Three generations

Our departure from “the Havana” was hastened by an incident, for which I was to blame. I accompanied my father on a visit to the prison. Here we saw huddled together in a miserable cell a group of boys of about my own age; one indeed was much younger, being only fourteen years old. These poor lads were under a sentence of death for a trifling offense, the desecration of the grave of some official who had oppressed the people. The boys had broken or overturned the tombstone on one of the Cuban holidays, as their part of a political demonstration against the tyranical Spanish officialdom. I was so much wrought up over the fate of these youths that I talked unguardedly about them to my friends and later managed to send to the prison a gift of tobacco and fruit. In consequence of this expression of sympathy, my father received a warning from the Cuban authorities, and without waiting for a second hint, he bundled us out of Cuba and over to Key West, much to my regret. Havana, with its bullfights, cock fights, Spanish officers, languid beauties, water ices, and guava marmalade, was an attractive place to a young traveler on her first journey!

My journal reads:

My journal makes no further mention of my father’s business with the Admiral. It gives a list of every officer on board the ships, from the captain to the youngest midshipman, and detailed accounts of the hops and other festivities the hospitable officers arranged for us on board and on shore. Reading over the record all these years after, certain phrases suggest to me that my father’s business with the Admiral was connected with those poor boys under death sentence in the Havana prison. I know he never forgot them, and I believe that he made an effort to secure American intervention on their behalf.

We had turtle steak for dinner at Key West, turtle stew for supper, turtle hash for breakfast! That is all that I remember of the place, at this time our most important naval station in southern waters.

After leaving Key West we stopped at Cedar Keys and broke the journey to Boston into several stages, stopping at Savannah, Charleston, and Norfolk. At the latter place we visited the New Hampshire, described in my journal as, “A splendid old line-of-battleship, with four decks. I rang the fire quarters, and was alarmed at the rushing and scattering of the officers and men. They all tore about the ship, putting out the supposititious fire. The first stream of water came from the hose just two minutes after I sounded the alarm.”

We called the journey from the South to the North “Our jaunt with Spring”, for we traveled hand in hand with her, halting when she halted, pushing on with the first roses and strawberries all the way from Florida to Massachusetts, to find the best of both in our own garden.

This, my first experience of foreign travel, was doubly precious because I was thrown so much with my dear father. During our four months’ absence from home we were constantly together. He taught me how to travel, to take the open road with an open mind and an open hand, not a bad rule for the journey of life and an invaluable one for a young traveler, who like Kipling’s soldier, takes as his motto;

CHAPTER VIII

Newport

I remember something of his talk about the Boundaries and Fisheries dispute, which twenty years before had loomed so large among the questions of the day. He impressed it upon me that while our differences with Great Britain had all the acrimony of a family quarrel, when all was said and done, despite the behavior of a certain portion of the English people during the Civil War, despite Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets and other irritating utterances, Americans should recognize Great Britain as our nearest of kin in the family of nations, to whom we are bound by ties of blood, tradition, and a common language. I am thankful to have escaped the anti-British sentiment so carefully cultivated by certain interests in this country.

An anecdote touching the Boundary dispute seems worth preserving; it was told me years after the event by an Englishman.

At the time when the boundary between British Columbia and Washington Territory was under discussion by the two governments, a commission was sent out from England to report on the value of the land. One of the commissioners, a famous sportsman, made the following comment:

“This is a rotten country; the fish won’t rise to a fly!”

When I visited Washington State and saw the beautiful country awarded to us at that time, I wondered if the dictum of the young angler had carried much influence in the decision.

Perhaps the sharpest memory I have of this year of 1872 is that of the great fire, when sixty acres of buildings in the heart of the business quarter of Boston went up in smoke and flame. I watched the terrible conflagration from the window of the room in the Institution for the Blind, where eighteen years before I first saw the light. Hour after hour passed, as I sat at the open casement watching the flames devour whole blocks of the city. The crimson sky was reflected in the black waters of South Boston harbor; the white spire of Park Street Church was often threatened; over and over again we lost sight of it in the clouds of sooty smoke, the curtain of leaping flame. Each time that the wind blew back the smoke and fire, and I caught a glimpse of that white finger pointing heavenward, fresh hope sprang up; so long as the steeple stood, we knew that the fire had not crossed the Common, and that Beacon Hill and the State House were safe. At this time my Aunt and Uncle Wales had moved into their new house on Brimmer Street, their son Thomas living at his farm in Wayland. During the night my aunt more than once called her husband’s attention to the unusual noise in the streets, the constant ringing of the fire alarm, the toot of engines flying by. His only answer was:

“Be quiet. Go to sleep!”

The next morning, as Aunt and Uncle Wales sat at breakfast, Cousin Tom came in, bearing some large ledgers in his arms.

“What brings you to Boston so early?” demanded his father.

“I came in to save the books. Your office and half Boston burned down last night.”

“I thought there was a good deal of disturbance!” Aunt Jenny placidly remarked.

The fire occurred on a Saturday night. Sunday morning Miss Elizabeth Peabody was found trying to make her way across one of the danger zones roped off and guarded by the police.

“Where did you want to go, Ma’am?” asked a policeman.

“To Sunday school! Please let me pass—my class is waiting.”

“Nary a scholar is waiting for you, Ma’am. There ain’t no church, nor yet no Sunday school.”

The presidential election of this year was one of the most exciting I remember. General Grant was running for his second term; he had been first elected in 1868 with Schuyler Colfax as vice president. In 1872 Colfax withdrew in favor of our friend Henry Wilson. My father was a Grant man, and our house was, as usual, the center of much activity as the election drew near. My mother gave a reception for General and Mrs. Grant, where there was a great gathering of the Republican clan, and my father was constantly receiving committees and delegations. A section of the Republicans, dissatisfied with party politics during Grant’s first term, “split off” and nominated Horace Greeley for president, with Gratz Brown as his running mate, the Democrats indorsing the nomination. Greeley was then sixty-one years old. Judging by the portraits, he must have been rather rustic in appearance, wearing old-fashioned chin whiskers. The campaign was a bitter one. Greeley was unmercifully caricatured by Thomas Nast and other cartoonists. My parents, who had great respect for Greeley, resented the ridicule to which he was subjected. I remember, among other instruments of torture, an absurd portrait of him on a paper fan with a long white cotton fluff representing his beard. This was widely circulated. Greeley’s death, a few weeks after his defeat at the polls, was said to have been caused by the suffering he endured in this cruel campaign. As founder and for thirty years editor of the New York Tribune, as a patron of artists and men of letters, he might have hoped for better treatment at the hands of the press. The very papers whose ridicule broke his heart were full of handsome obituary notices after he was gone. It was deeply impressed on me at this time that to run the gantlet of a presidential election, a man must have more than common courage.

In Boston it seemed as if every waking hour of my father’s and mother’s existence was filled with labor for city, state, or nation. At Portsmouth the pressure was somewhat relaxed. I remember both parents as steadily at work here during the morning, but there were delicious afternoons when they were free to play with us. Those were the palmy days of the Newport catboats, small, steady, centerboard sloops, the best craft for pleasure sailing I have known. Memories arise of delightful summer days when a gay party of us drove to town in the old carryall, which was “put up” in the shed of the Newport Reading Room, of which my father was one of the founders. At Bannister’s wharf, if we were lucky, we engaged Cap’n Anthony and his boat, The Two Sisters, for the day. The ecstasy of the motion of that little cockleshell as she danced over the water is something unforgettable. If the wind were light, we steered our way out of the harbor towards Beaver Tail for a taste of the ocean; if there was too much sea on, the course lay within the landlocked waters of the bay. At high noon we landed at Conanicut Island just below old Fort Dumpling. Conanicut now goes mostly by the more prosaic name of Jamestown. Sometimes, when a householder of this pleasant summer resort drives me about the island, pointing out this or that view, a miracle happens! Some wind of memory blows Jamestown, with its hotels, its nice comfortable houses, clean away, and gives me back the bare rocky Conanicut of my youth that I loved as I can never love Jamestown. The commodious ferry boat from which I have just stepped disappears, I am sitting once more at the masthead of The Two Sisters, flying over Narragansett Bay, the salt taste on my lips, the salt wind in my hair. I am climbing the steep rough path to the old ruined fort, a lunch basket in one hand, a camp stool in the other. On the farther side of the Island is a little sheltered silver stretch of beach where one day, when the party is small and intimate, we make out to rig a shelter to shield us in our undressing and to slip into the delicious cool water. The joy of such a stolen sea bath, where there is no curious crowd to watch, can hardly be known to the ladies and gentlemen who now disport themselves on summer mornings at Bailey’s Beach.

These joyous outings were often shared by the young people from Vaucluse, where every summer “Shepherd Tom” (Thomas Hazard) gathered about him the clans of Hazard and of Minturn. Mr. Hazard’s wife, dead long before this time, was one of the beautiful Minturn sisters; from her Shepherd Tom inherited a large family connection, to every branch of which he showed endless hospitality. Beside the five Hazard children there were relays of Minturns, Mayers, Halls, Blacklers, Birckheads, and Hunters, who came and went in dazzling succession. Taken altogether, they were the handsomest family I have ever seen. Beside their beauty and charm, they had certain characteristics that set them apart from the rest of us. They seemed to hold some secret knowledge of and communion with nature that gave them a power over animals; they understood the language of horses, dogs, even insects; they had no fear of any living thing,—knew snakes, bees, spiders, toads, for their friends. They seemed more like a race of fauns and dryads than mere flesh-and-blood boys and girls. The four slim, graceful Hazard girls were overshadowed by their father, a rustic, vigorous man, who left his mark on his generation, and is remembered to-day by a volume of essays, “Johnny Cake Papers”, later handsomely reprinted by a nephew of the Peacedale branch of the clan. The Hazards were Friends; when I first remember him Shepherd Tom went regularly to Quaker Meeting. He was rough in manner, careless in dress, and thought too little about his appearance. One Sunday morning on his return from meeting, he was seen to go hurriedly to a mirror, where he gazed hard at his reflection. He quickly saw why the folks at meeting had looked at him so curiously. He had a thick crop of tiny blond curls. The mirror showed each of these curls tied up with a bit of scarlet wool. While he slept on the porch before going to meeting, some of the younger children had played this scurvy trick upon him. If it were meant as a lesson, perhaps he deserved it, for the relatives of his beautiful young wife remembered her mortification when he came into the drawing-room where she was receiving guests from Newport, fresh from killing a sheep, his white smock showing the telltale scarlet stains.

Mr. Hazard took some pains to win great influence in the Rhode Island Legislature. This was a puzzle to his friends till they learned that his object was the abolition of capital punishment in the State. He did not rest until the death penalty was done away with, after which he retired into private life, and, as I think, never again meddled with public affairs.

Vaucluse, originally laid out by a French landscape architect, was in those days the finest country seat I had ever seen, although already a good deal fallen from its high estate and not maintained as it should have been. The remains of a labyrinth could still be traced by the windings of its box-bordered paths. The long alley leading to the summerhouse was bordered by a neglected box hedge higher than a man’s head. The trees here seemed larger and handsomer than all other oaks, elms, or maples, and in the month of May two superb specimens of Magnolia grandiflora were covered with enormous creamy white blossoms, whose perfume haunts me still. The house was of colonial design, with very large white columns at the entrance of the main building, flanked by two wings used in the olden time as servants’ quarters, but now devoted to seeds and bulbs and all sorts of quaint garden tools. Before the entrance a graveled path swept round a circle of greensward, in whose midst stood the old lichen-covered sundial, clasped by a scarlet honeysuckle. It was here one breathless midsummer afternoon that we gave the memorable amateur circus. As the crowning event, Sultan, the Mayers’ old Arabian pony, trotted round and round the ring, while Esther Hazard, in a blue bathing suit and scarlet cap, balanced lightly on his venerable back!

Mr. Hazard was a confirmed spiritualist. He read “The Banner of Light”, if, indeed, he did not contribute to that journal, then the chief organ of the spiritualists. I often went with him to séances, which had a great interest for me, though I was never for a moment shaken in my belief that the manifestations and materializations I witnessed were vulgar shams. Fannie Hazard, the eldest daughter, a girl of great sweetness and a good deal of will power, refused to allow mediums at Vaucluse; I remember some battles royal on this point. After her death, however, the mediums came, and a cabinet was arranged in one of the summerhouses, where the séances took place. Once Frederick Myers of the London Society for Psychical Research was present with me at a séance. The medium was a dull one, the grossness of her manifestations, it seemed to me, could not deceive the veriest child. They deceived Mr. Myer, however, who was deeply impressed with all that he saw and heard. Later, when I read accounts of the impartial manner in which the investigations of psychical phenomena were carried on by the society of which Frederick Myer was the leading spirit, the testimony left me quite cold.

At the close of the evening sessions, Mr. Hazard used to walk in the mysterious old garden where, he told me, his dead wife often joined him, walked with him, leant upon his arm. On one occasion she allowed him to cut a small piece from the spirit lace drapery in which she was arrayed. He showed me the fragment the next day; it proved to be the same “wash blonde” I had bought at Edward Lawton’s shop in Thames Street. The materialized spirits allowed Mr. Hazard to cut off locks of their hair for remembrance. The last time I was in the parlor of Vaucluse, there hung on the wall a glass case with strands of hair of every shade and degree of fineness: the name of the friend or relative from whose head it had been cut while the medium was in trance was written beside each. I remember that in the glass case the hair of Uncle Jonas Minturn was dark red, though my impression is that in life it was of another shade!

Among the young faces that look at me from the old garden at Vaucluse, the fairest is that of my “Twin”, Edith Blackler, a tall girl with skin like a sunburnt peach, eyes like a clear brown brook, teeth like fresh peeled almonds, and a laugh that made the old feel young, and the young feel immortal. We were as nearly inseparable as the four miles that lay between Lawton’s Valley and Vaucluse allowed: together we tramped the country roads, swam the waters of Narragansett, waded the streams and sailed the seas that bound our island home. When I was not at Vaucluse, my Twin was with me at Lawton’s Valley. Here Mama was mistress of the revels, and here young and old, grave and gay, fashionable and unfashionable, gladly gathered when she waved her fairy wand. One afternoon when all Newport, both the “intellectuals” of the Point and the frivolous of the Avenue, mingled in a friendly crowd in the Valley for afternoon tea, we had some famous charades. The final scene represented Blondin crossing Niagara Falls. A plank was laid across the summit of the waterfall just below the old mill, the “middle fall”, we called it, for at that time there were three falls in Lawton’s Valley. A tiny camp chair was placed in the middle of the plank, and here one of my mother’s familiars (was it William Hunt or Hamilton Wilde?) proceeded to compound an omelette, while the brook sang, the silver birch rustled, and the insects trilled their evening hymn. Henry James was of the company that day; something of its magic always lingered in his tenacious memory, as it does in my random recollections.

At this time Newport’s summer colony was in the wooden age. Bellevue Avenue was thickly settled with pleasant, substantial cottages, some of which still survive. The word cottage was, however, always a misnomer; these commodious, well-furnished houses should more properly have been called villas. The first symptom of the impending change was the sudden transformation of the cottage from a simple, medium-sized country house to a large ambitious structure like the George Francis Train villa in the atrocious style of the early seventies, the darkest period of American architecture. After the wooden age, the brick, stone, and marble ages followed in quick succession.

The Emperor Caesar Augustus “found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.” Richard Hunt might well have said, “I found Newport a town of wood; I left it a town of marble.” At about the time I am writing of, Hunt built Linden Gate for Mr. Henry Marquand and the John N. A. Griswold house on Touro Park, now the home of the Art Association. While maintaining something of the cottage characteristics, both these are far handsomer and more substantial than the earlier houses, and mark the summer colony’s second stage of architectural evolution.

I spent part of one season with my mother’s friend, Mrs. Charles H. Dorr, in Newport, and entered more fully into the social life of the place than I had done before. Compared to our life in Portsmouth, Newport seemed formal, dull, cut and dried. Everybody bathed then on the First Beach, except the few people who lived near “Bailey’s.” The ladies’ hour was from ten to twelve. At noon a flag was run up on the bathing pavilion, announcing that the “gentlemen’s hour” had begun, when women and children were banished from the beach, and the men were free to take their swim dressed or undressed as they pleased. Most people dined early, though the seven or half-past seven o’clock dinner parties were beginning. In the afternoon society took its drive up and down Bellevue Avenue from five to seven. The horses, harnesses, carriages, lap dogs, ladies, and toilettes were the handsomest that money could buy. While I admired the style of it all, the artificiality fretted me, and after a few days of Bellevue Avenue I was glad to scurry home to Portsmouth to embrace my parents and go for a tramp with my Twin. The introduction of polo by James Gordon Bennett was a great boon to the colony. I can see him now on his swift broncho, tearing across the polo field after the ball, the blood streaming from a cut on his forehead, made by the mallet of one of the opposing players.

Among the distinguished people of summer Newport at this time were the George Bancrofts, old friends of my mother’s. Every summer we were invited to see Mr. Bancroft’s roses, held to be well-nigh miraculous. There was a tradition that Newport was not a good place for flowers, and beyond the formal blue hydrangeas that fashion demanded, few people made any attempt to grow them. Mr. Bancroft’s roses and artichokes became famous, people were quick to follow the fashion he set, and now Newport is rich in beautiful gardens.

In the early seventies my father bought Oak Glen. He had sold our beloved Lawton’s Valley a few years before, partly on account of the endless difficulties of transportation.

I think he regretted this lovely place, and partly because my mother grieved so for it, bought the small estate of five acres a little higher up on the stream that runs through the valley. He improved the property and built a large addition to the house, where he spent the last summers of his life. As long as she lived my mother made Oak Glen her summer home, and after her death it passed into our hands.

CHAPTER IX

Some Painters and Poets

Each of the Hunt children occupied a box stall fitted up as a bedroom. They made me welcome and took me to see the farm. It was a hot July day; Mr. Hunt had left his work to lend a hand to the haymakers. He stood on the top of a fragrant load, vigorously pitching hay into the loft. He had thrown off his coat and worked in his shirt sleeves. He wore a soft felt hat and a scarlet sash like an Italian vignajuolo’s. I saw his keen face, with the hawklike aristocratic nose and piercing eyes, through a storm of long gray beard and yellow hay as he worked feverishly, while hardly brighter than his eyes, the big diamond on his finger flashed in the sun.

This must have been soon after the Civil War, for his work at this time breathed the spirit of that struggle. The best of his war pictures is “The Bugler”, a virile figure of a trumpeter on horseback in the dress of the Union army. The handling of the horse recalls Henri Regnault’s “Steeds of Achilles” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Another of Hunt’s popular war pictures was “The Drummer Boy”, a lad with torn shirt and bare legs, rolling out with his drumsticks the call,

“To arms, Freemen!”

A pretty sketch of the artist’s little girls playing “hospital nurses” was a prime favorite of mine. In the dining room at Oak Glen hang signed lithographs of “The Bugler”, “The Violet Seller”, and “The Woman at the Fountain.” Hunt himself made these faithful reproductions.

Years later I saw Hunt’s masterpieces, “The Discoverer” and “The Flight of Night”, in the Albany State Capitol before they were destroyed by the settling of the foundations. The designs fortunately are preserved, but not a vestige remains of the two magnificent frescoes that once glowed in the spaces above the windows of the Senate Chamber.

Hunt’s “Talks on Art” were taken down by his scholar, Miss Knowlton, as he flung them out, walking about the studio and criticizing his pupil’s work. The first volume opens thus:

“Drawing?”

“Yes, or trying.”

“All anybody can do is to try! Nobody ever does anything! They only try!”

Boston was proud of Hunt, declared him one of the greatest, if not the first, living artist. Did not William James, when he decided to become a painter, turn his back upon Paris and return to America to study with William Hunt? Yet it sticks in my memory that Hunt did not realize how much he was beloved and admired. He felt a certain impatience at Boston, expressed in such phrases as:

“When anybody in Boston sees a picture he likes, instead of buying it, he goes home and tries to paint one like it.”

The “Talks on Art” close with this paragraph:

“I was thinking of this subject of Eternity the other night, when I looked at the moon, and saw before it a church spire, a finger pointed upward into space. Next the spire, the moon. Beyond the moon a fixed star. Next,—what? Eternity. A ripple closes over us.”

The words were prophetic.

Unlike William Hunt, George Fuller had to die before Boston accepted him at his real worth. Everybody knows to-day that Fuller was a true artist, that his pictures have the unique quality called originality. This was not so when Lucy Derby took me to his Tremont Street studio, where I saw for the only time our Deerfield genius. He had a great head with a shock of iron-gray hair, ruddy complexion, and eyes at once shy and kind. He had just finished his masterpiece, “Winifred Dysart”, a lovely picture of a young girl standing in the sort of glorified mist with which he envelops his figures. Soon after, Mr. Montgomery Sears went with Miss Derby to the studio and bought the picture; it hung for many years in his Arlington Street house.

There is a naïve charm about Fuller’s “Arethusa” and his portrait of Mrs. Kimball’s daughter that increases with the years. To come unexpectedly upon a picture of his in some western art gallery or private collection brings a warm glow of pleasure, like meeting an old friend.

Lucy Derby, who had been of the Santo Domingo party, was a favorite with us all. The Derby house, Number 166 Charles Street, was a pleasant one, where I remember delightful entertainments. Lucy’s father, Mr. Elias Derby, was one of Boston’s foremost lawyers. Two of her brothers, Haskett and Richard Derby, became well known, Haskett as a leading oculist of Boston, and Richard of New York. Both were uncommonly handsome men. Richard, who shared Lucy’s social gift, was very popular on account of his professional skill and his great charm. He looked like his maternal uncle, Mr. George Strong, whom I remember as one of the interesting figures of the New York of that time, a collector of Greek coins and a man who labored for the cause of music.

I met the elder Sothern at Lucy’s house, where he was a frequent guest. His chief rôle was Lord Dundreary in Tom Taylor’s “Our American Cousin”, a part Sothern practically created, developing it from the forty-seven lines in the play as originally written. His impersonation of the foolish, indolent British “swell” was one of the cleverest bits of character acting I have ever seen. He told us that one night just as he began the “birds of a feather” story, the actress who supported him gave him an agonized glance and whispered: “You have told that once already!”

He always welcomed an opportunity to play David Garrick as a rest from Dundreary. Sothern was a man of great personal charm, beloved by his friends and that dearest of the actors’ friends, the public. An extract from my journal will show in what high favor he was held by young women devoted to the drama.

In these years we were again living at Green Peace. South Boston was now more accessible than when my mother first went to live there. My sister, Laura Richards, lived in the next house, where three of her seven children were born. There was much coming and going of Halls, Howes, Parkses, Wards, McAllisters, and Francises, with the newly added clans of my brother-in-law’s people, Richardses, and Gardiners. The journal gives glimpses of a gay household with the “young marrieds” next door and flocks of young people coming out for high tea on Sunday. One day’s record shows the varied character of the guests at Green Peace.

It must have been in the early seventies that I first met Benjamin Curtis Porter, destined to have a successful career as a portrait painter. At this time he had quarters in the Studio Building on Tremont Street, opposite the Old Granary Burying Ground. It was the pleasant custom of that simpler era for artists to receive on Saturday mornings. Friends, patrons, strangers even, were free to knock at any studio door and were pretty sure to be admitted. Mr. Rowse, whose crayon portraits were “all the rage”, lived in the same building, as did also our friend George Snell, the architect, who gave pleasant luncheon parties at his rooms. I do not know that Porter actually studied with Rowse, but his early work shows the influence of this artist.

Porter made a crayon drawing of my mother for the New England Woman’s Club, and I fancy that it was while he was having the sittings for this that he became a familiar visitor at our house. There is an early sketch of me at about this time in my sister Laura’s possession, for which I have no recollection of sitting. He made a charming little oil painting called the “Blessed Damosel” for Laura’s wedding present, and though taking some liberties with her coloring—he made her nutbrown hair the color of corn silk—it is the best existing likeness of my pretty sister at this time. I think it must have been in the winter of 1875-1876 that Porter painted the portrait of me that made his reputation. It was shown at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition under the title, “Portrait of a Lady.” It is a charming composition: the lady stands by a chair on which is seated a pug dog. The contrast between the girl’s fresh face and the little dog’s pugnacious mug is very piquant. The “Portrait of a Lady” soon became one of the most popular pictures in the exhibition. While almost everybody else liked it, Porter was not satisfied and wished to paint another. This time he used a larger canvas and made a full-length seated portrait. He was better pleased with this and sent it to the Paris Exposition of 1879, where it was much noticed. The portrait with the dog is now in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, while the larger portrait is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I am very familiar with the latter, for during my mother’s life it hung in her Boston house. It has lost nothing and gained much in richness of tone since it was painted. Porter made in all four portraits of me. The one my mother liked best is a crayon profile, of which she used to say:

“It is as if my Maud had passed and left her shadow on the wall!”

Porter was a witty man, with a keen sense of humor. He talked well and was much in demand in society, which now took him up vigorously. He was overwhelmed with orders and drew or painted many of the belles of the day. A painting of Mrs. Moses Williams with her young son at her side was, I think, his favorite portrait of this early period. He had now moved to a larger studio in Boylston Street, which he fitted up in picturesque style. Here he gave receptions and musicales to the ever-increasing circle of his friends.

I have forgotten, if I ever knew, why he gave up Boston and moved to New York, where he lived all the rest of his life, painting a great number of portraits of well-known society men and women. He was at his best with children or young girls. He often introduced dogs in his larger compositions with excellent effect. Loup, his white Russian deerhound, appears in several of his pictures. When he walked abroad Loup always followed closely at his heel. They made a good-looking pair, and when they left Boston, we missed the picturesque figures of the artist and his white deerhound from our streets.

Young writers, especially poets, often came to talk with my mother about their work and the great things they meant to accomplish. I took these visits as a matter of course and did not half appreciate the privilege of being present when some ardent young neophyte came, breathless, to kindle his torch at the flame that she, like some priestess of the Delphic oracle, kept alight from her earliest childhood until the very end of her life. I do distinctly remember, however, two of these visitors, who came within a few days of each other, John Hay and Francis Bret Harte. The younger poets acclaimed her as their muse and looked up to her with loving understanding.

I recall perfectly John Hay’s first visit to our house. She had met him in Washington, and not long after, when he was in Boston, he called upon her. He had already made a name for himself as a writer, and when he was announced, I was surprised to see so young a man. He was small, slender, smartly—even foppishly—dressed, with a splendidly shaped head and expressive, nearsighted eyes. They talked much of Lincoln; this was before the great emancipator had become the popular idol of a later day. What remains clearest with me is the almost reverent attitude and expression of John Hay, as he took my mother’s hand in parting and stood for a moment, looking silently into her eyes. A small, orange-brown volume of verse, “Pike County Ballads” by John Hay, always stood in the bookcase near her desk. I still treasure this book along with his “Castilian Days.” Colonel Hay is best remembered as a diplomat and a statesman; but for me he is, first of all, the author of “Little Breeches” and “The Prairie Belle.”

I never pass Number 32 Mt. Vernon Street without emotion. In this mellow old brick dwelling we lived for some years during the seventies. My father bought the house from the heirs of Miss Nabby Joy, a well-known character in the Boston of that time, and the owner of some interesting furniture and porcelain, also acquired by my father, and still in use in his grandchildren’s homes. Strange how permanent things are, compared to people! From this friendly Mt. Vernon Street house my three dear sisters were married,—what lovely brides, and all so different! Here many wonderful parties were given, among them the reception for General Grant and the breakfast for Bret Harte. The breakfast was set for nine, the company were all on time, the guest of honor arriving as the clock began to strike the hour. I remember my mother gave us broiled spring chickens and English bacon (that was before the day of our great packers), and to top off with, buckwheat cakes with maple syrup. That must be nearly fifty years ago, and breakfast parties are again in fashion, “morning after” breakfasts, served at the fag end of an all-night ball.

For some reason or other I had not been told of the party, and I remember my astonishment at coming into the dining room a little late, to find the long table surrounded by strangers.

“This is my youngest daughter, Mr. Harte,” was my mother’s introduction.

“I did not know there was to be company,” I stammered, to excuse my tardiness.

“You mean you did not know there were to be buckwheat cakes,” said Bret Harte, with mock severity.

He was then in the first flush of fame. “The Luck of Roaring Camp”, a volume of short stories, had won him instant recognition; and “The Heathen Chinee” was already a classic. He was a man of fine presence, medium-sized, with thick silver hair that would curl, a face deeply pitted with smallpox, and keen blue eyes.

The talk was so brilliant that I believed I should never forget the witty things that were said. Alas, only a few fragments remain of the conversation at that delectable breakfast table.

“Mr. Harte, you have taught the English-speaking world a lesson in brevity it will never forget,” somebody said, but whether it was my mother or Mr. Emerson I have clean forgotten. I do remember how pleased Harte was and how his face kindled at the compliment.

I found the opportunity to tell him that Jack Oakhurst was my favorite hero, and to ask why scampish heroes were so much more interesting to read about than the virtuous.

“I cannot tell you why,” was Bret Harte’s answer, “but there is no doubt about the fact. I have been asked to give a lecture; I refused because I couldn’t think of a subject. Now you have given me an idea. I will write a lecture about Bad People I have known, if you will deliver it for me!”

During the following summer Bret Harte was at Newport, where he wrote some of his finest poems. He was

much at our house and went with my mother to the meetings of the Town and Country Club, a literary association of her founding, which under her guidance flourished for some score of years.

During the season of 1875 my mother and I passed some gay weeks in Washington. We stayed at Wormley’s, hard by the lodgings of Uncle Sam Ward, who now brought me, instead of sugar plums and playthings, visitors and invitations; he was persona grata wherever good company was at a premium, and very popular in the capital. These were the palmy days of Washington society, before it grew rich and formal. Cosmopolitan as it always had been, it then had the cordial, informal flavor of a Southern city. The ladies of the Cabinet were at home on Wednesday afternoons, when everybody was free to call. Mrs. Hamilton Fish, wife of the Secretary of State, was most punctilious about returning all visits in person. One afternoon her carriage stopped before a humble house whose door was opened by a woman straight from the washtub, her sleeves rolled up, her arms wet with soapsuds. Mrs. Fish recognized in the washerwoman a person who had called on one of her reception days. At sight of the great lady in her carriage, the working woman burst into tears.

“If you did not wish me to call upon you, why did you come to see me?” Mrs. Fish asked kindly, and after a brief visit took her departure.

Miss Jenny Lowry was among the belles of this season. I had known her brother when he was at Harvard and took a great liking to the beautiful sister, who, with her soft Andalusian eyes, looked like a Murillo Madonna.

The house of Senator Frelinghuysen of New Jersey was made attractive by his three daughters, all much liked and admired. There were pleasant Saturday afternoons at Brentwood, the home of Mrs. Carlyle Patterson, and Thursday “At Homes” at Mrs. William Richardson’s; best of all were the historic Sunday evenings at the Loring’s on K Street. The elder Miss Loring was a close student of political history. At the Loring salon one met the leading statesmen and diplomats, many of whom, it was said, consulted Miss Loring with reference to the political events she followed so intelligently. I have grateful memories of a son of the house, Doctor Frank Loring, the oculist, who took my friend Helen Gardner and myself under his wing and introduced us to the young dancing set, in whose company we played happily through several blissful weeks. In reward for all his kindness, we gave him the title of “Mother in Israel” and never spoke of him by any other name.

An old visiting list helps me to recall this Washington visit. Until I unearthed the little morocco book with my name written on the flyleaf in Uncle Sam’s hand, I had quite forgotten I had ever known some of the people who called upon and entertained us, though some stand out strong and clear. “Major General Fremont” rouses no flash of memory, whereas “Mr. Thomas F. Bayard” evokes the shade of one of the most exquisite of gentlemen, of such winning personality that he was beloved even by those politically opposed to him.

“Mr. and Mrs. Carl Schurz.” I can remember nothing of the lady, but the strongly marked features of Schurz, harsh but intelligent, his keen hard eyes behind the gleaming glasses, his foreign accent, are as fresh as if I had met him yesterday. He was then Senator from Missouri, a marked man. His most important work for civil service reform came later, when he was Secretary of the Interior under President Hayes.

James G. Blaine, the “Plumed Knight”, then speaker of the House, was much in evidence. I never missed a chance to hear him speak. He was a natural orator, swaying his audience exactly as a good actor does. Mr. Blaine was then trying for the Republican nomination for President in the coming campaign of 1876, another bitter contest like the election of 1872. This was before Blaine, as Secretary of State under Garfield, had begun the great constructive policy of Pan-Americanism with which his name will always be linked. Though I remember the Blaines in Washington I saw them later more familiarly at their pleasant old house at Augusta, Maine, overlooking the Kennebec. Here I came under the magnetic influence for which Blaine was famous, and can testify to its control over his political friends and followers, whose devotion to their leader I have only once known surpassed. Walker Blaine, the oldest son, was a brilliant man, with his father’s fluency and grasp. The second son, Emmons, I knew better, and he once made a visit at Oak Glen; he was a genial, delightful young fellow, with certain quaint turns of speech I have never forgotten.

At the time I was far more interested in the young diplomats and officers with whom I danced than with the men who were making history in Washington. To-day, I can hardly recall the name or face of one of my dancing partners, while President Grant, Vice President Wilson, Mr. Fish, Senator Boutwell (Charles Sumner’s successor) and the other prominent figures of the time are perfectly clear to me. It may be because I have frequently seen portraits of them, but I am inclined to believe it is a case of subconscious self taking notice and registering impressions, while conscious self danced the german!

I remember interesting gatherings at George Bancroft’s house on H Street. Uncle Sam had been a scholar at Round Hill School, kept by Doctor Coggeshall and Mr. Bancroft when they and the century were young. Mr. Bancroft seemed to me very old, though he still had a good many years of life before him. He was a small man with the nearsighted eyes of a scholar, a white beard, and rather an argumentative manner. I remember hearing him say that the first ten volumes of his History of the United States were published exactly forty years before the last volume. He was fond of young company, and I was more than once flattered by his talking with me when there were older and wiser people present; he knew what I am now learning, that the elixir of youth can only be administered by the young!

There was more ceremony in Mrs. Bancroft’s ménage than was then common; once an ambassadress always an ambassadress. One did not forget that with her husband she had represented our country at the Courts of St. James and Potsdam. Mrs. Bancroft’s son, Alexander or “Sandy” Bliss, a friendly soul who went by the sobriquet of “Arabia Felix”, was very kind in keeping me supplied with partners at the Washington balls.

Helen Gardner, who was with us on our Washington visit, was then in her first bloom, a slender brunette with a sparkling personality, a wit, a charm, an originality that made her a prominent figure wherever she was. I like to remember Helen’s hazel eyes at this time, before they had shed the many tears that must have been her portion, though I never saw a trace of one! Helen, the reserved, the high-spirited, was full of distances that sometimes made her seem beyond the reach of human sympathy. Her hazel eyes were covered by the smoothest eyelids I ever saw; when she looked down, they were like the petals of a white magnolia blossom. Her sense of humor was so subtle that it carried her lightly over disasters that would have overwhelmed another. She was a born princess, and though most of her life she lacked a court, she never lacked courtiers. She had the “fatal fascination” of the other Helen, though it was she who suffered from it, not her suitors. It never hurt any man to have loved Helen, but it interfered with much that she might have accomplished. It takes a deal of time and power to be fascinating, and yet who of her generation who remembers her bright willful presence, her whimsical talk, would have changed her an iota?

Washington without Charles Sumner was to my mother “Hamlet” with Hamlet left out. Sumner had died during my parents’ absence in Santo Domingo the year before. At the time of his death, Sumner’s sister, Mrs. Hastings, telegraphed from San Francisco, asking me to place a wreath upon her brother’s grave. A public funeral was given him by the State of Massachusetts, from which women were excluded. When the authorities heard of Mrs. Hastings’ request they decided that it must be honored. I well remember that March day when I drove to Mt. Auburn in the first carriage behind the hearse, the only woman in the funeral procession. The black horses walked the entire way from the State House to Mt. Auburn, six or seven miles; the tramp, tramp of the military escort, the feet of that great host of mourners, seemed to beat out the refrain: