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“Roxbury, July 26th, 1838.

“My dear Wife—Your esteemed letter of the 20th is at hand, and it has relieved my mind to hear that you are all doing so well. I suppose you expect a history of my movements here. Well, on Saturday morning went to Boston; in the evening took mother and called on all my Dorchester friends—stayed with some five minutes, with others fifteen, etc. Sunday, went to church; very dry sermon in morning; evening attended Mr. Abbot’s church; was much pleased with the preaching—text—‘And there came one running and kneeling to Him, and said,’ etc. At night attended at same place what they call a ‘Conference Meeting’—quite an interesting time. Monday, went to Brookline—visited sisters. Tea at Mr. Davis’s; music of the best kind in abundance. Tuesday to Boston in morning, evening at home to receive company. Quite a pleasant afternoon; a good many Dorchester friends calling. Wednesday morning as usual in the city; evening held a grand levee: the street filled with chaises and carriages; some twenty or more to tea. Really, my visit has created quite a sensation among our good friends; some met yesterday afternoon who have not seen each other for ten or more years. Don’t you think I had better come here oftener to keep up the family acquaintance? for it seems to require some extraordinary event to set these good folks to using their powers of locomotion. By-the-by, you must not be jealous, but I had a lady kiss me yesterday, for the first time it was ever done here, and who do you think it was? My cousin Mary, of whom you have heard me speak. I have so much love given in charge for you, my own dear wife, that it will be necessary to send a part of it in this letter for fear that I should not be able to travel with it all. I am especially directed to bear from a lady two kisses to you from her, and they shall be faithfully delivered when we are permitted to meet. You don’t know how many inquiries have been made after you, and regrets expressed that you did not come on with me. Mother says, ‘Tell Anna I should like for Samuel to stay longer, but know that he is wanting at home, so will not say a word at his leaving.’ She sends much love to her daughter Anna. Father keeps coming in, and from his movements I judge he is waiting for me to finish. You know he is clock-work, so adieu once more. Give my love to the girls, and all at the parsonage. Kiss the children for father. I must now close my letter by commending you to the care and protection of Him who preserves, guides, and directs us in all things. May His choicest blessing rest on you, my dear wife, and on the children of our love! Adieu, my dear wife.

“Your husband,

“Samuel.”

Thus cheerily runs the old-fashioned family epistle. The writer, who never demitted the habit of going to church twice every Sunday, and sometimes thrice, does not comment upon the coincidence that he hears again a sermon from the text used and “improved” by a Virginia divine, two years ago. His mind was full of other things just now. This one of his annual visits to his mother was a glad holiday. The world was going smoothly with him, and the hearty congratulations of townspeople and kindred were a-bubble. His mother was happy in her second marriage. The good deacon was “father” to her son and his wife, and filled the rôle well.

My father’s namesake son, Samuel Horace, was born earlier in the summer.

Although the month was June, the weather must have been cold or damp, for a low wood fire burned upon the hearth one afternoon as I crept into the “chamber” to get a peep at the three-days-old baby, and perchance to have a talk with my mother. The nurse, before leaving the room on an errand, had laid the infant upon a pillow in a rocking-chair (I have it now!) There was no cradle in the house, and one had been ordered from Richmond. My mother was asleep, and, I supposed, had the baby beside her. Stealing noiselessly across the floor, I backed up to the Boston rocker, in childish fashion, put my hands upon the arms of the chair, and raised myself on tiptoe, when the child (aroused, I fancy, by his guardian angel, prescient of the good he would accomplish in the world he had just entered, and compassionate of the remorseful wight whose life would be blighted by the impending deed) stretched out his arms and yawned. I saw the movement under my lifted arm, and dropped flat upon the rug. I must have crouched there for half an hour, a prey to horrible imaginings of what might have been. My mother did not awaken, and the baby went to sleep again. The shock would have been terrific to any child. To a dreamer like myself, the visions that flitted between me and the red embers were as varied as they were fearful. Lucy Bragg’s tragic death had killed her mother and the baby-boy. If I had crushed our new baby, my own sweet mother would have died with him. I saw myself at their funeral, beside the coffin holding them both, and my father shrinking in abhorrence from the murderess. Forecasting long years to come, I pictured a stricken and solitary woman, shunned by innocent people who had never broken the sixth commandment, and cowering beside a brier-grown grave, crying as I had read somewhere, “Would to God I had died when I was born!”

I do not think I shed a tear. Tears were dried up by the voiceless misery. I know I could not sleep that night for hours and hours. I know, too, that I never told the shameful thing—the almost murder—to a living creature until it was ten years old.

I appreciate, most clearly of all, that my baby-brother became from that hour, in some sort, my especial property. The peculiar tenderness that has characterized our feeling for each other, the steadfast affection and perfect confidence in our mutual love that have known no variableness or shadow of turning, for all our united lives, may not have been rooted in the vigil of unutterable horror and unspeakable thankfulness. I look back upon it as a chrism.

Later in the year, another incident that might have been a tragedy, stirred the even flow of domestic life. We had finished prayers and breakfast, and my father was half-way down the avenue on his way to the village when we saw him stop suddenly, retrace his steps hurriedly, enter the yard, and shout to the colored butler who was at the dining-room window. The man ran out and came back shortly, dragging Argus and Rigo into the hall with him, shutting the front door. My father was taking down his gun from the hooks on the wall of the hall, and, without a word, began to load it.

One of the earliest of our nursery lessons was, “Never ask questions of busy people!” My mother set the example of obedience to this precept now by silence while her husband, with set lips and resolute eyes, rammed down a charge of buckshot into the barrel, and, saying, “Keep the children in the house!” ran down the steps and down the avenue at the top of his speed toward the big gate opening upon the village street a hundred yards away.

From the front windows we now saw a crowd of men and boys, tramping down the middle of the highway, firing confusedly and flinging stones at a great yellow dog trotting ahead of them, and snapping right and left as he ran. Before my father reached the gate, the dog had turned sharply to the right down a cross-street skirting our lower grounds. A low fence and a ditch divided the meadow from the thoroughfare. My father kept on our side of the fence, raising his gun to cover the brute, which, as we could now see, was slavering and growling hoarsely. A cry arose from the crowd, and my mother groaned, as the dog, espying the man across the ditch, rushed down one side of it and up the other, to attack the new foe. My father held his hand until the dog was within a few feet of him, then fired with steady aim. The brute rolled over to the bottom of the ditch—dead.

That evening we were allowed to walk down the field to see the slaughtered monster. That was what I named him to myself, and forthwith began a story in several chapters, with my father as the hero, and an astonishing number of beasts of prey as dramatis personæ, that lasted me for many a night thereafter.

The title I had chosen was none too large for the dog as he lay, stark and still, his big head straight with his back, his teeth showing savagely in the open jaws. A trickle of water was dammed into a pool by his huge bulk.

I held my father’s hand and laid my cheek to it in reverence I had not words to express, when my mother said:

“You ran a terrible risk, love! What if your gun had missed fire, or you had not hit him?”

“I had settled all that in my mind. I should have stood my ground and tried to brain him with the butt.”

“As your forefathers did to the British at Bunker Hill!” exulted I, inwardly.

Be sure the sentence was not uttered. The recollection of the inner life, in which I was wont to think out such sayings, has made me more tolerant with so-called priggish children than most of their elders are prone to be.

One paragraph of our next letter has a distinctly modern flavor. By substituting millions for thousands in the estimate of the defalcation, we might date it in this year of our Lord.

“Richmond, April 11th, 1839. “(Saturday night.)

“My dear Wife—The general subject, and, in fact, the only one which at present occupies the minds of the citizens here, is the late discovery of defalcations of my old friend D., first teller of the Bank of Virginia, for the sum, as reports say, of nearly, or quite half a million. He has absconded, but some individuals here have had part of the cash; among the number is the great speculator, W. D. G., who has ruined and also severely injured many persons in this place by borrowing, or getting them to endorse for him. I never have before witnessed so general an excitement here. Mr. G. has been arrested to-day, and taken before the mayor. It is now nine o’clock, and the court is still in session. It is probable he will be sent to the higher court for trial, etc. I expect a good many of our plain country folks will be afraid of Bank of Virginia notes when they hear of the loss. I hope it will make some of them shell out and pay me all that they owe. I should like to find a few thousands waiting for me on my return home. I expect to-morrow to attend the Sabbath-school at the Second Church, conducted by Mr. Reeve. It is said to be the best school in the city. Tell Herbert I have bought a book called Cobwebs to Catch Flies, and I hope it will be the means of catching from him many good lessons. He must learn fast, as I have bought for him Sanford and Merton, with plates, and when he can read he shall have it for his own. May I not hope for a letter from you on Tuesday?—for it seems a long time since we parted.”

Mrs. Bass, the meek widow of a Methodist clergyman, succeeded the eighteen-year-old girl in the conduct of the neighborhood school. It is doubtful if we learned anything worth relating from her. I am sure we learned nothing evil. She was very kind, very gentle, very devout; she wore a widow’s cap and a bombazine gown, and she was the only woman I ever heard pray until I was over fourteen years of age. There were a dozen girls in the class, which met in a one-roomed building in a lot adjoining her garden. We had no public schools at that date in Virginia. We were all paid pupils, and carefully selected from families in our own class. Those from Presbyterian families outnumbered the rest, but no objection was made by our parents to the “methods” of the Wesleyan relict. The tenets of the two churches were the same in the main. Discrepancies in the matter of free agency, predestination, and falling from grace were adjudged of minor importance in the present case. Mrs. Bass was not likely to trench upon them in the tuition of pupils of tender age. I more than suspect that there would have been a strong objection made to intrusting us to a Baptist, who would not lose an opportunity of inculcating the heresy that “baptize” meant, always and everywhere in the Bible, immersion. And every school was opened daily by Bible-reading. To this our black-robed, sweet-faced instructress joined audible petitions, and in our reading and the lessons that followed she let slip no chance of working in moral and religious precepts.

Let one example suffice:

One of our recitations was spelling, with the definitions, from Walker’s Dictionary. Betty Mosby, a pretty girl with a worldly father and a compliant mother, had learned to dance, and had actually attended a kind of “Hunt Ball,” given in the vicinity by her father’s sister. She had descanted volubly upon the festivities to us in “play-times,” describing her dress and the number of dances in which she figured with “grown-up gentlemen,” and the hearts of her listeners burned within us as we listened and longed.

On this day the word “heaven” fell to me to spell and define. This done, the “improvement” came in Mrs. Bass’s best class-meeting tone:

“Heaven! I hope and pray you may get there, Virginia! You ought not to fail of the abundant entrance, for your parents are devout Christians and set you a good example, but from him to whom much is given shall much be required. Next! ‘Heavenly!’ ”

Near the foot of the column stood “Hell.”

Anne Carus rendered it with modest confidence, spelling and defining in a subdued tone befitting the direful monosyllable. That she was a minister’s daughter was felt by us all to lend her a purchase in handling the theme. Mrs. Bass was not to be cheated of her “application”:

“Hell!” she iterated in accents that conveyed the idea of recoiling from an abyss. “Ah-h-h! I wonder which of my little scholars will lie down in everlasting burnings?”

“Mercy! I hope I won’t!” cried Betty Mosby, with a shiver of well-acted terror.

She was a born sensationalist, and quick to voice sensation.

The teacher’s groan was that of the trained exhorter:

“I can’t answer for that, Betty, if you will dance and go to balls!”

That was her “Firstly.” There were at least six heads and two applications in the lecture “in season” trailing at its heels.

We took it all as a matter of course. Each teacher had ways of his, and her own. Those of our relict were innocent, and our parents did not intermeddle. We were very happy under her tutelage. On Saturdays she had a class in “theorem painting.” That was what she called it, and we thought it a high-sounding title. Decorators know it as one style of frescoing. Pinks, roses, dahlias, tulips, and other flowers with well-defined petals, also birds and butterflies, were cut out of oiled paper. Through the openings left by removing the outlined pattern, paint was rubbed upon card-board laid underneath the oiled paper. I have somewhere still a brick-red pink thus transferred to bristol-board—a fearful production. I knew no better than to accept it thankfully when Mrs. Bass had written on the back, “To my dear pupil, M. V. H., from her affectionate Teacher,” and gave it to me with a kiss on the last day of the term.

She gave up the school and left the county at the close of that term, going to live with a brother in another part of the State. I heard, several years later, that she had “professed sanctification” at a Lynchburg camp-meeting. Nowadays, they would say she “had entered upon the Higher Life.”

She must have found, long ago, the abundant entrance into that Highest Life where creeds and threatenings are abolished. Her benign administration was to me a summer calm that held no presage of the morrow’s storm.