
recently, in the case of ladies, on the ground that their attractions dimin-
ish as their years increase, after a certain point, and that consequently the
number of years is made a mystery. Ah, I have it ! If " one '* is beautiful,
there is some reason in one's keeping one's age a secret, but if one is not,
one has little or nothing to lose by the flight of years in this respect, while
one is constantly adding to one's attractions in other ways, that is, in
knowledge of the world, intelligence, culture, conversational ability, etc. ;
therefore, if one is not beautiful, it is foolish to make a secret of one's age.
Corollary : My course is plain, because I myself am plain ! It shall always
be in order for any one to propound to me the usually much-dreaded
question, **How old are you — if I may be so bold? "
Why should men universally tell their ages? Because a man is an
individual and not dependent upon others for his support I early resolved
that I would not be dependent, either, and later that I would try to help all
other women to the same vantage-ground of self-help and self-respect I
determined, also, that I would set them a good example by always freely
speaking of my age, which I have not shunned to declare, my mother face-
tiously contending that I keep it, and hers, too, for that matter, just one
year ahead of the current calendar.
I have not done much in these years, yet God knows I will try to make
up if He will spare me, and somehow I believe He will.
September 29. — Going away to Kankakee to-morrow to begin my work.
Packed my trunk so as to have it out of the way. Oliver kindly lent me
Nolte's "Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres," D'Aubign^'s "History of the
Reformation," Scott's "Bride of Lammermoor," and the first volume of
Bohn's edition of "Plato," to take with me.
Kankakee, 111., October 2, i860. — Another book to begin and a new,
strange life to tell of. What a world this is, to be sure, and how we
struggle about in it, straying off from those whom we love and those who
love us, to strange, unfriendly regions, resolutely turning away from books
and quiet to take in their stead pain, weariness and toil ; yet in it all there
is the comforting reflection that we are right, that in our nature there still
exists, notwithstanding all our sins and ignorance, a spark of Godhood, a
shimmering ray from the stars that shine serenely in the zenith of the
angels, a breath of divinity which stirs within every human soul. Father
left me yesterday evening, and I prayed quite trustfully and went to sleep
with a broad grin on my face, put on through sheer strength of wilL Well,
this morning, I went to the Kankakee Academy, where I am second teacher,
and on the whole have had a tolerable day. I am going to try not to cry
once while I am here, for I am twenty-one, I would have you understand.
It is not so very bad, and I won't care. I wish I were a better tuofnan. I
shall always call myself that now.
A Sense of Right and Justice. ^49
I now feel competent] to work, and work I will. I can accomplish a
great deal between now and the holidays, so good-by to home and friends
until then. You can well do without me, and I have proved that I can live
without you, as well. Each of us is sent into the world by himself, to fight
and conquer for himself, and when all is said an infinite remoteness from
every being, save God, encompasses each one of us from the cradle to the
gr^ye.
A little poem in Harper's for this month struck me unusually. I will
copy from it as a text to a short sermon. It closes thus :
" In this poor life we may not cross
Our virtuous instinct without loss.
And the soul grows not to its height
Unless it love with utmost might.*'
I believe the doctrine of this poem divested of its imagery. I believe
no woman ever knows the depth and richness of her nature until she has
loved a man, some man good and noble, better than her own life. I believe
that unless she does this, much of pain and want must be endured by her,
and with all that I have admitted, my journal bears me witness that I say
little or nothing upon the subject Once only I will give the reason here,
and then I shall not revert to it again. In truth, it is not one of which I
often think. I have never been in love, I have never shed a tear or dreamed
a dream, or sighed, or had a sleepless hoiu* for love. I never treasured any
man in my heart until he became sacred to me, until his words were as
oracles, his smiles as sunshine, his voice like music. I never himg upon
any man's words or took any man's name into my prayer because I loved
him, but I might have done all this had I so willed it. I was too cautious,
loved my own peace too well, valued myself too highly, remembered too
frequently that I was made for something far more worthy than to spend a
disconsolate life, wasting my heart, the richest gift I could bestow, upon a
man who did not care for it, and who never thought of me save in friendly,
common fashion. I was too proud for that, I had too keen a sense of right
and justice ; too strong a desire to work out from the seclusion in which I
live, and try to become wiser and better and more helpful to the world each
day. I have known several men for whom I might have cared. I have
teen enough nobility in their natures, enough culture of intellect, enough
pmity of mind and heart and life, to inspire the choice emotion. I have
looked after them as they passed me on the street, as I saw them in church
or met them in society, and have tranquilly thought to myself, " You might
care for him, but remember you must not do so," and I have gone on my
way calmly and in great peace. It is not that I am hard-hearted or insensi-
ble, bat because I know perfectly well these men think nothing about me
except as an acquaintance, and therefore I am determined to be even with
them and have shut the door upon them and said, ** Get hence,'' and that is
the end of it. I am sure it is right for me to do so. I have not known as
yet what it is to lean on any being except God. In all my friendships I am
the one relied on, the one who fights the battles, or would if there were any
15<^ Socrates on Immortatiiy.
to fight Yet every night I say to God in prayer, ** Sometime, if it pleases
Thee, give me the love of a manly heart, of one that I can trust and care for
next to Thee. But if this can not be, make it up to me in some other way.
Thou knowest what is right. And in it all may I be very quiet and restful,
remembering that the fashion of this world perisheth and ere very long I
shall be gone beyond the light of sun or stars, beyond the need of this
blessing for which I have asked.'* I am quiet. The present situation does
not trouble, nor turn the song of my life into the minor key, and for this I
thank God fervently. Burke says that the traits most admired in women
are dependence, softness, trust, timidity, and I am quite deficient in them all.
October ii. — As an indication of the literary standard of the family in
which I am to stay for the next ten weeks, I might mention that the
Mercury, the Ledger and Godey*s Ladies' Book adorn (?) the parlor table,
and I find twenty or thirty copies of Littell '5 Living Age stuffed away in a
closet under an old chair.
October 13. — "To know, to esteem, to love and then to part.
Make up life's tale to many a feeling heart"
In the afternoon I went to Sunday-school ; they have given me a class
of boys to teach ; then went to class-meeting. My class- leader I like very
much. He looks to me like a Christian, he is rather old, has silvery hair,
dark eyes, sweet, calm mouth, finely-cut features. I told them that Christ,
their friend, was also mine. After all this I am going home peaceful and
content, if not happy. What a thing it is to be a Christian minister ! How
glad and proud I am that Oliver is one ! My landlady gave me those Living
Ages to which I referred a f<^w pages back. Took Plato to school and fin-
ished "Phsedo.** It requires close thought to follow the arguments, partic-
ularly the last one. The reasoning is like Butler's in the *' Analogy " as to
one or two of the points, and I think reason could not more clearly prove
the immortality of the soul. I do not like to affect such contempt for the
body as Socrates seems to have felt. It looks to me to have a certain dignity
of its own besides that reflected upon it by its kindly occupant, and it is so
fearfully and wonderfully made. The following words partake of a univer-
sal spirit in man that looks and longs for a divine revelation : *' For we
ought with respect to these things" (concerning the immortality of the
soul), "either to learn from others how they stand, or to discover them for
one's self, or if both these are impossible, then taking the best of human
reasonings and that which is the most difficult to be confuted, and embark-
ing on this, as one who risks himself on a raft, so to sail through life unless
one could be carried more safely and with less risk on a surer conveyance , or
some divine reason.'* The tears came into my eyes when I wrote the lines I
underscore, they seem so mournful, have such longing in them for the revela-
tion of which Socrates lived and died in ignorance. One of the speculations
in these dialogues pleased me particularly, that is the one where the philos-
opher inquires what will become of the souls of those who have not loved
wisdom, after this life. He thinks that some may be changed into wolves,
or hawks, or kites, while those of a milder type may become wasps, or ants,
or even change again into the human species. I can never rid myself of the
Music a Voice from Heaven, 151
idea that a spirit alien to them, looks out of the eyes of dogs, cows, and
horses I have seen. The expression is so wistful, as of those that long for
something forever unattainable. It is a curious thought, of which I can not
clear my mind ; in its practical workings it is a good one, too, for I try
always to be kind to animals, particularly those of the large, hungry eyes.
It is so cold that I am obliged to spend my evenings in the parlor down-
stairs with the rest, and therefore I can not write as I would, but I will do
my best
Evening. — There, I did not intend to cry during all my sojourn at Kan-
kakee, but sitting here alone, writing to my sister Mary, I have cried like a
child, no, like a strong man, rather, until I quivered with trying to suppress
the sobs that would make themselves audible. I am going to copy the few
sentences that had power to make a woman forget her self-reliance on such
short notice, for I sat down almost gayly to write, talked on with Mary in
business style until this last : "I am sorry I have nothing to tell you, and
have written so much about my own little affairs, but I could hardly help it
just this once. Remember I shall never live with you all at home again. In
all your careless, pleasant times, think now and then of your sister that loves
you, and who feels as she writes these words with tears in her eyes, that she
is to have a sterner life than you will know about. I am afraid you will
forget me there at home, now that I am always to be gone ; and I wish you
would not quite, father, mother, brother, sister, for I shall not have many to
love me while I live. I know your pleasant life and how you are used to be
without me, and how I was often impatient and indolent, too, perhaps. I
wish I had been better. There, I did not mean to write all this, but here it
is, and though it will sound strange to you coming from me, I will let it go.
Oliver need not say, in his droll fashion, that this last part of my letter is
all 'hypocrisy,' for I have written what I mean, though you do not know
me in this character."
Sunday. — Went to church with my little pupil, Fanny. While the first
h3rmn was being sung, my mind came into tune with the calmness and Chris-
tian quiet of the place. I believe I have a soul more susceptible to the
influence of music than any one who knows me dreams of, or than I fully
understand myself, for a few words played con expressione will thrill me
strangely, and sacred music most of all. There is something so spiritual
about music, so unearthly, it stirs me like a voice from purer, better regions
than these of ours. It was Coleridge who said a painting was something
between a thought and a thing. This definition seems to me as truly to
apply to music, and when I use this word I mean music ; not twanging of
strings and swelling of bellows merely, but the waking up of sweet and
solemn sound. No one, I think, can be truly a player who has not a fine,
cultivated mind, a delicate, sensitive nature. I have friends who, when they
are in loftier moods than usual, play so that the music seems simply to drop
from their finger-tips upon the keys. Miss Kellogg plays Beethoven's
"Spirit Waltz** that way. Five minutes of beautiful singing or playing will
change my entire mental attitude, and like Philip, as George Eliot pictures
under its inflnence, I think ** I might be capable of heroisms.'* Well;
152 ^^spasmodically Generous.^^
8o it was this very morning, as the solemn bass, the mournful alto, the ring-
ing tenor and exultant soprano united in singing :
''The whole creation joins in one
To praise the g[lorious name
Of Him who sits upon the throne
And to adore the I^amb."
I quite forgot my doubts and fears, my troubles and temptations, and
turned a reverent, wistful face imto the Lord. A strange thing is this soul,
this wonderful presence within my breast
I told Professor Woodruff, speaking of my propensity to give away my
books, that I was spasmodically generous, which he laughingly remarked
was a species entirely unknown to him. I must be very dignified-appearing,
for this evening a pair of young gentlemen called to see Professor Wood-
ruff about attending the Academy. The other ladies present and I talked
and laughed together about some trivial matter, after which one of the boys
asked me a few questions concerning the school, which I answered promptly
enough. Whereupon he inquired if I was attending school, and I answered
that I was one of the teachers. The boy put his hand to his mouth and in-
dulged in an ill-bred snicker at this. Upon relating the incident to Professor
Woodruff he inquired, with well-feigned petulance, "Why don*t you look
older ? How dare you masquerade in this false character ? ''
As I sat here writing the above, a neighbor came in ; he is a smart sort
of man, of middle age. I was not thinking about him or his talk until the
following sentence was thrust in upon my reverie, " Well, this old ortho-
doxy is running down, running down in my opinion. I suppose everybody
would not say so, but that is my way of thinking.*' I never heard such
scandalous language before fi-om the lips of a decent person. The poor,
blind fool ! I am so indignant at him that I can hardly sit here and let
him go on with his ignorant, blasphemous nonsense, but I will bear it
quietly unless he sa3rs something on the subject to me, and then I will de-
clare myself instanter. I am decidedly of the church militant, I see, but I
can not help it, I am so thoroughly disgusted with this man.
Subjects on which I am to write: "Mental Projectiles," "Religion,**
"According to Law.** But what is the use of putting down these themes
when I have no privacy or chance to ¥nite ? When I thought up these sub-
jects I thought up fine ideas to match them — fine ones and valuable, too, as
I steadfastly believe, but I was foolish enough to imagine if the subjects were
kept and remembered, the thoughts would come back to me, and the pity of
it is they don't, so I look regretfully over the words full of suggestion when
I wrote them first, but comparatively empty now. Have been reading of
Hypatia, about whom I always think with admiration and a sort of reveren-
tial love.
October 23. — Such a kind letter from father! I am going to make
an extract : " My Dear Daughter : I take up my pen a third time to write
without provocation on your part, but feeling symptoms of loneliness which
I presume are imparted to me through the affinities of father and child,
knowing that my little 'news* will not be unacceptable.** Then the dear
Mother^s Letter. 153
man went on and gaye me every item that would be of interest ; among
them, that Mr. Thatcher told him this morning that if Oliver did as well as
Frank had done when she taught at Harlem, they would be perfectly satis-
fied. I am glad to hear that he said so, though the praise is late in the day.
October 25. — Here comes a letter from mother and here is an extract :
"It gives me pleasure to learn that you are not lonely nor unhappy.
Though you have not the exuberant gleefulness of the little girls whom you
saw from the window that day with such a thoughtful face, I am thankfril
you have calmness, and quiet endurance, and something that you can almost
call peace. Your excitement you must now seek in the vitalizing influences
of the Holy Spirit. An infinite soul may not find contentment in the gifts of
a finite world. Some writer said, ' For suffering and enduring there is no
remedy but striving and doing.' This remedy you have early adopted." I
thank God for my mother as for no other gift of His bestowing. My nature
is so woven into hers that I almost think it would be death for me to have
the bond severed and one so much myself gone over the river. She does not
know, they do not any of them, the Four, how much my mother is to me,
for, as I verily believe, I cling to her more than ever did any other of her
children. Perhaps because I am to need her more. I am very proud of her,
and few women that I have ever seen have satisfied me as she does. She
has a fine intellect, and as she said to me once, in the regretful tone of
one who felt the world did not know her full capacities, '* I might have
been a singer with the heart under more kindly circumstances.''
Mary and I were talking together once and I said I could not imagine
what it would be to love any one better than mother, to cling to any one
more than I did to father, brother and her. The tears were almost in my
eyes, I spoke so earnestly ; but Mary answered lightly yet decidedly, that
the believed she could love the man she should marry more than all others,
and then I knew that in a few years longer my sister will love some one
alien to ns better than her mother who has been bone of her bone and flesh
of her flesh, better than her brother and sister whom that mother has carried
under her own heart ; better than her father who has watched over her ever
since she was bom into the world, and had many an anxious thought about
her even before that time. She is to love the stranger better than these who
are so dear to her, and who have been faithful to her always, and who will
be to the end of the world, when he may grow careless and indifferent. And
it is right that she should do so, it is an instinct of God's own appointing,
but my heart ached to hear her speak the words.
October 26. — Father is the cleverest of men. Just listen to him :
"Dear Frances, this day I forward by American Express, care Professor
Woodruff, a package directed to you, containing a book, a watch and belt
fixings such as all the girls are wearing now. The watch I took out of my
pocket as I would an eye out of my head, for I do not know what I am to
do without it. And I hesitated some time as to what was my duty in the case
without coming to any determination on that point."
The great event of this evening was Professor Woodruff's attempt to
mesmerize me. He tried eighteen minutes, looking me straight in the eye.
154 Mesmerism.
but never a bit of dazedness did he put upon me "at all at all/' although I
will admit he has a very peculiar eye, and two or three evenings ago when
he tried it I felt a curious dizziness, everything seemed going away except
his eyes and they glared at me like a serpent My landlady's daughter
came down to be mesmerized, if he could do it, and within two minutes she
was unconscious. I knew her to be perfectly honest and she was greatly
chagrined that he had conquered her, particularly after his laughing boasts.
I have been heretofore wholly skeptical on the subject, but I am now a con-
vert to this much : I believe it to be a species of animal magnetism, mani-
fested under certain conditions and dependent for force upon the will of the
operator. That is all Professor Woodruff claims. The symptoms all go to
prove this theory. The young lady said she felt prickings in the ends of her
fingers like those attending a shock from a battery.
We have most amusing times singing ; Miss C. takes the soprano, Pro-
fessor W. the basso, and I attempt the alto ; when Sam is here he helps and
we have quite a concert. " Oft in the Stilly Night,'* as rendered by us is
really quite heart searching.
October 27. — This is Oliver's birthday. I wonder if he remembers it.
I dare say not, the careless fellow ! I am vexed with him for not writing,
but I suppose he can hardly find time, as he is preparing for examination.
Went down town with my landlady and she kindly helped me to select a
dress, which I have earned with my own money, as I shall joyfully think
when I wear it in school.
Later. My two boys who laughed at the idea of my being a teacher,
are in one of my classes and I take great delight in magnifying my office
for their illumination. Had a letter from Oliver after all ; I am very proud
of my brother and very thankful for him. I like him, he suits my ideas
better than any other young man I have ever seen. He has delicacy,
quickness of perception, cultivation of mind, and physically the look that
I particularly admire. I let my hostess read the letter and as she laid it
down she said, '* He is a good brother, I know." I admire her sagacity and
sense. I believe I will copy some of his words : ** Evanston, October 20,
i860. My Dear Sister Frank : I ought to have answered your letter at once,
and should have done so but for poor health, a great deal to do, and a very
foolish aversion to letter writing, becoming, from long indulgence, almost
insurmountable. I am disposed to make amends and hope you will accept
my apology coupled with a promise to do better hereafter. I was very
sorry for the incident attending our parting, for I was unconscious of an
intention to injure your feelings in any respect, though part of what I
said would have been better unsaid. I am glad you gave me credit for in-
nocence of intention. As to the construction given my words, I was surely
guiltless, for I never thought there was any foundation for remarks based
upon the assumption that you were in any particular inferior to the rest of
us, because I feel, and have always felt, the opposite. ' To err is human'
in this respect I acknowledge myself related to humanity ; ' to forgive,
divine,' — in this respect I am glad to believe you are affiliated with spiritual
existences."
Lincoln Is President. I55
For little Fannie's amusement I have this evening become almost a
child again, having an interest that surprises me in the old games of the
dead years. I have ransacked my memory for stories of witches, robbers,
fairies, told her about Jack and his bean-stalk, Blue Beard and Cinderella,
with variations ; played all imaginable games, from the tick-tack to the laby-
rinth ; showed the wonderful pictures of the wolf and sand-hill crane, and
closed the exhibition by achieving the Spanish student in the highest style
of the art, which the bright-eyed little girl is now imitating with astonishing
success.
November 4. — Anniversary of the Kankakee County Bible Association.
When they took up a collection and I wrote, ** F. E. W., {i, " I felt a new
thanksgiving that I could earn and use money according to my own judg-
ment I hereby promise myself that I will give as much as I can from all
my earnings to promote the doing of good in the world.
Received a letter from Amelia I., one of my former pupils at H. I
smiled as I observed how careful she was to place all her capitals and punct-
uation marks. She is doing well and trying to learn and satisfy the hunger
that is given by the gods to their favorites among men. The closing words
of her letter are enough to reward me for the little I have done and shall do
for her : " I thank you for your kind offer to lend me some books, and trust
I shall learn much from them. Do write soon, Miss W., for it does me good
to hear from my old teacher. I feel resolved to take your advice and to
learn all I can and try to remember all that I learn."
November 7. — Lincoln is elected President of the United States. Hurrah !
Under the present system I was not allowed to vote for him, but I am as
glad on account of this Republican triumph as any man who has exercised
the elective franchise can be. It is amusing to observe the interest chil-
dren take in politics. This morning Professor W. read the returns aloud,
and all my little girls, some of them but six years old, crowded around and
listened attentively, clapping their hands at the announcement of an unusual
majority in any state. It was a curious and suggestive side-picture ; a tall
gentleman reading in triumphant tones ; twenty young men around him
listening eagerly ; a group of smaller boys in the rear ; several young ladies
paying careful attention, and "the other teacher'* looking with expectant
eyes toward the newspaper, and surrounded by a dozen little girls, holding
by the hand the rosebud who dances up and down exclaiming, "Are n't
you glad. Miss Willard, that Lincoln is elected?" A picture representing
this scene would not inaptly indicate the genius of a Republican govern-
ment, an organization in which every member, male and female, large or
tmall, feels a keen, personal interest.
Our reading lesson to-day was about God and his goodness to us. I
wished to impress it upon my pupils, and after going over the ground at some
length, said by way of application, ** Now, Sarah, what ought we to do when
God is so kind to us? " She looked up with a fresh sparkle in her eyes and
exclaimed, "Why, pay Him for it ! " Oh, we all have that idea, heaven
pity ns ! We can not take the gift of Christ humbly and thankfully. In all
156 ^* I ant Suffering to Draw,^^
the ages men have been trying to climb up some other way to God, trying
after all His love and mercy, to pay Him for it
I gave my pupils these three questions : How do we know right from
wrong? What is the diflference between morality and religion ? How do we
know the Bible is true ? My recollections of moral philosophy and *' Leslie's
Method with the Deists" were of great use to me in making these things
intelligible. Florence listened with attentive face and flush on cheek and
brow that delighted me. Nothing is so refreshing as these evidences of a
thinking, reasoning mind in a child. Nothing seems so hopeful for future
usefulness and growth.
My landlady has been telling me about Bunker Hill and the dedication
of the monument by Daniel Webster when Lafayette was present, and the
wonderful address delivered by the greatest orator of his time. I wish I had
seen something of the world, and I think I shall some day.
In the evening Mr. N. called ; he is a pleasant, good-hearted fellow and
very entertaining. He almost terrified me by his familiarity with Beaumont
and Fletcher, the poets Rogers, Pope, Addison, Dryden, etc. Talked with
him in friendly fashion and rather enjoyed the evening. He is going to
teach me to play chess. I lent him Plato's " Dialogues " ; wonder what he
will make of them.
November 13. — Was weighed to-night ; result, one hundred and nineteen
pounds. That is gaining more than a pound a week ever since I came here.
Evening. — Here Mr. H. sits, ridiculing the vicarious atonement and the
divinity of Christ. It almost makes me shudder to hear him. I know it
injures me and I know it vexes me beyond expression. What a terrible
creed is this of the spiritualist ! I believe it is from the bottomless pit.
My little Flora looked up discontentedly into my face to-day, and said,
** Miss Willard, I want to draw, / am suffering to draw .' " I burst out laugh-
ing, nobody could help it. Between you and me, I am not the most staid,
decorous ''school-marm " in the world.
November 18. — ^Afler dinner I went to Sunday-school. One of my boys
came in early and said, *' Were you sick that you did n't come for these two
weeks ? ** I felt reproached and ashamed. Then he said, *' I have remem-
bered the answers to those questions all this time." The other boys came
up and whispered the answers, "Paternoster," and "Apocrypha," I was
sorry I had stayed away. It was on account of a headache once, and the
next time some frivolous excuse, unworthy of my profession, but really they
behaved terribly the last time. They said to-day they would behave like
gentlemen hereafter and seriously began by being very quiet and attentive.
I will try not to stay away again. I spoke in class-meeting to the following
purpose : I wish I were a better woman. My conscience reproaches me for
my thoughtless words and actions during the last few weeks. My life is
very different now from what it was at home where every morning my father
prayed that we might be guided aright I seem to stand alone, almost, and
have many new temptations.
Then the class-leader said he had thought of me often and prayed for
me, had been sorry that I was away from my father and my friends. His
Our Draimng Class, 157
gentie words broaght the tears to my eyes. I resolved again and again to
lire better than I have done, and in Christ's strength to be *'a good girl "
as my father has so often and so kindly counseled me.
November 19. — Father says that Mary has been ill, something resem-
bling typhoid fever. That is why she did not write. I am worried about it,
poor child. I love my sister almost as I love myself, I think she is even
nearer to me, though not dearer, than my mother. She seems a part of my
hearL We have been together all our lives ; I have no secrets from her,
none in the world. I admire her for her frank, ingenuous manner, her
pleasant, pretty face and fine figure. I love her for her true, good heart,
her intellect and her strong good sense, but most of all for her unyielding
conscientiousness, her firm religious character, her entire devotion to truth
and righteousness. "Absence makes my heart grow fonder " toward her
and toward them all. God pity me if any evil should befall her ! If she
should be cut down in her youth and her prime, while the bloom is on
her cheek, the light in her eye and the luster on her brown hair ! I can not
conceive of anything so terrible. God will not curse me so. He will not
send such a blight over my life and mother's. She is mother's youngest
child. I can not bear to think of it, it makes me shudder.
Father fears I am wandering off and forgetting my allegiance to God
and Christ, but he need not, I am trying to be good. I wrote him so to-day.
If he did not love me very much he would not write me as he does.
November 21. — Letter from mother and a note from father. Mother
insists that I shall spend the winter at home and not return here again. I
can not tell, it will be just as I think best, but as I go through the cold
and frost and bear many unpleasant things and hear unjust words some-
times, I often wonder that I do not stay at home where they love me and
where I am warm and comfortable.
November 22. — Letter from father containing this comforting sentence
at the conclusion : "Keep up good courage, pray in faith, and remember
you have my poor prayers, as well as your mother's, every day."
We have pleasant times in our drawing-class. Besides the regular mat-
ten, we talk physiognomy. My recollections of Lavater are invaluable
here. We analyze faces, hands, figures and feet, classic noses, eyes and eye-
brows, disagree about the curve of the nostril, or the aristocratic elevation of
an instep, define the Roman nose, studying the sclfool generally in respect
of all these and their finger-nails and hair besides. I talk Rubens, Land-
seer and Rosa Bonheur as well as I am able, and I think my pupils like the
hour in which we do these things as well as any in the six. I have each one
of them bring in a drawing from nature and reproduce the day's lesson
from memory every day.
November 23. — To-day came a letter from my sister, the first she has
written since her illness. She speaks more seriously than usual, proposes
that we be baptized on Christmas Day. She has done a good deal of read-
ing since I left home, and sums it up with pardonable importance. She is
a smart girl and I am glad of her. Here is an extract from her letter : "My
dear Prvik, you did not know when you wrote yoiu* last letter that I should
153 Plays Chess.
read it on my sick-bed. Yes, I have been quite ill, a sluggish sleep for
thirty six hours, with fever and headache, only waking up long enough to
take a little medicine. I don't know as I ever was worse. I had the doctor
this time and I was put in a pack, like Oliver, you know, and all the ugly
do6toring things done, and so it was and so I might have died. Just think
of it ! And then — no, I am not ready for that There are matters of form
to be gone through with, saying nothing of the lack of polish that the
jewel in its case is suffering for.**
In the evening Frank N. came and gave Professor W. and me a lesson
in chess playing. He says we are apt pupils and shall do well. I like the
game exceedingly. It is quite intellectual, does not admit of cheating, and
is the king of games. Went to the " Reading Circle '* of this town and en-
joyed it very much. We read ** Washington's I^ife,** by Irving. These
yoang ladies seem well educated and quite appreciative ; they are critical
about pronunciation, etc., and I learned several things.
November 25. — Went to Sabbath-school and my boys seemed really
unusually interested in the class. It amused me to hear them whisper
among themselves, " You must be polite, she told us to act like gentlemen.*'
Monday. — We play chess all our spare time. I do not read a bit and am
ashamed of myself generally. From Goethe : ** Every day one ought to
hear a song, to read a little poetry, to see a good picture, and, if it is pos-
sible, to say a few reasonable words.** Thus we are better for everything
refined and beautiful that meets us in our lives, for every flower, dewdrop
and rainbow. In my working life I see these glorious things not often, but
receive, with hearty, loyal gratitude, the little that falls to my share. I
wish I could hear Beethoven's "Spirit Waltz" to-night. I wonder what he
thought of as he played it for himself I wonder what it said to him. I shall
know some day when, on the peaceful shore, I talk with the good and great
ones who have lived on earth. This faith of mine renders me patient and
hopeful. There is another life than this of ours.
November 28. — Mary Hickok and her brother spent the evening with us.
She beat me at chess, after which we sang the song-book through, and Frank
N. came and we enjoyed ourselves in a general way till twelve o'clock. I
received my firstf invitation to a ball, which I respectfully declined.
November 29. — Thanksgiving Day. Much to my regret, our school was
not adjourned. I thought many things this morning while I heard my geog-
raphy class and they were singing upstairs (the academy rooms being in the
basement of the M. E. Church). Then came the prayer. I heard the min-
ister's gentle, earnest tones thanking the Divine Father for the mercy and
goodness that have followed us all the days of our lives, mingling with the
words I heard from Professor W. explaining the value of x and y in an
equation of three unknown quantities. I stopped my class, and we all
listened with bowed heads to the prayer; my little girls were strangely
silent and attentive. Though I teach to-day as usual, instead of praising
God in the great congregation, yet in my heart I keep Thanksgiving, and
God, who seeth not as men see and judgeth not by the outward appearance
but by the intention of the heart, knows this.
Gains in Christian Charity. 159
Evening. — Finished Nolte*s " Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres.** He
is a keen, qnick-witted, garrulous man, with no idea of humor or decency.
Much of the book concerning individual speculations and like subjects is un-
interesting to me, yet I have learned a good deal from it The letters to
painters were especially attractive. It has been much fresh entertainment
to read sketches of great men with whom the ¥niter is personally acquainted,
as in the present instance. Chantrey, Delaroche, Charlet, and a dozen other
writers, were the author's friends. Of the latter he says that he was so
strongly impressed with the face and figure of Napoleon, that he could draw
him with his eyes closed. " He frequently did this for me," says Mr. N.
" Once asking where he should begin, ' At the heel of the right boot,* I said.
He did so, and drew the whole figure perfectly well."
December 3. — That grand student of men, Chamfort, who far surpasses
the philosopher, De la Rochefoucault, remarks: "In great matters men
show themselves as they wish to be seen ; in small matters, as they are.** I
heartily indorse this sentiment, my experience with myself approves it.
December 6. — I must own that all my talk about self-abnegation is be-
coming every day more like poetry and less like reality. I do not try to
control my temper as I did at Harlem, I do not try to grow good and noble
as I really did when I first came here. True, I have very little cause for the
exhibition of temper, and I do nothing really bad, as the world views it, but
the glorious Christian life I know little about. Finding that loftiness and
Spartan-like severity and dignity can not well be attained with my dis-
position in my present surroundings, I accept my lower destiny and grasp
the straws, content since I can not have the roses. I am not noble-
natored, I own it humbly, and with infinite regret. I descend to puny
thoughts, I sing songs instead of quiet and lofty psalms, talk localisms and
nonsense instead of morality and religion ; play chess instead of reading
history and the Bible ; use amusing, quaint expressions instead of well-
selected, elegant English ; laugh instead of think ; make efforts at satire
instead of trying to control my temper ; think more of doing up my hair
nicely than of exerting a pure, refining influence. And thus my life goes
on, my poor make-shift sort of a life. I am more sick of it than my best
friends can tell. I must not be unjust with myself, I am not wicked, only
thoughtless and rather degenerating even from the place to which I had
ittaioed, and yet the case has lights as well as shadows.
I have more charity for the world, more faith in it, than I ever had
before. I see these people " without God and without hope in the world,"
exhibiting a nice sense of honor, much tenderness of conscience, and an
emphatic love for justice and for truth. I see a thousand sig^s of noble-
nesB and right-heartedness that I would not before have dreamed of seeing
in a community of ** non-professors. " It enlarges my charity, my faith in
mankind as snch, my catholicity, my cosmopolitan spirit. Certainly this
ii t gain. I shall not cry, '* Surely we are the people " with half the empha-
wthat I once put upon the words, and it is better that I should not. I see
oen making no profession of Christianity and yet contributing liberally to
^ support of U^e church and all its enterprises, manifesting the deepest
i6o Writes a Composition for X.
respect for its rights and ordinances, professing the greatest reverence and
regard for its institutions. I hear young ladies not bred to orthodoxy, nor
afiecting an experimental knowledge of its worth, murmuring their prayers
each day with sincerity and faith. I see the children of careless, worldly
women reverently kneel to say ** Our Father," taught by their mothers.
I see lying and dishonesty frowned upon and noble deeds applauded. All
this in Kankakee, the most irreligious community in which I was ever
placed. I walk their streets quietly and they think me a humdrum person,
doubtless, but in my poor, wavering, silent heart there are, perhaps, more
longings and more purposes "than they have ever dreamed in their
philosophy.**
Some one has said : "My conceptions were grander when they were in-
articulate, in my youth, than when, in after years, they found a voice. The
wave, crestless in the deep sea, swelled like a mountain ; it broke in shal-
lower water, and rippled ineffectually on the shore of utterance.**
After a foolish evening I go to sleep and dreams— of dearer, holier things
than I had talked about, for every heart knoweth its own sacred possessions ;
every heart hath its faces
" That it muses on, apart**
I am reading now Plato's '* Lysis," on friendship, and the "Gorgias,"
on rhetoric. Prom the former I take this paragraph, which has in it
wholesome counsel : " If then you become wise, my boy, all men will be
your friends, and all friends will be attached to you, for you will be use-
ful and good ; but if yon do not, neither will any one else, nor your father
be a friend to you, nor your mother, nor any of your kindred.**
By the noon mail a missive arrived from my school-mate X., coolly beg-
ging her '* very dear friend Prank,** with the '* very dear ** underscored, to
give her some ideas of a composition to be read on a special occasion in
two weeks. Oh, Finley Johnson, thou who advertisest to concoct speeches
for senators, poems for freshmen, odes on " My own little boy,** k la Tom
Hood, for " doting parents,** come to the relief of a dazed school-teacher,
who amid all her other cares and troubles must take the additional one of
writing a composition for a very dear friend. Well, I must arm myself with
paper and pencil and bring to light a few scattered thoughts on the curious
and flowery theme, " The living strive, the dead alone are glorious."
Never be afraid to question your author, and to stop him in his loftiest
thoughts and profoundest depths with the question, " Is it so ? **
That is a beautiful idea contained in the writings of Schiller, I believe,
that "deprived of earth*s gifts by want of alacrity in suing for them, the
poet received from Jove the key of heaven.** Happy poet ! In having this
he has all things, and can well afford to miss the joys of common folks.
December i6. — ^Taught my school with a joyful heart, I am going home
so soon. Went to the book store for prizes for my Sunday-school class. Pro-
fessor W. wrote a commendatory letter to father about me. Now, even-
ing, having regaled myself upon the Chicago daily Tribune^ I will devote
the remainder of the time to the study of Agnew*s *' Book of Chess,*' and to
i
Youn^ Barbarians, i6i
mental congratulations of this character: '* Well, yon are going home,
going home in two or three days ; your hard times will all be over. You
will see your mother and father, your sister and brother, and all the kind
well-wishers that yon count among the inhabitants of dear, delightful
Evanston. You will see the old, familiar rooms, and the lake, and the col-
lie, and the church. You will sleep in your own little* room with your
sister by your side, and your cousin not far off— your bright cousin Sarah,
Lottie *s sister. So thank God, and be sorry that you have not better de-
seryed the blessings He is showering on your head.** This is the melody of
my life, all else is but seeming, and variations upon this beautiful reverie.
December i8. — Attended my classes and walked to and from school
through rain and mud unutterable. I sent to Chicago yesterday for prizes for
my Sunday-school boys, to-day went to the depot and wrote their names in
their books. They met me there, and as fast as this was done, the grace-
less little scamps snatched their *' winnings** and scampered off without
as much as " By your leave,** much less, ** Thank you.** Such an instance
of unkindness and ingratitude I have not seen in a long time.
Quotation from our reading lesson at school : ** That which each man
cm do best, no one but his Maker can teach him. Insist on yourself, never
imitate. Every great man is a imique.** (Emerson*s ** Essay on Self-re-
liance.**)
Packed my trunk to-night, and so it is almost all over, and I am going
home.
December 21. — ^An awful snow-storm has commenced. I walked through
the drifts to school. The elements seem determined to wreak their ven-
geance upon me to the last. Well, let them, they have but a little longer.
Here are some lines written by Stillingfleet that contain. ** my doctrine,**
as father says:
" Would you both please and be instructed, too,
Watch well the rage of shining to subdue.
Hear every man upon his favorite theme.
And ever 0^ more knowing than you seem.**
Evanston, December 26. — I doubt if there is a person living who has
greater canse for thankfulness than I have. I am in my little room once more ;
the fire bams brightly ; the old, familiar furniture is about me ; the pictures
look down benignly from the walls ; my sister Mary sits at my feet, writing
in her funny, off-hand journal ; my cousin '* Sac " sits opposite ; my brother
in his room across the hall is ^Titing a sermon ; down-stairs father and
mother gather cozily around the home hearth, and with heart brimming
fall of thankfulness, I come to Thee, Father of every good and perfect gift.
11
CHAPTER III.
THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN HARLEM AND IN EVANSTON.
(1861-1862.)
In the spring of 1861 I once more taught Harlem school for
a few weeks. Here at the Thatcher homestead, *' Shady Dell,"
came in June the climax that I then thought would close my inde-
pendent career. But in the following February that spell was
broken and I resumed the spelling-book in April of the same year.
The first I knew about the war was when my father came
home from Chicago, April 13, 1861, in an agony of mind, saying,
**Fort Sumter has been fired upon and our flag is there no
longer." This produced great consternation in our household.
When I think of the love that fills my heart toward the Southern
people in general and my own great circle of friends there in par-
ticular, I can hardly believe that I exhausted language in anath-
emas upon them when this news came. Soon after, the Bull Run
defeat showed us what we did not till then believe, that we had
foemen worthy of our steel ! Up to that time we looked with
disdain upon **the lily-handed Southrons*' and thought that
General Scott would soon teach them the difference between '* a lot
of idlers '* and the homy-handed and lion-hearted soldiers of the
North. After that terrible defeat the students in the University
immediately formed a company commanded by Alphonso C. Linn,
one of the truest of men and a favorite teacher there, who left
us with a thousand blessings on his noble head and returned to
us no more. A company was also formed among the theological
students in which my brother enlisted for one hundred days, but
they were not called out. All the relatives I had were too old to
go as soldiers except my brother and two cousins ; the latter had
dependent families, my brother was never physically vigorous,
(i6a)
Our First War Meeting, 163
and I am compelled to admit that we were well content that the
company to which he belonged was not called away from home. I
used to be sorry at the time that none of my kindred, so far as
I knew, was in the army, but I can not say at this distance that I
am now, and while I know that if my understanding of the South-
ern people had then been what it now is, I should have felt alto-
gether different toward them, I have the poor satisfaction of
knowing that they anathematized us as bitterly as we did them !
It grated strangely on my ear when the first Sunday trains I ever
knew rumbled by loaded with soldiers from my own Wisconsin.
The day is fi-esh in memory when Gen. Julius White, on Sunday
morning after church, stood up in his pew near the altar and
made an impassioned speech calling upon all patriots to con-
vene in the church the next night and declare what they were
going to do to save the country. They came ; the old *' meet-
ing-house " was filled to overflowing and our hearts beat fast when
students whom we knew and thought much of, went up the aisle
and placed their names upon the muster-roll. Governor Evans
presided, and he with other rich men and many not so rich,
pledged large sums to the families of those who agreed to go to
the fixmt. I was a yotmg school-teacher, but according to my
narrow income, perhaps I gave as generously as any. I would
have given myself to care for the wounded, indeed, was earnestly
desirous of so doing, but my father would not for a moment
listen to such an idea, and I must say mother was not particu-
lariy heroic in that connection. But we scraped lint and pre-
pared bandages ; went to all the flag-raisings, Professor Jones's
College flinging the first one to the breeze, and we prayed the
God of battles to send fi^edom to the slave.
In 1862, the Public School of Evanston was my theater of
action. Dr. Bannister, professor of Hebrew in our Theological
Seminar}', was a director. Meeting him on the sidewalk near his
own door, I asked him for the place. He thumped meditatively
with his cane, then said, abruptly, '* Are you sure that you can do
it, Frank?** All my forces rallied on the instant in the words,
"Try me and see ! ** His daughter was my associate, and ours
was a difficult portion ; two young women essaying to teach their
164 Evanston Public School.
neighbors' children in the town where they themselves were lately
students.
My journal says :
April 20, 1862. — This is the hardest work I have yet done. There are
two rooms, eighty pupils, thirty-two classes, of which we teachers have six
apiece that are '* high.'* I study on my mathematics all the time I can pos-
sibly get out of school hours. I have algebra, and arithmetic away over it
the back part of the book. It is almost impossible to keep order, but we do
our best and have hope^ though every night we ache.
We had two big overgrown pupils, **the O. boys," who had
been a terror to all preceding pedagogues. Their open insubor-
dination one day obliged me to go toward them with a stick,
whereupon both vaulted out of an open window and we never
saw them more ! The school was a thoroughly American type.
There sat the sons and daughters of men cultured, distinguished,
rich, beside the barefoot boy and girl from humble cabins, and
melodiously their voices mingled as they sang Coates Kinney*s
lovely song :
" When the humid shadows gather
Over all the starry spheres.
And the melancholy darkness
Gently weeps in rainy tears,
O *tis sweet to press the pillow
Of a humble cottage bed,
And to listen to the patter of the raindrops overhead.
To the patter, patter, patter of the raindrops overhead.**
Their fingers drumming gently on the desks, in imitation of
the falling rain, helped to make the sweetest music that my
teaching years recall.
April 25. — We try to teach well and to do good. Dear knows I "give
my whole mind to it,** to say the least Aunt Sarah has been with us all
winter, and is my main-stay in mathematics. She thinks it would be beau-
tiful for me if I could go East to teach next fall, and will do her best for me.
She has considerable influence with Mrs. Stanton, principal at Leroy, and
some leading ladies in Rochester. It looks pleasant to me to think of
carrying out this plan.
May II.— School goes well, is very hard, but can be compassed. Some
of the pupils I love. I play ball with them at recess and ' ' spell them down *'
myself, or take one '* side '* and put them all in competition with me on the
other, to enliven the proceedings.
At devotions in the morning, when I read and pray before them I feel
their weight a little, and a thrilling desire to help them toward eternal life.
Nineteen Beautiful Years Ended. 165
It is hard for me to conduct devotions, yet I prize this possibility of doing
good.
Among other things I teach natural philosophy » botany and physiology.
If I were not often beclouded by ph3rsical weariness I should always thank
God, every moment, that I am of use. I think I have a rather healthful nature
and I get on comfortably Mrith life. To-night Freddy Huse brought me a
little bouquet arranged after his own fashion. He did not know how grate-
ful it was nor how it stirred my heart to hear him say, '* We've missed you
very much in Sabbath-school. '^ It was a simple, boyish sentence, but I
have felt better ever since, and I think hardly so tired.
I had not been able to take my class as usual because my
sister Mary was not well and my Sunday afternoons were passed
with her.
Mary getting better very slowly— it is a painfully familiar sight — ^her
thin face on the pillow, when I come in from school.
We talked a little, she and I, about old times at home, before any of us
bad other loves than those of the dear ones there. She said, '* I have never
been so happy as when we used to ' keep store ' under the trees, and go
walking with father and mother in the orchard and pasture. Just think,
Frank, of the vine all over the house, of the splendid well, the evergreens,
the animals of all sorts, and the dear old bam ! '* She is so anxious to go
back — says she shall never get well unless we take her home. Just as soon
as she can bear it, mother will go with her.
I have *' inspirations" about the old home. Some day I shall write a
pleasant book about it I have believed I should, for years.
May 30. — Every day school grows pleasanter, and I think a little easier.
I have such a liking for Emma, Minnie, Ella, Eda and her sisters ; Darwin,
Harry, Vemer and many more. And my pupils like me, too, I think.
Nine days after this, June 8, 1862, I lost out of this life my
sister Mary. The record of her life is fully given in '* Nineteen
Beautiful Years."
June 8, 1862. — Ufary is dead. I write the sentence — stop and look at
it— do not know what it means. For God is merciful and the awful truth of
my desolation does not shut down close around me all the time ; it comes in
ptroxytms and goes again.
At the request of Dr. Bannister, who will preach the funeral sermon, I
tfaill write out many of the things that she has said during her illness —
tad at her death. Sweetness, purity and childlikeness were remarkable
features throughout her trial. She expected to recover almost down to the
Int hour, and her most ardent wish was to get well enough to go to For-
est Home, where she had spent her childhood. The very night she died
ihe told us to talk about returning there. She used to say, " I never have
had such pleasant times as when Frank and I were children and used to
i66 ^^ Humanity — What a Wonderful Tiling f
play among the trees and in the garden." The physician considered het
hopefulness her best symptom, so we did not talk to her of dying, though
of Christ and of religion a great deal. She used to wander in her sleep,
and often thought she was a child again. One night when I slept with her,
she put her hot hand against my face and said, ** You're with me in the trun-
dle-bed, Frank, as you used to be, are n't you ? ' ' And that night she thought
she was talking with Emma White (one of her Sunday-school scholars),
and she said, " Emma, I hope you remember your promises made in Sab-
bath-school, and read the Bible, and pray, and try to set a good example,
and don't think too much about this poor world, but about that wonderful,
wonderful, infinite world where God is. And remember that where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also— so you can easily tell whether you
are right or not. And don't worry about joining the church, but ask that
kind man, Mr. Goodrich, to put your name on some of the class-books
and then be proud to be a Christian, and to have it known that you are,
and not be like people who say, ' I'm not ashamed to own my Lord ' when
they ought to feel so honored."
She seemed anxious to do good and worried for fear she had not. Once
she said to mother, " I would like to be well if only for one day, so that I
could do some good to some one. I've never done any, unless a little in my
Sabbath-school class, and I am not quite sure about that. I've tried to learn,
and to improve, and to prepare myself to be useful, and now I'd like to
live and do something in the world."
She thought much about the kindnesses shown by her friends. Bou-
quets, notes, messages, were received so joyfully. She was thinking about
these things one day and said to me, " How good people are to me ; how
thoughtful and kind ! Oh, Prank, humanity, humanity, what a wonderful
thing ! "
On the last day of her life she was l3ring with her head in father's lap
and she asked to have the Bible read. He said, "Where shall I read?"
She told him, ' ' Oh, where it makes Christ seem beautiful ! ' ' He read a psalm.
She said, *' Please read where it says Christ was sorry for sick folks."
Father read about the healing of the daughter of Jairus. She liked it,
but when he had finished her plaintive voice cried out, ** Please read where
it says He is sorry now." After awhile she added, "We believe that God
loves us better than our mothers ; yet mother would have liked me to get
well, and God does n't seem to care — He does n't seem to see fit to make me
well — ^yet He knows what is right " In the night she was worse. She wanted
everything still ; kept moving her hands in a soothing, caressing way, and
murmuring, "So quiet, so quiet, no noise, so quiet ! " At four o'clock on
the morning of the eighth of June, Sabbath morning, we became greatly
alarmed and for the first time father and I decided that she could not get
well. I went at his suggestion for Mrs. Bannister and Mary. Father said
to our Mary, for the first time coming directly to the subject of her danger,
" My child, if God should think it best to take you to Himself should you
be afraid to go ? " She looked quickly at him with a rather pitiful face, she
seemed to consider a moment, and then said in her low, mournful voice,
" Tell Everybody to be Good:' 167
" I thonght I should like to get well for I am young ; but if God wants me
to go I should n't be much afraid, but should say, *Take me, God.' " We
asked if there was anything that we could do for her. "Pray," she said,
"pray thankful prayers." Mother asked her if she saw Christ, if He was
near her. ** Yes, I see Him " she said, "but He is not very near, I wish He
would come nearer."
I asked her if we should pray, she said " Yes," and I prayed aloud that
Christ would come close to her, that she might see and feel Him plainly,
that since she had tried to love and obey Him, He would come right to her
now in her great need. She clasped her hands together and said so joy-
fmlly, " He's come. He's come ! He holds me by the hand, He died for me.
He died for all this family, father, mother, Oliver, Frank" (and Mary
Bannister says she added, " my dear sister ").
" I'll have Him all to myself," she said and then seemed to remember
and added, "I'll have Him and everybody may have Him, too— there is
enough for everybody. He is talking to me. He says ' She tried to be good,
but she wandered, but I will save her,' " and added, "I see Him on the
cross, He died for the thief; He didn't die for good people, but for bad
people ; He died for me." I said, " I want to ask you to forgive me for all
my unkind actions to you, for everything bad that I ever did to you." She
answered very earnestly, " Oh ! I do, but you never did anything bad, you
were always good." Mother asked her if she did not wish to leave a mes-
sage for Oliver. " Don't you think he will be with us in heaven ? " she
said ; ** Of course, he is working for God. Tell him to be good, and to make
people good," and when I asked for a message for her Sunday-school class
she said, "Tell them to be good," and then added with great earnestness,
" TeU everybody to be good, ' '
She said to us, looking so sweet and loving, "I wish I was strong
enou£^ — I'd like to talk good to you."
Almost at the last she said, with a bright smile on her face, "Oh ! I'm
getting more faith ! " Mother questioned, " My darling, you will meet us,
won't you, at the Beautiful Gate ? " " Oh, yes ! and you will all come, and
fiither. Christ wants you right off ! "
She moved her hands convulsively and said, "I've got Christ — He's
right here ! " Then she said to me, " Oh, I'm in great misery," and then,
"Dear God, take me quick ! " She held out her hands and said, "Take
me quick, God— take me on this side," turning toward the right She lay
•tin, bolstered up by pillows ; I asked if she knew me, and she repeated my
name. Father asked her often if Christ was still near her, she would nod,
but did not speak. She seemed troubled, after a few moments father bent
over her and slowly and with difficulty she told him of her dread of being
buried alive and he promised her over and over again that she should not
be. Then she gave some little directions about preparing her bed, as she
laid, " For those who lay me out," showing her perfect consciousness. She
never spoke again, but opened her eyes and looked at us with such intent-
ocas, the pupils so wide, the iris so blue. I never saw such soul in human
eyes before. She groaned a little, then, and for some time she did not move.
i68 ''Mary Didn't Get Well,
M
her eyes closed slowly, her face grew white. Father said, " Lord Jesus,
receive her spirit ; Lord, we give her back to Thee. She was a precious treas-
ure, we give her back to Thee.** Mrs. Bannister closed Mary's eyes. Father
and mother went into the sitting-room and cried aloud. I leaned on the
railing at the foot of the bed and looked at my sister — ^my sister Mary — and
knew that she was dead, knew that she was alive! Ever3rthing was far ofif ;
I was benumbed and am but waking to the tingling agony.
August 21. — O dear ! I don*t know what it is that I would like to say. I
am crowded with feeling, and it was never before so plain to me that I am
without power of expression. ** Mary did' nt get well,*^ that is the key-
note to all my thoughts. I was so sure she would ; I refused to think it
possible that she could die. And now under the experiences that crowd
upon me faster than ever before, like a wave, the consciousness of what has
happened us flows back and forward in my heart, and put in words it all
amounts to this: "She is dead. Mary is dead. Her hands are on her
breast so cold and still ; she takes no note of us, or any thing ; and she
used to be so merry, so full of motion; she was always with us, she never
went away.'*
Oh ! this has crushed out all other feelings, except a vague sense of
incompleteness, of wanting some one, some thing — of reaching out toward
the future life almost with yearning. Sometimes I don't look upon her as
dead — I ought not to have said so. And oh ! last Sabbath evening when we
walked up to church, all that is left of us, father, mother and I, so clear and
beautiful I saw her in her unconditioned life — somehow, somewhere, so
radiant, so painless, so secure — very near to Christ, the glorious, satisfy-
ing Christ, and perfectly complete in heart and life, thinking of us, know-
ing that it will not be long till we shall come. And I was quite content to
go to church, to pray and trust and work awhile longer and then I believed
I should go, too. It is His will. He is as well pleased with us who pray
as with those who praise; with us who try as with those who triumph.
This is one stage, it is all arranged by Him. The time will be brief, the
eternity will pay all, will give us what we missed here, will round everything
to symmetry. All this if we love and trust the Father of our souls, and do
as well as we can what He has given us to do. And Mary is the favored
one, not sleeping in the grave, but conscious as we are, only so well off, so
glorified, so restful. It may be only a fancy, yet I think I shall be with her
before many of our little years are past O Father of my spirit, take it to
Thyself, any time, any where, only love it, take care of it Let it see
Christ and Mary.
Sept I. — I have been to the old home. Forest Home, since I wrote last.
Mary was to have gone there, Mary wished to go more intensely than any of
us — spoke of it not more than two hours before she died. The place is
sold now. Mary did not live to see it go out of our hands, she never
mourned a fnend lost by estrangement or by death, and no reverses ever
came to her.
CHAPTER IV.
"PRECEPTRESS OF THE NATURAI, SCIENCES."
We were so heart-broken after my sister left us, that a few
weeks later the old home was given up and by the kindness of
Professor Jones I went to the Northwestern Female College,
whence I had graduated three years earlier, as teacher of the nat-
ural sciences.
My brother was married July 3, 1862, about four weeks after
my sister's death, to her class-mate and my friend, Mary Bannister,
and their home was in Denver, Col., for several years, where he
founded the M. E. Church and Seminary, and was a Presiding Elder
when but twenty-seven years old. Thus unbefriended and alone,
for the first time in my life homeless and for the first bereft, I re-
turned to the scene of my girlish escapades a thoughtful, chast-
ened woman — at least I thought so, but my pupils of those days
declare, to my astonishment, that I was **full of fun." Surely,
they did not know my heart as here revealed :
Angust 29, 1862. — On Monday I move over to my Alma Mater, the North-
western Female College. I am elected "Preceptress of Natural Sciences."
Veiy humbly and sincerely I pray to God that I may be good over
there and do good. I was wild and wicked as a pupil ; in the same building
may I be consistent and a Christian as a teacher. The last days are passing
m this broken home. Life changes so. Thy heart must ache for us, O God,
but that Thou knowest we are soon to enter the unchanging home. I have
been at camp-meeting four days. It is a glorious place, I love it dearly.
God has brought me nearer to Himself. My Sunday-school girl, Jennie, ia
trying to be good, and her noble sister Hattie, and ever so many more. What
names I cx>uld write here of those for whom I pray and hope, who have not
yet come to the light Help me to act aright in these my new relations !
I want to live a good life and get ready to go to my sister in heaven. I am
ifraid that Mary's death will kill my mother.
Angostai. —
" Man may trouble and distress me,
'Twill but drive me to Thy breast
Life with trials hard may press me,
Heaven will bring the sweeter rest*'
(169)
170 ** As Much a Teacher as Herself. ^^
September 2. — Sitting in my room at the *' Female College/' a teacher reg-
ularly installed in a ladies' school. The sensation is agreeable. I have a
natoral love of girls, and to have them around me as pupils and friends
will be delightful. To think that I am sitting here in Uie room that was
Luella Clark's, my poet friend, as much a teacher as herself ; my dear old
books around me, my pictures and familiar things ; and then such admirable
girls to teach, Emma, Hattie, and the rest. Went for the last time to the
class-meeting of which I am so fond, at Dr. Bannister's, since I must as a
teacher attend here at the college. George Strobridge led it Kate Kidder
and Josephine Evans came home with me here to the steps below.
September 7. — Sabbath evening. My first Sabbath in the college. All
the teachers are at church except myself. It is sweet and full, busy and
fatiguing, at once, the life I lead. In the parlor to-night, how beautiful
was the grouping after tea : the graceful figures of the girls, Miss Fisk at the
piano. Captain Jones with his wife. Dr. Charlie, and spiritual-faced Professor
with his wife, and the children, all of them soon to start for China, where
Professor has been appointed consul ; the kind old father and mother
looking on contentedly at their three handsome sons ; the folding-doors
affording glimpses of the piazzas ; music in the air. I liked it. The bell rang
for church, the picture dissolved. Professor did not die, as we all thought
he would last winter. He is well and going on a voyage half around the
world. Mary, my sister Mary, who went with me to see him in his illness,
took that longest of all voyages in his stead !
Am reading Peter Bayne's ** Christian Life." It will help me to prepare
to go to Mary. I wish everything might.
September 8. — After school hours I ached — there are so many flights of
stairs, forty in a day or more. Went home at dinner time. Father and
mother are soon to go away. Oh, mother, with your sad, sad face, and your
black dress ! Heaven has much to restore to you for all your weary years !
I pray God to show me how I can be most comforting to you, how I can
justly fill an only daughter's place. Life reaches out many hands for me,
with manifold voices. I am intensely alive. I, who am to lie so still and
cold beside my sister Mary.
Sabbath morning, September 14. — Sitting in my room dressed in a pretty
black silk wrapper that mother and Miss Burroughs made. The autumn
sunlight is pouring in. I am here, but Mary, who was always with me,
where is she ? The question mocks me with its own echo. Where is she
who was so merry, who knew the people that I know, who studied the books
that I study, who liked *' Bleak House," who laughed at Micawber and Trad-
dies and read the daily Tribune, Where is she who picked up pebbles
with me by the lake and ran races with me in the garden ; who sang Juniata
and Star-spangled Banner ? She was so much alive, I can not think of her
as disembodied and living still. Then there is that horrible doctrine held
by many who are wise and good, that the soul is unconscious until the res-
urrection. That idea worries me not a little. Then, too, I am coming right
straight on to the same doom : I, who sit here this bright morning, with
carefully made toilet, attentive eyes, ears open to every sound I, with my
One Day^s Work. 171
thousand thoughts, my steady-beating heart, shall lie there so still, so cold
and for so long. It is coming toward me every moment, such a fate as that !
But my religion tells me that my life shall be unending. One interpretation
of my creed says that consciousness shall be uninterrupted both here and
there, that fruition awaits us in the years where every minute shall be full of
overflowing and nothing shall have power to disappoint How much a
human heart can bear, and how it can adjust itself! Pour months ago to-
day I thought if Mary died I should be crazed ; it made me shiver just to
take the thought on my brain's edge, and yet to-day I think of Mary dead
just as naturally as I used to think of her alive. Yet God knows how well
I loved my sister and how deeply she is mourned. Here on a piece of blot-
ting paper I keep in my book is her name written over and over again in
her careless round hand. She used to borrow this same piece of paper to
dry the fresh pages of her own journal not many weeks ago. Oh, dainty
little hand, I should not like to touch you now !
September 17. — This young person, F. E. W., reports herself tired and
proceeds to show cause therefor. Rose a little afler six, made my toilet for
the day and helped to arrange the room ; went to breakfast, looked over the
lessons of the day, although I had already done that yesterday ; conducted
devotions in the chapel ; heard advanced class in arithmetic, one in geome-
try, one in elementary algebra, one in Wilson's "Universal History *'; talked
with Miss Clark at noon ; dined, rose from the table to take charge of an
elocution class, next zoology, next geology, next physiology, next mineral-
ogy, then came upstairs and sat down in my rocking-chair as one who would
prefer to rise no more ! Now I have to-morrow's lessons to go over.
September 18. — I have the sorrow to write here that Forest Home is
sold. The time has been when I could not for a moment have contem-
plated the probability of its passing into other hands than ours who created
and who loved it. Alas for the changes of the great year of my history,
1862. I am to lose sight of the old, familiar landmarks, old things are
passing from me whose love is for old things. I am pushing out all by my-
self into the wide, wide sea.
"The shadow of a great rock in a weary land."
October 3. — My twenty-third birthday has come and gone without even
a passing remark. On Monday my brother Oliver started for Denver
CoL, after having been ordained a Methodist minister, at Joliet, by Bishop
Baker. Mother is going East to see our relatives ; she greatly needs the
change. Father will board in Chicago this winter, probably, and for the
fint time in my life I shall have no home. There is a grave in Rose Hill
cemetery ; most of these changes may be traced to it as their cause.
" The same fond mother bent at night
O'er each fair sleeper's brow ;
She had each folded flower in sight.
Where are those dreamers now ? "
October 11. — Have been ill a week since I wrote last Dear, unforget-
fol mother has nursed me up again. It almost paid to be sick to have
172 Teacher and Pupil,
people so sweet and mindful. My girls were marvels of loving kindness.
Welly I conclude that I can not stand very much, not so much as I supposed.
I am just a trifle discouraged to-night about the prospect before me. i
thought this last week as I lay in the bed, that perhaps God, seeing how
I wonder about that other life, would let me out into it, and it would seem
so natural to my sister Mary to have me with her once again. I refresh
myself little with reading nowadays. Miss Clark and I corrected the compo-
sitions all the evening. I stipulated for Ada's in my lot. Ada, dear, refined
girl, fit to be Charles Gifford's sister. I like the ideal, Heaven is that ! We
get hints of it here though, some of us. Luella Clark does and it is her
chief charm for me. Things are not so endlessly commonplace to her as
they are to most folks. A red leaf out of the woods, a bouquet, a cluster of
grapes, these are a great deal to her. She puts her ear close down to nature,
listens and hears. I wish I might do this more, but then I shall when mor-
tality drops off, and I have those acute, tense senses of my spiritual self
that Swedenborg tells us of, and I believe him. Ella Simpson, dear unfail-
ing friend, for all these years, has had my classes while I have been ill.
Dr. Tiffany is our minister and I am more thankful than I can express for
the prospect of hearing good preaching once more.
October 12. — Up here in my room, while the people go to church, I
watch the long procession of young ladies file out along the walks and
through the trees. The gate under the pretty arch bangs together as the
last one passes through. One of my pupils, Josie, is sitting with me, and
I have made her talk, trying to draw her out a little, in a friendly way,
asking her*if she likes her studies, if she likes to learn new things, if she
likes to read refined books, if she loves people, if she tries to make them
love her, if she tries to do them good, if she has ambitions and what she
expects from life. She answers with frankness and enthusiasm. There is
rare delicacy in the girl. Then we sit by the window in her room. This
was Mattie Hill's once, and in it I have played many a school-girl prank.
I tell Josie so as we sit here. She lets me into the history of her life, which
has been sorrowful, and we make a few wondering remarks over God's
providences. Then we talk a little of being good, and I speak somewhat of
my sister Mary, and how she lived and died, while I get a little nearer in
heart to pretty, sad-faced Josie. As I turn to leave her room, she kisses me,
and says, " You are the first one that has talked to me about being good since
I have been in this school. I wish you would do so often." I go back to mj
room, praying that God may make me well again, and that I may love all
these girls and they me, and that I may do them only good. Then I sit
down cozy and contented to read Harbaugh's "Sainted Dead," looking
out often at the window on the bright trees and sunshine of this pleasant,
pleasant world, thinking my thoughts between the author's sentences, and
feeling very full of wonder about my sister Mary. I learn that this author
thinks heaven is a place somewhere far away, and that the soul never
sleeps, not even for a single moment, and I find this sweet quotation : ** Selig
sind die das Himmelreich haberty denn sie sollen nach Hause komtnen.**
(Blessed are they who have heaven within them, for they shall come home. )
The Little Cat. 173
I think the book has not a page worth that I read a chapter in my Ger-
man Testament, '*Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden. '*
Then the folks come back from church, and my queer little pnpil, Lizzie B.
comes to my room. I ask Miss Pisk, my room-mate, about the sermon,
she comments briefly, the bell rings, and they all go down to dinner.
My room-mate brings me mine in her quiet, kindly way, and Misses Harvey,
Sewall and Bunnell sit around me while I eat. I like the toast, and have
some zest for the delicate, amber-colored jelly. Miss Sewall tells me of
her home between the two Miami rivers. Miss Holmes comes in to get
excused from "Biblical Antiquities." My dear Luella Clark enters with
the last Repository ^ and Dr. Johnson's book of sermons labeled '* Con-
solation." She tells me she went "way up to Professor Noyes' for the
book on purpose to read from it to me." How very kind she has been
to me always, when I was a pupil and now when we are both "faculty
folks" ! The girls go off to Sunday-school, Miss Clark sits with me and we
talk« She gets me to wrap up, and we go to walk in the garden, for she
thinks a sun bath is what I need. Swedenborg's book is in her hand,
brought at my suggestion, and she reads here and there as we sit on the
stile, while we talk of the Swedish seer and his professed revelations. I in-
cline to look with favor on it all, and say, " Why should not God in some
iray supplement that mysterious apocalypse of John ; for we are all longing
to know more about the other life — at least I am, in these days." She says
Swedenborg's belief is too materialistic, but his ideas of special providences
she likes exceedingly. A little gray cat comes and sits by us. We wonder
at the graceful little creature, and fall into a dozen queries over it, for we
are in a querying mood. Miss Clark takes it up in her arms, smooths its fur,
and says, " Poor creature ! You noticed us and followed us with your big,
carious eyes. You make the very best of life you can ; you like to jump
and play about, and it grieves me to think how your life Mrill all flicker out
after a little, not to revive again." Then I tell her how fond I am of the
kind old " Country Parson " (" A. K. H. B."), and repeat what he said to his
hoTM, " Old Boy," out in the stable, in that genial, generous passage with
this sentence in it: " For you, my poor fellow-creature, I think with sor-
row, as I write npon your head, there remains no such immortality as
remains for me." Then Miss Clark tells me anecdotes about her pets when
the was a little child, away off in New England, where I have never been.
I £all to wondering about this strange Being who made the little cat and
gave to her feet their active motion, who pushed out of the ground the little
flower that Miss Clark plucked for me from the borders as she walked, who
aide my favorite heliotrope. I hold two leaves of it on the palm of my
hand, one green with sap, one black with frost, and wonder at the difference
between the two. I see the leaves dying on the beautiful trees of the college
grove, and I wonder what God thinks as He sees this world that He has
made, and we poor, blind creatures groping along through it Then I remem-
ber that " God is love," and that thought quiets me. We go into the house,
vp to my room again, and Miss Clark begins to read to me from the book
ihe brought Soon comes a low rap at the door, and my friend Emma
174 ** The Slaves are Freer
enters, a very welcome visitor to me, with her refined face and large gray
eyes. Pretty soon my pupil Lizzie comes in, for a chance to read her Bible
in peace, I guess, and then the smart Bishop girls bring me news that Dr.
Ti£hny heard my '* Biblical Antiquities'' class at church, telling me who
had their lessons and who had not Then my firiend Ella Simpson, tried
and true, with Mollie Ludlam appear upon the scene ; soon after, Mary, my
kind sister-in-law. Now I will lay aside this writing and try to go to sleep.
I pray God to make me well again, to take away my uncertain, ghostly
feelings, and to restore to me something of the zest and enthusiasm that
have always been my portion. And oh, above all other things, may I rest
in the belief that Thou art love i
Northwestern Female College, January i, 1863.— " Abraham Lincoln
has fulfilled the pledge, the slaves are free," so said Father Jones to-night,
coming down late to tea, and on the instant all the girls clapped their hands
so heartily that it was fine to see and hear them, and far down in my heart
something stirred, some chord was struck that gave out music. How much
there was to think about just then ! Our girls sitting there so well kept as
they are, so good looking, so happy and contented, with the thought in
their heads that four million of wretched beings became this day constitu-
tionally free, and the feeling in their hearts of what a gift this freedom is to
a human soul. It was a thing that thrilled me beyond my power to tell,
one that I am thankful has transpired in my experience, and that I shall
think over with frequent pleasure.
The future rises before me misty, dark, moist, like an advancing wave«
Steadily I march toward it, there is no help, and God is in it, God who
manages a£fairs. My soliloquy was : *' F. E. W., why do you plan to go on
teaching ad infinitum, now here, now there, and then some other where?
Why do you content yourself with such a hedged-up life, with acquiring
money so slowly, with an allotment so obecure ? There is no need of it
You have abilities for something beyond this. Don't cheat yourself out of
your rights. Do you know that sometimes as you help arrange the room,
or make your toilet, or take your solitary walks, you think of splendid
paragraphs that you never write out — idle creature that you are ? Do you
know that you have a great many kind, fresh, beautiful thoughts that you
never tell ? Do you know that new and striking comparisons come to you,
and pleasant, queer ideas, and you let them pass in and out, leaving not
even a sedimentary deposit there. Stir yourself; be determined to write
books if you please. Why not ? Be intent upon it. Your flight of useful-
ness might be very much extended. God thinks it right to have ambitions ;
you are on the earth, now deal with the earthy, 'feel the victory in you,'
that is your father's quaint, expressive phrase. And now, to be pointed
and make the application, write next year, write. It is nonsense to think
you can not do it while you are teaching. You expect to visit Boston in the
summer. Take to that city an essay on the writings of William Mountfort,
an essay on a tolerant spirit, a novelette entitled 'Philip,' and a chastely
written memoir of your sister Mary. Now, do this without fail. Yon can.
CHAPTER V.
PITTSBURGH FEMALE COLLEGE.
(1863-1864.)
Several persons have stood at the parting of the roads for me,
and abnost all of them have been animated finger-posts pointing
towards a better and an upward path. Mrs. Bishop Simpson
was the first whose presence brought to me a greatly widened
circle. The Bishop had lived for several years only one street
fi*om us, and the young people of the two families had been quite
intimate. The Bishop, though at home only during brief inter-
vals was the central figure and beloved hero of the town, where
during his three or four years* residence he preached and
lectured not less than thirty times. His eldest daughter, Ella,
more like himself than any other of his children, was a school
friend and companion in many a pleasant, confidential ramble
through the woods and down by the lake shore. Now when
my sister*s mystical departure had changed all, and my parents
were so heart-broken that they went away and boarded in Janes-
ville, and afterwards in Chicago, while I was teaching, in this
small, rudimentary way, I found what fiiends I had in this now
historic family. Heartsick and homesick I had taken to my
bed, and from very listlessness seemed disinclined to leave it.
Hearing of this, Mrs. Simpson came down to see tne, and in her
emphatic tones said to me, ** Frank, it is absurd for you to stay
here in one village all your days. My husband is President of
the Board of Trustees of Pittsburgh College ; it is a fine, large
institution in the heart of a leading city noted for the remark-
ably good health of the inhabitants. Now, you just have your
trank packed and be ready to start within a week, for I am
sure we can arrange it so that you can have classes to hear,
enough, at least, to pay all your expenses and doubtless some-
(175)
176 First Day at Pittsburgh,
thing more." Her words did me a world of good. I consulted
with the faculty, of which I was a junior member, and they
agreed to let me go, so that a new world opened before me as
widely diflFerent from anything heretofore known as is conserva-
tive Pennsylvania, with its mountains, mines and valleys, from
the broad prairies and prog^ressive spirit of the West.
The new life will best be told in its own vernacular, as my
journal sets it down :
Pittsburgh Pbmalb Coli^bgb, January 26, 1863.
" Give battle to the leagued world ;
If thou art truly brave
Thou Shalt make the hardest circumstance
A helper or a slave."
Very aimlessly I have scrawled the above heading. Very aimleitlj
now I am racing my new " Gillott " across the first page of Journal Book
No. 17. Sitting here in Doctor Pershing's office, in his easy-chair with the
writing-table attachment, coal glowing in the grate, teams passing through
the muddy street outside, the tinkling of the school pianos in my ears min-
gling with the voices of the girls in the halls, sitting here thus surrounded I
thank God for life, — for life continued on the earth. My last winter day^
may be gliding away from me now just as our Mary*s were one year ago,
when we laughed and studied together. Next January my grave may be
curved under the snow as now her's is, oh, Mary ! But now I live, I am
surrounded with matter, or, to put it more truly, I am a spirit enshrined in
matter, and for this I am thankful, I hardly know why. Perhaps simply
because it is so natural. I am glad I came here, I am to like it, I know. By-
and-by I, who am a stranger here, may find sweet friends and be called by
beautiful, endearing names, and I am to learn much that is new and good ;
indeed, I have already. I mean to do my best to be as good a teacher as
my abilities will permit, and to win the love and respect of these strangers
to myself, if it be possible. I wish to made it a happy thing for some of
them that I came here among them, and not a thing unpleasant for any one.
This first Monday of my new experience, my classes have gone off credit-
ably and I am not dissatisfied with the result of the day's effort. Before it
was light, nice Fanny Pish, my room-mate, and I, rose, dressed and went to
devotions in the chapel before breakfast. Professor Johnson, a refined,
sweet little man — ^whom, with his wife I greatly like, indeed, I like him rather
better— read and prayed. After breakfast we returned to our room and did
our work. Then I went to smart Miss Scull's room and together we called
on Miss Teel ; the first is the head teacher among the ladies, the second is
teacher of drawing and painting. By much maneuvering we arranged to
have Miss Scull take the arithmetic, for which I have no "call," and I am
to take her class in elocution. What a weight went off my shoulders then !
I looked over my geometry, history, etc. Being the youngest teacher I
have no school-room to superintend.
:!^=^j±£:l2fe^'
The Open Secret 177
"The Open Secret" fascinates me ; sometimes it looms up misty and
awful for a moment but when I fairly look, it has disappeared unread.
Habitude is its safe mask. And that is one reason why habits seem half
hateful to me, but I know this is not right Oh, if I could but see ! Two
afternoons ago I was upon the street. A child was coming toward me with
a basket on his arm ; opposite, a servant cleared the sidewalk with her
broom ; just as I passed a forge where blackened men w^ere working, a lady
crossed the street ahead of me. The instant that I looked at her, a hint at
the open secret of the universe flashed through me, taking away my breath.
It went again an instant afterward. I can not tell you what it was, but oh
the vastness of it weighed me down. Are we to read it in this life, I wonder,
even when the Ripest Age has come ? I almost think that no man shall look
it in the face and live. We may talk of it, long for it, learn its alphabet,
hot with our last breath only shall it stand before us clear and — perhaps ter-
rible ! Schiller's final words, " Many things grow plain to me," gives a hint
of this. But oh, of late it is almost always in my thoughts, it winds itself in
every reverie of Mary. I have thought of God to-day, of "that wonderful,
wonderful world," as Mary called it in her incoherent sentences the last
night that we ever slept together, when the misty depths beyond us seemed
to have been penetrated a little way by her sweet spirit so soon to depart.
Social life in this world blinds us and stupefies us as too much confection
ery makes a child ill. The kind God of many a well-bred family on their
knees around their glowing grate, with warm and sense-pleasing things
about them, is little better than the Lares and Penates of ^neas and his
people. He is a domestic God, or at least, lie is the one we worship " in
our church." This is said without bigotry by them, too, and only in mem-
ory of their luxuriously-cushioned pews, beautiful stained-glass windows
and melodious organ, and with the thought of their well-dressed, gentle
manly pastor, besides. I write this not in bitterness. I have seen that it is
true. Oh, for a glimpse at Him who is without beginning and without
limitation ! We use these words, the wonder is that we have got so far,
but a little bird raising its head in grateful acknowledgment to heaven
as the water-drops pass down its throat, knows what the words mean
tt well as we do. Ecce Homo ! Let us take that in as best we may.
I thought to-day of another church where oflen and often I have sat
contentedly listening to what was given me to hear. Fatlier and mothei
were no doubt in opposite comers of the old pew, to-day, and they have
<ireamcd sadly of those who used to sit between, of nie, of Oliver, away by
the Rocky Mountains, of Mary, away by the River of Life. I have the feel-
ing of one who walks blindfold among scenes too awful for his nerves to
bear, in the midst of which we eat and drink, wash our faces and complain
^t the fire won't bum in the grate, or that the tea-bell does n't ring in
***son. We are like a spider's web in some remote angle of St. Peter's
CathedraL I suppose the cunning insects flurry greatly if a gnat flies past
without being entrapped ! All that appertains to the building from floor tc
dome it accidental in their sight
12 ^
178 A Botanical Outing.
A letter from Emma has made Pittsburgh with its smoke and forges to
be quite forgotten for awhile, and put me into a Utopia all my own.
May 2. — It is a queer place that I am in. I would give a good deal for a
painting of the scene around me. Professor G. 's botany class, with a few in-
vited friends, is spending the day among the hills. About thirty of us took
the street-cars this morning and came out into a beautiful valley, took a
long walk on the bank of the Ohio, amid charming scenery ; climbed the
highest hills, that I, a prairie girl, have ever seen, and are now encamped
on Jack's Run, a murmuring little stream. The scene is picturesque. I am
painfully conscious that my pen can do no justice to it, can hardly give a
hint, a sign, to stand for its calm beauty. Perched nearly on the top of
a queer mound of limestone, I am sitting, monarch of nothing that my eye
surveys, and yet in my poverty content I wish Emma could see me just
now, or Luella Clark ; they would know the costume, all black, with a little
hat Emma has seen rising out of a hollow many times as I took my evening
horseback ride and always went to her. The eye-glasses and veil drooping
to one side would be less familiar, for I never wore eye-glasses until sub-
merged in this Pittsburgh darkness in the midst of which I can not see my
pupils in the chapel except by artificial aid. I think of Shirley, which I
finished reading this morning and of Louis Moore. No female character
in any book suits me, like Shirley. Such fire and freedom, such uncalcu-
lating devotion to a master, command my hearty admiration. Oh, so much
better to wait for years and years, if we may hope to find at last the one
who can be all things to the heart ! I am glad, heartily glad, that I did not
perjure myself in 1862. But I digress. The highest kind of hills inclose
us ; the water drips, drips, drips, over the uneven stones, and I listen while
the music and the murmur sink into i:iy heart and make me richer-natured
for evermore. At my right a ledge of rocks rises perpendicularly, and on
its top grow trees. At the foot of it a group of girls recline in various grace-
ful attitudes, a botany among them, and a rare flower, a yellow trillium,
going through the ordeal of analysis. Across the little stream is a small,
white house, the home of some quiet farmer and those who love and look to
him. A peach tree in full bloom is in his yard ; his son, as I choose to
think, sits in a chair by the open door, while he himself is plowing near
by. The furrows are not those shining black ones that we used to like to
walk on as they fell off from the plowshare, Mary and I. Two of the smaller
girls run about gathering flowers ; sweet, gleeful faces they have, their child-
ish enthusiasm I look upon with smiles, partly in memory of my own sunny
years of early life. It is a kind, sweet scene about me. Its beauty makes
me glad. Thank God for this pleasant day of spring. All these things talk
to me, though I can not translate every message which the wonderful, mys-
terious Power sends to me by way of bud and blossom, sky and tree. If
only some one dear to me would take my hand and look into my eyes with
wise, kind words to-day ! If I might speak as I can not write what fills my
heart, I should be as complete as we can be on earth. A rain-drop falls on
the page as I am writing. A sudden shower, while the sun shines ; the
A Wordless Secret ^79
group of girls below me scramble after hat and shawl. The day ontside of
town is passed. I too, must go ; so, fair, gentle scene, good-by.
May 5. — Evening. Sitting in my room. What is it, I wonder, that I
keep wanting to say ? It never comes to my lips nor to the point of my pen.
I am almost sure that God does not mean that I shall say this while I live
on the earth, and yet it stirs in every pulse, it lies back of every true
thonglit, but it has never yet been told. Some of my best essa3rs are studies
for it ; sentences that I have hurriedly, earnestly, spoken to a friend's soul
with which for the hour I was en rapport^ have been guesses about it ; the
kindling eye and flushing cheek have told a little of it, but it will never be
uttered right out loud except in deeds of happiness and valor ; it lives on in
my heart unsaid, and even in my prayers unsaid. It comes so strangely near
me, how or why I can not tell. I have seen in the eyes of animals, so wist-
ful, so hopeless in their liquid depths, some hint at what I mean. That
monmfhl flower, the gentian, with its fringed corolla, is to me like the
sweeping e3relash that directs a loving, revealing glance, and gives a new
hint at that which I can feel, but can not tell. The dripping of water tries
to spell out some simple words of it, and the blackbird's note or the robin's
song, these help me wonderfully. The royal colored clouds of sunset make
it clearer and a long gaze upward through the depths of the night,
"When the welkin above is all white,
All throbbing and panting with stars,"
the secret clearest of all. The thought of this, which I can only
about, has been with me all day, like an ethereal perfume ; has wrapped
itself around me as a cloud of incense, and yet I have been through with
theusnal number of classes, absorbed the plain, substantial fare of breakfast,
dinner and tea eagerly, and read the daily papers. Hooker's triumphant
asTch thus far toward Richmond has made my heart beat faster than love
or pride has done since the Garden City was left behind.
Two letters have been received from two poet-souled women in obscure
life, and for the time they have transfigured me. Full of insight they were,
for these women love much and read the significance of destiny by clear
boming tapers lighted at the altar of consecration to their homes. I have
read of the French Revolution, and Charlotte Corday, and the Unknown
aad Invisible has risen before me misty and dark as I wonder what vision
bust on the freed soul of that marvelous girl as she lay on the plank of the
•cafibld and "the beam dropped, the blade glided, the head fell." I have
listened to the Bible reading at our quiet chapel prayers, and pondered
much over Job's words, "Why should a man contend against God?" and
u I thon^^it, my soul went out afler Him, this awful, overwhelming Power
tliat holds all things in equilibrium, and has come back again with some
dim, shaddering consciousness that He is, and some sweet faith that "He
i> a rewarder of all such as diligently seek him." I have looked at my
pUaat, active fingers, and wondered over this strange, imparted force that
i* 0 dained to live a while in me, that joins itself in some weird way to
■Mdc, sinew, tissue and bone ; that filters through my nerves and make
i8o ''Stop Your Scrouging:^
all things alive, among them the organic shape that is called me. I wish 1
conld talk to-night with some one who wonld say, with quick, emphatic
gesture, "Yes, I understand, I have felt so, too." "Be Caesar to thyself.*'
The words are brave, but to-night I am too tired to say them truly, and so I
will pray to God and go to sleep.
May 15. — Mary Willard is my one thought, even more truly now, I think,
than when I was in Bvanston. But the stunning weight is not always upon
me. Like an object held too near the eyes to be distinctly seen, so has
her memory often been ; but to-night I held the awful Providence at arms-
length and looked at it fairly. Oh, if I could keep my face and form for-
ever young, if I could save myself from such a fate as Mary's ! But there
is no release. In all nature there is no law so inexorable as this : "Dust
thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Oh, Frances Willard, aspiring
mortal ! Hungry for love and fame, and thirsty for the nectar of life, grasp-
ing afler the beautiful and bright, but crying out so often at the thorns that
prick when you would feebly reach out for the good — God pity you ! And
so He wilL " He doth not willingly afflict" He who loves us best is at the
helm. If He has ordained that we shall die, it is but that He may take us
nearer to Himself. Mary knows that.
May 17.— I have been reading the Presbyterian account of the first an-
niversary of the United States Christian Commission, also a sketch of the
orator, Anna E. Dickinson. My heart thrills with the hope of a long life
on earth and of seeing these persons that I read about ; walking up and
down the cities, feeling the salt sea-breeze in my face, being at one with the
great, pulsating heart of my race. I will try for it I am bound to try. And
yet, on such a morning as this Mary went into the Silent Laud, with her
hopes on earth all blighted, with unsatisfied ambitions, and unawakened
love. The earth side of that Providence is pitiful and touches me even to
tears. The heaven side, doubtless, is aglow with brightness, such as I could
not see and live. Oh, the untold wonder of my soul !
May 27. — For two nights I have been up till twelve or one. Night
before last we had a faculty meeting — the girls have been " acting up," as
they call it here, in a ridiculous manner. Their " pahs " and " mahs " will
be ashamed of them. '* You*uns," they will say, "stop your scrouging."
(Specimens in neat mosaic of Pennsylvania idioms.) N. C. sat before the
assembled awful ness of the faculty so gracefully, answered so readily,
interpolated her "no, indeed," with such pretty emphasis, and cried so
charmingly that I was duly charmed. I wanted to go up and kiss her.
Even A., naughtiest of pretty-faced girls, I felt sorry for. MoUie quite won
me with her introductory sentence, pronounced in that tired, childish voice,
which corresponds with her invalid state, " I mean to tell you just what I
have done, the best I know how." The bell has rung, and I have to go to
another faculty meeting. This makes the third night that I have been up
at all hours.
May 29. — ^Two little incidents have stirred my heart and taught me that
I am not fossilizing. Yesterday on the streetcar, coming from the House
of Refuge, several negroes sitting opposite us, a man in the blue uniform
One Year Ago. i8i
signaled the car. He came limping up and eagerly the driver helped him
on the platform. One of the negroes, a very black and noble-looking young
fellow, sprang forward and motioned him to his seat, but before he could
reach it a place was given him nearer the door. A thrill came to my heart
as the poor negro turned toward the soldier. They were types, the two
men, — one so dark and one so fair, the lower one looking to the higher,
grateful for his aid, turning to him for help. The negroes know quite well
for what this war is waging.
The other scene. Virginia Hart is a sweet girl among my pupils. We
read for our lesson this morning Alice Gary's story of her little sister
Dillie, to whom she was unkind, and who died from the effect of a fall on
the very day she used her ill. The story is very pitiful, and touchingly
told. Virginia turned toward me when we had finished, as I dismissed the
class, and with tears in her honest gray eyes, said, " Miss Willard, I was
never unkind to my little sister that died." *' That must be a comforting
thought, my child. How old was she ? When did she die ? " I asked. ** Oh,
a good many years ago,'* she said. " She was only nine years old." " Have
you no other sister?" I inquired. "No; only a brother," she replied.
Poor child ! I wanted to tell her that I had no sister, either, and that was
why I was wearing this black dress, but there were so many in the room
I could not mention it. Through my heart went the sad question, " Was I
ever unkind to Mary ? " And very mournful came the reply, *' Many a time
I was thoughtless and gave pain to the gentle, gentle girl. I can make no
wrong right now, — not one." Oh, how sweet and strange was the voice in
which, one year ago, she said to me, "You never were unkind, you were
alwa3rs good to me," and she spoke to me no more.
Extract from my poor father's last letter: "Yesterday, for the first
time this spring, we caught up Jack and drove him to Rose Hill. We put
some flowers on Mary's grave, but oh, how tame, when I would see her
face and clasp her to my heart, that I must be satisfied with merely putting
a few flowers on her grave. Oh, vacant and pitiful substitute I Well, we
must control ourselves."
Sabbath Day, May 31. — One year ago to-day Mary spent her last Sab-
bath on earth. I stayed from church ; we talked pleasantly together of
old, fiamiliar scenes. I read the Bible to her ; she was better than she had
been for weeks. She was really merry toward night, and made many a
htimorous speech. She did not seem to think of death. I felt sure she
would get well. Ah, on that calm, momentous Sabbath I did not see the
^ve so soon to be added to the number in Rose Hill. I did not see my
brother severed from us, my home in the hands of strangers, father and
mother left childless, myself far off from all, at I^iberty Street Church in
Httsbuigh, and in the aflemoon at the mission school on Prospect Hill.
To-day the superintendent brought flowers for every one. It was a pretty
sight to see the bo3rs holding out their caps for the blossoms, to see all the
poor children going gayly down the street, each with a handful of flowers.
And then, wiUi Birs. Holmes and Fannie, I went into a cellar where, for
four years an old man, who can not hear or speak, has lived upon the char-
1 82 IVar Humors.
ities of the benevolent It was something new to me, and impressed me
painfully. I gave the maQ some tea that I had brought at Mrs. Holmes'
suggestion. He looked at me gratefully, and put it into his pocket, he
could not speak.
June I. — Saddest, sweetest of months ! I am sorry to spend it in a
place so dirty, so dusty and so dull.
Juue 8.— On this same side of the page in my red journal one year ago
to-morrow I wrote the words, ** Mary is dead.*' And I have n't the heart to
write now that this, the first return of that awful day, has come. " Speech is
silver, silence golden. '* In silence I will think my thoughts. A letter
written to father and mother, the lonely, heart-aching pair, shall be my
record of this day.
June 12. — ^Two weeks from to-day I start for home. I am very eager for
it, more so than I can tell. Indeed, I think about it all my spare time.
Father and mother, the house and garden, — Mary's grave. ** Thoughts that
do lie too deep for tears " go through me as I think of my changed home,
and the pleasant face shut out of sight It is idle to write about it. Death
is unspeakably mysterious and awful. The feeling of this grows stronger in
my soul. The terrible sentence rings in my ears, " I am to die ! I am to
die ! " No matter to what it conducts, the earth side of it — and that is what
we see — is fearful enough to strike one dumb. Mary always viewed it so
herself, and yet it has passed upon her !
June 1 6. — Pittsburgh is in a ferment, two thousand men are working on
fortifications. Gen. Lee's army is said to be approaching, and martial law is
to be declared. Trains from the South are forbidden to come to the city.
Miss Dole, our New England teacher, is very much alarmed. The girls are
distressed, especially those living to the southward, but I am not troubled a
bit, nor any of the teachers except Miss Dole. It is quite exciting, though.
The President has ordered out ioo,coo men, 50,000 of them from Pennsyl-
vania, but there are so many false alarms that it does not do to receive all
we hear as gospel on any subject
Last night came a long letter from Oliver, the first since he went to
Denver last fall. It was interesting and characteristic. Though our roads
lie so far apart, and our interests are so unlike, yet I always think fondly of
my brother and proudly of his success. It is nice for him and Mary B. to
love each other and to be together.
June 25.— Doctor P. just now called me into the music-room and
complimented me so much that I must write it down, for this book is
my safety-valve. Ahem ! He said my success in the essay before the
Alumnse was something wonderful. He said it made a marked impression,
that he wanted me to come back, would make it pleasant for me, and that
if he had only thought of it in time, he would have had tn^ make the ad-
dress to the graduating class upon the occasion of receiving their diplomas,
instead of Dr. Herrick Johnson, pastor of one of the first Presbyterian
churches in this city and one of the oldest, and furthermore that he wanted
me to write an account of the Commencement for "Tom Eddy's paper, **
and insisted on my taking a five dollar bill for the same. So now, in great
Nineteen Beautiful Years. 183
haste and honest joy, I have written this and will proceed to prepare the
article. Praise, when it is meant, is life to me, "in a sense.'* I am afraid
I think too much about it. Anyhow, I know that I am glad of all this and
would like those who love me to know of it.
Evanston, July 7. — Thank God for my safe return.
July 9. — Sabbath morning before church. Sitting alone in my little
newly furnished room that father and mother have had fitted up for me, the
one where Mary and I once sat together when I was merry-hearted. Mother
has just been in and read to me some beautiful thoughts of Hannah More's,
on prayer. Mother is wonderfully spiritual since Mary is among the spirits,
and her thoughts are only incidentally of earth, habitually in heaven.
Father and she are in the front room now. He is reading the Northwestern
Christian Advocate^ she lying on the lounge, perhaps thinking of Mary in
heaven. Down-stairs the pleasant housekeepers, Mr. and Mrs. Hanchett,
otherwise Alfred and Cynth, with active little Tillie, the small maid of all
work, are walking about or reading in the rooms where we used to lounge
on Sabbath morning ; and under this room where I sit, that one where Mary
died is darkened and left solitary. Oh, life is strange and full of change !
If these things did not come to us slowly, they would craze us, I am sure ;
but as it is, we adjust ourselves to them and manage to get on. Though the
fresh air and sunshine are taken away, we live in darkness and from long
habit breathe on, struggling to inhale the heavy, un reviving air.
July 15. — I am writing with enthusiasm the book about Mary and think
it will be interesting. Her journals are delightful. I did not know she had
such talent as they evince. Evanston is different, though I say little about
it I have been to the city to visit dear, true Clara Thatcher, one of the best
friends I have on earth. Life is rather queer, but it pays, for all that. I
want to be good and g^t ready for something better in the way of animated
existence. I do not expect to live to be old. If I were sure about the
Future, I would like to go there right away.
July 24. — Not because I have the least thing to write, but just from habit,
sitting at my table, I take the pen and scratch away. If it were not for
"Mary's book,** at which I work almost constantly of late, I could hardly
get on. I go out very little, which is foolish, I presume. My book is so
well commenced now, that I mean to write only forenoons and visit more ;
read, study German, and play a little. I am really happy over books, they
are the true magicians. They take me back across the chasm of years and
make me as fresh-hearted as when the leaves sent their shadows dancing to
and fro on the pages which I read in the garden or on the piazza at home,
with the tinkle of the distant cow-bell in my ears, and the fragrant breath
of flowers cooling my cheek.
Sitting here alone, so often, I think about my future life out there in the
mjstic country, and glimpses come to me of an atmosphere golden as sun-
beams and inspiring as ether, of crystal towers and snowy cushions of cloud,
of streams that sing songs as they flow, of perfume delicate as the color of
nae-lined shells, of infinite repose and that unspeakable feeling never to
bewcm on earth by prayer or penance— that we are satisfied, Christ has in
l84 ''A Change of Works.''
His nature the elements that will make all this true when we behold Him
face to face. We do not know what we are seeking here when we strive so
hard and fret so much. Human love no doubt comes nearest, but it is only
the melody of an anthem, the study for a picture, the twilight of a morning
that shall dawn, and oh, to think ! *'the fret and jar gone from our souls
forever," how we shall erelong awake to life and be restless and hungry and
thirsty no more !
This may be as good a place as any in which to state that
when we wrote in our journals or elsewhere, as children, mother
was wont to help us with points, and sometimes with sen-
tences. In extreme cases, father would do the same. It never
occurred to me that this was at all out of the way, any more than
to have them help me with my mathematical problems. When I
went away to school, it soon became known to my fellow-students
that I kept a somewhat voltmiinous journal, and was very fond
of writing. Naturally enough, they flocked around me for aid
and comfort in their composition work, which I was by no means
slow to render, for I think no school-mate ever asked my help
without receiving it. Indeed, I am afraid that I had an undevel-
oped conscience on this subject, for one of my most lively re-
membrances is a "change of works," by which my clothes were
mended, and my room set in order, while I plied my pencil in the
interest of some girl whose harp was on the willows in view
of the fact that next Friday afternoon she must bring in a
composition.
When I was a teacher, while disposed to be helpful to all
my pupils, I did not write their essays, though given to "inter-
larding,'* as my father used to call the help furnished us children
at home. In a single instance I remember writing an important
paper for a pretty young lady, who received a class honor on the
basis of her good looks rather than upon her facility with her
pen. This was a deadly secret between us two, and one never
before divulged. It is mentioned now only by way of warning,
for in the confession of sin that I deem it right to make, as a true
witness in this autobiography, I am obliged to include not only
sins of omission but of commission in the particular treated of
in this paragraph.
In the auttmin of 1863, I returned to Pittsburgh and taught
in the Female College two thirds of that school year.
CHAPTER VI.
THE GROVB SCHOOL AND THE BUILDING OF HECK HALL.
(1865-1866.)
Mr. Edward Haskin, of Evanston, having six children of his
own and plenty of money, determined to found a select school
near his own home where they could have the best advantages.
He enlisted several leading gentlemen to cooperate with him as
trustees. Their children also attended the school, which was in
two departments, primary and intermediate, with a tendency
toward academic, in exceptional cases. My talented cousin, Mrs.
Minerva Brace Norton, was the first teacher. She was a woman
of intellect so penetrating and experience so large, that to follow
her was not a holiday undertaking, but it fell to my lot to make
this attempt in the winter of 1865. Associated with me were
the **two Kates," as we were wont to call them. Miss Kate Kid-
der, the accomplished daughter of our Professor in Homiletics,
and Kate Jackson, for so many years my friend and comrade.
The building where we exercised our gifts is still standing on
Hinman avenue, near the comer of Davis street, and I never pass
it without seeing those two rooms full of the best-bom and best-
mannered children in Evanston, kindly, quick-witted and stu-
dious. If there were any naughty children I do not recall them.
One or two who were dull formed the background for the rest.
Oiu- school had many unique features, but perhaps none more so
than the custom of the pupils to write questions on the black-
board for their teachers to answer. This turn about was but fair
play, stimulated the minds of all concerned, and added to the good
will and confidence between teacher and pupil. As we had all
grades, fi-om the toddler of four years old to the elegant young
lady of sixteen, the problem of government was not so simple as
(X85)
1 86 The Bank of Character.
it might appear. After trying several experiments, I introduced
the Bank of Character, opening an account with each student in
my room, and putting down certain balances in his favor. Then
by a system of cards of different values, which were interchange-
able as are our bank notes of different denominations, that is, one
of a higher value being equivalent to several of a lower denomi-
nation, the plan was carried out. Every absence, tardiness, failure
in recitation, case of whispering, was subtracted from the bank
account, and so emulous were those children that my tallest boys
were as much on the qui inve to know their standing, as were their
youngest brothers. Aside from the lessons, into which we intro-
duced as much as possible of natural history, object-lessons,
drawing and gymnastics, we gave out questions at each session,
keeping an account of the answers and putting at a premium
those who brought in the largest number of correct replies. I
remember my honored friend. Dr. Raymond, told me that his boy,
Fred, one of the brightest and most exceptional pupils I ever had,
when not in school was lying on the sitting-room floor with his
face in a book, hunting up the answers to some of this continuous
game of twenty questions. It was certainly delightful to see the
enthusiasm of my young folks in that Grove school.
We had our exhibition duly at the end of each term, on
which occasion the University chapel would be packed with the
appreciative throng of fathers and mothers to hear the exercises,
in which their children had been most carefully drilled, and to
see who got the prizes, for, thanks to the generosity of L. L.
Greenleaf, at that time one of our wealthiest citizens, we always
had several attractive rewards of merit, usually in the form of
books, which seem to me the most unexceptionable prize that can
be given. As I grow older, however, I doubt more and more the
propriety of offering prizes. Competition is so fierce in this
country and age, and the ** set *' of children's brains is so strong
toward it from the first, that I have become an ardent believer in
cooperation as a principle destined some day to overthrow the
selfishness of competition, and with my present views, would
hardly re-enact the scenes that made the ** last day " so exciting
in that school.
Oddly enough, the prosperity of this pleasant enterprise
gnawed at the root of its life. The trustees were urged to make
Word Studies. 187
common cause in building up the public school system whose suc-
cess was greatly hindered by this more select institution, and we
all saw that the best interests of the town required such action.
The spring of 1866 witnessed oiu* closing exercises, and
made the pleasant school in the grove a memory. I have always
thought that some of my most satisfactory teaching was done
here and have cherished a warm regard for the bright and win-
some pupils who helped me to succeed.
One of my hobbies as a teacher was to interest the children
in the history, poetry and morals that are bound up in single
words. Dean Trench was among my favorite authors, read early
and often, and I collated from his sparkling pages many a picture
for the children, drawn out from a single word written by me on
the board and copied by them as they sat behind their desks.
Every geographical word was thus analyzed, so far as our knowl-
edge permitted, and the chief words in reading and spelling
lessons. All except the dullest, were delighted with this varia-
tion in the order of the day. In teaching composition, I tried to
make the lessons vivid, concrete ; giving few rules, but taking a
subject with which the children were familiar, and drawing them
oat, or, if their little minds were empty concerning some character
or event, pumping in ideas by a familiar talk, and then asking
them to write out what had been said. In the formative period
of my mental habits, writing out recollection of books, characters,
addresses, etc., has been the most valuable discipline that ever
came to me.
I had list of tabooed subjects in my composition class, among
which were Home, Hope, The Seasons, Spring, especially Beauty,
Youth, Old Age, The Weather I did not allow them to use
'twas, 'tis, 'neath, th*, e'en, though they much inclined to drop
into poetry to this extent.
I find a list of words for studies of literal meaning in my
memorandum book for composition classes :
Poltroon, supercilious, astonished, sarcasm, imbecile, afiront, halcyon,
fortni^t, scape-goat, daguerreotype, mythology, disaster, asunder, apparent,
Mndwich, volcano, horse-radish, didoes, telegraph, surname, bayonet, ver-
nm, coxrents, windfall, caprice, desultory, silhouette, miser, trivial, happi-
iai» heaven, Holy Ghost, consciousness, sincere, Paternoster, enthusiasm.
I found that children ten years old could be well-nigh fes-
dnated by the study of words like these.
i88 Heck HaU.
An interlude in my work as a teacher brought me my first
introduction to a really public career. I was made corresponding
secretary of the American Methodist Ladies* Centenary Asso-
ciation, that helped to build Heck Hall, at Evanston, in 1866.
This was an addition greatly needed by the Garrett Biblical
Institute, our theological school, and our appeal was made to
Methodist women throughout the country for contributions to
ministerial education. But this new idea of organizing women
in a large way for Christian work was seized upon by other insti-
tutions, and so many ** good objects '* were soon before the public
that ours did not attain the prominence we hoped. About $25,000
was raised, however, and the certificate for framing sent out by
us, and representing Mrs. Garrett presenting a Gospel commission
to a very nice, spiritual-looking young man, had more of prophecy
within it than met the eye. These certificates hung up in many
a Methodist family of the nation, and bearing the honored name
of Mrs. Bishop Hamline as president, and mine as corresponding
secretary, first gave me a public larger than that implied in any
school constituency. I have often thought of this first associated
work of the most progressive Church women in America — for
Methodist women are confessedly that — and wondered if the
sense of power they then acquired did not pave the way for their
great missionary movement started about two years later, and of
which Mrs. Jennie Fowler Willing was so long the moving spirit
in the West.
My father had now become pecuniarily embarrassed, through
no fault or failure of his own, and it was necessary that I should
earn enough to float myself financially.
I was very grateful to the kind friends who secured the situ-
ation for me, and I found in Rev. Dr. James S. Smart, whose
keen brain thought out the '* Ladies' Centennial ** idea, a brother
indeed. He helped me in every possible way, and so did my
dear father, for I was not good at accounts, and these had to be
carefully kept. Father built ** Rest Cottage " three blocks from
our first home in Evanston, on some new lots reclaimed from the
swamp and embellished by him with as much enthusiasm as he
had felt in the creation of Forest Home. My parents moved into
this house, December, 1865. While it was building, my home
A Change. 189
was with the &milies of Br. Raymond and Simeon Farwell,
whose kindness in those days of diEGculty I shall not forget.
In the autumn of 1866, I went to Lima, N. Y., Miss Kate
Kidder taking my place in Evanston as corresponding secretary.
CHAPTER VII.
GENESEE WESLEYAN SEMINARY.
(1866-1867.)
For many years I had heard of this oldest seminary of the
Methodist church, located at Lima, Livingston Co., N. Y., not
more than thirty miles from my birthplace. Rev. Dr. B. F. Teflft,
whose story of ** The Shoulder Knot," published in The Ladies'
Repository, had fascinated me many years before, was in early
times principal of this famous institution. Associated with it as
teachers or students were such names as U. S. Senator Ang^
Cameron, Henry J. Raymond, founder of the New York Times;
Orange Judd, the greatest among agricultural editors ; Prof.
William Wells, of Union College ; Prof. Alverson, and many
others of whom I had heard with great interest. It had a history,
and to a Westerner this was a fascinating fact. It was a co-edu-
cation school and Oberlin life had proved to our folks that this
was the natiu-al, hence the wise, way.
With such history and traditions the school could but be
attractive to me, and when, one fine winter day, in Evanston, in
1866, a letter reached me from Prof. Charles W. Bennett, who
was then at its head, inviting me to become ** preceptress,** I
was delighted, and, with the approval of my parents, wrote him
at once that I would gladly go in the following September. I
was greatly disappointed to learn later on that Professor Bennett,
about whom Dr. Bannister's family had told me many pleasant
things, had gone abroad, and that a new principal, Professor Ful-
ler, unknown to fame, and certainly unknown to me, was to be
my chief associate.
It was a beautiful autumn day when I reached this historic
village nestling among the hills of Genesee. Its pastoral peace
(190)
First Days at Lima, 191
was welcome to my spirit as dew on the mown grass. An enter-
tainment was given to the faculty that evening at the home of
Rev. Dr. Lindsay, president of Genesee College, which was
located on the same campus. Here I met the leading members of
both faculties, with all of whom I was remarkably well pleased.
The seminary building, large, rambling, old, had special fascina-
tion for one who came from a country where everything was
new. I thought of the historic characters to whom this place was
familiar and by whom it was beloved. My own pleasant suite of
rooms had been occupied for two generations by women of the
highest character and exceptional abilities. My friend, Kate
Jackson, came with me, for I had secured her the promise of
French classes. Her object in going was to be with me, as she
had no occasion to make money for her own use, and there we
spent a year with very much of brightness in it, and somewhat
of shadow.
I can not more correctly depict the year at Lima, than by
giving in conclusion the following extracts from the journal of
the period ;
Lima, Livingston Co., N. Y., September 15, 1866. — Father went with
me to Lima. From Avon I had my first stage ride, seven miles across, the
driver blowing his horn as we entered a town, in the good old-fashioned
style. Stopped at the pleasant home of Rev. A. D. Wilbor, agent and treas-
nrer of the Seminary. We were warmly welcomed, had a nice dinner, and
walked over to the Seminary with bright E., a sophomore in the gentle-
men's college (Genesee), were introduced to Mrs. Hale, wife of the steward,
condncted to our rooms, sitting-room, bedroom, and closet, up one flight of,
stairs on the front side of the building ; nicely furnished, Brussels carpet,
pretty bedroom set, a fire ready in the stove, house plants in the windows ;
they had evidently done all they could to make it pleasant for us. We
went to work and put up the pictures, etc., and in a couple of hours, I was
nicely established in my new home. Then Professor Lattimore and daugh-
ter, Professor Steele and wife, and several others, called.
September 18. — After father had helped me put up the pictures and
got me nicely settled, he went away yesterday just after breakfast ; he stood
on the steps before the ^eat front door, held out his hand with his face
tnzned half away, and said, "Well, good-by ; take care of yourself, and don't
fetsick." I shall not comment upon my many thoughts and emotions as
he walked off with carpet-bag in hand, looking so gentlemanly, so tall and
slight and fragile — too much so for my peace.
Am getting acquainted with all these excellent people ; the bugbear,
Lima, is' nothing so dreadful after all. Have had my first duty as precep-
to welcome a lot of new-comers. Two are Indians from the Seneca
192 Girls and Questions,
reservation ; another is a peculiarly thoughtful, religious, book-loving girl
of seventeen. I brought her into my room and she looked with much in-
terest at my pictures, and we fell into talk. I happened to mention that I
had a sister who graduated young, and that I was nineteen when I left school.
Soon after, I handed her the new circular where my full name is printed.
She glanced over it, looked up with flushed face, and said, *'May I ask a
question? Did you write 'Nineteen Beautiful Years'?" I answered,
** Yes, of course," and showed her Mary's photograph while tears fell from
her eyes. New students are coming all the while, new teachers, and I am
not a bit blue. We had a long, tedious faculty meeting in the ladies' parlor.
They gave me rhetoric and composition, and I am perfectly delighted.
September 20. — ^To-day began my onerous task. At nine a.m., prayers
in the chapel, conducted by the principal. Afterward I went to my recita-
tion room and spent the forenoon registering young ladies who brought
slips of admission from the treasurer. I then took the names and addresses
of guardians, studies for the term, and number of rooms in the Seminary, or,
if an out-boarder, the place of residence. They are most of them interesting,
attractive girls. Then came to my room and had a call from one of my
Seneca Indians and also from polite Miss Waite, the assistant preceptress ;
Mrs. Hale, the stewardess, gave me a cup of tea in her room and consoled
me, the dear, motherly woman. Have had several homesick girls to look
after. Poor things, I like them, and pray that I may do them good, in all
true and pleasant senses. Have been registering all day, haveVeceived nu-
merous calls on business from my strange-faced and pleasant-mannered young
ladies, a few anxious fathers, and some of the professors. Gave them this
afternoon a chapel talk and took the postoffice addresses of them all. Think
I shall greatly like Lima when I get seasoned.
September 24. — Mrs. H. is a woman of mother wit ; witness her in-
veighing against people who parade their bookishness ; she brought me a
private cup of tea and a cooky, kissed my cheek and said, *' You dear little
kitten, you, if anybody hurts you, I'll bite *em, that's all."
October 6. — Girls, girls, girls ! Questions upon questions ! Dear me,
it is no small undertaking to be elder sister to the whole one hundred and
eighty of them, but it is pleasant, truly so. Tried to write on a talk to them
but can get no time nor much inspiration. This term, I will extemporize, I
guess. Went up to the room of the "Ladies' Literary," was introduced,
the whole society rising. They treat me beautifully, and I think I recipro-
cate. Never saw such a thing as Lima sociability.
October 13. — We have changed works; I hear Kate's physiology class
and she ** does up " our room,
October 15. — Have had a letter from Nina Lunt, dated Geneva, Swit-
zerland. What would I not give to have her opportunity in life, for my pet
desire is to travel. If I had been a man I would have liked Bayard Taylor's
portion under the sun.
October 24. — Prepared talks to my girls about room-keeping. This is
my hobby. I believe, whatever I can not do, I can make a home attractive.
My own room I delight to have a pleasant place to dwell in. For this I care
Longs to Travel. 193
more than to dress. Heard my rhetoric scholars, of whom I have thirty-
four.
October 29. — I went down to a political mass meeting addressed by
Horace Greeley. Here was American politics as manifested in a crowd of
yeomanry with bands and such mottoes as '* Down with the One Man
Power!" '* Congress Must and Shall Be Sustained!*' ''Andy Johnson
Swinging Around the Circle !*' This motley throng surged to and fro, nearly
taking us off our feet. It was somewhat to study, to be sure, but we did n't
stay long, the place was so breathless and full in spite of the rain. I like
Horace's quiet, unwritten face. Life has n't hurt him much — the noble old
philosopher. I liked to watch him standing there in his nice black suit,
with velvet vest, wide collar and queer ruffle of whiskers gray ; with his
bald head, ring on third left hand finger and red bandana in his hand. He
is a historic figure and embodies well the idea of our government — freedom
in all right things, to all. Give everybody a fair chance and let the out-
come come! Honor to H. G., the self-made chief editor in the United
States for the last score of years.
November 2. — Kate and I have great fellowship with Mrs. Fuller, the
principal's wife, she is so straightforward, and common-sensical, that one
likes her of right.
November 5. — In the evening, went to the twenty-two rooms of my girls.
I like them all. I really think I shall do these girls good in composition
lines. The seniors improve and I give them unsparing criticism. Regents'
I examination is going forward, to the great disgust of the students. Kate and
I went into the chapel to see the poor victims undergoing their ordeal. It is
the perfection of a system.
Sabbath, November 1 1.— Stayed at home all day and read ' ' Ecce Homo. "
It has mind in it, it has body, it is sometliing. I have enjoyed it and con-
cluded it certain, from internal evidence, that the author believes in Christ's
divinity. If our faith could but be separated from cant and hackneyism it
would touch the world more nearly.
November 16. — Professor Fuller laid down the law to the lawless
young men in a way that did my heart good. In the boarding- hall there is
ever so much that goes amiss, and some people that precisely answer to the
"Country Parson's" description of a " cantankerous fool."
November 26. — Girls are ten times as quick as bo>'S. In Rhetoric the
last do wTetchedly. I should think they would take hold and study for
very shame.
The term grows dreary and monotonous. I am an inveterate lover of
variety and should have made a traveler if I had been a man — as I some-
times wish I had been. My life is a free and happy one — surfacely so.
How strangely accommodating are our natures ! With nothing just as I
wish it ; with chasms and voids in my life too numerous to name, I yet
have a good time and no complaint to make !
November 28. — Went down town in the rain to see about my new dress,
hcmnet, etc. These evils of a lady's life are very irksome to me, yet quite
194 Cross- currents Diverted.
inevitable. For to express in toilet, manners, and the room (some day I
hope the house) I live in, that I am civilized of soul, I expect and intend.
November 29. — The first national Thanksgiving Day appointed by the
Chief Executive is here. Thirty-six millions of people at once offering
their thanks to the Source of life and of all that comes through living !
Alas that "my policy " Johnson instead of our beloved Lincoln, the eman-
cipator, should have written the proclamation setting this day apart to its
delightful uses ! Rain falling, windows open, no fire, dandelions golden in
the grass. Spent the day reading Carlyle on the religious life of Dr.
Johnson. Life is " sort o' rich,*' but might readily be more so.
One of the cross-currents came to the surface when I declined
to hold myself responsible for the locking and unlocking of the
outside door, a little distance from my room, at ten o'clock at
night and half-past five in the morning. They said, ** The pre-
ceptresses have always done this.** I replied, ** More*s ^\e pity,
it is the janitor* s business.*' Good Professor Fuller stood by me
and we carried the day, though it made no small jangle in the
faculty for a brief period. But we were in the main harmonious,
and I heartily liked all my associates.
It soon occurred to me that we might improve the name of
"The Young Ladies* Literary,*' which was the immemorial des-
ignation of one of the societies. This caused no small amount of
contention and criticism, but finally we christened it ** The Inge-
low,'* and when I went to New York, at Christmas, I expended
$100 that the young women had accumulated for the purpose, in
plaster of Paris busts of the great lights of literature, one or two
handsome chromos, and I know not what besides, to brighten up
their large, old-fashioned assembly room, with its low ceiling and
solemnities of president's chair and critic*s desk.
At Lima for the first time I gave a church-roll talk each
week, having the young ladies all to myself in the huge, old
chapel, and after calling the church -roll to know if they had been
in attendance punctually upon the Sabbath day, I talked to them
in a familiar, sisterly fashion about all sorts of things interesting
to them and to me. It was an hour of genuine pleasure on my
part, and they professed to like it, too.
Squire Hale and his wife were characters, indeed, known and
read of all men and women who were at Lima during the forty
years of their stewardship. To them I was indebted for many
kindnesses ; their accomplished daughter Dora and her genial
A Chapter in Methodist History, 195
husband, Rev. C. C. Wilbor, were my next-door neighbors on
the same hall. Dr. Lindsay was greatly looked up to by us, and
always seemed to me one of the noblest of men. Dr. Daniel
Steele was a special friend of ours, a man of independent mind
and sterling character. He had not then come to the vision of
**I/)ve enthroned.*' Professor Codding^on, the eloquent preacher
of Syracuse University, gave high promise in those early years ;
Professor French, honest and skilled ; Professor Lattimore, the
son-in-law of the lamented Professor Larrabee of Dickinson Col-
lege, was the exquisite man of the faculty ; the afterglow of Pro-
fessor Alverson*s great name still lingered on the hills ; Dr.
Cummings was spoken of reverently, Dr. Reid pleasantly, and an
important chapter in the history of Methodism was here studied
by me at first hand.
In our own seminary faculty we had in Professor Fuller a
man of excellent ability, who had succeeded in the pastorate, but
was hardly at his best in this new calling, a fact for which, be-
cause I thought so highly of him, I was often sorry. His wife
was a true friend, whom I have not seen since, but whom I have
remembered always with unchanged affection. Miss Bannister,
now Mrs. Ayers, of Penn Yan, the teacher of Fine Arts, had a
nature delicate as a porcelain vase, and a spirit tremulous with
aspirations toward God. With her I took sweet counsel, and
oftentimes we walked to the house of the Lord in company.
Prof(2ssor Hudson, the Latin teacher, was phenomenal in memory,
and has since become one of the leading stenographers at Chau-
tauqua. I remember he took my White Cross address with
marvelous celerity and accuracy when I spoke there in 1886.
Professor Locke was chief of the Conservatory, a young man of
harmonious character, great activity, and zeal that his pupils
should improve, and that all the students should be religious.
For many years now he has held the same position in the North-
western University, at Evans ton, loved and trusted by all who
know him. Prof. Delevan C. Scoville was probably the most
unique man of either faculty ; bom among the hills of Oneida,
devoted to the Adirondacks and to books, worshipful toward his
mother and sister — two rare women, worthy of his devotion, —
working his way to high culture, and phenomenally successful as
a teacher, with a certain magnetism in look, voice and manner
19^ Pleasant Prospects.
that made him a universal favorite among the students, he should,
to my mind, have been a minister, and I think he had this pur-
pose, but in some way was deflected from it, went to New York
City, and has become a first-class lawyer there.
I remember that Professor Scoville, who was very liberal-
minded on the woman question, urged me to consent to speak
before the United Societies at Commencement in the College
chapel, saying that if I would only agree to do this, it was the
easiest thing in the world for him to secure the invitation. But
I stoutly declined, saying that while I would rejoice to speak
were I a man, such a beatitude was not for women, and I would
not face the grim visage of public prejudice. This was at the
Commencement exercises of 1867. Something less than four years
later, I was glad to accept Mr. A. E. Bishop's generous cham-
pionship, and under his auspices to speak an hour and a quarter
in Centenary Church, Chicago, without manuscript. So goes the
world. It is always broader and better farther on.
I left Lima at the close of the school year of 1867, with the
pleasantest of memories and prospects, as shown by the following
correspondence :
July 8, 1867.
To the Board of Trustees of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary :
Gbnti«bmbn — Opportunity to visit Europe under circumstances most
advantageous having presented itself since I entered upon my duties here, I
have decided to avail m3rself of it, and therefore tender my resignation of the
position of Preceptress. Wishing continued prosperity to the institution in
which I have spent a year so pleasantly, I am,
Yours very respectfully,
Frances E. Wii,i,ard.
This was their courteous and brotherly reply :
Genesbe Wesi^eyan Seminary,
Lima, N. Y., July 9, 1867.
Miss Frances E. Wii*i*ard, Madam— 1 am directed by the Board of
Trustees of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary to transmit to you the following
resolution, unanimously passed by the Board as an expression of their regard
for you personally, and approval of your conduct as the Preceptress of the
Seminary.
Trusting that the good Lord will preserve you during your travels, I am,
Yours truly,
D. A. Ogden, Secretary.
Resolved, That in accepting the resignation of Miss Frances E. Willard
as Preceptress in Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, we feel great pleasure in
Kindly Words and Deeds. 197
cxjnadiig onr high HppreciBtioti and grateful acknowledgments for her
valnablc serrices during her connection with this institution.
Hoping for a pleasant tour and safe return from her joumeyings abroad,
we will pray for her safety, her continued success, prosperity and happiness
in any sphere of labor and usefulness she may be called to fill in the fhtore.
[Unwiiniously adopted.] ^ ^ ^^^^ Secretary.
My generous Senior girls gave me a beautiful ring like their
own, with my favorite motto from Goethe, which they had
adopted, Okne hast, ohne rasl ; the under-graduates gave me
nearly one hundred dollars with which to buy a dressing-case.
CHAPTER Vin.
PRESIDENT OF EVANSTON COLLEGE FOR LADIES.
The circumstances that led to my being elected president
of a new college, and the first woman to whom that honorable
title was accorded, though so many others have deserved it better,
are thus narrated by my mother to the stenographer :
In 1868 Frank went to Europe. Her good friend, Kate Jackson, paid
all the expenses of their trip, which cost about f 12,000 in gold, at the time
when gold was at a premium. We rented Rest Cottage to Rev. Mr. Safibrd
and family, friends of ours from Oberlin, and I boarded with them for a year.
The next year my son and his family moved into our house, and I boarded
with them a year. Then we closed the house, and I went to Churchville to
visit our relatives and await my daughter's coming. Frank and Kate
returned in September of 1870, and we three reopened Rest Cottage, where
I have lived ever since.
That winter we did all of our own work, not because we could not have
a girl, for Kate had no lack of money, but after such a tremendous outing
as those two had been through, they seemed to enjoy hugely the idea of
hiding away out of sight and hearing, and keeping house for themselves.
Frank occupied herself chiefly with the outdoor part, chopping kindling,
bringing in wood and coal, and doing the rougher work, while Kate and I
attended to the culinary and ornamental departments. One day when
Frank was busy nailing down the stair-carpet, Mrs. Dr. Kidder, whose
husband was then leading professor in the Theological Seminary, came
from her home across the street, and taking a seat on the stairs, said,
** Frank, I am amazed at you. Let some one else tack down carpets, and
do you take charge of the new college." ** Very well," answered Frank;
'* I shall be glad to do so. I was only waiting to be asked."
Comparing the opportunities for womanhood then and now,
the old Persian proverb comes instinctively to mind, ** More
kingdoms wait thy diadem than are known to thee by name."
Coincident with the advance of woman into an imknown realm,
began another epoch in my life, as I was made President of the
Evanston College for Ladies.
(198)
Something New, 199
On St. Valentine's day, 1871, I was elected to this position,
and at once entered on my duties.
Our college was, indeed, something new under the sun. Its
beginning was on this wise : Mrs. Mary F. Haskin, wife of the
kind friend who gave me my first financial send-off, was a woman
of decidedly progressive thought. She believed that women
should be a felt force in the higher education, not only as stu-
dents, but as professors and trustees. She believed that to have
men only in these positions, was to shut up one of humanity's
eyes, and that in the effort to see all around the mighty sub-
ject of education with the other, a squint had been contracted
that was doing irreparable damage to the physiognomy of the
body politic. Therefore, Mrs. Haskin ordered her handsome car-
riage and notable white horses one fine day, and calling on half
a score of the most thoughtful women in Evanston, proposed to
them to found a woman's college, in which women should con-
stitute the board of trustees, a woman should be president and con-
fer diplomas, and women should be, for the first time, recognized
and proved as the peers of men in administrative power. She
pointed out that even at Vassar College the president and all the
trustees were masculine, while at Mt. Holyoke, where one would
think the spirit of Mary Lyon would have left more liberal tra-
ditions, men only were trustees, and, a man always conferred the
diplomas that young women's study and older women's teaching
had combined to earn. Evanston is the paradise of women, and
Mrs. Haskin found abundant preparation of heart and answer of
tongue among the earnest Christian matrons to whom she ad-
dressed herself. A meeting of ladies was appointed in her own
home, at which measures were instituted to secure a charter and
empower Mrs. Bishop Hamline with fourteen other ladies, and
their successors, as trustees.
Our genial townsman, Hon. Edward S. Taylor, was in the
Legislature that winter [1869-70], and through his influence the
Charter was secured. Meanwhile, my own beloved Alma Mater,
the ** Northwestern Female College," was in full career, for
although its foimder. Prof. Wm. P. Jones, had been consul in
China for several years, he had placed the institution in 1862-63
under care of Mrs. Lizzie Mace McFarland, and, later, that
admirable College president, Rev. Dr. Lucius H. Bugbee, had
200 Bishop E, O. Haven.
been at its head. Professor Jones himself had now returned
and for a year resumed the leadership. But by wise diplomacy
Mrs. Haskin, president of the new board of trustees, and those
associated with her, secured the transfer of the Charter of the old
college into their own hands, with a choice list of alumnae, the
formalities of the change taking place in the old Evanston church
at the final "Commencement** of the old College in 187 1.
Meanwhile, in 1869, Rev. Dr. (afterward Bishop) E. O. Haven
had resigned the presidency of Michigan University to accept that
of the Northwestern University at Evanston, none of whose
advantages had been open to women until this man, who stood
second to no college president in the nation, made it a condition
of his coming to us, that every door should be flung wide to the
gentler half of humanity. How many times have I thought, with
regrets unutterable, of what it would have meant to my own edu-
cation had all those doors been open in 1858 ! But this was not
at all in the plans of the good men who founded and controlled
the University, and had not Dr. Haven been bom with the diplo-
matic skill of a Talle5rrand he never could have fitted the conflict-
ing elements of the three educational interests — old College, new
College, and University — into one, of which the University was
from the first, not only helm, but wheel and rudder. It was he
who held high counsel with Professor Jones when the latter,
strenuous — and justly so — for the dignity and historic perpetu-
ation of an enterprise into which he had poured heroic years of
toil, was loth to see his pet College merged in ours. It was Dr.
Haven who arranged for the Evanston College for Ladies to be so
correlated with the University, that, under his presidency, the
two moved on in perfect unison ; and had he remained until
the new order of things became fully established it is my confi-
dent belief that ours would have been to-day the greatest,
because the most thoroughly American University extant.
I see him now, medium-sized, alert-moving, most modest
and unostentatious of men, with his fine brow, mild, but keen-
flashing eyes, dominant nose of Roman mould, and his *' smile as
sweet as summer.** His voice was musical, his manner winsome,
but behind all, his purpose was unconquerable as Caesar's. Un-
like almost every other person I have known, he had the piercing
mental gaze that could divide the accidental from the necessary
'*/» Mon-esseniials, Liberty, ^^ 201
in this purpose ; the latter he followed with the rapidity and
lightness of a greyhound. Most men carry luggage in following
their purpose ; he laid aside every weight ; they load with small
shot and their fire is scattering ; his was always Sharpens rifle —
one ball, and hit the game; they tithe mint and cummin, he
tithed nothing, but made all gleaners welcome to his harvest-
field. More than once I heard him say, ** I think a man who has
the ability and who manifests the spirit of Professor Jones, should
have a good position in our University. He gives up the hope of
a lifetime in order that the educational interests of Evanston may
become unified, and this action should be recognized not in words
only but in deeds. * ' ♦
He wanted only what came to him naturally as the result of
his own reaction on the forces about him, and rejoiced to see the
dignity and prerogatives of others fully acknowledged, not fearing
for his own. How much of life's present friction will be avoided
when the average mind discovers that the central aim of any life
is best conserved by choosing for one's motto ''In non-essentials,
liberty'^ ! But the trouble is, only a great mind can so take in the
scope of life to perceive that most things are relatively, and all
things are absolutely, non-essential except *' truth in the inward
parts "/ and that to apply that truth more perfectly to heart and
home, to state and world affairs, is more than all burnt-offerings
and sacrifices. Dr. Haven saw the truth of family government —
the fatherly plus the motherly eye applied to the problem of edu-
cating yotmg people ; and he followed it more grandly than any
other educator of his time.
With such a master spirit among us, so intuitive in thought,
magnanimous in heart, and harmonious in action, we laimched
the fearless ship that flew the pennon * ' Evanston College for
Ladies.**
But we suffered from plethora of plans coupled with such a
dearth of dimes that something had to be done, and that right
speedily.
Now came to the fix)nt, with her unmatched gift of impart-
ing enthusiasm, Mrs. A. H. Hoge, the new president of our
•'Women's Educational Association," and the distinguished
*Both Uiew true men have passed onward now : Bishop Haven in 1681 ; Professor
jaoesiai«86L
202 The tVomen^s Fourth of July.
yoke-fellow of Mrs. Mary A. Livermore in the days when a sani-
tary fair meant victory. I shall never forget the morning when
this woman, one of the few truly great whom I have ever known,
stood up in a meeting of ladies in the Evanston Presbyterian
Church, of which she was a leader, and told us to preempt at
once the coming fourth of July, the University campus and the
Chicago press, in the interest of **our girls.*' Forthwith, we
said we would, and verily we kept our vow. But Mrs. Hoge
had never recovered from the rigors of her army work, and she
had many cares besides, hence could only give us the splendid
impetus of her magnetic words and presence. It remained for
the new * * college president, ' * minus a college, to show what she
could do, and to carry out the plan. Two years of foreign study
and travel were hardly the best preparation for a work so practi-
cal, but it was a case of '* sink or swim,** and I took my lessons in
the middle of the stream as many another has been forced to do.
For three months I slept and woke Fourth of Jui^y. It haunted
me like a ghost, nay, it inspired me like a good fairy. Men and
women rallied to my help as if I were their very own.
Although ours was a Methodist college. Episcopal ladies
were on the Committee, Presbyterians bore the battle's brunt,
Congregationalists cheered on the battalions and did not a little
of the fighting, while Baptists were outdone by nobody, and
Methodists headed by Mrs. Mary F. Haskin, president of our
Board of Trustees were ** at it and all at it," intent upon making
** The Women's Fourth of July celebration what it was, the most
complete ever known in the Northwest and the most unique ever
held upon the continent.
As a key-note I prepared a circular, of which the following
is a synopsis. It went out by cartloads, indeed Uncle Sam's
special express was our chief base of operations, next to the
newspapers :
CIRCUI^AR LETTER.
Addressed to all who are interested in the girls of the Northwest:
It is a very easy matter to sneer at the *' Girl of the Period," to dis-
course upon her frivolity, lack of perseverance, and general "shiftlessness."
It is a less easy, but not at all an impossible matter to cure her of these
faults.
Is not this last the more excellent, as it is the more j^enerous, way ?
The Girls of the Northwest, 203
How can we better begin this core than by proving to the period's much,
berated girl that we set no higher value upon any member of our complex
American society than upon herself; that we believe her worthy of the best
we have to offer ; that we regard her faults, not as inherent, but, rather, as
the result of a defective training, for which, not to put too fine a point upon
it, she isle be pitied, and we are to be blamed ?
We believe the common sense of the American people has arrived at
this conclusion, and that a higher education for women is demanded by the
qyirit of the age.
Perhaps this sentiment has nowhere found a more correct exponent
than B. O. Haven, LL.D., to whose efforts women owe their admission to
the foremost University in the United States, that of Michigan, and, more
recently, to the Northwestern University at Evanston, near Chicago, of
which Dr. Haven is now president.
And perhaps no attempt to utilize this new and noble public sentiment
has been so commensurate with its progressive character as the establish-
ment of the
EVANSTON Coi«I«KGB FOR WOMEN,
under the control of a Woman's Board of Trustees, and intended to supple-
ment the advantages of the
Northwestern University.
To foster the interests of this new institution, an
Educationai* Association
has been formed, of which Mrs. A. H. Hoge (whose name is endeared to
all hearts by her devotion to the " Boys in Blue " throughout the great Re-
bellion), is the President, and of which prominent ladies, connected with
the various denominations, are officers.
Under the auspices of this association, it is proposed to hold at
EVANSTON,
Next Fourth of Jui,y,
A GRAND CELEBRATION,
at which time the corner-stone of the new building will be laid ; orations
will be pronounced by some of our most celebrated comntrymen, and
A BANQUET
worthy of the occasion will be served.
Notice is hereby given of the Pre-emption of the Fourth of Jui*y in
the interest of
the giris of the northwest.
Then followed an appeal to editors, pastors, etc., to help in
the new movement; also a call for " supplies '* for the tables,
fcnqr articles, flowers, **and any curious or useful objects which
204 Laying of the Comer-stone.
will add to the interest and profit of the occasion." The call
was signed by the ** Committee on behalf of the Evanston Wom-
an's Educational Association," consisting of Emily Huntington
Miller, corresponding secretary Ladies' Board of Trustees ; Mrs.
Mary B. Willard, recording secretary of the same ; Mrs., General
Beveridge, Mrs. Sarah B. Bradley, and myself, as president of
the college.
We went to the village authorities and modestly asked for
one of its parks as the building site of our college, and, to their
everlasting credit be it said, they gave it. We had the founda-
tion laid for the elegant Woman's College Building and arranged
that the comer-stone should be set in place at the great celebra-
tion. We induced the famous Ellsworth Zouaves to come and
drill inside an inclosure on the campus, for an admission fee ; we
got a generous jeweler to give a silver ball for which the College
base-ball-ists of the country were invited to compete. On the lake
we arranged (that is, Gen. A. C. Ducat did) for a regatta with a
winner'^ prize ; in the University chapel we had an amateur play,
in which our young "society people," led by my friend, Kate
Jackson, performed three separate times that day to crowded
audiences, at so much a head. A general of the army (afterward
Gov. John ly. Beveridge) was persuaded to act as marshal ; a
United States Senator, Hon. J. R. Doolittle, of Wisconsin, pro-
nounced the oration ; a distinguished public reader. Prof. R. L.
Cumnock, gave the Declaration of Independence ; Gov. John
Evans, of Colorado, for whom our town is named, headed a sub-
scription list that aggregated thirty thousand dollars, and the
ladies served three thousand dollars' worth of dinners, notwith-
standing all the picnickers that filled our groves. The Chicago
press had during three months given us ten thousand dollars'
worth of free advertising ; special trains and steamboat excur-
sions bore the people to our feast with waving flags and bands of
music, but there was no clang of war ; no cannon, fire-cracker or
torpedo was tolerated at the WomerCs Fourth of July. The cli-
max of the day was the laying of the comer-stone, a woman,
Mrs. Haskin, assisting in the ceremony, at which a beautiful
dedication song by Emily Huntington Miller, one of our trust-
ees, was sung. On this occasion we all walked over from the
campus to the park in long procession, and my place was beside
Tlu Woman's Kingdom, 205
my brotherly and prescient friend, Rev. Dr. E. O. Haven, who
told me, as we went, how deeply he rejoiced in all the on-going
movements by which women were coming to their kingdom.
"When they are fully come,** he said, with that beautiful smile
not to be forgotten by any who have seen it, ** there will be peace,
even as here to-day they have preserved the peace for us ; never
before was there a Fourth of July without noise or accident.*'
It now became my duty to present the plan of the new
college to good people wherever I could get a hearing. The
Congregational Church in Evanston was the scene of my first
appearance, and the ordeal was difficult, but Dr. Haven also
spoke, and that made my trial less. Rock River Conference
welcomed me most courteously, and in many towns of the North-
west I sang the praises of the great ** Northwestern '* and its
sturdy little sister, the Evanston College for lyadies. All that
summer we planned the course of study, and my pen was busy
in pursuit of pupils, who, on the opening day, filled the old col-
lege where I had graduated twelve years before, and which we
had leased until our new building should be completed.
Our pupils of the Evanston College for Ladies were to have
all the school privileges of the University at the regular tuition
rates ; they were to take music, art, and several other studies at
om* oiwrn college building, and were to be under our care exclu-
sively as to morals and manners. For those who did not wish to
porsue any of the University courses, one having a larger propor-
tion of English and modern languages was carefully prepared.
As planned by Dr. Haven and ourselves, we had, in fact, five
departments ; Modem Languages, Fine Arts, Music, Health,
Home and Home Industries.
CHAPTER IX.
SELF-GOVERNMENT FOR GIRLS.
As I follow, in these later years, the thorny path of a re-
former, I sometimes think how good and pleasant would have
been the quiet life, so universally approved, of a teacher of girls.
But one confident belief gives me grace and courage to go on,
and it is this :
** My bark is wafted to the strand
By breath divine,
And on the helm there rests a Hand
Other than mine."
In Evanston College for Ladies, for the first and only time
in my history as a teacher, I was for one year free to work my
will as an elder sister of girls-:- for this was then my idea of my
relation to them ; now, I would say, ** a mother to girls.**
Dr. J. B. Chess, of Chicago, yearly gave a gold medal for
good manners, which keyed the whole school to a higher ideal,
and Miss Kate Jackson, who had the French classes, joined me
in offering prizes for neatness and tastefulness in rooms.
Every Friday afternoon a lecture was given in the College
chapel at which the ** Church Roll-Call " was had, to which all
lady students were expected to respond. History, biography,
books and reading, art, travel, manners, health, and many other
kindred subjects were brought forward. Mrs. Kate Doggett,
President of the Fortnightly (Chicago), gave several illustrated
lectures on art ; Rev. Dr. L. H. Chamberlain, spoke on his favor-
ite ** Philip Van Artevelde,'* and a lawyer of Evanston, Mr. L.
H. BouteU, g^e his reminiscences of Margeret Fuller Ossoli.
My own talks were frequent, and related chiefly to what I am
fond of calling ** Moral Horticulture." Every day each pupil
had twenty minutes alone in her room. We did not at all pre-
scribe what should be done, but what we hoped was perfectly
well known — it was a breathing place for heavenly thoughts.
I valued this time more than any other except evening prayers.
(206)
A More Excellent Way, 207
I constantly visited the youn^ ladies in their rooms, never
once being met with coldness, and almost always we knelt
together to ask God's blessing on those at home, and those here,
who were often lonely because home was far away.
On the first Sunday after the college opened, one of my
pupils came to my room saying : ** Miss Willard, we can't bear
to go in a procession over to the church. They say it has always
been the custom, but if you would trust us to go independently,
I feel sure you would never have occasion to regret it ; for we
would all be loyal to you and to the school. '*
My heart responded, **Amen and amen. We will find a
more excellent way.** Very soon a request came that the young
women might be members of the (open) literary societies of the
University, of which there were four, the Hinman and Adelphic
in College, the Philomathean and Euphronian in the Preparatory
School. But these societies all met in the evening, the distance
from our college was six or seven squares, the young ladies had
always been strictly kept to many rules, and when they left the
college grounds to go to public audiences were to be accompa-
nied by teachers. The idea of their participating in debates with
young men, and making orations, was unheard of, and "besides,**
quotli some objectors, ** some one of them might prevent a young
man from having as frequent opportunity to speak as he other-
wise would have had, or might possibly be elected president of
a society — such an improper position for a young lady to hold ! *'
But Dr. Haven thought the objections were all mole-hills, and
the advantages were mountain high. *' Here they can measure
swords," he said ; **here, even more than in the recitation room,
young men will learn that young women are their peers. It will
break down the prejudice against woman's public speech and
work ; it will refine the young men and develop intellectual
po^B^er in the girls — precisely what each class most needs.**
But he warned me more than once that the success of the
venturesome experiment was in my hands. Teachers could not
well attend the societies ; their presence would be irksome. The
girls must go and come at night, and they must do this always
and strictly by themselves.
I remembered the clandestine visits of "University boys**
to om* college grounds in former days, the secret sleigh-rides and
2o8 Arbiters of Destiny.
moonlight walks, from which my sister and I had always kept
aloof, but of which we dared not tell, and I knew that in our
alma mater there had been no more, if as much, of this as in the
average girls* boarding school. Could I brave public opinion
and take the risks on a method never before applied to a co-edu-
cation school ? Was it right thus to hazard our sacred cause ?
Much I mused and often prayed.
One evening soon after these requests for larger liberty, I
asked my pupils to remain after prayers. I can see the bright
double parlors planted out to my beautiful garden of girls. I told
them all that has been stated here, all my scruples, aspirations,
hopes. I told them how I came to Evanston as a school-girl about
thirteen years before, and of my ** ne'er-do-weel *' term in this
very college, of my conversion, and, finally, of my heart-break
when my sister Mary died. Then I laid before them my plan of
school government, which was to put it almost wholly into their
own hands, to have no rules except those that they and their
teachers felt to be of vital importance, and closed with some such
statement as the following : ** Here is an enterprise the like of
which was never seen, a college with women trustees and faculty,
a woman president and women students. Up yonder in the grove
is a first-class men's college, and to every one of its advantages
we are invited, on one condition — all of us must at all times be
Christian ladies. Now, girls, I place your destiny in your own
hands; I confide mine to you, also, for this is my own home
town, and my good name is more to me than life. Besides all
this, and greater, the destiny of this woman's college, and, to
some degree, that of the co-education experiment, rests with you
young creatures, fair and sweet. God help you to be good ! * '
We knelt in prayer for grace and guidance, and then, with my
faithful faculty, I passed from the room, leaving the girls to or-
ganize, according to the written plans I had previously explained
to the leading pupils, their ''Roll of Honor'' and ''Self-governed
Societies,''
How nobly they fulfilled their trust ! I used oftentimes to
wish that I behaved as well. On Sunday, when they entered
church after their own sweet will, with what pride, even such as
might thrill a mother's breast, I noted their unexceptionable
manners. No whispering, no tittering ; and woe to the youth
•M Roll of Honor Letter ^ 209
who tried to slip sly billets-doux into the hands of **my girls"
as they entered or left the sacred edifice. How many a Friday
night at ten o'clock, lying in my bed at Rest Cottage, four blocks
from the Woman's College and on the same street, I have heard
the light steps of that long procession going home from the Uni-
versity btulding, where they, separating into four groups as they
entered the campus, had attended their respective societies, and I
have wept to think how true and self-respecting a college full of
girls could be ! The town pronounced my method '* a success *';
Dr. Haven was satisfied — which meant everything to me — and a
teacher not now in the University, one who thought my ** gov-
ernment" was ** hair-brained," said, "The trouble is, these girls
are quite too loyal ; they make a hobby of it. "
Here are my first letter as president to the Roll of Honor
girls, and their ** general principles," together with the pledge of
the higher grade :
Dbar and Trusted Friends — In your novel and important posi-
tion, yon have need of all the guidance Divine and human that you can
possibly obtain ; the reputation of the college is largely in your hands,
hence as you already possess the unreserved confidence of your teachers,
you have been intrusted by them with intricate and delicate responsibilities.
Your conduct, your conversation, your scholarship, your manners, will be
henceforth carefully observed by all your fellow-students. Impressed as I
am most deeply with these thoughts, I shall implore for you the guidance of
the Supreme Power in your new undertaking, and I especially urge you to
do this in your private devotions and in each one of your committee meet-
ings. When we begin with prayer, we may be sure we are on the right track
to a genuine success.
Now, as to the practical workings of this new venture, the faculty
suggests :
1. That you appoint a regular time and place of meeting.
2. That you send in each week a written report to the faculty meeting
on Monday evening.
3. That to this end you appoint a secretary.
4. That you have a committee for each literary society at the Univer-
sity and the Preparatory department, and also a church committee.
5. That you get a list of all the lady boarders in the college who pro-
pose to join, and ascertain which society is preferred. Then assign to each
sab-committee those going to its society.
6. That you all go together and return together, and in all cases unac-
companied by gentlemen, and that you never go in companies of fewer
than four.
7. That you leave at the close of the literary exercises at ten o'clock.
w
2IO Principles and Pledge.
8. That if experience proves it to be impracticable for the University
and Preparatory detachments to meet after the exercises, that the two
return separately, but those from both the Preparatory societies together,
and those from both University societies together.
9. That the young ladies sit together and choose certain seats, which
they can retain henceforth.
10. That in regard to quiet deportment on the street, attention during
the exercises, faithfulness in performing duties of the society, the com-
mittee report to the faculty as a committee, thus relieving every one from
personal embarrassment.
11. Any member of the Roll of Honor who regards this as too much to
undertake must speak now or ever after hold her peace.
On behalf of Faculty,
Francbs E. Wii^lard.
GBNBRAL PRINCIPLES OF THB ROLL OF HONOR.
Roll of Honor girls must be examples to the flock. They will not, of
course, disregard the smallest of our few regulations. They will not ignore
study hours, enter rooms in study hours, keep lights burning after bell, be
late at meals or recitations, be noisy or uproarious either in or out of school
hours. They will be low-voiced and gentle-mannered, kind and considerate
toward all, and just as much above reproach as any of their teachers.
They will not be regarded as Roll of Honor young ladies after they
have transgressed a single regulation, and their places will be supplied by
others, and the number enlarged by those whose lives among us are above
reproach.
[By order of the Faculty.]
PLBDGB OF THE SBLF-GOVBRNBD GIRLS.
I promise so to conduct myself that if every other pupil followed my
example our school would need no rules whatever, but each young lady
would be trusted to be a law unto herself.
I promise that I will always try to do the things that make for peace.
I wish to have in my book the list of the original members
of this society who are among the choicest of my friends.
KLECTED BY THE FACULTY.
Sarah Heston, Belle Webb,
Emma Warner, Susan D. Mitchell.
ELECTED BY THE PUPILS.
Mary Pattison, Jennie Pattison,
Ella Wheeler, Belle Miller.
Alice Yaple.
The first list was limited to nine, because we wished to
make it a high dignity to belong, and because we could rally
around this nucleus, when its character was established, more
An Esprit de Corps, 211
successfully than if we had placed a larger number on the list
at the beginning.
The constitution of the Roll of Honor Club contained the
following :
The general principles of this clnb shaU be to cooperate with the Fac-
ulty in securing good order and lady-like behavior among the boarding
pnpils, both in study and recreation hours, in inspiring a high sense of
honor, personal responsibility and self-respect, and especially conducting
in this spirit the attendance of the young ladies at the literary societies
and church.
As this method developed, it was my custom to say at the
beginning of a term, ** We will have no rules whatever, just so
long as everything is quiet, your time diligently occupied and
your punctuality without flaw. We have no need of rules. Let
us see how long we can go without them. I will post a time-
table in the hall, and let us live by it. Regard the teachers as
you would your mother and elder sisters at home. You advise
with them as to what is best for you in every way, feel free to do
the same with us ; that is what we are here for."
The girls were so delighted to have no rules that the older
ones gave little comfort to the younger when they began mis-
behaving, which \hey did, not from bad intention, but on account
of thoughtlessness. After awhile, however, we would see the
necessity of some one rule, then it would be announced. Every
girl in school was a candidate for the Roll of Honor, which dis-
tinction could only be reached by one month of faultless deport-
ment and punctuality. So it fell out that for the first month we
had no rules, on the principle that "A new broom sweeps clean."
In the second month, we had almost no need of rules, for every
one was on the keen stretch to reach the Roll of Honor, and the
third month all being anxious to remain at that high grade, there
was an esprit de corps in the school that held the pupils to the
mark. So that the bondage of school discipline, of which I had
bad so much always as a teacher and member of faculties, was
reduced to a minimum, indeed, became almost inappreciable.
This was especially true when we had graduated from the Roll
of Honor grade enough of our older and more prominent girls
into the Self-governed class, so that their noble behavior was in-
deed '* an example to the flock," an incentive to every one below
212 A Problem Solved,
them, because the self-governed grade was open to the youngest.
I remember that my little cousin, Rilla Norton, when only twelve
years of age, not only attained this honor but eyer afterward
maintained it.
I sent this letter to my pupils when the second term began :
EvANSTON, Ii«];., January ii, 1873.
My Dbar ** Sblf^govkrnbd *• and "Roli. of Honor " Girls— There
are two things of which I wished to speak at your meeting to-day, but I shall
not be ablie to' attend, hence, I send you this '' encyclical '* :
1. In relation to the standing of the old pupils whom we welcome back
to the college this term. Having great confidence in your judgment, I ask
yon to take their cases into careful consideration and report to the faculty
what, in your judgment, will be the best way to arrange the matter. Re-
member that you thus establish a '* precedent ** and that *' precedents " are
often inconvenient unless very general in their application.
2. The subduing and controlling of the vexing spirit called ** noise '*
is one of the most difficult problems to a household that aspires to be har-
monious and peaceful. Last term I spent more breath upon this theme than
I intend to spare from nobler occupations for the future. During vacation
this revelation has come to me :
That Roll of Honor club can do whatsoever it will. Thanks to the
high-minded integrity and good common sense of its members, the problem
of membership in the literary societies is solved to the satisfaction of all
concerned. Thanks to them, also, the uproar that once disgraced our chapel
on Friday afternoon is quelled. What can they not achieve ? I will sub-
mit to them this subject of quietness in the college building, ask them to
secure it for us by such means as they see fit, and to be examples of it in
the future as in the past. Let us see what their inventive faculties can do
about it. They have proved themselves, thus far, equal to any emergency ;
they will again.
So I leave the subject with you. The good order and quiet of your
temporary home ought surely to be as important to you as it can be to your
teachers.
One thing more. Please elect ushers for next Friday p. m. Don't let
your meetings stagnate. Get up new things. Have wide-awake critics to
tell you your faults, appoint at least two, one for our end of the street and
one for the opposite.
Always affectionately yours,
Frances E. Willard.
They replied by sending me the following :
We, the undersigned, do pledge ourselves, in order to subdue the
noise and disturbance which has been of late and is now a growing evil in
our school, to faithfully observe the following resolutions :
Resolved: i . That we will not con^egate in the halls or on the stairs.
2. That we will avoid loud talking m passing through the halls.
3. That in going to and from the dinmg-room we will be quiet, also
while at the table.
Self-Government, 213
4. That in passing to the chapel and before the exercises commence,
we do each take it upon ourselves by our example and otherwise to do all
we can to maintain me best of order.
5. That, during the meditation hours, those of us who remain in the
parlor will try so to conduct ourselves as not to disturb the teachers, or those
who desire to study.
6. That we, as members of the Roll of Honor, do pledge ourselves to
remember and live up to the vows which we made when placed on the roll,
that we may retain the confidence of our teachers, the respect and esteem
of all, and that the injunction, " Study to be quiet," shall not be forgotten
by us.
After one year's sucxressful trial, the plan was oflScially out-
lined for the public in the following language :
GOVBRNMKNT.
The phrases made and provided for literature of the catalogue style
wiU not be employed under this head. *' Mild but firm," '* of the parental
t3rpe," have been the usual changes rung when this fruitful topic was under
consideration.
The general basis of government in this institution is, that merit shall
be distinguished by privilege. Any young lady who establishes for herself a
trustworthy character will be trusted accordingly. After a probation of one
month, any one who, during this time, has been loyal to the regulations of
the school, and has not once required reproof, will have her name inscribed
upon the Roll of Honor, and will be invested with certain powers and respon-
sibilities usually restricted to the faculty. The Roll of Honor has its con-
stitution, officers and regular meetings, and sends written reports to the
teachers relative to the trusts of which it is made the depository. A single
reproof conditions, and two reproofs remove any of its members, who can
regain their places by the same process through which they were at first
attained. Those who during one entire term have not been conditioned
(by a single reproof) upon the Roll of Honor, are promoted to the Self-gov-
erned List, and give this pledge : *' I will try so to act that, if all others fol-
lowed my example, our school would need no rules whatever. In manners
and in punctuality I will try to be a model, and in all my intercourse with
my teachers and school-mates, I will seek, above all else, the things that
make for peaces
Thenceforward, these young ladies do as they please so long as they
please to do right. Every pupil in school is eligible, first to the RoU of
Honor; next to a place among the Self-governed, hence there is no
ground for jealousy. Scholarship does not enter into the requirements of
admission— ^^ro^:^ is placed above all competition here.
A year's trial of this plan has proved that it is practicable, and that
school discipline may vitally contribute to the growth of noble, self-reliant
character. The ideal set before each pupil, the sum of all "regulations,"
the proverb of the school, is this : "^'Just be a Christian Lady.*^
N. B. — At the close of the year, twelve young ladies were on the Self-
governed List, and all the rest were on the Roll of Honor.
^14 Notable Names.
Successful candidates were promoted to the Roll of Honor, or
the Self-governed grade, at evening prayers, pledging themselves
before the school and receiving the right hand of fellowship.
I think our girls felt as did the young knights of old, and held
their vows as sacredly. To show the care they exercised, I copy
a note from the Roll of Honor girls at College Cottage :
Miss Wii^lard and Members of Facui^tv — The Roll of Honor have
decided that Miss and Miss remain on the Junior Grade, and
Miss should be on the same grade if at all on the Roll of Honor.
Also by unanimous Vote that none be promoted to the Self-governed
List until next term.
We pasted in the parlor the list of the Roll of Honor, and
Self-governed girls, and printed in the catalogue, next to the
faculty, the names of their leaders. I will copy them here, for I
like to link those noble names and memories with the story of
my life :
Chairmen of the Roll of Honor, Belle B. Webb, first term ;
Julia D. McArthur, second term ; Jemmy E. Pattison, third term.
Chairmen of Roll of Honor, at College Cottage, Sarah E. Cathcart,
first ; Mary E. Wood, second ; R. Frank Remington, third.
Without noble coadjutors in the faculty, this system could
not have succeeded, but we were a unit in purpose, plans and
personal affection. Our faculty meetings were a refreshment to
jaded nerves. Never as a white ribbon leader have I been sup-
ported more ably or more warmly than by those devoted and
gifted women whose names I wish to string on a rosary of per-
petual and endeared remembrance : Minerva B. Norton, Kate A.
Jackson, Evelyn C. Crosby, Harriet E. Reed, H. Maria Petten-
gill, Ada F. Brigham, Fanny D. Smith.
Among our teachers not boarding at the college were Oscai
A. Mayo, Anna S. Lewis, Mary L. McClure, Ida M. Kessler,
William Arnold. As lecturers on physiology and hygiene, we
had at different times the following physicians : Mary A. Thomp-
son, Sarah Hackett Stevenson, Mary J. Safford.
My friend, Professor Charles C. Bragdon, reared in Evanston,
a graduate of our University, and with his mother and her family
our nearest neighbors during his college life, sends me the follow-
ing reply to the question, *' How long have you governed by my
method, and how does it work ? " He says, ** Used this method
fourteen years," and adds this letter :
Testimony from Lasell Seminary. 215
Lasell Seminary, Auburndale. Mass., January 24, 1889.
Dear Friend — After a residence of three months, a committee of
twelve papils, chosen indiscriminately by the pupils, nominates candidates
for the Self-governed List and Roll of Honor. Each one of the twelve, with-
out consultation with any one, and without knowledge as to how any other
one of the committee votes, writes her list of candidates. Those who
receive a majority of the twelve votes for the Self-governed rank are made
into a list, and those receiving a majority for the Roll of Honor, into a second
list The teachers review these lists in assembly, talking over each name
and discussing such facts as to each pupil's conduct and spirit as may be
brought out, more weight being given to spirit than conduct. Where the
teachers' votes agree with the pupils* list, the candidates are confirmed.
Where the teachers differ, the pupils* judgment is usually taken, though not
always. If grave reason for differing appears, the teachers change a name
from one list to the other, or remove from both lists. The lists thus settled
are read before the school with such comments as seem fitting. We try to
emphasize trustworthiness as against petty details.
At the end of the next term (three months) the same is repeated, some
elevated, some, though not often any, demoted.
Our Self-governed do as they please, have all the privileges of teachers,
subject only to the general order of exercises, such as to go to bed at 9:30,
to rise at 6: 45, etc.
The Roll of Honor have certain privileges, inferior to those of the Self-
governed. Those not on either list are not reckoned as degraded, but as
" not having yet attained. * ' I f at any time special reason arise, members are
removed from either list, rarely some are promoted "between times." I
believe in the method. I believe all our teachers come to believe in it
although new ones may not at first.
The pupils of both grades are put upon their honor and helped to
live for the general good, to be good because they are trusted to do well.
There are cases always of incomplete comprehension of the spirit of the
thing, owing to incomplete moral development. The effort is to develop the
honor sense in such, and to hold up to disrepute the " being good '* for the
loaves and fishes, i.e., the privileges. The danger in the plan is the dis-
couraging of those who do not attain so soon as they think they ought, and
in the development of self-conceit among those elevated. These dangers
are constantly striven against by personal interviews as symptoms develop^
and the attempt is to deepen a sense of both obligation and privilege to do
right because it is right and because they are responsible, first and last, to
themselves. Yours sincerely,
Charles C. Bragdon.
The Woman's Educational Society gradually merged into
the Educational Aid Association, to which Rev. O. Huse, Isaac
Hitt and Dr. D. K. Pearson were the earliest contributors ; Mrs.
Hannah Pearson is the present chairman of the committee. It
^i6 The Good Behavior Club.
owns a large building called College Cottage and many women
of exceptional gifts and earnestness have been helped to help
themselves to an education under its auspices.
Concerning physical education, we made the following dec-
laration :
The young ladies walk over a mile a day in going to and returning
from their various recitations. Lectures on the care of health are given by
Dr. Mary J. Safford, the weU-known Chicago physician. Common sense
applied to dress is one of the problems in the solution of which we earnestly
solicit the co-operation of our patrons.
Another of otu- inventions was *'The Good Behavior Club,**
which proved to be a favorite feature of the school. Teachers
and pupils were all members and shared the offices. Represen-
tations were given of all social observances, from the White
House reception to the morning call ; personations of distin-
guished characters, adding the dramatic charm so attractive to
both young and old ; the fact that gentlemen participated in these,
by no means detracted from the interest manifested.
**The Good Behavior Club ** had its *' Question Box " into
which were dropped anonymous queries and criticisms of all sorts
relating to care of the toilet, the etiquette of occasions, and the
small, sweet courtesies of daily life. While many of these were
based upon observations involving the deficiencies of individuals,
the strictly impersonal character of the comments shielded the
sensibilities of each and all. I found this club a barrier against
the ** self-activity ** that in my own student days had led me to
plan escapades just for the novelty of doing so, and that to have
the amusements of my girls going forward under their teachers*
eyes, contributed greatly to that esprit de corps which is the first
requisite of success in all organized effort fi-om the family circle to
the great circle of nationality.
I believe there is a hint here for our ** Y *' societies of the
white ribbon, and so will copy an article of mine ft*om The Tri-
pod, in my day our college paper at Evanston, hoping that its
hints may help them to a new line of work :
Why it is not just as sensible to teach good manners as a theory and art
aa it is to teach singing, I can not understand. In a democracy like ours
good manners ought to be a branch specially attended to in all the schools.
Especially would I have it introduced into the public schools and continued
throughout the course of study.
After-thoughts. 217
Suppose the perpetrators of the "pudding-stick fun/' to which we were
treated in Philomathean Hall the other evening, had been trained from
the pinafore-age to ** habits of good society " — should we have had to blush
that they and we belonged to the same race ?
Americans are angular, uncouth, unkempt. Nothing is more palpably
true than this. A French gentleman recently exclaimed after an interview
with a high official in our state who, on leaving the room, turned his back
to the company : '* I will not say that American men have bad manners,
but I will say that they have no manners at all." The proofs of an unculti-
vated origin that meet us on every street comer of our own classic town
are beyond enumeration. The "student's slang" (not to mention other
varieties ! ) salutes our ears at every turn. And yet, when it is proposed to
teach good manners as one would any other art, to give line upon line, and
precept upon precept, and to illustrate and enforce the teaching given by
practice and example, many people have only weak sarcasms to offer by
way of commentary.
The need of some such teaching, to supplement the random and often
nugatory instructions of home, finds another salient illustration in the
excuse of Christian parents for sending their children to dancing-schools.
"They say our young people must learn ease and grace of deportment, and
become familiar with the etiquette of occasions, so that no social entertain-
ment will find them ill at ease." True ; and it must be confessed that the
drill of the dancing-school renders them more graceful and self-possessed.
We have nothing special to say in this connection of the harm that grows
out of dancing (not, mark you, out of dancing "i» itself,''^ any more than
out of swallowing braudy " /« itself ^ " but in its associations and results).
Read Dr. Bushnell's admirable sermon on " Free to Have Amusements : But
Too Free to Want Them," if you would see our position defined at length.
Our creed is clear in its declarations on this subject. The people who help
the world, and whose names are praised and blessed — whose memories
yield perennial fragrance and form the examples of our times — are not the
people who have excelled in polka or in waltz. But aside from the merits
of the case, there are large numbers of Christian people who send their
children to dancing-school for the same object which a class in etiquette
would subserve equally well, thus removing the temptation to that concern-
ing which the thoughtful mater familias can not fail to have misgivings.
The foregoing are " after-thoughts " connected with the pleasant enter-
tainment given at the Ladies' College, on a recent evening by the " Good
Behavior Club." This organization, numbering nearly forty members, has
been for the past term under the care of Miss Smith, of Chicago, teacher
of etiquette. Miss Smith has also had classes in the Normal University,
the Wesleyan University, at Bloomington, and other institutions. President
M. speaks in the highest terms of her success in the institution over which
he presides, where a large class of young gentlemen and ladies has been
formed.
As for the entertainment at our Ladies' College, it was tasteful, and well
conducted, the young ladies having entire charge of the arrangements.
2i8 No Utopian Dream.
Whatever others may think, the experiment is a success here ; and we
congratulate the accomplished young lady who is quietly opening to
women a new and attractive employment, and to students an added op-
portunity to learn and to illustrate '' the habits of good society."
In an address on ** School Government,*' before the Woman's
Congress, New York City, 1872, I said :
And this brings me to look carefully in upon that model home once
more, to find the system of government that shall most conduce to the for-
mation of genuine character in our young people at school. I find there
very few fixed rules, and that the continued observance of these by the
children as they grow older depends almost wholly upon the disposition they
display as they advance in years. I find that the noble, trustworthy boy
and girl are trusted, the deceitful and ignoble, governed. So in the school
I simply '' go and do likewise," applying rules to the unruly, regulations to
the irregular. All are placed under a system of restrictions at the first, the
simplest that experience pronounces safe, and many find it impossible to
work their way up through these to the bracing heights of self-control. I
open a "character bank," of which the faculty act as ** directors," in which
the "deposit" is reputation, of which each student may accumulate as
much as he will, and on which he may freely draw, his paper being honored
at sight and discounted only when his debit exceeds his balance on the
books. Self-government is then the noble possibility of each, the eagerly
sought goal of every student, and the exemplars of the school are the
" tried and true " of whom it is openly declared that " unto such there is no
law " or, to put the point with more decision, "they are not under the law,
but under grace." I know these are advanced positions, but I beg you to
believe they are not the result of dreamy theorizing, nor the mirage of an
nnvisited Utopia.
Between the first and second evening study hours, we had a
prayer-meeting of fifteen minutes in a teacher's room. This was
perfectly voluntary, but overwhelmingly attended. I can hear
yet those clear young voices, singing
* Rock of ages, cleft for me.
Let me hide myself in Thee.
In my hand no price I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling."
How little did I dream that erelong I, who loved it now so
well, should gain new love for it, and that the '* Crusade,"
undreamed of then, would bring the ** arrest of thought" to
Art and Composition Classes, 21Q
these dear girls and to me. Of temperance I never spoke, tak-
ing it for granted that all was well. Now and then, when espe-
cially **wom out," I would take a little of mother's currant
wine ; on the last winter of my teaching, Dr. Jewell, one of the
leaders in our Sunday-school, ordered a keg of beer into my
cellar, of which I drank a nauseating glass at dinner, rebelling
at every dose, experiencing no benefit, and abjuring it forever
when the blessed Crusade wrought its miracle upon our hearts. I
then introduced temperance themes to my classes, one and all, as
mentioned in the temperance chapters of this chronicle. A mis-
sionary society was organized in the college, cooperating with the
local auxiliary of the Methodist church at Evanston.
I had all the young ladies (numbering several himdred) in
my English composition classes. One feature that was attractive
to them was reporting for the Chicago and Evanston papers, for
which I arranged, so far as practicable, and with good results.
In teaching my art class at the college, I availed myself of
my friend Kate's remarkably fine selection of photographs and
stereoscopic views, nuinbering about eight hundred, including all
the leading places that we saw in our long trip abroad. Many of
these I had produced on glass so that they could be thrown on
the screen of the stereopticon, and described to the entire class at
once. It was my earnest hope that, after I had taught the theory
and history of the fine arts for a few years, I might be able to
prepare a text-book that would be used generally in schools and
would furnish the introduction, of which I so much felt the need,
to a study of the European galleries and of art in our own land.
It was my wont to open or close my recitations with a few
words of prayer, and I could feel the lofty spirit thus imparted
to teacher and to pupils.
Good Mrs. Van Cott came to Evanston this first year of the
new college (1871-72) and no one present will ever forget the
scene in the college parlors when, with illuminated countenance,
she talked of God and sang with us her favorite hymn :
*• Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,
With all Thy quickening powers.
Kindle a flame of sacred love
In these cold hearts of ours.'*
Then she placed her kind hands on every head as going
220 The First ** WamatCs Commenceme^ity
around that large circle she asked a blessing upon each and all.
The revival that followed was the most memorable ever known
in Kvanston, and all my girls but two — one of whom was a
Catholic, and a very good Christian, by the way — became mem-
bers of the church. Among all the noble girls whom I had the
happiness to see kneeling at the altar, none rejoiced me quite so
much as my brilliant Belle Webb, who had fancied herself an in-
fidel, but who from that time steadily developed Christian char-
acter throughout her six years* classical course, and is now with
her gifted husband. Rev. Dr. Edward Parks, connected with
the Methodist University, in Atlanta, Ga.
The Senior class bequeathed us by Professor Jones was the
only one, up to the date of its graduation (1872), whose diplo-
mas were conferred by women. I think at Wellesley, during
the administration of President Alice Freeman, this was done,
as also at Rockford (111.) Seminary by Miss Hillard — now
Mrs. McLeish — a Vassar graduate and teacher.
It was a noteworthy circumstance that at our first Commence-
ment a woman gave the baccalaureate sermon, Mrs. J. F. Willing,
the same who, two years later, presided over the first conven-
tion of the National W. C. T. U. At my suggestion our women
trustees voted her the title of A. M. I shall never forget the
beautiful appearance of our new church at Evanston, bedecked
for this '* Woman's Commencement ** — words significant in many
ways. Only the basement was finished, but it was endeared to
us by the services of Mrs. Van Cott, and as I stood there under
the beautiftd arch of evergreen, conferring the diplomas on my
six charming seniors, the scene recalled, by contrast, the laying
of Heck Hall's comer-stone only six years before, when my galr
lant friend. Rev. Dr. J. S. Smart, read in sonorous tones the
address I had composed, but lacked courage to pronounce.
This was my first presiding on a momentous public occasion,
and in looking over the data for the present history I came upon
the handsome printed program of that Commencement ceremony.
For the benefit of other on-coming presidents among women, I
will divulge the fact that what I was to say was all written out
inside that program, and the memorandum read as follows :
(Preliminary.) There is a time-honored request " made and provided **
for occasions like the present, which must be reiterated, I suppose, at this
time, or " Commencement '* will be shorn of a cherished prerogative.
The Great Chicago^ Fire, 221
It is my duty, then, to remind oar intelligent and thoughtful friends
that we are in a churchy and that, however much the eloquence of our grad-
uating class may unfit you to carry out the terms of the treaty, it is, never-
theless, expressly stipulated between us that no ruder method of applause
shall strike our ears than the mild concussion of manly palms or the
fragrant breath of the ever-welcome bouquet.
**********
(On giving the medal for good manners.) A word in explanation
of the intention of this award. It does not imply loyalty to school
regulations (though the young lady who receives it has not been once
reproved for word or act during the entire year) ; it refers, rather, to the
minor moralities, the '* small, sweet courtesies" of life; to habitudes of
gentle speech and graceful, kindly action ; to that nameless charm of
manner which springs not alone from a kind^ but from a cultured heart and
brain. While it afibrds me profound pleasure thus to decorate Miss Pat-
terson, I beg you to believe that a vast amount of embodied good manners
still remains undecorated among " our girls."
Immediately after these exercises there will be a reception at the
Ladies' College, to which the Board of Trustees and officers of the College
cordially invite all our patrons and friends from abroad, as well as those
residing here, also the faculties, alumni and students of all the institu-
tions here.
Please consider the invitation general^ cordial and emphatic.
Miss Annie Webster, by the authority of the Board of Trustees of
Bvanston College for Ladies, I confer upon you the degree of Laureate of
Liberal Arts, and in testimony thereof I present you this diploma. By the
same authority, I confer upon you (five) each the Degree of Laureate of
Science, and in testimony thereof, I present you these diplomas.
My dear young ladies, you have now received from your young Alma
Mater the first honors she has given. May He who is the strength of all
who tmst in Him, help you to fulfill the bright promise of this hour. Fare-
weUJ
In the midst of this first school year occurred that terrible
calamity, the Chicago fire. We were sitting at breakfast in Rest
Cottage, on Monday morning, October 8, 187 1, when a neighbor
came in and said, *' Did you know that Chicago is burned up ? "
We thought the lady joking, but her grave face belied the sup-
position.
'* Yes, burned up,*' she continued, *' Court-house and all.'*
We rose with one impulse and went into the beautiful, quiet
street. It was more quiet than ever — business seemed sus-
pended, no man was to be seen. A dull, dun-colored atmos-
222 Ruined Fortunes^ but Brave Hearts,
phere settled over us as the day wore on ; its odor was peculiar,
composite, and stifling, a total contrast to the pleasant, earthy
smell of the prairie fires to which my childhood was accustomed.
At ten o'clock the young ladies composing my class in moral
philosophy came to recite. They brought me tidings of stone
houses crumbling like cardboard in the fierce heat ; of the entire
business heart of the city taken out ; of the homeless, famished
ones, many of them now on their way to Evanston, whither they
fled, with the flames on their track. The awful situation en-
grossed us altogether ; lessons were not to be thought of, and
we all knelt in prayer to God for the friendless and forsaken.
Later, the rumor came that the fire had gained such head-
way it was possible that it might come on through twelve miles
of woods and fields to Evanston. Absurd as such a supposition
seemed, the panic was sufiicient to set men plowing furrows of de-
fense, while a corps of students was fitted out with buckets of
water and told to stand on guard between our peaceful village
and the fiery foe ! A committee of safety was organized and
we were told to be ready to entertain any refugees that might be
sent us. Kate Jackson was keeping our house then, and in her
busy, Martha-like fashion she hurried to grocery store, market
and coal-dealer that we might be fitted out in a manner suitable
to the hard fortunes we would alleviate. We went to the evening
train at six o'clock and such a sight I never saw. Our well-
favored, tailor-dressed business men crawled oflFthe cars, ragged
as cinders and black as chimney-sweeps. Their eyes were red
with involuntary tears called out by smoke, not by their gigantic
losses, for the Chicago man never bates a jot of heart or hope.
Now and then there was one who had not lost, and the rest would
pound him on the back in boisterous play, shouting, *' String
him up to a telegraph pole ! — what right has he not to be ruined
with the rest ? '* Men and women were loaded down with bas-
kets of silver, boxes of valuable papers, household relics, and the
like.
We had no guests, after all ; the distance was too great for
those who walked, and most of those who came by cars went
to their friends. Several persons brought baskets of precious
things, however, asking uj to keep until called for.
Thousands camped on the prairie near the city that night,
A Heroine. 223
and little babies were bom, and the sick moaned helplessly under
the wide, calm heavens. At midnight the fire was burning so
brilliantly that standing on our piazza I could distinctly read my
fine-print Testament.
The fire began at 9:30 on the evening of Sunday, October 8,
and ended about ten o'clock Tuesday morning, lasting through
thirty-six horrible hours. It covered an area of three miles in
length by one and a half miles in breadth, or two thousand one
hundred acres. The number of buildings destroyed was about
seventeen thousand ; of people rendered homeless, ninety-eight
thousand. Of these, about thirty thousand left the city and
about fifty -five thousand were fed by charity. It is estimated
that about two hundred persons lost their lives, and over two
hundred million dollars* worth of property was destroyed. The
cow-bam on DeKoven street, where a frightened bovine kicked
over a kerosene lamp, started this greatest conflagration of all
history.
I have hardly heard a more heroic story of this unmatched
calamity than that of Ina Coolidge, one of my pupils. On the
day before the fire I had gone with her to the city Eye Infirmary,
Dr. Annie Reid being with us, and a skilled hand had operated on
one of Miss Coolidge's eyes for strabismus. The quiet way in
which she laid her little form down on the operating table,
crossed her hands in prayer and submitted to the anaesthetic ;
the sweet, bright look when she said, " Oh, Miss Willard, we are
all in heaven and you are the center of our band ! ' ' have always
remained with me, since they brought the tears to my eyes as I
stood by her side. The flowing blood and bandaged eyes — both
bandaged, so that she was helpless — were pitiful to see. We
sent her to the Sherman House with her trusty room-mate.
There they were to stay for a few days, but that night came the
awftil conflagration, and the hotel was just in its path. My pupil
said the scene was terrible, with screaming women and cursing
men, nobody willing to help another ; people and trunks bump-
ing their way along the stairs, while din of bells and puff" of fire-
engines made up a horrid orchestra. In all this the blindfolded
girl never once lost her equipoise of mind. She would not take
the bandage from her eyes, but waited till the scampering crowd
was well-nigh gone, took her room-mate by the hand, and the two
224 Colossal Ruins,
girls started out alone. She noted the quarter from which came
the wind and roar of flames, and away they sped through the
livid inferno, not knowing, in that strange city, what direction
they had taken until, hours afterward, they found themselves at
the Milwaukee depot, on the West Side, and the next day, while
we were in breathless anxiety about them, they appeared climb-
ing the college stairs at Evanston !
All the newspaper oflSces were burned, but I remember the
Evening Mail^ with which my brother was soon after connected,
and all the other dailies, soon came out as usual, looking primi-
tive as the frontier. We found Oliver and his friend Hobart in
a downright **piney-wood shanty,*' a few days afterward, work-
ing away at a drygoods-box table with all the importance of
Chicago editors who had survived. I took my mother and several
wagon loads of my pupils to see the ruins, — that being for some
time the chief occupation of suburbaners. Tolerably familiar
though I was with '*the wreck of time** in Egypt, Palestine
and at Baalbec, these were the most colossal ruins I had ever
seen. The towering fragments, smouldering embers, charred
trees and half lifted smoke-cloud ; the groups of men and women,
roaming about as if bewildered, or delving into the heaps of debris
that covered their pulverized homes and melted hearthstones ;
and, in awful contrast, the sparkling waters of the great lake
stretching before us in mocking uselessness and selfish secu-
rity— the only thing unchanged — made up a picture the most
frightful that my eyes have mirrored.
But with a wish to see some smile of hope across the black-
ness, I asked my girls to take The Greatest Conflagration as a sub-
ject of debate, one side advocating the view that good was to
come out of it. I think we were first in the field for the opti-
mistic view now generally accepted, and so far realized that when
I welcomed the National W. C. T. U. to Farwell Hall, just six
years afterward, I was able to say to them, with all the pride of
a Chicago suburbaner :
You will see for yourselves our parks and boulevards, the palaces in
which we transact our business, and lodge our travelers ; the costly churches
where we worship, and the costly mansions in which our money-kings
are wont to eat and sleep. As you drive along our streets, a vacant lot here
Cind there, a heap of shattered stones, a bit of charred pavement will be
Beauty from Ashes.
225
shorwn yon as the only remainitig traces of that city of stone that in a night
became a city of ashes, and six years later gleamed forth a city of marble.
That fire touched humanity's heart, and endeared our smitten
dty to the whole world. Sailors have told me that at the
farthest point of the Aleutian Islands, they found that most of
the natives knew three English words — Victoria, a dollar, and
Chicago.
^
\
mM
0MX
i^
15
CHAPTER X.
WHY I LEFT THE UNIVERSITY.
That fire changed the outlook of our college. Its hot breath
shriveled our generous Fourth of July subscription list, impov-
erishing some of our most trusty friends and obliging us to cover
up the newly-laid foundations of our great building. We furled
our sails and went scudding as best we could before the blast.
The year 1872 witnessed the election of Rev. Dr. Haven as Sec-
retary of the Board of Education of the M. E. Church, and his
change of residence to New York City. And there rose up as
his successor one who *' knew not Joseph.**
Rev. Dr. C. H. Fowler (now Bishop), a man of brilliant
gifts, came to us from the pastorate, never having taught at all,
unless very briefly in district school when a student in college.
His concept of the situation was totally diflFerent from that of Dr.
Haven with his long experience in the work of higher education.
To go into the details of this most painful period of my
whole life is not my purpose. Sufiice it that the bone of conten-
tion was the relations of the Evanston College for Ladies to the
Northwestern University. Dr. Haven's plan, indorsed by the
University trustees, was as follows:
We would recommend that all young women receiving instruction in
the University, be requested to enroll themselves as members of the Evans-
ton College for Ladies * * ♦ ♦ and that the young women be under
the moral oversight of the faculty of the Ladies* College.
But the new president held that the University faculty of men
was the final authority in everything pertaining to those who re-
ceived instruction there. Hence, when a young woman preferred
not to take lessons in penmanship (required of all under our
care) ; when she fell fix)m the Roll of Honor list, or for any reason
desired to go outside our college building and thus be free from
(m6)
In a Quandary, 227
all restrictions except such as related to her recitations at the
University, or its Preparatory department, the new president said
she might go, and still be in good standing so far as those classes
were concerned, when the old president would have said she
must do as the women's faculty thought best. This was the '' rift
in the lute *'; it was a readjustment that removed the center of
gravity outside the base so far as the Evanston College for Ladies
was concerned, and introduced so much friction into our educa-
tional machinery that, perceiving the impossibility of going on
another year under the same disadvantages, I strongly advocated
what the new president favored, viz., such a union of the two
institutions as would make their interests identical.
A principle which I always tried to inculcate in the minds of
my g^ls was this — ^a sentiment of true honor and dignity favors
the school not the delinquent. How is it in society ? Every
noble man brings rogues to justice. He never dreams of shield-
ing them, yet pupils think it honorable to shield each other. And
I had myself the same absurd idea during a part of my years at
school, but it is a sediment of barbarous ages wherein espionage
took the place of free government. What I urged most in the
basis between the College and the University was that the Univer-
sity trustees should reaffirm the action which made all young
women members of the Woman's College, and that the University
faculty should do this with such minutiae of legislation as would
leHeve the Woman's College from all embarrassment, making our
faculty responsible for the young women in all cases save when
they were in the recitation room.
In my annual report to its board of trustees, as president of
the Evanston College for Ladies, I said Qune, 1873) :
The general policy during the first year of the college was frequently
expressed by Doctor Haven in terms like these :
" I wish the Ladies* College to be responsible for all the lady students
in everything ; but their recitations, so far as advantageous to them, will be
with us, and when they pursue our courses of study they will receive our
diploma.'*
But the practical workings of the school this year indicate a different
view of the subject, and it is necessary to the harmony we all desire to main-
tain that the question be settled.
W^ill yon, therefore, please detail, with as much minuteness as possible,
the duties of the president of your college toward the young ladies whose
228 Contract Between University and College,
names are placed upon its register, stating wherein they are amenable to her
anthority, and wherein they are not ?
For my own part, unless I am thoroughly self-deceived, I desire "the
greatest numbers' greatest good *' ; and I earnestly seek such a solution of the
problem, which I now present to you, as shall most directly tend to fulfill
the hopes and expectations of those who have stood by our enterprise from
the beginning. But I frankly acknowledge that I can not, with self-respect,
longer sustain relations so undignified as the last few months have witnessed.
I have no aspersions to make against any one. We have simply arrived
by a rather circuitous route, but a no less certain one, at the logical sequence
of relationships too dimly outlined at the beginning.
To your combined wisdom, energy and prudence, I submit questions
with which I have been loth to burden you, but with which I can no longer
contend alone.
I have great confidence in the power of a free and kindly interchange
of sentiment between the authorities of the two institutions to set these
questions at rest, and to develop a policy which shall render their harmoni-
ous interworking practicable.
Let me add a single sentence from an article written by Dr. E. O. Haven,
in The Methodist^ in which he gave an outline of our plans. He says :
" It is our intention to show that ' opening a university to women ' and
'giving ladies an equal chance with gentlemen,' means something more
than to control a university wholly by men, select courses of study fitted only
to men, give instruction mostly by men, and then, forsooth, ' open the doors
alike to both sexes, ^ '*
Let me, finally, put myself upon the record, as not at all unfiiendly to a
closer union between the two schools, providing always that the advance
positions we have gained for woman be not sacrificed.
We represent the most progressive educational movement of the world's
most progressive age, and timorous as well as weak should we prove our-
selves, did we surrender the trusts of which Providence has made us
the depositories.
EVANSTON COLLEGE FOR LADIES UNITES WITH NORTHWESTERN
UNIVERSITY.
An agreement was now made to this effect :
In consideration of having turned over to it all the property
of the Evanston College for Ladies, the Northwestern University
agreed to assume all financial obligations of said college, to com-
plete its building and maintain the institution on a basis of which
the principal features were the following :
The party of the first part (University Trustees) further covenants to
maintain in all future time a representation of women in the Board of
Trustees of the Northwestern University of not less, at any time, than five ;
and in the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees of the party of
the first part there shall always be, at least, one woman, if the women of
Dean and Professor, 229
the Board shall so require ; and provision shall also be made, by the party
of the first part, for an Advisory Committee of women, to be appointed by
the Board of Trustees of the party of the second part, to confer with the
Bxecutive Committee on all matters of interest to the party of the second
part hereafter, and the chairman of this committee shall always be received
at the sessions of the Bxecutive Committee of the Northwestern University ;
and the party of the first part shall also elect a woman to the presiding
office of Uie Woman's College as annexed to or affiliated with the party of
the fitst part, with the title of '* Dean," who shall be a member of the Fac-
ulty of the University. And the party of the first part shall elect at least
one woman to a Professorship in the University, and this perpetually ; and
shall also confer degrees and diplomas on the students of the said Woman's
College entitled thereto, and this in the name of the Trustees and the Fac-
ulty of the University ; and shall also maintain the same friendly relations
now existing between the Woman's Educational Association and the party
of the second part (Bvanston College for Ladies), and keep up the same as
betwecm the said Woman's College and the said party of the first part, so
fu" as is consistent with the charter of the University.
And in consideration of each and all of the matters aforesaid, the said
party of the second part has this day assigned, granted and conveyed to the
party of the first part, all its property, real and personal, together with all
its choses in action, moneys and subscriptions set forth and enumerated in
a schedule hereto attached, and hath agreed and covenanted and doth
hereby agree and covenant to change its present corporate name to that of
•* Woman's College of the Northwestern University," etc., etc.
A method was also provided by which, should the University
trustees fail to carry out the contract, the trustees of the Evans-
ton College for Ladies could obtain redress.
One year more was invested in an unavailing eflFort to make
the Woman's College and the University keep time together.
Charles V. had not more trouble in hi£ famous effort to make two
watches do the same !
Having been elected Professor of ^Esthetics in the University,
I heard my recitations in the president's room of the University
building. It was entirely a new thing to the students to recite to
ladies, my friend, Kate Jackson, having all the French classes in
the University, while I had part of the English composition.
They tested us in various ways. One day on entering, I saw
written on the blackboard, *'Miss Willard runs the Freshman
Hke a pack of girls. * * Without admitting by word or look that
I had seen the flattering sentence, I went to the blackboard
behind my desk, and while with one hand I erased it, with the
other I was looking into my note-book for illustrations of differ-
230 Crude Pranks of Young Collegians,
ent rhetorical styles, and sending the young men to the black-
boards around the room each to write out a specimen sentence.
Another time they entombed a howUng cat in the large drawer
of my desk, and its orchestral accompaniment did not intermit
one moment during the hour of my recitation, but if ever any
one had the appearance of being stone-deaf I think I may claim
to have been the person and this the occasion.
Their last attempt was on this wise : The recitation room
door began to creak vigorously, the weather being damp. A
young man would enter the class a minute late, open the door
the whole arc of its liberty, and close it carefully while the
squeaky creak went on, disturbing us not a little. The moment
he had taken his seat, another young man just a minute later
would open the door, enter, and close it in the same percussive
manner, and so on until a dozen, perhaps, came in — there were
no more mischievous ones in my large class of seventy. I made
no comment, went on with the class as best I could, but that
night a trusty student who was working for his board at Rest
Cottage, was armed with a lantern, a piece of soap and the key
to that recitation room, and he so limbered up those hinges
that there was quite a surprised look on the faces of the boys
when next day the door swung to and fro as if on velvet instead
of iron.
I was reminded of these occurrences in the anteroom of
Moody's great tabernacle in Boston, where I spoke one Sunday
afternoon in 1877 to five thousand people or more. Some excel-
lent ladies who accompanied me said in anxiety when I was about
to go before the audience, *' Aren't you frightened? Doesn't
it make your heart beat faster to step out, one lone woman in
sight of that great amphitheater?" And it came instantly to
my mind to reply, '*You never taught the Freshman class in
Northwestern University or you would not expect one who has
done that to be frightened at anything." To me an audience is
like a well-bred person, quiet, attentive, sympathetic, and, best of
all, not in a position to answer back ! In all of these particu-
lars it is the diametrical opposite of a lot of roystering youths
who never before recited to a lady teacher and who are tr>'ing her
mettle and their own. I ought to say, however, that the large
majority were gentlemen and brothers, whom I recall with the
TTu Method of ^^ Self -Government'' Disapproved. 231
kindest remembrance and in many cases with sisterly affection
because of their manly considerateness toward me in those dif-
ficult days.
In the meanwhile, however, my system of self-government
had fallen into * * desuetude * ' that did not seem to me to be * * innoc-
uous/* The new executive did not consider it compatible with
the dignity of the great institution wherein our Woman's College
was but a minor fraction. Some attempts to revive it in a modified
form failed to meet the exigency that now came upon us, for the
lease of Professor Jones's school building having expired, our
girls boarded in the village during two thirds of my last year.
A ** self-report** was then devised to be filled out by them in
writing. But it caused great dissatisfaction, the young men
students, who were not under rules, being particularly hostile to
this device which was only intended to tide us over the complex
difficulties of a woman's college that was "all about town.**
When the spring term of 1874 opened, the new college being
ready for occupancy, we moved into its spacious rooms and I
believed, and do believe to-day, that if the internal management
had been left with the ladies' faculty there, we could have restored
the good order and good feeling that were the chief features of
that single, bright, untrammeled year — 1871-72. But, our chief
now took the ground that the young women would get on very
well with very little supervision, and I, who had thought myself
an emancipator of college girls, saw myself designated " a female
Bluebeard ** by the press. On the test question, I voted all alone
in one of the last faculty meetings of my history — my good friends
being either absent or not voting. They knew the utter useless-
ness of making an issue with the president. I knew it, too, but
my resolve was taken, the world was wide, and I would not
waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.
With but two exceptions, my generous girls stood with me
and declared that they would gladly submit to any rules I might
think best. There may be other instances on record, but I have
not found them, of a college full of girls crying for rules like
housekeepers for sapolio ! But the fiat had gone forth : Practically
equal freedom for all students and the method of self-government
disfiaivored. This being settled, I determined to resign. My
mother, brother and dear friends protested with might and main.
^32 ''I Am To Go— I Am To Go.''
If I would state the case to the trustees, they felt sure that I
would be sustained ; Evanstonians were all my friends, they,
thought, and with a clearly defined issue like this, the local
pressure in my favor would be strong. I had been elected to a
most honorable life-position at a salary of $2,400 per year, had no
money laid up, and no other means of support ; it was consummate
folly to resign a position so congenial as ''Dean of the Woman's
College, and Professor of ^Esthetics in the Northwestern Univer-
sity." How could I think of leaving such a post? Thus they
reasoned long and loud. But to my trusted few I stated my de-
cision as unalterable, and then as always they stood by me, loyal,
loving and true. To no trustee did I give the slightest intimation
of my purpose, but went quietly on with my work ; saw the stew-
ard of the Woman's College, who had been authorized to do so,
conducting evening prayers while I sat by on the platform and
my girls looked whole encyclopedias of rebellion and wrath ; con-
ducted my art classes at the new building to which from Rest Cot-
tage I removed my residence ; went to the University Hall to hear
my college classes in English composition, and to the Preparatory
for similar classes there ; and all the time this refrain was in my
heart:
** I am to go, I am to go ! This college has been dearer to
me than anything save Forest Home. Three years of my life's
hardest work and best are here enshrined ; brick by brick I've
watched these handsome walls as they climbed high above the
trees, and thought, **This is Professor Jones's college of which
he was so fond, and it is my sister Mary's that died and it is
mine." With a faculty of women gathered around me that are
like a band of sisters, with pupils loving and beloved, with a life-
position as professor of the branches I like best and know most
about, and an adequate income assured, with mother and Rest
Cottage only two blocks away, I felt too tranquil and secure.
But as the eagle stirreth her nest and leadeth forth her young, so
the Lord alone shall lead me ; I must go ; the world is wide and
ftill of elbow room ; this atmosphere is stifling — I must leave it. ' '
On June 16, 1874, I went to my last faculty meeting.
How I dreaded it ! The beautiful stone building, the blue lake
seen through the trees, the pleasant sky — I took last pictures of
them all. In the president's room they were assembled — those
The Case Stated. 233
men of culture and conservatism of whom I knew that none were
my enemies, and several were my friends. Kate Jackson was
with me, as usual, having the position of acting professor of
French. I asked and received permission to read my report
which was as follows :
To THK Faculty — Authorized by a resolution of some weeks since,
I wiU indicate briefly, the principal points developed during the past term
in the working of the '^ Rules for the Woman's College/'
1. The demand of a certain class of patrons and of students for equal-
ity between young men and women in their relations to the government
seems to have been met in a manner generally satisfactory, by making
no special requirement of young women boarding outside the college build-
ing ; thus placing them, in all regards, on the same basis as young men.
Those parents who desire to entrust their daughters with the respon-
sibihties and prerogatives of self-government, can certainly make no com-
plaint that this is not practicable in the Northwestern University.
2. On the other hand, allow me to call your attention to the fact that
a large and estimable class of patrons do not find their wants met by the
S3rstem of regulations at present prevailing within the college building.
From the first, I have been impressed with this, but particularly so within
the last fortnight, on being questioned by those who contemplate intrust-
ing their daughters to the care of this faculty and who are not entirely
disabused of old time prejudices against " mixed schools." One of the first
inquiries of such parents is : ''To what extent will the acquaintances formed
by my daughter, and the social attentions she receives, be regulated by those
under whose care I place her ? "
A gentleman from Kansas applying on behalf of his motherless daugh-
ter of fifteen, asked me this question with much anxiety. In view of the
fact that yotmg ladies in the building receive calls from whom and when
their judgment dictates (out of study hours), that they can be attended by
gentlemen to nearly all the public exercises of the institution, and to all the
regular religious meetings, without any special permission ; in view, also,
of the fact that they leave the grounds at all times freely out of study hours,
(and thus, on Saturday and Sabbath can be absent for hours at a time with-
out a teacher's cognizance), I have found it impracticable to answer truth-
fully such questions as I have referred to, and at the same time to secure the
patronage of the inquirer.
3. The principle having been recognized, that, within the college build-
ing, the social relations of young ladies are, in the main, left to be deter-
mined by the girls themselves, I have found it extremely difiicult, indeed
impossible, to impress them with the dignity and importance of such excep-
tions to the general rule, as the faculty has seen fit to make.*
•The jroungr ladies were, under these rules, free to go with young men to all meetings
pertaining to the church and school, and only asked my permission when invited to con-
^*^ lectures, etc., outside these "regular exercises."
^34 Home Government the Correct Method.
When by the authority of this faculty, a young lady can receive a call
daily, if she chooses, from Mr. A. (even if the teacher in charge deems
his acquaintance an undesirable one for her), when, if she chooses, she
can attend Monday evening prayer-meeting, Tuesday class-meeting and
Wednesday prayer-meeting, and on Friday evening can accompany him to a
literary society, is it to be wondered at if she regards it as unimportant that
she obtain permission before going with him on Thursday evening to hear
the Hampton singers ?
Once admit that a lady student is competent to decide upon four fifths
of the "social privileges " of a given week and she will soon learn to speak
as flippantly as she thinks lightly of the restriction placed upon the remain-
ing fraction of her liberty.
4. As an inference from what has been stated already, let me record the
opinion that one and the same S3rstem of self-government for all lady
students within the building as well as without, is more logical and will
prove more successful than the present partial measures, which suit neither
the radicals nor the conservatives and are, as experience and their own testi-
mony conbine to prove, unsuited to the girls themselves. Indeed, I think
girls boarding out have, under the present system, moral advantages over
those in the building ; for, being few in number in any one family, they are
not likely to go to such extremes as when assembled in one building they are
sure to reach, when left so largely to their own immature judgment My own
conviction that a more responsible ^^ home government," — one more worthy
of a name involving an interest so deep, and a duty so high — is the truer
solution of the problem, need hardly be repeated here !
5. It has been my task to administer, during the past few weeks, laws
to which neither rewards nor penalties had been attached. Mild as is the
code, and few as are its requisitions, I have greatly felt the need of some
incentive to its observance on the part of the young ladies ; and though no
instance of violation of rule, which has come to my knowledge, has passed
unrebuked, I have found a growing unconcern on the part of our well-
meaning girls, and a hardly- concealed carelessness on that of othen. Iret
me suggest that the hope of advancement to a higher grade, the certainty of
a report sent home to parents, or some other expedient, will greatly aid in
the administration of the rules.
6. The effect on the young ladies, of being left to the guidance of their
own judgment, has not, in my opinion, been fortunate. Aside from the
slight esteem in which they have come to hold the rules, there has been a
stronger tendency toward sociability than toward study on the part of many,
and a lightness of bearing, a pertness of speech and manner, and a tendency
to disorder, such as my long experience in a school family has never wit-
nessed hitherto.
7. I do not deem it inappropriate to express, in this connection, the
decided opinion that, as at present conducted, the experiment of receiving
young men into the Woman's College building as day-boarders has not war-
ranted the expectations of its friends. I am confident that this opinion is
''Between the Upper and Nether Millstones, '^^ ^35
shared by all who have thoughtfully considered its developments. The
jomig men should, in my opinion, be more carefully chosen ; should have
certain restrictions or should be discontinued altogether, the latter being, as
it seems to me, much the better course to be pursued. Though a few have
been gentlemen, the majority have, by their rude behavior, much increased
the unpleasantness of the family life, while their influence over the young
ladies, uniformly directed against order and discipline, has rendered the
problem of government much more complicated than it would otherwise
have been.
8. In conclusion, let me ask your attention to the duty of a plain un-
derstanding with the public on the question of the government of young
ladies in this institution.
The supposition is as natiiral as it is universal, that a school having a
ladies' department, undertakes special supervision of this class of pupils,
particularly in regard to their social relations. The public mind is fully
persuaded that this is the policy of the Woman's College, not only from the
nature of the case, but from the newspaper controversy of last winter, at
which time the supposition was correct.
Repeatedly have mothers who intended sending their daughters to this
institution, asked me within the last month "If this were not a strict
school ? " and it has proved an ungracious task to correct this quite erroneous
opinion.
Bnt consider expressions like the following from the new catalogue : "A
home for yotmg women, where their morals, health and manners can be con-
stantly under the special care of women;" "special advantages of watch-
circ," and others, of the like import, and see if there is not a discrepancy, of
which you have not been aware, between these statements and the system
now in force.
My own relation to the Woman's College has brought out the difficulty
above referred to in a light more vivid than agreeable. With the parents
on one side asking, " What safeguards can you offer to my daughter in her
youth and inexperience ? " and tlie financial interests on the other urging the
utmost possible conciliation of patronage (in view of an impaired exchequer),
I have newly illustrated the peril of being between the upper and the
nether millstones.
Clearly there are but two courses open to the University : First, no
special requirements for young women, either in the building or in private
fiimilies, and a frank avowal of such policy to patrons and inquirers ; or,
second (the idea of general supervision having been abandoned by the fac-
ulty), a systematic oversight of the daily life and associations of those board-
ing within the college walls. I do not mean the old-fashioned boarding
ichool system, which I never advocated, but I do mean such care and over-
ng^ as will replace, so far as it can be done, the influence of home.
All this I can say to you, gentlemen, with the more directness, because
of its being my last utterance in my present relations to you.
236 '' We Must Work for Peaces
I have long thought there was but one fitting sequel to my experiences
of the past school-year, experiences of which but little has come to the sur-
face in the meetings of the faculty. Yet, from time to time, I have hoped
for an improvement in the outlook of the Woman's College. I finally deter-
mined, some weeks since, upon a careful reconsideration of the whole
question of my relations to the University, and, as a result, I wrote my
resignation several days ago, which I shall present to the trustees on Tues-
day next
As my last word concerning the vexed question of government (one
which, in my opinion, involves that of the success of the co-education
experiment to which I have, in Evanston, given some of my best years), let
me ask that the faculty carefully review the whole question, not only on
its merits, but in the light of this term's experience ; that you allow some
weight to the womanly judgment of her who shall succeed me as Dean ;
that the daily devotional exercise at the Woman's College be placed under
her care ; and that, upon whatever course you may determine, the policy be
clearly stated to the public, especially to parents who contemplate sending
their daughters to this institution.
Respectfully submitted,
Frances E. Wii.i:,ard,
Dean of the Woman* s College of Northwestern University.
June 13, 1874.
The reading over, I asked if Miss Jackson and I might be
excused. The president nodded, and I went forth, not knowing
whither I went, but glad, though grieved, to go. I pass over
the trying ordeal of a ** trustee meeting," in which it seemed to
me that those opposed would fain have put me in the attitude of
a culprit, while those who were my friends said, very properly,
** We'd fight for you if you would stay, but you are bound to go
and we must work for peace." I remember walking into the
University chapel, where this trustee meeting was held ; and
what a stay and solace it was to grasp the arm of my beloved
friend and sister, Mrs. Hannah Pearsons, who has reminded me
always of the blessed Hannah of old. I can see my brother at
the reporter's table, — though an editor-in-chief, he chose to hear
for himself that day, — erect, alert, and deeply angered ; my loyal
knight always. I can see the sad faces of those faithful women,
the trustees of the old college, and the thoughtful looks of the
officers of our educational association, and my dear pupils with
their sympathetic eyes. My resignation was read and referred,
without debate, to a ** Special Committee on the Woman's
College. ' ' It read as follows :
The Dean Resigns. 237
EvANSTON, June 13, 1874.
Genilemen and Ladies of the Board of Trustees of the Northwestern
University :
It has clowly, bnt surely become evident that I can never carry into ex-
ecution my deepest convictions concerning the interests of the Woman's
Collie under the existing policy of government.
I therefore resign the office of Dean of the Woman's College, and Pro-
fessor of JBsthetics in the University to which you elected me one year ago.
There are other reasons for this action, which justice to myself would
require me to name in the hearing of the trustees, but I refrain from doing
this out of regard to interests which must take precedence of any personal
Gonnderatioii. Respectfully submitted,
Frances E. Wii^i^ard.
Relative to the foregoing documents by me presented, the
following reports were made by the special committee and unani-
mously adopted by the trustees :
Your committee to whom has been referred the consideration of the
interests of the Woman's College and in connection therewith the resigna-
tion presented to the board of trustees by Miss Frances E. Willard of her
position as Dean of said College and Professor of ./^thetics in the North-
western University, would respectfully report that, while they profoundly
regret that any reasons should be supposed to exist sufficient to induce
such resignation, they would recommend the acceptance of the same by
the board of trustees. They further report that in view of the intimation
contained in the letter of resignation of Miss Willard that the existing sys-
tem of government in the Woman's College is in her conviction defective,
the committee ask leave for further time to inquire into the grounds upon
which the objections are founded, and to mature and indicate the proper
remedy for any such defects they may find to exist.
This report was accepted and adopted, the substance of the
latter part being laid over for further action. The final report
was as follows, and was also unanimously adopted :
The committee to whom was referred subjects of interest pertaining to
the Wommn's College would respectfully report upon the question of rules
for the Wommn's College and for women attending different departments of
the University, which question is suggested for present consideration by the
rrtignation of the Dean of the Woman's College ; that the system of co-
education is new to the trustees of the University, and new, as well, in
its University form to the faculty of the University and the Dean of the
Woman's College, and it is not surprising that there should have been a
diffierence of views with the members of the faculty as to the proper rules
required under the circumstances. That the existing rules were not the
views of any particular member of the faculty, and not precisely
238 TTie Special Committee Reports.
what any single one would have suggested, that they were in the natnre
of a compromise of dififerent views, seems true. There is no doubt that the
Dean of the Woman's College supposed in the formal union of the Woman's
College with the University, all authority to make rules and regulations for
the Woman's College was reserved to itself, and was not to be exercised by
the faculty of the University ; that subsequently she cordially united with
the president in framing rules that after much public and private discussion
were regarded as defective, and in this view she was understood by a ma-
jority of the faculty to concur ; that, at a later period, when public discussion
had ceased with reference to the rules, the faculty of the University took up
and fully considered the question ; that in this discussion the Dean of the
Woman's College was not in full accord on the general principles of gov-
ernment for young women with the faculty, or a majority of them ; but
it was understood that in the main, all parties assented to the rules as
adopted, though in some points they were not entirely satisfactory to the
Dean of the Woman's College. Distinct provisions were made by the
faculty that the Dean of the Woman's College shall, from time to time,
report to this faculty' upon the success of the rules adopted by the faculty.
That the Dean of the Woman's College was greatly solicitous for the wel-
fare and successful administration of the Woman's College, the committee
fully believe ; that she believed herself without adequate authority for a
satisfactory administration of the Woman's College is also manifest
The committee on the other hand fully believe the faculty of the Univer-
sity were equally anxious for the successful administration of the Woman's
College, and were ready and willing to render any aid that they believed
would contribute to that end, and that they regarded the rules adopted as
an experiment. That the Dean of the Woman's College made no request
to the faculty of the University for additional rules seems to be conceded.
That she did not, may be explained by the fact that she did not wish, with
too great haste, to pronounce the existing rules insufficient, or by the con-
sideration that she would delay such suggestion until by her announced
resignation all personal considerations should be eliminated from this
subject
The committee believe that the Executive Committee of the University
made arrangements without consulting the Dean of the Woman's College, or
the faculty of the University, with reference to day boarders in the Wonum's
College, that proved not wise, and which have been discontinued.
The committee would recommend to the faculty of the University that
at an early day they reconsider and re-examine the rules of the Woman's
College, and that in any respect in which they shall be found inadequate by
administration to a complete and thorough safeguard of the students, that
they be amended or added to.
The committee are persuaded that the trustees and faculty of the Uni-
versity have a united purpose to make the Woman's College, in its depart^
ments of instruction and government, worthy the fullest public confidence.
This ** Special Committee" was, as I then believed, mort-
Lifers Holiest Revelation, 239
gr^;ed firom the first to the side of the stronger, and before it,
when arraigned as not having carried out the rules efficiently,
I burst out crying, and left the room. Finding my brother with
a carriage at the gate, I soon reached friendly shelter.
So it was over, the greatest sacrifice my life had known or
ever can know. For, lying there alone in our beautiful college,
so thankful to be out of sight in my own quiet suite of rooms,
planned for me by the loving care of the good women whom I
had worked with so happily, there came to me the sense of an
injustice so overwhelming that no other experience of mine com-
pares with it in poignancy. ** I tried so hard and meant so well ! *'
Over and over again, I said those words and with agony of tears
I pitied myself then and there, so that they heard me all through
the hall, and were frightened by my anguish. Evening wore
on, and at his handsome residence near by, the president's levee
went forward. I could see its flashing lights and flitting forms
as I lay there alone, and music by the band smote my tired ears.
At last everything grew still and sweet and holy, while far
into the night the deep June sky bent over me with a beauty that
was akin to tenderness. The storm in my soul ebbed away
slowly, the sobs ceased, the long sighs were less frequent. As
dies the wave along the shore, so died away for evermore my
sorrow to lose the beautiful college that my heart had loved as
other women's hearts love their sweet and sacred homes. In the
long hours that followed, the peace that passeth understanding
settled down upon my soul. God was revealed to me as a great,
brooding Motherly Spirit, and all of us who tried to carry on the
University, while He carried on the Universe, seemed like little
boys and girls, who meant well, but who did n't always under-
stand each other. The figure was of children playing in a nurs-
ery, and one little boy had more vigor than the rest of us, and,
naturally, wanted us to play his way, while a little girl, whom I
thought I could identify, said, " No ; my way is best ! " Then a
deep voice declared, ** This is the interpretation — good to forgive,
best to forget. " And then the happiness that mocketh speech,
flowed, like the blessed, tranquil river of dear old Forest Home,
all through my soul, and overflowed its banks with quiet, happy
tears.
240 The Heavenly Vision.
My cousins, Rev. S. and Mrs. M. B. Norton, who were asso-
ciated with me from the first in all this college enterprise, and
my friend Elate, were sent for at this point by my room-mate,
Miss Harriet Reed. The record as my cousins have written it
out, is this :
Well do I remember (writes Mr. N.) the rap upon our door in the then
new Woman's College building at Evanston, one morning in June, 1874.
It was an early hour, while it was yet dark. To the question, ** Who is
there?" a friendly voice responded, adding, **Mrs. N., I wish you would
come to Miss Willard's room. She has not slept during the night Some-
thing is the matter with her, I don't know what."
The call was instantly heeded, and we found Miss Willard, though
surprised, yet glad to see us.
She seemed very anxious to have everything right between herself and
those from whom she had so widely differed. And so intent was she upon
this purpose that she urged us to send out at once to call in those who had
been so eagerly engaged in opposition to her, that she might ask pardon of
them all. But we who were then present were slow to believe that this was
any part of her duty. Yet we could not fail to see how easy it now was
with her to obey the best impulses of her heart in putting away everything
that seemed un-Christian ; sins of omission and sins of commission, of
"word, thought or deed,*' for since the heavenly vision was present, noth-
ing must be kept back. The joy of forgiveness was with her. Of this I
have never kno^n a brighter example.
It was now fully morning and Miss Willard's mother was sent for, who
came with a carriage, saying that "her own home and her own folks were
what Prank needed," so she was carried away from her well-beloved college
forever. Mrs. N, and myself took an early train for Wisconsin. As we
passed from this scene of "heavenly vision," in which, as Miss Willard had
said, " God seemed so great, so loving, and human plans so small," I re-
marked to my wife, " Our cousin is either soon to go to her heavenly home
or from this time her life is to be enlarged ! This wonderful manifestation
of Divine grace means something unusual."
FIFTEEN YEARS LATER.
In the foregoing pages I have tried to set forth the facts as
they seemed to me at the time, and to do this with all possible
considerateness and charity. But seen through the long telescope
of fifteen years, and from a totally different angle of vision, the
whole affair takes on a different aspect. I now perceive that our
Woman's College building, its traditions, plans and purposes, all
suited admirably to an independent institution, were not adapted
to our relations as a department. The cost of this building
greatly embarrassed the trustees, upon whom the failure of otu:
Moral Hortiadture in Universities. 241
sabscription list, after the Chicago fire, threw burdens greater than
they fielt able to bear, and probably prejudiced them somewhat
against our movement. The steward, who was authorized by
the president to conduct prayers in my stead, was a Methodist
nitni«gt<»r and a gentleman of fine attainments, for whose dignity
his brother minister showed a consideration that was perhaps no
more than due.
But the clashing of my theory of a woman's college against
our president's theory of a man's university was the stomf center
of the diflSculty. An executive chief, the law of whose mind
made general supervision his policy in the departments, was sud-
denly exchanged for one, the law of whose mind made special
snpervisioii the necessary policy and I, at least, as a departmental
leader, did not take kindly to the change ! Young men students
helped on the revolt against the restrictions that seemed to me
essential after my plan of self-government was set aside, and their
watchword, "Equal rights for us all," was certainly chivalric, and
in m deep sense, just. So far as the difficult question of govern-
ment in such an institution is concerned, I would now say, with
what seems to me to be the clearer sight of these more impartial
years : put all on the same plane, but lift the plane on which
young manhood stands to the higher level of young womanhood.
Have m coll^ne senate of students made up of representatives fi-om
all departments, and let them conduct the government. This
would break down the false ideas of ' ' honor ' ' that are among the
student's greatest temptations ; banish the hatefulness of espion-
age and give the noblest incentives to truthfulness in word and
deed. With present light, I would organize a school as the
national Government is organized — the college president and
faculty being analogous to the Supreme Court — and would make
the discipline of our young people's formative years a direct prep-
aration and rehearsal for their participation in the government of
their country, later on. This would leave the minds of teachers
fi-ee to develop their specialties of instruction, and to lay deep
and broad foundations for the ripe scholarship that is the glory
of a great seat of learning. Moral horticulture at home and at
school must always be the basis of success in developing Christian
character among students, but participation in the government
would i^ace them in organic contact with the wisest and most
16
242 Peace-tnaking,
parental minds among their teachers, and thus head and heart
culture would go on side by side. So much for my present
outlook and theory of school government, which, if I were to
begin my district school in Harlem at fifty, as I shall not, instead
of at twenty as I did, should be at once instituted in place of a
set of rules with a rattan back of them. And were I now at
Evanston, I would urge this view with what I fear might be
regarded as ** pernicious activity'* upon the grave and revered
leaders who very likely know a hundred times better than I do
how to conduct a university.
It grieves me that I can not truthfully say I left the Dean-
ship of a college and a professor's chair in one of America's best
universities on purpose to take up temperance work, but the
unvarnished tale here told must forever dispel that rare illusion.
It is however true, that having left, I determined upon temperance
work in face of tempting offers to teach in New York City and
several other centers, and held to temperance work though de-
lightful positions outside its circle have been open to me all along
the years. Nor is there any merit in this constancy ; I had, at
last, found my vocation, that is all, and learned the secret of a
happy life.
A few months after I left Evanston and while I was president
of Chicago W. C. T. U., Mr. Robert Pearsall Smith, a wealthy
Philadelphia manufacturer, and at that time a leading evangelist,
came to Chicago and gave Bible readings of wonderful power, in
Lower Farwell Hall. I remember he was staying at the Sherman
House, where he invited several ladies and gentlemen to dine
with him, and afterward I had an earnest conversation with
him about the Christian life. I told him of the circumstances
under which I left the University, and that I had unkind feelings
toward several who were then connected with it, that it was
the first time in my life that I had for any length of time felt
other than cordial good will toward every human being, and
though I was now greatly ameliorated in mind toward all, I
still felt and wished to do something farther in the direction
of a more friendly understanding with some of those whose asso-
ciate I had so recently been. ** There is but one thing to do, my
friend," he said; "take the morning train for Evanston, see
each and all between whom and yourself there is the faintest
A Winsome Thing is the Human Heart. 243
cloud, and without asking them to make any acknowledgment
whatever to you, freely pour out in their ears your own acknowl-
edgment, with the assurance of your affectionate good will.'*
And this I did next day. The recital of my experience in going
back on such an errand to '*my ain familiar town,'* would be
both pathetic and humorous. At first some of my dearest friends
declared I should do nothing of the kind, that the bad behavior
had been wholly on one side, and it would be an undignified and
hypocritical admission of ill-conduct if I should go and make
apology. My brother was specially strenuous on this point, but
I said to him, ** I am going to see the president of the University;
you are my only near male relative, and I think it behooves you
to act as my escort." When the matter was put before him in
this light he could not refuse to accompany me. There was a
revival meeting that night in the University chapel that we
attended and in which I was called upon to participate, which
I did. When it was over and nearly all had left the chapel, my
brother went forward to the president and said I wished to speak
to him and he would please tarry for a moment. How plainly I
can see at this moment the tall, slight figure of my brother as he
strolled up and down the aisle, at a distance, while in a recess of
the chapel I went to the president, saying as I extended my hand,
** I beg your pardon for everything I have ever done and said
that was not right," with other friendly words, assuring him that
I desired to be at peace with God and every human soul. He
received me with the utmost kindness and responded in about
these words: **To one who comes to me as magnanimously as
you have done, I surely can not say less than that I beg your
pardon," and from that hour we have been the best of friends.
He and my brother shook hands, too, which was no small victory.
Others whom I saw received me with tenderness even, and we
knelt in prayer with many tears, so that when I left the dear home
village and came whizzing back to my duties in the city, the
buoyancy of my spirit was greater than if I had been made that
day the heir to some rich inheritance. Nor do I know, nor ever
mean to know in this or any world, a reason why any human
being should hesitate to speak to me with cordiality and kind-
ness, or why any middle wall of partition should exist between
my spirit and any other human spirit that God has made.
244
Present Prosperity.
The vexed question of government received special attention
after I left, and I have every reason to believe that the Woman's
College has been under the accomplished Deans, Ellen Soal£ and
Jane M. Bancroft, and is under the present gifted Dean, Prof,
Rena A. Michaels, doing for young women all that their parents
could expect from a first-class institution, while the University
as a whole, with its two millions invested, its eleven elegant build-
ings, twelve departments, one hundred professors, and nearly
fifteen hundred students, greatly outranks any other west of
Lake Michigan, and richly deserves its name of the "North-
WBSTEKN ' ' in the modem sense of that great and comprehensive
designation. Steadily may its star climb toward the zenith,
growing clearer and more bright with each succeeding year !
' ^:|BJ0
a Srirrlrsfi Crahrlrr.
"Sleei' safh, O wavk-wokn mariner !
Fear not, to-nhiht, or .st<irm or sea.
The ear of Heaven hknds low to her:
He comes to shore who saii„s with me."
—X. P. Willis.
THE TIRELESS TRAVELER.
EARLY JOURNEYINGS.
One lonesome day in early spring, gray with fog and moist
with rain, a Sunday at that, and a Puritan Sunday in the bargain,
I stood in the doorway of our old bam at Forest Home. There
was no church to go to, and the time stretched out before me
long and desolate. I cried out in querulous tones to the two
who shared my every thought, ** I wonder if we shall ever know
anything, see anybody, or go anywhere ! " for I felt as if the close
curtains of the fog hedged us in, somehow, from all the world
besides. Out spoke my cheery brother, saying, ** Oh, I guess I
wouldn't give up quite yet, Frank!'' and sweet little Mary
clasped my thin hand with her warm, chubby one, looked into my
&ce and smiled that reassuring smile, as sweet as summer and as
fresh and fJEiir as violets. ** Why do you wish to go away ? " she
asked.
•* Oh, we must learn — must grow and must achieve ! It's
such a big world that if we don't begin at it we shall never catch
up with the rest," was my unquiet answer.
Always in later years when the world has widened for me,
as it has kept on doing, I have gone back in thought to that
gray, "misty, moisty morning, when cloudy was the weather,**
and been ashamed and sorry for the cross child I was, who had
so little faith in all that the Heavenly Father had in store.
My mother says I never crept, but, being one of those cos-
seted children brought up by hand, started at once, by reason of
the constant attention given me by herself, when I was less than
two years old, to walk, having declined up to that time to do
anything except sit in her arms. The first independent trav-
eling of which I am cognizant was running away, with that
primitive instinct of exploration that seems well-nigh universal.
246 My Father ^s Death.
Our overland trip to Wisconsin in my seventh year, two
visits to Milwaukee, the fair, lakeside city, and one to my birth-
place, comprised all the traveling done by me until we came to
Evanston to attend college.
I well remember the profound impression made upon me, at
nineteen years of age, by the first hotel I ever entered — the
Matteson House, Chicago. I can not pass the building that
now bears this name without shuddering recollections of the
impressive spectacle when we all sat down to dinner at what was
then one of the chief hotels ; the waiters (all white men) standing
in solemn line, then at a signal, with consummate skill and as
by "one fell swoop," inverting the covers on all those huge,
steaming dishes, without letting a drop fall on the snowy table,
ai^d marching out like a detachment of drilled soldiers ! And
never did a sense of my own small size and smaller knowledge
settle down upon me quite so solidly as when one of those fault-
lessly attired gentlemen in claw-hammer coat and white cravat
asked me **what I would have.'* I glanced helplessly at my
good father ; his keen eyes twinkled, he knew the man oppressed
me by his likeness to a clergyman ; he summoned him for a con-
ference, and chose my dinner for me. But I was distressed for
fear I should do something awkward under these strange circum-
stances, ate almost nothing, and had a wretched, all-overish sense
of being unequal to the situation. Helplessly I envied the fair
girl of sixteen who sat beside me, and was full of meny quips
with father, and not at all concerned about her conduct or her-
self—my beautiful sister Mary.
When we came home from my year as " preceptress '* in
Lima, in the spring of 1867, we found my dear father in what
proved to be the last stages of consumption. Hoping that a re-
turn to his early home and the society of his near relatives would
be beneficial, Kate Jackson and I induced him to go with us to
Churchville, in September, where he remained with his only
brother, Zophar Willard, and his youngest sister, Mrs. Caroline
Town, until the 24th of January, 1868, when his worn body suc-
cumbed to its inexorable fate, and his triumphant spirit wafted
its way to heaven
Inasmuch as my father was with his family and had mother
to care for him, I sought employment as a teacher once more,
The Sad Home-going. 247
the impaired fortunes of our house seeming to make this requisite.
I had secured a situation as teacher of English Composition in
Lasell Female Seminary, Aubumdale, Mass. My trunks were
packed to go there from Kate's home in Paterson, when a letter
from mother made me feel that my destiny did not lie in that
direction. I therefore telegraphed to father, ** I wish to come to
you ; shall I not do so ? " Receiving his reply, ** Come at once,'*
Kate and I set out for Churchville, where for two months or
more my only thought was to help as best I might in the care of
my father, who was confined to his bed, and with whom mother
and I took turns in watching for sixty nights, she having already,
with my uncle and aunt, had the care for nearly two months.
This season of solemn vigils was the most reflective of my life.
In the silence of the night, how many times I sang to my &ther
the old h3rmns dear to us at home, and read or wrote while he
slept. The devotion of my mother and of my father* s relatives
can not be described — it was complete. Our loyal friend Kate
settled herself in a quiet home across the street and was with us
daily. When the sad home-going came, she was one of the com-
pany. A committee sent for the piupose met us on the train
some hours before we reached Chicago, and when we arrived in
Evanston at midnight with our precious burden, lights in the
homes of our friends all along the streets we traversed, spoke elo-
quently of the sympathy and thoughtfulness they felt for us in
our sorrow, and our home was bright with their presence and the
manifold tokens of their loving care.
All that winter, mother, Kate and I kept house together. In
the spring we went to visit my brother Oliver and his family in
Appleton, Wis., where mother remained, and whence going to
New York, Kate and I sailed on our long, adventurous journey.
And now, to show how it came about that I had the great
advantage of living, studying, and traveling abroad from May
1868 to September 1870, I will give a sketch of my dear friend,
KATE JACKSON.
On my rettim ftx)m Pittsburgh in the summer vacation of
1864, I went according to my custom to the regular prayer-
meeting in our old church in Evanston, and participated accord-
ing to my custom in the exercises. At the close of the meeting
^4^ Katharine A. Jackson.
when I greeted my true and tried friends, Dr. D. P. Kidder and
family, I found with them a young lady who had been for some
months their guest. Many years before, her father had been a
member of Dr» Kidder's church, in Paterson, N. J., and the two
families were special friends. The young lady's name was
Katharine A. Jackson, and her father was James Jackson, founder,
and at that time proprietor, of the New Jersey LoccMnotive Works.
He was a self-made man, of great force of character and the
sterling uprightness and energy of a North-of-Ireland Protestant.
He had btiilt up a fortune for himself and family, and his daugh-
ter Kate had received a careful education at the Indies' Seminary
in Wilmington, Del., where she was foremost as a scholar, having
a very exceptional gift for the languages, especially Latin and
French. She had been tho. salutatorian of her class, and since
graduation had gone on with her studies until she was remarkably
accomplished in her specialties. This young lady, not then a
Christian, nor, as it would seem, even '* seriously disposed,"
always declared that she took a liking to me on sight, or rather
on sound, for I think it was my simple and fearless testimony as
one who wished to lead a Christian life that first attracted her» a
fact that has always made me thankful.
Being of a very enterprising disposition, Kate went a year or
two after her graduation away down to Brenham on the Brazos
River, Texas, where she taught French in Chapel Hill Seminary,
only coming home when the war broke out. She had lost her
mother early in life, and for that reason did not live at home.
We were much together that simimer, and when I assumed
the principalship of the Grove School in Bvanston, she, just for
the novelty of it, assisted me, and gave much additional popu-
larity to the school by teaching French. When I was chosen
corresponding secretary of the American Methodist Ladies' Cen-
tenary Association, in 1866, Miss Jackson did much writing for
me, and helped me on in every way she could ; and when I went
as preceptress to Lima, N. Y., she accompanied me, having the
French classes there.
One pleasant day at Lima, she said, '' Go home with me at
Christmas, for I am bound to coax my father to agree that you
and I shall make the tour of Europe.'' I looked into her face
with large-eyed wonder and delight. To see the countries of
My Benefactors. 249
which I had read so much, and the homes and shrines of the
great and good, had been one of my cherished dreams. I thought
that its fulfilhnent would sometime come to me, but supposed it
would be late in life.
When the holidays came, Kate and I went to Paterson, N. J.
A handsome carriage with a high-stepping span and coachman
in livery was at the train. A gentleman of about sixty years of
age, with iron-gray hair, shrewd face as keen as it was generous,
and the slightest suspicion of Scotch-Irish brogue, beamed upon
us as we approached, and welcomed us to his beautiful home. It
was James Jackson, a man whom my long acquaintance with his
daughter had prepared me to admire and respect, and through
whose liberality I was soon to have one of the crowning blessings
of my life. He readily fell in with the project of his daughter
Kate and told me not to feel in the least under obligations to
himself or to her, for he had long desired that she should go
abroad, but had never until now found any one with whom he
felt inclined to send her. This gracious speech of the generous
gentleman dispelled ray scruples, which, indeed, were not strong,
as Kate and I had been for years devoted friends. And so it
came about that good James Jackson and his daughter are among
the foremost of the beautiful procession of helpful souls that have
so many times stood for me at the parting of the ways and
pointed onward.
When we started on the long journey. May 23, 1868, I saw
that honest, brotherly face with the sweet countenance of his
youngest daughter, Carrie, close beside it, as the two stood under
one umbrella in the soft May shower and watched us as our
steamer parted from the wharf, we gazing on them with loving
eyes until in the distance they grew dim and faded out of sight.
That manly face we never saw again. In less than two years
Kate's father had gone home to heaven.
PRELIMINARY.
Previous to going abroad I had visited my birthplace and
Milwaukee, as already stated, been once to Pittsburgh, and twice
to New England ; the ocean, Niagara and the White Mount-
ains being all that I had seen of Nature's loftiest mood. To
visit the Capital of our own country, the only Eastern city that
250 Four Hundred Fellow-travelers.
we had not yet seen, struck us as eminently fitting, and we went
there just before sailing. Its glories fired our patriotism tre-
mendously, and nothing that we beheld beyond the sea was ever
admitted to be so grand as the great dome ** where Fame's proud
temple shines afar." We shook hands with President Johnson
at the White House and were present, thanks to cards from
Hon. Norman B. Judd, at one session of the Impeachment Court.
My former friend of the Northwestern Female College, Evanston,
Mrs. Jane Eddy Somers, now principal of Mt. Vernon Seminary,
was our hostess and cicerone.
While abroad, we visited almost everj*^ European capital,
large city, and specially interesting haunt of history, learning
and art, besides going north as far as Helsingfors, Finland, east
as far as the Volga banks in Russia, and Damascus in Syria ;
making the tour of Palestine, and going south far enough to look
over into Nubia on earth, and up to the Southern Cross in the
heavens. In all these joumeyings, so varied, diflBcult and dis-
tant, we did not lose a day through illness save by my brief
attack in Denmark, and our comrades paid us the compliment of
saying that we were ** as good travelers as men." We traveled
with four hundred different persons during our different trips
and had the comfort of believing that we were seldom, if ever, an
incumbrance. Dr. Bannister, through whose influence we were
admitted to the rare advantages of going through Palestine in
the company of a party of distinguished Christian scholars, was
especially proud of their verdict that we had not hindered them
nor made any complaint throughout the trip, though it involved
hardships to us unheard of and unknown until we braved the
terrors of ** camping out." My friend, Anna Gordon, has esti-
mated the distance traveled, abroad, and since then in the tem-
perance work of fifteen years, with the little flutterings that
preceded, as making a total of two himdred and fifty thousand
miles for the poor little girl that stood in the bam doorway and
thought she should never see anybody nor go anywhere ! But
the story will best be told from records made when the impres-
sions of all we saw were fresh upon the brain of one to whom the
world was new. From twenty volumes scribbled on the spot,
besides articles and letters, I make the wholly inadequate extracts
that follow :
Ocean Horrors. 251
So the long dream was coming true, and yet, somehow, ''it was not
like " — ^how could it be ? The Ideal world can never stoop to shore or sea,
but we are slow and sad to find this true. Kate and I looked into each
other's faces ; "I could cry this minute, but I won't," she said. And then
we talked of the kind, shrewd, grave face of her generous father and my
noble benefactor ; of his anxious, pathetic look after us as we started off all
alone for strange, unfriendly shores, and faces of other friends unknown as
yet.
All this while the nice looking little waiter, No. 2, left-hand side, at
two o'clock dinner — was putting on the dishes, and dinner would be ready
soon. We sat there silently, full of unusual thoughts. Looking over the
passengers we were disappointed in them. They were for the most part
quite mediocre in every sense — and probably they said the same of us ! After
a tolerable dinner we went below (the steamer now lying still waiting the
tide), and set our house in order for the voyage, changed our dresses, and
were innocently and unapprehensively putting the last touches upon our
ship-toilets, when, lo ! a pain that was not all a pain, but part a prophecy of
dreadful things to come, seized each of us. Five minutes thereafter I had
tumbled tumultuously into berth No. i, at the top, and was ** reaching" as
our stewardess calls it, and groaning with all the more vehemence because
so suddenly and totally surprised, for I had calculated with certainty upon
the very opposite of this result. Kate lay in her berth below me moaning
dutifully, but then, she had expected it. Well, for the next two or three
days I thought and did unutterable things. Sunday is a perfect blank. In
it I had just this one thought : " Let me lie still • let me keep this saucy
diaphragm in equipoise."
Our lively and unique companion. Miss C, of Columbus, Ohio, between
her "bad spells " and her tears, regaled us with exclamations of this charac-
ter: "Why did n*t they tell me it was this way and I would not have left
my country ! Oh ! why did n't somebody tell me it was this way f " empha-
sizing the words with soimds more expressive than all human language
could interpret, while listening to her I laughed like one who lived for laugh-
ter's sake alone. It is idle to attempt recounting the horrors of this voyage.
All these notes I am scrawling on Sunday, May 31, leaning my head against
the berth's side, and dipping my pen from a wine glass, furnished by our
stewardess, whom at first we voted a virago, but have now "learned to
love," have blessed with a sovereign, and voted a power in the earth.
June I. — This bright Monday morning we were a hilarious ship's com-
pany, for to-day we should tread solid ground once more. We dressed " for
shore, " packed our portmanteau, and went on deck, where blue and distant
loomed the longed-for land. Keen indeed was our pleasure in the sight of it.
The scene was charming. All about us gently rippled the quiet sea.; sails
shone against the far-off, slate-hued horizon ; birds, white and graceful of mo-
tion, careered around us ; clouds lay anchored here and there ; lines of dim
coast stretched out along^de to the left ; bunting flew merrily aloft ; every-
body was on deck in better dress than usual and with sunnier faces ; the
sailors furled the hanging canvas and made all trim for entrance to the har-
953 Tkt Blarney Skmes.
bar. And so Uie fint bright day passed with talk and Unghter, a>d toward
evcfiiag a tug shot ont from Queenstown harbor and we stepped giugerlj'
vpaa its slippery deck, endured its wretched accommodations cheerfully,
thongb r«iu began to fall and wind to blow, ontil they moored us alongside
the steamer "City of Cork," and the inevitable custom-bouseofficentook us
in charge. They went rapidly thiougb the form of unlocking our trunks,
while we stood 1^ unconcerned, looking over the magnificent Cove of Cork,
and wondering that it did n't feel queer to be in sight of Qneenstown shorea.
Soon we sped across the steamer's deck, went on shore, walked up strange
streets, striking jubilant feet firmly upon belored terra firma ; peeped into
cnrioua looking shops, talking and laughing, half beside ourselTes with
pleasure, dangerously amused at the little donkeys, almost delirious over
that intnnsically ludicrous, extravagantly rollicking contrivance, an Irish
janntittg car. And so we reached the depot at nine o'clock, P. M., broad day-
light at that, and took the cars for Cork, fburtaen miles away. We tried to
notice everything, even to the shape of the chairs and pattern of the
paper at the Queenstown station ; asked questions 4 la Yankee, and learned a
great deal ; drove to the Imperial Hotel, Pembroke street, Cork, had supper
at eleven o'clock in anelegantcoffeeroom, andwent tobed. In the morning
we chartered a jatmting car for Blarney Castle ; rode enchanted through
hedge-bordered roads to the famous castle, kiosed both the Blarney stones
(a gentleman giving na pieces of the real one, that we might carry the spell
away with ns) ; ^mbed to the topmost peak of the castle, and went down
into its dnngems ; got shamrock from inside the castle, went through Blar-
ney groTca, and what not We then went laughing back to Owk, in the
dear, ridiculous, old jaunting car ; were invited by &iends to go with them
to Eillamcy, orerland, one hundred miles by private coach. So at ten
o'clock we all departed amid smiles and bows of waiters and chamber-
maids (thinking of "ipntnitics "), for the classic lake scenery of County
Keny.
Itinerary, 253
imCERARY OP FOREIGN TRAVEL.
May 23, 1868. — Sailed from New York in steamship City of
Paris, Inman Line.
June 3. — Landed at Cork, Ireland.
June 3 to June 13. — Ireland.
June 13 to 30. — Scotland.
July 1 to 25. — England.
July 25 to 29. — Paris, France ; Geneva, Switzerland.
July 29 to September 12. — Geneva to Nijni Novgorod via Den-
mark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, returning via Poland to
Germany.
September 12 to December 20. — Berlin, Dresden, Leipsic.
December 20, 1868 to June 26, 1869. — Paris.
June 26 to July 28. — Belgium, Holland and the Rhine.
July 28 to September 2. — Switzerland.
September s to January 24, 1870. — Italy.
January 24. — Sailed from Brindisi for Alexandria, Egypt.
February i to 21. — Cairo, to the first cataract of the Nile (Island
Philae) and return.
February 23. — Climbed the Pyramid of Cheops.
Mareh 6. — Sailed from Port Said to Joppa.
Maicfa 7 to 18. — Jerusalem.
March 18 to April 9. — Camped out in Palestine and made a trip
to Damascus and Baalbec.
Ajnil 9. — Sailed from Beyrout to Cypress, Smyrna, Ephesus,
Athens and Constantinople.
April 29. — Sailed from Constantinople via Bosphorus, and up
the Danube to Vienna via Hungary.
May 4 to 16. — ^Vienna to Paris.
June 15. — Paris to London, Southampton, Isle of Wight, etc.
July 15. — Returned to Paris.
August 23. — Left Paris for Liverpool.
August 27. — Sailed from Liverpool in steamship City of Russia,
Cunard Line.
September 5, 1870. — ^Arrived in New York.
254 ^^ Lordship.
THE GIANT*S CAUSEWAY.
A morning's ride through broad and prosperous fields brought
us to the pretty village of Port Rush, with its fine outlook over
the sea and far away. The Antrim Arms hotel received us
hospitably and an appetizing dinner fortified us for the after-
noon's performance.
Chartering a huge and jolly jaunting-car for our party of six
explorers, we dashed off in pursuit of Nature's freakiest freak.
Our road lay along the shore but lifted high above it. We looked
down to see fantastic carvings of the waves upon the yielding
rocks. **Tell us everything you know,'* was our moderate in-
junction to the middle-aged Hibernian who held the reins, and to
do this he spared no pains.
** There's the Pope's nose ! " he called out, soberly pointing
with his long whip to this striking feature of the Holy Father's
face, wave-sculptured, glistening in the sunshine and outlined on
the blue-black ground of the sea. Our bright little fiiend, Willie,
excelled us all in his appreciation of this piece of chiseling, and
voted it, afterward, worth the whole Causeway.
** His lordship's residence " was pointed out, a fine country-
seat, at a distance, almost concealed by the trees las is * * exclu-
sively" done in these aristocratic regions), and a question brought
out this brief ** charcoal sketch " of the high-bom gentleman who
owns the ** Giant's Causeway."
**Sir Edward's not a bad landlord, only he sweeps every-
thing away. Just runs down here for money when he's out, and
then off again to London, to spend it on his pleasures. But, ah !
his steward is the man we're all in dread of. If one of the ten-
ants would give him an offense in the least thing, then you'd see
the beauties of a free government ! Out goes the tenant into the
street after getting a notice served on him to quit. Some of us try
to improve our little farms, but what good is it ? Down comes the
man they call a ** val-u-a-tor," and because we've made them
worth so much the more, on goes more rent to keep us always
sweating away just the very same as our fathers did before us,
for if we don't pay the rent we have nothing to do but just tramp
off as fast as we please. But Sir Edward, he spends nothing at
all on the soil, and we've no ambition in consequence of it."
**// Gives a Chance,^* 255
"You must come to our country across the water,*' said we,
much interested in the man's straightforward words.
** Then, ah ! I knew you was from America, Miss," said he ;
*• that's the country where they'll give a well-doing man a chance,
we all know that, and we'd go there on our hands and knees only
for the water being in the way !"
Palaces, museums, picture-galleries are fine things in their
places ; sometimes as we wander over these rich lands we con-
trast their splendid treasures with our emptiness at home, and feel
a moment's discontent. But we think of these words, and are
too grateful for complaint, too proud for boasting, ** America's
a country where they 7/ give a well-doing man a chance — ^we all
know that."
About a mile from the Causeway, two guides came trotting
along the road, anxious to enlighten us as to the merits of the
case in hand, and we engaged one as a refuge against the other
and any who might subsequently present themselves.
** Will you please look over my book of recommends ? " said
John McLaughlin, the chosen of our judgment, hanging on pre-
cariously to our rapid car, and we examined sundry soiled auto-
graphs of tourists, noble and otherwise, all of whom concurrently
attested the varied virtues of the said John in his capacity of
guide.
** Indeed, I'm the man that Harper says ye ought to have, in
his fine leather-covered book," quoth he, winking triumphantly
at his disappointed rival, who whined out, "It's my turn, any-
how, and I'll be even with ye yet."
We dismounted in front of John's cottage, the tonguey owner
thus introducing it : ** Ye must know, ladies and gentlemen, that
I have the honor to live in the house fartherest north of any in
old Ireland. Here I have lived for twenty years, and a snug
place it is, as ye all see."
Not altogether unattractive looked the man's home, with
white-washed walls, and grass and trees about it. Not far off,
around the curving crags, we came, by diligent and dangerous
scrambling in a down-hill direction, upon a cove, where tossing
upon the restless waves was a small boat in which we embarked
for a general in-look on the Causeway. Four oarsmen had the
boat in charge, and with tossings and dippings not conducive to
256 Almost Disappointed.
content on the part of the timid, nor to interior tranquility in
those of dizzy head and squeamish stomach, we put to sea, while
John McLaughlin, oblivious to fears or qualms uttered or unex-
pressed, proceeded with great fluency to give the following ** true
history of Giant's Causeway." ** Ye must know, ladies and gen-
tlemen, that long and long ago it was, we had here in Ireland a
giant, the like of which was never before seen nor will be seen
again. His name was Fin McCaul, and what he could n't do
nobody else need try. It so happened that at the same time
they had in Scotland another giant, a tremendous fellow and
jealous of our Fin, as a matter of course. Well, this Scotch
fellow sent word to Fin that the only reason he did n't come and
fight him was, there was no bridge across. So what does Fin do
but falls to work right immediately and all his servants with him,
and they make the genteelest road (or ' causeway ' as they used
to say in old times) from here to the other side. Then they had
their matched fight, and you may be sure Fin did n*t leave a whole
shred of the other fellow, but pounded him up fine, and that
was the last of him. So then when there was no use of it any
more, in the course of time the Causeway sank into the sea, and
there's nothing left of it now but some remains on the far side,
called Fingal's Cave, and this here that you can see for your-
selves. This is just the very same as it was in his day, and when
the sea is still you can notice it going out into the water as far as
you can see at all. "
Highly instructed and entertained by this historical account,
we viewed with increased interest the outlines of this astonishing
piece of engineering, though its general appearance, at this dis-
tance, hardly met our expectations. Indeed, some of us vocifer-
ously informed the imperturbable exhibitor that it did n*t pay to
be tossed about in this fashion, and risk one's life in the bargain,
just to see some sloping, irregular rocks, stretching for some dis-
tance along the shore. ** Gentlemen and ladies have many times
observed the same to me, madam," he replied, touching his old
blue cap, ** but I just get them to wait a bit, and afterwards they
look upon it quite different to that."
The name- worthy heights and depths before us were now duly
indicated and described, a geography lesson ** with illustrations"
worth talking about. We declined to row into Portcoon Cave, the
Expectations Realized. 257
waves being so high that our heads must inevitably be bumped
against its roof, a tribute we would not pay even for a new sensa-
tion. **The Steckan," or chimney-tops, a couple of tall, con-
spicuous rocks, were pointed out with the story that when the
Spanish Armada passed this coast they fired upon these rocks
through some misapprehension, and that right here, some of its
ships going to pieces, the organ upon which King Philip said his
Te Deutn should be played in Westminster Abbey (after the vic-
tory that he did n't win) came ashore and was conveyed to Trinity
College, Dublin, where we had seen it within a day or two. We
now returned to land, having as yet but a dim notion of the great
sight we had taken so much pains to see. Of our disappoint-
ment our guide was made repeatedly aware, but he bided his time
with an air of superior wisdom inspiring to behold, and profoimd
fisdth in the ultimate triumph of the great show over whose won-
ders he had so long presided. Marshaling us in line, he led us
up steep rocks and along devious ways, to inspect narrowly the
Giant's Road. From that time forth, our progress partook of the
character of an ovation. How very thoughtful everybody seemed !
Here came a young Hibernian of impecunious aspect, who urged
on our acceptance his collection of stereoscopic views illustrative
of scenery hereabouts. Each one of the four boatmen presented
a little box of pebbles, cr>\stals, shells, * ' Picked up right here at
the Causeway, sir.'* Half a dozen ragged urchins, none of them
over half a dozen years old, clamored for us to accept their her-
bariums of sea-weed, their curious bits of stone, their printed
** guides,*' their gathered flowers.
**Ye'll do as ye like," whispered the crafty McLaughlin
with an air of g^eat disinterestedness, *' I don't say but what all
these poor things have is very good, but, to tell the truth, I think
ye' 11 do better to look over me own assortment at the house when
we've done here."
Now we began to see that what we came to see was surely
worth the seeing. We stepped upon the Causeway, its surface at
the edge being, save for irregularities, quite like an incipient
Nicholson pavement ; traversed its whole extent (made up, some
careful counter says, of four thousand columns set side by side),
and every moment the wonder grew upon us that purest nature
could so mimic purest art. A monstrous puzzle it must all be,
17
256 ''The Wishing WeU:'
which some well-instructed giant hand might take apart ; or
else a honey-comb of the Olympian gods, gone gray with age
and hardened into stone.
On we went, over the ends of those most curious columns,
which extended, nobody knew how far below us, now stepping
up, now down, as the arrangement of the surface varied, for the
appearance everywhere is startlingly like that of intention, as if
the great artificer had turned aside to rest a little while, leaving
his carefully wrought plan to be completed on his return.
I have no wish to attempt a description in the abstract, but to
relate in the concrete what we saw, and how we saw it, hence it
becomes essential to confess that for thought deeply interesting to
the observer and inspired by the peculiarities of his surroundings,
we had little peace. Our retinue of pests increased in geometric
ratio as we proceeded ; we reached **The Well,'* a several-sided
indentation, whence an old man with a ready cup dipped water
for us, drinking which we were to ** wish a wish," which in a year
was surely to *'come true.*' A crowd of witnesses surrounded
us as we went through this ceremony and silently chose our
choicest wish, with as much sincerity as if we had believed the
story of its prospective fulfillment ; and while it was in our
thoughts, the dear, sacred, mystical desire, a ruthless, wrinkled
hand thrust before us a bunch of dripping sea-weed and the old
woman owner of both exhorted us to buy, with this clinching
argument, *' The nobility and gentry, they always buys of me ! "
At the same time, bright little Jessie P. was assailed by an
itinerant shell dealer with his flattering unction, *' Indade, darlint,
yer have the most illegant foot that ever came upon the Cause-
way in my time, and I've been here since ever I can remember
anything at all." And she was a Chicago girl !
On we labored, perseveringly, until we reached the ** Wish-
ing Chair," a depression formed by the removal of a section or two
of these carefully-fitted stones, and a most unluxurious seat. We
were now introduced to what the guide called * ' The Particular
Stones," those of shapes less frequent than the four, five and six-
sided, which make up the body of the Causeway. There are
septagons and octagons, two nonagons and a single triangle among
all the one thousand stony illustrations of geometry that make
up the vast structure. Specimens of every style having been
TTie Causeway Financially Considered. 2%,^
examined and a tiny piece of the triangle hammered off (strictly
"by permission ")» we next analyzed in cursory sort the back-
ground of the picture, the tall basaltic columns that rear them-
selves farther from the sea, behind the shelving floor that we had
thns fisu' trodden. One of these is sixty-three feet high above the
surface of the ground. How far it may extend beneath, the
wisest can not estimate. In one of the columns, of which we got
a long profile view instead of the mere surface one seen in the
foreground of the Causeway, there are thirty-eight different
pieces, all fitted with the nicest accuracy, but each so separate
fitnn that above and below itself, that an arm strong enough
could unjoint the whole column as children do toy steeples made
of spools.
** The Giant's Loom Post,*' is a splendid tower made up this
way, standing out in strong relief, but not facing the sea, and
hence invisible in general views. Here the old Road Builder was
wont to spin, including that effeminate accomplishment among
numerous more weighty ones. His organ, splendid but tune-
less in its basaltic pipes, stands opposite. The jack-stones with
which he was fond of playing in intervals of labor, the prints of
his huge knees made while enjoying this game ; the fan mosaicked
by him in his road for a lady admired and admiring, and, incon-
gruously, perhaps, the pulpit whence he sometimes preached, all
were pointed out and served the guide as reminders of anecdotes,
sometimes witty, often dull, always related with an air of deep
conviction, and listened to in a similar spirit, by me, at least.
Our expressions of appreciation satisfied him fully at last, and he
begged permission to pack and send to Liverpool for shipment to
the land of lands, at least one specimen joint apiece for us, from
those unclassified fossil remains. Pentagons were dear, octagons
at a premium, but hexagons could be had, I think, of ordinary
size (say a foot or two in length and four to six inches in diameter)
for the paltry sum of eight or ten golden dollars. We began to
wonder whether Lord Antrim, or Sir Edward (whose income is
set down as two hundred and fifty thousand dollars annually),
had &rmed out the eighth wonder of the world, but we remain
ignorant on that score.
We returned from the '* Grand '* across the ** Honey-Comb "
and *• Well" causeway (the three divisions which are yet undi-
26o Eden^s Garden,
vided, being designated thus). ** A belemnite and two ammon-
ites and all for one half crown ! *' screamed a little ne'er-do-weel
who might have offered herself as a specimen Bedlamite with
some propriety, as she outskipped her comrades and presented her-
self prominently beside us. Terms so geological from a young
nondescript like that, seemed whimsical enough.
Along the crag-bordered road we walked as evening fell,
breathing the vivid ocean air, a straggling procession at our
heels, through whose clutches we had passed imscathed.
We gathered for ourselves sweet flowers with faces strange
and new, and then rode homeward in the shadow of the lime-
stone cliflfe, with outlook on the far, mysterious sea.
MY TRIP TO THK GARDEN OF EDEN.
' * The gentle reader ' ' will surely be decoyed by such a head-
ing into a perusal of my first sentence. But my conscience drives
me to the avowal that I have in mind only some notes of an
excursion to the Isle of Wight. I realize the duplicity of trying
to sail into the uncertain harbor of **the public ear** on false
pretenses. England calls its pet island "Eden's Garden," but
the mother-land is so fair that I should hesitate to give the palm
to a daughter even so lovely as this. We landed at Cowes, — the
paradise of yachtsmen, — rumbled through its narrow streets on
top of an omnibus, overgrown and overcrowded, to Newport.
Leaving Newport, we jogged on to the prett>' little to\vn of
Carisbrooke, whence we walked up to the castle, the more active
of our party making its circuit, and finding eveiy lonesome room
haunted by thoughts of Good Queen Bess and stubborn, unfort-
unate King Charles I. A young woman of quite literary aspect,
with a wise looking book under her arm, opened the wicket for
us, and we thought her an obliging tourist till she took the prof-
fered coin, so seldom refused in Her Majesty's dominions, and
told us how to '*do" the fine old ruin. But, somehow, after
Netley Abbey, Carisbrooke seemed tame and too far gone for
much enthusiasm. What I shall remember longest is its fort-
ress well — excavated in forgotten centuries to a depth of three
hundred feet or more — from whose black abyss the most forlorn,
demented-looking donkey I ever saw drew a full bucket for us
by toddling along a great wheel in tread-mill fashion.
^^ Far from the Madding Crowds 261
Going to Carisbrooke village, near by, we had a homely,
but most toothsome English dinner at the Bugle Hotel. The
mistress of the house waited on us herself, cutting the "half-
gallon loaf, ' * and telling us she once saw Tennyson : * * that is, an
ordinary looking man passed by, and afterward somebody said
*he*d wrote a book about a sailor that went off and got ship-
wrecked, and when he came back, his wife was married again.* '*
She always thought the person that pointed this man out to her
called his name Venison! Over the midday meal our party de-
cided upon a separation. Four of them openly declared their
indifference to the ** Dairyman's Daughter*' and all the haunts
pertaining to her, and expressed their fixed determination ** to
see the inside of Osborne ' ' if money would purchase that beatific
vision. But Kate and I decided on the daughter of the dairy-
man, so, complying with the suggestion of our landlady, we
chartered ** our vicar's chaise, and the nice, stiddy young man
that drives it, ' ' and off we bowled through the shadiest and love-
liest of lanes. Of all the hamlets that English authors set before
us, or pensive fancy conjures when we read about the mother-
land, this of Arreton, at which we soon arrived, seems to me the
most perfect fulfillment of one's ideal. What a good and igno-
rant life one might here lead ! How distant from the pleasures,
sins, and numberless amenities of this our wide, wide world ;
**so near and yet so far'' from all that pains and pleases on
the turbulent, but buoyant sea of art, business and politics, that
we call life ! What a host of intricate relationships to the world
we touch at points so many and so varied, are brushed aside like
cobwebs, as one enters the still graveyard where simple Elizabeth
Walbridge has slept so sweetly and so long !
In the cool shade of the gray and friendly church — the very
quaintest in the kingdom — how many a fitful fever has been
quenched ; and looking far above its dim old spire into the quiet
heavens, what downlike peace has fallen into tumultuous hearts !
If one should ask me the place of all that I have seen in my rest-
less wanderings over the earth which lent itself most readily to
sober second thought — the place where one could be most truly
"in but not of" this world; did any seek the sanctuary of a
silence sacred, but not terrible ; of a serenity profound as that
which glorifies the brows undreaded death has touched, yet sweet
262 The Dairyman's Daughter,
and human as the smile upon a sleeping baby's face — I would
point him to this tree-embosomed hamlet. Here the invisible
spirit's breath alone seems to stir the quiet leaves, and the very
sunshine is toned and tempered as one sees it not elsewhere.
The clustered homes look as if they had grown here, like the
trees which hide them ; one's fancy can not make itself believe
that ever sound of hammer or of saw was heard in a retreat so
still. The solemn church has a look so venerable, one well
might believe it a feature of the scene as natural as the bowlders
on the highway.
Around it the silent graveyard stretched its quiet shadows
on that still summer noon. A little child, not six years old, was
playing near the roadside as we alighted trom the carriage, and
at a sign from the ** stiddy young man," she conducted us to the
church-yard, walking demurely down the narrow lane before us,
finger in mouth, and looking a strange, elfish little guide, as she
threaded her way among the thickly strewn graves, guided us to
the rear of the church, quite under the shadow of its solemn
walls, crossed a small bit of sunlit sward, and stood beside a
plain white headstone much larger than herself. Resting her
hand upon it, she pointed to the name we sought and senten-
tiously observed, ** That's it." Beside the grave were two
others — that of the parents and sister of good Leigh Richmond's
heroine — the parents without tombstones, those of the two sisters
having been secured by public subscription. Nothing could be
simpler than these little monuments ; and Leigh Richmond's
epitaph written for that of the ** Dairyman's Daughter" is very
touching and appropriate.
I brought away with me a dandelion that was growing on
the grave I came to see, for I thought it a fit emblem, with its
modest stem and globe of gold, of the lowly life which yet was
glorified by some of the loveliest beams that make bright the Sun
of Righteousness.
The gray-haired sexton came across the little meadow to
show us the old church, in whose plain and unadorned interior
he seemed to take fully as much pride as the elegant beadle of
unmatched York Minster evinces in his own especial charge.
** There his some very hold brass in the chancel, ladies, you
really hoiightn't to miss of seein' hit," he said, touching his old
The Sorrowing Qtteen, 263
straw hat. But we anticipated seeing so much ** brass,'* ancient
and modem, in that museum of antiquities called ''Europe/* that
we declined, to the evident disgust of the exhibitor.
Reluctantly we turned away from Arreton hamlet— the ideal
home of a Rip Van Winkle sleep — and told our ** stiddy young
man who drives the vicar's carriage** to take us next to the cot-
tage of the dairyman. But that worthy felt called upon to reason
with us in this wise: ** Hit's a long ways off— three good miles
there and back ; and I'm persuaded you'd miss the six o'clock
boat for Southampton that I've given you my word you should
be in time for. Then again hit's nothing to see, I assure you,
ladies — ^being as common a cottage as there is on the whole island.
I can show you many a one like it. And, besides, you could n't
get in if you went ; for the present proprietor don't like troubling
himself for visitors, and it was recently a question of pulling the
hold thing down altogether." We ranged ourselves as usual on
different sides of the argument — Kate the conservative, I the
radical ; she cautious, I adventurous ; she saying, *' We must n't
miss the boat,'* and I, ** But we must see the cottage." How-
ever, with two against one, it is manifest who gained the day ;
we drove off regretfully to join our friends at Osborne — the
**stiddy young man," true to his word, pointing out a cottage
now and then with his long whip and turning toward me with
his squint eyes, saying, ** Hit's very like the dairyman's, I do
assure you. Miss, only far prettier, and better worth your while."
Alas, for those to whom a primrose is a primrose only !
We looked down the cool vista of Osborne from * * without
the gate," and were glad that within a home so sheltered and so
noble the lonesome queen can shut herself from the obtrusive
world, and hide her wound as does the stricken deer in the deep
wilderness ; and as we went our restless way we mused upon the
lesson to be gleaned from the reflection that the saddest woman in
England's realm wears England's crown upon her head, and lives,
sometimes, at least, in its " Garden of Eden.'*
It was a great transition to find myself next day swinging in
the globe at the top of St. Paul's Cathedral spire in London — im-
pelled to a gymnastic feat so senseless by the declaration of a
young Boston snob, that **No woman had done this, or could, or
should."
264 En Route for St. Bernard,
THE MONKS AND DOGS OF ST. BERNARD.
It was the twenty-seventh day of August, 1869. The Doc-
tor '*<iid n't think 'twould pay to climb such a tall hill just to
see a few dogs and some monks," and his wife was not physically
able, so we three insatiables, Kate, Sophie and I, gladly accepted
the invitation of Messrs. Smith and Jones to take the long-
desired excursion in their company. We did our best to get up
and off early, but it was half-past seven before ourselves, our
bags, guide-books and umbrellas were all fairly stowed away
in a carriage meant for four. We drove six hours along a well-
built road, through scenery much finer than we had looked for
on this pass which the books feel called upon to characterize as
inferior to most other Alpine heights. We did not at all agree to
this, particularly Mr. Jones, who was in a sort of fine frenzy all the
way — only Mr. Jones is dry in manner, and, like a glacier river,
apt to burst forth ** on a sudden.*' The villages we traversed far
surpassed in age, dirt, narrowness, and direct antagonism to their
natural surroundings, all that had preceded them in our two
months' observation of Switzerland. At Orsieres we spent a
spare half hour in the curious old church, which has a crucifixion
quite too sanguinary and awful to be long looked upon, and a
contribution-box with a jingling bell attached, which Mr. Smith
shook in our faces, with his g^eat laugh, frightening us lest priest
or sexton should appear. Nobody was present, though, except
two sober-faced little girls, who said that they had come to pray,
and who responded in pretty, serious fashion, to Kate's shower of
French interrogations.
There were quaint and curious explanations written in a
hand like our grandfathers', on paper yellow as theirs, of the
dim, but tawdry pictures on the wall, stating that certain purga-
torial exemptions might be reasonably hoped for by the faithful
who should repeat in front of them a certain number of Aves
and Paternosters. There was also a huge eye painted in water-
colors, likewise an ear, and a hand holding a pen, under which,
respectively, were written, **The Eye that sees all ! " **The Ear
that hears all ! " ** The Hand that writes all ! " This, perhaps,
is good — for peasants. I was indignant at the contrast between
the bedizened wall and the high, stiff, narrow seats for the hum-
ble congregation. It seemed curious, in such squalid villages.
On Napoleon's Trail. 265
to come upon Latin inscriptions over the houses, but these were
numerous, also saintly symbols and monograms. Great crosses
spread their sheltering arms along the roadside, almost always
with inscriptions, of which the most impressive was, ** Cruci
fidelis inler omnes. ' *
Erelong we struck the trail of the great Napoleon — that is,
its palpable remains. Mr. Jones kept a bright lookout, for he
thinks there never was but one man, and his initials were N. B.
The old, broken-down bridge by which the "greatest captain of
his own or any other age ' ' crossed this deep gorge, is near the
ancient village of St. Pierre, and a tavern hard by is called the
** Hotel of Napoleon's Breakfast."
I went back in thought to my old *' McGuiGfey's Third
Reader*' and the rough Wisconsin school-house, where I first
studied out its account of the great warrior's passage here, and
gazed upon its rude wood-cut of David's splendid equestrian pict-
ure, which I saw last year in the palace of Frederick the Great.
I linked the present and the past by a strong effort of imagina-
tion, and repeopled the silent cliffs and valleys with the invincible
army of thirty thousand men, and the dauntless leader who said,
*' Is the route practicable ? " and being answered, *' It is not, per-
haps, impassable," cried, " Move forward the legions ! " and a few
days later won Marengo and lost Desaix. To my unskilled eyes
the route did not appear so difficult as I had fancied, but it was
August, that was May, and snow blocked up the passage and be-
numbed the troops. Yet even Mr. Jones, the hero-worshiper,
who would have followed to the bitter end the leader whom
Madame de R^musat does not love, admitted that it "didn't
really look so dreadful as he had hoped it would."
At a lonely wayside inn we left the carriage, and Kate and
Sophie took mules while I went on foot with the two gentlemen.
Kate*s muleteer was a handsome fellow wnth a mouth gleaming
in ivory, and a tongue which proved that perpetual motion is no
impossibility. As a peasant woman with fantastic head-piece,
passed on her way to church, he remarked in French, *' Men are
not good at prayer, no more have they the time ; they leave it to
their wives. Women's eyes are always fixed on the sky, but
men's eyes are rooted to the ground." As he said this, he saluted
the woman and exclaimed, " Pray for us husbands."
266 Excelsior.
The way was enlivened by interesting talk, and I forgot to
change with Sophie at the place agreed upon, but climbed upward
on foot in the sudden twilight toward the famous home of animals
of whose noble deeds men might be proud, and of men whose
saintly lives recall that of the Master who pleased not Himself.
The way grew very drear>% the chill in the air seemed to pene-
trate our bones ; bare, gray and pitiless rose the cliffs on every
hand, and the eternal snows seemed not a stone's throw distant.
Travelers of all nations passed us on this strange road where
nature was so pallid and so cold ; quick-footed young pedestrians
from England, leisurely gray-mustached French gentlemen on
horseback, fat German ladies in chairs borne by two stout-armed
peasants, delicate-featured Americans, the women riding, the men
lightly walking at their sides. On we climbed, while Mr. Smith
impelled our flagging steps by an explosive recitation of Long-
fellow's ** Excelsior," the scene of which is here. Around a
sharp, rocky bend, up an ascent as steep as a house roof, past an
overhanging precipice, I went, leaving the gentlemen behind me,
in the enthusiasm Of the approach, and then the gray, solemn,
friendly walls of the great Hospice, which had seemed to me as
dim and distant as the moon's caverns, rose before me outlined
upon the placid evening sky. I stopped and listened eagerly as
I approached its open door, no sound but the gurgle of a distant
brook ; no living object but two great St. Bernard dogs seated
upon the broad, dark steps of stone.
A gentleman may be defined as a being always wisely and
benignantly equal to the occasion. Such a character appeared
upon the scene in the person of *' Reverend Besse," the ** Hospi-
table Father ' * and chief of the establishment. Our party in com-
mittee of the whole (and no '' minority report "), voted him the
most delightful man we ever saw. All that is French in manner,
united to all that is English in sturdiness of character, all that is
winning in Italian tones, united to a German's ideality, a Yankee's
keenness of perception, a Scotchman's heartiness, and an Irish-
man's wit — these qualities seemed blended in our "nonesuch"
of a host, and fused into harmony by the fire of a brother's
love toward man and a saint's fidelity to God. Young, fair, blue-
eyed, he stood among our chattering group like one who, from a
region of perpetual calm, dispenses radiant smiles and overflowing
The Hospice and Its Host, 267
bounty. So quick was his discernment and so sagacious was his
decision, that almost without a question he assigned us, in de-
tachments correctly arranged, to fitting domiciles ; made each one
fisel that he or she had been especially expected and prepared
for, and within five minutes had so won his way into the inner-
most recess of everybody's heart, that Mr. Jones expressed in his
own idiomatic way the sense of fifty guests when he declared,
**To such a man as that even the Little Corporal might well
have doffed his old chapeau." Who shall do justice to the din-
ner at that L-shaped table, where the Father sat at the head
and said grace, beaming upon his great cosmopolitan family with
that young face, so honest, gentle and brave ? Who but the jestful
climbers to whom rice soup, omelet, codfish and potatoes, stewed
pears, rice pudding, figs, filberts, cake and tea, seemed dulcet as
ambrosia on these inspiring heights ? Then came the long even-
ing around the huge and glowing hearth-fire. How soon we
felt ** acquaint"; how fast we talked in frisky French or wheezy
German, minding little how the moods and tenses went askew,
so that we got and gave ideas. The Father turned from side to
side answering with solicitous attention every question that we
asked, so that a mosaic of his chief replies would read something
like this :
* * Mademoiselle asks the indications of the thermometer this
August evening ? I learn the mercury stands already at forty-
five degrees Fahrenheit, and the boundary line of Italy is but five
minutes distant. Here, Brother Jean, please provide the beds
of all our guests with warming-pans.
**Yes, lady, our Hospice was founded nine himdred years
ago, by Count Bernard, of Savoy, who devoted forty years of his
life to entertaining and protecting, as we still try to do, the many
travelers who annually pass through these mountains between
Switzerland and Italy. About twenty thousand were cared for
each year in olden times, without the smallest charge being made
of rich or poor. Now, we have not so many, the facilities for
travel having so greatly improved. But a g^eat number come
over the Pass who are out looking for work, and there are also
many beggars. These we limit to three days' entertainment.
We would gladly keep them longer, but can not. Our dogs are
a cross between Newfoundland and Pyrenean, and after seven or
268 ''It is My CaUingr
eight years become rheumatic, and we are forced to kill them.
In winter travelers are obliged to wait at a place of refuge we
have provided, at some distance from these buildings, which are
on the very top of the Pass, until we send out a man and dog,
with refreshments fastened to the neck of the dog, who never
once loses his way, though the distance is long, the snow is often
thirty feet deep, and the only guide the man has is the great
banner-like tail of the dog waving through the storm. Last win-
ter we lost one of our noblest animals. A strange dog bit him
and severed an artery. The monks always go out in the most
dangerous weather. I lead them at such times. They are not
obliged to go — ^we make it perfectly voluntary.*'
Here Kate broke in with an important question : ** How do
you occupy your time in summer ? " * * Oh, Mademoiselle, we study
and teach — we had fifty students last season." **What do you
teach ? '' '* All that a priest ought to know — theology, philosophy,
the laws of the church. We know contemporaneous events, ex-
cept politics (! ) which we do not read." ** What is your age ? '*
here chimed in the practical Jones. ** Monsieur, I am thirty-
one." ('* But he does not look a day older than twenty-three,"
whispered poetical Sophie, and we all nodded our energetic
acquiescence in her figures. ) *' How long have you been here ? "
** Eleven years, and I remain in perfect health. My prede-
cessors in the office could not endure this high latitude —
three of them left in a period of four years." "Why are you
here ? " persisted Jones. The scene was worthy of a painter — that
shrewd Yankee, whose very figure was a walking interrogation
point, and that graceful, urbane monk, in his long cassock, as
leaning in his easy-chair and looking fonvard and a little upward,
he answered with slow, melodious emphasis, ' ' Brother, // is my
calling, that is all." So simple was his nature, that to have heard
** a call " from God and not obeyed it, would have seemed to him
only less monstrous than not to have heard any call at all ! At
early dawn we were wakened by men's voices in a solemn chant,
led by the Hospitable Father — and never did religion seem more
sacred and attractive than while we listened as through the
chapel door came the words of the Te Deum, consecrated by cen-
turies of Christian song, ' ' We praise Thee, O God, we acknowl-
edge Thee to be the Lord."
A Forward Glance. 269
PARIS.
January 3, 1869. — In the evening we were all assembled in the salon,
and Madame P., our teacher, telling us not to be scandalized, brought in the
cushion cover she is embroidering and her sister*8 sewing, and they both
proceeded to put in a solid evening at work. Her son, with two friends, sat
at the card table throughout the evening, and this was my first Sunday with
a French family in Paris.
Memorandum. — A man of all work is cleaning out Madame's salle d
ftuinger floor with a brush on his foot, and his foot plying actively from side
to side. A more excellent way this than to see Antoinette, the maid of all
work, on her knees with a scrub broom !
January 6. — Rejuvenated, recreated, by eight hours' continuous repose,
I have a mind to indicate here what has much occupied me of late, but what
I am not brave enough to execute, perhaps, though, if I were, I believe my
usefulness would exceed the measure it will reach in any other line of life.
Briefly, it is to study so far as possible, by reading, learning the languages
and personal observation, the aspects of the woman question in France, Ger-
many and England, and when I return to America, after two or three years*
absence, and have studied the same subject carefully in relation to my own
land, to talk in public of the matter and cast myself with what weight or
weakness I possess against the only foe of what I conceive to be the justice
of the subject, and that is unenlightened public opinion. Sometimes I feel
"the victory to be in me,*' often I do not. Always, I have dimly felt it to
be my vocation, but a constitutional dread of criticism and too strong love
of approbation have held me back. With encouragement, I believe myself
capable of rendering services of some value in the word-and-idea-battle
that will only deepen with years, and must at last have a result that will
delight all who have helped to hasten it.
Antoinette, the bonne^ from whom we are also striving to learn, as
everybody is fish for our net at present, told us that Monsieur M., husband
of Madame P., was the architect of the thirteenth ward of Paris ; that no
one could make the least alteration in his house, either to put in a window
or a pane of glass, without his permission. We told her how in free Amer-
ica every man chose the material and style that suited him, and no one
dared to interfere. She thought it evidently a liberty not to be envied,
and said we must have all sorts of odd looking streets as the result. Paris
is to be beautiful, that is decreed, and no private tastes or ignorances are
permitted to interfere with the plan.
This evening Madame talked frankly with us of her affairs. She said
that to-day the reader of the Empress brought her a message from Eugenie,
in answer to a request made on Madame's behalf by the Duchess de Sesto.
It seems that Madame applied for the rent of a tobacconist's shop to increase
her income, a curious thing on its face, and a request lodged in a curious
quarter. But harkee ! All the tobacco that comes to France is the property
of the government. There is no permission given to private individuals for
its importation or manufacture. The only manufactory in France is at Paris.
zyo The Legion of Honor.
The shops in which it is offered for sale buy their license of the government
at a fixed yearly sum. To the wives and daughters of military men who
have distinguished themselves, these license moneys are given as a support
by the government. Vacancies only occur on the death of some lady to
whom a license has been given. The Empress sent word to Madame that
it would be as easy to bite the moon with one's teeth as to get her a tobac-
conist's shop within six years, but that anything in her power she would
do, and she offered the Bourse to her for Henri, her son, that is, the right of
gratuitous education in the Napoleon Lyceum, one of the chief schools of
Paris ; but through the city, on account of her husband's services as an
architect, Madame already has that privilege. The Empress also offered to
put the little girls in a school of high grade, but Madame wisely says she
will never be separated from them. She expects, however, to obtain some-
thing desirable through the kindness of the Empress.
Later, came in Captain Roll^, a soldier of the regular army, full of con-
versation and of contradiction. He told us a marvelous story of an Amer-
ican born in Prance who has just inherited a million by the decease of a
miserly uncle, and from his fruit-stand on the streets of New York he has
been transported to the elegant establishment in this city of delights. The
Captain brought in his various crosses of the Legion of Honor, one for
evening, one for the parade, and a ribbon for daily use, with the various
official papers relating to his promotion, in all of which we were much inter-
ested. I think a Legion of Honor would be a decidedly good novelty to
introduce into America.
" This is a funeral of the fifth class," said Madame, scrutinizing a pass-
ing procession with her lorgnette from our lofty balcony. It seems there
is one grand establishment in Paris which takes charge of all the funerals.
There are seven grades, one orders whichever he can best afford for a friend,
and has no further concern about any of the details. At the church, whither
everybody is carried after death, whether he ever went before or not, one
orders a dozen or a half-dozen choir boys and many or few prayers, accord-
ing to the style of purse he carries.
January 24.— Just one year ago to-day my father died. How changed
is life since then for mother and for me! In the twilight Kate and I
have just been singing the hymns he liked tlie best, and which I often sang,
in the midnight hours to him, in those last times, so sad, so brightened in
their clouds by his victorious faith. No other hymns will ever be to me
like those on which his fainting spirit, sorely tried, was oflten borne alofl
toward the calm regions where he has now enjoyed our Saviour's presence
for one whole year, has learned so much, and delighted in the company of
those he loved most dearly when in this world.
In the evening came Mr. U., an accomplished French gentleman, with
whom we have fine opportunities for improving our grammar and accent.
We fell into a spirited discussion of tlie late war, our own at home. He
favors the South, thinks the liberation of the slaves without compensation
to the master is theft ; thinks the proclamation of emancipation was but a
vigorous stroke of policy to enfeeble the enemy and to curry favor with
French Home Life. 271
Europe ; thinks the North has crushed the South, which sentiment he illus-
trated by raising his boot with force and bringing it down upon the well-
waxed floor of the salon with ringng emphasis ; thinks the South was not
bound to stay in the Union, on the principle that what our ancestors agree is
nothing to ourselves, and prophesies another assassination of the nation's
chief officer, and a second effiision of blood. Nevertheless, he says the
South was not wise in going to war, and slavery is wrong, and ought to end,
but by fair means. He says that France and England should have helped
the South, for America is growing so powerful that, joined ^*ith Russia, she
will "meddle herself" in European politics one of these days. It is very
interesting to listen to the absurdity of these foreigners. I have not yet
seen one who did not at heart lean a little toward the South.
January 26. — ^The lecture over, we went to Madame Farjon's for the
evening and to tea, and had hours of what we most delight in — solid French.
It was pleasant to me to be able to understand a whole conversation in
another language, with the help of an occasional word from Kate, who is
always ready and willing to come to my aid. It is odd, but when she is a
moment absent, I do not altogether understand sentences that would g^ve
me no trouble if she were within earshot.
January 31. — We go almost daily to the College de France, where ladies
are allowed to listen to the lectures of the ablest men in Paris. I have
already acquired enough French to understand quite well.
I like my peeps at the domestic life of the intelligent, but undistin-
guished, in this wonderful city. In only one salon have I seen a carpet
over the entire extent — and the fire, or the want of fire ! Talk was had
about the fine coal and the cheerful flame, when we made our bargain to
come, but to-night we sat in the great bam of a room with a foot- stove
apiece filled with warm ashes, and shivered with the cold, although such
a day as this in an American January would be thought spring-like.
Finally, Kate and I, in desperation, sat down Ix^fore the chilly grate and
absorbed what heat it had, since we paid so much a week therefor. While
the others, with wraps about them, took their sewing and gathered around
the great lamp on the center-table, resigned to their habitual fate, and
possibly gained some heat from that luminary, I quietly mended the scat-
tered fragments of the fire, at which one of the children said, " OA,
malheuteuse ! " (unhappy one) for to touch a thing so sacred is presumption.
If father were here he would say, " The French know no more about com-
fort than my goose."
I have been noting the industry of Madamc*s little girls, one nine, the
other seven years old. They rise at six o'clock, breakfast on a bowl of tea
and bread, stay at their work-table and are employed with their governess
until noon, three days in the week, at grammar, reading, English (such Eng-
lish !) lessons. Twice a week their aunt gives them lessons on the piano ;
two or three times they go for a walk with Antoinette ; in the evenings,
directly after tea, they bring forth their light work from their neat and or-
derly workboxes and sew an hour, read a little quietly by themselves in
books taken from the Sunday-school library, and retire at eight or nine
2y2 Imperial Factories.
o'clock after ** embracing" all present in the most dutiful and affectionate
manner. The other evening Madame made a little sketch for them to copy
by way of variation. She keeps them to their tasks with gentle firmness,
calling them all endearing names from '*my angel" to '*my little one,"
and admirably directs their young activities.
February 8. — I remember reading in the traveler books that in Paris
one rarely saw a drunken man on the streets. This morning four reeled
past us as we went to church. I repeated what I had read to Madame P.
She said no error could be greater, that such sights were common, but gen-
tlemen never became intoxicated here either at home or on the streets.
She claimed that it was the blouse, not the broadcloth, that covered the back
of the inebriate, but said that other pleasures no less fatal attract "the better
class" of Frenchmen ! What standards have the Parisians and what won-
der that their language has no word for home !
In the evening, Madame*s brother and sister were here. He has lived
in South America, believes in slavery, and says in the funniest pronunciation
that he is a copper-head. He laughed at the "pretty President" we have
in General Grant, and when Kate, acting as mouthpiece for us both, because
she speaks French more readily than I do, pushed him to the wall in argu-
ment, he asked if she would marry a colored man. She replied with spirit,
** No, nor would I marry a Frenchman, either ! " at which remark general
horror was expressed and the argument was ended.
February lo. — We have been to see the process of making both tapestries
and carpets at the Imperial manufactory. In the former, the artist stands
behind his work, because every thread must be tied on the wrong side of it,
to leave a perfectly smooth surface upon the other. The picture he is to
copy is behind him. From time to time he puts a little mirror between the
threads and in it sees the progress of his work. The busy bobbin Hies in and
out in the expert hand of the invisible worker. Then the mirror is pushed
through for an instant's scrutiny, and again the bobbin resumes its motion.
I do not believe that a quarter of an inch is wrought in a single day.
Watching a long time, I could see no growth in the delicate flower petal
that was under the fingers of the artist of whose work I took special notice.
The men who make carpets, on the contrary, have their work in front of
them, and the picture they are to copy hangs above their heads. They
loop upon a little iron instrument many loose stitches, then turn a sharp
edge that is on one side of this tool against the loop, cutting it in two and
leaving the severed ends exposed. These they clip down, smooth off and
their work is finished. But this work, too, is very slow, being on a much
larger scale than the tapestries. Some carpets take ten years, and none are
ever sold. The manufactory belongs to the government and its products
go to palaces at home or are the princely gifU of Prance to foreign poten-
tates. The largest carpet ever made here or elsewhere, probably, was for
the picture gallery of the Louvre. It was in seventy-two pieces, was more
than thirteen hundred feet long, and cost |30,ooo. It seems curious that
women are not at all employed here, where the delicacy of the work would
seem so well suited to their fingers. Large, heavy, unwieldy looking men
Strange Customs. 273
were clipping at the carpets, seated comfortably on their benches, some of
them with a scissors' end picking out the ends of the woven threads, but not
a woman was to be seen, except the one who laid hold of our umbrella and
confiscated it at a cost of two sous. The men who work here are poorly
paid. There are about one hundred and twenty of them, and they receive
prices ranging from three to six hundred dollars annually in gold, and
when disabled by age or illness a life pension ranging from one hundred
dollars to two hundred dollars annually. We did not see the establishment
for dyeing, but in one room was a dazzling collection of the colors used
in making the tapestries, the loveliest blues, greens, reds, and other shades,
that I ever saw.
At our evening lesson and talk Madame P. fell upon the subject of the
strictness of the marriage laws of France, saying that the ceremony at
church had no authority apart from that at the Mayor's office, whither goes
every pair from the Emperor and Knipress down. She told us about her own
trousseau, and disapproved the action of her cousin, who at her marriage had
a dozen dozen of each linen garment; she whought four dozen enough. She said
the proper way for the parents of the bride was to put a sum of money at
interest at her marriage, sufficient to keep her in linen for tlie rest of the
time, instead of getting such a senseless quantity on hand to grow old and
fall to pieces. She told us that she was married at the mayor's one day and
at the church the next, but that the common people usually went direct from
one place to the other. The church gave the benediction of heaven upon
the union, that was all, it had no validity apart from the legal forms. She
mentioned a curious custom that every child must be dispatched within three
days after the tenth birthday to the mayor's office to be registered and ex-
amined as to its sex to prevent deception on the part of parents, who would
avoid the conscription of their children. If a boy, he was not examined,
but if a girl was announced, an examination must be had in presence of
witnesses. That single law would brin>^ about a war within twenty hours if
passed in America. The idea is, " If you have sons, I, the Government,
will know it, and they shall fight to uphold my throne. I will examine for
myself, and you have no way to escape from the conscription which
I ordain."
Kate recounted several instances about American customs to Madame P.,
giving among them the incident of a young lady who broke off a "desira-
ble " engagement, because she did not love her lover. Madame replied with
spirit, "There is but one thing in the world that a woman has to give and
that is her hand. I like now and then to hear of her having refused it, just
as a token of her independence." I was much amused at an out-cropping
of the national sentiment which followed my remark that, if I ever married,
I hoped a minister might be my lot, as I needed the influence of such sur-
roundings and companionships. Madame replied : " Why, I know a young
man, well educated, very religious, a fine fellow, every way. I will write to
him, I owe him a letter, and will show you his reply. You can judge from
that what sort of a person he is. " vShe imagines that like all Americans who
have gone before me, I should be desirable bv reason of my dowry !
18
274 Rome — Openiifg of tlie '' Ecutnenical Council.'^
ITALY.
I never dreamed in those lethargic years at home, what a
wide world it is, and how full of misery. Indeed, in a thousand
ways, it was Rome's office to teach me this. Walking along her
streets with grief tugging at my heart for all the wretchedness
that they disclosed, how many times have I repeated to myself
those words of St. Augustine, ** Let my soul calm itself, O God,
in thee ! ''
Hollow-eyed beggars asking charity, at almost every step ;
troops of tonsured monks, barefooted and steaming in their
moist, dirty, old garments ; skinny hags, warming their knotted
hands over the smouldering coals in their little ** scaldino *' pots ;
dirty little children, whose tears make the only clean spots upon
their pitiful faces, old before their time ; soldiers standing as
sentries in wind and rain, for no real purpose save to subserve the
pride of Prince and Cardinal ; horses, whose bones but just refrain
from protruding through their rusty skins, driven rapidly over
the sharp stones, and falling, only to struggle and throw out their
wounded legs in the eflfort to rise and continue their journey under
the pitiless lash. All these sights smote my eyes every time I
walked the classic streets of Rome. Whoever can fail to feel the
fires of a quenchless philanthropy kindling in his breast as he
contemplates such scenes is either too frivolous for thought, or too
hardened for emotion. For myself, whatever I did not learn there,
Rome taught me an intense love and tender pity for my race.
OPENING OF THE *' ECUMENIC AL COUNCIL.'*
I doubt if Rome, old as she is and varied as her experience
has been, was ever earlier astir than on the morning of this day.
Lights glimmered in the Roman garrets, the cavernous depths of
Roman basements, and the lordly middle heights of Roman pal-
aces, at a most unseemly hour, looking like jack-o'-lanterns
through the cottony mist of the most unpropitious morning that
ever dawned, at least considered from a meteorologic point of
view. Crowds had already assembled at St. Peter's before the
bells struck ofi" the cheerless hour of five, and when our comfort-
able carriage load, invigorated by the breakfast that awaited our
appearance at seven o'clock, set out for the scene of action, the
tide of emigration in the same direction was frightful to behold.
** Red with Cardinals' Carriages ^ *75
We rolled on through the chief thoroughfares In th^ lotl^ dotible
line of carriages, while on each side the army of umbrell&KSaity-
ing pedestrians could be compared to nothing but a forest of
mammoth mushrooms. They poured in from all directions ; pro-
cessions of school-boys, colleges of theological students, their
symbolic ''leading string'' hanging limp and spiritless behind
them ; white-bonneted sisters of charity, solitary priests, ad-
venturous women; ** don't-care" urchins of the street, and
gaunt-faced beggar women, with ragged petticoats gathered
around their heads ; a monstrous, motley throng, all candidates
upon exactly equal footing as the wealthiest or most lowly
occupant of the hurrying carriages, who joked about them as they
passed, for the '* Holy Father " had ordained that perfect fairness
should prevail at the day's ceremony, and prince and peasant
would jostle each other this morning in their eflforts to get a good
look at the procession. In the street, however, slight distinctions
still prevailed ; mounted soldiers, wrapped in dripping cloaks
and wearing draggled plumes, guarded the approach to the
bridge of St. Angelo, and he must be at least a Bishop who would
pass unchallenged, while all lesser lights of church or state must
make the grand detour, pass the Tiber's classic muddiness by a
distant bridge, and pay roundly for the privilege of doing so.
Alas for human foresight ! Had we not planned to be among
the earliest to take possession of the great Basilica, and behold ! the
streets many squares distant from St. Peter's were lined on either
side by empty carriages which had already deposited their too-
enterprising burdens, though it was but seven, and the ceremony
would not take place till nine. Arrived at the great square we
became fully convinced, perhaps for the first time, that early birds
alone can hope for toothsome morsels. The place was red with
Cardinal's carriages and black with commonplace humanity, all
of whom were engaged in a break-neck race for the wide, invit-
ing, blocked-up doors of the cathedral. We filed in between
gigantic guards with old-fashioned muffs upon their heads, carry-
ing the burden of our wilted hopes. What a sea of human fiaces ;
what a deep ground-swell of human voices ; what waves of human
forms ! Along the dim, damp, lofty nave was stretched a douMe
Une of soldiers, keeping an aveune from the great central door,
now (^>en for the first time that we had ever seen it, to the coun*
27^ Yankees Standing on St. Peter^s Altar-rail !
dl hall. Against this moveless wall beat the eager, hopeless
crowd. Thousands were between them and us so the pleasant fic-
tion of '* seeing the procession *' was exploded at a glance. Still
we made desperate efforts to get nearer the soldiers and soon found
ourselves crushed between three peasants, two monks and a fish-
woman, the mingled odor from whose wet garments was more
invincible than bayonets, and we worked our way to a breathing
place without loss of time. Then we tried for the high altar
opposite which is the open door of the council hall, but Lconidas
and his Spartans were not more steadfast than the multifarious
monster that held position there. Then desperately we forced
our way into the entrance portico of the church, but this was
packed and had he passed at the moment, we could not have
seen the topmost feather of the Pope*s peacock fans. At last
becoming weary and dispirited, we retired to the chapel of the
Presentation of the Virgin, vis-a-vis with the splendid chapel of
the Holy Sacrament, and our escort, Signor Paolo Caveri, a
Genoese lawyer, devout Catholic that he was, insisted on our
taking sitting positions on the marble railing that surrounded
the altar, turning our backs upon the sacred symbol. We had
our scruples, but a glance revealed the startling fact that several
sanctimonious priests had been guilty of a like irreverence, and
so we mounted the rich balustrade, and thence ** assisted " at the
pageant of the day. Time wore on and the human stream still
gurgled through the open doors. The beautiful marble floor was
deluged with water dripping from cloaks, shoes and umbrellas;
the air was dark with incense from the * ' unseen * censer ' ' of ten
thousand pairs of panting lungs ; the Babel of voices grew louder,
the crush more formidable, but along the endless nave the lines
of troops stood firm. Side scenes were not wanting to make the
hours less long. At every altar in the church, mass was being
celebrated, and to us irreverent heretics the struggle in the Cath-
olic breast between curiosity and devotion was a curious study.
One solemn-faced gentleman in holiday attire elbowed his way
through the crowd and knelt to take the sacrament, but being
closely pressed on either side, he inadvertently knocked from the
altar one of its tall candles which dripped upon his fine new coat
in swift revenge. The priest pretended not to see, and went on
decorously with his genuflexions ; the communicant affected not
**His Riverince'' Under Difficulties. 277
to feel, but assumed an apoplectic hue, and the people hid their
laughing faces in their prayer-books while they muttered the
responses in broken tones. We saw our good friend and escort,
the Italian lawyer, and his daughter on their knees, but with faces
that would have become them far better at the comic opera than
before the sacred altar. A worthy priest intent on seeing all that
passed and yet on escaping the pressure of the crowd, had abused
his prerogative so far as to climb the projecting ornaments of a
column beside the altar, and was making most industrious use of
his eyes, when, lo ! another priest in glittering vestments and with
attendant choir boy came to say mass within arm's-reach of him.
The struggle between duty and inclination was ludicrous enough ;
the poor priest wriggled himself into a position of compromise
and nodded and mumbled toward the altar while he kept one eye
sharply opened on the passage way for the procession. Opposite
him, standing up on the altar railing, was a portly dame who
courtesied and responded from her statuesque position and ran a
dreadful risk of becoming cross-eyed for life by trying to look two
ways at once — toward God and Mammon. From time to time
ladies were carried out in fainting fits, with faces ghastly white
and chignons trailing on their shoulders, or purple-cheeked chil-
dren were lifted over the heads of the crowd to purer air. Now a
gentleman's hat or his umbrella would be swept from his hand
and lost irrevocably, or a lady's shawl drop from her shoulders to
be seen no more. And in all the tumult the automaton boy who
kneels beside the priest would ring his little bell, and as the wind
bends the prairie grass, so the warning sound would bring the
faithful to their knees. The liveried serv-ants of cardinals and
bishops, in their cocked hats and knee-breeches, went down upon
their ** prayer-bones ' ' like men who feel that their position
demands a certain decorum at any sacrifice, while, mindful of
their white stockings, they tucked a handkerchief under their
knees. Now and then a purple-gowned bishop, preceded by his
secretary and servants, forced his way through the crowd which
always made room for a personage so distinguished. But at last
the boom of minute-guns announced the long-looked-for moment ;
the peal of bells joined its rich alto to this solemn bass, and che
clear, seraphic voices of the Pope's choir completed the chorus.
Every soldier stood wnth lifted bayonet ; the crowd existed but fcr
278 ''Heads of the Catholic Church^
the sake of its eyes, and dizzily poised on tiptoe oi; my marble
balustrade, I — one of this august army's fifty thousand fractions —
beheld the passage of the august procession. Beheld it, yes, but
at a distance of one of the aisles and half the nave of the hugest
existing church ; over the heads of the greatest crowd ever gath-
ered within doors and on the darkest morning that ever rained
down shadows. As a veritable chronicler I can pretend to noth-
ing more than having literally looked upon the heads of the
Catholic church, which I would respectfully report as for the most
part gray, when not bald, tonsured, or concealed by skull-caps.
The procession was half an hour in passing, and Monsieur TAbbe,
who also went with us, but was more fortunate in his place of
observation, reports it as having numbered eight hundred or more.
The venerable priests moved very slowly, as became their dignity
and the majesty of the duties to which they were going, and last
of all came the Pope who left his pfficial chair at the door and
walked to the council hall with his brethren, to the scandalization
of the commonalty, who had comforted one another with these
words, ** At least we shall get a good view of his Holiness borne
in his chair of state."
What was done at the high altar and in the coimcil hall,
deponent saith not. We all crowded as close as possible to the
great open door of the latter when the members had taken their
seats, and were rewarded by a glimpse of white-robed Bishops,
sitting in wide semicircles as the saints are represented in the
heavenly visions of Fra Angelico, and above them royal person-
ages, the Empress of Austria and the Queen of Hungary, looking
very black and unseemly in such a shining company. Pour times
we charged upon the phalanx that had crowded around the open
door aforesaid, but were driven back in confusion and disgust.
We drove home fatigued beyond measure and thankful beyond
words that Ectmienical Councils happen not more frequently than
once in three hundred years.
Its Golden Memory, 279
UP THE NILE.
Steamer ** Behera'^ borrowed of the Pasha for a three weeks'
trip by * * Cook's tourists * * and * * us Americaiis. ' ' February 11, 1870,
One week of my restless, ranging life has now been passed
upon the quiet river that was once the god, and is ever the good
genius of the Egyptians.
Let me try to give a true sketch of an experience entirely
unique. We thought to make the trip by '' dahabeah'' (boat)
would take too long ; we found that to charter a small steamer
would be difficult. Cook and his tourists came along ; they wished
us Americans, sixteen in number, to join them in engaging a large
steamer ; in an evil hour we yielded, and behold us "in for it"
and afloat upon the Nile, a most uncongenial crowd of forty -seven
persons, in a big, bloated, blustering steamer, all to be dined and
wined, walked on shore and mounted on donkey-back, by whole-
sale ; marshaled by a dragoman in green clothes, an interpreter
who speaks nine languages, and an important ** tourist-manager, * '
whenever an Arab village, a venerable temple, or a tomb old
when Joseph was governor of Egypt, is to be ** done."
Well, a sorry day it was in which Warburton, in his ** Voy-
age up the Nile," taught me what the East might be to a pale-
faced traveler from chilly shores and stormy skies.
The Real is a dragon under whose scaly feet the airy form of
the Ideal is almost always trampled in my life's cheerful history.
We came to feel the subtle spirit of the East ; instead, we
feel Egyptian fleas. We came to float musingly along the mystic
waters of the world's most curious river ; instead, we go snuffing,
snorting, shaking, over its tolerant breast— eyes full of smoke,
ears full of discord, noses full of smells from kitchen and from
coal-bin. And yet, in spite of all, I shall never forget one even-
ing's ride ; it was the culmination of what the East can yield me,
and very grateful I am for its golden memory. Above me were
new heavens ; in the frame of a violet sky hung constellations I
had never seen before, their palpitating golden globes like the
fruit waving in the trees of Hesperides. And dear, familiar stars
were there, only in places very different from those they occupy
in the ** infinite meadows of heaven " that bend above my home.
The Dipper lay on the horizon's edge, tipped up most curiously ;
28o Kamak by Moonlight,
the Pleiades had nearly reached the zenith and the changeless
face of the North Star I could hardly distinguish in his new sur-
roundings. Around me was a new earth, and the sandy plain
stretched away into the purple darkness full of attractive mystery.
Far off gleamed the fire-fly lamps of an Arab village, and on the
cool, invigorating breeze which had succeeded to the day's stifling
heat came the lonesome bark of dogs and jackals so characteristic
of the East. I rode under magnificent palm trees of a symmetry
unequaled by any hitherto seen, and casting shadows in which
the moonlight mingled so that they looked like an emblazoned
shield. The white walls and graceful dome of a sheik's tomb
gleamed through the trees.
My thoughts flew across the sea — dear mother, for whom all
things lovely and noble have such significance, never looked
upon a palm tree's feathery crest, nor saw it mirrored by an orien-
tal moon upon the desert's yellow sand ! Dear mother ! did she
think of me that night and pray for her far-away child ? The
landscape was dim for a moment as my heart stirred at thought
of home.
I rode along the avenue of sphinxes that once extended over
. the mile that separates the temple of Luxor from that of Kamak.
How still it was, and how significant that stillness in the highway
through which for more than two thousand years had passed what
was choicest and most royal in the wide earth — processions of
kings and priests and captives, compared with which those of
Rome were but the sport of children; and this, ere Romulus
laid the first stone of his famous wall or ^neas fretted the blue
waves of the ^gean with his adventurous prow. The pride and
glory of a world had had its center here ere Cadmus brought let-
ters into Greece, or Jacob had his vision on the Judean plains.
But of what value is the " dramatic justice " which pleases
us in romance, compared to the visible hand of vengeance with
which a merciful God, who loves the creatures he has made, has
smitten this stronghold of cruelty, wrenched from their lofty places
the statues of bloodthirsty tyrants, and sent the balm of moon-
light drifting through the shattered walls, and mellowing the
fallen columns?
We sat upon a broken pedestal in the great court of the Tem-
ple, Xate and I, and let the wondrous beauty of the place fall on
Typical Columns. 281
our hearts. One isolated column, the last remaining fragment of
a stately colonnade, outlined itself against the liquid sky — its
white shaft brilliant in the moonshine and its broad, corolla-
shaped capital gleaming far above us, while beyond, the shattered
propylon once gay with the banners of Isis and Osiris frowned
like the bastion of a fortress, and nearer by, an avalanche of fallen
rocks of huge dimensions marked where ruin had struck the
Temple of Jupiter Ammon with its relentless hand. Farther on
was the forest of columns, which in its kind is unequaled by any-
thing ever wrought by man — one hundred and thirty-four pillars,
each seventy feet in height and thirty-five feet in circumference —
covered from base to abacus with carefully wrought sculptures,
brilliantly painted in their day. One of them was broken and
leaned heavily against its giant neighbor, one of the most
pathetic, indeed the most mournfully significant fragment that
human hands have ever carved from stone, and time and ruin
consecrated. Still beyond, in the white moonlight, climbed the
tapering finger of the largest obelisk in Egypt, as fresh and clear-
cut in its outline as on the day the chisel left it — the chisel held
by that unknown artisan who was a mummy before Phidias
wrought in Greece, or Zeuxis and Apelles had their rivalries.
Against the obelisk leaned an old Arab in graceful turban, and
around were seated several others, all by their costume and their
bearing as perfectly in harmony with the scene as human acces-
sories could be, and lending it a strange yet human charm.
In what far-off realm of our endless life shall we some day
meet those mighty builders whose works we contemplated under
the moonlit heavens? What a thought is this, that in the
changeful round of being we shall doubtless encounter, some-
where, the awful king, Sesostris, the witching Cleopatra, the
Pharaoh who was overwhelmed in the revengeful sea !
I firmly believe that they are all upon some stellar world,
seen by us, probably a thousand times, when we looked up into
the great, gleaming, kindly heavens. And I can not help an
earnest heart-welcome for every student of pyschic laws ; spirit-
ualism and all the occult phenomena that shall doubtless build up
new sciences some day — just as alchemy became chemistry and
astrology changed into astronomy. Only these new investigators
must be disinterested students, not money-seeking jugglers.
282 Through Burning Sands,
THE PYRAMIDS.
A wise man once wrote in my autograph album, as follows :
" There is an Up in life. ' * (I remember he commenced the word
•*Up^' with a capital ''U.'')
Always after that, I dimly believed in his idea, but on Feb-
ruary 23, in 1870, I found out its truth for certain. To the airy
hypothesis that there is actually, Upy I then applied the substan-
tial test of **that experience which one experiences when one
experiences one's own experience." Briefly, I climbed to the
tip-top stone of the biggest of the pyramids.
Our party drove from Cairo to the pyramids in a barouche
worthy of the Champs Elys^es at Paris, along twelve miles of
splendid road, built through the sands by the Viceroy in an-
ticipation of a visit from the French Empress, and lined with
shady sycamores and delicate mimosa trees. Quite a different
way of getting there from the one reported by earlier tourists, who
toiled on donkey-back through burning sands, accompanied by
an escort of vociferous Arabs.
The barbarous scenes of which our Bible speaks, lived and
moved again before our saddened eyes. A part of the embank-
ment of the regal highway where we rode was broken down, and
a hundred ragged laborers with baskets on their heads were
bringing mud for its repair, while scattered at small intervals
among them were swarthy overseers, each with his whip, which
he plied almost unceasingly about the heads and shoulders of
those bearded workmen, of those women who were mothers,
while they all crouched like dogs, beneath the lash.
We drove on through fields of lentils, like those for which
hungry Esau sold his birthright to long-headed Jacob ; we saw
men in ample gowns of blue and tiu"bans of red, scratching the
earth with one-handled wooden plows, leisurely dragged by
stolid buffaloes ; the whole scene having apparently walked out
of the ** Pictorial Family Bible" that we left behind us. We
saw at frequent intervals, stalking along the road with listless
tread, a tall, solemn woman of the Egyptians, with a little child
sitting astride her shoulders, as Ishmael may have sat when
Hagar was turned away from Abraham's inhospitable tent, over
which the palm tree bent its feathery head as that one did be-
neath wbi^b the wQinan leaned to rest.
Pyramid Theories. 283
We talked of the theories concerning the use of pyramids,
which have been held at different times by learned men. We
knew that the stately group toward which we moved was not «
the only one in Egypt. There are several others scattered in
groups for a distance of about seventy miles, along the Nile's
west bank, averaging one to each mile. They, like those of
Gizeh, are on the western or sunset bank of the mysterious river,
the point of compass which receives the declining sun, being
supposed to indicate the region of the dead. These pyramids
are by no means rivals of Cheops and its mates, either in size or
history, but are a conspicuous feature of the Nile's west bank
for seventy miles or more south of the capital.
Why this laborious effort to preserve from decay the bodies
whence life and spirit have departed ? The doctrine of metemp-
sychosis, or the transmigration of souls, offers the only answer to
this interrogation. According to this belief, every spirit not
thoroughly purified on its departure from the body, must pass
through a long exile, entering, successively, into the bodies of
different animals, and returning after cycles of these transforma-
tions, to its owm corporeal form again. The importance of find-
ing its own still in existence and in a tolerable state of repair
will readily occur to thoughtful minds ! But besides the horrid
possibility of failure here, the disembodied spirit had a thousand
other things to dread. Whenever the body it had last left
became subject to corruption, the course of its migrations was
suspended, and its ardently desired return to a human body — its
own — delayed. Hence, every form of animal life became pre-
cious, as the possible shrine of a departed friend. The greatest
care was employed in preserving all, so far as possible, from
becoming decomposed. This was effected by the intricate and
mysterious process of embalming, in which certain orders of the
priesthood were almost constantly employed.
After migrations of three thousand years through inferior
animal forms, the spirit was permitted, as has been said, to
return to its own human body, and to try its chances once again.
Now, if we could, by a prodigious effort of imagination, put
ourselves for a moment in the place of an Egyptian of the olden
time, and if we could conceive of the anxiety w^ith which we
should guard against the possibility of a ** failure to connect" in
284 " Yankee Doodle Coin' Upf*
the endless whirligig I have described, we might appreciate why
their tombs are finer than their palaces ; why the dead were in
their thoughts more than the living, and why, when this gro-
tesque belief had passed into the life and heart of the nation, the
king, who had all resources at his command, should, on his cor-
onation day, put his whole empire under contribution to begin
for him a tomb which should rival the mountains in its stability
and guard his paltry dust from every chance of harm.
With constant notes and queries about the uses and abuses
of the pyramids, we passed along. We crossed the limits of the
belt of green, which is old Father Nile's perpetual gift to Egypt ;
the desert's golden edge came nearer, and at last, our white-
robed Arab checked his steeds at the foot of Cheops' pyramid,
where — shade of great Pharaoh, forgive us prosaic Yankees ! —
the Cheops restaiu-ant treated us to Smyrna dates and Turkish
coffee. A banditti of Bedouins, fierce-eyed and unsavory, sur-
rounded us as we emerged from our retreat, and clamored for the
privilege of pulling and pushing, hoisting and hallooing us up
the saw-tooth side of the monster pyramid. We got speedily to
windward, assured them that, as for us, we'd *' not the least idea
of going up ' ' (at least, not now) and turned aside to visit the
tomb-pits at the left, hoping to shake off the odious crew. But
you might just as well try to dismiss the plague by a dancing-
room bow ; the old lady Fates, by raising your hat ; or the neigh-
borhood bore by a glance at your chronometer. They careered
before us, a tatterdemalion throng ; they lagged behind us ; they
helped us over the stray stones the pyramid has shed, with offi-
cious hands under our nervous elbows, and when, at last. Dr.
Park cleared a breathing space for us by whirling his cane, they
danced about us, beyond the circle thus marked out ; they grinned,
they groaned, they laid their hands upon their hearts and pointed
with melodramatic finger to the serene heights they would so
gladly help us climb, while the one refrain from which, for two
consecutive breaths they were utterly incapable of refraining, was :
**Goin' up, mister — madam?'' ** Yankee Doodle goin' up?
Ver' good, thankee. Yankee Doodle go up ebery time ! " But
we passed on regardless, and they were left lamenting. We
walked upon sealed tombs ; the whole ground for miles about this
Since History's Glimmering Dawn, 285
group of pjrramids is honey -combed with them. This is a grave-
yard in which they are but chief monuments.
Some distance from old Cheops, we saw a sandstone rock
much worn and rounded. While we were wisely theorizing as
lo how it came to be here on this almost level plateau, we walked
around to the other side of this queer, rounded rock protruded
fix>m the clasping sands, when, lo ! the oldest, wisest and most
bafiUng face the world has seen, looked grandly into ours ; and
our ephemeral forms passed from the unhistoric sunshine into the
shadow which the Sphinx has cast for forty centuries ! The worn
and rounded rock which had deceived us, was only its ' * back
hair," which I am obliged to report as very much spread out,
and hence, not ** stylish *' in the least. It is an unique moment
in which a flitting creature, such as we are, pauses in his change-
ful haste, folds his weak arms and confronts the steadiest gaze
that has ever met his own ! That this calm and not unfeeling
face has looked out thus, over the level sands and emerald mead-
ows and toward the steadfast Nile since history's glimmering
dawn, we know. That Abraham stood where we are standing,
and mirrored (in the eyes that witnessed the deliverance of Isaac ! )
these flowing outlines, this low brow, these rounded lips, we
deem altogether probable. That Moses, grandest figure of antiq-
uity, has gazed upon this stem, but not unpitying face, is certain.
That Eastern emperors have turned aside from their pompous
march to see it ; that Herodotus asked of it many an unheeded
question ; that thoughtful Plato measured glances with it ; that
fierce Cambyses may have struck its nose off with iconoclastic
hammer — all this is true as history. And stranger than it all —
throughout the three decades of the world's one matchless Life,
with Bethlehem at their beginning and Calvary at their close,
this gaze neither brightened at the first nor faltered at the last.
Thinking about it all — sending bewildered fancy onward into the
wondrous future, upon whose happier myriads and milder des-
tinies this changeless face shall gaze, one sinks beneath the
contrast this mystic creature's history affords to one's own trivial
joys and petty griefs so like to those of gossamer- winged insects
which the evening taper blots from being. But, afterward, one
has a thought more worthy of a soul for whom the Mightiest died;
it is a thought which brightened Plato's eyes when he stood here
286 * ' / Am ImmortaL ' *
more than two thousand years ago, though he knew not the won-
drous truth which dims my own with happy tears, and that
thought is : I am immortal ! The centuries flow onward at thy
feet, O weird and mystic Sphinx ! yet from their fertile waves thou
dost not gather aught that enriches thee. But for me each breath
yields blessings that shall last forever, and all climes and ages are
my gleaning fields. Not like an ignoble worm do I crawl beneath
thee, but like a tireless bird I soar above ! For a moment I have
paused to muse on thy strange, unproductive histor>% but now I
spread my wings and fly away to other scenes, and by and by,
weary of one small world, I shall journey to another, and so on
and on through the beneficent universe of God whom I love, and
who loves me, and whose boundless heart is my eternal home !
Gaze on over the desert and the still meadows, solemn Sphinx !
One landscape can not satisfy eyes so insatiable as mine, and so,
farewell !
Cheops lifted his dimensions toward the sky in a style so thor-
oughly uncompromising that we felt quite in haste to set our feet
on his bald crown. But our hurry did not at all compare with
that of the wild Arabs gathered at his base and eager for their
prey. They knew it had been only a question of time when
we threw them off, with such indomitable purpose, an hour ago ;
alas ! we knew it now. For the first time in all our journey ings,
my friend Kate, who side by side with me had climbed half the
cathedral spires of Europe, executed marvels of mountaineering
in Switzerland and scrambled to the sunmiit of Vesuvius, con-
fessed herself vanquished, without striking a blow, and retreated
to the carriage to watch the attack gallantly conducted by the
rest of us. Taught by all the guide-books, warned by all the
tourists, I took my purse — although it was not dangerously pie*
thoric — from my pocket, placed it in the hands of my friend who
stayed below, and told the three men who, nolens volens, had
taken my destiny in hand, that if I did not hear " backsheesh,'*
until I regained terra firnia, I would parody, for their benefit, the
famous lines of Uhland :
** Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee,
Take, I give it willingly."
I then resigned myself to fate.
Just here I will confess something not usually divulged, viz.:
A ''Pair of Stairs:' 287
I cherished a secret determination to reach the top before any
of my comrades. The undertaking was by no means trivial. I
had a dim suspicion ot this before I started, which became, as
I set out (or set up, rather), the most vivid "realizing sense *' of
all my history. Three feet and a half at a step is a *' departure "
hardly excelled by Weston of pedestrian fame, and when the in-
cHned plane one is trying to walk is set on edge, as in the
present instance, you can imagine such *'a getting upstairs*' as
it would be hard to beat ! Just try, some day, in the solitude of
your apartment, to step ** genteelly *' from floor to mantel-piece,
or on top of the bureau ; do this one hundred times in fourteen
minutes, and see if the achievement is n't a feat, though it may
not prove a * * success. ' '
It is to be remembered that the huge slabs of granite and
porphyry which once smoothly covered the pyramid, were scaled
off in the time of the caliphs and taken, with about twenty feet
from its apex, to be used as building material at Cairo. Climb-
ing the side of Cheops, then, is nothing more nor less than going
up the most outrageous "pair of stairs " on earth, under circum-
stances the most harrowing. But I got on bravely, in spite of
all. Climbing rapidly, I did not once sit down to rest, and
stopped but briefly, thrice, to breathe, or rather to puff, like an
asthmatic locomotive ; my Bedouins, meanwhile, tranquilly watch-
ing the spectacle, and cool as if they had but just emerged from
a refrigerator. Below, I could hear the advancing steps of my
rivals in the race, and this lending ardor to my flagging zeal, I
clambered on.
Ever above me, with extended hands, were two solemn, but
never silent Bedouins ; ever beneath my shoulders were the
strong hands of a burly Egyptian, while for me, the only possible
thing to do was to fix my foot firmly against the upper edge of
the stone step before me, and to grasp with desperate grip the
steady hands of those above, they going up backward with an
agility which put to shame ray own backwardness about coming
forward in this business !
Well, when one measures off dimensions in this straightfor-
ward fashion, one soon learns that they amount to something. I
had no more narrow ' ' flings ' ' about the Pyramids of Cheops. It
was
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SmiMs Autograph vs. Tlie Pyramids, 289
when I came again I should just see how he had cared for
mine and kept its sprawling capitals in good repair (more par-
ticularly if I paid him a shilling for such service). In this last
statement, however, my faith was irremediably weakened by the
scratching-out process through which poor Smith's autograph
had just now passed !
But all this time we had been sitting dangerously near the
western edge of Cheops' pyramid, with the most significant of
panoramas spread out before us. The charm of evening's earliest
hour, the zest of novelty, the spice of danger, tlie chastening
thought of pathos — all these united to make the time forever
memorable.
That was a break-neck scramble down the side of Cheops as
the darkness fell ! The Arabs said to me (as they doubtless say
to each ambitious tourist), ** Yankee Doodle ver' good fust rate."
As they conducted me — and a long way I found it — from the
point where I alighted, back to the carriage, two of them put a
hand apiece under my elbows and I fairly flew over the ground,
they delighting in the sport and telling me that I had *• Arab
feet," which (if I had) they lent me.
With facts, fancies, and *' guesses at truth" in mind, we
walked on in the gathering twilight toward the entrance of the
King's tomb. This entrance, carefully concealed during thou-
sands of years, but discovered by the indefatigable Belzoni, now
yawned black and ominous in the uncertain light. Above its
solemn doorway, in letters several feet long, done in black paint,
we had the mortification of seeing this inscription :
** PAUL TUCKER, OF NEW YORK."
All the way up the Nile, even to Philae, we had found this
same epitaph of American refinement ; carved in the Temple of
Jupiter Ammon at Thebes ; scrawled upon Memnon's pedestal ;
and cut beside the mystic sculptures of Abydos. But on a tablet
so tempting as the front angle of the ** big pyramid," the confid-
ing Paul had vouchsafed a bit of personal history eleswhere
withheld. Beneath his name he had printed in straggling capi-
tals, this time not more than a foot apiece in altitude :
**AGED 18 1-2."
It was a pleasant and consoling thing to know how tender were
19
ig6 A Dolorous Procession.
his years. There's always hope — more than we churlish old folks
may be inclined to think, ** concerning veal'* — as the country
parson said.
The entrance to the tomb, for the sake of which the pyra-
mid was reared, had been carefully concealed in former ages. We
can but admire the ingenuity which located this opening twenty-
three feet to the right, rather than in the center, where one would
naturally look for it. Another precaution hardly less surprising,
was to seal up the passage-way, narrow and intricate as it is,
when the royal builder had been laid in his tomb, with blocks of
granite, so much more difficult to break through than the ordi-
nary, calcareous stones of the pyramid, that a passage has been
forced around them. In these, as in every feature of the pyra-
mid, it will be seen that the security of the body one day to be called
for by the soul was the controlling purpose of its design. Through
a passage three feet eleven inches high, and over three hundred
feet in length, along a downward and then upward angle of about
26°, we wended our weary way to the king^s tomb. Clinging
now to slippery, now to cobwebbed walls, anon to the sleeve of
some officious Arab ; blinded by dust from the wings of countless
bats, and finally measiuing off the distance on our hands and
knees, we made a dolorous procession to the center of the pyra-
mid with its empty sepulcher. We found as the reward of our
pains a rectangular-shaped chamber, lined with red granite. In
its center stands a sarcophagus of red granite, too large to have
been introduced through the entrance passage, and therefore
necessarily placed here before the pyramid was built around it.
Notwithstanding all the precautions mentioned, this sarcopha-
gus has been empty and without a lid since the time of the Caliphs,
when, in the expectation of finding treasure, an entrance was
forced and the king's body was thrown out and treated with the
grossest indignities by the rabble in the streets of Cairo. Sic
transit gloria mundi! Vandal tourists have hammered the cor-
ners of the sarcophagus till they look as though a grindstone
had been scooped from each one of them, and straightway our
Arabs began to pound off ** specimens ** for us at five piastres
each.
Waving them solemnly aside, Dr. Park marshaled our entire
party of five into this coffin of the elder world, where we stood
Dr. Park of Andover in the King^s Tomb. .291
in a strange looking row, with the flickering torch-light on our
faces, while at the bidding of our leader, we sang that curious
old hymn :
*' Hark, from the tombs a doleful sound ! "
Our voices woke some most lugubrious echoes ; our Arabs listened,
looking more than ** dumb-founded," at our performance. Dr.
Park smiled audibly. But his mood quickly passed from gay to
grave. **Sing * Rock of Ages, cleft for me!'** were his next
words. With swelling hearts we joined in the dear old hymn
we learned so long ago, so far away. At its close, solemn and
deep sounded the good man's voice ; I shall not soon forget the
words :
**The pyramids may crumble, but the Rock of Ages stands
firm and secure. The old idolatry that reared this awful tomb
has had its long, its little day. The kingdom of our Lord and of
His Christ is ushered in, and we, His ransomed sons and daugh-
ters sing of Him who hath so loved us, standing in the empty
coffin of the idolatrous and cruel Pharaoh."
After all, this was the lesson we shall cherish longest, the
truest lesson of Cheops, old and gray
Let Egypt boast her mystic monuments, which, in the race
with time, have come off grimly victorious ; a Christian's eye
pierces the boundless blue above their heads, and gets a glimpse
of more enduring habitations, while, as he turns away from their
pitiless masses of stone, his humble, happy faith sings of the
'* Rock of Ages, cleft for me ! "
292 First Promenade in Jerusalem,
SYRIA — THE HOME OF OUR SAVIOUR.
" Over whose acres walked those blessed feet
Which eighteen hundred years ago were nailed
For our advantage to the bitter Cross."
On the night of March 6, 1870, I closed my eyes upon Eg5T)t,
and in a comfortable cabin of the Russian steamship, ** Grand
Duke Constantine, " after a tranquil passage, opened them at six
o'clock upon a low sandy coast and hill-top crowned by a white-
walled town, while sunlight from behind the clouds spread broad
blades of light over the distant lands — light lovelier to me even
than that of home. Between me and the shore shimmered the
sea, even in the unwonted calm, sustaining by its motion the
unsatisfactory reputation of the port, or want of port, at Jaffa.
Yonder the Great Apostle had his vision, which gave even to me,
a Gentile maiden, a right to look upon the country of God's
chosen people with a sense of home stirring my heart, and such
thoughts of Him with whom ** there is neither Jew, nor Greek,
bond nor free," as filled my eyes brimful of tears, and silenced my
voice which, in earlier, less tender years, nothing ever could un-
steady or place beyond my own control.
March 8. — En route for Jerusalem. The day has dawned on which my
eyes shall mirror the city of our Lord. From yonder valley to the right,
Joshua made the sun stand still. On this side is the supposed site of Em-
maus. Here we first strike the trail of the Divine Pilgrim ; in that village
yonder John the Baptist was bom ; in this brook David got the stones to slay
Goliath ; here the Philistines were encamped ; there across the valley were
the Israelites. Boy-peddlers would have slings to sell here, if they had any
"gumption" ! I ride on alone, ahead and out of sight of our procession,
pass wretched women, fierce-looking men, files of camels, flocks of sheep,
processions of donkeys with bells on. At last I am alone — in sight of Jeru-
salem !
March 9. — First promenade in Jerusalem through the Via Dolorosa.
Saw a fallen pillar where Christ is said to have reposed — covered with pil-
grims* kisses ; another pillar where the cock stood to crow ; a stone in the
wall with the impress of the cross — a boy comes up, puts his fingers in the
hole of this stone and goes oflf kissing them ; wretched pavements, no car-
riages, no realization whatever of the glorious city of our God.
Jerusalem is the most disagreeable, dismal, ugly city I have anywhere
seen. There is so little that attracts, and so much that repels ; everything is
so shut up, streets not only narrow, but with heavy stone arches running
sometimes their whole length. I can heartily echo the sentiment of some
author I have recently read, that he congratulated himself upon the fact
Sacrilegious Fraud, 293
that the Jerusalexn of David's song and Solomon's wisdom and magnificence,
and, above all, of Christ's divine love, is half a hundred feet below where
we are walking.
Reading up Murray half an hour is worth a whole morning of ** barn-
door flights of knowledge " from the regulation guide, even when he is as
nice a man as , who, however, pointed out the Angel of the Annuncia-
tion in one of the absurd daubs of the Armenian Convent, as "the devil " ;
and when, not liking to hurt the poor fellow's feelings, we mildly hinted
that it was curious the devil should have wnngs, and carry his hands filled
with white lilies, he said, anxiously, "But they dress the old gentleman
very oddly sometimes, you know, that is, these rascals do." But at the
Holy Sepulcher this afternoon, when he stoutly maintained that the Mater
Dolorosa and John the Beloved, on either side the crucified Saviour, were the
two thieves, I could hardly contain my amusement, and his "stock " as " tfff
homnte savant*' took a mighty fall !
THK TOMB OF CHRIST.
I would approach that spot with reverent feet for its name's sake, and
because of the reverence of ages which has been here so freely spent. I
always thought it would be to me a solemn and a tender hour in which
I stood beside the place where men have even said that mystic body lay in
which He bore our burdens, in which He tasted for us the bitterness of
death. But after seeing Moses' rod, and Adam's tomb, and "the stone that
cried out," my mood was spoiled ; grief at the wounding of my Saviour in
the house of his friends, at the example given to infidels in the very temple
of his sepulcher, displaced all otlier thoughts. I bent at the low entrance
door, made with a view to exacting this homage, and stood beside the mar-
ble slab on which, "they say," the angel sat whom the gentle Mary saw.
Some pilgrims from Armenia were just folding and putting in cases an altar-
cloth of the dimensions of the tomb which they had consecrated by contact
with this slab. A frightful daub representing Christ hung over it ; bouquets
of weed-like flowers, tinsel and tawdry adornings unworthy of a child's doll-
house surrounded the most august of tombs. A frowzy monk stoo<l beside
it on g^ard. Kate sat down upon the tomb, being quite weary, and forget-
ting what it was ; luckily his head was turned at the moment, and before he
observed the sacrilege I gave her a push that spoke volumes. The pilgrims
knelt and kissed the ground before entering the sepulcher and went forth
from it backward. I thought I would have given something just then for a
little of this faith, but, dear me ! fervor and filth, sanctity and smells seem
to go hand in hand. Here at Jerusalem, processions of the different creeds
are marching about constantly. In the Greek chapel there is continual
hopping up and down ; prostrations of forehead to floor, and all the ardor we
had observed so often at St. Izak's and the Kazan in Russia. The Catholics
seemed very business-like, keeping excellent time, stepping about briskly,
and going through their genuflexions in a most workman-like manner ;
while the Armenians droned out sonorous prayers, and their long black
garments trailed not ungracefully behind them as they paced o£f to their
294 Something Genuine,
appointed altars. The quarrels amid these brethren are such that a key to
the holy sepulcher is kept by the Mohammedans who act as peace-makers !
Most pitiful of all the places shown, is the summit of Calvary. In the
great open court before the church, squat venders of beads, ivory crosses
cigarholders^ Jericho roses, and other souvenirs of the so-called sacred place.
March lo. — A day of unrivaled execution. Mr. Floyd brought us per-
mission for the Mosque of Omar, which a few years since could not at any
price be entered, and later, often required a hundred dollars for the privilege ;
but thanks to the efforts of the American Consul it is now open to our coun-
trymen at five francs each. We are obliged to take off our shoes and put on
slippers, that are furnished, and our party scuffs along through the world-
famed Mosque, looking with watchful eyes for traces of the temple, dear to
Jew and Christian, whose undoubted site was here. It is comforting to come
at last upon something true, and to find it even in Jerusalem ! Through
courts and archways, carven pulpits and places of prayer, we reach the
Mosque itself. In its external appearance from any point yet seen, I have
been gravely disappointed in it. The interior is still more unsatisfying;
dark, gloomy, and heterogeneous, made up of little bits and big bits of
Oriental marble and other choice stones, all said to be fragments froih the
temple. Many columns stand in double rows around a great bare rock ; the
peak of Mount Moriah, projecting from the floor, surrounded by a railing
and overhung by an old silk quilt, is the central point of attraction to infidel
and Christian eyes alike. This looks so genuine and is so palpable, that
the prints of Gabriel's fingers, made in holding the rock down in its place,
instead of permitting it to follow its impulse and Mahomet to heaven, when
that worthy took his flight, did not destroy our belief in its authenticity.
Under this rock is a grotto where are shown the *' praying places ** of Solo-
mon and David. The latter is very curious. The top is a trefoil, and at each
side there are two little capitals and two little columns, each divided into two
strands, and each pair braided together in a very curious, graceful style, the
whole in design entirely different from anything hitherto seen. This we all
examined with great interest, believing it may really once have been a part
of the Temple of Jehovah. Another fragment in similar design also inter-
ested us, as did old bits of marble in the walls and on the floors. The real
Jerusalem is so far beneath our feet that we shall never press a stone where
our Saviour's feet have passed, if it be not here and now. This thought
gave an inexpressible sweetness and pathos to the dark, old Mosque of the
Moslem. I reached my hand through the jealous bars, and laid it on the
naked rock which once sup|>orted the altar of the Most High, whereon the
offering was typical of Christ. I felt as if that contact placed me in sym-
pathetic union with the long line of prophets and the sad elder race who
waited and hoped for a Redeemer, who foretold the rising of the Star which
should shed the only light of love and hope our world has ever known.
But jealous eyes were on me, for Moslems hate the Christian intruders
from the noble lands they fear, and harsh voices called me to "come
along," using the only English word they had acquired, and I left the
upon the Mount of Olives. 295
glcxnny Mosque, sad that in the City of Christ, hate and intolerance had
andisputed sway.
Later we went to the Garden of Gethsemane, all planted out to flowers,
and sat under one of the great olive trees, while an old Italian monk,
twenty years an exile from his country, clipped flowers for us with the long
scissors at his girdle. We cut for ourselves twigs from the solemn old trees ;
accepted the olives given us by the old monk ; made the acquaintance of his
comfortable cat ; mounted to his pleasant rooms in one comer of the garden
for a drink of water, and raised our eyebrows contemptuously as the op-
position *' garden " of the Greek Church was pointed out near by. But not
at Gethsemane as in some other places, did I realize that One had been here
to whom the wide world offers no rival — One who was mystical — Divine !
To dose the day's investigation we went under the city into the great cave
made by the quarriers of the temple, whose tool-marks are fresh upon the
lofty walls.
March 13. — Upon the Mount of Olives in the afternoon. We went out
on our donkeys, followed the path by which David went with ashes on his
head when Absalom rebelled against him, and climbed to the summit of the
middle division of the mountain — for, as all the world knows, Olivet has
three. Here we contemplated Jerusalem from the top of a Moslem minaret ;
studying its topography and getting into our minds more thoroughly than
we could elsewhere, the relation of the so-called mountains on which it
stands to the desolate, stony valleys that surround it on every side. Here
we had our first real view of the Dead Sea, which in this crystal air seemed
but a little distance off, though we shall sadly learn the contrary, I suppose,
when we measure it inch by inch over the worst paths ever tried by himian
enterprise and patient horses' hoofs. Here the blue mountains of Moab
spread themselves dimly "as a dream when one awaketh," and the Judean
hills touched our hearts vnth manifold suggestions of the blessed Presence
that vanished from them to the mount of God many a sad century ago.
Away beyond the stony promontories that overhang the stonier valleys, was
Bethlehem. Yonder was the path where Jesus walked so often seeking the
home of his friends, Mary, Martha and La2:arus; by the winding road
nearer us he made his triumphal entry into the city ; from some blessed
height beneath our eyes — what matters it that we can not tell which one ! —
he floated into the airy regions suited to his resurrected body, and thence
away to the mystic heavens we love to think about in our exalted hours.
What a matchless landscape this, impossible to rival on the wide face of the
beautiful earth ; more significant to the Christian heart than all the classic
plains or poetic mountain heights of Europe, the grand peaks and vales
of Switzerland, or the tender beauty of the home scenes his longing heart
recalls.
But around us were clamoring Arabs intent upon showing us the very
spot whence the Ascension took place, the very prints left by the upward
tending feet of the Redeemer. We go to see them duly, and escape down
the hill-side, gathering flowers for dear ones at home who will never have
this landscape under their wistful eyes, and picking up bits of agate and
296 A Sabbath in Jerusalem,
onyx which have lain here for unnumbered ages, been tnmed a thousand
times by the rude plowshare of the husbandman, and we please ourselves
by fancying that possibly our Saviour's footsteps may have touched them
as he passed along the hill-side.
A Sabbath in Jerusalem ! An afternoon upon the Mount of Olives !
To a devout soul this were worth a pilgrimage longer than any other that
the earth's wide belt makes possible. And yet — and yet — we were so cold ;
the wind blew so searchingly ; curious Arabs pursued us so relentlessly; the
intellectual part of studying the landscape, and the practical part of keeping
on the backs of slippery donkeys distracted our attention so that the spirit-
ual part, those shy, sweet feelings of the heart — those tender, child-like
aspirations — those deep and solemn contemplations more suited to the spot
than to any other in all the earth, had little chance to hold us. But I had
some quiet moments of priceless worth. Gleams and glimpses of what all
this may mean flashed through my soul. The gentle, helpless face of
Mary — my sister Mary — shrined forever in the center of my heart, looked
out upon me from her dying pillow, and that failing voice uttered again the
words : " Oh, Christ has come to me ! He holds me by the hand ; He says,
* She tried to be good, but she wandered ; but I'll forgive and save her' ! "
That same Christ to whom we trusted Mary walked upon this mount-
ain ; here spent the night of His infinite agony, and purchased her sweet
soul's redemption on the bitter cross, within sight of where I stand !
Pale and wasted and framed in hair made gray by suffering, more than
age, another face looked on me, and my honored father's voice rang in my
ears: "Christ lived, and died, and rose again! Upon this faith I walk
right out over the awful gulf of death — and I am not afraid ! " Ah, how these
tender memories, so sad, so sacred, so inspiring, bring home to me the
reality of that religion which was bom in yonder gray and mournful city,
and hence has swept its way to the remotest corner of our world ! The
poet's song brings relief to my heart, which is surcharged with trembling
love and timid hope, and prayerfully I sing,
" Rock of Aees, clefl for met
I/Ct me hide myself in thee ;
Let the water and the blood,
From thy wounded side that flowed.
Be of sin the double cure ;
Save from wrath and make me pure.**
Oh, I must go again and yet again to Olivet ; no experience of all my
life has seemed so sweet and so significant as this!
It is a mournful thing to see the white-robed women of Jerusalem, their
beauty or hideousness concealed by colored handkerchiefs wrapped about
their faces, congregating around the graves that fleck the valleys and the
hill-sides of Jerusalem beyond the walls. I wonder why they go there, poor
things ! and whether it is to be merry or sad. Sometimes I have seen flowers
upon a little stony grave and children playing around, while the women,
patient and still, sat beside the lonesome mound. As we toddled in at the
Damascus gate (my odd word describes, not inaptly, the motion of our drol]
In Camp Outside the Jaffa Gate, 297
little donkeys), a cannon was fired, and another and another still, signals
for closing the gates at evening. The Spanish Consul here, a pleasant gen-
tleman who sits opposite us at table d'hote, says that at Ramadan, the fasting
time of the Mohammedans, the firing of a cannon informs the people
when they can eat, when they must commence their rigorous abstinence,
which lasts from sunrise to sunset and in which no good Mohammedan eats,
drinks, or even smokes ; also, in the night, it arouses the faithful to prayer.
This is the first religious use to which I have heard gunpowder put in all
my travels !
I can never tell what force and added pathos I found in all the wonder-
fiil Bible words after the experience of this marvelous week, and this chief
Sabbath of my life. Why, the Bible is going to be a new book to me after
this ! God grant it may be ' ' new " in a deep, spiritual sense ; that it may
take hold upon my careless life, may make me what all teaching and the
most golden opportunities must fail unless they accomplish, a better humai;
creature, nearer to what God meant when He created me ; more as Christ
taught us we must be to serve Him on earth and live with Him in heaven.
Bishop Kingsley, Dr. Bannister, Dr. March and company reported
themselves as comfortably encamped beyond the Jaffa gate, and we lost
no time in getting our luggage into the prescribed compass, and walking
behind the same as piled upon the broad back of El Hani's servants it
traversed the dark and winding streets. With the least possible ceremony
we introduced ourselves in camp, where three large tents, besides the
"kitchen," were in order, the star-spangled banner floating from that occu-
pied by the wide-awake Presbyterian quartet, Drs. March, Goodwin and
Hay den, and Brother Ezra Coan. We found our quarters quite comfortable,
one large tent adorned within after the manner of a patch-work quilt of the
"basket pattern, " red, white, blue and green calico in circles and triangles,
and at the top branching out into a flaming star ; pieces of carpet cover the
ground, four iron bedsteads stand thickly around (Mr. and Mrs. Paine, of
Boston, are our companions), a table occupies the center with a decent red
"spread " thereon ; there are two tin wash-basins and pitchers, and one brass
candlestick suitably equipped for evening. We hunt up the gimlets we have
provided (at our friend Warburton's suggestion), bore into the tent pole,
regardless of any sensitiveness on El Hani's part, and hereon hang curtains
to divide the tent, riding-whips, waterproofs, carriage-top hats, and so on.
Things begin to " look like living." I get out our books, and finding in my
Bible the description of the temple built by Solomon, read it, placing myself
in fancy where I stood last evening, imagining its glories replacing the
swelling dome of the Caliph's Mosque and listening with ear intent to that
stately prayer of the wise king with its impressive iteration of ** Hear us, O
Lord, in heaven thy dwell inj:^ place, and when thou shalt hear, forgive !"
Ah, but it is a new book altogether, this Bible I have read so long and left
so long unread ; what would I not give now to have it all " at my tongue's
end " ! I also read ** Esther," being interested particularly in the account of
the pilgrims to the Holy Land ; and make out from the various guide-books
a list of such places as I yet must see or must revisit in this city, which has
298 At Bethafiy.
a charm for me — although it is the darkest, dreariest and most comfortless
I ever saw — ^that no other can ever attain. Jerusalem and Paris ! What
contrast greater does our various earth afford ! They are at the two opposite
poles of human life and history. The one gratifies every sense, pleases every
taste, is the bright, consummate flower of modern civilization, the long result
of time in its most winning sense, the admired of all admirers ; the other
girt about with gray and barren hills, hedged by stem and solemn walls,
with no beauty, no attraction, hardly even the ordinary comforts of life to
offer to the weary pilgrim ; and yet drawing him to her withered bosom with
a spell to which he gladly yields, and melting his heart with a love, pity and
hope that take fast hold upon the dearest ties, that reach backward through
all ages and forward to the consummation of creation's mystery.
But the wiry little luncheon bell disturbs my reverie. We repair to the
tent of the banner, in which Dr. March & Co. have lodgings, and find
cold beef, cold chicken, bread, nuts, dates and oranges awaiting us, from
which, thanks to our keen app>etites, we make a hearty repast. Thus far we
like tent-life, seeing nothing to dread, save the mosquitoes which have set
their crimson seal on the foreheads of our hardy comrades, and against
whose attacks we have been trying to provide by rigging out a net apiece,
made of our veils with our Garden-of-Gethsemane whips bent across them.
In the afternoon we went to Bethany. Here lived Jesus' friends and
here his nature showed its most human side ; here affection won from him
the tears that torture could not force ; here he performed his crowning mira
cle ; somewhere hereabouts from the side of Olivet he passed through the
pure air that fans my cheek into the blue above us. All that our hearts most
dearly cherish in the crisis hours of life centers in this ascent of Jesus from
some spot beneath our gaze, as it wanders over the low and lonesome hill
that stands out in the history of our race, more lofly in its meanings, more
heavenly in its hopes than all the summits of the earth. For *' if Christ be
not risen, then is our preacliing vain, and your faith is also vain."
They showed us Lazarus' tomb : a deep, disagreeable excavation by the
roadside, suspiciously convenient to "the house of Mary and Martha,"
and not a stone's throw from that of ** Simon the leper." We crawled
dutifully into the cave and mounted a housetop to look down upon the
ruins, but should have been puzzled to reply had anybody asked why we
did so, why we paid the tribute of a thought to these barefaced impostures,
when around us were the faithful face of nature, the changeless outlines of
the hills, the unvarying rocks, all of which Jesus had seen, and these alone.
Doubtless, our unanalyzed impulse to look at these impostures, was a certain
kindly sympathy with the army of pilgrims from every land, who have hon-
estly venerated these shrines. Well, I am glad that since " I am human,
whatever touches humanity touches me. ' ' We lingered long upon the house-
top, while the \nllage sheik stood near us, watching curiously our move-
ments and listening attentively to our reading of the chapter about how
Jesus came from beyond Jordan, up yonder rugged path before us, and
Martha went to meet him, and his potent voice called her brother from the
grave — perhaps one of the very holes in the rock before us.
Jesus Walked Here Often, 299
TO THE DEAD SEA AND JERICHO.
March 18. — We rise at about six o'clock and breakfast out-of-doors at
This morning it rained upon our omelette, toast and coffee. The
wind was chilly, the sky a leaden gray, and matters looked a little dubious
for starting on the grand route, " doing " the Dead Sea and the Jordan, and
reaching Jericho to-night. Mr. Wilson, Kate and I made it our first busi-
ness to ride up to Jerusalem in the rain and buy ourselves rubber coats, a
precaution we had stupidly neglected up to this time. Not until nine o'clock
did our long line get in motion, led off by a couple of formidable-looking
Arabs who, for a consideration, acted as our escort.
It really takes a good deal of '* impedimenta " to start a baker's dozen
of tourists over these break-neck hills, paradoxical though it may seem. In
and out, up and down, around and over we wind by the worst road that ever
outraged that respectable name. And what has set us all to wriggling thus
among these barren hills ? Why, one called Jesus walked here often, in olden
times, and with him went twelve others, whose humble names have gained a
luster brighter than those of kings and have gone into all the world. After
the fall from my horse I thought perhaps the feet of Christ might have
pressed the very stones that bruised me ; could I but know it, how I should
prize the wound ! We lunched beside an old wall inclosing the summit of
the '* Pisgah " of the Mohammedans, the only trouble with which is, that it
ought to be the other side of Jordan ; but one must not be exigent.
To pass rapidly through this wilderness is nothing, but to live here
would be simply impossible, for no green thing is seen for miles, unless
sometimes in the valleys the gray, weird-looking shrub made for the
camel's nourishment and found in the great deserts. But the hills have
such variety of form, are so harmoniously rounded, circle around each other
in dance so intricate, display such curious lines of stratification, and abound
in such tempting pebbles, that, flecked by the bright sunshine that the
newly swept and garnished skies have yielded, their white and yellow colors
light up cheerfully, and the scene is far" more pleasant than travelers teach
us to expect. And as for the desolation of the Dead Sea, I surely was unable
to discover it. A more beautiful sheet of water I have rarely seen, blue as a
mountain lake, its distant promontories standing out grandly and mellowed
with a light that Claude need not have disdained, while to-day the effects of
cloud and the hue of the sky were magnificent enough to be memorable.
I certainly never saw a more splendid display in the heavens, and even as
we bent over the smooth and glassy water a rainbow in the east gave the last
touch to a picture that we all thought marvelous. Neither is the approach
to the Dead Sea desolate ; there was far more vegetation than we had looked
for — tall, rank cane, juniper, tamarisk, and a few flowers. Some apples of
Sodom, at least our knowing ones pronounce them such, were gathered here
(also at the Jordan and Jericho), but they are a pretty, yellow fruit, and on
the same twig with them grows a purple flower which is in appearance, com-
pared to that of the potato, what a race horse is to a mule. (I become,
natitrallj enough, equestrian in my comparisons!) But the water of the
300 Sabbath at Bethel
Dead Sea is worthy of its reputation. I tasted it slightly when filling the
little can we are going to take home. It is unbearable to the tongue, but the
feeling of it is smooth, almost slipp>ery, and the gentlemen who took the
bath, self-prescribed here to all tourists, report it as buoyant even beyond
their expectations and almost blistering to lips and eyelids. Master El
Hani (up the Nile we had an English, here an Arab commander-in-chief),
told us we had *'just ten minutes" to spend at the Dead Sea. What with
scolding and display of temper I managed to get twenty, and the gentlemen,
some of them, a little longer ; but the train departed, leaving many loiterers,
long before half an hour was passed. Pleasant, is n't it, to come seven or
eight thousand miles to a renowned spot and be told by a wild ignoramus
that he allots you ten minutes in which to make observations ? Well, well,
some people don't even have ten.
March 21.— Far off, Gerizim and Ebal loom, and here is Jacob's well.
There the pleasant fields on which Christ looked, when He said, Behold the
fields are white and ready for the harvest ! I have hardly seen a landscape
more suggestive of sweet and hopeful thoughts, and certainly, go where we
may, we can never be so certain as here that we have found our Saviour's
footsteps, that we are actually in the same place where he once was. Onl}'
those who have been fortunate enough to prove it can know what life, what
vividness, must ever invest that beautiful fourth chapter of John when it
has been read beside this well, with Gerizim on the right hand, Ebal on the
left, Joseph's tomb a little distance off and the fields stretching away on
every side. Horseback-riding is fatiguing work sometimes, living in tents
is not the method of existence one would choose, but a single experience
like that I have described repays a thoughtful traveler for more of hardship
than he would have believed himself capable of enduring, until the spell
of such a land as this was laid upon him.
That night we sat at table (V hote as usual an hour and a half, there
being time for a nap between each of the courses, only the opportunities
were small as we were perched on camp stools all on a slant and leaned our
elbows on the table to maintain our equilibrium. And in the night how the
rain poured, the lightning Hashed, the thunder roared with short explosions
among these sacred hills ; yet so weary were we all that we slept very
soundly, rising a little after five, in hopes to get off to Mt. Gerizim after an
early breakfast. Not so however was it written in the almanac. The rain
poured, the wind blew, and thick clouds shut down over our heads. But we
bravely prepared for a day's ride ; ** the ladies " each fastening her big hat
on her back and drawing over it her rubber coat, fastening the hood tightly
under her chin until she looked like an Esquimaux, buttoning on her riding-
gloves with whip attached to one of them ; taking her bag of books intended
to swing from the pommel and containing the Bible, Murray, and a book for
flowers, and a pincushion in case of anything "giving out." The tents
were knocked down over our heads and we stood out in as " big a drip *' as
ever poured its wet sheets upon defenseless travelers. It was very amusing
to look around and see thirteen drenched, but cheerful mortals looking out
from under their umbrellas and longing for a better time. I was espedallj
A Visit to Damasais, 301
stmck by the mild, smiling countenance of Bishop Kingsley, shining like
a full moon from under his wet and shapeless sombrero. But the dragoman
decreed that the weather was too bad, we could not move to-day, so we
mounted our horses and rode slipping along over the mud and through a
roaring torrent to the town where, at the present writing, we are toasting our
feet around a brasier of charcoal in a great, dirty, nondescript room of an
Arab hotel ; some reading their Bibles, others their Murray, others asking
hard questions in history and chronology pertaining to our whereabouts,
• others still cracking dry jokes, and some curious scribblers sketching this
room where we have taken refuge.
April 6, 1870.— So I am in Damascus— city of so many vague and pleas-
ant fancies— even I !
We clatter along the muddy, wretchedly paved streets, where walk the
same parti-colored processions of barbarians that trail their soiled, but brill-
iant garments through all the highways and byways of the East. We pass
under the gigantic palm tree, down in all guide-books as one of the marvels
of Damascus. Grand and brave it looks, the sunshine sifting through its
million leaves and the mild breeze singing a hymn away up in its branches.
What a lesson it has preached here, quite unheeded, during all the centuries
of its noble growth ; rising from these dirty streets and dingy dwellings into
purer air and sunny skies, without a spot upon its emerald garments or a
distortion among its vigorous branches. In a sense this palm tree pleases
me better than anything else in all Damascus.
We clatter on at the discretion of our guide.
A slave market, the first and only one we ever saw, is among the
"sights " he sees fit to place before us. Through several courts, up shaking
stairs and into miserable little dens we are conducted with much discomfort
and outrage upon our olfactories. Here are several miserable negro
women, tattered boys, and one pretty Circassian girl waiting to be sold.
They hold out their hands for alms. Some are in bed, sick in body or in
heart. It is a sad sight to behold, in some regards the saddest upon which
I ever gazed.
The great Mosque is of interest from its history, though I see little
there except its vastness, which attracts me. This Mohammedan religion
is by no means the harmonious affair one ignorantly supposes, but has its
divisions and its rancors, all the more fierce from the fanatical stupidity of
its adherents. We climb one of the minarets — that of " The Son of Mary,"
and get the ripest fruit of a journey to Damascus — namely, a view of the
city itself. There it is, the emerald in its setting of gold, which poets have
sung of, artists painted, and tourists spent pages of verbiage upon ; one of
the strangest, choicest sights of our beautiful earth, one to drink in with the
eyes, one to cherish in the memory, one tliat Moore might have described in
Lalla Rookh, or Warburton in his best mood might have presumed to touch,
but which should have the tribute of silence from such pens as mine. The
hill whence Mahomet first beheld it is thickly covered with snow, so we
can not climb it as we have so much desired to do, as I have a thousand times
dreamed of doing, even in Wisconsin groves and upon Illinois prairieg.
302 Sight-seeing,
Through dark, crowded streets we go to the "goldsmiths' hall*' of
Damascus, where hundreds of workmen, seated tailor fashion on their
tables, are hammering away at all imaginable kinds of jewelry, and where
from rude cases gleam pearls, rubies and diamonds of incalculable price,
from earliest ages the heritage of the splendid Orient. But we hasten
through this golden bedlam and emerging upon its roof come upon what we
are seeking — the old, walled-up door that led to the Mosque we have just
visited, when it was a Christian church, and where we read, or might if we
knew Greek, an inscription placed here twelve hundred years ago, '*Thy
kingdom, O Christ, is an everlasting kingdom, and Thy word endureth to all
generations !" There is almost the inspiration of prophecy in these words,
and no one whose early and most innocent hopes Christianity has cherished,
can look upon it without emotion. I stoop to gather a leaf that is grow-
ing from a crevice of this sculptured doorway.
The uninviting exterior of Oriental houses is proverbial, but those of
Damascus are so much uglier than any other city of the East can show, that
it would seem as if the fashion started here and its imitators had fallen as
far behind their model, as is the fate of imitators generally. Our donkeys
pick their way along a street outrageous in its filth, and so dark and narrow
that it reminds us of the entrance to the pyramids, and stop before a small
door let into a wall twenty feet high. A vigorous application of our whips
to the same, unearths a withered-up old servant who flings wide the bird-cage
portal, and bending nearly double we stumble into the finest of Damascus
houses ; into the place which brings us nearest to the dear, impossible, story-
book world, and banishes in the twinkling of an eye that matter-of-fact old
world, where we have lived so long, to the greatest distance to which it has
ever yet been banished from our eyes. The transformations of the stage are
nothing to it ; the charm of Lalla Rookh's enticing pages can not go beyond ;
nay, rather, can not approach this scene. Look ! As we pass from the entrance
court to a second in the middle of the house, where fountains sparkle and the
native Damascus roses bloom, a lady from an upper window salutes us with
graceful courtesy, regards us for several minutes, no gentleman being of our
party, and retires. She looks worthy of her surroundings, indeed, is just the
htmian creature to lend a harmonious charm to all the beauty lavished here,
where every sense is pleased. The very sight of her makes us commonplace
Europeans ill at ease ; our thoughtful faces and travel-worn garments have
no rightful place in this exotic dream. We feel relieved when that fair face
withdraws from sight and yet our foolish thoughts go with it wondering, and
envious for one impulsive moment of the strange, glowing life one here
might lead amid so much embodied poesy. We wander through the cool
and shady rooms that open on the central court where orange trees in marble
basins sift the sunshine that the sweet-voiced fountains cool. We enter by
windows wide open as doors and on a level with the court-yard's marble
floor. An ample space, also marble-covered and with a fountain in its midst,
marks the limit beyond which shodden feet can not be allowed to trespass.
Before stepping to the higher level where Turkish carpets indicate the
sanctum sanctorum of the apartment, slippers must be put on or shoes put
A Glimpse of Greece, 3^3
offl Velvet furniture of graceful, airy shape adorns the principal salon.
Bright colors greet the eye wherever it may rest, from silver lamps to
tapestried doorway, and large mirrors of surprising frequency repeat the
rich hues that fall through windows of stained glass. In an alcove of the
parlor are the delicate coffee, and wine cups with cunous holders, peculiar
to the East. In one great room are thirty or more windows, but all high
above the loftiest head ; no sound or suggestion of the outer world can
penetrate this beautiful retreat. It is a place apart, a paradise unforfeited.
The only thing I saw there which reminded me of the world from which I
came and to which I must so soon and so inevitably return, was a plate of
visitors' cards from all parts of Europe, showing that the charm of this
strange spot has seized upon a thousand tranquil imaginations from the
cooler zones. I am quite sure that when in my dear, quiet home in Evan-
ston I shut my eyes to summon the most glowing picture that my fancy
can afford, the least like what is around me there, the least, indeed, like
what my notions of our old world would lead me to expect it could contain,
I shall see a sunny bit of sky above an odorous garden walled in by the
brightly colored interior walls and made musical by the clear fountains of a
Damascus home.
Athens, April i8, 1870. — It is very much of a moment in one's life, I
hold, when he looks first upon the birthplace of the arts, the capital of
earth's most heroic land — even though its glory is departed and its children
are enslaved.
And so it happened that when those stout-armed, swarthy-faced Greek
boatmen took us in charge, tumbled us like so much merchandise into their
little boats and rushed us off to the shore, I saw, instead of them, a blue-
eyed, fair-haired race, the same to whom were given those visions of Minerva
and of Venus which a colder age crystallized into religion ; and before me
on those azure waves loomed the fleet of Xerxes driven by Themistocles
and his helmeted warriors away from the paradise they had menaced.
A pleasant carriage ride along the line of wall built by the prudent
Athenians to afford a sheltered passage from their city to their port, and we
enter the city which has succeeded to that of ancient times. It is a fresh,
cheerful looking place, altogether European, even American in seeming, to
our Asiatic eyes ! The streets are clean, shops large, windows bright and
clear, pavements and sidewalks smooth and well arranged. Our hotel
seems like a palace, and I don't wonder that a dozen different travelers have
extolled its merits in the guide-book, if all came hither from the East as
we do. What rooms we have, covered with rich carpets, and planted out
to huge easy-chairs and pretty escritoires, with clean beds covered by a
scarlet blanket apiece. Engravings of Kings George and Otho are on the
walls, and out of the windows views of the Acropolis ! What a dining
saloon is this, and what a breakfast they give us — crisp cutlets, fresh eggs,
fresh rolls and coffee, and honey from Mt. Ilymettus !
The creature comforts duly attended to — and who forgets them? even
long-haired artists, and starry-eyed poets confessing their indolent sway —
we engage "Philosopher " as our guide, a plump man of middle age, dull
304 From Hisses to Applause.
as his own eyes and good natured as he is well fed. Bj his exertions a
nice carriage, and driver in short white petticoats, i la Greek, are speedily in
readiness, and obedient to the order, " To the Acropolis ' ' ; we drive off in high
spirits to the goal of onr long voyage. We wind around the base of this
famous hill, which has several much higher and fully as steep in its vicinity,
and passing through three comparatively modem gates enter the Propylaeum,
pass its beautiful, though ruined portal, climb the bare rock, where the
brilliant processions of the Golden Age were wont to pass, and take up ow
position before the Parthenon. Gray and broken as is this ruin it is yet
among the most impressive I have had the good fortune to behold. So
simple, almost austere, in its beauty ; so satisfying in its proportions ; so
nobly dignified in its tout ensemble — one feels a reverence for the Parthenon,
not exceeded by that inspired by any other fane that reverent hands have
reared to any deity. Three or four hours of scrutiny, as honest and as earn-
est as we could bestow, gave us somewhat of a home feeling in this temple.
We studied the Propylaeum, the Temple of Victory, the Parthenon and
Erechtheum and found where the old altars had stood, the glittering
statues on their sculptured pedestals, and followed the road by which the
splendid processions used to wind up the steep rock in the Age of Pericles.
PARIS AND THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR.
We returned to Paris after another visit in England and re-
mained until the investiture of the French capital by Germany
became imminent. Our sympathies were with King William and
**Unser Fritz," Bismarck, Von Moltke and the '*Red Prince,'*
but to say this would have been treason, and we maintained that
** guarded silence '' in which diplomatists rejoice and honest peo-
ple grow impatient. The results of the struggle form a part of
history's record to-day. But we who watched its beginnings
from within were not surprised at the sequence.
August 12, 1870. — Even so soon, the outmost ripple of the widening war-
wave has reached me in my quiet life and quietest of Paris homes. This
morning the cream cheese which helps out my slender breakfast failed,
because the man who was wont to bring it was conscripted and has gone to
the frontier. The garrulous old custodian who conducted us this afternoon
to the Arc de Triomphe, said that most of the trees in the park were to be
cut down in the progress of the home defenses. We saw hundreds of men
working on the fortifications which are soon to shut off communication with
the outer world.
Thiers spoke in the Corps L^gislatif to-day, for the first time since
three weeks ago, when he was hissed and howled at and silenced, and his
house stoned a while later by the populace, because his voice was not for
war. To-day he was applauded. To-day Marshal Leboeuf, then Minister
of War, head of the army, the nation's hope, the most eager of them all in
The French Anny m Retreat, . 305
his shrieks for combat, has handed in his resignation. What a people is this,
and how short-lived the glory so dear to all who love the nanie'of France !
News on the bulletin posted up at the mayor's : " The Prussians have
surrounded Strasbourg. The French are retreating in good order. But her
soldiers performed prodigies of valor in the recent engagement."
As Thiers said, " All the failure is due to the incapacity of their chiefs."
To which Picard replies, "An incapacity that has lasted twenty years."
Many think, and all who have not loaves and fishes to lose by it, hope
that the second Empire is in its dying hour. It looks ominous —the num-
ber of men working on the fortifications and the number of places where
the grass has been cut away to make space for the cannon, of which six
hundred will very soon be mounted.
P^re Hyacinthe publishes his determination to work on the fortifica-
tions, since he thinks a priest should only fight in extreme cases. He will
take his spade to-morrow after mass.
All other considerations are evidently overshadowed when the gay Paris-
ians reflect that the whole French anny is in retreat, closely followed by "the
German brutes," as polite France does not hesitate to call the challenged
invaders of her soil. Great, but quiet crowds stand waiting upon the boule-
vards and in the street of the newspaper offices. The varying aspects of Paris
are like those of a handsome woman's face swayed by contending passions.
News of two indecisive French victories are reported by Marshal
Bazaine, with the words, " Our losses have been great." The people seem
as disconsolate as ever, for who does not know that if real success should
crown the French armies, the streets would bloom with flags and the air be
rent with the noise of minute-guns ? This state of things can not endure
much longer.
A lengthy placard posted on the columns of the Rue de Rivoli, and on
all available spots along the boulevards, announces that ** General Trochu is
governor of Paris in the peril of the nation, and that his motto Is, * I am for
the country, with the help of God.' " Everybody feels relieved, because he
is a very able man and much beloved.
We have another batch of London papers, and the news we gather is
altogether different from what the Paris papers give us.
Let me here set down one corollary on my European study of the Sab-
bath problem. Even if the observance of one day in seven by cessation from
ordinary pursuits, particular observance of divine worship, and thoughts of
destiny and duty, be not required of us by our Creator, it is at least proved
to be for our highest good and l^est development, first, by comparing nations
where such observances are habitual with those where they are not ; and
second, in individual experience, by instituting a similar parallel between
the periods when we have and when we have not regarded the injunctions
of the fourth commandment. I look hopefully toward the better country
of America and the better life that it is easy there to lead. For me and for
my work in life it is a happy thing that I am going home. I would that I
had the ambition of goodness even as strongly as I have the ambition of
knowledge !
20
3o6 Total Abstainers Abroad,
Three things I did, once in awhile, during my two years and
four monthls of foreign travel, that I never did and never do at
home. I went to see sights on Sunday, went to the theater, and
took wine at dinner. I reflect upon these facts with undisguised
regret, but will frankly mention how this apostasy occurred.
Never having been inside of a theater but once in America,
and that on my first visit to New York City, in 1863, I went a
few times in London, Paris, Berlin, and once in Moscow — ^perhaps
half a dozen times in all. The universal judgment of tourists
is that one's impression of the class that has best opportunity
of culture is best gained by one's observations at the play, and
their native language is spoken with grater purity by actors,
perhaps, than by any other class.
There are some important sights in Paris never to be seen
except on Sunday, so we went a few times, probably not half a
dozen, in the nine months of our residence there.
Having been reared a total abstainer, the thought never oc-
curred to me to take wine until my violent illness in Copenhagen,
when a kind-faced physician bent over me and told me in French
that if I ever expected to see my home again, I must avoid drink-
ing water as we journeyed from one country to another, that being
the most fruitful source of disease among travelers. The subject
had not then been studied as it has been since, and I was more
reverent towards physicians than I am now, so these words came
to me as law and gospel. From that time on I thought it right
to mix a little wine with the water at dinner, taking tea and cofiee
at the other meals. Kate also carried a bottle of wine with which
to moisten our box of Albert biscuit, which was a requisite on our
long car rides. Coming home, the custom was at once abandoned
by us both and not renewed by her in her many years of foreign
travel since, nor by me save as herein confessed.
At the International breakfast in Philadelphia, which was a
part of the Centennial celebration by temperance people in 1876,
I heard testimonies from travelers who had circumnavigated the
globe many times, to the effect that they never drank wine. I
know it is the testimony of all of our Methodist Bishops, and their
duties take them to every clime, and my honored friends, Mr. and
Mrs. Joseph Cook, of Boston, tell me that they found a bottle of
thoroughly boiled water to be a perfectly safe and satisfactory sub-
Curt for Sea-sickness. 307
»
stitute for wine in all their world-wide travels, so that were I now
to set out for a voyage around the world, as I suspect I shall some
day, I should have no anxiety in my character of total abstainer.
I firmly believe that had I never tasted wine while on the other
side of the water, and had I scrupulously followed the American
customs in my Sabbath observances, it would have been much
better for me every way.
Aui^^t 14. — I went to the Louvre to see my favorite among Vennaes,
that of Milo, for a leave-taking. In the long, dim perspective, she gleamed
like a divinity. She has a soul, a brain, a heart, which one can not say of
the Medici and hardly of the Capitoline, or of the Diana of Versailles and
her antiquarian companions. The gallery of modem sculpture, including
Canova's Cupids and Psyches, and many other chefs d'oeuvre were our last
sights in the Louvre, most artistic of all galleries and the one that more than
any other contributes to the culture of the public taste. It is the noblest
thing in France, worthy of what is highest and most generous in the great
Latin race. How it has pleased and taught me by its lessons manifold as \ht
panorama of evening clouds, and free as the air from Swiss mountains. To-
day, as alwa3rs, when I have been there, many poor workmen in their blouses
were passing through this gallery, looking delightedly from side to side,
holding their caps in their hands, not awkwardly, but with a certain timid
grace, until they observed that gentlemen wore theirs, when they replaced
them suddenly and commenced staring more diligently than ever at the
pictured walls.
August 23. — Our adieus to our dear French hostess and her children
were indeed hard to be said. We felt that we should probably never see
again this gracious and accomplished woman and her lovely little children,
who, with their invariable happy heedlessness, went smiling to the carriage
door, throwing kisses and repeating their good-bys without cessation. Dear
Bfadame, from her I hastened away, so as not to cry outright. She has a
Brm and loyal friend in me, and I am sure that while she lives I shall not
lack one on this side the water, nor shall I lack, while she has a roof over
her, a home, where I am as welcome as anywhere on earth save in the little
Gothic cottage on the sunset shore of Lake Michigan.
September 5. — With respect to sea-sickness, I would offer a recipe of my
own, inasmuch as every one has at his tongue's end a deliverance of this
tort — I mean if he has never been sea-sick. My recipe is, however, an ex-
ception to the rule, for I am never an3rthing but sea-sick while on the sea !
dossing the Mediterranean is perhaps as much worse than crossing the
Atlantic as the latter is worse than navigating a mill-pond. But on both
these watery highways,* I got relief by just one method, namely, rolling the
piUow into a cylinder and rolling back my neck over that, while I held my
arm above my head and with eyes well up in their sockets and fixed with
*Alao on the Pacific Ocean where I eked out a miserable existence during the voyage
frna f>*t» praaciaoo to Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia river.
3o8 Home Again.
■
despeimte clinch upon the pages of an interesting book, I performefl my
cure and defrauded Old Neptune to the, at least intermittent, quietude of my
diaphragm. I thus read the Life of Robertson, and his sermons, many of
the best novels of Bulwer, and choice excerpts from Tauchnitz's Edition of
Great Authors.
September 6. — ^New York almost in sight, silver sails all out in the west,
silver moon in the clear sky, breakfast in the American fashion ; port-holes all
open for American air. We fill out our custom-house affidavits, pass Sandy
Hook, the Narrows, the forts, the shipping, with the Star-spangled Banner
at the mast-head, feel choky over it, vote unanimously that there is no
nobler harbor ; see the German flag everywhere, and learn amid tremendous
excitement that Napoleon is a prisoner, McMahon's army has capitulated
and Prance is a Republic. We are so delighted we know not what to do
or say. Our friends, the German Doctor and his wife, hop up and down !
Wait three hours for our baggage to be taken off, enthusiasm ebbs to a
low point ; get our eight trunks and packing boxes together with infinite
pains. A gentleman of the police fraternity takes our effects in hand, asks
fhe solemnly, *' In which trunk are all those handsome new dresses from
Paris?** to which I innocently reply, **In this big black one, sir.'* Asks
me if we have any piece goods, to which I replied, ** Oh, yes, enough to
make our dresses over when they get out of style!** He smiles wisely.
" Have you worn all your clothing ? '* " Well, yes, that is, we tried it all on
at our dressmakers*, but we have worn it very little.** He sees that we are
so tremendously honest that he does n*t look into a single trunk, merely
cuts the rope, saying, '' You understand these have all been examined. I
do this for you as a personal favor, I peril my position by so doing, but you
say you are in haste to take a train, and I wish to annoy you as little as pos-
sible.** Poor fellow ! It were more than human charity to say that he did
not look for a fee, but at least he did not get any from two such upright and
patriotic women as Kate and I, for, in the first place, we were " principled
against it,*' and in the second place, our finances were at such a point of
exhaustion, that only my ten-dollar gold piece, that I had when we left Amer-
ica, bought for fifteen dollars in greenbacks and sold at a premium of one
dollar at the New York railway station, saved us from bankruptcy. We
talked of taking a carriage from the wharf, and asked the price. ** Five dol-
lars,*' said the hackman, which frightful words we repeated afler him in holy
horror and wrath and toddled off to take the street cars, meditating on the
nice Paris cabs that would have carried us for thirty cents, and agreeing that
America was not perfect, but then it was America, and that was enough.
And now, in conclusion, follow my rough notes made like
Captain Cuttle's, *'when found*'; for my native land, which
seemed a little strange at first, was now as closely scrutinized as
those lands had been whence I was newly come, and no home-
fondness was allowed to dim my glistening spectacles as I drew
forth pencil and paper and took up my task.
A New and Nervous Nation. 309
Pint. Wooden wharfs, general look of temporariness, as one ap-
proached the shore ; no imposing baildmgs ; droll ferry houses, and steamers
that look as ''skating bugs " did on Rock River of old; cart going like
wild-fire ; nnpaved streets full of weeds, as we passed through the villages
going out to the home of Kate's genial Aunt Jane in New Jersey ; cow-
catcher on the engine ; the screaming whistle instead of the mild, cultured
whistle of the continent ; au ear-splitting ding-donging of the engine bell ;
''Lookout For the Locomotive," at every turn. In Europe no railroad or
path, or passenger, is ever, under any circumstances, allowed to cross a
pnck. "Coal, brick, lime, cement, mortar," these are signs frequently met
with and of proportions that indicate a thriving business and a new country.
We have stood upon Mt Calvary, and here we are at the Morris and Essex
depot; we have eaten pomegranates at Damascus, and behold us with
youths watering for prairie melons. " Fust regular stop's Milbum, don*t
pay no 'tention, it's only to let ofif a passenger." Spruce conductor, ring
on finger, gold chain, well-kept mustache, not a man adapted to climbing
along outside of car from one door to another after the manner of conduct-
ors on the other side. Raw, stubby fields, smell like a prairie on fire, as we
cross the Jersey marshes. Polite gentleman changes seats with us because
purs is a back one ; anticipates our raising of the car window ; an employ^
conducts us to the car, carries our baggage, opens door and seats us unthout
charge f " Pop-corn for sale. " The cars are like a meeting-house, where peo-
ple decorously and comfortably face one way instead of glaring at each other
from benches opposite all the weary day long. Every man, well-dressed and
ill-dressed, has a newspaper. Cost of a carriage, five dollars ! Truckman
with trunks, five dollars ! In Frante, all that for five francs (one dollar) or
less. Railroad salutation between two men of business ; rough shake of
the hand, " Good- by, give my respects to your folks ;'* " Thankee, I will ; "
wooden houses everywhere, glaring white ; whole forests manufactured into
fences glaring white. Amazing gentility of custom-house officers and street
conductor ; first advertisement that we saw plastered on a bowlder by the
roadside, "Watt's Nervous Antidote." We have got home to a nervous
nation. Tremendous play bills, with huge portraits, caricatures, etc.; cir-
cuses predominating ; newsboys allowed to hop on the street and other cars
with papers, without being taken by the collar and jerked off by a police-
man. You would know that the street-car conductor did not always expect
to be one, by the very style of his making change for your tickets. He has
the air of a man holding on to one round of the ladder while he reaches up
to grasp the next. Street barber's poles instead of little brass basins, concave
on one edge. Street-car conductor to Kate, " Excuse me, but have n't you
just come from England ? you said station."
All this was twenty years ago or more, when we were less
** English, you know,*' than Henry Irving, daily cable dispatches,
and plenty of money have made us since. But we are true
Americans at heart, and we know beyond all doubt or contra-
diction, ours is God's Country.
3IO Indian Customs.
CAR-WINDOW JOTTINGS.
NEW MEXICO.
Albuquerque, nearly as ancient in its origin as Santa P6, is
the ** Wide-awake " of this mercurial continent. We were there
on Good Friday, and wagons of nondescript appearance thronged
the streets, while teams were in the corral, and men lounged
about the street comers and saloons. *' That's the way the men
go to church here,** dryly remarked a friend. "They think
they've done their whole duty when they fetch the women to
mass." Sure enough, the dingy old church was full of devout
women, prostrate in acknowledgment of sin, while tlieir liege
lords were drinking ardente at the next comer. It needed no
prophet to declare the doom of such an unequal civilization.
Whatever makes the beliefs, tastes, habits and education of men
and women more congenial, providing always that we must level
up and not down, will most rapidly hasten the sway of happy
homes and regenerated hearts.
The Pueblo Indians have a very simple form of election,
one that might, with propriety, be recommended to the politi-
cians of Gotham. It is this : The mayor of the city is chosen
once a year. He can not have a second term. On the morn-
ing of election day, the outgoing mayor nominates two can-
didates for the succession. One of these goes to one end of the
field, the other takes his station opposite. Every man (why not
every woman, pray tell ?) goes to the candidate of his choice and
literally ** stands up for him." Rapidly the lines lengthen on
either side. The old men of the tribe count the number in each,
and thus the election is absolutely without fraud, and, best of all,
they can dispense with caucuses. The Navajoes a tribe cf 1 6,000,
trace their line of descent wholly along the mother's side, and
A Peep at Arizona, 311
the inheritance of property is from mother to daughter, so that a
man when married goes to his wife's house. This is in accord
with the philosophy of that most brilliant French thinker, Emile
de Girardin, who descants at length on the intrinsic advantages
of this plan as being founded in natiu-e, ancestry being far more
easily and surely traced on the mother's than on the father's side.
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.
We are at last in the land of enchantment, where helio-
trope climbs all over the fronts of the houses ; where com grows
seventeen feet high, and one can have a bouquet of fresh
roses and a strawberry short-cake on the table all the year
round. We are with a people as genial as the climate and
breathe an air that makes wine seem more than ever an imnec-
essar>' and absurd exhilaration. Mrs. Dr. Gray, the dignified
president, and Mrs. M. E. Congdon, the keen-brained secre-
tary of California W. C. T. U., came five hundred miles to
welcome us. Capt. A. D. Wood, our noble friend, of The Rescue,
with Mr. and Mrs. Will D. Gould, of Los Angeles, the former
a gifted la\iv^er, and the latter a grand woman, met us at the
depot after our long overland trip. But I must not tell all
our delightful impressions and haps with no mishaps, until I
bring up the log by noting down some items of our stay in
Tucson, for ten years the capital of Arizona, and still its chief
city.
Outsiders say that Arizona means ' * arid zone, ' ' but insiders
insist that its real significance is *' beautiful zone.'' The latter
we will not dispute, only its beauty is below ground, for its
deserts are wide and its mines the most famous of the period.
Roads leading nowhere, desert plains, strange, useless vegetation ;
no fences, general appearances not unlike Arabia Petraea, accord-
ing to the books ; one dollar charged for an aged canned meal ;
now and then an emigrant wagon, with wild-faced, bearded men
driving oxen or mules ; lone mountains, tranquil, treeless and
distant, like vast, heaped-up shapes of sand or stone ; a saw-tooth
sky-line ; needle-pointed shrubs ; seven -branched candlestick cac-
tus trees, forty feet high, these items include some of my im-
pressions of Arizona. The only living things indigenous to the
plains that cheered our eyes, were six graceful antelopes, discerned
312 A New Name for the Planet Earth.
at early dawn, coming no whence, going no whither. What a
strange juxtaposition, this wilderness outside, and the race-horse
of the East, puffing his undaunted way ; the elegant ** silver car,*'
with its artistic decorations, its tapestry cushions and curtains,
and way-wise men and women reading the Chicago dailies, the
last Century, of New York, Atlantic, of Boston, or Spectator, of
London, and looking out through costly glass (adjusted from
** opera" to *' field") over this waste of primeval lonesomeness !
SAN FRANCISCO.
Of all places on the globe, go to the California metropolis if
you would feel the strong pulse of internationalism. Few have
caught its rhythm, as yet, but we must do so if we would be strong
enough to keep step with that matchless, electric twentieth cen-
tury' soon to go swinging past. You can almost hear his resonant
tread on San Francisco pavements ; his voice whispers in the
lengthening telephone, saying, *' Yesterday was good, to-day is
better, but to-morrow shall be the red-letter day of all life's magic
calendar." I have always been impatient of our planet's name —
** the earth." What other, among the shining orbs, has a desig-
nation so insignificant ? That we have put up with it so long is
a proof of the awful inertia of the aggregate mind, almost as sur-
prising as our endurance of the traffic in alcoholic poison. With
Jupiter and Venus, Orion and the Pleiades smiling down upon us
in their patronizing fashion, we have been contented to inscribe
on our visiting cards, * ' At Home : The Earth ! ' ' Out upon such
paucity of language. ** The dust o' the ground " forsooth ! That
answered well enough perhaps for a dark-minded people who
never even dreamed they were living on a star. Even now an
army of good folks afraid of the next thing, just because it is the
next, and not the last, will doubtless raise holy hands of horror
against the proposition I shall proceed to launch forth for the
first time, though it is harmless as the Pope's bull against the
comet. They will probably oppose me, too, on theologic grounds,
for, as Coleridge hath it,
"Time consecrates, and what is gray with age becomes religion."
Nevertheless, since we do inhabit a star, I solemnly propose
we cease to call it a dirt heap, and being determined to **live up
Rev. Dr. Gibson. 313
to my light,*' I hereby bring forward and clap a patent upon the
name
CONCORDIA.
By the same token, I met half a dozen selectest growths of
people in San Francisco who, in the broadest international way
are doing more to make this name Concordia descriptive, rather
than prophetic in its application to our oldest home, than any other
people I can name. They work among the Chinese, Japanese,
and * * wild Arabs of the Barbary coast, ' * they go with faces that
are an epitomized gospel, and preach to the stranger within the
Golden Gate that he is a stranger no more ; they bring glad tid-
ings of good which shall be to all people, for to them, as to their
Master, ** there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male
nor female in Christ Jesus.*'
Among the many such, I can here mention only two : ** See
Otis Gibson, or you have missed the moral hero of Gold-opolis " —
this was concurrent testimony coming from every side. Garfield
left no truer saying than that the time wants men ' * who have the
courage to look the devil squarely in the face and tell him that
he is the devil. * * Precisely this fearless sort of character is Rev.
Otis Gibson. He has been the uncompromising friend of "the
heathen Chinee** through all that pitiful Celestial's grievous
fortunes on our Western shore. When others cursed he blessed ;
while others pondered he prayed ; what was lacking in schools,
church, counsel and kindness he supplied. It cost something
thus to stand by a hated and traduced race in spite of hoodlum
and Pharisee combined. But Otis Gibson could not see why the
people to whom we owe the compass and the art of printing, the
civil service examination, the choicest porcelain, might not Chris-
tianize as readily on our shores as on their own ! In this faith he
and his noble wife have worked on uiitil they have built up a
veritable city of refuge for the defenseless and despairing, in the
young and half barbarous metropolis of the Pacific slope.
We afterward visited the ** Chinese Quarter," so often de-
scribed, under escort of Rev. Dr. Gibson. We saw the theaters
where men sit on the back and put their feet on the board part of
the seat ; where actors don their costumes in full sight of the
audience, and frightful pictured dragons compete with worse dis-
cord, for supremacy. We saw the joss-house, with swinging
3^4 A Chinese Home.
censer and burning incense, tapers and tawdriness, a travesty of
the Catholic ceremonial, taking from the latter its one poor merit
of originality. We saw a mother and child kneeling before a
hideous idol, burning tapers, tossing dice, and thus * * consulting
the oracle," with many a sidelong glance of inattention on the
part of the six-year-old boy, but with sighs and groans that proved
how tragically earnest was the mother's faith. Dr. Gibson said
the numbers on the dice corresponded to wise sayings and ad-
vices on strips of paper sold by a mysterious Chinese whose
*' pious shop*' was in the temple vestibule, whither the poor
woman resorted to learn the result of her ** throw," and then re-
turned to try again, until she got some response that quieted her.
Could human incredulity and ignorance go farther ? We saw the
restaurants, markets and bazaars, as thoroughly Chinese as Pekin
itself can furnish ; the haunts of vice, all open to the day ; the
opium dens, with their comatose victims ; and then, to comfort
our hearts and take away the painful vividness of woman's degra-
dation. Dr. Gibson took us to see a Christian Chinese home, made
by two of his pupils, for years trained under his eye. How can
I make the contrast plain enough ? A square or two away, the
horrid orgies of opium and other dens still worse, but here a well-
kept dry-goods store, where the husband was proprietor, and in
the rear a quiet, pleasant, sacred home. The cleanly, kind-faced
wife busy with household cares, her rooms the picture of neatness,
her pretty baby sleeping in his crib, and over all the peace that
comes from praise and prayer. Never in my life did I approach
so near to that perception, too great for mortal to attain, of what
the Gospel has achieved for woman, as when this gentle, honored
wife and mother said, seeing me point to an engraving of '* The
Good Shepherd " on her nursery wall : ''Oh, yes ! He gave this
home to us. ' '
How firm and fine the etching that should accurately show
the features of Mrs. Sarah B. Cooper ! whose strong, sweet indi-
viduality I have not seen excelled — no, not even among women.
From the time when our Eastern press teemed with notices of the
Presbyterian lady who had been tried for heresy and acquitted,
who had the largest Bible class in San Francisco and was founder
of that city's Kindergartens for the poor, I made a mental mem-
orandum that, no matter whom I missed, this lady I would see.
Sarah B. Cooper, 315
So at half-past twelve on a mild May Sabbath noon, I sought the
elegant Plymouth Church, built by Rev. Dr. A. ly. Stone, for-
merly of Boston, and found a veritable congregation in its noble
auditorium. Men and women of high character and rare thought-
fulness were gathered, Bibles in hand, to hear the exposition of
the acquitted heretic, whom a Pharisaical deacon had beg^n to
assail contemporaneously with her outstripping him in popularity
as an expounder of the gospel of love. She entered quietly by a
side door, seated herself at a table level with the pews, laid aside
her fur-lined cloak and revealed a fragile, but symmetric figure,
somewhat above the medium height, simply attired in black,
with pose and movement altogether graceful, and while perfectly
self-possessed, at the farthest remove from being self-assertive.
Then I noted a sweet, untroubled brow, soft brown hair chas-
tened with tinge of silver (frost that fell before its time, doubtless
at the doughty deacon's bidding) ; blue eyes, large, bright and
loving ; nose of the noblest Roman, dominant yet sensitive,
chiseled by generations of culture, the unmistakable expression
of highest force and mettlesomeness in character, held in check
by all the gentlest sentiments ; a mouth firm, yet delicate, full of
the smiles that follow tears.
When the delightful hour was over, among the loving group
that gathered around her, attracted by the healing virtue of her
spiritual atmosphere, came a temperance sojourner from the East.
As my name was mentioned, the face so full of spirituality lighted
even more than was its wont, and the soft, strong voice said,
"Sometimes an introduction is a recognition — and so I feel it to
be now. ' * I consider that enough of a compliment to last me for
a term of years. I feel that it helped mortgage me to a pure life ;
I shall be better for it "right along." For if I have ever clasped
hands with a truth-seeker, a disciple of Christ and lover of hu-
manity, Sarah B. Cooper held out to me that loving, loyal hand.
A more hospitable intellect I have not known, nor a glance more
wide and tolerant ; " Christ, and him crucified," is to that loyal
heart **the Chief among ten thousand and altogether lovely."
Among the best types of representative women America may
justly count Sarah B. Cooper, the student, the Christian exegete
and philosopher, and the tender friend of every untaught little
chUd.
3^6 Doxology Valley.
If I have not yet written up my California trip it is not for
lack of material, but rather because I have such a bundle of notes
that I dread to begin. California ! *'She is made up of every
creature's best."
THE YOSEMITE.
Who can fitly tell of the condensed impressions about God
made by a valley only six miles long, one mile wide and half a
mile high, wherein all forms of solemn, majestic and pastoral
beauty are combined ?
When, after a mountain ride of half a day, surrounded by
inclined planes of evergreens, each of which would have been a
world's wonder at the East, with superb curves in the road ever-
more opening fresh vistas of illimitable height, verdure and
beauty, we rounded Inspiration Point, '* there was no more spirit
in us." Word-pauperism oppresses one upon this height as
nowhere else on earth. There is in Europe a single revelation
of art that has power to silence the chatter even of fashion's
devotees, and that is Raphael's Sistine Madonna. I have been
in its seraphic presence for hours at a time, but never heard a
vocal comment. The foamiest natures are not silenced by Niag-
ara, by Mount Blanc, by the Jungfrau's awful purity, or the ter-
rors of Vesuvius, for their flippant tones have smitten me in all
these sacred places. But from the little child in our midst — a
bright- faced boy of four — to the rough, kind-hearted driver, not
one word was spoken by our party as the heavenly vision of Yo-
semite, framed in fleecy, flying clouds, greeted our thoughtful eyes,
and spoke of God to our hushed souls. Except beside the dying
bed of my beloved I have never felt the veil so thin between me
and the world ineffable — supernal. What was it like ? Let no
pen less lofty than that of Milton, less atune with Nature's purest
mood than that of Wordsworth, hope to '* express unblamed " the
awful and ethereal beauty of what we saw. *' Earth with her
thousand voices praises God," sang the great heart of Coleridge of
the vale of Chamouni, but here, the divine chorus includes both
earth and heaven, for El Capitan rears his head into the sky,
while Sentinel and Cathedral Rocks and sky-climbing Cloud's Rest
round out the full diapason of earthly and of celestial praise.
A holy awe rested upon us, and tears were in all eyes. At last
the sacred silence was broken by a rich voice, beloved by me for
Earth \v Noblest Harbor, %\'J
many a year, as Mrs. Dr. Bently led the *' Gloria in Excelsis,**
in which the jubilant soprano harmonized with the melodious
bass of humanity's united utterance of praise. "O come, let us
worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker,"
these inspired words leaped to our lips, and we found that in
this supreme moment of our experience, beyond all poets, was
the fitness of grand old words our mothers taught us from the
Book of God. "The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth
keep silence before him,** " What is man that thou art mindful of
him ? '* *' Stand in awe and sin not, " these were the words that
came first to us, and I believe we shall be better men and women
always for that vision of eternity from which the curtain of mys-
tery was for a moment drawn aside. We learned afterward that as
our two coaches rolled on into the valley a third rounded " Inspira-
tion Point,*' and Judge , of Sydney, Ohio, a dear old gentle-
man, rose to his feet, clasped his hands as if in prayer, and
exclaimed ** Mercy, mercy, mercy ! Have I lived seventy-six years
that I might see this glor>' ! God made it all ! '* and he lifted up
his voice and wept. Such a scene as that is once for a life-time.
We saw the valley from an hundred points of view afterward;
we waved our good-by to it a week later from this very spot,
but the first remains the unmatched view — its like will never
greet our eyes again — not in this world.
As we sped onward into the valley I thought of the sightless
children with whom I used to play at Forest Home and said:
"I never before felt such pity for the blind."
PUGET SOUND.
Beautiful for situation is Puget Sound. A generation hence
it will be the joy of this noble Republic. Oregon with its
matchless mountains and river, Washington and its wonderful
forests, are both included in this name. Here is the Pacific
cowed and conquered, purring like a tamed tiger at the feet of mar-
velous young cities. No one can appreciate the transformation
save those who, like ourselves, have experienced the untold mis-
eries of the voyage between San Francisco and Astoria, Oregon.
For fifty-four hours I lay motionless in the upper berth suitably
assigned to one who, during that interval when * ' deep calleth
unto deep,** had no part in this world's hurry or delight.
Welcome Puget Sound with its fathomless harbors of land-
3i8 The Climax of the Continent,
locked blue, and the imperial pressure of such snow-clad mount-
ains as are found nowhere else, no, not in Switzeriand !
Twice Anna Gordon and myself visited Victoria, the cap-
ital of British Columbia, receiving a royal welcome. The sec-
ond time, we went to organize a Provincial W. C. T. U. The
climate of the Sound is perhaps its greatest surprise. It is so
mild that the English ivy grows out-of-doors all the year round.
The ladies told me they could gather flowers always up to March,
when slight frosts generally appear, but of snow or ice there
is nothing to signify. It has the summer of Denmark and
the winter of Italy. It is a rare climate for clear thinking and
quiet, rational living, a soil in which the temperance reform has
readily taken root. The forests, chiefly of fir and cedar, are of
une^ualed magnificence. Frequently more wood is cut from an
acre of ground than can be corded thereon. ** Go West, yotmg
woman, and grow up with the country,*' would be our advice to
aspiring girls.
MONTANA.
Bishop Hargrove of the M. E. Church, South, had it about
right when he said, " Montana has barely enough valleys to slip
in between its hills.** Never was a territory more aptly named.
For beauty of railway scenery I should like to know what coun-
try furnishes anything superior to the panorama between Spokane
Falls, W. T. , and Missoula, Montana. Spokane Falls itself is an
almost ideal town in situation, and the cataract is better worth a
day's journey to visit than several on both sides of the water that
I have made a pilgrimage on purpose to behold.
" Clark's Fork " of the Columbia is the absurd name of a
river quite comparable in dash and beauty of color with the
** arrowy Rhone," only this is of the most delicate emerald, and
that, as all the world knows, is the most cerulean blue. But the
towers, spires and bastions of the American river are unique
beyond those of any other save the glorious river toward which it
runs — the Columbia, Oregon's pride and, erelong, the tourist's
favorite rendezvous.
We left Missoula July 26 in a covered conveyance for Hel-
ena and Deer Lodge — a distance of one hundred and eighty-two
miles — Rev Mr. Shannon, his wife and little girl accompanying
us. The two horses and entire outfit had been loaned Mr. S. in
The Steeds y ** Thunder and Lightning .^ 319
token of good will. He had sent it ahead the night before
eighteen miles beyond Missoula, as the railroad authorities had
kindly permitted us to ride on the construction train to that
point, which was the western terminus of this great iron track.
Here we clambered into our wagon behind the unmated steeds
loaned us from two separate establishments, packed away ' ' big
box, little box, bandbox and bundle ' ' almost to the overflow-
ing point, and set out overland. Anna dubbed our horses
"Thunder and Lightning" ; for what purpose did not appear,
unless, as cheer>' young Mr. Riggin, superintendent of Methodist
missions in Montana, said, "One of them looked as if he had
swallowed an avalanche of thunder, and it had n't agreed with
him, and the other seemed to have been struck by lightning."
We perambulated along through wooded valleys, the sun's light
obscured by forest fires and great pines in process of ignition on
either side our path. We camped at noon beside a gurgling
brook, spread our table-cloth, boiled our eggs and tea over a fire
made of pine cones, washed our dishes in the little mountain
stream, got some nice milk for the baby from a way-side farm, and
took up our '* jog trot " over the hills and far away. Our dark
horse * ' Thunder ' ' stood from under the hea\^^ load upon hill-
sides dangerously sloping, and it was droll indeed to see Mr.
S. balance on the hind wheel to strengthen the "brake" while
his wife drove, and we ran with stones to block the hind wheels.
Thus we worked our passage the first day and wished for lands
with railroads. It came to pass, how^ever, that when we stopped
at night, having made fifty-six miles, cars and all, we found that
it was "all along of" the misfitting collar that poor Thunder
had led us such a hard life, whereupon he became the pet of
the party. I could but think whether it be not true that a gall-
ing, ill-adjusted yoke, may explain much, in many cases, of the
criss-cross and contradiction of this our mortal life.
Our second day's ride was much ameliorated by the experi-
ence of the past and the increased adequacy of our thunderous
steed. W^e had leisure to take in the changeful beauty of Mon-
tana, a territory with an individuality all its own. It is the
fourth in size among the grand divisions of Uncle vSam's estate,
the order of extent being as follows : Texas, California, Dakota,
320 ** Ch'cr the Hills and Far Away,^'*
Montana. It is emphatically the pasture land of the Republic,
and its cattle kings are justly famed.
#
Montana sometimes exhibits a thermometer marking fifty-
seven degrees below zero, but so light and clear is the atmosphere
that the people declare they * * do not feel the cold as they used
to back East.'' The territory is thinly settled as yet, but rail-
roading is simply rampant there and in Idaho, and we shall soon
regard both as next door neighbors.
On our third day*s ride, we passed the place where robbers
sacked a stage and killed a horse a few days previous. Though
unarmed and mostly of the timid class, I don't think we felt
a qualm. Somehow, though distance lends enchantment, prox-
imity brings grit to bear, and we went on our way rejoicing. On
our fourth day's riding we passed the logs beside the road from
behind which, not twenty-four hours earlier, three masked men
had pointed guns at the stage load, and afterward at a private
conveyance, making them stand and deliver. Perhaps it was on
the principle, they that know nothing fear nothing ; anyhow, we
did n't mind, but jogged on over endless reaches of hill country,
till we reached a stage station where we slept the sleep of the
weary, if not of the just.
We were glad to learn that the robbers were captured in a
few days after their crime. Brother Garvin told me that Plum-
mer, the greatest *'road agent" of the far West (for by that
euphemism do they absurdly soften down the atrocious occupa-
tion of these men) could in two and a half seconds take his pistol
from his pocket, and fire three bullets, hitting a little percussion-
cap box at ten paces. Woe is me, to think of such quickness of
mind and dexterity of hand turned to an unmixed curse.
A couple of droll speeches were reported to me on this trip.
One was by an emigrant woman in Washington Territory, who
was seated in a rude wagon behind a wear>'-looking ox team,
while the lordly owner was refreshing himself in a saloon. A
tourist accosted her with the words, *'How do you like it out
here ? " and she answered,'* Well, stranger, it may do well enough
for men, but I tell you what, it's dreiful poor countr>'/t7r women
and oxen f Another passing traveler asked a Montana girl if
she had ever seen the cars and received this philosophic answer
Mormcn Cookery, 321
which might be appropriately headed ' ' sweet satisfaction * * :
" No sir, I can't say that I ever saw the cars, but I don't care,
VAjusi as lief see the stage."
UTAH.
After leaving Montana, we boxed the compass of Utah,
home of the strangest civilization of modem times, the ** Church
of the Latter Day Saints. ' *
First of all our train entered Cache Valley north of Ogden,
and we watched out sharply for signs of the new departure.
Early in the day, we passed numerous farms and little villages,
utterly treeless and forlorn, whereupon we ejaculated : ** There !
we've struck Mormondom, no doubt of it; plain to be seen as a
pikestaff." When, behold, we were informed by the conductor
of our mistake, for these drear>' burghs were * ' Gentile * * beyond
a peradventure. Later on, they grew more winsome, with trim
little homes, trees and vines, yellow harvests and solid comfort
everjrwhere. Mirabile didii ! These were the Mormon settle-
ments ! We soon learned that their most salient features were
the presence of willow fences around the fields, woven somewhat
like a basket — an Old World notion, imported by the Mormon
emigrants, which, combined with the churchless aspect of the
villages themselves (for the Mormon ' ' Tabernacle ' ' has an
architecture peculiar to itself, not unlike our notion of what the
temple might have been) gave a novel aspect to the scene.
Noon came, and we stopped for dinner at the notable Mormon
town of Logan, where we first saw one of these stately buildings.
Our breakfast in a Gentile village had been simply execrable.
Here, it was the most toothsome we had tasted in a year. It was
homelike, wholesome and appetizing ; " Mother's cooking ! " was
my immediate exclamation. The butter, with flavor and fra-
grance of sweet pastures and new-mown hay, reminded me of the
cool cellar and delightsome dairy of my old Wisconsin home.
What a contrast to the frouzy abomination usually taken as medi-
cine in railroad waiting-rooms in that sultry month of August!
The bread was worthy of its companionship, with cheese that was
the ambrosial essence of sweet cream, the vegetables simply de-
lightful, the meat could be prepared for deglutition without the
ten minutes of assiduous grinding we so often laboriously give,
and the table-cloth, dishes, etc., were absolutely whole, fresh and
21
322 A Mormon Tabernacle.
clean ! A neat, modest, rosy-cheeked girl was our attendant —
the first real, live Mormon I had ever seen **for certain." This
was her sorry classification as the following brief dialogue dis-
closed:
Gentile Temperance Traveler. — Is this a Mormon town?
Modest Waitress. — I suppose it would be called so, though
some Gentiles live here.
Traveler. — Is this Gentile or Mormon cooking ? that's what
I want to know.
Waitress. — Well, since you ask, I can assure you it is Mor-
mon like myself.
Traveler. — Well, it is an unspeakable credit to the Mormons,
that's all I have to say, and I'm a judge, having learned by the
things I have suffiered. The Indian chief asked, ** Who is there
to mourn for Logan?'* and I promise you here is one weary
wayfarer, of microscopic appetite, who will hereafter** mourn for
Logan "every time the brakeman pipes his dreary warning, ** Train
stops for dinner at this place."
We reached Ogden toward night. Sabbath morning we
went to the Mormon Tabernacle with our host and Mr. Cannon,
son of the famous George Q. Cannon of Washington memory.
Forgetting for a moment this significant fact, I asked the accom-
plished young man if he had brothers and sisters, whereupon he
meekly answered, ^* About twenty.^*
We entered the tabernacle, which seats three thousand per-
sons. It was almost surrounded by horses and wagons from the
country, and was tolerably well filled with a motley throng of what
would be called the common people. There were no windows
save very large ones just beneath the oval roof at each end of the
building. The seats sloped toward the wide platform where,
behind a choir of nice-looking women and a few men, sat the
speakers of the hour. Nobody knows who will speak, there are
no paid ministers, but every man is free to exercise his gift of
exhortation and of prophecy, the yoimger brethren being put for-
ward with a kindly tolerance on the part of the fathers in Zion,
which our churches might wisely emulate.
It was the annual meeting of the "Mutual Improvement
Societies" of this county; or as it is curiously called, '*This
Stake of Zion, "
How Mormons Talk, 323
Reports were given by half a dozen honest-looking young
men, evidently accustomed to public speaking, for their voices
reached without effort the seat far back, where, in the middle
tier, we sat with the rest of the women, the men forming a sort of
guard on either side. There was not an instance of whispering,
even the children, though evidently not under repressive training,
keeping remarkably quiet. All the men spoke in the same
style — as if following a certain model.
There were no figures of speech, no anecdotes, only a certain
equipoise, deliberateness and dreary level of mediocrity. They
talked about the meetings in which they study the history and
doctrines of their church. One said : ** We have purchased a
book-case that cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty
dollars, and we hope, after awhile, to have a reading-room to
put it in." Another told about the "benefits to be deriven*'
from this mutual improvement society. All who spoke, and
there were half a dozen at Jeast, conspicuously murdered the
Queen's English. Nearly all closed with a perfunctory **This
is my prayer, in the name of Jesus, Amen," pronounced with eyes
wide open.
A son of Apostle Rich ("one of the twelve") preached a
brief discourse. He has just returned from England, and is one
of the two hundred and fifty missionaries who go out minus purse
or scrip to win converts in distant lands. He had more culture
than his brethren, and proceeded on this fashion, using the Bible
as a sort of fulcrum. His text was, "Blessed art thou, Simon
Bar-jona : for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but
my Father which is in heaven." Matt. 16:17. "My breth-
ren and sisters, I ask the prayers of the Latter Day Saints who
are here, and also of those who are not. I ask the good wishes
of all. Our religion is different from all others. Christ is the
head of His church, even as the husband is the head of his wife,
but a wife would be of very little use to her husband, if she had
no head of her own, would n't she ? [Smiles and nodding of the
women's heads in approbation !] Even so Christ has never left
His church without a head. Some say there is no need of a far-
ther revelation, but I declare that the first proof that any revela-
tion is real must be that it goes right on. We believe that there
is no people on this earth who really follow Christ, except those
324 A Zealous Disciple.
who receive the revelation of His latest prophet, Joseph Smith,
who stood up at fourteen years old and went into the woods and
declared that there he received a revelation. The world says :
*We don't care how much you believe in your revelation, if
you will let alone the principle of plural marriage which we
are bound to stamp out.*
** But it is not for this principle that our fathers and moth-
ers were driven into the wilderness. In the early days of the
church my mother had muzzles of pistols at her head to make
her tell where my father was. She has seen him fired at when
carrying a flag of truce. Was this because of his belief in polyg-
amy? No, it was because he held to the Bible, its form of
government, its teachings and examples all through. I believe
the Bible prophets have had successors, and that Joseph Smith,
Brigham Young and John Taylor, are true prophets of God.
If the Gentiles could bring up as many proofs that our doctrine
is false as a sixteen-year-old Mormon boy can that it is true,
they could stamp it out quick enough. But here are we accord-
ing to prophecy. Don't the Bible say, * Let us go up to the
temple of the Lord, that is in the tops of the mountains ? * Well,
here we are, and * seeing is believing.* The people who drove
us here had little idea that they were fulfilling prophecy ! Our
elders carried to the wilderness the promise and prophecy of
Joseph Smith, that in baptism they should receive the testimony
that ours is the true religion. They have taken the medicine and
know it does what it agrees to. If you who are here this morning
will take it also you will rejoice in the same result. Let us not
have theory, let us have experience. I can take my Bible under
my arm and go to the ends of the earth and testify for the religion
of the Latter Day Saints. I know it will yet fill the earth as the
waters do the great deep. It can be so deeply stamped upon the
youthful mind that all hell can not prevail against it. ' *
The young man spoke earnestly and with evident convic-
tion.
As a temperance worker I was glad of the testimony of An-
son Call, one of the leaders, who said, '* Young men who attend
our Mutual Improvement Society can readily be known by the
grater purity of their habits. As a class they do not drink, use
tobacco, nor swear.**
Voun^" Mr, Cannon, 3^5
The last speech was by H. Anderson, a pure-faced young
man, who publishes the Mormon paper. Our keen-witted lawyer
host (the scalpel of whose criticism does n't spare the Mormon
leaders), said to me as he came forward, ** There is a native
product, a thorough gentleman, one whose life illustrates everj*
Christian virtue, though he is a Mormon through and through. •'
He said :
**When we have young men who can expound the prin-
ciples of our church as has been done this morning, it is indeed
a comfort and refreshment. We are willing to be judged by our
fruits. Take the Mormons of Cache Valley and Ogden, and
our own county as a class, and compare them with others as to
truth, kindness and uprightness. We have learned to be good —
for I went to Sabbath-school when a boy, and learned to honor
God and my parents, and those by whom I was surrounded. We
are becoming better, nobler, more upright. Why, then, do the
Gentiles object to our polygamy? But then God*s people are
always persecuted — this is one of the surest marks of God's favor.
The time is short. The Gospel is to be preached to all nations,
and then shall the end come. ' '
• The services were closed with a beautiful anthem, that Anna
Gordon says they sing in her own home church near Boston.
One of the men lifted his hand, whereupon all rose and he
pronounced the benedictory prayer.
I walked up the street with young Mr. Cannon, who little
guessed the turbulent subjectivity beside him. He was too polite
to ask an opinion and I was too considerate to offer one. But
never in my life have I been more profoundly disturbed. The
service was such an awful travesty of * * the faith once delivered
to the saints." For the moment I thought I never wanted to
hear those words again. It was as if Christianity had died and
they were galvanizing its corpse into hideous contortions imita-
tive of life. ** Wounded in the house of his friends" has our
Christ always been and far more grievously than any free-thinker
can ever wound Him! For whatever may be true of Brigham
Young and his hierarchy, these were honest, simple, kindly souls,
and believed what they had said about Joe Smith as a prophet
and polygamy as a sacred tie. But for the self-control which
326 Forty in Family,
years and discipline have brought me since my impetuous girl-
hood days, I would have lifted iip my voice and wept.
Partly was I grieved for them in their awful delusion ; for
human reason brought so low, for deadly fanaticism that blights
every fairest flower of the beautiful soul, so rampant in its credulity,
when in our own sublimated land and sunlit century it ought to
be so balanced and serene. But as a woman, my sense of outrage
and humiliation was beyond language. The highest ideals of
noble souls in all ages were here trampled under foot by those
who verily thought they did God service. The lofty companion-
ship of *' Two heads in council^ two beside the hearth,^' on which
Home's sacred citadel is founded, how it is blotted out in the
** Church of the Latter Day Saints"! Woman becomes the
servitor of man, having no promise of heaven save through her
relations to him, and he, whose relations to her are intended to
exalt and purify every faculty of his nature, loses his loftiest and
sweetest hopes of manly character. Childhood, too, is defrauded
of its most precious inheritance, the tender guardianship of faith-
ftil parentage, and fond tie of brother and sisterhood. *' About
twenty brothers and sisters,*' said young Cannon. What can
he know of the close love of our fireside groups in Christian
families ? A young lady of Salt Lake City said with a twinge
of pain upon her face, ' * My father has at least forty children ; I
do not think he would know me should he meet me on the street. * '
Three Mormon ladies called upon me at Salt Lake ; one was
the editor of The Woman's Expoyient, another was an accom-
plished lady physician, educated in Philadelphia and Boston, the
third had been a wife of Brigham Young. All were bright
women, leaders of their church. At first I did not know that
they were Mormons, and when, in speaking of that as voting day,
two of them said, "The government of the United States has dis-
franchised us because we are polygamists, ' ' I simply replied, * * On
that question I have my own opinion, but the temperance work is
the only reform about which I care to express myself in Utah."
They had avowed their interest in our societ>% and I was glad of
this. Said Mrs. Young, *' A wise general will not on the eve
of battle, ask the religious opinions of his soldiers, but rather
this question, * Are you ready to do battle against our common
foe.' " As years have passed, our society has, however, taken
Grave of Brigham Young. 327
higher ground than this and come out squarely against such
Mormons as persist in the practice of polygamy.
We went to Brigham 's grave as a wonder of its kind, being
to an American woman the most obnoxious on the whole circle
of the planet. Three tons of granite in one block were hardly
needed to hold him from aerial heights, his own specific gravity
settled that matter ! But he is thus hedged in to keep his bones
fi^m desecration, probably, and his only dead wife (poetic justice
that, with this exception, the whole outfit should survive him ! )
has no stone nor flower to mark her grave. What an oversight
on the part of the loving sisterhood, who, with her, shared his
affections.
By the way, we saw a most inferior woman hunying from a
Mormon house, when one of us commented upon her stolid ap-
pearance and the other remarked, ** Eternal fitness! only the
fifth part of a woman would ever take up with the fifth part of a
man.'* The prettiest place we saw was ** Rose Bud Cottage,'* a
Mormon, but not a polygamous home, completely embowered in
trees and vines, the latter being trained over strings, so that they
lay as a roof of greenery overhead, along the garden paths.
Nothing more sylvan, cool and restful could greet one's eye.
Salt Lake with its Mormon and * ' Gentile ' * population has
every convenience and luxury of any city ; has * * Gentile * ' society
of the forcible type that dares consecrate life to setting up the
American civilization among a people essentially alien in purpose
and life. Altogether we never had a more curious, pleasant,
pathetic trio of days than in far-famed ** Deseret."
Ogden, Utah, is a far lovelier town than we are taught.
Doubtless it has improved since becoming a railroad center of
five difierent roads. Its summer climate is delightfully tem-
pered by **the canyon breeze," which blows nearly one half of
the twenty-four hours, and the near neighborhood of this same
delightful valley affords to the home people such facilities for
camping out as must go far to conserve their health, rejuvenate
their spirits and drive dull care away. If asked in my own life,
and that of our fevered Americans, the greatest mistake and depri-
vation, I would say : ** Great Nature hasn't half a chance to
soothe, enrich and nurture us ; we * go toiuing, ' but we do
not let the calm old mother take us to her heart and sing the
328 Notes of Southern Travel.
lullaby that we sigh for without knowing what we miss.'* Only
blurred and misty revelations of God can come to souls so
worn and travel-stained. When we temperance workers go to
the sea or to the mountains, it is still to wring ixom our tired
brains a few more thoughts for public utilization or a little **stored
up energy'* of magnetism for a ** summer audience." May the
valleys, trees and skies forgive us this profanation of their sanct-
uaries and this profane substitution of our restless glances and
babbling tongues for their sacred liturgy.
SOUTHWARD HO ! ♦
My first trip of three months (1881) spent in blessed work for
the homes and loved ones of a most genial, intelligent and heartily
responsive people, made me quite in love with the South. To
think they should have received me as a sister beloved, yet with
full knowledge that I was that novel and unpalatable combina-
tion (as a Richmond gentleman said) **a woman; a Northern
woman, a temperance woman ! " I had been told that to speak
in public in the South was * ' not to be thought of, that all
would be lost if I attempted anything beyond parlor meet-
ings. But instead of this, their liberality of sentiment was
abundantly equal to the strain ; their largest churches were
filled with the best, most influential and thoughtful people ; their
ministers were more united and earnest in the temperance cause
than ours at the North ; their editors, without the slightest sub-
sidizing, were as kind and helpful as my own brother could
have been. Nay, the only grief I had was in being spoken of
so much better in every way than my own consciousness bore me
witness that I merited.
From the first the Southern ladies took up our quiet, system-
atic lines of work with an intelligence and zeai that I have
never seen exceeded and seldom equaled. There was an **our-
folks ' ' air in audiences, cars, and on the streets that was quite
refreshing. The native population is so regnant, colored popula-
* In my book entitled " Woman and Temperance " I have given an extended account
of my Southern trips, now numbering six, hence these brief notes.
New Orleans Exposition. 3^9
tion is of such home-like nature, and the foreign element so
insignificant in influence and numbers, that temperance has an
immense advantage at the South. Beer has no such grip on the
habits or the politics of the people as at the North. Almost
without exception the gulf and seabound states have taken
advance ground. The time is ripe ; ** the sound in the mulberry
trees ' ' is plainly audible. I have now made five trips thither, and
always with the same warm welcome.
On a later journey I spent a week in New Orleans at the
time of the famous Exposition.
Here our natural point of rendezvous was the booth of the
National W. C. T. U. ; en route thither we passed through an im-
mense park with an avenue of live-oaks that would be a glory in
itself were it in Central Park or the Bois de Boulogne. We
climbed the slow, graded stairs of the great government building,
and turning to the right came upon a home-like oasis in the des-
ert of strangeness, for from a hundred costly banners, white and
golden, blue and emerald, representing every state and territory
of the great Republic, gleamed on every side the magic legend
that we love, " For God and Home and Native Land.'' Here at
last were the flags, and pennon fair, and brilliant gonfalon of the
Ohio Crusade and the Continental white ribboners !
At three o'clock of that day, I was expected to preside and
speak on behalf of the National W. C. T. U. The auditorium
seated over eleven thousand persons, and the only blunder of the
Exposition was that the music of the Corliss engine drowned all
competing voices. The engine did not stop until four o'clock
and we were to begin at three. Fancy a vibrant soprano unable
to hear itself in all the whiz and roar of a cataract of sound
where the most capacious lungs could not reach over a thousand
persons even when the machinery was motionless ! But the advan-
tage of speaking there was that a stenographic reporter sat just
beside me, and the audience that hears with its eye, got my ideas
next morning in the Times- Democrat and Picayune. We went
through the pantomime of a meeting. Bro. Mead pitched the
tmie ' * Coronation, ' ' but to the rumbling orchestra of that remorse-
less ''Corliss," our singing was like the chirping of a sparrow
when an avalanche is falling. I went through the motions oi
calling oflF the parts, and bravely that sweet- voiced gentlewoman,
330 A Temperance "Stint."
Mrs. Judge Merrick, went to the front and articulated the Cru-
sade Psalm, after which Mary T. Lathiap offered prayer. Then
gallantly came to our rescue broad-shouldered Governor St. John,
and talked against time until the horrible mouthing of that piti-
less engine ceased. The great audience was in good humor, and
deserting the chairs, stood closely around him, eager to catch
ever>- word, while he spoke in frank, soldierly fashion to the
men who once had worn the gray, even as he had the blue, and
predicted the good time coming. That Governor St. John is a
man who can " tire out " almost any other on the platform is
well known, but as a tour deforce I have never seen equalled the
speech of this afternoon when, as he declared should be the case,
he "wore out" the Corliss engine. At four o'clock Mrs. La-
tbrap and I made brief addresses, and Mis. Wells read the song
salutation dedicated to Louisiana W. C, T. U. by Indiana's white
ribbon poet, Mrs, Leavitt, of Vemon. Wearier women have slept
the sleep of the just, perhaps, but more willing dreamers never
were, than the twain — Matilda B. Carse and I — who retired from
view at seven p. m. that night.
As a temperance worker, I was devoted to my "stint," as I
called it, which consisted of presenting the white-ribbon cause,
not only in every capital, but in every other town and city in our
country that by the census of 1870 had 10,000 inhabitants. This
was completed in 1883.
VI.
a SrcmpiranrE airbocate anb ©rganifet.
"The Wojian's Chuistian Temperance Union is organ-
ized MOTHER-LOVE."
—Hannah Whitall Smith.
CHAPTER I.
ON THE THRESHOLD.
From my earliest recollection there hung on the dining-room
wall at our house, a pretty steel engraving. It was my father's
certificate of membership in the Washingtonian Society, and was
dated about 1835. He had never been a drinking man, was a
reputable young husband, father, business man and church mem-
ber, but when the movement reached Churchville, near Roches-
ter, N. Y., he joined it. The little picture represented a bright,
happy temperance home with a sweet woman at the center, and
over against it a dismal, squalid house with a drunken man stag-
gering in, bottle in hand. Unconsciously and ineffaceably I
learned from that one object-lesson what the precepts and prac-
tice of my parents steadily enforced, that we were to let strong
drink alone.
In 1855 I cut from my favorite Youth^s Cabinet, the chief
juvenile paper of that day, the following pledge, and pasting it in
our family Bible, insisted on its being signed by every member of
the family — ^parents, brother, sister and self.
"A pledge we make no wine to take.
Nor brandy red that turns the head,
Nor fiery rum that ruins home,
Nor brewers' beer, for that we fear,
And cider, too, will never do.
To quench our thirst, we'll alwa3rs bring
Cold water from the well or spring ;
So here we pledge perpetual hate
To all that can intoxicate.'*
It is Still there, thus signed, and represents the first bit of
temperance work I ever did. Its object was simply to enshrine
to)
332 First Offers the Pledge.
in the most sacred place our home afforded a pledge that I con-
sidered uniquely sacred. Nobody asked me to sign it, nor was
there a demand because of exterior temptation, for we were liv-
ing in much isolation on a farm three miles from Janesville, Wis.,
where my childhood was invested — not ** spent."
Coming to Evanston, 111., in 1858, we found a prohibition
village, the charter of the University forbidding the sale of any
intoxicating liquor as a beverage.
Temperance was a matter of course in this ** Methodist
heaven'* where we have lived from that day to this, from the
time it had but a few hundred, until now when it claims seven
thousand inhabitants.
About 1 863-' 65 a ** Temperance Alliance *' was organized here
by L. L. Greenleaf, then our leading citizen, the Chicago repre-
sentative of the Fairbanks* firm, who have made St. Johnsbury,
Vt., a model temperance town. Before that Alliance I read one
temperance essay when I was a quiet school teacher amid these
shady groves, and one evening at the ** Alliance sociable'* I
offered the pledge for the first time and was rebuffed by a now
distinguished literary man, then a pastor and editor in our vil-
lage. This was my first attempt and his brusque and almost
angry negative hurt me to the heart. We are excellent friends
all the same, and I do not believe he dreams how much he
pained me, so little do we know what touches us, and what we
touch, as we wend our way along life's crowded street.
In all my teaching, in Sunday-school, public school and sem-
inary, I never mentioned total abstinence until the winter of the
Crusade, taking it always as a matter cf course that my pupils
did n't drink, nor did they as a rule.
I never in my life saw wine offered in my own country but
once, when Mrs. Will Knox, of Pittsburgh, a former Sunday-
school scholar of my sister Mary, brought cake and wine to a
young lady of high family in our church, and to me, when we
went to call on her after her wedding. ** Not to be singular*'
we touched it to our lips — but that was twenty-five years ago,
before the g^at examples burnt into the Nation's memory and
conscience by Lucy Webb Hayes, Rose Cleveland and Frances
Folsom Cleveland.
Better Things. 333
That was truly a prophetic innovation at the White House
when our gracious Mrs. Hayes replaced the dinner with its wine-
glasses by the stately and elegant reception. Perhaps while men
rule the state in their government "of the minority, by the mi-
nority, for the minority,** its highest expression will still be the
dinner-table with its clinking glasses and plenty of tobacco-smoke
afterward, but when men and women both come into the kingdom
for the glad new times that hasten to be here, the gustatory nerve
will be dethroned once and for evermore. For there are so many
more worthy and delightful ways of investing (not "spending ")
one's time ; there are so many better things to do. The blos-
soming of women into deeds of philanthropy gives us a hint of
the truer forms of society that are to come. Emerson said, " We
descend to meet," because he claims that we are on a higher
plane when alone with God and nature. But this need not be
so. Doubtless in the outworn and stereotyped forms of society
where material pleasures still hold sway, we do "descend to
meet,*' but when a philanthropic purpose determines our com-
panionships, and leads to our convenings, then we climb together
into purer and more vital air. The "coming women," nay, the
women who have come, have learned the loveliest meanings ot
the word "society." Indeed, some of us like to call it "com-
radeship," instead, this interchange of highest thought and ten-
derest aspiration, in which the sense of selfhood is diminished
and the sense of otherhood increased. We make no "formal
calls," but the informal ones are a hundred-fold more pleasant.
If a new woman ^s face appear in church we wonder if she won't
"come with us" in the W. H. M. S., the W. F. M. S., the
W. C. T. U., or some other dear " ring-around-a-rosy " circle,
formed "for others' sake." If new children sit beside her in the
church pew, we plan to win them for our Band of Hope or other
philanthropic guild where they will learn to find " society 'Mn
nobler forms than this poor old world has ever known before.
The emptiness of conventional forms of speech and action is
never so patent as when contrasted with the " fullness of life '*
that crowns those hearts banded together to bring the day when
all men's weal shall be each man's care. Wordsworth wrote
wearily of
** The greetings where no kindness is."
334 Uses Wine — Crusade Begins.
From 1868 to 1870 I studied and traveled abroad, not tast-
ing wine until in Denmark, after three months' absence, I was
taken suddenly and violently ill with something resembling chol-
era, and the kind-faced physician in Copenhagen bending above
my weakness said in broken French: *' Mademoiselle, you must
put wine in the water you drink or you will never live to see your
home.'* This prescription I then faithfully followed for two years
with a gradual tendency so to amend as to make it read, ** You
may put water in your wine,'* and a leaning toward the " pure
article,*' especially when some rich friend sent for a costly bottle
of ** Rudesheimer,** or treated me to such a luxury as " Grand
Chartreuse.** At a London dinner where I was the guest of
English friends, and seven wine-glasses stood around my plate,
I did not protest or abstain — so easily does poor human nature
fall away, especially when backed up by a medical prescription.
But beyond a flushing df the cheek, an unwonted readiness at
repartee and an anticipation of the dinner hour, unknown to me
before or since, I came under no thralldom, and returning to this
blessed *' land of the wineless dinner table,** my natural environ-
ments were such that I do not recall the use of intoxicants by
me, ** as a beverage,** from that day to this.
Thus much do I owe to a Methodist training and the social
usages of my grand old mother church. Five years in Oberlin,
Ohio, in my childhood, also did much to ground me in the faith
of total abstinence and the general laws of hygiene.
In 1873 came that wonderful Christmas gift to the world — ^the
woman* s temperance crusade, beginning in Hillsboro, Ohio, De-
cember 23, and led by that loyal Methodist woman, Mrs. Judge
Thompson, daughter of Gov. Trimble and sister of Dr. Trimble,
the oldest member of the last M. E. General Conference. All
through that famous battle winter of Home versus Saloon, I read
every word that I could get about the movement, and my brother,
Oliver A. Willard, then editor of the Chicago Evening Maily gave
favorable and full reports, saying privately to me, ** I shall speak
just as well of the women as I dare to** — a most characteristic
editorial remark, I have since thought, though more frequently
acted out than uttered! Meanwhile it occurred to me, strange to
say, for theyfr^/ time, that I ought to work for the good canse Just
where I was — that everybody ought. Thus I first received ** the
IVorks in N. IV. University — Crusade in Chicago, 335
arrest of thought*' concerning which in a thousand diflFerent
towns I have since then tried to speak, and I believe that in this
simple change of personal attitude from passive to aggressive lies
the only force that can free this land from the drink habit and the
liquor traffic. It would be like dynamite under the saloon if, just
where he is^ the minister would begin active work against it ; if,
just where he is, the teacher would instruct his pupils; if, just
where he is, the voter would dedicate his ballot to this movement,
and so on through the shining ranks of the great powers that
make for righteousness from father and mother to Kinder-
garten toddler, if each were this day doing what each could, ju^i
where he is.
I was teaching rhetoric and composition to several hundred
students of the Northwestern University and my eyes were
opened to perceive that in their essays they would be as well
pleased and would gain more good if such themes were assigned as
"John B. Gough " and " Neal Dow " rather than "Alexander the
Great'* and *' Plato the Philosopher," and that in their debates
they would be at least as much enlisted by the question ** Is Pro-
hibition a Success?" as by the question, '*Was Napoleon a
blessing or a curse ?" So I quietly sandwiched in these practical
themes to the great edification of my pupils and with a notable
increase in their enthusiasm and punctuality. Never in my
fifteen years as a teacher did I have exercises so interesting as
in the Crusade winter — 1874.
Meanwhile in Chicago the women of the Churches were
mightily aroused. They gathered up in ten days fourteen thou-
sand signatures to a petition asking that the Sunday closing
ordinance might be no longer a dead letter, and while some
remained in old Clark Street Church to pray, a procession of
them led by Mrs. Rev. Moses Smith, moved across the street to
the Court House and going in before the Common Council (the
first and last time that women have ever ventured into that
uncanny presence), they offered their petition and made their
plea. Their petition was promptly tabled and the ordinance for
whose enforcement they had pleaded, was abrogated then and
there at the dictate of the liquor power while a frightful mob col-
lected threatening them violence ; the police disappeared and only
by the prompt action of such men as Rev. Dr. Arthur Edwards in
336 Speaks in Robert Collyet^s Church.
finding a side exit for them, was Chicago saved the indelible
disgrace of seeing some of its chief Christian women mobbed on
the streets by the minions of saloon, gambling den and haunt of
infamy. All these things we read at Evanston next morning
and ** while we were musing the fire burned."
Events moved rapidly. Meetings were held in Chicago to
protest against the great indignity and to organize for further
work. There were fewer writers and speakers among women
then than now. Some missionary and educational addresses of
mine made within the two years past caused certain Methodist
friends to name me as a possible speaker; and so to my quiet home
eleven miles up the lake-shore came Mrs. Charles H. Case, a
leading Congregational lady of the city, asking me to go and try.
It is my nature to give myself utterly to whatever work I
have in hand, hence nothing less than my new-bom enthusiasm
for the Crusade and its heroines would have extorted from me a
promise to enter on this untried field, but I agreed to attend a
noon meeting in Clark Street Church a few days later and when
the time came went from the recitation room to the rostrum,
finding the place so packed with people that Mrs. Dr. Jutkins
who was waiting for me at the door had much ado to get a
passage made for us. Ministers were on the platform in greater
numbers than I had ever seen before or have seen since in that
or any other city. They spoke, they sang, they prayed with the
fervor of a Methodist camp. Philip Bliss was at the organ and
sang one of his sweetest songs. For myself, I was frightened by
the crowd and overwhelmed by a sense of my own emptiness
and inadequacy. What I said I do not know except that I was
with the women heart, hand and soul, in this wonderfril new
** Everybody's War.''
Soon after, I spoke in Robert CoUyer's Church with Mrs.
Mary H. B. Hitt, now president of the Northwestern Branch of
the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society. Here, for the first
and last time, I read my speech. I believe it was Rev. Dr. L. T.
Chamberlain, who called it a ** school-girl essay " — and served it
rght. Robert CoUyer took up the collection himself, I remem-
ber, rattling the box and cracking jokes along the aisle as he
moved among his aristocratic ** Northsiders." I went home blue
enough and registered a vow as yet well nigh unbroken, that I
Goes East to Spy out the Land, 337
would never again appear before a popular audience manuscript
in hand.
My next attempt was in Union Park Congregational Church
a few weeks later. Here I had my * * heads * ' on paper, but
from that time forward I ** swung clear*' of the manuscript
crutch and the '* outline " walking-stick. In June I resigned my
position as Dean in the Woman's College and Professor of Esthet-
ics in the Northwestern University. It has been often said in
my praise that I did this for the explicit purpose of enlisting in
the temperance army, but it is my painful duty in this plain, un-
varnished tale to admit that the reasons upon which I based that
act, so revolutionary of all my most cherished plans and pur-
poses, related wholly to the local situation in the University itself.
However, having resigned, my strongest impulses were toward
the Crusade movement as is sufficiently proved by the fact that,
going East immediately, I sought the leaders of the newly formed
societies of temperance women, Dr. and Mrs. W. H. Boole, Mrs.
Helen E. Brown, Mrs. Rebecca Collins, Mrs. M. F. Hascall and
others of New York, Mrs. Mary C. Johnson, Mrs. Mary E. Hartt,
H. W. Adams, and others of Brooklyn, and these were the first
persons who befiiended and advised me in the unknown field of
*' Gospel temperance." With them I went to Jerry Mc Auley's
Mission, and to **Kit Bums's Rat- Pit, " and saw the great un-
washed, unkempt, ungospeled and sin-scarred multitude for the
first time in my life as they gathered in a dingy down-town square
to hear Dr. Boole preach on Sabbath afternoon.
With several of these new friends I went to Old Orchard
Beach, Me., where Francis Murphy, a drinking man and saloon-
keeper recently reformed, had called the first * 'Gospel Temper-
ance Camp Meeting" known to our annals. Here I met Neal
Dow and heard the story of Prohibitory Law. Here I saw that
strong, sweet woman, Mrs. L. M. N. Stevens, our white ribbon
leader in Maine, almost from then till now; and here in a Portland
hotel, where I stayed with Mary Hartt, of Brooklyn, and won-
dered ** where the money was to come from " as I had none, and
had mother's expenses and my own to meet, I opened the Bible
lying on the hotel bureau and lighted on this memorable verse :
Psalm 37:3, ** Trust in the Lord, and do good ; so shalt th^u dwell
in the land, and verily thou shalt befed,^^
22
33^ Sees Dr, Dio Lewis,
That was a turning-point in life with me. Great spiritual
illumination, unequaled in all my history before, had been vouch-
safed me in the sorrowful last days at Evanston, but here came
clinching faith for what was to me a most difficult emergency.
Going to Boston I now sought Dr. Dio Lewis, for, naturally
enough, I wished to see and counsel with the man whose words
had been the match that fired the powder mine. He was a con-
siderate and kind old gentleman who could only tell me o'er and
o*er that ** if the women would go to the saloons they could soon
close them up forever.'* But we had already passed beyond that
stage, so I went on to broader counsels. Convinced that I must'
make my own experience and determine my own destiny, I now
bent all my forces to find what Archimedes wanted, ** where to
stand" within the charmed circle of the temperance reform.
Chicago must be my field, for home was there and the sacred past
with its graves of the living and dead. But nobody had asked
me to work there and I was specially in mood to wait and watch
for providential intimations. Meanwhile many and varied oflfers
came from the educational field, tempting in respect of their wide
outlook and large promise of financial relief. In this dilemma I
consulted my friends as to their sense of my duty, every one of
them, including my dear mother and my revered counselor,
Bishop Simpson, uniting in the decision that he thus expressed :
** If you were not dependent on your own exertions for the supply
of current needs, I would say, be a philanthropist, but of all work,
the temperance work pays least and you cannot afford to take it
up. I therefore counsel you to remain in your chosen and suc-
cessful field of the higher education."
No one stood by me in the preference I freely expressed to
join the Crusade women except Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, who
sent me a letter full of enthusiasm for the new line of work and
predicted success for me therein. It is said that Napoleon was
wont to consult his marshals and then do as he pleased, but I
have found this method equally characteristic of ordinary mortals,
and certainly it was the one I followed in the greatest decision of
my life. While visiting in Cambridge, Mass., at the home of
Mr. and Mrs. John S. Paine, with whom I had traveled in Egypt
and Palestine, I received two letters on the same day. The first
was from Rev. Dr. Van Norman, of New York, inviting me to
The Door Opens, 339
become ** Lady Principal" of his elegant school for young women,
adjoining Central Park, where I was to have just what and just
as few classes as I chose, and a salary of twenty-four hundred
dollars per year. The other was from Mrs. Louise S. Rounds of
Centenary M. E. Church, Chicago, one of the women who had
gone to the City Council on that memorable night of March,
1874, and she wrote in substance as follows:
**I was sitting at my sewing work to-day, pondering the
future of our young temperance association. Mrs. O. B. Wilson,
our president, does all she can and has shown a really heroic
spirit, coming to Lower Farwell Hall for a prayer-meeting every
day in the week, though she lives a long distance from there and
is old and feeble, and the heat has been intense. She can not go
on much longer and it has come to me, as I believe from the Lord,
that you ought to be our President. We are a little band with-
out money or experience, but with strong faith. I went right
out to see some of our leading women and they all say that if
you will agree to come, there will be no trouble about your elec-
tion. Please let me hear at once.'*
I can not express the delight with which I greeted this an-
nouncement. Here was my "open door" all unknown and un-
sought— a place prepared for me in one true temperance woman's
ieart and a chance to work for the cause that had in so short a
lime become so dear to me. I at once declined the New York
offer and very soon after started for the West.
The first saloon I ever entered was Sheffner's, on Market
street, Pittsburgh, on my way home. In fact, that was the only
glimpse I ever personally had of the Crusade. It had lingered in
this dun-colored city well nigh a year and when I visited my old
friends at the Pittsburgh Female College I spoke with enthusiasm
of the Crusade, and of the women who were, as I judged from a
morning paper, still engaged in it here. They looked upon me
with astonishment when I proposed to seek out those women
and go with them to the saloons, for in the two years that I had
taught in Pittsburgh these friends associated me with the recita-
tion room, the Shakspeare Club, the lecture course, the opera,
indeed, all the haunts open to me that a literar>'-minded woman
would care to eater. However, they were too polite to desire to
disappoint HK, and so they had me piloted by some of the fac-
340 Pittsburgh Crusaders,
totums of the place to the headquarters of the Crusade, where
I was warmly welcomed, and soon found myself walking down
street arm in arm with a young teacher from the public school,
who said she had a habit of coming in to add one to the proces-
sion when her day's duties were over. We paused in fix)nt of
the saloon that I have mentioned. The ladies ranged them-
selves along the curbstone, for they had been forbidden in any-
wise to incommode the passers-by, being dealt with much more
strictly than a drunken man or a heap of dry-goods boxes would
be. At a signal from our gray-haired leader, a sweet-voiced
woman began to sing, ** Jesus the water of life will give,'* all
our voices soon blending in that sweet song. I think it was
the most novel spectacle that I recall. There stood women of
undoubted religious devotion and the highest character, most of
them crowned with the glory of gray hairs. Along the stony
pavement of that stoniest of cities rumbled the heavy wagons,
many of them carriers of beer ; between us and the saloon in
front of which we were drawn up in line, passed the motley
throng, almost every man lifting his hat and even the little news-
boys doing the same. It was American manhood's tribute to
Christianity and to womanhood, and it was significant and fiiU
of pathos. The leader had already asked the saloon-keeper if
we might enter, and he had declined, else the prayer-meeting
would have occurred inside his door. A sorrowftil old lady
whose only son had gone to ruin through that very death-trap,
knelt on the cold, moist pavement and oflfered a broken-hearted
prayer, while all our heads were bowed. At a signal we moved
on and the next saloon-keeper permitted us to enter. I had no
more idea of the inward appearance of a saloon than if there had
been no such place on earth. I knew nothing of its high, heavily-
corniced bar, its barrels with the ends all pointed towards the
looker-on, each barrel being furnished with a faucet ; its shelves
glittering with decanters and cut glass, its floors thickly strewn
with saw-dust, and here and there a round table with chairs — nor
of its abtmdant fumes, sickening to healthful nostrils. The tall,
stately lady who led us, placed her Bible on the bar and read a
psalm, whether hortatory or imprecatory, I do not remember, but
the spirit of these crusaders was so gentle, I think it must have
been the former. Then we sang * * Rock of Ages " as I thought I
Prayer in a Saloon. 341
had never heard it sung before, with a tender confidence to the
height of which one does not rise in the easy-going, regulation
prayer-meeting, and then one of the older women whispered to me
softly that the leader wished to know if I would pray. It was
strange, perhaps, but I felt not the least reluctance, and kneeling
on that saw-dust floor, with a group of earnest hearts around me,
and behind them, filling every comer and extending out into the
street, a crowd of unwashed, unkempt, hard-looking drinking
men, I was conscious that perhaps never in my life, save beside
my sister Mary's dying bed, had I prayed as truly as I did then.
This was my Crusade baptism. The next day 1 went on to the
West and within a week had been made president of the Chicago
W. C. T. U.
CHAPTER II.
THE OPENING WAY.
No words can adequately characterize the change wrought in
my life by the decision I have chronicled. Instead of peace I was
to participate in war ; instead of the sweetness of home, nevermore
dearly loved than I had loved it, I was to become a wanderer on
the face of the earth ; instead of libraries I was to frequent public
halls and railway cars ; instead of scholarly and cultured men
I was to see the dregs of saloon and gambling house and haunt
of shame. But women who were among the fittest gospel
survivals were to be my comrades ; little children were to be
gathered from near and from far in the Loyal Temperance
Legion, and whoever keeps such company should sing a psalm of
joy, solemn as it is sweet. Hence I have felt that great promotion
came to me when I was counted worthy to be a worker in the
organized Crusade for *'God and Home and Native Land."
Temporary differences may seem to separate some of us for
awhile, but I believe with all my heart, that farther on we shall
be found walking once more side by side. In this spirit let me
try to tell a little of our story.
One day in September, 1874, a few ladies assembled in one
of the Young Men's Christian Association prayer rooms adjoin-
ing Farwell Hall, and elected me their president. One of them
came to me at the close of the meeting and said, ** We have no
money, but we will try to get some if you will tell us your
expectations as to salary.*' **Ah," thought I, **bere is my
coveted opportunity for the exercise of faith," and I quietly re-
plied, ** Oh, that will be all right ! " and the dear innocent went
her way thinking that some rich friend had supplied the neces-
sary help. It was known that my generous comrade, Miss Kate
A. Jackson, had taken me abroad for a stay of over two years, so
the ladies naturally concluded that she was once more the good
fairy behind the scenes. But this was not true. She had not
approved my entrance upon temperance work. She was a thou-
sand miles away and knew nothing of my needs.
(342)
Odd ''Faith Test:' 34;^
Having always been my faithful friend I knew she would help
me in this crisis, but I chose not to tell her, for I had a theory
and now was the time to put it to the test. To my mind
there was a missing link in the faith of George Miiller, Dorothea
Trubel and other saintly men and women who *' spoke and let
their wants be known ' ' by means of annual announcements,
reports, etc., so I said to myself, "I am just simply going to pray,
to work and to trust God." So, with no financial backing what-
ever, I set about my work, opened the first "Headquarters"
known to Woman's Christian Temperance Union annals — the
Young Men's Christian Association giving me a room rent free ;
organized committees for the few lines of work then thought of by
us ; started a daily three o'clock prayer-meeting at which signing
the pledge and seeking the Lord behind the pledge were constant
factors ; sent articles and paragraphs to the local press, having
called upon every editor in the city and asked his help or at least
his tolerance; addressed Sunday-schools, ministers and mass-
meetings and once in awhile made a dash into some town or
village, where I spoke, receiving a collection which represented
financially **my little all." I remember that the first of these
collections was at Princeton in October of 1874 and amounted to
seven dollars, for I had small reputation and audiences in propor-
tion. Meanwhile my mother, who owned her little home free
from incumbrance, held the fort at "Rest Cottage," Evanston,
dismissed her ** help " and lived in strict seclusion and economy.
I was entertained by different ladies in the city or was boarded at
a nominal figure by my kind friend Mrs. William Wheeler, one
of the truest of my coadjutors. Many a time I went without my
noonday lunch down town because I had no money with which
to buy, and many a mile did I walk because I had not the pre-
requisite nickel for street-car riding. But I would not mention
money or allow it named to me. My witty brother Oliver, then
editor of the Chicago Mail, who with all his cares, was helping
mother from his slender purse, and who had learned my secret
fix)m her, said, "Frank, your faith-method is simply a challenge
to the Almighty. You've put a chip on your shoulder and dared
Omnipotence to knock it off." But for several months I went on
in this way and my life never had a happier season. For the first
time I knew the gnawings of hunger whereat I used to smile and
^44 ** Owns Chicago,'*
say to myself, as I elbowed my way among the wretched people
to whom I was sent, '*I'm a better friend than you dream ; I know
more about you than you think, for, bless God, I'm hungry too ! *'
When in Italy I had been greatly moved by the study of St.
Francis d* Assisi, whose city I had visited for this purpose, a
nobleman who gave his life to the poor and who was so beloved
of Christ that legends say he was permitted to receive the stig-
mata.
Thinking of him, my small privations seemed so ridiculously
trivial that I was eager to suffer something really worthy of a
disciple for humanity's sweet sake. I had some pretty rings, given
me in other days by friends and pupils, these I put oflf and never
have resumed them, also my watch-chain, for I would have no
striking contrast between these poor people and myself. To
share my last dime with some famished looking man or woman
was a pure delight. Indeed, my whole life has not known a more
lovely period. I communed with God ; I dwelt in the spirit ; this
world had nothing to give me, nothing to take away. My fnend
Kate came back from the East and I told her all about it. **Why,
you are poor as poverty," she said with pitying amazement.
'*True,'* I replied, *' I haven't a cent in the world, but all the
same I own Chicago," and it was a literal fact; the sense of uni-
versal ownership was never so strong upon my spirit before or
since that blessed time. "I'm the Child of a King" was the in-
most song of my soul.
I find this record in a little pocket note-book of the time :
Came back to the city from my evening temperance meeting at ;
almost froze getting from Lake Shore depot to my office— did freeze indeed.
No women in the streets, everything stark and dead. Found lovely Mrs. F.
J. Barnes and faithful sister Wirt trying to help three poor ^ellows who had
come in, learning their stories and trying to do them good. We have more
''cases," histories, crises, calamitous distress revealed tons than could be
told in an octavo or helped out by a millionaire. Verily, we are in the "real
work." How good it is to watch the men grow clean and shaved and bright-
ened; the outward sign of an inward grace. This work is by far the most
blessed of my life. My "Gospel talks " are in demand to an extent that
surprises me. Dr. wishes me to conduct meetings right along in his
church, Dr. invites me to church and so does . If I were fit for
it how this work would enthrall my heart, as no other ever could — as I used
secretly to wish, with hopeless pain, it might, but thought it never must since
I "was but a woman." Engagements crowd upon me for Temperance, but
p.:.
<^
Note-Book of Experience, 345
still more for *' Evangelical ** talks, and persuasions come to me from friends
to abandon the first and devote myself to church work. But I can not per-
ceive, I can not feel as yet — and hope I never may— that a cause so forlorn
as that of temperance should be deserted by a single adherent I'm strong
in the faith and believe that I am in the path of duty.
Our Daily Gospel Meeting in airless, sunless Lower Farwell Hall grows
constantly in interest ; the place is two thirds full of men who never go to
church and who are deep in sin. Christian men come in to help us and a few
ladies, perhaps one to every eight or ten men. This last is the saddening
feature, but only temporary I feel sure. Daily, many ask for prayers and
ever so many sign the pledge. My strongest intellectual thirst is to know
more of the Word. Who is sufficient for these things — these hours when
destiny hangs trembling in the uncertain balance of the human will ?
Did n't go to the Conversazione on Oriental and Greek Thought, though
General B urged me. I can not serve my intellect at the expense of my
Master, and our church prayer-meeting comes at the same hour. Went out
to Evanston to see my dear seventy-year-old mother, finding her blithe as a
lass and active as a cricket.
I called on O. C. Gibbs of the City Relief Committee and asked him to
post notice of our prayer-meetings and talked to him of my grief over the
homeless, dinnerless condition of men whom I met daily and proposed a
Workhouse where they could render an equivalent for food and lodging.
He looked at me in his sad, thoughtful way and said: ''Ten years ago I
believed that I could solve the problem of the unemployed, that it was a sin
and shame for them to suffer. I investigated and studied the whole question
carefully. It will seem strange to you, but now I have no remedy to ofiTer.
Their own volitions have brought them where they are, others surrounded
just as they were, have pushed on to good conditions ; these have not, what
can we do?"
Pound the manager of the Museum waiting to see me and to invite our
Union to free seats at the " new and highly moral drama, ' Three Days in a
Man Trap, ' a strictly temperance play ! ' ' He seemed to think it so desirable
for us, so ** just the thing," and was apparently so much in earnest that I
had much ado to make my voice sound friendly, out of a world of thoughts
so different from his own. But I did the best I could, thanked him for his
courtesy and said we had opinions widely at variance, that my own experi-
ence was that my life was far less helpful when I used to go to places of the
sort, that I needed all my time for higher things and I believed our ladies
felt the same.
is converted and, sure and swift " fruit of the Spirit," has made up
with his wife to whom he had not spoken in a fortnight, and has asked me
to forgive him for his inconsiderate language. O " heart of flesh ! " how
gentle and easy to be entreated ; but the " heart of stone," how hard and cold
and self-absorbed ! What is the matter with me is that I'd like to go out by
myself, looking only to God, and preach the unsearchable riches of Christ I
346 Chicago Life,
When Bro. wrote me that offer to be editor of a New York temperance
paper, it did n't stir my soul a bit, but this little Gospel meeting, where
wicked men have wept and prayed and said they would see Jesus — it thrills
me through and through.
Went to hear Nathan Sheppard on George Bliot Don*t believe 1*11
ever attend another literary lecture. It was keen, brilliant, flinty as flint, cold
as an icicle. Poor, grand George Eliot, who sees no light beyond the sepul-
cher, who thinks we are snuffed out like' candles ! Dear me, it is n*t even
sesthetic, that ! As a cute critic said, purely from an artistic point of view
our poor old Religion has some notions that ought to commend it to the
attention of cultivated personages.
Dr. discourages me what she can in my work and says " a cheaper
woman would do it just as well." Ah my dear friend, is it Uien ''cheap "
work to be God*s instrument in delivering men from voluntary insanity ? — to
bring them back to themselves ? to help enthrone the conscience in a human
breast? A letter read just after Dr. 's, from a mother in Pishkill, N. Y.,
thanking us for helping her wajrward son, was antidote enough, if I had
needed one.
Heard Rev. George Coan, newly returned from Persia. If I were younger
I believe I*d be a missionary.
Went home to mother, read to-day's mail aloud to her, in which she was
greatly interested. Pound her well up in the events of the day — President's
message to Congress on Ivouisiana, Collyer's sermon on Gerrit Smith, etc.
Told her of Dr. 's invitation to me to " preach " for him and how glad
I was the way was opening so for me to speak of the glad tidings, and she,
too, rejoiced.
I wonder what the '* Women's Congress" will think about my plan of
Literary Clubs for women.
In p. M. studied my Bible and thought about *' my sermon.' ' In evening
went to Rail Road Chapel and heard Captain Black, a Christian lawyer,
preach a simple Gospel sermon. We are to have temperance meetings here
if the South Side ladies will rally. It is an intemperate neighborhood, the
red light " danger signal " gleams from scores of saloons.
January 18, 1875. — A hurried P. M. — large prayer-meeting, twenty drink-
ing men present, only four ladies ! Dear Mrs. Barnes, of New York, my little
Quakeress, is my main- stay. I don't know what I could do without her. I
should often be here alone with the office full of men. This would n't worry
me, to be sure, save that it is better to have a little help. I've given up
expecting the ladies of Chicago to come to the rescue at present. They will
sometime— in the Lord's own good time. Por me, my hands are overrunning
full of Christian work, and that's enough. Large meeting — one poor fellow,
gray-headed, washed-out looking, hands shaking with effects of drink, came
in for the first time. He was once a church-member and promising businesa
man of the city, but is now at ebb-tide.
January 19. — Well, last night I preached— the word grates somewhat.
Mother Protests. 347
but has no business to— at Ada Street M. £. Church (Dr. McKeown's). Text,
*' Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ? " Had a few '* heads " on a slip of
paper. Took my little Bible that father gave me, and just talked. I greatly
regretted to go to my first most sacred service from the lightness and repartee
of the pleasant parlor at Mrs. N 's and felt ill-attuned at first But per-
haps that was forgiven ; anyhow I was in earnest and greatly enjoyed the
evening, and my large audience was thoughtful. O God ! can I live near
enough to Thee to dare tell the good news to Humanity ?
January 25. — Have spoken again at Ada Street, with more efficiency and
spirit. Subject: "Thou requirest not sacrifice, else would I give it'* My
friend, Kate Jackson, says I'm better as a gospel talker than anything else.
O I wish I might be one; that I enough communed with God !
After several months invested in this fashion, I went to speak
one night at Freeport, a few hours* ride from the city; became ill
from overwork, addressed my audience while in a burning fever,
came home to mother, and went to bed with inflammatory rheu-
matism. I asked her to send for our family physician, then Dr.
Jewell, of sainted memory, the man who had prayed at my bed-
side six months before, when I was sick with heartache at leav-
ing my dear college. **No,** said that Spartan matron, **You
are going by faith — ^you do not need a doctor.'*
The truth was she always believed that she best knew what
her children needed, whether they were well or ill. **Now I
want you to listen to your mother, * * she quietly continued, **I
believe in faith as much as you do, but you have, with pure
intention, yet ignorantly, flown in the face of Providence. Those
good women spoke to you about a maintenance on the very day
they chose you president. That was your Heavenly Father's
kind provision, and you turned away from it and dictated to Him
the method of His care. The laborer is worthy of his hire; they
that preach the gospel shall live by the gospel ; this is the law
and the prophets from St. Paul down to you. God is n*t going
to start loaves of bread flying down chimney nor set the fire
going in my stove without fuel. I shall soon see the bottom of
my flour barrel and coal bin. You are out at the elbows, down at
the heel, and down sick, too. Now write to those temperance
ladies a plain statement of facts, and tell them that you have
made the discovery that God works by means and they may help
you if they like.**
My mother*s words were a needed revelation. I wrote a
248 Mrs. Matilda B. Carse.
letter to my dear, women. Later on I learned that they cried
over it in Executive Committee. That night a tender note came
from them with a $ioo check inclosed, and my **faith test" was
met upon the Heavenly Father's basis, not upon the one I had
prescribed for Him. But I enjoyed that episode and shall be the
better, and the richer for it evermore.
One of my best and brightest coadjutors from the first has
been Mrs. Matilda B. Carse, of Chicago, the chief financial
woman of our white ribbon host. Her first money-raising vent-
ure consisted in getting a hundred men to give ten dollars apiece
to keep me going when my blissful episode of impecuniosity was
over. Rev. Dr. J. O. Peck, ** of ours," was the first name she
secured. Prom that day to this she has been on the war-path,
financially, raising hundreds of thousands for the Foundlings'
Home, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union with its huge
cheap Lodging House for. men, its ''Anchorage Mission" for
women, its Gospel Meeting, Kindergarten, Temperance Restau-
rant and other philanthropic enteiprises, until now she has set
herself with perfect equanimity to collect eight hundred thou-
sand dollars for the building of a Woman's Temperance Temple
in Chicago, to serve as the Headquarters for our National Wom-
an's Christian Temperance Union, also for the great ** Woman's
Temperance Publication Association " founded by her, and which
printed in 1888 over sixty million pages of temperance litera-
ture. From this Temple she expects to derive, beyond all
expenses, over a hundred thousand dollars a year rental, with
which our work will be still more widely carried on.
But to return. A few weeks after my election as President
of the Chicago Woman's Christian Temperance Union (October
8, 1874), the ** Woman's Congress" met in Farwell Hall, Chi-
cago, Mrs. Livermore presiding. It was her wish to have me
speak upon the temperance question. For years I had been
vice-president of the organization for Illinois and had prepared
a paper read at the New York ** Congress" on the ** Higher
Education of Women. " But in my new character I was less
welcome and only by taking a brave stand did Mrs. Livermore
succeed in having me recognized. I wish here to record my
sincere appreciation of her loyalty to the great cause and to one
of its * * new beginners " at a time when her championship before
Cla7is Rally at Cleveland. 349^
the most intellectual body of women then existing, was particu-
larly valuable to both.
That same autumn of 1874 the Woman's Christian Temper-
ance Union of Chicago sent me as a delegate to the Illinois
Woman's Christian Temperance Union Convention, called by
Mrs. J. F. Willing, at Bloomington. where she was then professor
in the college. As a hundred of us marched, two by two, along
the street, under cover of the stars, I felt that we were marching
to victory. My life had hardly known a more exalted moment.
I seemed to see the end from the beginning ; and when one has
done that, nothing has power to discourage or to daunt. Of this
meeting I was made secretary (my first appearance in the state
arena), Mrs. Willing being elected president. A few weeks later,
(November 18, 19, 20, 1874), the great National Woman's Tem-
perance Convention, which had been called by a committee formed
at Chautauqua, of which Mrs. Willing, Mrs. Emily Huntington
Miller and Mrs. Mattie McClellan Brown were leaders, convened
in Cleveland, Ohio. Its object was to preserve the fruits of Cru-
sade victory — indeed, it may be justly called the sober second
thought of that unparalleled uprising. Women from eighteen
states were gathered.
** Hear the call, O gird your armor on ;
Grasp the Spirit's mighty sword,"
was their stirring battle-cry. Something divine was in the air —
a breath of the new dispensation. Introductions were at a dis-
count— ^we shook hands all round and have been comrades ever
since. Here I first met Mrs. Annie Wittenmeyer, Mrs. Mary T.
Lathrap, Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, Mrs. Governor Wallace, Mother
Stewart and Mrs. Judge Thompson, leader of the first praying
band and the ** mother of us all."
Very few could make a speech at that early period — ^we
gave speechlets instead, off-hand talks of from five to fifteen min-
utes. The daily prayer-meetings were times of refreshing from
the presence of the Lord. There was no waiting, ever>' thing was
fresh, tender and spontaneous. Such singing I never heard ;
the Bible exposition was bread to the soul. Everybody said it
'^wasn't a bit like men's conventions." ** And it'sall the better,
for that," was the universal verdict.
350 A Larger Field.
As I sat quiet, but observant, in my delegation, Mary T.
Lathrap sent me a note to this purport : ** We Michigan women
are going to nominate you for corresponding secretary of this
national society. ' *
Now it is my nature to accept every offer that means a wider
outlook from a higher point of observation, and my heart sprang
up to meet this kindly call. But the heavenly forces had me
pretty well in hand just then. I had already been nominated for
President by Mrs. M. B. Reese, of Ohio, and had promptly de-
clined, with the statement that I was but a raw recruit, and
preferred to serve in the ranks ; when they had proved me, I
would be at command for anything thej' wished ; but, though I
met this overture from my new-found friend, Mrs. Lathrap, with
a similar refusal, her eloquence prevailed, and I became first
mate on our newly launched life-boat of reform, under the cap-
taincy of Sister Wittenmeyer.
The only resolution written by me, so far as I can now
recall, was this :
'' Resolved^ That, recognizmg that our cause is, and will be, combated
by mighty, determined and relentless forces, we will, trusting in Him who
is the Prince of Peace, meet argument with argument, misjudgment with
patience, denunciation with kindness, and all our difficulties and dangers
with prayer."
There was some debate about inserting the word * * Christian"
in the name of our society, the point being made that to leave it
out would broaden and thus benefit the platform, but then, as
always since, the Convention said by its deeds, ** We are not here
to seek a large following, but to do what we think right"
Returning to Chicago with the duties of national secretary
upon me, I found my generous comrades saying, ** Go right
ahead as our local president, and we will pay you a hundred dol-
lars a month and give you time to work for the National in the
bargain." So I struggled on, blessed with good health, blithe
heart and warm co-operajtion. The summer of 1875 I spent with
Mrs. Wittenmeyer at Ocean Grove, where our pens flew from
early mom till dewy eve in the interest of the National Woman's
Christian Temperance Union. Here she wrote her valuable
'* * History of the Woman's Crusade. ' ' By Dr. Vincent's invitation,
I spoke at Chautauqua, and with Mrs. Wittenmeyer visited several
:
Declares for Woman^s Ballot, 35^ j^
summer camps in New England and the Middle States. After a
second winter's work in Chicago, during which I prepared
** Hints and Helps for the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union," I made a trip through Ohio, and while in Columbus
for a Sunday engagement, remained at home in the morning for
Bible study and prayer. Upon my knees alone, in the room of
my hostess, who was a veteran Crusader, there was borne in upon
my mind, as I believe, from loftier regions, the declaration, ** You
are to speak for woman's ballot as a weapon of protection to her
home and tempted loved ones from the tyranny of drink, " and
then for the first and only time in my life, there flashed through
my brain a complete line of argument and illustration — the same
that I used a few months later before the Woman's Congress, in
St. George's Hall, Philadelphia, when I first publicly avowed my
faith in the enfranchisement of women. I at once wrote Mrs.
Wittenmeyer, with whom I had always been in perfect accord,
telling her I wished to speak on "The Home Protection Ballot "
at the International Temperance Convention of Women, then
being planned by us as a Centennial feature of the movement.
She replied mildly, but firmly, declining to permit the subject to
be brought forward. We had our convention in the Academy of
Music, Philadelphia, and an International Woman's Christian
Temperance Union was organized, with Mrs. Margaret Parker, of
England, as its president, and Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, of Iowa, sec-
retary, but the time was not ripe for such a movement and it
advanced but a short distance beyond the name and letter- head.
I spoke, but not upon the theme I would have chosen, and Mrs.
Mary A. Livermore who was present and to whom I offered to
give my time, so greatly have I always honored and admired
her, was not allowed to speak, because of her progressive views
upon the woman question.
At the Newark National Woman's Christian Temperance
Union Convention, held that Autumn (1876), disregarding the
earnest, almost tearful pleading of my friends, I repeated my
** suffrage speech "with added emphasis. The great church was
packed to the doors; Mrs. Wittenmeyer was on the platform,
Mrs. Allen Butler, a Presbyterian lady of Syracuse, then presi-
dent of New York Woman's Christian Temperance Union, pre-
sided. I remember her quoting at the outset an anecdote of Mrs,
352 Mrs. Governor Wallace.
Lathrap's about a colored man in the war who saw a Confederate
boat approaching an island where several Union soldiers of whom
he was one were just landing, whereupon they all lay flat in their
canoe; colored man and all, until he jumped up, sajdng, ** Some-
body's got to be shot at and it might as well be me,*' pushed the
boat from shore, and fell pierced by bullets, but saved the day for
his comrades. I then gave the people my argument, and though
I could but feel the strong conservatism of an audience of Chris-
tian women, in New Jersey in 1876, I felt far more strongly the
undergirdings of the Spirit. At the close I was applauded be-
yond my hopes. The dignified chairman came forward saying,
** I wish it clearly understood that the speaker represents herself
and not the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, for we do not
propose to trail our skirts through the mire of politics. " These
words were received in silence, and I knew then that the hearts
of the women were with the forward movement. As we left the
hall my honored chief whispered regretfully, ** You might have
been a leader, but now you'll be only a scout. "
It is true that at the Cincinnati convention, held in St. Paul's
M. E. Church just one year previous, Mrs. Governor Wallace of
Indiana (the original of that famous mother in Gen. Lew Wal-
lace's **Ben Hur"), had secured the adoption of a resolution
favorable to submitting the question of prohibiting the dram-
shops to a vote of men and women. But it is equally true that
this was done by her great personal influence in privately secur-
ing from leaders strongly opposed, an agreement to let her make
the test, whereupon the resolution went through without debate.
Thus it is an historical fact that the first time the subject of pro-
hibition came before the temperance women of America was upon
the proposition that the united home forces should vote out the
saloon. We knew that we could not at Newark get such a reso-
ution passed, therefore we tried another plan, asking that in the
territories and the District of Columbia the sale of alcoholic drinks
should be legalized only ** when a majority of men by their votes
and women by their signatures should ask for the legalizing of
such sale. " A petition to Congress embodying this request led
to our first work at the capital.
It was at this Newark convention that the national motto,
** For Qod and Home and Native Land," was first indorsed. It
** Our Union '* Saved. 353
had come to my thought early in the work and been accepted as
the motto of our Chicago Woman's Christian Temperance Union,
then of the State of Illinois and lastly of the nation. It was at the
Newark convention that a majority of the members pledged them-
selves to pass the cup untasted at the sacramental table, if they
knew that it held alcoholic wine. It was at Cincinnati the year
previous, though on recommendation of the New Jersey conven-
tion, that we pledged ourselves to observe the **noon hour'* for
prayer that God would help the temperance work and workers,
overthrow the liquor traflSc and bring in the universal reign
of Christ.
At the Newark convention our national organ was found to
be so heavily in debt that its committee of publication resigned,
and Mrs. Jane M. Geddes, of Michigan, Mrs. Mary T. Burt, of
New York, Mrs. C. B. Buell, of Connecticut, and my.self volun-
teered to save the day for this new journalistic venture and literary
outgrowth of the Crusade. We put in what money we had as a
free-will offering, gathered up gifts from our friends, gave several
months' gratuitous work, during which I was entertained in Brook-
lyn by my good friends, Mr. and Mrs. J. F. Stout, and we were so
happy as to see the enterprise placed upon a paying basis. It was
removed to Chicago in 1882, by action of the Louisville conven-
tion, merged with The Signal, organ of the Illinois Woman's Chris-
tian Temperance Union, founded by Mrs. T. B. Carse in 1880, and
under the name of The Union Signal, was at first edited by Mrs.
Mar>' Bannister Willard, and is now by Marj^ Allen West, issuing
a weekly edition of from fifty-five to .sixty thousand. It is one
of half a .score of periodicals brought out by our Woman's Tem-
perance Publication Association, a joint stock company of women
only, which declared in 1886 a dividend of four per cent, in '87
one of five and in '88 one of six per cent, besides owning its
machinery, handling in 1888 a hundred and thirty thou.sand dol-
lars and sending out over sixty million pages of literature.
In the winter of 1877 I went to Washington and spoke before
the House Committee on Judiciar}-, Hon. Proctor Knott of Ken-
tucky, chainnan, urging the claims of the Home Protection Peti-
tion adopted at Newark as aforesaid. I remember the presence of
Gen. Ben Butler with a red, red rose in his button-hole. I remem-
ber the blandly non-committal Garfield, the friendly Fr>'e, the
23
354 Moody s Meeting for Women — Goughfs Lecture.
earnest Blair, the polite Samuel J. Randall who invited us tp a
seat in the speaker's gallery during the presentation of our huge
petition, which was so large that the pages required help to bring
it in. I remember being most hospitably entertained for ten days
in the home of Rev. Dr. and Mrs. John P. Newman, where I said
nothing about my intention to speak before the Committee on
Judiciary, supposing that my kind friends were opposed to a move-
ment so prog^ssive, and I remember, too, how glad I was when
they told me afterward of their hearty sympathy and took me to
task for not inviting them to be present. Prom Washington I
came home to Chicago and was somewhat identified with the
Moody meetings then being held in the huge Tabernacle there.
I shall never forget a stormy Sabbath day when, through blinding
snow, nine thousand women gathered to hear a sermon specially
for them, from that most successful evangelist of the Christian era.
We then met for the first time and he asked me to lead in prayer.
/The mighty significance of such an army of wives and mothers,
sisters and daughters gathered to pray for their beloved absent
ones, surged in upon my heart like the sea at high tide. I never
beheld a more impressive scene. A few weeks later I introduced
John B. Gough in this Tabernacle to the largest temperance audi-
ence I have ever seen assembled within four walls. How mag-
nificently he spoke ! his good wife, Mary Gough, sitting near by
with knitting-work in hand. As he retired from the audience
and the tremendous evening's task, a little boy's autograph album
was thrust into his face and as he wrote his name the page was
wet with perspiration. Alas for kind but thoughtless hearts!
" Strange we never heed the singer
TiU the sweet voiced bird has flown/*
would be the truthful epitaph of a thousand Greathearts of pen
and voice killed by kindness and appreciation no less than by the
stress of their prodigious industry and boundless versatility in the
sacred causes upon whose altars they are laid and by whose steep
stair- ways they climb to fame and death. We ** heed " them in
eulogies, in resolutions of condolence, in marble-cut epitaphs;
would that we might heed them earlier by lifting off the wholly
needless cares we heap upon their shoulders in token of our love !
I remember being in the Tabernacle when it was draped in
Moody's Proposition. 355
black for Mr. and Mrs. Philip Bliss, whose death by the frightful
railroad accident at Ashtabula Bridge, shocked the whole world.
They were to have been present on Christmas day, the announce-
ments were out and the public expectant. Mr. Moody stood
before the multitude and cried. We all cried with him, and he
said between his sobs, "O that lovely, lovely man!" I could
but say of Mr. Moody then, and often since, "Thy gentleness
ha*h "lAi^r ihee great."
CHAPTER in.
MOODY'S BOSTON MEETINGS— OLIVER'S DEATH.
Toward the close of his meeting, sometime in January,
Brother Moody — that is the only name for him — asked me to call
at the Brevoort House. He stood on the rug in front of a blazing
grate in his private parlor, and abruptly said to me, ** Good-
morning — what was that trouble you and Dr. Fowler had in the
University at Evanston ? **
I was not a little ** set back," as the phrase is, but replied,
**Dr. Fowler has the will of a Napoleon, I have the will of a
Queen Elizabeth ; when an immovable meets an indestructible
object, something has to give way. '*
He said *' Humph, " and changed the theme. *'Will you
go with me to Boston and help in the women's meetings? *' he
asked. ** I think I should be glad to do so, but would like to
talk with mother, * ' was my answer. * * What are your means of
support?" was his next question. **I have none except as
the Chicago Woman's Christian Temperance Union pays my cur-
rent expenses, and in leaving its work for yours, I should have
none at all," I said. '* Let's pray about it !" concluded Brother
Moody, falling upon his knees. We did pray and he shook hands,
dismissing me to admit some other individual of the endless com-
ers-in. My mother liked the plan. * * Enter every open door, * *
she said, and every friend I had, seemed glad. At a farewell
meeting in Farwell Hall, Mrs. Carse presented me a Bagster Bible,
and John Collier, a reformed man whom we all liked and believed
in, gave me on behalf of himself and others who had signed the
pledge, a copy of Cniden's Concordance, sa^'ing, **We didn't
know about the Bible, let alone this big, learned Concordance,
till the women fished us up out of the mud and set us walking on
the heavenly highway. "
I had studied the Bible a few w^eeks with Rev. W. J. Erd-
man, a scholar of beautiful spirit and great knowledge of the
(356)
Boston and Beacon Street, 357
Scriptures. But I went to Boston with no material on hand save
a few temperance lectures. On a fly leaf of my new ** Bagster *'
I find this entry, my only record of that fruitful three months of
work and study, for I kept no jovunal and have not since my
return from Europe in 1870:
"My first whole day of real, spiritual, joyful, loving study of the kernel
of God*s word, simply desirous to learn xpy Father's will, is this 17th of
February, 1877, with the Boston work just begun. And on this sweet.event-
ful day, in which, with every hour of study, the Bible has grown dearer,
I take as my life-motto henceforth, humbly asking God's grace that I may
measure up to it, this wonderful passage from Paul: ''And whatsoever ye
do^ in word ordeed^ do all in the name of the Lord Jesus ^ giving thanks to
God and the Father by him, "—Col. 3:17. ' *
I had lacked specific Bible teaching, having almost never
attended Sunday-school, because of being brought up in the
country. Mrs. Governor Beveridge is the only teacher who had
me in charge whom I clearly recall, and she for a brief period.
I had taught in Sunday-school, somewhat, but with the pressure
of academic and college cares, my temerity in undertaking a Bible
reading daily before the most cultured audience of women on the
footstool surprises me as I reflect upon it. Entertained in the
beautiful home of Mrs. Fenno Tudor, an Episcopalian lady of
broad views, on Beacon Hill, I went to my room at eight o'clock
each morning, studied until noon, then met my audience, spoke
twenty minutes without manuscript, conducted the inquiry meet-
ing afterward, attended to correspondence for the National Wom-
an's Christian Temperance Union all the afternoon, save when I
had an extra meeting, which was not infrequently, and made a
temperance address, usually in the suburbs, at night.
I never studied by lamp-light and I had my requisite eight
hours of sleep. Sometimes I had four or six hundred, often a
thousand, and occasionally twelve or fourteen hundred women
in my meetings at Berkeley Street and Park Street Congrega-
tional Churches. Usually I spoke on Sabbath evening in Clar-
endon Street Baptist Church, and when Mr. Moody called a
** Temperance Conference," in the Tabeniacle, at which Gough,
Tyng, Wanamaker and others spoke, he placed my name upon
his program, also had me literally preach — though I did not call
it that — one Sunday afternoon. I said to him, *' Brother Moody,
358 Moody and Money.
you need not think because I am a Western woman and not afraid
to go, you must put me in the forefront of the battle after this
fashion. Perhaps you will hinder the work among these con-
servatives. * ' But at this he laughed in his cheery way, and
declared that *'it was just what they needed and I need n't be
scared for he was n't."
The Christian womanhood of Boston rallied around me like
sisters indeed. I never had more cordial help, even from my own
white ribboners.
Mrs. Myra Pierce, the leading Methodist woman of the city,
was made chairman of the Committee to arrange for my meet-
ings, and, with Mrs. Rev. Dr. A. J. Gordon, stood by rae stead-
ily. I tried my best to make the temperance work a prominent
feature, and had the satisfaction of seeing some grand new work-
ers develop, among whom were Miss Elisabeth S. Tobey, and
Miss Bessie Gordon, now president and corresponding secretary
of Massachusetts Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and
Miss Anna Gordon, a gifted girl, boni in Boston, christened by
Rev. Dr. Nehemiah Adams, to whose church her parents be-
longed, and now for twelve years my devoted friend, faithful
secretary and constant traveling companion.
One day as I was about to open my noon meeting in Berke-
ley Street Church, Mr. Moody came running up the pulpit steps,
for his own meeting was waiting, and said, ** I see by the papers
that you're talking temperance all around the suburbs. Why do
you do that ? I want all there is of you for the Boston meetings."
" It is because I have n't any money and must go out and
eani some," I replied.
*' You don't mean that I've given you nothing?" he said,
striking his forehead.
"Of course you've given me nothing," I replied with
mildness.
'* Who paid your way from Chicago ? "
"I did."
"Didn't those fellows" — naming some of his immediate
friends — "send you money for traveling expenses as I told
them to?"
" I guess they forgot it," I replied.
" Well, I never heard the like ! " and he was off like a shot
Goes Her Way. 359
That evening, as I was going into my meeting, he thrust a
generous check into my hand, saying, ** Don't you go beating
about in the suburbs any more."
Everything went on smoothly until a Woman's Christian
Temperance Union Convention was announced at Maiden, and I
was asked to speak there with Mrs. Livermore, then president of
Massachusetts Woman's Christian Temperance Union. I agreed
to go, and was again taken to task by Brother Moody, but this
time on another ground. He held with earnestness that I ought
not to appear on the same platform with one who denied the
divinity of Christ. In this he was so earnest and so cogent, by
reason of his deep convictions and his unrivaled knowledge of
proof-passages, that I deferred to his judgment, partly from con-
viction and partly from a desire to keep the peace and go on with
my good friend in his work ; for I deem it one of the choicest
seals of my calling that Dwight L. Moody should have invited
me to cast in my little lot with his great one as an evangelist.
But on returning West, I went over the whole subject of an
'* orthodox" Christian's duty, for myself, and as a result, sent
the following letter to my honored brother, through my gracious
friend, his wife :
EvANSTON, September 5, 1877.
Dear Mrs. Moody — In view of the fact that when I last saw Mr.
Moody, I agreed to go with him in his work, I think a simple statement of
the ground of my changed purpose, due to myself, though I dislike to take
his time to listen to it ; you will consult your own judgment about present-
ing my reasons to him.
For myself, the more I study the subject, the more I fail to see that it
is for us to decide who shall work in this cause side by side with us, and
who shall not I cannot judge how the hearts of earnest, pure, prayerful
women may appear in God's clear sight, nor just when their loyalty to
Christ has reached the necessary degree. If to the communion table we bid
those welcome who feel themselves fit subjects to come, then surely in the
sacred communion of work for poor humanity, I dare not say, "You may
come, " and "You must not." "With you I will speak on the same plat-
form,— ^with you, I will not" Rather let the burden of this solemn choice
rest on those who come, and whosoever will may work with me, if only she
brings earnest purpose, devout soul, and irreproachable moral character.
This has been my course always, and it would be denying my deepest and
most sacred convictions to turn aside from it. In denominational lines, we
certainly have safeguards enough for the defense of the faith, and I am
ndly aware that within these lines there are myriads less true, less Christ-
/3
360 Co-operation the Key-Note.
like than many whom I must disfellowship if I take the dilemma by the
other horn.
All my life I have been devoted to the advancement of women in educa-
tion and opportunity. I firmly believe God has a work for them to do as
evangelists, as bearers of Christ's message to the ungospeled, to the prayer-
meeting, to the church generally and the world at large, such as most people
have not dreamed. It is therefore my dearest wish to help break down the
(barriers of prejudice that keep them silent. I cannot think that meetings
. in which *' the brethren " only are called upon, are one half as effective as
those where all are freely invited, and I can but believe that " women *s meet-
ings,** as such, are a relic of an outworn regime. Never did I hold one of
these meetings without a protest in my soul against it. As in the day of
Pentecost, so now, let men and women in perfectly impartial fashion partici-
pate in all services conducted in His name in whom there is neither bond
nor free, male nor female, but all are one. Nobody is more than half him-
self who does not work in accordance with his highest convictions ; and I
feel that whenever I surrender the views herein stated, I have the lever by
the short arm when I might just as well grasp the long one, nay, when I am
in duty bound to do this. No one knows better than Mr. Moody, that to
work at our best, we must work out our own ideas. To represent the views
of another, no matter how much we may love, honor, or revere him, is like
pulling with the left hand when we might use the right.
fMr. Moody views the temperance work from the standpoint of a reviv-
alist, and so emphasizes the regeneration of men. But to me as a woman,
there are other phases of it almost equally important to its success, viz.,
saving the children, teaching them never to drink ; showing to their mothers
the duty of total abstinence ; rousing a dead church and a torpid Sunday-
school to its duty ; spreading the facts concerning the iniquitous traffic far
and wide; influencing legislation so that what is physically wrong and
morally wrong shall not, on the statute books of a Christian land, be set down
as legally right ;- and to this end putting the ballot in woman*s hand for the
protection of her little ones and of her home. All these ways of working
seem to me eminently religious— thoroughly in harmony with the spirit of
the most devoted Christian man or woman"!]
So I cannot believe myself called upon to discontinue these lines of
work, nor to cease hearty co-operation with those thus working; and yet it
remains true, that best of all I love to declare the blessed tidings of sal-
vation, and would gladly do so still, if I might act in my own character,
under the auspices of the greatest Christian leader of our day.
It costs me much to turn away from such a future and from such a
guide — but I believe it to be right, and this is a decision resulting from a
whole summer of thought and earnest prayer for wisdom.
Pardon me for going so much into detail, and yet I think your kindly
nature will appreciate my wish to be understood by those for whom I have
so great regard, and with whom my relations have always been so pleasant
With sincere Christian affection, I am, as I shall always be.
Your friend, Frances E. Wiu^AJtp,
Chicago W. C. T, U, Convention, 361
In the wider fields that would have opened to me as a coad-
jutor of the great evangelist, no doubt the widest that could by
any possibility be open to a Christian worker, whether man or
woman, in our day, my work for the Woman's Christian Tem-
perance Union and the World's Woman's Christian Temperance
Union would have been immeasurably greater than it is now, for
Mr. Moody made no objection to my being president of the first
society, and I doubt not he would have welcomed my becoming
president of the larger one. I should have gone to England with
him and been able, both there and here, to acclimate the white
ribbon movement in conservative circles never yet penetrated by
its broad and genial influence. It was my dream to do this — to
rally under Mr. Moody's indirect influence, all the leaders, men
and women, of our growing host. But for this one objection, so
unlooked for, how different might have been my future and that
of the white ribbon cause ! My friends were grieved again, and
many told me what many more told others, that I had once more
made * ' the mistake of a life- time." For myself I only knew that,
liberal as he was toward me in all other things, tolerant of my
ways and manners, generous in his views upon the woman ques-
tion, devotedly conscientious and true, Brother Moody's Scripture
interpretations concerning religious toleration were too literal for
me ; the jacket was too straight — I could not wear it.
In the autumn of this year, 1877, our annual convention was
held in Chicago, where, after a lively discussion over the report
of the committee on badge (they having recommended royal
purple as the color), we adopted a simple bit of white ribbon,
emblematic of purity and peace, on the principle of ** first pure,
then peaceable." Miss Margaret Winslow, of Brooklyn, then
our editor, made a telling speech upon this subject, which I wish
might have gone upon the records. After debate, a resolution
known in our annals as *'the famous Thirteenth " was adopted, -
declaring that ** woman ought to have the power to close the '
dram-shop door over against her home. ' '
At this convention I resigned the corresponding secretary-
ship of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union and
again declined the use of my name as a candidate for president,
because I felt, after much prayer, unwilling to appear as an oppos-
ing candidate.
362 Goes '^ On a Bureau,'^
Throughout the next year, 1878, I was a firee lance for the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union, during which period I
proceeded to ** go on a bureau.'* My friends had long urged me
to quit the guerilla warfare of hap-hazard engagements, so to
speak, and to put my invitations into the hands of a Lyceum
Lecture Bureau. In an evil hour I listened to the siren's voice,
went to Mr. Slayton, the gentlemanly manager of such an insti*
tution, he having repeatedly invited me to do so, handed him
some of my letters and lists of invitation, of which I had enough
to cover more time and territory than I could ever exhaust ;
submitted to the indignity of placards, small bills and a big
lithograph ; was duly set forth upon glossy tinted paper in an
imposing * * Annual ' ' — in common with one hundred others — as
a light of the age, no newspaper to the contrary being quoted ;
contracted to pay ray per cent, and was started out. I remained
on that bureau, to which I had climbed at the expense of a hun-
dred-dollar lithograph and all the rest of it, just three weeks. It
was what is called ** a damper " to one of my temperament and
habitudes. To go from the genial, breezy, out-doorsy temperance
meeting, the warm, tender, exalted gospel meeting, the home-
like, sisterly, inspiring Woman's Christian Temperance Union
Convention, into a human snow-bank of folks who have ** paid
to get in " and are reckoning quietly, as one proceeds, whether
or not they are really going ** to get their money's worth," is an
experience not to be endured with equanimity by anybody who
can slip his head out of its noose. To have a solemn ** Lyceum
Committee ' ' of men meet you at the train, take you to a hotel of
funereal dreariness and cooked-over cuisine ; to march upon a
realistic stage that no woman's hand has beautified or brightened ;
to have no heartsome music or winsome prayer preceding you and
tuning your weary spirit to the high ministry for which you
came ; to face the glare of footlights ; and after you have ** gone
through" your speech and are feeling particularly **gone," to
hear the jeremiad of the treasurer that **they had n't sold so
many tickets as they hoped," or ** the weather was against them,"
or ** counter attractions had proved too powerful;" all this is
** nerve- wear " to no purpose. Then to be exploited over the
country with as little regard for comfort as if you were a case of
cod-fish or a keg of ^ails, th^ heart of the night being all the
^^Philanthropists Mustn't Make Money ^ 363
symptom of a heart that your time-table reveals, the wee small
hours being made consciously present with you in order that you
may **make '* the next engagement, the unconscionable **wait''
at side stations and uncanny junction depots, all these are rea-
sons of my hope never again to see a " Bureau,'* — indeed, I can
hardly tolerate one in my room since an ^end was put to that
abyssmal epoch of three weeks. I think my manager was as
glad to have me go as I was to say Good-by, for I would n*t raise
my price ($25), even when double and three times that amount
was offered for an ** option.'* **No," I replied with reproving
tone, **a philanthropist can't afford to make money. It shall
never be said that I charged more as I became more popular.
I've set my price once for all and I'll never raise it and I'll never
lay up money and I'll never be rich, — nobody shall ever bring
that reproach upon me no matter how else I may fail." Whereat
my handsome manager was wont to look upon me as mildly
lunatic, changing the subject lest I might become violent.
Returning to Anna Gordon's tender mercies, a young woman
who has repeatedly convinced ticket-agents that they make mis-
takes concerning train-time ; who has a face so honest that (be-
fore that wretched Interstate law !) she has often got passes for
me from entire strangers on her simple say so ; who understands
traveling as well as Robert Bonner does Maud S. and who has n't
her superior as a business woman on this continent, I have
gone my way in peace since 1878, visiting with her every state
and territory and all but two capitals, those of Arizona and Idaho,
in a single year (1883, our temperance "round-up," ten years
after the Crusade), and reaching, since my work began, a thou-
sand towns, including all that by the census of 1870 had ten
thousand inhabitants, and most of those having five thousand.
Mother says that for about ten years she thinks I averaged but
three weeks in a year at home, and Anna Gordon says she thinks
I averaged one meeting daily throughout that period.
In 1878 the white ribbon regiment of Illinois placed me at
its head and we entered on our home protection campaign, col-
lecting in nine weeks nearly two hundred thousand names to the
following petition :
To the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Illinois :
WuBREAS, In these years of temperance work the argument of defeat
364 Women at the Illinois Capital,
in our contest with the saloons has taught us that our efforts are merely
palliative of a disease in the body politic, which can never be cured until
law and moral s'.asion go hand in hand in our beloved state ; and
WHBRBiis, The instincts of self-protection and of apprehension for the
safety of her children, her tempted loved ones, and her home, render woman
the natural enemy of the saloon ;
There/ore^ Your petitioners, men and women of the state of Illinois,
having at heart the protection of our homes from their worst enemy, the
legalized traffic in strong drink, do hereby most earnestly pray your honora-
ble body that, by suitable legislation, it may be provided that in the state of
Illinois, the question of licensing at any time, in any locality, the sale of
any and all intoxicating drinks, shall be submitted to and determined by
ballot, in which women of lawful age shall be privileged to take part, in the
same manner as men, when voting on the question of license.
We had great hearings at the State House, which we deco-
rated with the Petition,* all the names being pasted upon a strip
of cloth neariy a quarter of a mile long, bound with blue to
represent the Murphy, and red to indicate the Reynolds reform
movement ; we sang * * Home Sweet Home ' ' in the Senate cham-
ber ; held prayer-meetings in the committee rooms and on top of
Lincoln's monument, and convened mass-meetings throughout
the state to the tune of :
" Rally then, rally then,
Ye men of Illinois ;
■ICjive woman home protection vote,
To save the tempted boy.**
That we did not get an iota from the Illinois legislature goes
without saying. It is chosen by the saloon and legislates for it
almost exclusively. The beer and whisky interests of the world
are nowhere centered as in our state, with Chicago and Peoria as
the foci of an ellipse in which our politicians move as in an orbit.
But all the same we roused the people so that, under our local
option law, six hundred and twenty-five towns went for prohibi-
tion out of eight hundred and thirty-two voting that spring, and
nothing so encouraging was ever known before nor has been
since.
Rest Cottage was like a rag-bag by reasons of the petitions
stacked everywhere. My dear old mother, president of the local
•This petition was sealed and placed in the rooms of the Chicago Historical Sodetji
not to reappear until the day of Jubilee when women vote in Illinoui.
Politicians ** Dare Not Stand by the Women,** 365
union when she was seventy, took turns with Anna Gordon, iron-
ing the *' Big Petition '* smooth as a shirt bosom. I used to take
my little tin dinner-pail as of old in district school days, and go
over to the Illinois State House every morning, some kind ladies
being there with their sewing to stay with me, and we thus kept
house for weeks. The state geologist let us fix up his room with
flowers and birds and pretty home devices. A good temperance
man was in attendance to take our cards in to the legislators
when they were not busy, and we interviewed them man by
man, setting down their names as plus or minus, according to
their promises. One day all the grangers came in a body and
pledged us their votes. Another, a party leader agreed to make
the speech of presentation when our petition should come up, but
a week later he came in and said the caucus (Republican) had
threatened him ; he had also, ** heard from home and did n*t dare
to go back on the men that had voted him in.'* ** If you women
had votes, and could reward them that stood by you and punish
them as would n't, your bill would be all right,'* he said com-
miseratingly as he slunk out of the room. Another leader with
whom we had a private interview, said: ** Ladies, I'm ashamed to
admit that I'm bound hand and foot, and can't do as I would.
My wife put her hand on my shoulder when I left home and said,
* Won't you please stand by the temperance ladies ? ' and she
looked straight in my eyes so earnestly I could have cried. But
I said, ' No, my dear, I can't; my law practice is nearly all from
the saloons, my hopes of promotion are from them, I have no
sons to help me earn money, and I'm bound to support you and
the girls in good style, so don't say another word,' and then I
left her. Now, ladies, if I denied the plea, of the woman I love
better than any other being on earth, you'll not urge me, I know. ' *
As we still pressed our plea this man of kind nature had tears in
his eyes ; his lips quivered, and he left us saying : * * I want to
help you, ladies, more than you know, but I just can't ^
I have not named the most significant experience of my life
in 1878.
My only brother, Oliver, of whose great gifts and genial
nature I can never say enough, after his graduation from Beloit
College in 1859, took a diploma from Garrett Biblical Institute
in 1 86 1 and became a Methodist minister, founding that church
366 Brother's Illness,
in Colorado, and being chosen presiding elder when he was
twenty -seven years old.
Afterward he was for years editor of the Chicago Mail^ then
the Chicago Post, and on March 17, 1878, he died quite suddenly
at the Palmer House, Chicago. One of the last efforts of his life
was to help work up for me my first Evanston audience since I had
left the University four years earlier. Temperance was a thread-
bare theme and he feared I might not be greeted by the attend-
ance that is the most grateful of all to a speaker when it consists
of his or her own towns-folk.
But I had a fine audience in our own church. My mother,
my brother's wife and their four children were all present, but
where was he who had cared so much about this meeting ?
At the close we were informed that he had been taken sud-
denly, but not at all dangerously ill, and had remained in the
city, but would come home next day. His faithful wife drove
in at once, reaching the Palmer House at midnight. He rallied
her on her needless anxiety and asked * ' how Frank had got
along ? " When she told him of the meeting's success, he smiled
and used a favorite phrase of his (borrowed from a song about
** Brave Wolfe," at Quebec), '' I die with pleasure."
How little he dreamed of leaving us was shown in his bright
greeting to me when I went to see him in the morning and our
good Dr. Jewell assured me he would be able to go home by the
next day, and advised me not to miss the appointments I had, in
company with Mrs. S. M. I. Henry, at Saginaw, Mich., for the
next day but one, which was Sunday. So I left my dear, kind
brother, life-long comrade and friend, without any thought of the
sorrow that was so near.
Mrs. Henry and I had what ministers call, **a good time"
in our meetings on the Sabbath day.
Monday at family prayers in the Christian home where we
were sheltered, Mrs. Henr>' breathed this petition :
'* Grant, Heavenly Father, that each one of us may this morn-
ing so find our balance in Thee that no sin or .sorrow may be able
to surprise us. ' '
Going upstairs to my writing, five minutes later, I heard
the door bell ring and a telegram was put into my hand. This has
long been an experience so frequent as to cause no surprise, but
Brother^ s Death, 367
I have never yet opened a tdegiam without first lifting up my
heart to God in prayer. What need I had to do so now I The
message was dated Sunday and read as follows:
" Your brother Oliyer died this morning — Funeral Tuesday. "
I read it aloud, Mends being in the hall, and crouched upon
the stairs without a cry, like one who had been struck. They
led me to my room, and my saintly Sister Henry took me in
her arms, as I repeated the words of her prayer, and we knelt
once more together. I Shall never forget the tenderness of her
voice as for my consolation she read that blessed psalm, ** I<ord,
thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations.**
I had been announced to •onduct a temperance prayer-meet-
ing that afternoon. The Chicago train would go at an hour that
left me time to fiilfill the engagement. I said, * * He would have
wished me to do this ; he was punctual to his religious duties
all this blessed year, no matter what might come.** And so I
went and told the people all about it while we cried together,
praying and talking of a better life which is an heavenly. They
went with me to the train and we had a sort of meeting in the
depot while we waited, and as I departed alone, they stood there
with their sorrowful but kindly faces, those dear new friends in
Christ Jesus, and sang:
** Rescue the perishing, care for the dying." *
When I reached my sweet Rest Cottage home, there stood
my mother, seventy-four years old, upon the steps. He was the
pride and darling of her life, and I had almost feared to see her
sorrow. But no, her dear old face was radiant and she said,
** Praise Heaven with me — I*ve grown^ray praying for my son —
and now to think your brothef Oliver is safe with God ! **
I went up the street to his pleasant home beside the College
campus —
'* Dead he lay among his books.
The peace of God was in*his looks,"
but the dear face was tired and worn. His last words to his wife
had been, ** All your prayers for me are answered ; I have a
present, perfect, personal Savior.**
•Afterward, I had the comfort of learning that a young and gifted man that day
decided in the meeting to be a missionary.
CHAPTER IV.
CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS.
I was much taken to task because I would not allow my
name used as a candidate for President of the W. C. T. U. at the
Chicago convention in 1877, and the papers tried to make out that
I said, "Nothing but a unanimous choice would induce me to
accept the position. ' ' The facts were that we then had an unpleas-
ant method of nominating our candidates ; namely, by means of
a very complimentary speech made by some leading orator. Mrs.
Foster generously made such a speech in my behalf, although I
had said all I could to the women against their taking such action.
A friend of Mrs. Wittenmeyer then rose and made a very compli-
nientar>' speech about her, and put her in nomination. Then I
rose and said I would not allow myself to come forward as an
opposing candidate when the President of the society, a much
older woman than I and one who had borne the burden Tor some
years, was in the field, and I withdrew my name.
If no other name had been brought up I would not have
done this, and the next year but one, when by a change in the
constitution we had done away with the viva voce nominations
and the flower>', coniplimentar>' speeches, I did not object, when
elected by a large majority, to taking the position.
In 1879, at Indianapolis, I was elected president of the
National Woman's Christian Temperance Union.
Two policies had in the five years* evolution of the Crusade
movement become distinctly outlined under the names, ** Conserv-
ative " and *' Liberal." Our honored president, Mrs. Wittenmeyer,
believed in holding the states and local unions to strict account,
expecting uniformity of organization and method — in short,
maintaining strongly the central power of the National ^omsoi^s
Christian Temperance Union. She also vigorously opposed the
^^ Liberal'' Policy Inaugurated in rSyg, 369
ballot for women. In opposition to this, we "Liberals" inter-
preted the constitution of our society on the laissez-faire prin-
ciple. We believed in making very few requirements of the state
and local unions ; if they paid their small dues and signed the
total abstinence pledge, we asked no more, believing that the less
we asked the more we should get, and that any amount of elbow
room was good for folks, developed their peculiar genius and kept
them hard at work and cheerful. So we declared for state rights
and intruded not at all upon our thrifty auxiliaries, save that we
were ready to go to them, work for them and build them up all
that we could. In respect to woman's ballot we believed it was
1 part and parcel of the temperance movement, one way out of the
j wilderness of whisky domination, and that any individual, any
] state or local union ought to have the right to say so and to act
I accordingly.
At our previous convention (Baltimore, 1878 ) we had de-
bated one whole day over this question, taking it up in two parts
as follows :
1. Shall we indorse the ballot for women as a temperance measure ?
2. Shall our official organ publish accounts of work withm our societies
along this line?
The debate was a marvel of mingled courtesy and cogency,
at the close of which the first question was decided in the nega-
tive, but the second affirmatively, which opened the columns of
our paper, and henceforth the process of educating our women in
favor of the ballot went forward rapidly.
At Indianapolis the principles of the liberal wing of our
society became dominant, not so much by specific declaration as
by the choice of leaders who incarnated those principles.
The number of delegates at this convention was one hun-
dred and forty-eight from t^venty states, no Southern state save
Maryland being represented. Total receipts in national treas-
ury for the year, $1,213.00.
At Boston the next year, there were one hundred and seventy-
seven delegates from twenty-five states, and the receipts were
$2,048.00. The debate begun the year before on a change in our
mode of representation was earnestly continued. As the con-
stitution had stood from the begining, each state was entitled to
24
/
370 First Annual Address.
as many delegates in the national convention as it had repre-
sentatives in Congress, but this operated unjustly because several
states having the largest number of local unions had fewer con-
gressional districts than others having but few unions ; it also put
a premium upon unorganized states which were represented on
the same basis.
The liberal party held that representation ought to be on a
basis of paid memberships, but the conservatives claimed that
** praying not paying *' was the only true foundation of the move-
ment, while their antagonists declared that we must both pray
and pay. No change was made at Boston and asi a consequence
the work was greatly hampered financially. But at Boston the
cumbrous system of ** standing committees'* was abolished and
that of individual superintendence substituted on the principle
that ** if Noah had appointed a committee the ark would still be
on the stocks.*' The departments were divided into Preventive,
Educational, Evangelistic, Social, Legal and Department of
Organization.
Under the first head we had a superintendent of Heredity
and Hygiene ; under the second, a superintendent of eflforts to
secure Scientific Temperance Instruction in the public schools
(Mrs. Mary A. Hunt) ; under the fifth a superintendent of Legis-
lation and Petition (then Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, now Mrs. Ada
Bittenbender), etc., making one woman responsible for one work,
and giving her one associate in each state and one in each local
union. The plan of putting a portrait of Mrs. Lucy Webb Hayes
in the White House as a Temperance Memorial was here
adopted by request of Rev. Frederick Merrick, of Ohio, its
originator.
From my annual address at Boston — my first as President
of the National W. C. T. U.— I make this extract :
Two-thirds of Christ's church are women, whose persuasive voices will
be a re-inforcement quite indispensable to the evangelizing agencies of the
more hopeful future.
A horde of ignorant vot««, committed to the rum-power, fastens the
dram-shop like a leech on our communities ; but let the Republic take
notice that our unions are training an array to offset this horde, one whiclm.
will be the only army of voters specifically educated to their duty which has
ever yet come up to the help of the Lord against the mighty. For slowly
First Allusion to Prohibition Party, 371
fmt surely the reflex influence of this mighty reform, bom in the church
and nurtured at the Crusade altars, is educating women to the level of two
most solemn and ominous ideas : ist. That they ought to vote. 2nd. That
they ought to vote against grog-shops. The present generation will not pass
away until in many of the states this shall all be fulfilled, and then America,
beloved Mother of thrice grateful daughters, thou shalt find rallying to thy
defense and routing the grimy hosts that reel about thee now, an army of
voters which absenteeism will not decimate and money cannot buy. Under
the influence of our societies may be safely tried the great experiment that
agitates the age, and which upon the world's arena most of us have feared.
When we desire this ** home protection *' weapon, American manhood will
place it in our hands. Though we have not taken sides as yet, in politics,
we cannot be insensible to the consideration shown us in the platform of the
Prohibition party — a prophecy of that chivalry of justice which shall yet
afiFord us a still wider recognition. These benign changes will not come
suddenly, but as the result of a profound change in the convictions of the
thoughtful and conscientious, followed by such a remoulding of public sen-
timent as this class always brings about when once aroused.
At Boston the ballot for woman as a weapon for the protection
of her home was indorsed, and the action of the president in open-
ing official headquarters in New York City was confirmed. Mrs.
Caroline B. Buell was elected corresponding secretary, an office
which she still retains.
In the spring of 1881, following this convention, I went to
Washington to be present at the inauguration of General Garfield
and to meet the commission of the Mrs. Hayes' Temperance Me-
morial of which I was president. The Woman's Christian Tem-
perance Union of the North — it was then practically non-existent
at the South — had stood solidly for the Republican candidate
whom we then believed to be a friend of total abstinence and pro-
hibition. His name was cheered whenever mentioned in the
Boston convention, and being personally acquainted w^ith him, I
had written him at Mentor, immediately after his nomination, that
if he would hold to total abstinence during the campaign, he might
count on our support — although Neal Dow was in the field, and I
had been invited, but declined, to go to the Prohibition convention
at Cleveland. For I had not then beheld, therefore was not dis-
obedient to, the heavenly vision of political as well as legal suasion
for the liquor traffic. The disappointment of our temperance
women was great over the reply of President Garfield, when, on
March 8, we went to the White House and I presented the pict-
372 First Visit to the Sunny South,
ure of Mrs. Hayes. His manner seemed to us constrained. He
was not the brotherly Disciple preacher of old, but the adroit poli-
tician '* in the hands of his friends" and perfectly aware that the
liquor camp held the balance of power.
Surprised and pained by his language, we at once adjourned to
the Temple Hotel (conducted by Mrs. S. D. La Fetra, one of our
members) and such a prayer-meeting I have seldom attended.
The women poured out their souls to God in prayer that total
abstinence might be enthroned at the White House, that a chief
magistrate might come unto the kingdom who would respond to
the plea of the nation's home-people seeking protection for their
tempted loved ones.
From Washington I started for the South, accompanied by
Mrs. Georgia Hulse McLeod of Baltimore, a native of Tallahassee,
Fla., a gifted writer and corresponding secretary of our society
in Maryland. I had also with me my faithful Anna Gordon and
her sister Bessie. In the three months that followed we visited
nearly one hundred towns and cities of the South, and I have
made four trips since then, attending, in different years, a state
temperance convention in almost every one of the fourteen South-
em states. By this means I have become acquainted with the
men and women who lead the movement there, and so know
them to be, in the old New England phrase, **just our sort of
folks." The Methodist church is in the van, and here I found
my firmest friends. Good Bishop Wightman, when not able to
sit up, wrote me letters of introduction as hearty as our own
Northern bishops would have penned, and they proved the ** open
sesame " to many an influential home in the Gulf states ; brought
many a pastor out from the quiet of his study to * * work me up a
meeting"; conciliated the immense influence of church journal-
ism and paved the way for the recognition of the white ribbon
movement throughout the Southern states. I would gladly name
the noble leaders who thus stood by me both in Methodist and
other churches, but the roll would be too long. It is written on
my heart, where it will never grow dim.
I have always believed that I had an unexpected element of
power in my name. The first night at Charleston and in each
Southern audience from then till now, lovely women came forward
to take my hand and said, ' * Are you Madam Emma Willard, of
Madam Emtna WillarcTs Name. 373
Troy?" or else, "Are you her daughter?" Often and again
4iave I been told, ** We came to hear you because our mothers
were educated in Mrs. Willard*s school, and we wanted to see if
you were kin to her." Once I have been introduced as **Knmia
Willard," and more than once, gentlemen old enough to be my
ancestors have shaken my hand with vigor, saying, *' We studied
your United States History when we were little boys." Many a
time in the passing crowd I was unable to contradict these dec-
larations and often I smiled internally and thought, ** My people
love to have it so," but whenever the opportunity presented itself,
I frankly discounted my standing and crushed their hopes by the
mild announcement that *' Madam Emma Willard was the second
cousin by marriage of my great-grandfather!" I have that
elegant lady's historic picture, the ** Temple of Time," on my
study walls, her life on my shelves, and have dutiftiUy visited her
relatives in Troy ; but I did not thank them so warmly for the
good she had done me as I would now, for that was before the
events occurred which, at the South, showed me how truly **a
good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving
fisivor than silver and gold."
That trip was the most unique of all my history. It ** recon-
structed ' ' me. Everywhere the Southern white people desired
me to speak to the colored. In Charleston I had an immense
audience of them in the M. E. Church, North ; in New Orleans,
Mrs. Judge Merrick, a native of Louisiana, whose husband was
Chief Justice in that state under the Confederacy, invited the
Northern teachers to her home, and wrote me with joy that the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union would yet solve the prob-
lem of good understanding between sections. I was present re-
peatedly in the gallery when legislatures of the Gulf States voted
money for negro education, and for schools founded by North-
erners. * * We were suspicious of the Northern school-teachers at
first," said Southern friends to me, '* we thought they had come
down here, as the carpet-baggers did, to serve their pockets and
their ambitions by our means, but we don't think so now."
I found the era of good feeling had indeed set in, and that
nothing helped it forward faster than the work of temperance, that
nothing would liberate the suppressed colored vote so soon as to
divide the white vote on the issues, " wet " and ** dry "; that the
^
374 "^^ A'Inc Faith ivitkin Me.
South "Solid" for prohibition of the liquor traffic might be
exchanged for the South Solid against the North, by such a re-
alignment of those moving armies of civilization popularly called
"parties," as would put the temperance men of North and South
in the same camp. Therefore it was Ixinie in upon my spirit that
I must declare in my next annual address, as President of the
National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the new faith
that was within me.*
■ To avoid rrpclition, dcwriptions of the constilutional nmendrDcnt campilsiiB. aod
many olhtr phases of Ihc work. htsidM personnl ikclchw of the worltFTS, »« omUted ta
thu Tolmnc, having been given at length la " Woman and Temperance."
VII
a aBoman in ^9oUtics(.
"As ONCE He sat o\'er against the treasury, so now
Christ sits over against the ballot box to see what
His disciples cast therein."
—Mary Allen West.
y
CHAPTER I.
THE HOME PROTECTION PARTY.
My purpose to adopt the new faith gained power at the Sara-
toga Convention in the summer of 1881. Called by the National
Temperance Society, of which Hon. William E. Dodge was presi-
dent, this great meeting was '* non-partisan * ' in action, but not
in utterance. There I first met James Black, of Lancaster, Pa.,
the James G. Bimey of the new abolition war, in which Northern
and Southern bayonets point the same way ; John B. Gough
was present, at his best, and Rev. J. O. Peck, of Brooklyn, out-
did himself in eloquence ; Rev. Dr. A. J. Gordon, of Boston, was
chairman, and three hundred and thirty-seven delegates were
present, representing many states. A noticeable feature was the
presence of accredited delegates from the General Assembly of
the United Presbyterian Church, the Reformed Presbyterian
Synod, the Lutheran Synod, etc. Ta^o ladies were designated to
escort Doctor Gordon to the chair, and for the first time in
history, a lady, who had been chosen as vice-president, presided
over the deliberations of a convention made up chiefly of men.
The keen, clear logic of those who declared in the convention
their conviction that the temperance question must follow the
liquor question into politics, the earnest talks I had with leaders,
the fer\'ent religious spirit of the convention, confirmed me
unchangeably in my new political departure. To me, the central
figure of the scene was James Black, the Presbyterian, with his
noble gray head, his pure, true face, his sturdy figure, as he stood
before us all on the first morning with the Bible in his hand, and
read God's decree of downfall for despoilers of the people, and
triumph for the truth. I shall never forget the night before the
close of the convention, when I, who am one of the "seven
sleepers," could not sleep ; but, while dear Mrs. Carse, who was
with me, peacefully reposed, I thought through to the conclusion
of my personal duty and delight to take sides for the Prohibition
party. It was a solemn and exalted hour in which my brain
C375)
376 Resolved on a New Party,
teemed with the sweet reasonableness of such a course, and my
conscience rejoiced in its triumph over considerations of expedi-
ency. Nothing has ever disturbed the tranquil assurance that I
was then helped to make a logical and wise decision inspired
from Heaven.
Two months later, at Lake Bluff, 111., thirty miles north of
Chicago, we held our usual Temperance Convocation. This
beautiful spot, on the sunset shore of Lake Michigan, has long
been famous as the chief rallying place of Temperance leaders on
this continent, and has borne a part unequaled in influence by
that of any other rendezvous of the Prohibition army.
Coming here with a heart full of new love for the South and
enkindled perceptions touching what might be done, I heard a
reformed man of Illinois, Captain Lothrop, of Champaign, make a
most touching plea for better protection from the legalized drink
curse. As he left the grounds he shook hands with me and said,
** Don't let this convocation end in talk — ^we want to hear that
you folks who stand at the front have done something ; taken a
forward step against the liquor power.'*
His worn face and intense earnestness made a deep impres-
sion on my conscience.
* * By the help of God we will do something, * * I said in my
heart and immediately sought Dr. Jutkins, Colonel Bain and
John B. Finch, who that year came for the first time to Lake
Bluff and captured everybody by his great gifts as an orator.
I told them what I had heard from the reformed man ; of
the thoughts and purposes that came to me at Saratoga ; of the
stirring in my spirit when my brave cousin, Willard Robinson,
also a reformed man, who signed the pledge at one of my meetings
in Spencerport, N. Y., had said this very year, ** Cousin Frank,
you people ought to go into politics ; you'll never succeed until
you do. I've got where I write my own ticket and put it in all
alone for men who, if they were but voted into power, would out-
law the saloon."
My temperance brothers listened and gave heed. What had
been tutoring them for this same hour, I do not know ; the living
can speak for themselves. I do not profess to give all the links in
the chain that led us, then and there, to found the *' Home Pro-
tection Party," but only those that are most clearly impressed on
Home Protection Movement in Politics. yil
my own mind. As a result of our deliberations at this summer
camp, an address was issued to the temperance people of the
country. R. W. Nelson, of The Liberator, Chicago — a bright
young man, whose paper was devoted to political prohibition,
was prominent in all this movement and his journal gave us at
once what we needed most, a medium of direct communication
issuing from a metropolitan city.
A committee on organization was subsequently appointed, a
form of constitution for Home Protection clubs prepared and the
co-operation of all Prohibition leaders sought.
On the 13th of March, 1882, a Call for a national convention
on the 23d of the following August, to be held in Chicago, was
issued by Gideon T. Stewart, chairman of the Prohibition Reform
party of the United States .
In the autumn following the Lake Bluff Convocation, our
National Woman's Christian Temperance Union met in Wash-
ington, D. C. When I prepared my annual address, this thought
came to me : " For you to favor the Prohibition party as an indi-
vidual is one thing, and to ask the Woman's Christian Temper-
ance Union in your oflBcial address to indorse that party, is quite
another ; are you going to do it ? Such action will cost you
much good-will and many votes." But a voice from loftier
regions said : ** You ought to declare for the party officially as well
as individually,'' I knelt to pray, and rose to write as follows,
without one misgiving :
Belovkd Sisters and Co- workers — WhcD the National Prohibition
party held its convention in Cleveland in 1880, women were invited to attend
as delegates ; but while I admired the progressive spirit thus indicated, it
seemed to me clearly my duty not to go. Always profoundly interested in
politics, as the mightiest force on earth except Christianity, and trained to
be a staunch Republican, both my education and sympathies were arrayed
on Garfield's side; moreover, I labored under the hallucination that the
South secretly waited its opportunity to reopen the issues of the war.
During all that stormy summer of the presidential campaign, I did not hear
Neal Dow*s candidacy spoken of with interest by the workers of the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and yet we all honored and gloried
in that brave father of the Maine Law. In contrast to the apathy with
which we regarded the "Third Party" movement, you wnll remember the
profound enthusiasm that greeted General Garfield's name at our annual
meeting in Boston, and that, later on, we hailed his election as an answered
prayer. Dear sisters, since then, by your commission, I have visited the
/
378 First Declaration in Favor of a Political Alliance.
Sonthem States, and met in every one of them representatives and leaders
of opinion. I have seen their acceptance in good faith of the issues of the
war — a good faith sufficiently attested by the great loyalty they invariably
manifested toward President Garfield, in spite of his army record, his radical
utterances in Congress, and the uncompromising tone of his clear-cut inau-
gural. I have seen Northern capital pouring into those once disaffected
states in untold millions, and I know there is no stronger bridge across the
" bloody chasm" than this one woven out of national coin, and supported
by the iron-jointed cables of self-interest ; I have seen their legislatures
making state appropriations for the education of the freedmen, and helping
to sustain those '* colored schools " whose New England teachers they once
despised ; I have learned how ex- masters cheered to the echo the utterances
of their ez-slaves in the great Prohibition convention of North Carolina,
and my heart has glowed with the hope of a real "home government"
for the South, and a ''color line *' broken, not by bayonets nor repudia-
tionists, but by ballots from white hands and black, for prohibitory law.
Seeing is believing, and on that sure basis I believe the South is ready for a
party along the lines of longitude, — a party that shall wipe Mason and
Dixon's line out of the heart as well as off the map, weld the Anglo-Saxons
of the New World into one royal family, and give us a really re-United
States. With what deep significance is this belief confirmed by the South's
tender sympathy in the last pathetic summer, and the unbroken group of
states that so lately knelt around our fallen hero's grave ! But this new
party cannot bear the name of Republican or Democrat Neither victor
nor vanquished would accept the old war-cry of a section ; besides, "the
party of moral ideas " has ceased to have a distinctive policy. Was its early
motto, "Free Territory"? We have realized it. Later did it declare the
Union must be preserved and slavery abolished ? Both have been done.
Did it demand negro enfranchisement and the passage of a bill of Civil
Rights ? Both are accomplished facts, so far as they can be until educa-
tion completes the desired work. Was the redemption of our financial
pledges essential to good faith ? That noble record of the Republican
party cannot be erased. If we contemplate questions still unsettled, as
Civil Service Reform, both parties claim to desire it ; or a National Fund
for Southern Education — each deems it necessary. But when we name the
greatest issue now pending on this, or any, continent — the prohibition of
the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors as a drink — behold, the
Republicans of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont vote for, and the
Republicans of North Carolina, Ohio and Illinois against it, while the
Democrats of Kansas oppose, and of South Carolina favor it ! Now, I
blame neither party for this inconsistency ; it is simply the hand-writing
on the wall, which tells that both are weighed in the balance and found
wanting. For they are formed of men who, while they thought alike and
fought alike on many great questions, on this greatest of all questions are
hopelessly divided, and a "house divided against itself cannot stand." This
is saying nothing whatever against the house ; it is recognizing the law of
gravitation, that is all.
lUinois IV. C T. U. the Pioneer. 379
Believing that the hour had come for us, the Woman's Christian Tem-
perance Union of Illinois, at its annual meeting, nearly two months ago,
indorsed the action of the Lake Bluff Convocation, held a few days earlier,
and composed of representative temperance men and women from twelve
different states.
In many a meeting of our temperance women I have seen the power of
the Highest manifest, but in none has the glow of Crusade fire been so
bright as when these daughter^ of heroic sires who, in the early da3rs of
the great party whose defection we deplore, endured reproach without the
camp, solemnly declared their loyalty to the Home Protection party, wherein
dwelleth righteousness. Let me read you the statement of doctrine to which
we women of Illinois subscribed :
'* We recommend that, looking to the composition of the next legisla-
ture, we request and aid the Home Protection party to put in nomination in
each district a Home Protection candidate, committed not more by his specific
, promise than by hiJs well-known character, to vote for the submission of a
' constitutional amendment, giving the full ballot to the women of Illinois as
a means of protection to their homes.
•* Finally, to these advance positions we have been slowly and surely
brought by the logic of events and the argument of defeat in our seven
years' march since the Crusade. We have patiently appealed to existing
parties, only to find our appeals disregarded. We now appeal to the man-
nood of our state to go forward in the name of ' God and Home and Native
Und.'"
Ten days later the Liquor League of Illinois held its convention, the
day being universally observed by our unions in that state in fervent prayer
that God would send confusion and defeat as the sequel of their machina-
tions. Let me read you their declaration :
** Resolved, That the district executive committee be instructed to make
a vigorous fight against all such candidates for the General Assembly, no
matter what political party they may belong to, who cannot be fully relied
upon to vote in favor of personal liberty and an equal protection of ours,
with all other legitimate business interests."
They want protection, too ! and they know the legislature alone can
give it But we know, as the result of our local Home Protection ordinance,
under which women have voted in nearly a dozen widely separated locali-
ties of Illinois, and have voted overwhelmingly against license, that our
enfranchisement means confusion and defeat to the liquor sellers. There-
fore, since for this we have prayed, we must take our places at the front and
say, with the greatest reformer of the sixteenth century :
'* Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen!"
Here, then, at the nation's capital, let us declare our allegiance ; here
let us turn our faces toward the beckoning future ; here, where the liquor
\ traffic pours in each year its revenue of gold, stained with the blood of our
dearest and best, let us set up our Home Protection standard in the name
of the Lord !
But the convention took no action ; the sentiment of the
society was not yet ripe for the declaration I so earnestly desired.
L
380 A Secession that Did Not Secede.
Of this convention, held in Foundry M. E. Church, the most
notable feature was the large attendance bom the Southern states,
a delegation of thirty or more from a majority of these states,
being present, headed by Mrs. Sallie F. Chapin.
At this convention the following resolution was adopted :
* * Resolved^ That wisdom dictates the Do-every thing policy ;
Constitutional Amendment, where the way is open for it ; * Home
Protection ' [i.e., the vote for women on the temperance question
only], where Home Protection is the strongest rallying cry ;
Equal Franchise, where the votes of women joined to those of
men can alone give stability to temperance legislation."
The Plan of Work Committee also recommended :
** A Committee on Franchise whose duty it shall be to mr-
nish advice, instruction and assistance to states that so desire, in
inaugurating measures for securing and using woman's ballot in
the interest of temperance.'*
The Southern delegation requested permission not to vote
upon these measures, but showed a degree of tolerance not to
have been expected of them at their first convention. Besides,
Susan B. Anthony was present as a visitor, was introduced on
I motion of a delegate and publicly kissed by an enthusiastic
Quaker lady from the West. All this had alarmed the conserv-
atives, and a few of them withdrew, stating that they could no
longer keep us company.
The New Tork Tribune^ which had never reported our work,
nor shown the least interest in our proceedings except as an antag-
onist, now came out with displayed headlines announcing that our
society had *' split in two.*' The facts were that out of a total of
two himdred and eighteen delegates, only twelve to fifteen dele-
gates left us. They made immediate overtures to the Southern
women to join them, stating that **then there would be a con-
servative movement divested of the radicalism that was destroy-
ing this one ** ; but the Southern ladies said, ** they had seceded
once, and found it did n't work." Not one of them joined the
malcontents, but the latter formed themselves into the ** National
Woman's Evangelical Temperance Union," which had, perhaps,
a dozen auxiliaries, but soon died for lack of members.
At this convention the constitution was so changed that
actual membership became the basis of representation instead o^
Mission and Com-
381
as heretofore, allowing so many delegates to each congressional
district, no matter how few its white ribbon women.
New women came to us continually with bright ideas about
the work. Personal initiative was at a premium and a new
department usually developed from the advent of a woman with
a mission, to whom, after a study of her character and reputation,
we gave a aim-mission. We thus conserved enthusiasm and
attached experts to our society.
CHAPTER IL
NATIONAL CONVENTIONa
In August of 1882, a **Home Protection Convention" met
in Chicago, to which rallied the ** old liners '* as well as the new
converts. There were present three hundred and forty-one dele-
gates from twenty-two states. A substantial reorganization of
the party followed, the name becoming ** Prohibition Home Pro-
tection Party." Gideon T. Stewart, of Ohio, was made chair-
man of the national committee, and Rev. Dr. Jutkins, secretary.
I there became officially related to a political party as a member
of its central committee and have been thus related almost ever
since. A new force was added to the Prohibitionists by means of
this convention, chiefly drawn from the Crusade movement and
consisting of men and women who had dearly loved the Repub-
lican party and who retired from it with unaffected sorrow.
In the autumn of this year I renewed the political attack,
closing my annual address before our National Woman's Chris-
tian Temperance Union Convention in Louisville, Ky., with
these words:
Protection must be administered through a mighty executive force and
we call that force a party. Happily for us, what was our earnest expectation
last year, is our realization to-day. The Prohibition Home Protection Party
stands forth as woman's answered prayer. In the great convention of last
August at Chicago, where three hundred and forty-one delegates represented
twenty-two states, where North and South clasped hands in a union never
to be broken, we felt that the brave men who there combined their energy
and faith were indeed come unto the kingdom for such a time as this.
"The right is always expedient," and the note of warning which this
non-partisan convention may sound in the ears of partisans will serve the
cause of constitutional amendment far better than the timid policy of silence.
It will help, not hinder, our onward march ; for we must each year fall back-
Our First Political Resolution. 383
ward if we do not advance. God's law of growth does not exempt the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Therefore I call to you once more,
sisters beloved, '* Let Us Go Forward ! ^^ As we now proceed with the
duties in whose sacred name we are met, let it be said of us as of a gifted
Southern statesman, whose biography I have read in the Courier-Journal ^
since coming here: ** He never questions the motives of men. He alwa3rs
argues the merits of the case.*' As the great general said to the boatman,
so the temperance cause is saying here to us, ** Remember, you carry Caesar
and his fortunes." God grant that we may be so wise and gentle that the
cause we love shall not be wounded in the house of its friends.
** We have no time to waste
In critic's sneer or cjmic's bark,
Quarrel or reprimaind ;
' Twill soon be dark ;
Then choose thine aim
And may God speed the mark."
But I saw that the convention was reluctant to make this
new departure. Profoundly convinced that it ought to do so, I
sought my friend, Mrs. L. D. Carhart, then president of Iowa
Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and asked her to write
a resolution bearing on the subject. She told me afterward that
she went alone into an undisturbed comer of the church, lifted
up her heart to God in prayer, and wrote the following, which
was adopted with practical unanimity:
** Resolved, That we rejoice in the day that gives recognition
to our prohibition principles by political partisans and we will
endeavor to influence the best men in all communities to commit
themselves to that party, by whatever name called, that shall
give to them the best embodiment of prohibition principles, and
will most surely protect our homes. ' *
Nothing is truer than that most people are mor€ afraid of
words than of ideas, and as this resolution avoided naming any
party, while really pointing one out by its description, the con-
vention passed it with very little diflBculty.
At this convention, Our Union was consolidated with The
Signal and removed to Chicago. The Flower Mission, Kitchen
Garden and other departments of work were added, and prejudices
against the public work of women were broken down as never
before among the Southern people. The number of delegates
present was one hundred and forty-six, from twenty-seven states.
Receipts from state auxiliaries, $4,046. The next year we called
*'OUR TEMPERANCE ROUND-UP,"
borrowing the expressive phrase of the Western plains. I was
384 Convention in a Parlor and Reception in an Omnibus,
determined that the completion of the first Gospel Temperance
Decade should see every state and territory in the nation visited
by me and organized if possible. Helped by the railroad men to
passes, replenished financially by an appropriation of $300 from
the Good Templars of California, and personal gifts from Dr.
McDonald of San Francisco, Captain Charles Goodall, of the
Oregon Steamship Company, and other wealthy friends (for I
had no salary until 1886), I went the rounds accompanied by
Anna Gordon. The Pacific Coast friends gave us royal greeting
ever>^where. We visited thirty-three towns in California, went
to Oregon by steamer, and worked in that state and along the
wonderful Puget Sound Coast, visiting British Columbia and go-
ing by the Snake River to Lewiston, the former capital of Idaho,
the only town ever quarantined against us, so far as I remember.
The *' municipal authorities," learning of our intended \dsit,
de<?lared that on account of the danger resulting from diphtheritic
contagion, no public meeting could be held. But we had traveled
thirty-six hours by river steamer for the express purpose of meet-
ing the good women at this head of navigation on the Snake River
and did not propose to be defeated. Mrs. Judge Buck, our hostess,
went out and arranged for a parlor meeting at a friend's house,
we adopted a constitution and appointed officers for Idaho,
finished up our convention and had an ice-cream reception in the
omnibus as we went back to the steamer, and instead of shaking
the dust off our feet we waved our handkerchiefs in loving adieu
to the band of devoted women who had thus stood by us, as the
river bjfnk receded and the swifl wheel bore us back from this
nook and comer to the broad highways of civilization and philan-
thropy. Some account of that long trip — covering from twenty-
five to thirty thousand miles — is given in the car- window jottings
of the '* Traveler's " department of this volume.
OUR FIRST DECADE.
At Detroit, in October of 1883, we celebrated our First
Decade with rejoicings, every state and territory having that
year been visited, and the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union set in motion not only as a local, but also as a state and
territorial society duly constituted, and with regularly elected
officers, not chosen by the National Woman's Christian Temper-
^H
^,X-*t'~.. i.''r~p£li*'*''
'.,-.. rn.
i.
Founding of World* s W. C. 71 U. 385
ance Union, but by conventions held for that purpose in each one
of the forty-eight subdivisions of the United States — ^Alaska not
included.
In this Detroit convention we had an able and spirited
debate on the resolution favoring equal suffrage, which was
almost unanimously adopted. The following on political prohi-
bition were also adopted practically without debate:
^^ Resolved, That we lend our influence to that party, by
whatever name called, which shall furnish the best embodi-
ment of prohibition principles and will most surely protect our
homes.
** Resolved y That effort be made to secure in each state and
territory, non-partisan prohibition conventions of men and women
before the party nominating conventions of 1884 are held. At
such conventions, efforts shall be made to unite electors in dec-
laration that they will vote with no party that has not prohi-
bition in its platform. These conventions shall adjourn to meet
after the last nominating convention has been held."
This was intended to educate and urge men to the duty of
forcing the prohibition issue upon the old parties if possible, and
if unsuccessful in that, to put upon the same men such compul-
sion of reason and conscience as would drive them into the party
that did make prohibition its issue — primary and supreme.
A memorial to the presidential nominating conventions was
adopted, asking for a plank in their platforms in favor of submit-
ting the question of national prohibition to the people, and it was
made my duty to present the same. Another memorial asking
the ballot for women was ordered to be presented to the National
Congress.
The ** World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union" was
projected and the general officers of the National Woman's
Christian Temperance Union were made a standing committee
of correspondence and organization for that movement. Five
fraternal delegates were present from Canada, headed by Mrs.
Letitia Youmans, president of Dominion Woman's Christian
Temperance Union. Total delegates present, two hundred and
forty-two, from twenty-eight states and territories. Total receipts
$5,045, balance in treasur>', $919. No salaries were paid up to
this date, save $1,000 a year to our corresponding secretary.
25
386 ** Towers and Bastions of Petition ^
The following extracts from my annual address at Detroit,
show the thought and purpose of that time :
'* We are wiser than we were ; our intellects ought to be all aflame with
cleat and penetrating thought. We are more loving-hearted than we were ;
our sympathies ought to move with more compassionate enthusiasm to the
rescue where the onslaught is most fierce and the crisis most inevitable.
We have a steadiness of purpose that comes of faith in God, and our wills
ought to fly with resistless sweep to the execution of both thought and 83rm-
pathy in glowing deeds.
Revolutions never move backward. Pillar of cloud, pillar of flre, where
dost thou lead? This question has burned in my heart as I read the news of
our defeat in Illinois and Michigan ; our victory in the states that having
eyes, have also seen— the Buckeye and the Hawkey e ! Sisters, we must send
the plea of *'Home, Sweet Home," into the national conventions of the
Republican and Democratic parties, when, six months hence, they meet to
select candidates for the Presidency of these United States. Thank God,
the nation has one senator who declares his purpose to insist on a prohibitory
constitutional amendment plank in the platform of his party . You know his
name : Henry W. Blair, of the Old Granite State. Let us give emphasis
to his demand by rolling in such petitions in its support as never before
bombarded a political assembly ! Let us redeem the pledge made to the
senator when he addressed our Washington convention, by intrenching
him behind such towers and bastions of petition as will give decisive courage
to the good, and bring confusion to the counsels of the base. All honor to
the gallant Republicans of Iowa ! Every true woman's heart blesses them
with their rallying cry of *' Home, Sweet Home." But there is not an organ
of their party outside that state which has not pierced them like a javelin,
nor a leader in its counsels who has not jeered them as the Don Quixote of
the party camp. In Ohio the Republican candidate for Governor planted
himself squarely on a license platform ; the leading organs exhausted con-
tempt and sarcasm upon our cause before the election, and bitterest curses
since, while it seems not unlikely that their carelessness or complicity, or
both, have combined with Democratic treachery to render doubtful or futile
the most sacred " counts " known to the annals of this country, of votes
' * for God and Home and Native Land. " But if the party that in 1872 at the
dictation of the Germans passed the ** Herman Raster Resolution,*' intended
as a stab at prohibitory legislation ; if the party that now champions license
and deludes the unwary with the prefix '*high," turns a deaf ear to our
prayer ; and if the party of Judge Hoadley remains true to its alliance with
the rum-power, as undoubtedly it will, and our petitions are once more
trampled under foot of men, I ask what then would be the duty of the hour?
O friends, God hath not left Himself without a witness. There is still a
party in the land to be helped onward to success by women. There is one
now despised for the single reason that it lacks majorities and commands no
high positions as the rewards of skillful leadership or wily caucusing, but
which declares as its cardinal doctrine, that a government is impotent in-
Diana and Endymion in Politics, 387
deed which cannot protect the lowliest home within its borders from the
aggressions of the vilest saloon that would destroy that home. It declares
all other issues trifling when compared with this, and insists that the " home
guards *' shall be armed with the ballot as a Home Protection weapon.
Here, then, let us invest our loyalty, our faith and works, our songs and
prayers. To-day that party is Endymion, the unknown youth, but the
friendship of Diana, the clear-eyed queen of heaven, shall make for it
friends, everywhere, until it becomes regnant, and the two reign side by
side. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union was never weak, but it is
a giant now. The Pacific Coast, the New Northwest, the South are all with
us to-day. But yesterday, Mary A. Livermore, of Massachusetts, sent to
Sallie F. Chapin, of South Carolina, our forces being in convention assem-
bled in both states, this telegraphic message : " If your heart is as our heart,
give us thy hand." Back came this message from our gifted Southern leader:
*' For God and Home and Native Land, we'll give you both our heart and
hand." The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, headed by a Wood-
bridge, an Aldrich, a Lathrap, West and Stevens, with the flush and prestige
of success, can not go forth in vain. Auxiliaries are in every important
town of all the nation, sometimes ambushed, it is true, little thought of
by the great public, but ready to execute with promptness all military orders
wisely planned and gently given. Our work grows most rapidly where the
need is most imminent. Witness Ohio, with five hundred unions this year,
out-leaping by half, its previous record, and forcing the issue of prohibition
with a persistence like that of gravitation, and a faith high as the hope of a
saint, and deep as the depth of a drunkard's despair. lK>ok at Iowa, where
Judith Ellen Foster started five years ago with a petition of which few took
note, but which, like the genii of Arabian story, " expanded its pinions in
nebulous bars " until the Woman's Christian Temperance Union has
"Moulded a mighty state's decree, and shaped the whisper of the throne *'
from which a sovereign people declares its sovereign will. Look at Georgia
and Florida, where the petitions of our women last winter resulted in the
advance step of local option ; and Arkansas, where their efforts secured the
banishment of saloons from seventy-five counties by the united signatures
of men and women. Look at Vermont, New Hampshire and Michigan,
where we have already won the battle for compulsory scientific instruction
in the principles of temperance, and tell us, has not God chosen the Crusade
Army to be His warriors, indeed ? Let no man say, '* But you have not the
ballot yet, and must not expect recognition from a party." Be it well un-
derstood, we do not come as empty-handed suppliants, but as victorious
allies. Our soldiers are not raw recruits, but veterans, wearing well- won \
laurels. We have no more to gain than God has given us to bestow. Let ',
not the lessons of history be disregarded. Of old the world had its Semir-
amis and Dido, its Zenobia and Boadicea, nay, better still, its Miriam and ,
Deborah. Later on, Russia had her Catherine, and England her Elizabeth. .
But in my thoughts I always liken the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union to the Joan of Arc, whom God raised up for France, and who, in spite
of their muscle and their military prowess, beat the English and crowned her
388 The Parting of the Roads.
king ! But evermore she heard and heeded heavenly voices, and God grant
that we may hear and heed them evermore ! To the martyrdom of public
rebuke and criticism they will surely lead us, a sacrifice not easy for gentle
hearts to bear ; doubtless, also, with some of us, to the actual martyrdom by
which a national history becomes heroic, but following where those voices
lead, we shall steadily pass onward from the depths of this world's pain to
the heights of eternity's peace, and, best of all, we shall help to lift Humanity,
so weak and so bewildered, nearer to the law, the life, the freedom of God
in Christ our Lord."
A strong controversy arose about the form of our Mem-
orial to the national political conventions. The word used was
** Memorial " and I supposed the description of my plan as given
in the foregoing address was unmistakable. I had said that we
would intrench Senator Blair in the Republican convention,
behind *' towers and bastions of petition '* sufficient to **give
decisive courage to the good and bring confusion to the counsels
of the base; ** that we would roll in such petitions as had never
before bombarded a political assembly, in support of a Prohibi-
tion plank, and would "redeem the pledge made to the Senator
when he addressed our Washington convention in 1881. *' A
reference to the record of that convention shows that we then and
there promised one million names for an amendment to the Con-
stitution of the United States, prohibiting the manufacture and
sale of all alcoholic liquors, fermented and distilled.
Because the passages in my address where I argued this
petition were more earnestly applauded than any others : because
in tabulating my recommendations I had called it a " Memorial,**
the terms "Petition" and "Memorial" being interchangeable;
because nothing to the contrary was said when the exact word-
ing of my recommendation was adopted by the convention, I
claimed that a general circulation of the Memorial should be had
in every hamlet and city of the nation, hoping thus to bring upon
the Republican Convention such a pressure that the Prohibition
plank would be adopted.
And now arose Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, of Iowa, until this time
my warm and earnest coadjutor in every measure that had come
before our conventions, in so much that we two were called "the
wheel-horses of the W. C. T. U. wagon, " but who (the Conven-
tion being adjourned and Executive Committee scattered) insisted
that this was to be a Memorial in the sense of a document signed
A Reformer's Grief. 389
only by the ofl&cers of the National Woman's Christian Temper-
ance Union. In this greatest surprise and disappointment of my
life as a temperance worker, I turned to the women of Illinois,
meeting with them in Bloomington at their mid-year Executive
Committee. They had invited Mrs. Foster to be present and,
weary as they were of the petition work in which they had largely
lost faith, influenced by the urgent entreaties of Mrs. Elizabeth
G. Hibben, then a devoted Republican, and impressed by Mrs.
Foster's eloquent presentation of her views, they begged me not
to insist upon a popular petition, but to be content with a simple
memorial in the sense of that word upon which Mrs. Foster in-
sisted, viz.. a request oflScially signed by the state and national
officers.
Twice in my life I have been moved to bitter tears, by
the contradictions of my public environment. Once, when I
left the Woman's College at Evanston, and now in the Illinois
Executive Committee. I had believed with my inmost heart in
that great popularly -signed Memorial, as an object-lesson that
should condense and crystallize the thought and purpose of
American manhood for the protection of the home by Prohibition
ballots. I solemnly believed that the heart of the convention was
with me in this understanding, and that faithful hands were
ready to carry out the work on a scale commensurate with the
greatness of the crisis and the sacredness of the interests involved.
But after strong crying and tears on the part of many of us who
bowed together in prayer, seeking for guidance, I promised that
I would commend to the general officers (all of whom understood
the convention to mean what I did), an official rather than a
popular Memorial. But they did not agree to this and the Exec-
utive Committee was convened at Indianapolis — for the first and
only time in our history, thus far — to decide the weighty ques-
tion. Only seven out of forty-eight members answered the
call, distance and expense being the chief explanation of their
failure to appear. These declared their belief that my under-
standing was the correct one, but we all desired the opinion of
the entire committee, and so sent out the question by letter, to
which, almost without dissent, the answer came that a petition
numerously signed was what they understood the convention to
mean in its use of the word, *' Memorial."
390 -^^ Honorable Embassy.
But the time was now far spent for securing a million names or
anything approaching that number and only an official Memorial
could be prepared. I have always thought that this decision
hindered the growth of our party, believing that a national can-
vass with the petition as an educating force, would have enlisted
an army of men in the old parties whose decision, when these
parties denied their prayer, would have been like that of Gover-
nor St. John, to "come out from among them and be separate.*'
While the Woman's Christian Temperance Union had this
unprofitable difficulty on hand, during the winter of 1884, the
Prohibition Home Protection party had another. Our honored
friends, the "old liners, '* who had stood sponsors for the party
at its birth, had three points of disagreement with the new-
comers : Our favorite name of '* Home Protection *' was distaste-
ful to them because an innovation, and the purpose we had to
hold the national convention in Chicago was distasteful also;
they wanted it held in the East; besides all this, they thought
we should not wait for the old parties, but hold our convention
earliest of all. Hon. Gideon T. Stewart, of Norwalk, Ohio,
chairman of the Central Committee, was strenuous on all these
points, and was, perhaps, the most influential man in the party
at that time. Although the ** new-comers ** were confident of a
majority and clearly had one in the Central Committee, we felt
the vital importance of unity in these decisions as to time and
place. A commission was now given me by my associates on the
committee, of which I have always felt proud; they sent me to
Norwalk to see Mr. Stewart. He received Miss Gordon and me
with the utmost cordiality, coming with his daughter to meet us
at the early morning train, and introducing us to his pleasant
home where his wife had prepared for us. A man of college
education and a lawyer of prominence, Mr. Stewart had felt the
"slings and arrows of outrageous fortune*' because of his polit-
ical Prohibition sentiments and deeds. His fellow townsmen
had even condescended so far as to change the name of a street
named in his honor, and to make him unmistakably aware of
their social as well as their political hostility. After a friendly
talk we agreed to disagree in this way; Mr. Stewart conceded
the time and I the place. Pittsburgh was the choice of the * * old
liners," and this Chicago granted, while, in deference to our cal-
The White Ribbon Memorial '^ Moves On.^^ 391
low wish to "give the Republicans one more chance," the con-
vention was to follow theirs. It now became my duty to wend
my solitary way, after the manner of G. P. R. Jameses strategic
horseman, to the four national conventions. Never having seen a
political convention of any sort, I was quite shy and sat in a box
at the Indianapolis Opera House with Mrs. Zerelda Wallace beside
me, while Rev. Dr. Gilbert Delamater presented to the Greenback
Convention our White Ribbon Memorial in a fine speech, received
with hand-clappings by the good men and women delegates there
gathered. But when it came back from the committee to which,
without debate, it was referred, it had sufiered a sea-change into
nothing rich, nor, alas, strange. The temperance plank was
suspiciously succinct, and stated that a constitutional amendment
relative to the liquor traffic ought to be submitted; but how near
a relative — whether a third cousin or a mother-in-law, was not
indicated. This was not specially encouraging, and like poor
Joe in Dickens' story, I heard a voice saying to me, ** Move
on ! *' In the great Exposition Building of Chicago the ** Party
of Moral Ideas *' had gathered up its leaders. Although I had
been working with the Prohibition party, my final farewell was
not yet said to tfie Republican. I had yet fond and foolish hopes
that it might take advanced ground, though the difficulties seemed
insuperable and I believed that it and every other party should
be obliged to go on record for or against the grandest living issue :
Home or Saloon Protection, which shall it be ?
Having been often urged to do so I will here write out some
account of my visit to the Committee on Resolutions of the Re-
publican National Convention in 1884. Commissioned by the
National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, I took the
memorial of our society to the Exposition Building and placed
it in the hands of Hon. Mr. Donan, chairman of the Iowa dele-
gation, who presented it in due form and it was referred without
debate to the Committee on Resolutions. Senator Blair of New
Hampshire then set at work to secure the opportunity for a brief
hearing before that committee. Similar demands from other
societies, reformers, etc., were many and urgent ; I think it was
not until the day before the resolutions were presented that we
obtained an audience.
My impression is that this took place during the noon recess.
392 Before the Republican National Committee.
Word was sent me at Woman's Christian Temperance Union
Headquarters that the Senator had been successful, and I asked
Mrs. Mary B. Willard, editor of our organ, The UnionSi^jial,
and Miss Helen L. Hood, corresponding secretary" of Illinois
Woman's Christian Temperance Union, to go with me. We
were escorted to the committee room at the appointed time and
found but few of the members present — they being in an adjoin-
ing room, the door of which was, I think, open. I know that
tobacco smoke was most uncomfortably noticeable throughout
our stay, though I do not think that any member smoked in our
presence, but the room was thoroughly distasteful, almost sicken-
ing to us, by reason of the sight of the many much-used spittoons
and the sight and smell of the blue cloud of smoke.
We three women sat in one comer on a sofa, feeling very
much like mariners stranded on a lee shore. There was no greet-
ing for us or notice taken of our presence by any one so far as I
remember. We were not asked what votes we could deliver or
questioned in any way whatever. Senator Blair gathered in as
many as he could of the committee and asked for a hearing.
He then began to speak of our mission and after a few minutes
was called to order and a motion made that the 'length of time to
be granted be now fixed. The Senator asked that we might have
half an hour but was greeted by a vigorous * * no " from several
throats. Some one, I never knew who, then moved that fifteen
minutes be the limit, and this carried, though there were several
sharp negatives. I then rose, took out my watch, made my
speech in thirteen minutes and we at once withdrew. As we did
so, several, perhaps half a dozen, members of the committee came
forward and shook hands with us, some expressing their sympa-
thy and hope that favorable action might be taken.
My speech read thus :
Gentlemen — The temperance women of America have never before
asked for one moment of your time. Thousands of them have worked and
prayed for your success in the heroic days gone by, but up to this hour they
have laid no tax on the attention of the people's representatives in presi-
dential convention assembled. Though the position is a new one, I can not
count myself otlier than at home in your presence, gentlemen, as you repre-
sent that great party which, on the prairies of Wisconsin, my honored father
helped to build, and whose early motto roused my girlish enthusiasm, " Free
soil, free speech, free labor, and free men." But I rejoice to-day in the
sisterhood of the women's party — the Woman's Christian Temperance
''Some Political Party Will Respond^ 393
Union — where I may march side by side with that brilliant Southern leader,
Sallie F. Chapin, of South Carolina, who, in our new anti-slavery war, the
fighX.for a free brain, is my beloved coadjutor.
' I am here in no individual character, but as a delegated representative
of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of forty-eight states and terri-
tories, including the District of Colimibia, to present to you the memorial
of the American home against the American saloon. You will notice that
we make no note of foreign drinking customs, but speak and work directly
against an institution which derives its authority directly from our own gov-
ernment. Our society is the lineal descendant of that whirlwind of the
lK>rd known as the *' Woman's Temperance Crusade," of 1874, and stands
not only for total abstinence and prohibition, but for no sectarianism in
religion, no sectionalism in politics, no sex in citizenship. We recognize
state rights as to the adoption of these principles, but move forward in one
grand, solid phalanx — ^a society as well known in Florida as it is in Oregon,
by the results of the last ten years' work ; a society that has an open hand
for Catholic and Protestant, for the foreign as well as the native bornTi
We know that in America the great clanging mill of government^ kept
in motion at enormous cost, turns out just one product, and that is protec-
tion for life and limb and property. But it seems to us women that the citadel
of purity, the palladimn of liberty, the home, our brothers have forgotten
adequately to protect. Therefore I am here to-day to speak on behalf of
millions of women, good and true, but grieved and sorrowful ; to ask that
the guarantees and safeguards of law shall be stripped from the saloons of
my country ; that their tarnished gold shall no more pollute our treasury,
and that the land we love may at once and forever go out of partnership
with the liquor traffic.
rGentlemen, some political party will respond to this plea from the
he^rt^ of women asking for protection from a stimulant which nerves with
dangerous strength the manly arm that God meant to be woman's shelter
and protection, so that man's cruelty becomes greatest toward those he loves
the best. Some party will declare that when our best beloved go forth into
life's battle they shall not have to take chances so unequal in the fight for a
clear brain, nor run the gauntlet of saloons legalized and set along our
streets. Some party will lay to heart this object-lesson of the " Nation's
Annual Drink Bill," shown in the chart I have had placed before your eyes
to-day, with its nine hundred millions for intoxicating liquors, to five mill-
ions and a half for the spread of Christ's gospelj
The Greenback convention has already received with favor this memo-
rial. Senator Donan, our gallant Iowa champion, has secured its reading
in your own great convention and its reference to your committee. To-
morrow you will act upon it. On July 8 it will be presented to the Demo-
cratic convention in this city, and on July 23 to that of the Prohibition Home
Protection party, in Pittsburgh, Pa.
A great chief of your party, who was with us as the hero of your last
convention, said that not in the turmoil of politics, but at the sacred fireside
hearth, does God prepare the verdict of a great, free people. Let me say.
394 ^^ New Occasions Teach New Duties, ^^
gentlemen, that the party that declares for national prohibition in 1884 will
be the one for which the temperance women of this land will pray and
work, circulate literature, convene assemblies, and do all in our power to
secure its success. Nor is the influence of these women to be forgotten or
lightly esteemed, as the past has sufficiently proved. While I have tried to
speak, my spirit has been sustained and soothed by the presence of that
'devoted army which I am here to represent. As womanly, as considerate,
as gentle as the women of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, from
Alabama to Wyoming, would wish me to be in this presence, I have tried
to be — ^that I might justly represent them — ^good-natured as sunshine, stead-
fast as gravitation, persistent as a Christian's faith. I have no harsh word
' to speak of any. The liquor traffic is the awful heritage of a less wise, less
kind, and less enlightened past. For its existence in this gentler age we
.are all more or less responsible.
Let us combine to put it away, "with malice toward none, with charity
for all.'* Daughters of heroes and sisters of patriots are those for whose
dear sake I have dared to speak to-day. De Tocqueville said: "Life is
neither a pleasure nor a pain ; it is a serious business, to be entered on with
courage, and in a spirit of self-sacrifice." Gentlemen, in that spirit I have
tried to speak, —not because I wished to be heard, but to represent, as best
I could, the homes of America in their sacred warfare against the American
saloon. May God lead and guide us all into lives and deeds of tenderest
charity and divinest toil for the sorrowful and weak.
Some of us have sung the Miriam song of this great party in other days,
and whether or not we shall, erelong, chant its requiem, depends upon
whether or not the party shall be as true to living issues of the present as it
was true to living issues in the past. For
" New occasions teach new duties.
Time makes ancient good uncouth ;
They must upward still, and onward.
Who would keep abreast of truth.'*
We ask you to declare in favor of submitting to the people a national
constitutional amendment for the prohibition of the liquor traffic.
Gentlemen, on behalf of the National Woman's Christian Temperance
Union, I thank you for this courteous hearing.
I ought to say that while I spoke, those present listened re-
spectfully, so far as I observed. Indeed, I took no special excep-
tions to their conduct, which was, no doubt, from their point of
view, altogether courteous. They were nearly through with
their report, the convention was impatiently waiting, they had
not the remotest intention of doing anything for the temperance
people, and, weary and annoyed as they were, I think they did
all in the way of politeness that we could expect from them. A
diflferent standard would most assuredly be applied by us to the
Prohibition party, as to its manner of receiving ladies, for ladies
The Famous Political ^^ Memorial ^ 395
themselves are members of and leaders in that party. This being
so, there is, of course, no smoking in the committee rooms of
Prohibitionists. The gentlemen of the Republican committee
belonged to the old regime — they were, as Mrs. Hannah Whitall
Smith so often and so charitably says of people, *'in their condi-
tions, " and, being in them, they did the best they could.
Whether or not they received the Brewers' Committee, and what
length of time was accorded its members, if received, I do not
authentically know. It is said that those men had an hour — I
cannot say, and do not wish to do any one injustice, least of all
my political opponents. Going upon the platform of the conven-
tion, thanks to a ticket from Senator Blair, I listened earnestly
while Chairman McKinley, in his grand voice, read the resolu-
tions. As he went on I said to myself, ** Of course, ours will be
near the close, if there at all, " but when he had finished and
there was not a word for temperance, I said to myself:
** * Tis sweet to be remembered,
' Tis sad to be forgot'*
When the report was accepted without debate and without a
single negative (although the Iowa delegates, the Maine and
Kansas delegates, were out in full force), I said to myself,
** Streams cannot rise higher than their fountains; men in the
states cannot rise superior to their party nationally, and this
Republican party, once so dear to me, I must now leave because
here is the proof that even good men dare not stand by prohibi-
tion when they meet upon a national platform. '*
So then and there I bade the * ' Grand Old Party ' ' an ever-
lasting farewell and took up my line of march toward the Grand
Army of Reform. By this I mean, that while I had already acted
with the Prohibition party for a brief period, I had never until
now utterly given up the hope that the Republican party might
so retrieve itself that we could stand together for God and Home
and Native Land.
The document that I presented to the four conventions read
as follows :
THK MEMORIAI, OF THE AMERICAN HOME FOR PROTECTION FROM THE
AMERICAN SALOON.
To the National Convention of the Party :
We, members of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the
United States (and of its forty-eight state and territorial Woman's Christian
396 The Pittsburgh Prohibition Convention.
Temperance Unions, with that .of the District of Columbia), herein repre-
sented by the signatures of our oflScers, believe that, while the poison habits
of the nation can be largely restrained by an appeal to the intellect through
argument, to the heart through sympathy, and to the conscience through
the motives of religion, the traffic in those poisons will be best controlled by
prohibitory law.
We believe the teachings of science, experience and the Golden Rule,
combine to testify against the traffic in alcoholic liquors as a drink, and that
the homes of America, which are the citadels of patriotism, purity and hap-
piness, have no enemy so relentless as the American saloon.
Therefore, as citizens of the United States, irrespective of sect or section,
but having deeply at heart the protection of our homes, we do hereby
respectfully and earnestly petition you to advocate and to adopt such meas-
ures as are requisite to the end that prohibition of the importation, exporta-
tion, manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages may become an integral
part of the national Constitution, and that your party candidate shall be by
character and public pledge committed to a national constitutional prohib-
itory amendment.
After two such failures I had little heart to approach the
Democrats, but in loyalty to my appointment I had this to do.
The great Exposition Building was packed once more with dele-
gates whose drink bill at the Palmer House was no larger than
that of the Republicans had been — in both cases it was immense.
Major Burke, of the New Orleans Times- Democrat, presented the
Memorial which was referred without debate to the Committee on
Platform ; they reported against ** sumptuary laws that vex the
citizen.** Meanwhile one more national party remained un-
visited, and to that I went with the rejected Memorial, purposing
in my heart henceforth to cast in my lot just there.
THE PITTSBURGH CONVENTION.
It was a gathering never to be forgotten! In old ** La-
fayette Hall," cradle of the Republican party, where in 1852
John P. Hale and George W. Julian were nominated for president
and vice-president, were gathered on the morning of July 23,
1 884, over six hundred delegates representing twenty -eight states.
Women were there in goodly numbers, almost wholly from the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which, in common with
other temperance societies, had been invited to send delegates.
It was a crowd not only of ** real folks " but of *' our folks ** —
the non-drinking, non -tobacco-using home-people, almost with-
out exception members of the church. Careful hands had be-
TTte Memorial Accepted at Last, 397
decked the old hall with mottoes and flags, pictures and banners,
all symbolic of ** Down with the saloon and up with the home."
Mary A. Woodbridge, of Ohio, was chosen one of the secretaries,
and women were on every committee. After an admirable address
by Chairman Stewart I asked for three minutes in which to
present the Memorial of the National Woman's Christian Tem-
perance Union, which was adopted with cheers, and a general
uprising.
The following droll resolution, ofiered by John Lloyd Thomas,
of Maryland, shows the paternal interest manifested in us by
leaders of the party which in its heroic days had waked the echoes
of this same hall :
* * Resolved^ That the convention of the Prohibition party rec-
ognizes with due humility the anxious care for the welfare of our
party displayed by the representatives of the national government,
who in the persons of W. W. Dudley, Commissioner of Pensions,
and Hon. Hiram Price, Commissioner of Indian Afiairs, have
violated civil service rules and used public time to come to Pitts-
burgh and to urge advice upon members of the convention, but,
^'Resolved, that we timidly advance the claim that the intel-
ligence of this assembly is ample to provide for its own security.**
Here I met for the first time Prof. Samuel Dickie, now
chairman of the Prohibition National Committee. Mrs. Mary T.
Lathrap came to me, saying : * * We have a man in our state who
cannot be excelled as a presiding officer, Professor Dickie, the
astronomer of Albion college." I knew he was what '* the com-
mon people " call ** a square man ," square head and shoulders,
strong Scotch face, and good Scotch blood. We women worked
for him — he was elected chairman. I do not say we did it, for
I do not know.
A pleasant surprise came to me when the Kansas delegation
asked me to represent its members in seconding the nomination
of Governor St. John for the Presidency. The stenographer thus
reports my words :
Mr. Chatrman, Brothers and Sisters in America's Great Battle for a clear
brain:
The thing that has been shall l)e. Histor>' repeats itself. Thirty-three
years ago, only eight years before the nomination of Abraham Lincoln under
the increased impetus of the same movement, John P. Hale and Geo. W.
Julian were chosen in this hall.
During their campaign a little girl, a farmer's daughter on the prairies
39^ A Woman's Nominating Speech.
of Wisconsin, sat up until unprecedentedly late at night to ** hear the news
from the Free-soil meeting " which her mother and brother had gone miles to
attend because Hale and Julian were to speak, and she will never forget the
eagerness with which she listened to that recital. But how little did she
dream that in the interval between those days and these the world would
grow so tolerant ; old prejudices would roll away like clouds below the
horizon, and women come forth into public work like singing birds after a
thunder-storm ! Least of all could she have imagined that a royal, free state
like Kansas, by unanimous invitation of its delegation in the second great
" Free-soil *' gathering of Lafayette Hall, would accord to her the honor of
seconding the nomination of Kansas' greatest leader. But so it was to be !
The heroes of America have been from the first, and will be to the last,
men of the people. The name of John P. St. John, of Kansas, has already
passed into history. His is the rare and radiant fame that comes of being
enshrined, while yet alive, in that most majestic of Pantheons, the people's
heart. Our action here to-day will neither lift nor lower his position, for he
is " Fortune's now and Fame's ; one of the few, the immortal names that
were not bom to die." His history, half heroic, -half pathetic, has always
deeply touched my heart, and I rejoice to rehearse it briefly here to-day.
Brother and sister delegates, picture to yourselves a lonesome little fel-
low in the wilderness of Indiana fifty years ago, trying, single-handed, to
make his way in the world.
'* Blessings on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan."
Picture an adventurous youth as, with but a dollar in his pocket, he
crossed the *' Big Muddy," bound for Pike's Peak, and, driving an ox-team
over the Rockies, '* footed it " to California. See him next delving in the
mines by day and studying law by the camp-fire at evening. For
" The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attamed by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept.
Were toiling upward in the night"
See him at the outbreak of the Civil war, waiting for no draft, hiring
no substitute, but baring his own breast to foemen who, thank God, to-day
are friends ! See him next in the senate of Kansas, then twice elected gov-
ernor, keeping always near the people and trusting them in spite of a thou-
sand warnings from political leaders. I saw him first at Bismarck Grove,
Kansas, in presence of a great concourse, when the campaign for constitu-
tional amendment was at its height As he came forward, every man's hat
and every woman's handkerchief waved high in air, and while the loud
hurrahs resounded, I saw tears on many a gentle face of mother, sister,
wife, because they knew he was defender of their endangered homes.
They told me in Topeka, where he had lived for years, that he was
always in his place at church and prayer- meeting, no matter how official
duties pressed upon him. They told me how he went to Leavenworth when
letters threatening his life warned him to stay away, and being met em
Governor SL John the New '^ Pathfinder y 399
route by a temperance delegation whose anxiety was so great they had come
to protect him, he showed them the letters of which, until that moment, no
one had been aware, saying : *' Our cause must have its martyrs as well
as heroes, and I might as well be ready."
It seems to me the world must have in every age the object-lesson of
new lives dedicated to all that most exalts humanity, and here we have
this one which God has set up high where all may read.
I never heard John P. St. John traduced, save by the m3mnidons of the
saloon. The party that now reviles would have adored him had he been
even a little less loyal to our cause. The Senate's open door would have been
just before him if indeed he had not entered it already. But now, forsooth,
he is *' an office seeker " when he holds on high the standard for us who can
give him nothing but our gratitude ; when he lays his lofty fame a sacri-
fice upon the altar of our holy cause !
I yield to none in admiration of these glorious veterans, John Russell,
James Black, and Gideon T. Stewart. History will place their names be-
side those of Phillips and Garrison upon her roll of honor ; they were the
adventurous pioneers who struck out into a forest of prejudice and *' blazed
the trees." But to make our way across the Sierras of difficulty that still
separate us from the Eldorado of success, we want a *' Pathfinder," and we
believe St. John to be the " Fremont " of our battles.
For Dr. R. H. McDonald I have the highest esteem, his lofty charac-
ter and generous help command my admiration and my gratitude; but as
between two noble men we must choose the one who, as a sun-glass, will
focus the most votes, and I believe Governor St John to be that man.
Dear women of the white ribbon, here assembled, you know that from
all this land went up the voice of supplication when the call for prayer was
made just before the first of these party conventions, in May last ! We
prayed that America might have a plank in some platform declaring for
national prohibition for the sake of home protection, and a candidate
whose character and personal habits mothers might safely commend to their
sons. In Governor St. John we have an answer to that prayer. When I
think of what he is to the temperance people of the nation, I know that in
ten thousand homes these words of England's laureate will strike respon-
sive chords :
'• As some divinely gifted man,
Whose life in low estate began
And on a simple village green;
*' Wlio breaks his birth's invidious bar.
And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance.
And grapples with his evil star ;
" Who makes by force his merit known,
And lives to clutch the golden keys,
To mould a mighty state's decrees
And shape the whisper of the throne ;
400 Woman's Ballot Indorsed.
" And moving on from high to higher,
Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope
The pillar of a people's hope,
The center of a world's desire."
On behalf of the Kansas delegation, I second the nomination of John P.
St John, of Kansas.
When it was announced that all the votes of the convention
had been cast for Governor St. John, the tumult was tremendous,
and as we all stood up and sang,
" Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of the coming of the LK>rd,"
there were tears on many a cheek.
I was a member of the Committee on Resolutions, and espe-
cially interested in the one on equal suflFrage. It read as follows,
and was mainly written by James Black, of Pennsylvania, the
Prohibition party's first candidate for president ; my own part I
will print in italics :
Resolved ^ That the activity and cooperation of the women of America
for the promotion of temperance has, in all the history of the past, been a
strength and encouragement which we gratefully acknowledge and record.
In the later and present phase of the movement for the prohibition of the
traffic, the purity of purpose and method, the earnestness, zeal, intelligence
and devotion of the mothers and daughters of the Woman's Christian Tem-
perance Union have been eminently blessed of God. Kansas and Iowa
have been given them as ''sheaves" of rejoicing, and the education and
the arousing of the public mind, and the now prevailing demand for the
Constitutional Amendment are largely the fruit of their prayers and labors.
Sharing in the efforts that shall bring the question of the abolition of this
traffic to the polls, they shall join in the grand *' Praise God from whom all
blessings flow," when by law victory shall be achieved.
Resolvedy That believing in the civil and political equality of the sexes,
and that the ballot in the hands of woman is her right for protection, and
would prove a powerful ally for the abolition of the liquor traffic^ the execu-
tion of laWy the promotion of reform in civil affairs^ and the removal of
corruption in public life, we enunciate the principle^ and relegate the prac-
tical outworking of this reform to the discretion of the Prohibition party in
the several states ^ according to the condition of public sentiment in those
states.
I had been so much in the South that its delegates confided
to me their earnest hope that we would * * draw it mild, ' * but I
felt that they would hardly disown their traditional doctrine of
state rights as here expressed. They did not, nor do I believe
** Home Protections^ as a Name. 401
that, as a class, they will antagonize those of us who are com-
mitted to the equdl suffrage plank in the Prohibition platform.
There was some debate, lively and courteous, but the reso-
lution was adopted with but little dissent. Not so the party
name. Rev. Dr. Miner, of Boston, a chief among the old liners,
moved that the old name ** Prohibition** be restored. **Our
side*' amended with the proposition to retain the name given
two years before at Chicago, viz., ** Prohibition Home Protec-
tion Party,** — ten syllables! and on this rock we foundered.
It was not in human nature to put up with a decahedron name,
and one parted in the middle at that ! If we had moved to sub-
stitute **Home Protection,** we should have done much better.
I remember uttering a few sentences in favor of retaining the
long name, but the old liners were too strong for us, and almost
without debate, the change was agreed to. This action scored
another of those huge disappointments through which one learns
** to endure hardness as a good soldier.** Away back in 1876, I
think it was, when our great and good Mrs. Yeomans, of Can-
ada, spoke at Old Orchard Beach, my ear first caught the win-
some and significant phrase ** Home Protection.*' My impression
is that she did not coin, but adapted it from the tariff" vocab-
ulary of the Dominion. Listening to her there in the great
grove of pines, with blue sky overhead and flashing sea waves
near, it flashed on me, *' Why not call this gospel temperance
work the * Home Protection Movement,* for that*s just what it
is, and these words furnish the text for our best argument and go
convincingly along with our motto : * For God and Home and
Native Land? * ** The more I thought about all this, the more it
grew on me, and in 1877, when invited by Henry C. Bowen, of
the New York Independent, to speak at his famous ** Fourth of
July Celebration,** I chose ** Home Protection ** for my theme and
brought out from the Independent of^c^ my ** Home Protection
Manual," which I distributed among our white ribbon women
throughout the nation. We called our petitions, ** Home Protec-
tion , " our great Illinois campaign in 1879 went by that name,
and when I was converted, heart and soul, to the Prohibition
party, I believed, as I do still, that its strength would be immeas-
urably increased by adopting Home Protection as its name. But
the old name was endeared to those who had suffered for it, and
26
402 My First Campaign Speech,
they were not disposed to give it up. In this I then, and always,
believed them to be unwise.
Directly after the convention I went, by the earnest request of
Mr. Daniels, vice-presidential nominee of the Prohibition party,
to speak at a ratification meeting in Cumberland, Md. I dreaded
the encounter, for, except at our temperance conventions, I had but
once in my life, so far as I can recall, spoken on politics.* To
meet the ** world's people " in the opening of a fierce campaign
was painful to me, and I did it only as a token of loyalty to our
new candidate. This town among the hills is fore-ordained to be
provincial, by reason of its physical geography. Its pretty little
opera house was welt filled that night ; but the air felt cold as
winter to my spirit, though July's heat was really there. Curi-
ously enough did its well-dressed women look on me, standing
forlorn before the footlights, on a bare stage, and sighing for the
heart-warmth of a Woman's Christian Temperance Union meet-
ing, where women would have crowded around me, flowers sent
forth their perfume, and hymns and prayers made all of us at
home. I spoke, no doubt, forlornly ; anyhow, I felt forlorn. The
gainsaying political papers said next day, that I was poor enough,
and our candidate even poorer than I ! Major Hilton, of Wash-
ington, D. C, was with us, and I think if there were honors that
evening, he bore them away.
Meanwhile, we had heard that our noble martyr of the
Prohibition army had accepted the sacrifice, not without in-
tense reluctance and most bitter heartache, and our campaign
began. I say * * ours, ' ' because the white ribbon women were so
thoroughly enlisted in it. By going as delegates to its convention,
many of our leaders ** lent their influence," and our five ** general
ofl&cers," Mesdames Buell, Woodbridge, Stevens, and Miss Pugh,
with myself, issued a card expressing our hearty sympathy, and
our belief that, since the Prohibition party, of all the four then in
the field, had indorsed our memorial, we were bound to take its
part. At the annual meetings of that battle autumn, nearly all
our state unions did this in one form or another, Iowa and Penn-
sylvania being then, as now, on the opposing side.
♦The single exception occurred in Canandaigua, N. Y., September, 1875, when, having
8t>oken by invitation before the Conference TempKsrance Society of the M. E. Church, I
also briefly addressed the first Prohibition party audience I had ever seen, by invitation
of Rev. Mr. Bissell ; but I did not speak as an adherent.
CHAPTER III.
THE ST. LOUIS CONVENTION.
When our National Woman's Christian Temperance Union
Convention met in St. Louis, just before the swift arbitrament of
the memorable election day that changed the national adminis-
tration, the air was full of thunderbolts. For the first time,
there was much ado to get a church. The Central Methodist
agreed, and then disagreed to our assembling there. **Will
you promise not to mention politics ? " was the question. ** Nay ;
but we will promise that the politics believed in by us shall
most assuredly be mentioned," was the reply. **We can give
up the high-toned churches, but not our high-toned ideas ; we
will meet in a tent in a public square, if need be, but we will
never smother a single sentence that we wish to speak.**
Our St. Louis women were brave and staunch, but not a
little tried and tossed in the seething counter-currents of the
time. Where to put either delegates or convention they hardly
knew. But all their difficulties dispersed in due season. Good
church-people of liberal spirit opened their houses ; Rev. John A.
Wilson, a generous-hearted pastor of the United Presbyterian
denomination, secured for us the use of his church, saying, **I
traveled with your national president some years ago in Egypt
and the Holy Land, and I don't believe she will permit anything
very bad'* — albeit he was an ardent Blaine man and I fear he
repented his bargain before we were through.
In my annual address I used as a theme Mrs. Lathrap's new
and suggestive phrase, and spoke on
** GOSPEL POLITICS."
Dear Sisters — By the laws of spiritual dynamics this has been one of
our best, perhaps because one of our most progressive, years. Stationary
pools and people tend toward stagnation. The most senseless of proverbs
is that about the rolling stone that gathers no moss. What does it want of
mois when it can get momentum ?
UP3)
404 Senator B lairds Wise Words.
In the arena of National Prohibition we shall fight our hardest hattles
and win oar most substantial victories. Nothing will alarm and anger our
opponents like our effort in this field, because no effort less direct aims a
blow so decisive at the very vitals of their trade.
Senator Blair, of New Hampshire, has made a more careful study of
national prohibition, and with better opportunity to learn, than any other
student of this subject in the nation, and he thus sums up his opinion :
** For more than half a century, the working life of more than two genera-
tions, gigantic efforts have been put forth by noble men and women, by phi-
lanthropists, by statesmen, and by states, to restrain and destroy the alcoholic
evil through the operations of moral suasion and by state law. Public
sentiment has been aroused and public opinion created, and at times, in my
belief, it might have been crystallized into national law had the labor been
properly directed. But it has failed, as it will always fail, so long as we save
at the spigot and waste at the bung, if I may borrow an expressive simile
from the business of the enemy. The temperance question is in its nature
a national question, just as much so as the tariff is and more than slavery
was. It is waste of time to deal with it only by towns and counties and states.
All possible local efforts should be put forth against the liquor-death eveiy-
where. The yellow fever should be fought in the by-ways and hospitals, by
the physician and the nurses as well as by the quarantine of our ports and
the suspension of infected traffic by national law, but the enemy will forever
come in like a flood, unless the nation, which is assailed as a nation, defends
itself as a nation. What the tetnperance reform most needs is unification oj
effort, nationalization. Samson was not more completely hampered by withes
than is this giant reform by the geographical lines of states ; and if its sup-
porters would but use their strength, they would at once find their natural
arena circumscribed only by the national domain. How shall this be done?
By concentration upon the enactment of a national constitutional law. The
nation can act in no other way than by law ; and now there is no national
law for the removal of the alcoholic evil. On the contrary, we have seen
how, by guaranteeing the importation and transportation and permitting the
manufacture, the national Constitution is the very citadel of the rum-power."
Existing parties can not in the nature of the case, take up this ques-
tion. Not to this end were they born ; not for this cause did they come into
the world. Upon this issue the voters who compose them are irrevocably
divided. Twenty years ago Governor St. John and Senator John Sherman
voted one way. Now the latter champions the brewer's cause, and the
former is Prohibition's standard-bearer. Party inclosures must be broken
down, that men who think and vote alike may clasp hands in a political
fraternity where the issue of to-day outranks that of yesterday or of to-mor-
row. A friendly editor uttered his word of warning to us in terms like
these : "There is any amount of political lightning in the air, and if you
are not careful a bolt will strike the Woman's Christian Temperance Union."
Whereupon our brave Mary T. Lathrap replied : ** Women who have been
fighting Jersey lightning for ten years are n't afraid of the political kind."
Mastership over Ourselves, 405
Dear sisters we must stand by each other in this straggle. Side by
shoulder to shoulder, we must move forward, with no break in the ranks,
no aspersions, no careless, harsh or cruel judgments, but the tenderest and
most persistent endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit, if not of method,
and, above all, the bond of peace. Let the criticising world see plainly that
concord has the right of way in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.
In all the turmoil of these toilsome days, in which motives of which we
never dreamed are foisted on us, words we never spoke attributed, and deeds
we would spurn ascribed, may the law of kindness still dwell upon our lips
and the spirit of a loving forbearance keep our hearts tender. Let me give
you the sweet words my mother used to speak as the talismanic charm to
still my turbulent spirit in girlhood days : " Hath any rvronged thee f Be
bravely revenged. Slight it, and the work's be^un. Forgive it, and Uis
finished. ^^ Permit me also to give you golden words, spoken by one of the
clearest philosophic minds of our own or any age. They may cheer you in
this battle-hour as they have strengtliened me : * * Whoever hesitates to utter
that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance
of the time, * * * * must remember that while he is a descendant of
the past, he is a parent of the future ; and that his thoughts are as children bom
to him which he may not carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may
properly consider himself as one of myriad agencies through which works
the Great First Cause ; and when that cause produces in him a certain belief
he is tliereby authorized to profess and act out that belief. * * * * Not
as adventitious, therefore, will tlie wise man regard the faith which is in him.
The highest truth he sees he will fearlessly utter ; knowing that, let what
may come of it, he is thus playing his right part in the world."
We are slowly but surely attaining to tlie grandest mastership in all the
world, mastership over our own spirits. The noblest figure of contemporary
history is Gladstone, England's governmental chief, because with the people
ready to mob him one day and to worship him the next, he holds right on
his way quietly and patiently, but dauntlessly true to his convictions. God
has set the Woman's Christian Temperance Union for a grander confession
and defense of the faith than we have dreamed as yet ; one which would
blanch our cheeks, perhaps, and make our hearts heavy with fear, could we
to-day know all that it involves. But if we are true and tender-hearted,
holding fast the hand of Christ, we shall be equal to the emergencies as they
arise, no matter how perilous or great. Let me give you De Tocqueville's
words, for a motto in 1884 : ^* Life is neither a pleasure nor a pain. It is
serious business ^ to be entered on with courage and in a spirit 0/ self-sacrifice,*^
The general work of our conventions falls into the care of
two committees, one on a statement of principles, called the
** Committee on Resolutions ;" the other on formulation of plans,
called the **Plan of Work Committee," and the President's
Annual Address is always referred to these. From the former
committee the following resolution came, and led to the great
4o6 The St, Louis Resolution,
**St. Louis Debate" in which Mrs. Mar>' T. Lathrap so distin-
guished herself as a St. John, and Mrs. J. Ellen Foster as a
Blaine, woman :
We refer to the history of ten years of persistent moral-suasion work as
fully establishing our claim to be called a non-political society, but one which
steadfastly follows the white banner of prohibition wherever it may be dis-
played. We have, however, as individuals, always allied ourselves in local
and state political contests with those voters whose efforts and ballots have
been given to the removal of the dram-shop and its attendant evils, and at
this time, while recognizing that our action as a national society is not
binding upon states or individuals, we reaffirm the position taken by the
society at Lonisville in 1882, and at Detroit in 1883, pledging our influ-
ence to that party, by whatever name called, which shall furnish us the
best embodiment of prohibition principles, and will most surely protect our
homes. And as we now know which national party gives us the desired
embodiment of the principles for which our ten years' labor has been ex-
pended, we will continue to lend our influence to the national political
organization which declares in its platform for National Prohibition and
Home Protection. In this, as in all progressive effort, we will endeavor
to meet argument with argument, misjudgment with patience, denunci-
ation with kindness, and all our difficulties and dangers with prayer.
This resolution was drawn up by Mrs. Mary B. Willard, but
the last sentence was my own, being a resolution adopted by the
first National Woman's Christian Temperance Union Conven-
tion as a basis of action immediately following the Crusade.
Men who heard the long and brilliant argument, pro and con, on
this political declaration — an argument that packed the church
and crowded the aisles hour after hour with standing listeners —
declared that it had not been equaled for courtesy, and not
excelled in force, wit, pathos and earnestness by any they had
known. At its close, the ayes and noes were called, for the first
time in our annals, and here culminated the features that had
made the debate itself so remarkable, for nearly every delegate
gave, in a sentence, her reason for voting as she did. Mrs. Dr.
Erwin, President of the Mississippi W. C. T. U., one of the saint-
liest and most motherly of women, standing with Bible open in
her outstretched hand, lifted her eyes as one who prays, and said :
*' By God's grace, I vote this way for the sake of the poor, mis-
guided colored people of the South."
Beloved as she was by them and a student of their needs and
* * Bulldozing ' ' by Epithet. 407
wrongs, she felt that the new party would not only give them
standing-room but would put away from them the curse that
makes their votes a terror now to temperance homes.
That scene has passed into memory and will be recorded in
history, — for then and there the fitting representatives of Ameri-
can womanhood, both North and South, ** entered politics '* for
the sake of home protection, and when they came they came to stay.
The vote stood 195 (including seven who had to leave) in
fevor to 48 against the Resolution.
The situation ** after election " is shadowed forth in the fol-
lowing call to prayer written by me and issued November 20,
1884:
Bblovbd Sisters of the Locai, Unions — ^These are the times that
try women's souls. To be tolerant toward the intolerant is a difficult grace,
and yet its exercise is imperiously demanded of us.
A party long accustomed to success is in defeat. Thousands of leading
men see their hopes blighted, ambitions overthrown, perhaps their occu-
pations gone. Party journals denounce the Prohibitionists as having
caused all this, and " fellows of the baser sort " hang ex-Governor St John
in effigy. The W. C. T. U. is termed "a political party,'* and subjected to
the sharpest criticism by men who found no fault with our societies in
Iowa, Kansas and other states where they ** lent their influence" to the
Republicans. Free speech and *'afree ballot" have, within a fortnight,
cost many a voter dear, in the good-will and business patronage of his
neighbors, while obedience to the most profound convictions has called
down bitter imprecations on many an earnest woman's head. Our own
familiar friends in whom we trusted, have uttered these words in public
print and private reprimand. Not from the ignorant or base, but from cult-
ured scholars and Christian gentlemen have come these words and deeds.
Not in a generation has such a cross-fire of denunciation whistled through
the air as that now aimed at those who " lent their influence " to the Pro-
hibition party.
All this you know from the things that you have suffered. But what is
our duty in this strife of tongues ?
Dear sisters, we stand before the people as followers of Him "who when
He was reviled, reviled not again ; when He suffiered He threatened not,
but committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously. ' ' Let us, therefore,
pray mightily to God that we may be replenished with heavenly grace accord-
ing to our need, so that the law of kindness still shall dwell in our hearts
and on our tongues, and charity (or love) which *' vaunteth not itself, is not
easily provoked, doth not behave itself unseemly," shall control our every
action. Next to God's spirit dwelling in our own, nothing will so help us
to be considerate and i>atient, as to pray for and speak gently of those who
in our judgment, have done injustice to our motives, our record and our
4o8 Mrs. Foster^ s Protest.
character. Let us be careful not to do them a parallel injuatioe, bnt by
recalling their noble qualities and their kindness in the past, keep them
hidden in the citadel of our generous regard and confidence until this storm
be overpassed.
Let us try, also, to put ourselves in their places and to realize that they
too, are sincere, even as we are, and acting, the great majority of them at
least, from patriotic motives. We seek the same goal, but have chosen dif-
ferent roads, each one believing his way the best. In time we shall agree to
disagree and go on without bitterness. " A soft answer tumeth away 'smXHif
but grievous words stir up anger." May God fill our mouths with soft
answers in these wrathful days ! If we women can not mitigate the asperities
of politics, woeful will be the day of our influence therein, whether that
influence be indirect, as now, or direct, as in some future time. But if God
be with us we can save our country as surely as Joan of Arc crowned her king.
That the infinite Spirit of Christ may rule and reign in our hearts, mak-
ing them tender, true and teachable, we ask you to observe, as a day of fiMit-
ing and prayer, the fourth of December, reading on that day those passages
of Scripture which relate to God's power in the affairs of government, and
also such as illustrate the supreme fact that '' he that is slow to anger is bet-
ter than the mighty ; and he that nileth his spirit than hethattaketh a dty."
Let us exhort you more earnestly than ever before to observe individually the
noontide hour of prayer. Our prayer for you, beloved friends, shall also be
that ** your faith fail not," but tliat you '* stand fast in the liberty wherewith
Christ hath made you free," and "having done all, stand."
Yours, " with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,"
Frances E. Wii.i.ard, President.
Caroune B. Bueli,, Corresponding Secretary,
The next year, 1885, at Philadelphia, the same political res-
olution was again adopted by a vote of two hundred and forty-five
to thirty, and Mrs. Foster presented a protest signed by herself
with twenty-six others, to which, by order of the convention, a
committee consisting of Mesdames Woodbridge, Lathrap and
Hoffman made reply.
At Minneapolis, in 1886, the vote stood two hundred and
forty-one for the Prohibition party to forty-two against, and at
Nashville, in 1887, the protest had but fourteen names out of
three hundred and forty-one delegates. Meanwhile, at Minne-
apolis, Mrs. Rastall, President Kansas W. C. T. U., offered the
following, which was adopted :
Having for three years thoroughly discussed and established by a large
majority vote our position in regard to the Prohibition party, I move the
adoption of the following by-law :
" Any resolution referring to our attitude toward political parties is to
be decided by vote without discussion."
Tie Famous By-Law. 409
This was in force at Nashville only, and was rescinded by
an overwhelming majority at New York. At Nashville an amend*
ment to our Constitution offered the previous year by Mrs. Foster,
was voted down. It read as follows :
"This association shall be known as the National Woman's Chriattan
Temperance Union, and shall be non-sectaiioii in religions, and non-partiaan
in political work."
The convention held that our non-sectarian character had
been thoroughly established from the beginning, and as to being
non-partisan, it was far from our intent. In St. I/niis we had
crossed the Rubicon forever, and with us it was a case of " sink or
swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart
to this vote." We could not as a national society consent to re-
main in relations of equal friendship toward one national party
that ignored, another that denounced, and a third that espoused,
the cause of prohibition. But we did not appreciate the anger
of a party in defeat — indeed, we had not supposed that defeat
was in store for the Republicans.
CHAPTER IV.
WOMEN IN COUNCIL.
Patiently the **01d Guard'' (for so we now called the
National W. C. T. U.) held on its way. What it hoped and
prayed for came true, the good men who were angry thought
better of the situation after awhile. Ministerial brethren, even,
who had declared that our pulpit notices should be read no longer,
changed their minds and let us hold meetings in the dear old home
churches as aforetime.
At our next National Convention in Philadelphia (autumn of
1885), forty churches were opened to our speakers on the Sabbath
day, though we chose Association Hall in preference to the beau-
tiful edifices that were offered us. Among the beautiful decora-
tions of this Hall were the banners and other devices that had
made our booth at the late Exposition in New Orleans a fitting
symbol of our womanly work. That the woman-touch is thus to
brighten every nook and comer of earth, has always been a car-
dinal doctrine of my creed, coming to me first as an intuition,
later on as a deduction, but always as an emphatic affirmation.
Two hundred and eighty-two delegates were present fix)m
forty states and territories. Nearly eleven thousand dollars had
been received by our treasurer and our convention was conceded
to be by far the strongest and the best that we had ever held.
Clearly, our branch of the temperance work had not **been set
back twenty years." Forty-four district and national depart-
ments of work were provided for ; a new constitution was
adopted, requiring ten cents per capita to be paid into the national
treasury, instead of five cents, as heretofore ; our superintendents
were organized into a committee to confer with the Executive
Committee. Headquarters were removed from New York, where
they had never flourished, to 161 La Salle Street, Chicago, 111.,
(410)
Pageants of the New Crusade. 411
where, in conjunction with our Woman's Temperance Publishing
House, they have greatly gained in power, and the White Cross
movement was adopted as a feature of our work.
I was made, perforce, superintendent of this new department,
also of our national department of publications, and had that of
organization assigned me as an ex officio duty.
The Philadelphia Convention was remarkable for the large
number of white ribbon women in attendance as visitors, for the
number of distinguished persons outside our ranks who addressed
it, also for the deference manifested by ministerial and other
bodies in sending us fraternal delegates. Probably no conven-
tion ever assembled in America in an auditorium more beauti-
fully decorated. The escutcheons of states, the banners of the
forty departments, the gay pennons of state and local unions, of
young women's societies, and of the children's Loyal Temperance
Legion, recalled the pictures and pageants of the mediaeval
Crusaders and knights of olden chivalry. Mrs. Josephine R.
Nichols, national superintendent of introducing temperance work
at expositions, state and county fairs, and other great assemblies
of the people, had set our women at work preparing these beau-
tiful bits of color and emblems of sentiment and purpose, for the
New Orleans Exposition, where we had a handsome booth. I
fear, lest in setting forth the political attitude of our society and
my relation thereto, I am doing injustice to its real, though less
observed, activities. For example, at St. Louis nearly thirty
distinct departments were passed in review by their chiefs, in
reports printed and cii;culated throughout the convention, and
methods for improving all of these departments were duly dis-
cussed and acted on ; a strong corps of national organizers was
selected, and all our publishing interests provided for.
Indeed, the versatility of our W. C. T. U. can hardly be
better illustrated than by the fact that this same convention not
only swung us into politics, but adopted the following petition to
editors of fashion-plate magazines, reported to us from the Press
Department, which sends out news, temperance literature and bul-
letins to thousands of papers, from Tampa Bay to Puget Sound,
and of which Miss Mar>^ Henry is our present Superintendent :
Dear Frikxd — Knowing that the fashion in woman's dress which re-
quires the constriction of the waist and the compression of the trunk
/
412 The Fashion Plate Petition.
is one which not only deforms the body in a manner contrary to good
taste, but results in serious, sometimes irreparable, injury to important
▼ital organs, and believing that the existence of the widespread perversion
of natural instincts which renders this custom so prevalent may be fairly
attributable, in part, at least, to erroneous education of the eye, and the
establishment of a false and artificial standard of symmetry and beauty,
which in our opinion, is largely the result of the influence of the popular
fashion-plates of the day, we, the undersigned, most respectfully petition
you that, in the name of science and humanity, you will lend your aid
toward the elevation of woman to a more perfect physical estate, and con-
sequently to the elevation of humanity, by making the figures upon your
fashion-plates conform more nearly to the normal standard and the condi-
tions requisite for the maintenance of health.
The Minneapolis Convention was held in an enormous rink
which was packed to the doors whenever any speaker of special
prominence appeared. During the great debate on one of the last
evenings, the scene was full of a new significance, for women of
the South as well as the North, with strong and ready utterance
declared for prohibition in politics as well as in law. General
Nettleton, a gentleman of local prominence and champion of the
anti-saloon (Republican ** non-partisan") movement, spoke to the
convention, and fairly — or most unfairly — scolded us ; the quiet
self-restraint with which he was heard, and the immediate return
of the convention to the order of the day, without making note
or comment, as soon as he had finished, afiford, as I believe, the
most palpable proof on record that women are capable of consti-
tuting a really deliberative body.
Perhaps the most notable feature of that convention was the
presence of Mrs. Margaret Bright Lucas, of London, England,
the sister of John Bright, and the first president of the ** World's
Woman's Christian Temperance Union.** This distinguished
lady crossed the sea when nearly seventy years of age, in token
of sisterly good-will toward American temperance women and
their work. She came under escort of our own Mrs. Hannah
Whitall Smith and accompanied by two other English ladies.
Her reception was magnificent, the convention rising in separate
groups, first the Crusaders in a body, second the women of New
England, then of the Middle States, after these the Western, and
the Pacific Coast, and last (by way of climax) the Southern rep-
resentatives, while the English and American flags waved from
the platform and all joined in singing, '* God save the Queen."
Address to Labor Organizations. 4^3
One of the most important suggestions made by me to this
convention was that of an address to the Labor Organizations.
The following is a specimen of tens of thousands that were printed :
AN ADDRESS TO ALL KNIGHTS OF LABOR, TRADES UNIONS,
AND OTHER LABOR ORGANIZATIONS.
PROM THE NATIONAL WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION.
\
Headquarters of the Nation ai, W. C. T. U.,
i6i La Salle Street, Chicago, III.,
November ii, 1886.
To all Working Men and Women — Brothers and Sisters of a Common Hope:
We come to you naturally as to our friends and allies. With such of
your methods as involve cooperation, arbitration and the ballot-box, we are
' in hearty sympathy. Measures which involve compulsion of labor, the de-
struction of property or harm to life or limb, we profoundly deplore, and we
believe the thoughtful and responsible among your ranks must equally de-
plore them, as not only base in themselves, but a great hindrance to your
own welfare and success. We rejoice in your broad platform of mutual
help, which recognizes neither sex, race, nor creed. Especially do we
appreciate the tendency of your great movement to elevate women indus-
trially to their rightful place, by claiming that they have equal pay for equal
work ; recognizing them as officers and members of your societies, and
advocating the ballot in their hands as their rightful weapon of self-help in
our representative government.
As temperance women, we have been especially glad to note yonr hostile
attitude toward the saloon, the worst foe of woman, of the workingman,
and of the home. We read with joy of the vow made by the newly elected
officers of the Knights of Labor at the convention in Richmond, Va., when,
with hands raised to heaven, they pledged themselves to total abstinence.
In addressing you at this time we wish to offer our sincere congratula-
tions upon your achievements as practical helpers in that great temperance
reform which engages our steadfast work and prayers, and which, as we
believe, involves, beyond all other movements of this age, your happiness
and elevation. Permit us to ask your careful consideration of this statement
of our belief :
The central question of labor reform is not so much how to get higher
wages, as how to turn present wages to better account. For waste harms
most those who can least afford it. It is not over production so much as
under-consumption that grinds the faces of the workingmen. Fourteen
hundred millions annually drawn, chiefly from the pockets of working
men, by saloon-keepers and cigar-dealers, means less flour in the barrel,
less coal in the cellar, and less clothing for the laborers' families. We
grieve to see them give their money for that which is not bread, and their
labor for that which satisfieth not. We suggest that if, by your request, pay
day were universally changed from Saturday to Monday, this would do
much to increase the capital at home.
414 ffmv to Turn Wages to Better Account,
The life insurance statistics prove that while the average life of the
moderate drinker is but thirty-five years and a half, that of the total ab-
stainer is sixty-four years. The successful explorers and soldiers, the
famous athletes, pedestrians, rowers and shots are men who do not cobweb
their brains, or palsy their nerves with alcoholic drink.
We believe that the work of our societies, resulting in laws by which
nearly one half the children of the United States are being taught in the
public schools the evil effects of intoxicating liquors upon the tissues of the
body and the temper of the mind, merits your earnest cooperation, and
will prove one of your strongest re-inforcements in the effort to elevate
your families to nobler levels of opportunity. We believe that the study of
hygiene, including a knowledge of the most healthful foods and the dis-
covery that these are of the cheaper and non-stimulating class, with a care-
ful consideration of the scientific methods by which, in the preparation of
food, a little can be made to go a long way in home economies, is well
worthy of your attention. We ask you to aid us in our endeavors to have
taught in all the departments of our public schools those beneficent laws of
wealth which relate to wholesome living in respect to diet, dress, sleep, ex-
ercise and ventilation, so that this teaching shall be given to every child as
one of the surest means to its truest happiness.
We ask your attention to our White Cross pledge of equal chastity for
1 man and woman ; of pure language and a pure life. We ask your help in
» onr efforts to secure adequate protection by law for the daughters of the poor
and rich alike, from the cruelty of base and brutal men. We ask your help
in our endeavors to preserve the American Sabbath with its rest and quiet,
redeeming it from being as now the harvest-time of the saloon-keeper, when
he gathers in the hard earnings of the workingman, and we promise you
our co-operation in your efforts to secure the Saturday half-holiday, which,
we believe, will do so much to change the Sabbath from a day of recreation
to one of rest at home and for the worship of God. We rejoice to note
that the Central Labor Union of New York City petitioned the municipal
officers to close saloons upon the Sabbath Day, and we earnestly hope that
all such societies may soon petition for their closing every day, and order a
perpetual boycott upon the dealers in alcoholic poison.
We call your attention to our departments of evangelistic temperance
meetings ; work for railroad employes, lumbermen, herdsmen, miners, sol-
diers and sailors ; also to our efforts to organize free kitchen gardens and
kindergartens, and Bands of Hope ; to supply free libraries and reading
rooms, temperance lodging-houses and restaurants, and to reach a helping
hand to fallen women as well as fallen men. We have a publishing house
at i6i La Salle Street, Chicago, which sent out thirty million pages of tem-
perance literature in the last year, which is conducted by women, its types
being set by women compositors. Our National organ, The Union Signal,
has good words for all lawful efforts made by w^orking men and women for
their own best interests.
We ask you to do all in your power for the cause of prohibition, which
is pre-eminently your cause. With the dram-shop and its fiendish tempta-
Welcomed to Nashville. 415
tions overthrown, what might you not attain of that self-mastsry which is
the first condition of success ; and what might you not achieve of protection
and happiness in those homes which are the heart*s true resting places !
Your ballots hold the balance of power in this land of the world's hope.
We ask those of you who are voters to cast them only for such measures and
such men as are solemnly committed to the prohibition of every brewery,
distillery and dram-shop in the nation. And that women may come to the
rescue in this great emergency, also as an act of justice toward those who
have the most sacred claim on your protection, we hope that you may see
your way clear to cast your ballots only for such measures and such men as
are pledged to the enfranchisement of women.
In all this, we speak to you as those who fervently believe that the com-
ing of Christ's kingdom in the earth means Brotherhood. We urge you
with sisterly earnestness and affection to make the New Testament your text-
book of political economy, and to join us in the daily study of His blessed
words, who spake as never man spake. His pierced hand is lifting up this
sorrowful, benighted world into the light of God. In earnest sympathy let
us go forward to work out His golden precepts into the world's life and law
by making first of all His law and life our own.
Yours for God and Home and Every Land,
Frances E. Wii^lard, President.
Caroi«inb B. Bubix, Corresponding Secretary.
N. B. — Local unions please have this printed in all the papers practicable.
It was intended by the convention's action at Minneapolis to recommend
each local union to take copies of the preceding address to the local labor or-
ganizations of its own totan or city^ and ask them to discuss and adopt a
resolution concerning it ; also to bring the address before district, state and
national conferences of workingmen for their action. By this means, great
good can be done, in an educational way, for the cause of temperance and of
labor.
In 1887 we once more wended our way southward, Balti-
more (in 1878), Louisville (in 1881) and St. Louis (in 1884),
having been the three points farthest south, at which the
National Convention had been held up to this date.
Ample preparations were made for us by Mrs. Judge East,
Mrs. Judge Baxter, and other ladies of Nashville, the Athens of
the nation as well as of the South — if the proportion of students
to inhabitants and the number and variety of institutions of
learning is considered.
On the opening morning a rare picture was presented in the
elegantly adorned hall with three hundred and forty-one delegates
pre.sent from thirt>^-seven states, five territories and the District
of Columbia, and the platform crowded with notables of Vander-
4i6 looted Guests.
bill University and the M. E. Church, South, with whom this
great institution outranks all others as Harvard does with the
people of New England. The Southern delegates were out in
force and [it was admitted by the press, which treated us most
courteously, that there was no denying the fact that this conven-
tion was not made up of the kind of women dreaded in that
conservative region, but that our delegates were well-dressed,
sunny-faced, winsome, home women, but at the same time, women
with minds of their own.
William Jones, the noted English Quaker, and Peace philan-
thropist, was our guest at this convention and a magnificent
reception was given in his honor by Colonel and Mrs. Cole, at
which the National W. C. T. U. officers and leading Southern
ladies assisted in receiving.
Rev. Dr. Alfred A. Wright, of Cambridge, one of the best
Greek scholars in the country, was our guest also, and then and
there began his work as instructor in our Evangelistic Depart-
ment, which has widened and deepened until now he has charge
of the Course of Study for Evangelists and Deaconesses in that
branch of the service.
Pundita Ramabai, in her white robes, was a central -figure,
and her plaintive appeal for the high-caste Hindu widows, a
memorable event in the convention.
Mrs. J. Ellen Foster was not present this year, being on a
health trip in Europe. The non-partisan Republican delegates
were not, therefore, a strong force in the convention, though the
usual protest was circulated and received fourteen signatures.
We adopted our customary resolutions on controverted points,
the Southern press making certainly no more ado than the North-
em had often made under like circumstances. The following
resolutions would have been bomb-shells in the camp a few years
earlier, but now the first couplet occasioned almost no debate, and
the second was adopted with practical unanimity, excepting the
dissent of Iowa and a few other delegates.
Resolved, That the success of municipal sufirage in Kansas convinces
us that no stronger weapon has been hurled against the liquor power ; we
therefore urge upon our members the importance of trying to secure this
power in any and all states and territories where there is a prospect of snc-
ceas in such an undertaking.
John B, Finch. 4^7
Resolved^ That an amendment to the national Constitntion is the
final goal of all those efforts for the enfranchisement of women which
shall deal the death blow to the liquor tra£ELC, and for the first time provide
adequate protection for the home.
Resolved, That we rejoice in the great successes that have been
gained by the Prohibition party during the past year and we again pledge
it our hearty co-operation, assuring it of our prayers and sympathy.
Resolved, That we ask the Prohibition party at its coming National
Convention to re-affirm its former position in regard to woman's ballot
We placed on record our protest against personalities in pol-
itics, sending the same to the leaders of all parties, and we rejoice
that the campaigpti of 1888 largely fiilfiUed our hopes, except that
the after-election abuse of the W. C. T. U. and its leaders, by old
party organs, has been, in view of the beneficent work and record
of the society, nothing less than unmanly, and we feel assured
that history will so pronounce it. This is the Nashville reso-
lution :
Resolved, That with a deep sense of the significance of such action,
we women, representatives of thirty-seven states and five territories, do
most solemnly urge upon all political parties and partisan papers the duty
of avoiding, in the pending Presidential campaign, the personal vilification
and abuse that characterized the last, and we call upon them to consider
the fact that the women of the North and the South have clasped hands in
concord and co-operation, which is a most practical proof that war issues
are dead, and that the land should have rest from reviving them for cam-
paign purposes. We protest as women against this outrage upon the grow-
ing spirit of fraternity, and reiterate the cry of the great general, " Let us
have peace r*
We lost that most brilliant of our leaders, John B. Finch,
October 3, 1887. At once the thought came to many of us,
** Samuel Dickie, Michigan's trusted leader in the Constitutional
Amendment campaign, is his natural successor. ''
A meeting of the National Committee of the Prohibition
party was held in Battery D, Chicago, at the close of 1887, to
elect a new chairman. The attendance was general and enthusi-
asm at white heat. Professor Dickie was chosen ; woman's ballot
as a plank in the platform was warmly indorsed. Rev. Anna Shaw
making a most telling argument in its favor, and plans for the
campaign of 1888 were outlined. At this meeting a memorial
service was held in honor of Mr. Finch and I was chosen to pro-
nounce his eulogy.
27
CHAPTER V.
WHITE CROSS AND WHITE SHIELD.
The most pointed and practical standard of daily living of
which I can think, is to permit in one's self no open habit in
word or deed that others might not safely imitate, and no secret
habit that one would be ashamed to have the best and purest
know. Anything less than this is vastly beneath our privilege.
Having thus made the only adequate preparation for a work so
holy, we may send out our plans and purposes to the wide world
of manhood and of womanhood, calling upon all to climb the
heights whence alone we shall see God.
When the Crusade began, no one would have predicted that
twelve years later we should be as earnestly at work for fallen
women as we were then for fallen men.
That we are so doing, is because we have learned in this long
interval, that intemperance and impurity are iniquity's Siamese
Twins ; that malt liquors and wines have special power to tarnish
the sacred springs of being ; that every house of ill-repute is a
secret saloon and nearly every inmate an inebriate. Unnatural
and unspeakable crimes against the physically weaker sex make
the daily papers read like a modem edition of Fox's Martyrs.
A madness not excelled, if indeed, equaled, in the worse days of
Rome, seems to possess the inflamed natures of men, let loose
from the two hundred and fifty thousand saloons of the nation
upon the weak and unarmed women, whose bewildering danger it
is to have attracted the savage glances of these men or to be
bound to them by the sacred tie of wife or mother in a bondage
worse than that which lashes the living to the dead.
But our Iowa sisters were in the field as early as 1879, and at
the annual meeting of their State W. C. T. U., in response to the
plea of Mrs. L. B. Benedict, they resolved to found a Home fiw
penitent, erring women, and to that end established a department
(418)
White Cross Life-boat Launched at Philadelphia. 419
of work. Maine W. C. T. U. has set us a grand example with
its Industrial Home, New York with its *' Christian Home for
Inebriate Women,'* Cleveland with its "Open Door," Chicago
with its ** Anchorage," and many cities East and West by the
appointment of police matrons to care for women under arrest ;
all these things prove that temperance women have never been
indifferent to this branch of work.
But, after all, it was the moral cyclone that attended the
Pall Mall Gazette disclosures, which cleared the air and broke the
spell, so that silence now seems criminal and we only wonder that
we did not speak before.
Some sporadic efforts had been made in this direction from
time to time, but the action of our Philadelphia Convention in
1885 launched the new life-boat nationally, and because no other
woman could be found to stand at its helm I have tried to do so,
though utterly unable to give to this great work an attention
more than fragmentary. My faithful office secretary, Alice
Briggs, has really been the main spoke in the wheel at my home
office, and Dr. Kate Bushnell, in the field, for I have only spoken
in large cities, and the heroic doctor is going everywhere and
has made such a reconnoissance of the North Woods lumber cen-
ters as ought to place her name among the Grace Darlings of
moral rescue work. Mrs. Dr. Kellogg has developed the Mothers*
meetings into a potent factor of the department, and Hope Led-
yard (Mrs. 'C. H. Harris) has taken up this specialty at our
request.
My own ** call '* is hinted at in these words from my annual
address, only a few weeks after the Pall Mall Gazette disclosures.
How hard men work for votes ! They do not assemble the faithful by
general bell-ringing and let that end it. Nay, verily ! They obey the Gos-
pel injunction : " Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them
to come in. " Carriages are running all day between the voters and the polls,
no matter how hard it is to bring the two together. Thus must we go out to
seek and save the lost ; as eager for our Master's triumph in the individual
soul, as politicians are for the election of their candidates.
This work can not be done by proxy nor at arms-length. We ought to
have always, in every local union, an active committee of visitation to the
homes of those who drink. I beg you to do this, though you do noth-
ing else. Go into homes and saloons, inviting lost men to come to Christ
We must go : we can not send. As an earnest-hearted minister recently said
420 ** Salvation by Tongs is a Failure.'^*
in my hearing : ** Salvation by tongs is a failure '' The grip of our oiwi
hands can alone convey the unbeliever's hand lo the Urm and tender clasp
of the Hand once pierced for us and hini.
The Bishop of Durham founded the White Cross League. Its pledge
predicts the time when fatherhood shall take its place beside motherhood,
its divine correlate, as equal sharer in the cares that have so ennobled women
as to make some of them akin to angels. Its blessed pledge declares : " I
will maintain the law of purity as equally binding upon men and women ;
I will endeavor to spread these principles among my companions, and try
to help my younger brothers, and will use every means to fulfill the sacred
command, 'AV^*/ thy self pure.* *•
Those noble men, Anthony Comstock, of the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice, and Rev. Dr. De Costa, of the White Cross League,
will address our convention. Their work relates to the overthrow of those
Satanic means by which the theory and practice of abominable crimes
against social purity are carried on in our great cities, and from thence
spread their leprous taint to every town and village.
Our Department for Suppression of the Social Evil is as yet inoperative.
It is greatly to be regretted that we do not yet succeed in winning the serv-
ices, as superintendent of this most difficult work, of a lady who combines
the rare qualities of a delicate perception of propriety with practical ability
and leisure. The special aim of this new superintendency will be to trace
the relation between the drink habit and the nameless practices, outrages
and crimes which disgrace so-called modem ** civilization '* ; especially the
brutalizing influence of malt liquors upon the sexual nature. Besides this
we should emulate the example set us by Mrs. Stevens, of Maine, and her
clear-headed associates, in providing a temporary home for the women whom
our police matrons rescue from the clutch of penalties whose usual accom-
paniments often render them still more familiar with sin. But the efifect
upon our minds of such unspeakable disclosures as those of the Poll Mall
Gazette, and the horrible assurances given us by such authority as Dr.
Elizabeth Blackwell, that we should uncap perdition in the same direction,
w«re the hidden life of our own great cities known, has so stirred the
heart of womanhood throughout this land, that we are, I trust, ready for an
advance. Had we to-day the right woman in this place of unequaled need
and opportunity, we could be instrumental in the passage of such laws as
would punish the outrage of defenseless girls and women by making the
repetition of such outrage an impossibility. Woman only can induce law-
makers to furnish this most availing of all possible methods of protection
to the physically weak. Men alone will never gain the courage thus to leg-
islate against other men. Crimes against women seem to be upon the in-
crease everywhere. Three years ago the Chicago Inter Ocean gathered from
the press in three weeks forty cases of the direst outrage, sixteen of the
victims being girls. In a majority of cases, where the gentler sex is thus
hunted to its ruin, or lured to the same pit in a more gradual way, strong
drink is the devil's kindling-wood of passion, as everybody knows. Hence
the relation of this most sacred work to that of the W. C. T. U. is so close
Conventional Cowardice. 4.21
that the press, tlirough some of its noblest representatives has. in the last
year, appealed to us to ignore the tempted and the fallen of our own sex no
longer. It is not by the vain attempt to re-introduce the exploded harem
method of secluding women that they are to be saved. It is rather by
holding men to the same standard of morality which, happily for us, they
long ago prescribed for the physically weaker, that society shall rise to
higher levels,, and by punishing with extreme penalties such men as inflict
upon women atrocities compared with which death would be infinitely wel-
come. When we remember the unavenged murder of Jennie Cramer, of
New^aven, and the acquittal of the ravishers of Emma Bond, a cultivated ^ ?.' •
school teacher in Illinois : when we reflect that the Pall Mall Gazette de-
clares *' the law is framed to enable dissolute men to outrage g^ls of thirteen'
with impunity ' * ; that in Massachusetts and Vermont it is a greater crime to
steal a cow than to abduct and ruin a girl, and that in Illinois seduction is '
not recognized as a crime, it is a marvel not to be explained, that we go on
the even tenor of our way, too delicate, too refined, too prudish to make
any allusion to these awful facts, much less to take up arms against these
awful crimes.
We have been the victims of conventional cowardice too long. Let us :, • / /^ '^*
signalize the second century of temperance reform by a fearless avowal of
our purpose to take up the work of promoting social purity by the inculca-
tion of right principles and the serious demand for more equitable laws.
The Society of the White Cross will warmly cooperate with our endeavors
in this righteous cause. Oh, may some clear brain, true heart and winsome
spirit in our great fraternity cry out under the baptism of the Heavenly
Spirit, ** Here am /, Lord, send me ! "
These are the first words I ever publicly uttered on a subject
that had been farther from my thoughts than I like to acknowl-
edge, all my life long. When I was first a boarding-school pupil,
at Evanston, in 1858, a young woman w^ho was not chaste came
to the college through some misrepresentation, but was speedily
dismissed ; not knowing her degraded status I was speaking to
her, when a school-mate whispered a few words of explanation
that crimsoned my face suddenly ; and grasping my dress lest its
hem should touch the garments of one so morally polluted, I fled
from the room. It was, no doubt, a healthful instinct that led
me to do this, but I am deeply grateful that the years have so
instructed and mellowed my heart, that, could the scene recur, 1
would clasp that poor child's hand, plead with her tenderly and
try to help instead of deserting her as I did in my more self-
righteous youth.
The next time this subject was thrust upon me is described
in my first address after becoming superintendent of the depart-
422 White Slaves in Paris.
ment. It was given to an audience of women at the twelfth
annual meeting of the Chicago W. C. T. U., in 1886 :
In the year 1869, while studying in Paris, I used often to see passing
along the pleasant streets, great closed wagons, covered with black. In-
quiring of my elegant landlady the explanation of these somber vehicles,
she answered, sorrowfully, ''It is the demi-monde, who go to be ex-
amined.** I then learned for the first time that in Paris, fallen women have
a legal " permit'* to carry on what is a recognized business, but must remain
seclu cJ in their houses at certain hours, must avoid certain streets, and
must go once a week, under escort of the police, to the dispensary for ex-
amination and certificate that they are exempt from contagious disease.
Always, after that, those awful wagons seemed to me to form the most
heart-breaking funeral procession that ever Christian woman watched with
aching heart and tear-dimmed eyes. If I were asked why there has come
about such a revolution in public thought that I have gained the courage to
speak of things once unlawful to be told, and you may listen without fear of
criticism from any save the base, my answer would be :
" Because law-makers tried to import the black wagon of Paris to Eng-
land and America, and Anglo-Saxon women rose in swift rebellion.**
Even a worm will turn at last, and when her degradation was thus de-
liberately planned and sanctioned by the state, on the basis of securing to
the stronger partner in a dual sin the same protection from nature*s penalty
which society had granted him so long, and of heaping upon the weaker
partner in that sin all the disgrace and shame, then womanhood*s loyalty to
woman was aroused ; it overcame the silence and reserve of centuries, and
Christendom rings with her protest to-day.
Thus do the powers of darkness outwit themselves, and evils ever-
more tend to their own cure. It is now solemnly avowed by thousands of
the best and most capable women who speak the English tongue, not only
that the contagious-diseases acts shall never be tolerated upon a single inch
of British or American soil, but that houses of ill-fame shall be not only
prohibited but banished altogether. The system of license must not come.
The let-alone policy must go. The prohibitory method must be achieved.
Having determined on a great petition to Congress, asking for
the better protection of women and girls through severer penalties
.for assaults upon them, and that the age of protection might be
raised to eighteen years, I went in company with my dear friend,
Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, of Philadelphia, whose guest I was
at the time, to see Mr. Powderly, chief of the Knights of I<abor,
at their headquarters in the same city. A score of clerks were
busy in the oflfice below, and I was told that it was diffictilt to get
access to Mr. Powderly, delegations often waiting for hours to take
their ttun. But Mrs. Bryant, editor of the jotunal of the Knights
Terence V. Pawderly. i.23
of Labor and a white ribbon woman, used her influence for us,
and the detention was brief. Mr. Powderly came into her office
from the inner room, where he sits from morning till night in
counsel with six other men, I think, who, with himself, form the
executive of this great organization. I saw a man of something
more than medium height, broad-shouldered but of not specially
robust physique, with a noble head, ftdl, arching and slightly
bald ; the brow particularly handsome, also the clear-cut profile
and magisterial nose ; the eyes weary-looking but most intelli-
gent and kindly, protected by light-bowed spectacles ; the mouth,
as I should judge, fine, but almost concealed by a military mus-
tache. In the fewest possible words I told him my errand. He
said, * ' Please show me your petition. * ' Glancing at it a moment,
he added, *' Excuse me, I will consult my brothers'' ; he was
gone perhaps three minutes, and returning, said, **If you will
send me ninety-two thousand copies, they shall go out to every
local assembly of the Knights of Labor without expense to you
and with the recommendation that they be signed, circulated and
returned to you at Evanston." I rose, reaching out my hand, and
said, *' Brother Powderly, you are a Catholic, and I am a Meth-
odist sister, but I have sincere respect and high regard for you
and I shall pray Heaven every day to bless you and your work.**
There was, perhaps, a little tremor in my voice as I said this, and
the faintest token of the same in his as he replied, warmly grasp-
ing my hand, **I thank you, friend and sister. Good-by.** I
had asked him for his photograph, which he soon sent me, and
it has stood on my desk ever since with those of Elizabeth Fry,
Josephine Butler, Mrs. Cleveland and Pundita Ramabai. I know
that Mr. Powderly is a thorough total abstainer, that he never
uses tobacco and can not tolerate any symptom of it in his pres-
ence, that he is a man mighty in deeds as in words, having, as I
believe, a single eye to the best interests of the working-classes,
and the purpose to advance them only by the noblest methods,
namely, education, cooperation, arbitration and the ballot-box.
Repeatedly we have sent our delegates to the annual meeting
of the Knights of Labor. Mrs. H. A. Hobart, president of the
Minnesota W. C. T. U., spoke for us when the convention was
held in Minneapolis ; Mrs. Henrietta Monroe, president of the
Ohio W. C. T. U., in Cincinnati, and in 1888, Mrs. Josephine R
4^4 The Great Petition,
Nichols, president of the Indiana W. C. T. U., in Indianapolis.
Our representatives have always been most cordially received, and
as Mrs. Nichols was on the platform after her speech, Mr. Pow-
derly came forward, taking her hand, and saying, ** The Knights
of Labor pledge themselves to stand by the W. C. T. U.,'* while
applause, loud and hearty, rang out through the assembly.
When the petition for the protection of women came wing-
ing its way back to Rest Cottage from every quarter of the nation,
no copies were quite so welcome as those soiled by the hardy
hands of toil, largely signed in pencil, sometimes with the sign
of the cross, and showing the devotion that binds lowly to lofty
homes for the protection of those they hold most dear.
In the winter of 1888 our great petition was presented at the
Capitol by Senator Blair, Mrs. Ada Bittenbender, our legal
adviser, making all the arrangements, and the Senate giving
respectful heed to the words of our illustrious champion as he
read the petition and urged that action upon it be not delayed.
A bill passed the Senate raising the age of protection to sixteen
years, and it is pending in the House.
The petition, well known throughout the country, having
been presented to almost every state and territorial legislature,
reads as follows :
PETITION
OP THE
WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION
FOR FURTHER PROVISION FOR THX
Protbction of Women and Chii<drbn.
To the Honorable^ the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of-^
The increasing and alarming frequency of assaults upon women, the
frightful indignities to which even little girls are subject, and the corrupt-
ing of boys, have become the shame of our boasted civilization.
We believe that the statutes of do not meet the demands of that
newly awakened public sentiment which requires better legal protection
for womanhood and childhood ;
Therefore we, the undersigned citizens of , County of , and
State of , pray you to enact further provision for the protection of
women and children. And we call attention to the disgraceful lEact that
protection of the person is not placed by our laws upon so high a plane as
protection of the purse.
Betrayer and Betrayed, 425 ,
The first time the thought ever came to me that a man could
be untrue to a woman was when on entering my teens I read a
story in the Advocate of Moral Reform, entitled, '*The Betrayer
and the Betrayed.'* It haunted me more than any story in all
my youth, except ** Uncle Tom's Cabin." It was brief but it
was tragic, and the lovely young girl was left at the close in a
madhouse, while of the man, I remember this sentence, **I see
him often, passing to and fro in his elegant carriage. Beside him
sits his wedded wife, around him are his happy children, and he
is a candidate for the state legislature.'* As I used to think over
the situation there came a deep, honest purpose in my inmost
spirit always to stand by women in every circumstance. I was
thirty years of age before I had the opportunity. I then found
that a Swede girl, Bertha by name, who had served us several
years, who seemed to be an earnest Christian, to whom we were
all attached, was very sorrowful and strange. Erelong, she told
us that a handsome young S^vede who was then a student in our
Theological Seminary and highly thought of, who had been her
boyish lover and for whose sake she had come to this country, had
betrayed her, and in my own house, too. Instead of driving her
from our door, I sent for this young man, talked the whole matter
over with him, and urged him to allow me that very evening to
send for a justice of the peace and put a legal stamp upon what
was already true. I told him he might then go his way, if he
desired to do so, and we would keep Bertha. But he stoutly
declined to do anything of the sort. Whereupon I walked over
to the home of the President of Garrett Biblical Institute, my
good friend, Dr. Bannister, and told him the situation. A faculty
meeting was held the next morning, and by noon the young man
had been ousted, under ban of professors and students, and went
his lonely way to the depot, nothing having been heard of him
since. We kept Bertha, and she was a few years later happily
married to an honorable countr>'man of hers. ** He is thrice
armed who hath his quarrel jusf
When the great International Council of Women was held
in Washington, D. C, in 1888, at the women's meeting to discuss
Social Purity work, it fell to my lot to speak as follows :
Now, in closing this majs^nificent meeting, a poor little Protestant nun
comes before you, and feels that she hasn't much right to talk to you ; feels
426 Men's Self-respect vs. Women's,
that the high and solemn mysteries that have been spoken of in such varied
tone and manner to-day, are those that she ought not to try to deal with;
feels more than ever the inadequacy of one whose life has been set apart
from the sacred tie of home, to utter her thought on themes like these.
While the ladies have spoken so bravely or so tenderly, on this historic
morning, my thoughts have been at work. I have seemed to see those two
who went forth hand in hand from Eden on the saddest of all mornings,
afler the fall, and I have said to myself many times, " Oh, if those close
clasped hands had never parted company, our poor world had been to-day the
place God wants to see it, and the place Christ came to make it*' I have
said to m3rself many times, " Would that the other half the audience were
here ! *' This is only half the circle ; we ought to have had it bnilded out
into completeness. So I have only to offer you the thought, that every
objection brought forward here to-day, every philosophical statement made,
is based upon the fact that out of the aggregadon of men by themselves
always comes harm ; out of the coming of men and women both into true,
and noble, and high conditions, side by side, always comes good. Where is
it that you have this curse most deeply rooted and most apologized for by
men ? In the camps of the soldiery. What would woman's coming forward
in government tend to bring about? The reign of peace. The mother
heart that can not be legislated in and can not be legislated out would say :
''I will not give my sons to be butchered in great battles,'* and we would
have international arbitration.
My noble friend, Mrs. Hoffman, who spoke so bravely, said : "Until
woman has complete industrial freedom, until woman has the purse jointly in
her hand, marriage will never be the thing we want to see it** This blessed
change is involved in all the magnificent enterprises represented by the
women who stand on this platform, while doubtless you who are in the audi-
ence are true to this emancipation in your own circles. So that my heart is
full of hope, and, out of the long savagery and darkness and crime, I see
humanity coming up into the brightness and beauty of a new civilization. I
see the noblest men of the world's foremost race, the Anglo-Saxons, who
made this audience possible, the men who have worked side by side with
us, to bring about these great conditions, placing upon woman's brow above
the wreath of Venus the helmet of Minerva and leaiiiiig forward the fair
divinities who preside over their homes to help them make a new and nobler
government
There is nothing on this earth that I tried more earnestly to instill into
my girls* hearts, when I was teaching, than a genuine womanly self-respect.
I doubt if we have this ourselves as the women of the future will. Why, I
pass signs on the street, I pass pictures of women in the cigar-stores and
saloons, that, if we were as self-respectful as we ought to be, could n*t stay
there over night ; I see fair women in beautiful robes walking on the
streets, or hear of them in fine social surroundings, with a man at their side
puffing tobacco smoke into their faces and eyes, and I say that is a survival
of past savagery and debasement and of the immolation of women. If
there is anything on earth I covet that pertains to men it is their self-respect
Man is King and Woman Courtier. 427
No man would be seen with a woman with the faintest taint or tinge of
tobacco about her ; no man would allow himself to enter into marriage with
a woman of known habits of drinking or impurity ; it is n't thinkable.
When I see women coming out before men, or when I know they do^I do
not see them, they are not women with whom I am socially acquainted —
revealing the sacredness of the pure symbol and badge of their womanly
nature, coming out dressed so improperly that the joke, the jest, and jibe,
are uttered in the dressing-room where young men smoke cigars and hobnob
together, I could weep my life out that a woman thus api)earB, borrowing
that style from women the hem of whose garments she would be ashamed
to touch. Let us have self-respect. Let us be clothed with the raiment of
purity that ought to guard the virgin, the mother and the wife.
When we assemble socially and allow scenes to be put before us that are
indecorous and shameful, we have passed away from the purity and self-
respect that must and shall characterize the women of the future. Oh,
friends, these things are deep in every thoughtful woman's heart ! Girls
come and ask me, "Would you dance round dances?" Dear little sister,
no ; don't dance a round dance. The women of the future will not do it.
I walked the aisles of the picture galleries of Europe. I saw the men in
those g^at historic paintings, with their ear-rings, and their fingers covered
with rings, their necks bedecked with ruffles, their forms dressed in all the
hues that the peacock and rainbow could supply. They were nothing but
an exhibition of sycophants, a collection of courtiers. That was the time
when King Louis XIV. said : "The state, it is I ! "
Woman is courtier and man is king to-day, in the sacred realm of gov-
ernment But when a woman shall be able to say to the state, " I am part
of you, just as much as anything that breathes " ; when she shall say, " lam
part of society ; I am part of industrial values, I am part of everything that
a man values ; everything that a man's brain loves to think about in philos-
ophy, in philanthropy, in history, or science," then the calm equipoise of
human forces shall come ; and for that I would like to live ; for that I would
like to speak. Persons who know more about it than I, tell me that women
who give their lives to shame, women who are on the street-comers with
their invitations at night, are women who have, from the very look of the
face and configuration of the head, the symbols and emblems of no self-
respect. The superior, queenly woman is the one who has most self respect,
who sees its application to everything around her, and who makes every man
feel that he would as soon die as offer her an insult
The Arabs love to say of a pure man that he is **a brother of girls."
The brotherly man will come forward to meet and respond to the sisterly
woman. When we are not toys, when we are not dolls, when we stand
before them royal, crowned with heart of love and brain of fire, then shall
come the new day. I ignore nothing that has been said. I am in hearty
S)rmpathy with all. But, in my own thought, this is the key-note that must
be struck. God grant that we may be so loving and so gentle in it all, that
there shall be no vanity, no pride. Evermore the grandest natures are the
humblest
428 Mrs, Laura Ormiston Chant.
Let me speak a word of hope. I have heard this statement from a
woman who has just come from Germany, a woman for 3rear8 a student in the
universities. She says the professors* wives tell her that the new science has
developed this thought, and that professors are saying to their young men :
" If you want a scintillating brain, if you want magnificent power of imag-
ination, conserve every force, be as chaste as your sister is, and put your
power into the brain that throbs on like an untired engine." I do not know
how you feel, but I want to take by the hand this woman who has spoken
so nobly to us, this sweet-faced and sweet-voiced English woman, Mrs. Laura
Ormiston Chantt who, last night when all of us were asleep, went out into
the holiness of moonlight and saw that our capital was not so bad as Lon-
don ; this woman who went to see the little girl that had n't been taught and
had n't been helped, and who came from her country home and was getting
entangled in the meshes of this great Babylon. God bless you, Mrs. Chant,
you are welcome to America. I thought, while you were speaking, of what
our Whittier said of our two countries : *' Unknown to other rivalries than
of the mild humanities and gracious interchange of good."
We women are clasping hands. We do not know how much it means.
I have sought this woman from over the water. I wanted her to come here
with her large experience in work. I have not seeu so many sorrowful
girls as she has, and don't know how to reach them, only in a general way ;
and I have asked her if she will stay and teach us, and she says she will.
Are you not glad ? So understand that the National Woman's Christian
Temperance Union is going to keep Mrs. Chant here and send her about
with her sweet evangelism. Now I think, dear friends, that we have cer-
tainly this morning boxed the compass of the woman movement, for we
have talked purely and sacredly together of the White Cross and the
White Shield.
No department of work was ever developed so rapidly as this.
The women's hearts were ready for it. White Cross and White
Shield pledges and literature, leaflets for mothers' meetings, in-
deed, for every phase of the Social Purity work, are ordered in
constantly increasing numbers. The White Shield work is espe-
cially for women. Industrial homes for women are being founded
by the state in response to our petitions, and a movement is now
on foot to establish homes for adults who are physically, mentally
or morally incapable, by reason of irremediable defects. We be-
lieve that the harm this large class (including hereditary drunk-
ards) does to society makes it an unquestionable economy to
detain them in institutions for the purpose, and render them self-
supporting. ** Do thyself no harm ' ' would then be a motto alike
applicable to these unfortunates and to the state.
It is hoped that this cau.sc will b^* prjsc itcd carefully and
"In the Beanty of the Lilies." 429
wisely to all bodies of Christian, educational, and philanthropic
workers in everj' part of the land. This will best be done under
the auspices of the state or local superintendent of the depart-
ment in person or by letter : or often, better still, by some dele-
gate who has a right to the floor and will present and support a
suitable resolution of sympathy and cooperation.
White Cross work contemplates a direct appeal to the chivalry
of men : that they shall join this holy crusade by a personal pledge
of purity and helpfulness : that boys shall early learn the sacred
meaning of the Wbite Cross and that the generous knights of this
newest and most noble chivalry shall lead Humanity's sweet
and solemn song.
" In the beanty of the lilies
Chriat was bom acroas the sea.
With a glory in His t>osom
Thattransfignrea yotx and me.
Aa He died to make men holy.
Let ns live to make men free.
While God ia marching on."
CHAPTER VI.
THE WORLD'S W. C. T. U.
White light includes all the prismatic colors, so the white
ribbon stands for all phases of reform, and there is no phase
which the drink curse has not rendered necessary. Our emblem
holds within itself the colors of all nations and stands for universal
purity and patriotism, universal prohibition and philanthropy,
and universal peace. For ** hearts are near, though hands are
far," and women's hands and hearts all round the world will be
tmited by our snowy badge ere another generation passes out of
sight. There is now no speech or language where its voice is
not heard.
One secret of the success that has from the first attended our
great society, is that it always goes on '* lengthening its cords
and strengthening its stakes.''
When I was organizing on the Pacific Coast in 1883, ^ saw
the opium curse in San Francisco alongside the alcoholic curse,
introduced the W. C. T. U. into British Columbia, was urged to
visit the Sandwieh Islands, go to Japan and China, and was so
impressed by the outreaching of other nations toward our society
and their need of us, that I proposed in my annual address at
Detroit, **the appointment of a commission to report the next
year plans for the organization of a World's W. C. T. U." This
was done, and the general officers of our national society have
from that time to the present been leaders in this enterprise.
We proceeded at once to send out Mrs. Mary Clement Leavitt,
who started a work in the Sandwich Islands which promises to
revolutionize sentiment, and make that country in favor of our
principles and methods. Mrs. Dr. Whitney, of Honolulu, is
president of the white ribbon societies there.
Mrs. Leavitt was supplied with money for her voyage to
Australia by the temperance friends at the Sandwich Islands!
(430)
" Our White Ribbon Stanley.'' 431
and left for New Zealand in January, 1884- She there traversed
a territory as gpreat as from Maine to Florida, and from the Alle-
ghany Mountains to the sea, forming ten good, strong unions,
with Mrs. Judge Ward, of Christchurch, at their head. She
then crossed one thousand one hundred and thirty miles of sea
to reach the continent of Australia, where she steadily worked
on in the Provinces of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria,
and Tasmania (formerly called Van Diemen's I^and), and re-
mained until the next auttunn, when she started for Japan.
We must remember that Australia is one half as large as
South America, being about two thousand, six hundred miles
long, by two thousand in width. Like New Zealand, it is set-
tled by English people, and governed partly by officers sent to
represent the British Crown, partly by local legislatures. It is a
strange and beautiful country, with climate, flora and fauna
unlike those of any other part of the world. It seems like the
best kind of a fairy story that our W. C. T. U- should be accli-
mated there, for Mrs. Leavitt writes, ** These people are thor-
ough ; when they take the white ribbon, they take it to keep
and to wear,''
Perhaps they might teach us a lesson in this silent preaching
of temperance by the *' little badge of snow.*' Mrs. Leavitt's
letters in TTie Union Signal have kept our great constituency
informed of all her movements.
In Japan her success was so great that a leading missionary
wrote home to his church paper, declaring that what Commo-
dore Perry's visit was to the commerce, Mrs. Leavitt's has been
to the women of Japan. She thoroughly established the W. C.
T. U. in that bright morning-land of enthusiasm and hope;
worked to the same end in the less fertile soil of China and of
India ; traversed Ceylon, which has, thus far, sent more names
to the World's petition than any other country; was received in
Madagascar with enthusiasm, and has now plunged into Africa.
She is our white ribbon Stanley, not one whit less persistent and
valorous than the great explorer. In one more year this intrepid
Boston woman will have reached the golden number, seven, in
her triumphal march, and will, I trust, receive such a reception as
has not yet been accorded to a returning traveler — not even to a
successful politician ! We have never heard a criticism on her
432 Our British Cousins.
conduct, methods, or words, since she went forth, empty-handed
and alone. Her world-wide misvsion has been largely self-support-
ing, and her success has led to the sending out of Miss J. A.
Ackerman, of California, to follow the route so patiently laid
down, for all future comers. Miss Charlotte Gray has also vis-
ited Switzerland and is now organizing for us in Norway. Mrs.
Mary B. Willard is superintendent of our Press Department. Mrs.
Hannah Whitall Smith, of Bible Readings ; Mrs. Mary H.
Hunt, of Scientific Temperance ; Mrs. Bishop Newman, of Ameri-
can Petitions ; Mrs. Josephine R. Nichols, of World*s Exposi-
tions. Mrs. Nichols was brilliantly successful in representing us
at the New Orleans Expositions, hence her embassy to Paris in
the spring of 1889 is full of promise for our cause.
But the two most powerful auxiliaries of the World's W. C.
T. U-, aside from our own beloved *' National,*' the mother of
them all (as the Crusade was our mother), have not yet been
named.
As I have recently become President of the World's W. C.
T. U., let me epitomize the history of these sister societies bom,
official reports and personal knowledge :
The British Women's Temperance Association was founded
in 1876, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and was the outcome of an in-
spiration caught by Mrs. Margaret Parker, from the American
* * Crusaders. ' ' The secretary thus sketches its origin : ' * One of the
first aggressive movements was in the town of Dundee, Scotland.
A number of earnest women resolved to petition the magistrate
to reduce the number of public houses for the sale of intoxicating
drinks. Their petition was in the name of the wives, mothers,
and sisters, and was signed by upwards of nine thousand of
them. * * * The result was that next day not a single new
license was given, and many were withdrawn. Thus commenced
the first Women's Temperance Prayer Union ; and first one town
and village and then another followed the example of Dundee in
establishing Women's Temperance Unions, until nearly every
town was doing something, and many Friendly Inns or British
Workman's Public Houses were planted.
** Still there was no attempt at national organization, although
it had been a cherished thought in many hearts. Mrs. Margaret
Parker, who had been foremost in the Dundee deputation, was
Canadian While Ribboners, 433
in America afterward, and saw the efficient Woman's Christian
Temperance Union there, and feeling assured that the time had
come for a similar union in Great Britain, she ventured to issue a
call, which was nobly responded to. A conference of about one
hundred and fifty ladies, including influential delegates from
various parts of the Kingdom, assembled in the Central Hall,
Newcastle-on-Tyne, on Friday morning, April 21, 1876. On the
motion of Mrs. Lucas, Mrs. Parker, of Dundee, was called to the
chair. After singing, reading the Scripture and prayer, Mrs.
Parker, in opening the proceedings, said : ** In accordance with
the earnestly expressed wish of the Woman's Christian Temper-
ance Union of America, and the firm conviction in our own minds
that God has already prepared the hearts of Christian women
throughout the land to do a great work for Him in the cause of
temperance, this convention has been called. * * * -y^g
believe that there is such a power in the influence of women as,
if it were exerted aright, would shake the kingdom to its center
on this important subject, and the country is in perishing need
of it ! " From this time the society has gorfe straight on, and
now has a large number of auxiliaries.
Mrs. Margaret Bright Lucas, who for years has stood at the
head of this society, is, with Mrs. Mary B. Willard and Miss
Charlotte Gray, of Antwerp, a member of the International Tem-
perance Association of men and women, organized in August,
1885. By my request, the commission of the World's W. C. T. U.
chose Mrs. Lucas as first president of that society, it being desired
to show all honor to the mother country in this new enterprise,
and to enlist our British cousins to the utmost as its active friends.
This gifted gentlewoman is the youngest child of Honorable
Jacob Bright, and sister of John Bright, the great English Com-
moner. Although over seventy years of age, with her children
long ago settled in life, Mrs. Lucas travels and organizes
constantly, enlisting her countrywomen wherever she goes.
We have also a bright young ally across the border — the
Dominion W. C. T. U., with provincial auxiliaries in British
Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
Its history is one of heroism. Our delegates to Cincinnati
W. C. T. U. Convention in 1875, met there Mrs. Letitia Youmans,
the earliest white ribbon pioneer in Canada. She came to learn
28
434 The WorUTs Petition,
our methods and we were in turn astonished and delighted by
her power upon the platform. Her **Haman's License" and
*' Nehemiah Building the Walls '* are addresses known through-
out the country as unrivaled Bible expositions of great reform.
The British temperance women publish an official organ,
The British Women's Temperance Journal^ and the Canadians
have one also. Both exchange with The Union Signal, whose
readers skim the cream of the temperance world each week. Can-
ada's paper is The Women* s Journal, and is edited by Mrs. Addie
Chisholm, of Ottawa, President W. C. T. U. of Ontario, and one
of the ablest women in our ranks anywhere. Canada women
fearlessly take advance positions. The Scott Act is covering
their land with prohibition ; municipal suffrage for women is
helping solve the problem of their great cities.
In Toronto a temperance mayor was elected by seventeen
hundred majority, thanks to the combined votes of the women
and the workingmen. We must look well to our laurels, or our
allies of the maple leaf will be first at the goal of prohibition.
Let us clasp hands in the wide sisterhood of the World's
W. C. T. U., learning its motto — '^ For God, and Home, and
Every Land, " wearing our knots of white ribbon, observing the
noontide hour of prayer, working steadily for the overthrow of
the use and sale of alcoholics and narcotics the world around,
and remembering the watch-words. Prevention, Education, Evan-
gelization, Purification, Prohibition,
Let us also circulate fi-om house to house this the World's
Petition to all nations :
Honored Rulers, Representatives and Brothers:
We, your petitioners, although belonging to the physically weaker sex,
are strong of heart to love our Homes, our Native Land and the world's
family of Nations. We know that when the brain of man is clear, his heart
is kind, his home is happy, his country prosperous, and the world grows
friendly. But we know that alcoholic stimulants and opium, which craze
and cloud the brain, make misery for men and all the world, and most of
all for us and for our children. We know these stimulants and opiates are
forced by treaty upon populations either ignorant or unwilling, and sold
under legal guarantees which make the governments partners in the traffic
by accepting as revenue a portion of its profits. We have no power to pre-
vent this great iniquity beneath which the whole world groans and staggers,
but you have the power to cleanse the flags of every clime from the stain of
their complicity with this unmingled curse. We, therefore, come to yon
Petitions are the Temperance Sun-glass. 435
with the united voices of representative women from every civilis^ nation
under the sun, beseeching you to strip away the safeguard and sanctions of
the law from the drink traffic and the opium trade, and to protect our homes
by the total prohibition of this twofold cvu^e of civilization throughout all
the territory over which your government extends.
Names of Women. \ Nationality,
Mrs. Mary A. Woodbridge, Ravenna, Ohio, is American Sec-
retary of the World's W. C. T. U., and is doing earnest work for
the petition, which will not be presented until we have two
million signatures gathered up from all nations of the world.
It is translated into the language of every civilized nation, and
is to be circulated in every country. The entire list of names
secured will be presented to each government. Thus the Amer-
ican Congress will be petitioned to abolish the liquor traffic in
America by women in Great Britain, Australia, Japan, etc. The
same will be true of the Dominion of Canada. The British Par-
liament will, in like manner, be petitioned to abolish the alcohol
traffic and the opium trade by women from America, and all over
the world. Indeed, the first thought of this petition came to the
president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the
United States, when reading an English book about the opium
trade in India and China. To carry out this idea, an organized
movement seemed necessary, that the women of the whole worlds
immeasurably cursed as they are by the results of these gigantic
evils, might unitedly appeal to the men of the world, convened in
all its great legislative Assemblies, and represented by its Poten-
tates, to protect and deliver them.
There is a vast amount of righteous sentiment on the sub-
jects of temperance and social purity that is scattered, and is,
therefore, comparatively powerless. It needs a standard around
which to rally ; a focus for its scattered rays ; and the gpreat peti-
tion supplies this need. Besides all this, the reflex influence of
the petition as an educational force upon the people will be of
immeasurable value. It will create or confirm the arrest of
thought in a million heads, and the arrest of conviction in a
million hearts. It will be, in effect, a muster-roll for our ^rmy,
and those who circulate it will be virtually recruiting officers in
everybody's war. Their words of sweet reasonableness uttered
in a million ears will mightily augment the sum total of moral
436
' TV FederaHon of the World."
influeDce. The Gatling gun of pulpit, press and platform, send-
ing out our many-sided arguments and loving pleas, will gain
incalculably in directness of aim and force of impression from
the clear-cut issue furnished by the great petition. Nor will
our work prove to have been "love's labor lost," in the great
councils to which it is addressed. Nothing within the scope of
our possibilities could be so influential and commanding. What
two million of the most intelligent and forceful adults on this
planet ask for, over their own signatures, will not long be disre-
garded or denied by their representatives. This petition will be
the beginning of the end. Many years will be required in which
to work it up, and it is believed that in no way can the same
amount of effort be turned to better account in the interest of
unifying and forwarding the reforms which are of equal import-
ance to all the nations of the earth.
Far-sighted philanthropists are looking toward a time in the
distant future, when, in the words of the poet —
All modem thought and effort are tending toward this
universal federation, which it is hoped will one day control the
world's forces in the interests of peace and of every right reform.
CHAPTER VII.
THE GREATEST PARTY.
The contradiction and malignity of political debate have
long since ceased to mar the tranquility of my spirit. I will do
what I can do to mitigate the asperities of politics, believing
them to be altogether needless, and unnatural, but for myself I
have entered the region of calms and " none of these things move
me." If this work be of God, it can not be overthrown ; if it be
not, then the sooner it comes to naught, the better for humanity.
The year 1888 will always rank as having been, up to its date,
the most remarkable in the history of the Temperance Reform.
Being the year of a Presidential campaign, it was, for sufficiently
apparent reasons, the one in which politicians of the old school
would do least for prohibition ; but the presence of the new
school in politics and of women as an active power in public
affairs to a degree before undreamed of. mark it as a sort of moral
watershed. In England the Primrose League of women antag-
onizing Gladstone's policy, and the Women's Liberal League
presided over by that great statesman's wife, counting among its
officers, Jane Cobden (Richard's daughter), and devoted to Home
Rule, had already demonstrated the power of women in politics.
Meanwhile, the Prohibition party had enjoyed since 188 1, the
active cooperation of the white ribbon women, and its vote had
risen from ten thousand for Gen. Neal Dow, of Maine, as Presi-
dent (in 1880), to over one hundred and fifty-one thousand for
ex-Governor St. John, of Kansas, in 1884. The Democratic
party, led by President Cleveland, projected the tariff issue
squarely across the path of the campaign ; Republicans took it up
eagerly, distorted the revision of the tariff, which was the actual
issue, into the abolition of the tariff, to which the traditions of
(437)
43^ The Famous ' * Catnip lea ' ' Resolution,
the money-getting Yankee nation were totally opposed, and won
the battle of the ballot-box by making good temperance people
believe that they must save their country, just once more, within
the old lines of political warfare, by unblushing bribery, and by
secretly assuring the liquor element that its interests would be as
safe in Republican as in Democratic hands. In this campaign,
Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, of Iowa, went before the Republican Con-
vention with representatives of the anti-saloon association, and
asked for a temperance plank. The report of the Committee on
Resolutions contained no reference to this subject, and its reaffir-
mation of its previous platform served to leave the infamous '* Ras-
ter Resolution " in full force. Subsequently, on the night of the
adjournment, the following resolution was hurried through under
circumstances proving to fair-minded lookers-on that it was but a
sop in the form of a subterfuge to the prohibition Cerberus :
Resolved^ That the first concern of all good government is the yirtne
and sobriety of the people and the purity of the home. The Republican
party cordially sympathizes with all wise and well-directed efforts for the
promotion of temperance and morality.
Concerning this resolution, the liquor men's leaders and
newspapers declared that it was ** no stronger than the brewers
themselves had adopted ; '* was no hindrance to their remaining
in the Republican fold, since it was agpreed to by their chie& at
the convention before being offered, and was declared by the
doughty Sheridan Shook, a notable New York liquor politician,
to be only a little harmless catnip tea for the temperance ele-
ment. But upon this basis, as well as because of their supposed
devotion to **the heart side of the tariff question, " — ^whatever
that may be — Mrs. Foster called upon the women of the nation
to rally to ** the party of great moral ideas. " She was elected
by the Republican National Campaign Committee, Chairman of
the Women's National Republican Committee, which, like the
former, had its headquarters in New York City, and sent out
literature in which the tariff, not temperance, had the right of
way. Though in other years an advocate of prohibition and
denouncer of high-license, she vigorously championed the high-
license campaign of Hon. Warner Miller, in New York state, and
fought the Prohibition party with a vehemence worthy a better
cause. This was the first time that women had ever been recog-
The Prohibitum Party Convention, 439
nized as helpers by either of the great parties, and shows the
gathering force of the great woman movement in America as
everywhere. No doubt the attitude of the Prohibition party,
which had from the first recognized women as integral forces in
its organization and which had for many years given them a
place upon its National Committee, and invited them as dele-
gates to all of its conventions, did much to pioneer the way foi
this surprising new departure.
The success of Mrs. Foster's effort to organize Republican
Clubs of women was not conspicuous, but, chiefly through her
efforts, no doubt, some clubs were formed, women participated in
the campaign as speakers, — notably Anna Dickinson and Mrs.
Foster, women escorted speakers, paraded on foot in processions,
and in several instances occupied the ancient and honorable
place always heretofore accorded to the brass band.
Democratic women were hardly heard from, except as occa-
sional wearers of the * ' red, red rose * * or wavers of the bright
bandana. Women appeared before every one of the national
conventions where a president was to be nominated, and asked
that an equal suffrage plank be placed in their platforms. This
was done by the Prohibition and by one wing of the Labor party,
an educational test being attached to the prohibition plank. It
goes without saying, that women were out in force at the Prohi-
bition party convention, held May 30, at Indianapolis in Tomlin-
son Hall. Over a thousand delegates were present, of whom
about one hundred were of the steadfast sex.
Every state, except South Carolina and Louisiana, and all
the territories but four — Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, and Wyom-
ing— were represented. It was a gathering of the home-folk, but
included nearly every leading nationality.
Not a taint of tobacco smoke was in the corridors ; not a
breath betrayed the fumes of alcohol. Clear-eyed, kind-faced,
well-dressed, these men and women were familiar with the inside
of the school-house, the church, the home, but not with that of
the saloon.
Promptly at 10:00 o'clock A. m., the manly form of Samuel
Dickie, chairman of the National Committee, was seen upon the
elegantly decorated platform, and he called the other members of
the committee and the National Officers of the Woman's Christian
44^ Gen. Clinton B. Fisk Nominated.
Temperance Union to the front, amid great applause. Then
James Black, of Pennsylvania, the party's first candidate for pres-
ident, John Russell, of Michigan, its founder, John P. St. John,
its last candidate, and Neal Dow, the father of prohibition, stood
in line on the platform, amid the hurrahs of the convention.
** America ** was sung, and Rev. Sam Small, of Georgia, led in
prayer. In a brief, but happy speech, Professor Dickie congratu-
lated the party on its steady growth, proposing that it should
make a coffin of ballot-boxes, weave a shroud from ballots, and
bury the saloon in the ** bloody chasm.*' Rev. Mr. Delano, of
Connecticut, was made temporary chairman. He said the Dem-
ocratic party was an interrogation point, ** What are you going
to do about it ?' ' The Republican was an exclamation point, * * A
tear on the end of its nose,*' *' Alas ! Oh !** But the Prohibition
party was a period, ** We'll put a stop to it."
Gen. Clinton B. Fisk, of New York, was nominated for the
presidency, amid gpreat enthusiasm, and Rev. Dr. John A. Brooks,
the great temperance leader of Missouri, was nominated for vice-
president. Col. George W. Bain, of Kentucky, and Rev. Sam
Small, of Georgia, were also nominated by several delegations
for vice-president, but insisted upon withdrawing their names.
Thirty thousand dollars were subscribed for campaign purposes.
The convention was an immense success every way. Rev.
Dr. John Bascom, ex-president of Wisconsin University, was a
delegate ; also Father Mahoney, a Catholic priest of Minnesota,
Professor Scomp of Oxford University, Georgia, with Bishop
Turner, of Georgia, Rev. Mr. Hector, of California, and Rev. Mr.
Grandison, of Georgia — three wonderfully gifted colored men.
A resolution urging scientific temperance instruction in the
public schools was adopted, also one insisting on the rights of the
colored man. The latter was introduced by Mr. Grandison, a
representative of Clark University, Atlanta, seconded by Rev.
Sam Small, and adopted unanimously.
Prof. Samuel Dickie was re-elected chairman.
A committee of ten, with Chairman Dickie at their head,
was chosen to bear the formal announcement of the convention's
action to General Fisk. This committee included two ladies —
Mrs. Hoffman, of Missouri, and myself, and was another of the
great convention's new departures. There was fine music by the
The Anti-Suffrage Minority. 441
Silver Lake Quartette, Herbert Quartette, Nebraska Quartette
(ladies), and the **Jinglers" (mellow- voiced colored men), who
invariably brought down the house. The gavel used by ex-Gov-
ernor St. John was presented by the Kansas delegation, and was
made from a bit of the telegraph pole on which he was hung in
eflSgy in Topeka, where for two terms he had been governor,
applauded and beloved. At eleven o*clock on the second night
the great convention closed with the doxology and prayer.
There was a rare memorial exercise on Decoration Day, five
hundred soldiers of the Blue and Gray being assembled. There
was also an oratorical contest for the Demorest prize medal (pro-
hibition speeches required), and an intercollegiate contest ar-
ranged by Mr. Mills, with original speeches on the same great
theme. Thus every opportunity was utilized for awakening
public sentiment.
At every session, the hall, holding five thousand people,
was crowded. The convention outran the expectations of its
friends and followers. It was wonderfully earnest, eloquent,
devout, and it marks a new epoch in Christian civilization.
At this memorable convention a small minority, led by
Walter Thomas Mills, did its utmost to defeat the equal suffrage
plank, on the plea that ** two issues *' could not be carried at a
time, that this plank alienated the South, in general, and con-
servatives at the North, in particular, with other minor objec-
tions. This minority had agitated the subject vigorously for a
year or more, and had thus put leaders, as well as rank and file,
so thoroughly on guard, that when the vote came, only about
sixty voted to drop the plank which had been in from the first
nominating convention of the party in 1872.
Although we had a very large majority in the Committee
on Resolutions, of which I was a member, our desire to hear all
sides and reach a settlement as amicable as possible caused a
long debate, in which Rev. Sam Small, of Georgia, gallantly
declared at last his willingness to let the resolution pass, because,
as he said, "The majority has been so magnanimous that I can
not do less than bow my neck to the yoke. * *
James Black, of Pennsylvania, the Prohibition party's first
nominee for president, was chairman of the Committee on Reso-
lutions. He is a man of noble countenance, and every way
44^ The Indianapolis Piat/onH,
impressive presence. When our sub-committee, to whom the
controverted resolution was submitted (North and South, con-
servative and progpressive, all being represented in that small
midnight group of seven), had agreed upon the form, bom the
deep heart of this saintly man came the solemn words, ** Thank
God," and he bowed his head in prayer. The resolution was
his own ; he had carried one, almost identical in language,
through the first convention of the Prohibition party and, but a
few weeks earlier, through that of his own state.
When our committee filed into the great hall next day, the
gentlemen and ladies that composed it marching arm in arm
upon the platform, all felt that the hour was come when the
manhood of this rising power in American politics was to declare
decisively not only in favor of prohibition by law and prohibi-
tion by politics, but prohibition by woman's ballot, as the final
consummation of the war upon King Alcohol, the most relentless
foe of womanhood and home.
I believe history will not forget that scene. Governor St.
John, the hero of the Kansas fight for Constitutional Amend-
ment, was the central figure of the platform group, his keen, but
kindly face and military bearing being well suited to the duty
we had laid on his broad shoulders as the convention's chairman.
Around him were men and women known throughout the nation
as leaders for many a year of the Prohibition host in every contest
made and every victory won.
This was the Prohibition party's platform in 1888, upon which
there is reason to believe that in spite of defection, misrepresenta-
tion, bribery and the stolen mailing lists of the New York Voice^
three hundred thousand men took their position. In it, the word
Christian occurs perhaps for the first time in American politics :
PI^ATPORM.
The Prohibition party, in national convention assembled, acknowl-
edging Almighty God as the source of all power in government, do hereby
declare :
1. That the manufacture, importation, exportation, transportation,
and sale of alcoholic beverages should be made public crimes, and pro-
hibited as such.
2. That such prohibition miist be secured through amendments of
our national and state constitutions, enforced by adequate laws adequately
supported by administrative authority ; and to this end the organization of
the Prohibition party is imperatively demanded in state and nation*
iC
Great Moral Ideas:' 443
3. That any form of license, taxation, or regulation of the liquor traffic
is contrary to good government ; that any party which supports regulation,
license, or tax enters into alliance with such traffic, and becomes the actual
foe of the state's welfare ; and that we arraign the Republican and Demo-
cratic parties for their persistent attitude in favor of the licensed iniquity,
whereby they oppose the demand of the people for prohibition, and, through
open complicity with the liquor crime, defeat the enforcement of law.
4. For the immediate abolition of the internal revenue system whereby
oiu: national government is deriving support from our greatest national vice.
5. That, an adequate public revenue being necessary, it may properly
be raised by import duties, and by an equitable assessment upon the property
and legitimate business of the country, but import duties should be so re-
duced that no surplus shall be accumulated in the treasury, and that the
burdens of taxation shall be removed from foods, clothing, and other com-
forts and necessaries of life.
6. That the right of suffrage rests on no mere accident of race, color,
sex, or nationality, and that where, from any cause, it has been withheld
from citizens who are of suitable age and mentally and morally qualified
for the exercise of an intelligent ballot, it should be restored by the people
through the legislatures of the several states, on such educational basis at
they may deem wise.
7. That civil service appointments for all civil offices chiefly clerical
in their duties, should be based upon moral, intellectual, and physical qual-
ifications, and not upon party service or party necessity.
8. For the abolition of polygamy and the establishment of uniform
laws governing marriage and divorce.
9. For prohibiting all combinations of capital to control and to increase
the cost of products for popular consumption.
10. For the preservation and defense of the Sabbath as a civil instita*
tion, without oppressing any who religiously observe the same on any other
day than the first day of the week.
11. That arbitration is the Christian, wise, and economic method of
settling national differences, and that the same method should, by judicious
legislation, be applied to the settlement of disputes between large bodies of
employes and employers. That the abolition of the saloon would remove
burdens, moral, physical, pecuniary, and social, which now oppress labor
and rob it of its earnings, and would prove to be the wise and successful
way of promoting labor reform, and that we invite labor and capital to unite
with us for the accomplishment thereof. That monopoly in land is a wrong
to the people, and that the public land should be reserved to actual settlers,
and that men and women should receive equal wages for equal work.
12. That our immigration laws should be so enforced as to prevent the
introduction into our country of all convicts, inmates of other dependent
institutions, and all others physically incapacitated for self-support, and
that no person should have the ballot in any state who is not a citizen ol
the United States.
444 Two Haurs^ Debate.
Recognizing and declaring that prohibition of the liqnor traffic has
become the dominant issue in national politics, we invite to full party
fellowship all those who, on this one dominant issue, are with us agreed,
in the full belief that this party can and will remove sectional differences,
promote national unity, and insure the best welfare of our entire land.
The opening resolution was listened to with devout serious-
ness, and was adopted by a rising vote, without debate.
The prohibition resolution was received with hearty but not
prolonged applause. We were there as the sequel of its fore-
gone conclusions.
The resolution declaring in favor of women^s receiving
** equal wages for equal work,'* evoked enthusiasm ; it was rapt-
urously cheered ; all felt that it was like the drops that precede
the plentiful shower. Toward the close came the crucial test in
the famous ** sixth resolution.'* Its reading ** brought down the
house " with roars of applause and brought up the house again,
hundreds rising to their feet with cheer upon cheer of approba-
tion. It was then voted to debate the question two hours, and
the clear voice of Professor Dickie, chairman of the National
Committee, was heard suggesting that leaders should be chosen
on either side to make the arg^uments. Nobody doubted where
he stood whose pure life had delivered him from the worship of
physical force ; whose first vote and every ballot since then had
been cast for the Prohibition candidates, and who, in the call
issued for this very convention, had stated that ** a fair represen-
tation of women delegates was desirable.*' But the rank and
file desired to whack for themselves the ball now set in motion ;
hence Professor Dickie's plan was voted down, and free lances
were tilted with great vigor from floor and platform, scores at a
time seeking to obtain the floor up to the final vote. A minority
of one, in the person of John M. Olin, of Wisconsin, reported
against the resolution. This gentlemen spoke ably from his point
of view, as did Walter Thomas Mills, T. C. Richmond and our
good Neal Dow. All of them were believers in equal sufifrage
but thought this was not the time to declare for it. General Dow
saying, * * After we secure prohibition, we will give the ballot to our
faithful allies." But it fell to my lot to remind these good
brothers that though Maine had rejoiced in prohibition for over
forty years, it last winter voted down a proposition to enfranchise
^^ No Sex in Citizenship,'** 445
women ; that we have what we take the most pains for, and
unless we take especial pains to secure the ballot for woman, she
will never be armed and equipped as the law directs, for the
home protection fight where **the g^uns are ballots and the bul-
lets are ideas.'* With some such points as these, I closed the
debate, and Sam Small came forward, took my hand and spoke in
his eloquent way, saying, in effect, that ** as we had added the
educational test, he would stand with us.'* The South had been
most generous from the beginning, showing a spirit of forbear-
ance and good-will for which the women of that convention can
never be too grateful. If its delegates had not with practical
unanimity favored our cause, I fear we might have lost it on that
most eventful day ever known to woman's annals of enfranchise-
ment. George W. Bain made one of his most brilliant speeches,
in our favor, and other gifted Southerners proved that with them
the chivalry of justice outranked that of compliment. **Who
would be free, himself must strike the blow," is a truth that
received new confirmation in this memorable debate, where not one
woman's voice or vote was given against the famous resolution.
When the count came, Secretary CranfiU announced less
than thirty negatives, but Walter Thomas Mills claimed sixty,
and Chairman St. John, in his humorous way, said, **Iyet it be
as he says." Then came the climax of the convention, when
flags waved, wooden "cranks " humorously creaked when turned
by live ones, state delegatioqp hoisted aloft their banners, wom-
en's white handkerchiefs were like a wind-blown argosy, and
with shouts of hallelujah, men pointed to the significant motto
above the platform, where the loyal white ribboners of Indiana
had flung their pennon forth, ^^ No sex in citizenship,^^ They
knew the Supreme Court had said there was none, but they knew
also that those cannot really be citizens who have no voice in
making the laws they must obey.
At the close of this session, I received what is called in pop-
ular American parlance, "an ovation"; with half a score of
strong men's hands stretched toward me at a time, I hardly knew
which one to grasp, while their kind voices said over and over
again, " You ought to be a happy woman ; " " This is the Gos-
pel's triumph;" **I wish your old mother had seen this;"
** Hurrah for our side !" and other exclamations of rejoicing.
44^ Reminiscence of lUinois IV, C, T. U.
Now and then I would say, ** My brother, what led you to vote
for us ? ** The answers were all tributes to home's steadfast influ-
ence : ** Oh, I was bom a suflfragist,** said one ; ** Women must
help us save the nation if it's ever saved "; ** My wife educated
me up to this"; and repeatedly young voters answered, **Why
should n*t we ? I don't forget that my mother is a woman ! **
Slipping away with those good sisters, Anna Gordon and
Anna Shaw, who shared with me Mrs. May Wright Sewall's
hospitalities, I could but think, as we walked on in silence, of
that other day in Dixon, 111., in the year 1875, at the second ses-
sion of the Illinois W. C. T. U., when I was in the second year
of my temperance work. I remembered writing a declaration to
/ this effect : ** Resolved, That since woman is the greatest sufferer
■ from the rum curse, she ought to have power to close the
dram-shop door over against her home." I remembered kneel-
• ing in prayer with my friend and room-mate, Mrs. Louise S.
Rounds, who agreed to support me in this first attempt ; then
going over to the convention and getting this resolution offered,
I seemed to hear once more the quiet emphasis of the presiding
oflScer, as she said, ** What will you do with this woman suffi^ge
resolution ? ' ' and the decisive tones of the treasurer as she said,
** I move we lay it on the table." I almost felt once more the
painful heartbeats of suspense, and the joyful surprise when no
one seconded the motion ; then the debate, when a brave voice —
I wish I could know whose — broke pie stillness with, ** I move it
be adopted." I remembered the broken words in which I there-
upon asked the women of the prairies that if they did not
speak out, who would ? Surely not the conservative East, the
silent South, the unorganized Northwest. We all knew that
woman was the liquor traffic's natural enemy. In Illinois the
law said the municipal officers might license or not '* in their dis-
cretion ' ' ; men were not discreet in this matter, as was proved by
saloons on every hand, but women would be. Why not let them
help good men elect oflficers who would truly represent the major-
ity, and not saddle the saloon upon our people with its outcome
of three thousand lunatics let loose each day upon defenseless
homes ? I told them that I had no home in that word's highest
and most sacred sense, and never should have in this world,
though I hoped to in a better, and that if I could brave an
The Blue and Gray, 447
adverse public opinion for the sake of other women's homes,
surely they could do so for the sake of their own. These words I
could hardly speak for the ache in heart and throat, and I saw
tears in many a gentle woman's eyes as I made my simple plea.
When the vote came I think there was not one dissenting voice —
if there were such I can not now recall them.
And thus the good ship Illinois swung from her moorings
and put out to sea for a long and stormy voyage.
I thought, too, on that blessed day at Indianapolis, of the
ringing words of Mrs. Lide Meriwether, of Tennessee :
"She is launched on the wave, the good ship Prohibition !
The wave of humanity, boundless and free.''
I had been invited by Chairman Dickie to make a Decora-
tion Day speech before the ** Army of Blue and Gray,*' as repre-
sented at this Convention. Here follows the substance of this
address:
THB GREATEST PARTY.
Here side by side sit the Blue and Gray. No other than the Prohibition
party ever dared to be so great as to ordain a scene like this. I speak the
words of truth and — soberness.
What a circle we have here ! Sweep the compasses of thought through
its circumfeience. Prohibition, first of all, the fixed point whence we cal-
culate all others. The Blue and the Gray, the workingmen, the women.
Inclosed and shielded by this circle is the home — that goes without saying ;
and beyond its shining curve is the saloon, out-matched, out-witted, and out-
voted, which, in a republic, is best of all. For the fiat of the greatest party
has gone forth, and we are here simply to set our seals to it ; no saloon in
politics or law, no sectionalism in law or politics, no sex in citizenship, but
liberty, equality, fraternity in politics and law, now and for evermore.
This is our platform in a nutshell, and it is a platform of four ideas, at
least.
When, in all history, were such matchless issues espoused by such mag-
nanimous men ?
There are two other parties ; big, but not great ; multitudinous, not mas-
terful. Their tissue is adipose, not muscular. The issues of the one are
made literally out of whole cloth, of all-wool tariff, warranted to wash in yet
one more campaign, and the ensanguined shirt warranted never to be washed
at all. Those of the other are spoils and Bourbonism. They will soon rally
their respective clans to their stereotyped, old-fashioned conventions in Chi-
cago and St. Louis, prepared to fight, bleed, and die for their country and
its offices once more. Not a woman will be in their delegations. A woman
might displace some man. Not a word about the home. No decisive utter-
Ance as to the greatest of our national perils.
443 ** Let Us Have Peace.
M
Probably women would not attend these conventions, even were their
presence sought. They certainly could not hold their oym at the bar of the
saloon, while in the greatest party they are only required to hold their own
at the bar of public opinion.
Meanwhile, as if to set before these brethren a loftier example, the great-
est party welcomes here the home- folks to equal opportunities and honors,
and rallies here a remnant of the noble veterans who have learned that it is
good to forgive, best to forget, attesting by this splendid and fraternal object-
lesson that one party spells "nation " with the tallest kind of a capital **N*'
— one that indeed includes ''th^ people of these United States " — and that
the Blue and the Gray are to us emblems of nothing less than the blue sky
that bends its tender arch above us all, and the gray ocean that enfolds one
country and one flag.
" Angels look downward from the skies
Upon no holier ground,
Than where defeated valor lies
By generous foemen crowned."
How Grant would have rejoiced to look upon a scene like this^he whose
most memorable words were, *' Let us have peace ! " by whose sick-bed sat
General Buckner of the Confederate army, and to whose recent birthday cel-
ebration rallied Fitz Hugh I^ee and other Southern braves !
The leaders of the party that was great when great Lincoln was its chief,
are pleased in these days of its fatal degeneracy to call us the "St John-
ites." He is our patron saint — Heaven bless him ! — who laid himself upon
the altar of our sacred cause, and in the flame of partisan wrath that fol-
lowed the defeat of 1884 proved to be a whole bumt-oflFering, yet I present
him to you here to-night, one of the most gallant Union soldiers, " without
the smell of fire upon his garments."
That party dare not gather Blue and Gray at its convention lest they
should spoil its ammunition and tip one chief plank of its platform in^o the
last ditch. What would it do if thus ruthlessly deprived of that time worn
utterance about " a free ballot and a fair count, " which in its long years of su-
premacy it has proved itself impotent to secure, while the greatest party, by
dividing the white vote into two hostile camps on the prohibition issue, is
opening a straight path for the black man to the polls ?
The women who uniformed their sons in Southern gray, and said, like
the Spartan mother of old, " Come ye as conquerors or come ye no more,**
arc here to-night with those other women who belted Northern swords upon
their boys in blue, with words as pitiful, as brave. The women who em-
broidered stars and stripes upon the blessed flag that symbolized their love
and faith, to-day have only gentle words for those who decked their "bonny
flag of stars and bars" with tenderness as true and faith as fervent The
greatest party seats these women side by side to-night, and we all wear our
snowy badge of peace above the hearts that hate no more, while we clasp
hands in a compact never to be broken, and solemnly declare, before high
Heaven, our equal hatred of the rum power and our equal loyalty to God
and home and native land.
** The Sword of Lee^ 449
What liath God wrought? Surely a winsome thing is the human heart
It went against the grain for us to hate each other, did it not, dear Southern
friends and allies ? Never in history was there a war involving so little per-
sonal animosity. The French by nature hate the English, and speak about
** perfidious Albion," and we know that " lands intersected by a narrow frith
abhor each other," but our great unsevered continent was meant for an un-
severed people, and " man breaks not the medal when God cuts the die.*'
One Anglo Saxon race, having one heritage of a queenly language and a
heroic history of hardships mutually borne— it was hard for us to hate each
other. The soldiers learned this first, brave and chivalric fellows, and they
helped to teach us stay-at-homes the gracious lesson of fraternity. How
often was the rude wreath of leaves placed on the grave of a Confederate by
the Union soldier who had killed and yet who had wept over him ! The
fury of the non-combatant was almost the only fury that survived Grant's
brotherly words to Lee at Appomattox.
Devoted to the stars and stripes, the sentiment of patriotism having
been, from childhood, like a fire in the bones with me, I have wept over
the flag for love of which great Stonewall Jackson and gallant Albert Sidney
Johnston died. Nor do I envy the Northern patriot who can read without
a tugging of the heart that wondrous poem by Father Ryan, the South-
em Catholic priest, about **The Sword of Lee," and I can hardly trust my-
self to repeat his requiem of the Southern flag:
** Fold that banner, for 'tis weary ;
Round its staff *tis floating dreary,
Furl it, fold it : it is best ;
For there's not a man to wave it.
And there's not a sword to save it.
And there's not one left to lave it
In the blood that heroes gave it,
And its foes now scorn and brave it ;
Furl it, hide it. let it rest.
** Purl that banner, furl it sadly ;
Once ten thousands hailed it gladly.
And ten thousands wildly, madly
Swore it should forever wave ;
Swore that foeman's sword should never
Hearts like theirs entwined dissever,
Till that flag should float forever
O'er their freedom or their grave.
** Furl that banner, softly, slowly;
Treat it gently, it is holy,
For It droops above the dead.
Touch it not, unfold it never.
Let it droop there, furled forever.
For its people's hopes are dead."
Not that I loved that flag. No, brothers. I loved the slave too well not
to desire its downfall ; but then, so many brave hearts bled for it, so many
gentle women wept, that I could be sincerely sorry for their grief, and yet
be loyal to an emancipated race and my own glorious North. When the
29
450 Nationalism as Against Sectionalism,
troops were mustered out in 1865, we little dreamed that less than ten years
later the home guards of the land would be mustered in to the war of the
crusade. God bless the crusade state, the veteran of our army!
As the sequel of that mighty movement, God's pentecost of power upon
the nations, behold the women who, only a year ago, went to the polls to
persuade men to cast their ballot for prohibition in Oregon and Texas, in
Michigan and Tennessee. If the voters of the greatest party are true to us
as we have been and will be true to them, ten years hence we will help those
who were beaten in four states that stood for constitutional prohibition in
1885, with our guns that are ballots, as we are now helping with our bullets
that are ideas.
I never expected to speak with pride about the Solid South as such, but
surely I may do this now that it is becoming solid for the " dry ticket,'* and
you who dwell there may be glad that the Northern heart is fired once
more, tliis time with the same war-cry as that which fires the Southern, and
it is " protection for our homes." That is the spell to conjure by. That is
the rallying cry of North and South, Protestant and Catliolic, of white and
black, of men and women equally. Bourbon Democrat and Radical Repub-
lican will seek in vain to stifle that swift-swelling chorus, that ** chorus of
the Union," for which great Lincoln vainly prayed in his first inaugural.
Do you not recall this marvelous concluding sentence (I quote from mem*
ory) : "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from many a sacred
hearth and patriot's grave, all over this broad land, shall once more swell the
chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the bet-
ter angel of our nature." The angel is the temperance reform, and the ful-
fillment of that prophecy we have lived to see.
The greatest party stands for nationalism as against sectionalism ; it
stands for the noblest aims and aspirations of the wage- worker as against
monopolies that dare to profane that holy word, " trust " ; it stands for the
future in politics as against the past, the home vote with an educational test
against the saloon vote with a beer-breath as its credentials ; and, best of all,
it stands for the everlasting and absolute prohibition of sin as against any al-
liance between sin and tlie government. For while the greatest party will
never hesitate to be the champions of these causes good and great, so closely
linked with its own central purposes, neither must it fail to put prohibition
by law and prohibition by politics so far in the lead that no candid man can
for a moment question the august supremacy of tliese overmastering issues.
We are firmly persuaded that the separation of the people into two distinct
armies, one voting for men who will outlaw the poison curse, and the other
for men who will legalize it, must come, and that such separation can not
come too soon. We are not here to speak harsh words of armies rallied un-
der other ensigns, but simply to declare tliat in this great emergency we can
not depend upon them. Party machinery and the ambition of party leaders
to-day stand between the people and their opportunity. We would clear the
track for prohibition. We are bound to do it. For that were we bom, and
for that came we into this world.
When I think of Lexington and Paul Revere ; when I think of Bunker
Heroes of South and North. 45'
Hill and the dark redoubt where General Warren died ; when I think of
Washington, that greatest of Southerners, upon his knees in prayer at Val-
ley Forge ; when I think of Stonewall Jackson praying before he fought ;
of Robert Lee's and Sidney Johnston's stainless shields ; when I remember
Sheridan's ride, and Sherman's march to the sea with the boys in blue be-
hind him, and Grant fighting the battle out and on to the glorious triumph
of our Northern arms, then my heart prophesies with all a patriot's grati-
tude, America will win in her bloodless war against the awful tyranny of
King Alcohol and King Gambrinus, and proud am I to have a part in it, for,
thank God, " I— I, too, am an American."
Bound together by our mutual faith in Mary T. Lathrap, of Michigan
and Sallie F. Chapin, of South Carolina; cemented by the martyr blood of
Iowa*s George B. Haddock and Mississippi's Roderick Dhu Gambrell ; made
one by the pride we feel in these grand old pioneers, John Russell, the
father of our party ; James Black, its earliest presidential candidate ; Gideon
T. Stewart and H. W. Thompson, St. John and Daniels, the heroes of a
later day and a more dreadful crisis ; Green Clay Smith and Samuel Dickie,
Hopkins and Brooks, Clinton B. Fisk and George W. Bain, and glorious old
Neal Dow, the father of prohibition for the world, sorely temperance people
of the North and South may well say each to other, " Whither thou goest I
will go ; where thou lodgest, I will lodge : thy people shall be my people,
and thy God my God. The Lord do so to me, and more, also, if aught but
death part thee and me."
Here, upon Indiana's genial soil, midway between the sections that shall
erelong be sections no more, but part of the greatest party's family circle,
gracious and great, let us say unitedly to the fire-eaters of the South on the
one side and the chasm-diggers of the North on the other :
" Oh, meaner folks of narrower souls.
Heirs of ignoble thought.
Stir not the camp-fire's blackened coals.
Blood-drenched by those who fought.
Lest out of Heaven a fire shall yet
Bear God's own vengeance forth
On those who once again would set
Discord 'twixt Soum and North."
In the spring of 1863, two great armies were encamped on either side of
the Rappahannock river, one dressed in blue and one in gray.
As twilight fell, the bands of music on the Union side began to play the
martial strains, ** Star-Spangled Banner " and " Rally 'Round the Flag,"
and this musical challenge was taken up by those on the other side, who
responded with the ** Bonnie Blue Flag " and " Away Down South in Dixie."
But after awhile it was borne in upon the soul of a single soldier in one of
those bands of music to begin a sweeter and more tender air, and slowly as
he played it, they joined with all the instruments on the Union side, until
finally a great and mighty chorus swelled up and down our army, ** Home,
Sweet Home." When they had finished there was no challenge over yon-
der, and every Confederate band had taken up that lovely air, so attuned to
452 The White Rose.
all that ia holiest and dearest, and one great chorus of the two great hosts
went up to God ; and when they had finished came from the boys in gray a
challenge, "Three cheers for home," and as these cheers went resonnding
through the skies from both sides of the river "something upon the sol-
dier's cheek washed off the stain of powder.**
Fellow soldiers in the fight for a clear brain, I am proud to belong to an
army which makes kindred of those who once stood in arms against each
other. Let us cherish North Carolina's motto from Isaiah's words : *' Fear
not, I am with thee ; I will bring thy seed from the east and gather them
from the west ; I will say to the North, give up^ and to the South, keep not
back; bring my sons from afar, and my daughters from the ends of the
earth." I am glad of these good times, and I think we women are in them,
equal members of the greatest party, as we have been since the day of its birth.
'' It shall shine more and more
Till its glory like noontide shall be.
It shall shine more and more
Till the home from the dram-shop is free.
It shall shine more and more
Till the nation Christ*s gloxy shall see.*'
While the Democratic National Convention was in session at
St. Louis in 1888, the papers had much to say of the Thurman
bandana and the red, red rose, as the symbol of simon-pure Democ-
racy. I had also noted the primrose as the emblem of the
Conservative women of England, and it occurred to me that our
Prohibitionists ought to have a floral badge. What then more
beautiful than the white rose to match the white ribbon ? So I
telephoned the suggestion to The Union Signal^ wrote about it to
our leaders, who officially indorsed it, and when our committee
appointed to notify General Fisk of his nomination, assembled for
that purpose in the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, June 22,
i888, I asked my faithful friend, Mrs. Frances J. Barnes, of that
city, to see that those who sat on the platform were all provided
with white roses. This she did. The suggestion was cordially
adopted by the gentlemen, who were present in larger number than
the ladies, and I had the honor of fastening a white rose to the
lapel of our newly-created Bishop Fitzgerald of my own chinrh,
a devoted party Prohibitionist, who made the opening prayer on
this occasion. A celluloid rose was brought out by our Woman's
Temperance Publication Association, in Chicago, and has been
sold by tens of thousands, so that we may conclude the white rose
is acclimated as the political badge of those who would overthrow
the dram-shop and protect the home.
Higk-Lkeiisc is the Trojan Horse. 453
So far as I know, my advocacy of the Prohibition party has
not personally alienated a friend, though it has seriously inter-
fered with what friends called a "rising popularity," and has
grieved and wounded many who are dear to me and who as hon-
estly believe that I am wrong in my working hypothesis of
prohibition as I believe that they are wrong in theirs. How
good people can be so deceived by high-license as to see in il
anything other than the Trojan horse smuggled into our tem-
perance camp on false pretenses, I expect to discover on the day
when I learn how you can elect prohibitionists to power by
voting for them.. To me, high-license is the devil's counterfeit
for the pure gold of prohibition. And thus believing, I have, in
every state and territory of the Republic, declared high-license a
high crime, and in the name of boyhood bewildered and man-
hood betrayed, in the name of woman broken-hearted and home
broken down, I have solemnly pronounced upon it the anathema
of the American home. This was not what one would have
chosen to say who well knew that but for Christian people high-
license could never have been for a moment tolerated by the
reputable class, who knew that Christian ministers all over the
land were voting for it and that some of them were discounting
the speaker's wits even while she tried to talk !
CHAPTER VIII.
THE NEW YORK CONVENTION.
(1888).
The New York Convention caused more comment than all
the others put together. Held in the great metropolis, in one of
the five largest audience rooms of the world ; on the eve of a
Presidential election and in the most doubtful and determinative
of Commonwealths ; attended by four hundred and twelve elected
delegates fi'om almost every state and territory ; filling five days ;
with a printed program containing fourteen pages and one
hundred and eighty-two specifications, with forty departments of
work passing in review, over fifty officers to be elected, a dozen
memorials and counter-memorials to be replied to; with dress
reform and cooking lectures, sermons, flag presentations, intro-
ductions, welcomes, White Ribbon Quartette, and a great deal
besides, and all listened to by an audience five thousand strong,
the great convention was not inaptly described by one who said
it was a ** Moral Jumbo.'* Its reports and addresses were highly
complimented by onlookers during its progress, and I was many
times made to wonder anew if the wrath of man is not going to
be made to praise the Lord on this wise : while our brothers
handicap themselves with the alcohol and tobacco habits, we
women, like the tortoise outdoing the hare, will pass, or, at
least, overtake them, on the splendid highway of intellectual
evolution. Woman's capacity at branching out was here
abundantly illustrated ; in proof, note the daring of Mrs. Mary
T. Burt, who engaged the costly Metropolitan Opera House
and served a free lunch every day to the entire convention,
paying the expenses by sales of opera boxes and seats ; note the
enterprise of Mrs. Dr. Buchanan, walking New York streets to
seek entertainment for the throng, and succeeding where mission-
(454)
A Brilliant Scene. 455
ary and other women's societies had well-nigh failed in Gotham,
because the quiet little Scotch Presbyterian woman acted on a
Scotch motto, that she perhaps has never heard, ** It*s dogged as
does it.*' When I knew that we four (disavowed) but duly ac-
credited women delegates to General Conference were not invited
to Methodist homes in the metropolis, I supposed it was because
they were *' too far back," — as we in the West say of conserva-
tives— but when I heard one of the most noted and conservative
Methodist women in the nation mention that she was never yet
invited to a Methodist home in New York City, I had my
thoughts. Suffice it that at our convention, all received entertain-
ment who wished for it, the expenses of our secretaries and treas-
urer being paid by the National W. C. T. U. at hotels near by.
An elegant reception was given us by Madame Demorest, at
which we met Clara Barton, Jennie June (Mrs. Croly), and other
noted leaders in the world of to-day. The courage of Madame
Demorest in assuming all expenses of the decorations was in
keeping with her enterprising spirit, and last, but not least, the
courage of the general officers in taking the convention to New
York when almost no white ribboner save the state president gave
them hope of its success, deser\^es to go on record.
Promptly at nine o'clock on the opening moniing, Mrs. S. M. I.
Henry, of Illinois, began the prayer-meeting, and at ten the con-
vention came to order, with Ainia Gordon's bannerets flying
at the mast-head, so to speak, of every delegation, the platform
brilliant with white ribbon ensigns, national and state, the whole
great auditorium decked with the red, white and blue, mingled
with the escutcheons of ever>' Commonwealth, and before us, in
that huge parquette, four hundred women with white ribbons on
their breasts, while from floor to dome the place was packed with
people, and the famous temple of Art had l>ecome for the time
being a famous temple of Temperance. In fourteen years the
Hillsboro praying band had gathered around it in this country
a direct following of men, women and children, amounting to not
less than half a million, and its publishing house had sent out
in this year more than sixty million pages, or one for every inhab-
itant of the United States
* ' What hath God wrought ? * ' must have been the grateful
cxclamatioii in erer>- zzirA. i< thr Cru.%ide leader, our bekyved
Mr>^. JudjTe Thorps— r:" KillfS.r: « Xi: thr rrigile-lookiiig,
sweet- voict^ old lidy s:>-«i -y ~- -: Ic :hr C-vcction rose, and
from :he bicHill^Sr Eirl,: ! or.-: -.i- : r the runwee bv the
Pre<b>^er!ir. Church thcrt -vr rr^i rc^7«: ::-:vcIy the Cnxsade
Psalz:. Then ill v: lets -.inef :- <:zc:r.c the Crusade Hvnm,
■ Give to the -snni^ thy :V.ir^ the White R:':'-.:- Qtiirtette ttom
Miiue Icidiug :vith their grlier. ciruets ir.i yirs. Barker, of
Dakota. lei tis :u rnycr. The ExtrJtitive C uiziittee had been
is sessi.?t: f:r rx: d:iv< ils:- the Sari ;:' Sur^rlutcudeuts, and the
It T*i> rtrtVrtl: -xC:. kr. -.vr. th^t thr I tiu W C. T. U. had
a nieru:rii.I rr:tc>t t trt^r.t :r. :TTi>:t: n to the artirude of
• B * A
ineuc^iues^ t.-^iri tJie r'riu-.nt: - z^zv. u:j.:-tJ.:zei since 1SS2
by the Ni-tifuil \V C T. V Th:> -tj.te hj.i u~:zi the first
led the rrotcstir.c zz.\zl r.v. j^ni :: .v Tres^rr.tci i r rotes: in its
own name t^^rf its nj^ture i.1*. -vrre ^xe".'. ir.r'.rtne'd tor it had
anc nai reome vir:uj.-.y 1 oazirai^rr. t cuzr.cnt. It5 ge:
tertn^ wert the si.zie i> th x- :" the rrrte^t.- -A-ntten *ry Mrs.
* * M
the c^rn-.-enti :r. >z::therzr.: •vh.it th- -^i t : re>s hid f:r weeks
ieast- emment-y ,."mrjL>z.ert?'-'^ 11 i.i' or.u^." t-ir-u^n. ^^e
camraijrt: ■::" i'^'^^
TherUinr^W C T V ils-rhiii 7r:te<t ruttheirshad
aal to whi^h it -xj^-i 2iire-<:kr: 7-:> : r :e-: .Ml'-e-:. in c:
the wtscom :: t-ie >i.t: ni.. .'. ^ . . .:: y^L— "::t:r.i: :t5 m<
tised t: Izrr i :> —finv.,- \\".::\. " Attczirt was robe
* . • - - -
•-^ ^^•^-- ■• t'~v N.i".: r.i.'- ".V J T '.' A- Mrs F^'s-ter "xas ti
t: le I'.rzti it her. Besides this memrr.i^. ther^ were -bcr from
Not a ''Star Chamber'' Clique. 457
the minority in Iowa who disagreed with Mrs. Foster's views, in
which they asked the help of the National W. C. T. U., declaring
that the parliamentary machinery of the State W. C. T. U. was
being used to rule them out ; that on purely partisan grounds
they were deprived of representation ; that the literature of the
National W. C. T. U. was not permitted to be circulated, and
that they could not hold their own unless assistance was soon
furnished them, and one of the protests distinctly called for the
discontinuance of Mrs. Foster as a vice-president of the national
society, because of her antagonistic attitude toward the W. C. T. U.
In view of all these facts, it was thought best by certain of the
leaders, that these memorials should not be read in the National
Convention until first considered by the Executive Committee,
which, so far from being a ' * Star Chamber, * * as some of our * * non-
partisan " sisters have called it, is made up of the presidents of all
the states and territories, and the District, of Columbia, or forty-
eight women, representing every section of the country, besides the
five general oflScers of the society. Several of these protests were
addressed to the Executive Committee, and were already in our
hands, but it was felt by some that by having all of them so re-
ferred, the whole subject could be more temperately and fairly
passed in review than if it were launched without such preliminary
consideration upon the surging waves of the great convention.
Besides, by this method, the program could first be gone
through, giving to the public an adequate idea of our many-sided
work, and forestalling the false impression already created by
the Republican press, that the National W. C. T. U. was simply
a "political annex'* to the Prohibition party. Hence, the
motion of Mrs. Henrietta Monroe, president of the Ohio W. C.
T. U., that ** memorials and protests be referred to the Executive
Committee without reading." In the handling of this motion
there was no possible motive for doing any one injustice, and
none whatever was intended by the presiding oflScer.
The largest vote mustered by the minority was thirty-one ;
the convention was heartily in favor of the motion to refer, and it
promptly prevailed. These are the facts concerning an action rel-
ative to which the misapprehensions — to call them by no harsher
name— of a partisan press have been more widely circulated
than has anything helpful to our movement, since the Crusade.
45^ The EccUsiastical Emancipation of Woman.
If we could have had the same use of Republican newspapers
for an argument exhibiting the falseness of their high-license
theor>', constitutional prohibition wotdd have received the great-
est '* boom " in all its history.
The memorial breeze having blown over, the convention
held itself steadily to its work. Under the heads of Preventive,
Educational, Evangelistic, Social, and Legal, we had, with the
Department of Organization, and including Sunday afternoon,
which was devoted to the Department of Social Purity, three
days filled with the reports of forty leaders, earnest, intelligent
women of the church, the home, and school, who came forward
and without manuscript, compressed into a few minutes of
always attractive and often eloquent speech, the steadfast work
of a year.
Our annual sermon was preached, as usual, by a woman.
Miss Elizabeth Greenwood, of Brooklyn, whose perfect equipoise
in the pulpit, breadth of thought, elegance of diction, and deep
spirituality, place her in the front rank of pulpit orators. She
was chosen national superintendent of our Evangelistic Depart-
ment, and with Dean Wright, of Cambridge, is working to place
it on a basis of real Christian scholarship.
Bishop Fallows gave us a remarkable sermon on * * The Ec-
clesiastical Emancipation of Woman/* choosing his text, as did
Miss Greenwood, from the Crusade Bible, which lay on the table
throughout the convention, and was a constant comfort and
inspiration to us all.
It seemed like that rarest thing on earth, poetic justice, to
hear a woman preach and a Bishop declare that women ought to
be freely permitted so to do, on the same platform where, but a
few months before, women had been ruled out of a great ecclesi-
astical convention. And when Rev. Dr. J. M. Buckley, woman's
redoubtable opponent in her broader fields and pastures new, was
introduced, and handsomely received by the white ribboners, the
amenities of civilization could no farther go.
General Neal Dow came, by my urgent request, glorious old
man, erect and vigorous in his eighty-sixth year, wearing his
frosty, but kindly age like an imperial crown. I wanted our
blessed white ribboners to have the joy of seeing the immortal
** Father of Prohibition,'* And Governor St. John was there,
Distinguished Guests, 459
the hero of journalistic abuse,. on which he has grown constantly
more gentle-hearted and beloved. Whenever he appeared the
women's handkerchiefs were in the air. Gen. Clinton B. Fisk
is a great favorite, personally, being one of the most genial and
gifted of men, while as *' our candidate " he carried off the white
ribbon honors. Joseph Cook, that oratorical cyclone, swept all
away with him in his magnificent enthusiasm for "whatsoever
things are pure, lovely, and of good report." Gentle Clara Bar-
ton was received as a grand elder sister might have been ; Mary
A. Livermore, with the love we give our very own.
Chairman Dickie, on being introduced, suggested playfully
that the convention indorse the action that had just occurred, by
which I was made a counseling member of the Executive Com-
mittee of the Prohibition party, and this was done, in my absence,
in our own Executive meeting, in the same vein, as I supposed,
until the hostile press made much of it. Mayor Abram S. Hewitt
gave us an address of welcome in the midst of his candidacy for
re-election, quite in line with his well known reputation for mental
shrewdness and square dealing. Elizabeth Thompson, the phi-
lanthropist, presented us, not in person, but through the happy
intervention of Rev. Anna Shaw, with a ** woman's flag," bor-
dered with the flags of all nations, and symbolic of that interna-
tional peace for which she works so earnestly and well. Madame
Demorest had a reception in our honor, as elegant as New York's
luxurious facilities could furnish, and this enumeration but hints
at the handsome pageant of our fifteenth convention.
On the last afternoon came the report of the Committee on
Resolutions, Mrs. Governor Wallace, chairman, Miss Helen L.
Hood, secretary. For two years this report had been printed be-
forehand, as nearly all our documents are, for the convenience of
delegates, and in both cases unfortunate misapprehensions have
resulted from the reporters' not unnatural supposition that all
that was printed was indorsed. The following resolution adopted
from that of Rhode Island W. C. T. U. was passed with no
dissent except from Iowa, a part of Pennsylvania, and a few
other scattering votes :
Resolved^ That we re-affirm our allegiance to that party which makes its
dominant issue the suppression of the liquor traffic, declares its belief in
Mmighty God as the source of all power in Government, defends the sane-
460 A Gag'law that Did n't Gag.
tity of the Christian Sabbath, recognizes equal suffrage and equal wages for
women, demands the abolition of polygamy and uniform laws governing
marriage and divorce, and aims to remove sectional differences, promote
national unity, and insure the best welfare of our land.
Woman*s ballot was thus dealt with :
Resolved^ That the right of citizens to vote should not be abridged or
denied on account of sex ; we therefore urge an amendment to the National
Constitution granting women the franchise.
Another resolution read as follows :
" Whbrbas, Individual membership in the W. C. T. U. has never been,
and is not based upon the holding of certain political views ; and whereas,
the individual member is accorded perfect freedom of private opinion and
private utterance of the same, we nevertheless recognize the fact, that the
action of the National W. C. T. U. in promising "to lend its influence to
that party, by whatever name called, which would give the best embodiment
of Prohibition principles, and would most surely protect the home," gives to
our organization a policy which each member is in honor bound to respect.
Resolved^ That it is the sense of the National W. C. T. U. that no mem-
ber should speak from the public platform to antagonize our policy toward
the party to which our influence is pledged, and that any member thus an-
tagonizing our policy is hereby declared disloyal to our organization.
When this was read, Mrs. Benjamin, our superintendent of
Parliamentary Usage, to whom all points of difference under that
head were referred throughout the convention, said, '* I object.'*
The chair asked, as in duty bound, ** Is the objection sustained? "
And by an overwhelming majority this was done ; — yet it went
out to the country that we * * had passed a gag-law for the express
purpose of persecuting Mrs. Foster."
The general course of The Union Signal was sustained, as it
certainly ought to have been, the following resolution being
adopted :
Resolved^ That we extend to Mary Allen West, the able editor of The
Union Signal^ our hearty thanks for the manner in which she has conducted
oar national organ, and that we hereby indorse the position she has taken
in the exercise of editorial prerogatives on the political as well as any other
questions which concern our organization, and in testimony of this we ex-
press our appreciation of her labors and our determination to stand by uer
in her difficult and trying position.
George W. Bain, the orator-in-chief of the American tem-
perance movement, was introduced amid vociferous applause ;
among other good things he said :
Having traveled this country from ocean to ocean, and from the I<akesto
George IV. BaMs Speech. 461
the Gulf, I have found our prisons filled with men, our saloons filled with
men, and the school-houses, or rather the high schools, graduating more
girls than boys, our Sabbath- schools and chvirches filled with women, — and
I believe I serve my country, its homes, and heaven, when I pledge myself
that I will henceforth do everything in my power to bring more directly to
bear upon the political life of this Republic, the virtuous, intellectoal
offices of womanhood. When the church gets into trouble, it returns at
once to the Preachers* Aid Society of women, and when the youth of this
country is being blocked by vices, I apprehend it won't be very long till
our country will be in such a condition that it will have to turn to its
womanhood for salvation.
Every action of the New York convention showed a liber-
ality of spirit for which, I dare assert, no parallel can be found
in the history of associated effort among men or women.
The closing hours of the convention, extending to midnight
of the fourth day, were occupied with the consideration of the
six memorials and the replies. To Iowa's objections to our rec-
ognition of the Prohibition party, a general demurrer was entered,
the specific points involved having been taken up when they
were first brought forward in 1885. To Illinois* urgent request
that women who antagonize our policy should be declared dis-
loyal, the reply was that to do this would be out of harmony
with our present safety and past policy. To the Iowa W. C.
T. U. minority the following, among other messages, was sent :
We have lamented with you, and more deeply than you have been
aware, the hardships you have sufifered.
But the National W. C. T. U. makes two constitutional requirements of
its members — and two only ; signing the pledge of total abstinence, and
paying annual dues.
It has always been with us a cardinal doctrine that each state should be
left free in all things except these.
The debate was spirited, but kindly, and at midnight the
convention rose, the members stood hand in hand to sing, ** God
be with you till we meet again,'* our beloved ** Deborah'* Wal-
lace prayed, Rev. Dr. C. H. Payne pronounced the benediction,
and the National W. C. T. U. Convention of 1888 was duly
adjourned.
Meanwhile, otu* publishing interests constantly increase in
volume ; the devotion of white ribboners grows stronger ; the
honest, outspoken position of the society in saying just what it
means and being really a coadjutor of the Prohibition party,
462 Department Work,
rather than an ally of Republicanism, but professedly ** non-parti-
san/' compels respect, and we move forward to a victory, slow but
sure, which shall bring in the day of national prohibition,
woman ^s enfranchisement, alcohol's downfall, and home's supreme
dominion in America and over all the world.
But that any considerable advance in legislation will be
achieved by the party whose cause we have espoused, while it
retains its present name, I for one, do not expect.
While we maintain the *' courage of our convictions,*' politi-
cally, our other departments of work have never '* called a halt."
At the Minneapolis convention in 1886, at Nashville in 1887,
and at New York in 1888, our official organ was published daily,
with a stenographic report of the proceedings. The minutes of
our St. Louis convention (debates are never reported) covered
two hundred and sixty-three pages of a large pamphlet ; those
of Philadelphia, three hundred and ninety ; those of Minneapo-
lis, four hundred and eleven ; of Nashville, four hundred and
fifty-three. Every important document that comes before the
convention, from the president's address to the ballots, is in
printed form, the printed program covering several pages. A
large book would be required to furnish even an outline history
of the W. C. T. U. movement by means of which the children,
from primer to high-school grade, in thirty-six states and terri-
tories, are now studying the laws of health, '* with special refer-
ence to the effects of alcoholic drinks and narcotics upon the
human system," this study being required by law, and teachers
being obliged to pass examination therein, before securing a
certificate. Not fewer than ten millions of names have been
gathered for our petitions on this subject, and the first temper-
ance legislation ever granted by Congress was in this interest.
Still the good work goes on, and will go on until every state is
under this wholesome law. Meanwhile, the Sandwich Islands,
Australia and Japan are adopting the same temperance text-books
indorsed by our society. I hope that Mrs. Mary H. Hunt, of
Boston, superintendent of this department, may, ere-long, write
the thrilling story of which she is the heroine ; also that Miss
Lucia Kimball, whose temperance work in Sunday-schools has
culminated in the Quarterly Lesson now provided in the Interna-
tional Lesson Series, may tell how that mighty field was won.
The Bible in the Public Schools. 463
From my annual address at the New York Convention, I
select the following as touching on advanced phases of our work :
The new movement for the study of the Bible, as the finest of English
classics, introducing it into colleges and seminaries of the highest grade, is
full of possibilities for Christian progress and development The marvel is
that Christian scholars should ever have permitted the heathen classics to
outrank the psalms of David, the visions of Isaiah, and the wonderful phi-
losophy of the four Gospels. But something else needs to be done on the
same line, and must become universal before we can fairly call ourselves
other than a practically pagan republic. This is the teaching of those prin-
ciples of ethics that are found in the Scriptiu*es and questioned by no sane
mind, whether Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant. No general move-
ment toward making our great public school system an ethical system has
yet been inaugurated, except by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union,
and this kingdom of heaven has come to the children of the land, as its
wont is, "not by observation," but so quietly that our people hardly know
the good thing that has happened to them.
The effort of good women everywhere should be to secure the introduc-
tion of a text-book of right living ; one that should teach the reasons for the
social code of good manners, every particular of which is based on the
Golden Rule, and those refinements of behavior which involve the utmost
kindness to the animal creation, including the organization of Bands of
Mercy in all our public schools. All this is sure to come, and that right
speedily, as a consequence of the awakened interest of women everywhere
in the subject of education, and their increasing power along these lines.
The time will come when it will be told as a relic of our primitive barbarism
that children were taught the list of prepositions and the names of the
rivers of Thibet, but were not taught the wonderful laws on which their
own bodily happiness is based, and the humanities by which they could live
in peace and good will with those about them. The time will come when,
whatever we do not teach, we shall teach ethics as the foundation of every
form of culture, and the "faith that makes faithful" in every relation of
life will become a thing of knowledge to the child of the then truly Chris-
tian republic. For we can never teach these things and leave out Christ as
the central figure, and His philosophy as the central fact of our system of
education. At the same time our teaching must be as far removed from
anjrthing sectarian or involving the statement of a creed, as the North Star
is from the Southern Cross. There will be no trouble in those days about
opening school with such extracts from the Bible as have been agreed upon
by men and women of all faiths, and the repetition of the Lord's Prayer
with its universal benignities will be a matter of course. It is for the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union to work on quietly to this end, with-
out haste, without rest.
THE ECCIvESIASTICAI^ EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN.
By a strange and grievous paradox, the Church of Christ, although first
to recognize and nurture woman's spiritual powers, is one of the mostdiffi-
J^^^
Woman in the Church.
cult centers to reach with the sense of justice toward her, under the improved
conditions of her present development and opportunity. The sense of au-
thority is here so strong, and woman's capacities for reverence and humility
are still so great, that, while we can not fail to deprecate, we need not won-
der at the present situation. Here, as elsewhere, enlightened womanhood
will come with the magic open sesame which shall ere-long prevail even
against these gates so sedulously barred : Woman^ like man^ should be
freely permitted to do whatever she can do well.
Who that is reasonable doubts that if we had in every church a
voice in all its circles of power, it would be better for the church, making it
more homelike and attractive, more endeared to the people, and hence more
effective in its great mission of brotherly and sisterly love ? By what right-
eous principle of law or logic are we excluded from church councils when
we so largely make up the church's membership ? Who that did not know
it beforehand would believe that good men actually desire to keep us out ?
Antecedently I would have made my affidavit that nothing could have
pleased them so much as to have us come in and share with them the
power and honor, as we do the burdens and responsibilities, of the church
home. Indeed, I can not help thinking that it might be said of us, *' O fools,
and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken !" We have
not ourselves rightly understood the liberty wherewith Christ hath made
woman free by introducing a religion that removes the world from a war
footing to a peace basis, thus rendering science possible, with invention as
its consequence, from all of which comes a civilization having as its choicest
blossom the material comforts and contrivances of the modem home. We
f have not seen that old-time duties have been taken from our hands that we
\might enter upon higher ones, and that to make the whole world homelike
IS the province of one half the race. But as these truths take possession of
our inmost hearts we shall go gently to our brothers, asking them to open
to us every opportunity and to share with us every prerogative within the
Church of Christ In the United States, the generous spirit of whose man-
hood has nowhere been excelled, we have a vantage-ground in any effort that
may be quietly and unitedly put forth for the opening of closed doors,*eccle-
siastical or otherwise. I have long thought that the spectacle of well-nigh
a hundred thousand church edifices closed, except at brief intervals when
meetings were in progress, was a travesty of the warm-hearted gospel of
our Lord, and I rejoice to see that just as woman's influence grows stronger
in the church, those doors stay open longer, that industrial schools. Bands
of Hope, church kindergartens, reading-rooms, and the like, may open up
their founts of healing, and put ** a light in the window for thee, brother."
The time will come when these gates of Gospel Grace shall stand open
night and day, while woman's heavenly ministries shall find their central
home within God's house, the natural shrine of human brotherhood in
action, as well as human brotherhood in theory.
** Stay in the church and help reform it," says one. ** No, that is impos-
sible ; old churches and old parties are equally crystallized," comes the
reply. ** I^et the W. C. T. U. organize a church, and we will join it, every
IV. C. 71 C/, Deaconesses. 465
man of ns/' is the declaration of an influential gronp of earnest men. ** No,
we have too many churches already," objects a listener, *' let the wheat
and tares grow together until the harvest" Meanwhile, many letters and
consultations with men and women high in church circles develop on the
part of some a plan like this :
An organization to be formed, called the '' Church Union/' made up of
those who are unwilling longer to leave inoperative the protest of their souls
against a government of the church by its minority ; this Church Union to
be open to any and all who will subscribe to the Apostles' Creed, and the
triple pledge of total abstinence, anti-tobacco, and social purity ; none of
the members obliged to leave a church to which they now belong in order
to join this ; men and women to be on terms of perfect equality, and women
to be regularly licensed and ordained. The special work of this Church Union
would be among the masses of the people, still, alas, so generally ungospeled,
and in foreign lands, especially among the women. In this cotmtry, build-
ings now devoted to amusements to be utilized rather than new ones erected,
and everywhere the steadfast effort made to go, not send, and to go rather
than to stay at home and say ** Come" to the great humanity that beats
its life along the stony streets.
But for myself, I love my mother-church so well and recognize so thor-
oughly that the base and body of the great pyramid she forms are broader
than its apex, that I would fain give her a little time in which to deal justly
by the great household of her loving, loyal, and devoted daughters. I
would wait four years longer, in fervent hope and prayer that the great
body of her ministers and of her membership may make it manifest to all
the world that the church of Lady Huntington, Barbara Heck, and Phebe
Palmer, does not hesitate to march with the progressive age it has done so
much to educate, nor fear to carry to their logical sequence its life-long
teachings as to woman's equality within the house of God. I say this
frankly, from my present outlook, though so often urged, and not a little
tempted, and sometimes quite determined to take a new departure. The
time will come, however, and not many years from now, when, if repre-
sentation is still denied us, it will be our solemn duty to raise once more
the cry, " Here I stand, I can do no other," and step out into the larger lib-
erty of a religious movement where majorities and not minorities shall
determine the fitness of women as delegates, and where the laying on of
hands in consecration, as was undoubtedly done in the early church, shall
be decreed on a basis of ** gifts, graces and usefulness," irrespective of sex.
W. C. T. U. DEACONESSES.
I wish that we might here state with all considerateness, but with fear-
less honesty, our position on the question of women in the church. But,
as I have already said, women are, if possible, even more to blame than
men that they are so discounted in church as well as state at this late day.
A majority of men in this country and age have so far outgrown the igno-
rant notion of their divine right to rule over women, that if we had but the
coTirage of conviction, and that sense of dignity that ought to mark us as
466 True Service.
daughters of the Lord Almighty, men would within a t#elvemonth, seat us
beside themselves upon the thrones of government in church and state,
ruling the world jointly, as He meant we should, when, as the Bible says,
*' He gave to ihem dominion."
Truly we have what we take the most pains for, and women must be
up and d:>ing if they expect the co-operation and fealty of men in politics,
ecclesiastical or secular. It also seems to me we should, at this convention,
provide for White Ribbon deaconesses to be trained in our Bvangdiatic
Department, taught to be skilled nurses at our National Temperance Hos-
pital, and employed by our local unions in preaching, teaching and visiting
the sick and poor. I am confident that there are men of the best standing
in the pulpit, who will not hesitate to set them apart to this sacred office
and ministry in accordance with the custom of the early church. There
are thousands of women, young and old, whose hearts the Lord hath toodied
and who would rejoice to find a vocation so sacred and so ftill of halp
within the sheltering fold of the W. C. T. U.
" She spoke of justice, truth and love.
How soft her words distilled ;
She spoke of God, and all the place
Was with His presence filled.*'
Of how many a sweet soul within our borders those words are true?
What hindereth that they be set apart with every guarantee and Safeguard
that can emphasize their gospel ministry? Of them how long has it been
said, as of Christ's early servants, "the people magnify them," and "the
common people hear them gladly.**
Rev. Dr. Black, of Mississippi, says in his new book :
"The offices of deaconesses formed a part of the machinery of the
Church for many centuries. The deaconess received ordination by the im-
position of hands. The ordination ritual is given in the Apostolical Consti-
tutions, from which we extract the following prayer of the officiating
bishop:
" 'Eternal God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Creator of man and of
woman, thou who didst fill with thy spirit Miriam, Deborah, Hannah,
and Huldah, thou who didst vouchsafe to a woman the birth of the only
begotten Son, thou who didst in the tabernacle, and in the temple, place
female keepers of thy holy gates, look down now also upon this tny hand-
maid, and bestow on her the Holy Ghost, that she may worthily perform
the work committed to her to thy honor and the glory of Christ* **
What a practical element the deaconesses would introduce into relig-
ion. Doubtless, in early days, when the conflict was between idolatry and
the worship of God, " divine service " may have rightly consisted largely
in sermon, song, and prayer, but to call that "service** now, as is univer-
sally done, seems to me a mockery. That is a delight, a coveted and
blessed means of growth ; but "service ** now is to our fellow-men, and he
whose purse and work are not invested there knows nothing about "divine
service,** and might well name his place of Sunday lounging and aesthetics
the "Church of the Divine Emptiness,'* or the "Church of the Celestial
Sugar Plum.**
Other Worldliness, 467
What the world most needs is mothering, and most of all in the spirit's
natural home, the church, and on the Sabbath day. It needs the tender
sweetness of the alto voice, the jubilant good- will of the soprano, in ser-
mon as in psalm ; tenor and bass become monotonous at last, and the full
diapason of power and inspiration is impossible except we listen to the full
chorus of humanity. God hasten that great chorus, in church and state
alike, with its deep-hearted love and its celestial hope !
The sine qua non of our success is mutual faith and fellowship. We
must *' have fervent charity among ourselves.**
It is not uncharitable to judge an act as good or bad, but we should be
very slow to judge the actor bad. Only by rising to the sublime sense of
our sacred sisterhood with every woman that breathes, be she good or bad,
foreign or native, bond or free, shall we find our individual pettiness covered
and flooded out of sight by the most inexorable force of all the univeive,
the force of Love.
If I. could have my wish for all of us, it would be that in our measmie
we might merit what was said of that seraphic woman, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning. It is an ideal that we shall all delight to share :
** Persons were never her theme, unless public characters were under
disciission, or friends were to be praised, which kind office she frequently
took upon herself. One never dreamed of frivolities in her presence,
and gossip felt itself out of place. Books and humanity, great deeds,
and, above all, politics, which include all the grand questions of the day,
were foremost m her thoughts, and therefore, oftenest on her lips. I
speak not of religion, for with her evervthin^ was religion. Her Chris-
tianity was not confined to the church and rubric ; it meant civilization.**
Envy and jealousy lig^t the intensest fires that ever bum in human
hearts ; gossip and scandal are the smoke emitted by them. If, as has been
said, these passions could, like some modem chimneys, be consumers of
their own smoke, a purer and a better atmosphere would then prevail.
In all the battle of opinion that rages, and must rage until a better
equilibrium is reached in this great nation, be it ours, beloved sisters, to
remember that ** when either side grows warm in argument, the wiser man
gives over first.**
Good breeding has been called ''the apotheosis of self-restraint.** But
the higher evolution is not to need restraining, but to have that inward
quietness which, when God giveth it, " who then can make trouble?** All
strife in manner, word and deed, grows out of worldliness, and to this there
is but just one antidote, and that is, Othbr Worldunbss.
One look into the silent heavens, and all our earthly jargons seem un-
worthy ; one deep tone of the forest's mystical seolian, and our deeper hearts
respond in tenderness ; one solemn strain out of the sea's unutterable anthem,
and the soul hears in it that " something greater'* that speaks to the heart
alone.
All true souls know that this is true. ''Let my soul calm itself, O
God, in Thee," sings the stormy spirit of St. Augustine. "Live without
t without God," cries Count Tolstoi from Russia,
" We should fill the hours with the sweetest things.
If we had but s day.
We should drink alone at the purest springs.
In our upward way,
We should love with a life-time's love iu an hour
If the hours were but few,"
are the sweet lines of our own Mary Lowe Dickinson.
And these are the words of a great but unnamed saint : "The strong-
eM Christians are those who. from daily habit, baaten with everytluiig to
God."
CHAPTER IX.
AIMS AND METHODS OF THE W. C. T. U.
Thus have I tried to set forth the sequel of that modem
Pentecost called the '* Woman's Crusade." That women should
thus dare was the wonder after they had so long endured, while
the manner of their doing left us who looked on, bewildered
between laughter and tears. Woman-like, they took their knit-
ting, their zephyr work or their embroidery, and simply swarmed
into the drink-shops, seated themselves, and watched the pro-
ceedings. Usually they came in a long procession from their
rendezvous at some church where they had held morning prayer-
meeting ; entered the saloon with kind faces, and the sweet songs
of church and home upon their lips, while some Madonna-like
leader with the Gospel in her looks, took her stand beside the
bar, and gently asked if she might read God's word and offer
prayer.
Women gave of their best during the two months of that
wonderful uprising. All other engagements were laid aside ;
elegant women of society walked beside quiet women of home,
school and shop, in the strange processions that soon lined the
chief streets, not only of nearly every town and village in the
state that was its birthplace, but of leading cities there ^nd
elsewhere ; and voices trained in Paris and Berlin sang ** Rock
of Ages, cleft forme,'* in the malodorous air of liquor-rooms and
beer-halls. Meanwhile, where were the men who patronized
these places ? Thousands of them signed the pledge these women
brought, and accepted their invitation to go back with them to
the churches, whose doors, for once, stood open all day long;
others slunk out of sight, and a few cursed the women openly;
but even of these it might be said, that those who came to curse
remained to pray. Soon the saloon-keepers surrendered in large
numbers, the statement being made by a well-known observer that
(469)
470 Crusade Annals,
the liquor traflBc was temporarily driven out of two hundred and
fifty towns and villages in Ohio and the adjoining states, to
which the Temperance Crusade extended. There are photographs
extant representing the stirring scenes when, amid the ringing of
church-bells, the contents of every barrel, cask and bottle in a
saloon were sent gurgling into the gutter, the owner insisting
that women's hands alone should do this work, perhaps with
some dim thought in his muddled head of the poetic justice due
to the Nemesis he thus invoked. And so it came about that soft
and often jeweled hands grasped axe and hammer, while the whole
town assembled to rejoice in this new fashion of exorcising the evil
spirits. In Cincinnati, a city long dominated by the liquor trade,
a procession of women, including the wives of leading pastors,
was arrested and locked up in jail ; in Cleveland, dogs were set
on the crusaders, and in a single instance, a blunderbuss was
pointed at them, while in several places, they were smoked out,
or had the hose tiimed on them. But the arrested women
marched through the streets singing, and held a temperance meet-
ing in the prison ; the one assailed by dogs laid her hands upon
their heads and prayed ; and the group menaced by a gun
marched up to its mouth singing, * ' Never be afraid to work for
Jesus.*' The annals of heroism have few pages so bright as
the annals of that strange crusade, spreading as if by magic,
through all the Northern States, across the sea and to the Orient
itself. Everywhere it went, the attendance at church increased
incalculably, and the crime record was in like manner shortened.
Men say there was a spirit in the air such as they never knew
before ; a sense of God and of human brotherhood.
But after fifty days or more, all this seemed to pass away.
The women could not keep up such work ; it took them too
much fi-om their homes ; saloons re-opened ; men gathered as
before behind their sheltering screens, and swore "those silly
women had done more harm than good," while with ribald words
they drank the health of '* the defunct crusade."
Perhaps the most significant outcome of this movement was
the knowledge of their own power gained by the conservative
women of the churches. They had never even seen a "woman's
rights convention," and had been held aloof from the "suffrj^-
gists ' ' by fears as to their orthodoxy ; but now there were womien
Women are '^ Branchers-out,'*^ 471
prominent in all church cares and duties eager to clasp hands for a
more aggressive work than such women had ever before dreamed
of tmdertaking.
Nothing is more suggestive in all the national gatherings of
the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, that sober second
thought of the crusade, than the wide difference between these
meetings and any held by men. The beauty of decoration is
specially noticeable ; banners of silk, satin and velvet, usually
made by the women themselves, adorn the wall ; the handsome
shields of states ; the great vases bearing aloft grains, fruits and
flowers ; the moss-covered well with its old bucket ; or the setting
of a platform to present an interior as cozy and delightful as a
parlor could afford, are features of the pleasant scene. The
rapidity of movement with which business is conducted, the
spontaneity of manner, the originality of plan, the perpetual
freshness and ingenuity of the convention, its thousand unex-
pectednesses, its quips and turns, its wit and pathos, its im-
promptu eloquence and its perpetual good nature — all these
elements, brought into condensed view in the National Conven-
tions, are an object-lesson of the new force and unique method
that womanhood has contributed to the consideration of the great-
est reform in Christendom. It is really the crusade over again ; the
home going forth into the world. Its manner is not that of the
street, the court, the mart, or office ; it is the manner of the home.
Men take one line, and travel onward to success ; with them
discursiveness is at a discount. But women in the home must be
mistresses, as well as maids of all work ; they have learned well
the lesson of unity in diversity ; hence by inheritance and
by environment, women are varied in their methods ; they are
bom to be " branchers-out. " Men have been in the organized
temperance work not less than eighty years — women not quite
fifteen. Men pursued it at first along the line of temperance,
then total abstinence ; license, then prohibition ; while women
have already over forty distinct departments of work, classified
under the heads of preventive, educational, evangelistic, social,
and legal. Women think in the concrete. The crusade showed
them the drinking man, and they began upon him directly, to get
him to sign the pledge and seek *' the Lord behind the pledge.**
The crusade showed them the selling man, and they prayed over
472 Evolution.
him and persuaded him to give up his bad business, often buying
him out, and setting him up in the better occupation of baker,
grocer, or keeper of the reading-room into which they converted
his saloon after converting him from the error of his ways.
But oftentimes the drinking man went back to his cups, and
the selling man fell from his grace ; the first one declaring, **I
can*t break the habit I formed when a boy," and the last aver-
ring, ** Somebody's bound to sell, and I might as well make the
profit." Upon this the women, still with their concrete ways of
thinking, said, **To be sure, we must train our boys, and not
ours only, but everybody's ; what institution reaches all ? — the
Public Schools." How well they wrought, under the leadership
of Mrs. Mary H. Hunt, has been told on earlier pages.
To the inane excuse of the seller that he might as well do it
since somebody would, the quick and practical reply was, '*To
be sure ; but suppose the people could be persuaded not to let
anybody sell ? why, then that would be God*s answer to our cru-
sade prayers. ' * So they began with petitions to municipalities,
to Legislatures and to Congress, laboriously gathering up, doubt-
less, not fewer than ten million names in the great aggregate,
and through the fourteen years. Thus the Woman's Chris-
tian Temperance Union stands as the strongest bulwark of pro-
hibition, state and national, by constitutional amendment and
by statute. Meanwhile, it was inevitable that their motherly
hearts should devise other methods for the protection of their
homes. Knowing the terrors and the blessings of inheritance,
they set about the systematic study of heredity, founding a jour-
nal for that purpose. Learning the relation of diet to the drink
habit, they arranged to study hygiene also ; desiring children to
know that the Bible is on the side of total abstinence, they
induced the International Sunday-school Convention to prepare a
plan for lessons on this subject ; perceiving the limitless power
of the Press, they did their best to subsidize it by sending out
their bulletins of temperance facts and news items, thick as the
leaves of Vallambrosa, and incorporated a publishing company
of women.
It is curious to watch the development of the women who en-
tered the saloons in 1874 as a gentle, well-dressed, and altogether
peaceable mob. They have become an army, drilled and disci-
Organization. 473
plined. They have a method of organization, the simplest yet
the most substantial known to temperance annals. It is the
same for the smallest local union as for the national society
with its ten thousand auxiliaries. Committees have been abol-
ished, except the executive, made up of the general officers, and
*'superintendencies'* substituted, making each woman respon-
sible for a single line of work in the local, state and national
society. This puts a premium upon personality, develops a
negative into a positive with the least loss of time, and increases
beyond all computation the aggregate of work accomplished.
Women with specialties have thus been multiplied by tens of
thousands, and the temperance reform introduced into strong-
holds of power hitherto neglected or unthought of. Is an expo-
sition to be held, or a state or county fair? there is a woman
in the locality who knows it is her business to see that the
W. C. T. U. has an attractive booth with temperance literature
and temperance drinks ; and that, besides all this, it is her duty
to secure laws and by-laws requiring the teetotal absence of
intoxicants from grounds and buildings. Is there an institution
for the dependent or delinquent classes? there is a woman in
the locality who knows it is her duty to see that temperance lit-
erature is circulated, temperance talking and singing done, and
that flowers with appropriate sentiments attached are sent the
inmates by young ladies banded for that purpose. Is there a
convocation of ministers, doctors, teachers, editors, voters, or any
other class of opinion-manufacturers announced to meet in any
town or city? there is a woman thereabouts who knows it is
her business to secure, through some one of the delegates to
these influential gatherings, a resolution favoring the temper-
ance movement, and pledging it support along the line of work
then and there represented. Is there a Legislature anywhere
about to meet, or is Congress in session ? there is a woman near
at hand who knows it is her business to make the air heavy with
the white, hovering wings of petitions gathered up from ever>'-
where asking for prohibition, for the better protection of women
and girls, for the preventing of the sale of tobacco to minors, for
the enforcement of the Sabbath« or for the enfranchisement of
women.
Thus have the manifold relationships of the mighty temper-
■474 The Triple Curse,
ance movement been studied out by women in the training-school
afforded by the real work and daily object-lessons of the W. C.
T. U. Its aim is everywhere to bring woman and temperance in
contact with the problem of humanity's heart-break and sin ; to
protect the home by prohibiting the saloon, and to police the
state with men and women voters committed to the enforcement
of righteous law. The women saw, as years passed on, that not
. one, but three ciu"ses were pronoimced upon their sons by the
nineteenth century civilization : the curse of the narcotic poisons,
alcohol and nicotine ; the curse of gambling ; the curse of social
sin, deadlier than all, and that these three are part and parcel of
each other. And so, '* distinct like the billows, but one like the
'sea," is their unwearied warfare against each and all. They
have learned, by the logic of defeat, that the mother-heart must
be enthroned in all places of power before its edicts will be
heeded. For this reason they have been educated up to the level
of the equal suffrage movement. For the first time in history,
the women of the South have clasped hands with their Northern
sisters in faith and fealty, wearing the white ribbon emblem of
patriotism, purity and peace, and inscribing on their banners the
motto of the organized crusade, '* For God and Home and Native
Land."
* * No sectarianism in religion, " "no sectionalism in politics, * '
**no sex in citizenship * ' — these are the battle-cries of this relent-
less but peaceful warfare. We believe that woman will bless and
brighten every place she enters, and that she will enter every
place on the round earth. We believe in prohibition by law,
prohibition by politics, and prohibition by woman's ballot. After
ten years* experience, the women of the crusade became con-
vinced that until the people of this country divide at the ballot-box
on the foregoing issue, America can never be nationally delivered
from the dram-shop. They therefore publicly announced their
devotion to the Prohibition party, and promised to lend it their
influence and prayers, which, with the exception of a very small
minority, they have since most sedulously done. Since then
they have not ceased beseeching voters to cast their ballots first
of all to help elect an issue, rather than a man. For this they
have been vilified as if it were a crime ; but they have gone qu their
way, kindly as sunshine, steadfast as gravitation, and persistent
I
it
One in Christ Jesus ^ 475
as a hexx)*s faith. While their enemy has brewed beer, they have
brewed public opinion ; while he distilled whisky, they distilled
sentiment ; while he rectified spirits, they rectified the spirit that
is in man. They have had good words of cheer alike for North
and South, for Catholic and Protestant, for home and foreign bom,
for white and black, but gave words of criticism for the liquor
traffic and the parties that it dominates as its servants and allies.
While the specific aims of the white ribbon women every-
where are directed against the manufacture, sale and use of
alcholic beverages, it is sufficiently apparent that the indirect
line of their progress is, perhaps, equally rapid, and involves
social, governmental, and ecclesiastical equality between women
and men. By this is meant such financial independence on the
part of women as will enable them to hold men to the same high
standards of personal purity in the habitudes of life as they have
required of women, such a participation in the affairs of govern-
ment as shall renovate politics and make home questions the
paramount issue of the state, and such equality in all church
relations as shall ftdfiU the gospel declaration, ''There is neither
male nor female, but ye are all one in Christ Jesus."
The ctdtivation of specialties, and the development of esprit
de corps among women, all predict the day when, through this
mighty conserving force of motherhood introduced into every
department of human activity, the common weal shall be the
individual care ; war shall rank among the lost arts ; nationality
shall mean what Edward Bellamy's wonderful book, entitled
'' Looking Backward,'' sets before us as the fulfillment of man's
highest earthly dream ; and Brotherhood shall become the talis-
manic word and realized estate of all humanity.
In concluding this portion of my book, I can not better express
my view of what we have been and what we may be, than by the
following quotation from my address before the Women's Con-
gress, at its meeting in Des Moines; Iowa, 1885 :
Humanly speaking, such success as we have attained has reaalttd fom
the following policy and methods :
I. The simplicity and unity of the organixcUion, The local unkm is a
miniature of the National, having similar officiary and plan of work. It is
a military company carefully mustered, officered and drilled. The county
onion is but an aggregation of the locals^ and the district, of the conntiei^
47^ The Secret of Success.
while each state is a regiment, and the National itself is womanhood's
" Grand Army of the Republic."
3. InditHdual responsibility is everywhere urged, "Committees" are
obsolete with us, and each distinct line of work has one person, called a
superintendent, who is responsible for its success in the local, and another
in the state, and a third in the National union. She may secure such lieu-
tenants as she likes, but the union looks to her for results and holds her
accountable for failures.
3. The quick and cordial recognition of talent is another secret of
W. C. T. U. success. Women, young or old, who can speak, write, conduct
meetings, organize, keep accounts, interest children, talk with the drinking
man, get up entertainments, or carry flowers to the sick or imprisoned,
are all pressed into the service.
There has been also in our work an immense amount of digging in the
earth to find one's own buried talent, to rub off the rust and to put it out at
interest Perhaps that is, after all, its most significant feature, considered
as a movement
4. Subordination of the financial phase has helped, not hindered us.
Lack of funds has not barred out even the poorest from our sisterhood. A
penny per week is our basis of membership, of which a fraction goes to the
state, and ten cents to the National W. C. T. U.
Money has been, and I hope may be, a consideration altogether second-
ary. Of wealth we have had incomputable stores ; indeed, I question if
America has a richer corporation to-day than ours : wealth of faith, of en-
thusiasm, of experience, of brain, of speech, of common sense— this is a
capital stock that can never depreciate, needs no insurance, requires no
combination lock or bonded custodian, and puts us under no temptation to
tack our course or trim our sails.
5. Nothing has helped us more than the entire freedom of our society
from the influence or dictation of capitalists^ politicians^ or corporations of
any sort whatever. This can not be too strongly emphasized as one of the
best elements of power. Indeed, it may be truly said that this vast and sys-
tematic work has been in nowise guided, moulded or controlled by men.
It has not even occurred to them to offer advice until within a year ! and to
accept advice has never.occurred to us, and I hope never will. While a g^eat
many noble men are " honorary members," and in one or two sporadic in-
stances men have acted temporarily as presidents of local unions at the
South, I am confident oiu- grand constituency of temperance brothers rejoice
almost as much as we do in the fact that we women have from the begin-
ning gone our own gait and acted according to our own sweet will. They
would bear witness, I am sure, to the fact that we have never done this flip-
pantly or in a spirit of bravado, but with great seriousness, asking the help
of God. I can say, personally, what I believe our leaders would also state
as their experience, that so strongly do good men seem to be impressed that
the call coming to Christian women in the Crusade was of God, and not of
man, that in the eleven years of my almost uninterrupted connection with
the National W. C. T. U., I have hardly received a letter of advice or a ver-
** Comradeship Among Women.** 477
bal exhortation from minister or layman, and I would mildly but firmly
say that I have not sought their counsel. The hierarchies of the land will
be ransacked in vain for the letter-heads of the W. C. T. U. We have
sought, it is true, the help of almost every influential society in the nation,
both religious and secular ; we have realized how greatly this help was
needed by us, and grandly has it been accorded, but what we asked for was
an indorsement of plans already made and work already done. Thus may
we always be a society " of the women, by the women," but for humanity.
6. The freedom from red-tape and the keeping out of ruts is another
element of power. We practice a certain amount of parliamentary usage,
and strongly urge the study of it as a part of the routine of local unions.
We have good, strong "constitutions'* and by-laws to match; blanks for
reports ; rolls for membership ; pledges in various styles of art ; badges,
ribbons and banners, and hand-books of our work are all to be had at
"national headquarters," but we will not come under a yoke of bondage to
the paraphernalia of the movement. We are always moving on. "Time
can not dull nor custom stale our infinite variety." We are exceedingly apt
to break out in a new phase. Here we lop off an old department and there
we add two new ones. Our " new departures " are frequent and oftentimes
most unexpected. Indeed, we exhibit the characteristics of an army on the
march, rather than an army in camp or hospital.
The marked esprit de corps is to be included among the secrets of suc^
cess. The W. C. T. U. has invented a phrase to express this, and it b
"comradeship among women." So generous and so cherished has this
comradeship become, that ours is often called a "mutual admiration
society." We believe in each other, stand by each other, and have plenty
of emulation without envy. Sometimes a state or an individual says to
another, "The laurels of Miltiades will not suffer me to sleep," but there is
no staying awake to belittle success ; we do not detract from any worker's
rightful meed of praise. So much for the "hidings of power" in the
W. C. T. U.
There are two indirect results of this organized work among women,
concerning which I wish to speak :
First It is a strong nationalizing influence. Its method and spirit
differ very little, whether you study them on the border of Puget Sound or
the Gulf of Mexico. In San Fraticisco and Baltimore white ribbon women
speak the same vernacular ; tell of their gospel meetings and petitions ; dis-
cuss The Union Signal editorials, and wonder "what will be the action of
our next national convention."
Almost all other groups of women workers who dot the continent, are
circumscribed by denominational lines and act largely under the advice of
ecclesiastical leaders. The W. C. T. U. feels no such limitation. North and
South are strictly separate in the women's missionary work of the churches,
but Mississippi and Maine, Texas and Oregon. Massachusetts and Georgia,
sit side by side around the yearly camp-fires of the W. C. T. U. The South-
em women have' learned to love us of the North and our hearts are true to
them ; while to us all who fight in peaceful ranks unbroken, " For God and
^
478 Our Aim — The Regnang^ ef Christ,
Home tnd Nktlve LanA," tbe Nation la a lacred name apelled wftb « tap-
ttalN.
Second. Onr W. C T. U. ia a school, not founded in that tlio(^t, or for
tliat purpose, bat anre to fit na for the sacred duties of patriota in the lealm
ttiat Ilea jnst beyond the horizon of the coming century.
Here we try onr wings that yonder our flight may be strong and steady.
Here we prove our capacity for great deeds ; there we shall perform them.
Here we make onr experience and pass onr novitiate that yonder we may
calmly take onr places and prove to the world that what it needed moat
was "two heads in counsel," as well as "two beside the hearth." When
that day comes, the nation shall no longer miss as now the influence of
half its wisdom, more than half its purity and nearly all its gentleness,
in conrts of justice and halls of legislation. Then shall one code of morals —
and that the highest — govern both men and women, then shall the Sabbath
be respected, the rights of the poor be recognized, the liquor traffic ban-
iahed, and the home protected from all its foes.
Bom of such a visitation of God's Spirit as the world has not known
aince tongues of £re sat upon the wondering j^np at Pentecost, cradled in
a flifth high as the hope of a saint, and deep as the depths of a dnmkard's
despair, and baptized in the beanty of holinesa, the Crusade determined
the ultimate goal of its teachable child, the W. C. T. U., which has one
steadfast aim, and that none other than the regnancy of Christ, not in
form, but in fact ; not in substance, but in essence ; not ecclesiastically, bnt
truly in the hearts of men. To this end its methods are varied, changing,
manifold, but its unwavering faith, these words express ; " Not by nigte,
nor by power, hut by my spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts."
CHAPTER X.
MISCELLANEOUS INCIDENTS OP TEMPERANCE WORK.
How threadbare, because so frequent, is the reiteration of the
excuse among moderate drinkers, '' I can take a glass of beer, or
I can let it alone. ' * A stalwart yotmg Scotchman came to Evans-
ton. He was of good family, fine, athletic figure, handsome
face expressive of strength and resolution. He took the Uni-
versity course with credit to himself, afterward graduated from
the Law Department and began to practice in Evanston. Years
passed by, twelve of them, I think, when this man entered the
Gospel Temperance meeting addressed by me one Sunday after-
noon in Evanston, and when the speech was over came to the
front, and turning toward the audience, largely made up that
day of University students, he raised his trembling hand, and
with a face more marred and marked by dissipation than any
language can depict, he cried out in his deep voice, full of tears,
'* Boys, don't drink, don't drink I I was a student just as you
are, with prospects just as bright ; held my own well in the
University all through the scholastic and professional courses,
but said from time to time as I took a glass of beer, ' This can
never master a man so masterfhl as I.' And here I stand to-day
and you see how it is. I am the slave of that little glass of beer.
Let me say it once again and don't forget it while you live,
* Boys, don't drink, don't drink / ' "
Another man in the same town, a blacksmith, a Scotchman
by birth, or at least by heritage, after having been known in
Evanston as a pronounced inebriate, resolved one Thanksgiving
Day, nine years or more ago, that he would never touch liquor
again.
(479)
48o Fulfilled Pledges.
He has faithfully kept his word, is a pillar in the temperance
work in Evanston, no man being more respected or relied upon.
I am glad to coimt him among the friends of our family, and to
invite him with his family whenever we have a reception. What
pride he takes on these occasions, going to the railroad magnates,
getting them to lend great engine head-lights to make the
grounds bright, both in front and on the lawn behind the house.
He trims up the place with festoons of evergreens, and is our
chief standby throughout the enterprise. I remember when he
was going away after mother's eightieth birthday festival, when
four hundred guests had passed through our home, from the
Governor of the state to the humblest of our reformed men, with
their families, and every clergyman, including the pastor of the
colored church, so that our own pastor said that if ever he saw a
gospel feast this was the one — this good man said to me as he
left our door, nearly all the guests having gone, **I suppose it
did n*t mean so very much to most of them that live in nice
houses and have everything they want, but I tell you it was a
mighty epoch in my life, and will make me a better man. ' * It
was this same kind friend who placed in front of Rest Cottage,
and of my sister's annex adjoining it, a beautiful standing vase
which he fills every year with flowers. It is to him and his fam-
ily that we are glad to send remembrances from time to time,
and to him that the ladies of our society gave a nice arm-chair
one Christmas, in token of their appreciation of all that he had
done, suffered and survived.
At one well-remembered meeting in the town of S., Mr.
C , who was from an excellent family, and had been a
leading merchant, but was now a confirmed drunkard, came
forward to sign the pledge. Something in his face interested
me, the more so as I noticed a look of positive distress on the
faces of some of the white ribbon women. This was so contrary
to the usual cordial reception given by our workers to any
one — ^no matter how degraded — ^who wishes to enter on a new
life, that I asked an explanation afterward and they said, *'He
has signed it so many times and broken it so often that he is
bringing the pledge into positive disrepute. Some saloon-keeper
will offer him a drink if he will let him have his pledge card and
Perfect Through Suffering. 481
they will nail it up behind the bar.** I could not wonder that
the ladies were jealous for their cause, but somehow I believed
that this time he would stand firm. I resolved to go and see
his wife, and the next morning did so. She was a stony-faced
and broken-hearted woman. I could not get the least intima-
tion of hope. Finally I asked her to kneel with me in prayer,
which she did, I think out of courtesy more than from any inter-
est in the exercises. And as I left, after urging her to cheer him
up all she could, she replied, without a particle of light in her
face, ** I will agree to this much, I won't hinder him the least bit
in the world.** If her manner was as inspiring to him as it was
to me, I think that he must have had to get a good deal of it be-
fore he could extract any appreciable amount of enthusiasm. A
year passed and I returned to the same village, and spoke in. the
same church once more. Standing in the pulpit, I read my audi-
ence, pew by pew, as one would read a book line by line, to find
the countenance of this gray-haired, kindly man. He was not
there. No one had spoken to me of him and I began to fear it
was because they did not like to disappoint me. I sought his
home again. A lady, smiling and affable, came out of the door
as I approached, and met me at the gate. I did not know her, but
she introduced herself as the same woman whose stony face I had
carried in my memory throughout the year. " Come around into
the garden, he is sitting on the bench under his favorite apple-
tree,** she said. So I went, and he rose and came forward to
meet me, his face full of a new hope, his whole appearance in-
stinct with self-respect. I thought to say a pleasant word to him
and so remarked, ** Why were you not at my meeting last even-
ing, Mr. ? I counted on you more than on any one except
my cousin.*' At this came a look of pain and a quick glance at
his wife, as he exclaimed, ** There now, we have got to tell her,
and we did n't mean to." Then he said : *' You have n*t heard
a word fi-om me this year, although you have written me several
times, and I have got those letters, every one of them, put away
carefully, and I have read the newspapers you sent, and appre-
ciated your kindness just as much as if you had heard from me.
And I have said to my wife often when she would ask me why I
did n*t write, * Anyhow, I am doing what she wants me to.* But
the fact is that I have n't been outside my gate since you was
482 No " Ball and Chains
here before, and I am ashamed to have you know about it, but it
is an honest fact — I have n't dared to. The only way for me,
even with God*s g^ce, to keep true to what I promised was to
stay right close at home. I tell you that woman there has been
kind to me, my daughter and all the folks, the best they know.
And I have hoed these garden beds, don't you see how fresh and
nice they are ? — and asked God to take the weeds out of my
heart as I do the weeds that get among the flowers, and to take
care of the posies, if I have got any, just as I try to take care of
these. But now I want to tell you," he went on, as we all seated
ourselves on the bench imder the apple-tree, ' * you can go up and
down throughout the country just where you have a mind, for
you don't carry any ball and chain. Now, make a speech for me
every time you stand before the people and tell them how it is
with me. Tell them that good men come along past my gate and
lean their elbows on it, look at me as kind as can be, and say,
*You are doing first-rate, , keep right at it,' and that
very minute their breaths are so full of beer or something even
stronger that I must get speedily to windward, and am as tempted
as I can well be. Then they came along here on election day,
leaned their elbows on my gate and said, * I tell you, you are
making a good fight of it. You will show them how it is done
this time, ' and they walk right on down to the ballot-box and put
in little pieces of paper with the names of men on them that they
know favor the liquor trafl&c and will license it to set its trap here
in this town, so that I dare not go outside my gate. Now, when
I think of this, it makes their words of cheer sound sort of empty ;
I think they might have helped me more by their example and
their vote. You talk a good deal about the arrest of thought, I
wish you could screw it into the heads of the men in my own
village."
Among the invitations that I have most prized is the follow-
ing from that most cultured of all Indian races, the Cherokee,
and signed by the famous Chief, Bushyhead :
ExEcuTivK Department, Cherokee Nation, I. T.,
Tahlequah, May i8, 1881.
Mrs. L. I. Stapler : — In expectation of a visit to the Nation from Miss
Frances K. Willard, president of the Christian Temperance Union, about
the twelfth instant, I respectfully request you, in connection with Mrs.
French, Miss Carrie Armstrong, Rev. A. C. Bacone, Rev. Daniel Rogers
Mrs. Judge Thompson. 4^3
and W. W. Ross, £sq.« to act as a committee, on behalf of the Nation, to
welcome Miss Willard to the capital when she arrives, and, jointly and sev-
erally, to devise such means as may seem to you best, to make her visit to
the Nation pleasant and agreeable to herself, and profitable to onr people.
Miss Willard comes highly recommended as a lecturer and laborer in the
cause of temperance and humanity. Very respectfully,
D. W. BXTSHYHBAD,
Principal Chief Cherokee Nation,
My first extended temperance trip was in the state of Ohio,
in the month of May, 1876, two years after the Cnisade. The
saloons were all back again, flourishing as usual. I asked men
and women the question, ** What good do you think the Cru-
sade accomplished ? *' One woman answered : ** Until we went
out praying on the street I never knew where the saloons were,
or how they looked. Of course, I had passed by them, but I had
the impression that those second-rate looking places were barber- .
shops. The Crusade taught me that they are places where men
get shaved, not of their beards, but of their honor.** Another
made this explanation : " Until the Crusade I never taught my
children especially about temperance, but now they have had it
dinned into ear and mind, tmtil, this morning, when I was going
down town with my little boy, hardly six years of age, I felt his
hands grasping my own more closely than usual, and noticed
that his step was quicker. * What is the matter, my son ? Why
do you hurry mamma along ? * I asked, and I shall never forget
how he rolled up his bright eyes to my face, and said, * Why,
mamma, don't you want to hurry? Don't you know we are
passing a saloon ? ' " A movement that can point out to women
that there are saloons, and what they are like, and can inspire
in children a wholesome dread of such institutions, will bear
fruit far beyond the hopes of those whose heroism set it going.
Naturally enough, I was desirous of seeing Mrs. Judge
Thompson, leader of the first praying band in the Crusade, and I
went for that purpose to speak in Hillsboro. I found a little
town that thinks well of itself, not a great ways from the Ken-
tucky line, the former home of Governor Trimble, who was a great
temperance man and the father of this same Mrs. Thompson. I
found the beautiful home he had built for her, a fine house, with
every comfort and convenience, large, shady grounds about ii,
and at the door, as I entered, was the sweetest woman, of medium
4^4 Our Magna Charta of the Crusade.
height, slight figure, with the remains of striking beauty in her
face, golden-brown, curly hair, kind eyes and rare, winsome smile.
Her voice was low and sweet as she welcomed me, almost as my
own mother might have done, to her delightful home. She told
me all the stor>', and in her own room, where she first read the
Crusade hymn, we read it once again together and knelt in
prayer. Then I said to myself, ** What if this woman had not
dared? What if her noble coadjutors had shrunk from the un-
dertaking ? Many a time had Dr. Dio Lewis in his lectures urged
the women to go forth into the saloons and pray. What if these
women, like so many ethers, had declined? *'
I spoke in the Presbyterian church from which the noble
band marched two by two and there I heard Mrs. Thompson
read the Crusade psalm once more out of the Bible that is now
our Magna Charta of the Crusade. On the tenth anniversary of
the movement, I went again to Hillsboro, staying with Mrs.
Thompson, and speaking in the hall where Dr. Dio Lewis spoke.
Going from Hillsboro, the cradle, to Washington Court-house,
the crown of the Crusade, I spent Christmas of 1883 in the home
of Mrs. Ustick, who with Mrs. George Carpenter made up the
Crusade duet of leaders in that famous town. Mrs. Carpenter
was the wife of the Presbyterian minister, and the success of the
movement in Washington Court-house so far outranked that of
Hillsboro, that the good people, naturally enough, have always
felt that justice was not done them when the muse of histor>'
represented Hillsboro as the vital historical center of the greatest
Pentecost of modem times. This was manifest on the evening
when I addressed them in their Temperance Hall, and it grieved
me to the heart that they must always think so, and, perhaps,
blame me a little that at first I had accounted Hillsboro the start-
ing point — which it was by the space of twenty-four hours. But
surely all temperance people will love and cherish the memory
of that splendid beacon-light flung out by the brave women of
Washington Court-house, from which it shone to every comer
of the Buckeye State, and thence throughout the nation, and
thence throughout the world.
Ever>' public speaker must endure the contradiction of sin-
ners and of saints as well. This should be taken into account
beforehand, and should not be looked upon with disgust, ill-
Light for One St€p Ahead. 485
temper or surprise. For instance, the ladies of Elmira W. C. T. U.
had written me to be present at the Annual Fair, and I went,
knowing simply what I have stated. At the entrance of the fair
grounds my carriage was met by a band of music, of which I had
no previous knowledge ; but the statement went all over the
country, north and south, east and west, that I had become so
strong-minded that I traveled with a brass band, and came to the
entrance of the Exposition Building where United States Senator
Hiscock was speaking, breaking up his address, and going on
the platform with the statement that the time was mine and I
prop)osed to use it. None of my acquaintances would believe
this, but what of the public in general ? No one can ever track
down a lie like that. The facts were, that as we drove up to the
hall, preceded by the band. Senator Hiscock was speaking, at
the hour assigned to the ladies for their meeting, and, no doubt,
was disturbed by the music. I entered the hall with other ladies,
took my seat and listened to what he had to say, which was a
panegyric on tobacco-raising, a theme not specially congenial to
the audience that had gathered to hear a temperance speech,
and was largely made up of thorough-going temperance people.
At the close of the speech I went upon the stand, expressed to
him my regret that he should have been incommoded, and we
proceeded with our meeting.
I had spoken before an afternoon audience of ladies in a vil-
lage of Delaware. It was in my earlier work, and I probably
did not make my points as clear as I ought, for a nice old lady
to whom the membership card was handed by one of my assist-
ants who sought her signature, looked at the card, poised the
proffered pencil in her honest hand, and mused audibly as follows :
*'She wants me to join this society, and I have no idea in the
world what they intend to do. But I suppose it will be a good
deal as it is when I take my lantern of a dark night to go to
prayer-meeting — I can see but one step ahead, and I take that,
and when I have done so the lantern is there and I am there, and
we can just go on and take another." So her honored name
went down upon the card, and she handed it back, saying still to
herself, " If the Lord has got any temperance work for me to do,
He's going to give me light to do it by.'*
In a town in Virginia, a group of lovely women gathered
486 ''A "Righteous CoveHngy
about to hear what I wanted them to do, and when I proposed an
organization, the loveliest of them said to me, in a low, sweet
voice, " Because my own home has never known this curse, but
my husband and sons are pure and true, I will join the society
from a simple sense of gratitude and loyalty.**
In Griffin, Georgia, at a similar meeting, going down the
aisle for signatures, I passed a sweet young lady who shook her
head when the membership card was offered her. A few mo-
ments later I came back up the same aisle, when she laid her
hand upon my arm, saying, **I think I'll change my mind.'*
Of course, I recognized her ancient, inalienable right to do just
that, and as she wrote her graceful autograph, I said in a low
voice, " Would you mind telling me, my dear, how you came to
change your mind?" And with flushed cheeks, she answered,
earnestly , " I am in the senior class at the High School, and very
busy, but when I came to think it over, I could not go home and
say I had declined to help you form this society - 1 did not dare
to do that, for my only brother spends all his evenings out ! * *
In Virginia City, Nevada, there was a charming old lady in
our audience whom I especially coveted for the society, but I did
not obser\'e when the cards were passed whether she gave her
name or not. At the close of the meeting she came forward to
greet me, and I said, ** Dear lady, I coveted you with a ' right-
eous coveting' ; did you give us your name?" She answered,
presenting her little grandson Neddie to me, * * He sat by my side
during your address. I kept saying to myself, ' I am a member
of the Episcopal Church, and that is vow enough ; I don*t pro-
pose to take another, nor do I think it is required of me. * But
when the paper was passed around, he drew his little stub-pencil
from his f)ocket, and reaching his hand for the pledge, printed
his name, never yet dishonored, in the proper place, and turning
to me with a smile in his blue eyes, he said, ' Here, grandma,
put your name right down under Neddie's.' Of course I did just
what the boy desired."
Among our pleasant convention episodes, should be named
our visit to President Arthur, whose home was then in a stone
house on Capitol Hill. Anything more elegant than his manner
of recei\4ng us I have not seen. At my suggestion, the delegates
stood in groups according to their states and territories. The
Object-lessons of Temperance. 4^7
President entered on the arm of Senator Blair, and on being pre-
sented I said to him, ** We will not take your time, Mr. Presi-
dent, to shake hands with every one of these ladies, but have
arranged that each delegation shall be presented to you by its
president, and she alone will claim the honor of a personal recog-
nition.'* His handsome face lighted up with a genial smile as
he replied, ** Please permit me the pleasure of grasping every
lady's hand,** and this he insisted on doing, making some pleasant
remark to each of the leaders and presenting a magnificent rose
to almost every lady present, although some cross-looking poli-
ticians seated on the sofas around the g^eat reception room
looked disgusted that a '* parcel of women'* should take up so
much time, and some of them had so little grace as to make some
such observation within hearing of the delegates. President
Arthur did not reply to my little speech, save with the elo-
quence of his rarely attractive smile.
We went down to Mt. Vernon on the day after the Washing-
ton Convention closed ; we planted there a tree near the tomb of
the great chief, each delegate throwing on a bit of earth, Miss
Nardssa White (now Mrs. Kinney) making an ofihand speech
and all of us singing, *' My country, *tis of thee.**
In Philadelphia the convention visited the grave of Dr. Ben-
jamin Rush, the first American writer on the evils of intemper-
ance, who, in 1785, sent out his famous essay, from which returned
to him the loud echoes of Lyman Beecher*s sermons and the or-
ganization of the first temperance society, at Moreau, in Saratoga
County, New York, in 1808 ; bread cast upon the waters to be
found after many, many days. Beside this honored grave a tree
was planted and a marble tablet placed, with the record of our
visit, Edward S. Morris, the well known Quaker philanthropist,
helping us with this enterprise and bearing the expense thereof.
From Louisville most of the delegates went to che Mammoth
Cave, where we began the building of a white ribbon cairn, each
of us gathering a stone for the fast-rising heap, and leaving in-
structions that all of like faith with us should follow that exam-
ple, and so place an object-lesson of temperance before all visitors in
that weird sanctuary. Our little * * golden cometist * * fi*om the state
of Maine, Mrs. F. A. Bent, a niece of our beloved Mrs. Stevens,
woke the echoes of the cave while we sang our favorite h3nnns.
488 '' De World Do Move.''
At Nashville the convention visited Mrs. President Polk,
the widow of James K. Polk, whose grave is in the grounds in
front of her stately home. In iSSi I had suggested that the po -
trait of this accomplished lady of the old regime ought to adorn
the White House, and had started the subscription for that pur-
pose after my first visit to the South. The enterprise was suc-
cessful, and, so far as I know, this is the first united work of
Northern and Southern women in our day. Mrs. Polk has been
a dear, kind friend to me, and she received our delegates with the
utmost cordiality, although in her eighty-seventh year.
Among the pleasant tokens of a growing spirit of tolerance,
I would like to record that we have had public meetings under the
auspices of the W. C. T. U., especially in the South, where be-
sides the usual varieties of religion represented by the Protestant
clerg>', we have had on the platform the Catholic priest and the
Jewish rabbi, all meeting in harmony and evincing the sincerest
interest in the work of the white ribboners.
I have spoken repeatedly in Episcopal churches, but never
as yet stood in one of their pulpits. I was invited to speak in a
Catholic church on Saturday night, with the explicit statement
that as it was new and not to be dedicated until the next day, my
speaking would not be a desecration ! This invitation I declined.
My good friend, John Campbell, a Catholic lawyer in Phila-
delphia, invited me to speak before the Total Abstinence Society
of his church in the Cathedral Hall, not the Cathedral itself, on
Sunday afternoon. I went with my friend and hostess, Mrs. J. R.
Jones, president of our local auxiliary. We were invited to seats
upon the platform. When the priest entered every person in the
hall rose. I was sorr>^ to feel that the good father's response to the
introduction to me was not specially cordial, although courteous.
After speaking half an hour I was obliged to leave, on account of
an engagement to meet a local assembly of the Knights of Labor,
when, behold ! as I took my departure, every mortal stood up,
as be had done for the priest. And they all Catholics, and I a
Methodist sister !
In St. George's Hall, Philadelphia, where in 1885 we cele-
brated the one hundredth year since the publication of Dr. Rush's
essay, this same John Campbell presided at the meeting when the
work of the churches in the temperance reform was the subject,
A Bey's Petition, 489
and it was curious indeed to hear him call a distinguished doctor
to the stand to report for the Presbjrterians, and other eminent
ministers for the Baptist, Methodist and the various Protestant
societies. At the close of this meeting, Father Cleary, a Catholic
priest, who devotes himself to the temperance work, was, at my
request, called upon to pronounce the benediction. I do not know
of any other cause that would so have melted away the prejudice
of centuries; temperance is indeed the Greatheart among
reforms.
I have been asked to speak before the Presbyterian Social
Union of my own city, which was certainly a liberal-minded
thing for those good conservatives to do, also before the
Congregational Club in New York City, where Dr. Buckley
and I appeared on opposite sides of the great question of
woman's ballot, and Rev. Leonard Bacon fired his brilliant
sky-rockets in opposition to the W. C. T. U. and the prohi-
bition movement.
The young men of Beloit College, which, sorrowful to relate,
does not admit women, were gracious enough to invite me to
speak at Commencement, in 1878, before the Archaean Society,
of which my brother was a leading member away back in 1859.
I thought this a hopeful token, and my ears are always intent to
hear that the girls have been admitted to this, and to all other
colleges throughout the nation.
One summer I went to Redding Ridge, Conn., some miles
off the railroad, expecting to have a week in the coimtry, busy,
indeed, with my pen, but entirely free from interruption or the
necessity of public speaking. On the very first evening, as I
sat contentedly on the piazza listening to the fascinating chorus
of the forest, a bright boy of twelve leaned against the post in
front of me and said, " Don't you make speeches, sometimes?"
**Yes, my lad,** I answered, **but I came up hereto getaway
from seeing people.*' **But I think you ought to speak," he
said ; ** don't you notice how many orchards there are, and a good
deal of cider is made up here, and the people who drink it get
very cross. I think it is as ugly a drink as ever was made." It
occurred to me that I would see if he was really in earnest, so I
replied:
490 Bessie's Reason.
*'When a boy asks me to speak it is hard for me to decline, more
so than it would be for almost any other sort of a person, because
I think boys have so many temptations, and I am so glad when
they are friends of temperance. But would you not rather have
me speak on the pyramids ? I traveled in Egypt some years ago,
and climbed that tallest pyramid of all, named Cheops, nearly five
hundred feet high. On the top of it I gathered some bits of mor-
tar, older than Abraham, and I have pictures and diagrams with
which I can illustrate my lecture. Don't you think that would
be more entertaining to the people ?" Ned's bright eyes danced
at the thought of such an evening. I said, **Don't you expect
some day to see the pyramids?" **Oh, yes," he answered, **I
expect to see all there is to be seen one of these days. And since
I am a temperance boy it would be right for me to hear that lec-
ture, but then I think about our people, and how much they need to
have you talk of temperance, so temperance let it be." Of course
there was nothing else to do, and Ned rode up and down, over
hills and through valleys, drumming up an audience, so that on
Sunday afternoon the old church was packed with people who
came, some of them in wagons, some in great loads with a hay
rack to enlarge the wagon, now and then some in carriages, others
in carts, many on foot, and I wondered if we should not see some
man rolling his children along in a wheelbarrow. It was a very
interesting and unusual audience. I talked as best I could, plead-
ing for total abstinence, and at the close brought out the muster
roll of the temperance army, the total abstinence pledge, and asked
how many would enroll their names. A grand response was
given, and at the close whom should I see coming demurely along
the aisle but little Bessie, a sweet child of six years old, who was
under my care at the time for a short outing. I can see her yet
in her white dress and blue rib\)ons and little white shoes as she
stood before me. I laid my hand on her young head and said,
*'I did n't ask you to come, because I thought your mamma would
think you were too young to put your name down on the pledge.
Do you understand what it means, my child ?' ' And I shall never
forget how her little face lighted up with the words, **I sign not
for myself so much, but at home I have a little brother, Artie, he
is only four years old, and when he grows to be a man you said
Suffrage Talk in Dr, BushnelVs Pulpit 491
that folks would ask him to go into the saloon and drink, and I
thought maybe if he knew I signed the pledge it would help him,
so I want to sign for an example." Could a better reason have
been given?
I was to speak in the Congregational church in Hartford, that
had rejoiced in the preaching of that wonderful man, Dr. Horace
Bushnell, for many years. The present pastor was himself a
genius. Dr. Nathaniel Burton, son-in-law of Isabella Beecher
Hooker. Meeting him in his study just before the service, I said,
* 'Doctor, I am a great admirer of Horace Bushnell and have read
ever>'thing he wrote. My reverence for his memory is such that
every leaf on the pathway of Bushnell Park seems to me worthy
to be preserved in an herbarium. I have visited his home, been
received with the utmost courtesy by his accomplished wife, rev-
erently entered his study where he wrote that marvel among books,
'Nature and the Supernatural,' and glanced out of the window
upon the beautiful scenes that soothed his mind while he devoted
himself to his gigantic tasks. His book, on the 'Reform against
Nature,* opposing woman's ballot, has, of course, afflicted me, and
though it seems an impertinence, I thought I should be glad to
speak of woman's suffrage as a means of home-protection from the
saloon curse, in this very pulpit, from which Dr. Bushnell used
to fling his varied thunder-bolts.**
"Do so by all means,** was the Doctor's answer.
"But I would not if it would in anywise embarrass you," I
said; "your people might not like it.*'
"Like it," he answered, "I don't care a continental whether
they do or not. If they don't like it, that is the very best reason in
the world why they should hear you tell what makes you differ from
them." So we went into the church, ascended the elegant pulpit,
and I saw over at my right a bust of the philosopher whose mighty
spirit seemed to brood in the very atmosphere. Dr. Burton \vas a
mischievous man, and he whispered to me softly, "Mrs. Horace
Bushnell sits well up toward the front." Under these interesting
circumstances I gave my argument, nor can I say that I felt any
special embarrassment, for I believed in my cause.
After a long, dusty ride on a summer's day, I arrived in a
famous Hudson river town, which shall be nameless^ and was
492 Temperance Women are Total Abstainers,
taken to the elegant home of an Episcopal lady who had vol-
unteered to entertain me. No sooner had I reached my beautiful
and quiet room, than the hostess, who had greeted me at the door,
came in, saying earnestly, * * Will you not allow me to send you up a
glass of wine ? You must be very tired after your journey. ' ' The
blood flushed in cheek and brow as I said to her, * 'Madam, 200,-
000 women would lose somewhat of their faith in humanity if I
should drink a drop of wine." And I pointed to my white rib-
bon, saying, **This is the sign between us.'* The lady's eyes
filled with tears and she impressively begged my pardon, and
begged me to understand that in her home wine was not used as
a beverage, beat a hasty retreat from my room, and with her fem-
ily showed me the utmost kindness and consideration throughout
my stay. It was difficult for me to understand how she came to ask
such a question of me. I know that the popular belief is that
temperance men who speak are not always invulnerable, but I am
confident this is a libel on these men and largely originates in the
saloon. Evidently this lady lived in a world so difierent fix)m my
own that it did not occur to her that a temperance woman was a
total abstainer!
A party of fashionable young gentlemen and ladies came into
the Palmer House restaurant from Mc Vicker'sTheatre one night,
and sat down at the table next to that at which Mr. and Mrs. Barnes
and I were taking an oyster stew, after a temperance meeting. The
young people ordered supper. One of the young men spoke to
the head waiter, who disappeared and soon returned with a
long-necked wine bottle, whereupon the handsomest of the elegant
trio of American girls said quickly, **I am sure, gentlemen, you
will respect our wishes not to have wine. We belong to the Young
Women's Temperance League of Cleveland. " **Yes, let us have
lemonade instead," said the gentle young lady beside her. **Very
well, it shall be as you wish," assented the gentleman courteously,
and they were soon discussing the play over a thoroughly temper-
ance repast. My heart smote me, for I had said to myself,
* 'These young theatre-goers naturally enough take wine," when
behold, they were as staimch as the most strenuous church-goer
in all the land.
^illjouettce.
WORD
"Not kv
PAINTl
Let LIFK DE BANNED OR
SAI NTED.
>j:eper than writtbn
SCROLL
The colors of the sodu
Sweeter than anv sung
My sosgs that found so tongue.
Nobler than any fact
My wish that failed of act."
— IVkiltur.
l:
M
WHAT I HAVE DONE AND SUFFERED AS A PEN-HOLDEIL
I was early encouraged by my parents to keep a daily rec-
ord, not of events only, but of commentary as well. A short
time previous to entering the Woman's College in Milwaukee
(1857), I began to branch out in this direction largely, and con-
tinued to do so right on through my student and teacher years,
writing so steadily during the nearly two years and a half that I
spent abroad, that I have about twenty volumes of note-books
filled out during that period. It is a token of my good health
that I was able to do this writing an3rwhere, on the cars, on
steamers, and on horseback, besides constantly contributing to
papers at home.
I was taught by my mother to read out of a tiny juvenile
paper, no longer than a postal card, entitled, * *The Slave's Friend. ' '
The little bound copy lies before me now, marked at my favorite
articles. There are two childish pencil strokes at the following,
and as I read it over I smile at its current value — something
above all else dear to the journalistic mind — ^if only the word
** slavery ** be changed to ** temperance.'*
UTTLK DANIEL.
Danikl. — Mr. W. is going to give a lecture this evening, papa, in the
school-house, on slavery. May n*t I go hear him ?
Mr. Tracy. — Go to hear him ! No, indeed, you shall not I am glad
they would not let him have the meeting-house.
D. — I am told, father, that he is a very good man, and a very interest-
ing lecturer. May I ask why you will not permit me to hear him ?
Mr. T. — Why ? Because he is a fanatic, an incendiary, a brawler, a
cut-throat, a fool. I hate him.
D.— O papa ! When he published his report on manual labor schools,
don't you remember that you said it was the most sensible pamphlet you
had ever read, and that the author was one of the wisest and best young
men in this country ?
Mr. T.— Did I ? Well, I had forgotten that I ever said sa But he is
doing more hurt than he ever did good.
(493)
494 My Pet Book.
D.— They say he is a temperance man, a peace-maker, a friend to
liberty, and you have said he was a wise and good man ; how then can he
be a fool, or a fanatic, or a cut- throat, or an incendiary, father ?
Mr. T. — Wherever he goes there are mobs ; and there will be one here,
or I am mistaken. I have said so a dozen limes today.
D.— Is not that the way, sir, lo get up a mob? and how is Mr. W. to
blame if people will stir up mobs instead of going to hear him lecture.'
Mr. T. - Go to bed, Daniel ; you are too young to talk about such
things ; if you don't take care you will be just such a fanatic as this Bir. W.
before you are much older.
D. — Good night, papa ; but you have forgotten you once told me, after
Mr. W. had made an address in our Sabbath-school, that you hoped to see
me just such a man.
Mr. T. — Did I ? But you need not remember everything I say.
D. — No, father ! I will not if it displeases you.
Early impressions are made on a memory that is **wax to
receive and marble to retain," so I may justly say that I owe to
journalism in the shape of that little anti-slavery paper, my ear-
liest impulse to philanthropy and much of the fearlessness as a
reformer that has surprised me no less than my friends. I liked
nothing so well as to go away alone and read this little book, the
bound volume having been given me by Mary Thome, daughter
of the well-known Oberlin professor. I often vexed my playmates
because I preferred it to doll, doll-dishes or doll-clothes. But my
mother's favorite paper was The Mother's Assistant, published in
Boston, and filled with hints and helps for the Christian nurture
of children, so I read that at a tender age. My father's paper
was The Oberlin Evangelist, and as I looked up to him as the
greatest of men, I pried into its pages, determined to know what
he found there that held his steady gaze so long. President
Charles G. Finney's sermons seemed to be the main thing, and
my little mind had many a fright and untold * * horror of great
darkness," as I read the tremendous terrors of the law therein set
forth. My older brother had for his own, The Youth's Cabinet,
the chief, if not the only, juvenile paper, that was to a genera-
tion ago what St, Nicholas and The Youth's Companion are to
this. There I learned a love for natiu-al science, outdoor sports,
and story reading. The first time that I was ever mentioned in
a paper was when about four years old, and it was not in a fash-
ion calculated to excite my vanity or my dear mother's, either,
for we were therein held up not as an example, but as a warning.
Father's Political Papers, 495
The article was by Prof. George Whipple, of Oberlin College,
aud published in The Mother's Assistant, His wife had been to
see us, and my mother, after the immemorial manner of our mater-
nal relatives, told her something I had said, then changed the
subject. Whereupon I left my play, drew my little cricket
to mother's feet, seated myself with elbows on her knee, and
piped out with intense interest, ** Oh, mother, tell the lady som^
thing more that I've done ! '* I think it was a good lesson, for
my mother was not given to that defect in training thereafter ;
I mean, not '* before company,*' for she always praised us im-
mensely in private for every good thing we tried to do, and when
we were not good, her chief weapon with which to restore us to
our right minds was, *' I wonder where my nice little girl has
^i^one? She was so helpftd and polite, but this scowling little
thing must have been left here by a peddler or a witch."
When I was in my seventh year, we removed to Wisconsin
overland, in ** prairie schooners," going ten years ahead of the
railroad. But to our isolated farm, came The Morning Star
and The Myrtle from our life-long friend, the wife of David
Marks, that famous **Boy Preacher" of the Free Will Baptist
Church ; the National Era in which, when eleven years of age,
I read and wept over ** Uncle Tom's Cabin ; " The Ladies^ Repos-
itory, then edited by Rev. Dr. B. F. Tefft, whose historical story,
**The Shoulder Knot," fascinated my brother and me, who were
never permitted to read novels ; and the Horticulturist of that
artist in landscape gardening, A. J. Downing, whose death by a
steamboat accident upon the Hudson River smote us almost like
a personal bereavement. We had also The Agriculturist and The
Prairie Farmer, Later on, we had Putnam* s Magazine and Har-
per's Monthly, besides our own church papers. The New York and
Northwestern Christian Advocates, All these we children were en-
couraged to read, but ** father's political papers " were by him
declared to be to us unlawful. He kept them out of sight so far as
possible, and asserted with strong emphasis that he *' did n't want
his family, and, above all, his women folks, to know about any-
thing so utterly detestable as politics." Meanwhile, he was a good
Democrat, an active politician, and a man of the highest honor
and integrity. Therefore, I reasoned that politics could n't
possibly be so bad or else he would n't so greatly relish being in
496 White Wings that Fly to '' Forest Home:*
them, and the one particular in which I disobeyed my father ww
in getting and reading those papers with the utmost particular-
ity on every practicable occasion. I found myself to be indeed
*' a chip of the old block/' for these political papers were move
attractive to me than any others. The Democratic Standard^ iti
politics and candidates, were subjects of great interest, and, later
on, S. M. Booth's Milwaukee Free Press was more to me than any
partisan paper has been since, until the era of the New York VoicL
John P. Hale and George W. Julian visited the neighboring town
of Janesville and my mother would go to hear them speak, Oliver
acting as her escort ; returning late at night from her unexampled
adventure she found us all up and waiting *'to hear the argu-
ments.'' My father forsook the Democrats, erelong, and joined
the ''Bam burners," Pree-soilers and Republicans, all parts of
one tremendous whole.
I read Benton's *' Thirty Years in the United States Senate,"
and the great Missouri Senator made a sttDng impression on my
mind, but we were all Fr^monters, and my brother's first vote
was cast for the hero of the day, the fearless ** Pathfinder.'* It
was journalism that tracked us into the wilderness, kept us com-
pany in our isolation, poured into our minds the brightest
thoughts of the best thinkers, and made us a family of rural
cosmopolites. It was journalism that developed in us the passion
of patriotism and the insight into politics as the arena of loftiest
philanthropic achievement. Our college-bred neighbor. Professor
Hodge, who came west ten years later than ourselves, was a
devotee of the New York Tribune y and we had the reading of
that paper in Horace Greeley's day, when it was the friend of
human freedom, and not flung fix)m a tall tower, wherein,
'* The spirit above is a spirit of sin,
And the spirit below is the spirit of gin."
What wonder that to us, upon our prairie farm, one mile from
any neighbor and several miles from anywhere, the white wings
of the press flying in, so broad, so free and manifold, seemed like
kind visitants from some great fairyland that we were bent on
seeing and living in, ourselves, in the sweet *' sometime" of our
expectant dreams !
My brother Oliver had decided literary talent and eariy
declared his purpose and desire to be an editor. I remember
I
First Literary '' Contribution ^ 497
article he wrote for the college magazine when he was about
twenty-one, and how much my emulation was stirred by its open-
ing sentence, which was as follows : "I believe in metempsycho-
sis, yet I am not a Hindu, nor a worshiper of the sacred ibis."
•* Oh,'* I thought, ** if I could only roll out words after that man-
ner !** But it was not for women ; so far as I then knew, no
woman had ever dared aspire to such a thing. Sarah Josepha
Hale had done so, beginning as far back as 1828, but we were
oblivious of one who, however gifted, had got no farther than to
edit ** a woman's fashion paper."
I do not remember trying to reduce my ideas to writing until
I was about eleven years old, at which time Miss Burdick, the first
teacher that I ever had, herself a young lady under twenty years,
told me that I must write a composition once in two weeks in the
little school of six or eight pupils that used to assemble around
a big table made for us by father, in what was afterwards the
parlor of our home. I had run wild out-of-doors, and had written
so little that it was a fonnidable undertaking, not so much to
think as to write down my thoughts. I had an unlimited enthu-
siasm for pets, and just then was making a live doll out of my pet
kitten, so I thought it would be the easiest thing to write upon a
subject with which I was acquainted, and which had fascinations
for me. This famous production is given here, for I feel sure the
actual experience of that first composition may bring a waft of
cheer to some white ribboner, boy or girl, by whom pen and
paper are as little loved as they were by me at that age.
At our farm, named by us " Forest Home, "we established
a paper called The Tributie^ with three columns to the page,
nicely ruled off for us by mother, and filled in with exceedingly
**fine work " in the way of penmanship, not forgetting an occa-
sional drawing that would have been more satisfactory if labeled.
Mother contributed poetry, my brother wrote the ** solid arti-
cles," and I did the ** literary part," the specimen that has
survived being a natural curiosity, of which the less said the
better.
When about fourteen years old, I first ventured to send a
** contribution " to an educational paper in Janesville, the ' ' organ ' *
of a classical school long ago extinct. ** Rustic Musings" was
the uncooked title of my exceedingly raw composition. I^ife had
32
49^ Wnttng by the Clock,
no charms for me during the interval between the secret sending
in of this manuscript by one of our hired men, and the next issue
of that paper. My name I had not given. This was the first
thing I saw about myself "in print/* after that wretched check-
ing up that mother and I received in The Mother's Assistant
aforesaid :
"Zoe's * Rustic Musings* have some good points, but we
can hardly use the article. Besides, we don*t believe a lady
wrote it. * Ex pede Herculem' **
I asked father what that Latin quotation meant, and he
replied, " Hercules is known by his foot.** I confided to mother
what I had done, and asked her what that Latin meant to me.
"Oh,** she said, "it means that the writing is like a man*s.
Your father set most of your copies when you learned, don*t you
remember ? Try again, my child ; some time you will succeed.*'
Soon after, Grace Greenwood's Little Pilgrim was sent us, and I
resolved to get up a club, for she said all who did that would have
their names printed in a list, and I, so distant and obscure, found
a fascination in the thought that my name would be put in
type, away in Philadelphia, where the Independence Bell had
rung out long ago ! So I went on horseback, near and far, to
get the names, when, lo, my own appeared ! but, as so often
since, it had an " i " where *' e ** ought to have been ; whereat I
lost my temper, and querulously complained to mother that " The
first editor said I wrote like a man, and the second spelled my
name like a boy, and I guessed they did n't think a gkl could
come to anything in this world, anyhow. * *
Not long after, mother said to my brother and me one winter
evening, * ' See who will write the best composition in twenty
minutes by the clock." We chose the fresh and charming sub-
ject, " Falling Leaves." I got the verdict, it being one of those
rare decisions in favor of the weak. Encouraged by this victory,
I sent my " piece " to the Prairie Parmer, in Chicago, where it
appeared the next week, as follows :
An autumn zephyr came sighing through the branches of a noble elm,
which stood like a protecting giant over my cottage home. It shook, half
regretfully, I thought, one tiny bough ; and down through the gnarled
branches of the grand old tree, fell one, two, three, dark crimson leaves.
The sight, though insignificant, was a sad one to me, then. It reminded
ine of the similitude existing between leaves and mortals. Both wake to be-
Would Write for The Atlantic/ 499
ing in a bright, beautiful world ; both live their appointed season, enjoy
their allotted share of happiness, die their inevitable death, and are, alike,
forgotten. This is the epitome, the simple story, of everything that ever
existed, save the Eternal God. We all begin life with bright hopes and
eager expectancy. In time we leave the stage of action with one convic-
tion— that all is vanity.
We all build our splendid air castles ; alas ! how often have we seen the
anticipated consummation of the cherished plans of some bright being sud-
denly dashed to the ground, and instead of the fruition of those gay dreams,
we have seen ** The sable hearse move slowly on, as if reluctantly it bore
the young, unwearied form to that cold couch which age and sorrow render
sweet to man;" and all of hope and. joy and happiness for that peerless
creation has passed away.
We have our individual hopes and fears ; joys and sorrows ; loves and
hates. These feelings we may not if we would, impart to any living thing.
They are our own, peculiarly our own.
We go on through life. Our eyes lose the brilliancy of youth ; our
frames cease to be erect and powerful ; our steps become slow and spiritless;
our intellects lose their vigor. Yet we still cling fondly to our cherished
schemes ; we hope that we, at least, notwithstanding the thousands that have
been unfortunate, may be successful. Still we plan and endeavor.
We become older, feebler, sadder. Still we try. The cold autumn of
our lives sets in. We tremble before its relentless power. Yet we hope on.
Colder grow the nights, more cheerless the days. Death, like the zephyr,
though not unwillingly nor sadly, sweeps with icy breath across the now
tender, yielding cord of our lives ; he snaps it rudely, and we launch forth
into the vast, unfathomable — Unknown.
How like our fate to that of the falling leaves! Sad, mournful, dirge-
like, everything seems murmuring — " Falling Leaves."
No literary distinction, not even being solicited to write for
The Atlantic — which, I fear, will never " transpire " — could give
me such a thrill of joy as that small leverage imparted then.
Just here I will say, though it is not usual to reveal one's
highest literary ambition, especially when one has failed to attain
it, that I am willing to admit that mine has been during the last
thirty years to write for the Atlantic Monthly/ The Century,
Harper^ s, Scribner^s, etc., are all very well, but when I began
writing for the press the Atlatitic was the nectar and ambrosia of
literary people as well as of those who aspired to be literary, and
early loves last longest. I have written for Harper's and had a
letter in the Century, but I have never yet dared oflfer one to the
Atlantic. Once I went so far as to send its admired editor,
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a printed article that I thought tolerably
500 An Exploded ' * Epic, ' '
good, that is for me, asking him if he believed I could write any-
thing the Atlantic would accept. I received in reply a courteous
note with the enigmatical statement that he was unable to say
from the article forwarded whether I could or not ! The ques-
tion in my mind is now and ever shall be, * ' Is that a compliment
to the article?'* This point I have never been able clearly to
settle for myself, but one thing is certain, I have not yet recov-
ered sufficiently ifrom the shock to make any other venture Allan-
tiC'^^xA, But I give the cultured editor notice that though I
may never be lifted to the Olympian heights of his pages, I in-
tend so to live that somebody who is, shall yet write of me
between those magic yellow covers of the Queen of Monthlies !
Next came, in the same friendly columns that opened to me
first, an oflfer of a premium from the Illinois Agricultural Society,
to consist of silver cup and medal, for the best essay **On the
Embellishment of a Country Home.*' Our farm had taken the
prize at county fairs ; it was a beauty, with such a flower garden
as careful study of A. J. Downing had helped my tasteful father
to create. I ' ' wrote it up, ' ' won the prize, and danced about the
house like a kitten with a ball.
Of ** poems" I wrote many, of which, happily, almost none
have seen the light. My " Epic *' was begun at nineteen.
This poem I had the grace to bestow upon the flames some
years ago. It was nothing less aspiring than an account of the
creation of the universe. I suppose most young writers would
begin at this point ; it was my familiar theme for many a year.
To this I added an account of the pre-historic history of my hero-
ine, who was the central figure of the drama. The only vestige
which remains of this exploded stellar system is the following :
Up above thee smiles no planet.
Far beyond it gleams no star ;
Whizzes there no fiery comet ;
Thou'st not known in ages far.
Going away to school soon after, I was made editor of the
college paper, and some poetic effusions long since forgotten and
forgiven, appeared in the Home Journal, edited by John F. Eber-
hart, then superintendent of Cook county schools, with headquar-
ters in Chicago. Soon after, this same gentleman gave me my
first certificate to teach (in i860), and the ferule replaced the
** Put Money in Thy Pursed 501
pen in a wild prairie school at Harlem (near Oak Park), west
of Chicago.
Teaching was now for many years not the goal of my ambi-
tion, but the necessary ally of my financial independence. If I
had my life to live over again, I would do difierently. I cannot
too strongly counsel any ardent young spirit who feels, as I did,
that to express with pen or voice her deepest thought, her ruling
love and purpose, is to her more than all else, not to be diverted
from that path except by absolute necessity. No such necessity
was laid on me. My father was well off, ours was a comfortable
home, we had now moved to Evanston, seat of the Northwestern
University, and the best minds in that choice literary circle were
my friends. Books without limit were at my command, and
sweet) shy paths, wild groves, and the anthem of Lake Michigan,
were all to be had for the asking. My father begged me to remain
at home. He ** did n't believe that women were called on to earn
money ; he would take care of me gladly — indeed, should feel
compromised if I set out to care for myself. ' '
But I was a * * free bom ' * nature, hence was determined upon
independence. My father believed in the one-purse theory and I
felt that only money of my own could give me self-determining
power. Hence it was that, having graduated at nineteen, when
I was twenty I proceeded, without leave or license, to bind myself
to teach the hardest school in the county, and my literary paradise
forever closed its doors on one who had loved it, no words may
say how well. But the ruling passion was still strong, although
in death. Editors were kind to me and gave me books to review,
in return for which I got the books ; Emery' s Journal of Agricult-
ure sent me flower-seeds and Webster's Unabridged ; I read a
great deal, wrote for The Ladies' Repository once in awhile, and for
Mr. Sewell's Little Corporal, even had an article in that most
exigent of Western papers, the Chicago Tribune, In the ** Cen-
tennial Year of Methodism " (1866), as corresponding secretary of
the American Methodist Ladies' Centenary Association, I bom-
barded our own church press with paragraphs and circulars, mak-
ing the acquaintance of Zion's Herald, I think, at that date.
When our good Bishop Wiley edited the Repository, I vent-
ured to send him my first story. It was along a new line — so I
fancied — was entitled ** Jenny and John;" had held me amaz-
502 ''To Be or Not To Bef'
ingly in the writing, and I said to myself, ** If this only succeed»,
I'll give up independence, go home and be a writer without,
rather than a teacher with, money." Joy to the world ! a letter of
acceptance promptly came with complimentary allusions. Then
I watched ; going to the postoflfice, and when the magazine came
cutting the index page impatiently and enduring the heart-tattoo
that every untried aspirant for literary honors knows so well, as
I searched for my story. Twelve months passed and no story
appeared. I wrote Dr. Wiley, asking him why this was thus and
urging the manuscript's return. He replied curtly that they
did n't undertake to keep track of everybody's manuscript, evi-
dently having forgotten that he had once accepted my poor little
novelette. I had no copy, and in my discouragement I reasoned
thus : *' If it had been really good he would n't have forgotten ;
he is a great man and I am nobody, as yet ; he has, unwittingly,
given me a final judgment ; it is not for me to be a literary woman ;
it is too high, I cannot attain unto it."
So I turned aside once more to teaching, but at Pittsburgh
Female College and Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, wrote essays
for our church press and for the society papers of my girls ; one
address on "Woman's Lesser Duties," was my first ** publica-
tion " "by order of the society." What an epoch was that, my
countr>'men ! I was twenty-four, but the sight of that pretty,
crisp, new pamphlet, with my name on the cover, filled me
with delight.
Going abroad in May of 1868, and remaining until the
autumn of 1870, I sent letters home to the Chicago Republican^
then edited by the celebrated Charles A. Dana, author of the
Cyclopedia, and now proprietor of the New York Sun. Return-
ing, I had an article in Harper's Magazine, wrote for the New
York Independent and our church papers, also for our Chicago
magazine, The Lakeside Monthly, edited by F. F. Browne, and
later on for The Christian Union, Sunday School Times ^ The Forum
and a score of lesser lights.
Meanwhile, all along the years, I have been a writer of para-
graphs and items in which a few lines would set forth an opinion.
The aggregate of these would make volumes, but nearly all
appeared impersonally. When in the summer of 1874, Henry
W. Adams, of New York, started The Morning, his sunny,
Beats the Lead Pencil Tattoo Anywhere. 503
sweet-spirited paper, that earliest incarnated the Woman's Cru-
sade, I had a hand in it as chief contributor. It was my first
pen-work for temperance.
When our W. C. T. U. launched its organ, Our Union,
in 1875, with no subscribers and much faith, I again **put pen
to paper*' with new-found zeal, trying my ** 'prentice hand,"
strange to say, at a ^tory once more. It was entitled ** Margaret's
Victory," but was declared, after twelve chapters, ** too woman's
rightsy " and withdrawn ** by order of the management. "' I also
wrote (in 1875) my '* Hints and Helps," the first hand-book for
white ribboners. Indeed, since the Crusade I have always been
writing my uppermost thought in railway stations, Pullman cars,
on convention platforms and anywhere, glad when it was chron-
icled, and never on the lookout to ascertain whether it went into
the paper or the basket. But our editors have had loving and sis-
terly consideration for me always. The Union Signal^ into which
Our Union was merged at the Louisville National Convention in
1882, has now fifty thousand subscribers, and is rapidly climbing
up to one hundred thousand. My sister-in-law was the first and
Miss Mary Allen West is its present editor ; I have had more
articles in its columns than I was entitled to expect or they, per-
haps, were wise to set before the public.
As already stated, my brother, who had for years been editor
of a daily paper in Chicago, passed away suddenly, in 1878,
leaving the Chicago Evening Post without a chief, and his gifted
wife, Mrs. Mary Bannister Willard, had the heroism to undertake
to save the paper ; it was in the crisis of reconstruction when my
brother died, and was left in a position so critical that no man
would tr>' to stem the tide. I agreed to stand by her, and we
accordingly became the forlorn hope of an enterprise that was
running behind at the rate of several hundred dollars a week, and
for about three months, without fee or reward, we tried to hold our
own. Though briefly mentioned before, I may be permitted here
to give further details concerning this, the most novel experience
of all my life ; I found myself at the head of a corps of twelve
editors and reporters, all of them inured to journalism, of which
I knew practically nothing, and to which I came from the ardors
and hap-hazard of a popular temperance campaign, into the sor-
rowful inheritance of my brother's desk, chair, and dingy city
5^4 Becomes a Chicago hdiior,
offices. My editorial associates, Collins Shackelford, James C.
Ambrose, Henry Ten Eyck White, Alanson Appleton, and others,
were most considerate toward me. They had loved my gifted,
genial brother and were loyal to the women who tried to take up
the herculean task that bore him down. Foreman, proof-readers,
compositors, and all the force of sixty persons or more, stood by
us to the last.
Coming and going, Evanston still my home, mother my
home-maker, Anna Gordon with me at the office, helping in all
the ways I could invent, with evening engagements to speak on
temperance, as my only source of income, I felt the great world-
wave strike hard against my life ship, as it does far out at sea.
But there was so much of home solace and spiritual renew-
ing that, though practically submerged, I do not remember ever
being sleepless over the strange, new work or the impending
doom. We had acted in good faith and done our best. Why
should we make ourselves sick in the bargain ? for health and
good heart, with faith in God, these were our capital. This was
not the first time that the inheritance of being ofae of the ** seven
sleepers," has carried me through.
My sister acted as publisher, for figures — other than those of
speech — have been foreign to me always. She had helped my
brother with book reviews and editorial writing, for which she
has especial gift, but in this emergency her hand was on the
monetary helm.
In our card to the public. May, 1878, I declared our purpose
as follows :
* ' The Post will be more than a buyer and seller in the news
mart. It will aim so to outline the story of the world's doings
to-day that the reading thereof will tend to make the world better
to-morrow. It will address itself to a constituency located not in
bar-rooms and billiard halls, but in business offices and homes.
It will warmly advocate all causes that tend to ennoble human
nature, and will strive always to express itself in words which a
woman might hear and speak.
As heretofore. The Post will be a political paper, independ-
ent and fearless, lending its influence to such measures only as
are calculated to hasten the time when all men's weal shall be
each man's care. "
A Woman's Rule of Journalistic Couriesy. 505
I soon had occasion to define our idea of how to behave as
editors :
** The Post wishes to say here and now and once and for all,
that its notion of journalistic courtesy involves the same princi-
ples that govern well-bred persons in the intercourse of society.
Any word that may creep into these columns not in keeping with
this statement, is hereby disavowed beforehand, for all possible
measures will be employed to forestall such mistakes. **
We found on coming into our thrice mortgaged heritage
that there were contracts for advertisement of liquors, proprietary
medicines, etc., such as we could not approve, but as we had no
money and these were unexpired, we could not discontinue them.
Meanwhile, liberal offers of advertising flowed in fix>m liquor
dealers, which my sister, of course, instantly declined. In face
of these facts, we had little relish for the *' moralettes *' that came
to us in every day's mail to this effect :
'* Dear Ladies: I have had high esteem for you, but certain-
ly the advertisement (inclosed) that you persist in flaunting
before the public, lifts you very little above the lowest journal-
istic level. I am at a loss to account for such flagrant incon-
^'^**°*'^' [Signed] Anonymous.
Or this: **You will please stop my paper. I subscribed
supposing it marked a new era in journalism, but evidently (see
advt.), * the dog returns to his,' etc.
'*X. Y. Z."
I verily believe we had more letters of warning and exhorta-
tion, than of subscription and good cheer, during that most
tr>'ing ordeal of my life. I used to say tb myself, '*Is it possible
that I was once a happy, care-free, temperance worker, skimming
contentedly along the sea of life ? Alas, I am now fathoms deep
in the wilderness of waters and well nigh suffocated," but not
enough to lose my sleep !
In the financial extremity that tightened around us every
day. some leading business men of the city showed us great
kindness and our creditors were remarkably considerate. But
this terribly unequal strife of plus with minus could not long
continue. I consulted with my sister and my hopes, and then
went to New York and laid our case before Elizabeth Thompson,
the well-known philanthropist, with whom I had a most agreeable
So6 Elizabeth Thompson's Sage Advice.
acquaintance. To obtain an audience with this lovely and lov-
ing-hearted woman is extremely difficult, but through the inter-
cessions of my loyal hostess, Mrs. M. P. Hascall, I succeeded in
seeing her. So I laid our case before Sister Elizabeth, who
listened most kindly, with pitiful face, and said: **My dear
friend, if you had asked me to help you in almost anything else,
I would have done so, but I dread journalism as a burnt child
dreads the fire. Putting money into a paper is like pouring
water into- a sieve. Drop that enterprise before it beggars you
all. Drop it, I implore you. It was heroic, as you say, for your
sister to try; but no ma7i would have tried. '* So our last hope
was like our first, forlorn ! As I went down the stairs, after a
kindly leave-taking, Mrs. Thompson leaned over the railing and
called out :
** Give my love to your sister and tell her to drop that paper
before she is a day older. ' * And I told her. Our valedictor>'
came out within a fortnight, and the paper, franchise and all, was
sold at auction to the Daily News, owned by Victor A. I^awson
and Melville E. Stone.
This is the only paper for which I ever personally stood
sponsor, and among the score of different positions to which I
have been chosen since my first official relation to the public,
(when, at eighteen, I taught our district school near Forest Home)
it is the only one in which I might not freely have continued had
I chosen so to do. But the mandate of an empty exchequer
drove me from this, and there is no other fate quite so impres-
sive or inexorable. I thought of all this for my consolation as I
packed up my few literar>^ effects and turned away forever from
**No. 88 Dearborn street," to resume the work that I had
learned to love the best.
My resolution then taken remains unchanged. I will never
again be the responsible head of any journalistic venture, nor be
in any wise financially accountable to any, save as a contributor
of money or of articles. I have freely allowed my name to be
used in this way, as a matter of course. When women asked for
it, on the list of almost any temperance or philanthropic paper,
and when Joseph Cook, that grand defender of every faith sacred
to humanity, did me the honor to request my name for his maga-
zine, Our Day, what could I say but * * Yes " ? In like manner.
Handi on the Rocking Stone. 507
when Rev. Dr. Theodore L. Flood, founder of The Chautauquan
and a firm friend of woman's wider opportunity, asked me to
contribute, I told him that if Anna Gordon would make herself
responsible for me and would **see that I wrote,** he would be
sure to hear from me. Out of that contract came ** How to Win."
When Alice Stone Black well of The Woman* s Journal, asked me
to be an occasional contributor, I was glad. When Alice M.
Guernsey wished me to write for our W. C. T. U. juvenile paper,
The Young Crusader , I gathered up the dropped threadil of a story
begun in The Little Corporal away back in 1865 at the instance
of my friend, Alfred I^. Sewell, and unceremoniously cut short
at the third chapter through some misunderstanding between us,
and carried it on through fifty-two numbers, written ** en route,"
and picturing out the twelve years during which ** We, Us & Com-
pany ** lived on a farm. When a Hartford publisher, persistent
as the forces of gravitation, persecuted me with petitions to write
** Woman and Temperance" (his own elected title), and appeared
upon the scene for personal interviews until I saw there was but
one alternative, and that was to get it ready, I took refuge in the
home of my staunch sister and ally, Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith,
of Philadelphia, and there in the space of three weeks had ** car-
pentered and joinered " a rough strong-box which has the single
merit of enshrining some of the newly-mined jewels of fact,
which the stately historian of the temperance reform can polish
at his leisure.
When the National Convention of 1887 asked me to signal-
ize my approaching semi-centennial (1889) ^Y ^ volume of per-
sonal reminiscences and speeches, I sat me down to evolve the
same as best I could from my *' internal consciousness," clearing
a little space on my workshop table by pushing aside so much
that I ought to do, that I bring to my present task a mind sadly
divided. Few have learned more thoroughly than I, from the
things that they have suffered, that the paths of true literature
are shady and silent ; as leisurely as the slow lap of wavelets
when the lake is still ; as secret as the mossy nooks in the valleys
of my old Forest Home. * * Far from the madding crowd ' ' lies the
pastoral path of the life I longed for most, and treading whose
piney wood aisles I might perhaps have thought out consolations
for the fierce fighters of the plain ; but with the battle on and
5o8 ''Nineteen Beautiful Years ^
my own place chosen for me at the front, I shall never get beyond
*' Notes from the Saddle,*' at least not imtil too old or too deeply
wounded by the fray. A lifetime ago, one who had wished me
well and hoped much from my future wrote me thus : * * You
always write with your left hand ; I think when reading after
you, * How much better this would be if she could take more
time. ' ' ' How well I knew this was the truth and that the un-
hasting pen alone creates the works that do not haste to die !
Aside' from my little hand-book of ** Hints and Helps,"
written in 1875 for the W. C. T. U., the only book not asked of
me, but freely written out of hand and out of heart, is ** Nineteen
Beautiful Years," published by Harper & Brothers in 1864, re-
printed by the Woman's Temperance Publication Association of
Chicago, to which I gave the electrotype plates in 1885, ^^d
brought out in England, thanks to the influence of Mrs. Hannah
Whitall Smith, by Morgan & Scott, of London, publishers of The
Christian, That little book said itself — both my sister's part, so
unconsciously furnished when she wrote her girlish journal seen
only by us two, and mine — out of a heart that spoke aloud its
strange, new grief.
It was one year after she left us, and in the home where all
of us were last together ; * * Swampscott" we called it, on Church
Street, Evanston, the grounds but not the house being those now
owned by William Deering. I was there alone with mother in
the summer of 1863, my brother having married and gone to
Denver, Col. , my father being in the city all day.
"To us the silence in the house.
To her the choral singing."
Never in this world could we all be again what my deai
brother had once called us : "A family unbroken by death, dis-
cord, or distance."
Alone in my desolate room, so lately brightened by her
sunny presence, I prepared the little volume which would have
been larger by half had all I wrote gone in. My father, who
was of reticent nature, disapproved the undertaking ; he hated
publicity for women, and most of all for his *' two forest nymphs,"
as he used laughingly to call us. But for myself I liked the
world, believed it friendly, and could see no reason why I might
First Visit to New York. 509
not confide in it. Besides, it was more than I could brook that
she shotild live and die and make no sign — she who was so wise,
so sweet and good. I had a chivalric impulse to pass along the
taper that she lighted at the shrine of Truth, even though her
weary little hand had dropped it early at the tomb.
And so, when my manuscript was ready, I went to Mr. E.
Haskin, who was then the leading business man of my own
church, borrowed a hundred dollars and started for New York,
under escort of T. C. Hoag, one of our nearest friends. It was
my first real outing, and zestful beyond telling. Mr. Hoag never
knew how grateful I was for his kindness in stopping over a day
at Buffalo that I might go out to see Niagara Palls. The wonder
of that revelation roused all the recklessness for which I had been
famed at Forest Home and which had been toned down by later
years. The fascination of the Falls drew me to the ragged edge of
every cliflf and set me running down steep banks, so that Mr. Hoag
soon supervened and took me into custody. Somehow, the sense
of God was with me on those heights and with that wraith-like
form and thunder-voice smiting my ear. It gives me satisfaction
that, young and ardent as I was, and with the desire ever innate
in me to ** wreak myself upon expression,'* I did not drop into
poetry, nor yet into prose, in presence of that gleaming mystery.
The scenery of tlie Susquehanna and Chemung was simply
fascinating in its autumnal garniture. We reached New York at
dark, took a coach for the St. Nicholas Hotel, and as we rolled
along Broadway I was far more dazed than by anything in all my
life before, except Niagara ! Mr. Hoag, though a merchant on a
business trip, told me to make a list of what I wished to see and
he would **help me through with it." It was Saturday night.
I chose Grace Church, Dr. Cheever's and Dr. E. H. Chapin*s, the
first for its fame, the second for its reformatory spirit, the third for
its pastor's eloquence. On Monday we climbed Trinity steeple,
went to the Batter>' and Castle Garden, Bamum's, and Wall Street.
Here Mr. Hoag had to stay awhile, and he put me into a Broad-
way stage, telling the driver to stop at the St. Nicholas. It did
not occiu* to my kind friend that I had never in my life been any-
where alone, nor to me that my pocket-book was locked up in my
trunk at the hotel. " Ting-a-ling " went the driver's bell. I sat
in sweet unconsciousness, studying the pageant of the street
5IO Tliat Generous Jew !
**Ting-a-ling-a-ling,*' with vigorous vexation. I gave no heed.
** Hand up that fare ! " he shouted through an aperture ; the pas-
sengers looked at each other ; my face turned crimson. ** I have n't
any money," I whispered confidentially, in my great fright and
desperation, to a big Jew with diamond shirt front and forbidding
coimtenance. ** What can I do ? *'
** Oh, Miss," he answered kindly, ** it's of no consequence,
just let me hand up the fare and there's an end of it ! " At that
moment his countenance seemed fairly angelic. **You are so
kind," I faltered almost with tears. ** Indeed, it is an honor;
don't mention it," he said. Forever and a day that act of his
made me think better of mankind, trust more in human nature.
I thanked him again as the 'bus pulled up for me at the St. Nich-
olas ; he lifted his hat and was gone, the great, beak-nosed, unmis-
takable Jew. I went up to my room and cried at remembrance
of his kindness.
That night we went to Wallack's Theatre. It was the first and
last time in all my life that I ever attended the theatre in my own
land. I said to myself: ** This is the most respectable one there
is ; ' Rosedale, or the Rifle Ball ' is a reputable play and Lester
Wallack is at his best in it ; no one knows me and no harm will
be done. ' ' This I then stated to my father's friend, and he agreed,
both of us being good Christians and church-members. We
went — it was an evening of wonder and delight, but I forbear to
state who of our Western friends and fellow church-members we
then and there beheld, who had gone from the same motives that
actuated me !
All my life I have read the '* Amusement column " of the
daily paper and often greatly enjoyed it. For the stage I have
strong natural liking. In England I saw Sothem as David Gar-
rick, and it lifted up my spirit as a sermon might. But in this
age, with my purposes and its demoralization, the stage is not for
me. Sometime, somewhere, it may have the harm taken out of it,
but where or when, this generation, and many more to follow this,
will ask, I fear, in vain.
A week or so later, my good father came on to take me to
New England, having decided, perhaps, that my embassy was
not so foolish as he had thought at first. Together we went up
the Hudson to Sing-Sing, where Rev. Dr. Randolph S. Foster
First Proof Sheets and First Critic ! 511
(now Bishop) was pastor of the M. E. Church. This noble man
had been President of the University at Evanston, and I wanted
his opinion and influence in my new enterprise. Cornelius J.
Walsh's family had driven in their elegant carriage from Newark
to visit Dr. Foster. I remember my palpitations of heart as they
all assembled to hear me read my manuscript. Annie, the
Doctor's gifted daughter, was the one I feared and loved the most ;
upon her verdict hung my hopes. I read the whole little book at
one sitting, and when I finished they all sat crying — it was a cir-
cle of white handkerchiefs, and nobody said a word.
How I loved them for their sympathy and thanked God for
raising up such friends for Mary and for me !
Dr. Foster took the manuscript to the city next day. Har-
per & Brothers were his friends ; most of them had been his
parishioners. They accepted it at once, asked the Doctor to
write an Introduction, which he did, and so the life of my sister,
playmate, and comrade came to the world.
What a delight were my beautiful proof-sheets, the first I
ever saw ; what a mar\- el the letters that accompanied them fi"om
Thomas Glenn, the long-time proof-reader of Harpers, whose
penmanship seemed to me vastly plainer than print ! What a*
comfort to dedicate the little book to my beloved parents ! Dear
father said very little about it, but five years after, when he had
passed away, we found a copy locked up with Mary's photograph
in a secret drawer of his desk. And what a rude assault was the
Round Table criticism ! Up to that time all had been plain sail-
ing ; the press, so far as I could learn, had dealt gently with the
record that was so sacred in my eyes. But one day a friend drew
from his pocket a copy of the New York Round Table, and pro-
ceeded to read what Gail Hamilton afterward called ** A bludgeon
criticism."
It was my first heavy blow from a " reviewer," and it struck
so deeply home that I can not forget it in any world. In these
years, when to be " taken to task " is a matter of course, and to
be bitterly blamed, or even cruelly maligned, is not uncommon, I
have learned a calm philosophy that neutralizes the virus and
takes the harm out of the wound. But in those days such blows
bewildered me, more from their manner than their matter, for
criticism I expected, and had been bred to believe that it was
512 Wkaf to Do,
wholesome, which I do now believe with more intelligence than
I could bring to bear upon the subject then.
Being in need of money at one time, I wrote my publishers
that if they would give me a hundred copies I would forego the
ten per cent royalty on which we had agreed. This they did,
and that is all that ever came to me, except that in later years I
gave away a hundred or more copies furnished without charge by
them. In 1885 I bought the plates and presented them to our
own temperance publishing house in Chicago. This is a fidr
sample of the financial side of my pen-holder work.
Each new book is to me a new impoverishment ; I give them
away freely, never having been able to keep a book of any sort,
least of all, my own, any more than I can an umbrella or a section
of the atmosphere. All of my ventures combined have not netted
me one thousand dollars.
From England I have encouraghig accounts of the little
book's success, and I have had no more welcome greeting than
from those who, wherever I go, speak gently to me of the good
that Mary's life has done them. So the sweet young soul lives
on in minds made better by her presence, and still in artless
language tries to ** tell everybody to be good."
Messrs. Morgan & Scott, publishers of the English edition,
courteously allowed me a royalty amounting now to about two
hundred dollars.
As years go by I find that my jottings gain wider hospital-
ity, my last two magazine articles having been for two monthlies
most unlike — The Homiletic and The Forum, My article for the
first has been printed in full as a book entitled, *' Woman in
the Pulpit," by D. Lothrop & Co., Boston.
And now, to sum up what I have learned by the things
sought, suffered and succeeded in, along my pathway, pen in
hand, let me urge ever>' young woman whose best vehicle of
expression is the written word, not to be driven from her king-
dom by impatience as was I.
I. If you can have a roof over your head, a table prepared
before you and clothes to wear, let them be furnished by your
** natural protectors," and do you study and practice with your
pen. Read Robert Louis Stevenson's revelations of how he
came to be a master of style ; he worked and waited for it,
that is all.
<5
The Journalism of the Future, 5 1 3
2. If you miist be self-supporting, learn the prmter*s trade
in a newspaper office. The atmosphere will be congenial ; you
will find yourself next door to the great world ; if you have
•* faculty,'* the inky powers will find it out and your vocation
will take you into fellowship.
3. The next best outlook is the teacher's desk. A majority
of our most celebrated women writers were teachers once. The
life is intellectual and, though one of routine is not most favor-
able to the freedom that a writer should enjoy, it conduces to
surroundings that enhance, rather than deteriorate, the mental
powers. But imagination, that angel of mind, is a shy spirit and
breaks not readily to harness ; while Pegasus in the tread-mill
sawing up the fire-wood of necessity is the sorriest spectacle alive.
But journalism will be a larger field to-morrow than it is
to-day, and nine tenths of our literary aspirants, if they have the
divine call of adaptation and enthusiasm, will enter there.
Newspapers need women more than women need newspapers.
Fewer tobacco cobwebs in air and brain and a less alcoholic ink
are the prime necessities of the current newspaper. Mixed with
the miraculous good of journalism note the random statements
given to-day only that they may be taken back to-morrow. Note
the hyperbolism of heads not level, the sensationalism, the low
details not lawful to be uttered, the savagery of the pugilist and
baseball columns, the beery mental flavor, the bitter gall dipped
from the editorial inkstand and spattered on political opponents.
In brief, note that newspaperdom is a camp and not a family
circle — a half sphere not a whole one.
But the journalistic temperament is almost the finest in the
world — keen, kind, progressive, and humanitarian. Take away
the hallucination of nicotine and the craze of alcoholic dreams,
and you would have remaining an incomparable set of brother-
hearted men, whose glimpses of God would be not at all infi^-
quent. Anchor alongside these chivalric-natured experts, women
as gifted as themselves, and free from drug delusions ; then, in
one quarter century, you will have driven pugilists and saloon-
keepers, ward politicians and Jezebels from the sacred temple of
journalism, and the people's daily open letter fi-om the great
world shall be pure as a letter from home.
Until the bitter controversy about the Prohibition party's
33
514 The f^litics of the Future.
relation to politics, I have been treated almost univeisally with
kind consideration by the editorial fraternity. I attribute this
to my brother's membership therein and to my own participation
in journalism, also to a certain kindliness that I believe belongs
to the journalistic temperament. There is much of the dramatic
in these editorial brethren and the theory on which I account
for the oceans of abuse that they seem to dip up out of their
inkstands, is that each in thought separates his own genial per-
sonality from the dreadful pen-and-ink dragon who writes the
perfiinctory editorials and paragraphs.
It seems to me this is a great evil, doing incalculable harm to
their own nature and character, and greatly diminishing the sum
total of the world's goodwill. If the politics of the future can not
be more reasonable, if men and women can not discuss great ques-
tions without using abusive epithets, then the true civilization
is a long way off. I confidently believe that all of this sanguin-
ary style of writing is but an unconscious reminiscence in the
editorial brain of the cruel bloodshed of his ancestors when they
matched spear with spear instead of fighting at the pen's point
alone. Surely this will wear away and we shall leam to think
and speak with the utmost personal kindliness concerning our
opponents in the field of politics.
2He World's True Aristocracy. 515
PEOPLE I HAVE MET.
I console myself as regards many famous personages that I
have tried to give them a little peace of their lives. Attracted by
great characters far more than by any other magnet in this world,
I have visited their haunts on both sides of the sea at every oppor-
tunity ; have gone scores of miles out of my way to stand beside
De Quincey's grave, and Coleridge's and Wordsworth's, but have
not intruded upon the living objects of my admiration, for the
mere purpose of the sight, save in a single instance, which I have
felt guilty over ever since ; to Longfellow, at my request, my friend
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps gave me a note of introduction, saying to
him and me, ** I think she has earned it by her honest, hard work
for temperance."
It has been my good fortune, however, to have had many a
glimpse of those the world calls great. I have seen the motherly
Queen of England graciously distributing prizes to the peasantry
at Windsor Castle ; the dignified Emperor Napoleon III. driving
in state along the Champs Elys6es ; the martial Emperor Will-
iam saluting the enthusiastic crowd from his box at the Imperial
Opera House in Berlin ; the handsome Pope of Rome pronouncing
benedictions at St. Peter's ; the ponderous Sultan of Turkey rid-
ing to the Mosque of Santa Sophia, and several Presidents of the
United States in the parlors of the White House.
But my most cherished memories are not of those whose
heads were crowned by virtue of rights not in the least divine.
Only the world's true aristocracy, its kings and queens in the
better realms of literature, art, science and himianity, have held
sway over my loj-al heart. In seeking to pay them worthy
tribute, I have found that such reminiscences alone would fill a
volume. Within the limits allotted here, I can sketch but a few
out of the scores by whose presence, as well as by their grand
words and lives, my life and character have been enriched.
5i6 A Thorough American Type,
HANNAH WHITALI. SMITH.
Among the friends who have been most helpful tx) me is Mrs.
Hannah Whitall Smith, wife of Robert Pearsall Smith, of Phila-
delphia. Mrs. Smith is the author of "The Christian's Secret of
a Happy Life," a book that has reached numerous editions and
been translated into eight languages ; a book from which I had
already derived great advantage in my spiritual life before ever
meeting her who has long been to me like ** the shadow of a
great rock in a weary land."
The first time I ever saw this noble woman was when I spoke
for the first time in the city of Philadelphia, and was informed by
those having the meeting in charge tfiat she was to conduct the
devotional exercises. I was not a little impressed by the honor
and pleasure of having her associated with me, and when a tall
woman of strong physique, not stout, but far from thin, walked up
the steps into the pulpit with a business-like air, her fine, beaming
countenance, motherly tones, and warm grasp of the hand made
me at ease with her at once. From that hour we have been warm
friends, and her home seems like my own, so often has she said
to me, ** When thee comes to my house thee is to do just exactly
as thee likes, and while thee is here the house and all we have is
thine." This most hospitable mansion at Germantown, in the
suburbs of Philadelphia, has been a refuge to me many a time,
more so than any other of the thousand homes that have so
kindly opened their doors to me, except * * Rest Cottage, ' ' and
"Weary Woman's Rest," as I call the beloved Aubumdale
home of Anna Gordon.
I did myself the pleasure to sketch ** H. W. S. " at length in
* * Woman and Temperance, ' ' but a large volume would hardly
suffice to show the many-sided amplitude of character with which
this woman, a thorough American type and one of our choicest, is
endowed. Her sunny spirit has hardly its peer for sustained
cheerfulness in all the shining ranks of the W. C. T. U., with
which she has been associated almost from the beginning. The
Bible readings given by her at our National Conventions are the
most unique religious meetings I have ever attended. Her Ex-
pository Leaflets on "Chariots," the "Crusade Psalm," and
other subjects, have had an immense sale among our local unions
where they are reproduced to the great advantage of all who
A Croais-natured Woman, 517
hear them. Once a month, for many years, Mrs. Smith has
furnished us one of these inimitable readings.
Their eldest daughter, Mary Whitall Costelloe, having mar-
ried an English barrister, the family now reside in London, but
wherever they are, their noble character, varied accomplish-
ments, and great wealth are consecrated to the cause of ** God
and home and every land."
MARY A. LATHBTJRY.
Some twelve summers ago I was in that great literary cara-
vansary called the Methodist Book Rooms, Broadway, New York.
Passing the editorial doors, a soft voice called me from within,
and a timid hand touched my arm, as Mary A. Lathbury, whom
I then saw for the first time, said to me, '* Won't you come in
and let me talk to you a little?" She had just been chosen
assistant editor of the Sunday-School Advocate; a position of an
unrecognized sort, in which a woman ha3 an opportunity to do a
vast deal of hard work without anybody being any the wiser as to
her individuality. This will be considered a crabbed remark,
but it always seemed to me that a woman, as well as a man,
should have the happiness of an honest recognition for the good
she does and the help she brings to any enterprise. My own im-
mediate corps of lieutenants in the office amuse themselves at my
expense because I insist on devising some responsible name that
shall belong to each of them, preferring not to bunch them all
under the general name of clerks, but naming one, office secre-
tary, another, department secretary, etc., and yet I believe they
like it, all the same, and recognize, as I do, that it is simply just
that those who do the work should have the pleasure of forming
the wider circle of friends naturally belonging to those who work
in a wide field. I also think it an advantage to the work itself,
fi-om the added individuality and enthusiasm of those who give
themselves, body, soul, and spirit, to the enterprise, whatever it
may be.
Mary A. Lathbury is one of the most delicate, crocus-natured
women that I know. She takes strong hold of the nutritive
powers of the universe, so that no amoimt of cold above the
ground can make her less hardy, and yet she is as fragile as a
harebell to look upon, and as shrinking as a mimosa. We were
at once acquainted and our rapport has been well-nigh perfect
5i8 Our Special Artist and Poets Laureate.
ever since. She had planned her pretty Bay- Window Department
and asked me many questions that I could not answer, about in-
genious ways of interesting children and young people. I told
her all I knew and more besides, which did not take long, and
went my way, enriched by the knowledge of one more beautiful
soul. As I am somewhat of a questioner, I then and there learned
from her much of her history and aspirations. She came from a
quiet New York village ; was converted early, and as she knelt in
consecration, knowing that she had some special gifts of brain
and hand, she there specifically dedicated them to the worship of
the Master whom she loved and the humanity for whose sweet
sake He gave Himself to sorrow and to death. I think she told
me that just then flashed on her fancy a series of pictures, since
embodied in a beautiful book entitled ** Out of Darkness Into
Light," where the progress of a human spirit is typified in the life
of a young man. She has gone on her shining way, with light
always falling on her pencil from the celestial country toward
which her course is steadfast. As we had no money, I early
asked her to design for us a picture for our children's pledge card,
and a seal for our National Society, so we call sweet Mary Lath-
bury our " special artist.'* She has also written for us beautiful
hymns, and shares with Rev. Dr. Rankin, the celebrated author
of some of the choicest contributions to our modem hymnals, the
title of our poet laureate. In the Centennial year Miss Lathbmy
wrote what seems to me the finest hymn of that epoch, beginning,
*' Lift up, lift up thy voice with singing,
Dear land, with strength, lift up thy voice !
The kingdoms of the earth are bringing
Their treasures to thy gates, rejoice ! **
Music and words were never more rarely suited to each other
than the lamented William P. Sherwin's and Miss Lathbury's in
that celestial song. Another of her hymns written for white
ribboners begins thus :
** Room for the truth, make room before us,
For truth and righteousness to stand !
And plant the blessed banner o'er us,
For God and Home and Native Land!"
Miss Mary Van Marter succeeded to Miss Lathbury's place
when the latter' s gracious and growing fame led her into the i)ath-
ways of artistic book-making, and the two women have set up
A Great Religious Seci. S^^
their rest together in New York where a handsome little nephew
of Miss L. furnishes a model for many of her fairy faces, and is
bound to grow up, under the hallowed influences of this pure
home, to be one of the new-fashioned men that shall help bring
about the new-fashioned world of men and women.
REV. DR. JOHN HALL.
Some years ago, when the Presbyterian General Assembly
was held in Madison, Wis., I attended with Mrs. Elizabeth Hib-
ben and Mrs. Hinckley, who were at that time respectively pres-
idents of the W. C. T. U. of Illinois and of Wisconsin. We
wished to bring a knowledge of our methods to these good, con-
servative men, leaders of a great religious sect. But as we knew
we should not be admitted to their sanhedrim, we arranged for a
meeting in a church near by at an hour when they were not in
session and the local union of Madison sent a tasteful ticket of
invitation to each member. There was a good attendance, and
among others the massive form and kindly face of Rev. Dr.
John Hall, of New York City, dignified the audience. He was
courteously invited to open the meeting with prayer, but said he
would prefer to witness the proceedings first, so the Rev. Dr.
Stryker, who is not afraid of the white ribboners, prayed for us,
and then we three women spoke as we were moved. Coming
down from, the pulpit I met Dr. Hall for the first time, who spoke
to me most gently from his tall height, and asked if he could
have an interview with me next day. We arranged one in the
Capitol building, where the Presbyterian Assembly held its ses-
sions. I invited my two partners in distress to accompany me,
and for an hour or more we had a talk that was to me sur-
prising. In substance Dr. Hall said that he had been convinced
I had a mission as a public speaker ; he wished to tell me this
and to beg me to confine my speeches wholly to the members of
my own sex. He said the Bible clearly taught this, and he
believed it to be his duty kindly to urge this truth upon my
attention. He also spoke about the sacerdotal line, and that while
we might accomplish good, he very much questioned if, on the
whole, we had not already done still more harm ; preaching was
the work of men set apart to do it, and there were now so many
going about with Bagster Bibles under their arms who could
520 *' Sew on Buttons and Make the Kettle BaU:'
imitate Mr. Moody in nothing save that action, that he feared the
sanctity of the clerical office and its high prerogatives were not
so clearly defined in the popular mind as they would otherwise
be. Mrs. Hinckley was visibly hurt by his words and rose to
leave, saying, ** With such a curse on hand in this country as the
drink habit and the liquor traffic, I wonder that any man dares
to speak as you have done to a woman like our president. To
me it seems that you would frustrate the grace of God. You say
that woman's place is in the home. I grant it, and if you will
discover a way by which you can protect our homes and our
boys from the wolves that howl upon their track, I will gladly
stay at home with my four little boys for the remainder of my
days to sew on buttons and make the kettle boil." The great
man inclined his head slightly, saying, ** Indeed, madam, I hope
your boys may grow up good and happy.** His entire stress
was laid upon the personal conversion of drinking men, and so
far as he could seem to see there was nothing beyond this in the
temperance reform. I told him of our work among the children :
that the mother-hearts of the land were working along the line
of prevention, rather than spending all their time on reformation.
We talked to him of prohibition, but met with small response.
He was very kind and thoughtful, but spoke to us out of one
world and we answered him out of another. One of us said to
him, *' Is it not possible, Doctor, that in your church, the most
costly in the United States, surrounded by millionaires as you are,
you may not have as broad a view of this great question as we
whose lives are spent among the people?" ** Indeed,*' he an-
swered, '*the best members of my church are servant-girls."
'* But servant-girls do not set the key-note of public opinion in
your church," was the response. He assured us that he never
tasted wine, no matter at whose table he might be, which we
were very glad and grateful to find out. On the whole, the inter-
view was rather unsatisfactory to all concerned, and as we left
him I remember saying, *' It is impossible for you, Dr. Hall, bom
and reared in Ireland and in the Presbyterian fold, to have any
conception of the outlook of an American woman, of all that
stirs in her brain and heart. Some day when we get home to
heaven, I expect to see you high up among the shining ones and
from a very low place close by the door, if I am so happy as to
Murphy Meetings, 521
attain so much, I expect to look up at you with an inquiring
glance, recalling to you this interview, and that you will then
glance down toward me and the look will mean, * Sister, away
yonder in the little planet Earth, when I reproved you for speaking
of a pure life to my brother-men, I was egregiously mistaken.' *'
FRANCIS MURPHY.
I first met Francis Murphy at Old Orchard Beach, finding him
a whole-hearted, genial man. I invited him to come to Chicago ;
he did so, and held meetings for several nights. I engaged Bruns-
wick Billiard Hall for him, and my brother, through his paper,
did all he could to help the movement on, but for some reason his
first visit was not successful, though subsequently he has had
great audiences and good results. I was in Pittsburgh when
thirty different churches in the city and suburbs were packed each
night with Murphy meetings and he was conveyed in a carriage
from one to another of the principal audiences, sometimes being
admitted through a window because the aisles were as thorough-
ly packed as the pews. I was myself at a meeting where this
occurred, in the United Presbyterian Church, where they sang
psalms, and such a breaking up of formality as this was for staid
old Pittsburgh can not be described. I also spoke on that occa-
sion, in the Episcopal Church, packed after the same manner, and
as I stood inside the chancel rail, I could hardly believe my eyes
as the motley throng rolled in out of the human tides along the
street. Had Brother Murphy's constructive plans been equal to
his magnetism, he would have excelled any reformer of our time,
and I am constrained to say that if he had adhered to prohibition
and kept along side by side with the W. C. T. U., his influence
would have been incomparably greater, but a high-license advo-
cate can not under any circumstances be acceptable to the white
ribboners. Prohibition is our watch-word and our guiding star.
We shall follow where it leads, though it be to prisons and to
death.
DR. WM. H. HOLCOMBE.
Mrs. Judge Merrick, of New Orleans, introduced me in that
city to Mrs. Anna Y. Waugh, a Boston woman of great accom-
plishments, who had lived in many foreign countries ; known
more remarkable people than almost any one I ever met and was
a seer in her own right. This lady took me to see Dr. William
S^^ A IVoman ''Knight oj Labor.'*
H. Holcombe, a Northern gentleman for many years resident in
the Crescent City, and its leading homeopathic physician. Many
years before I had read this gentleman's curious book, •* In Both
Worlds/* an account of the supposed whereabouts of Lazarus
during his absence from the body, as determined by Swedenbor-
gian standards. I had also read many of his religious articles
and his ingenious putting of the Christian Scientists' philosophy.
That the doctor has a wide and lofty soul, and one totally fear-
less, no one can disbelieve who thinks his thoughts after him.
What was my surprise, not knowing that he had cognizance of
me, to hear him say as my name was announced, *' Oh, I know
about you, and I regard you as a man-spirit sent into this sphere
of being to help the women up — they are too passive, they're like
sheep, they've been dogged so long that they'll never rally without
a man-spirit to go before them, shepherd-fashion." Not a little
taken aback by this greeting, I said, '' But, Doctor, I'm a woman,
and it is my greatest glory to be one."
*' O yes, I know you are * for the present distress' and to
fulfill your ambassadorship, but all the same, what I tell you is the
truth, and you'll find it out some day," was his final affirmation,
for I speedily dismissed the subject and talked to him of the
psychical themes in which he has long been a specialist.
MRS. ELIZABETH RODGERS.
When the Knights of Labor held their great convention at
Richmond, Va., a score of women appeared and were heartily
received as delegates. Chief among these was Mrs. KUzabeth
Rodgers, Master Workman of District No. 24, Chicago. Always
desirous of meeting remarkable women, I ascertained her address,
asked an interview, and received a cordial invitation.
So I went ; in an imfamiliar, but reputable part of the city,
where the street-car patrons are evidently wage-workers, I was
welcomed to a small, but comfortable, modem house by a woman
who came to the door with sleeves rolled up and babe in arms.
She was the presiding officer over all the Knights of Labor in
Chicago and the suburbs, except the Stock Yards division. Her
orders came directly from "Brother Powderly " (as she calls
him), and were by her promulgated to the local societies, include
ing fifty thousand or more working men and women. SKe pre*
''Delegate No. Soo, Knights of Labor.'* 523
sided once a fortnight over a meeting of three hundred, who
represent the mass ; and when I asked her * * if she studied Gush-
ing's Manual" she replied, ** Indeed, I do; for these men are
very wide-awake, and on the watch to see if I make mistakes. * '
Probably no parallel instance of leadership in a woman's hands,
conferred by such peers, can be cited in this country, if indeed in
any other.
Mrs. Rodgers is about forty years of age ; height medium ;
figure neither stout nor fragile ; complexion fair, clear, and
healthful ; eye an honest gray ; mouth sweet and smiling ; nose
a handsome, masterful Roman ; head square and full ; profile
strong and benignant. I was glad to note her fair, unpunctured
ear — a proof of wholesome instincts. She has been the mother of
twelve children, ten of whom are now living. The youngest was
but twelve days old when her mother started for the Richmond
Convention, where the baby was made ** Delegate No. 800,*' and
presented by the Knights with a silver cup and spoon, and the
mother with a handsome Knights of Labor gold watch.
' * My husband always believed that women should do any-
thing they liked that was good and which they could do well, ' *
said Mrs. Rodgers, proudly ; "but for him, I never could have
got on so well as a Master Workman. I was the first woman in
Chicago to join the Knights. They offered us the chance, and I
said to myself, ' There must be a first one, and so I'll go forward.' "
*' How do you speak to them ? " I asked.
'*0h, just as I do here to my children at home," she
answered, simply. "I have no time to get anything ready to
say, for I do, and always have done, all my own work, but I just
talk as well as I can at the time."
And that is well enough, for Mrs. Rodgers is ready of utter-
ance, with a round, clear voice, gentle and womanly, and that
concise and pointed method of expression which shows her
mental faculties to be thoroughly well in hand.
* * Our leaders are all in favor of temperance and the woman's
ballot, and every other thing that's good," she said, '* and will
bring the rank and file up to these things as soon as they can."
** Some people object to you because of your secrets," I said.
**Oh, we are not a regular secret society," she answered,
** we have no such ways as the Masons ; no oath in such a sense
524 *' IVe Take No Saloon-keepers y
as they have. We are like the Good Templars, with a 'grip/
that we may know each other, and a 'password,' that strangers
may not get in, and that's about all.*'
"Then your only secret is that you have n't any?" I in-
quired, glad to learn this because opposed, by nature and by
nurture, to close corporations.
'* That's about it," she smilingly returned.
Mrs. Rodgers got her training as the chief oflBcer of a local
board of the Knights of Labor, which office she held four years,
and by the death of the District Master Workman became the
chief for our great city.
" We take no saloon-keepers," she said, *' not even a saloon-
keeper's wife. We will have nothing to do with men who have
capital invested in a business which is the greatest curse the poor
have ever known ; but wage-workers connected with the liquor
business are not forbidden to join us." I told her I hoped the
pledge of total abstinence might be made a test of membership,
and she heartily acquiesced in the plan. I spoke of the White
Cross movement, and my desire to enlist the Knights in its favor,
leaving with her some of the literature and the petitions for the
protection of women and the prohibition of the liquor traffic. She
seemed to me a sincere Christian, and warmly seconded my state-
ment that ' ' Mr. Powderly must have the help of God, or he could
not speak and act so wisely."
*' The Socialists are our greatest trouble," she said. "All
they are good for is to agitate mischief and misrepresent us to the
public. I do wish good and earnest people would join us, and
hold the balance of power ; then we could be a great blessing to
this country."
That is the key to the position. Out of this workingwoman's
pure and motherly heart comes the appeal to all good people, and
I pass it along, that we may, instead of standing off to find fault,
come near to help this blind Hercules of labor in its mighty
struggle toward a better day.
I told her of my wann sympathy with the labor movement
along the lines of cooperation, arbitration and the ballot box ; of
my advocacy of the eight-hour law, the prohibition of child
labor, and the ownership by Government (that is by the people)
of all railway and telegraph lines ; of my belief that the Sunday
A Prophecy of All We Prayed for. 525
law is our chief bulwark of the workingman's liberty and that
the New Testament is our best treatise on political economy and
Christ the only being whose life, law and love can bring in uni-
versal brotherhood so that humanity will become one great
Republic. Her fine face glowed with spiritual beauty while we
talked — ourselves a prophecy of all we prayed for — ^the Irish and
the Yankee woman, the Catholic "and Methodist. ** If such as
you would only come and help us ! ** she repeated ; ** if the edu-
cated and earnest would lend a hand, instead of standing off to
criticise and blame us ! We do the best we can, but we've not
had the chance to learn, and you folks could just set us on our
feet and put down the few loud-mouthed anarchists if you would
only join us.'*
I told her I would like to do so and to get all otir temper-
ance leaders to make common cause with them, but when I tried
this afterward, found it could not be done. Still it remains true
that the Local Assembly in every town and village draws young
men away from the saloon, its debates help to make them better
citizens, and that the mighty Labor movement has, by outlawing
the saloon socially, done more for temperance than we who
devote our lives to its propaganda have been able to achieve in
the same period.
GLADSTONE.
Westminster Palace is by far the noblest pile of governmental
buildings that Europe furnishes. It is an eye-filling and a heart-
satisfying portion. So stately, yet so sturdy, so solid, yet so
gracious, that when one thinks of all it means touching the royal
English race, there is a spell on every thoughtful traveler who
stands before the Parliament Buildings at Westminster.
Once, when doing this, oblivious of all around me, I noticed
the gathering crowd at last, and some one said, ' * There is Glad-
stone ! " He was not in 1870 so much my hero as he is now, but
as I looked upon that tall and stalwart form, a temple in itself,
that noble head, bright countenance, on which goodness is
stamped, no less plainly than learning, and where the eyes are
indeed the windows of a wonderful soul, I could but feel that in
this, the greatest leader of the century, England had a human
offset to Westminster ; for what one is among buildings, the
other is among men*
526 Founder of WellesUy College.
HBNRY P. DURANT.
Henry F. Durant, founder of Wellesley College, was one d
the most agreeable men whom I have met, as well as one of the
handsomest, with his tall, perfectly proportioned figure, his noble
head and brow, his hair, fine as silk and white as snow, parted in
the middle, yet without any sign of effeminacy as the result,
his piercing black eye, classic hose and radiant smile. His wife is
hardly less agreeable than he was, devoted, unworldly, living the
life of her Lord, literally going about doing good to the lowest and
the most forsaken of God's creatures.
There are hundreds of the outcast in the city of Boston, who,
if they knew enough, would say,
" The blessings of her quiet life feH on me like the dew,
And good thoughts, where her footsteps passed, like fairy blossoms grew.*'
When I went East in my early temperance pilgrimage, I first
met Mr. Durant at Old Orchard, and he said to me, ** I have built
a college as perfect and beautiful as any palace and I have dedi-
cated it to the girls of the nation. It is my firm resolve to have
only women in the faculty. You are a believer in the emancipa-
tion of women. I ask you to become a member of my faculty
when I have searched this country as with a lighted candle to
find the women whom I can trust, but you deliberately decline.
Come and see the college and it will give you everlasting regrets,
to say the least of it.*' So I went out to Wellesley and saw its
beauty, comparing favorably with the finest buildings that one
finds abroad. We lingered longest in the library, which was Mr.
Durant's delight, a perfect gem, as everybody truly said, and he
asked me again if this college were not my fitting place. But I
had turned my face forever from the only educational institution
in all the world to which I was devotedly attached, and nothing
that I could see anywhere after that could ever give me regret
or hope.
MARY MORTIMER.
The first woman of remarkable gifts and reputation whom I
recall is Miss Mary Mortimer, for many years President of Mil-
waukee Female College. She was a special friend of Catherine
Beecher, who brought her to the West when the college was
founded. I remember the day she came to our quiet farm-house
Smitten by the Sense of Gad. 527
when I was about fourteen years of age. She was a small, plump
woman, with an astonishingly impressive head, so high, so ample
and satisfying in its curves and arches. Her face was kindly, but
not specially impressive. Her conversation was more like that of
Margaret Fuller than any other to which I have yet listened.
She was philosophic, humanitarian, prophetic in every utterance ;
incapable of commonplace, smitten by the sense of God, of duty
and of immortality, and devoted to the unfolding of woman's
mental capabilities. Miss Mortimer was a figure that thirty
years later would have become central in the pantheon of Ameri-
can women. To have heard her talk is an inspiration that re-
mains with me unto this day.
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS.
By invitation of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (now Mrs. Ward), I
have repeatedly visited Gloucester, Mass., her summer home, and
had the honor and pleasure of being her guest, hearing her con-
versation, and driving about with her through the old-fashioned
streets, where, whether she stops at the blacksmith's shop, the
market or the humble home of some reformed man, she is g^reeted
with a reverence that I have almost never seen manifested toward
any other person. Probably her hidden life, delicate face and
figure, the knowledge of her physical suffering and the great love
she has shown to these poor people, chiefly account for this ag^ree-
able phenomenon.
JOHN SWINTON.
One man of splendid powers in New York City is John
Swinton, whom we saw in company with Mrs. Celia B. White-
head, the bright little "dress reformer,'* whose articles attracted
so much attention in the Cloak and Dress Review, He lefl
the New York Sun and a salary of twelve thousand dollars
per year, to devote himself to the cause of working men and
women. He is a man fifty-five. who. by reason of hair prema-
turely white, is often thought to be much older. He wears a
black silk cap, his face is worn with years of night work, and his
black eyes are inscrutable. In his little office in Park Row, with
less of elbow-room than any journalist with whom I am acquainted,
he writes John Swinton' s Paper ^ and his sweet-voiced wife oppo-
528 ** Carlyle and Maszini in One.**
site answers letters and works at the subscription list. She is
constantly with him, and their mutual devotion is good to see.
He asked us of our work, and I gave him a brief outline as did
Mrs. Barnes of her own beautiful mission for boys * * up town. ' '
Then we told him we wanted to know his views — as much as
could be told in a few minutes. At this he began, and such a
cylopean talk as he gave us I never heard. It was Carlyle and
Mazzini in one. Words were fairly dynamited from his lips.
They roared and rang, they scorched and hissed. Something of
the primal energy of nature was in the man. He brushed aside
our favorite plans as if they had been butterfly wings in the lurid
flame of Chicago's conflagration. He rolled from that deep bass
chest his anathema maranatha against our trifling expedients,
our straws to stay Niagara ! He volleyed statistics of the in-
crease of pauperism and crime in New York, ' * a city that gives
ten millions a year in charity "; he tore down our scaflblds for
building and uprooted our levers for lifting, until — ^as a face may
be so ugly as to seem positively handsome by the positiveness of
its quality — his pessimism approached the sublime. History was
ransacked from Constantine onward to show that the year '89 in
any century is the year of fate.
The fifth of Nehemiah was quoted as appropriate reading for
the epoch. It had been lately read at a workingmen*s union and
they had no idea what book it came out of! He told us to go, as
he had done last Sunday, to a district in New York, which he
described, where seven hundred thousand people are flung into
the chaos of poverty and crime ; to watch the women and little
children at work for a crust, as desperately as a drowning man
works for a breath, and he said, *' Anybody who can look at
them, knowing the horror of their slime and sin, and not cut his
own throat, is a scoundrel.'* I forebore to remind him that he
had thus looked, and still lived on ! He summarized the horrors
of our present situation thus : Aggregation of the masses into
great cities ; aggregation of the money into monopolies ; working
of women and children like beasts of burden ; ** and last of all,
nearest the devil of all, is this danger (his voice was ftill of
sulphurous portent here), this workingman, this Titan, this
monster of the mud-sills, who in other crises has been but the
bond-slave of wealth and power, this giant with the basal brain
Nelson Sizer the Phrenologist 529
and hairy hands, this Caliban has found his Cadmus ; he begins
to think ; he has learned how to read — and he is reading the
Police Gazette ! ''
When he was a New York boy, he said, but fifteen thousand
papers were issued daily to one million five hundred thousand
now. Then, the shipping news was the staple article, arousing
such questions as ** Where is Hong-Kong? *' '* Where is Rio de
Janeiro ? " Now the news was of bursting bombs and monster
strikes, and the question, "How can I get my hands upon
the throat of the man who is richer than I and choke him to
death ? *' He shook his great head and paused a moment in the
tornado of his speech. I lifted a copy oi John Swin ton's Paper
from his desk and said, ** But here, my friend, is something better
than the Police Gazette, You at least would help these men to
a better road, and, little as you think of me, I would cool their
brains from the alcohol delirium.*' He dropped the splendid
jeremiad, smiled a radiant glance upon our quiet trio, said, **I
was tired ; I did not sleep last night. Am charmed to meet you
ladies ; delighted by much that you have told me, ' * and we shook
hands with him and his gentle monitor, and went on our way
believing that all of us, after our fashion, are trying to help solve
the problem of poor old Humanity's bewilderment and heartache.
NELSON SIZER.
A most antithetical character to burly John Swinton is Nel-
son Sizer, for thirty years the head examiner of Fowler & Wells.
Anna Gordon had a fancy that I should let him know who I was
when we dropped in one day to look at the collection of casts,
whereupon he proceeded to give me the benefit of his life-long
studies of the * * bumps. * * I told him that mother always had a
kind side for phrenology, one of her earliest and most oft-repeated
remarks to me having been this : ' * You have combativeness
largely developed, my child.'* After a fashion as cheery as John
Swinton seemed sad. Nelson Sizer is the talker among ten thou-
sand. He seems to be endowed with the balanced, or ** tempered
temperament," as Henry Tuckerman, the essayist, used to call it.
His vocabulary is boundless, its pictorial quality exhaustless, and
his anecdotes many and apt. A skilled stenographer with a little
stenographic type-writing machine sat near him ; and as he walked
94
530 Total Abstinence in the White Haust*
back and forth, between making his cranial observations, Mr.
Sizer had only to speak his mind and the swift click of the ma-
chine did all the rest. When I told him of the tens of thousands
of letters received and written at Rest Cottage, he said, ** And do
you people waste yourselves on that eternal scratching ? It is the
poorest of economy. You could quadruple your efficiency by
dictation.** I asked him if he thought I could after a life- time of
thinking along a pen-holder learn to work in this easier harness,
and he said, " My own experience is that twenty days of this new
liberty will make you quit the other method forever and a day."
FRANCES FOLSOM CLEVELAND.
During the Cleveland administration I attended a reception
given at the White House to the Woman's International Council,
and thought the President seemed somewhat taken back by the
invasion of such an army of representative women, although he
was all that one could wish in the way of cordiality, and Mrs.
Cleveland wore her usual charming smile. I had seen her when
she was a school-girl at Wells College, where I went to speak by
invitation of the lady principal, Miss Smith, a life-long friend of
my sister-in-law, Mary B. Willard. My niece, Katharine Will-
ard, who was a student there, was one of Mrs. Cleveland's
special friends, and has received from her at the White House
many tokens of her loyal remembrance and affection. I spoke
to the young ladies at Wells College on the duty that girls owe to
their country as well as themselves and the homes of the future,
urging upon them the motto, " Noblesse oblige,'' and I remember
that my niece and Miss Folsom accompanied me in the omnibus
to the railway train, and seemed entirely sympathetic with what
I had said. Mrs. Cleveland has written me letters showing her
devotion as a Christian woman to what she believes to be right,
and assuring me of her steadfast total abstinence principles. I
hold her in the highest honor and regard, and believe that no
woman of her age has ever had it in her power and in her heart
to do more for the sacred cause of temperance. The position of
a total abstainer in the White House is, of necessity, a difficult
one, because of the inevitable contact with the representatives
of other nations whose temperance ideas are even less advanced
than those of our own high officials.
A Valhalla of Its Oivn. 53^
THS BBBCHSR FAMII«Y.
When but a school-girl, the sense of the worshipful in me
bowed down before the first member of this magnificent family
that my eyes had yet beheld ; the woman who had built her
whole life into the rising temple of woman's work and worth. I
looked for ** somebody wonderful to behold.'*
Catherine Beecher was really the first distinguished woman
that I met. On one of her trips to visit and inspect her favorite
college at Milwaukee, she came to Evanston and was the guest
of my friend and benefactress, Mrs. Dr. Kidder. I entered the
room where I was told she was, with a feeling of appropriate awe,
which was, however, soon dispelled by the wholly unconven-
tional manner of the sturdy little woman who was putting on her
rubbers preparatory to a walk. She seemed to me essentially
Beecherish, like a lump of ore out of the mine, not smelted in
the mill of custom nor hammered into shape on the anvil of preju-
dice. To me the Beecher family has always lived in a Valhalla
of its own, and been an original force, strong and refreshing as
Nature herself. My parents were never done talking about them
and holding them up as examples. I have improved every un-
forced opportunity to meet the different members, and have had
personal acquaintance with eight out of the twelve.
At Elmira, where I had the pleasure of being a guest in the
well-known water-cure conducted by the Gleason family, I met
Thomas K. and Mrs. Beecher in their own home, and in their
church at an evening sociable. Brother Thomas was so genial
that I said to his wife, ** He is one of the most affable men I ever
saw, and yet I had been told he was a man of moods." ** Ah,
well," she answered in her cheery tones, '*you have seen my bear
when his coat was stroked the right way, and I*m glad of it."
Henry Ward Beecher was always my mother's hero beyond
all other men. His sermons were her Sunday reading in the Inde-
pendent and the Christian Union for many a year. She never
saw him until in one of his last trips West he came to Evanston
to speak, and it grieved me that in my absence she failed to meet
him personally, for he never had a warmer friend or one more
true and steadfast in the night of his great calamity. She would
not hear a word against him, and her sturdy strength, when
532 A Grown-up Boy.
almost every one around her wavered, gave me a new sense of her
native force of character.
Mr. Beecher was more than any other man, a grown-up boy.
It was seen in his whole manner. The very way in which he
would take oflf that broad felt hat and tuck it under the chair or
pulpit as he sat down ; the way in which he would push back his
hair and drum with his fingers on the chair arm ; the curious for-
getfulness that frequently led him to wear his rubbers into the
pulpit and stand up in them to preach, showed the unpremeditated
character of his words and thoughts. His * * lectures to Young
Men * ' was one of the first books read by my brother and me.
His papers on Pomology were special pets w4th my father, who
was as fond of horticulture as Beecher himself
In 1876, by invitation of Mary A. Livermore, I was her
guest for a day at the Twin Mountain House, New Hampshire.
Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were there as usual. I sat at the same
table, but not near enough to speak beyond the mere acknowl-
edgment of the introductions with which I was then for the first
time honored
Next morning, the guests of the hotel all gathered in the
parlors, as the custom was, and Mr. Beecher conducted family
prayers. In my pocket testament I find these notes, penciled at
the time :
Twin Mountain House, August 18, 1876.
As usual Mr. Beecher conducted morning prayers. Hon. William
Wheeler, a worthy candidate for vice-president, was present, also Mrs.
Beecher and Mrs. Livermore. The exposition of Romans xiv. and the
prayer of Mr. Beecher were memorable and beautiful and helpful to my
soul. There was in them so much of breadth, of strength and gentleness.
In a word, they had the Christ-like spirit. He desired us to ask questions,
and mine was on the twenty-first verse, "It is good neither to eat flesh nor
to drink wine."
Mr. Beecher was very earnest in his reply. "It is just like this," he
said : " Suppose there is a precipice out by a school-house where many chil-
dren are assembled. Suppose that half way down that precipice there is a
spring I specially enjoy, and, strong man that I am, I can go down there
safely, by a narrow path, dangerous to many, but not to me. Suppose
that the children are determined to go dow^l there after me and won't
believe the path is dangerous since they see that I tread it with impunity.
Some of them that try it fall and break their necks and others are lamed
for life. Now what sort of a man, much more, what sort of a Christian
should I be, if, under these circumstances, I persisted in going down that
At Plymouth Church, 533
dangerous path ? Nay verily, if I have one particle of magnanimity of soul,
if I have been at all taught of Christ, I shall put a good, strong fence across
that path and never tread it any more. That's my position on the total ab-
stinence question ; that's why I am, myself, a total abstainer and shall
always be unless I take alcoholic drinks by a physician's prescription. For
why should I insist on drinking wine, even if I were fond of it ? which I sun
not. It would do me no special good, and what I gain in character by the
habit of studying the good of others is an incalculable and an eternal gain."
Mr. Beecher then went on to say that relative to the question of going
to the theater he held the same position. ' ' I would like to see Edwin
Booth," he said; ''I would like to see Ristori and greatly would it have
delighted me to watch Rachel, but I was never in a theater in my life, and
on precisely the same basis that I never drink wine." He also testified
strongly against the use of tobacco in any form. I asked him about speak-
ing in a criticising way of people, and his answer was most noble ; I wish in
these notes I could but do it justice, the gist of it was this : have no rule
about it, but keep your own heart so full of loving kindness that the words
that brim over will take care of themselves.
At the great meeting arranged for me in Plymouth Church
by the Brooklyn Woman's Christian Temperance Union, he pre-
sided, saying, just before I came forward, ** Pardon me, if I leave
the platform to sit beside my wife — I almost never get the chance
to do so in this church, you see;" and after I had finished he
walked up the steps, smiling, and pointing toward me as he
came, then turning to the audience, he said in his dramatic way,
** And yet — she can not vote ! Are n't you ashamed, men, that
this should be ? "
I was grateful indeed to him for thus clearl}' taking sides with
the sacred cause of women's enfranchisement — but then, he was
President of the ' ' American Woman Suffrage Association ' ' away
back in 1870. I had spoken as strongly as I was able in favor
of prohibition as the best method of dealing with the liquor
traffic, and he said distinctly, ** Not a word has been uttered, but
that we all know to be just and true and right." This too
seemed natural, for was not his very first temperance speech,
when he was an Amherst collegian, in favor of a law against
the liquor traffic ?
After these two sermons in a sentence, he proceeded to make
such a ** collection speech " as outdid all I ever heard elsewhere
for wit and wisdom. Of course ever>'body "stayed through"
and the baskets came back actually full — I have never seen
them thus except on that occasion.
534 Sermons on Evolution,
I believe him to have been in hearty accord with us of the
white ribbon movement, except as he was led away by the
'* high-license " theory, like many another good, but deceived
man in New York, Brooklyn and elsewhere.
The last time I ever saw him was in 1886 as he descended
from his pulpit after the sermon. Having heard in later days
that he had abjured his total abstinence principles, I went to
him and said :
**Mr. Beecher, I am denying what the papers say about
your drinking wine and ale — that is what you expect of me I
hope?''
He smiled, shook hands cordially and answered as the throng
pressed upon him, '* Yes, you are right — I stand where I always
did, but I have no harsh word for my brethren in the ministry
who do not see as I do." This was his testimony the last time I
ever heard his kindly voice and it outweighs all testimony uttered
against him.
I did not agree with his theology, but all the same I bought
and read his ** Sermons on Evolution " and extracted any amount
of spiritual nutriment therefrom for my soul's growth. By the
same token I do not live upon theology, but ' * by the faith of the
Son of God," and while I glory in the great men who. in the
name of exact science, defend that formulation of the faith
which my orthodox home cherished, in which I was trained
and from which I shall never depart, I can cherish Henry Ward
Beecher too, and it would be the joy of my life if I were sure
that I loved Christ as well as he did.
Mr. Beecher had a most inconvenient capacity for seeing
both sides — hence, men of electrotyped nature called him incon-
sistent. He was not " all of a piece " like certain accurate and
exact minds, hence whoever sentenced him on the evidence of any
single sentence he had uttered was sure to do him wrong. Per-
haps the most salient instance of this is that one about ** Bread
and water ' ' so often and so absurdly quoted to prove him an aris-
tocrat and the enemy of wage-workers. But to reason thus is
to make a pyramid stand on its apex, for the whole body of divin-
ity that his character and words have given to the world is one
that glorifies work as a sacrament and makes ** the reign of the
common people " essential to the world's redemption.
An j^olian Harp. 535
** He had his faults '^ ; yes, so he had — ^like all the greatest
and best souls — of whom he was one of the best and greatest ;
but, somehow, like my dear old mother, I dearly love to praise
him — he has been blamed so much !
Genius would rather go and tell its story to the whole world
than to an individual. There is no stronger proof of its univer-
sality than this. Poets and heroes always take the human race
into their confidence — and to the everlasting credit of the race let
it be said, that confidence is not abused ! * ' The great, but scep-
tered sovereigns who still rule our spirits from their urns,'' the
mighty men of whom ** the world talks while they sleep," have
loved the world, bemoaned it and believed in it. Henry Ward
Beecher was one of these.
An aeolian harp is in my study window as I write. It seems
to me the fittest emblem of him who has gone to live elsewhere
and left our world in some sense lonely. The compass of its
diapason is vast as the scope of his mind ; its tenderness deep as
his heart ; its pathos thrilling as his sympathy ; its aspiration
triumphant as his faith. Like him it is attuned to every faintest
breath of the great world-life, and like his, its voice searches out
the innermost places of the human spirit. Jean Paul says of the
aeolian harp, that it is, like nature, "passive before a divine
breath ' * and in him who has gone from us there was this ele-
mental receptivity of God. Other natures have doubtless devel-
oped that God-consciousness which is the sum of all perfections,
to a degree as wonderful as Mr. Beecher did, but what other, in
our time, at least, has been en rapport so perfect with those about
him that they could share with him this blissful consciousness to
a degree as great ? John Henry Newman says, * * To God must
be ascribed the radiation of genius. ' ' No great character of whom
I can think illustrates that most unique and felicitous phrase so
clearly as Henry Ward Beecher. His was the great, radiating spirit
of our nation and our age. For fifty years his face shone, his
tones vibrated, his pen was electric with the sense of a divine pres-
ence, not for his home only, not for his church or his nation, but
for Christendom. He radiated all that he absorbed and his capa-
cious nature was the reservoir of all that is best in books, art, and
life. But as fuel turns to fire, and oil to light, so in the laboratory
of his brain, the raw materials of history, poetry and science were
536 In the Alembic of Memory.
wrought over into radiant and radiating forces which warmed and
illumined human souls. Plymouth Church was the most home-
like place that could be named ; its pulpit a glowing fireside ever
ready to cheer the despondent and warm those hearts the world
had chilled. No man ever spoke so often or wrote so much whose
classic, historic, and poetical allusions were so few, but the potency
of every good thing ever learned by him who was an insatiable
student of nature and an omnivorous reader of books, was all
wrought, in the alembic of his memory, into new forms and com-
binations. He intersphered so perfectly with the minds and
hearts about him, that he seemed to them a veritable possession.
The interpenetrative character of his mind has not been matched,
for the reason that he was that doubly dowered phenomenon — a
great brain mated to a heart as great. This royal g^ of S3rm-
pathy enabled him to make all lives his own ; hence, he so under-
stood as to have charity for all. As Sir James Mackintosh has
said, ** If we knew each other better, it would not be to love each
other less.** It was because, in human measure, our great Mend
*' knew what was in man " that men so loved him.
'* What I aspired to be
And was not, comforts me,"
is the sweet song in minor key that every heart has sometime
sung. Our friend knew these aspirations better than any other
preacher of his time, and spoke out frankly of them to his
brother men. Since Terence uttered the words, no life has echoed
them so roundly as this life now transplanted to the skies, ** I am
human and whatever touches humanity touches me." For this
reason he was bom a patriot, a philanthropist and a reformer.
We read of ** epoch-making books," but here was an epoch-mak-
ing character.
Goethe said that when any one did a great deed, the world
at once formed a conspiracy to prevent him from ever doing
another. The demands of a personal nature that come to every
person of the least achievement — demands for ** inflooence," as
the lamented Nasby taught us to say ; for letters, autographs, and
"situations," were what this greatest of the Germans meant.
Emerson says in tones of pathos, "Why should we desecrate
noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them ? '* Why should
we, indeed ? If we will but leave them free, they will last longer
Harriet Beecher Stawe, 537
and accomplish more in those great lines of thought and action
that they and we both have at heart. I was sorry that Charles
Sumner said to Julia Ward Howe — if indeed he did so say, as was
reported — when she came to him for help in the care of a poor
negro, * * Madam, I am tr>'ing to lift up a race, do not ask me to
take my time for individuals.'* I do not think that Henry Ward
Beecher would ever have said that, but we can ourselves defend
the magnanimous souls who like him seem to have no weapons
of self-defense from those constant interruptions and personal
demands which yield but little in the way of valuable results, and
thus leave them free to live their own lives and work out their own
great destinies, helped by our prayers, our love for them, our faith
in their sincerity and their success. How often have I said this
in my heart of some among my elect circle of heroes and heroines,
with the inspiration of this one thought more : ** If ever I reach
your level in this or any world, I shall find myself face to face
with you by the law of spiritual gravitation, and shall need no
note of introduction.'*
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
It is stated by those who are informed, that except the Bible
no book ever written has had a circulation so boundless as * * Un-
cle Tom's Cabin." Translated into a score of languages, issued
in a hundred different editions, scattered as far as printer's ink
has ever gone, that mother-hearted book has been one of Christ's
evangels to humanity.
On our return (October 22, 1887) from the Connecticut W.
C. T. U. Convention, at Bridgeport, Anna Gordon and I availed
ourselves of the opportunity received through the kindness of
Mrs. J. G. Parsons, of Hartford, to grasp the hand that wrote the
matchless book. We drove to her pleasant home on Farmington
street, in the elegant city of Hartford. Mark Twain's home is
within a stone's throw, so is Charles Dudley Warner's ; while
Judge John Hooker and Isabella Beecher Hooker, his wife, are
but a few blocks distant.
An autumnal chromo in maple stood before the door of a
tasteful, lilac-colored wooden house of medium size, with porch
53^ A Little Woman Entered,
over the front, and old-fashioned hallway through the centre.
Three well-to-do cats, one yellow, one tortoise, one black, and
all handsome, had dignified positions on the walk, the porch, and
the rug before the door.
The bell was promptly answered by a plump colored maid
who evinced uncertainty as to the whereabouts of her mistress.
A voice from upstairs called out, " I am at home — I am at home,"
and we were shown into a pleasant study with book -cases, easy-
chairs, writing-table, and many photographs, the largest being
of Henry Ward Beecher, evidently taken just before his last ill-
ness, the hair snow-white.
A little woman entered, seventy-five years old, decidedly
undersized, and weighing less than a hundred pounds. She was
very simply attired in a dress of black and white check, with
linen collar and small brooch, her hair, which had once been
brown, hung fluffily upon a broad brow and was bound by a black
ribbon in front and gathered in a low knot behind. Her nose is
long and straight, her eyes are dimmed by years, her mouth is
large, and with the long, Beecher lip, full of the pathos of human-
ity's mystical estate.
This is what Time has left of the immortal Harriet Beecher
Stowe. She greeted us with cordial hand and voice and smile.
"On a Wisconsin farm, away back in the fifties, I read Un-
cle Tom, and have always dreamed that some day I should see
its author," was my inane remark.
*' Nobody is so much surprised about Uncle Tom as I am,"
she replied. **I first intended to write two or three numbers,
and when I got going could not stop."
**The world now knows that your pen was divinely guided,"
I said. " Do you not believe that pens and voices are constrained
from on high ? ' '
She smiled, nodded her head, and made a most dulcet remark
to the following effect:
" You have written a very valuable book yourself, * How to
Win.' I have it on my mantel-shelf upst£\irs, I want all our girls
to read it."
*' I little thought that anything ever done by me would win
such words of praise from the most distinguished of my country-
women,'' was my grateful reply, at which she smiled and said:
" Whatever Ought to Happen Will Happen^ 539
** Oh ! you are doing and saying more valuable things than
you know/'
Her praise was sweet, but I had grace given me to change
the subject.
** It does me good to hear that you are a remarkable pedes-
trian/* I said. Her glance kindled.
** Indeed, I am, I learned that long ago at a water-cure,"
she answered ; ** I go out in the morning and again in the after-
noon, making from five to seven miles daily. If I am not feeling
well I can usually walk it oflf, or if not, I sleep it off, going to
bed by eight o'clock.'*
**Do you go walking alone?" I said, admitting that **for
my part, I wanted ' a friend in my retreat to whom I might whis-
per solitude is sweet.' "
** But I can not have it so, and though I would prefer com-
pany, I go alone, ' ' she answered, adding, in reply to Mrs. Parsons'
query, that she *' was in excellent health, never better."
Speaking of her brother Henry's pictures, she said, **That
profile is like him — it has his uplift glance. The full-faced one I
do not like. I think the photographer must have been flattering
him, hoping to get a good impression, and nothing made him so
cross as that."
She told us that her ** twin daughters kept the house and
would not let her do a thing, which was as well, since they knew
how she wanted everything done. ' ' She showed us a charming
photograph of her grandson, saying, **He is so handsome that
he is not vain, and the way of it is this : he has heard himself
called handsome since his earliest recollection and thinks it is
some quality belonging to all boys."
** Well," I said, ** you have told us that * whatever ought to
happen will happen ' and as everybody ought to be beautiful,
doubtless some day everybody will be."
** We can not dictate to God," she answered earnestly, ** but
we know He desires that we shall all have the beauty of holi-
ness."
I told her of my dear old mother, ** Saint Courageous," to
whom she sent her love, adding, ** I love everybody ; as I walk
alone in the fields and along the streets, meeting many who speak
540 ''Good Deacon IVillardy
a friendly word to me, I rejoice to think how much I love them,
and every creature that God has made.*'
I repeated this verse from one of her poems :
** It lies around us like a cloud,
A world we do not see ;
Yet the sweet closing of an eye
May bring us there to be,"
and told her how in hours of grief the poem had comforted my
heart. At this she took me by the hand, saying earnestly, '* God
help you, God be with you. " I kissed the dear, old, wrinkled
hand that in its strength had written " Uncle Tom's Cabin '* ; she
gave a kind good-by to each of us, and we went our ways — to
meet "some sweet day, by and by," in heaven.
DEACON WII.I.ARD.
When working in the revival with Mr. Moody in Chicago,
January, 1877, I met for the first time Deacon L. A. Willard, a
well-known leader for many years of the Y. M. C. A. My witty
Irish friend, Mrs. Kate McGowan, vspoke to me of him first, and
said, " If you wish to be forever a favorite of this lovely old
gentleman, you must respond to the question he will be sure to
ask, namely, What single passage of Scripture contains within
it the whole plan of salvation ? you must speak up brightly and
say, 'Acts x 143,' and there is nothing that he will not do for
you from that time forth.'*
He was one of the loveliest old men in face, manner and spirit
that I ever saw. His whole soul was absorbed in his own method
of presenting the plan of salvation, which he did with remark-
able clearness and efficiency. He has doubtless been the means
of the conversion of more persons than the entire membership of
an average church can show for all its work in any g^ven year,
perhaps in several years. At this time I was intensely stirred by
the desire and purpose that my brother should be converted over
again, for although at twelve years of age he had started in the
Christian life, had graduated in theology at twenty-five, and
become Presiding Elder of the Denver District, Colorado, at
twenty-seven, he had some years after that seemed to fall away
from his allegiance, and the dearest wish of our hearts was that
he should return to the Shepherd and Bishop of his soul, and of
^^ Angling for Souls.' ^ 54 ^
all our souls. I had told Mr. Moody of this, and urged his help,
but he answered, ** I am so preoccupied that I can not see indi-
vidual cases, but I will pray for you and you must work and
pray." Just then I made the acquaintance of this dear patriarch.
Deacon Willard, and told him all my heart about my brother,
begging him not to go at first on a religious mission, but to call
upon him as a friend and a possible relative. My brother, like
my father, was exceedingly interested in the annals of his family,
and delighted to read the Willard Memoir, the Histor>' of Dublin,
N. H., with which his great-grandfather, Rev. Elijah Willard,
was so long connected, the History of Marlborough, N. H., and
indeed every scrap that he could learn touching his lineage was
sedulously treasured. On the contrary. Deacon Willard seemed
to care very little about all this, but, as he said, he had '* learned
to angle skillfully for souls." Going to my brother's editorial
sanctum at a time when I told him he would be most likely not
to be preoccupied, the Deacon talked up ancestry with great
spirit, told my brother he believed they were related, that he had
no son himself and as my brother had not long since lost his
father, he proposed they should ' * club together and make believe
father and son." So with much bright and genial talk, he threw
his arm over my brother's broad shoulders and said, " Let us go
to lunch, Willard, and talk this matter over more at length." So
it began and the rest of the story is told in the priceless letter
which I preserv'e in my dear old friend's handwriting. We
leanied that we were really cousins at two removes, but I am sure
we shall be nearer of kin than that when we meet in the Celes-
tial Mansion, to which, as I believe, that gentle old hand was
God*s instrument to open the way for one we loved so well.
WAI.T WHITMAN.
One Christmas I was in the home of Mrs. Hannah Whitall
Smith, where I have met many most interesting literary people
at her "hobby parties," which are a witty invention of her
gifted husband, herself or her ingenious children, I do not
know which, the plan being to have some person of distinction
in a particular line of literary, moral or religious activity, as
the central figure of the evening. Each of these persons
brings out his or her hobby, and paces it up and down before
542 The Wake Robin.
the group, after which any other person has a right to ride upon
it, if so disposed. This results in a really charming and informal
conversation, following the brief special disquisition, and is the
most enjoyable home entertainment I ever attended.
Finally the suggestion was made, * * Why not ask Walt Whit-
man, who lives just across here in Camden ? let us see him for
ourselves ; " and the invitation went. In due process of time,
there appeared on the scene a man about seventy years of age,
attired in gray, from his soft gray overcoat to his old-fashioned
gray mittens, with sparse gray hair, kind, twinkling gray eyes,
and russet apple cheeks, the mildest, most modest and simple-
hearted man I ever saw. It almost seemed as if a grand old oak
had opened suddenly and turned the good, gray poet loose upon
the world. He is the farthest possible from being leonine in
aspect or intent. He has no ends to serve, no place to hold in
conversation, nothing to gain or lose. He is the soul of geniality
and seems never better pleased than when others are talking and
he is seated in a large arm-chair gazing reflectively into the
glowing grate. But if you talk of Nature and her shy ways, he
is at home. I remember his look of amused surprise when some-
one mentioned the title of one of his books, "The Wake Robin,*'
and he told us John Burroughs, who seems to me to be a sort of
spiritual son to Whitman, had suggested it. I said, '* I did not
know what a Wake Robin was, unless it was a bird — they used
to wake me early at Forest Home in olden days" — when, behold,
the mild old man informed me gently that it was a flower ! He
did not like to talk about his books and seemed to me as a hunt-
ing hound lying at full length on the rug before the fire, content
and quiet, until some reference is made to horses, hunting-horns
and guns, when it rises up, intent, alert, electrified with activity.
So the common hum and talk seemed quieting to Father Walt,
but when Thoreau or Burroughs were referred to, or a quotation
given from Wordsworth, Thomson, or some dear Nature-lover, the
kindly eyes beamed upon us with joy, and some pithy sentence,
clean-cut enough to be a proverb, fell from his lips. What he
really is I do not know. I only tell about him as he was to me,
and his sense of God, Nature and Human Brotherhood struck me
as having been raised to such a power, and fused in such a white
heat of devotion, that they made the man a genius.
An Indian Civilizer, 543
CAPTAIN PRATT AND THE CARLISI.E INDIAN SCHOOL.
Captain Pratt is a man six feet in height, and every inch a
soldier. His great, well-balanced head, dauntless profile, and
kindly smile predict the qualities of a bom leader. A native
of New York state, reared in Logansport, Ind., of Methodist
parentage and training, but a Presbyterian by reason of his wife's
preference, he has the root of the matter in him as a muscular
Christian of the nineteenth century. Joining the Union forces as
a volunteer at the outbreak of the war, he was appointed lieuten-
ant in the regular army in 1867, and assigned to a post in the far
West. From that time he studied the Indian question at first
hand, and he has become an expert, not excelled in all the nation.
Later on, when his pre-eminent ability as an Indian civilizer came
to be known, he was put in charge of the captured ** hos tiles *' in
Florida, where he remained three years, and was then sent to
Carlisle, Pa. , to found and conduct an Indian school there. His
' ' views ' ' are best expressed in his own words :
"There are about two hundred and sixty thousand Indians
in the United States, and there are twenty-seven hundred coun-
ties. I would divide them up, in the proportion of about nine
Indians to a county, and find them homes and work among our
people ; that would solve the knotty problem in three years' time,
and there would be no more an " Indian Question." It is folly
to handle them at arms-length ; we should absorb them into our
national life for their own good and ours. It is wicked to stand
them up as targets for sharp-shooters. The Indians are just like
other men, only minus their environment. Take a new-bom baby
from the arms of a cultivated white woman, and give it to the
nurture of a Zulu woman in Africa ; take the Zulu's baby away
from her and give it to the cultivated white woman. Twenty-five
years later you would have a white savage in Africa, and a black
scholar, gentleman, and Christian in America. This sharply
illustrates what I mean. We can, by planting the Indians among
us, make educated and industrious citizens of them in the briefest
time and at the least expense. I would teach them trades and
turn them loose.
"The Indians are naturally religious, an infidel is to them
an unknown quantity. All you have to do is to familiarize their
reverent minds with the truths of the New Testament. Our Sun-
day-.school and prayer-meeting are the best proof of their readiness
to take on Christianity ; their testimonies are full of earnestness
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Relation of Religion and Science. 545
JOSEPH COOK.
The nineteenth century has its kings — not the puppets of a
succession, dressed in a little brief authority, but monarchs rul-
ing in their own right, and defenders of the faith by force of
intellect, variety of knowledge, and unswerving devotion to Him
whose motto is. Come, let us reason together, and whose symbol
is the lighted torch of truth passing from hand to hand.
First among these to-day stands Joseph Cook, of Boston.
The record he has made in the last few years has no parallel in
history. When the W. C. T. U. held its second annual meeting
in Cincinnati, in November of 1875, probably there was not a
delegate among us all who had ever heard of him. He began his
residence in Boston the year of the crusade, as pastor of a small
Congregational church. In the winter of 1875 he was invited by
the Y. M. C. A. of that city, to speak briefly, on Monday of each
week, at its noon prayer-meeting. This is the day when most de-
nominations hold ministers' meetings, and the ministers of Boston
and its suburbs were wont to adjourn in time for this noon meet-
ing. In them this Christian scholar had audience fit but few.
They were no less delighted than astonished by his art of put-
ting things. The results of the latest German, English, and
American scholarship on the more important and difficult topics
concerning the relation of religion and science were the things he
put, and precisely those concerning which they most desired to
hear. Soon the audience was so large that it removed to Tremont
Temple, and now, during the "Monday Lecture Course," *'the
busiest hour of the busiest day of the week, the seats and stand-
ing-room of that immense auditorium are fully occupied.*'
But what has this man of royal intellect and profound learn-
ing set himself to prove ? Meeting the skepticism of science with
its own ' ' scientific method, ' * he proves that if a man die he shall
live again ; that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto
Himself; " that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but
have everlasting life '' ; and that those who ultimately persist in
sin shall be shut out **from the presence of the Lord, and from
the glory of his power. * *
These matchless themes Joseph Cook handles with a logic
unequaled save by his pathos, and a wit unmatched save by his
rhetoric. But he does not stop here. Even as pure mathematics
35
546 Mrs, Joseph Cook.
must be the basis of mathematics applied, so must pure Christian
doctrine be the basis of Christianity applied, and that application
has never been made more forcibly than in the famous ** Prel-
udes *' wherein he considers practical questions of philanthropy.
How we ought to handle the Chinese, the Mormon, the Temper-
ance, the Woman and the Labor questions, has never been more
ably shown than by this master of theologic controversy.
Mr. Cook was bom at Ticonderoga, N. Y., January 26,
1838, and retains so much affection for his old home that he has
established his summer headquarters there, at ** Cliff Seat."
It is needless to say that the man who has accomplished such
mental prodigies, has never squandered his vital forces upon alco-
hol or tobacco. Joseph Cook is the uncompromising foe of these
two abominations. His genuineness of character, sturdy integrity,
and purity of life set the seal to his profession of Christianity.
He is not one of those deadly enemies of Christ's church who
preach cream and practice skim-milk.
The quaUty of his education is shown in this statement from
one of his nearest friends :
**Mr. Cook's favorite teachers and authors are Professor
Park, Julius Miiller and Jonathan Edwards, in theology ; and in
philosophy Sir William Hamilton, Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Leib-
nitz, and Kant."
Doubtless it is no small factor in Joseph Cook's solved prob-
lem of success that his heart is not a stranger to the ** supreme
affection " of which he so eloquently discotu-sed in his lectures on
Marriage. Mrs. Joseph Cook, a New Haven lady whom he i&rst
met in his Yale College days, has shared his life and honors since
the siunmer of 1877. She is his counselor as well as his com-
panion, and constantly aids him in his correspondence and
researches, the two being omnivorous and insatiable students.
But any record that fails to bring out his earnest advocacy of
the temperance reform, by word as well as by example, does
Mr. Cook injustice. A note from one cognizant of his early his-
tory reads as follows :
'' When he was but nineteen years old, Joseph Cook gave a
course of six lectures on temperance in his native town. During
the progress of these lectures a poor woman, living in the village,
died from the effects of injuries inflicted by her drunken husband.
The American Laureate. 547
The material for her shroud was procured at the same store where
her husband obtained the liquor that ** stole away his brain."
Her sad death made a profound impression on the community,
and when, at the close of the last lecture, Mr. Cook gave a pict-
ure of what rum will do, and produced a piece of the identical
shroud-cloth, with a lock of the woman's hair pinned to it, and
suspended it from the desk, the audience was in deep excitement ;
most of the women were in tears, and the faces of the men were
white with indignation."
Concerning the home-protection movement and work, Mr.
Cook has spoken plainly. ** Woman's vote would be to munic-
ipal politics depending on saloons, what the lightning is to the
oak. Godsend us that lightning."
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIBR.
Whittier was the household poet of our abolition family. We
knew more of him by heart, in all senses of that phrase, than
of any other singer, living or dead. As a teacher, I gave his
shorter pieces to my pupils, even as mother had once given them
to me. So when, in 1880, I was speaking all about in Massa-
chusetts, and Amesbury was on my list of towns, I asked at once
of my hostess, ** Is he at home ? " ** I do not know,*' she said,
*'but we will call and see." He was absent, but his genial
friends met us most kindly, and showed us the simple, comfort-
able house that has for years divided with Danvers, a few miles
distant, the honor of being called home by the greatest home
poet of the age. The desk at which he wrote and the picture of
his beloved sister so exquisitely described in **Snow Bound," —
that most perfect picture of the old-fashioned New England home-
stead,— impressed me most of all. That afternoon I met various
ladies of the village, and as my mission at this time was to
induce them to use the school ballot in the interest of scientific
temperance instruction, I asked if this were their intention, and
was much impressed by the reply that came to me repeatedly,
* ' Oh, yes ; we women vote in Amesbury — Mr. Whittier wishes it, ' *
This unconscious testimony to the silent, pervasive power
of that great nature, impressed me more than all the praise of
which their talk was full. Toward evening the poet returned,
and was so graciously considerate as to send for me. I called a
548 Whittier's Birthplace.
few minutes on my way to the hall where I was to speak. Noth-
ing could be more modest, mild and winsome than his manner.
He spoke of our home protection movement, then at its height
in Illinois, where the women had voted on the saloon question
in Rockford, Keithburg and elsewhere, under special ordinances,
and always solidly against license.
I said I was surprised that he had heard of me, whereupon
he replied in his deep low voice and with a sun-bright smile in
the great, Websterian eyes, ** But thee must know thee is becom-
ing a figure quite conspicuous yonder on thy prairies ! '*
For such an utterance from him one well might work a
life-time, so thought I, and said, ** What a matchless power do
those possess who by an utterance can thus gild life with imper-
ishable halos ! '*
Not long after, the generous poet wrote me that he was
giving copies of '* Nineteen Beautiful Years,'* my sister's life, to
his young friends, and for the later and English editions he
wrote a lovely introduction. There is just one thing that I have
desired of this great soul and failed to get — ^a temperance home
protection song for the children of oiu* half million white ribbon
and white rose prohibitionists. He says he is too old, but I can
not bear to have him pass away from us until these fresh up-
springing voices shall bear across the continent his heavenly
thoughts of a pure life.
Whittier's birthplace, the old log-house near Haverhill,
Mass., immortalized in his fireside epic, **Snow Bound,** is more
to the home hearts of America than any other national shrine. I
visited this place long years ago, and have long hoped it might
become the property of the Whittier Club in Haverhill. But a
wealthy citizen of that town who owns the old farm declines to
sell, but declares his purpose to preserve and keep it open, under
proper regulations, to the public. What Ayr*s world-famous
cottage is to Scotland, Whittier*s birthplace will become to
America ; for to paraphrase his own words,
" Blow high, blow low, not all Time's snow
Can quench that hearth-fire's ruddy glow."
In 1877 the poet Whittier' s Boston publishers gave him a
birthday banquet to which only the male contributors to the
Where Were the Women f 549
Atlantic Monthly were invited. Apropos of this I sent the follow-
ing to the Boston Advertiser :
THE ATI.ANTIC WHITTIKR DINNER — A WOMAN'S THOUGHTS
THEREOF.
To the Editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser:
Some of us feel as if our own mothers had received a slight ; a few of us
have cried, and many stormed, but I alone am left to tell thee. In the
Republic of Letters, if nowhere else, woman is a citizen. Parnassus seats
gods and goddesses on the same throne ; the Muses are feminine, the entire
nine of them ! Alongside facts like these, set the Brunswick banqueting
table, with a guest at its head accustomed to see women honored equally
in his Quaker home and church, and down the sides of the groaning board,
among the '* contributors to the Atlantic *' see the brilliant women of that
guild conspicuous only for their absence !
"Astraea at the capital,'* forsooth ! Dear Bard of Freedom, what did
you think about Astraea's absence from your birthday fete ?
" Assuredly," we thought, glancing along the columns radiant with the
wit and wisdom of the feast, '* there will be letters of regret showing that all
the leading contributors were at least invited," but the hope proved vain.
''Then, most assuredly,'* we gasped, ''the publishers or editors will give
some explanation of all this, some recognition of services so splendid, some
brief phrase, at least, to redeem the very dome of American brain from the
charge of an obliviousness not explainable by any law of mind yet ascer-
tained ?" But no ! from generous publishers and genial editors to grotesque
humorist, all combined in " expressive silence." The only reference to the
gentler sex that anywhere creeps in is this : " When the after-dinner speak-
ing began, the women who were staying in the hotel entered and were
favored with seats."
Indeed ! but who had earned a seat at Whittier's own right hand ? Who
but Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the chief contributors to the Atlantic?
and Harriet Prescott Spofiford, Rebecca Harding Davis, Gail Hamilton,
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mrs. Whitney, and Louisa M. Alcott — were they
not "to the manner bom " ? Among the sweet singers, ought Rose Terry
and Lucy Larcom, Celia Thaxter, Florence Percy, and H. H., to have been
overlooked ? And Mrs. S. M. B. Piatt, why should she not have had an
invitation, and sent a poem as well as John ?
Yet this is Boston that sat on her three hills and ruled the world ! And
these are the Bostonians — so broad, so liberal and just !
And Colonel Higginson was there, and he forgot us, too ! Ah me ! this
is the most unkindest cut of all !
Hopeless as seems the task, we must still seek an explanation of this
uncomely state of things. Was it because "women are angels" that the
contributors belonging to that celestial class were not invited to a banquet
(nor mentioned at it) in honor of a total abstainer before whom were set (in
550 The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
delicate compliment, of course) eight kinds of wine ? Was it because of Eve's
being "first in transgression" (as tempter-in-chief at the first dinner), her
sons determined she should never more sit down beside them at the con-
vivial board ? Or was it that the prestii^e of sex is not yet ofi&et by the
chivalry of justice, even among the liberals ?
If it were not Boston we should say, '' I wot it is through ignorance ye
did it. " But as it is, we dismiss the subject with the mild reproof, in sorrow
not in anger, " My brethren, these things ought not so to be ! *'
A Few Among Many.
PUmassusville^ Dec i8, 1877,
OI.IVER WENDELL HOLMES.
No book ever fascinated me more than the " Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table "; indeed, ever3rthing that Dr. Holmes has writ-
ten, I have eagerly absorbed. It has always been one of my
chief regrets, when in Boston, as I so often am, that I had no
right to the rare privilege of seeing him.
One day in 1877, on a crowded Boston street, I met the
famous autocrat. He was not pointed out to me, but I knew him
from his photograph and from a certain sixth sense. He passed
me so that we were for a moment face to face. I could not be
mistaken in that upright, well-knit figure, alert bearing, and
remarkable face with its keenness of perception and geniality of
heart. I wheeled about instinctively and followed, for some dis-
tance, the little man who is so great, hardly knowing that I did
so. This is the only time I ever saw him, or, probably, ever
shalL
SARAH K. BOLTON.
Mrs. Sarah Knowles Bolton, of Cleveland, Ohio, was Assist-
ant Corresponding Secretary of the National W. C. T. U. in 1876.
She was a leader in our work in Ohio, and that she made a most
capable officer goes without saying. Probably no woman in
America has a style more telling and compact. She excels in
seizing upon the salient points in a character, and her word-pict-
ures, though but outline sketches, are complete revelations of
men, manners, and times. What Samuel Smiles and James
Parton are as biographers of men, that Mrs. Bolton is as the chief
woman biographer of our times, and popular as her work has
been from the beginning, her best days are now, and in the
smiling futtue of her literary history.
The Matchless Orator. 55t
JOHN B. GOUGH.
Almost the only temperance lecture that I ever heard in my
life, previous to entering the field myself, was by John B. Gough.
It was in 1863, when I was a teacher in the Pittsburgh Female Col-
lege. There was such a mob of good people waiting for the
doors of the great hall to open, that when at last they did so, I
was carried oflF my feet and borne along on the crest of this wave
of humanity, half fiightened out of my wits. It was the only
time that I ever thoroughly lost my equipoise, save when I was
thrown fix)m my horse in Palestine, my donkey in Switzerland,
and my tricycle in Evanston. How I marveled at the first great
orator to whom, save Bishop Simpson, I had ever listened at that
time. Indeed, he then impressed me as an actor rather than an
orator. That lithe form was always in motion up and down the
immense platform ; that sallow, bearded face, framed in a shock
of iron-gray hair, was of protean aspect, now personating the
drunkard, then the hypocrite, anon the saint. Those restless,
eager hands, supple as India-rubber, were always busy, flinging
the hair forward in one character, back in another, or standing it
straight up in a third ; crushing the drink fiend, pointing to the
angel in human nature, or doubling up the long coat-tails in the
most grotesque climaxes of gesticulation when, with a "hop,
skip, and jump," he proceeded to bring down the house. Dickens
says of one of his humorous characters that ''his very knees
winked," but there was a variety and astonishment of expression
in every movement of Mr. Gough that literally beggars description.
He had all weapons at command ; but argument, pathos, wit and
mimicry were the four elements which, entering almost equally
into every speech I ever heard from him, made Mr. Gough the
most completely equipped and many-sided orator of his time.
Others have equaled him in any one of these g^fls of persuasion ;
a few, possibly, have excelled him in each, but none approach
his rank as a combination of all the elements of power in public
speech. More than any one else, he kept his audience on the
quivive. We never knew what to expect next, his antitheses
were so startling, his transitions as an actor so abrupt. " Prom
grave to gay, from lively to severe," he ranged, **all things by
turns and nothing long."
His voice was in complete harmony with the make-up I have
55^ Gospel Temperance.
described. It sounded the whole diapason of human joy and sor-
row ; at one breath it thundered and the next was soft and cooing
as a dove ; now it was rich with laughter, then deluged with tears;
now hot with hate, then balmy with tenderness ; now vibrant with
command, or sibilant with scorn, then full of coaxing and caress.
The voice was the man's completest instrument and exponent ; he
was its perfect master, and hence with it could master all who
heard. I think his theme that night was ' ' Eloquence and Ora-
tors,** anyhow, it was not temperance, but the impression I
brought away was that I had been under an enchanter's spell and
in a ** temperance meeting.'* I remember he told how, years
before, he had, in speaking, brought down his hand with so much
force upon a marble-topped table as to break a finger bone, but
was so intent upon his subject that he never knew it until the
address was ended.
How little I dreamed of approaching the great orator that
night. The distance between us seemed like an abyss ; and so,
while others, in no wise entitled to do so, intruded upon him in
his weariness, I went home through the mud and darkness, a loyal
but silent worshiper at his shrine, saying to myself, ** It is the
sublimest thing in all the world to lift humanity to nobler levels
through the gift of speech, but to women the world does not per-
mit such blessedness.** How little did I dream that in the unfold-
ing of God's great fairy story, entitled **Life," twenty years
should not elapse before that chief leader of the world*s g^reatest
reform would say of the W. C. T. U. with its two hundred women
speakers in the field, '* Your society is doing more to advance the
cause of temperance than all other agencies combined.'*
I heard him but four times. The next was in 1877, when,
by Mr. Moody's invitation, and during his three months* meet-
ing in Boston, I spoke in the great Tabernacle on the same day
with Messrs. Gough, John Wanamaker, and Stephen H. Tyng.
Then, for the first time, I met him personally, and found the
modest, self-distrustful, brotherly man, who professed to be in
doubt about his speech, and seemed as appreciative as a boy when
told how splendidly he had succeeded. He was the same magi-
cian as of old, but I could feel the change that had come over
the drunkards' outlook under the influence of ** Gospel Temper-
perance," for the wonderful personation of delirium tremens
A Generous Giver. 553
brought an expression full of pain to Mr. Moody's face, and he
did not smile when the antics of the half-tipsy man were imi-
tated. There is a compassion felt for the wives and families of
the inebriate, now that we know so much more about them, which
shrinks in sympathetic pain from such delineations, and the only
criticism I ever heard on Mr. Gough's lectures was at this point,
nor was that made until the Crusade period.
The next time I met him was in Chicago when he lectured
for the Central W. C. T. U., and by Mrs. Carse*s request I intro-
duced him to nine thousand people in Moody's Tabernacle.
Though suffering from a severe throat trouble, and distressed by
the fear that he could not be heard, he was his old self, and fully
measured up to the height of his great reputation. When he had
finished and was dropping into a seat, exhausted to a pitiful
degree, an '* autograph fiend'* pounced upon him, and he scrawled
his name, his hand being so bathed in perspiration that the whole
page was defaced. The marvel is that he lived so long, he who
gave himself so completely to his work that at the close of every
lecture his clothes were literally wringing wet, and hours of atten-
tion were necessary so to soothe and recuperate him with food
and baths that, long after midnight, he could sleep. For this pur-
pose some friend always went with him, usually his wife, that
strong, brave, faithful *' Mary,*' in whose praise he could never
say enough. On the evening of this tremendous effort in the
great Chicago Tabernacle, she sat upon the platform, a little in
the background, knitting, with a proud and happy smile upon her
face. We paid Mr. Gough five hundred dollars for that lecture,
but made seven hundred dollars clear of all expenses. Many have
criticised Mr. Gough for accepting such large sums, but he earned
them if ever mortal did, and he was one of the most generous
men that ever lived. His gifts were private and most unostenta-
tious, but the young men and women he sent to school and col-
lege, the friends he helped, the families he supported, would make
up a list of princely benefactions. Money passing into his hands
was always transmuted into blessing.
On the day after the lecture I went about noon to see Mr.
and Mrs. Gough at the Sherman House. Mrs. Gough was ill in
bed with a throat diflSculty. It was delightful to witness the ten-
der thoughtfrilness toward his wife of this man who had been
554 **/*// Mak^ MoHans. * '
so praised and loved by the people of two continents that if he
had not possessed a really great nature he would surely have
been spoiled. In all his practical affairs she was evidently his
guide, as well as his philosopher and friend in their home life. I
have never met a woman less injured by prosperity than Mrs.
Gough, or possessing a more affluent endowment of good com-
mon sense.
The next time I met our orator was at the Saratoga Temper-
ance Convention of 1880, where I had the high honor to stand
once more on the same platform, Mr. Gough and Rev. Dr. J. O.
Peck being the other speakers. How little did I think then, as
the Wizard of Worcester wrought his spell afresh upon an audi-
ence, that I should see the wondrous sight no more I I remem-
ber with what inimitable force he said, ** While I can talk against
the drink I'll talk, and when I can only whisper, I'll do that,
and when I can't whisper any longer, faith, 1*11 make motions —
they say I'm good at that!" How prophetic were the words.
He talked right on against the drink evil until he lacked but
six months of being seventy years of age, speaking nearly nine
thousand times, to at least nine millions of people, and traveling
four hundred and fifty thousand miles to reach them. His last
words were to the public in the great audience, and his last
motion was to raise his hands to heaven for temperance, throw
back his head, and pass beyond our human ken forever.
Twice I have visited the home of John B. Gough, on a quiet
farm, six miles from Worcester, Mass. Once I went in his
absence, with my cousin, Rev. Dr. A. Hastings Ross, of the Con-
gregational Church, then his pastor at West Boylston, a couple of
miles from his residence. Probably his location at Hillside, in a
place so secluded, was for a twofold reason : his wife's old home
was near here, and only by living in the country could a man so
celebrated enjoy the seclusion and secure the quiet for work and
recuperation that were essential to his health and usefulness.
One of the penalties paid by all who have that ** large follow-
ing " which is essential to a reformer's success, is loss of invalu-
able time through constant interruption, and failure to rest
adequately because of the local interests of the movement with
which they are connected. Probably Mr. Gough solved this
problem in the only way possible to a nature so genial ; he liter-
* * Brother Jojiathan * * Unmoved, 555
ally ** tore himself away "; he followed the highest possible ex-
ample and injunction, ** Come ye apart into a desert (ed) place,
and rest awhile.**
His home was the shrine of natural beauty, good sense and
good taste. A quiet farm-house, it was sheltering, ample, and
the very incarnation of comfort. Rare pictures and engravings,
books, souvenirs, and testimonials were in every room.
The last time that I saw him was in 1883, when, by invita-
tion of Mr. and Mrs. Gough, Anna Gordon and I spent a day
and night at Hillside where his wife and his accomplished nieces
graciously ministered to our comfort, and we had a memorably
delightful time.
He was, as usual, full of anecdote and personation. He
showed us with pride an elegant and complete set of Spurgeon's
works, recently sent him with a beautiful letter from that g^at
preacher, and told how on hearing that Mrs. Spurgeon, who has
been an invalid, confined to her house for years, was lamenting
that she ** never should hear Gough,** he said to Mr. Spurgeon,
** She shall hear me if she wants to,** and he actually went to her
sick-room, stood up before her, and for one hour exhausted all the
resources of his genius and experience to impress that saintly
woman with the merits of the temperance reform ! This incident
reveals a volume relative to the simple, kindly nature of this man
with a child's heart.
He told us, playfully, that, being received by processions,
bands of music, etc., when he landed at Liverpool, and having
had such a wonderful experience in England, speaking one hun-
dred nights in succession to packed audiences in Exeter Hall,
and having reached people of all grades, from the nobility down,
as no American had ever done (he did not say all this, but I knew
it), he was a little nervous on approaching New York Harbor, as
his return had been cabled and he did not know what demonstra-
tion might be made. But behold, ** Brother Jonathan '* held on
the even tenor of his way ; there was none so poor to do the
returning hero reverence ; and greatly relieved he took a hack
and drove to a hotel, newly enlightened as to American charac-
teristics and more profoundly impressed than ever that ** this is a
g^eat country.*'
At this visit Mr. Gough urged me to go to England for a
556 But One Thing To Do.
year, and proflFered his influence to introduce me under the most
favorable auspices, giving me a survey of the situation, and de-
claring that the outlook for woman's work in England was im-
equaled, and the temperance reform certain to win. He spoke with
especial aflFection of Robert Rae, the accomplished secretary of the
British Temperance League, who had been so helpful to him in
all his work for the mother country. Subsequently he wrote me
repeatedly on this subject, and but for my unwillingness, at her
advanced age, to put the sea between my mother and myself, I
would have gone.
It was a privilege, indeed, to kneel with Mr. Gough and his
family at their fireside altar and join in the simple, fervent prayer
he offered for God's guidance. The last communication I had
from him was a note accompanying a beautiful solitaire tea-set
for dear mother's eightieth birthday. He was a guest in Mar>'
B. Willard's home in 1884, having lectured in our W. C. T. U.
course at Evanston, while I was absent. It was just after the
great election, and quite a sensation was produced when Mr.
Gough spoke in this wise :
'• I had to face a diflScult question, recently. Forty years a
temperance worker and advocate of prohibition, the temperance
people's prayer denied and no recognition of this principle in any
national platform but one, what was ray duty as a Christian and
a patriot ? I considered the matter seriously and talked it over
with my wife. * John, there is but one thing you can do,' she
said, and I thought just the same, so I voted for St. John and
Daniels."
He has left us a clear testimony that, in all the changing,
evolving phases of the great movement which he did more to
advance than any other man of his time, he kept step to the
music and fought upon the picket line of progress. No words
ever spoken to the young men of America have greater signifi-
cance than the last uttered by this man whose pitiful past haunted
him like a perpetual nightmare ; words that seemed to come to
them out of eternity, because with his last conscious breath,
** Yoioig men keep your records cleayi^
Good friend, great heart, gallant leader, hail and farewell ;
we shall not look upon thy like again.
A Word Photograph. 557
PUNDITA RAMABAI.
I am bound to say that this gentle Hindu woman showed
extreme reluctance to being "written up," permitting it only at
ray earnest solicitation, and adding at last, ** Do as you will with
me, only help my college for women all you can."
So here she stands before us — a young woman of medium
height and ninety-eight pounds weight ; not thin, but small-
boned, muscular, lithe, straight as an arrow, with action quick and
graceful. Her simple dress of gray silk, guiltless of occidental
humps and trains and furbelows, and her native ** chuddar" —
the white wrap of the East — attest her freedom from the bondage
of mantua-maker and milliner. The spirited pose of her head,
when the chuddar is removed, gives fullest revelation of her char-
acter. The close-cut, blue-black hair clearly shows those noble
outlines where perception, conscience, benevolence, and indomit-
able piupose hold their lofty thrones. She has dark gray eyes full
of light, a straight nose with a tiny tattoo between the eyebrows,
high cheek bones, mobile lips, and perfect white teeth. She can
trace her Brahmin ancestry a thousand years ; they were all strict
vegetarians and never tasted wine, nor does she know the alco-
holic flavor (except through the communion), although **for
others* sake " she signed the pledge. She has broken her caste
in many minor ways, such as eating with Christians, but the
Pundita can not abide the taste of animal flesh — or anything
** cooked in grease," and marvels much how persons of refine-
ment can tolerate it in their houses. Her food is of cereals,
vegetables, and fruit. But so unobtrusive is she, in all these
peculiarities so beautiful, to my thinking, at least, and in the
habitude of immaculate cleanliness, that except as she is closely
questioned, one would hardly note her mode of life as peculiar.
She is delightful to have about ; content if she has books,
pen and ink, and peace. She seems a sort of human-like gazelle ;
incarnate gentleness, combined with such celerity of apprehen-
sion, such swiftness of mental pace, adroitness of logic, and
equipoise of intention as make her a delightful mental problem.
She is impervious to praise, and can be captured only by affiec-
tion, to which, when genuine and delicate, her response is like
that of the rock to Moses* rod. She is full of archness and
repartee, handling our English tongue with a precision attained
558 A Liberal-minded Priest.
by few of us who are to the manner bom. But I must repeat
that her gentleness exceeds any other manifestation of that ex-
quisite quality that I have yet seen. This seems to be her motto :
**Has any wronged thee? Be bravely avenged: slight it, and
the work's begun ; forgive it, and 'tis finished."
When we recited verses at family prayers, she could not, on
the instant, think of one, and my mother told her to repeat some
Sanskrit precept, which she did, with a quick translation, saying,
' ' Madam, you have a broad and generous spirit. ' ' She knew her
poets were usually spoken of as " heathen," and not to be for one
moment tolerated at a Christian fireside. When she spoke in our
Sunday gospel meeting of the W. C. T. U. at Evanston, I asked
her what hymn she preferred, and in her clear, earnest voice she
instantly replied,
" I heard the voice of Jesus say.
Come unto me and rest"
The Pundita is a woman-lover, not as the antithesis of a
man-hater, for she is too great-natured not to love all humanity
with equal mother-heartedness, but because women need special
help, her zeal for them is like a quenchless fire.
My mother wrote thus of her in her ** Diary ":
*' The Pundita Ramabai is a marvelous creation. She has a surprisingly
comprehensive intellect and is as open to receive truth as the daisy to the
sun. With face uplifted she marches straight into its effulgence, caring for
nothing so she find the eternal truth of the eternal God — ^not anxious what
that truth may be."
Ramabai is the daughter of a Marathi priest. In his youth
he saw his preceptor teaching Sanskrit to a royal princess and
resolved that he would thus teach his own wife. But their kin-
dred on both sides looked upon this as hardly less than insanity.
They doubtless said, as did a Hindu who was criticising the mis-
sionaries, ** Having determined to teach the women, we shall
next find you going with your primer to the cows." There was
no peace in the house and our liberal-minded Marathi priest g^ve
up the unequal contest. But a few years after, his wife died, and
on one of his pilgrimages he met at a sacred river, a learned
Brahmin whose lovely little girl he married and being three times
her age, he found it more easy to do as he would about her edu-
cation. She was very bright, and glad to learn, but after awhile
An Earnest Advocate. 559
his strange course excited so much comment that he resolved to
retire from the world and cany out his ideas without further
molestation. He accordingly sought a home in the forest of
Gangamul on the Western Ghats in Hindustan, and here on the
23d of April, 1858, Ramabai was bom. She lived in entire
seclusion, and the consequent enjoyment of outdoor air and exer-
cise ; she was taught by the mighty ministries of Mother Nature,
who has stamped her sanctities on this impressionable soul. Her
earliest recollections are of the birds singing in the morning twi-
light, at which time her mother (busy during the day with house-
hold cares, as she had several other children and step-children)
was wont to take little Ramabai in her arms to teach her the
Sanskrit language. In this way and as they walked, later on,
thousands of miles on pilgrimages to sacred shrines, Ramabai
learned twenty thousand verses from the poets and sayings of
the philosophers.
Before she was sixteen this gifted girl was left an orphan;
she traveled several years with her brother, a noble young man
who sympathized with her in the determination she had made
to devote herself to the elevation of her countrywomen. The
genius, learning, and devotion that she evinced, gained for her a
wide celebrity. She was never a member of the Brahmo Somaj,
but perceiving its theism to be higher and better than her Hin-
duism, she became a convert to its ideas and broke her caste, for
which she received the anathemas of her people. But she had
one of the bravest souls ever enshrined in clay, and so went on
her widening way, unperturbed by the criticisms of her people.
She lost her brother, and was once more sorrowful, but kept
steadily to her work of traveling, lecturing, and writing in the
interest of Hindu women. The English admired and trusted
her. Before their high commissions her word was taken as
authority concerning the needs of those for whom she labored
with unselfish devotion. She urged that native women should
be trained as physicians and taught to teach. Measures were
introduced having these ends in view, and as a sequel to the
society formed by her among leading Brahmin ladies of Poonah,
that city now has not only primary schools for girls, but high
schools ; while Bombay has several high schools, and Calcutta
the ** Victoria " school, conducting to the university.
5^ Professor of Sanskrit,
In the latter city, learned pundits (professors in the univer-
sity) proceeded carefully to examine into her acquirements, and
as a result, conferred upon her the degree of Sarasvati — equiva-
lent to **the Hindu Minerva/* This made a stir throughout
the empire, as no woman had ever received such a degree up to
that time. Soon after, Raraabai married a Bengalese gentleman,
a lawyer, whom she freely chose, this being an instance almost
without precedent. He did not belong to her caste and she suf-
fered much criticism on this account. She taught him Sanskrit
and he gave her English lessons. She called him by his first
name which was a dreadful thing in the opinion of the women
round about. (They lived in Cachar, Assam.) She did not
especially wait upon him, but took her meals at the same time,
which was another mortal sin. She had already determined to
go to England and study medicine, and he agreed to help her all
he could. But he died suddenly of cholera, when they had been
but two years married, leaving her a widow with an eight months*
baby when she was only twenty-four years old. But, though her
protection and support were thus suddenly cut off, Ramabai did
not despair. She sold their little home, paid off the debts, wrote
a book which brought her money enough for the journey, and
sixteen months after her husband's death set off across the un-
known seas for England. This was in 1883. She found that a
slight deafness, the result of scarlet fever, would prevent her from
studying medicine. Professor Max Miiller and other learned men
took up her cause. She was made Professor of Sanskrit in Chel-
tenham College, where she remained until 1886, when Dr. Joshee,
who was her cousin, a lady of high caste, was to graduate from
the Woman's Medical College, of Philadelphia, and the Pundita
came over to see her and to study our educational methods. The
death of Dr. Joshee soon after she returned to India, was a heavy
blow to Pundita and to the women's cause in Hindustan.
Ramabai has thoroughly studied the kindergarten system ;
has lectured in our principal cities, and has written a remarkable
book entitled *' The High Caste Hindu Woman," in the eighteen
months of her stay in America. Dr. Rachel Bodley,* Dean of the
Woman's Medical College, Philadelphia, in an introduction to
this book, which can not fail to enlist every reader, says that she
♦Now dcccas»cd.
Pundita Ramabau 561
never read one more remarkable. It tells of women whose only
and unpardonable crime is having been bom at all, and who are
all their lives accursed in the eyes of their kinsfolk because death
took away the boys to whom they were betrothed in infancy, and
they are held to be the ones who caused this loss and grief in
their prospective husbands* homes. It tells with tender pathos of
their bondage from which suicide and shame are the only sources
of deliverance and it tells in burning words of Pundita Ramabai*s
undying purpose to work out their deliverance by means of a
Christian education. For the great question is now and has al-
ways been: ** Ought women to learn the alphabet?'* After
that all else is easy and no man may fix the limit of their
** sphere.**
Pundita Ramabai became an avowed Christian while in
England, was baptized, and declared her acceptance of the Apos-
tle's Creed, and her belief in Christ as the Master and Redeemer.
But her acute mind finds it diflScult to choose among the sects,
so she announces herself as being in harmony with all, and has
joined none. But every Christian grace blooms in her life, com-
munion with God seems her most natural habit, and love to Him
and all that He has made, her atmosphere. She wishes to found
in India a school for high-caste Hindu widows, and asks good
people of every name to help her. But she is not under any
** auspices*'; no denominational missionary board can consist-
ently take up her enterprise, nor does she wish it. Were she
more worldly-wise, she would avoid this hindrance by attaching
herself to one of them and accepting their counsel and their
money together.
But, earnest Christian though she is, the Pundita is a woman
of ** views " and will defend them to the last. She believes there
is room for this new agency ; and that through the plans formu-
lated by a Christian Hindu widow who knows the inner workings
of that class, its members may best be reached.
I can not help cherishing the earnest hope that, under Pundita
Ramabai*s Christian sway, women never yet reached by the usual
missionary appliances of the church may be loosed from the prison
house of ignorance, lifted out of the habitations of cruelty, and
led fix)m their darkness into the marvelous light of that gospel
that elevates women, and with her lifts the world toward heaven.
96
562 Almira Lincoln Phelps.
DISTINGUISHED SOUTHERNERS — CHIEFLY LITERARY MEN ANP
WOMEN.
'* We know your authors, but you don't know ours,'* was a
lErequent observation of my Southern entertainers, and, as I eagerly
noted every allusion to the household favorites whose genius was
indigenous to their own soil, the exclamation was not infrequent,
**Tell your friends about our writers, when you go home.*'
Hence these brief notes, gathered up by the way.
Almira Lincoln Phelps, the sister of Emma Willard, though
not a native, was an acclimated Southerner. The Patapsco Insti-
tute, near Baltimore, was most successful under her management ;
and, when I saw her in 1881, she took a hearty interest in the
later phases of that irrepressible ** Woman Question ** with whose
evolution she and her famous sister had as much to do as its
more pronounced advocates. In her stately home, on Kutaw
Place, Baltimore, I visited the genial and accomplished octoge-
narian (since deceased), who manifested lively pleasure in the
declaration that her *' Botany ** was one of my most cherished
companions on a Wisconsin farm; but shook her long finger
ominously at me as she expressed her dissent from my * * views * *
of woman's relations to the manufacture of public sentiment and
its crystallization into beneficent law. She smiled, however, at
the soft impeachment that our present work in manifold forms
of intellectual and philanthropic endeavor is but the logical
sequence of the higher education, and when she gave me a nice
picture of herself in the gracious days of her prime, I felt assured
her opposition was not fundamental. In this opinion she con-
firmed me by calling attention to a large swinging book-case,
within reach from her easy-chair, and crowded with the best
results of modem, as well as ancient thought — the Bible having
evidently the first place in her study and afiection. Mrs. Phelps
shared her home with her son, Gen. Charles E. Phelps, the
gifted orator who was chosen to give the memorial address at
Baltimore's magnificent sesqui-centennial in September, 1880.
At Johns- Hopkins University I had the rare pleasure of hear-
ing Sidney Lanier, who almost up to the time of his death was
lecturer on literature in that marvelous institution, which has
risen at one bound to the very first rank, by reason of its wealth
Sidney Lanier. 563
and the statesman-like qualities of its president and board of
trustees, who, taking as their motto from the beginning, **Get the
Best," have attracted a coterie of rarely gifted and accomplished
professors, and by their post-graduate studies a quality of students
altogether superior to the average of American colleges. In-
deed, *'the liberal education** in Max Mtiller*s sense, which
leaves the student at liberty to g^ve large scope to elective affin-
ities in scholarship, and to become at once a man of culture and a
specialist, has wide illustration here. My only regret was that
the genial Quaker whose name the institution bears did not pay
sufficient respect to his schooling in the grand Society of Friends
(whose object-lesson in equality of right between the sexes is its
chief glory) to ordain co-education as its crowning feature. It is
humiliating to know that Carey Thomas, a young Quakeress, the
daughter of Dr. James Carey Thomas, a leading trustee, was
refused admission and pursued in the University of Leipsic,
Germany, the post-graduate studies denied at her own door.
To-day she is the best educated woman in America and Dean
of Bryn Mawr College. But there is a strong co-education sen-
timent among the powers that be, and its realization is but a
question of time that shall prove brief. What Sidney Lanier
thought on this weighty subject I did not learn ; but, surely, the
preponderance of ladies, grave and gay, at his superb lectures
must have given him food for a generalization thereupon. Taine
made the study of environment enter largely into his philosophy
of literature, but Lanier's root principle is the development of
personality. This he traces from its embryo, among the Greeks,
wherein the state is everything and the individual nothing, to its
consummate blossom in Shakspeare and George Eliot. It was
refreshing to listen to a professor of literature who was something
more than a raconteur and something different from a bibliophile,
who had, indeed, risen to the level of generalization and employed
the method of a philosopher. Georgia is proud of Sidney Lanier,
whose birthplace and early home was Griffin, and whose services
in the Confederate army are added to his fame as a poet. He will
be remembered as author of the *' Centennial Ode " of that Cen-
tennial year wherein the arts of peace did more than has been
generally understood to bind the broken sections in new bonds of
amity and emulation. He also wrote a charming novel of South-
564 Paul Hamilton Hayne.
em life, entitled ** Tiger Lilies,*' published in 1867. Several of
his best productions have appeared in Scribner's Magazine and
in The Independent, His brother, ClifiFord, is also a man of
talent, having published a novel, ** Thorn- Fruit" in 1867.
Sidney had varied fortunes. He was once a teacher ; then bein^
a fine musician was attached to Theodore Thomas's concert
troupe. Later he found fit audience at the great university until
his death.
He had a theory of the art of rhyme and rhythm set forth at
length in a volume on the subject. Many have compared his
shorter poems with some of Emerson's least comprehensible
efforts — *' The Red Slayer," for instance ; but the more carefully
one studies his unique effusions, the more of strength and genius
and that * * personality ' ' which is the key-note of his creations and
criticisms alike is felt and seen. In personal appearance Sidney
Lanier was of medium height, exceedingly slight figure, closely
buttoned in a black suit ; face very pale and delicate, with finely
chiseled features, dark, clustering hair, parted in the middle, and
beard after the manner of the Italian school of art. Altogether,
he had a countenance rare and pleasing as his verse. He sat
not very reposefiiUy in his professional arm-chair and read from
dainty slips of MS. in a clear, penetrating voice, full of subtlest
comprehension, but painfully and often interrupted by a cough,
which proved that the fell disease of our New England climate
had fastened on this gifted son of the South. As we met for a
moment, when the lecture was over, he spoke kindly of my work
and Southern mission, evincing that sympathy of the scholar with
the work of progressive philanthropy which our grand Wendell
Phillips declared to be pathetically rare. ** We are all stri\'ing
for one end," said Lanier, with genial, hopeful smile ; '* and that
is to develop and ennoble the humanity of which we form a part."
Paul H. Hayne was, par excellence, the poet of the South —
** their Longfellow," as I often heard Southerners say, although
they claim a share in the love and reverence that we feel for
ours. He was in 1881, the only literary man in the South who
relied on the labor of his pen in poetry for his living. Through
the leading magazines of the North he drew the remuneration
for his literar>^ labors — meager enough, at best. He was devoted
to his art, working, doubtless, far beyond his strength; for his
The Southern Press. ^565
health was very delicate. He lived in almost absolute seclusion
at Berzelia, near Augusta, Ga., ministered to by his devoted
wife and only child, William, a young man who shares -his
father's genius. Hayne was quite the ideal poet in physique,
with dark hair and eyes, mobile and kindly features, cast in
heroic mould. His home was plainer than that of any among
his brother singers at the North, one room being papered from
floor to ceiling by his wife's ingenuity, with a mosaic of wood
engravings, but it was a most attractive place, lighted up by
their two beautiful souls, and their welcome to us was the soul
of refinement and cordiality. The beloved Southern laureate
has now passed on to heaven.
Hayne was a descendant of him against whom Daniel Webster
directed the reply that added so largely to his fame. He was a
South Carolinian by birth, a voluminous writer and his verse is
of exquisite finish, delicate, melodious, brilliant in imagery, but
marred by occasional affectations of obsolete phraseology and
strained quaintness of expression. At his best he was strictly
a lyrical poet, a sky-lark, flying from the grass with a throat full
of song, not the matchless eagle whose pinions bear him out of
human sight, up toward the sun. The South is justly proud
of this lovable man and true literary artist and points fearlessly
to his works when its literary development is sneered at by the
thoughtless or malicious.
The press of the South is far above the grade usually assigned
by the vanity and ignorance of our Northern popular opinion.
It is in the large cities exceptionally independent and allies itself
with religion and philanthropy. Perhaps its temptations are less
than ours at the North. Certainly it does not cater to the igno-
rant and base. It has no fear of *' the German vote *' before its
eyes, and speaks with fairness of the temperance cause, often with
undisguised firiendliness. As yet, it has not joined in the ** con-
spiracy of silence," by which Northern journals, while they give
full reports of the meetings of brewers and distillers, are often
** so crowded*' that, **much as they would like to, you know,*'
they find it ** impossible** to furnish to the temperance people
that larger audience which hears with its eyes and might under-
stand with its heart and be converted, had the greatest of reforms
the help of this greatest of allies.
566 Mrs. Jefferson Davis
At Mobile I met Augusta Evans Wilson, the famous author
of "Beulah** and other well-known novels. She could not be
induced to speak of her writings, but showed me her superb col-
lection of azalias and her costly Jersey cows, in both of which
curious creations she is a connoisseur.
In Memphis, I made the acquaintance of Mrs. Je£ferson Davis,
one of the best talkers imaginable, a queenly looking woman of
cosmopolitan culture and broad progressive views. She spoke
with pride of her New England tutor, and attributed to him a
determining impulse toward books, philosophies and art. Her
daughter Winifred, I met at a New Orleans kettledrum, where
Mrs. Judge Merrick introduced us, and I have rarely seen a
nobler type of educated American womanhood. Her talents as a
writer promise to lead her to a literary career.
At a reception given me by Mrs. Merrick, in the Crescent
City, I met Mrs. Nicholson, owner of the New Orleans Picayune^
and Mrs. Field (** Catharine Cole *') o^ the New Orleans Times-
Democrat, literary women and also charming society women.
Joel Chandler Harris is a fine critic and paragraphist, and
writes almost equally well in verse and prose. He is set down
by Southern literary authorities with whom I talked as their best
humorist. He was educated at the printer's case, is a native of
Georgia, and about thirty -five years of age ; but his fame refets on
the well-known collection of (colored) folk-lore entitled ** Uncle
Remus.'' It is not easy to make his acquaintance, by reason of
a shyness easily accounted for when one remembers that he has ** a
brilliant mind encased in a homely and unprepossessing body,"
as a friend of his expressed it. Not knowing this beforehand,
I made this entry in my note-book on the day of my interview
with him: **The creator of 'Uncle Remus' is a most unex-
pected-looking man ; but a good woman has condoned the fault,
and in his pleasant home, Harris is writing out his wealth of
wisdom concerning the legends and traditions of the slaves."
He told me that ** Uncle Remus" is a veritable character, the
favorite companion and friend of his boyhood, and that these
stories which were the delight of all the children for miles
around had been traced upon his youthful memory in outlines so
clear and deep, he could not forget them, if he would. Learned
men in Europe and America will gladly know that in the mine he
James H. Handatt. 567
has been working with so much skill there are treasures not yet
brought to light, for which he will not delve in vain. ^
James R. Randall is, perhaps, the most gleeful and scholarly
writer of the Southern press. He edits the Chronicle and Consti-
tutionalist of Augusta, Ga., and gives to his editorials all the
advantages of a pure literary style and a rich and flowing diction.
His descriptions of President Garfield's inauguration are the most
picturesque on record, and his spirit toward the North, like that
of all the leading journalists of his section, is liberal and concilia-
tory ; yet his fame is founded on the ringing war-lyric, ** Mary-
land, My Maryland,'' in which
" Huzza ! she'll spam the Northern scum "
is a well-remembered line. Mr. Randall is a large, fine-looking
man, with full, dark eyes, ample forehead, and delightful man-
ners. When I asked him if
" Hark to a wandering son's appeal "
was the correct version of a familiar line in his famous song, he
replied, promptly : ** No. It should be * exiled son ' ; for, as a
native of Maryland, I felt my change of residence as, indeed, an
exile in that crisis.*'
** And another line. Does it read
" ' His foot is at thy temple door/
or * his touch/ as in some versions ? "
'* Oh ! *his touch,' by all means," said Mr. Randall, laugh-
ingly. ** That more clearly involves the idea of profanation ! "
But the war-songs do not exhibit Mr. Randall at his best.
He has the true fire of genius, the divine afflatus, in abundance
and of the purest quality.
But why is it that ** Maryland, My Maryland," ** Father
Ryan's Conquered Banner," his ** Sword of Lee," and other
Southern favorites are unmatched in fire and pathos by our
Northern verse of that unequaled period ? The answer is not far
to seek. With us the war was at arms-length ; with them an
awful grapple for life or death. Our homes, at least, were safe ;
theirs might any day be food for fire-brands. Our fields still
smiled ! theirs were trampled by the ruthless hoof of war. Hence
the wild fervor of their best martial strains.
568 Gifted Southrons,
One Sunday afternoon in 1881, I gave a temperance talk at
Franconia, N. H. In the audience, as I afterward learned, were
Mr. George W. Cable and his wife and daughter. It pleased me
not a little to heiar him say that, going home from the meeting,
this bright young girl, after a long reverie, said to her mother,
*' I intend to be a total abstainer always after this, and sometime
a temperance talker with a white ribbon on my breast."
For one I have not been greatly encouraged by the applause
or commendation of my auditors — ^indeed, have said an hundred
times that if I judged by their lack of demonstration I would
immediately quit the field, but one pure girl's approbation thus
unconventionally expressed, helped me onward more than the
genial man and great author who took the trouble to report it
will ever know — unless, as is unlikely, he reads these grateful
lines.
Among other exceptionally gifted Southerners whose names I
string as pearls on the rosary of friendship, are Sallie F. Chapin,
author of * * Fitzhugh St. Clair : the Rebel Boy of South Caro-
lina''; Georgia Hulse Mcl^eod, of Baltimore, Fannie Casseday
Duncan, the Louisville journalist, and her saintly sister Jennie ;
Mrs. James Leech, who carried oflF the parliamentary prize at the
Chautauqua Examination ; Col. George W. Bain and family, of
Lexington ; Mrs. Jenny Morton, the poetess of Frankfort, Ky. ;
Mrs. Lide Meriwether, of Tennessee, who wrote, ** She Sails by the
Stars"; Laura C. Holloway, the popular author, now of Brook-
lyn, N. Y. ; Rev. Dr. Atticus G. Haygood, who declined to be a
bishop, and who wrote **Our Brother in Black"; Judge East,
whom I call **the Abe Lincoln of Tennessee"; Sam Jones, the
out-yankee-ing Yankee of the South ; Judge Watson, of Missis-
sippi, once a Confederate Senator and always a Virginia gentle-
man of the old school ; Dr. Charles Marshall, of Vicksburg, Judge
Tourgee, of North Carolina, and Mrs. H. B. Kells, the white
ribbon editor of Mississippi.
The South is moving steadily up toward its rightful place as
one bom to the purple of literary power, and that its women are
in the van of the march to the throne-room of this highest aris-
tocracy, gives their Northern sisters special encouragement and
pleasure.
** Once an a Time.^* 569
WOMEN SPEAKERS.
The first woman I ever heard speak was the first woman I
ever had a chance to hear. Her name was Abby Kelley Foster ;
she was refined, inspired, but so far ahead of her age that she was
a potion too strong for the mental digestion of the average man.
She was a woman speaking in public and that was not to be
tolerated. She spoke against the then cherished institution of
slavery and for that she was to be mobbed. In the International
Council at Washington, in 1888, I heard some of her former
associates say that she went to church one Sunday in a certain
town where she had spoken the night before, and the minister
took as his text, ** That woman Jezebel which calleth herself a
prophetess," and rained oratorical fire and brimstone on the poor
little reformer throughout the morning service. Let us remem-
ber this, for there are those who are abused nowadays by short-
sighted mortals whose children will be very likely to build the
sepulchers of those whom their fathers traduced.
I was a little girl when I heard Abby Kelley, for it was before
we left Oberlin, so that my impressions are not as definite as I
could wish.
The next one was a woman whose name I do not recall. I
think she was a spiritualist, and she spoke in a little out-of-the-
way hall in Milwaukee, when I was a student there in 1857. I
had to coax my Aunt Sarah for some time before she would con-
sent to let me go, but she finally did so as a concession to what she
called my ** everlasting curiosity,'* sending me in charge of a
city friend. The woman was perched in some queer fashion mid-
way between the floor and ceiling. I think she had short hair.
I know she looked very queer and very pitiful, and I felt sorry,
for my intuitions told me that a woman ought to be at least
57^ The Peerless Anna Dickinson,
as good a speaker as a man, and quite as popular. Nothing of
all she said remains with me, except one sentence, which I half
believe is a fragment from some poet : ** I love to think about a
central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.**
The next woman I heard was Anna Dickinson in the hand-
some Crosby Opera House, Chicago, during the war. The audi-
torium was packed ; the stage occupied by the most distinguished
gentlemen of the city, no ladies being allowed on its select pre-
cincts save one, a young woman hardly past twenty, who came
forward with poised, elastic tread, took her seat modestly and
smiled her thanks as thunders of applause woke the echoes of
the great pavilion. Her dark, curly hair was flung back from
her handsome brow, her gray eyes, of which a gifted man had
said, ** They make one believe in immortality,** glanced around
upon us with a look of inspiration. What she said I do not
know, but it set vibrating within my spirit the sacred chord
of patriotism, for Anna Dickinson was queen of patriots. Going
home that night I could not sleep, for I heard as clearly as I had
done in the audience the cadence of that wondrous voice, its cour-
age, its martial ring, and its unmeasured pathos. Beyond all men
and women to whom I have yet listened, Anna Dickinson has
been to me an inspiration. In 1875 I met her first when I was
President of the Chicago W. C. T. U. and she came to the city
to lecture. Her agent wished her to speak in Evanston, and I
think I never had more pleasure than in using my influence to
secure our church for her and entertaining her in my own home.
According to her custom, she refrained from eating till the lecture
had been delivered ; then we had supper in our little dining-
room and I sought to have it to her liking. We remained at
the table until two o'clock at night, for we were all so much
delighted with her conversation that my dear mother, for the
first time, forgot her early hours and sat there until after midnight
We talked of things past, present, and to come. If we had known
each other always we could not have had more abandon. My
mother said to her, **What do you think of Christ?** She
paused as if she had been smitten with a blow, then changed
the subject skillfully, but made no answer. When I showed
Anna to her room, she put her arm about me saying, **The
question was so sudden that I hardly understood your grand old
The First Gun for Home Protection. 571
mother's meaning. What do I think of Christ ? *' And then for
several minutes she spoke of him with an eloquence and tenderness
that I have never heard excelled and rarely equaled in the pulpit.
Later on I saw her many times, for she spent weeks at the
Palmer House writing her plays. The National Temperance
Society had a great convention in Farwell Hall during her stay.
I remember Vice-president Wilson spoke and other distinguished
men and women, among them all who were leaders of the Na-
tional W. C. T. U. I had prevailed on Anna to be present at one
of these meetings when the question of equal suffrage was to be
debated. Miss Lavina Goodell, a lawyer from Madison, Wis.,
daughter of William Goodell the noted antislavery reformer,
moved, at my suggestion, that Miss Anna Dickinson be invited
to speak, and at once the house manifested both excitement and
applause. The friends of the pending resolution wanted her help,
the foes dreaded her voice. But the motion prevailed by a large
majority, and as she came along the aisle and ascended the plat-
form, I could think of nothing except Joan of Arc. Indeed I
suppose she has reminded everybody of that great character
more than any other woman could. As she stood there in the
prime and plenitude of her magnificent powers, simply attired
in a tasteful walking suit of gray, her great eyes flashing, her elo-
quent lips tremulous at the thought of what was pending, she was
a figure long to be remembered. Often as I have heard her speak,
it seems to me that day crowned all. It was not so much her
words, as I read them in cold type when the meeting was
reported, but it was the mighty spirit that moved upon the hearts
and consciences of those who heard. She seemed an avenging
angel as she depicted the injustice that fastens saloons upon this
nation, and gives women in the home no remedy and no redress,
although they and their children must endure its awful cruelty
and shame. Our resolutions carried and that was the first gun
of the ever thickening campaign, in the midst of which we now
are, and whose final result will be woman regnant in the state,
an outlawed liquor traffic and a protected home.
How earnestly I pleaded with Anna Dickinson to come with
us in the temperance work ! Sometimes she seemed half per-
suaded, but the brilliant friends around her were patrons of the
drama; she felt her power, and I am one of those who believe she
57^ Elizabeth Comstack.
was entitled by her gifts to make a magnificent success upon the
stage. Earnest and tender were the letters I sent her and eloquent
of hope the bouquets of flowers. Indeed, for some months I was
conscious that my spirit was polarized toward this splendid
specimen of womanhood. When she was writing her last book
**A Paying Investment," I saw her almost daily. She said to
me, with her inimitable smile, showing me the chapter in which
a capital argument was made in favor of the temperance work,
**See, Missy, I wrote that for you.*
One evening I took Elizabeth Comstock, the dear old
Quaker philanthropist with me to the hotel, and we made a
combined assault upon Anna to devote her gifts to the temperance
reform. She took a hand of each in her strong, warm palms,
and said, *' Kind hands, gentle hands, and sisterly, fitted to the
deeds you do, and to the burdens that you carry. Go yotir own
sweet way and do your work, but leave me to do mine in my
own fashion. Your souls are calm and steadfast, while mine is
wild and stormy. Let me go my way ! '' Her voice trembled and
tears were in her eyes. After that I knew the case was hopeless,
but my love and prayers have followed her all the years, and I
have been grieved, as words may not relate, in all the griefis
and losses that have come to her.
Everybody agrees that our present queen of the platform is
Mrs. Mar>' A. Livermore, than whom no American woman has a
better record for patriotism and philanthropy. We women of
a later time were fortunate in having for forerunners the two
remarkably endowed women I have named, and we should be
forever grateful to that statesman-like speaker and chief-reformer,
Susan B. Anthony ; to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the philosopher,
and lyucy Stone, the heroic pioneer, who still earlier bore the
brunt of battle for us, and whose names millions of loyal hearts
will cherish. As a speaker, Julia Ward Howe has a rare niche
of her own among the most cultured women of her century, and
surely our gratitude to her will not be less, who has laid fame
and fortune on the altar of a sacred cause in circles the most dif-
ficult to reach and win. The platform is already a conquered
field for woman ; so is the pulpit in all senses save the sacerdotal,
and here our progress is steady and sure. God bless the gener-
ous-hearted men who from the first have fought valiantly for the
Albro E, Bishop. 573
fulfillment of that blessed prophecy, ** The Lord gave the word,
the women that publish the tidings are a great host.''
HOW I CAME TO BE A PUBLIC SPEAKER.
One day when I was doing house-work at Rest Cottage, the
winter my mother, my friend Kate and I decided to have no
stranger intermeddle with otir lot, either in kitchen or parlor, a
gray-haired gentleman, the scrupulously elegant style of whose
toilet made an impression even upon me who givei^but little JtfJi^
attention to such subjects, rang our door-bell and inquired if this
was the home of Frances E. Willard. Being afi&rmatively an-
swered, he entered, with much mingled dignity and urbanity, and
addressed his remarks about equally to my mother and myself as
we were all seated in the little south parlor. He discoursed some-
what on this wise : ** I have been present at several of the meet-
ings of the Women's Foreign Missionary Society before which
you have been speaking within the last few weeks concerning
your observations in Egypt and the Holy Land. It seems to me
you have the art of putting things, the self-possession and many
other of the necessary requisites of a good speaker. And I said
to myself, I will go and see that lady ; she is a good Methodist,
as I am, and I will invite her to lecture in Centenary Church, of
which I am trustee, making this agreement, that if she will work
up a good, popular lecture, I will work up a good, popular audi-
ence, will pay her a fair price for her eflfort, and will see that it is
well reprcvsented by the press of Chicago. It occurs to me that
as the result, if all goes as well as I believe it will, she will have
no more difficulty in making her livelihood and broadening her
opportunities of usefulness. * *
The pleasant-faced gentleman looked to me very much like a
combination of Santa Claus and a hom-of-plenty as he uttered
these words. Mother seemed equally delighted, and we told him
that he was the kindest of men to have thought of me with so
much interest ; that I had returned from Europe a few months
before, earnestly desirous of employing my time to the best ad-
vantage for the support of my mother and myself, and for the
good of those among whom I might labor ; that what he had
promised would suit me to a dot, as I had. all my life felt a strong
inclination to speak in public and had only been withheld from
doing so before, because of the somewhat conservative atmosphere
574 * ^'^ -AVze/ Chivalry y
of the educational institutions in which I had spent the last few
years and my own sensitiveness to appearing in public.
Declaring that he had no claim upon our gratitude, the pleas-
ant gentleman went his way, and for the next three weeks he
invested a good share of his time in interviewing influential per-
sons and in working up with all the ingenuity of which he was a
consummate master, an interest in me and in the lecture that was
to be.
For myself, I spent those three weeks in the closest kind of
study, writing and committing to memory a lecture about one
hour and a half long entitled, **The New Chivalry.**
On the evening of March 21, 187 1, I appeared with my
friends. Rev. Dr. Reid, editor of the Northwestern Christian
Advocate, and his daughter Annie, at the luxurious home of the
kind gentleman, where we took tea, and then went over to the
handsome city church, where I was presented at the door with
an elegant card, the first ticket that I had ever seen about a
lecture of my own. It read as follows :
Miss FRANCES E. WII^LARD WII,!, GIVE HER I^ECTURE,
"THE NEW CHIVALRY.'*
In the Centenary {Dr. Fowler's^ Church,
Tuesday Evening, March 21, 187 1, at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets Twenty-five Cents.
The pleasant-faced gentleman said, as he reached his kindly
hand to me, '*Tum the crank skillfully at your end of the
church, and I will do so here, ' ' for, behold, he was gathering up
the tickets himself ! I was gracefully introduced by Dr. Fowler,
the pastor of the church, and spoke my piece, making no refer-
ence whatever to my manuscript which lay concealed in a modest
portfolio that had been previously carried in and placed upon the
pulpit. My audience consisted of the Slite of the West Side,
with many fi-om the North and South Sides, and they cheered me
far beyond my merits. At the close the pleasant gentleman intro-
duced me to a semicircle of well-known journalists of the city,
whom he had as good as coerced into being present, and in my
** Tlu Stenographer of Memory, ^^ 575
private opinion, he had caused to be written up at his dictation
the very nice notices that the young debutante upon the platform
was so fortunate to win from the Chicago press. Need I say that
I have alwa:>'s gratefully remembered him, perhaps more grate-
fully than he or his have been aware, and here I write, with
affectionate memory of one who has passed beyond our sight,
above our ken, the name of Albro E. Bishop.
ABOUT SPEAKERS.
Always, in presence of an audience I am saying to myself at
one time or another, '' How dare I stand here, taking at least a
thousand hours of time, and focalizing the attention of a thousand
immortal human spirits ? Who am I, that so great possibilities
of influence should have fallen to my lot ? And I must remem-
ber that there is a stenographer always present, the stenographer
of memory, and that in the white light of the world to come, not
only what I utter here, but every thought I think, will stand out
plain as the sun in the heavens, — for every soul shall give account
of himself to God.
There is something unspeakably pathetic about the life of
one to whom must frequently recur the unmatched responsibility
of meeting public audiences. His is a joy and sorrow with which
none intermeddleth. A ring at the bell may dissipate a thought
he was just catching on his pencil's tip in the preparation of a
speech ; a rap at the door may put to flight the outline of an
address ; the constant coming and going of people who really
must see him, break into staccato snatches the speech that might
have been flowing, deep and bright. His riches, what he has,
are like Sojourner Truth's — *' in his idees,*' yet they are scattered
right and left, as if they were of the smallest consequence,
because they are impalpable, invisible, unheard. He grieves for
the thousand children of the brain that might have come to light,
had they not been throttled in their birth. He knows the mean-
ing of the words, ** travail of soul." Then he must put aside a
thousand pleasant things in nature, music, books, society, for he
has a certain speech to make at a certain time, and, like an
engine on the track, he must go forward toward that time. True
as this is on a great scale of the great speakers, it is also pathet-
ically true of us who are the lesser lights
57^ First Public Lecture,
THE NEW CHIVALRY;
OR, THE SCHOOL-MISTRESS ABROAD.
[Here follows my first public lecture, which is chiefly made up of obser-
vations upon women in Europe — ^whose sorrowful estate, as I studied it
twenty years ago, had much to do with giving me the courage to become a
public speaker.]
Bayard Taylor, Paul du Chaillu and Dr. Hayes picture for
us the inhospitable climes in whose exploration they hazarded
their lives ; Emily Faithful comes across seas to tell us of her
work among the toiling masses of Great Britain ; the Sage of Con-
cord, founder of our lecture system, comes from his meditations
to tell us what he heard a voice saying unto him, ** Write.'*
A humbler duty lies upon my heart. I have no poem to
recite, no marvelous discovery to herald. I come to you in the
modest character of the school-mistress abroad ; in the capacity
of friend-in-general to our girls.
Gail Hamilton, in that most racy of her essajrs, entitled
**Men and Women," exclaims with a bturst of enthusiasm : **I
love women, I adore them ! '' But, by way of compensation, she
declares in the next sentence that "There's nothing so splendid
as a splendid man. ' '
Now I have no disposition to deny either of Gail's state-
ments, but I would repeat and emphasize the first.
And by ** women," be it distinctly understood, I always and
invariably mean girls. The largest part of my life, thtis far, has
been spent in their service. I claim to have coaxed and reproved,
caressed and scolded, corrected the compositions and read the
love-letters of more girls than almost any other school-ma'am in
the Northwest. I began with them before I was eighteen, in
my * * Forest Home ' ' on the banks of a Wisconsin river, the noblest
river in the world to me, though since last I floated on its breast
I have wandered as far as the Volga, the Jordan, and the Nile.
An Egyptian Woman. 577
In district schcx)ls, academies, and ladies' colleges, both
East and West, I have pursued their fortunes ; in schools where
they were marshalled, two by two, when taking daily exercise,
and when it was my happy lot to be their guardian on shopping
expeditions ; and anon, in easy-going schools, where in the recita-
tion rooms black coats were numerous as basques, and opposite
each demure young lady at the dinner table sat a being with a
bass voice and hair parted on one side. Then I wandered
away from the merry-faced girls of America, and for two years
and a half studied their sisters in Europe and the East. Coming
home full of new thoughts and more earnest purposes, I gathered
them around me once again — the fortunate daughters of the dear
Home Land — and understood, as I could not have done before,
what maketh them to differ from the sad-faced multitudes beyond
the seas.
Let me, then, invoke your patience while together we review
the argument from real life which has placed me on the affirma-
tive side of the tremendous ** Woman Question'' — ^while we
consider the lot of woman beyond the seas, and then contrast
this with her position, present and prospective, here in America,
and while we seek the reasons of this amazing difference. Or,
as I like better to express it, let me try to picture the position
taken by the New Chivalry of our native land in contrast with
that of the Old Chivalry in the old world. And by this term,
'*The Chivalry,'* for I do not use it as a dictionary word, I
mean to denote (sometimes sincerely, and sometimes sarcastically)
the sex now dominant upon this planet.
I shall ask you, first of all, to take a glance with me at the
saddest of destinies in whose presence I have deduced conclusions,
the destiny of an Egyptian woman. It is a June day in the
month of February. We are floating lazily along the balmy
Nile, reclining on the crimson cushions of our gay dahabeah.
As we gaze upon the plumy palm trees and away over the desert'8
yellow sands, a tall, slight form comes between us and the
dreamy horizon, and passes rapidly along the bank, looking weird
and strange in its flowing robe of black. If we come near
enough, the sight of that dusky face, into which the misery of
centuries seems crowded, will smite us like a blow ; and as the
87
57^ A Roman Matron of the Period,
child shares always in the mother's degradation (as in her joy),
we shall find the baby on this sad woman's shoulder the most
wretched little being ever victimized into existence. This
woman is perhaps seventeen years old, and has already passed
the noonday of her strength. Into this fate of marriage was she
sold before the age of ten, by her own father's hand. If she
should prove unfaithful to its vow, honor would call upon him,
with imperious voice, to cut her into pieces and consign her to
the Nile. The history of this silent, uncomplaining woman is a
brief one. She asserts her ** rights" in no ** convention"; she
flings no gauntlet of defiance in the face of her ** manifest
destiny." She is the zero-mark upon the scale of being, and
her symbol is a tear. But upon a fate so dire as this, I will not
ask you to look longer. Let us turn our eyes westward — the
Star of Bethlehem moves thither evermore, and the next illustra-
tion of old-world Chivalry, though sad enough, will be far less
painful than the last.
La Signora Sopranzi is a Roman matron of the period, with
all Italia' s romance stifled in her heart. She was once celebrated
for her beauty, but she is already thirty-four years old. Her hair
is gray, her gentle eyes are dim, and of the glory long ago de-
parted, only those "traces" remain on which the novelist lingers
with so much pathos. Her father was a Roman lawyer, but he was
also Garibaldi's friend, and so the Pope shut him up in the ample
dungeons of St. Angelo. Her husband, the veriest ne'er-do-weel
who ever joined the beauty of Adonis to the wiles of Mephis-
topheles, has gallantly left her to solve the problem of a main-
tenance for himself, herself, and her little ones. The only * *gen-
teel" avocations suited to her "sphere," are to keep a fashionable
boarding-house and give Italian lessons. I have reason to con-
gratulate myself upon the remarkable enterprise she thus dis-
played, for in her capacity of hostess and instructor, she intro-
duced me to an extensive circle of acquaintances among the more
intelligent of her countr>'woraen, and all I learned of them gave
me a stronger purpose of helpfulness toward women. They were
not innovators, I promise you! They had never heard about a
"College Education" ; no taint of the new world's unrest had ever
reached their placid souls. Indeed, their average wisdom as to
The Most Beautiful Girl in Rome, 579
the Great Republic, is well illustrated by this question, propounded
gravely to me on more than one occasion:
* 'When our Cristoforo Colombo discovered your America, did
he find many Indians there as light-complexioned as yourself?"
They knew they were not very wise, poor things! and often said,
shrugging their shoulders most expressively:
"We marry so early, you know, there's really very little need
that we should study much. Indeed, in Italy, it hurts a womarCs
prospects to be troppo istrutta ('too well instructed'), and you see
this is a point we cannot guard too carefully, for out of marriage^
there is no place for us, except the cloister."
My landlady's daughter, Bianca, was the most beautiful girl
in Rome, chief city of fair women. Although but twelve years
old, she was a woman in her words and ways. I was very fond
of her, and used often to wish I could lift her out of that lifeless
atmosphere — breathed by so many generations that almost all the
oxygen is gone — and electrify her with the air that blows across
our Illinois prairies. In one of our frequent conversations she
thus stated her ideas upon a theme to which she had evidently given
no casual thought. Remember I give her precise language-that of
a young lady of twelve (for my practice when abroad illustrated
that line of Bums', "a chiel's amang ye takin' notes"):
*'We are too tender-hearted, we women of Italia. Why, I
have a cousin who is dying of gjief because her lover seems cold
of late. I laugh at her, and say, *Ah, bella Margherita, you are
a little idiot! You should not waste yourself thus, upon that silly
Antonio.* You shall see how I'll behave! I will never marry m
this world. I have seen too much unhappiness among these hus-
bands and wives. And yet, you see, 'twill not be easy for me to
escape (she said with charming 7iaivetS). Why, the other evening
I went to see the sunset from the Pincian hill with my naughty,
handsome papa, and a foolish boy, not so tall as I am, a mere child,
indeed, but dressed up like a young gentleman, with white vest,
gold chain, and carr>'ing a silly little cane, whispered to me, while
papa smoked his cigar upon the terrace and I sat near the foun-
tain, that he should come this very night and play the mandolino
under my window. But I turned my face away, and when he
persisted, I scowled at him from under my black eye-brows and
58o Greca Caveri of Genoa.
just dared him to come! I tell you, Signorina, that I will not fall
in love for a long, long time yet, if ever, for in our country it kills
women or else it drives them mad. I'm going to give Italian
lessons like my poor mamma, and in character I'm going to be a real
Americana — calm as the broad Campagna, cold as the catacombs.
For I am very sad over the women of my country. Life begins
with them at twelve, and at twenty-five they are already old; the
lights are out — the play is over."
And yet when I have sung the praises of my native land to
beautiful Bianca, her eyes have gleamed with a new splendor as
she stood erect and said: "Ah! but I am a Roman, and still to
be a Roman were greater than a king." (But, mind you, some
bright American had taught the little magpie that!)
Somewhat to the same purpose as dark-eyed Bianca' s words,
were those her pale-faced mother had spoken to me that very
morning:
** Men cannot be as good as we are," she said in her voice
most musical, most melancholy. "I'm sure that they are not so
dear to God. We suffer so — our lives call down the pity of all
the Saints in Heaven. Life gives us just one choice — ^to be wives
or to be nuns, and society sneers at us so cruelly if we neither
wear the marriage-ring nor the consecrating crucifix, that we are
never happy unless we are miserable — and so we marry ! You
of the North have a thousand defenses," she continued, mourn-
fully, "the intellect yields you so many pleasures, and your man-
ner of life renders you brave — so that you are seldom at the mercy
of your hearts. Sometimes I think there must be a sort of magic,
though, about it all, and I have asked many of your country-wo-
men to let me have their talisman, for my poor daughter's sake."
One of my nicest little friends in Rome was Greca Caveri, of
Genoa, who had come with her father to witness the opening of the
^Ecumenical Council. She was seventeen years old, and evinced so
much delight when I offered to give her English lessons, that,
struck with her youth, I asked why she did not go to school. She
looked at me in surprise, saying, — "Does not the Signorina
know that I am superior in education to my countrywomen
generally? My father is one of King Victor Emmanuel's
lawyers, and a learned man. Moreover, he has very advanced
She Awaits the Coming Man. 581
ideas about what a lady should be permitted to know, and so he
placed me in the best school for girls at Turin. I completed my
education there on my sixteenth birthday, one year ago. This is
what has kept me unsettled until I am so old. But then I have
learned music, French, drawing and dancing — not to speak of the
Catechism and the lives of the Saints."
She went on to tell me that her dear mamma, whose loss her
dear papa so much deplored, had been three years married, at her
age, and then it dawned on my dull wits that she was one among
that vast and noble army of mart3rrs who, with sad face and lifted
glance, await the Coming Man.
Poor Greca's sad dilemma gave me long, long thoughts about
a brave young country far away, whose institutions each year
more generously endeavor to take sides with homely women in the
tug of life, and to compensate thus for nature's wayward negli-
gence. I tried to talk of this to sweet-voiced Greca, and she list-
ened with a flush of pleased surprise, but soon relapsed into her
normal way of thinking, saying as she shook her little head: *'But
then, dear friend, you know we women have but one vocation —
there's no denying it."
A few days later, on New Year's morning, she ran to my
room, saying:
**Now, I'm going to try a sign! As I go to the Vatican with
papa, on this first day of the year 1870, I'm going to notice whoni
I meet first. If it's a^/V?z;/>i^//^ (young man) I shall surely be
married this year; if it's a priest, why I shall die, and there will
be an end of it; but miscricordia! if it should be an old man, I
must restare in ca^a another year still."
"What's that?" I asked; the idiom was new; literally trans-
lated, it meant, "Stay in the house."
"Why, don't you understand?" the girl explained; "in my
countr>% if a girl isn't married, she stays in the house, and, oh! I
do so long to get out into the world!' '
"You say, Signorina. that the women are so crazy as to set
up for doctors in your countr>' ? It is a folly and a crime.
I wonder that the priests don't interfere. Whatever will become
of the buttons and the general house- work ? "
Thus spake an elderly Italian dame, the thinning ranks of
582 A Roman Old Maid.
whose own buttons I was even then contemplating with a some-
what startled glance !
** And you tell me there are fifty thousand lady teachers in
the United States ? It is alarming ! What will you come to, at
last, in a country where women are permitted thus to usurp author-
ity over the men ? *'
I told her what a wag has called *' the horrible statistics/'
How that two millions of men had been killed in our late war,
and that hence there were in many of our states thousands more
women than men ; that in England there are three millions of un-
married women, of whom two millions have a choice different from
the fair Italians — namely, to be their own bread-winners, or starve.
Indeed, my figures grew conclusive, whereupon she stopped her
ears and exclaimed, with a charming grimace, *' For love of
Heaven, don't go up any higher ! Don't you know that I can't
add more figures than I have fingers on this hand ? ' '
I should regret to weary you with my Italians, but am
tempted to give you a glimpse into the life of a Roman old maid ;
because I fancy I have here that single aspect of human life in
Rome which neither poet nor historian has ever treated — and
because the reverse of the medal has a lesson for us also.
She was a rara aids, I did not see another of her species in all
Italy, and if she had not been a little unbeliever in all such shams
as Pope and priest, she would long ago have sought the shelter
of a convent, and borrowed the name of some woman-saint, since
she could not otherwise get rid of her own. And yet, hers was a
pretty one, I thought — Alessandrina Paradisi. She was one of
those against whom Nature seems to have a pique, yet often, as
I looked at her puny, hump-backed figure and heavy features, it
seemed to me that, after all. Nature had treated her very much as
legend tells us Jupiter did the Poet, who came to him complaining
that to Tellus had been assigned the earth, and to Neptune the
sea, while to him nothing whatever had been offered, whereupon
Jupiter said: "For thee, O Poet, I have reserved the key of
Heaven, that thou mayst come and go at will, and be my guest."
For a spirit looked from the intense, dark eyes of Alessandrina,
which had no peer among her sisters ; an eloquent voice kept
silence behind those mournful lips ; a brain that harbored noble
Alessandrina Parodist. 583
thoughts, was lying half-asleep under that mass of shadow>' hair.
Permit this record of an evening's talk with my favorite little
Italian :
Jan. 10, 1870. She has been to see me again, ^' la povera
piccola sorella ' ("the poor little sister ") as they all call her. It
is really marvelous, the faculty this small creature has of making
me understand the rich, soft utterance of her mother- tongue. To-
night she gave me, without intending it, perhaps, a peep into a
place I had greatly wished but dared not hope to see — her heart.
It was on this wise. She was describing a representation she had
witnessed, recently, at the theatre in Naples. As the climax
approached she became animated. It was, as it ought to be
always, the triumph of virtue and punishm^t of vice, or, to
employ her words, — "So, at last, the husband confessed his fault
to his forgiving wife, and they lived in peace ever after, while the
hateful woman who had caused the mischief, was sent off to parts
unknown.'* And here the little narrator clapped her hands, say-
ing,— " Don't you see, cara arnica, that it was a beautiful play ? "
When I asked if, after witnessing the pageants of the stage, every
day life did not seem doubly tame, she scowled, shrugged her
poor shoulders, and, presto, came my peep at hearts : —
"Yes, Signorina, what you say is true. But look at me!
Life cannot yield me much at best. Indeed, it is so sombre, that
it doesn't matter if these brilliant contrasts the theatre affords,
make that look a shade darker, which is always dark. I frankly
tell you that if the good God had asked me I would have begged
Him not to thrust me into this world. But he did not, and here
I am, and there is nothing left me but to make the best of it. I
am twenty-nine years old, and by this time, you see, I am accus-
tomed to my lot. I quarreled with it, sadly, though, when I was
younger. Ah, I have passed some bitter years ! But I've grown
wiser now, and try to bring what happiness I can to others, and
to forget myself. Only I dread lest I must grow old, with no-
body to take care of me. But I try to keep a young heart, and
so I give my thoughts to God's fair world, and to hopes of a
future life. Is not God kind, who gives me sweet sleep, always,
and dreams more fair than anything that I have ever seen in any
play or read in any poem ? And He lets me sleep ten hours in
584 In Paris Wives Buy Husbands,
every twenty-four, and dream right through them all ! I would
never dare to care for any one, you know, and notfody could be
expected to find any charm in me — besides, in Italy, people like
me never go into society. And so Rome, my native city, has the
love I might have given in ties more tender. Ah, shall I live, I
wonder, to see Rome free? What would I not do for her, if I dared ?' *
But here her tone changed to the mocking spirit that is more
pitiful than tears: "Women are nothing in Italy, you know.
Think of it! I am twenty -nine years old! my brother Romana is
eighteen, but on my father's death, this boy became my guardian,
and I take from his hand whatever he chooses to give me from
the estate for my support, and do not murmur. For him there is
that independencj^ which I count one of the noblest elements of
character; for him there is brave work to do; for me there is —
to twirl my thumbs and wait to see if the next life can possibly atone
for this r
Poor child! Let me hasten to deliver her from the limbo to
which by some she may have been consigned. She had never
heard about a college education and a wider work with better pay
for women who must earn their bread, and those frightful words,
* 'strong minded," have never been translated into her sweet,
Italian tongue.
In our quest for illustrations of what chivalry has wrought
beyond the seas, the most ancient and the most poetic civilizations
have yielded us their lessons — let us pass on to interrogate the
most luxurious. We shall soon see how differently they do these
things in France. In Egypt, as we have observed, the husband
buys his wife; in Paris, by strange contradiction, it is the wife
who buys her husband, and he knows his value, be assured! In
proof of this, let me give a conversation I chanced to have with an
intelligent Parisian lady, who, starting out in life without suffi-
cient capital, had made no matrimonial investment up to the ripe
age of forty-four.
*'I am much concerned," she said, "for my friend, Madame
D., who is just now doing her best to marry off her daughter; and
it is high time, too, for the girl is already eighteen. But it will
not be an easy task, I fear, for she has not a tempting dowry, and
but few personal charms."
French Courtship. 585
**How will they begin their operations?** I inquired.
*'0h, the parents will say tout franchement (quite frankly)
to their friends, 'Find me a husband for my daughter/ and the
friends (knowing that one good turn deserves another) will beat
up for recruits, and will, perhaps, find a young man who is deemed
suitable and who is willing 'to consider the project,* at least.
Then, as if by chance, for we are a people of quite too much del-
icacy to give a business air to proceedings of this nature'* — she
explained with true French vivacity, ''then, as if by chance, the
parties meet in the picture gallery of the Luxembourg, or at an
open-air concert in the Champs Elysies. The young people are
now introduced, while the old ones look on sharply, to witness
the effect. After several minutes of casual conversation, they sep-
arate. The young man says to his friends, 'She pleases me,* or
'She pleases me not,' and upon this turns the decision.*'
"But what about the girl?" I pursued innocently.
' 'Oh, the girl ? She is charmingly submissive. She simpers
and makes a courtesy, and says: 'As you please, dear parents;
you know what is for my good far better than I' ; — so glad is she
to marry upon any terms, it is such a release.'' The lady then
went on to say, "If the girl has been so fortunate as to 'please' the
young man, and if his friends pronounce her dowry adequate,
the necessary^ papers are made out; she receives half a dozen calls
from her fianci in the presence of her mother; he sends her a
huge bouquet daily for about three weeks, and so the courtship
merges into the wedding day.**
Will you believe it ? I was stupid enough (but then it was
because of the interest I take in girls) after all this to ask: ''And
what about love V How she laughed ! that "lady of a certain
age '* as the French say, avoiding harsher epithets.
"Dear Mademoiselle,'* was her voluble reply, "that ques-
tion tells the whole story! You are AmSricaine, you have read
those pretty fictions of Miss Dinah Mulock, and you have not lived
very long abroad."
Then she explained to me how, established in her new home,
the young wife tastes her first liberty. Her husband goes his way
to theatre and club, and she goes hers — oflen learning what love
is (since you insist), from another than he. Her children she puts
586 The German Girl,
away from her at an early age; the girls in a convent, the boys in
a Lycee, and when they emerge from there, they repeat the
scenes of their parents' courtship and marriage — ^the sons, after
several years of profligate life; the daughters, after a brief period
of espionage at home. And so the drama goes from age to age.
In good old Fatherland the relations of men and women are
hardly less irrational than in France. Young gentlemen never
visit young ladies, and the latter are rigidly prohibited ftx)m all
social intercourse with them except in presence of their parents
and guardians, and at the public balls. How they ever arrive at
an engagement is one of the mysteries that the uninitiated desire
to look into, but, strange to say, that stupendous crisis does at
last occur. Whereupon the friends of the parties are promptly
notified, and it is customary to call upon the fortunate maiden
who has staked her all upon a throw, and won. With the yoimg
gentleman — a gallant Knight of the Old Chivalry! — it is quite
a different matter. His good fortune consists principally in the
amount of very hard cash that rewards the sacrifice of his liberty.
He has paid the sex a great compliment in the person of his
betrothed, which she will appropriately acknowledge on her own
and their behalf. Not that he means to be exacting — oh, no! He
is a down-right good-natured fellow, and will require in return
nothing more than — unconditional surrender to his will from this
time forth until death do them part.
A friend, long resident in Berlin, writes me as follows :
' * In Germany a girl exists so exclusively for marriage, that
the linen for her bridal trousseau is collected from the time
she is bom. At family Christmas festivals contributions to this
outfit form the prominent feature of the gifts to girls, and being
questioned they will reply without the least embarrassment : *Oh,
that's for my aussteuer — ^wedding outfit.' German girls marry
principally for greater social freedom. Those of the upper classes
care less for this, and are slower to change their estate in life."
In ** merrie England " there is far more freedom, but Thack-
eray's incomparable satires, which denounce **more in sadness
than in anger ' ' the customs that preside over marriages in high
life, are as true to-day as when he wrote them. To my delight
I found Thackeray reverenced in England as we reverence Bryant,
The English Maiden. 587
and loved as we love Whittier, but to my grief they told me the
shades in his sad pictures are not dark enough. You remember
the episode in that noblest of his books, **The Newcomes/'
about the queenly Ethel, whose aristocratic grandmamma is bound
to marry her to Lord Farintosh, in spite of her repugnance and
her protestations, and how Ethel is made to pursue the noble
lord through every lane of life, until he lays his coronet before
her ? You remember how this compromised young woman, visit-
ing an Art Collection and seeing a green card with the word
** Sold '* attached to a picture there, slyly carries it off, fastens it
in firont of her white muslin frock, and thus appears at dinner.
When asked what this queer fancy means, she makes the old
dowager a profound courtesy, saying ** Why, grandmamma, I am
a tableau vivant — living picture. ' * ** Whereupon, " says Thack-
eray, *'the old lady, jumping up on her crooked stick with
immense agility, tore the card out of Ethel's bosom, and very
likely would have boxed her ears, but that just then the Marquis
of Farintosh, himself, came in. * But after his departure there
was, I promise you, a pretty row in the building,' relates Ethel
afterward. * '
Going to Hyde Park at the fashionable hour, one sees many
a poor Ethel who needs no green ticket on her breast to tell the
story of her barter. One's heart aches at the thoughts of ** sweet
bells jangled," whose music might have filled so many lives with
soothing melody. For Hyde Park is the scene — as an English
gentleman expresses it in language that grates harshly on our
ears — ** of the richest and most shameful marriage markets in the
world." "Men stand by the rails," he says, '* criticising with
perfect impartiality and equal freedom, while women drive slowly
past, for sale in marriage^ with their careftil mothers at their
side, to reckon the value of biddings and prevent the lots from
going off below the reserved price. Instinctively you listen for
the auctioneer with his * going — going — gone !* "
Listen to the moral drawn by the same Christian Englishman
under his frightful picture:
**Such is the pitch at which we have arrived by teaching
women that marriage is their whole duty,*'
I turn with grateful pride &x)m these sad pictures of the Old
588 The Three-Fold Tie.
World, to the glowing colors of the New. The difference between
them has been often figured to my fancy by that between the mys-
tic, melancholy sunsets behind Rome's sad Campagna, and their
brilliant pageantry as they light up the west from the prairies of
my own Illinois. I see what is noblest in the manhood of Amer-
ica rallying like St. George of old, to fight the Dragon, while
firm and brave rings out their manly war cry, claiming "Fair
play for the weaker" in life's solemn fight. Do you wonder if
this contrast set me thinking about the New World's Chivalry ?
or if, the more I studied the movements of this matchless age, the
more clearly I saw that it can give a Roland for an Oliver, till
History calls off its last heroic name ?
The Knights of the Old Chivalry gave woman the empty
husk of flattery; those of the New, offer instead, the wholesome
kernel of just criticism; the Knights of the Old Chivalry drank
our health in flowing bumpers; those of the New invite us to sit
down beside them at the banquet of truth.
"By my lady's bright eyes," was the watch-word of the Old;
"Fair play for the weaker," is the manly war cry of the New!
Talk about the Chivalry of Ancient Days! Go to, ye medieval
ages, and learn what that word meaneth! Behold the sunny after-
noon of this nineteenth century of grace, wherein we have the
spectacle, not of lances tilted to defend \h^ prestige of my "lady's
beauty," by vSwaggering knights who could not write their names,
but of the noblest men of the world's foremost race, placing upon the
brows of those most dear to them, above the wreath of Venus, the
helmet of Minerva, and leading into broader paths of knowledge
and achievement, the fair divinities who preside over their homes.
No picture dawns upon me so refulgent as this Home that
yet shall be the gift of this Better Age to the New America, in
which a three-fold tie shall bind the husband to his wife, the
father to his daughter, the mother to her son. Religion and af-
fection— as heretofore in all true homes — shall form two of the
strands in this magic three-fold tie ; the third this age is weaving,
and it is iiitelledual sympathy, than which no purer or more en-
during bond survived the curse of Eden !
Whoever has not thought thus far, has failed to fathom the
profoundest significance, or to rise to the height of the noblest
Woman* s Martyrology, 589
inspiration, which our new ideas of woman's privilege infallibly
involve.
Those far-ofiF lands of which I told you, made me very sad.
I had not known what a wide world it is, and how full of misery.
Walking in the market-place of proud Berlin, where dogs and
women were fastened side by side to carts laden with country
merchandise ; riding along unfrequented Italian roads where I
encountered at one end of the plow a cow and a woman yoked to-
gether, while at the other a man presided, whip in hand ; or
watching from the car window as we whirled along from Alex-
andria to Cairo, women building railway embankments under the
overseer's lash, how often have tears blurred these grievous scenes,
as I felt how helpless one frail arm must be to right such wrong^.
Sometimes it seemed sweetly mysterious to me, but I understand
it now, that always when my heart was aching over the measure-
less woes of women in almost every land beyond the seas, a voice
would whisper to me: **Not to these, but to the dear girls of
your home shall you be sent, and some day the broader channels of
their lives shall send streams of healing even to these far-ofiF shores. * '
Do not think my purpose idle, in sketching sombre scenes
from lands afar, or evoking in your hearing the jangle of sweet
bells, for the foundation of the faith that is within me rests on no
theory of ** rights" or *' wrongs,*' but is a plain deduction from
my contrast of woman's lot in the Old world and the New. Shall
we not learn a lesson of unutterable gratitude from this contrast
of our affluent lives with those which, under sunnier skies than
ours, and in more genial climes, are yet so shadowed and dwarfed ?
Thinking of them and us, how often do I murmur to myself an
adaptation of the Laureate's noble lines that has stmg itself out
of my own heart and brain:
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
Whose thralldom dates from days of yore ;
Ring out false laws from shore to shore,
Ring in redress to all mankind !
Ring out the contest of the twain
Whom thou for noblest love didst make,
Ring in the day that shall awake
Their life-harp to a sweeter strain !
590 Organized Womanhood.
THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF WOMEN.
The greatest movement ever undertaken by women is the
outgrowth of that unparalleled International Council held in
Washington, March 25 to April i, 1888, of which Susan B.
Anthony was the central figure. By her invitation I made five
speeches there, and through her generous partiality was chosen
president of this national federation of women, when the oflBce
would naturally have gone to her. A more unique and wonder-
ful book has not been published in America than the steno-
graphic story of that Washington meeting. Send 90 cents to
Wotnan^ s Journal Office^ Boston, for a copy to read and lend.
The purpose of the National Council is thus stated in its
constitution :
We, women of the United States, sincerely believing that the best good
of our homes and nation will be advanced by our own greater unity
of thought, S3anpathy, and purpose, and that an organized movement of
women will best conserve the highest good of the family and the state, do
[hereby band ourselves together in a confederation of workers committed
to the overthrow of all forms of ignorance and injustice, and to the appli-
cation of the golden rule to society, custom and law.
We have just sent out our first call to the organized woman-
hood of the land, hoping to enlist them in this effort for solidarity
among women workers as a preliminary to the universal solidarity
sought by the International Council of which Mrs. Millicent
Fawcett, of England, is the leader.
We should have our representatives constantly at the state
capitals and ask unitedly for the things that have heretofore been
asked for only by separate societies. Laws for the better pro-
tection of women ; for the teaching of hygiene in all grades of
the public schools, with especial reference to alcoholics and other
A Woman'* s League. 59 1
narcotics ; for compulsory education ; also for appropriations in
aid of industrial schools for girls, and other institutions to which
our philanthropic women are devoted — ^we must together strive
for these.
^ Locally, a Woman's league should, in the interest of that
** mothering *' which is the central idea of our new movement,
seek to secure for women admission to all school committees,
library associations, and boards intrusted with the care of defect-
ive, dependent and delinquent classes ; all professional and
business associations ; all colleges and professional schools that
have not yet set before us an open door of ingress ; and each local
league should have the power to call in the united influence of
its own state league, or of the National Council, if its own influ-
ence did not suffice?
In the development of this movement I am confident that it
will impart to women such a sense of strength and courage that
their corporate self-respect will so increase that such theatrical
bills as we now see displayed will not be permitted for an hour,
without Qur potent protest ; and the exhibition of women's forms
and faces in the saloons and cigar stores, which women's self-
respect will never let them enter, and the disgraceful literature
now for sale on so many public news stands, will not be tolerated
by the womanhood of any town or city.
An ''anatomical museum" that I often pass, bears the
words, ** Gentlemen only admitted." Why do women tolerate
this flaunting assumption that men are expected to derive pleas-
ure from beholding objects that they would not for a moment
permit their wives to see ? Some day women will not, and then
I these base exhibitions will cease, for women will purify every
place they enter, and they will enter every place on the round
earth. To develop this great quality of corporate, as well as
individual, self-respect, I believe no single study would do more
than that of Frances Power Cobbe's noble book on **The Duties
of Women." It ought to be in the hands of every woman who
has taken for her motto, ** Heart within, and God o'erhead," and
surely it ought to be in the hands of every one who has not this
high aim, while I am certain that every man who lives would
be a nobler husband, son, and citizen of the great world, if he
would give this book his thoughtful study.
592 \Vome7i are Snowflakes,
The following extracts from my addresses at the won-
derful meeting in Washington will show the trend of thought on
some of the subjects presented:
We only wish to turn all the bullets into printers' t3rpe; we only wish
the war to be a war of words, for words are wings; they are full of lightning.
Rver>' brain the open furrow, every word the seed cast in, and you have
humauity brought to a different plane; but you can't do it alone; you can't
do it unless you come along together; it is easier to climb up taking hold
of hands.
Somebody who has studied these things a great deal said to me: "Yon
can tell a harmonious and organizing nature, because the involuntary posi-
tion of the hands will be like that" (folded together).
See a little, lonesome, stray snowflake come down through the air; it
falls and melts and is no more. Now see others come along talking in that
noiseless, gossiping way toj^ether, and as they come down more and more
they have evidently got something on their minds. After awhile these are
joined by others, and, their organized attack will make a drift thirty feet
high that will stop a fifty -ton engine.
Now, women are the snowflakes. And the organized attack is against
this old, hoary-hcaded, materialistic, conservative way of doing thing's.
And the mighty breeze that shall set them flying is the new sens^ of sister-
hocxl, and it will bring in all that is good, and true and pure. It has been
the curse of humanity in the past that half the wisdom, more than half the
purity, and more than half the gentleness did not find any organic expre^
sion. Now il is getting expression, and we are here not only to see it and sit
by, twirling our thumbs and watching it come, but we are here to put in all
our mighty force to make it come. Each woman that has just sat here
and lent a kind attention has helped it. P^ach one who has gone away and
spoken a kind word has helped it. Each one that has lifted an aspiration
toward the great Heart that holds tlie world has helped it.
The highest power of organization for women is that it brings them out;
it translates them from the passive into the active voice; the detu", modest,
clinging things didn't think they could do anything, and, lo and behold!
they found out they could. They come to you with a quiver of the lip, and
look at you so hopeful and expectant, and wonder if they could do some-
thing; and a year or two after, you hear them with a deep voice and perfect
equipose telling their dearest tliought to a great audience, or you see them
in the silent charities, carr\nng out their noblest purpose toward humanity.
******** x*«»»
I v^-ill tell you how it is with nic: I go like a bee into the gardens of
thought; 1 love to listen to all the voices, and I go buzzing around under
the bonnets of the prettiest flowers and the most fragrant, just like this bee,
and when it is a lovely life and a sweet life, like the lives of those who have
spoken lo us to-day, it seems to nie I get a lot of honey; but I have a won-
Saint or Politician, 593 ^
derful bee-line fashion of carrying it all home to my own Methodist hive.
I couldn't do any other way. I am made that fashion; it is part of me. It
is wo. kcd into the woof and warp of my spirit, the result of the sweet old
ways in which I was brought up. I should have to deny myself in my in-
most heart, if I didn't believe what mother had taught me at her knee, if
I didn't, above all the teachings and all the voices, reverence the voice that
calls to me from the pages of the Bible; if I didn't, above all things and
always, in my mentality and spirituality, translate God into terms of Jesus
Christ. I cannot rest except there. And so I frankly tell you how it is
with me this sweet Easter day. The inmost voice, deep down in my heart,
says: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit! Receive it as I sit here listening
to women whom I love and revere and honor for their loyalty to what
they believe is the highest and best Receive it as I go forth into the
crowded ways of life with so many voices calling me on every hand. Re-
ceive my spirit!" It will be the last thought that this brain will think, it will
be the last quiver of this heart that has ached and rejoiced, "Lord Jesus,
receive my spirit ! "
I don't know that it will make me stand any Ixjtter with the ladies of the
audience, and certainly it won't with the gentlemen, I suppose, but, honestly,
I always thought that, next to a wish I had to be a saint some day, I really
would like to be a politician.
Now, I was a farmer's daughter, and got this idea of politics through
father's and mother's talks together, as much as from the newspapers. I
remember so well sitting by and listening to their talk, and mother was a
very motherly woman, and a tremendously potential p>olitician, though I
don't think she ever knew it, and I only discovered it within the last fourteen
years. I never knew quite what was the matter with her, but in these days I
believe she was bom to be a Senator, and never got there. * « « Then
my brother came to be twenty-one, and we had gone around the pastures and
prairies together; we had kept along in our ideas and ambitions; we had
studied the same books and had the same general purposes. But lo and
behold! there came a day when there was a separation. I saw that voting
made it, and it seemed to me the line was artificial and should be broken
down. Then I said to myself: "My politics is sacred; there isn't any-
thing about it with which a pure heart, serving its kind, wouldn't like to
have to do. But it is a kind of poor man that went down to Jericho. Now,
can't we get politics out of the company of thieves into which it has fallen?
Cannot we get it out from among the beasts of Kphesus ? Are we going
to pass by on the other side or are we going to come, like the good Samar-
itan, and to make politics a home question, something that women care for
and are greatly interested in ?
If to all this our brothers answer, "It is not because you women are inferior
that we don't want you to vote, but because you are too good and nice and
38
594 Aunt Columbia's Kitchen,
pure to come into politics," then I say to you: *' My friend, we don't expect
to leave political affairs as we find them ; not at all. You, our brothers, all
alone by yourselves and no women with you, have constructed this "filthy
pool" that you talk about so much, and that you don't admire, and you can't
make it any worse. You know that into the witch's broth they pom* all the in-
gredients together. Now, you have all the ingredients there are, except
women's votes. Turn them in ; it may be the branch of sweetness that it needs;
and certainly it canH be any worse." So I want to say to my brothers, that
we are coming in, as we believe, just as we should go into a bachelor's hall.
We should takealong broom and dust-brushes and dust-pans, open the windows
and ventilate the place, and try to have a general " clarin " out, and that is
exactly what we want to do in Old Aunt Columbia's kitchen. Brother Jon-
athan hasn't kept house there in an orderly and cleanly manner, and if
ever a place needed " clarin " out we think it is the kitchen of Uncle Sam.
So we have made up our minds and you will see us coming in, and nothing
on this universal earth will keep us out of it. It seems to me just the dif-
ference between the smoking-car and the parlor-car; in the smoking-car
there are men alone, and in the parlor-car men and women together. And
how nice and wholesome it is in the parlor-car; and how everything but
wholesome and nice it is in the smoking-car. It seems to us women that
every great thought must be incarnated, that disembodied principles and
disembodied spirits fare about equally well in this work-a-day world; that
every principle seeks a hand that can cast its ballot into the urn, where a re-
public manufactures its own destiny. And so we believe that into this magnifi-
cent scene we may well enter, because the weapons are not carnal, but
spiritual. We believe that when coal in the mine and not in the grate will
warm you; when flour in the barrel and not in the loaf will feed you; when
wool on the sheep's back, and not woven into cloth will clothe you, then
public sentiment that is lying around loose and not gathered up through the
electric battery of the ballot-box, or sent tingling along the wires of law, will
change the ways of men.
God made woman with her faculties, her traits, her way of looking at
all great questions from the highest to the lowest, and he made her to be a
helpmeet for man, and he made man to be a helpmeet for her; he made
them to stand side by side, sun-crowned; he made them to stand in a
republic, as I believe, bearing equally its magnificent burdens. I like to
see how men are grandly meeting the uprising of womanhood. I recog-
nize, and all of us here do, that it was our big brother man who said,
Come and sit down beside me at the banquet of Minerva. I recognize, and
so do we all, that it was a man that encouraged us when we made our first
ventures; that it is not with any special purpose to keep us down that men
do not let us enter into politics, but that they are sort of considering it;
they are waiting for us to be a little more anxious. They are waiting them-
selves to get wonted to the notion, and they are growing rapidly. The
time is not distant, and every man knows it who hears me.
The Widening Horizon, 595
But I do not forget that if we come, you and you only must open the
door!
*************
You are told that public opinion seems to demand the saloon, and as a
White-Ribboner I ask, " Whose public opinion ? That of the home ? " " Oh,
no ; the home is solidly against it." "Whose public opinion ? That of the
church?" "Oh, no; two-thirds of the church is made up of women."
*' Whose public opinion ? " That of men who drink and men who sell, and
men in professional, business and political life, who don't like to get the ill-
will of those who drink and sell. Thus, as the outcome of deliberate choice,
based upon motives wholly selfish, these men have saddled the liquor traffic
on this nation. But the nation has great guns of power pointing sublimely
up into vacancy. We want to bring them to the level of our use, and send
their shot banging into the eyes of the foe. It is this purpose of arming
women with the ballot that makes me so perfectly at home on a platform
like the present. It is this which brings me to do homage to these grand
pioneers, just as you do, and no one can pay them too much gratitude and
honor.
Let us.be grateful that our horizon is widening. We women have
learned to reason from effect to cause. It is considered a fine sign of a
thinker to be able to reason from cause to effect. But we, in fourteen
years' march, have learned to go from the drunkard in the gutter, who was
the object lesson we first saw, back to the children, as you will hear
to-night ; back to the idea of preventive, educational, evangelistic, social,
and legal work for temperance ; back to the basis of the saloon itself. We
have found that the liquor traffic is joined hand in hand with the very
sources of the National Government. And we have come to the place
where we want prohibition, first, last, and all the time. While the brewer
talks about his "vested interests," I lend my voice to the motherhood of
the nation that has gone down into the valley of unutterable pain and in the
shadow of death, with the dews of eternity upon the mother's brow, given
birth and being to the sons who are the "vested interests" of America's
homes.
We offset the demand of the brewer and distiller, that you shall protect
their ill-gotten gains, with the thought of these most sacred treasures, dear
to the hearts that you, our brothers, honor — dear to the hearts that you love
best. I bring to you this thought to-night, that you shall vote to represent
us, and hasten the time when we can represent ourselves.
I believe that we are going out into this work, being schooled and
inspired for greater things than we have dreamed, and that the esprit de
corps of women will prove the grandest sisterhood the world has ever
known. As I have seen the love and kindness and good-will of women
who differed so widely from us politically and religiously, and yet have
found away down in the depths of their hearts the utmost love and affec-
tion, I have said, what kind of a world will this be when all women are as
fond of each other as we strong-minded women are ?
596 Vi^ws with a Capital V.
So, friends, as I think of the new America, the good time coming, when
He who is the best friend that women ever knew, the Christ of God, shall
rule in our hearts and lives, not outwardly, but by His Spirit— as I think of
it all I say, to myself, I am glad I am alive, I am glad I was not alive till
this last part of the nineteenth century, I am glad I shall be alive when the
golden hinges turn and roll wide open the door of the twentieth century
that shall let the women in ; when this big-hearted brotherhood of broad-
shouldered men who have made it possible for us to have such a council as
this, who listen to us and are more pleased with us than we are with our-
selves— and that is saying a great deal — and who, if we write a book that is
interesting, or a song, or make a speech, are sure to say, " That is good ; go
on, and do better next time ; we will buy your books and listen to your
speeches," — when these men shall see that it was not to the harm of the
home, but for its good, that we were working for temperance and for the
ballot.
\ Home is the citadel of everything that is good and pure on earth;
nothing must enter there to defile, neither anything which loveth or maketh
a lie. And it shall be found that all society needed to make it altogether
homelike was the home-folks ; that all government needed to make it alto-
gether pure from the fumes of tobacco and the debasing effects of strong
. drink, was the home-folks ; that wherever you put a woman who has the
atmosphere of home about her, she brings in the good time of pleasant and
friendly relationship and points with the finger of hope and the eye of faith
always to something better — always it is better farther on. As I look
around and see the heavy cloud of apathy under which so many still are
stifled, who take no interest in these things, I just think they do not half
mean the hard words that they sometimes speak to us, or they would n't if
they knew ; and, after awhile, they will have the same views I have, spell
them with a capital V, and all be harmonious, like Barnum's happy family,
a splendid menagerie of the whole human race — clear-eyed, kind and
victorious !
^^a^^
•* Good WiU to Men:' 597
MY OPINION OF MEN.
" I've heard of unkind words, kind deeds
With deeds unkind returning ;
Alas ! the gratitude of men
Has oftener left me mourning.'*
Men know where their true interests lie, and women whom
men love and trust and honor are always motherly at heart.
If there is a spectacle more odious and distasteful than a man
who hates women, it is a woman who hates men. If I am glad
of anything it is that, while I have my playful quips and passing
sallies anent them in my own inner home circle, when some pass-
ing injustice of the old regime quickens my pulses, the life-long
tenor of my pen and voice and work has been not more for
"Peace on earth" than for **Good will to men." This frank
utterance may surely be permitted to one now entered on her
fiftieth year, and who thanks God with unspeakable tender-
ness for all the pleasant land on which she can look back from
the high chronologic vantage-ground she has attained. If this
had not been so, surely the royal wives and mothers who in all
these working years have rallied arotmd me, would rightfully
have refused my leadership.
From this time on, the world will have in it no active, vital
force so strong for its uplifting as its organized mother-hearts. I
do not say all mothers, because all women who are technically
mothers are not mother-hearted, while many a woman is so, from
whom the criss-cross currents of the world have withheld her
holiest crown.
In my own quiet refuge at Evanston, where we are wont
to talk of these things, I once said to Susan B. Anthony, that
noblest Roman of them all :
59^ Mother-hearted Women.
If
Bravely as you have trodden it, and glorious as has been
your via solitaria, have you not always felt a sense of loss ? **
She answered in the gentle, thoughtful voice that we all
love :
** Could I be really the woman that I am and fail to feel that
imder happier conditions I might have known a more sacred com-
panionship than has ever come to me, and that this companion
could not have been a woman ? ' *
But that she also felt God's call, under the unhappy con-
ditions that exist, to go her own victorious way alone, is proved
by her reply to a good man who once said to her :
** Miss Anthony, with your great head and heart, you, of all
women I have met, ought to have been a wife and mother.'*
Our noble pioneer answered him after this fashion :
** I thank you, sir, for what I take to be the highest compli-
ment, but sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for
children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better
state of things for mothers generally, so that their unborn little
ones could not be willed away from them."
And now, concerning my opinion of men, let me give a few
scenes in which they have been chief actors and I * ' a chiel amang
ye takin* notes'*:
I was coming from New Orleans alone after attending the
Louisiana W. C. T. U. Convention in that city in 1881. Mrs.
Judge Merrick, my generous hostess, had provided me with such
a lunch as rarely falls to mortal lot. As usual, I had a section
which I hardly left during the trip, and as has happened several
times in my experience, I was the only lady in the car. The
porter provided me with a table and I had open my well-worn
traveling bag, "Old Faithful," and was writing letters and
articles uninterruptedly. By some mischance, I do not now re-
member what, we were side-tracked twelve hours and no food
could be had. In traveling, my constant preoccupation makes
me peculiarly uncommunicative. I have gone from Chicago to
Boston without speaking to any one except the porter, indeed
almost without seeing any one. But as the day wore on and our
car stood there motionless, my thoughts went out to those stal-
wart men about me, those hungry travelers. After much reflec-
tion and some quiet observation, I selected a man in whom by
Brother-hearted Men. 59$
intuition I believed, and catching his eye, beckoned him to come
to my side. I had spread out my tempting lunch in all its
fascinating forms and colors and I said, * * Will you do me the
favor to divide this among my fellow-travelers ? " Those words
were a magic spell ! The glow of gratitude upon his face was
worth doing without one's meals twenty-four hours to enjoy.
The grace and courtesy with which he acknowledged my
thoughtfulness, the gathered group of men who came to take
away a fragment of the feast, the doffing of hats, and charm of
manner were worthy of any drawing-room. Poor fellows ! they
had been trying to get themselves some coffee and had gone to
the engine for hot water. I had sugar and cream, which they
had not, but my coffee was cold and such an ado as they made to
see that it was heated, and such solicitude lest I should not
keep refreshments enough for my own needs !
My chosen spokesman said, ' ' I am from Illinois and my
wife belongs to the W. C. T. U." Another echoed, " I am from
Massachusetts ; have heard you speak in my own town," and a
third chimed in, *' I was in your audience two nights ago at New
Orleans." Of course I think well of those men ; the little inci-
dent did me good for many a day and I rejoice to hope that those
men think well of me !
Early in my work it became necessary for me to go across the
country in Michigan on a freight train, the trip involving a whole
day's ride in a caboose. Although my secretary is almost always
with me, on this occasion she was not. I seated myself opposite
the stove on a rough bench, and began reading and writing, as is
my custom, now so confirmed that while hours and days flit
by I do not find travel wearisome, and often think I have but
fairly begun work when I find a half day is gone and we are at
the lunch station. But on this occasion there slowly stole over
my senses a dull perception of something strange, and then of
something most unpleasant, and then of something deadly. It
was the foul emanations from the pipes and mouths of six or seven
freight train ** hands," sitting at a short distance from me. I
hurriedly rose, went out of the rear door and stood in the cold
and snow upon the platform, filled my mouth with snow and
tried in every way to take my mind off from the intolerable
misery of the situation. But I could not long remain outside.
6oo On a Freight Train,
the cold was too extreme. I re-entered the car and was soon
enveloped in a tobacco cloud, the nausea becoming so violent
that a manifest exhibition thereof in a form recalling ** Neptune's
tribute,*' soon occurred. I suppose my face was very white, for
the men all came toward me in consternation, cursing at one
another and each separately cursing himself with oaths, not
loud but deep. They flung open the doors, they established
me on the long wooden settle, bringing their coats and fitting
the place up for me, folding one or two for a pillow, which they
placed under my head with as much gentleness as my own mother
could have done, asking my pardon over and over again, saying,
**Our hides are so rough and so thick we did not have sense
enough to know how this smoke would strike a lady." Indeed,
their penitence was of such a poignant type that in my efforts to
assuage it I quite forgot my sad condition. They brought me
some nice apples, and after a little I was able to resume my
work. But there was no more tobacco smoke about that car,
and there was very earnest consideration for my comfort, they
often asking me if the ventilation was right, and if the fire was
warm enough. These men always remain in my mind as one more
proof of what I steadfastly believe, that if there are remainders of
evil there are also great, noble conceptions of good in every
human breast. And of these men, in spite of their tobacco smoke,
I can but have a good opinion.
In 1884, just after the presidential election, when politics
ran high, I received a letter postmarked , Wisconsin, guilt-
less of punctuation, and as to its orthography, gone quite astray.
Opening it curiously, and finding it voluminous, I read in the
initial lines the gist of the communication. It was fi-om Mike,
our man-of-all-work on the farm, one of the best-hearted and
brightest of Irishmen, whom it had been our good fortune to
indoctrinate into the mysteries of reading, writing, and, perhaps,
a little arithmetic. He had evidently retained a kindly remem-
brance, for what I read was to this purpose :
Dear Miss — It is long since I seen you and you will be glad to hear
that now I am a farmer mesilf and not working out. I have three sons, one
studying at the Wisconsin University, another at a Catholic school in Mil-
waukee, and a third is minded to be a lawyer. We are all Dimocrats but I
have read in the papers that St. John and Daniel were your candidates, and
A Saloon-keeper* s Son. 6oi
I said to my boys, "Tkat lady and her folks was good to me when I was
a lonesome broth of a boy just over fix>m the Old Country, and now the lady
has n*t a vote to bless herself with, but we can put in four and let 'em all
count on her side." So I and me boys went to the poles and did just that,
and I thought I'd wright and tell ye.
With respect,
MikkCarby.
Of course, a letter written after this manner helped to give
me a good opinion of men.
In Scranton, Pa., I spoke in the Opera House one Stmday
evening and at the close went home partictdarly wearied, for to
hold steady a large audience and a six-horse team are, perhaps,
somewhat analogous mental proceedings. Going at once to my
room, as is my invariable custom, with the statement to my
friends that I owe it to the next audience to do so, I was, as I
hoped, to be out of sight and hearing tmtil eight o'clock next
morning, when a hesitating rap on the door recalled me to my
duty, and my hostess said, **I was very sorry to come after
you, but a young man in the parlor insists that he has something
you must hear.** So preparing myself I went down to see him,
lifting up my heart for patience, for I find no other talisman but
prayer suffices to hold a temper naturally so quick as mine tmder
control. A young fellow rose as I entered, and said, * 'Perhaps
you think all the people who sell liquor are opposed to you, but
I came to tell you that they are not by any means. Probably
one reason is you don't abuse that class, but you admit, what
everybody knows to be true, that they are by no means alone re-
sponsible for all the mischief they have caused. If you had not
said that, I should not be here to-night, for I am a saloon-keeper's
son. I wanted you to know that my mother has always been
bitterly opposed to father's business, and I have refused to engage
in it and am learning the printer's trade, and hope to become a
successful man in the true sense of that term and a reputable cit-
izen." I was delighted with his words, and his honest, kindly
face. ** Why does your father go on selling? " was my natural
question. ** Not because he likes the business, but he knows no
other. It is an easy way to make a living and all he has in the
world is invested in his saloon." **Have you sisters?" I in-
quired. ** Yes, two of the nicest girls you can find anywhere."
** What do they think about your father's way of getting a liv-
6oi Stories of a D.D, and a CapitatUi.
ing?" I asked. **They are grieved to the heart about it, just
as mother is. They are never received in the kind of society
where they naturally belong, and of course it embitters their
lives. In fact, I assure you it is not pleasant to be a saloon-
keeper's wife, daughter or son in these days. It puts a ban upon
us and hard as it is to bear, I thought I ought to come and
tell you for your encouragement. That's all." He reached out
an honest hand to me, said " God bless you," and was gone.
Of course this incident was calculated to make me think well
of men.
I had been invited to speak in the Central Congregational
Church, Boston, where for many years Rev. Dr. Nehemiah Adams
had preached, he who was known in his prime as the Washing-
ton Irving of the American pulpit. But word had come to me
that Sarah Smiley had at one time spoken in that same pulpit,
when the good doctor was absent on a trip, and that he was so
shocked to think that a woman had trodden its sacred planks
and precincts that, not being in good health, he fell into a spasm.
I therefore sent word to him that I would on no account speak if
it would cause him discomfort. But the years had come and
gone since then, **the ripe, roimd, mellow years," as Gail
Hamilton has called them, and the good doctor sent me this
message : *' Go on, my child, speak as you will, I shall be glad
to have you do so, and I hereby send you my benediction. * *
I thought well of that man, beyond a doubt !
In 1875, when without salary I was serving the National
W. C. T. U. as its corresponding secretary, Mrs. Wittenmeyer,
knowing my embarrassment, mentioned to Eliphalet Remington,
of the well-known firm of Remington Bros. , that she would be
very glad to have him give me the encouragement of some finan-
cial aid. Forthwith there came a beautiful letter, full of the
most brotherly sympathy, and inclosing a check for five hundred
with the modest remark that he hoped she would pardon him for
sending so little, as the calls were just then more numerous than
usual !
This noble man is the founder of the New York Witness, a
fact not generally known, perhaps. He had seen the Canada
Witness and been impressed with its value as a promoter of
morality and of our Christian faith. So without taking counsel
The Savage World Is under Foot 603
other than of his own keen conscience, he went to Montreal and
induced the good and great John Dougall, editor of the IViiness,
to come to New York City, assuring him of sufficient help to
establish a paper just as able as the one he was then editing.
This generation has hardly been fed from purer springs than
those of the two papers — ^the Montreal Witness, and its comrade
namesake in New York.
My acquaintance with Bliphalet Remington, not alone
because he gave me money when I needed it, but because he
belongs to the nobility of character, helped me to a noble esti-
mate of men. So did my father and my brother — one, the soul
of uprightness, the other, of geniality ; so do the hundreds of my
Christian brothers in Evanston where I have lived these thirty
years, and so do uncounted thousands in the great and kindly
continent that I have traversed, who have shown true magnan-
imity of soul toward modem movements among women, and who
are White Cross heroes illustrating the last beatitude of man,
as man is yet to become, that high and holy virtue — chastity.
Nothing to-day makes woman so regnant over the thoughts and
imaginations of men as this great quality. But it took centuries
for Christianity to work it into the warp and woof of her charac-
ter, and Hebrew women, as a class, are foremost in its illustration,
and have always been.
At first, courage was the greatest virtue of man ; he must
smite the beast of the field and ride forth to the wars ; he must
subdue the savage earth, while woman, the fountain at which
*
life was to be replenished, must be kept pure, else the race would
perish in the long lesson and fierce battle of its uplift and devel-
opment. But now the savage world is under foot, and man lifts
his strong hand up toward woman, who stands above him on the
hard- won heights of purity that she may lead him upward into
freedom from the drink dominion and the tobacco habit, and that
he may learn that highest of all human dignities — a chastity as
steadfast as her own. Meanwhile, she must learn of him that
noble, masterly grace, physical courage, and that other manly
virtue, intellectual hardihood, while she imparts to him more
of her own courage of conviction. Into what mutual greatness
they shall yet grow ! We have never seen the royal men and
women who are to illustrate God's ideal when He set apart a
6o4 Man in the Home.
peculiar people and taught them first of all that letter in His
alphabet of centuries that meant one Supreme Spirit rather than
many monstrous materialistic objects of worship ; then followed
up this great lesson with others, all of which grew out of it. The
old time exclusiveness of the Jews is not in harmony with Chris-
tianity, but it had to be to make them conservators of that mono-
theistic religion which was to lift future generations up into the
light, and it had to be to conserve in savage ages the purity
of woman. The same is true of many other things hard to be
understood — and only a part of which is dimly apprehended
by us.
The only wise way is for us to declare, ** I will wait ; what
God does I know not now, but I shall know hereafter ; he has
promised this, .and it must be that faith is to be ihe final
beatitude of character, or he would not require its exercise.
Nay. He does not arbitrarily require it, but my present
infancy of being involves it as a part of the nature of
things.**
Mr. Moody says, ** I might as well try to impart my plans
to a fly, as for my Heavenly Father to impart His to me.'* Let
us, then,
''Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait."
MAN IN THE HOME.
. Home has already done more for man than for anj' other
member of its favored constituency. It is his special humanizer ;
the garden where his choicest virtues grow. Man's heart is lone-
some often and the feeling does him honor, for his lonesome-
ness is always for the home that was, but is not, or else that is
not, but ought to be or to have been.
He sits alone, when he knows that it was in his power to
have sat beside his other, gentler self in the calm content of a
completed life. He warms himself beside other men's hearth-
stones when he knows that for him one might have glowed, a
guiding light, through all the darksome years. He hears the
gleeful shout of boyhood and knows that the tenderness of a
father's love might have rejoiced and purified his breast. In this
*' Home is Man and Woman Added to a House.** 605
sorrowful period of his existence Bayard Taylor uttered what
most men's pride would have left unexpressed :
" I look upon the stormy wild,
I have no wife, I have no child ;
For me there gleams no household hearth,
I've none to love me on the earth.**
Never has woman bemoaned the fact that she, too, had
missed life's crowning joy, in sadder language than man's strong
hand has penned, with a stormy and sorrowful heart behind the
words. If his wounds have seemed sooner to heal, it was be-
cause his life was fuller of distractions. If he sought less sedu-
lously to found a home, it was because there were so many other
things for him to do outside of that — even as for her there is
now so much else to do and will be fix)m this time forth.
Indeed, in the present transition period, when woman,
deprived of her earlier interests and occupations, and not yet
adjusted to her new opportunities, is found in an anomalous
position, it may be questioned if man does not love home even
better than his partner. How many women are content to vege-
tate in a boarding-house because they can support more ** style "
and avoid more care than they could in a home ! How many
women who are idle all day long, will urge their husbands out
to the theater or card party at night when the weary benedicts
would fain toast their feet on the fender and enjoy some book
or magazine instead! How many women leave their minds
imtilled and bring no wit or brightness, no fresh thought or
noble impulse into the evening's converse, because they are worn
out with shopping, or a daily round of calls and other fashion-
able occupations !
The charm of any home is its individuality. Coleridge said
that Art is man added to Nattu^. In like manner home is man
and woman added to a house. If it is to be really a home, it must
be a mirror repeating their united thought, sentiment, .purpose and
taste. How much Whittier tells in that one most poetic phrase
where he speaks of his home, '* No step is on the conscious
floor." That is it ; a home, as contradistinguished from a house
or an upholstered model, is a place conscious of wise, benignant
personality ; instinct with lives that are noble and beloved ; dif-
ferentiated as thoroughly from other homes as its founders are
6o6 Married Men the Highest Type,
dissimilar in character, education, and inmost intent from other
people.
To such a home in the evolution of our time, the bass voice
will bring a tone as true, as sweet, as needful as the soprano ;
and upon it man's individuality will reflect as much significance
as woman's. Indeed, his change of occupation has changed
home more than hers. When he spent his life in war, home was a
castle ; when he pioneered, it was a cabin ; but now when he be-
gins to ** settle down," ceases to be a nomadic, or a partially wild
animal, and becomes domesticated, home takes on a docile, cozy,
feather-lined aspect and condition.
To judge man in the home at his right valuation, we have
but to compare him with his fellows in the club, the camp,
the ship, the pinery. That is, we have but to estimate the dig-
nity and value of the normal over the abnormal, of the complete
as against the fractional. Nor does it matter whether his home
be a * * dug-out ' ' in Dakota, or a brown-stone front in Boston.
The man with the one woman that he loves, and who loves him,
standing in the relation of true yoke-fellow to all his plans and
toil, with happy children at his knee, and an unselfish purpose in
his soul, is as far removed from his self-centered, squandering,
dissatisfied brethren as is the light-house keeper firom the ship-
wrecked crew.
All the world knows that it must look to married men for its
types of the ideal in manhood. They have a delicacy, a broth-
.erly considerateness, a homelikeness of character and manner,
quite unmistakable. It is the outcome of their nurture ; it could
not be other than it is, because like causes lead to like results.
All women think that if all men were but like some married men
whom they could name, the world would reach its acme. But
no man can be like these model men except by passing through
the flower-wreathed gate- way of the home.
The man who, in his uncompanioned estate, yet carries
steadily from year to year the " lily of a stainless life,'' would
oftentimes command our reverence if we but knew why he so
resolutely walks that shadowed pathway. Perhaps like our own
beloved Washington Irving, he is keeping faith with some sweet
woman long since dead. Perhaps, like Longfellow in those
years of his pathetic widowerhood, life seems a blank to him,
The ** Home-ache.^* 607
which he tries to fill by singing the song of an uncomplain-
ing, but sorely smitten heart.
This world of halfness and mirage has many, doubtless, who
thus go uncompanioned, bufieting the waves of temptation ** like
some strong swimmer in his agony,*' and for them heaven must
twine its brightest amaranths, and angels plan their sweet sur-
prises.
** He who wrote home's sweetest song, ne'er had one of his
own." So sang Will Carleton of gentle John Howard Payne.
*' Heimweh,'' or ** home-ache, " that stronger, tenderer word for
** homesick," coined by the Germans, was indubitably coined by
men. ** Blessed are the homesick for they shall go home " was
a holy thought smitten from a man's and not a woman's heart.
I undertake to say that the dearest and most disinterested lovers
of home upon this earth are men. A thousand motives, preju-
dices, and conventions hedge women into homes, but men, with
all the world to choose from, choose the home. It is the noblest
and most redeeming fact in their long annals, and predicts their
perfectibility as nothing else can. This innate tenderness makes
every man, cultured as well as ignorant, respond with a thrill
of the heart to the simple, but famous lines :
" One little hut among the bushes,
One that I love,
Still fondly to my memory rushes.
No matter where I rove."
That very ** roving" has much to do with it, for contrasts
alone educate the soul into a knowledge of values. Tempest-
tossed and battle-worn, deceived and buffeted, the manly heart
loves the sacred refuge of its home.
It was said of a French soldier, whose well-nigh fatal wound
near the heart was being probed, after the battle of Waterloo,
that he whispered to the surgeon, ** If you go much deeper, Sir,
you'll find the Emperor." I believe that if every normal heart of
man were probed, its deepest, sweetest, and most cherished image
would be home. Those who have none of their own are well
described in Grace Greenwood's lines :
" Thus was his soul tempestuous.
As the ocean on the beach
Moans for the inland quiet
Its waves can never reach*
6o8 " Old Maid'' and '' Old Bachelor:'
Man needs home, if possible, more than woman does;
though without it, either, is at best, but a jewel torn from its set-
ting. He is in more danger without its anchorage than she, for
the centripetal forces of her nature will always draw her strongly
toward the light, even though its beacon shine from some hap-
pier woman's fireside, while the centrifugal forces of his nature
will drive him afar off into darkness. Women who go their way
alone are not, in this kindly age, so lonely as men who do the
same. Almost always such women make for themselves a niche
in some home sanctuary, are sheltered by its walls and warmed
by its genial glow, but an isolated man finds this solace imprac-
ticable. ** In the long run," God's compensations balance desti-
nies once cruelly tmequal, and to-day, in America at least, the
term ** old maid " has in it as little of reproach and almost less
of pathos than ** old bachelor."
But does any one suppose we have found out what man might
be in the home ? He has been thus far an embryonic figure there,
a mere sketch or outline, dim and shadowy. Nor is it yet ap-
parent what he will be, but we may catch some glimpse of that
new and magnificent creation by a study of the evolution of home.
This is the most attractive theme in sociology, and the silence of
philosophers concerning it seems unexplainable. The locomo-
tive has in sixty years been developed from a speed of six, to one
of sixty miles an hour, and the car from a lumbering stage-coach
propelled by steam, to a luxurious and palatial ** Pullman " ; the
plow has grown from a wooden board to a glittering, steam-driven
monarch of the sod ; the public school has advanced from horn-
books to the methods of Pestalozzi and of Froebel — and meanwhile
the home has kept pace with these other forms of growth which
are but its caterers and its conservers.
No greater change has been witnessed in material surround-
ings than that between the log-house of the pioneer and the
palace of his grandson, for the embellishment of which every
country has been ransacked and where every device of invention
has been exhausted upon the comfort and convenience of the
family. This outward progress does but symbolize the develop-
ment of its interior spirit and advancing life. At the present rate
of improvement, two generations will not have passed before
the outgrowth of invention will have reduced to a minimum
Equal Partners, 609
housewifely cares, and the wholesale will have supplanted the
retail method in household economics. This is a perfectly fair
inference from what has been already wrought by the transforma-
tion of the simplest home duties into great industries carried for-
ward by machinery. -Thus set free from accustomed occupations
the average woman will enter more largely into her husband's pur-
suits and share more constantly her children's studies and recrea-
tions. The desideratum will be found when the house becomes a
unit, not by such extinguishment as makes * * husband and wife
one and that one the husband,*' but by such recognition as makes
one-half the property the wife's in fee simple, and associates the
husband with her as equal partner in the rearing of their children,
A brilliant, but irreverent writer began an article on home-
training with the words, ** Show us the father and it sufficeth us."
The New York Independent in a description of the Knights of
Labor convention in Richmond, Va., brings the father forward
in a new and, perhaps, prophetic role. These are its words :
" On the first day of the session there was in attendance Mrs. Elisabeth
Rodgers, of Chicago, with her twelfth babe in her arms, that day two weeks
old. Mrs. Rodgers is District Master Workman of District 24 in that
city and was accompanied by her husband, both being delegates. She
is a woman thirty-nine years old ; tall, large and noble-looking, with a pleas-
ant face and fine features. She and her child received very general and
kindly consideration. A gold watch and chain were purchased and pre-
sented to Mrs. Rodgers on the platform, the father standing and holding the
child ; and the group was a very pretty and touching sight"
Doubtless this honest workman, cradling in his strong arms
his little one, felt no sense of degradation, but rather was proud
of his place and honored by his fellows. That this could be in
the rank of life to which he belonged, is a vivid proof that we
have moved a long way onward in this Christian republic from
the Indian who loads his wife with the rations given out at a
Western fort, or the peasant of Berlin who fastens wife and dog
together to the cart of vegetables.
Man in the home will have a larger place in the proportion
that woman, in the constantly more homelike world, gains larger
standing-room. Motherhood will not be less, but fatherhood a
hundred-fold more magnified. To say this is to declare the
approaching beatitude of men. For when to the splendor of their
intellectual powers and the magnificence of their courage shall be
39
/
6io Evolution of the Home Idea,
added the unselfish devotion that comes of **childward care,"
we shall see characters more Christ-like than the world has
known save in its calendar of saints.
Immeasurable has been the loss to men that in the age of
force, of war, and pioneering, they were so much shut out £rom
the holy ministries of home's inmost sanctuary, where Madonna
and Child are evermore enshrined.
Our environments are so largely answerable for our virtues
or defects, that the quality of character we would produce must
have its promise and its potency in the recurring experiences of
our daily lives. When the hand that rules the world shall also
rock the cradle, the millennium will no longer be far off. When
the father builds his life and thought into his daughter as the
mother has hitherto built hers into her son, the world will see
her grandest women and her kindliest men. The manhood of
strength and gentleness can only come as a result of the ministry
of gentleness and strength, and home will be its training school.
**What is home without a father?** shall then become a
question as natural and as genuinely full of pathos as is now its
maternal correlate. The capacity of the human mind to resist
knowledge is nowhere more painfully illustrated than in the post-
ulate laid down by average minds that home is always to be
just what it is now — forgetting that in no two consecutive gener-
ations has it remained the same ; and the other postulate that
man's relation to the home can never change — forgetting that the
one constant quantity in his evanescent relations to every sub-
lunary object has been change itself.
Already the word ** obey " has been expunged fix)m woman's
marriage vow ; already her relation of inferior to her husband is
changed to that of comrade ; already the time-worn phrase, ** no
home can hold two purses," is regarded with contempt by the
best men, and the relation of financial equality before the law
hastens to replace that of ** coverture" which had its value in a
warlike age but hastens to its exit fi-om the age of peace;
already woman as an individual, standing beside man as her
equal partner in life, love, and opportunity, is the ideal of the
typical young American, both male and female, so that man in
the home is becoming a new factor under conditions that make
him joint high-priest of that holiest temple made with hands.
Is Marriage a Failure? on ^
The nearer he approaches to the cradle and the more frequently,
the happier for him and for his home and for the state. Habits
of impurity will seem more loathsome in that presence than any-
where else upon the earth. The loftiest chivalry of which the
strongest can be capable comes as a sequel of their service to
the weakest.
When the White Cross gospel shall have been embosomed
in young manhood's life for one blessed generation, the sancti-
ties of fatherhood shall be seen to exceed all others to which a
manly spirit can attain in this state of existence, and the malari-
ous dream of wicked self-indulgence shall slowly but surely give
place to the sacred self-restraint which waits to crown with all
good fairies' gifts the little life which noble love alone may dare
invoke.
IS MARRIAGE A FAILURE ?
With all its faults, and they are many, I believe the present
marriage system to be the greatest triumph of Christianity, and
that it has created and conserves more happy homes than the world
has ever before known. Any law that renders less binding the
mutual, life-long loyalty of one man and one woman to each other,
which is the central idea of every home, is an unmitigated curse
to that man and woman, to that home and to humanity. Around
this union, which alone renders possible a pure society and a per-
manent state, the law should build its utmost safeguards, and
upon this union the Gospel should pronounce its most sacred
benedictions. But, while I hold these truths to be self-evident, I
believe that a constant evolution is going forward in the home as
in every other place, and that we have but dimly dreamed the good
in store for those whom God for holiest love hath made. In the
nature of the case, the most that even Christianity itself could do
at first, though it is the strongest force ever let loose upon the
^planet, was to separate one man and woman from the common
herd inlo each home, telling the woman to remain therein with
grateful quietness, while the man stood at the door to defend its
sacred shrine with fist and spear, to insist upon its rights of prop-
erty, and to stand for it in the state.
Thus, under the conditions of a civilization crude and mate-
rial, grew up that well-worn maxim of the common law : ** Hus-
band and wife are one, and that one is the husband." But this
6i2 ^^ Many Men are Good and Gracious.*^
supreme power brought to the man supreme temptations. By the
laws of mind he legislated first for himself and afterward for the
physically weaker one within ** his *' 'home. The femme amverte
is not a character appropriate to our peaceful, homelike communi-
ties, although she may have been and doubtless was a necessary
figure in the days when women were safe only as they were shut
up in castles and when they were the booty chiefly sought in war.
To-day a woman may circumnavigate the world alone and
yet be unmolested. Twenty years ago when I was traveling in
Palestine, a lady of wealth made the trip, tenting by herself and
escorted only by a dragoman, as was our own party of ten men
and three women. A recent book, the name of which I have for-
gotten, gives a piquant account of the journey made by a party
of American ladies in Africa, and nothing is more common
than the European rambles of newly-fledged collegians of the
gentler sex. Our marriage laws and customs are changing to
meet these new conditions. It will not do to give the husband
of the modem woman power to whip his wife, provided that the
stick he uses must not be larger than his finger ; to give him the
right to will away her unborn child ; to have control over her
property ; and, in the state, to make all the laws under which she
is to live, adjudicate all her penalties, try her before juries of
men, conduct her to prison under the care of men, cast the ballot
for her, and in general hold her in the estate of a perpetual minor.
It will not do to let the modem man determine the ** age of con-
sent," settle the penalties that men shall suffer whose indignities
and outrages toward women are worse to their victims than
death, and by his exclusive power to make all laws and choose
all ofl&cers, judicial and executive, to have his own case wholly
in his own hands. To continue this method is to make it as
hard as possible for men to do right, and as easy as possible for
them to do wrong, the magnificent possibilities of manly char-
acter being best prophesied from the fact that under such a 'system
so many men are good and gracious.
My theory of marriage in its relation to society would give
this postulate: Husband and wife are one, and that one is —
husband and wife. I believe they will never come to the heights
of purity, of power and peace, for which they were designed in
Leaven, until this better law prevails :
TTu New Rigime, 613
" Two heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life ;
Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss
Of science and the secrets of the mind.'*
Poets are prophets, and the* greatest poet of our time has set
humanity's great goal before us, only to be gained
" When reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm."
One-half the world for the wife — an undivided half apiece
for wife and husband ; co-education to mate them on the plane of
mind, equal property rights to make her God's own free woman,
not coerced into marriage for the sake of a support, nor a bond-
slave after she is married, who asks her master for the price of a
paper of pins and gives him back the change, or, if a petted
fevorite, owing her lease of purse wholly to his will and never to
her right ; free to go her honored and self-respecting way as a
maiden in perpetuo rather than marry a man whose deterioration
through the alcohol and nicotine habits is a menace to herself
and the descendants that such a marriage must have invoked —
these are the outlooks of the future that shall make the marriage
system, never a failure since it became monogamic, an assured,
a permanent, a paradisiacal success.
In that day the wife shall surrender at marriage no right not
equally surrendered by the husband — not even her own name.
Emile Girardin, that keen-sighted writer of France, says that it is
so much easier, for obvious reasons, to trace ancestry along the
mother's line, that historic records have incalculably suffered by
the arbitrary relinquishment of her name. Probably the French
have hit upon the best expedient, the union of the two. Thus I
recall that in Paris my home was with an accomplished lady
wh se maiden name was Farjon, and whose husband's was Perrot,
her visiting-card bearing the inscription, ** Madame Eglantine
Perrot-Farjon." The growing custom, in this country at least, to
give the mother's name to a son or daughter indicates the increas-
ing, though perhaps unconscious, recognition of woman as an
equal partner in the marriage sacrament and compact. But the
tendency, even among men of intelligence, to sign themselves
6 14 The Magnum Opus of Christianify,
"John Jones, wife, child and nurse,*' as we see it in the registers
of fashionable hotels, is a frequent reminder of the pit from which
wives are slowly being digged. The man who writes **Mr. John
and Mrs. Jane Jones,*' may be regarded as well on the road to a
successful evolution ! although **Mr. and Mrs. John Jones" is
about the correct thing up to this date. The time will come when
the mother's custody of children will constructively be preferred
in law to that of the father, on the ground that in a Christian
civilization it is safer and more consonant with natural laws.
Last of all and chiefest, the magnum opus of Christianity,
and Science, which is its handmaid, the wife will have undoubted
custody of herself, and, as in all the lower ranges of the animal
creation, she will determine the frequency of the investiture of
life with form and of love with immortality. My library groans
under accumulations of books written by men to teach women
the immeasurable iniquity of arresting development in the gene-
sis of a new life, but not one of these volumes contains the remot-
est suggestion that this responsibility should be at least equally
divided between himself and herself The untold horrors of
this injustice dwarf all others out of sight, and the most hopeless
feature of it is the utter unconsciousness with which it is com-
mitted. But better days are dawning ; the study by women of
heredity and prenatal influences is flooding with light the Via
Dolorosa of the past ; and the White Cross army with its equal
standard of purity for men and women is moving to its rightful
place of leadership among the hosts of men. I believe in uniform
national marriage laws, in divorce for one cause only, in legal
separation on account of drunkenness, but I would elevate and
guard the marriage tie by every guarantee that could make it at
the top of society, the most coveted estate of the largest-natured
and most endowed, rather than at the bottom, the necessary refuge
of the smallest-natured and most dependent woman. Besides all
this, in the interest of men, i, <?., that their incentives to the best
life may be raised to the highest power, I would make women so
independent of marriage that men who, by bad habits and nig-
gardly estate, whether physical, mental, or moral, were least
adapted to help build a race of human angels, should find the
facility with which they now enter its hallowed precincts reduced
to the lowest minimum.
General Conferences. 615
THE I^AW OF KINDNESS.
I am proud to belong to the Universal Peace Union, and the
Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,
and to echo every word uttered by Frances Power Cobbe of
England, and George T. Angell of America, those brave defend-
ers of the gentle faith that ** Nothing is inexorable but love,"
and that we are
** Never to blend oar pleasnre or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."
My shepherd colUe, ** Prohibition '' (**Hibbie,'' for short,
and ** Hib,*' for shorter), is a perpetual gospel to me as he reaches
out his shaggy paw with a wise look in his eyes that seem to
say, ** Have patience with me and it shall grow to be a hand."
MY EXPERIENCE WITH GENERAL CONFERENCES.
I have seen three of these courts. The first was in Chicago
in 1868, when, dressed in my spick-and-span new traveling suit
for Europe, I glanced in through the crowded door of Clark
Street Church, where a tremendous debate was going on about
lay delegation ; but it was nearly time for my train to New York,
and this glance was all I had.
The next was in 1880 in Pike's Opera House at Cincinnati.
Our National W. C. T. U. had sent a message that year to all the
leading ecclesiastical assemblages, respectfully asking for a
fiiendly word fi"om them, and suggesting that they appoint rep-
resentatives who should attend our National Convention to see
what we were doing and bring us words of cheer. In our sim-
plicity, we thought it the most natural thing imaginable thus to
bring the work we loved back to the church that had nurtured
us and given us our inspiration, and we thoroughly believe that
history will declare not only that our purpose was true and good,
but that our plan was altogether reasonable. One would have
thought, however, that something revolutionary had been pro-
posed, when it was known that my friend. Miss F. Jennie Duty,
of Cleveland, and myself were in the Opera House desirous of
presenting this message ! Grave, dignified clergymen who had
6i6 An Unspoken Speech Ten Minutes Lang.
always been my friends, looked curiously upon me as if I were,
somehow, a little daft. *'We have no precedent,** they said.
*'How could you have?'* was my answer, **the Crusade was,
like the Day of Pentecost, unprecedented. The case is a new
one, and your Methodist sisters earnestly believe that you will
meet it on its merits.**
I will not write here the names of the good Bishops, almost
as dear to me as my own brothers, who passed by on the other
side, not wishing to commit themselves, also not wishing to hurt
my feelings at this crisis. We sought in vain for their advice.
Somehow, they were always busy, and never could be seen.
Meantime the buzzing went on. Poor Anna Oliver, who was
trying to gain recognition as a preacher, seemed hardly more of
a black sheep than we two white ribbon women with our harm-
less little message.
The Temperance Committee, however, treated us well, invited
us in to its session, and incorporated in its report a resolution that
we desired about communion wine, also made kindly allusion,
though not by name, to the W. C. T. U. My noble friend, Bishop
Foster, consented to preside at a temperance meeting addressed by
me, and stood his ground valiantly, at much cost, I have no doubt,
to his prejudices. Some liberal-minded delegates, Dr. Payne, Dr.
Theodore L. Flood, and Philip Gillette, a lay delegate from Illi-
nois, flung down the gauntlet for me by introducing a resolution
that I should have ten minutes in which to speak before the
Conference. And now began the war of words, the opposition
being headed, as a matter of course, by Dr. Buckley, who, with
his faithful ally, Dr. Daniel Curry, dealt sledge-hammer blows
against a man of straw. Two hours or more were expended in
the debate, when the call of ayes and noes demanded by Dr.
Buckley, showed that two thirds of the Conference favored giv-
ing the ten minutes. Dilatory tactics were now resorted to by
the conservatives, and adjournment was secured, it being a little
after noon. In the inter\'^al, I saw that my brave friends were
weakening, and they suggested that I send a note saying I would
not speak, for as the matter now stood, I had the right to do so,
but Dr. Buckley had declared that he would exhaust parliament-
ary resources to prevent it. I told them that personally I thought
it would be wiser to let the question settle itself, and I was neither
Rock River Conference Elects a Woman Delegate, 617
afraid nor ashamed to stand in my lot and place as a disturber of
the peace for the sake of all that I believed was involved in the
decision, but seeing that my champions strongly preferred to
settle the question peaceably, I compromised the matter and
wrote the following :
TuBSDAY Morning, May 18, 1880.
To The General Conference:
Honored Brbthrbn — It is the judgment of many of your members
who championed the cause of woman in yesterday's debate (in which
judgment I concur), that I would better state to you, with my hearty thanks
for the final vote, that I decline to use the hard-earned ten minutes allotted
me. Suffer me, however, to explain that, having been sent here as a fra-
ternal visitor by our Woman's National Society, and, moreover, having so
often spoken before ecclesiastical bodies upon their earnest invitation, and
never having attended a General Conference before, I had no idea of the
strong opposition that would be manifested, or I would not have listened to
the generous friends who urged the matter on your attention.
Your sister in Christian work,
Prances E. Wii^i^rd.
In October, 1887, Anna Gordon and I were at Binghamton,
attending the W. C. T. U. Convention of New York State. It
was a grand occasion, so many delegates being present that the
large church was filled with them. We were entertained in the
home of Mrs. Mather, granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards,
and while sitting at the breakfast table in her pleasant home, I
opened a telegram there handed to me, and read these words :
Chicago.
I suppose you know that the Rock River Conference has chosen you
one of its lay delegates to the General Conference.
O. A. IsLBAN.
The tears sprang to my eyes, and turning to my dignified
hostess I said : '* You can hardly imagine how much this means
to me. The dear old Rock River Conference of which my brother
was once a member, and many of whose ministers I have known
from girlhood, selects me as one of its two lay delegates, and my
father's business partner of twenty years ago kindly telegraphs
the pleasant news. Why should I not think well of men when
they can do things so magnanimous? Every one who voted
for me would have g^ven his eye teeth to have gone in my stead,
yet they set to work and sent me, just out of brotherly good-
will.*'
6i8 Women in the M, E, General Conference.
Much more after this sort I poured out, in my gratitude and
gladness, to the quiet old lady, whose face lighted up as she
** rejoiced in my joy."
No one had ever named to me the possibility of such an
honor, save that Miss Phebe and Mrs. Franc Elliott (daughter
and daughter-in-law of Rev. Dr. Charles Elliott, former editor of
the Central Christian Advocate, but now deceased) had sent me a
letter stating that they thought women should go to the General
Conference, as they had for years helped to elect those who did
go as lay delegates, and had themselves been chosen alternates,
and their names placed without question on General Conference
lists. I had always thought that no fair-minded person could
have a doubt of their inherent right to go, since women consti-
tute at least two thirds of the church membership, bear more
than one half its burdens, and have patiently conceded to the
brethren, during all generations, its emoluments and honors.
No more was known to me until, on returning West, I heard
that certain lawyers of the contrary part (i. e,, well-known oppo-
nents of woman's larger recognition in these modem days) had
said that I would never be allowed to take my seat. But my
friends declared, what I fully believed, that the Discipline was so
explicit, that ** the wayfaring man, though a fool," could not fail
to find its meaning friendly.
In the midst of the contention that came up later on in the
papers of my church, I gave myself no anxiety about the subject ;
indeed, I hold that word, ** anxiety," to be altogether atheistic,
and have endeavored to weed it out of my vocabulary. '* Careful
for nothing, and in everything a giver of thanks," is what the
commonest sort of a Christian is sacredly bound to be, or to
become. My invitation was duly sent, my name was on all
the published lists of delegates ; the author of * ' Representative
Methodists" (containing sketches and portraits of delegates), to
be brought out by our ofl&cial Methodist publishing house, wrote
to obtain the necessary data ; my Methodist friends in New York
not inviting me, I had accepted the assignment to the Oriental
Hotel, suggested by Gen. Clinton B. Fisk, and I went to New York
a few days before the great Conference was to begin its quadrennial
session as the Supreme Court of our church, representing over
two millions of Methodists. By this time, Dr. Buckley had
Looks into and Leaves the Great Arena, 619
taken his position against the admission of wometv the tintin-
nabulation of tongues had set in, and the pent-up pendulosity of
pens had fairly burst forth.
I arrived in New York on the Friday previous to the Confer-
ence, and wishing to know just what was the best course for me
to pursue, I went over to the Opera House where the Conference
was to hold its session and inquired for General Fisk, finding
him already conferring with grave dignitaries of the church,
and busy with his duties as chairman of the Committee of Arrange-
ments. He went with Mrs. Carse and me into the Opera House
and we took our seats on the platform with the great yawning
auditorium before us, empty and dark. He told me there was
going to be a vigorous fight, but he thought the women would
get in. I asked his advice about sitting with my delegation,
assuring him that I would on no account take a wrong attitude
toward the controversy. He replied, **Your moral right, there
is none to dispute, and if you are ruled out it will be on a pure
technicality and not upon the merits of the case. This being
true, I advise you to be on hand bright and early the morning
that the Conference opens, and if you like, I shall be glad to
escort you along the aisle to your place with your Rock River
brethren. ' ' But there had come to me that morning a disquieting
telegram fi"om home ; my dear mother had not been well for two
or three weeks, but I had received repeated notes in her usual
hand and as I knew her cheery spirit and great desire that I
should be a member of the Conference, I had gone on with my
engagements, knowing that she was in the very best of care, and
believing that I should be able to enter on my novel duties.
However, on receiving the morning telegram that mother was not
very well and Anna Gordon would perhaps better go to her, I
telegraphed at once, ** Would it not be better for me to go?"
That this made it almost a foregone conclusion that I should
return to my home, I knew, for my faithful secretaries there
would hardly take the risk of telling me not to come when I had
so plainly expressed the thought and purpose of doing so. There-
fore, I was prepared for the response that soon arrived, ** Do not
be anxious, but come. ** And so on Saturday night I took the
limited express, for the first time in my life deliberately setting
out on a Sabbath day's journey. A few times, chiefly during my
620 Anna Gordon Views and Reviews the Pray.
travels abroad, I have been under circumstances that seemed to
me to justify taking a train on Sunday, but while I would not
conceal any such action I should wish to go on record as having
the totality of my life opposed to Sunday travel. The way was
long and dreary, but closely filled in with reading and writing,
the unfailing solace of all my years since childhood. It was on
this trip, however, that for the first time in my life of travel I
had a downright ill-mannered vis-a-vis.
My kindest of neighbors in the ** annex," as we call the
cottage that my sister built joining our own, were at the depot
in Chicago. Helen L. Hood, that staunch white ribboner of Illi-
nois, reached out her strong hand to me before I left the platform
of the car, and said, *' Your mother is better.** I think no words
were ever sweeter of all that I have heard. Now followed a
month in which I exchanged the busy and constantly varied
activities of a temperance reformer for the sacred quiet of my
mother's sick-room. I had never seen her so ill, but she was, as
always, entirely self-possessed. We had a council of physicians
and she went through the diagnosis with even smiling cheerful-
ness, saying, ** I think I shall get well, but I am not at all afi-aid
to die." Little by little she crept up again under the skillfiil
care of that noble woman. Dr. Mary McCrillis, who by day and
night was with us in our trouble.
Anna Gordon arrived in New York the day I left, and
remained, at my request, until the great question was decided,
sending me constant bulletins from the Opera House box where
General Fisk, with his customary thoughtfulness, had assigned
her a seat. Nothing could exceed my surprise when I learned
that our good bench of Bishops had prejudged the entire ca:Se in
their opening address. Only the cold type of the Associated
Press dispatch, giving their language, could have made me
believe this possible. Anna Gordon pictured the scene dramatic-
ally, catching on the wing many of the bright turns and argu-
ments of the debaters, and seeming full of expectation that the
women would carr>'^ the day. She wrote that there was unrivaled
commotion, that our side felt confident, that friends were urgent
for my return and strongly counseled it, but without saying
anything to my mother, who is so self-sacrificing that I knew
she would tell me, *'By all means go back, my child," I fully
" Thou, too, Brutus! " 621
determined that I would have nothing to do with the controversy,
directly or indirectly, and so in great quietness of spirit awaited
the result. When the morning Inter Ocean was thrown on the
steps, I would refrain for some time from going after it, and mother
asked no questions. But when I read that the lay delegates gave
a majority against the admission of women, and remembered that
the vote of women, as they well knew, at the time of the debate on
the eligibility of the laity to the General Conference, had forced
open its doors to the laymen who now deliberately voted to
exclude women, I had no more spirit in me. Once more it was
a case of *' TJiou, too, Brutus ! *' That the Bishops should have
*' left us lamenting, ** grieved me, but when the lay delegates did
the same, I said in my heart, '*Once more the action of my
fellow mortals weans me from love of life, and by so doing they
have doubtless helped me more than their generosity of action
could possibly have done. " However, I lost no sleep and wasted
no tears over the curious transaction, and I confidently predict
that we five women, whose election was thus disavowed, will
have more enviable places in history than any who opposed us on
those memorable days. Of them it will be written, while doubt-
less they did not so intend, that they committed an injustice; of
us, only that in silence we endured it.
The champions of equality made a splendid record, of which
they will be prouder with each added year. They are forerun-
ners of that grander, because more equitable, polity that shall
3'et glorif>'^ our Methodism when in her law, as in Christ's gospel,
there shall be " Neither male nor female.**
SOCIETIES OF CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR.
The wonder to me has long been why ministers don't strike !
They are, beyond all others, the burdened brain-workers of the
world. Like the work of women, theirs is never done. At every-
body's beck and call for the greatest variety of counsel that
human ingenuity can devise or prodigious power supply, the min-
isters are so well entitled to complain, that the fact of their not
doing so is proof positive of their superhuman grace. More
unreasonable than all the other demands upon them in these
enlightened days is, to my thinking, the demand for a Sunday-
622 God and My Heart,
evening sermon. When books were few and guiding intellects
were fewer, when the present affluence of home-life was unknown,
it may have been, and very likely was, essential to require the
pastor to serve up two sermons weekly. But, surely, under
modem conditions it is cruel as well as inconsistent to make such
a requisition. What shall we substitute ? is the problem now
before us. To this, it seems to me, the Christian Endeavor
Societies afford an admirable solution. The elders do not, as a
rule, largely make up an evening audience, and the younger
ones may here find a field for the exercise of their constantly
increasing experience and zeal. Missionary meetings, home
and foreign, for which the Endeavor Society is held responsible,
at stated intervals ; temperance meetings ditto ; Bible readings,
praise services, Sunday-school concerts — ^may not these be the
beginning of a new outlook for the overworked pastors and a
blessedly increased activity of the pews ?
GOD AND MY HEART.
It was one night in June, 1859. I was nineteen years old
and was lying on my bed in my home at Evanston, 111., ill with
typhoid fever. The doctor had said that the crisis would soon
arrive, and I had overheard his words. Mother was watching
in the next room. My whole soul was intent, as two voices
seemed to speak within me, one of them saying, *' My child,
give me thy heart. I called thee long by joy, I call thee now
by chastisement ; but I have called thee always and only be-
cause I love thee with an everlasting love.**
The other said, *' Surely you who are so resolute and strong
will not break down now because of physical feebleness. You
are a reasoner, and never yet were you convinced of the reason-
ableness of Christianity. Hold out now and you will feel when
you get well just as you used to feel."
One presence was to me warm, sunny, safe, with an impres-
sion as of snowy wings ; the other cold, dismal, dark, with the
flutter of a bat. The controversy did not seem brief; in my
weakness such a strain would doubtless appear longer than it
was. But at last, solemnly, and with my whole heart, I said,
not in spoken words, but in the deeper language of consciousness,
My Life's Greatest Resolve, 623
**If God lets me get well FU try to be a Christian Rirl."
But this resolve did not bring peace. ** You must at once declare
this resolution,'* said the inward voice.
Strange as it seems, and complete as had always been my
frankness toward my dear mother, far beyond what is usual
even between mother and child, it cost me a greater humbling of
my pride to tell her than the resolution had cost of self-surren-
der, or than any other utterance of my whole life has involved.
After a hard battle, in which I lifted up my soul to God for
strength, I faintly called her from the next room, and said,
** Mother, I wish to tell you that if God lets me get well I'll
try to be a Christian girl.'*
She took my hand, knelt beside my bed, and softly wept, and
prayed. I then turned my face to the wall and sweetly slept.
That winter we had revival services in the old Methodist
church at Evanston. Doctor (now Bishop) Foster was president
of the university, and his sermons, with those of Doctors Demp-
ster, Bannister, and others, deeply stirred my heart. I had con-
valesced slowly and spent several weeks at Forest Home, so these
meetings seemed to be my first public opportunity of declaring
my new allegiance. The very earliest invitation to go forward,
kneel at the altar and be prayed for, was heeded by me. Waiting
for no one, counseling with no one, I went alone along the aisle
with my heart beating so loud that I thought I could see as well
as hear it beat, as I moved forward. One of the most timid,
shrinking, and sensitive of natures, what it meant to me to go
forward thus, with my student friends gazing upon me, can never
be told. I had been known as * * skeptical, ' ' and prayers (of which
I then spoke lightly) had been asked for me in the church the year
before. For fourteen nights in succession I thus knelt at the
altar, expecting some utter transformation — -'some portion of
heaven to be placed in my inmost heart, as I have seen the box of
valuables placed in the comer-stone of a building and firmly set,
plastered over and fixed in its place for ever. This is what I
had determined must be done, and was loath to give it up.
I prayed and agonized, but what I sought did not occur.
One night when I returned to my room baffled, weary and
discouraged, and knelt beside my bed, it came to me quietly that
this was not the way; that my ** conversion,** my ** turning
624 Five Years of ** Common Religion ^
about," my religious experience {re4igare^ to bind again), had
reached its crisis on that summer night when I said **yes," to
God. A quiet certitude of this pervaded my consciousness, and
the next night I told the public congregation so, gave my name
to the church as a probationer, and after holding this relation for
a year — waiting for my sister Mary, who joined later, to pass her
six months' probation, I was baptized and joined the church. May
5, 1 86 1, ** in full connection.'* Meanwhile I had regularly led,
since that memorable June, a prayerful life — which I had not
done for some months previous to that time ; studied my Bible,
and, as I believe, evinced by my daily life that I was taking
counsel of the heavenly powers. Prayer-meeting, class-meeting
(in which Rev. Dr. Hemenway was my beloved leader), and
church services were most pleasant to me, and I became an
active worker, seeking to lead others to Christ. I had learned
to think of and believe in God in terms of Jesus Chri'-t. This
had always been my difficulty, as I believe it is that of so many.
It seems to me that by nature all spiritually-disposed people
(and with the exception of about six months of my life, I was
always strongly that) are Unitarians, and my chief mental diffi-
culty has always been, and is to-day, after all these years, to
adjust myself to the idea of "Three in one '* and "One in three."
But, while I will not judge others, there is for me no final rest,
except as I translate the concept of God into the nomenclature
and personality of the New Testament. What Paul says of
Christ, is what I say ; the love John felt, it is my dearest wish
to cherish.
Five years passed by, during which I grew to love more and
more the house of God and the fellowship of the blessed Christian
people who were my brothers and sisters in the church. The first
bereavement of rfiy life came to me about three years after I was
a Christian, in the loss of my only sister, Mary, whose life-long
companionship had been to me a living epistle of conscientious-
ness and spirituality. In her death she talked of Christ as "one
who held her by the hand," and she left us with a smile fresh
from the upper glory. A great spiritual uplift came to me then,
and her last message, "Sister, I want you to tell everybody to
be good," was like a perfume and a prophecy within my soul.
This was in 1862. In 1866 Mrs. Bishop Hamline came to our
** Holiness {Wholeness) of Heart,'* 625
village and we were closely associated in the work of the ** Amer-
ican Methodist Ladies' Centennial Association ' ' that built Heck
Hall. This saintly woman placed in my hands the ** Life of
Hester Ann Rogers/' '*Life of Carvosso," *'Life of Mrs.
Fletcher," Wesley's "Sermons on Christian Perfection," and
Mrs. Palmer's "Guide to Holiness." I had never seen any of
these books before, but had read Peck's " Central Idea of Chris-
tianity" and been greatly interested in it. I had also heard
saintly testimony in prayer-meeting, and, in a general way, be-
lieved in the doctrine of holiness. But my reading of these
books, my talks and prayers with Mrs. Hamline, that modem
Mrs. Fletcher, deeply impressed me. I began to desire and pray
for holiness of heart. Soon after this, Dr. and Mrs. Phebe
Palmer came to Evanston as guests of Mrs. Hamline, and for
weeks they held meetings in our church. This was in the winter
of 1866 ; the precise date I can not give. One evening, early in
their meetings, when Mrs. Palmer had spoken with marvelous
clearness and power, and at the close, those desirous of entering
into the higher Christian life had been asked to kneel at the altar,
another crisis came to me. It was not so tremendous as the first,
but it was one that solemnly impressed my spirit. My dear
father and a friend whom we all loved and honored, sat between
me and the aisle — both Christian men and greatly reverenced by
me. My mother sat beyond me. None of them moved. At last
I turned to my mother (who was converted and joined the church
when she was only twelve years old) and whispered, " Will you
go with me to the altar?" She did not hesitate a moment, and
the two gentlemen moved out of the pew to let us pass, but did
not go themselves.* Kneeling in utter self-abandonment, I con-
secrated myself anew to God.
My chief besetments were, as I thought, a speculative mind,
a hasty temper, a too ready tongue, and the purpose to be a cele-
brated person. But in that hour of sincere self-examination I felt
humiliated to find that the simple bits of jewelry I wore, gold
buttons, rings and pin, all of them plain and "quiet" in their
style, came up to me as the separating causes between my spirit
and my Saviour. All this seemed so unworthy of that sacred
•A little later my father did publicly ask prayers, though an officer in the church and
a Christian from early manhood. His remarkable experience, and triumphant death in
1868 1 have described in " The Guide to Holiness."
40
626 ** Confession and Possession^
hour that I thought at first it was a mere temptation. But the
sense of it remained so strong that I unconditionally yielded my
pretty little jewels and great peace came to my soul. I can not
describe the deep welling up of joy that gradually possessed me.
I was utterly free frx)m care. I was blithe as a bird that is good
for nothing except to sing. I did not ask myself, *' Is this my
duty ? *' but just intuitively knew what I was called upon to do.
The conscious, emotional presence of Christ through the Holy
Spirit held me. I ran about upon His errands ** just for love.*'
Life was a halcyon day. All my friends knew and noticed the
change, and I would not like to write down the lovely things
some of them said to me ; but they did me no harm, for I was
shut in with the Lord. And yet, just then, there came, all unin-
tended and unlocked for, an experience of what I did not then
call sin, which I now believe to have been wrong. My own real-
ization of it was, however, so imperfect that it did not mar my
loyalty to Christ. In this holy, happy state, I engaged to go from
Evanston to Lima, New York, and become preceptress of Genesee
Wesleyan Seminary. Just before leaving, my honored friend,
Dr. , who was visiting Governor Evans, said to me one
evening :
** Sister Frank, there is a strange state of things at Lima.
The Free Methodists have done great harm in Western New
York by their excesses in the doctrine and experience of holiness.
You know I believe thoroughly in and profess it, but just now
our church has suffered so much from the 'Nazarites,* as they
are called, that I fear if you speak and act in this cause as zeal-
ously at Lima as you do here it may make trouble. Hold to the
experience, but be very careful in statement."
So I went to Lima with these thoughts, and there, quite
soon, in a prayer-meeting in the old Seminary Chapel, my good
friend, Professor , whose subsequent experience has been
such a blessed heritage to Christians, replied to a student who
rose to inquire about holiness : " It is a subject we do not men-
tion here."
Young and docile-minded as I was, and revering those two
great and true men, I "kept still" until I soon found I had
nothing in particular to keep still about. The experience left
me. But I think my pupils of that year will bear me witness
The Ice-cake and the Sweet South Wind, 627
that for their conversion and spiritual upbuilding I was con-
stantly at work.
Since then I have sat at the feet of every teacher of holiness
whom I could reach ; have read their books and compared their
views. I love and reverence and am greatly drawn toward all,
and never feel out of harmony with their spirit. Wonderful
uplifts come to me as I pass on, clearer views of the life of God
in the soul of man. Indeed, it is the only life, and all my being
sets toward it as the rivers toward the sea. Celestial things grow
dearer to me ; the love of God is steadfast in my soul ; the habi-
tudes of a disciple sit more easily upon me ; tenderness toward
humanity and the lower orders of being increases with the years.
In the temperance, labor and woman questions I see the stirring
of Christ's heart ; in the comradeship of Christian work my spirit
takes delight, and prayer has become my atmosphere. But that
sweet per\'^asiveness, that heaven in the soul, of which I came to
know in Mrs. Palmer's meeting, I do not feel. I love too well
the good words of the good concerning what I do ; I have not the
control of tongue and temper that I ought to have, I do not
answer to a good conscience in the matter of taking suflBcient
physical exercise and the sweet south wind of love has not yet
thawed out the ice-cake of selfishness firom my breast. But God
knows that I constantly lift up my heart for conquest over all these
evils, and my life is calm and peaceful. Just as frankly as I * ' think
them over, ' ' have I here written down the outline phenomena of
my spiritual life, hoping that it may do good and not evil to those
who read. I am a strictly loyal and orthodox Methodist, but I
find great good in all religions and in the writings of those lofty
and beautiful moralists who are building better than they know,
and all of whose precepts blossom from the rich soil of the New
Testament. No v/ord of faith in God or love toward man is alien
to my sympathy. The classic ethics of Marcus Aurelius are
dear to me, and I have carried in my traveling outfit not only
^ Kempis and Havergal but Epictetus and Plato. The mysticism
of Fdnelon and Guyon. the sermons of Henr>' Drummond and
Beecher, the loft>' precepts of Ralph Waldo Emerson, all help me
up and onward. I am an eclectic in religious reading, friendship
and inspiration. My wide relationships and constant joumeyings
would have made me so had I not had the natural hospitality of
628 An Orthodox '' EdecHc:'
mind that leads to this estate. But, like the bee that gathers from
many fragrant gardens, but flies home with his varied gains to the
same friendly and familiar hive, so I fly home to the sweetness
and sanctity of the old faith that has been my shelter and solace
so long.
** Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,'' is the deepest voice out of
my soul. Receive it every instant, voluntarily given back to
Thyself, and receive it in the hour when I drop this earthly man-
tle that I wear to-day, and pass onward to the world invisible, but
doubtless not far off.
All my life I have heard of the old stone church — the church
of my ancestors — ^founded in 1815, two miles north of Church ville,
my place of birth, which is fifteen miles west of Rochester, N. Y.
In 1854 I ^^^ seen it when my sister and I came from Wisconsin,
as ' ' prairie girls, * ' to visit the old-fashioned home-nest ; I had then
entered the antiquated auditorium, that with its galleries could
hardly seat three hundred persons. Much had I wondered at its
pulpit perched on high, and a solemn awe had struck my heart
as my Grandfather Hill, revered and venerable, gave his testi-
mony on the Sabbath day, and my tall, gentle Uncle James, his
son, extolled the grace of Christ. Ever since I began to speak
in public, eighteen years ago, I had greatly wished to declare
within those hallowed and historic walls, my loyalty to Him. But
not until April, 1888, did my time come. At my request, dear
mother penciled her recollections a few days earlier for my refer-
ence ; they read as follows :
The people that came from Vermont and founded what was then called
" Oilman settlement," brought their religion with them.
Our family came in the spring of 1816, and meetings were held in the
block-house which was our home, as well as in other private houses in the
winter and in bams during the summer. Sometimes, service was held in the
' ' log school-house, ' * in the ' ' stone school-house, * * and in the * ' Bishop school-
house." Elder Jonathan Hinkley was our first pastor, and the old stone
church was built in 1832. John Hill, my father, J. F. Willard, your father,
James Hill, your uncle, and many others, were those who, after consultation,
decided to build this house of worship, and it was not long before it was
completed. In that church the last tribute has been paid and the final
eulogy pronounced over the dearly loved and tenderly revered, when I was
far away ; tears have fallen that I could not witness, and hearts have been
wrung with grief in which I participated at a distance and alone. Here I
have heard my father's voice in prayer and praise, and I remember to have
" Our Old Neighborhood:' 629
heard my dear mother in monthly meeting with mnch emotion bear testi-
mony to her love to Christ, and my brother James with impressive earnest-
ness, speak of his firm conviction that there is no *' other name either in
Heaven or among men " whereby we mnst be saved. Many others have I
here heard speak of their earnest, abiding, uplifting trust in the world's
Redeemer. All of my father's family and nearly all of your grandfather
Willard*s, belonged to that old church, and it is the sacred shrine of our
two households and of many others.
My mother does not here record what she has often told me,
that in 1829 my father, then a handsome, popular young man,
who, while he was noted for good morals, had never manifested
any interest in Christianity, had gone to the neighborhood prayer-
meeting in the ** stone school-house," now demolished, and rising
in his place had asked for prayers. But so set back were the
people that for a moment nobody moved, whereupon he fell on
his knees in the midst of the group and poured out his soul with
strong crying and tears. This was in the midst of ' * harvest time, * '
that busiest season of the Western New York farmer, but so great
was the resulting interest that a '* reformation " broke out, involv-
ing more than thirty heads of families. Almost without excep-
tion, the older households of Willard and Hill, my father's and
mother's kindred, were already members, and from that time on,
the younger were strong adherents of the faith. It was a non-
sectarian denomination, gathered from Presbyterian, Baptist,
Methodist and Unitarian, and called by the broadest possible
name, ** The Church of God in Ogden." The neighborhood was
of the best ; a profane word would have marked a man as ** below
the pauper line, ' ' in brain and social status. A drunkard was
unknown. My father's only brother, Zophar Willard, now sev-
enty-nine years old, for sixty years a leader in the community,
assures me that he never saw a drunken man until he was seven-
teen, and that one was an importation. My uncle says of Grand-
father Hill : * * He was a wonderful exhorter and when imbued with
the Holy Spirit, the tears would run down his cheeks and a holy
unction inspired his very tones. He was never satisfied except
when thus broken down by the Spirit. Once he felt that he was
not as helpful in the meetings as he wished to be and he went
home. That night the power of God rested so mightily upon
him that his whole household, wife and eight children, joined with
him in a most memorable prayer-meeting. He was a marvelous
630 ** The Old Stone Churchy
man in prayer. His wife was one of the Lord's saints. She was
goodness itself and a mighty power in talking.*' She was so
spiritually-minded that she would talk out loud to herself about
God's beautiful world, for she seemed to hear Him breathing in all
His works. Her son James was herself over again, and his daugh-
ter Morilla was so spiritual that she seemed not to belong to this
world and when she died she was perfectly aware of the presence
of angels in her room. My gentle Grandfather, Oliver A. Willard,
was the first. Uncle James Hill, second, and Cousin Henry Dusin-
bury, third and last clerk, of the Old Stone Church. Uncle
Zophar Willard, Uncle Ward Hall, Cousins John and Sheldon
Hill were all officially connected with it.
The 1 6th of April, 1888, was calm and sunshiny. Uncle
Willard's beautiful home on the hill in the suburbs of Church-
ville gave us, as so often, its quiet shelter, and though we missed
the loving smile, the wit and brightness of dear Aunt Caroline,
his widowed sister, and so long his home-maker, we were thor-
oughly content in the care of the noble, genial uncle, who had
done us good and not evil all the days of our lives. In the morn-
ing we went with him to the Congregational church in the village,
of which he has so long been the leading spint, and listened to
the gifted young minister in whom his heart rejoiced. After
dinner we drove "up North," where we had delightful calls in
the pleasant, well-to-do homes of Aunt Sarah Hill Hall and
Cousin Sarah Oilman Dusinbury. At three o'clock we all gath-
ered at the church, a quaint old structure standing at the foot of
a long, graceful slope on the top of which is the picturesque
Willard homestead of auld lang syne. The present residents of
the home, Mr. and Mrs. Way, with Cousin Sarah, had brightened
and beautified the old sanctuary with an improvised setting for
the platform, of carpet, easy chairs and potted plants. All the
relatives and neighbors who yet remain, with many new ones,
besides youth and maiden, boy and girl, not of our circle, packed
the little church, and, Uncle Willard presiding, we sang the old
hymns so often echoed by those walls from voices long since
silent. ** How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord," ** Guide
me, O Thou great Jehovah," and ** There is a land of pure
delight, ' ' seemed to me tenderly to invoke the spirit of the sacred
past. Then in rich tones full of pathos, my* Cousin Sarah read
TJie Gospel of Health, 631
the ninetieth Psalm, "I^ord, thou hast been our dwelling place
in all generations," and the Churchville minister. Rev. Mr. Mc-
Connell, led in prayer with a brother's sympathy for all that the
hour signified to us. After that I frankly told the kind people all
my heart, taking, ** The Master is come and calleth for thee,'* as
a text, and setting what I tried to say to the key of
" We are traveling home to God,
In the way our fathers trod.'*
I told them what Christianity meant to my heart, and what
I believed it meant to custom and law, to society and government.
It stirred my spirit deeply as I realized in some small measure
what it signified to testify as one of the cloud of witnesses who
belonged to the same household of faith with those who within
these walls had found and taught the unsearchable riches of
Christ. Bom of a Christian race, bred in a Christian home, I
dedicated myself anew in the Old Stone Church that day to
Christ and to His Gospel, vowing that by His grace I would be
in this and every world where I might live, a woman whom the
Lord could trust.
THE GOSPEL OF HEALTH.
It was my remarkably good fortune to be bom of parents
who were clean from the alcohol and tobacco taint, and, so far as
I can trace my ancestry through several generations, there was
but one intemperate person in the ranks, and he was a distant
relative out of the direct line. It was also my unspeakable privi-
lege, being **only a girl," to enjoy the utmost freedom firom
fashionable restraints up to my seventeenth year. Clad dur-
ing three fourths of the year in flannel suits, not unlike those
worn at **g>'mnastics" now by young lady collegians, and
spending most of my time in the open air, the companion in work
as well as in sport of my only brother, I knew much more about
handling rake and hoe than I did of fr>^ing-pan and needle ; knew
the name and use of every implement used by carpenter and
joiner ; could chase the sheep all day and never tire ; had a good
knowledge of farming, gardening, and the like ; was an enthusi-
astic poultry raiser, and by means of this natural, outdoor life,
eight or nine hours' sleep in twenty-four, a sensible manner of
dresS; and the plain fare of bread and butter, vegetables, eggs.
632 The Gospel of Longevity.
milk, fruit and fowl, was enabled to *' store up electricity'* for the
time to come.
My parents lived five years at Oberlin before I was seven
years of age, at the time when *' Grahamites ** were popular, and
they became indoctrinated with many of the ideas of Dr. Jen-
nings, whose *' Water Cure '* book my father was fond of reading.
As a result, the three children were each promised a library, to
cost $100, if we would not touch tea or coffee until we became of
age. Subsequently I used both for years, very moderately, but
have now almost discarded them. A physician was an unknown
visitant to our home in early days. I have no recollection
of such a personage being called for me before I was fourteen,
and although my mother says that, when an infant, I was the
feeblest of her children, I have outlived all the family except her-
self. My father died in his sixty-third year, and my mother is
now in her eighty-fifth, her grandmother having lived to be nearly
ninety-seven, and the ancestors on both sides being remarkable
for their longevity.
I never saw the inside of a school-house until near my
teens, but was encouraged to read and study somewhat at home,
and always lived in an intellectual atmosphere, my parents and
our few friends and neighbors being persons of education and
earnestness of purpose. Although my first school was in a coun-
try district, the teacher was a graduate of Yale, and had been for
years a classical tutor in Oberlin College. My parents were of
Ptuitanical training as to Sabbath observance, and I count its
rhythmic period of rest, as well as the late beginning of my school
days, an element in the health antecedents here enumerated. I
have written thus in detail of what might be popularly termed
the ' ' indirect reasons ' ' for my life-long good health, because my
study of the temperance question teaches me that heredity and
early training are the most direct ''procuring causes" of physi-
cal soundness.
I am now in my fiftieth year, and though, since sharing the
great and varied disabilities of a more conventional life, I have
had two acute illnesses and several slight ones, my health is so
uniform that I have often laughingly told my friends I had com-
posed the first line of my " great epic,'* and it is this :
"Painless, in a worid of pairu"
The Eight-hour Law of Sleep, 633
The chief wonder of my life is that I dare to have so good a time,
both physically, mentally and religiously. I have swung like a
pendulum through my years, '* without haste, without rest'*
What it would be to have an idle hour I find it hard to fancy.
With no headache, why should I not think ** right straight
ahead ' ' ? My whole life has been spent in intellectual activities,
having begun to teach when about twenty years of age, and having
pursued that difficult avocation with no set-back or breakdown until
I dedicated myself to the Temperance Reform in 1874. (I should
except about two years and a half of hard study, writing and
travel in Europe and the East between 1868 and 1870.) In the
last twelve years I have been perpetually *'on the road,** going
15,000 to 20,000 miles per year, visiting in 1883 every state and
territory in the Union and holding a meeting once per day on an
average throughout the entire period. It has been my custom to
write articles and letters and plan work, all day long on the cars,
being thus constantly employed, and then to give an address
at night.
Now, I am aware that this is not a hygienic mode of pro-
cedure, and that to breathe car-air and audience-atmosphere, year
in and year out, is not conducive to the best development. But
it was the only way for me to reach the one thousand towns set
as my ' ' stint ' * (a farm fashion we had, this of * ' doing our stint, ' *
persisted in as an inherited tendency), and feeling so adequate to
the day's doings, I went steadily on, taking the opportunity to
recline in the quiet of my apartment, between the meetings, stat-
ing to my friends that visiting was impossible to me, and making
it an invariable rule to go directly firom the platform to my room.
Here a cup of bread and milk, a cracker, or a few spoonfuls of
beef-tea were taken in order to set up a counteraction to the
movements of the brain, and I went to sleep a few minutes after
going to my room, usually getting eight hours, in every twenty-
four, of * * tired nature's sweet restorer. ' ' A bright Chicago woman
said to me when I told her this, ** You acted according to the prov-
erb, *He who fights and runs away, may live to fight another
day,' for I interpret that to mean, * He who nms away promptly
at nightfall from the day's warfare will live to plunge into the
fight next morning, and so on firom year to year, and will be a
victor always.'"
634 The Gospel of Exercise.
My rising hour has long been from seven to half-past (I wish
it were earlier) and retiring anywhere from half-past seven to half-
past nine, but when traveling it has been about ten. I regard
that hour as the dead line of recuperation, vigor and sustained
mental activity. Eight hoiu^ of writing and study, all of them
between breakfast and tea, has been my rule. After the evening
meal at six o'clock I will not work — lecturing, of course, ex-
cepted. In this field I have studied the non-dramatic style, be-
cause it is less wearing and fully as well adapted to purposes of
information and conviction. Illustrations can be used that involve
but little acting, thus keeping the circulation normal, avoiding
the exposures that attend perspiration, and the reaction resulting
from undue fatigue.
My manner of life has recently been changed fi-om peripatetic
to stationary, and my purpose is, for the next ten years at least,
^should God spare my life so long, to live in my quiet cottage
home at Evanston, in the suburbs of Chicago, with my mother
and a dozen secretaries, and help to spread the temperance propa-
ganda by pen instead of voice. I expect, as a rule, to sit at my
desk fi*om 8:30 or 9:00 A. m., until 6:00 p. m., daily, with a half-
hour's interval from 12:30 to i :oo o'clock, with the exception of an
outing of about half an hour. The tricycle for open air purposes
and Dr. Dio Lewis's home exerciser within doors, are my basis of
gymnastic operations. Walking I delighted in when I could go
unimpeded ; but from the sorrowful day when my hair was first
twisted up and long skirt twisted down, I have never enjoyed that
noble form of exercise, and I have met very few women in this
country who really walk at all. Wrigglers, hobblers, amblers, and
gliders I am familiar with among the ways of women, but walking
is an art hereditarily lost to our sex.
** 'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis, 'tis true ! "
I never touch the pen after tea, and ten o'clock finds our
house dark as a pocket, silent as a tomb, and restful as a cradle.
To this single fact more than all others, excepting fortunate inheri-
tance, I attribute my life-long good health and cheery spirits.
I have not jotted down these personal items because I think
my methods specially noteworthy or by any means faultless.
Hoping that we may learn the health decalogue of our Heav-
Heaven Speed the ''Dress Reform.'' 635
enly Father so thoroughly, and be so loyal to it that we shall all
become as hearty and as happy as, I am sure by the analogies of
Nature and the teachings of grace, He meant us to be, I hereby
declare myself willing to live a century and work right on.
But I must confess that after my long day^s task with the
pen, I say to myself often, " If I could put on a hat, button a coat
arotmd me, and step off freely, how delightful a walk would be. ' *
But no ; there are intricate preliminaries before a woman can do
anything so simple as take a constitutional. In my own case, the
easy wrapper that I wear at my work must be changed for a street
dress, with its long, heavy skirt ; the slippers, for shoes to be but-
toned up ; a bonnet affording no protection from light, wind, or
observation, must be ** tastefully ' * put on; tight-fitting gloves
drawn to their places, and then only, with skirts to be lifted at
every step until one's knees grow weary, the airing may begin.
A man would have two things to do — put on his coat and
crowd a hat over his eyes ; a woman has three articles to take off
(wrapper and slippers), dress to draw on, collar and cuffs to adjust
and pin, shoes to button, wrap to fasten, bonnet to tie, and then
all of their burdens and constrictions to endure.
So, for the thousandth time, I return to my room, actually
too tired to ** get ready" and then ** get over the ground,'* though
Lake Michigan's splendid expanse stretches away to the east,
and there are cool, shady nooks, and tempting by-ways all about
me. I recognize joyfully the progress we have made since I was
a student, when no girl was really ** stylish ** who wore less than
eight white skirts trailing on the ground after her ; but how slowly
we move when women of refinement will wear bustles, lace them-
selves as of old, pinch hands and feet, bare their heads to the blast
that their tufts of bonnets may be * * like the rest, ' ' and simper
their criticisms on ** dress reform.*' Near me on the walls of my
study hang Annie Jenness-Miller's picture and engravings of her
new costumes. I look up at them with a prayerful heart,
saying, *' How long, O Lord, how long ? **
Instead of the walk I would like to take, had I the old-time
conditions — the modest, simple, short dress, loose jacket, and
broad-rimmed hat of auld lang syne — I pen this jeremiad, and bid
God-speed to the earnest-hearted woman who, in roaring Gotham,
plans for us women a costume that hints at better days.
636 The Mind-cure.
"prove all things/'
I am often asked what I think about the mental method, mind-
cure, Christian science, or whatever may be the most appropriate
term, and I have been warned repeatedly against it by excellent and
trusted friends. However, I cannot see in it the danger that many
do. We live in a strangely materialistic age, when thought is
declared to be a secretion of the brain, and revelatidli looked upon
as nothing but a myth. Thousands of well intentioned persons had
come to the end of the rope and were beating their heads against
a stone wall, finding no mode of egress into the upper air of spirit-
uality and faith. It seems to me that just because the world had
gone so far, and had so largely become a victim to the theory that
only seeing is believing, the Heavenly Powers brought in this
great reaction, which declared that the invisible is all and in all,
that thoughts are the real things and things are but effervescent
shadows ; that there is no escape from what is infinitely good
and infinitely immanent in everything created ; that evil is a
negation and must pass away ; that to be carnally minded is
death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. I have
never studied the question seriously, because I have not had the
time, but from conversation with experts in this study, who are
also among the best men and women I have ever known, I have
certainly felt that it would be disloyalty to God and to humanity
for me to speak against this new era. That some who have entered
upon it are not genuine ; that some cases of cure are not actual,
must necessarily be, in so great a movement ; there must be a
counterfeit beside the real, but I am confident that if Christians
will take what is good in this new evangel and eschew what is
evil, it may become a mighty power for the triumph of Him who
said : **My words are spirit and they are life."
Something analogous to this seems to be true of theosophy,
and the occult studies that have come to us from those wonderful
religions of the East, that furnished the soil out of which grew the
tree of life — Christianity. * ' God hath not left Himself without a
witness' * anywhere. A philosophy that takes immortality as its
major premise must conduct toward a good life, as opposed to the
materialism that says, " I was not — I lived and loved — I am not*'
— the saddest epitaph ever penned.
Loyalty to Friends. 637
COMPANIONSHIPS.
If I have a virtue in the world, it is loyalty to old memories
and old friends, and nothing rejoices me so much as to have this
trait believed in by those who walk with me the path of life.
One dear lady who had been my teacher thirty years before, died
in 1886, and her son wrote me that she had mentioned to him in
her last days, her belief that I would gladly write the notice for
our church paper. The request came to me with a sense of solid
satisfaction that she had so believed in me when we had hardly
once met since I was her scholar in the little district school near
Forest Home. It did my heart good to turn aside from my
pressing cares to write the In Memoriam she had desired.
With my naturally adventurous disposition I fear that but for
a strenuously guarded girlhood I might have wandered into hope-
less unbelief But I recall only one reckless friend in all my life,
and I was with her but a single term at school. Christian
women have been my constant and intimate associates through-
out my pilgrimage and Christian men have been like loyal
brothers to me always. Beyond every other influence outside
my home, I reckon that of a circle within which I have moved for
well-nigh fifty years, made up of persons who were chaste, totally
abstinent, truth-telling, philanthropic and devout.
** Tell me with whom thou goest and I'll tell thee what thou
doest.*' No precept was ever more frequently repeated and en-
forced by my parents than this. In guarding Mary and me from
illiterate and harmful associations my father evinced a solicitude
that many of his friends considered morbid. But he would smile
and say, "These are * Two forest nymphs that dwell in the depth
of the woodland shade,' and I propose to keep them innocent,''
So we never went anywhere except with our parents until I was
sixteen, and almost never, after that, until fully fledged and flown.
Even my brother was eighteen years of age before he ever spent an
evening away from home. Around the fireside we were always
busy with books, pencils and plans until the early hour of bed-time
638 My First Inamorata,
came. We were literally never left alone with children or work
people ;* there was always quiet but careful supervision. " Hered-
ity may count for much, but environment is next of kin to
destiny ;* ' these are my mother's words at eight>'-four, the outcome
of her observant and reflective life. Who, then, have entered the
inner circle of my confidence in fifty years ? I ask myself and
answer with deep thankfulness : All who have done so meant to
be good, sought after goodness, lifted their eyes toward the heights
rather than lowered them to the level of the depths. Only two
persons, one of them a child and one a girl in her early teens, ever
said to me things that were calculated to mar the purity of my
thoughts in the formative years of my life, and these were neither
of them persons who had influence with me or the ability to
determine my actions or opinions. To their everlasting honor be
it said that the many men and women who worked in our home
and on our farm, never tried in word or deed to lead us astray.
But I have always felt that he who is forewarned is best fore-
armed, and wished that my first ideas concerning the mysteries of
being had come early to my observant spirit from my dear
mother's lips, which were closed by her reticent New England
habitudes.
Meanwhile, there was the heart, the ardent, impulsive heart
of childhood and of youth, with its perpetual instinct of bestow-
ment, what did it do? I remember with pleasant pain how
early, how vigorously and often that truant heart went forth,
seeking rest and finding none ! I was hardly six years old when
the flame of the ideal burned in my breast for a sweet girl of six-
teen, Maria Hill by name, daughter of ''Secretary Hill," an
English gentleman who was a central figure in the College Board
at Oberlin. Her coming meant a new world, her going shrouded
my little life in gloom, but she never dreamed of this — she only
saw an impetuous child whose papa had (as was the custom in
those days of the hygienic revival) induced the little one not to
eat butter, and paid her a penny a week for such sacrifice, and
who was so determined '* to give her pennies to Miss Hill " that
when the young lady declared that she could on no account
accept them, the child flung them after her retreating form upon
•Margaret Ryan, an Irish girl that lived with us for years, was an exception to this rule,
but then she was as refined as she was good " and her uncle was Bishop of I«imerickl"
•* That Soft, White Hand:' 639
the gravel walk and burst out crying. That was my first ** heart
affair/* and I have had fifty since as surely as I had that one.
I have had the subtle sense of an afiinity for persons of all ages
and conditions, for man and woman, youth and maiden, boy and
girl. The solar system has for a season seemed to revolve around
each one of these beloved objects and for each of them I have
endured all stages of the divine disease that was meant, as I
believe, to acclimate us to heaven. They pass me now in bright
array, my choice procession of immortals; how can I ** express
unblamed *' so much of sweetness and of nobility as they in turn
enshrined for me ? After Maria Hill the hiatus was long. Nature
became my one dear love and for many a youthful year I knew
no other, needed none.
Then came the vision of my cousin Mary G. , several years my
senior, self-poised and gracious, little dreaming of the commotion
that her presence stirred in the wayward heart of her Western
cousin then in her fifteenth year, who coming back to the old
home at the East, met for the first time since infancy a troop of
relatives unknown before except by name. My boy cousins I
liked, my other girl cousins I loved, but for my cousin Mary I felt
nothing less than worship. She had such royal dignity and she
knew books and she was good — so I said to myself a thousand
times over, but she thought not of my devotion and I was far too
shy to tell her. That soft, white hand on mine seemed to complete
the circuit that brought me into harmony with the electric tides of
God's great universe ; life was full to the brim and its rich draught
I drank with solemn joy. But in two weeks we came away and
the star I would have followed faded to a spent meteor within a
year. Next came the sweet-faced blind girl, Carrie, with her gift
of music, sending my blithe spirit up to heaven's gate, but soon
she went away; then Anna C, the superintendent's daughter, but
she liked my sister Mary best and my budding hopes were swiftly
nipped; then my blind music teacher, a young married man of
beautifiil nature, who was wont to make his way alone down to
our house, which was a mile fi'om his, and I was wont to watch
for him at the gate and go to meet him up the road. But so did
sister Mary, and never in the world by voice or sign had he reason
to believe that the elder sister's greeting had more back of it than
the child-like good cheer of the younger* s. Careftdly as I had
640 A Young GirPs Self- Respect,
been reared, I had no special sense of sin in dreaming of this young
man's loveliness. I knew that he would never be the wiser nor
would the woman he loved be grieved ; she was my friend and I
was hidden utterly from both of them in my eye-and-ear-proof
armor woven of mingled cheerfulness and pride. Erelong he, too,
went away, and the next enshrined ideal of my life was Marion,
* * whose soul was like a star and dwelt apart, ' * the high-bred girl
with whom in 1857 I contested the palm for scholarship in Mil-
waukee Female College; then Susie B., the rich merchant's
daughter in that same city, who was a very Saint Cecilia to my
ardent fancy ; and then Maggie H., of early Evanston fame, the
'* wild girl '* of the school, whom I followed to the extent of being
a "law unto myself" as to the rules, but from whom I recoiled
with absolute rage when without any hint to me she arranged
for us to take a surreptitious moonlight horseback ride with Hart,
a certain gay lyOthario of the University, and his friend Will.
Ignorantly I entered into her plot enough to walk out in the
College grounds while all the teachers were at prayer-meeting — a
thing we had no right to do. But when, in the most shadowed
part, two young men rose before us, I dropped her arm and fled
back to the college building like a startled fawn. For this aflfront
I refrained from speaking to my inamorata for three weeks, but
finally made up our difficulty when she admitted that I was right
in saying that no ' * self-respecting girl would ever make a clandes-
tine appointment of any kind with a young man." It was my
mother's fear lest this young woman, who was most attractive,
would get a stronger hold on me, that led her, after I toM the
whole story on going back to Forest Home, to determine that she
would give my father no rest until he left the farm and came to
Evanston to live. Here I met Mary B., for whom my attachment
was so great that when she very properly preferred my brother,
although I had devotedly desired their union, the loss of her was
nothing less than a bereavement, a piteous sorrow for a year and
more, as my journals testify, one of the keenest of my life, to
which the death of my only sister Mary put a sudden, and as I
have always thought, a well-nigh miraculous end, while our
sisterly affection has remained intact. Other attachments fol-
lowed, so much less restful than friendships, that I can not fairly
call them by that consoling name. Their objects were good
My Benefactor and His Daughter. 641
women all, thank God ! and the only trouble was not that we
loved unwisely, but too well. They are all written in the records
of those days. One of them, dating from 1864, led to my trip
abroad with all its riches of observation, study, and acquaint-
ance. A more loyal heart never beat than that of Kate A. Jack-
son, who, though a rich man's daughter, went with me to Lima as
a teacher when I was (in 1867) preceptress of Genesee Wesley an
Seminary, and afterward took the French professor's place in
Northwestern University, leaving there when I did, in 1874. Her
father was founder of the New Jersey Locomotive Works, at
Paterson, a sturdy-natured, generous-hearted man, who freely
adopted his daughter's suggestion that she and I make a long tour
together, for
" We determined to go abrocui^
Togo abroady strange countries for to see."
We stayed over two years, since which time Kate has
spent six years more in foreign lands, but has come home at last,
living, with her accomplished sister, Mrs. Dr. Whitely, and that
lady's two charming young people, next door to us. There are
several other good and gifted women whom I might name as
having belonged to my inner circle of aflfection at some time in my
life; but in Anna A. Gordon, a lovely Boston girl, whom I met
when conducting revival meetings with Mr. Moody, in 1877, I
found the rarest of my intimate friends. For twelve years she has
been at once a solace and support in all my undertakings. I call
her '* Little Heart's-ease," for, as she knows, I have struggled
through the depths and come out on their Beulah side ; have
voyaged through roaring storms to emerge at last in the region of
perpetual calm; and as I am so much her senior she seems quite
dure to be my loved and last.
The loves of women for each other grow more numerous each
day, and I have pondered much why these things were. That so
little should be said about them surprises me, for they are every-
where. Perhaps the "Maids of Llangollen," (in Wales) aflford
the most conspicuous example ; t^^o women, young and fair, with
money and position, who ran away together, refusing all oflfers
to return, and spent their happy days in each other's calm com-
panionship within the home they there proceeded to establish.
Tourists .visit the spot where they once dwelt, to praise their
41
642 The Loves of Women,
constancy and sigh for the peace that they enjoyed. In these
days, when any capable and careful woman can honorably earn
her own support, there is no village that has not its examples
of ** two heads in counsel,*' both of which are feminine. Often-
times these joint-proprietors have been unfortunately married,
and so have failed to '* better their condition *' until, thus clasp-
ing hands, they have taken each other '* for better or for worse/'
These are the tokens of a transition age. Drink and tobacco are
to-day the great separatists between women and men. Once they
used these things together, but woman's evolution has carried
her beyond them ; man will climb to the same level some day,
but meanwhile he thinks he must have his dinners from which
woman is excluded and his club-house with whose delights she
intermeddleth not. Indeed, the fact that he permits himself fleshly
indulgences that he would deprecate in her, makes their planes
diflferent, giving him a sense of larger liberty and her an instinct
of revulsion. This has gone so far on man's part that a learned
writer has a treatise to prove the existence of organic reasons why
men were made to drink and smoke, but women not ! This
opinion sets up a standard that influences the minds of men who
do not use these poisons, and thus extends the domain of the
most harmful separating force that to-day alienates so many men
and women. It is safe to claim that among the leading advo-
cates of woman's advancement, and of an equal standard of chas-
tity for both sexes, we do not find tobacco users or drinkers of
beer and wine.
The friendships of women are beautiful and blessed ; the
loves of women ought not to be, and will not be, when the sacred
purposes of the temperance, the labor, and the woman movements
are wrought out into the customs of society and the laws of the
land. For the highest earthly good that can come to any indi-
vidual, or home, or state, or to humanity, is told in the poet
Thomson's lines :
** Oh happy they, the happiest of our race.
Whom gentle stars unite and in one fate.
Their lives, their fortunes, and their beings blend."
With a belief so orthodox, why did I miss life's crowning
joy ? Surely a serene heart, now closed forever (on the planet
Earth) to love's delirium or delight, may tell its secret for the
** The Most Occult of Dreams:* 643
help of those less way-wise ? One of my early friends was wont to
call me **Opal/' because that jewel has an edge of snow and
heart of flame. When I told my dear mother, going home from
my first term at Evanston, that I had written thus to Maggie :
** I love you more than life, better than God, more than t dread
damnation!'' that great philosopher exclaimed, '* Oh, Frank!
pray Heaven you may never love a man ! "
But her prayer was not answered — for I have been so fortu-
nate as to. fancy, at least, that I loved a man, — nay, more
than one.
When I was but fourteen, a brilliant young scientist came
on a brief visit to our family. Of course he never knew it, ele-
gant fellow that he was, but for many a day I dreamed dreams
and saw visions of which he was the central figure. No one
supposed this, not my own mother, even ; though I have always
claimed that she knew my every thought — however, this was
not a thought — only the most occult of dreams ! We lived so
much alone that I was almost nineteen before the slightest token
of interest came to me from beyond the mystic line that a virtu-
ous woman's glances may not cross. This epoch in my history
took the form of a carefully written note, sent through the post-
oflSce, inviting me to go to a student's entertainment, and the
missive came soon after we removed to Evanston. It was passed
around as a rare curiosity, and the wisdom of the family was
combined in my discreet aflSrmative reply. I took the young man's
arm with feelings akin to terror, for it was the first time in my
life. At the evening's close I noticed that he and I were almost
the only ones remaining. He said reluctantly, ** I beg your par-
don, but is it not time for me to take you home ? " Alas ! the
wise ones of the family circle had not supposed it necessary to
tell me I must give the signal to return, and I was morbidly
afraid of seeming "forward"!
At this distance I understand the situation — I only felt it then.
Of a forceful mind and an imperious will, it was not natural
for me to fall into a passive attitude toward anybody. Hav-
ing so long had great Nature for my teacher, and country free-
dom as my atmosphere, the sudden conventionalities of society set
heavily upon me. Without knowing it, I felt that her code did
not deal with me justly. Her dictum was that no well-bred,
644 The Ineffable Compliment
delicate-natured woman would ever let any man living know
she had a gentle thought of him until he gave the sign. And I
had said in my inmost spirit, not in so many words, but by just
such a vow, ** You heartless old tyrant of custom, since you have
dared thus basely to decree, hazarding the holiest interests of
two lives on the perceptions of the one less finely organized, you
shall have full measure of obedience,'' and no actor, no detective,
no alias ever schooled himself more sedulously to carry out his
part, than I did to be utterly impassive, to treat all men alike,
with universal calm, with casual good-will, and that alone.
And have men dared, when all these stem defenses were set
in array, to speak their potent word to one like me ? Yes, but
under such conditions it *' stands to reason" that most of the
messages received must have been perfunctory, the queries com-
ing by letter and being answered by my secretaries with the official
statement that I had no time for other than business correspond-
ence. But so high has always been my admiration and respect
for any good and true man that never, when I could avoid it, did
I permit one of them to pay me the ineffable compliment of an
expressed personal preference, unless my heart felt the potentiality,
at least, of a response. My mother strictly taught her daughters
to do by other women's brothers as they would have them do by
theirs, /. ^., never through look or word to lead any young man
to an avowal of regard that was not mutual. The ingenuities by
which our handsome Mary *' moved the previous question," that
the impending one might be avoided, were far beyond what her
plainer sister ever needed to employ, and proved the generosity of
Mary's heart — ^for what tribute to a woman's charms and goodness
equals that of the true man who says to her, *' It would be the
highest happiness this world could yield if I might spend my
life with you " ? Only the noblest, best instructed natures among
women are willing to forego the music of such words.
Per contra, the man who permits himself even the most deli-
cate approach in deeds unaccompanied by the honest, self-com-
mitting words that honest women always expect to hear in such
connection, is not the soul of honor, and his familiarity, however
small, should be resented on the instant. ** Hands off" is the
golden maxim for every genuine girl and for each true gentleman.
Lifers Most Intricate Equation. 645
All this I say out of a heart that suffered once and to help those
as yet untried.
A gifted man (who has made two women happy since) once
wrote me on this wise: **Dear friend, methinks your heart
deceives you, for when we meet, though you speak kindly, you
hardly look at me, and I take this as a token. ' ' I replied : ' * Dear
Brother : This is the explanation. I had a clear and direct gaze
until much study weakened my eyes, and I protect them now by
studying the carpet.**
Another, true and loyal, had heard through a near friend of
mine that I was supposed to have a special admiration for him,
whereupon he wrote a frank letter implying the truth of that hy-
pothesis. My answer was, *' Dear Friend : You have had the mis-
fortune to begin at the wrong end of life's most intricate equation ;
you have assumed the value of the unknown quantity — a sin that
hath not forgiveness in this life ; no, nor in that which is to come. ' *
He sent me back a royal letter, saying he ** would never have
dared write what he did, but for the encouragement of my friend's
words, and he would like to know why I of all women might not
help a man out of such a fearful quandary;*' indeed, he went fer-
ther, and declared that '* there was no reason in nature, grace or
anything but sin, why a woman must stifle her heart, and a man
wear his upon his sleeve." But the sphinx that I have always
been had spoken once, and there the drama ended and the cur-
tain fell.
In 1861-62, for three-quarters of a year I wore a ring and
acknowledged an allegiance based on the supposition that an
intellectual comradeship was sure to deepen into unity of heart.
How grieved I was over the discovery of my mistake the journals
of that epoch could reveal. Of the real romance of my life, un-
guessed save by a trio of elose friends, these pages may not tell.
When I have passed from sight I would be glad to have it known,
for I believe it might contribute to a better understanding be-
tween good men and women. For the rest, I have been blessed
with friendships rich, rare, and varied, all lying within the tem-
perate zone of a great heart's geography, which has been called
**cold" simply because no Stanley had explored its tropic cli-
mate, and set down as ''wholly inland " because no adventurous
Balboa had viewed its wide Pacific Sea.
^. w
646 Self-Criticisms.
DEMERITS.
I wonder if we really know ourselves in respect of discount
as well as we do in respect of advantage? It seems equally im-
portant that we should, else our undertakings will be out of all
proportion to our powers, and failure a foregone conclusion. I
have always believed that in a nobler state of society we should
help each other by frank and kindly criticism, coupled with
equally frank praise, and have held, in the face of steady contra-
diction from my friends, that Christian people ought thus to help
each other here and now.
Probably the most haunting disability of my youth was a hot
temper. If, as a child, I stubbed my toe, it was instinctive with me to
turn back and administer a vigorous stroke to the object, animate
or inanimate, that had caused the accident. A blow for a blow
was my invariable rule, but my temper was a swift electric flash,
not the slow burning anthracite of suUenness. Indeed, the sulks
and blues are both foreign to my natural habitudes. My sister,
though vastly more amiable than her older brother and sister, was
somewhat inclined to brood, or *'mump,'* as we graceless young
ones called it.
I well remember the last time that I ever "struck out," and
am ashamed to say it occurred in the first years of my student
life at Evanston. My father had a queer way of buying the
dresses, bonnets, indeed, almost the entire outfit of his daughters,
and continued it until we were well nigh grown up. One winter
he brought me home a red worsted hood that I declared I hated
with **a hatred and a half,*' but all the same I had to wear it. We
two sisters were wont to dress alike, and while the bright color
set off Mary's dark blue eyes and ruddy cheeks, it simply extin-
guished what little * 'looks" I had, and some of my school-mates
made fun of my appearance. One, in particular, a handsome girl
belonging to a family that was well at the front socially, hectored
me unmercifully. I gave her fair warning that "if she did not
stop she would be sorry," but this only added zest to her attack.
We were all at the entrance to the chapel, school was out, and no
teacher left in sight. I began putting on the hated hood and the
"hectoring" also began. My anger burned so fiercely against my
handsome tormentor that, though she was much taller than I, the
No Need of Money. 647
vigor of my attack was such that she was flung in a crumpled
heap between the benches, face foremost on the floor. Nobody
spoke — ^the deed was so sudden that it took their breath away; I
finished tying on that red hood and walked home. The handsome
girl never retaliated, never referred to the subject again, and we
have been the best of friends from that day to this.
Dear mother says she does not know when in well-nigh thirty
years she has seen me angry, and beyond a momentary flash that
I am glad to see and say grows more infrequent every year, that
inborn energy is slain. I have only written of it here because I
want the picture truthful, and hope my failings may help others,
handicapped as I have been, to "rise on the stepping stones of
their dead selves to higher things."
A tendency to exaggeration is the next enemy that I have
tried to fight. When traveling in Europe, my friend, Kate Jack-
son, would see the same landscape or city, picture or celebrity , and
in the midst of my enthusiastic efforts to describe them she would
often interrupt with the words, "Why, Frank, you don't mean to
say that we saw all that?' ' While I would break in on her efforts at
description, with the words, ' 'You didn't half tell it. ' ' Neither had
meant to give a wrong impression, but the personal equation
needed in both cases to be taken into the account. "You see
double," has been said of me when I had delineated a friend
whom I admired, but if so it was with one real and one idealiz-
ing eye. It comforts me to know that in the habit of accurate
recital I have gained greatly with the years, and to know also that
I have n't a near friend who does not deem me fairly accurate and
scrupulously truthful so far as my intention goes.
As to money, a five-cent silver coin sewed into each tiny toe
of a pair of stockings knit by the tireless hands of my father's
mother and sent to the far West when I was about ten years old,
was the first (except my ' 'butter pennies' ' ) of my financial pos-
sessions. Money was something far off", unnecessary, except for
the convenience of those who dwelt in cities. On the farm, having
formed an alliance with generous old Dame Nature, we were
abimdantly able to take care of ourselves without it. This was
about the view I held in childhood.
When in Milwaukee, at seventeen, attending school, good
648 First Earnings,
Irish Mike, one of our farm hands, sent fifty cents apiece to Mary
and to me, all the spending money we had for three whole months.
After a careftil consultation with my wise aunt Sarah, I invested
mine in a ticket to the menagerie (not the present circus, by a
long moral distance), a blank book for my historical and other
charts, and five cents* worth of peppermint candy. When away
at school in Evanston, we had no spending money either; it was
never named or thought of as necessary. My father furnished
us with all needful stationery and postage, and paid all bills.
**What would you more?'* he used to ask. But \ wrote an arti-
cle for the Prairie Farmer, and received two dollars for it at two
difierent times; whereupon I invited my friends to a feast, also
treated my favorite Maggie to a buggy ride, and for the first time
looked upon myself as a moneyed proprietor. From that day to
this I have been, by pen and voice, an earner of money. My first
solid possession was a little gold stud for my sister and myself,
then a pair of sleeve buttons, then an engraving of Longfellow's
* ^Evangeline, * * then a handsome gilt-edged book for my sister's
journal and a photograph album for each of us, then the photo-
graphs of mother, Mary and myself, but for which we should
have had no picture of the dearest girl that ever died. In all
those earlier years I kept accounts, but was careless about adding
them up; and as for a "balance sheet," I have never even seen an
object so distasteful. When tottering out uncertainly into the
world of bread-winners (for while I lived near home my father
generally clothed me, and my own small earnings went for
* 'extras"), I was, for a brief period, somewhat g^ven to borrow-
ing in a small way; but the concurrent testimony of all who know
me best is that the money has been scrupulously returned. I
am one who, while she never lays up money, keeps the finances
in a snug, thrifty way, and is careftil to meet all obligations of a
financial sort.
For this good reputation the chief credit should be given to
those good women who, ever since the unspeakable loneliness of
my sister's going from me, have been what she was tome, '*guide,
philosopher and friend." A thousand times they hear my * 'don't
forget, ' ' whether it is to pay the insurance or to return a borrowed
slate pencil, and with pimctilious care they see it done. This
The Height of Human Brotherhood. 649
care-taking about rendering even-handed justice in financial
accounts was a prime trait with my parents and in both their
families. My mother gives no rest to herself or to us while a debt,
no matter how small, hangs over us. Though I have earned tens
of thousands of dollars, I have nothing except Rest Cottage, the
joint inheritance of mother and myself, and finally to revert, after
a tenure of "life use," to the National W. C. T. U., to be em-
ployed by that association for the purpose of training boys and girls
to habits of physical purity, with especial reference to personal
chastity and the non-use, in any form, of alcoholics and narcotics.
For I have felt, as the great Agassiz declared of his, that one of
my vocation * 'could not afford to make money .' * Living com-
fortably, but with entire simplicity, and not keeping horse or cow,
we barely succeed in making both ends of the year meet, after
giving away from a fifth to a fourth of our income. Until 1886
I was not salaried by the National W. C. T. U., and for three years
before that, generous friends sent money to mother to keep the
home intact. I hold that a reformer cannot advantageously lay up
money— at lea^t I cannot. The leverage lost in public confidence
is too great an off-set; the demands are too varied, constant and
imperious. Some years ago I set out to receive no more than $25
per lecture, and though offered $50, $75 and $100, 1 have steadily
declined to advance my figures. My fiiends have talked severely
to me about this, but I am convinced my course was Christian, and
along financial lines more in harmony with that day of brotherhood
toward which we hasten than any other one thing of all that I have
tried to do. For I believe that *'the love of money is the root of
all evil;" that it has warped and minified more lives, turned
more homes into small compacts of perdition, and defeated the
Gospel's blessed purpose, more than all other curses that ever
crazed the human heart. May the slow, steady lift of Christian
justice hasten us to the grander height where stand already, with
clear heads and helping hands, some of the noblest thinkers of the
world.
6so Milestones of the Years.
BiY HOI.IDAYS.
The holidays of fifty years ! Seven weeks apiece of Christ-
mas, New Year, and the Fourth of July, with Washington's Birth-
day and one's own, as milestones on life's pathway — surely that
ought to be a toothsome theme, redolent of savory dinners and
firagrant with good will.
My seventh is the first birthday I recall. We were in the
isolated Wisconsin farm-house, newly built and unplastered, not
to say unpainted. But mother had made me a big rag-doll, fasten-
ing the historic curls, described before, upon its head, and father
had painted its face, drawing thereon the most surprising pair of
eyes it has ever been my lot to see. Doll Anna was attired in a
Turkey red calico gown, made fi-om one of my mother's old
aprons, and I was permitted to hold her all day, except when I
put her to sleep on the pillow on mother's high, four-posted bed.
Later on, my sister fell heir to this doll and its hair, and last of
all, my brother's children played with its remnants in their in-
fancy. On the day that mother, in the midst of all her farm-
work, gave me this memorable and beloved image, she made me
a birthday cake, and permitted me to wear her gold pencil, — a
souvenir of her teaching years, and the one article of jewelry that
she possessed. Happy as a queen, I little knew, what now I
know so well, that the spell wrapped around me that day, and
every other, was spun from my mother's happy thoughts.
The Fourth of July was a high day in our Zion, for patriot-
ism was the most attractive form of religion that my reckless
childhood knew. Thanksgiving was passed lightly over, in that
new country where there were no absent members of the family
to come home. Christmas made us hang up our stockings and
find but little there, next morning ; New Year hardly counted at
all. Birthdays cut no great figure, even Washington's going for
almost nothing. But the Fourth of July ! — that came in, went
on, and passed out, in a blaze of patriotic glory. This does not
mean powder, though, and a big noise, for never a cracker nor
torpedo snapped off our Yankee Doodle * * sentiments ' ' on the
old farm in all the years. We had no money to spend, and if we
had, it would n't have been allowed to pass away in smoke. Nor
had we any fire- works. Not so much as a single *' rocket " ever
shot toward the stars above the close-set trees that sheltered
New Yearns Calls. 651
Forest Home. From the steeple on the bam we watched with
wonder the fiery serpents and Roman candles ** up at Janesville/*
three miles away, and shuddered in the summer dark at thought
of what it would be to fall down the steep roof beneath us, as
father had so nearly done once, when painting a favorite orna-
ment upon the Gothic gable. But Forest Home patriotism rose
all the higher, perhaps, because it lacked the fizz and buzz and
sputter of the regulation Fourth of July ''break-down.**
Mother had talked to us so much about America that fi'om
earliest recollection we had spelled nation with a capital N. To
us our native land was a cherishing mother, like our own in
gentleness and strength, only having so many more children,
grateful and glad, under her thoughtful care. We loved to give
her praises, and half believed that sometime, when we grew big
enough, and got out into the wide, wide world, we should find her
and kneel to oflfer her our loving service and to ask her blessing.
The ''Annual Agricultural and Mechanics* Fair of Rock
County'* was another notable holiday, perhaps the most pro-
nounced of all the year. Of later Christmas-tides, there was one
in Paris, and my Roman Christmas was noteworthy. New Year's
calls did not begin for me until my twentieth year. We had lived
in the country twelve years, where no such novelty was known,
and it was with not a little perturbation that we arrayed ourselves
' * to receive with mamma. * * Evanston was a wee bit of a village,
but the University newly planted there had attracted a really
cultured group of men and women, while the students were a very
*' likely'* class of young people. My fears — for the others had
none — ^lest we might not know just what to say or do were put
to flight by the advent at nine A. m. of a quartette of boys hardly
more than half my age, with whose pleasant talk of outdoor sports
I was in perfect sympathy, and when the grown-ups came they
were in groups so large and so intent on seeing "who could
make the most calls,** that conversation was impossible, and the
business-like spirit of the day was so thoroughly Chicagoesque
that I forgot my fears, and concerned myself chiefly with " count-
ing up ** how many calls we had. From that day on, the custom
has seemed to me to be one best honored in the breach, though a
few of our friends who still drop in find those of us who are left
sincerely glad to see them. But the convivial feature alone gave
652 Mother's Eightieth Birthday.
cohesion to the custom of New Year's calls, and it has already
fallen into disuse. The only day thus employed that I ever really
enjoyed was in 1875, when the Chicago W. C. T. U. received its
friends.
Among the touching incidents of the day was a call from a
young German, who came in, arm in arm with his wife. He
signed the pledge while she wept tears of joy. He gave her the
witnessed pledge-card, and she took it as if it had been a wedge
of gold. He clasped her hand and kissed her, and we all knelt
in prayer. He looked up as I pointed to our beautiful motto
above the pledge-table, ** Trust in God," and promised me he
would, and they went away weeping. Yet they understood no
word that I had spoken, — it was wholly an ** affair of the heart **;
but how sacred and how true !
But mother's eightieth birthday (1885) was the greatest hol-
iday that our house ever saw. Twenty-five hundred invitations
were sent out to our old friends and the white ribboners, in the
name of Mrs. Mary B. Willard and myself. Evergreens came from
her native town, Danville, Vt., from our former home on Pleas-
ant street, Oberlin, Ohio, from the Wisconsin farm, with products
of **the old place,** kindly ftimished by the present owners;
gifts in great variety were sent from everywhere ; reformed men
with their families decorated and lighted up the grounds ; old
neighbors at Janesville, Wis., united in a testimonial; Whit-
tier and John B. Gough, Neal Dow and Marietta Holley, with
hundreds of others, sent letters and remembrances. Kinsley
served the feast, with eighty candles gleaming around the birth-
day cake. Mamie Willard, her youngest grandchild, recited this
as she gave her an album :
Dear grandmamma, I'm only ten,
While you have passed four score ;
But every day I live with you
I'm sure I love you more.
And I do hope, when I*m as old,
That I'll be kind like you,
And make the children care for me
When I am eighty, too !
I pray that God will let you stay
Here ten more years at least ;
Greetings and Gifts, 653
And when yonr ninetieth birthday comes,
Then /will make the feast.
And with this wish, and loving kiati
Because you are so dear,
I want to give you, for your own
This birthday souvenir.
A group of lovely children brought a basket with eighty roses,
repeating Anna Gordon's happy lines :
Now, last of all, yonr little friends
Have just a word or two ;
We can*t imagine how 'twould seem
To be as old as you.
But then you have so young a heart,
And are so good and kind.
If we could all grow old like yon,
We think we should n't mind.
We bring you eighty roses fair.
One for each fragrant year ;
Accept them with a blessing, please.
From little hearts sincere.
Anna also wrote a song of which space permits only a
single stanza. It was rendered by voices sweet as the song's
significance, to the tune of ** Auld Lang S3me **:
We join to-night to honor one
Whose crown of eighty years
Reflects a faith that's bom of love,
A hope that conquers fears :
A«life enriched by blessed deeds
All through its busy days ;
A soul that e'en in darkest hours
Still sings its song of praise.
Down upon the sweet scene looked the portraits of our trio
beloved who had passed onward. Dear mother was her own
unchanging, sunny self, and after receiving from eight until
eleven, was up bright and early next morning, going to ** Love
Feast '* and to " Quarterly Meeting ** at the church.
Mother's reply to the birthday greetings was as follows :
I have no language in which to respond appropriately to the kindly sen-
timents just expressed in such polished phrase. This is my eighty-first
birthday. Eighty years is a long time, longer than any one now present
can remember. I did not expect to live so long, I wonder that I have. And
654
Mother's Reply.
•o my friends htm come to congratulate me npon mjr continaed life and
health. I appreciate your kindness, and the honor yon do me ; coming, as
it does, from persons of exceptional excellence of life and character, and
of rare discrimination and attBinmcnt,'it will lend a halo to the sunset of
mj life. But I am aware that it is to an ideal that you show this loving
Gomtesy and unfeigned respect. I, too, have had ideals from my girlhood,
and I still pay homage to the creations of my imagination, just as others do.
It does no harm when our friends put an oTcreHtimete npon ns ; it stimn-
lates ns to endeavor to be such petvons as our friends charitably think
I have a prayer lo my heart for yon all, that your lives may be prolonged
and that your influence in the canse of God and humanity may be extended
and multiplied until time shall not be measured by the flight of years.
Accept my sincere and gratefnl thanks for this expression of your kind
Mother* s First Temperance Pledge. 655
MOTHER.
Concerning my mother, I wish to say that for mingled strength
and tenderness, ** sweetness and light,** I have never met her
superior. The word ** dauntless*' best expresses the attitude
of her mind; the word ** loving,** that of her heart. She has
such equipoise of character, such anchorage in God, that no
storm surprises or is able to make shipwreck of her sovereignty
and faith.
My father and mother both had marked gifts with voice and
pen, and a colloquial quaintness that kept our home in perpetual
merriment. My brother and sister had a rich inheritance of
humor from this double source of drollery and fun. It did not
take the form of far-fetched puns or thrice-told anecdotes, but
bubbled up perpetually in original phrases and felicities of play-
fulness that enlivened their conversation like the play of light-
ning upon a summer cloud. But beyond all of ** My Four ** best
and nearest ones, she ranks, whose supreme gift of motherliness
reached, in her children's estimation, the height of actual genius.
My mother was a school-teacher not far from Rochester, in
the prime of her youth, beginning at the age of fifteen. An ele-
gant gentleman entering her school-house one day, asked if he
might make a temperance speech. It was Gen. Riley, of Roch-
ester, who lived to be nearly one hundred years old, and talked
temperance all his life, being a man of wealth and going out at
his own expense to speak. This lecture that he gave in mother's
school-house was the first she ever heard, and she signed the
pledge then and there for the first time. One of her friends, a
young man, learned of this later, and thought it so purely fanat-
ical that he said with warmth to her, ** I hope, just to pay you
for doing that, you will never be able to get married.** This is
an interesting side-light on the popular thought of that day.
656 A Septuagenarian President
When mothd- was seventy years old she became President
of the Woman's Temperance Union of Evanston. I am very
glad that she, though in the evening of her life, may be reckoned
not only a white ribboner, but as one who has served in the army
as captain of a company recruited in her own village, and which
still holds on its way, one of the best, most level-headed Unions
in the whole ten thousand.
Mother says that at family worship in her home, they were
wont to sing together, ** How firm a foundation, ye saints of the
I/)rd," and her parents used to say ** it would never wear out,
because it was so full of scripture.'* When mother came back
to us, after being confined in her room six weeks, we sang that
hymn for her, Anna and I, at family prayers, and she broke in
at the verse about ** hoary hairs," and said, **How I enjoyed
that fix)m my old grandmother, who lived to be ninety-seven, and
then I enjoyed it fix)m my dear father, who was eighty-six when
he passed away, and now my daughter enjoys it for me, who
am eighty-four, and perhaps she will live on to be as old as I,
when I feel sure she will have friends who will enjoy it just as
tenderly for her. ' * I said, * * The hymn is memorable in connection
with the St. Louis Convention, where we sang it just before we
entered on the great political debate, and I was wonderfully borne
up by the words beginning,
''The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose,
I will not, I will not desert to its foes."
But above all other hymns, mother's favorite seems to be, in
these days :
"Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on.'*
On the 26th anniversary of our Mary's funeral day, Jime loth,
1888, when she was slowly recovering from her long illness, my
mother said, coming into the * *Den* * where I was writing, and stand-
ing near the door, with her beautiful hands raised and clasped
as her frequent custom is, *' When I slip away before long, as I
shall, you must be consoled by remembering how long you have
had your mother ; how much of our pilgrimage we have walked
together, and that you are already over the roughest of the road.
I
I
\ ■
■4
I<
Not a Clog or Hindrance y 657
for you are well-nigh fifty and I am in my eighty-fourth year.
Then you must be glad and grateful that I was not a clog or
hindrance to you, but kept my health so long and retained my spirit
of good cheer and tried to make your home a real and happy one.
And then you must be glad that you are able to keep up such a
home, one that grows more beautiful and pleasant every year, and
is hallowed by so many sweet and sacred memories. Few
daughters could have done for their mothers what you have done
for me. From the other side, I can help you more, perhaps, while
I leave you untrammeled, for I cannot bear to be an invalid on the
hands of one whose life is so greatly and growingly burdened. I
have never been a hindrance to you in anjrthing, and you do not
know how it would grieve me to become one now. If I were
not here you would be likely to spend your winters South, and
your throat seems to require it as you grow older, and the or-
ganic trouble so increases. But I can never live anywhere but
here. I am a sort of snail and Rest Cottage is my shell.
**They are nearly all gone now, our five, of whom we used to
talk so much together, and I shall slip quietly away from you and
follow them. Don't allow yourself to grieve, my child, for the
time will fly so much faster than you think until you too are
gathered home, and so we shall all be * forever with the Lord.* '*
The same day, I think, she said to me at dinner, **You have
always been« asking your friends to tell you your faults. For
myself, I do not care to hear about mine. At my age there is no
help for them. Rather let me say with Whittier,
* Suffice it if— my good and ill unreckoned — •
I find myself, by hands familiar, beckoned
Unto my fitting place.' "
When she was seventy-five years old I took her back to her
birthplace in Danville, Vt., which she had not seen since her
eleventh year, and she found the location of the old home and
school house with unerring eye, though not the faintest remnant
of either yet remained. It did my heart good to have her visit
New York and Boston, and to look out over "old ocean's gray
and melancholy waste," which she had never thought to see.
She has also attended the National W. C. T. U. conventions at
Washington and Minneapolis, going as a delegate.
42
658 *' Alone in the House,''
Life is a joy to her among the hundred papers and magazines
coming to us each week; she looks over her favorites, examines
many books sent me for review, and gives me her opinion, for I
can seldom find time to read them; she goes to church once in
awhile, but mainly stays in her own room, except when our kind
neighbors take her out to ride. The presence of her grand-chil-
dren, Robert and Kate, Frank and Mary, who were with us
last summer, brightened her days greatly; in her grandson, Robert,
she seems to live anew his father's youthful days, and from her
illness of last year she seems to have recovered altogether.
In the earlier years of my temperance touring, mother
always said to me, **Go, my daughter, your work is mine —
I will stay at home and pray for your safe return.*' So I left
her with our good Hannah and usually a student in the house,
my brother and his family living in Evanston, and some of them
seeing her daily. After his death we were all together, as my
sister built an annex to Rest Cottage, and in the latest years my
secretaries have been with her, and our kind and capable Swede
girl, Eda. It pained me not a little to find one day in mother's
portfolio these lines, composed after she was seventy years of age:
ALONE IN THE HOUSE.
Alone in the house! Who would dream it,
Or think that it ever could be;
When my babes thrilled the soft air with love notes
That had meaning for no one but me ?
Alone in the house ! Who would dream it,
Or think that it ever could be,
When they came from their small garden-castle,
Down under their dear maple tree:
Or from graves of their pets and their kittens
With grief it would pain you to see.
Then with brows looking weary from lessons,
Pored over with earnestness rare,
And then from a thoughtful retirement.
With solitude's first blanch of care.
A house of stark silence and stillness
Is this, where I think of the rush
Of childhood's swift feet at the portal.
And of childhood's sweet spirit of trust
All alone in the house, all alone.
Mother's Cooking, 659
On this generous festival day.
O where have my girls gone this New Year's,
Who made the home merry as May ?
One went to the call of Death's angel,
And one, duty called her away.
0 how will it be in the future ?
1 wonder so how it will be.
When we all meet together in Heaven,
Husband, son, gentle daughters and me ?
Who will bring us together in glory,
When the long separation is done ?
'Tis the Friend who will never forsake u^
And who never has left us alone.
Then fearless I'll enter to-morrow,
'Twill be one day nearer our home.
But when shall we reach there, I wonder ?
Where father, brother and sister now rest,
To dwell with the Christ who redeemed us.
In the beautiful land of the blest ?
Shut in from life's strange contradictions,
These questionings, these heart-aches and tears,
Never more shall I sigh for the absent.
Throughout all eternity's years !
My dear mother was an admirable home-maker as well as
housekeeper. The literature of her good housekeeping was en-
shrined in two volumes that always lay upon her dressing bureau,
Catherine Beecher*s ** Domestic Economy," and the ** Domestic
Receipts,'* by the same author. She was immaculately neat,
though we never felt oppressed by it. There was a wholesome-
ness about our way of living, a comfortable abundance without
any approach to display, and an inviting table, with mother's
cooking, the flavor of which remains with me as one of the most
pleasant of my childish memories. Indeed, since then, it seems
to me, I have cared very little about the pleasures of the table.
I remember the samp she used to make and what a luxury we
children thought it with the fresh sweet milk from our own cows,
and the hulled com that she often had ** doing " on the back of
the stove for our especial delectation.
One of her pet books was, *' The Mother at Home." Noth-
ing seemed to fascinate her so much as the few volumes that
were at her command relative to the proper training of children.
I think there must be twenty now where there was one in
her day.
66o ** Young' hearted when OldV
When she was eighty-four, my mother said to me one day in
her reminiscent tone : ** I sometimes wonder, as I think it over,
that I minded it so little when you were away almost all the time
for so many years, and I lived here in this house. It is well for
you that neither of your parents took on unnecessary care. Your
father never worried, he never laid awake or tossed upon his
pillow. He often said to me that he did not lose sleep through
care. He had a philosophical way of looking at everything, in-
deed, we both had, and you inherit it. The Thompson gener-
osity, the Willard delicacy, the Hill purpose and steadfastness,
the French element coming from the I^ewis family, make up an
unique human amalgam.'*
Mother was fond of music, and on the farm she taught her-
self to play on the melodeon. She was always studious to
acquire, and we felt, although she did not say it, that she had a
purpose to keep along with her children, so that they should not
look upon her as antiquated, or come to acquirements themselves
that made her a less congenial comrade. In this she surely
showed the subtlest wisdom.
I think the key to mother's long and tranquil life is to be
found in the conscientious care with which she required herself
to sleep. Many an evening, so many that it became a proverb
in the family, she would take her leave of us before the circle
around the evening lamp was broken, saying, ** I must go to bed
and to sleep, for my children's sake, that I may still be young-
hearted when I'm old." Of course, this made us think that
sleep had magic in it, and the habit was sedulously followed by
my sister and myself, and, so far as I know, by my brother.
One of my mother's most frequent stories when she was
taken to task for not initiating her daughters early into the
routine of daily domestic cares, was this : ** I once read about two
Arabs entering on a competition between their favorite steeds.
They flew over the ground as by magic, and for a long time were
neck and neck, as if their horses had been paired ; then one shot
a short distance ahead of his rival, and he who was left behind
called out, ' Did your horse ever do a day's plowing?' * Yes,'
was the answer, *just one day.* 'Then I will win the race,'
proudly exclaimed the Arab whose horse had been left a little
behind, * for the steed I ride has lived a free life always, and never
Scrap-books, 66 1
knew a plow.' He urged him forward with ever>' token of affec-
tion and of confidence, outstripped the Arab who had thought
to gain the race and came in with grand strides to the goal far
in advance of him.'*
My mother's theory was not that girls should not do house-
work, but that if they distinctively evinced other tastes that were
good and noble, they should be allowed to follow these to their
conclusion, and that in doing so they would gain most happiness
and growth themselves, and would most truly help forward the
progress of the world.
Mother dictates this account of her occupations between
seventy and eighty-four :
A capable Swede girl named Hannah Swan son was with us the best
part of ten years. She was very desirous to learn, and having leisure much
of the time, I enjoyed teaching her, she was so earnest and appreciative.
She took lessons in the simple rules of arithmetic, read history and paid
some attention to the principles of English grammar ; she was quick to
reckon and I could send her to the bank or to pay any bills and found her
always accurate. I taught her a little of everything. She was prominent
in the Swedish Sunday-school and in church work in her own church. She
is now happily married, has a comfortable home of her own. While she
was with us one summer. I remember I thought it would be pleasant for her
to have her friends, the other girls who worked in the neighborhood, come
in and take lessons in English. So I gave them an afternoon each week, I
think it was Thursday. They were bright, improved rapidly, and seemed
very happy ; I had a class of five such girls for years, and to me it is a very
pleasant memory. Since I gave up the active <:ares of the family, I have
amused myself one year (my eighty-fourth) by keeping a journal ; writing
in it every day things that seemed to me to be of interest, and choice say-
ings of the good and gifted. I have also occupied myself by clipping from
the newspapers, of which we have a hundred or two each week, such things
as I considered to have superior merit, or on some favorite topic, and have
preserved them in scrap-books, of which I have a voluminous collection,
which I think will be of interest to the younger members of the family in
years to come. Though fond of the society of my friends, I have found
pleasant pastimes in these occupations in my own home. I have preferred
that other people should come to see me, rather than that I should go to
see them. I do not find life less enjoyable as I grow older and the cares
fall off. I have a world full of people to sympathize with ; many to love ;
many to deplore ; and on the whole, sufficent to interest and keep the sym-
pathies of my heart alive. I have none but kindly feelings for any human
being ; and there is no person whom I would not gladly comfort if I could ;
and so '* my days go on, go on," without haste and without rest, while the
ideal future lends inspiration to my buoyant hopes.
662 The Do-everything Method,
I have but one fault to find with mother : she strenuously
insists on my drinking a weak decoction of tea and coflfee in oppo-
sition to my declared purpose, and I think it right to state the
fact publicly, inasmuch as she is proud of it, and I have publicly
given in good faith the impression that tea and coffee were ban-
ished from my bill of fare.
Miss Mary Allen West, editor of The Union Signal, and one
of my mother's chief admirers, asked her to pencil some of her
views on the training of children, which she did in these words :
I have been asked to write some of the thoughts suggested by my exper-
ience in training my own children. We lived in Oberlin, Ohio, when my
children were in their infancy. There were mothers' meetings at stated .
times ; I felt my utter inefficiency to train these young immortals ; I was
almost always present at the meetings. I hoped they would tell me just
what to do, so that having the approved formula, or program, I might make
no mistake. But new conditions were constantly arising, and in my despair
I said to a wise friend, "I don't learn anything from those meetings! I
don't know what to do." He said, " They are making an impression upon
you all the time." It gave me a little comfort to think that perhaps down
deeper than my consciousness I was gaining a gleam of light
And now, first of all, I would insist, teach your children to be truth-
ful ; by all the incentives that occur to your prayerful thought, keep their
love and confidence so that they will be open to you as the day. Then I
would recommend the do-every thing method, according to the varying needs
of your priceless charge. If the nerves are startled, quiet them in the best
way you can. Don't put your child into a dark room and let it cry itself to
sleep. It would be more motherly to hang it to the limb of a tree, like an
Indian baby, where it would see the light and feel the gentle motion of the
breeze. Don't regard it as a mere animal, only to be fed and clothed. It
needs sympathy very early ; it smiles back your love when only a few weeks
old. Never punish a child when it can think you are in anger or about to
take its life. It will be so frightened as to lose all self-control. You may
think it obstinacy when the little creature is in a frenzy inspired by onte in
whose power it is utterly helpless. Mothers should try to keep their health,
so as to be bright, agreeable company for the older children, and to be pa-
tient with the little ones. I know this is easier said than done, especially
if the mother is sick or overborne with care ; but the attempt, if partially
unsuccessful, will not fail of its reward. The habit of unselfishness and
kindness can not be too early impressed. The mother should be in spirit
and manner, or should aim to be, such as she desires the child to become. I
would not recommend over indulgence, but genuine tenderness and love can
hardly go to an extreme, especially in the early helpless years. If compli-
cations arise between the children, do not let them accumulate. Don't let
the little ones lie awake all night dreading a punishment in the morning.
Deal with each case at once upon its own merits without referring it to any
Character 'forming, 663
umpire but yourself. When they are old enough, to commence study, do
not be indifferent to the trials they meet with in the effort to solve the, to
them, difficult problems, but solve them often yourself ; don't be so fearful
about weakening their self-reliance and desire for high achievement as to
the future. On no account allow them to be discouraged at the outset.
Should a child show a strong bias toward any laudable line of life that
promises self-support and easy independence I would encourage this ten-
dency with all my power. Try to cultivate a tender conscience, a delicate
sensitiveness to right and wrong. I would place the acquisition of character
infinitely before that of wealth, desirable as is a moderate share of the latter.
Wealth ends with life, character is immortal, and toward perfection all our
efforts should tend. I must not forget my pet idea to be more careful to
praise children for doing well, than to chide them for doing ill. When the
children are young and in the mother's care more directly, there may be a
feeling of comparative safety, but when they bloom into young men and
women, and begin to assume personal responsibility, it is the hour of doom
which threatens to make or mar all your careful handiwork. Who is wise
enough to counsel then ? Silence seems safest, but silence would be trea-
son ; the mother must have the heart of her loved ones in keeping in this
hour of destiny ; no one can be consulted with such safety as she, and she
will need the electric light of Deity to guide her in this supreme emergency.
Who can arrest the fl3dng hoiurs ? What issues hang upon the decision of a
moment I She can find refhge only in Him who has said, " If ye ask any-
thing in my name I will do it." Here she may anchor in a sublime faith
that the young, inexperienced, and adventurous feet may, through infinite
riches of grace, be led into paths of safety, usefulness, and to a lasting peace.
mothbr's retrospect at seventy-six.
My daughter wishes me to sketch some incidents of past years in our
Wisconsin home. But who can picture the changing skies or the currents
in the ocean ? Lives are experienced not written. Young life came to me
with odors wafted from eternity. Feelings, perceptions, fancies were
mingled in a kind of chaos. Then the prospect widened, every aspect be-
came more clearly defined, more serious, more grave. Then came a very
hopeful, but solemn womanhood, wifehood, and who can write it — the story
of my motherhood ? My life would not have been more changed if some
white-robed messenger from the skies had come to me and said, " I will send
five apiritual beings into your arms and home. Two I shall soon recall,
three may remain. It is a momentous charge, potent for good or ill, but I
will help you, do not fear. " Who would attempt to explain the change that
comes to thehomb where such mysterious questions are entertained ? The
material care demanded by helpless infancy ; the boundless welcome burst-
ing from parental hearts, the feeling of a new and measureless responsibility,
the unspeakable tenderness of parental love, the painful consciousness of
limited powers in the presence of an infinite need. We can not stay it, hab-
its are begun, character is forming, destiny is being determined. Here are
wise little faces looking up to you, as to an oracle, every nerve of the soul
664 Life's Changes.
thrilling to your slight^ touch, divining by a strange intuition your
tone and spirit, with the certainty of a seraph. Mother, step softly, you
shall be the accepted creed of these young immortals ; in all the coming
years these unwritten lives shall herald your example and counsels when
yoa are resting trom your labors.
To the parent as to the child, there is something strangely pathetic in
the first efiEbrts to practice its infant wings, the first struggles to solve the
mysteries of its being. " Where is Christ ? " Prances once inquired of her
father, "I can not see Him, I do not feel His arms around me." And then
how inspiring to mark the change when the soul grasps the m3r8tery of the
atonement, and proves by the development of childhood into maturity, that
the spirit searcheth all things, even the deep things of God. Oliver, when
writing his first letter to his grandmother, was told he could improve it by
rewriting ; he did so, and was encouraged by being told he had bettered it,
and was then asked to copy it again. I can not forget, after nearly forty
yean, how despairingly he looked up and said, *'I can not write any better
with my present amount of knowledge." I saw him in a very few years
with plumed wings, ascending to a high intellectual life, beyond the realm
of my thoughts. The quiet happenings in our farm-life, remote from town,
were so different from the noisy tumult of a large city that the spirit
there was a direct contrast to what my children later learned. The educa-
tion of the children was more the result of circumstances than of any defi-
nite plan, except the living in the country ; there was special solicitude in
regard to their intellectual wants. For their moral training, living remote
from the excitements of the town, and depending for the most part on older
persons for society, the conditions were not unfavorable.
Of their physical education there is not much to be said. They lived
largely in the outdoor air. Their lives were free from restraint ; their plans
seldom or never opposed if harmless and at all practicable.
I remember once, when tired and weary of care, I went to my room and
had determined on a restful and quiet hour, but Frances came with her hands
full of children's papers, The Myrtle and Youths s Cabinet, ** I came, my
dear, to be alone and to think my own thoughts," I said. She seated herself
upon the carpet, and with perfect nonchalance, remarked, "It is natural
that I should want to be with my mother, and I mean to be," then proceeded
to read her papers, to which there was no further objection made.
Oh ! these little girls and boys that come to our homes and play with
their pets, and are so conscious of safety if by our side, then reaching, ma-
turity, assume bravely life's duties, and stand erect under its mountain-
load of care ! or dying fold the Redeemer to their hearts, saying, as did our
dearly beloved Mary who, when being asked by her mother in her last sick-
ness "what she could do for her," said, "Put your arms around me and
press your cheek to mine, that is all I want." Thus one of the loveliest
beings that ever visited this world of mystery, lovely in person as in charac-
ter, beautiful as good, and good as beautiful, passed from our stricken hearts
and home to holy regions out of sight.
*' Silling in Sunshine."
«5
Motherhood ia life's richest and most deliciotu romaace, and titting in
snnshme calm and sweet, with all my precions onea npon the other side,
save the daughter who so faithfnllr cherishes me here, I thank God most
of all that he ever said to me, " Bring np this child for me in the love of
hnioani^ and in the expectation of immortal life."
666 Audacious and ConstroaHve.
FATHER.
Mother's description of my father is as follows :
Of fine personal appearance, tall» rather slight, a well-poised head, dark
bine eyes, square forehead and strong chin, a firm month, dark, full, and
ornamental hair and beard.
Mr. Willard was select and true in his friendships ; devout in religion ;
honorable and exact in business relations ; proud of his children, though
undemonstrative ; versatile in affairs ; analytical in his judgments of persons
and principles ; reserved and dignified to outsiders ; easily accessible to only
a few ; fond of nature and books, to which he was especially drawn in all
matters pertaining to horticulture.
He was an amateur artist, and most appreciative student of the writings
of A. J. Downing. He had towering aspirations and a consciousness of
reserved power, and was a marked and positive character, who achieved
honorable distinction both in business and public positions.
Relative to his unique utterances, Dr. Bonbright, one of his
most valued friends, once said to me, *' Your father was the most
audacious man in speech, and the most conservative in action,
that I have ever known." He was thoroughly intellectual, and
an insatiate reader, a life-long habit of the house being that we
all went to bed early except father, who would sit up after the
rest, saying he was going to read mother to sleep, a feat speedily
accomplished, after which he sat alone for hours, poring over his
books.
He had exceedingly fine taste, but I always thought he
made a mistake in directing everything not only about the farm
and the beautiful garden and grounds, but also the minutest ex-
pense within doors. This was not because mother was extrava-
gant, for she was a thrifty though never a niggardly housekeeper,
and she had excellent capacity in buying whatever goods were
needed for the family, but father fell into the habit of buying
everything himself. Indeed, he selected nearly all our dresses
and bonnets, mother saying nothing about it, though I think she
<(
Father* s Monuments.** 667
would have been glad to have had it diflferent. Very likely this
resulted from his being almost every day in town, where all these
things were to be had, while mother stayed with the children,
because it was a solemn compact between them that both of them
should never leave us at a time. My mother's abounding good
health must have had to do with her always cheery spirits and
equable temper. My father was a life-long invalid, though so
brave and forceful that he ' said very little about it, but his lungs
were greatly weakened and he not only had several hemorrhages,
but suffered from their frequently threatened recurrence. All
this, of course, affected his disposition and made him more irri-
table than he otherwise would have been, though I would not
on any account represent him as other than a kind man in his
home, for he certainly was so in intention, and usually in action.
He was very loyal to all the ties that he had formed in life, to
kindred, neighbors, associates in church and business, yet he
disdained anything frivolous, was a Cromwellian sort of man in
his loyalty, and in his convictions of duty.
Every home in which my father lived has memorials of him
in the way of beautiful evergreens. He planted more trees and
loved them better than any other person I ever knew. Rest Cot-
tage was built by him on a large area of ground that was simply
a marsh, considered perhaps as undesirable a lot as there was in
Bvanston, except for its location on the principal street, about a
block and a hal/ from the University campus. Now there is not
a handsomer row of elms in the beautiful college town than the
double row that stands in front of our home, shown in the picture
entitled ** Picturesque Evanston,'* and known by us as ** Father's
Monument.*'
My Uncle Zophar says there was nothing so pitiful in father's
long illness during which he was with us at the home of this
dear uncle, as his lamentation, sometimes with tears, when he
would tell the story of the Irishman who died away from home,
and who, grieving in his homesickness, would repeat over and
over again that he should see his "beautiful Belle Valley no
more." My father said to his brother that his greatest sorrow
was that he should no more see Rest Cottage, which his loving
skill had translated from a swamp into a charm.
In 1848, father was one of thirteen Free-soilers in the Madi-
668 The Earthly Side,
son legislature who held the balance of power to such a degree
that an excellent law was secured through their instrumentality
although they belonged to a third party, the Democrats and
Whigs being the two great parties, and fully convinced that wis-
dom would die with them.
It interests me not a little that Hon. Samuel D. Hastings,
who was a fellow-member of the Legislature with my father, and
a valued friend of his, should now be treasurer of the Prohibition
party and one of my most valued associates and friends in that
party's Executive Committee. If such a suggestion had then
been made to either of these men, they would have said that no
woman would ever hold such a relation to politics unless chaos
and old night had settled down upon the world, whereas the facts
are that order and the rising day are the fitting emblems of the
change that makes this possible.
For one year my father's feeble frame endured that most ter-
rible disease, consumption. It crept upon him slowly, allowing
him a daily respite at first, attacking him with great violence in
the early months of summer, pursuing him when he left his home
on the lake-shore as the chilly winds of autumn began to blow,
and went to his friends at the East, hoping much from change of
air and scene ; confining him constantly to his bed for four months,
wasting him to a mere skeleton, and finally, in untold suffering,
wresting away his last faint breath. This is the earthly side ;
not so stands the record, thank God, upon the heavenly side.
Almost from the first, he thought it would be his last illness, and
quietly, diligently, and wisely proceeded to arrange his earthly
aflRairs. No item, however minute, seemed to escape him.
Whatever was of the least importance to his family, whatever
friendship, or acquaintance, or any of his relations in life demanded
or suggested, ever so faintly, was done by him.
Much that he said has been preserved, and dimly shadows
the delightful visions by which the sick-room was made sacred.
Extracts from these memoranda show the experience of his last
da)'s on earth :
Once when a dear friend sat beside him, while his cheek wore the hectic
flnsh, he said : '* If Christ sat here, as you do, by my side, and said to me,
' My dear brother, what can I do for you, in any way that I have not already
done ? ' I should say, * Nothing, beloved I^ord ! * **
The Heavenly Side. 669
Speaking of that wondrous verse, "And ye are Christ's, and Christ is
God's," he said :
" What a stupendous meaning is in those words ! Think them over for
yourself ! Ah, as one nears the border of that plane which breaks off sud-
denly, these things grow clearer to the mind."
September 19. — I was writing up his brief diary and he said :
** I did not mention it, but you might put it in every day, ' Peace, great
peace in God.' "
September 22. — He talked long and in a most interesting way about
faith — always his favorite theme— concluding with these striking words :
'* 'Trust me and 111 take care of you '; that's what Christ says. That's
religion and that's good for something ! Walk right out on this plank into
the dark eternity ; when you come to the end of the plank, Christ will be
there to catch you."
November 23. — Referring to a plan he had feebly sketched in pencil of
the family burial lots in Rose Hill Cemetery, he said :
" I drew this with as much pleasure as I ever planned a garden. How
God can change men's minds ! I never used to think about our cemetery
lots, but now I very often do, and love to call them our family home- our
blessed family home ! " (Uttering these words with tears.)
November 24. — "I have often thought of late how much richer 1 am
than any Emperor. An Emperor has this world to back him, to be sure, but
think of me ! I have God and His universe on my side, because of the child-
like faith which I, a poor, trembling, dying man, repose in my Redeemer !
This is a high truth— a wonderfully inspiring thought People who are well
don't know anything about my feelings in these crisis hours. Ah ! I've
rested my case with the eternal God ! "
December 2. — Rev. J. N. Simkins (whose kind attentions were a great
comfort to him) called. Father said to him, very naturally, *' I have been
dictating letters, having business papers filed, etc. It's a good deal of work,
getting ready for so long a journey. You know there are so many ' last
things ' to be regulated ! "
" The doctrine of sanctification by faith in Christ, preceded by entire
self-surrender to Him, is unspeakably dear to me. It should be fearlessly
preached from our pulpits and earnestly sought by our people. How little
does one know of his powers of submission until the Holy Spirit helps and
teaches him ! How God can humble and chasten a strong, self-reliant man,
until he lies in His hand like a simple, loving, teachable child ! The hour
in which he does this is life's holiest, truest hour."
Extracts from a dictated letter :
My Dear Sister Bragdon — Your poor friend lies helpless in the
arms of Jesus, waiting to depart. I often think of you and of your little
family gathered up there in your cozy home so near that dear home of mine
which I had hoped longer to enjoy, but which I have given up, though not
without many a bitter pang. But it was one of the sacrifices of this life
which I must make before going to my glorious home in heaven. 1 expect
we shall be again settled near each other in a better world. I'm going soon,
670 '*As God WUlsr
to take possession of my mansion, and perhaps I shall see, marked with
golden letters, the name of my Sister Bragdon npon the one adjoining, the
one awaiting her. I expect to find Brother Bragdon quite at home and able
to lead me by the hand to pleasant pathways and delightful contemplation
of the marvels of that world which he has now for several years enjoyed.
I praise God for our prospects, and believe the day is not far distant
when your family and mine and all our dear friends will be spending our
years unitedly in heaven.
January 3i. — I sang his favorite verse :
" Take my poor heart and let it be
Forever closed to all but Thee."
He said, " Oh, my child, that is my prayer for you— perhaps the last I shall
ever breathe, but it is enough. For saint or sinner, it does not matter who,
that is the most elevated purpose of which a human mind can be possessed. "
** Brush up the evergreens in the garden and let them stand -emblems
as they are of an immortal life — mementos of my last work on eftrth. You
will want a crocus bed in our garden next spring — don't forget that Go to
the greenhouse at Rose Hill for plants of all kinds that you need. Re-
member how fond I was of flowers, and do as I would have done if I had
lived. I expect you will observe nature more than ever when I am gone. "
January 22. — His sister, Mrs. Robinson, said to him : " Josiah, we do
not know how to spare you— there are not many of us now." He answered
cheerfully : " You spared me when I was a boy of sixteen, to go from home ;
later in life you spared me to go West and live for many years ; the time
that you will have to spare me now won't be so long as those times in the
past"
"As I waked up just now and consciousness came over me, this question
flashed over my mind : ' Is it possible that there is any unsafety — any unsafety
for me anywhere in God's imiverse ?' My child ! That is a startling thought
to one just going into the unknown world. But in a moment I settled down
again quietly, saying to myself : * No, I'm safe in any event ! I am safe by
the mercy of my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ ' If I have one strong wish
which is not a heavenly aspiration, it is that I may die with a clear intellect ;
that I may be able to look God in the face as I go into His presence, and
into the eternal world.
'* I look forward to a scene like that when our dear Mary went to heaven,
as a pleasant scene,— the pleasantest of all my history here on earth. But
I shall be unconscious in that final hour, perhaps, notwithstanding my de-
sire. May it be just as God wills."
God willed to take him one cold winter night, January 24,
1868, in storm and darkness, to take him in an hour when con-
sciousness was clouded and the power of speech was gone.
A little while before his death we caught these words, among
the last indistinct utterances of his receding spirit :
''Jesus — take me — take me to Thyself.^''
Young Theologues. 671
BITS FROM MY NOTE-BOOK.
CONCERNING TABLE-D'HOTB.
This is a subject so rich in humor and philosophy that the
silence of travelers concerning it is without other explanation
than that afforded by the homely old proverb, ** A burned child
dreads the fire * * ; to the average tourist, fresh from an uncon-
ventional American home, the ordeal of an English table-cThote —
usually the form of this phenomenon that first presents itself — is
sufiiciently trying to make upon a sensitive epidermis, impres-
sions of a lasting character.
But be it ours to rise superior to this weakness, and to offer
ourselves as martyrs to the promulgation of some notions touch-
ing the mighty Juggernaut of the European hotel system.
Call we then to mind our first solemn down-sitting before
"the table of the host.** It was at the Lakes of Killamey —
** Royal Victoria'* Hotel. There was such a land-and-water-
scape outside the windows as rarely meets the eye ; but some-
thing close at hand obscured it — namely, one dozen dinner-plates;
for there was an oflScious young clergymen, in white cravat and
claw-hammer coat, who, aided and abetted by the whole senior
class of a theological seminary, seemed to have an eye single to
despoiling us of our trenchers at intervals so frequent that our
plate of soup was hastier than General Scott's, and our salmon
melted away like the fabled draught from the lips of mythologic
Tantalus. So unequal, indeed, was our game of knife- and-fork
to his brilliant maneuvers of spoliation, that we soon resigned
ourselves in desperation to our fate, while this thought flashed
cheerfully athwart the chaos of consciousness : ' * Who says we
can't have tea and toast upstairs, in spite of these theologues,
when this horrid farce is over ? ' ' Words are inadequate to meas-
ure the degree of awe that the chief of these young men inspired.
672 Visamni Fitz-NoodU,
Snch a sense of helplessness and ignorance of the world as his
very glance created, can only be compared to the emotions which
Steerforth's ** man ** aroused in the gentle breast of David Cop-
perfield ; for he was thoroughly master of the situation — and the
situation was so frightfully new to us ! Indeed, I shall always
believe he racked his brain on this occasion to impale me upon
dilemmas whose horns were never before brandished, and at
junctures the most unexpected. His unctuous voice, using
faultless French, glided over lists of unimag^ned delicacies,
and his pause was as the silence of fate, while I made election
of **the last** with a presence of mind that astonishes me as I
contemplate it. Nor was this all. Eight English dames and
seven bald-headed gentlemen, written all over with the marks of
the most unmistakable gentility, surrounded this aristocratic
board. A hush was in the air, suggesting to my feverish fancy
that a ghost was at the banquet ; while the decorum of each
movement, the measured rhythm of those noble jaws, and the
geometric precision of those mouthfiils of roast beef, recalled that
period in history when dining was a ceremony of religion. Nor
was this all. Opposite sat Viscount Fitz-Noodle. To see this
scion of a noble race recruit exhausted nature was my despair.
What a perfect connoisseur was he in all culinary things ! how
thorough was his master>' of the mystic Art of Dining ! It haunts
me still, that high-bred face, that Cupid's bow of a moustache,
that faultless hand with fairy wine-glass poised between the first
and second of its taper fingers, regardless of so commonplace a
grasper as the thumb. Less pleasing was the merciless glass
screwed beneath a patronizing eyebrow, in the long intervals of
the repast, and the anatomizing glance across the table at his
vis-a-vis. But never mind — bread and cheese came at last, and
then the Charlotte Russe and the signal that the ceremonies were
concluded, from Lady Weazened, at the table's head.
Thus ended my initiation into that vast and highly respect-
able company who learn by what they suffer at tabU-dhote ; for
be it mildly intimated to all "intending tourists,'* that he who
declines to avail himself of this means of grace falls at once to
zero upon the social scale and takes his modest steak or slice of
beef, as he can catch it, after the elect, at a dollar or two per
head, are served.
On the Continent. 673
Upon the continent this service is often really enjoyable. It
ifl far less formal than in England, everybody talking freely with
his neighbor, so that the grinding of one's own molars is not all
the sound one hears. Besides, the requisitions of the toilet are
not so rigid, the time occupied is less, and when one's initi-
ation is well over, tabU-cThote is rather agreeable as a study
of customs and character. A racy book would that be which
Mark Twain might write on ** The Tabie-cthote of Different Na-
/iiiww/' since the most prosy traveler's "Notes** yield material
varied and amusing. For example : In Denmark they bring
one's ** portion " of tea to the table in a small silver box, with a
curious contrivance — a combination of furnace and tea-pot — in
which one prepares it as he best can. In Sweden, before sitting
down, the gentlemen, at a side-table, take off or put on the edge
to their appetites — we could never exactly determine which —
over sandwiches, sardines, and g^n. In Russia, also, one learns
to relish a slice of lemon in one's tea, though travelers seldom
fall into the custom of drinking it from tumblers, d, la Muscovite ;
and in a Moscow restatu'ant, where ladies lean back in their
chairs, enjoying cigarettes, the waiter brings you with the bill of
fare, a list of tunes from which you select what you will listen to
as you take an ice, whereupon a huge hand-organ grinds it out
for your aesthetic delectation. Coming up the Danube on the
el^ant steamer Orient, a grim old Turk sat opposite our party,
and it was something other than amusing to see him eat dried
herring, tail and all. Germany and Egypt have one heathenish
custom in common — that of supplying the tables with candles
which are lighted during dessert, and are a signal and means for
igniting the gentlemen's cigars, which soon emit smoke enough
to drive any but a very strong-diaphragmed lady from the table.
Going up the Nile we had a droll table^a'hote :
It was the steamship Behera that sailed the Nile's broad sea,
And fifty hungry tourists that formed the company.
We were divided into two parties and dined fore and aft,
according as we had or had not "come out ** with Thomas Cook,
"Tourist Manager,'* from London. Being, happily and unhap-
pily, among the "had nots," we were classed with those who
occupied the sailors* cabin instead of the saloon ; and one of
43
674 Asiatic Style,
our companions — a nice old English tea-merchant — used to
watch the dishes as they came up from below, or rather down
from above (though they had none of manna's gracious quali-
ties), and report the unfairness with which the dainties (?) were
dealt out.
At Suez we were served with Red Sea fish and mountain
honey, by tall, handsome waiters from Hindustan, in the tight-
fitting linen garments of their country. Their only English
words were ** Tank you *'; and they repeated these in their soft
tones even when berated by irate English colonels. At Damas-
cus, solemn Syrians in Turkish costume were our waiters ; and
at Moscow, Tartars with inconvenient paucity of expression and
dose-cropped hair. In Constantinople, on Greek Easter Sunday,
two " Paschal Lambs*' flanked by plates of red eggs formed a
leading feature of our table-d'hote. Odd enough they looked,
with a lemon apiece squeezed between their herbivorous jaws,
double rosettes of white paper garnishing their tails, and lettuce
leaves fastened to their sides with silver spikes. But our Jeru-
salem table-cthote was the most unique. Nobody could here
object that he was n*t at his ease. We used to go to the '* cup-
board" and help ourselves, under the very eyes of the dark-
skinned proprietor. One day a gentleman of our party happened
to upset his coffee-cup on the already copper-colored cloth. Mine
host looked so seriously afflicted at this that we tried to console
him by suggesting that a napkin be laid over the offending stain,
adding — as conclusive authority for such a device — **That*s
the way they do at Paris. * * He raised his hand in energetic dep-
recation, fxclaiming, "You may think so, lady, and the people
may do so if they like in Paris, but I can tell you it won't
answer for Jerusalem !" Next day we had a spotless damask
cloth — the only clean feature the table could boast.
***
In the autumn and winter of 1869 and '70 we were in Rome,
studying Italian, and studying also the wonderful palimpsest of
that enchanting city. Most of all I delighted to spend my days
in the gallery of the Vatican where Raphael's Transfiguration,
and the Greek statue of the Minerva Medici were my favorite
studies. To write about the Transfiguration were an imperti-
nence, and of the Minerva I have only to say that she seemed to
The Children's Page, 675
me the embodiment of perfect equipoise of regal strength, and
the most soothing and womanlike helpfulness. Perceiving it to
be my favorite of all the marvels we had seen in all the galleries,
my friend, Kate Jackson, had the head cut for me on a cameo by
Tignani, the finest cameo artist in Rome, and ever since this has
been my preferred and almost my only ornament.
FOR THE CHILDREN.
In looking over * * books for big folks, ' * as the children say,
I used in my own childhood to wish that somewhere between the
covers they had remembered my own small self, and put in a
picture or a word that I could claim. So when I found that some
bright-tinted pages were provided for, I fell to thinking of one for
the little folks. Our kind business manager favored my views,
so you have a picture in colors of four of my special treasures,
joined with the blue ribbon that so many earnest men have worn
upon their breasts in their heroic fight for a clear brain. The
traveling bag, ' ' Old Faithful, ' ' that I have carried to every state
and territory of our blessed Republic and to one thousand of its
towns and cities ; out of which fi-om the cars, which are my cus-
tomary workshop, tens of thousands of articles, paragraphs, let-
ters and postals have gone forth on their home-protection errands ;
out of which have come the "Documents'* that have led to
founding local unions from Victoria on Puget Sound to San An-
tonio, Texas ; to say nothing of gospel temperance speeches — for
I make no other — on prohibition, woman's ballot, philanthropic
politics, and all the rest of it. My ten-cent New Testament, car-
ried in almost all these campaigns, explains, I hope and pray,
what the traveling bag is for. My silver cup and medal for a
prize essay are described on page 69, and the cameo representing
the Minerva of the Vatican is mentioned above. The most inter-
esting relic on the page is Father Mathew's medal, given by his
own hand to Mrs. Kate Crossley McGowan, of Youghal, Ireland,
when she was a child, and bestowed on me by that gifted
Christian worker, in Chicago, in 1878. The entire page gives to
thoughtful mothers many a text on that curious, hopeful, twofold
theme, Woman and Temperance. What the flowers are I have
been unable to make out, so I submit the question to the children
as a botanical conundrum.
676 Father's Phrases,
FAMILY IDIOMS.
Every household has its own vernacular and it would be a
most interesting study to make a list of the words and expres-
sions that are peculiar to different homes.
The study of family idioms is often more curious and self-
revelatory than that of national idioms, for the field is smaller
and the generalization not so difficult to make. I think the
philological society should send out its circular for a list of family
idioms, as the psychological society has sent out its request for
a list of family spooks.
Our family had its full share of these peculiar phrases.
When we would become somewhat rampant in our sense of self-
sufficiency, my father would raise his heavy eyebrows, gaze
upon us with a queer grimace, and ask in his significant, sar-
castic tones, '*Whodugyou up and set you going?*' When
he wished to express the ultimate of distrust concerning any
individual he would say, " I would not set him with the dogs of
my flock."
Once when I spoke to him quite flippantly, he remarked,
'* Do you know that what you are saying is simply the puling of
an inanity ? " I did not proceed with my observation.
One of my father's most frequent phrases was, ** Have you
got the victory in you? " also this, ** If it's in it's in, and will
come out, but what's wanting can't be numbered.**
We always spoke of yeast as **emptin's." We children
were quite apt to become boisterous in our fun when lessons were
over in the evening ; my father, when he could bear it no longer,
would rap on the table and say, '*This is nothing but running
emptin's, you young ones must go straight to bed.**
INVITATIONS.
Anna Gordon says that often in the letters, which she looks
over first, giving me only those that are important for me to read,
occur such words as these, coupled with, perhaps, a thrice-
repeated invitation to speak in a given town : * * It is evident she
does not care to come to us, for we have asked her often.*' It
afflicts me that my friends should write in this way, for if they
knew the actual situation they would see how impossible it is
for me to go. I have spent ten years chiefly upon railroad trains,
The Doll Question. 677
going to little and large towns alike, but now when my dear
mother is so old I can not do as I would otherwise. Besides,
Anna says I have at least fifteen thousand invitations already
unaccepted. Long ago I should have made the trip around the
world, to which I have been invnted many times, but for mother.
Indeed, I tell her often that she is my only anchorage. If she
were gone I should no more have a home or place of refuge on
the planet earth.
NAMESAKES.
May I say to all my namesakes, boys and girls, of whom
Anna Gordon, who carefully keeps the records, says she has
account of over one hundred, that if I do not send them each a
silver cup it is not because I would not like to do so, but I am
sure the parents who do me an honor so high and sacred as to
name their children for me, would far rather any money I may
have should go into the work than to make any other disposi-
tion of it. My New Year card will be sent them regularly
Cunless Uncle Sam's messengers should fail me), my affectionate
regard will follow them, and if I can ever be of service in
their future lives they will not call upon me in vain. Perhaps,
indeed, in my old age it may fall to my lot to call on some of
them, instead.
ON THE DOLL QUESTION.
{From Babyhood, October, 1888.)
To the Guardians and Inhabitants of Babyland:
Can I come in? Or will the dolls roll their eyes, shake
their heads, and whack away at me with their wax hands ? I
had always fondly supposed myself a loyal friend of little folks,
but now I am held up as a warning, and burned in eflSgy, figu-
ratively speaking, with dolls to light the fagots.
Please let me tell you how it came about that I was thus
grievously misapprehended. Having been asked to write a leaf-
let on the assigned topic, ** Dress and Vice," I was tr>Mng to
show how the French doll may unduly foster that love of finery
which is one of woman's greatest temptations. Against the
simple, modest, ** old-fashioned " doll I did not mean to say a
word, for my dear old doll ** Anna " was a favorite plaything of
my childish years. But I did not guard my point as carefully as
678 Pets Better Than Dolls,
I would now, after the terrible hair-pulling that has fallen to my
lot, or as I will in future editions of my harmless little leaflet.
Let me, then, here and now, declare my faith more definitely :
I believe that boys and girls should be trained very much alike
and have the same toys. This will give the girls abundant out-
door exercise, fit them out with that physical equipoise that we
call health, which means wholeness, which means happiness. It
will also develop their observing faculties, now so much less
brought out than those of boys. Perhaps the fact that a doll is
so early placed in the girl's arms may help to account for her
dulled curiosity, her greater passivity, her inferior enterprise,
bravery and courage. Perhaps the doll may help to shut out the
world of wonder and surprise in which she was meant to dwell.
The ever-present doll may close her mind to studies and obser-
vations which would develop inventors among women. I have
always believed the lack of mechanical inventions as the fhiit of
woman's brain, was superinduced by a false training, and that
possibly doll-nurture had somewhat to do with it. Perhaps be-
cause my own early years were spent upon a farm, I have thought
that live dolls, that is, pets, were nobler, as they are certainly
far more frolicsome and responsive companions for children than
the wax imitations that form the ** regulation pattern" toy of
girls.
The ^excessive altruism of women is one of the greatest
wrongs to men, and defrauds men of a thousand opportunities
for forming noble character. The doll may have much to do with
this much-to-be-regretted outcome. I repudiate the notion that
any girl of normal constitution needs a doll to develop or to cul-
tivate a mother-heart. God has been before us all in this, and
the central motive power of every woman's heart is mother-love.
It has a thousand ways to show itself, and makes women, not a
few, take the part of foster-mother to thousands of human beings
that are worse than motherless.
There are cogent reasons why the fatherly instinct is less
strong in boys than is the motherly in girls, and nothing more
beneficent could happen to men or to the world than that they
should have this sacred, home-conserving instinct more strongly
accentuated in heart and life. If either is to play chiefly with
dolls, by all means let it be the boy.
Wkaf The Types Said, 679
This is my heresy in full, and I do not believe it to be
monstrous or in any wise unreasonable. Let me, then, humbly
commend it to the kind, thoughtful, and charitable attention of
all who share the sacred cares and joys of baby land — I mean
all but the dolls.
ERRORS.
Typographical errors are the despair of pen-holders. Here
follow a few of those from which I have suffered :
I said of Joseph Cook that, of certain evils named, he was
the ** uncompromising foe'*; the types re-christened him ** un-
compromising Joe'\- of a lovely white ribbon friend who had
gone to the Better Country, I wrote, "Some of us are like comets,
but she was a steady shining star'* ; the types said, **Some of
us are \\k& camels''; in a mild quotation I wrote, '*'Tis only
strength makes gentleness sublime "; the types said, ** 'Tis only
strength makes gentlemen divine''; again, this was written,
"The souls of some sit on the ends of their nerves" ; typo de-
clared that the * * souls of some sit on the ends of \h€\r fingers ' */ a
friendly journalist in Boston declared of me that I was *' a be-
liever in Immortality " ; but typo echoed, ''immorality"; and so
on and on and the end is not yet. Be it understood that,
solid as they are, the types refract the light of truth and often
make out of an unoffending human creature a Specter of the
Brocken.
A SPELLING SCHOOL.
When I was president of the Chicago W. C. T. U. , the mania
for spelling-schools was at its height and we arranged for one,
working it up with great care and trying to enlist the chief men
and women of the city, sixteen on a side, to help us out by spell-
ing up or down, as the case might be. Emory Storrs, the brilliant
lawyer and reformed man (for so he was at that time), consented
to act as pedagogue, and did his best to enlist distinguished
friends. He showed me several answers, or, rather, declinations,
that piled in upon him. I remember, in particular, one from
Robert Collyer, who took an entire sheet of foolscap and wrote at
the top " Dear E."; in the middle, '* It can not be," and at the
bottom, "R. C."
But we had a fair showing, in spite of all. My genial friend,
the Rev. Dr. W. H. Thomas, agreed to be the head one of the
68o Our ** SpelM SkuUr
boys' side, and I took that place on the girls', and my coadju-
tors and myself appeared with hair braided down the back, and
wearing old-fashioned, high, white aprons. Emory Storrs had
an unconscionably tall collar, swallow-tail coat, and a ferule at
least six feet long. He was als© fitted out with the biggest kind
of a big dictionary. Clark Street Church was packed, at twenty-
five cents apiece, a ticket after the following pattern having been
very generally sold beforehand :
**AWL FUR TemPURUNCK.
Speun* Skulk.
Fust Methuddis'
KORNER KLARK & WaSHUNTUN STREATS.
8t Aperile, Thors Day. "
25 - - - - - Sents.
**Come, Henry, stand straight and toe the line," were the
pedagogue*s instructions to the tall and somewhat attenuated
Doctor. ** Frances, no giggling, attend strictly to business," and
he rapped the ferule with vigor and rolled his eyes in the most
threatening manner. After various other preliminaries, he began,
** Henry, spell abscess," and Henry was left to spell it without
the preliminary s of the three that adorn its physiognomy. For-
tunately profiting by his mistake, I got in the s and brought
down the house, while Henry sank back discomfited at the very
first attack. * * Aspergeoire ' ' was the word that came to my friend,
Kate Jackson, who sacrificed herself to the cause on this occa-
sion. Mr. Storrs was not an adept at pronouncing French, and
Miss Jackson, who was, attacked him and at the same time gave
him a lesson then and there on the correct method. An appeal
was taken to the house, which voted that all those who had lost
their places throuj^h his bad pronounciation should be allowed
once more to return to the attack. And so the fun went on
until a savage word that I have forgotten, ** downed" us all
at last.
It occurs to me that we should do well as temperance people
to utilize more than we have yet done, the love of amusement that
is in young people, and put money in the purse of the reform by
Mental Methods. 68 1
bidding for the presence of the amusement-loving public in the
villages and towns during the long winter evenings. Our new
department of entertainments will, I believe, do much to supply
in a perfectly legitimate way the natural demands that young
people make upon the ingenuity of their elders in this regard.
METHODS OF COMPOSITION.
Everybody's method of composing is his own. For myself
there is much to be done on such occasions in the way of mental
preliminary, and a great deal to clear my mind of; it is like a pail
of water that has just been drawn from a spring and it must
settle. Or, to use a more familiar figure, which I have quoted a
hundred times, I am like a hen that is about to settle herself for
a three weeks' incubation. She goes fluttering about with every
feather porcupine-fashion, scratches the ground, gets sort of cross
and blusters this way and that ; finally, with great care, she
settles herself, but even then her bill is at work, pulling a straw
here and throwing one out of the nest there, until she gets it just
to her mind, and then she begins to do some execution, and she
keeps at it until the end she has in view is reached. But you
must let the hen have her own way, or she will never set at all
and you will never get your chickens.
I would like exceedingly to know if other people who write,
perhaps not more, but better, have similar experiences. Indeed, I
think an interchange of the internal methods and operations of
** composing minds " would be a study of great interest.
In preparing for the National Convention, I begin for the next
year before leaving the platform of this year. I have memo-
randum-books and papers and scraps on which are jotted notes of
any deficiency in the arrangements, so that they may be avoided
the next time, and bright points suggested to me by ingenious
women, or read about in temperance papers or women's mis-
sionary or suffrage papers, for I wish our convention to be
made up of every creature's best. All these items are kept in a
series of pigeon-holes, labeled with the date of the year to come,
and later they are taken out, classified in books, and acted upon
so far as possible.
The manner of preparing my annual address is analogous to
that already described. Whenever any topic occurs to me, a
682 A Helping Hand.
memorandum is made, and when I am writing the address, these
are taken up and classified in the best order that I can contrive,
though of late years the address has been written in from four
to seven days, and with so many other cares dragging my
thoughts away on every side, that I have the misfortune of being
judged most widely by that to which I pay the least attention,
for the special occupation of my mind is the National W. C.
T. U. itself, with the Worid's W. C. T. U. and the Woman's
National Council. Plans for the advancement of all these are
with me when I wake. I can not truthfully say when I sleep,
also, for I am, as a rule, a dreamless sleeper, but often in the
morning so many thoughts come to me before rising that I have
the room peopled with mnemonic figures lest I should fail to
recall the good-fairy plans that seem to have been given me in
my sleep.
REQUESTS.
A sadder feature, even, than the loss of what one might
imagine himself capable of achieving for humanity if unhindered,
is the revelation of humanity's weakness and. distress, of its help-
less outreaching to grasp in the darkness a human hand almost as
helpless as its own, when, if it would but take a firm grip upon
the Hand that holds the world, it would swing itself forward into
the tides of power.
If I could epitomize here the letters asking for a position as
private secretary, office secretary, stenographer, type- writer,
housekeeper at Rest Cottage, care-taker of my dear mother, not
to mention the suggestions that new departments be formed in
the National W. C. T. U., the requests that we enlarge the force
of the W. T. P. A., or send out new organizers and speakers in
the World's or the National W. C. T. U., or the Woman's Na-
tional Council, the list would reveal the mighty unrest of women's
hearts, and such a striving earnestly for the best gifts as would
make gainsay ers laugh and good hearts cry.
Why any one should think that a temperance worker with-
out fortune is a proper person to apply to in case of need, will
evermore remain to me a mystery. But strange to tell I have,
among the constant applications extending over fifteen years, the
following that I recall as specimens :
A woman traveled from Puget Sound to Bvanston, telling me
••'7m True, ' Tis Pityr 683
that she felt called to take up the work of temperance and came
to offer herself to me. She had no credentials that were sufficient
to identify her, no fitness for the work that I could see, and when
I gently remonstrated with her, she took such an ** excess of
nerves,** as the French say, as was harrowing to behold, crying
so loudly at the boarding-house in which I placed her, and where
I paid her expenses for some time, that the people thought she
was likely to do herself harm.
A merchant in good standing, and a bright man, desired me
to prevent his wife from securing a divorce.
A young minister was confirmed in the conviction that I
alone, of all people on this continent, would direct him to the
right woman as partner of his joys and sorrows.
A miner in Idaho, who confessed himself to have been one
of the worst of men, but was now thoroughly reformed, and sent
references to people altogether creditable, wanted me to forward
to him fi-om our Chicago Anchorage Home for degraded women,
one who had reformed, whom he promised to marry and be faithful
to, saying, with a sense of justice too infrequent, that he was well
aware she was the only sort of person fit for him.
A woman desired me to send her a hired girl, away out to
Colorado.
Another asked me to secure for her a patent on a new style
of rolling-pin.
A man wished me to arrange for the manufacture of his new
carpet-sweeper, and would give me half the proceeds.
A woman said if I would get her husband the appointment
to be postmaster in their village, she would pay me twenty-five
dollars.
A woman whose daughter had evinced elocutionary talent,
said if I would write her a speech, she could quite likely support
the family by rehearsing it in California.
A young man wished me to write his part in a debate, that
was to occur in a certain college, on the Prohibition question.
Another wrote : " You wod doe us a grate favor if you
Could Send us a mishineary to this Place."
One who **was bom a prohibitionist,*' after detailing her
husband's financial losses, asked if *' I would be so kind as to
684 *'^(y '^«. '^w True.''
present her with a dolman or some other wrap, and a dress that
would be nice enough to go into company of any kind.**
Another good friend — a perfect stranger — who was in debt,
inclosed two bills in the letter, and asked me to pray over them,
and then pay them.
Another was sure I would gladly aid in the circulation of a
book she had written concerning myself.
The following is from a poem dedicated to the W. C. T. U.,
and placed in my hands at one of our National Conventions :
To you Who Comes With Hearts So Brave
Mounted the Stage like tidel waves
Like a Statue to Behold
White as marbel Pure as Gold
With Words of truth From throbing Heart
Your Misels like a piercing dart
Turned the key of Pandors Box
And threw the Rubish ore your Flock
Revealed to light the dark conclave
And Sent them out like tidal waves
Of Polyticks and Royal Kings
O My What Joy to Hearts it Brings
But not with you By Power of might
But your the Sword of truth and Right
you Shield is Faith Sword is prair
On this platform you need not feare
For He Who claved the Red Sea
Will Stand For you and liberty
Will carry you ore to cannens land
And then will Shout a Happy Band
A HELPFUL BOOK.
No single book has helped me more in these last years than
the little French treatise translated by Hannah Whitall Smith,
entitled, ** Practice of the Presence of God.** Brother Lawrence,
a Franciscan friar, who did the cooking for his monastery, is the
hero of the narrative and I do not believe it possible for any well-
intentioned person to read the contents of this little volume once
a month throughout a single year without being lifted above the
Old Rye 's Speech.
685
mists and vapors of bis every-day environment into the sweet,
clear air of that spiritual world which is always with us if we
only knew it, and in which we may perpetually dwell if we only
try, or rather, if without trying we just accept its presence and its
hallowed communion.
In all the harvest there was ttothing sweeter to us than
the sense of independence and security that came from feel-
ing that the old farm could supply our wants ; could garner up for
us and all the hundreds of four-footed and two-winged creatures
that were our fellow-beings and our fn^ds, enough to keep us
safe and sound in all the winter's cold. iWe liked to watch our
mother's wonderful butter, that smelt Awclover blooms. We
r^oiced in her pickles and preserves, haMvild plums, and'" rare
ripe " peaches, and it seemed to us thavpeople who buy every-
thing at the stort, live at a poor dying rjlte, an^ take' everything
second-band — finding life a sort oPhash fcf thills left over.
Happy this hancst home of iIk houe:^^^nded farmer, who
knows and loves the good creaturesVM Goa too well to turn into
crazy ,drink.s what a bounnful Creafcr Has givm^imfdi food.
As "Old Rye"' ' ■■^-
685 Conversation.
INTROSPECTIVE.
What mind I have is intuitional. The processes of calcula-
tion are altogether foreign to me, and old school-mates will tes-
tify without dissent that while I stood at the head of my classes
in all other things, I hobbled along with a crutch in ** higher
algebra.*' It consoled me not a little to read in some of General
Grant's biog^phies, that when officers galloped up to him in
battle bringing bad news and asking his commands, he never
commented on the disaster, consulted nobody, but as swiftly as
the words could be uttered, told just what he wanted done.
This trait that he showed as a great chieftain I have had always
on my own small field, that is, I have never been discouraged,
but ready on the instant with my decision, and rejoicing in noth-
ing so much as the taking of initiatives. Such facilities as I
have are always on hand. What I do must be done quickly.
Perhaps it is the possession of this very quality that by the law
of opposites renders a reflective life, the otium cum dignitate of
which I have never for one moment tasted since we left the farm,
supremely attractive to me in contemplation.
To my thought, conversation is the filling and soul of social
life, the culmination of the spirit's possible power, the giving of
a life-time in an hour, though its form and method certainly have
changed in this electric age when the phonograph has come into
being. I half suspect that there will be a strike in the physical
manufactory one of these days ; the muscles of the face will refuse
to do 'heir duty, the tongue will make believe paralytic, and the
lips will join the rebellion. But there is this good fortune about
it, people will be more careful how they talk when the electric
waves are secret as well as open message-bearers, when the con-
cealed phonograph may be acting as reporter in any place
they enter. Science will make us all behave and put us under
bonds to keep the peace. Its outcome always is the betterment
of mortals.
My nature is to the last degree impressionable, without
En Rapport, 687
strong personal antipathies, and though ready with some remark
for any one into whose company I happen to be thrown, nothing
short of a congenial atmosphere can ** bring me out.'' A human
being, like a cathedral organ, has many pipes and stops and banks
of keys ; the sort of music that you get depends upon the kind
of player that you are. Oliver Wendell Holmes never wrote a
subtler thing than that he likes people not so much for what they
say, as for what they make him say ! Judged by this standard, J.
do not believe that six persons have ever heard me talk, and not
more than three ever in private converse heard my voxhumana, sim-
ply because they were not skilled musicians. There is no ego-
tism in this statement, it is so universal. All of us have been so
happy as to meet a few persons who made us blossom out. We
did n't dream ourselves half so great, so noble, so lovable as they
proved us to ourselves to be. " Is it possible that I can talk like
that ? " I have said to myself in such companionship. The in-
toxication of it is the soul's true wine. There are a few fortunate
and elect spirits who have expanded under such sunny skies into
flowers whose fragrance was the rarest fame, — perhaps all might ;
in some world let us hope all will ! For myself, I know so little
T)f it, that only as a foretaste of heaven's companionships do I
think of such beatitude at all.
I shall never forget how like a flash it came to me one
winter day, when I was preceptress of Genesee Wesley an Semi-
nary at Lima, N. Y., in 1866, as I was seated in my large,
pleasant sitting-room, with as many of my pupils gathered around
me, chiefly sitting on the floor, as the room could possibly accom-
modate, and while we were planning something good, I do not
recall what, in which we were all greatly interested, that just
what was happening then in the way of aroused enthusiasm,
unified purpose, and magnificent esprit de corps, might just as
well happen on a scale involving thousands instead of scores.
I did not then determine that it should, but only with swift
intuition and sudden pain felt that I might have filled a larger
place. I have been called ambitious, and so I am, if to have had
from childhood the sense of being bom to a fate is an element of
ambition. For I never knew what it was not to aspire, and not to
believe myself capable of heroism. I always wanted to react upon
the world about me to my utmost ounce of power ; to be widely
688 Plus Ultra.
known, loved and believed in — the .more widely the better.
Every life has its master passion ; this has been mine. Very
few things waken my contempt, but this couplet in the hymn
book did:
*' Make me little and unknown,
Loved and prized by God alone. "
Its supreme absurdity angered rather than amused me, for
who could be ** loved and prized" by the Great Spirit and
yet despised by the lesser spirits made in His image? Who
could deliberately desire to be ** little and unknown" — of small
value and narrow circle in a world so hungry for help and
strength and uplift — yet be ** loved and prized" by God? No, I
wanted to be now and in all worlds, my very utmost. I fully
purposed to be one whom multitudes would love, lean on, and
bless. Lying on the prairie grass and lifting my hands toward
the sweet sky I used to say in my inmost spirit, '* What is it —
what is it that I am to be, O God ? " I did not wish to climb by
others* overthrow and I laid no schemes to undermine them, but
I meant that the evolution of my own powers should do for me all
that it would. But a woman, and most of all a woman shy and
sensitive, could not determine on a ** career" except as a writer
of books, when I was young, and I was too impatient of the
utter dependence that results from having no money of one's own,
to take that doubtful path, though it had supreme attractions for
me in my loftiest hours. During the war I begged my dear
father to let me offer my services to the Sanitary Commission, but
he scouted the idea for '*a girl just out of school. " I then
pleaded with him to let me go and teach the freedmen, but he
was more careful of his daughters than any other father I ever
knew, and shook his head saying, '* Stay at home — that is your
natural and proper place until you have a home of your own ; I
am able to take care of you. "
My mother would have let me do any good thing that I liked ;
it was her method always to encourage our self-activity along the
line of strongest impulse, only that impulse must be beneficent.
But she, too, liked us to be at home and would not antagonize
**the head of the family " in this respect.
If to have some innate sense of a confidential relationship
•* A Cloud of Witnesses. 689
with humanity at large, so that it was always pleasant to be
known and recognized, is to be ambitious, then I plead guilty, for
I never liked to be impersonal, and chose a 7iom de plume for a
few earlier journalistic ventures only; then not because I did n*t
like the dear public, but because I did n*t like my own dear
family to know what I was doing. Somehow I always felt that
** faith in folks '* of which I speak so often, and wanted them to
know about me as I about them. I believed we were all made of
one blood and there was no need of this ado about ** impersonal-
ity.'* To my notion, personality was the grandest production of
the ages ; it came into fuller perspective by reaction on the world
of matter and of spirit according to one's power ; let it carry us
as far as we would. Besides, I felt that a woman owed it to all
other women to live as bravely, as helpfully, and as grandly as
she could, and to let the world know it, for so many other women
would thus gain a vantage-ground, and I used to sing with this
thought, sometimes, the hymn beginning :
" A cloud of witnesses around
Hold thee in full survey,
Forget the steps already trod
And onward urge thy way."
I once heard the Jubilee singers render an old plantation
melody with this refrain :
" May the lyord He will be glad of me,
May the Lord He will be glad of me,
May the JU>rd He will be glad of me,
In the heaven He'll rejoice."
The words and music touched a chord very far down in my
heart and I have hummed the strange old snatch of pathos to my-
self times without number at twilight on the cars, after a hard
day's work with book and pen.
If it be ambitious to have no fear of failure in any under-
taking, to that I must plead guilty. Fools rush in where angels
fear to tread, and this may help explain it, but I frankly own that
no position I have ever attained gave me a single perturbed or
wakeful thought, nor could any that I would accept. No one
could induce me to become a professor of mathematics or o£
domestic economy, but outside these and what they imply, I can
think of no helpful calling that I would not undertake, and there
44
690 Edward Eggleston^s Good Word.
is none that would render me anxious. But with all this hardi-
hood I have not sought advancement. So far as I can recall, ex-
cept when at twenty years old I secretly applied for a district school,
and two years later for the public school in my own village, the
positions that I have held have all sought me, and as for writing
such poor books as I do, it is at the point of the bayonet they have
been ground out — all save Mary's ** Nineteen Beautiful Years."
If I had been a man the pulpit and politics would have been my
field in case I was early driven from the Eden of literature by the
desire for financial independence. But a woman who did n't pur-
pose ** to make a spectacle of herself" had to walk softly in the
years when I suddenly emerged from nature's boundless hospi-
tality, into custom's pinched arena, away back in '57.
Not to be jealous of others who come at rattling pace along
the track, speeding onward neck and neck, or else distancing
one's self altogether, is a diflficult grace. I do not profess to have
attained it, but am grateful that its outward expression has not
yet aroused my self-contempt, and I will own that, so far as I
recall, I have never seen myself outdone without making myself
secretly say to God, '* I thank thee for this other one's beautiful
gifts ; may they grow and abundantly flourish ;" and (if it were a
speaker who left me behind, and especially a woman speaker) I
have also prayed, ** May she have more power this time than she
has ever had before."
Still, with it all, I have odious little ** inwardnesses " of dis-
comfort when distanced, as one must be so often, and my only
consolation at such times, is that I loathe these selfish S3nnptoms
and have in their presence the instinct of prayer.
People little know the good or harm they do us by a word.
Edward Eggleston once lived in Evanston, was superin-
tendent of our Sunday-school and a brother to us all. After he
became famous he once said to me, " I do not believe there is
another young woman in America of your ability, who is content
to move about in the small circle of a girl's school." And when
I visited his family in Adelphi Street, Brooklyn, he said, when I
apologized for some remark, " My child, don't make your man-
ners to me — you're never impolite; in fact, you could tCt do a rude
thiytgy The happy tears sprang from their out-of-sight fount-
ains ; I ordered them back and he never saw them. Great
Noble Friends, 691
generous soul, but what words may measure the encouragement
to me to have made such an impression upon one like him ! So
when I saw Whittier and he said, ** I am glad of thy work ; thee
is becoming a quite conspicuous figure yonder on thy prairies,"
I was more than ever determined that I would be one. The
letters of Bishop Simpson, Frances Power Cobbe, Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps, Gilbert Haven, and a score besides of the best men and
women of our time, how can I do them justice for the spur that
they have been to my ambition ? The dictionary tells us that this
word comes from the Latin '' ambitio,'' a going around^ — especi-
ally of candidates for office in Rome, to solicit votes. As my
self-respect has always protected me fix)m this, I conclude that
what I have is aspiration ; t.e,, * * ardent desire ' * for the achieve-
ments herein confessed as having been ** the top of life " to me.
A friend, greatly revered, said to me in my youth: **Do
things because they are in themselves pure, lovely and harmo-
nious, without regard to whether anybody knows that you do
them or not."
But every nature has its limitation, and mine was here pre-
cisely : I wanted some one else to know !
*' How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude ;
Yet graut me still a friend in my retreat
Whom I may whisper, * Solitude is sweet ! ' "
Whether for weal or woe, I had to care about that other one,
about his knowing, too, and take the consequences. That same
friend said to me in my youth, ** Be true to your ideals, hold fast
to them, what e'er betide." And so I have: but to be widely
known, widely helpful and beloved, was my ideal. That same
friend said, ** You are nothing if not frank," and used the words,
I thought, reproachftilly. But I was ** Frank," how could I help
it ? and, having the faults of my qualities, have had to pay their
penalty. A sweet white ribbon woman once said to me as simply
as a child : '* I would like a window in my heart that all might
see my love for them ; there is nothing that I wish to hide."
Often have I wished I could afford to be equally transparent —
perhaps in heaven I shall be so. But this consoles me : if all
could see the keen regrets, the self-contempt, the wistful purpose,
the ever new outreaching toward a higher life ; if all could know
692 The Pain of an Injustice.
the instant prayer, "God pity, God forgive!" such sight and
knowledge would go far to prove the selfishness a distemper, cer-
tain to be healed some day. lyong, long ago, a Mend gave me a
pretty journal with morocco cover, and wrote on the first page
these words :
' ' Dear F. : Record here your inner life as fi-eely as you think
it, as carefully as you speak it, as genially as you live it and as
bravely as you meet it day by day. ' *
I have tried to do so in this chapter, chiefly written at my
own expense.
By nature I am progressive in my thought. As Paul said of
himself, ** I was free bom. ** For a great sum do they purchase
this fi-eedom who have it not by heritage. A life of patient study
and research, with steadfast effort to hold the soul open to
*' skyey influence" will hardly send one along the adventurous
path of progress if he was not bom with a soul hospitable toward
new ideas. Being a woman, I have grown, inside the shell of such
environment, all that one of my sensitive nature could, toward
God*s plan for our souls — ^so different from that of man. Under the
mould of conservative action I have been most radical in thought.
Christianity has held me as the firm bridle steadies the champing
steed. Early embracing my father's and mother's faith, it has
mellowed my nature and made me * * true to the kindred points of
heaven and home. " But I do not recall the time when my
inmost spirit did not perceive the injustice done to woman ; did
not revolt against the purely artificial limitations which hedge
her from free and full participation in every avocation and pro-
fession to which her gifts incline her, and when I did not appre-
ciate to some extent the state's irreparable loss in losing from halls
of legislation and courts of justice the woman's judgment and the
mother's heart. The first sharp and painful consciousness of
humiliation that came to me was from the English-bred boy who,
when I was a girl of four or five years, called me a ** Tom-boy "
and dared me to play with my brother — the two being together in
our door-yard. Angered by his interference, and encouraged by
my brother's more tolerant spirit, I declared I would play and no-
body should hinder me, whereupon the English boy held up his
broad-bladed pocket-knife, in striking at which I received a
wound, the scar of which is with me to this day. My cries
*' Unto this Last:' 693
brought mother to the rescue, who chased the foreign invader
jfrom our soil and, instead of telling me that little girls must
** stay in the house, *' declared that I should play just where and
when I liked and no bad boy should interfere with me. The
next hard lesson — and well-nigh unendurable — ^was when I was
required to wear my hair long and wadded on my cerebellum,
instead of short, evenly distributed, and leaving every motion of
the head easy and free. But my cup was more than full, and
brimmed over in bitterest tears when the light, unimpeded gait
and easy spring over fences and up into trees was forever debarred
by the entanglements of numberless white skirts and a long dress.
At this I felt a sense of personal rights invaded, and freedom
outraged, such as no language may express, and a contempt for
** society*' and its false standards from which I have never
recovered. But I quietly accepted the inevitable ; ** conformed **
down to the smallest particular in wardrobe, conduct and general
surroundings, confident that I could thus more completely work
out my destiny in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation,
having always for my motto, ** To reform one must first one*s self
conioim., ' *
Dedicating my life to the uplift of humanity, I entered
the lists at the first open place I found and have fought on as
best I could, not blaming any one as having of set purpose caused
the conditions, which I so entirely reprobate, in the customs that
immeasurably hamper and handicap the development of women,
but thoroughly convinced that these conditions are the necessary
outcome of the Age of Force, so long in its duration, but certain
to be slowly followed by the age of spiritual power when the
gentler sex shall take its rightftil place in humanity's great
family.
Holding these opinions I have the purpose to help forward
progressive movements even in my latest hours, and hence here-
by decree that the earthly mantle which I shall drop erelong,
when my real self passes onward into the world unseen, shall be
swiftly enfolded in flames and rendered powerless harmfully to
afiect the health of the living. Let no friend of mine say aught
to prevent the cremation of my cast-oflF body. The fact that the
popular mind has not come to this decision renders it all the
more my duty, who have seen the light, to stand for it in death
694
•• Unto this Lastr
as I have sincerely meant in life, to stand by the great cause of
poor, oppressed humanity. There must be explorers along all
pathways ; scouts in all armies. This has been my ** call '* from
the beginning, by nature and by nurture ; let me be true to its
inspiriting and cheery mandate even ** unto this last. "
Youth's Delectable Mountains. 695
FINALLY.
The foregoing book has been written, revised and the proo&
corrected, in about three months, largely in enforced seclusion,
away from books of reference and to a great degree from memory.
It does not then claim to be absolutely accurate, and it is quite
likely that in respect to some minor dates there may be a dis-
crepancy between the book and the series of journals beginning
when I was about twelve years old and ending when I returned
from Europe in 1870.
" Seen through memory's sunset air,"
the far away Delectable Mountains of my youth may have a halo
around them greater even than when with eager feet I climbed
their summits. My mother says that I have idealized her char-
acter, and friends have always accused me of seeing them in
colors more glowing than the cold light of day revealed.
All that I claim is that in this book, from cover to cover, I
believe I have been loyal to the higher law of truth, if not to the
common law of fact, and my purpose, from first to last, has been
to tell the story as it was told to me by the higher faculties of
my nature. I have had the happiness of illustrating in a small
way the result of American institutions upon individual and
family life, in the hope that good might come of it to some who
are now in the formative period of their career; and with the
purpose to applaud whatsoever things are true and lovely and of
good report, frankly bemoaning those things that are not, in
myself especially.
Nothing in this book is meant to give the impression that
its author undervalues the household arts or household saints.
696 My Household Creed.
If anybody living is beholden to them, I surely am. A well-
ordered home is the beginning of wisdom and of virtue and, I
have always dwelt in such a home, made wholesome and delight-
ful by other hands than mine. Most girls take kindly to the
spelling-book of home's beautiful literature of action as exempli-
fied in the needle, broom and kneading-trough, but I had not
this happy gift, never having got beyond the A B C of sampler,
dust-brush and cake-making in my home education. Lack of
natural facility should have condoned the offense whose inexor-
able penalties I have been, under the present regime, obliged to
pay as the years brought in their bills. All that I plead for is
freedom for girls, as well as boys, in the exercise of their ispecial
gifts and preferences of brain and hand. It is also my belief that
the law of development will at no distant day, so largely relegate
the household arts to the realm of invention and cooperation that
unless this larger liberty of woman is fully recognized she will,
during the transition period, at least, prove less useful to society
than she was meant to be and must be for her own highest
happiness.
This is the sum total of my creed concerning household
economics, and if it be treason I mean to make the most of it, for
I expect to see the day when hot water and steam-heated air will
be supplied to every house as gas is now fi-om common reser-
voirs ; when we shall have a public laundry system, so complete
as to drive the washtub out of every kitchen, banishing forever
the reign of steamy, sudsy, indigo-blue Monday ; and a caterer's
system so complete as to send the cooking-stove into perpetual
exile. If men had these problems on hand, complicated with
the unspeakable servant-girl problem, they would have solved
them by a syndicate long before this, putting no end of money
in their purses and no end of misery outside of home's four walls.
I often think, when rejoicing in the homelike amenities of
a vestibule train, with its day coach, dining-car, and sleeper,
that if George M. Pullman could be induced by a council of
women to give five years of his wonderful brain to this problem
of household comfort oflf the rails, counseling with the house-
keepers, as he would be wise enough to do, he might crown his
life by carrying into the average home the same wholesale com-
forts and elegancies with which he now regales the traveling
** A Great New World Loams into Sight J" ^ 697
public. Only in that case we must petition him to spare us the
difiiisive atmosphere of that horrible smokers* annex !
To preserve the individuality, the privacy, and sanctity of
home, while diminishing its cost and friction, is the problem that
women in council must set themselves to solve. Notable home-
makers, ready for the next thing, and not afraid of it because it
is the next and not the last, should be organized into a standing
committee on this subject.
But with these varied cares and perpetual annoyances re-
moved, how will the home-maker of the well-to-do classes employ
her time ? In the care of her children, the companionship of her
husband, and in works of philanthropy, by which will be has-
tened forward the coming epoch when there shall be no classes
that are not well-to-do.
There will always remain abundant territory to be possessed
in home's illimitable realm. Women in council working to im-
prove that sanctuary of their hearts will find grievous inequalities
in the laws that relate to the control of children and of property
as between husband and wife ; they will find that in most of the
states a wife can not bring a civil suit for damages against her
husband ; that as a rule, the crime of despoiling a woman of her
honor is not punished so heavily as the crime of stealing a cow ;
that in general, the protection of the person ranks far b^ind
protection of the purse.
A great new world looms into sight, like some splendid ship
long-waited-for — the world of heredit>', of prenatal influence, of
infantile environment ; the greatest right of which we can con-
ceive, the right of the child to be well boni, is being slowly,
surely recognized. Poor, old Humanity, so tugged by fortune
and weary with disaster, turns to the Cradle at last and perceives
that it has been the Pandora's box of ever>' ill and the Fortunatus
casket of every joy that life has known. When the mother learns
the diyine secrets of her power, when she selects in the partner
of her life the father of her child, and for its sacred sake rejects
the man of unclean lips because of the alcohol and the tobacco
taint, and shuns as she would a leper the man who has been false
to any other woman, no matter how depraved ; when he who
seeks life's highest sanctities in the relationships of husband and
fiither, shuns as he would if thoughtful of his future son the
698 Christ* 5 Kingdom Means Universal Brotherhood.
woman with wasp-waist that renders motherhood a torture and
dwar& the possibilities of childhood, French heels that throw
the vital organs out of their normal place, and sacred charms
revealed by dresses ddcolletd, insisting on a wife who has good
health and a strong physique as the only sure foundation of his
home-hopes, — then shall the blessed prophecy of the world's peace
come true ; the conquered lion of lust shall lie down at the feet
of the white lamb of purity and a little child shall lead them.
Forces of infinite variety conspire to bring in the kingdom to
which poets, orators, philosophers, philanthropists and statesmen
have looked with longing eyes since humanity set forth on its
mystical career. If this true story of my life has any force at all,
I pray that it may help to hasten the coming of Christ's King-
dom, whose visible token is universal brotherhood ; the blessed
time drawing nearer to us every day, when in the most practical
sense and by the very constitution of society and government,
" all men's weal shall be each man's care."
APPENDIX.
anwBttfi.
My good friends. S. MilUtt Thompson, of Providence, R. /., and Mrs.
Jane Eggleslon Zitatnerman, of Evaruton, lU. have prepared tkt data
for this chapter.— F. E. W.
ANCESTRY.
I3 the scbnrbs of t!ie djaeic tovn of Concnnl.
bovider by the rofttbade; 2S tbe ingu.pcioc. grm is tbe
Ma^or ScmoD Willani case &r?cx Eorszzoc
m 1634, ami thxrtj-ooe. The naz=e has teem k=ov2 on Fi*g4-i«i>
eight hoailred jean, being f^se rises recorded is the Doof=sii» book. All
the AsKxicas Wxllar^ are haa A^^^'t^n^ x^^^x. tl&e faTrTy '"^^■"^Tti.
bj Joseph WiDard, of Bostoc says :
Baa '.f-rrrj mrxA ^A'u'jrt^ oCiit Tie wr:rir=gr :^ tir wrZ i&cw^ tiai
wrjK. !ta» '•eMesc bat aa sacut :f !a» 4«c3Cii aarrsLfc t-: focceed \--n
laarSK&farr =x the fSuaily. Hi* ■Vfryz.'f w-rt Vfrnrjr* icwiCTcr ^t
toXcv Fng*aarl
Scar,« WrIIari. bora =a tbc ^ar!Tr part :f ric*. Nscxax* rs. In* ■ntiilftjod a
KIM iail2*gar*je«t »ari =q^3e«t>:Of;^ isi" ti^!ser be ifterariaeii zs ;rx*c-i -w^ati ia* stacly.
Vir:i:i;di r^^rjcta-c* ^pi:ts e^rs^nriic w-r» riy^fly «a5:racd iur-sa: tie ^reaier part of
tiftc ti=* *r-.= :-: jc lat:: tbe pi:wrr c :be k=^ ^"cyi^ t : #cik Asi tiat rf Pxr^aauoie te
•1 frzd tie '.-zeal i-thiirttae* crrtficats:
hart M-f.: --h.rT !Lfci jt<A3e^ frzci tie '.'Zcal i-thiirttae* -xrtdtcats* Hf arrr^i-raracv to the
or-ier* *-ji ^>crpi=e .t tbc Cb^rci :<^ Fj=^-i=.l ini :c* ba-rhtf tiiss tic jat!i»oc alji
aarl 4C7»rr=ac7 Other T»jala:<E* r«trxi=t* mrrrt 3 Ifke -T.fi'ier tax^osnL
Wrs.'.hr:^ 'jtZ.*' -z.* -srsifiTr iate :f J-zl-r :ru. tiat it lygearfi "b^ •n-.i-rr prrrate
the 'it7»rt3r* -Jt *-.=.!- t tie be<t,'!:i:th =r:ii3ter« i^i Ciristaiz:*. Vfcf ired «ad li»:«
ia thrjie beii=ii ct tl*- :...r-i 4 ~t«r=t3--t* = ti» w:rk. i^-t i^ ir^reJtesskn orf" ^cme^cvil
<*av*t-'. cr^t^-e -tr.c P>.-.itjl "n^tt: - V^a= t: te i-7Fr»i'r=»iie»f ^ tie xrc&bBs^:p«^
otfiert of tic cr:c=*rl 1- * =;-kttrr :f «tatc *.: t* th^y -sest ret wirrirts tj stay
aarl to call =s -xr pater:t brrt "ptzn prrtrt:^:-; ■:c t.'-*' *:t;rr=ii.<ir* ittsstiasc iew NcaeScnl
lh» p'jkaZJkZyja wtl* t; E=.?!a=»l i^ nrsrarTi ':c tie N-rwf :u-=»!li=id £sii=« ■itkit tier tc«>lL <?■
tieir waT br.T=ewar± tie *h:p» wtre at tiit f.=< rrl-iaxd. Sin-rc WiZani gr".^a>iy caaoe
owrr in tii* ficet.
H»wtfe Sfary Starpr. fciira it H :t^t:i:ciie= :- r^u iiTiz^ttrr ?f Henry S&ar?c aad
Jane Frrkit. wa* twrrt-T T«ar> ■: ji whe= *>.« icc- r=r«i=^- -•^■^ >:-=*taad to Aaarr-ka.
Wt:".ard'c«ab:i*h<d hiriiieif :ti :t:- i:::=.ir-i irr^ :c :i< Er-^it-c sade ot Char^
at CasibtTrizr-
The tiiivariajj -rear r-f^s. i= cr.t=pG=v wrti Rct Filter BcTk*^ a ssxc of cr
»wi Ian{^ beart. ct'=»,^:-t fi~ Cv ir..i i->t:=*-i->h<-i j* a iiT-.-- »io bad litelv «i
Enjflaarl in=i -n W-lliri iz-l t^Tlv-r c:-Tt> w-.th th«tr ti=::l>rs :tci=«d a jmat of
mile* iriTsare ^pt-ti ti« rrv-r at a p"_ic*- .-rillfi M ->k=ti ;:iai •aritrrt tiey asiu fT>cat Ifeaxd-
»h:;** a»l dtiEcaltif* er*ti'- li-h-rd the icwr: :f Crric.r-i I^—'S'iu.telT =pcn tie 01
Lico of the triwn ^--Iti-.t: W^Ilar^ was ap7«::rted Clerk :f tie Writ*, aad coet:
tkm of the irjw^ ^--Iti-.t: W=:iar^ was ap7«::rted Clerk :C tie Writ*, aad ccBtr=.aed
that office by ar.asal *!icta:c. f-:r Trraetcer: j. :j-ir«. K*-* rtil-.tiry ?enrace wa5 ccotiaacvE?^ 1
fcrtv ytar* cat:! h:* 'i<tath. At the carMtst'^'.-ctDr-s =^i.e >y tie tr-wn rije
a4 4rp»xtv to the Oeceral C'crt mi wa* r-e-elrcti-i e-r-ry ytar wrth three excepcaocis. till
i'-?au a term of ei^teen y^ar* Hes'-.-o h^'.i ti<: t^c* :c"c':~~-js*i':cer S.Ttbn
llard. witi Jolm
Indsaa^;. fortsid-
<I:=ar a:: other* eace^-t *-
natfre tribe*.
The ear:v hist7r\- -f Mi*s£ci:i.*«:tt* I* f.:" f I'.Ic.*:::!- t: the nxay a=d varied *
of M'»''.r W-.Ilar-". :n £r. ,Sc-_-.: :;jt,;^c'.ty ill rrf-rctir^ h:v:h h- .rupee hi:* character as a
xs^r. ".t ir.trrtfritv .-ih:l:ty x~i tn-rr^. ' H:=- ninie il.-: ^^p^-ir- ir^iocg ti->«e .-^ the Biea»>
Vr* '^f the •Ver.Vr-'.: C 'Irt »h-. ^■- *:«i"i::y r-t-^-.-te'. t!--. :• —:=-.>*:;- er^? *e-=t -tit by Ciarles
II t J t'/^A into th- ifLi'.r- ,f th* ^'* "■^- ^^' *^ .tfit : i-. r' : yilty wi* seriocsTv qTsestsoacd.
Th*- -'/r:r::w>.r:*ri »•»*- " -.rtt-ri »*. -irr^rT. p. -ir.t th-c ' -r.^— ." C :':-t -rsistiiia: every r:
n-.-^.'. f 'heir patrr.t iniiTri r-arily *.r;^p:-^ at thit lein^ .tcter=ii=ed to ■nanrtint
ngit tht:-. had tiiicrt.> e=;o:.T:^.
Ancestry, 3
At the outbreak of King Philip's war. we find Major Willard, a man of seventy years,
in active service, filling important posts of duty, ana enduring hardships which might
well have been the death of many a youn^^er man. Although past the age of legal military
service, having, as we have seen, done his full share of public duty for the intant colony,
and suffered aDio his full share of privation and exposure, he seems to have undertaken all
the military duty falling to a soldier of his prominence, giving his inestimable services
freely and unstinting^ly. Maior Willard was looking forward to a further term of service
in civ 1 life as an assistant aajutant, and in military life to continued exertion in the field
against an enemy still active and destructive. But, in this last year, an unusual load of
care, with its train of anxieties, added to the hazards of an intense winter, to which he was
so often exposed on the journey or on the march in long continued absences from his cher-
ished home, must have rendered him easily accessible to the attacks of active disease. It
so happened in the spring-time of this year, in the order of Providence, that there was an
unusual amount of sickness. Scarcely a hearthstone in New England escaped the visita-
tion. *. * * The disease was an epidemic cold of a very malignant type, and to this
disease, afler a short illness. Major willard fell a victim at Charlestown, on Monday, the
2^th day of April (corresponding to May 4, new style), 1676, in the seventy-second year of
his age. • ♦ • Increase Mather, in lamenting over the widespread desolation caused by
this pestilence, occurring as it did during the gloomy period of a war in which some six
hundred persons had fallen a sacrifice, remarks : " Tnere have been many sick and weak,
and many have fallen asleep ; yea, eminent and useful instruments hath the I/>rd re-
moved. ♦ • * This colony of Massachu.sctts hath been bereaved of two. viz.. Major
Willard and Mr. Ru.ssell. who for many years had approved themselves faithful in the
magistracy, and the death of a few such is as much as if* thousands had fallen."
The memoir further says :
Early called into the public service, disciplined by the teachings of toil, deprivation,
and varied experience, with his character and capacity well understood and valued, it was
a natural sequence that he should retain his hold upon the confidence and affection of an
enlightened community throughout all the emergencies of a new state, in important trusts
as legislator, judge ana military commander until his death. This^ as we have seen, was
no li^ht or easy service. It eng^rossed. doubtless, a large part of his time and attention ;
certainly so afler he was called to the Council in 1654, and tnence until his death in 1676. It
took him away from his family, from the cultivation of his estate, and from special atten-
tion to his private interests. He must be present at every session of the General Court,
every meeting of the Governor and Council, at the terms of the Court of Assistants and of
the County Court. From 1634-1636 the sessions of the General Court were quarterly, and
afterward semi-annually. The meetings of the Governor and Council were to be held
monthly, according to the provision of the charter. As a judicial tribunal, their terms were
quarterly. The Major attended the County Court in Middlesex, probably between seventy
and eighty terms. » ♦ * Add to this, the numerous meetings of committees, in and
out of legislative sessions ; and in military matters, the time neces.sarily occupied in attend-
ing to the minute and detailed provisions of the laws in the organization, equipment, dis-
cipline and mustering — first, of his company and afterward of his regiment — for a period
of^ forty years.
Again we quote the memoir :
Fathers are often said, and truly, to live again in their children : and traits of char-
acter descend through several generations, distinctly brought out in many instances, and in
others still somewhat prominent, but modified by circumstances. Thus we may suppose that
Samuel, the most distinguished son of his father, inherited that mildness, as well as firm-
ness and noble indei>enaence which universal testimony concedes to him. I may add, that
so far as my observation extends, and so far as we can predicate any quality of au entire
genus, this temperament belongs to the present generation of the family.
Major Willard lived in Lancaster and Groton, Mass., as well as in Con-
cord. Among his immediate descendants are two presidents of Harvard
University, also Rev. Samuel Willard, pastor of the Old South Church, Bos-
ton, who opposed the hanging of the witches ; and Solomon Willard, of
Quincy, Mass., the architect of Bunker Hill Monument, who refused to ac-
cept pay for his services, and of whom Edward Everett said that " his chief
characteristic was that he wanted to do everything for everybody for noth-
ing." Rev. Samuel and Solomon were brothers of Deacon Cephas Willard,
of Petersham, Mass., who died at ninety-three years old, having served the
Unitarian church there as deacon fifty-six years.
My own line of descent is from Henry, fourth son of the major, whose
mother was Mary Dunster, sister of President Dunster of Harvard University.
The order is as follows :
'Simon, ^Henry, ^Henry, *Abram, ^Elijah, ^Oliver Atherton, ^Josiah
Flint, 'Frances Elizabeth.
As the derivation of family names is largely fanciful, I have chosen to
4 Ancestry.
think of mine as meaning ** One who wills " ; Joseph Cook makes it signify,
"will-hard'*— and either definition is acceptable. My great great-grand-
father, Abram Williu'd (great-grandson of Simon), died in the American army
during the French war. His home was Harvard, Mass., where my great-
grandfather, Elijah Willard, was bom, March, 1751. Elijah died at Dublin,
N. H., August 19, 1^39, six weeks before my birth. He was forty years a
Baptist minister in Dublin, and even at the advanced age of eignty -eight,
only four weeks previous to his departure from this world, he preached a
funeral sermon. He was three times married, his first wife, Mary Atherton,
being the mother of my grandfather, Oliver Atherton. He served in the
Revolutionary war. His ministry at Dublin, near Keene, N. H., was faith-
ful and long.
The following droll story is told of his powers as a peace-maker. A
member of his church had called another "an old skinflint/' whereupon
accusation was brought by the offended party. When the authorities of the
church were sitting in council on this ^rave piece of indecorum. Elder Will-
ard suggested, in his character of presiding officer, that they should look in
the dictionary and see what a skinflint was. This met with great favor.
But lo, and behold ! there was no such word in the book referred to. The
elder then said, that inasmuch as there was no definition there given, he
would appeal to the brother who had used the word to give the definition.
This was done, the brother replying : "Why, Elder, what I meant was that
Brother Blank is a downright clever sort of a man." At this they shook
hands, and the church quarrel was at an end. It is shrewdly suspected by
some that Elder Willard cooked up this reconciliation, dictionary and all.
My grandfather, Oliver Atherton Willard, married Catherine Lewis, one
of the twelve children of Captain Lewis, who fought in the Revolutionary
war and whose wife was Martha Collins, of Southboro', Mass., where she
married James Lewis, September 5, 1753, ^^^ remained there until 1771,
when they removed to Marlboro, N. H. Immediately after their marriage
Oliver A. Willard and Catherine Lewis went with other pioneers to Wheelock,
Vt., where my father, Josiah Flint Willard, named for a maternal uncle, was
bom, November 7, 1805. His mdther was a woman of great force of char-
acter, piquant and entertaining ; the finest singer in the county. The family
lived within a few miles of my mother's but never met until both went on
runners across the snow to Ogden, Monroe county, N. Y. (two miles from
Chnrchville), in 1816, where they were neighbors and friends, the Willard
brothers, Josiah and Zophar, marrying two of Deacon John HilPs daughters,
Mary (my mother) and Abigail. Grandmother Willard became an invalid
in middle life and died at the age of seventy-seven.
My mother's line of ancestry is more difficult to trace, the names in-
volved being those of much larger families.
Her grandparents were Samuel Hill, born in Lee, N. H., October 6,
1720, and Abigail Huchins, bom in Lee, February 20, 1733. Samuel died
in Danville, Vt., and Abigail in Ogden, N. Y., in 1829. Mother's father was
John Hill, of Lee, N. H.
Traditions conceminjif the great bodily strength, agility and intense energy of some of
the members of the family at Durham still exist, and notably of Samuel Hill, who was
quite a giant in his way ; and the family generally are represented as excelling in those
brave, manly and strong qualities which make successful pioneers in a new country ; while
their generally great longevity stands as proof positive of their good habits in temperance,
peacefulness and moderation. They were ready to defend their homes and honor, how-
ever, at all hazards ; quite an extended list of their names appears in the early Colonial
military roster, and I still have in my possession the signatures of three of the Huls of Dur-
ham and I^ee — Nathaniel, Robert and John— all three probably the sons, or grandsons, of
Nathaniel. They joined a volunteer organization of patriot minute-men in Durham,
June 29, 1775.
As a rule, the Hills were well-to-do. had a fondness for mills, machinery and mechani-
cal pursuits, most of them owning and cultivating large or ^^ood-sized farms. Many of
them removed early and settled in the interior of New Hampshire and Vermont.
Ancestry, 5
My great-grandfather Hill was a man of most self-sacrificing integrity.
When, rather early in his career, he had become security for a friend, who
failed, men of good conscience came to him urging that a man's family was
•* a preferred creditor " in all business relations, and that he should refuse to
give up all he had to satisfy another man's creditors. But he was a man of
clean nands — swearing to his own hurt and changinj^ not He only
answered, "It is the nature of a bondsman when the principal fails to stand
in the gap.*' And so he stood in the gap, losing all his fortune rather than
fail to be true to the implied promise of his bond.
This good man's wife, Abigail Huchins, was a woman of strong character,
and firm of will and action. It is related of her, that when a young girl,
she was alone in the house one day just as a storm was coming up. A man
somewhat off his mental balance came to the door and exclaimed, *' I am the
author of this storm ! " *• If j^ou are, then you are the Prince of the Power
of the Air," said the young girl, *' and you sha'n*tstay in this house,*' and
she resolutely drove him off.
Concerning these ancestors, notable in character, mother writes :
My grandfather Hill was a man of meditative habit of mind, almost morbidly con-
scientious, with intense spiritual convictions, and strong relifoous faith. He praved inces-
santly for his children, until he received the evidence that they would all be saved. He died
before my remembrance.
My grandmother Hill who lived with my parents till I was a youne lady in the twen-
ties, and died at the age of ninety-seven years, was a woman of sangume temperament,
strong everjr way, strong of heart, strong of mind, strong in moral and religious convic-
tions— a Whitefield Congregationalist.
My father was like his mother, a sort of Hercules. When a child I had no idea there
was a'power in the universe that could attack him successfully. I felt safe in the thunder-
storm if he were near. He was very fond of his children and we felt that he stood between
us and all trouble. He was a zealous and active Christian of the Freewill Baptist church.
I can do no justice to my mother's character, it was such a rare combination of excellen-
cies—relig[ious, devotional, cheerful, industrious, frugal, hopeful, Imoyant, mirthful at
times, loving and lovable always ; my father's heart did safely trust in her, so did her chil-
dren and friends. She was a member of the Freewill Baptist church.
A sister of my father married Uncle Clements, and one of my most valued cousins was
Rev. Dr. Jonathan Clements, at one time Principal of Phillips Academy, at Andover. He
was an uncle of Rev Dr. Phillips Brooks and a teacher of Dr. Oliver Wendell Phillips.
The Thompsons were from Scotland, and tradition says from the Coimty
of Cromarty. The name is patronymic from Thom, the head of a Norse fam-
ily, and, though widespread, stands only twenty-first in the list of common
names. The line runs thus : David Thompson, Gent., a Scotchman who
settled on Thompson's Island, so named for himself, in Boston Harbor, in
May, 1619, a year and a half before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, thus
being, as the Dorchester Historical Society aflirms, "The first recorded per-
manent white resident of Boston Harbor." David died in 1628, leaving an
infant son, John Thompson, of Piscataqua. His son, John Thompson, Sr.,
of Durham, died in 1734. His son, John Thompson, Jr., of Durham,
died in 1727. Next comes his son, my mother's maternal grandfather,
Nathanael Thompson (or Nathaniel) of Durham, N. H., baptized by Rev.
Hugh Adams, May 2^, 1726, an *' infant.'* He was a trader, millwright and
shipwright; settled m Holdemess, now Ashland, N. H., (after living at
Portsmouth, N. H.), where he was an importer. He lost his property and
was killed in tlie launching of a ship. He married Elizabeth Stevens,
of Newburyport, Mass.
He was once at a dinner where everybody was a Tory and drank the
health of the tyrant whom Americans were fighting, and said, as they clinked
their glasses, "King George's health, and tt shall go rounds''' whereupon
Grandfather Thompson cned out, "Washington's health, and it shall go
round ! " But the disloyal Tories struck him, drove him from the room, and
even threatened his life.
The l^est testimony to this man's character is found in the following
extracts from liLs will. Being wounded and unable to reach home, three
days before his death he dictated the following :
6 Ancestry.
"Letter of Natbanlel Thompson lo Blinbetb Thompioo. hia wife, i
N. H., June 14, 17^ : Tlirec dayi finer, 1 now conclude. I received my mun.
eipeciinK KiOD to Uke mr Snir«nd long brcwellofTliae, I Dowaecdrou n
. uke mrSni(«nd long brcwellofTliae,! DOW ac. _.
eel the moat tender Bympathy for the diaconioUte litu
■ bernved widow, wllh a number of nung children.
yourlmftln God, —'•" " "— '^~' ""■ " '■■' — '- •■'- "--i- >—"■-•< —
tut prayer and e
le God of tbe widow la hIa faoly haUtatJcm, And it la now m
^ ^ ... quest that you may teach them to loae and fear the King 1
glory, tod bring them up in tbe nurture and admonition of tbe Lord. And in my name,
requeat you to exhort my two eldest »on«, in particular, by no ineanB lo frequent e¥"
TC follow tradiuR in hoi
o tbe ioula and bodies of youth, And it is my (tying request Ihey would exer-
eiw all possible kindnes.' to their mother In her bereaved state and manifeat all friendlv,
brotberfy aOectlon toward my other children. And above everything which can be named,
O tbat my ebildren may remember Iheir Creator in the days of their youth ! and often
recollect and observe the counicls and advice of tbejr kind btber while ha wu with
tboo."
These were the last words of a man mortally wonnded, and thej are
fhll of Christian faith and fortitude.
Of her mother, Pollj Thompson, daughter of tbe heroic Nathaniel, my
mother has always spoken in terms that surprised mc by their delineation
of a character almost aneelic. My cousin, Sarah Dusinbnry, from the old
homestead, sends me the following peep into the home life of these revered
grandparents :
About that Bpinning wheel of your grandmother Hill's that yon found in our garret
and carried away, 1 anked AunI Sarah if she could furnish interesting facts. She said tbat
knew waa that it was brought l>y your grandmother from Vermont, and that abe
lace and apiti a " nwiof fiax" be-
read aloud from the large Bible
,. . . .... , the low hum of her wheel not
'■ Hum, hum'huin, hum," as eaatly and almost as noiselesaly as one would ply the knitting
needles, she spun the whole eveninorlhrouah ; for womi ■ ' •'-—'--
of Iheff admiration? Probably not ; such timber as our grandparmta were made of ia scarce
In these days. My mother has always told me that there ma Irish blood in my veins from
my adorable maternal grandmother,
John Hill and Folly Thompson were married February 4, 1796, and re-
moved to Danville, Vt, where my mother, Mary Thompson Hill, was bom
January 3, 1S05. My father was bom in Whcelock, VL, November 7, 1805,
and they were married in Ogdeu (near Chorchville,) N. Y., November 4,