Chapter 5

[Sydney Smith said that he never desired to live in a hot climate, as he disliked the idea of processions of ants traversing his bread and butter. The month of June had hardly begun in the year 1874, when I was residing close to the home of my early married life, Butler Place, when the ants appeared in such numbers in the dining-room sideboards, closets, cupboards, etc., that we were compelled to isolate all cakes, biscuits, sugar, preserves, fruit, and whatever else was kept in them, by placing the vessels containing all such things in dishes of water--moats, in fact, by which the enemy was cut off from these supplies. Immediately to these succeeded swarms of fire-flies, beautiful and wonderful in their evening apparition of showers of sparks from every bush and shrub, and after sunset rising in hundreds from the grass, and glittering against the dark sky as if the Milky Way had gone mad and taken to dancing; but even these shining creatures were not pleasant in the house by day, where they were merely like ill-shaped ugly black flies. These were followed by a world of black beetles of every size and shape, with which our room was alive as soon as the lights were brought in the evening. Net curtains, and muslin stretched over wooden frames, and fixed like blinds in the window-sashes, did indeed keep out the poor mouthful of stifling air for which we were gasping, but did not exclude these intolerable visitors, who made their way in at every crack and crevice and momentarily opened door, and overran with a dreadful swiftness the floor of the room in every direction; occasionally taking to the more agreeable exercise of flying, at which, however, they did not seem quite expert, frequently tumbling down and struggling by twos and threes upon one's hair, neck, and arms, and especially attracted to unfortunate females by white or light-colored muslin gowns, which became perfect receptacles for them as they rushed and rattled over the matting. After the reign of the beetles came that of the flies, a pest to make easily credible the ancient story of the Egyptian plague. Every picture and looking-glass frame, every morsel of gilding, every ornamental piece of metal about the rooms, had to be covered, like the tarts in a confectioner's shop, with yellow gauze; whatever was not so protected--unglazed photographs, the surface of oil pictures, necessary memoranda, and papers on one's writing-table--became black with the specks and spots left by these creatures. Plates of fly-paper poison disfigured, to but small purpose, every room; and at evening, by candlelight, while one was reading or writing, the universal hum and buzz was amazing, and put one in mind of the--

"Hushed by buzzing night-flies to thy slumber"

of poor King Henry. The walls and ceiling of the servants' offices and kitchen, which at the beginning of the spring had been painted white, and were immaculate in their purity, became literally a yellow-brown coffee color, darkened all over with spots as black as soot, with the defilement of these torments, of which three and four dustpanfuls a day would be swept away dead without appreciably diminishing their number.

These flies accompanied our whole summer, from June till the end of October. Before, however, the beginning of the latter month, the mosquitoes made their appearance; and though, owing to the peculiar dryness of the summer of 1874, they were much less numerous than usual, there came enough of them to make our days miserable and our nights sleepless.

These are the common indoor insects of a common summer in this part of Pennsylvania, to which should be added the occasional visits of spiders of such dimensions as to fill me with absolute terror; I have, unfortunately, a positive physical antipathy to these strangely-mannered animals (the only resemblance, I fear, between myself and Charles Kingsley), some of whose peculiarities, besides their infinitely dexterous and deliberate processes for ensnaring their prey, make them unspeakably repulsive to me,--indeed, to a degree that persuades me that, at some former period of my existence, "which, indeed, I can scarcely remember," as Rosalind says, I must have been a fly who perished by spider-craft.

It is not, however, only in these midland and comparatively warmer states of North America that this profusion of insect life is found; the heat of the summer, even in Massachusetts, is more than a match in its life-engendering force, for the destructive agency of the winter's cold; and in the woods, on the high hill-tops of Berkshire, spiders of the most enormous size abound. I found two on my own place, the extremities of whose legs could not be covered by a large inverted tumbler; one of these perfectly swarmed with parasitical small spiders, a most hideous object! and one day, on cutting down a hollow pine tree, my gardener called me to look at a perfect jet of white ants, which like a small fountain, welled up from the middle of the decayed stump, and flowed over it in a thick stream to the ground. As far north as Lenox, in Berkshire, the summer heat brings humming-birds and rattlesnakes; and of less deadly, but very little less disagreeable, serpent-beasts, I have encountered there no fewer than eight, in a short mile walk, on a warm September morning, genial even for snakes.

The succession of creatures I have enumerated is the normal entomology of an average Pennsylvania summer. But there came a year, a horrible year, shortly before my last return to England, when the Colorado beetle (_alias_ potato-bug), having marched over the whole width of the continent, from the far West to the Atlantic sea-board, made its appearance in the neighborhood of Philadelphia. These loathsome creatures, varying in size from a sixpence to a shilling, but rather oval than round in shape, of a pinkish-colored flesh, covered with a variegated greenish-brown shell, came in such numbers that the paths in the garden between the vegetable beds seemed to _swim_ with them, and made me giddy to look at them. They devoured everything, beginning with the potatoes; and having devastated the fields and garden, betook themselves to swarming up the walls of the house, for what purpose they alone could tell--but didn't. In vain men with ladders went up and scraped them down into buckets of hot water; they seemed inexhaustible, and filled me with such disgust that I felt as if I must fly, and abandon the place to them. I do not think this pest lasted much more than a week; then, having devoured, they departed, still making towards the sea, and were described to me by a gentleman who drove along the road, as literally covering the highway, like a disbanded army. One's familiar sensations under this visitation were certainly "crawling and creeping"; it is a great pity that flying might not have been added to them.]

BRANCHTOWN, Monday, August 29th, 1836. DEAREST H----,

You are in Italy! in that land which, from the earliest time I can remember, has been the land of my dreams; and it seems strange to me that you should be there, and I here; for when we were together the realities of life, the matter-of-fact interests of every-day existence always attracted your sympathies more than mine; nor do I remember ever hearing you mention, with the longing which possessed me, Italy, or the shores of the Mediterranean.... If, as I believe, there is a special Providence in "the fall of a sparrow," then your and my whereabouts are not the result of accidental circumstance, but the providential appointment of God. Dearest H----, your life's lesson just now is to be taught you through variety of scene, the daily intercourse of your most precious friend [Miss Dorothy Wilson], and the beautiful and lofty influences of the countries in which you are traveling and sojourning: and mine is to be learnt from a page as different as the chapters of Lindley Murray's Grammar are different from those of a glorious, illuminated, old vellum book of legends. I not only believe through my intuitive instincts, but also through my rational convictions, that my own peculiar task is the wholesomest and best for me, and though I might desire to be with you in Italy, I am content to be without you in America.... How much all separation and disappointment tend to draw us nearer to God! To me upon this earth you seem almost lost--you, and those yet nearer and dearer to me than yourself; your very images are becoming dim, and vague, and blurred in outline to my memory, like faded pictures or worn-out engravings. I think of you all almost as of the dead, and the feverish desire to be once more with you and them, from which I have suffered sometimes, is gradually dying away in my heart; and now when I think of any of you, my dear distant ones, it is as folded with me together in our Heavenly Father's arms, watched over by His care, guarded over by His merciful love, and though my imagination no longer knows where to seek or find you on earth, I meet you under the shadow of His Almighty Wings, and know that we are together--now--and forever.

[To those who know the rate of intercourse between Europe and America now, these expressions of the painful sense of distance from my country and friends, under which I suffered, must seem almost incomprehensible,--now, when to go to Europe seems to most Americans the easiest of summer trips, involving hardly more than a week's sea voyage; when letters arrive almost every other day by some of the innumerable steamers flying incessantly to and fro, and weaving, like living shuttles, the woof and warp of human communication between the continents; and the submarine telegraph shoots daily tidings from shore to shore of that terrible Atlantic, with swift security below its storms. But when I wrote this to my friend, no words were carried with miraculous celerity under the dividing waves; letters could only be received once a month, and from thirty to thirty-seven days was the average voyage of the sailing packets which traversed the Atlantic. Men of business went to and fro upon their necessary affairs, but very few Americans went to Europe, and still fewer Europeans went to America, to spend leisure, or to seek pleasure; and American and English women made the attempt still seldomer than the men. The distance between the two worlds, which are now so near to each other, was then immense.]

Let me answer your questions, dear H----; though when I strive most entirely to satisfy you, I seem to have left out the very things you wish to know....

I am reading Sir Thomas Browne's "Religio Medici." What charming old English it is! How many fantastical and how many beautiful things there are in it!

Yesterday I walked down, with a basket of cucumbers and some beautiful flowers, to Mrs. F----'s, the wife of the Unitarian clergyman whose church I attend, and who is an excellent and highly valued friend of mine; and I sat two hours with her and another lady, going through an interminable discussion on the subject of intellectual gifts: the very various proportions in which they were distributed, and the measure of consciousness of superiority which was inevitable, and therefore allowable, in the possessor of an unusual amount of such endowments....

I wish Mr. and Mrs. F---- lived near me instead of being merely come to spend a few weeks in this neighborhood.... I do not keep a diary any more; I do not find chronicling my days helps me to live them, and for many reasons I have given up my journal. Perhaps I may resume it when we set out for the South....

We are now altogether proprietors of this place, and I really think, as I am often told, that it is getting to be prettier and better kept than any other in this neighborhood. It is certainly very much improved, and no longer looks quite unlike an English place, but there are yet a thousand things to be done to it, in the contemplation of which I try to forget its present mongrel appearance.

Now, dear, I have answered as many of your questions as my paper allows. Do not, I beseech you, send me back word that my letter was "thoroughly unsatisfactory."

God bless you.

I am ever your affectionate F. A. B.

BRANCHTOWN, Wednesday, October 5th. MY DEAREST H----,

It is a great disappointment to me that I am not going to the South this winter. There is no house, it seems, on the plantation but a small cottage, inhabited by the overseer, where the two gentlemen proprietors can be accommodated, but where there is no room for me, my baby, and her nurse, without unhousing the poor overseer and his family altogether. The nearest town to the estate, Brunswick, is fifteen miles off, and a wretched hole, where I am assured it will be impossible to obtain a decent lodging for me, so that it has been determined to leave me and baby behind, and the owner will go with his brother, but without us, on his expedition to Negroland. As far as the child is concerned, I am well satisfied; ... but I would undergo much myself to be able to go among those people. I know that my hands would be in a great measure tied. I certainly could not free them, nor could I even pay them for their labor, or try to instruct them, even to the poor degree of teaching them to read. But mere personal influence has a great efficiency; moral revolutions of the world have been wrought by those who neither wrote books nor read them; the Divinest Power was that of One Character, One Example; that Character and Example which we profess to call our Rule of life. The power of individual personal qualities is really the great power, for good or evil, of the world; and it is upon this ground that I feel convinced that, in spite of all the cunningly devised laws by which the negroes are walled up in a mental and moral prison, from which there is apparently no issue, the personal character and daily influence of a few Christian men and women living among them would put an end to slavery, more speedily and effectually than any other means whatever.

You do not know how profoundly this subject interests me, and engrosses my thoughts: it is not alone the cause of humanity that so powerfully affects my mind; it is, above all, the deep responsibility in which we are involved, and which makes it a matter of such vital paramount importance to me.... It seems to me that we are possessed of power and opportunity to do a great work; how can I not feel the keenest anxiety as to the use we make of this talent which God has entrusted us with? We dispose of the physical, mental, and moral condition of some hundreds of our fellow-creatures. How can I bear to think that this great occasion of doing good, of dealing justly, of setting a noble example to others, may be wasted or neglected by us? How can I bear to think that the day will come, as come it surely must, when we shall say: We once had it in our power to lift this burden from four hundred heads and hearts, and stirred no finger to do it; but carelessly and indolently, or selfishly and cowardly, turned our back upon so great a duty and so great a privilege.

I cannot utter what I feel upon this subject, but I pray to God to pour His light into our hearts, and enable us to do that which is right.

In every point of view, I feel that we ought to embrace the cause of these poor people. They will be free assuredly, and that before many years; why not make friends of them instead of deadly enemies? Why not give them at once the wages of their labor? Is it to be supposed that a man will work more for fear of the lash than he will for the sake of an adequate reward? As a matter of policy, and to escape personal violence, or the destruction of one's property, it were well not to urge them--ignorant, savage, and slavish, as they are--into rebellion. As a mere matter of worldly interest, it would be wise to make it worth their while to work with zeal and energy for hire, instead of listlessly dragging their reluctant limbs under a driver's whip.

Oh, how I wish I was a man! How I wish I owned these slaves! instead of being supported (disgracefully, as it seems to me) by their unpaid labor....

You tell me, dear H----, that you are aged and much altered, and you doubt if I should know you. That's a fashion of speech--you doubt no such thing, and know that I should know you if your face were as red as the fiery inside of Etna, and your hair as white as its snowy shoulders.

I have had the skin peeled off the back of my neck with standing in the sun here, and my whole face and hands are burnt, by constant exposure, to as fine a coffee-color as you would wish to see of a summer's day. Yet, after all, I got as sharp a sunstroke on my shoulders, driving on a coach-box by the side of Loch Lomond once, as could be inflicted upon me by this American sky. The women here, who are careful, above all things, of their appearance, marvel extremely at my exposing myself to the horrors of tanning, freckling, etc.; but with hair and eyes as dark as mine, a gipsy complexion doesn't signify, and I prefer burning my skin to suffocating under silk handkerchiefs, sun-bonnets, and two or three gauze veils, and sitting, as the ladies here do, in the dark till the sun has declined. I am certainly more like a Red Indian squaw than when last you saw me; but that change doesn't signify, it's only skin deep....

You speak of the beauty of the Italian sky, and say that to pass the mornings with such pictures, and the evenings with such sunsets, is matter to be grateful for.

I have been spending a month with my friends, the Sedgwicks, in a beautiful hilly region in the State of Massachusetts; and I never looked abroad upon the woods and valleys and lakes and mountains without thinking how great a privilege it was to live in the midst of such beautiful things. I felt this the more strongly, perhaps, because the country in my own neighborhood here is by no means so varied and interesting.

I am glad you are to have the pleasure of meeting your own people abroad, and thus carrying your home with you: give my kindest love to them all whenever you see them....

I have not been hot this summer: the weather has been rainy and cold to a most uncommon degree; and I have rejoiced therefore, and so have the trees and the grass, which have contrived to look green to the end of the chapter, as with us....

If I am not allowed to go to the South this winter, it is just possible that I may spend three months in England.

Good-bye, my dearest H----.

I am ever yours, F. A. B.

[This was the last letter I wrote to my friend from America this year; it was decided that I should not go to the South, and so lonely a winter as I should have had to spend in the country being rather a sad prospect, it was also decided that I should return to England, and remain during my temporary widowhood with my own family in London.

I sailed at the beginning of November, and reached England, after a frightfully stormy passage of eight and twenty days. I and my child's nurse were the only women on board the packet, and there were very few male passengers. The weather was dreadful; we had violent contrary winds almost the whole time, and one terrific gale that lasted nearly four days; during which time I and my poor little child and her nurse were prisoners in the cabin, where we had not even the consolation of daylight, the skylights being all closely covered to protect us from the sea, which broke all over the decks. I begged so hard one day to have the covering removed, and a ray of daylight admitted, if only for five minutes, that I was indulged, and had reason to repent it; the sea almost instantly broke the windows and poured down upon us like Niagara, and I was thankful to be covered up again as quick as possible in dry darkness.

This storm was made memorable to me by an experience of which I have read one or two descriptions, by persons who have been similarly affected in seasons of great peril, and which I have never ceased regretting that I did not make a record of as soon as possible; but the lapse of time, though it has no doubt enfeebled, has in no other way altered, the impressions I received.

The tempest was the first I had ever witnessed, and was undoubtedly a more formidable one than I have ever since encountered in eighteen passages across the Atlantic. I was told, after it was over, that the vessel had sprung its mainmast--a very serious injury to a sailing ship, I suppose, by the mode in which it was spoken of; and for three days we were unable to carry any sail whatever for the fury of the wind.

At the height of the storm, in the middle of a night which my faithful friend and servant, Margery O'Brien, passed in prayer, without once rising from her knees, the frightful uproar of the elements and the delirious plunging and rearing of the convulsed ship convinced me that we should inevitably be lost. As the vessel reeled under a tremendous shock, the conviction of our impending destruction became so intense in my mind, that my imagination suddenly presented to me the death-vision, so to speak, of my whole existence.

This kind of phenomenon has been experienced and recorded by persons who have gone through the process of drowning, and afterwards recovered; or have otherwise been in imminent peril of their lives, and have left curious and highly interesting accounts of their sensations.

I should find it impossible adequately to describe the vividness with which my whole past life presented itself to my perception; not as a procession of events, filling a succession of years, but as a whole--a total--suddenly held up to me as in a mirror, indescribably awful, combined with the simultaneous acute and almost despairing sense of _loss_, of _waste_, so to speak, by which it was accompanied. This instantaneous, involuntary retrospect was followed by a keen and rapid survey of the religious belief in which I had been trained, and which then seemed to me my only important concern....

The tension, physical and mental, of the very short space of time in which these processes took place, gave way to a complete exhaustion, in which, strangely enough, I found the sort of satisfaction that a child does in crooning itself to sleep, in singing, one after another, every song I could call to memory; and my repertory was a very numerous one, composed of English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh, French, German, Italian, and Spanish specimens, which I "chanted loudly, chanted lowly," sitting on the floor, through the rest of the night, till the day broke, and my sense of danger passed away, but not the recollection of the never-to-be-forgotten experience it had brought to me.

I have often since wondered if any number of men going into action on a field of battle are thus impressed. Several thousands of human beings, with the apparition of their past life thus suddenly confronting them, is not a bad suggestion of the Day of Judgment.