CHAPTER XIV.

–––––– THE GAY STREET HOME.

In November, 1867, the Halls bought the Captain Peters’ place, No. 18 Gay Street, Georgetown, and for twenty-five years, that is, for the rest of Angeline Hall’s life, this was her home. The two-story brick house, covered with white stucco, and having a shingled roof, stood in the centre of a generous yard, looking southward. Wooden steps led up to a square front porch, the roof of which was supported by large wooden pillars. The front door opened into a hall, with parlor on the right hand and sitting room on the left. Back of the sitting room was the dining room, and back of that the kitchen. In the year of the Centennial, 1876, the house was enlarged to three stories, with a flat tin roof, and three bay-windows were added, one in the dining room and two in front of the house, and the front porch was lengthened so as to extend from one bay window to the other. The new house was heated chiefly by a furnace and a large kitchen range, but in the dining room and sitting room grates were put in for open coal fires. The two rooms were thrown together by sliding doors, and became the centre of home comfort; though the room over the sitting room, where, in a low cane-seated rocking chair of oak, Mrs. Hall sat and did the family sewing, was of almost equal importance. In the sitting room hung the old-fashioned German looking-glass with its carved and gilded frame, the gift of Dr. Powalky. Over the fire-place was an engraving of Lincoln, and in one corner of the room was the round mahogany table where Professor Hall played whist with his boys. Over the dining room mantle hung a winter scene painted by some relative of the family, and in the bay window stood Mrs. Hall’s fern table.

In the front yard was a large black-heart cherry tree, where house-wrens built their nests, a crab-apple tree that blossomed prodigiously, a damson plum, peach trees, box-trees and evergreens. The walks were bordered with flower beds, where roses and petunias, verbenas and geraniums, portulacas and mignonnette blossomed in profusion. In the back yard was a large English walnut tree, from the branches of which the little Halls used to shoot the ripe nuts with their bows and arrows. In another part of the back yard was Mrs. Hall’s hot-bed, with its seven long sashes, under which tender garden plants were protected during the winter, and sweet English violets bloomed. Along the sidewalk in front of the premises was a row of rather stunted rock-maples; for the Southern soil seemed but grudgingly to nourish the Northern trees.

Such, in bare outline, was the Gay Street home. Here on September 16, 1868, the third child, Angelo, was born. Among the boys of the neighborhood 18 Gay Street became known as the residence of “Asaph, Sam, and Angelico.” This euphonious and rhythmical combination of names held good for four years exactly, when, on September 16, 1872, the fourth and last child, Percival, was born. One of my earliest recollections is the sight of a red, new-born infant held in my father’s hands. It has been humorously maintained that it was my parents’ design to spell out the name “Asaph” with the initials of his children. I am inclined to discredit the idea, though the pleasantry was current in my boyhood, and the fifth letter,—which might, of course, be said to stand for Hall,—was supplied by Henry S. Pritchett, who as a young man became a member of the family, as much attached to Mrs. Hall as an own son. In fact, when Asaph was away at college, little Percival used to say there were five boys in the family _counting Asaph_. As a curious commentary upon this letter game, I will add that my own little boy Llewellyn used to pronounce his grandfather’s name “Apas.” Blood is thicker than water, and though the letters here are slightly mixed, the proper four, and four only, are employed.

So it came to pass that Angeline Hall reared her four sons in the unheard-of and insignificant little city of Georgetown, whose sole claim to distinction is that it was once the home of Francis Scott Key. What a pity the Hall boys were not brought up in Massachusetts! And yet how glad I am that we were not! In Georgetown Angeline Hall trained her sons with entire freedom from New England educational fads; and for her sake Georgetown is to them profoundly sacred. Here it was that this woman of gentle voice, iron will, and utmost purity of character instilled in her growing boys moral principles that should outlast a lifetime. One day when about six years old I set out to annihilate my brother Sam. I had a chunk of wood as big as my head with which I purposed to kill him. He happened to be too nimble for me, so that the fury of my rage was ungratified. My mother witnessed the affair. Indeed, she wept over it. She told me in heartfelt words the inevitable consequences of such actions—and from that day dated my absolute submission to her authority.

In this connection it will not be amiss to quote the words of Mrs. John R. Eastman, for thirteen years our next-door neighbor:

During the long days of our long summers, when windows and doors were open, and the little ones at play out of doors often claimed a word from her, I lived literally within sound of her voice from day to day. Never once did I hear it raised in anger, and its sweetness, and steady, even tones, were one of her chief and abiding charms.

The fact is, Angeline Hall rather over-did the inculcation of Christian principles. Like Tolstoi she taught the absolute wickedness of fighting, instead of the manly duty of self-defense. And yet, I think my brothers suffered no evil consequences. I myself did. Perhaps the secret of her great influence over us was that she demanded the absolute truth. Dishonesty in word or act was out of the question. In two instances, I remember, I lied to her; for in moral strength I was not the equal of George Washington. But those lies weighed heavily on my conscience, till at last, after many years, I confessed to her.

If she demanded truth and obedience from her sons, she gave to them her absolute devotion. Miracles of healing were performed in her household. By sheer force of character, by continual watchings and utmost care in dieting, she rescued me from a hopeless case of dysentery in the fifth year of my age. The old Navy doctor called it a miracle, and so it was. And I have lived to write her story. Serious sickness was uncommon in our family, as is illustrated by the fact that, for periods of three years each, not one of her four boys was ever late to school, though the distance thither was a mile or two. When Percival, coasting down one of the steep hills of Georgetown, ran into a street car and was brought home half stunned, with one front tooth knocked out and gone and another badly loosened, Angeline Hall repaired to the scene of the accident early the next morning, found the missing tooth, and had the family dentist restore it to its place. There it has done good service for twenty years. Is it any wonder that such a woman should have insisted upon her husband’s discovering the satellites of Mars?

Perhaps the secret of success in the moral training of her sons lay in her generalship. She was an ideal general. In house and yard there was work to do, and she marshaled her boys to do it. Like a good general she was far more efficient than any of her soldiers, but under her leadership they did wonders. Sweeping, dusting, making beds, washing dishes, sifting ashes, going to market, running errands, weeding the garden, chopping wood, beating carpets, mending fences, cleaning house—there was hardly a piece of work indoors or out with which they were unfamiliar. Nor did they lack for play hours. There was abundance of leisure for all sorts of diversions, including swimming and skating, two forms of exercise which struck terror to the mother heart, but in which, through her self-sacrifice, they indulged quite freely.

Their leisure was purchased by her labor; for until they were of academic age she was their school teacher. In an hour or two a day they mastered the three R’s and many things besides. Nor did they suffer from too little teaching, for at the preparatory school each of them in turn led his class, and at Harvard College all four sons graduated with distinction. Four sons graduates of Harvard! How few mothers have so proud a record, and how impossible would such an achievement have seemed to any observer who had seen the collapse of this frail woman at McGrawville! But as each successive son completed his college course it was as if she herself had done it—her moral training had supplied the incentive, her teaching and encouragement had started the lad in his studies, when he went to school her motherly care had provided nourishing food and warm clothing, when he went to college her frugality had saved up the necessary money. She used to say, “Somebody has got to make a sacrifice,” and she sacrificed herself. It is good to know that on Christmas Day, 1891, half a year before she died, she broke bread with husband and all four sons at the old Georgetown home.

Let it not be supposed that Angeline Hall reached the perfection of motherhood. I make no such claim. The Gay Street home was the embodiment of her spirit; and as she was a Puritan, her sons suffered sometimes from her excess of Puritanism. They neither drank nor used tobacco; but fortunately their father taught them to play cards. Their mother brought them up to believe in woman suffrage; but fortunately Cupid provided them wives regardless of such creed. She taught them to eschew pride, sending them to gather leaves in the streets, covering their garments with patches, discouraging the use of razors on incipient beards; but fortunately a boy’s companions take such nonsense out of him. She even left a case of chills and fever to the misdirected mercies of a woman doctor, a homœopathist. I myself was the victim, and for twenty-five years I have abhorred women homœopathic physicians.

But such trivial faults are not to be compared with the depths of a mother’s love. To all that is intrinsically noble and beautiful she was keenly sensitive. How good it was to see her exult in the glories of a Maryland sunset—viewed from the housetop with her boys about her. And how strange that this timid woman could allow them to risk their precious necks on the roof of a three-story house!

Perhaps her passion for the beautiful was most strikingly displayed in the cultivation of her garden. To each son she dedicated a rose-bush. There was one for her husband and another for his mother. In a shady part of the yard grew lilies of the valley; and gladiolas, Easter lilies and other varieties of lilies were scattered here and there. In the early spring there were crocuses and hyacinths and daffodils. Vines trailed along the fences and climbed the sides of the house. She was especially fond of her English ivy. Honeysuckles flourished, hollyhocks ran riot even in the front yard, morning-glories blossomed west of the house, by the front porch grew a sweet-briar rose with its fragrant leaves, and by the bay windows bloomed blue and white wisterias. A magnolia bush stood near the parlor window, a forsythia by the front fence, and by the side alley a beautiful flowering bush with a dome of white blossoms. The flower beds were literally crowded, so that humming birds, in their gorgeous plumage, were frequent visitors. In childhood Mrs. Hall had loved the wild flowers of her native woods and fields; and in the woods back of Georgetown she sought out her old friends and brought them home to take root in her yard, coaxing their growth with rich wood’s earth, found in the decayed stump of some old tree.

Thus the following poem, like all her poems, was but the expression of herself:

ASPIRATION.

The violet dreams forever of the sky, Until at last she wakens wondrous fair, With heaven’s own azure in her dewy eye, And heaven’s own fragrance in her earthly air.

The lily folds close in her heart the beams That the pure stars reach to her deeps below, Till o’er the waves her answering brightness gleams— A star hath flowered within her breast of snow.

The rose that watches at the gates of morn, While pours through heaven the splendor of the sun, Needs none to tell us whence her strength is born, Nor where her crown of glory she hath won.

And every flower that blooms on hill or plain In the dull soil hath most divinely wrought To haunting perfume or to heavenly stain The sweetness born of her aspiring thought.

O yearnful soul of infinite desire! With what expectancy we wait the hour When all the hopes to which thou dost aspire Shall in the holiness of beauty flower.