"One evening I was sitting by the fire when my wife asked me to go to bed. I told her that I would go to prayer, and when I went to prayer I could not utter my desires with any sense, nor open my mouth to speak. After a little space I did according to my measure attend the duty. Some time last week I fetched an ox well out of the woods about noon, and he laying down in the yard, I went to raise him to yoke him, but he could not rise, but dragged his hinder parts as if he had been hip shot, but after did rise. I had a cat some time last week strongly taken on the sudden, and did make me think she would have died presently. My wife bid me knock her in the head, but I did not, and since she is well. My wife hath been wont to sit up after I went to bed, and I have perceived her to kneel down as if she were at prayer, but heard nothing."

Incredible as it seems to-day, this was accepted as "evidence" of Mrs. Corey's bewitchment. Then, as so often happened, Giles Corey, the accuser, was soon himself accused. He was arrested, taken from his mill, and brought before the judges of the special court appointed by Governor Phips to hear the witch trials in Salem. Again the girls went through their performance, again there was an endeavour to extort a confession. But this time Corey acted the part of a man. He had had leisure for reflection since he had testified against his wife, and he was now as sure that she was guiltless as that he himself was. Bitter, indeed, must have been the realisation that he had helped convict her. But he atoned, as has been said, to her and to his children by subjecting himself to veritable martyrdom. Though an old man whose hair was whitened with the snows of eighty winters, he "was laid on his back, a board placed on his body with as great a weight upon it as he could endure, while his sole diet consisted of a few morsels of bread one day, and a draught of water the alternate day until death put an end to his sufferings." Rightly must this mode of torture have been named peine forte et dure. On Gallows Hill three days later occurred the execution of eight persons, the last so to suffer in the Colony. Nineteen people in all were hanged, and one was pressed to death in Salem, but there is absolutely no foundation for the statement that some were burned.

The revulsion that followed the cessation of the delusion was as marked as was the precipitation that characterised the proceedings. Many of the clergy concerned in the trials offered abject apologies, and Judge Sewall, noblest of all the civil and ecclesiastical authorities implicated in the madness, stood up on Fast Day before a great congregation in the South Church, Boston, acknowledged his grievous error in accepting "spectral evidence," and to the end of his life did penance yearly in the same meeting-house for his part in the transactions.

Not inappropriately the gloomy old house in which the fanatical Corwin had his home is to-day given over to a dealer in antique furniture. Visitors are freely admitted upon application, and very many in the course of the year go inside to feast their eyes on the ancient wainscoting and timbers. The front door and the overhanging roof are just as in the time of the witches, and from a recessed area at the back, narrow casements and excrescent stairways are still to be seen. The original house had, however, peaked gables, with pineapples carved in wood surmounting its latticed windows and colossal chimneys that placed it unmistakably in the age of ruffs, Spanish cloaks, and long rapiers.



LADY WENTWORTH OF THE HALL

On one of those pleasant long evenings, when the group of friends that Longfellow represents in his "Tales of the Wayside Inn" had gathered in the twilight about the cheery open fire of the house at Sudbury to tell each other tales of long ago, we hear best the story of Martha Hilton. We seem to catch the poet's voice as he says after the legend from the Baltic has been alluringly related by the Musician:

"These tales you tell are, one and all, Of the Old World, Flowers gathered from a crumbling wall, Dead leaves that rustle as they fall; Let me present you in their stead Something of our New England earth; A tale which, though of no great worth, Has still this merit, that it yields A certain freshness of the fields, A sweetness as of home-made bread."

And then, as the others leaned back to listen, there followed the beautiful ballad which celebrates the fashion in which Martha Hilton, a kitchen maid, became "Lady Wentworth of the Hall."

The old Wentworth mansion, where, as a beautiful girl, Martha came, served, and conquered all who knew her, and even once received as her guest the Father of his Country, is still in an admirably preserved state, and the Wayside Inn, rechristened the Red Horse Tavern, still entertains glad guests.



This inn was built about 1686, and for almost a century and a half from 1714 it was kept as a public house by generation after generation of Howes, the last of the name at the inn being Lyman Howe, who served guests of the house from 1831 to about 1860, and was the good friend and comrade of the brilliant group of men Longfellow has poetically immortalised in the "Tales." The modern successor of Staver's Inn, or the "Earl of Halifax," in the doorway of which Longfellow's worthy dame once said, "as plain as day:"

"Oh, Martha Hilton! Fie! how dare you go About the town half dressed and looking so!"

is also standing, and has recently been decorated by a memorial tablet.

In Portsmouth Martha Hilton is well remembered, thanks to Longfellow and tradition, as a slender girl who, barefooted, ragged, with neglected hair, bore from the well

"A pail of water dripping through the street, And bathing as she went her naked feet."

Nor do the worthy people of Portsmouth fail to recall the other actor in this memorable drama, upon which the Earl of Halifax once benignly smiled:

"A portly person, with three-cornered hat, A crimson velvet coat, head high in air, Gold-headed cane and nicely powdered hair, And diamond buckles sparkling at his knees, Dignified, stately, florid, much at ease. For this was Governor Wentworth, driving down To Little Harbour, just beyond the town, Where his Great House stood, looking out to sea, A goodly place, where it was good to be."

There are even those who can perfectly recollect when the house was very venerable in appearance, and when in its rooms were to be seen the old spinet, the Strafford portrait, and many other things delightful to the antiquary. Longfellow's description of this ancient domicile is particularly beautiful:

"It was a pleasant mansion, an abode Near and yet hidden from the great highroad, Sequestered among trees, a noble pile, Baronial and Colonial in its style; Gables and dormer windows everywhere— Pandalan pipes, on which all winds that blew Made mournful music the whole winter through. Within, unwonted splendours met the eye, Panels, and floors of oak, and tapestry; Carved chimneypieces, where, on brazen dogs, Revelled and roared the Christmas fire of logs. Doors opening into darkness unawares, Mysterious passages and flights of stairs; And on the walls, in heavy-gilded frames, The ancestral Wentworths, with old Scripture names. Such was the mansion where the great man dwelt."

The place thus prettily pictured is at the mouth of Sagamore Creek, not more than, two miles from the town of Portsmouth. The exterior of the mansion as it looks to-day does not of itself live up to one's preconceived idea of colonial magnificence. A rambling collection of buildings, seemingly the result of various "L" expansions, form an inharmonious whole which would have made Ruskin quite mad. The site is, however, charming, for the place commands a view up and down Little Harbour, though concealed by an eminence from the road. The house is said to have originally contained as many as fifty-two rooms. If so, it has shrunk in recent years. But there is still plenty of elbow space, and the cellar is even to-day large enough to accommodate a fair-sized troop of soldiery.

As one enters, one notices first the rack in which were wont to be deposited the muskets of the governor's guard. And it requires only a little imagination to picture the big rooms as they were in the old days, with the portrait of Strafford dictating to his secretary just before his execution, the rare Copley, the green damask-covered furniture, and the sedan-chair, all exhaling an atmosphere of old-time splendour and luxury. Something of impressiveness has recently been introduced into the interior by the artistic arrangement of old furniture which the house's present owner, Mr. Templeton Coolidge, has brought about. But the exterior is "spick-span" in modern yellow and white paint!



Yet it was in this very house that Martha for seven years served her future lord. There, busy with mop and pail——

"A maid of all work, whether coarse or fine, A servant who made service seem divine!"

she grew from childhood into the lovely woman whom Governor Wentworth wooed and won.

In the March of 1760 it was that the host at Little Harbour exclaimed abruptly to the good rector of St. John's, who had been dining sumptuously at the manor-house:

"This is my birthday; it shall likewise be my wedding-day, and you shall marry me!" No wonder the listening guests were greatly mystified, as Martha and the portly governor were joined "across the walnuts and the wine" by the Reverend Arthur Brown, of the Established Church.

And now, of course, Martha had her chariot, from which she could look down as disdainfully as did the Earl of Halifax on the humble folk who needs must walk. The sudden elevation seems, indeed, to have gone to my lady's head. For tradition says that very shortly after her marriage Martha dropped her ring and summoned one of her late kitchen colleagues to rescue it from the floor. But the colleague had quickly become shortsighted, and Martha, dismissing her hastily, picked up the circlet herself.

Before the Reverend Arthur Brown was gathered to his fathers, he had another opportunity to marry the fascinating Martha to another Wentworth, a man of real soldierly distinction. Her second husband was redcoated Michael, of England, who had been in the battle of Culloden.

This Colonel Michael Wentworth was the "great buck" of his day, and was wont to fiddle at Stoodley's far into the morning for sheer love of fiddling and revelry. Stoodley's has now fallen indeed! It is the brick building marked "custom-house," and it stands at the corner of Daniel and Penhallow Streets.

To this Lord and Lady Wentworth it was that Washington, in 1789, came as a guest, "rowed by white-jacketed sailors straight to their vine-hung, hospitable door." At this time there was a younger Martha in the house, one who had grown up to play the spinet by the long, low windows, and who later joined her fate to that of still another Wentworth, with whom she passed to France.

A few years later, in 1795, the "great buck" of his time took to a bankrupt's grave in New York, forgetting, so the story goes, the eternal canon fixed against self-slaughter.

But for all we tell as a legend this story of Martha Hilton, and for all her "capture" of the governor has come down to us almost as a myth, it is less than fifty years ago that the daughter of the man who fiddled at Stoodley's and of the girl who went barefooted and ragged through the streets of Portsmouth, passed in her turn to the Great Beyond. Verily, we in America have, after all, only a short historical perspective.



AN HISTORIC TRAGEDY

One hundred years ago there was committed in Dedham, Massachusetts, one of the most famous murders of this country, a crime, some description of which falls naturally enough into these chapters, inasmuch as the person punished as the criminal belonged to the illustrious Fairbanks family, whose picturesque homestead is widely known as one of the oldest houses in New England.

In the Massachusetts Federalist of Saturday, September 12, 1801, we find an editorial paragraph which, apart from its intrinsic interest, is valuable as an example of the great difference between ancient and modern journalistic treatment of murder matter. This paragraph reads, in the quaint old type of the time: "On Thursday last Jason Fairbanks was executed at Dedham for the murder of Miss Elizabeth Fales. He was taken from the gaol in this town at eight o'clock, by the sheriff of this county, and delivered to the sheriff of Norfolk County at the boundary line between the two counties.

"He was in an open coach, and was attended therein by the Reverend Doctor Thatcher and two peace officers. From the county line in Norfolk he was conducted to the Dedham gaol by Sheriff Cutler, his deputies, and a score of cavalry under Captain Davis; and from the gaol in Dedham to the place of execution was guarded by two companies of cavalry and a detachment of volunteer infantry.

"He mounted the scaffold about a quarter before three with his usual steadiness, and soon after making a signal with his handkerchief, was swung off. After hanging about twenty-five minutes, his body was cut down and buried near the gallows. His deportment during his journey to and at the place of execution was marked with the same apathy and indifference which he discovered before and since his trial. We do not learn he has made any confession of his guilt."

As a matter of fact, far from making a confession of his guilt, Jason Fairbanks denied even to the moment of his execution that he killed Elizabeth Fales, and his family and many other worthy citizens of Dedham believed, and kept believing to the end of their lives, that the girl committed suicide, and that an innocent man was punished for a crime he could never have perpetrated.

In the trial it was shown that this beautiful girl of eighteen had been for many years extremely fond of the young man, Fairbanks, and that her love was ardently reciprocated. Jason Fairbanks had not been allowed, however, to visit the girl at the home of her father, though the Fales place was only a little more than a mile from his own dwelling, the venerable Fairbanks house. None the less, they had been in the habit of meeting frequently, in company with others, en route to the weekly singing school, the husking bees and the choir practice. Both the young people were extremely fond of music, and this mutual interest seems to have been one of the several ties which bound them together.

In spite, therefore, of the stern decree that young Fairbanks should not visit Miss Fales at her home, there was considerable well-improved opportunity for intercourse, and, as was afterward shown, the two often had long walks together, apart from the others of their acquaintance. One of their appointments was made for the day of the murder, May 18, 1801. Fairbanks was to meet his sweetheart, he told a friend, in the pasture near her home, and it was his intention at that time to persuade her to run away with him and be married. Unfortunately for Fairbanks's case at the trial, it was shown that he told this same friend that if Elizabeth Fales would not run away with him he would do her harm. And one other thing which militated against the acquittal of the accused youth was the fact that, as an inducement to the girl to elope with him, Fairbanks showed her a forged paper, upon which she appeared to have declared legally her intention to marry him.

One tragic element of the whole affair was the fact that Fairbanks had no definite work and no assured means of support. Young people of good family did not marry a hundred years ago without thinking, and thinking to some purpose, of what cares and expense the future might bring them. The man, if he was an honourable man, expected always to have a home for his wife, and since Fairbanks was an invalid, "debilitated in his right arm," as the phrasing of the time put it, and had never been able to do his part of the farm work, he had lived what his stern forebears would have called an idle life, and consequently utterly lacked the means to marry. That he was something of a spoiled child also developed at the trial, which from the first went against the young man because of the testimony of the chums to whom he had confided his intention to do Elizabeth Fales an injury if she would not go to Wrentham and marry him.

The prisoner's counsel were two very clever young lawyers who afterward came to be men of great distinction in Massachusetts—no others, in fact, than Harrison Gray Otis and John Lowell. These men advanced very clever arguments to show that Elizabeth Fales, maddened by a love which seemed unlikely ever to end in marriage, had seized from Jason the large knife which he was using to mend a quill pen as he walked to meet her, and with this knife had inflicted upon herself the terrible wounds, from the effect of which she died almost instantaneously. The fact that Jason was himself wounded in the struggle was ingeniously utilised by the defence to show that he had received murderous blows from her hand, for the very reason that he had attempted (unsuccessfully, inasmuch as his right arm was impaired) to wrest the mad girl's murderous weapon from her.

The counsel also made much of the fact that, though it was at midday and many people were not far off, no screams were heard. A vigorous girl like Elizabeth Fales would not have submitted easily, they held, to any such assault as was charged. In the course of the trial a very moving description of the sufferings such a high-strung, ardent nature as this girl's must have undergone, because of her hopeless love, was used to show the reasons for suicide. And following the habit of the times, the lawyers turned their work to moral ends by beseeching the parents in the crowded court-room to exercise a greater vigilance over the social life of their young people, and so prevent the possibility of their forming any such attachment as had moved Elizabeth Fales to take her own life.

Yet all this eloquent pleading was in vain, for the court found Jason Fairbanks guilty of murder and sentenced him to be hanged. From the court-room he was taken to the Dedham gaol, but on the night of the seventeenth of August he was enabled to make his escape through the offices of a number of men who believed him innocent, and for some days he was at liberty. At length, however, upon a reward of one thousand dollars being offered for his apprehension, he was captured near Northampton, Massachusetts, which town he had reached on his journey to Canada.

The gallows upon which "justice" ultimately asserted itself is said to have been constructed of a tree cut from the old Fairbanks place.

The Fairbanks house is still standing, having been occupied for almost two hundred and seventy-five years by the same family, which is now in the eighth generation of the name. The house is surrounded by magnificent old elms, and was built by Jonathan Fairbanks, who came from Sowerby, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, in 1633. The cupboards are filled with choice china, and even the Fairbanks cats, it is said, drink their milk out of ancient blue saucers that would drive a collector wild with envy.

The house is now (1902) the home of Miss Rebecca Fairbanks, an old lady of seventy-five years, who will occupy it throughout her lifetime, although the place is controlled by the Fairbanks Chapter of the Daughters of the Revolution, who hold their monthly meetings there.



The way in which this property was acquired by the organisation named is interesting recent history. Miss Rebecca Fairbanks was obliged in 1895 to sell the house to John Crowley, a real estate dealer in Dedham. On April 3, 1897, Mrs. Nelson V. Titus, asked through the medium of the press for four thousand, five hundred dollars, necessary to purchase the house and keep it as a historical relic. Almost immediately Mrs. J. Amory Codman and Miss Martha Codman sent a check for the sum desired, and thus performed a double act of beneficence. For it was now possible to ensure to Miss Fairbanks a life tenancy of the home of her fathers as well as to keep for all time this picturesque place as an example of early American architecture.

Hundreds of visitors now go every summer to see the interesting old house, which stands nestling cosily in a grassy dell just at the corner of East Street and the short "Willow Road" across the meadows that lie between East Street and Dedham. This road is a "modern convenience," and its construction was severely frowned upon by the three old ladies who twenty years ago lived together in the family homestead. And though it made the road to the village shorter by half than the old way, this had no weight with the inflexible women who had inherited from their long line of ancestors marked decision and firmness of character. They protested against the building of the road, and when it was built in spite of their protests they declared they would not use it, and kept their word. Constant attendants of the old Congregational church in Dedham, they went persistently by the longest way round rather than tolerate the road to which they had objected.

That their neighbours called them "set in their ways" goes, of course, without saying, but the women of the Fairbanks family have ever been rigidly conscientious, and the men a bit obstinate. For, much as one would like to think the contrary true, one seems forced to believe that it was obstinacy rather than innocency which made Jason Fairbanks protest till the hour of his death that he was being unjustly punished.



INVENTOR MORSE'S UNFULFILLED AMBITION

The first house erected in Charlestown after the destruction of the village by fire in 1775 (the coup d'etat which immediately followed the battle of Bunker Hill, it will be remembered), is that which is here given as the birthplace of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph. The house is still standing at 203 Main Street, and in the front chamber of the second story, on the right of the front door of the entrance, visitors still pause to render tribute to the memory of the babe that there drew his first breath on April 27, 1791.



It was, however, quite by accident that the house became doubly famous, for it was during the building of the parsonage, Pastor Morse's proper home, that his little son came to gladden his life. Reverend Jedediah Morse became minister of the First Parish Church on April 30, 1789, the very date of Washington's inauguration in New York as President of the United States, and two weeks later married a daughter of Judge Samuel Breese, of New York. Shortly afterward it was determined to build a parsonage, and during the construction of this dwelling Doctor Morse accepted the hospitality of Mr. Thomas Edes, who then owned the "oldest" house. And work on the parsonage being delayed beyond expectation, Mrs. Morse's little son was born in the Edes house.

Apropos of the brief residence of Doctor Morse in this house comes a quaint letter from Reverend Jeremy Belknap, the staid old doctor of divinity, and the founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which shows that girls over a hundred years ago were quite as much interested in young unmarried ministers as nice girls ought ever to be. Two or three months before the settlement of Mr. Morse in Charlestown, Doctor Belknap wrote to his friend, Ebenezer Hazard, of New York, who was a relative of Judge Breese:

"You said in one of your late letters that probably Charlestown people would soon have to build a house for Mr. Morse. I let this drop in a conversation with a daughter of Mr. Carey, and in a day or two it was all over Charlestown, and the girls who had been setting their caps for him are chagrined. I suppose it would be something to Mr. Morse's advantage in point of bands and handkerchiefs, if this report could be contradicted; but if it cannot, oh, how heavy will be the disappointment. When a young clergyman settles in such a town as Charlestown, there is as much looking out for him as there is for a thousand-dollar prize in a lottery; and though the girls know that but one can have him, yet 'who knows but I may be that one?'"[10]

Doctor Morse's fame has been a good deal obscured by that of his distinguished son, but he seems none the less to have been a good deal of a man, and it is perhaps no wonder that the feminine portion of a little place like Charlestown looked forward with decided interest to his settling among them. We can even fancy that the girls of the sewing society studied geography with ardour when they learned who was to be their new minister. For geography was Doctor Morse's passion; he was, indeed, the Alexis Frye of his period. This interest in geography is said to have been so tremendous with the man that once being asked by his teacher at a Greek recitation where a certain verb was found, he replied, "On the coast of Africa." And while he was a tutor at Yale the want of geographies there induced him to prepare notes for his pupils, to serve as text-books, which he eventually printed.

Young Morse seconded his father's passion for geography by one as strongly marked for drawing, and the blank margin of his Virgil occupied far more of his thoughts than the text. The inventor came indeed only tardily to discover in which direction his real talent lay. All his youth he worshipped art and followed (at considerable distance) his beloved mistress. His penchant for painting, exhibited in much the same manner as Allston's, his future master, did not meet with the same encouragement.

A caricature (founded upon some fracas among the students at Yale), in which the faculty were burlesqued, was seized during Morse's student days, handed to President Dwight, and the author, who was no other than our young friend, called up. The delinquent received a severe lecture upon his waste of time, violation of college laws, and filial disobedience, without exhibiting any sign of contrition; but when at length Doctor Dwight said to him, "Morse, you are no painter; this is a rude attempt, a complete failure," he was touched to the quick, and could not keep back the tears.

The canvas, executed by Morse at the age of nineteen, of the landing of the Pilgrims, which may be seen at the Charlestown City Hall, is certainly not a masterpiece. Yet the lad was determined to learn to paint, and to this end accompanied Allston to Europe, where he became a pupil of West, and, it is said, also of Copley.

West had become the foremost painter of his time in England when our ambitious young artist was presented to him, but from the beginning he took a great interest in the Charlestown lad, and showed him much attention. Once in after years Morse related to a friend this most interesting anecdote of his great master: "I called upon Mr. West at his house in Newman Street one morning, and in conformity to the order given to his servant Robert always to admit Mr. Leslie and myself even if he was engaged in his private studies, I was shown into his studio.

"As I entered a half-length portrait of George III. stood before me on an easel, and Mr. West was sitting with his back toward me copying from it upon canvas. My name having been mentioned to him, he did not turn, but pointing with the pencil he had in his hand to the portrait from which he was copying, he said, 'Do you see that picture, Mr. Morse?'

"'Yes, sir,' I said, 'I perceive it is the portrait of the king.'

"'Well,' said Mr. West, 'the king was sitting to me for that portrait when the box containing the American Declaration of Independence was handed to him.'

"'Indeed,' I answered; 'and what appeared to be the emotions of the king? What did he say?'

"'His reply,' said Mr. West, 'was characteristic of the goodness of his heart: "If they can be happier under the government they have chosen than under me, I shall be happy."'"[11]

Morse returned to Boston in the autumn of 1815, and there set up a studio. But he was not too occupied in painting to turn a hand to invention, and we find him the next winter touring New Hampshire and Vermont trying to sell to towns and villages a fire-engine pump he had invented, while seeking commissions to paint portraits at fifteen dollars a head. It was that winter that he met in Concord, New Hampshire, Miss Lucretia P. Walker, whom he married in the autumn of 1818, and whose death in February, 1825, just after he had successfully fulfilled a liberal commission to paint General Lafayette, was the great blow of his young manhood.

The National Academy of Design Morse helped to found in New York in 1826, and of this institution he was first president. About the same time we find him renewing his early interest in electrical experiments. A few years later he is sailing for Europe, there to execute many copying commissions. And on his return from this stay abroad the idea of the telegraph suggested itself to him.

Of the exact way in which Morse first conceived the idea of making electricity the means of conveying intelligence, various accounts have been given, the one usually accepted being that while on board the packet-ship Sully, a fellow passenger related some experiments he had witnessed in Paris with the electro-magnet, a recital which made such an impression upon one of his auditors that he walked the deck the whole night. Professor Morse's own statement was that he gained his knowledge of the working of the electro-magnet while attending the lectures of Doctor J. Freeman Dana, then professor of chemistry in the University of New York, lectures which were delivered before the New York Atheneum.

"I witnessed," says Morse, "the effects of the conjunctive wires in the different forms described by him in his lectures, and exhibited to his audience. The electro-magnet was put in action by an intense battery; it was made to sustain the weight of its armature, when the conjunctive wire was connected with the poles of the battery, or the circuit was closed; and it was made to 'drop its load' upon opening the circuit."

Yet after the inventor had made his discovery he had the greatest difficulty in getting a chance to demonstrate its worth. Heartsick with despondency, and with his means utterly exhausted, he finally applied to the Twenty-seventh Congress for aid to put his invention to the test of practical illustration, and his petition was carried through with a majority of only two votes! These two votes to the good were enough, however, to save the wonderful discovery, perhaps from present obscurity, and with the thirty thousand dollars appropriated by Congress Morse stretched his first wires from Washington to Baltimore—wires, it will be noted, because the principle of the ground circuit was not then known, and only later discovered by accident. So that a wire to go and another to return between the cities was deemed necessary by Morse to complete his first circuit. The first wire was of copper.

The first message, now in the custody of the Connecticut Historical Society, was dictated by Miss Annie G. Ellsworth, and the words of it were "What hath God wrought?" The telegraph was at first regarded with superstitious dread in some sections of the country. In a Southern State a drought was attributed to its occult influences, and the people, infatuated with the idea, levelled the wires to the ground. And so common was it for the Indians to knock off the insulators with their rifles in order to gratify their curiosity in regard to the "singing cord," that it was at first extremely difficult to keep the lines in repair along the Pacific Railway.

To the man who had been so poor that he had had a very great struggle to provide bread for his three motherless children, came now success. The impecunious artist was liberally rewarded for his clever invention, and in 1847 he married for his second wife Miss Sarah E. Griswold, of Poughkeepsie, the daughter of his cousin. She was twenty-five when they were married, and he fifty-six, but they lived very happily together on the two-hundred acre farm he had bought near Poughkeepsie, and it was there that he died at the age of seventy-two, full of honours as an inventor, and loving art to the end.

Even after he became a great man, Professor Morse, it is interesting to learn, cherished his fondness for the house in which he was born, and one of his last visits to Charlestown was on the occasion when he took his young daughter to see the old place. And that same day, one is a bit amused to note, he took her also to the old parsonage, then still standing, in what is now Harvard Street, between the city hall and the church—and there pointed out to her with pride some rude sketches he had made on the wall of his sleeping-room when still a boy. So, though it is as an inventor we remember and honour Samuel Finley Breese Morse to-day, it was as a painter that he wished first, last, and above all to be famous. But in the realm of the talents as elsewhere man proposes and God disposes.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: Drake's "Historic Fields and Mansions of Middlesex." Little, Brown & Co., publishers.]

[Footnote 11: Beacon Biographies: S. F. B. Morse, by John Trowbridge; Small, Maynard & Co.]



WHERE THE "BROTHERS AND SISTERS" MET

No single house in all Massachusetts has survived so many of the vicissitudes of fickle fortune and carried the traditions of a glorious past up into the realities of a prosperous and useful present more successfully than has Fay House, the present home of Radcliffe College, Cambridge. The central portion of the Fay House of to-day dates back nearly a hundred years, and was built by Nathaniel Ireland, a prosperous merchant of Boston. It was indeed a mansion to make farmer-folk stare when, with its tower-like bays, running from ground to roof, it was, in 1806, erected on the highroad to Watertown, the first brick house in the vicinity.

To Mr. Ireland did not come the good fortune of living in the fine dwelling his ambition had designed. A ship-blacksmith by trade, his prospects were ruined by the Jefferson Embargo, and he was obliged to leave the work of construction on his house unfinished and allow the place to pass, heavily mortgaged, into the hands of others. But the house itself and our story concerning it gained by Mr. Ireland's loss, for it now became the property of Doctor Joseph McKean (a famous Harvard instructor), and the rendezvous of that professor's college associates and of the numerous friends of his young family. Oliver Wendell Holmes was among those who spent many a social evening here with the McKeans.

The next name of importance to be connected with Fay House was that of Edward Everett, who lived here for a time. Later Sophia Willard Dana, granddaughter of Chief Justice Dana, our first minister to Russia, kept a boarding and day school for young ladies in the house. Among her pupils were the sisters of James Russell Lowell, Mary Channing, the first wife of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and members of the Higginson, Parkman, and Tuckerman families. Lowell himself, and Edmund Dana, attended here for a term as a special privilege. Sophia Dana was married in the house, August 22, 1827, by the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, to Mr. George Ripley, with whom she afterward took an active part in the Brook Farm Colony, of which we are to hear again a bit later in this series. After Miss Dana's marriage, her school was carried on largely by Miss Elizabeth McKean—the daughter of the Doctor Joseph McKean already referred to—a young woman who soon became the wife of Doctor Joseph Worcester, the compiler of the dictionary.

Delightful reminiscences of Fay House have been furnished us by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, as a boy, was often in and out of the place, visiting his aunt, Mrs. Channing, who lived here with her son, William Henry Channing, the well-known anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a youth, used to listen with keenest pleasure, to the singing of his cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song she chose was, "The Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut up in a chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to the Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that there was a bride shut up in the walls of this house—and there may be to-day, for all I know."

For fifty years after June, 1835, the house was in the possession of Judge P. P. Fay's family. The surroundings were still country-like. Cambridge Common was as yet only a treeless pasture, and the house had not been materially changed from its original shape and plan. Judge Fay was a jolly gentleman of the old school. A judge of probate for a dozen years, an overseer of Harvard College, and a pillar of Christ Church, he was withal fond of a well-turned story and a lover of good hunting, as well as much given to hospitality. Miss Maria Denny Fay, whose memory is now perpetuated in a Radcliffe scholarship, was the sixth of Judge Fay's seven children, and the one who finally became both mistress and owner of the estate. A girl of fourteen when her father bought the house, she was at the time receiving her young-lady education at the Convent of St. Ursula, where, in the vine-covered, red-brick convent on the summit of Charlestown, she learned, under the guidance of the nuns, to sing, play the piano, the harp, and the guitar, to speak French, and read Spanish and Italian. But her life on Mt. Benedict was suddenly terminated when the convent was burned. So she entered earlier than would otherwise have been the case upon the varied interests of her new and beautiful home. Here, in the course of a few years, we find her presiding, a gracious and lovely maiden, of whom the venerable Colonel Higginson has said: "I have never, in looking back, felt more grateful to any one than to this charming girl of twenty, who consented to be a neighbour to me, an awkward boy of seventeen, to attract me in a manner from myself and make me available to other people."

Very happy times were those which the young Wentworth Higginson, then a college boy, living with his mother at Vaughan House, was privileged to share with Maria Fay and her friends. Who of us does not envy him the memory of that Christmas party in 1841, when there were gathered in Fay House, among others, Maria White, Lowell's beautiful fiancee; Levi Thaxter, afterward the husband of Celia Thaxter; Leverett Saltonstall, Mary Story and William Story, the sculptors? And how pleasant it must have been to join in the famous charades of that circle of talented young people, to partake of refreshments in the quaint dining-room, and dance a Virginia reel and galop in the beautiful oval parlour which then, as to-day, expressed ideally the acme of charming hospitality! What tales this same parlour might relate! How enchantingly it might tell, if it could speak, of the graceful Maria White, who, seated in the deep window, must have made an exquisite picture in her white gown, with her beautiful face shining in the moonlight while she repeated, in her soft voice, one of her own ballads, written for the "Brothers and Sisters," as this group of young people was called.



Of a more distinctly academic cast were some of the companies later assembled in this same room—Judge Story, Doctor Beck, President Felton, Professors Pierce, Lane, Child, and Lowell, with maybe Longfellow, listening to one of his own songs, or that strange figure, Professor Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, oddly ill at ease in his suit of dingy black. In his younger days he had been both pirate and priest, and he retained, as professor, some of his early habits—seldom being seated while he talked, and leaning against the door, shaking and fumbling his college keys as the monks shake their rosaries. Mr. Arthur Gilman has related in a charming article on Fay House, written for the Harvard Graduates Magazine (from which, as from Miss Norris's sketch of the old place, printed in a recent number of the Radcliffe Magazine, many of the incidents here given are drawn), that Professor Sophocles was allowed by Miss Fay to keep some hens on the estate, pets which he had an odd habit of naming after his friends. When, therefore, some accomplishment striking and praiseworthy in a hen was related in company as peculiar to one or another of them, the professor innocently calling his animals by the name he had borrowed, the effect was apt to be startling.

During the latter part of Miss Fay's long tenancy of this house, she had with her her elder sister, the handsome Mrs. Greenough, a woman who had been so famous a beauty in her youth that, on the occasion of her wedding, Harvard students thronged the aisles and climbed the pews of old Christ Church to see her. The wedding receptions of Mrs. Greenough's daughter and granddaughter were held, too, in Fay House. This latter girl was the fascinating and talented Lily Greenough, who was later a favourite at the court of Napoleon and Eugenie, and who, after the death of her first husband, Mr. Charles Moulton, was married in this house to Monsieur De Hegermann Lindencrone, at that time Danish Minister to the United States, and now minister at Paris. Her daughter, Suzanne Moulton, who has left her name scratched with a diamond on one of the Fay House windows, is now the Countess Suzanne Raben-Levetzan of Nystel, Denmark.

In connection with the Fays' life in this house occurred one thing which will particularly send the building down into posterity, and will link for all time Radcliffe and Harvard traditions. For it was in the upper corner room, nearest the Washington Elm, that Doctor Samuel Gilman, Judge Fay's brother-in-law, wrote "Fair Harvard," while a guest in this hospitable home, during the second centennial celebration of the college on the Charles. Radcliffe girls often seem a bit triumphant as they point out to visitors this room and its facsimile copy of the famous song. Yet they have plenty of pleasant things of their own to remember.

Just one of these, taken at random from among the present writer's own memories of pretty happenings at Fay House, will serve: During Duse's last tour in this country, the famous actress came out one afternoon, as many a famous personage does, to drink a cup of tea with Mrs. Agassiz in the stately old parlour, where Mrs. Whitman's famous portrait of the president of Radcliffe College vies in attractiveness with the living reality graciously presiding over the Wednesday afternoon teacups. As it happened, there was a scant attendance at the tea on this day of Duse's visit. She had not been expected, and so it fell out that some two or three girls who could speak French or Italian were privileged to do the honours of the occasion to the great actress whom they had long worshipped from afar. Duse was in one of her most charming moods, and she listened with the greatest attention to her young hostesses' laboured explanations concerning the college and its ancient home.

The best of it all, from the enthusiastic girl-students' point of view, was, however, in the dark-eyed Italienne's mode of saying farewell. As she entered her carriage—to which she had been escorted by this little group—she took from her belt a beautiful bouquet of roses, camellias, and violets. And as the smart coachman flicked the impatient horses with his whip, Duse threw the girls the precious flowers. Those who caught a camellia felt, of course, especially delighted, for it was as the Dame aux Camellias that Duse had been winning for weeks the plaudits of admiring Boston. My own share of the largesse consisted of a few fresh, sweet violets, which I still have tucked away somewhere, together with one of the great actress's photographs that bears the date of the pleasant afternoon hour passed with her in the parlour where the "Brothers and Sisters" met.



THE BROOK FARMERS

One of the weddings noted in our Fay House chapter was that of Sophia Dana to George Ripley, an event which was celebrated August 22, 1827, in the stately parlour of the Cambridge mansion, the ceremony being performed by the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The time between the date of their marriage and the year 1840, when Mr. and Mrs. Ripley "discovered" the milk-farm in West Roxbury, which was afterward to be developed through their efforts into the most remarkable socialistic experiment America has ever known, represented for the young people joined together in what is now the home of Radcliffe College some dozen years of quiet parsonage life in Boston.

The later years of George Ripley's life held for him a series of disappointments before which his courage and ideals never failed. When the young student left the Harvard Divinity School, he was appointed minister over a Unitarian parish which was gathered for him at the corner of Pearl and Purchase Streets, Boston. Here his ministrations went faithfully on, but inasmuch as his parishioners failed to take any deep interest in the social questions which seemed to him of most vital concern, he sent them, in the October of 1840, a letter of resignation, which they duly accepted, thus leaving Ripley free to enter upon the experiment so dear to him.

The Ripleys, as has been said, had already discovered Brook Farm, a pleasant place, varied in contour, with pine woods close at hand, the Charles River within easy distance, and plenty of land—whether of a sort to produce paying crops or not they were later to learn. That winter Ripley wrote to Emerson: "We propose to take a small tract of land, which, under skilful husbandry, uniting the garden and the farm, will be adequate to the subsistence of the families; and to connect with this a school or college in which the most complete instruction shall be given, from the first rudiments to the highest culture." Ripley himself assumed the responsibility for the management and success of the undertaking, and about the middle of April, 1841, he took possession with his wife and sister and some fifteen others, including Hawthorne, of the farmhouse, which, with a large barn, was already on the estate.

The first six months were spent in "getting started," especially in the matter of the school, of which Mrs. Ripley was largely in charge, and it was not until early fall—September 29—that the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education was organised as a kind of joint stock company, not incorporated.

A seeker after country quiet and beauty might easily be as much attracted to-day by the undulating acres of Brook Farm as were those who sought it sixty years ago as a refuge from social discouragement. The brook still babbles cheerily as it threads its way through the meadows, and there are still pleasant pastures and shady groves on the large estate. The only one of the community buildings which is still standing, however, is that now known as the Martin Luther Orphan Home. This house was built at the very start of the community life by Mrs. A. G. Alford, one of the members of the colony.



The building was in the form of a Maltese cross with four gables, the central space being taken by the staircase. It contained only about half a dozen rooms, and probably could not have accommodated more than that number of residents. It is said to have been the prettiest and best furnished house on the place, but an examination of its simple construction will confirm the memory of one of its occupants, who remarked that contact with nature was here always admirably close and unaffected. From the rough dwelling, which resembled an inexpensive beach cottage, to out-doors was hardly a transition, it is chronicled, and at all seasons the external and internal temperatures closely corresponded. Until lately the cottage wore its original dark-brown colour; and it is still the best visible remnant of the early days, and gives a pleasant impression of what the daily life of the association must have been.

Gay and happy indeed were the dwellers in this community during the early stages of its development. Ripley's theory of the wholesomeness of combined manual and intellectual work ruled everywhere. He himself donned the farmer's blouse, the wide straw hat, and the high boots in which he has been pictured at Brook Farm; and whether he cleaned stables, milked cows, carried vegetables to market, or taught philosophy and discussed religion, he was unfailingly cheerful and inspiring.

Mrs. Ripley was in complete accord with her husband on all vital questions, and as the chief of the Wash-Room Group worked blithely eight or ten hours a day. Whether this devotion to her husband's ideals grew out of her love for him, or whether she was really persuaded of the truth of his theory, does not appear. In later life it is interesting to learn that she sought in the Church of Rome the comfort which Ripley's transcendentalism was not able to afford her. When she died in 1859 she had held the faith of Rome for nearly a dozen years, and, curiously enough, was buried as a Catholic from that very building in which her husband had preached as a Unitarian early in their married life, the church having in the interim been purchased by the Catholics. With just one glimpse of the later Ripley himself, we must leave this interesting couple. In 1866, when, armed with a letter of introduction from Emerson, the original Brook Farmer sought Carlyle (who had once described him as "a Socinian minister who had left his pulpit to reform the world by cultivating onions"), and Carlyle greeted him with a long and violent tirade against our government, Ripley sat quietly through it all, but when the sage of Chelsea paused for breath, calmly rose and left the house, saying no word of remonstrance.

It is, of course, however, in Hawthorne and his descriptions in the "Blithedale Romance" of the life at Brook Farm that the principal interest of most readers centres. This work has come to be regarded as the epic of the community, and it is now generally conceded that Hawthorne was in this novel far more of a realist than was at first admitted. He did not avoid the impulse to tell the happenings of life at the farm pretty nearly as he found them, and substantial as the characters may or may not be, the daily life and doings, the scenery, the surroundings, and even trivial details are presented with a well-nigh faultless accuracy.

The characters, as I have said, are not easily traceable, but even in this respect Hawthorne was something of a photographer. Zenobia seems a blend of Margaret Fuller and of Mrs. Barlow, who as Miss Penniman was once a famous Brookline beauty of lively and attractive disposition. In the strongest and most repellant character of the novel, Hollingsworth, Hawthorne seems to have incorporated something of the fierce earnestness of Brownson and the pathetic zeal of Ripley. And those who best know Brook Farm are able to find in the book reflections of other well-known members of the community. For the actual life of the place, however, readers cannot do better than peruse Lindsay Swift's recent delightful work, "Brook Farm, Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors."

There was, we learn here, a charming happy-go-luckiness about the whole life. Partly from necessity, partly from choice, the young people used to sit on the stairs and on the floor during the evening entertainments. Dishes were washed and wiped to the tune of "Oh, Canaan, Bright Canaan," or some other song of the time. When about their work the women wore short skirts with knickerbockers; the water-cure and the starving-cure both received due attention at the hands of some of the members of the household; at table the customary formula was, "Is the butter within the sphere of your influence?" And very often the day's work ended in a dance, a walk to Eliot's Pulpit, or a moonlight hour on the Charles!

During the earlier years the men, who were in excess of the young women in point of numbers, helped very largely in the household labours. George William Curtis occasionally trimmed lamps, Charles Dana, who afterward founded the New York Sun, organised a band of griddle-cake servitors composed of "four of the most elegant youths of the Community!" One legend, which has the air of probability, records that a student confessed his passion while helping his sweetheart at the sink. Of love there was indeed not a little at Brook Farm. Cupid is said to have made much havoc in the Community, and though very little mismating is to be traced to the intimacy of the life there, fourteen marriages have been attributed to friendships begun at Brook Farm, and there was even one wedding there, that of John Orvis to John Dwight's sister, Marianne. At this simple ceremony William Henry Channing was the minister, and John Dwight made a speech of exactly five words.

Starting with about fifteen persons, the numbers at the farm increased rapidly, though never above one hundred and twenty people were there at a time. It is estimated, however, that about two hundred individuals were connected with the Community from first to last. Of these all the well-known ones are now dead, unless, indeed, one is to count among the "Farmers" Mrs. Abby Morton Diaz, who as a very young girl was a teacher in the infant department of the school.

Yet though the Farmers have almost all passed beyond, delicious anecdotes about them are all the time coming to light. There is one story of "Sam" Larned which is almost too good to be true. Larned, it is said, steadily refused to drink milk on the ground that his relations with the cow did not justify him in drawing on her reserves, and when it was pointed out to him that he ought on the same principle to abandon shoes, he is said to have made a serious attempt to discover some more moral type of footwear.

And then there is another good story of an instance when Brook Farm hospitality had fatal results. An Irish baronet, Sir John Caldwell, fifth of that title, and treasurer-general at Canada, after supping with the Community on its greatest delicacy, pork and beans, returned to the now departed Tremont House in Boston, and died suddenly of apoplexy!

This baronet's son was wont later to refer to the early members of the Community as "extinct volcanoes of transcendental nonsense and humbuggery." But no witty sallies of this sort are able to lessen in the popular mind the reverence with which this Brook Farm essay in idealism must ever be held. For this Community, when all is said, remains the most successful and the most interesting failure the world has ever known.



MARGARET FULLER: MARCHESA D'OSSOLI

Any account of Brook Farm which should neglect to dwell upon the part played in the community life by Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d'Ossoli, would be almost like the play of "Hamlet" with the Prince of Denmark left out. For although Margaret Fuller never lived at Brook Farm—was, indeed, only an occasional visitor there—her influence pervaded the place, and, as we feel from reading the "Blithedale Romance," she was really, whether absent or present, the strongest personality connected with the experiment.

Hawthorne's first bucolic experience was with the famous "transcendental heifer" mistakenly said to have been the property of Margaret Fuller. As a matter of fact, the beast had been named after Cambridge's most intellectual woman, by Ripley, who had a whimsical fashion of thus honouring his friends. According to Hawthorne, the name in this case was not inapt, for the cow was so recalcitrant and anti-social that it was finally sent to Coventry by the more docile kine, always to be counted on for moderate conservatism.

This cow's would-be-tamer, not wishing to be unjust, refers to this heifer as having "a very intelligent face" and "a reflective cast of character." He certainly paid Margaret Fuller herself no such tribute, but thus early in his Brook Farm experience let appear his thinly veiled contempt for the high priestess of transcendentalism. Even earlier his antagonism toward this eminent woman was strong, if it was not frank, for he wrote: "I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller, but Providence had given me some business to do for which I was very thankful."

The unlovely side of Margaret Fuller must have made a very deep impression upon Hawthorne. Gentle as the great romancer undoubtedly was by birth and training, he has certainly been very harsh in writing, both in his note-book and in his story of Brook Farm, of the woman we recognise in Zenobia. One of the most interesting literary wars ever carried on in this vicinity, indeed, was that which was waged here some fifteen years ago concerning Julian Hawthorne's revelations of his father's private opinion of the Marchesa d'Ossoli. The remarks in question occurred in the great Hawthorne's "Roman Journal," and were certainly sufficiently scathing to call for such warm defence as Margaret's surviving friends hastened to offer. Hawthorne said among other things:

"Margaret Fuller had a strong and coarse nature which she had done her utmost to refine, with infinite pains; but, of course, it could be only superficially changed.... Margaret has not left in the hearts and minds of those who knew her any deep witness of her integrity and purity. She was a great humbug—of course, with much talent and moral reality, or else she could never have been so great a humbug.... Toward the last there appears to have been a total collapse in poor Margaret, morally and intellectually; and tragic as her catastrophe was, Providence was, after all, kind in putting her and her clownish husband and their child on board that fated ship.... On the whole, I do not know but I like her the better, though, because she proved herself a very woman after all, and fell as the meanest of her sisters might."

The latter sentences refer to Margaret's marriage to Ossoli, a man some ten years the junior of his gifted wife, and by no means her intellectual equal. That the marriage was a strange one even Margaret's most ardent friends admit, but it was none the less exceedingly human and very natural, as Hawthorne implies, for a woman of thirty-seven, whose interests had long been of the strictly intellectual kind, to yield herself at last to the impulses of an affectionate nature.

But we are getting very much ahead of our story, which should begin, of course, far back in May, 1810, when there was born, at the corner of Eaton and Cherry Streets, in Cambridgeport, a tiny daughter to Timothy Fuller and his wife. The dwelling in which Margaret first saw the light still stands, and is easily recognised by the three elms in front, planted by the proud father to celebrate the advent of his first child.

The garden in which Margaret and her mother delighted has long since vanished; but the house still retains a certain dignity, though now divided into three separate tenements, numbered respectively 69, 72, and 75 Cherry Street, and occupied by a rather migratory class of tenants. The pillared doorway and the carved wreaths above it still give an old-fashioned grace to the somewhat dilapidated house.



The class with which Margaret may be said to have danced through Harvard College was that of 1829, which has been made by the wit and poetry of Holmes the most eminent class that ever left Harvard. The memory of one lady has preserved for us a picture of the girl Margaret as she appeared at a ball when she was sixteen.

"She had a very plain face, half-shut eyes, and hair curled all over her head; she was dressed in a badly-cut, low-neck pink silk, with white muslin over it; and she danced quadrilles very awkwardly, being withal so near-sighted that she could hardly see her partner."

With Holmes she was not especially intimate, we learn, though they had been schoolmates; but with two of the most conspicuous members of the class—William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke—she formed a lifelong friendship, and these gentlemen became her biographers.

Yet, after all, the most important part of a woman's training is that which she obtains from her own sex, and of this Margaret Fuller had quite her share. She was one of those maidens who form passionate attachments to older women, and there were many Cambridge ladies of the college circle who in turn won her ardent loyalty.

"My elder sister," writes Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his biography of Margaret Fuller, "can well remember this studious, self-conscious, over-grown girl as sitting at my mother's feet, covering her hands with kisses, and treasuring her every word. It was the same at other times with other women, most of whom were too much absorbed in their own duties to give more than a passing solicitude to this rather odd and sometimes inconvenient adorer."

The side of Margaret Fuller to which scant attention has been paid heretofore is this ardently affectionate side, and this it is which seems to account for what has always before appeared inexplicable—her romantic marriage to the young Marchese d'Ossoli. The intellect was in truth only a small part of Margaret, and if Hawthorne had improved, as he might have done, his opportunities to study the whole nature of the woman, he would not have written even for his private diary the harsh sentences already quoted. One has only to look at the heroic fashion in which, after the death of her father, Margaret took up the task of educating her brothers and sisters to feel that there was much besides selfishness in this woman's makeup. Nor can one believe that Emerson would ever have cared to have for the friend of a lifetime a woman who was a "humbug." Of Margaret's school-teaching, conversation classes on West Street, Boston, and labours on the Dial, a transcendental paper in which Emerson was deeply interested, there is not space to speak here. But one phase of her work which cannot be ignored is that performed on the Tribune, in the days of Horace Greeley.

Greeley brought Boston's high priestess to New York for the purpose of putting the literary criticism of the Tribune on a higher plane than any American newspaper then occupied, as well as that she might discuss in a large and stimulating way all philanthropic questions. That she rose to the former opportunity her enemies would be the first to grant, but only those who, like Margaret herself, believe in the sisterhood of women could freely endorse her attitude on philanthropic subjects.

Surely, though, it could not have been a hard woman of whom Horace Greeley wrote: "If she had been born to large fortune, a house of refuge for all female outcasts desiring to return to the ways of virtue would have been one of her most cherished and first realised conceptions. She once attended, with other noble women, a gathering of outcasts of their sex, and, being asked how they appeared to her, replied, 'As women like myself, save that they are victims of wrong and misfortune.'"

While labouring for the Tribune, Margaret Fuller was all the time saving her money for the trip to Europe, which had her life long been her dream of felicity; and at last, on the first of August, 1846, she sailed for her Elysian Fields. There, in December, 1847, she was secretly married, and in September, 1848, her child was born. What these experiences must have meant to her we are able to guess from a glimpse into her private journal in which she had many years before recorded her profoundest feeling about marriage and motherhood.

"I have no home. No one loves me. But I love many a good deal, and see some way into their eventful beauty.... I am myself growing better, and shall by and by be a worthy object of love, one that will not anywhere disappoint or need forbearance.... I have no child, and the woman in me has so craved this experience that it has seemed the want of it must paralyse me...."

The circumstances under which Margaret Fuller and her husband first met are full of interest. Soon after Miss Fuller's arrival in Rome, early in 1847, she went one day to hear vespers at St. Peter's, and becoming separated from her friends after the service, she was noted as she examined the church by a young man of gentlemanly address, who, perceiving her discomfort and her lack of Italian, offered his services as a guide in her endeavour to find her companions.

Not seeing them anywhere, the young Marquis d'Ossoli, for it was he, accompanied Miss Fuller home, and they met once or twice again before she left Rome for the summer. The following season Miss Fuller had an apartment in Rome, and she often received among her guests this young patriot with whose labours in behalf of his native city she was thoroughly in sympathy.

When the young man after a few months declared his love, Margaret refused to marry him, insisting that he should choose a younger woman for his wife. "In this way it rested for some weeks," writes Mrs. Story, who knew them both, "during which we saw Ossoli pale, dejected, and unhappy. He was always with Margaret, but in a sort of hopeless, desperate manner, until at length he convinced her of his love, and she married him."

Then followed the wife's service in the hospitals while Ossoli was in the army outside the city. After the birth of their child, Angelo, the happy little family went to Florence.

The letters which passed between the young nobleman and the wife he adored are still extant, having been with the body of her beautiful baby the only things of Margaret Fuller's saved from the fatal wreck in which she and her two loved ones were lost. One of these letters will be enough to show the tenderness of the man:

"Rome, 21 October, 1848.

"MIA CARA:—I learn by yours of the 20th that you have received the ten scudi, and it makes me more tranquil. I feel also Mogliani's indolence in not coming to inoculate our child; but, my love, I pray you not to disturb yourself so much, and not to be sad, hoping that our dear love will be guarded by God, and will be free from all misfortunes. He will keep the child for us and give us the means to sustain him."

* * * * *

In answer to this letter, or one like it, we find the woman whom Hawthorne had deemed hard and cold writing:

"Saturday Evening, 28 October, 1848.

"... It rains very hard every day, but to-day I have been more quiet, and our darling has been so good, I have taken so much pleasure in being with him. When he smiles in his sleep, how it makes my heart beat! He has grown fat and very fair, and begins to play and spring. You will have much pleasure in seeing him again. He sends you many kisses. He bends his head toward me when he asks a kiss."

* * * * *

Both Madame Ossoli and her husband were very fearful as they embarked on the fated ship which was to take them to America. He had been cautioned by one who had told his fortune when a boy to beware of the sea, and his wife had long cherished a superstition that the year 1850 would be a marked epoch in her life. It is remarkable that in writing to a friend of her fear Madame Ossoli said: "I pray that if we are lost it may be brief anguish, and Ossoli, the babe, and I go together."

They sailed none the less, May 17, 1850, on the Elizabeth, a new merchant vessel, which set out from Leghorn. Misfortune soon began. The captain sickened and died of malignant smallpox, and after his burial at sea and a week's detention at Gibraltar, little Angelo caught the dread disease and was restored with difficulty. Yet a worse fate was to follow.

At noon of July 18, while they were off the coast of New Jersey, there was a gale, followed by a hurricane, which dashed the ship on that Fire Island Beach which has engulfed so many other vessels. Margaret Fuller and her husband were drowned with their child. The bodies of the parents were never recovered, but that of little Angelo was buried in a seaman's chest among the sandhills, from which it was later disinterred and brought to our own Mount Auburn by the relatives who had never seen the baby in life.

And there to-day in a little green grave rests the child of this great woman's great love.



THE OLD MANSE AND SOME OF ITS MOSSES

"The Old Manse," writes Hawthorne, in his charming introduction to the quaint stories, "Mosses from an Old Manse", "had never been profaned by a lay occupant until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers had grown up to assume the priestly character. It is awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written here!... Here it was, too, that Emerson wrote 'Nature;' for he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and Paphian sunset and moon-rise from the summit of our eastern hill."



Emerson's residence in the Old Manse is to be accounted for by the fact that his grandfather was its first inhabitant. And it was while living there with his mother and kindred, before his second marriage in 1835, that he produced "Nature."

It is to the parson, the Reverend William Emerson, that we owe one of the most valuable Revolutionary documents that have come down to us. Soon after the young minister came to the old Manse (which was then the New Manse), he had occasion to make in his almanac this stirring entry:

"This morning, between one and two o'clock, we were alarmed by the ringing of the bell, and upon examination found that the troops, to the number of eight hundred, had stole their march from Boston, in boats and barges, from the bottom of the Common over to a point in Cambridge, near to Inman's farm, and were at Lexington meeting-house half an hour before sunrise, where they fired upon a body of our men, and (as we afterward heard) had killed several. This intelligence was brought us first by Doctor Samuel Prescott, who narrowly escaped the guard that were sent before on horses, purposely to prevent all posts and messengers from giving us timely information. He, by the help of a very fleet horse, crossing several walks and fences, arrived at Concord, at the time above mentioned; when several posts were immediately dispatched that, returning, confirmed the account of the regulars' arrival at Lexington and that they were on their way to Concord. Upon this, a number of our minute-men belonging to this town, and Acton, and Lincoln, with several others that were in readiness, marched out to meet them; while the alarm company was preparing to receive them in the town. Captain Minot, who commanded them, thought it proper to take possession of the hill above the meeting-house, as the most advantageous situation. No sooner had our men gained it, than we were met by the companies that were sent out to meet the troops, who informed us that they were just upon us, and that we must retreat, as their number was more than treble ours. We then retreated from the hill near the Liberty Pole, and took a new post back of the town upon an eminence, where we formed into two battalions, and waited the arrival of the enemy.

"Scarcely had we formed before we saw the British troops at the distance of a quarter of a mile, glittering in arms, advancing toward us with the greatest celerity. Some were for making a stand, notwithstanding the superiority of their numbers, but others, more prudent, thought best to retreat till our strength should be equal to the enemy's by recruits from the neighbouring towns, that were continually coming in to our assistance. Accordingly we retreated over the bridge; when the troops came into the town, set fire to several carriages for the artillery, destroyed sixty barrels flour, rifled several houses, took possession of the town-house, destroyed five hundred pounds of balls, set a guard of one hundred men at the North Bridge, and sent a party to the house of Colonel Barrett, where they were in the expectation of finding a quantity of warlike stores. But these were happily secured just before their arrival, by transportation into the woods and other by-places.

"In the meantime the guard sent by the enemy to secure the pass at the North Bridge were alarmed by the approach of our people; who had retreated as before mentioned, and were now advancing, with special orders not to fire upon the troops unless fired upon. These orders were so punctually observed that we received the fire of the enemy in three several and separate discharges of their pieces before it was returned by our commanding officer; the firing then became general for several minutes; in which skirmish two were killed on each side, and several of the enemy wounded. (It may here be observed, by the way, that we were the more cautious to prevent beginning a rupture with the king's troops, as we were then uncertain what had happened at Lexington, and knew not that they had begun the quarrel there by first firing upon our people, and killing eight men upon the spot.) The three companies of troops soon quitted their post at the bridge, and retreated in the greatest disorder and confusion to the main body, who were soon upon their march to meet them.

"For half an hour the enemy, by their marches and countermarches, discovered great fickleness and inconstancy of mind,—sometimes advancing, sometimes returning to their former posts; till at length they quitted the town and retreated by the way they came. In the meantime, a party of our men (one hundred and fifty), took the back way through the Great Fields into the East Quarter, and had placed themselves to advantage, lying in ambush behind walls, fences, and buildings, ready to fire upon the enemy on their retreat."[12]

Here ends the important chronicle, the best first-hand account we have of the battle of Concord. But for this alone the first resident of the Old Manse deserves our memory and thanks.

Mr. Emerson was succeeded at the Manse by a certain Doctor Ripley, a venerable scholar who left behind him a reputation for learning and sanctity which was reproduced in one of the ladies of his family, long the most learned woman in the little Concord circle which Hawthorne soon after his marriage came to join.

Few New England villages have retained so much of the charm and peacefulness of country life as has Concord, and few dwellings in Concord have to-day so nearly the aspect they presented fifty years ago as does the Manse, where Hawthorne passed three of the happiest years of his life.

In the "American Note-Book," there is a charming description of the pleasure the romancer and his young wife experienced in renovating and refurnishing the old parsonage which, at the time of their going into it, was "given up to ghosts and cobwebs." Some of these ghosts have been shiveringly described by Hawthorne himself in the marvellous paragraph of the introduction already referred to: "Our [clerical] ghost used to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlour, and sometimes rustle paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in the long upper entry—where, nevertheless, he was invisible, in spite of the bright moonshine that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably he wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of manuscript discourses that stood in the garret.

"Once while Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there came a rustling noise as of a minister's silk gown sweeping through the very midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against the chairs. Still there was nothing visible.

"A yet stranger business was that of a ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the kitchen at deepest midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing,—performing, in short, all kinds of domestic labour—although no traces of anything accomplished could be detected the next morning. Some neglected duty of her servitude—some ill-starched ministerial band—disturbed the poor damsel in her grave, and kept her at work without wages."

The little drawing-room once remodelled, however, and the kitchen given over to the Hawthorne pots and pans—in which the great Hawthorne himself used often to have a stake, according to the testimony of his wife, who once wrote in this connection, "Imagine those magnificent eyes fixed anxiously upon potatoes cooking in an iron kettle!"—the ghosts came no more. Of the great people who in the flesh passed pleasant hours in the little parlour, Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller are names known by everybody as intimately connected with the Concord circle.

Hawthorne himself cared little for society. Often he would go to the village and back without speaking to a single soul, he tells us, and once when his wife was absent he resolved to pass the whole term of her visit to relatives without saying a word to any human being. With Thoreau, however, he got on very well. This odd genius was as shy and ungregarious as was the dark-eyed "teller of tales," but the two appear to have been socially disposed toward each other, and there are delightful bits in the preface to the "Mosses" in regard to the hours they spent together boating on the large, quiet Concord River. Thoreau was a great voyager in a canoe which he had constructed himself (and which he eventually made over to Hawthorne), as expert indeed in the use of his paddle as the redman who had once haunted the same silent stream.

Of the beauties of the Concord River Hawthorne has written a few sentences that will live while the silver stream continues to flow: "It comes creeping softly through the mid-most privacy and deepest heart of a wood which whispers it to be quiet, while the stream whispers back again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were hushing one another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of the sky and the clustering foliage...."

Concerning the visitors attracted to Concord by the great original thinker who was Hawthorne's near neighbour, the romancer speaks with less delicate sympathy: "Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom look upon themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet are simply bores of a very intense character." A bit further on Hawthorne speaks of these pilgrims as "hobgoblins of flesh and blood," people, he humourously comments, who had lighted on a new thought or a thought they fancied new, and "came to Emerson as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value." With Emerson himself Hawthorne was on terms of easy intimacy. "Being happy," as he says, and feeling, therefore, "as if there were no question to be put," he was not in any sense desirous of metaphysical intercourse with the great philosopher.

It was while on the way home from his friend Emerson's one day that Hawthorne had that encounter with Margaret Fuller about which it is so pleasant to read because it serves to take away the taste of other less complimentary allusions to this lady to be found in Hawthorne's works:

"After leaving Mr. Emerson's I returned through the woods, and entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with some strange title which I did not understand and have forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground and me standing by her side. He made some remark upon the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the crows whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits; and about other matters of high and low philosophy."

Nothing that Hawthorne has ever written of Concord is more to be cherished to-day than this description of a happy afternoon passed by him in Sleepy Hollow talking with Margaret Fuller of "matters of high and low philosophy." For there are few parts of Concord to which visitors go more religiously than to the still old cemetery, where on the hill by Ridge Path Hawthorne himself now sleeps quietly, with the grave of Thoreau just behind him, and the grave of Emerson, his philosopher-friend, on the opposite side of the way. A great pine stands at the head of Hawthorne's last resting-place, and a huge unhewn block of pink marble is his formal monument.

Yet the Old Manse will, so long as it stands, be the romancer's most intimate relic, for it was here that he lived as a happy bridegroom, and here that his first child was born. And from this ancient dwelling it was that he drew the inspiration for what is perhaps the most curious book of tales in all American literature, a book of which another American master of prose[13] has said, "Hawthorne here did for our past what Walter Scott did for the past of the mother-country; another Wizard of the North, he breathed the breath of life into the dry and dusty materials of history, and summoned the great dead again to live and move among us."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: "Historic Towns of New England." G. P. Putnam's Sons.]

[Footnote 13: Henry James.]



SALEM'S CHINESE GOD

Of the romantic figures which grace the history of New England in the nineteenth century, none is to be compared in dash and in all those other qualities that captivate the imagination with the figure of Frederick Townsend Ward, the Salem boy who won a generalship in the Chinese military service, suppressed the Tai-Ping rebellion, organised the "Ever-Victorious Army"—for whose exploits "Chinese" Gordon always gets credit in history—and died fighting at Ning Po for a nation of which he had become one, a fair daughter of which he had married, and by which he is to-day worshipped as a god. Very far certainly did this soldier of fortune wander in the thirty short years of his life from the peaceful red-brick Townsend mansion (now, alas! a steam bread bakery), at the corner of Derby and Carleton Streets, Salem, in which, in 1831, he was born.

This house was built by Ward's grandfather, Townsend, and during Frederick's boyhood was a charming place of the comfortable colonial sort, to which was joined a big, rambling, old-fashioned garden, and from the upper windows of which there was to be had a fascinating view of the broad-stretching sea. To the sea it was, therefore, that the lad naturally turned when, after ending his education at the Salem High School, he was unable to gain admission to the military academy at West Point and follow the soldier career in which it had always been his ambition to shine. He shipped before the mast on an American vessel sailing from New York. Apparently even the hardships of such a common sailor's lot could not dampen his ardour for adventure, for he made a number of voyages.