Part 8

“DEAR DORINDA,—I suppose mother has told you of our privileges and pleasant situation. I only want some of my friends to enjoy it with me to make me perfectly happy. Oh, how I wish you were here to go to the debating society with me and to hear the young men preach! I went to college last night to hear some speeches delivered by the Senior Class. They have questions given, and one takes one side and one another. The two best speeches were made on the question ‘Is a love of fame more injurious than beneficial?’ One young man took the affirmative, and one the negative. They made the best speeches. Then the question was whether ‘the execution of Charles I. was just or not.’ Both of these speakers needed prompting; that is, one of those who had spoken or was to speak took the speaker’s speech which he had written off, and, if he forgot, set him right again. The young man who performed this office was very well qualified for it; he spoke in a low, distinct tone, and seemed to find no difficulty in reading the writing. They speak again in about six weeks. But the chief enjoyments I have are the religious privileges. I can go to the prayer-meeting at the Seminary every Wednesday, and can hear three sermons every Sunday. Don’t you wish you were here, too? Aunt Rice and sister went to the Court House last Sunday evening to hear Mr. Ballantine’s lecture, and as they did not come back very soon the young men came in to supper. While sister and Aunt Rice were away I wrote an account of Mr. Hoge’s and Mr. Howison’s sermons. Well, when Mr. Howison came in, ‘Well, Miss Virginia, have you been by yourself all this evening?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Did you not feel very lonely?’ ‘Not at all.’ ‘Why, what have you been doing?’ ‘I have been writing.’ He paused, laughed, and then said, ‘And what have you been writing?’ And when I told him, I wish you could have seen him! He looked at me for a while as if he did not understand me, and then laughed heartily. He is very easy to laugh, but his manners are as different from Mr. Tayloe’s as can be—but hush! what am I drawing comparisons for? I do not feel in the least restrained where he is, and can talk to him better than to any other gentleman here. Would not you like to have such a teacher?

“_Feb. 6th._—I wonder when father will come up; I have been looking for him every day for more than a week. Mr. Nevius was here the other day. I inquired after you, but he had never seen you when he went to Mr. Miller’s. I was quite disappointed, and I wish you would show yourself next time—that is, if you can.

“I very often think of the times we ate roasted corn and turnips in the midst of the corn-field; don’t you remember the evening when the supper-bell rang and we hid our corn among the leaves of the corn that was growing? I never knew how much I loved you or any of my friends until I was separated from them. Mr. Nevius brought a letter for sister from Anne Carus. She still writes in that desponding style you know she was so remarkable for in school, but I am glad to see from her letter that she has come to the conclusion to be contented with her lot.

“I hope you do not indulge in such feelings, and, indeed, you have no reason to do so, for you are only six miles from your mother and friends, and you are with your brother, and I think you will find a valuable friend in Malvina. How do you like your new teacher and situation? If you are ever home-sick, study hard and forget it.

“I have made many pleasant acquaintances here, and among them Mr. Tayloe’s flame! I do not think they are engaged, but he goes there very frequently, and the students plague him half to death about her, and he never denies it. He boards here. She has a fair skin, blue eyes, and almost red hair, but she is very pretty ‘for all that.’ She is about seventeen. There is a little girl about my own age here, who takes your place in my affections while _here_; she is a granddaughter of Professor Wilson, and lives in his house. Her name is Louisa Caruthers. I will speak to Lou about you, for you _must_ be acquainted. But a truce to this nonsense! Do not show this letter to any one of Mr. Miller’s family, for I feel restrained if I think that my letters are to be shown to any except my particular friends. I will not show yours. Show this to mother, your mother, E. D., and V. Winfree. Give my respects to all Mr. M.’s family, take some of my best love for yourself, and divide the rest among my friends.

“Now farewell, do not forget me, and I will ever be

“Your sincerely attached friend, “M. V. H.”

The foregoing priggish and stilted epistle begins the next chapter of my life-story.

After Miss Wilson’s departure, and divers unsuccessful attempts to obtain a successor to his liking, my father determined upon a bold departure from the beaten path of traditional and conventional usage in the matter of girls’ education.

The widow of Reverend Doctor Rice lived in the immediate neighborhood of Union Theological Seminary, founded by her husband, and of which he was the first president. The cluster of dwellings that had grown up around the two institutions of learning—Hampden-Sidney College and the School of Divinity—made, with the venerable “College Church,” an educational centre for a community noted for generations past for intelligence and refinement. Prince Edward, Charlotte, and Halifax were closely adjacent counties peopled by what nobody then ridiculed as some of the “first families” of the state. Venables, Carringtons, Reades, Bouldins, Watkinses, Randolphs, Cabells, Mortons, Lacys—had borne a conspicuous part in state, church, and social history. The region was aristocratic—and Presbyterian. There was much wealth, for tobacco was the most profitable crop of Central and Southern Virginia, and the plantations bordering the Appomattox River were a mine of riches to the owners. Stately mansions—most of them antedating the Revolutionary War—crowned gently rolling hills rising beyond the river, each, with its little village of domestic offices, great stables, tobacco-barns, and “quarters,” making up an establishment that was feudal in character and in power.

Every planter was college-bred and a politician.

The local atmosphere of “College Hill” was not unlike that of an Old World university town. The professors of the sister institutions of learning occupied houses in the vicinity of seminary and college, and the quaint church, the bricks mellowed to red-brown by time stood equidistant from both.

One feature of the church impressed my youthful imagination. “Cousin Ben,” of Montrose—afterward the senior professor in the seminary, and as Rev. B. M. Smith, D.D., known throughout the Southern and Northern Presbyterian Church as a leader in learning and in doctrine—had, when a student of Hampden-Sidney, brought from Western Virginia a sprig of Scotch broom in his pocket. “The Valley”—now a part of West Virginia—was mainly settled by Scotch-Irish emigrants, and the broom was imported with their household stuff. The boy set the withered slip in the earth just inside of the gate of the church-yard. In twenty years it encompassed the walls with a setting of greenery, overran the enclosure, escaped under the fence, and raced rampant down the hill, growing tall and lush wherever it could get a foothold. In blossom-time the mantle of gold was visible a mile away. The smell of broom always brings back to me a vision of that ugly (but dear) red-brown church and the goodly throng, pouring from doors and gate at the conclusion of the morning service, filling yard and road—well-dressed, well-born county folk, prosperous and hospitable, and so happily content with their lot and residence as to believe that no other people was so blessed of the Lord they served diligently and with godly fear. Without the church-yard were drawn up cumbrous family coaches, which conveyed dignified dames and dainty daughters to and from the sanctuary. Beyond these was a long line of saddle-horses waiting for their masters—blooded hunters for the young men, substantial cobs for their seniors. None except invalided men deigned to accept seats in carriages.

As may be gathered from the formally familiar and irresistibly funny epistle, indited when I had been four months an insignificant actor in the scene I have sketched, “religious privileges” was no idle term then and there. Our social outings were what I have indicated. There were no concerts save the “Monthly Concert of Prayer for Foreign Missions” (held simultaneously in every church in the state and Union); not a theatre in Virginia, excepting one in Richmond, banned for the religious public by the awful memories of the burning of the playhouse in 1811. “Dining-days,” which their descendants name “dinner-parties,” were numerous, and there was much junketing from one plantation to another, a ceaseless drifting back and forth of young people, overflowing, now this house, now that, always certain of a glad welcome, and contriving, without the adventitious aid of cards or dancing, to lead joyous, full lives.

Once a week the community turned out, _en masse_, for church-going. They were a devout folk—those F. F. V.’s, at which we mock now—and considered it a public duty not to forsake the assembling of themselves together for worship, prayers, and sermons. These latter were intellectual, no less than spiritual pabulum. Oratory had not gone out of fashion in these United States, and in Virginia it was indigenous to the soil. Pulpit eloquence was in its glory, and speech-making at barbecues, anniversaries, and political gatherings, in court-rooms and upon “stumps,” was an art learned by boys in roundabouts and practised as long as veterans could stand upon their shrunken calves.

People flocked to church to attend reverently upon divine service, and, when the benediction was pronounced, greeted friends and neighbors, cheerily chatting in the aisles and exchanging greetings between the benches they had occupied during the services—men and women sitting apart, as in the Quaker meeting-house—as freely as we now salute and stroll with acquaintances in the _foyer_ of the opera-house.

Such were some of the advantages and enjoyments included in the elastic phrase “religious privileges,” vaunted by the epistolary twelve-year-old.

“Rice Hill” was a commodious dwelling, one mile from the seminary, and not quite so far from the college. Doctor Rice had literally spent and been spent in the work which had crowned his ministry—the foundation and endowment of a Southern School of Divinity. At his death, friends and admirers, North and South, agreed that a suitable monument to him would be a home for the childless widow. She had a full corps of family servants, who had followed her to her various residences, and she eked out her income by supplying table-board to students from college and seminary. Thus much in explanation of the references to the coming in of “the gentlemen” in the “evening”—rural Virginian for afternoon.

A kindly Providence had appointed unto us these pleasant paths at the impressionable period of our lives. The goodliest feature in that appointment was that Robert Reid Howison, subsequently “LL.D.,” and the author of a _History of Virginia_, and _The Student’s History of the United States_, became the tutor of my sister and myself.

He came to us at twelve o’clock each day, and we dined at half-past two. Hence, all our studying was done out of school-hours. The arrangement was eccentric in the extreme in the eyes of my father’s acquaintances and critics. Other girls were in the class-room from nine until twelve, and after recess had a session of two hours more. That this, the most _outré_ of “Mr. Hawes’s experiments,” would be a ludicrous failure was a foregone conclusion. Whereas, the cool brain had reckoned confidently upon the fidelity of the tutor and the conscientiousness of pupils accustomed to the discipline of a home where implicit obedience was the law.

Never had learners a happier period of pupilage, and the cordial relations between teacher and students testified to the mutual desire to meet, each, the requirements of the other party to the compact.

To the impetus given our minds by association with the genial scholar who directed our studies, was added the stimulus of the table-talk that went on in our hearing daily. It was the informal, suggestive chat of men eager for knowledge, comparing notes and opinions, and discussing questions of deep import—historical, biological, and theological. In the main, they were a bright set of fellows; in the main, likewise, gentlemen at heart and in bearing. It goes without saying that the exception in my mind to the latter clause was our late and hated tutor. I might write to Dorinda, in constrained goody-goodyishness, of the impropriety of “drawing comparisons” between him and Mr. Howison, whose “easy” laugh and winning personality wrought powerfully upon my childish fancy. At heart I loved the one and consistently detested the other.

To this hour I recall the gratified thrill of conscious security and triumph that coursed through my minute being when, Mr. Tayloe having taken it upon himself to reprove me for something I said—pert, perhaps, but not otherwise offensive—Mr. Howison remarked, with no show of temper, but firmly:

“Mr. Tayloe, you will please recollect that this young lady is now under _my_ care!”

He laughed the next moment, as if to pass the matter off pleasantly, but all three of us comprehended what was implied.

We began French with our new tutor, and geometry! I crossed the _Pons Asinorum_ in January, and went on with Euclid passably well, if not creditably. Mathematics was never my strong point. The patience and perfect temper of the preceptor never failed him, no matter how far I came short of what he would have had me accomplish in that direction.

“Educate them as if they were boys and preparing for college,” my father had said, and he was obeyed.

Beyond and above the benefit derived from the study of text-books was the education of daily contact with a mind so richly stored with classic and modern literature, so keenly alive to all that was worthy in the natural, mental, and spiritual world as that of Robert Howison. He had been graduated at the University of Virginia, and for a year or more had practised law in Richmond, resigning the profession to begin studies that would prepare him for what he rated as a higher calling. My debt to him is great, and inadequately acknowledged in these halting lines.

Were I required to tell what period of my nonage had most to do with shaping character and coloring my life, I should reply, without hesitation, “The nine months passed at Rice Hill.” A new, boundless realm of thought and feeling was opened to the little provincial from a narrow, neutral-tinted neighborhood. I was a dreamer by nature and by habit, and my dreams took on a new complexion; a born story-maker, and a wealth of material was laid to my hand. We were a family of mad book-lovers, and the libraries of seminary and college were to my eyes twin Golcondas of illimitable possibilities. Up to now, novel-reading had been a questionable delight in which I hardly dared indulge freely. I was taught to abhor deceit and clandestine practices, and my father had grave scruples as to the wisdom of allowing young people to devour fiction. We might read magazines, as we might have confectionery, in limited supplies. A bound novel would be like a dinner of mince-pie and sweetmeats, breeding mental and moral indigestion.

So, when Mr. Howison not only permitted, but advised the perusal of Scott’s novels and poems, I fell upon them with joyful surprise that kindled into rapture as I became familiar with the Wizard and his work. We lived in the books we read then, discussing them at home and abroad, as we talk now of living issues and current topics. _The Heart of Midlothian_, _Marmion_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, _Peveril of the Peak_, and _Waverley_ were read that winter on stormy afternoons and during the long evenings that succeeded the early supper. Sometimes Mr. Howison lingered when his comrades had gone back to their dormitories, and took his part in the fascinating entertainment. Usually the group was composed of Aunt Rice, her sister (Mrs. Wharey, lately widowed, who was making arrangements to settle upon an adjoining plantation), Mrs. Wharey’s daughter, another “Cousin Mary,” my sister, and myself.

Aunt Rice was a “character” in her way and day; shrewd, kindly sympathetic, active in church and home, and with a marvellous repertoire of tale and anecdote that made her a most entertaining companion. “The Seminary” was her foster-child; the students had from her maternal interest and affection. Like other gentlewomen of her time and latitude, she was well versed in the English classics and in translations from the Latin and Greek. Pope, Swift, and Addison were household favorites, and this winter she was reading with delight the just-published _History of the Reformation_, by Merle d’Aubigné. She always wore black—merino in the morning, black silk or satin in the afternoon—and a regulation old lady’s cap with ribbon strings tied under a double chin, and I think of her as always knitting lamb’s-wool stockings. Hers was a pronounced individuality in every capacity she assumed to fill—mistress, housewife, neighbor, and general well-wisher. She never scolded, yet she managed the dozen or more servants that had come down to her by ordinary generation—seven of them men and boys—judiciously and well. Even then she was meditating a scheme she afterward put into successful execution—namely, liberating all her slaves and sending them to Liberia. To this end she had taught them to read and write, and each boy was trained in some manual trade. She superintended their religious education as faithfully. Every Sunday night all the negroes who were beyond infancy assembled in the dining-room for Scripture readings expounded by her own pleasant voice, and for recitations in the Shorter Catechism and Village Hymn-book. They were what was called in the neighborhood vernacular, “a likely lot.” The boys and men were clever workers in their several lines of labor. The women were skilled in the use of loom, spinning-wheel, and needle, and excellent cooks. One and all, they were made to understand from babyhood what destiny awaited them so soon as they were equipped for the enterprise.

I wish I could add that the result met her fond expectations. While the design was inchoate, her example served as a stock and animating illustration of the wisdom of those who urged upon Virginia slaveholders the duty of returning the blacks to the land from which their fathers were stolen. Colonization was boldly advocated in public and in private, and the old lady was a fervent convert. In the fulness of time she sent out five families, strong and healthy, as well-educated as the average Northern farmer and mechanic. She sold Rice Hill and well-nigh impoverished herself in her old age to fit out the colony with clothes and household goods, and went to spend the few remaining years of her life in the home of her sister. The great labor of her dreams and hope accomplished, she chanted a happy “Nunc Dimittis” to sympathizer and to doubter. She had solved the Dark Problem that baffled the world’s most astute statesmen. If all who hearkened unto her would do likewise, the muttering of the hell that was already moving from its depth under the feet of the nation, would be silenced forever.

The competent colonists had hardly had time to send back to their emancipated mistress news of their safe arrival in the Promised Land, when they found themselves in grievous straits. These, duly reported to Aunt Rice, were African fevers that exhausted their strength and consumed their stock of ready money; the difficulty of earning a livelihood while they were ignorant of the language and customs of the natives; lack of suitable clothing; scarcity of provisions, and a waiting-list of etceteras that rent the tender heart of the benefactress with unavailing pity. She was importuned for money, for clothes, for groceries—even that she would, for the love of Heaven and the sake of old times, send them a barrel of rice—which, infidels to her faith in colonization did not fail to remind her, was to be had in Liberia for the raising.

The stout-hearted liberator never owned in word her disappointment at the outcome of long years of patient preparation and personal privation, or gave any sign of appreciation of the truth that her grand solution of the Dark Problem was the song of the drunkard and a by-word and a hissing in the mouth of the unbeliever. But she ceased long before her death, in 1858, to tax her listeners’ patience by setting forth the beauties of colonization as the practical abolition of negro slavery in America. If her ancestors had sinned in bringing the race into bondage, and her teeth were thereby set on edge, she hid her hurt. This significant silence was the only token by which her best friends divined her consciousness of the humiliating revelation which had fallen into the evening of a well-spent life. She had exchanged for the five families born and reared in her home, dependence, comfort, and happiness, for freedom, pauperism, and discontent. The cherished bud had been passing sweet. The fruit was as bitter as gall.

At the time of which I am writing, the dream-bubble was at the brightest and biggest. She was in active correspondence with the officers of the Colonization Society; subscribed to and read colonization publications, and dealt out excerpts from the same to all who would listen; was busy, sanguine, and bright, beholding herself, in imagination, the leader in a crusade that would wipe the stain of slavery from her beloved state.

One event of that wonderful winter was a visit paid to Aunt Rice by her aged father, Major James Morton, of High Hill, Cumberland County, the “Old Solid Column” of Revolutionary story. The anecdote of Lafayette’s recognition of his former brother-in-arms was related in an earlier chapter. It was treasured in the family as a bit of choice silver would be prized. I had heard it once and again, and had constructed my own portrait of the stout-hearted and stout-bodied warrior. Surprise approximated dismay when I behold a withered, tremulous old man, enfeebled in mind almost to childishness, his voice breaking shrilly as he talked—a pitiable, crumbling wreck of the stately column.

He had definite ideas upon certain subjects still, and was doughty in their defence. For example, during this visit to his daughter, he sat one evening in the chimney-corner, apparently dozing, while a party of young people were discussing the increasing facilities of travel by steam, and contrasting them with the slow methods of their fathers. The Major drowsed on, head sunken into his military stock, eyes closed, and jaw drooping—the impersonation of senile decay—when somebody spoke of a trip up the Hudson to West Point the preceding summer.

The veteran raised himself as if he had been shaken by the shoulder.

“That is not true!” he said, doggedly.

“But, Major,” returned the surprised narrator, “I did go! There is a regular line of steamers up the river.”

The old war-horse reared his head and beat the floor with an angry heel.