Harriet Beecher Stowe did for her country more than one inestimable service that should win for her the gratitude of her countrymen. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” besides being a clarion call to the world, happened also to be a book that was to become immortal. This was incidental; but it was not a small thing to do—thus to focus the attention of the whole world upon one American book. And it was no small service to the literary life and hopes of this country to write a book that should, as Sir Arthur Helps said, “insist on being read when once begun.” On the wave of a great enthusiasm of pity and love, her name was carried around the globe. Therefore, it is not too much to say that it was because of her that the famous British taunt, “Who reads an American book?” has now been answered, “Everybody!”

But “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” although the most famous, was not the only book that Mrs. Stowe wrote. On the contrary, it was one of a long series of novels, some of which are to be specially valued for their historical import and some to be read for the sheer enjoyment of the pictures of life drawn in them. Mrs. Stowe was a great story-teller, a true raconteur. The story flows from her pen with a delightful smoothness and ease. In her later books she turned with a very glad and loving heart to the portrayal of scenes such as she had known in her girlhood and of the native and unique spirit of that life which was as the very marrow of her bones. We cannot be sufficiently thankful that the old-fashioned Thanksgiving, the quilting-bee, and the wood-spell survived to the year when the seeing eye and the recording memory came to the Connecticut parsonage in the person of Harriet Beecher. To every one that values those elements of our national character that were formed in the struggles of the heroic Pilgrim fathers and mothers in the wilderness and their inspired successors, this part of Mrs. Stowe’s writing ought to be doubly precious. Her work in the books that describe early New England life is a gift that every impulse in us of patriotic reverence should leap to acknowledge.

It will be remembered that in her first book of stories, “The Mayflower,” she drew from the rich field that was her native heath. Uncle Tim, the hero of her very first story, was a living, breathing expression of the New England spirit, and the town, the church, the ways, the turns and queernesses of speech were of immortal simplicity and truth to life. Scattered through the stories in that book are found little character sketches of amazing vividness. How she makes us see these solemn and important brethren in the church! Here they are, Deacon Enos Dudley, solemn as an ancient Israelite, and, for contrast, the brisk little Deacon Abrams, who came to a meeting to manage things and to see that everything went off rightly!

“The services Deacon Enos offered to his God were all given with the exactness of an ancient Israelite. No words could have persuaded him of the propriety of meditating while the choir were singing, or of sitting down, even through infirmity, before the close of the longest prayer that ever was offered. A mighty contrast was he to his fellow-officer, Deacon Abrams, a tight, little, tripping, well-to-do man, who used to sit beside him with his hair brushed straight up like a little blaze, his coat buttoned up trig and close, his psalm-book in hand, and his quick, gray eyes turned first on one side of the broad aisle, and then on the other, and then up into the gallery like a man who came to church on business and felt responsible for everything that was going on in the house.”

The observant child Harriet, sitting on the bench in the children’s row from Sabbath to Sabbath in the Litchfield church, must have watched these grave deacons that seem so much like story-book people as she gives her accurate memories of them.

“At this instant Deacon Enos Dudley’s mild and venerable form arose before me, as erst it used to rise from the deacon’s seat, a straight close slip just below the pulpit. I recollect his quiet and lowly coming into meeting, precisely ten minutes before the time, every Sunday, his tall form a little stooping, his best suit of butternut-colored Sunday clothes, with long flaps and wide cuffs, on one of which two pins were always to be seen stuck in with the most reverent precision. When seated, the top of the pew came just to his chin, so that his silvery placid head rose above it like the moon above the horizon. His head was one that might have been sketched for a St. John—bald at the top, and around the temples adorned with a soft flow of bright, fine hair.... He was then of great age, and every line of his patient face seemed to say, ‘And now, Lord, what wait I for?’ Yet still, year after year, he was to be seen in the same place with the same dutiful regularity.” Those two pins set precisely upon the deacon’s cuff ought to be immortalized along with the two-pronged stick in Defoe’s famous “Journal.” In either case it was not in the least necessary to mention the slight circumstance; yet by the very casualness of the reference is given the precious air of verisimilitude that the artist most desires.

Mrs. Stowe was one of the earliest among us to choose our own ancestral life as a field for story-telling. To fix her place in the literary procession, we must recall that it was only in 1849 that Longfellow’s “Kavanagh” appeared, and that that great book, “The Scarlet Letter” of Hawthorne and that popular one, “The Wide, Wide World,” by Sarah Warner, were being written at the same time that Mrs. Stowe was writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “The Blithedale Romance” and “Queechy” and “The Lamplighter” came in the early fifties. The true literary descendants of Mrs. Stowe in the realm of New England tales are Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah O. Jewett and Kate Douglas Wiggin. It will perhaps be a help to remember, too, that at the same time when Mrs. Stowe was giving us our racy Mary Scudder, George Eliot was introducing Mrs. Poyser in “Middlemarch” to the British public.

In this New England field Mrs. Stowe had therefore a unique opportunity. She had seen that life; having been separated from it, it grew precious to her, and, as her artistic instinct developed, seemed worthy of preservation. No one else has reproduced as she has done the first Christmas of New England, the days in the harbor of Cape Cod, the first day on shore, Christmas tide in Plymouth Harbor, and Elder Brewster’s Christmas sermon. These were the first fruits of the seed planted when little Harriet, unperceived in a dim corner of the garret study of Dr. Lyman Beecher, began to peer into the pages of Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia” and thought it an excellent story-book.

Finally the more and more highly developed artistic skill of the novelist and the widened taste of the woman, and the deep and ineradicable religious nature of her soul united in the production of the novel, “The Minister’s Wooing,” a book in which Mrs. Stowe lets her passionate interest in old New England life have full sway. It is a story built solely upon religious feeling. Nothing like it had been done before, though since she led the way myriads of novels like it in this respect have been attempted. It was a torch borne onward into the dark. Mrs. Stowe maintained the right of the soul’s interests to a place among themes fit for artistic treatment in the novel as Elizabeth Barrett Browning did in poetry. Both were pioneers in this field of artistic endeavor. But people were totally unaccustomed to think of the novel in the terms of theology, and they at once classed “The Minister’s Wooing” as a theological treatise. This was not in the least true. It was a novel pure and simple, however seriously it dealt with the effects on certain souls of certain kinds of theological speculation. Gladstone appreciated the true position of the book. In a letter to Mrs. Stowe he called it a “beautiful and noble picture of Puritan life,” “exhibited upon a pattern felicitous beyond example as far as my knowledge goes.” Our knowledge also goes no farther, even to this day.

The “pattern” shows us the problem of a pure, young New England girl, Mary Scudder by name, whose mind is formed by religious aspiration, of the power of which her lover has no understanding. He reveres her and she stands to him as a religion, as often happens with a sincere and questioning soul. The lover goes to sea and after a while Mary hears that his ship has gone down and that he is lost. When a long time has gone by the Minister wooes her and, believing that the lover is forever gone, Mary consents to marry this man whom she reveres, though she does not give him the love she gave the lost lover. Shall I tell how the story comes out? I certainly will not, for that might destroy the charm that this novel will have for its reader. And the story must be read to be enjoyed. For who could give any idea of the charm of the heroine and the manliness of the lover? There are historic characters, Aaron Burr and Dr. Hopkins and President Stiles, delineated with genius. Like Shakespeare, Mrs. Stowe, while disregarding dates and sequences of events, has been loftily true to the spirit of things. One may look in this book for a true picture, if not for actual events in their exact order.

The scene of “The Minister’s Wooing” was laid at Newport. Mrs. Stowe’s next New England story, “The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” gives a picture of the Maine coast, not far from Brunswick, near Harpswell, and deals with a later time. Both, however, undertake the difficult task of representing life a century or so back. Whittier called “The Pearl” the “most charming New England idyl ever written.” He liked it far better than the “Minister’s Wooing.” Its plot is simpler and there are fewer characters; but it has the clear background of a whole town with its quiet life streaked with tragedy, as life especially is along the sea coast where the waves take their annual toll regardless of human loves and ties. Mara Lincoln, the heroine, dies in the midst of the story, but her loyal friend, Sally Kittridge, takes her place in our interest; and after many sea-yarns, some ministrations by Aunt Ruey and Aunt Roxy, typical characters of the town, a touch of far-away Gothicism in the fact that the body of a beautiful woman floated ashore tightly holding a handsome Spanish boy to her breast, and the unraveling of the puzzle about her, we are allowed a happy wedding-bell ending to the story at last.

“Oldtown Folks,” published in 1869, Mrs. Stowe considered more than a story; it was her “résumé of the whole spirit and body of New England.” In writing it, she tried, she said, to make her “mind as still and passive as a looking-glass, or a mountain lake,” and then to give “the images reflected there.” We are not, then, to take any of the opinions expressed in the book as conclusively Mrs. Stowe’s opinions, but to think of her as reporting impartially the point of view taken by the Calvinists, Arminians, High Church Episcopalians, skeptics and simple believers in the story. It has been said of Mrs. Stowe that she remained without change the Calvinist, the old New Englander, the Beecher, to the end of life. A close study of her work and spirit will reveal that she made the most amazing progress in thought, in spirit and in art. She herself knew this. One of her old friends who met her at one time rather late in her life was afraid of what would happen if she should be told that her friend did not hold exactly the same views as of old. “Why,” exclaimed Mrs. Stowe, “I should be ashamed to believe the same this year that I did last!” For “Oldtown Folks” Mrs. Stowe gathered her “images” in large part from scenes reported to her by her husband as he remembered them from his own boyhood. Together they went to the home of his youth, South Natick, Massachusetts, and there studied the places where the “visionary boy,” who was none other than Professor Stowe himself, passed through the lonely and dream-haunted experiences of his youth. From Professor Stowe’s account of the people and customs in the old village, and from her own memories, Mrs. Stowe organized a picture of the time a generation before her own.

The consummate masterpiece in the work is the character of Sam Lawson, a literary grandson of the Vicar of Wakefield, an own cousin to Ichabod Crane, and a sort of stepfather to Huckleberry Finn. Sam Lawson was a “tall, shambling, loose-jointed man, with a long, thin visage, prominent, watery blue eyes, very fluttering and seedy habiliments, who occupied the responsible position of first do-nothing-in-ordinary in our village of Oldtown.” Why is it that such a character invariably endears itself to our whole country? Mrs. Stowe gives us a sort of explanation of the strange phenomenon. She says that the lovable, lazy genius and factotum of the town was a necessary appendage of every New England village; for Yankee life was so “harried by work and thrift and industry,” that society would “burn itself out with the intense friction if it were not for the lubricating power of a decided do-nothing!” But that, perhaps, was not all. Sam was the undeveloped artist and had a touch of the artist’s charm. He was a great singer; he could sing all parts, bass, tenor, counter, soprano, going from one to another at any point in the midst of the hymn; and as a story-teller he was beyond compare. “‘Why, didn’t you ever hear ’bout that?’” he would begin. “‘Want to know! Wal, I’ll tell ye, then. I know all ’bout it.’” And with this the story started out and the blissful listening of boys by the roadside or of friends around some fireside—not his own—would begin. He was a New England Scheherazade, with stories enough to last for a thousand and one long, lonely, winter nights. Sam Lawson “filled this post with ample honor.” He would leave any work that ought to be done for his wife and large family of children and spend hours tinkering some boy’s knife, tending a dog’s sprained leg, or baiting hooks for a troop of boys in their fishing. He was a soft-hearted old body and would knock the fish in the head to put it out of torment. “‘Why, lordy massy!’” he would say, “‘I can’t bear to see no kind o’ critter in torment. These ’ere pouts ain’t to blame for bein’ fish, and ye ought to put ’em out of their misery. Fish has their rights as well as any of us.’” When Sam was engaged to put a clock in order, he would get it all to pieces about the kitchen and then go away to start in on some other body’s job, saying that “‘Some things can be druv and then agin some things can’t, and clocks is that kind. They’s jest got to be humored. Now this ’ere’s a ’mazin’ good clock; give me my time on’t and I’ll have it so ’twill keep straight on to the millennium.’” Speaking of the millennium starts a theological argument and under cover of this he leaves the kitchen with the clock wheels scattered all over, and goes off fishing. Sam Lawson’s philosophy of life is summed up in this: “‘It’s all fuss, fuss and stew, stew, till we get somewhere; and then it’s fuss, fuss and stew, stew, to get back agin; jump here and scratch your eyes out, and jump there and scratch ’em in agin—that ’ere’s life.’”

Sam loved nothing so much as to “‘kind o’ go along and sort o’ see how things turn out’” with the boys. He told them tales that made their eyes stand out, constantly interspersing the incidents with moral persuasions and advice. “‘So, boys,’” he would say, “‘you just mind and remember and allers see what there is in a providence afore you quarrel with it.’” With this lofty moral altitude, an intellectual superiority in Sam combined to make him a popular favorite. For forty years in the village there had not been a marriage or a birth or a burial or a slight beginning of a love-making which he did not know all about. This knowledge made his charm and also his power. A great intellect had been really wasted in this shiftless fellow. The variety of his accomplishments was amazing. His work shop was filled with cracked china, lame tea-pots, rickety tongs and decrepit andirons, and any one of these would afford opportunity for hours of conversation if a neighbor came in and if—important consideration!—the sharp, black eyes of Hepsy, his wife, were not at the minute upon him. Hepsy was a “gnarly, compact, efficient little pepper-box of a woman.” Of course if she came in his fun was over. “‘You’re always everywhere but where you’ve business to be,’” her scolding voice would cry out, “‘helpin’ and doin’ for everybody but your own. For my part, I think that charity ought to begin at home.’” Hepsy was a “great talker.” She frequently was so bad in this respect that Sam, who was not a specially silent person, could not “get in a word edgeways, nor crossways, nor noways.” At such times no one could blame Sam if he did “‘go Indianing around the country a spell till she kind o’ come to.’”

The main interest in “Oldtown Folks” is, however, in a little boy and girl, Henry and Eglantine Percival, or Harry and Tina for short, who are left orphaned and are distributed among the homes in the Calvinistic and theological town. As Sam Lawson said, they “‘was real putty children, as putty behaved as ever he see.’” Harry Percival is a fine, manly little boy and Tina, his sister, is the little witch whose buoyancy and charm can never be crushed out of her even by a Miss Asphyxia. Ah, Miss Asphyxia! Every creature in her service—horse, cow and pig—knew at once the touch of Miss Asphyxia; and when it was she that said, “Get up!” the beast would make the wagon spin. Into her hands fell the hapless and whimsical Tina. Miss Asphyxia was past fifty and her hair was well streaked with gray; but this would not matter only that when she did it up, she tied it in a very tight knot and fastened it with a horn comb; then she gave it a shake to see if it would certainly stay all day and went about her work. Her one idea in regard to the little fairy Tina was to give her efficient discipline. She put a brown towel into her hands and said, “‘There, keep to work.’” And when Tina’s fingers refused to bend to the unusual task, Miss Asphyxia rapped her promptly on the head with the thimble, saying, “‘Keep to work.’” When Tina began to cry Miss Asphyxia displayed a long birch rod. At night when deluged with soapy water and rubbed with bony hands, Tina was so suppressed that she could only breathe out long sighs and whisper “‘Oh, dear!’” But she was helpless in the hands of Miss Asphyxia. Having despoiled the bright little head of its curls by means of her great shears, she rubbed some camphor on vigorously to keep the child from taking cold; then, after dropping the golden curls on the fire, she opened the door into a small bedroom and, pointing, said to the child, “‘Now go to bed.’” Tina crept in under the blue checked coverlet, thankful to be free of the dreadful woman. In a moment, however, her tormentor opened the door again. Miss Asphyxia had forgotten something. “‘Can you say your prayers?’ she demanded. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ faltered the child. ‘Say ’em, then,’ said Miss Asphyxia; and bang went the door again. ‘There, now, if I h’ain’t done up my duty to that child, then I don’t know,’ said Miss Asphyxia.”

Miss Asphyxia and her contemporaries thought that a child was “‘pretty much dead loss the first three or four years; but after that they’d more’n pay, if they’s fetched up right.’” Miss Asphyxia intended that Tina should be “‘fetched up right.’” Good old Sol, her hired man, suggested that perhaps Tina cried at night because she was lonesome. “‘All sorts of young critters is,’” he argued; “‘Puppies is; kittens mew when ye take ’em from the cats. Ye see they’s used to other critters; and it’s sort o’ cold like, bein’ alone is.’” Miss Asphyxia gave a sniff of contempt. “‘Well, she’ll have to get used to it. I guess ’twon’t kill her.’”

When poor Tina broke a saucer and failed to make quick confession, that is, to speak with accuracy, when she did really and truly let a lie slip over her lips, we can imagine what an awful thing it seemed to Miss Asphyxia. She proceeded to cure her of lying by scouring out her mouth. Putting some soap and sand on a rag and grasping the child’s head under her arm, she rubbed the mixture through her mouth with the energy of an insulted prophetess. “‘See now if you will tell me another lie,’” she said, pushing the child from her, and feeling that her own conscience was quite clear, whatever might be the spiritual condition of the culprit.

But things were coming to a crisis. Explaining the final fuss, Sam said: “‘Wal, ye see, the young un was spicy; and when Miss Sphyxy was down on her too hard, the child, she fit her,—ye know a rat’ll bite, a hen will peck, and a worm will turn,—and finally it come to a fight between ’em.’”

Tina’s brother did not fare much better than did the little girl. His cruel master would not allow him to go to visit his sister any more than Miss Asphyxia would have allowed him to come in if he had arrived, for she would “‘Just as soon have the red dragon in the Revelations come into her house as a boy!’” Finally Harry ran away, went to Tina’s window in the night and told her to come with him. They went off together, wandering in search of some good people to give them a home, an event in which they had a firm faith. They went along the roads and through the fields, playing that they were Hansel and Gretel in the story. They had the adventure of coming upon an Indian encampment with a little tent and an old woman weaving baskets. With her they dipped succotash with a clean clam-shell from a wooden trough and were content and comforted. Harry knelt in prayer before lying down in the tent and this act made the eyes of the Indian woman shine, for she, it seems, was the relic of a long since Christianized tribe. When he was through she said: “‘Me praying Indian; me much love Jesus.’” The next morning, however, the heathen husband came and drove the children away.

The children took up their wandering and soon came to an old stately mansion with an avenue of majestic trees. This, we were told, was the Dench House, home of a Tory family of pre-revolutionary days and now deserted with all its furnitures and its mysteries until it could be decided properly to whom, under the new order, it really belonged. In this beautiful place they found no giant waiting to execute fell purpose upon them, so they built a fire, gathered berries, and slept, until a very human and kind-hearted giant came along in the form of Sam Lawson himself, who bore them to Oldtown, where the home and the loving hearts they had had faith would appear, were awaiting them.

So Tina and Harry came to the home of Horace Henderson, the writer, as Mrs. Stowe portrays it, of these annals. Horace and Harry became the friends of a lifetime. Tina was passed into the care of Miss Mehitable Rossiter, a plain-faced and true-hearted old maid. When Tina stood at her knee and looked up into her homely face, Miss Mehitable said: “‘Well, how do you like me?’” Tina considered attentively, looking long into the honest, open eyes. “‘I do like you,’ she said, putting out her hands; ‘I think you are good.’” Miss Mehitable said that it was well that she did, for otherwise, as she was a fairy, she might turn her into a mouse or a kitten. “‘I like you, and I will be your kitten,’” said Tina. That night Tina slept in a big four-poster bed with hangings of India linen, on which Oriental pagodas and peacocks and mandarins mingled together like the phantasms of a dream. In this pretty little bit of description we have a memory of Mrs. Stowe’s own childhood when she visited the old Foote homestead at Nut Plains, and went to sleep behind the famous bed-hangings that her Uncle Samuel Foote had brought home, and wondered why the mandarins on the printed India linen did not ring the little bells in the pagodas and why the birds did not pick off the golden fruits and eat them.

Thus the children were safely landed on the shores of “quality,” where they belonged. They became a part of that best of New England connections, the Rossiter family. They came to know Parson Lothrop, his wig and cocked hat and, above all, his old shay. They paid reverence to his wife also, the great lady, and to her lady’s maid, who had “grown up and dried in all the most sacred and sanctified essences of genteel propriety.” Everywhere Tina went she did more good than harm. Even to Lady Lothrop’s lonely grandeur she was a blessing. Tina had been told that in the presence of that great personage she must not talk. So the active child sat still as long as she could keep the dismal silence and then burst forth in several long, loud sighs.

“‘What’s the matter, little dear?’ said Lady Lothrop.

“‘O dear!’ said Tina, ‘I was just wishing that I could go to church.’

“‘Well, you are going to-morrow, dear.’

“‘I just wish I could go now and say one prayer.’

“‘And what is that, my dear?’

“‘I just want to say, “O Lord, open thou my lips,”’ said Tina with effusion.... ‘I am so tired of not talking. But I promised Miss Mehitable that I wouldn’t talk unless I was spoken to,’ she added with an air of virtuous resolution.”

The irresistible child was given permission to talk all she wanted, and from then on she rattled and sparkled and went on with a verve and gusto that waked everybody up. The icy chains of silence being thus broken, everybody talked and Lady Lothrop looked from one to another in a sort of pleased surprise, for the childless woman had a loving heart beneath her decorous breast.

All this is but the beginning of the story. Would it be possible to guess what is going to happen? The old Dench House with its secret drawers should afford a suggestion to a good guesser, and the “visionary boy,” who is the teller of the whole story, will think a great deal about Tina, we may be sure. A first-class, fascinating rascal will be introduced as new material, and the threads of the plot will work up into tragic crises. Far be it from me, however, to make known how it is to come out!

When “Oldtown Folks” was published, the reading world was so charmed with Sam Lawson that they cried out for more. Like Shakespeare with “Merry Wives,” the writer had to exhibit a favored hero under new conditions. More, more of Sam Lawson’s stories, they said. For the garrulous fellow kept up his story-telling habit to the very end of the book, telling his very best story last of all; therefore, the thought of the lazy, delightful Sam was in the mind even while the reader was sighing over the woes of Tina. Hence, after a while Mrs. Stowe wrote another book called “Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories,” in which she gathered some tales of adventure, ghostly and otherwise, and let Sam tell them in his inimitable way. To be sure, everybody does not care for such a character as Sam Lawson; but, as he himself says, “‘Wal, you know there an’t no pleasin’ everybody; and ef Gabriel himself, right down out o’ Heaven, was to come.... I expect there’d be a pickin’ at his wings, and sort o’ fault-findin’.’”

As Mrs. Stowe’s first book had been a reflection of her love for old New England, and her two greatest, considered purely from the artistic point of view, had also come from the same source, so the last novel that she wrote, “Poganuc People,” is again an echo from this music of her youth. The Tina of “Oldtown Folks” is said to be modeled upon her own daughter, Georgiana May; if this is so, the Dolly of “Poganuc People” must be Harriet herself. In fact, a copy of “Poganuc People” exists with Mrs. Stowe’s marginal notes, telling where it is “exact” in its delineation, “my own experience,” “my own childish experience,” “the whole chapter drawn from life,” etc. This book has a pathetic and joyous interest as the very tender memoranda of the child’s life recalled by that all-remembering mind in declining years.