POPPIES AND WHEAT
Poppies have loved the golden wheat
Many a thousand years,
And still they lift a glowing face
Up to the bending ears,
Wherever the yellow wheat doth grow,
Scarlet poppies will surely go.
Bind the sheaves in the East or West,
Take seed where man ne’er trod,
And when the corn bends to the breeze,
The poppy there will nod.
No time, no distance, hath the power
To change the love of grain and flower.
See how the silky petals stir
Like banners in still air;
See how the rich ripe ears sway down
To flowers so idly fair.
O sweet wind of the harvest day!
Tell me what do these lovers say.
Do they remember Nilus yet?
Ham’s daughters dusky fair?
Greek girls with mingled wreaths of wheat
And poppies in their hair?
Or fair Judean maids at morn
Gleaning among the yellow corn?
Does grain of wheat, or seed of flower,
Hold still a memory
Of happy English harvest homes
On many a pleasant lea?
And youths and maids amid the sheaves,
Testing their love with poppy leaves.
If so, then winds of harvest haste
Carry a greeting sweet,
No heed where corn and poppies grow,
Kin are poppies and wheat,
Grain and flower of every strand,
Came from the fields of Edenland.
I had never permitted Alice to go to any school, but had always had a governess for two or three hours daily, as she could bear it. During the many years she was thus instructed, she had many teachers of all kinds; but at this period a Mrs. Jones, the daughter of the Episcopal minister, came to her. And she loved Mrs. Jones, who was a beautiful and lovable woman, and I think of her often because I was always so happy when anything happened that made Alice specially happy.
For the rest, the year went quietly on. I wrote a story for Mrs. Dodge, editor of St. Nicholas, the only woman I ever liked to write for. She put on no editorial airs, and if you brought her a good story, she made you feel that you had conferred a favor on her, and her magazine. Ah, Mrs. Dodge showed that her soul had been to fine schools, before she came into this life! Her courtesy was native to her—her fine manners the fruit of her good heart.
After I had finished Mrs. Dodge’s story, called “Michael and Theodora”, I was obliged to give up using my hands until 408 October, then I began “Remember the Alamo” but had to stop early in November, to help Mr. Freund who wished me to write with him a play from “The Bow of Orange Ribbon.” It was the first of at least twenty, I think I may say fifty, attempts that have been made to dramatize this novel. Mr. Charles Frohman got the famous August Thomas to try it with me, but when I sent him the two first acts he said it was “a beautiful piece of literary work, but not playable.” After the elopement, the original proposition is closed, and the play really ends there; but ending there, it is only half long enough. Some day, however, the difficulty will be conquered, and it will pay for all its previous failures.
I was busy with Mr. J. C. Freund until the day before Christmas. Then I began a Scotch story for Clarke called “The Household of McNeil,” and at the end of the year had finished nearly two chapters; I make the following entry which says all that is necessary:
December 31st, 1887. This last week has been full of work. Mary came to see me before starting for Florida, and I am very unhappy about Lilly and Captain Morgan. But I trust for the best. O God, my times are in Thy Hands, and how glad I am to leave them there! Unto Thee I look, for “Thy compassions fail not.”
The first three months of 1888 were occupied with “The Household of McNeil,” and my regular fugitive newspaper work. Alice still had her good teacher, and Lilly did not speak about her unfortunate love affair. I knew she was very unhappy, but she tried to be cheerful, and to share my pleasures and my anxieties, as she had always done; and I thought her reticence wise, though I was ready at any moment she wished to advise or to console her.
My right thumb was almost useless. I held the pencil mostly between the first and second finger, and the outside of the little finger was so sensitive, that I wrapped it in cotton wool to prevent it feeling the movement on the paper. But on my birthday, March twenty-ninth, I was finishing the fourteenth chapter of “Remember the Alamo” and enjoying the writing of the book very much indeed. Sometimes General Houston 409 seemed actually visible to me, and we had some happy hours together. General Sherman was positive that the men martyred at Goliad and San Antonio fought with the eight hundred gentlemen, who led by Houston captured the whole Spanish army, and gave the Empire State of Texas to the United States. The dead can, and do help the living, and I believe General Houston helped me to write the truth, and the whole truth, and nothing but the truth concerning that glorious episode, far too little valued and understood. If General Houston had been an Englishman, and had given the English Crown such a magnificent principality, he would have been ennobled and enriched. This great, ungrateful nation let him die wanting the comforts, yes, the necessaries of life. I have said more about this book than I intended, but I love it and “The Lion’s Whelp” better than I can express. Their characters are living people to me. I have known them, either in this life, or some other life.
This sense of companionship in many, indeed in most, of my books has made them easy and delightful to write. Sometimes it has been so vital that I have found it impossible to shut my study door. It seemed like shutting them out of my life, and I really loved these invisible, intangible friends, and often whispered their names, and bid them good night before going to sleep. To say that I shall never see them, or speak with them in another life, is an incredible thing. I expect General Sam Houston, and the great protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, to praise me, and thank me, for what I have done; and I shall not be disappointed. As far as General Houston is concerned, I have already the thanks of the son he loved so devotedly, in the following letter:
Galveston, Texas, Oct. 22, 1888.
My dear Madam:
Returning to this city a short time since, I found awaiting me your latest very interesting book, “Remember the Alamo.” Please accept my thanks, and as well, my assurances of due appreciation of the honor conferred.
The general reader I am sure cannot fail to find the style 410 in which the work is written in the highest degree entertaining. To one bound by ties of birth and blood to Texan history and traditions, it naturally possesses a peculiar interest, an interest which throughout does not flag.
Of the rather numerous productions based on the same theme, few, if any, read so much like actual history, and I think I can safely say, none show that intimate acquaintance with the peculiar social elements which composed the Texas of the days of the Republic, manifest in the valued work I now have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of.
While I have derived much pleasure from a perusal of “Remember the Alamo,” as a production of merit, I could not be insensible to the tribute paid my revered father’s memory; that the wreath is from the hand of woman lends it a grateful perfume.
I cannot but regret I am denied the honor of the personal acquaintance of one, who through her pen has made me so much her debtor for enjoyment of the most enduring kind.
I am, dear madam, with abiding sentiments of esteem,
Yours sincerely,
William R. Houston.
Often I have believed that my heroine was a real personality, that she had once lived in the very scenes I depicted. This was particularly the case with the book “Bernicia.” It is many years since I told the story of that fascinating creature, but she is as real to me today, as if she had spent the summer with me. Sometimes these phantom heroines are very masterful. In “Friend Olivia,” Anastasia made me throw away many pages, but I always discovered as the book progressed, that they did not belong to it.
Until April of this year, I was more or less troubled with Mr. Freund and the proposed play. I say “troubled” because I felt all the time that the work I had to do, was useless, that the thing someway was not right, and I know now, that neither Mr. Freund—clever actor and manager as he was—nor I, could build a play, any more than we could build a house.
On April tenth, 1888, we moved into a little cottage on Storm King Mountain, for the house we were in was sold, and the buyer wished to occupy it. I remember so well the afternoon 411 I first drove up the mountain. It was a lovely April day, Nature was making a new world, and there was no sound of hammer, or axe, or smoke of furnace. Only an inscrutable, irresistible force at work, a power so mighty, that the hard trodden sod under our feet was moved aside by a slender needle-like shaft of grass, or plant, which the faintest breeze could blow and bend. A miracle! Yes, a miracle before which science is mute. The birds were singing as if they never would grow old, and the winds streamed out of the hills as cool as living waters. The grass was climbing the mountains until it met the snow, and the mountains rose like battlements, with piny slopes furrowed by one or two steep paths.
The house I came to see was a mere cottage of five rooms, but it stood in a pleasant croft, full of fruit trees, mingled with pines and a few maples. My heart went into the place without opening gate or door, and I said to myself, “I will buy this little house, and make it a home, if God wills so; and as for it being small, there is only three of us, and we can enlarge it, if it is necessary.” The view from it was enchanting—a long stretch of the Hudson River, with mountains and valleys on every side of it. But I remembered the English dictum about buying a house, namely, “to summer and winter it first;” so I refrained the words on my lips, and instead of buying it, I offered to rent it for a year, promising to buy it then, if I still liked the place.
Lilly’s brows knit ominously, when I told her what I had done. “You will not like it, Mamma,” she said.
“Why not? And you, Lilly, have always loved country solitudes.”
“Yes, in books, Mamma. In real life, they are damp and rheumatic, and most hated by those who live in them, and know them best.”
“O Lilly!” I cried, “I do want to go up the mountain so much. I am sure I can write well and easily there. I know I should be so happy, and I believe my hands would get strong.”
“Then, dearest, we will go at once. So let us talk over what is to be done.”
This was on April, the sixth, and on the tenth we moved into 412 the mountain cottage. We had barely got our household goods into its shelter, when there commenced one of the heaviest rain storms I ever remember, and we ate our first meal, a very good one of broiled Virginia ham, poached eggs, coffee, and orange marmalade, to its pattering and rattling on the roof and against the windows.
“Grandmother Barr said, it was the luckiest thing to move in a rain storm,” cried Lilly, with one of her old cheerful laughs; “she did not know she was prophesying luck for us, but she was, Mamma. I hope she knew how it was pouring as they carried in the last load.”
“Is that a Scotch superstition?” I asked.
“Certainly, Scotch wisdom is the only kind of wisdom Grandmother quotes, or believes in. She believed also in carrying the house cat with you. Aunt Jessy once left her cat behind in moving, and left all her luck to the people who came after her, and they happened to be people Grandmother didn’t like.”
And I laughed, and talked about the Cumberland superstitions, sitting by the kitchen fire in one of the best parlor chairs, while Lilly deftly broiled the ham and poached the eggs, and Anne Hughes, our small Irish servant, set the table in her own remarkable way, and Alice wiped all the dishes after her with a clean napkin. I have eaten few happier meals than that first one in Cherry Croft, and then we made up the beds in the dining-room for that night; and I fancied my bed had never been as soft and comfortable before. With happy wishes for good dreams, we all slept soundly, and sweetly, until Annie Hughes woke us with the information, that it was past seven, and a man was at the door with milk, and a big handful of flowers.
It was Thomas Kirkpatrick, of course. Any one who knew Thomas would suspect it. He worked for me on and off in some way for twenty years, and there was always that fine streak in his nature, typified by his love of flowers. In that twenty years, I had few birthdays that Thomas Kirkpatrick did not honor with a bunch of wild flowers at the dawning.
The house had been thoroughly cleaned, and was in good condition, for it had been built for the well known artist Theyer, 413 who with his wife had occupied it one or two years; and he had been followed by a New York family whose name was Appleton, who only lived in it for a short time, so that it was nearly new, and quite free from all the wraiths and influences of prior inhabitants.
I shall never feel again in this life as joyous as I felt for the first few months in this house, though, thank God, I keep my child heart yet, and I am pleased with little things. My right hand got well rapidly; my headaches were much better. I slept like a baby; I woke up singing, a thing I had not done since Robert died. I was so happy in my little five-roomed cottage. I loved every foot of the pretty croft, in which it stood, and one morning when its fourteen cherry trees were all pink and white with blossom, I called it Cherry Croft. And now the name of Cherry Croft is known all over the English speaking world, and I not infrequently have letters directed to me “Cherry Croft, New York, United States of America,” and they come direct to me without question or delay.
On the first of June, Dodd, Mead paid me a thousand dollars for “Remember the Alamo,” but Mr. Mead wished the name changed. It was published in England under the name of “Woven of Love and Glory” but Mr. Mead desired it to be called, “Remember the Alamo.” I could not have written it to that name, but the book being finished, it did not make so much matter. I suppose it sold better under the latter name, for I was told this year by a famous Texan, that few Texan families are without a copy of it. “The Alamo” was a phrase full of tragedy to every Texan, but not so distinctive to other people; it being a Spanish word given to a number of places.
On this day I received a copy of “Jan Vedder’s Wife” in French. I do not know French, but was frequently told that it was an excellent translation. It appeared first as a serial in the best of the French reviews, but I never received a cent for its use, either as a serial or in book form. Well, I had the pleasure of writing it. That could not be taken from me.
On the third of June I began a Manx story called “Feet of Clay.” The Isle of Man I have described in an early chapter of my life, and it was an easy background for me full of 414 romantic possibilities, and vivid and ready-made romance. This story had a foundation of truth, and I remember that Mr. Gilder, while praising the literary workmanship of the tale, objected to the reformation of the hero, who had an inherited tendency towards forgery. With the tender pity natural to his rare character, he said that forgery was in his opinion and observation an unconquerable weakness; that a man who committed the crime once, would do the same thing again, whenever the temptation came to him. But I was still a Methodist, and I thought the love of Christ in the heart sufficient to prevent, as well as to forgive sin.
Besides I have always found myself unable to make evil triumphant. Truly in real life it is apparently so, but if fiction does not show us a better life than reality, what is the good of it? Aufidius was successful in his villainy, but are we not all glad to know that Coriolanus had time to call him to his face “a measureless liar!” I confess that I like to reward the virtuous, and punish the guilty, and make those who would fain be loved, happy.
On the twenty-third of June I went to England on the Circassia. I was a favorite with her captain, and I sat at his right hand; the Reverend Mr. Meredith and Mrs. Meredith being opposite me. I have had few pleasanter voyages than this one. Captain Campbell was a good talker, so was the minister, and he gave us the following Sunday the best sermon I ever heard on a steamer. This journey was a purely business one, though after being in Kendal a day, I could not resist the something that urged me to go on to Glasgow. I intended to remain there a couple of days, and to do a little shopping, that could be better and more economically done in Glasgow, than anywhere else. I thought I was perfectly sure of my incognito, but the next morning my arrival was in the newspapers, and I had several very early callers, and many invitations to “go down the water” for the week end. One of these invitations was in the shape of an exceedingly friendly letter from Dr. Donald McLeod, at that time editing Good Words Magazine. I had one from the McIntosh family by the same mail, and my heart went out to the McIntoshes, though I had the highest 415 respect for Dr. McLeod, and knew that a Sabbath spent with him would be a wonderful one in many respects. Yet there was in me a perverse spirit that morning. I did not want to go anywhere. I did not want to dress, and to take my food and sleep and pleasure, as other people gave it to me. I wrote the proper apologies, and slipped back to Bradford that afternoon. The following night I went to an intense Methodist service, and heard a thousand Yorkshire men and women sing “There is a Land of pure delight,” and “Lo, He comes with clouds descending!” as I shall never again hear them in this life. In fact I was singing myself as heartily as any one, and if I did not quite agree with the sermon, I felt sure it was the only kind of sermon likely to influence the wonderfully vitalized flesh and blood by which I was surrounded. There were no hesitations in it, no doubts, or even suppositions; it was an emphatic positive declaration, that if they did right they would go to heaven, and a still more emphatic one that if they did wrong they would go to hell. And he had no doubts about the hell. He saw it spiritually, and described it in black and lurid terms, that made women sob, and the biggest men present have “a concern for their souls.”
I would not have missed that service for any company on earth. I know Dr. McLeod would have talked like the Apostle John, and there would have been a still peaceful Scotch Sabbath full of spiritual good things; but I felt all alive, soul and body, from head to foot, in that Methodist Chapel; so much so that I put a larger coin in the collection box than I could well afford, and never once regretted doing it. I would go to church every Sunday gladly, if I could hear a minister talk in such dead earnest, and be moved by a spiritual influence so vitally miraculous. The very building felt as if it was on fire, and for an hour at least, everybody in it knew they had a soul. They felt it longing and pleading for that enlargement, only the Love and Actual Presence of God could give it. I do not believe I should hear the same kind of a sermon in that chapel today. There is doubtless an organ and a choir now, and the preacher will have been to a Theological Institute, and perhaps be not only “Reverend” but have some mystic letters after his 416 name, and the congregation will be more polished, and the precepts of gentility will now be a religious obligation. And I am afraid it is not genteel now, to be anxious about your soul—especially in public. But I thank God that I spent that Sunday in Yorkshire instead of Scotland; for spiritually I have never forgotten it, and physically, it was an actual influx of life from the source of life. I was twenty years younger. And I believe that if it were possible for men and women to live constantly so close to the spirit in which they live, move, and have their being, they might live forever.
The next day I went to Shipley Glen, to see Ben Preston, a poor man yet, but a fine writer both in prose and verse, especially in his native dialect. He had not much education, but there was a vigorous native growth of intelligence. I spoke to him of the sermon I had heard the previous night, and he answered, “Ay, you’ll hear the truth in a Methodist Chapel—here and there—even yet; but a Yorkshire man nowadays reads his newspaper, instead of his Testament, so when a man comes out with ideas gathered from the Gospel of Jesus Christ, he’s sure to be considered an original writer, whose crazy notions would turn the world upside down.” There was a man from a Bradford newspaper sitting with him, and he spoke of Dilke and Chamberlain, and Preston answered, “They may be able to do something for us, but the biggest reforms of all will have to begin and be carried out by wersens.”
The press man spoke of some local grandee whom he called “a self-made man” and Preston answered slowly, as he whittled a bit of stick,
“I admire self-made men, if I’m sure they’re owt like ‘John Halifax, Gentleman;’ but lots o’ them owe their elevation, not to their talents, but to a dead conscience and a kest-iron heart. Of such men, if they’re rich enough, the world is ready to say ‘they hev risen from the ranks.’ It ’ud be nearer t’ truth to say, ‘they hev fallen from the ranks.’ Yes, sir, fallen from t’ ranks of honest, hard-working men, and taen to warse ways.”
Of a certain marriage that he was told of, he said it was “a staid, sowber, weel-considered affair, a marriage wi’ all t’ advantages of a good bargain.” I was much struck with his 417 ready wit, his good sense, and his clever way of putting any remark he made. He was greatly and deservedly loved and respected, but his best work had a local flavor, which I dare say narrowed both his fame, and his income.
On the twenty-second of July I was still in Bradford, for I went to lunch with Mrs. Byles. She was a woman, whom if you once saw, you could never forget. Her husband was the clever editor of the Bradford Observer and I think she had been made purposely for him—brains to her finger tips, full of vivid life, a brilliant talker, a perfect hostess, not beautiful but remarkably fascinating—so fascinating that you thought her beautiful. I never saw her but on that one occasion, but she made on me such an impression that if I met her on Broadway today, I should have no hesitation in saying, “I am glad to see you, Mrs. Byles.” At this luncheon, I met also the daughter-in-law of Sir Titus Salt, the discoverer and first maker of alpaca.
On the twenty-fifth of July, I sailed from Liverpool, on the City of Rome, and on the second of August landed at New York. I love England with all my soul, but when I saw the Stars and Stripes flying off Sandy Hook, my eyes filled with happy, grateful tears, for “East or West, Home is Best;” and the land where your home is built, is another native land.
Mary met me at the pier, went out to Cornwall with me, and remained with us until the eleventh of September, when she left for Florida. The rest of the month I was busy on “Feet of Clay” which I finished on the tenth of October. Then I had my apples gathered, got in some large stoves, put up heavy curtains, and prepared the house for winter. On the twenty-seventh, I had a letter from General Sam Houston’s son, in praise of what I had done for his father’s memory, and on the twenty-eighth of October I began making notes for my story of Quakerism called “Friend Olivia.” I was at the Astor Library every day until the twenty-fifth of November when I felt my way clear enough to begin “Friend Olivia.” It was a bright lovely Sabbath, and I had a pious enthusiasm about the work, for my mother’s family were among the earliest of George Fox’s converts, and had suffered many things for the faith that 418 was in them. I worked slowly at first, and did not finish my first chapter until the twelfth of December, nor my second until Christmas Day, when I copied it. After this I became aware of the character I called Anastasia, and every thing relating to her came easily enough, and I had a fancy she was not a bit sorry for her dislike of Olivia and her efforts to injure her. But the year closed with me happily at work on “Olivia,” and seeing my way clearly from the beginning to the end.
The first three months of 1889 I was nearly broken-hearted about Lilly’s affairs. I was writing “Friend Olivia” and found my only relief in losing myself in it. Yet I had some pleasant events in my work. Oscar Fay Adams wrote a fine criticism of my books in the Andover Review. Mr. Clark sent me seven hundred six dollars for “Feet of Clay.” I wrote special articles for the Book News and the Youth’s Companion and the latter offered me five hundred dollars for a story of one hundred pages. Their pages were large, and I could not afford to accept their terms, which were burdened also with several limitations and forbidden topics. It was very unlikely that I should ever have touched these topics, unless forbidden to do so. That temptation might have made me wish to show the censors how innocently, and indeed profitably, they might be touched.
On my fifty-eighth birthday, I had finished thirteen chapters of “Friend Olivia,” but I received on April, the first, a letter from the North American Review, asking me for an article, and I left my novel to write it. While I was thus engaged, I was requested by a minister with whom I had crossed the Atlantic once, to write for him on a certain subject, which I have not noted, and am not quite certain about. It was the request that astonished, and also pleased me, for I feared that my plain criticism on a certain occasion had deeply offended him. It happened that we had walked and talked together at intervals during the week, and that on the following Sabbath morning he preached in the saloon, and I was present. Leaning over the taffrail, that evening he came to me and asked how I liked his sermon?
“The sermon was a good sermon,” I said, “but spoiled in the delivery.”
“Why! How? What do you mean, Mrs. Barr?” he asked.
“Your sermon,” I answered, “was a series of solemn declarations and avowals of faith and belief, and after stating each with remarkable clearness, you invariably concluded with this reflection, ‘It seems to me that no logically sane mind can refuse this truth.’”
“Well,” he said, “that was right.”
“No,” I answered, “it was wrong. Those four words, ‘it seems to me,’ destroyed the whole effect of your argument. You left us at liberty to dispute it, and debate it. What seemed to you true, might not seem so to any one else, if they began to look for reasons.”
“What would you have said, if in my place?”
“If I believed, as you do, I would have said, ‘Friends, I have told you the truth. There is no other truth on this subject. If you believe it, and live up to it, you will be saved. If you do not believe it, and live up to it, there is no salvation for you.’”
“A minister can but give his opinion.”
“He ought to give God’s opinion, that is what he stands up to do, and there is no ‘seems to me’ in that. Excuse me,” I said, “I am a daughter of Levi, and have been used to talking as I feel to ministers all my life. I meant no harm. I was only sorry you took all the salt and strength out of a really good sermon.”
“I thank you!” he said, but he was quiet afterwards, and I soon went away, fearing I had everlastingly offended him. But here was the kindest of letters, with a request that I would write him a short article for a paper in which he was interested. I did so cheerfully, but I put my price on it; for I had discovered by this time, that newspapers value articles according to what they have to pay for them.
I may mention that among the trials of this spring, my big English mastiff was so ill, that we had to send him away for treatment. It was almost like sending one of the family away. He was a noble, loving creature with far more intelligence than is credible.
On the twenty-second of May, I finished all the creative 420 work on “Friend Olivia,” and on the twenty-fourth, having gone carefully over it, I took it to Dodd, Mead and Company, and they sent it to the Century Company, thinking it might suit Mr. Gilder for a serial. Until the third of June I rested, for my eyes and right hand were weary and aching, then I wrote an article for the Book News for which I received thirty dollars. Until the second of July, I wrote articles for the Advance, North American Review, et cetera, and copied some short stories for the Kendal Syndicate, and the Christian World. On the second of July, I began a story of the Cheviot Hills but on the ninth received a letter from Dodd, Mead saying Mr. Gilder liked “Friend Olivia” very much, and wished to see me. The following day I went to see Mr. Gilder, and agreed to rewrite the story suitably for a serial for three thousand dollars; and from this time forward until the sixteenth of September, I was going over “Friend Olivia,” and while arranging it suitably for a serial, was also trying how much richer and better I could make it.
I was abundantly repaid by the following letter from Mr. Gilder, under date of September, 1889.
Editorial Department,
The Century Magazine.My dear Mrs. Barr:
I have finished the story. It closes like music, beautifully. There might be some points that I could wish different, but I do not press them, the whole story is so charming.
In this revisal of “Friend Olivia,” I followed in all matters Mr. Gilder’s advice and suggestions, and so learned much of the best technicalities of fiction. I could not have had a finer teacher. I could not have had a more kind, just and generous one. He rejoiced in good work, and gave it unstinted praise, no matter who was its author. To a soul who had been hardly used by the world in general, it was a kind of salvation to meet such a man.
I owed a great deal of my success with the Century, to Mrs. Grover Cleveland’s praise of “Friend Olivia.” She read the 421 story in manuscript, and spoke so highly of it to Mr. Gilder, that he was induced by her report to read it himself. So one of the first printed copies of the novel was sent to Mrs. Cleveland, who wrote me the following note:
December 2nd.
Dear Mrs. Barr:
Pray do not think that my long delay in replying to your note indicates any lack of appreciation of its kind words, or your thoughtfulness in sending me “Friend Olivia.” I feel a peculiar attachment to the book, because I knew the story when it was so very young. I liked it, and surely need not tell you that your sending it to me yourself, gives me very great pleasure.
I have been away from home ever since your letter came to me, or I should have told you this before.
Pray do not over estimate the effect my interest in “Friend Olivia” has had. The story itself brought you, as you say, “the recognition and success you had patiently worked and waited for during twenty years,” and as I say, which you richly deserved.
May I assure you that I never forget my young friend who loves my picture, and that her mother is often in my thoughts.
Very sincerely,
Frances F. Cleveland.
I will only give the letter received from Moses Coit Tyler, regarding “Friend Olivia.” Others of interest will be found in the Appendix if any desire to read them.
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York.
Feb. 21, 1891.My dear Mrs. Barr:
I was much touched by your kind remembrance of me in causing your novel, “Friend Olivia,” to be sent to me; and as my days here are heavily burdened with work, and my reading is almost exclusively on certain professional lines, it was only lately that I have had the opportunity of reading the book as I wanted to do it. We read it aloud in the family evenings, as the leisure came to me, my wife, my daughter, and myself. We 422 were charmed and held from the beginning, but it was not till we had gone through perhaps the first seventy-five pages, that the story grasped us with enthralling power. After that, it was a nightly trial to us all, that I had to cut short the reading, when we were all so absorbed in the story, and the development of the characters; and I want to give you my thanks for the great pleasure, nay for the good cheer, the strong spiritual refreshment and stimulation which the book gave us. I could say much of the power with which the several characters are delineated, of the vivid truth, of the historic elements of the story, and of the masterly handling of the plot. Better than any satisfaction in mere literary success, must be the privilege of portraying, in a fascinating form like that, the beauty, the mighty helpfulness, the calming and sweet power of faith in God, and in the spiritual life. That book of yours will go on helping and cheering people, long after you have passed from this world. If all your literary labors had resulted only in that piece of work, your life would have been lived not in vain.
The reading of this book has given me a new desire to meet you again, and to talk over persons and things with you, and perhaps some day when I have a few hours or days in New York, I may be able to find you with half-an-hour to spare for a chat.
With deep gratitude for your book, and a thousand good wishes for the continuance of your literary successes, I remain
Faithfully yours,
Moses Coit Tyler.
For nearly a month after finishing my second copy of “Friend Olivia” I was too tired to do much. Mr. Mead had urged on me the Arcadian background and I saw at once its possibilities, if I might make it historically true. But this would be in direct opposition to what Longfellow and others had done. However as I had the fiction in my own control, I thought it would be possible to make the background, and general atmosphere inoffensive. I made great preparations for this work. I was in New York at the library most of October, and was in communication with the Officer’s Club at Halifax who sent me a great deal of material, also with a Miss Caldwell of Louisiana, whose home was on the great Bayou, where the Arcadians settled after leaving Canada; and she sent me the true history of 423 Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” and much interesting material as to the country, and the descendants of the Arcadians. But not all the work I did, nor yet all the help I received, could create in me the slightest enthusiasm about the story. The people disgusted me. They were so double-tongued and false-hearted, I could have turned their bigotry into intense faith, as I had often done with Calvinism; but their cowardice and unreliability I could not handle, unless I was to show it rightfully punished. And to tell the last truth, I did not see anything romantic in a girl, traipsing the length of the United States seeking her lover. If I could have shown the lover in all sorts of adventures seeking Evangeline, that would have been all right; but the fact was he had speedily married, and was comfortably bringing up a family in the Teche country. I could not bear to think of making a beautiful and innocent girl die for so unworthy a lover, and I did not really pity the woman who could and did deliberately die for him. Her grave at the Poste des Attakapas could not impress me. She ought to have thrown off her false unworthy lover, and if she could love no good man, she could at least have lived to comfort and help the old woman, who had taken her when a friendless babe, and cherished her as her own daughter.
As late as the sixteenth of November, I note being in New York at the library getting the proper patois for Arcadia, and add with an emphasis of under-crossing, “I hate the story.” Until the eleventh of January, 1890, I was writing an article on divorce for the North American Review, in favor of it under proper conditions. Bishop Potter wrote the one on the absolute inviolability of the marriage tie. I think they were in the same number but have forgotten surely. I wrote also many other articles suitable for Christmas and New Year’s. During December, Clark paid me two hundred pounds for “Friend Olivia,” and seventy-five pounds for the book rights of “The Last of the McAllisters.” I also wrote a short story for the McClure Syndicate, being busy on it from the twenty-second to the twenty-eighth of December. I liked to write for McClure’s Syndicate; he always both paid, and praised me well. I can say the same of the Bacheller Syndicate, and though I never see 424 either Mr. McClure, or Irving Bacheller now, I remember them both with the utmost kindness.
On the eleventh of January, 1890, I notice that I threw all the Arcadia matter into a drawer in my study, where it would be out of sight and memory, adding, “I can’t feel that story, so I can’t, and won’t write it!” This neglected, despised Arcadian matter is still occupying the drawer, and I have not looked at it since I put it away, until this morning, when I took from the pile “the true story of Evangeline,” to be sure of the name of the country, to which the Arcadians went after leaving Canada. It was on the Teche Bayou they settled, and Evangeline’s real name was Emmeline Labiche, and her body rests, as I have already said, at the Poste des Attakapas. Probably the Poste is now a town or city, though the Arcadians were by no means an energetic or progressive people.
As soon as I put the Arcadian matter in that drawer, I began a New York story called “She Loved a Sailor.” It contained a vivid picture of New York city life in General Jackson’s time, and is probably the last of the New York series of tales. I have had fewer letters about it, than I usually have about a New York novel, and I wondered at that, because it is within the memories and traditions of many living families. So I have taken it for granted that its localities and data are correct, for if I had made an error some one would have told me of it.
While I was writing this book, on the eleventh of February, Mr. and Mrs. Van Siclen gave me a “Bow of Orange Ribbon” dinner at the Lawyer’s Club. It was a very fine affair, and I kept its artistic menu and bow of ribbon for many years. The guests were mostly Dutch, but I had the great honor and pleasure of having Henry Van Dyke at my right hand. Two things I remember about this dinner. I tasted crabs à la Newburgh for the first time; and then while I was as happy as I could be talking to Dr. Van Dyke, Mr. Van Siclen shocked me by asserting, “Mrs. Barr will now make us a little speech, and tell us how she came to write ‘The Bow of Orange Ribbon.’” I do not believe I had ever heard of a woman speaking at a dinner table before. I had an idea it was absolutely a man’s function. It would then have been as easy to imagine myself 425 doing my athletics in public, as making a speech at a dinner table. I turned to Dr. Van Dyke in a kind of stupefaction, and said only one word “Please!” and he understood, and rose immediately, and made a speech for me that charmed and delighted every one present. Indeed I am inclined to think it was the best speech he ever made. It was so spontaneous that it was not Henry Van Dyke’s speech, it was Henry Van Dyke his very self.
After I had finished “She Loved a Sailor” I took Alice and went to England, leaving in the Bothenia July the second, and returning about September in the Aurania. And after I had finished my business, I gave myself entirely to Alice. She learns best through her eyes, and I took her to everything I thought would interest her. We were fortunate enough to hear Handel’s fine oratorio of “Samson” at the Crystal Palace, with a thousand male and female voices in the chorus; and Sims Reeves in the solos. Ada Rehan was playing “As You Like It” and she went three times to see her, before she was tired. But I think the service at St. Paul’s Cathedral pleased her most of all. Dr. Vaughan preached from “There remaineth a rest,” an eloquent sermon, and the music was heavenly. She was curiously pleased also with the little rush chairs, she thought it seemed “more like sitting with God, than if you were shut up in a pew.” We had a happy happy time. It is the only holiday I have had since Robert died. I gave it to Alice, and she gave it back to me a hundred-fold. It seems like a dream of heaven to remember it.
CHAPTER XXIV
BUSY, HAPPY DAYS
“Days of happy work amid the silence of the everlasting hills, days like drops that fall from the honeycomb.”
. . . . . . . . . .
“Slow, sweet busy hours that brought me all things good.”
After my return we had to consider the winter. During the previous winter we had suffered much from the severe cold, it being impossible to warm the house, when the thermometer sank to twenty, or to even thirty below zero. After some efforts to find suitable winter quarters in the neighborhood we closed the house, and went for a week or two to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I had a business contract pending with Mr. Edwin Bonner, and we knew that a suitable house somewhere near New York would be the best for me. There was one great trouble connected with this arrangement: we had to send our English mastiff to the kennels, and Sultan was really a very much beloved member of the family. He had been given to me by my friend Dr. Bermingham when we first went up the mountain. “It is a lonely place,” said the good doctor, “and you ladies will need a protector.” He was sent from the kennels with a pedigree as long as an English duke’s, and he was positively described as a Saint Bernard. I knew he was an English mastiff of pure breed, as soon as I saw him, and I loved him all the better for it.
Everyone’s dog does wonderfully, but Sultan excelled them all. He could nearly speak, and in the last agonies of death, he did really call “Lilly” as plainly as I could have done. He came to every meal with us, and had his plate and napkin laid next to Lilly, for between Lilly and himself there was the strongest affection. He permitted no other dog on the place, 427 but he talked to all the dogs from far and near through the gate, and they brought him all the news of the mountain. Sometimes he brought it to us, and we always listened and answered, “Is that possible, Sultan?” and he would give a little bark of assent, and lie down to consider it. He liked me to be prettily dressed, and always showed his satisfaction in some unmistakable way. He was most polite to company, met them at the gate, and conducted them to the parlor, invariably lying down at the feet of the prettiest and best dressed person in the company. If I was in England he watched for the mail with Lilly, and listened attentively while she read my letter to him. When she came to the words, “Mamma and Alice send their love to Sultan,” he always answered the message with a little bark of pleasure. Oh, indeed, I could tell still more wonderful things of this affectionate creature, but they would raise a doubt. No one could believe them, unless they had lived with the splendid fellow, and known him as we did. So it was hard to part with him, even for a week or two, but he was large as a mastiff of pure blood can be, and the proprietors of the Fifth Avenue Hotel would not hear of him as a guest.
We went to the hotel on October, the seventeenth, and between that date and the twenty-seventh I made a contract with Mr. Bonner for four serials. I was to deliver two each year, and he was to pay me twenty-five hundred dollars for each, in all, ten thousand dollars. In the meantime Lilly had found a house in East Orange, which was thoroughly warmed, and we moved into it on October the twenty-fifth, and brought Sultan home with us.
We were soon comfortably settled, and on the first of January I had finished the ninth chapter of my first serial for Mr. Edwin Bonner, called “A Sister to Esau.” On the eighth of February it was finished. But the press of business, and the proposals of various publishers, seems to have really made me very unhappy. In a note on the twenty-third of February, when I had had a great deal of business to attend to, I wrote at night, “I am sad and weary with the day, and feel terribly unfit for the considerations I have to face. I have a sense of being politely bullied, and of having suffered a loss of some 428 kind—spiritual, mental or financial—perhaps something in all respects.”
I was much interrupted by callers in East Orange, a great many of whom brought manuscripts, which they were sure I would like to read, and could easily place for them. I had a heartache for the peace and solitude of the little cottage on the mountain. Now the dream of every English man and woman is a home of their own, and I saw this to be a possibility now; and I could think of no place but Cherry Croft. I wanted it for my own. Then I could put in a proper furnace and make it habitable all the year round.
I had finished Mr. Bonner’s serial on the eighth of February; on the fifteenth of February, I began for Lippincott’s “A Rose of A Hundred Leaves.” Its heroine, Aspatria, was one of my favorites. She dwelt among the Fells in one of those large, comfortable farm or manor houses, occupied for centuries by the Sheep Lords of the North Country. I always knew what she was going to do. Sometimes I have wondered, if Amelia had once been Aspatria. Her brothers seemed so near and real to me, and she lived in just such a home, as I have had glimpses of, whenever the Past comes back to me. I finished the book on the fifteenth of March, and Mr. Mead praised the story, which pleased me, because it was the first time he had ever expressed satisfaction with my work.
On the twentieth I went to Cornwall, and bought Cherry Croft, paying for it six thousand dollars in cash. Some told me I had paid too much, others too little, but I was satisfied. The house was not worth much, but there was nearly four acres of land full of fruit and forest trees. And there were the mountains, and the river, and the wide valley view, and that general peace and quiet, that has in it a kind of sacramental efficacy.
“Cherry Croft,” Cornwall-on-Hudson
I had at this time a great deal of trouble with English houses printing my work, without either payment or permission, and a laughable but provoking incident occurred with the proof-reading of “A Sister to Esau.” In this story, my chief character is a Scotch gentleman, of the most perfervid Calvinism, and the period of the story was the glorious ecclesiastical 429 “departure” of the Free Kirk. Now Mr. Bonner’s proofreader happened to be a strict, strait Methodist, and he altered all the Calvinism to Methodism, which was sheer nonsense in the mouth of a Scotch Chief, and a seceding Free Kirker. However as soon as I explained the circumstances to Mr. Bonner he had the text restored as written, with many apologies for his Methodist proofreader’s conscience.
The whole summer was spent in writing Mr. Bonner’s second serial, “Love for an Hour Is Love Forever;” and in attending to the alterations going on in my home. Every room that was papered and painted afresh, was a new pleasure; and I had a fine garden, and began to plant vines, and to make an asparagus bed. Also, I made preparations for the winter’s comfort by putting in a hot water furnace, and then I began a novelette called “Femmetia’s Experience” for Mr. Bonner. It was a reincarnation story, and had a large sale, though at the time, the doctrine was but looming up on my spiritual horizon. The main facts of this story had been told me by an old lady when I lived in Boroughbridge, and was only twelve years old. Dr. Deems came to see us just as I had finished the story, and I spoke of its tendency and he said he had a strong leaning to the old heresy, that it had never died out of the heart and imaginations of men, and was steadily gaining a new growth.
I ought to have had a very happy summer, for I had my own home, good health, and all the work that I could do; but how often below this calm idyllic surface of life, there is some fateful, domestic sorrow! It is likely met with the heroism and devoted affection of the old Greek tragedy, but there it is! and it has to be borne as best it may. I found in love and work the strength and consolation, the heavy-hearted of the Greek world never knew. It brings tears to my eyes yet, to read the short, pitiful entries of that cruel November. Yet I finished “Femmetia’s Experience” and wrote also a novelette for Bonner called “The Mate of the Easter Bell,” and other short articles. For in mental grief, mental work is a great salvation. I worked hard, though I was often compelled to lay down my pencil to seek the strength and comfort found only by “fleeing to the 430 Rock that is higher than I.” At the last, all was well. The gay handsome Captain M—— passed out of our lives, and Lilly bore the breaking of the tie better than I expected.
I must not forget that in the midst of this trouble one of the dearest friends I still possess came into my life. It was Rutger Bleecker Jewett, the son of the learned Professor Jewett, of the General Theological Seminary. Through the December cold and deep snow, he climbed Storm King, one afternoon, and stepped into the light and warmth of Cherry Croft, like an incarnation of splendid youth and hope. He brought his welcome with him. With open hearts, and both hands we all met him, and he was free of my home from that hour. His father and mother were my friends, but I had never met Rutger before. Yet in a recent letter he writes, “I have always felt that we were old friends from the first—never strangers. It was as though we had met again, after an absence, not as though we were meeting for the first time. I also cherish vivid memories of you later in our old graystone house in Chelsea Square. The old house with its deep windows, big old-fashioned rooms, and vine-covered walls, has been replaced by a modern building, no more comfortable, and nowhere so picturesque as the house we knew. It is more than twenty years since I first came to Cherry Croft—twenty years of unbroken trust and friendship—a very rich possession to me.”
And to me also. As opportunity offered, I have often sought his advice or help, and he has never failed me.
On January tenth I began “A Singer from the Sea,” Mr. Bonner’s third serial. On the twenty-second I was at the Astor Library all day, and at Rossiter Johnson’s at a reception in the evening; Mr. Jewett went with me. On the twenty-third Mr. McClure and Mr. Ballistier took lunch with me at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and Mr. McClure would have been very generous to me for some stories, but my engagement with Mr. Bonner prevented any business. I was at Mrs. Dodge’s in the afternoon, and among the numerous visitors picked out Edith Thomas at once. I took dinner at Dr. Jewett’s and watched with delight Mrs. Jewett dancing with her sons and daughters.
On March fifteenth I finished “A Singer from the Sea” 431 and then began “Michael and Theodora” for Mrs. Dodge, which I did not finish until June; and in July I began “Girls of a Feather,” Mr. Bonner’s last serial, which I finished in October. I was busy all summer in having a fence put round Cherry Croft, and a hedge planted within the fence. During October I wrote an article for the North American Review called “Flirting Wives;” I had my little green house filled with bulbs and flowers, and planted with my own hands, and many tender memories, some laburnum trees. They were my mother’s favorite, and I can see them dropping golden flowers all around our pretty garden in the Isle of Man.
On November sixth I began the “Flower of Gala Water” which Bonner published after its serialization in the new Godey’s Magazine, and on the eleventh we were honored and delighted with a visit from Dr. William Hayes Ward, who spent the week end with us. A little event of this visit remains like a picture on my memory. There was some question about a text in the Epistles, and Dr. Ward took from his vest pocket a small Testament. He said he had carried it there for many years. “Then it is not a revised Testament?” I asked. And he looked at the little book affectionately, and answered, “No.” Yet the doctor had been on the committee of revision. But I understood. For me there is no version but the King James Version, and nothing could make me give it up. I have only one copy of the revised edition, and that Dr. Talmage inscribed to me with such extravagant encomiums, that I leave it lying on my parlor table, as a kind of certificate of moral health.
During 1892 I had written “The Singer from the Sea” and “Girls of a Feather,” “The Flower of Gala Water” and “The Preacher’s Daughter,” “Michael and Theodora” and several articles. My eyes were very tired, and I did not do so much during January, 1893. On the twenty-third, I began an article for Mr. Bok called “Why Literary Women Do Not Marry” and on the twenty-ninth, I began my novel called “Prisoners of Conscience.” It was then a short story, and was published in the Century Magazine, but was later enlarged to book size, and published by the Century Company. During 432 the month I also wrote another article for Mr. Bok called “Women’s Weapons.”
In March, I wrote “The Lone House.” A study of this story had appeared in the Christian Union. It was a good book, but Rutger told me the young people said it was “too religious,” and they wished I would go back to my love stories. So I began “Bernicia,” a love story among people of the first condition. But on my sixty-fourth birthday I became very ill with ulcerated sore throat, and on the fourth of April was in such a dangerous condition, that I sent for a New York specialist. I came near to death, but recovered slowly, and on June sixth I took Alice and went to England.
It was not until the beginning of 1895, that I was able to take up “Bernicia,” but during the same interval, I had written a story and several articles for the Bacheller Syndicate. From the eighteenth to the twenty-first of January I was in New York paying a visit to Mrs. Goldschmidt. The first afternoon we went together to a large studio reception. There were all sorts of professional people there, but I remember no one but Mrs. Frank Leslie. She was then Mrs. Wilde, I believe. The next day Mrs. Goldschmidt gave a dinner, and I sat next to General Collis, but liked Mr. John Wise and his beautiful wife best of all. I believe they were Virginians. The day following there was a crowded reception, and a supper party, and I sat next to Moncure Conway and Mrs. Frank Leslie. For the next night there was a theatre party, and a supper at the Waldorf. More weary than if I had written a book, I went home in the morning. I was grateful for the kindness shown me but very sorry indeed for the people who called it “life” and lived it.
On my sixty-fifth birthday I was still on “Bernicia,” but I had been very sick, and had a great deal of trouble of a heartaching quality, but though I complain a little to my diary, I add, “Truly I am old and weary, but with Thy help, O God, I am young, and strong, and ready to mount up as on eagles’ wings. Thy loving kindness faileth not!”
I finished “Bernicia” on the twentieth of April, and found a couplet from the Sufi poets, which pleased me so much, I will copy it here:
“The Writer of our Destiny is a fair writer;
Never wrote He that which would wrong us.”
I was very ill with nervous dyspepsia during June, but on July second accepted the proposal of the New York Herald, to run for one of the three judges of the ten thousand dollars prize offered by that paper for the best novel submitted to it. My vote was so large, that it was at this time the Herald said I must be “the best beloved woman in the country.” Mr. George Parsons Lathrop and Mr. Hazeltine were my colleagues.
After this I wrote “The Knight of the Nets” for the Herald. “Discontented Women” for the North American Review—for which article Mr. Rideing the editor wrote me a letter of thanks, a story for the Home Queen, and other small items.
On the twenty-sixth of September Lilly married Mr. Edward A. Munro, a Canadian whose business was in Brooklyn. It was an overwhelming trial to me, for Lilly had been my right hand in all affairs since her father’s death. It is true that ten words by telegraph never yet failed to bring her to my side by the next possible train, but the house was empty and forlorn without her; and both Alice and I were desolate. However life is a constant learning “to do without” until that wonderful, “never-coming-back,” we call death, restores to us all that we have lost.
On December twenty-second, our dear Sultan died. We buried him in Cherry Croft, and were all heart-broken. Alas!
“There’s sorrow enough in the natural way,
From men and women to fill our day:
But when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware,
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.”—Kipling.
January twelfth, 1896, Mrs. Goldschmidt had opened her house in Cornwall and Mr. Wilcox, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the artist Arter and Mrs. Arter and others were staying there. 434 I took dinner with them, and that evening made up my mind that large parties were a mistake. A man’s family is never too many, because perfect freedom and unanimity of interest make them one. But with strangers there should be no more guests than the host can personally entertain. The Ettrick Shepherd’s “Rule of Three” is a good one, both as regards the guests and the courses. Every one has been to crowded and extravagant dinners, where they played the hypocrite for three or four hours, and said a fervent “Thank God!” when it was over.
Two days after this dinner I was in New York to attend Edward Bok’s reception—I think at the Waldorf Astoria. I should call it a mob, and not a reception. I had with me Dr. Lysander Dickerman, but even his splendid physical bulk, could not make a way for me through the crowd. The next day he came to Cornwall with me, and with Dr. and Mrs. Stone, who called to see him, we had a delightful evening. I wish I had space to say more of Dr. Dickerman, but there must be many living yet who remember his piety, his vast stores of learning, his attractive personality and fine conversational powers. The next morning Mr. Paul, a London editor, came in and brought me his last book.
On the twenty-seventh of this January, 1896, I made an arrangement with Mr. Dodd to enlarge “The Knight of the Nets” for a book, for which they agreed to pay eight hundred dollars on January, 1897. Then I went out to spend the weekend with Irving Bacheller at his home in Port Chester. He had a beautiful place there, and a lovely wife, and I enjoyed my holiday very much. Mr. Bacheller was a good performer on the organ, which astonished me, and yet it need not have done so, for men seem to play with little or no effort. He was a fine driver also, and I saw the villages of Greenwich and Belle Haven. Professor Gaines dined one evening with us, and my visit to Mr. and Mrs. Bacheller is full of pleasant memories.
I returned to New York on Monday morning, Mr. Bacheller coming with me. I intended spending the day in the Astor Library, but when we reached Astor Place, Mr. Bacheller said 435 suddenly, “I am going to see Louis Klopsch, and I want you to go with me.”
“Who is Louis Klopsch?” I asked.
“The proprietor of the Christian Herald.”
“Oh!” I replied. “Do you think he will care to see me?”
“He will be glad to see you, and I dare promise, that you will be the better for seeing him.”
So I went to see Louis Klopsch, and it was one of the happiest and the most profitable things I ever did. We found him in his private office, and the room was in itself remarkable. It had an ornate, Eastern look; the windows were shaded with tinted glass, and there was an oil painting of “The Descent from the Cross” covering a large space of the western wall, while other Biblical pictures and models were everywhere to be seen; giving it the Oriental look of which I have spoken. And I had never seen such handsome furniture and appointments in any editor’s or even publisher’s office. I thought of the rather large closets, with their plain wooden chairs and simple desks, in which Harper’s editors sat; of the slips in which George Merriam, and Moses Coit Tyler wrote and read; the poverty of all the editorial offices I had ever seen flashed across my memory, as I sat amid the color, beauty and luxury of the office of the Christian Herald.
Dr. Klopsch rose as we entered, and with smiles came to meet us. Mr. Bacheller hastened away, I stayed nearly two hours, and they went like ten minutes. At the end of our interview, I was astonished at my first estimate of his countenance. I had then thought it remarkable, but not handsome; but I soon understood that it was the only face, that could have expressed his complex inner man, as well as properly manifest his slight, graceful personality. He had charming manners, and walked with a kind of alert grace. I have been particular about Dr. Klopsch’s appearance, for I came to know him well, both in a business and a social way, and I suspect he could appear very different, to people with whom he was not in sympathy.
I went home on the first of February, and found so many letters I could do nothing on the second but answer them. 436 Among the writers were Mrs. Libbey, and Mr. Rideing; the latter sent me a check for seventy-five dollars in payment for “Discontented Women.” On the eleventh, I went to Princeton, and remained with the Libbeys until the fourteenth, when I returned to New York, and dined with the Rideings. I liked to go to the Rideings; there was always such a sweet, old English air and influence about their home and dinners. I think they spent their summers in England, and never quite lost its atmosphere.
On the sixteenth I began to rewrite “The Knight of the Nets” for Mr. Dodd; and on the twenty-first I signed a contract with Dr. Klopsch to write him a serial for the Christian Herald for twenty-five hundred dollars. I also saw Mr. Booth King about a short story of four chapters for his paper called Fashion and promised to write it for five hundred dollars. Then I worked on “The Knight of the Nets” all the rest of February.
On the fourth of March I was again in New York attending a play and supper at Colonel Robert Ingersoll’s. Mr. Jewett went with me. I remember nothing about the play, but I shall never forget Robert Ingersoll. I know all that has been said against him. It does not alter my fixed opinion that in practice he was one of the best Christians I ever knew. He has gone to the Mercy of the Merciful One, and I can only remember his wonderful intelligence, and personal charm.
On March nineteenth the Sorosis Club gave me a breakfast at the Waldorf, at which I met Mrs. Helmuth, Jennie June (Mrs. Croly) and many other notable women. I returned home after the affair, and the next day went to work on Mr. King’s story called, “I Will Marry My Own First Love.” I did not finish it until the thirty-first, for though I had contracted for twelve thousand words, I wrote twenty-one thousand, because I could not properly develop the story with less work.
March, the twenty-ninth, was my sixty-fifth birthday. I was writing all day on the story for Mr. King. “In the evening I sat with Lilly and Alice in the firelight, and talked of God’s wonderful care over us. Alice said many comforting things. So sweet and good is the dear One! We used the new blue dinner service for the first time.” (Diary, 1896.)
I was on “The Knight of the Nets” again until the twentieth of April, when I got a letter from Mr. Charles Frohman, about “The Bow of Orange Ribbon.” On the twenty-first I made a contract with him to dramatize it, if I could, about which fact I was doubtful. I had already realized that a play was not to write, but to build. Mr. Frohman gave me a box for that night’s performance of “The Prisoner of Zenda” and Mr. Edward Dodd and Mr. Bacheller occupied it with me. Before trying the play, I finished “The Knight of the Nets” so often delayed and put aside. This was not until the eleventh of May.
I gave nearly two weeks to the play, but felt it was not technically right, and Mr. Frohman in a kindly and gentlemanly manner told me so. And I was sorry at my failure to do what he wished. It made me nervous and sick, and I went to stay a few days at Elwyn, with Dr. Martin Barr.
This clever, delightful physician is not, I regret to say, any relative of mine, but we are the best of friends, and I always resort to him for advice when sick, and other physicians fail me. Only three months ago I did so with the usual success. He is the head of the Elwyn State Institution for Insanity in many forms, and an exceedingly clever physician and social scientist.
As the Elwyn Institution is very near to Swartmoor College I visited Professor De Gama, its principal at that time, and was delighted with him, and his large body of male and female students. He took me through the building, until we came to a door leading into a separate wing of the house. He told me he could not pass this door, as it led to the quarter sacred to the women students. “But,” he added, “go down the corridor, and you will find plenty of friends.”
I did so, and seeing a door open, and a room full of girls, I stood and looked at them. There was an instant pause, and then a little joyful cry of “Amelia Barr! Amelia Barr!” Afterwards I had as happy an hour as any woman could have, and standing among that joyous, handsome crowd of young, lovely girls, and hearing their sweet voices call me, “Friend Amelia,” I felt young again. And my thoughts flew instantly to the fair streets of Kendal, on First Day morning, full of 438 beautiful, richly-gowned Quaker girls, going to meeting, while the magical chimes of Kendal Church filled the still air above them with heavenly melody. And every morning, as long as I remained at Elwyn, I found on my breakfast table a bouquet from the girls of Elwyn College. May God bless every one of them, wherever they now dwell!
On the first of June, I began a story for Dr. Klopsch called “The King’s Highway.” It is a good story, but would have been better, if I had not received so many instructions from the editors of the Christian Herald. It had an unique acknowledgment from Mr. Thomas E. Clarke of Minneapolis, who sent me a copy of a story called “The King’s Highway” in the Dakota language.
On the twenty-second of June, I was at a dinner party given to Julian Hawthorne on his fiftieth birthday, and had the pleasure of sitting between Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Hazeltine. I know there was a very fine dinner, but as to the feast of reason and the flow of soul, if it was remarkable I have quite forgotten all about it. Yet with Hawthorne and Hazeltine present, many clever things must have been said. The two items that impressed me, was the beautiful gown of Mrs. Richard Stoddard, and the wreath of laurel that crowned the chair in which Julian Hawthorne sat.
On the ninth of July I was so tired, that I took my work to Nantasket and stayed there two weeks. It was then a quiet seaside resort, I believe it is now a kind of Coney Island. But I met pleasant people, and saw the New Englander on his native soil, and liked him so much, that I wrote the following poem to express my admiration of his character:
They intended to go to Virginia,
But God at the wheel said, “No!
The hundred that I have chosen,
To the cold, white North shall go.
I will temper them there as by fire,
I will try them a hundred fold,
I will shake them with all its tempests,
I will steady them with its cold.”
So these men from the English meadows
By the pitiless Plymouth Bay,
Learned well the worth of their Freedom,
By the price they had to pay.
But out of the fires of affliction,
The tumult and struggle of wars,
They brought forth her glorious banner,
Its azure all shining with stars.
The Hundred has grown to a nation,
The wilderness blooms like the rose,
And all through the South and the West
Go the men of the ice and the snows.
But wherever they go, they carry
The strength of their forefather’s fight—
The courage and moral uprightness,
Of men who prefer to do right.
On July thirty-first, I had a letter from my sister Alethia who was staying a few weeks at Castletown in the Isle of Man. In this letter she told me she had been with a marble cutter to Kirk Malew churchyard and had had Captain Thomas Huddleston’s grave stone cleaned and all the moss and lichen removed from the lettering. My readers may remember that he was captain of the Great Harry and was bringing home troops from America, when his ship was wrecked on Scarlet Rocks, every one on board perishing. And she told me, that when the stone was cleaned, she noticed that this tragedy occurred on the twenty-ninth of March, so that Captain Thomas Henry Huddleston and his son Henry died on the day that I was born.
Early in August I finished “The King’s Highway” and began to try to dramatize “The Bow of Orange Ribbon.” I did not stop for anything except to visit Mr. Hearst’s Children’s Republic near Haverstraw, and to write an article about it. I finished the play in September, and Mr. Frohman was so far pleased with it that he promised to find a playwright who understood stage business to work with me. On the twenty-fourth, he introduced me to Mr. August Thomas, who agreed to direct the work as soon as I came to the city for the winter.
October was a very busy month. I wrote half a dozen articles for Dr. Klopsch, and on the twentieth I went to Princeton to attend a great anniversary. I stayed with my old pupil, Professor William Libbey, and Professor Wheeler of the California University, the author of a fascinating “Life of Alexander the Great,” was there with me. Professor Jacobus and Mrs. Jacobus were also there, and at night I went to a college concert with Mrs. Libbey. On the twenty-first I went to Alexander Hall with Mrs. Libbey and heard Henry Van Dyke deliver a splendid poem written by himself called “The Builders.” After it, I was unable to decide whether he was greater as an orator, or a poet. On the twenty-second I saw the degrees given, heard Mr. Cleveland speak, and then went to a reception at President Patton’s. On the third of the following March, I had a letter from Moses Coit Tyler in which he says:
My dear Mrs. Barr:
I had from my colleague Wheeler a faithful account of his talk with you at Princeton last fall, and of your kind message to me. I’m sorry that I can’t send you a portrait of the literary editor of the Christian Union as he looked twenty-four years ago, when he was that great man. So I must ask you to accept this his latest portrait, which may tell you that these years which have crowned you with laurels, have crowned him with gray hairs. All the same he is
Yours faithfully,
Moses Coit Tyler.
March 30, 1897.
On the twenty-fourth I was at home and wrote an article for Dr. Klopsch on the Armenian question, and on the twenty-sixth I went to a great meeting in Carnegie Hall, called to sympathize with the persecuted Armenian Christians. This meeting was chiefly memorable to me, because I met there Dr. Burrell. He made the great speech of the occasion, and as I sat beside him on the platform I heard and enjoyed every word of it. As an orator, I do not think he has many equals, and his voice is very fine and resonant, and his gestures expressive and pleasing.
During all the month I had been working as I found opportunity on the “Prisoners of Conscience” enlarging it for the Century Company, but I also wrote an article for the Advance on the “Four Champions of Justification by Faith”—Paul, St. Augustine, Luther and John Wesley. At the close of October I saw Mr. Frohman again, and he told me Mr. Thomas wanted one thousand dollars to go over the play, and he would not give it. He was most kind and gentlemanly, but I think this disappointment wearied him. I knew how he felt, because I also was weary of work that wouldn’t be manageable, and I laid it aside without any regret, and returned gladly to “Prisoners of Conscience.”
On the twelfth of November I was in New York, and going into Mr. Dodd’s store then on Fifth Avenue about Twenty-second Street, I met there Barrie and Mrs. Barrie, and Robertson Nicoll, a distinguished editor and publisher of London. I thought Mrs. Barrie a lovely and most attractive woman, and I was proud to take the hand of the famous Scotch novelist.
On the twenty-third of November I went to New York for the winter. I had not finished “Prisoners of Conscience,” but Alice was so exceedingly psychic, I thought it best to take her away from the solitude of Cherry Croft to the material stir of the city. We went to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the proprietors of which house always made such favorable terms for me, that it was a point of economy in the winter to go there.
On the twenty-seventh, Mr. Frank Dodd asked me to a reception given to Ian McLaren, and on the same day Mr. Sankey gave me a pass to the Moody and Sankey meetings. I did not like Ian McLaren much, but I did like the stir of human feeling in the other invitation, and Mr. Sankey’s singing pleased me, for my taste had not been either trained, or spoiled, by too much classical music; and Sankey’s singing had in it, not only a fine lyrical cry, but also that “touch of Nature, which makes all men kin.”
On the twelfth of this December, Mrs. Klopsch called on me, and then and there began the sweetest friendship that has come into my life. I love beauty, and she was, and still is, very beautiful; and her kind, cheerful disposition made her ten 442 times more so. From that hour I have loved her dearly, nay, but I think I must have loved her somewhere long before that hour, for our attachment was always full grown. And I count her love among the best blessings that God has given me.
On the seventeenth, Mrs. Libbey called and brought me the Professor’s photo in cap and gown. He looked very grave and handsome, and I could not help thinking of the days, in which I had given him music lessons, and cut many a slice of bread and jelly for him, when he came into my cottage, after a morning on the ice. Mr. Jewett took dinner with me and I finished “Prisoners of Conscience.” On Christmas morning Mr. Jewett entered my parlor with armsful of laurel and mistletoe, and dressed it beautifully; and Lilly and her husband came over from Brooklyn to dine with me. I believe in good dinners. In some way or other domestic happiness has a fundamental dependence on them, they are conducive to amiable understandings. They are a festal sacrifice to household love, and sacred friendship, and intellectual recreation; and they are necessary to every kind of success. Only the Scotsman “who is fit for anything when he is half-starved” may neglect his dinner, and not injure his fortune.
The year 1897 has a record similar to the one just described. I spent the first three months at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and then returned joyfully to Cherry Croft, and remained there until near the close of the year. It will be sufficient, if I now note the days containing distinctive events; for instance, on the seventh of January I addressed the men at the Bowery Mission, and on the fifteenth began a story for the Bacheller Syndicate, called “The Price She Paid.” Lilly was sick with grippe, and I missed her daily visit very much. On the twenty-ninth Mr. Thomas called again about the play, and I returned to it, but with little heart, though working under his direction. On the seventeenth of February I wrote “still working hard, but hopelessly on my play. I have finished the second act, and Mr. Thomas professes to be satisfied, even pleased; but then he is a very courteous gentleman.” On the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh I was at the Astor Library, and had a long comforting 443 talk with Mr. Beauregard on reincarnation and other spiritual subjects.
On the fourth of March, Mr. Thomas came and appeared well satisfied with what I had done, and on the ninth Mr. Frank Dodd called and contracted for my next two stories. On the eleventh Mr. Beauregard dined with me, and afterwards lectured in my parlor on occultism. The rooms were crowded, and every one much interested. On the thirteenth I made tea at the Author’s Club, having General Sickles at my left hand. I took a dislike to him, perhaps unjustly, but the Southern gallantry I had admired forty years ago, seemed out of place in a man so old, and a company calm and intellectual. The following day I was at Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson’s to dinner. His now famous son was present, a dark handsome youth, with the quiet thoughtful eyes of dreaming genius.
I spent the evening of the twenty-first at Mr. Dana’s, and saw all his wonderful collection of pottery. Very carefully he unlocked for me the box that held the famous Peach Blow jar, and I will tell the truth, and acknowledge that I was insensible to its beauty. I thought I had seen far lovelier vases. Rutger Jewett was with me, and on the twenty-fifth I was at Dr. Jewett’s to tea. On the twenty-sixth Dr. Klopsch asked me to go to India with the ship load of corn and wheat which American women had given to the famine sufferers. He wished me to go as the representative of these American women. My children would not allow me to accept the offer, which I regretted. The twenty-ninth was my sixty-sixth birthday, and all my rooms were full of flowers, but Lilly had gone to Cornwall, and could not come, so there was a little shadow on it. I spent the afternoon of the thirty-first at Colonel Ingersoll’s and met there Andrew White, our Minister to Berlin, a most interesting man. He was just publishing a book and promised to send me a copy.
On the first of April I came back to Cherry Croft. Lilly had gone there three days previously, and the house was warm, everything in order, and a loving smiling welcome waiting me. I was very happy to be home again. On the third, Mr. Frohman wrote me that he was disappointed in the play. So was I. 444 I had wasted a deal of time and strength on it, and I felt I was doing so, all the time I was working on it.
All the first week in May was spent in trying to see my way clear to go with Dr. Klopsch to India, about which he was urgent. But Alice was mentally very sick, and Mary and Lilly would not hear of the journey, the cholera being at that time very bad there. On June the thirteenth, the Reverend Mr. Boyd of Chicago preached a sermon against the “Prisoners of Conscience” which the Century Company had just issued in book form. On the twenty-second, the Chicago Times Herald published my defence; and Dr. Boyd’s sermon was only a splendid advertisement for the story. In July, I was busy finishing my new novel “I, Thou and the Other” but in August, I left it a week to write a story for the Bacheller Syndicate, called “Judith of Keyes Grif.”
On the twenty-sixth of September I was writing a story for Leslie’s called “The Lost I. O. U.” and on the twenty-eighth I had a letter from Dodd, Mead and Company saying they liked “I, Thou and the Other” very much. There was nothing out of the usual course of events in October, but a dinner which I gave, and which, quite unintentionally on my part, consisted only of three clergymen. One day the Reverend Mr. Snedeker, the Methodist preacher at Newburgh, told me many interesting things about Father McGlyn, his offence against the Church, and his summons to appear before some spiritual court at Rome. I said, “I should like to see any man, who had been brave enough to offend the powerful prelates of Rome;” and Mr. Snedeker answered, “He wishes to meet you.” “Then come to-morrow,” I replied, “come to dinner, and there is a fine moon to light you home.” He gladly accepted the invitation, and the next morning I sent and asked Mr. Page, our Episcopal minister, to dine with them.
It was a remarkable meeting. Father McGlyn told us all about his visit to Rome, and his interview with the Pope; then he went to Alice’s room, and blessed her, and blessed her altar, and prayed with her. For he had quickly discerned the spirit within her, and with a beautiful humility said it was greater and purer than his own. I shall never forget Father McGlyn. 445 As a social man he was a failure, as a priest of God he was worthy of all honor.
On October the fifteenth, Professor and Mrs. Libbey sent for me to hear the Earl of Aberdeen and President Cleveland speak, but I did not go. A month afterwards I went to the Fifth Avenue Hotel for the winter at the same favorable terms. I noticed that there was a great crowd at dinner but I had a long, pleasant talk in the green parlor after it with Mr. and Mrs. Tom Platt. I liked both thoroughly. Mrs. Platt worked me a most exquisite center piece, and Mr. Platt wrote his name in the corner. This autograph I embroidered, and the beautiful square lies to this day over the green velvet cover of my dining-room table.
The next day I took lunch with the Mount Holyoke Alumnæ, and made an address on “The Neighbor at Our Gate,” a most important person, for we may choose our friends, but we cannot choose our neighbor. We have to take him as he is, and make the best of him.
On December the second, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Platt, and Mrs. Lockhart of Pittsburgh, and Mr. and Mrs. Saltus spent the evening with me, and I received an invitation to address the Congregational Club on January twenty-eighth, 1898; which I promised to do conditionally. On the seventh, Edward Bok called and I promised to write some short things for him. But I was really too tired to do anything, and was compelled to stay away from Mr. Rideing’s reception on that day, and even Rutger’s happy presence was almost more than I could respond to.
CHAPTER XXV
DREAMING AND WORKING
“Came the whisper, came the vision,
Came the Power with the need.”
. . . . . . . . . .
“This is the scene of combat, not of rest,
Man’s is laborious happiness at best;
On this side death his labors never cease,
His joys are joys of conquest, not of peace.”
Following my physician’s advice, I slipped away to Old Point Comfort on December the twenty-third. I fell into a sound sleep as soon as I was on the boat, and practically slept all the way there. I had a letter of introduction to the proprietor of the hotel from Mr. Hitchcock, the proprietor of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and was given rooms almost over the sea, and treated with unbounded kindness and respect. Lilly went down with us, and made my rooms comfortable, and ate Christmas dinner with us. We had a delightful surprise at this meal, for we were at the same table with Dr. Peck, one of my neighbors on Storm King Mountain, Cornwall, a most intelligent and delightful companion.
I was not really sick; I was only tired, so tired, however, that I could hardly lift my heavy, aching eyes, and my brain absolutely refused to follow a thought out, and I suffered much from a relaxed, nervous throat. I slept nearly night and day for a week, and the sea winds breathed fresh life into me. Then Lilly felt that she might leave me to their healing influence and the renewing power of sleep and rest.
On January the twentieth, I note, “I am much better. I feel nearly well.” Dr. Frissel of the Hampton School called to see me. Reverend Father Hall, Judge Parker’s son-in-law, sent me violets, and I had a strange but interesting letter from 447 Lilly, who said she had been at a crystal party in M——’s studio rooms, and had heard a lecture by a Hindoo occultist. The guests were invited to ask him any question they wished him to answer, and Lilly asked how her mother was. He said, “She is at sea, or very near the sea. She will be quite well in February, and some good thing will happen at the end of the month. Her good fortune is at a standstill until then.” And I add with emphatic undercrossing, “How does he know anything about me? My times are in God’s hands.” I will also add, that nothing he said was true.
In February I was able to see a few visitors, and I had a great deal of attention from the officers of the regiment stationed there. Colonel Morris and Mrs. Morris called several times, and Lieutenant Allan and Mrs. Allan did all they could to make me happy. On the eleventh, they gave me at their house a delightful reception, and on the nineteenth I was entertained at the Officer’s Club, and had all the privileges of the club presented to me. This honor was the more remarkable, as I was the only woman who had ever received it.
After this callers were so numerous, I thought it best to go home, for I was still very weak and nervous, and I feared to lose what I had gained. My eyes also were far from rested, and it was difficult for me to write. I was sorry to go, because Alice had been so happy, but it was “for Mamma’s sake,” and she went gladly.
No, I cannot write of the next few months. They were filled with sorrow of the most heart-breaking kind, and for the first time in my life, I could not go unto Him who promised to give rest to the sorrowful and heavy laden. Grief, with me, runs into motion, and I walked my room day and night, until exhaustion forced me to sit down. I got the first help from a book Mr. Van Wagenen gave me. I had to go to Dodd, Mead and Company and all of the firm happened to be out but Mr. Van Wagenen, and he gave me a book, telling me to read it, and it would do me good. I do not know why he did so. I tried to smile and look happy, but he may have seen the sorrow in my eyes, for its shadow is still there. This was on April twenty-first and on April twenty-fifth, I write, “I have taken 448 courage, and am going on in God’s strength. I can do nothing without God. I can do everything with God to help me. I will not fret, and I will not worry. I will cease from being hurt and angry. I will go back to my work, and trust in God to give me the sight and strength to do it.”
It was during these months of such anguish as only mothers can know that the great comforting truth of reincarnation was fully revealed to me. And I count the sorrow, even if it had killed me, but a small payment for it. Slowly, but surely it dawned upon my soul, that the suffering which I had not deserved, by either thought, word or deed in this life, must have been earned in some previous existence, and this conviction enabled me not only to accept, but to forgive. Then I read upon my knees the Fifth-first Psalm and prayed, “Forgive me, for it is against Thee, and Thee only, I have sinned.” I had paid my debt, and I was comforted; for we must all go up our own Calvary. The just cannot die for the unjust, the purehearted for the sinner, the merciful for the cruel.
“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.”
We all pay our just debts, we all reap then our just rewards. And my soul rose up to God’s expectation, yielded
“... itself to the Power constraining,
With a ready and full surrender;
Trusting God in the roughest whirlwind,
In a cloud of the thickest night,
While I watched and hoped in silence,
For the dawn of a richer splendor;
Musing what new gifts await me—
What of Knowledge, or Love, or Light!”
In July Professor Libbey and Mrs. Libbey spent two days at Cherry Croft, and at the end of the month I had a visit from the Countess de Brémont. She brought a letter from 449 Mr. Paul of London, and I found her an interesting woman. She had just come from Africa, where she had lived for several months in Paul Kruger’s home. Her descriptions of it, and of the Boer President and his family, were of the most unsavory even disgusting character; but I listened to them with a kind of satisfaction. I had no respect for the Boers, and I was heart-sick at their early successes; so much so, that my doctor had forbidden me to read anything respecting the war until my daughter gave me permission.
In August I managed to locate the story of “The Maid of Maiden Lane.” I had begun it half-a-dozen times, but always found myself running across “The Bow of Orange Ribbon;” and I was about to give it up, when I awoke one morning about four o’clock, with the whole story clear in my mind. I made a note of the plot as given me, and then with a good heart finished off “Trinity Bells” for Mrs. Dodge.
On the third of September I was at work again on “The Maid of Maiden Lane,” and on the eighth I took tea at Dr. Henry Van Dyke’s, who was then occupying the beautiful Club House on Storm King as a summer home. The fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth of September, I kept as I have always done in memory of my dear husband’s and sons’ deaths, and I wrote, “It is thirty-two years ago, but I have forgotten nothing of God’s mercy, and of their love.
‘Faithful, indeed, the spirit that remembers,
After such years of change and suffering.’
I am more alone than ever, but God is sufficient.”
Sept. 30th. I made bread, tidied drawers and closets, filled all the vases with fresh flowers, and walked for two hours and half.
Oct. 1st. Writing in the morning on “The Maid of Maiden Lane,” and in the afternoon watching the gathering of the apples, and the digging of the potatoes.
In November I finished “The Maid of Maiden Lane” and made an arrangement with Mr. Dodd to write “The Lion’s 450 Whelp.” For these two books, I was to receive three thousand dollars each.
In December I suffered a great loss. I had as cook a Mrs. Kirkpatrick, the wife of that Thomas Kirkpatrick, whom I have named as my first caller at Cherry Croft, and who was at this very time my gardener. She had both my trust and my affection, for she was faithful and kind to me, and had fine spiritual instincts, which I delighted to inform and to direct. On Sunday, the eleventh of December, she appeared to be in as perfect health as a woman in the prime of life could be, yet when I awoke out of deep sleep, soon after midnight, I knew that something was going to happen; for I could not move a finger, nor could I open my eyes. I lay motionless waiting and listening. Then I heard steps mounting the stairs—steps, no human foot could make—the strong swift steps of a Messenger whom nothing could delay. At the head of the stairs was a corridor on which my room, my study, a guest room and Alice’s two rooms opened. At the end of the corridor there was a door, always locked at night, then two steps leading down to a small hall, on which Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s room, and another room opened.
Into which of these rooms was He going? I listened awestruck and breathless. Past my door, my study, and the guest room He went; past the open door leading into Alice’s rooms, and then I heard the same fateful tread going down the two steps into the outer hall, after which there was dead silence. In a few minutes I was able to move, and I sat up and considered. I was certain that I had locked the door between the corridor and the small hall. Yet there had been no delay at the door, nor any sound of a lock turning. I struck a light and went to the door. It was locked. It had been no impediment unto Him who passed through it, shut and locked. Alice was in a deep sleep; Mrs. Kirkpatrick, also. I went back to my room and sat down. And that night I slept no more.
In the morning Mrs. Kirkpatrick told me she was sick. “I will go home,” she said, “and send my daughter to do my work. I shall be well in a day or two.” I held her hand as she spoke, and looked into her kind face, where I saw written what no 451 mortal could either write, or blot out. As she passed through the gate, I called Alice, to “come and take a last look at Mrs. Kirkpatrick;” and we both watched her hurrying up the hill, until she was out of sight. Seven days after she died of pneumonia.
That night as I sat quite alone by the parlor fire, praying for the passing soul, Lilly came to me. And I cried with joy, while together we sought “Him that ... turneth the shadow of death into the morning” (Amos, 5:8). She spent two days in packing and preparing the house for the winter, and on the third day, I went with Alice to the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York, leaving Thomas Kirkpatrick, the sorrowful husband, in charge of the house.
I do not like to write much about 1899. The first three months my doctor forbid me to write, and I amused myself by reading everything I could find on the new cults and “isms” then clamoring for recognition. Theosophy for a few weeks fascinated me, but Christian Science, never for one hour made any impression. I thought it, only a huge misunderstanding of the Bible. Spiritualism I had examined many years previously, and discarded its pretensions at once. Truly God speaks to men, but when he so favors any soul, He asks no dollar fee, and needs no darkened room, veiled cabinet, nor yet any hired medium to interpret His message. He can make Himself heard in the stir and traffic of Broadway, and in the sunshine of midday, as well as in the darkness of midnight. And when I had satisfied my foolish curiosity, I was sorry and ashamed, and with deep contrition asked only to be permitted to say once more “Our Father!” Going back to my Bible, was like going back home, after being lost in a land of darkness and despair.
This three months’ reading, often by electric light, made havoc with my sight, and I was obliged to spend six weeks in a darkened room after it. Lilly spent them with me, and I was greatly consoled by this proof of her affection for me. I was very anxious about money matters, for though I could not write, the expenses of the house went on. But God did not forget His Promise to me. Towards the end of March Mr. Stone of Chicago wrote to me for a novel, and I sold him “Was It Right to 452 Forgive?” for twelve hundred dollars; soon after Mr. Jewett came up to Cherry Croft, told me he had gone into the publishing business with his friend Taylor, and bought the book rights of “Trinity Bells,” for two thousand dollars. These two events, both most unexpected, made my mind easy; and I improved so rapidly, that in May I began to write a little. Then Dr. Klopsch ordered twenty short articles, and these gave me just the work I could do, because I could leave it, and take it up, whenever it was prudent to do so.
I spent the winter of 1900 at Atlantic City, and on the sixth of February, the novelist, Robert Barr of London, came to visit me. He was delighted with Atlantic City, and stayed more than a week. At this time I had a remarkable dream. I thought I stood on the piazza at Cherry Croft, and was looking upward at an immense black African bull, that rose and fell between the sky and the earth. Sometimes he was very high, sometimes he came near to the ground, but as I watched he fell to the earth, and his head came off, and rolled out of sight. And the grass was high, and I called Kirkpatrick and said, “The grass is ready, you will cut it to-morrow.”
After that dream I read all the newspapers I wanted to read. I knew the Boers would fail, and fall, and the English flag float over their conquered states. On the twenty-eighth of February I read of Cronjes’ defeat, and on the fifteenth of March, a few days after my return home, Mr. Henry Hunter of Cornwall, sent his son through a great storm, late at night, up to Cherry Croft to tell me that the English had possession of the capital of the Orange Free State. The next morning I walked to the end of the piazza, and noticing the grass high, I called to Kirkpatrick and said, “Kirk, the grass is too high, cut it down tomorrow.” Then my dream flashed across my mind, and I thanked God and was happy.
The eleventh of July was the fiftieth anniversary of my wedding day. Alice was with Lilly in Brooklyn, and I was quite alone, neither had I any letters referring to it. All my world had forgotten it, so I made it memorable to myself, by commencing my Cromwell novel, which I that day named “The Lion’s Whelp.” In the afternoon I sat in the sunshine, and 453 thought over the incidents of my fifty wedding days. It was a little story for my own pleasure and I shall never write it down. On that day also, I resolved to give up all social visiting, and devote myself entirely to my work.
I worked steadily afterwards on “The Lion’s Whelp” but did not finish it until April second, 1901. Then I note in my diary, “I finished my dear Cromwell novel today, five hundred fifty pages. I leave it now with God and Mr. Dodd.” It was hard to leave it. For some days I could not bring myself to finish the last few sentences, and my eyes were full of tears when I wrote “Vale Cromwell!” I had the same reluctance to close “Remember the Alamo.” In both cases, I was bidding farewell to characters with whom I had spent some of the happiest hours of my life.
After finishing “The Lion’s Whelp,” I collected a volume of my short stories for Dr. Klopsch, and on July fourth I began a novel for Mr. Jewett called “Thyra Varrick.” The scene was laid in the Orkney Isles, and the wind of the great North Sea blew all through it, while it had the brilliant blundering of Prince Charles Stuart for a background. It was a great favorite, for it was the initial story of the Delineator, and I received the following letter from Charles Dwyer, the editor, after it was published:
Dear Mrs. Barr:
I take leave of “Thyra Varrick” in the May number, with the greatest regret. It seems like parting with an old friend, and one who has conferred many favors on you. It is the first serial that has appeared in the magazine, and I consider myself very fortunate in being able to present such a story. A copy of the book has come in from the publishers, and is now in the hands of the reviewer. When it comes back to me, I shall take the liberty of sending it to you for an autograph.
With every good wish for a pleasant summer, and that we may be again in association, I am
Very faithfully yours,
Charles Dwyer.
On May the third, my sister Alethia died of apoplexy, and I am now the last of a family that had been more than a century 454 at home when Edward the Confessor reigned. A very ancient prophecy regarding the family said, “It will go out with a lass.” So it will. I stand at the end of a long, long roll of priests and heroes, but though I am only a woman, I have fought a good fight, my hands are clean, my honor unstained, and I have never written a line that I would wish to blot, if I was dying. I am not afraid to meet any of my ancestors, and I shall be glad to look my dear father in the face. He was a great scholar, but he was too busy preaching to write a book. And when I tell him I have written over sixty books, I shall add, “But that is because I am your daughter.”
On June the sixteenth, I had the following letter, and among the hundreds I have received, not one has given me more soul pleasure:
War Department.
United States Engineer’s Office.
Mobile, Ala.Mrs. Amelia E. Barr.
Dear Madam:
Allow me to thank you for Chapter Seven, “Souls Of Passage.” I am on a higher plane since reading it, and thoughts, heretofore merely in solution in my mind, have flashed into beautiful and permanent crystallization. I do not apologize for addressing you, for I feel that it must please you to know, that your soul in its passage, has helped another.
Very respectfully,
William Stoddard McNeill.
From the middle of August unto the end of the year, Alice was very ill, and I could not leave her night or day, unless Lilly was with her. So I went early to the city this year. I finished “Thyra Varrick” on December nineteenth, and then rested until the New Year.
On the second of January, 1902, I was in the Historical Library, then on Second Avenue, where I worked all day, and then bought from the library a large and very valuable book on the Loyalists of New York City during its captivity to the English. It is written by one of the De Lancey family, and is a 455 monumental book that ought to be better known. Alice was in a most unhappy condition all month, and I write sorrowfully on February first: “I am heartbroken about Alice. I can get no hopeful response spiritually from her. She is always conscious of some inimical Presence, whom she cannot pray against, and she is miserably depressed, and will not go out.”
On the fifteenth I had a letter from a small town in Turkey-in-Asia, asking permission to translate my articles in Success into Greek, and thus I discovered that Success had been using my work without my knowledge, or permission, for I never wrote for the paper except one article for the opening number. The success founded on such methods had in it no lasting elements, and the paper has disappeared.
On the twenty-eighth Alice begged me to take her home, and on the third of March I did so. Kirkpatrick had the house beautifully warm, and Lilly went up to Cherry Croft with us, and put all in order.
On March twenty-ninth, my seventy-second birthday, I had had a night of prayer and watching, but I fell asleep at dawn, and woke up wonderfully refreshed; and to my happy amazement, Alice gave me a kiss and a blessing, when I went to her room. “Dear God!” I prayed, “add Thy Blessing to it.” The mail brought me a present of violet pins from Lilly, and all my soiled lace done up with her own hands, and looking like new. Her husband sent me a very handsome scrap-book for my newspaper clippings. I had one hundred seventy-five dollars from Rutger, royalty money, and Mary had made and sent me a pretty kimono. I was very happy indeed; for, thank God, I still keep my child heart, and “little things” make me happy.
On April second I began “The Song of a Single Note.” It carried on the story of “The Bow of Orange Ribbon,” and a month later I wrote, “Alice is well and happy; our days go on calm and sweetly, and I am enjoying my work.”
On May the twenty-first, Mrs. Harry Lee called to see me for the first time. I liked her at once. She is now one of the two women I really love. There is no set time for her calls, she can come morning, noon or night, and be welcome. She is loving and intellectual, and never gets bored or has a train to meet, 456 if our conversation slips into grave, or even religious subjects. From a good tree, we expect good fruit, and she is the eldest daughter of the late well-beloved E. P. Roe. Her love for me also runs into physical and material grooves, which are very enjoyable; many a time she has walked over the fields to my house, with a basket of fine fruit, or a dish of whipped cream, or some other delicacy. And as she is a fashionable woman in the social world, I think such little attentions show a sweet and homely affection, that I value highly.
On May thirty-first I made a note that causes me to smile as I read it—“a kind of dictatorial letter, from a firm who want me to write a novel for them—they are both young!” I also, rejoice, because I have got the grip of the story I am writing, and now it will be easy work.
On June the twelfth, I had a remarkable experience, one I shall never forget. I heard the clock strike three, and thought I had a letter in my hand from my mother. It was written on the old-fashioned large, square letter paper, and contained two sheets, the last one not quite full; folded as we folded letters before envelopes had been thought of, and closed with a seal which I carefully broke. In this letter she told me of all that she had suffered, and how she had prayed to God, and I buried my face in the letter and wept bitterly. Yes, I felt the tears, and I said, “O dear, dear Mother, you had to die, and I had to grow old, to know how much I love you!” A strange thing was, I saw plainly her address, and she had signed herself “Mary Singleton,” her maiden name, “Kingdom of Heaven.” There were two other lines in the address, which I have forgotten, but I knew they were the names of city and street. I was wonderfully comforted by this letter, and its enthralling, heavenly perfume lingered about me for many days.[8]
Miss Alice Barr
On June thirtieth Charles Francis Adams sent me a copy of 457 his oration about Cromwell’s having a statue in the New England Colonies. He deserved it. If England had not so urgently needed him, he would have accompanied his friend, Long John Wentworth, to Massachusetts. If Mr. Adams had only told the New Englanders, that Cromwell was the best ball player in England, and that Wentworth was the only man who could match him, they would doubtless have taken the statue into serious consideration.
At the end of August I finished “A Song of a Single Note” and Mary and Kirk fortunately came from Florida, to pay me a visit. My days of remembrance, the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth of September, I spent reading Professor James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience,” a wonderful, wonderful book, which none who read thoughtfully can ever forget. I have read it through many times; it always makes a good time for me, spiritually.
On October, the twenty-sixth, Mr. Hearst gave me fifty dollars for permission to copy my article on “Divorce” from the North American Review into his paper; and on the sixth of December I went to the Marlborough House in Atlantic City. Alice and I spent Christmas alone; she was very sweet and reflective, and talked to me long of the Christmases gone forever. “So fair! So sad!” I said; and she answered with a smile, “They are with God.”
On February fifteenth, I was again settled at Cherry Croft, and began “The Black Shilling,” but on the twenty-sixth I tore up all I had written, and began it over again. On the twenty-ninth of March, my seventy-third year of travail through this life, I write gratefully, “I have good health, a good home, good daughters, good servants, many friends, and one hundred three pages of ‘The Black Shilling’ written to my satisfaction. Lilly was here, and Alice is quite well, and Rutger remembered my birthday and sent me one hundred thirty dollars royalty.” I finished “The Black Shilling” on the twenty-ninth of July; and my eyes were so tired, I went into a darkened room for three weeks, and on the thirtieth of October I went to New York in order to be under the care of Dr. Hunter, a fine oculist, and no alarmist. He told me there was not the slightest evidence of 458 any disease, they only wanted rest; and the relief his verdict gave me was unspeakable, and in itself curative.
From the fourteenth to the nineteenth of December I went to Princeton to stay with the Libbeys. I had sent out no cards this winter, and I saw no one but Dr. and Mrs. Klopsch, and Rutger Jewett. On the whole 1903 was a hard year, and my eyes were so troublesome that I only wrote “The Black Shilling,” and a few little articles for the daily press.
“Jan. 1st, 1904. When I opened my Bible this morning my eyes fell upon this cheering verse, ‘Having obtained help of God, I continue unto this day.’ (Acts, 26:22.)” Three days afterwards I went back to Cornwall, and on the sixteenth I had a visit from Mr. Platt of the Smart Set, about writing for him. He was an English gentleman of a fine type, but I am sure he understood at once, that I could not write for a set I knew nothing about. Nevertheless I enjoyed his visit. I read all January for “The Belle of Bowling Green,” which I began on February, the eighth, and finished on June, the twenty-seventh. All August, I was writing for Mr. Rideing and Dr. Klopsch; but on September, the eighteenth, I began “Cecilia’s Lovers,” which I finished on February eighth, 1905.
All April, May and June I was writing articles for the Globe on social subjects, such as slang, bored husbands, colossal fortunes, et cetera. On November fifteenth, I had an invitation to a dinner given to Mark Twain on his seventieth birthday. I did not go to the dinner, but I sent Mr. Clemens the wish that Dr. Stone wrote to me on my seventieth birthday. “The days of our life are three score years and ten, and if by reason of strength it be four score years, yet is it labor and sorrow. May you have the labor without the sorrow.”
On November, the twenty-fourth, I made a contract with Mr. Lovell to write him a novel for five thousand dollars. I wrote him one called “The Man Between,” and it was finished and paid for on March thirty-first, 1906. In April of 1906, I began “The Heart of Jessy Laurie,” which was sold to Mr. Dodd on September the seventeenth. In November I began a book that is a great favorite, and whose writing gave me constant pleasure, “The Strawberry Handkerchief.”
I began 1907 in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and on the fifteenth had finished the first chapter of “The Strawberry Handkerchief,” but on the thirtieth I took pneumonia, and was very near to death. With God’s blessing on the skill of Dr. Charles Nammack, and Lilly’s faithful care, my life was saved. Her husband gave me an equally loving service. Every afternoon he came to the hotel, read and answered my letters, and sat with Alice, while Lilly had a long, sound sleep. Then he went for medicines, and if likely to be needed, remained all night. My own son could have done no more for me, nor done it any more lovingly.
On the twenty-third of February, I had one of the most wonderful spiritual experiences of my life. Lilly had gone home, and taken Alice with her, and I was quite alone. The room which they occupied, while in the hotel, opened into my room; but it was now empty, and the proprietors had promised to put no one into it, unless obliged by stress of business; for it had been very convenient, for changing the air in my room. I awoke from sleep about three A.M. and found my room distressingly hot. I rose, put on wool slippers, stopped at the table, ate a few grapes, and drank a glass of milk, and then thought I would open the door between the two rooms. I was very weak, but I reached the door, and had my hand on the key. Then Some One in the adjoining room thrust quickly a heavy bolt across the other side of the door. I concluded the room had become occupied while I was asleep, was a little annoyed at not being informed, but thought no more of the circumstance, until the chambermaid came to me in the morning.
“Do you know,” she said, “I left both the windows in the next room open, and it has been the coldest night of the winter. The room was like an ice box this morning; for the heat was turned off and the wind blowing, and freezing as it blew.”
“But the room was occupied,” I answered.
“No, indeed!” she continued. “I went in an hour ago, and shut the windows and put on the heat, and I will take you there while I make this room comfortable.” She did so, and I was lying wrapped in a blanket upon a sofa, when I remembered the almost angry drawing of the bolt, and turned my head to look at the door. There was no bolt there. There was nothing but 460 a little brass screw in the lintel, that a child’s finger could turn noiselessly. Yet the bolt I heard was one of the large iron bolts, used in the farm and manor houses of Westmoreland, and the North Country. They crossed the whole door, and fell into the socket provided, with a great noise—the noise I had heard early that morning. Who had been watching me through the long night hours? One step into that freezing room would have chilled the spark of life in me. Who had prevented it, and that in such a manner as should convince me that it was no mortal hand, and no mortal bolt that saved me? That day, I could do nothing but pray and wonder, and then pray again. I thought I was alone, and I was not alone. Some angel had charge over me, and I remembered that there was just a touch of impatience in the driving of the bolt, as if the watcher had the feeling of a mother, vexed at her child’s imprudence. I have had many spiritual experiences but few that affected me more than this one.
About the eighteenth of March I resolved to go home, and Lilly’s husband went to Cornwall, had the water put on, and the fires lighted; and on the twentieth Lilly and Alice followed, taking a servant with them. I waited as patiently as I could for Lilly to send me word the house was warm and comfortable; then Mr. Munro came and packed my trunks, and on the twenty-sixth my captivity ended. God let me go home, and I found Love and every comfort waiting for me.
On March, the twenty-ninth, I wrote: “I am getting well. This is a new birthday. A happy day.” I had written two chapters of “The Strawberry Handkerchief” when I was taken ill, but I was not able to return to it until May, the nineteenth, and I did not finish it until January, the seventh, A.D. 1908, when we were staying at Bretton Hall Hotel, for the three cold months.
On January, the thirty-first, Mr. and Mrs. Dodd gave me a “Bow of Orange Ribbon” dinner. All decorations were in the dominant color, and it was a very pretty affair. Mrs. Dodd is a charming hostess, and Mr. Dodd knows the exact tone at which a company of happy, sensible people should be kept. He sets it, and he keeps it, and every one follows his lead, as naturally in pleasure, as they do in business.
On February, the twenty-ninth, I was guest of honor at the Press Club Reception, held at the Waldorf Astoria. I enjoyed this occasion thoroughly, for I like the men and women of the press. I sat beside Mr. Pollock, a man of extraordinary genius. I had a very sore throat that day, but his speech made me forget I had anything but a heart and a brain. Bishop Potter sat near me. I had a pen and ink acquaintance with him, but had never before met him personally. As a man, he was delightful; as a bishop, he fell below my ideal. But then my ideal had been formed on the English Spiritual Lords, and I thought of Carpenter, and others, and wondered if they ever forgot their office so far as to tell a great public assemblage funny stories. The stories were excellent, and quite in keeping with what one of them called “his job,” but somehow they fell below the office he filled in the church. Yet everyone enjoyed them, and my quibble may be laid to my English superstitions about sacred things.
I had a little reception after the meeting, and never in all my life had I been so petted and praised. The young women crowded round me and kissed my hands, and my cheeks, and I wished they were all my daughters. Mrs. Klopsch had sent me an immense bouquet of violets, and I gave every flower away to them. If ever fame tasted sweet to me, it was during that half hour among the lovely women of the New York press.
On March, the first, I went back to Cornwall, and on the fifteenth I began a novel called “The Hands of Compulsion,” which I finished on June, the twenty-seventh. It is one of the best of my Scotch stories. All July I was reading for “The House on Cherry Street,” which I began on August, the second. I was busy on it all summer, for it was a very difficult period to make interesting, the fight for freedom of the press. The winter came on early, and I went to the city on the first of November, as I needed the Historical Library for my work. On November, the eighteenth, I took dinner at Mr. Dodd’s and among the guests were Mr. George McCutcheon, and Mr. Maurice of the Bookman, a handsome, interesting young man, whom I should like to know better.
On November twenty-seventh, I went to Dr. Klopsch’s to dine with the Honorable Lyman Gage, one of the most widely 462 cultivated men I ever met. I supposed he would not talk of anything but finance or politics. These subjects were never named. During dinner we were talking of evolution and Orlando Smith’s great book on eternalism; after dinner Mr. Gage read aloud some passages from Plato with wonderful beauty and expression; notably the death of Socrates. This began a conversation lasting until midnight concerning death and reincarnation. I shall never forget this evening, which was duplicated on December fourth, with the addition to our company of the Reverend Dr. Chamberlin.
On December, the sixth, I dined with my friend and physician, Dr. Charles Nammack, and his family. Mrs. Nammack and I had long been friends, for they occupied the cottage next to my place on Storm King for two summers. On December, the fifteenth, I went with Dr. and Mrs. Klopsch to the theatre to see “The Servant in the House.” After these compliances for the sake of friendship, I went out no more, for I was busy writing “The House on Cherry Street” until my return home on the eleventh of February.
On the twentieth of February, A.D. 1909, the house was in most comfortable order, and Lilly had gone home the previous day. I was writing well all morning, and was called to dinner as the clock struck twelve. I went into Alice’s rooms to summon her, and we left them hand-in-hand, happily telling each other, how glad we were to be home again. We took one step of the long stairway together, and then in some inscrutable way, I lost my footing, and fell headlong to the bottom. I remember one thought as I fell, “So this is the end of all!” I was insensible, when I reached the lower floor, and knew nothing until I found myself in bed. Alice had run to our nearest neighbor and brought help, and they had telephoned to Lilly to come at once.
Dr. Winter, my own physician, did not arrive for three hours, but I was quite conscious by that time. I had not broken a bone, nor received any internal injury, and he looked at me incredulously. It appeared miraculous, but it was the truth. My right side, however, was severely bruised, and my right shoulder, arm and hand, so much so, as to be practically useless for many months. For neuritis took possession of the bruised member, 463 and I suffered with it, and the nervous consequences of the shock, more than I can express.
And there was my work! How was I to finish it? And it must be finished. I needed the money it would bring. As soon as the pain subsided a little, I began to practice writing with my left hand—tracing letters on the bedspread, and by the time I was able to sit up a little, I was ready to take a pencil and pad. The result was, that I finally wrote very plainly with the left hand, and through sleepless, painful nights and days, I finished the manuscript of “The House on Cherry Street,” on July the twenty-fifth. And by that time, I was able to superintend the typewriter, and to see that it was copied faithfully.
On my seventy-ninth birthday I wrote, “I do not sleep two hours any night. I am racked with pain in my right shoulder, arm and hand. Weak and trembling and unfit to work, but trying to do as well as I can. My left hand stands faithfully by me.”
It was a hard summer in every way. Mr. Munro was in the hospital for a dangerous operation, and Lilly broke down with care and nursing. But through it all, Dr. Winter stood by me, full of hope and encouragement, and promises of final recovery. Mrs. Klopsch sent me constantly pretty hampers of fresh fruits, my friends in Cornwall did all they could to evince their sympathy, and I had almost a wicked joy in my success in training my left hand. Some malign influence had found a moment in which to injure me, but I was hourly getting the better of it. Every page I wrote was a triumph, and Dr. Winter reminded me, also, that the enforced idleness was resting my eyesight, which it sorely needed, and that as I would mind neither physician nor oculist, there was nothing for it, but a fall down stairs, to make me give my eyes a chance. He thought upon the whole it had been a very merciful and necessary fall. So I made the best of it.
On August, the twenty-third, I began “The Reconstructed Marriage,” which I finished on the sixteenth of December. It was a very cold winter, and Alice and I went to the Garden City Hotel, and I felt its healthy influence at once, but I could not escape company, which in my weakened condition was very 464 fatiguing. So I bought a larger furnace, and then my home was warm enough to return to. I only received one thousand dollars for “The Reconstructed Marriage,” but Mr. Dodd had many reasons for cutting my price—the advance in wages, and the price of paper, et cetera, all just reasons, no doubt, but they pressed hard on me, for my long sickness asked for more, instead of less.
On March first, 1910, I heard of Dr. Klopsch’s death. I put away all work that day. He was my best friend! My truest friend! The friend on whom I relied for advice or help in every emergency. I think there were few that knew Dr. Klopsch. He was a man of the widest charity, if you take that word in its noblest sense. And my heart ached for Mrs. Klopsch, whom I love with a strong and true affection, for I knew the lonely suffering she was passing through.
On March, the twelfth, I began “Sheila Vedder.” It was really a continuation of “Jan Vedder’s Wife.” I wrote it at the request of Mrs. Frank Dodd, who said she wanted “to know something more about the Vedders.” The writing of this book was a great pleasure to me, therefore I know that it has given pleasure to others; for if the writer is not interested, the public will not be interested, that is sure.
On April, the sixteenth, I make the short pitiful note, and it brings tears to my eyes yet, “My sweet Alice’s birthday. I could not afford to give her any gift. I asked God to give it for me.”
I finished “Sheila Vedder” on August twenty-fourth, and began making notes for my Stuyvesant novel on August, the twenty-eighth. I was three months in getting the material I wanted, and in fixing it clearly in my mind, but I began this book on the fifteenth of December.
This year, A.D. 1910, I was too poor to keep Christmas. I was not without money, but taxes, insurance, servants’ wages, and a ton of coal every six days, with food, clothing, doctors and medicines, took all the money I could make. And Christmas was not a necessity, though I had always thought it one, and had never missed keeping it for seventy-nine years.
While writing this Stuyvesant novel—which Dodd Mead called “A Maid of Old New York”—a name I do not like, my 465 own choice being “Peter Stuyvesant’s Ward,” I became persistently aware of a familiarity, that would not be dismissed; in fact I recognized in Theodore Roosevelt, a reincarnation of Peter Stuyvesant, Roosevelt having all the fiery radiations of Peter’s character, modified in some cases by the spirit of a more refined age, and intensified in others, by its wider knowledge.
I sent this book to Colonel Roosevelt myself and received the following reply to my letter:
November 8, 1911.
My dear Mrs. Barr:
Any book of yours I am sure to read. I look forward to reading the volume just sent me, which of course has a peculiar interest to me, as a descendant of some of old Peter Stuyvesant’s contemporaries. It would be a pleasure if I could see you some time.
With warm regards, and all good wishes and thanks, I am
Sincerely yours,
Theodore Roosevelt.
The thing that delights me in this pleasant note, is that all the kind words, good wishes and thanks, are written by his own hand, interpolated as it were. I prize it very highly. I would not part with it for anything.
This March twenty-ninth was my eightieth birthday, and I had one hundred and thirty letters and cards full of good wishes, from men and women whom I have never seen, and who were scattered in many states and far distant places.
I finished the Stuyvesant novel on August, the first, 1911, and on September, the eighth, 1911, I began to write this story of my life, which is now drawing rapidly to its conclusion on October twenty-eighth, A.D. 1912.
It has been a grand lesson to me. I have recalled all God’s goodness, remembered all His mercies, lived over again the years in which I have seen so much sorrow and labor, and I say gratefully, yes, joyfully, they were all good days, for always God has been what He promised me—“Sufficient!”
CHAPTER XXVI
THE VERDICT OF LIFE
“Lord, mend, or make us—one creation
Will not suffice our turn;
Except Thou make us daily, we shall spurn
Our own salvation.”
Old age is the verdict of life. I am now an old woman. Many people tell me so, and there is the indisputable evidence of my eighty-second birthday, the twenty-ninth of next March. But truly I am unconscious of being old. My life here is so simple, that I have never as yet met either business or social demands I was not able to fulfil without any sense of effort. My day’s work is as long as it was twenty years ago, and I have quite as much pleasure in it now, as I had then. I have rarely a headache now. I was rarely without one then. I enjoy my food, especially my breakfast, and the eminent physician Brudenel of London told me that an enjoyment of breakfast was an excellent sign of general well being. I sleep seven hours every night, neither more nor less, except under some unusual circumstances; but I never fail to be ten hours in the restful and recuperative freedom of the night’s silence and darkness. I have made my living for forty-two years in a stooping posture, but I am yet perfectly erect, and I ascend the stairs as rapidly as I ever did. I am more free from pain than I have been for many years. A touch now and then of rheumatism reminds me that I am a subject to mortality, and a gray hair here and there foretells the hand that shall finally prevail. But life is still sweet and busy, and my children talk of what I am going to do in the future, as if I was immortal. Also my long true friends on the daily press do the same thing. They tell of what I am writing or planning to write, far more than of what 467 I have done in the past. And I hope and pray, when the Master comes, He will find me at my desk, writing such words as it will please Him to see. For to literature, humanly speaking, I am indebted not only for my living, but also for every blessing I enjoy—health of body, activity of mind, cheerfulness, contentment, and continual employment, therefore continual happiness.
Happiness? Yes, I will certainly let the word stand. My old age is very like this fine October day; calm, restful and fair in its own beauty. Indeed both in body and mind,
“I have put on an Autumn glow,
A richer red after the rainy weather,
I mourn not for the Spring, for the lost long ago,
But clothe my cliffs with purple-honeyed heather.”
I feel strongly that these last years of life must not be a time of repose, but rather a time of beginning again; of learning afresh how best to make ready for the new world before me. I wish to master the fine art of dying well, as great a lesson as the fine art of living, about which every one is so busy; for I want to take into the Great Unknown before me, a supple, joyous spirit ready for it.
Eighty-two years ago I was not. Then I was. I have had my day. I have warmed both hands at the fire of life. I have drank every cup, joyful or sorrowful, life could give me; but neither my soul nor my heart is old. Time has laid his hand gently on me, just as a harper lays his open palm upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations—that is all. The sunrise has never yet melted for me into the light of common day. The air, far from being emptied of wonder, is thrilled with its new travelers for peace and war. Still I can listen to Greene and Putnam, and Sam Houston, shouting in the trenches of freedom, and hear the palaces of tyrants crumbling, and see the dungeons of cruelty flame to heaven. Nobody has watched the daily papers of the last few months with more eager and passionate interest than I have done. I have followed the great colonel with all my youthful enthusiasms, and listened at the street corners to the noble band of women pleading for their just rights. Such a pitiful sight! How can the noble American male bear to see it? Why 468 does he not stand up in her place, and speak for her. Any decent Christian will speak for a dumb man, and women have been dumb for unknown centuries. They are only learning now to talk, only learning to ask for what they want.
“Then I am for Women’s Suffrage?” I am for the enfranchisement of every slave. I am for justice, even to women. Any one who lived in England during the early half of the nineteenth century would be a suffragist; for then the most highly cultured wife was constantly treated by her husband, as Tennyson says, “Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.”
Men ought to remember that they have had a mother, as well as a father, and that in most cases she has been, in every way, the better parent of the two. All my life long I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man’s work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others. If it was not for the constant inflowing of God into human affairs, the condition of women would today have been almost as insufferable, as was the condition of the negro in 1860. However, the movement for the enfranchisement of women will go forward, and not backward, and I have not one fear as to the consequences it will bring about.
I have lived, I have loved, I have worked, and at eighty-two I only ask that the love and the work continue while I live. What I must do, I will love to do. It is a noble chemistry, that turns necessity into pleasure. About my daily life I have been as frank and truthful as it was possible to be; but I have not found the opportunity of saying anything about my dream life. Yet how poor my daily life would have been without it. All day long we are in the world, and occupied with its material things, but the night celebrates the resurrection of the soul. Then, while the body lies dormant and incapable of motion, the soul is free to wander far off, and to meddle with events that the body is 469 unconscious of. What is the lesson we learn night after night from this condition? It proves to us the separate existence of the soul. We are asleep one-third of our life. Is the soul as inert and dead as the body appears to be?
No! No! Who has not suffered and rejoiced in dreams, with an intensity impossible to their waking hours? Who has not then striven with things impossible and accomplished them without any feeling of surprise? Ah, dreams reveal to us powers of the soul, which we shall never realize until this mortal puts on immortality!
The shadowy land of dreams rests upon the terra-firma of revelation, for the dream literature of the Bible comprises some of its most delightful and important passages. God did not the less fulfil all his promises to Jacob, because they were made in a dream; nay but in a second dream, he encourages Jacob, by reminding him of this first dream. All through the historical part of the Bible its dream world presses continually on its humanity; and the sublime beauty of the prophecies is nowhere more remarkable than in the dreams of these spiritual sentinels of the people. In all the realm of poetry, where can there be found anything to equal that dream of the millennium peace, which Zachariah saw—the angel standing among the myrtle trees, and the angelic horsemen walking to-and-fro in the happy earth reporting, “Behold all the earth sitteth still, and is at rest.” There is little need to speak of the dream life in the New Testament. Every one is familiar with it.
“God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not; in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon man in slumberings upon the bed.” This was Job’s testimony. Dare any one declare that God has ceased to speak to man? Every man and woman has exigencies and sorrows of which only God knows, and only God can counsel and comfort. I solemnly declare, that I have known this truth all my life long:
“Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest,
Cannot confound, nor doubt Him, nor deny;
Yea, with one voice, O World, though thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this, am I.”
There has always been a distinction between dreams and visions. Visions imply the agency of an angel. Christ did not dream of an angel comforting him in Gethsemane; “there appeared an angel unto Him from heaven strengthening him.” Visions are much rarer than dreams. I have had divine and prophesying dreams of many kinds, but never have had a vision. My spiritual ear was pre-attuned to heavenly voices, when I came into this reincarnation, but my sight has not yet been opened. Yet I am intensely sensitive to Spiritual Presence, and though I cannot discern it, it is as real to me as my own person. Never in all eternity can I forget the Angel Presence who came to me when I was a child twelve years old. I was praying with all my child heart, that God would love me, and teach me how to please Him, and suddenly, even as I prayed, there was some one there, and I heard a voice, clear and sweet, say to me, “Arise and shine, for thy light has come.” And I was so happy, I thought I was in heaven. If all the events I have written in this book should vanish from memory, this one would remain bright and imperishable, though the waves of centuries washed over it. Yet I did not see. I am not yet ready for vision. But it will come, for we have a natural body, and we have a spiritual body—not we are going to have—we already possess it, and as we develop our spiritual faculties, they will be ours.
No doctrine is taught more authoritatively and constantly in the Bible than that of Angel Ministry. Whenever we read of angels it is as helpers and comforters. They rejoice over our repentance, they minister continually to our sorrows. The broken in heart, the eyes washed and cleared by consecrating tears, the feet that have been to the border land, they know. However there never was in Christendom an age when there were so many creeds and so little faith. People are proud of being practical and material. They forget that our spiritual life is beyond all scientific laws, and rests entirely on one spiritual and miraculous book, and one spiritual and miraculous life.
On the twenty-third of September, that is about a month ago, a most interesting thing happened. I received by mail a newspaper in English, printed and published in the City of Jerusalem, Palestine; a large sheet of four pages, and the lower half 471 of every page was occupied by the article I had written for the American of New York, on the subject of spiritual revelations, and the sublime destiny of man through the means of reincarnations. It delighted me that this article should appear in a paper named The Truth and this especially, because the subject of reincarnation was well known in ancient Jerusalem; was indeed a recognized faith in all Judea in the time of Christ. With the exception of the class called Sadducees, the Jew believed in his own immortality. He knew that whatever had its beginning in time, must end in time; but he looked backward, as well as forward, to an eternity of God’s love. Solomon says for all his race, the indisputable words of faith found in Proverbs, 8:22-31.
What does reincarnation demand of us? Only that we should by a series of human lives, attain to the condition of celestial beings, worthy to be called the sons and daughters of The Most High. Some through love, obedience and self denial—which last is the highest form of soul culture—will reach this end sooner than others, but I believe all will eventually do so; for it is not the will of God that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance, and consequently to an era of effort, which will finally prevail.
Every new existence is paid for by the old age and death of a body worn out, which though it has perished, contained the indestructible seed out of which the new life has arisen. And why should we not come back as often as we are capable of acquiring fresh knowledge and experience? Do we carry away so much from one life, that there is nothing left to repay us for coming back?
A constant objection against reincarnation is the nearly universal absence of any recollection of a previous life. It is a great mercy that we do not remember. In some cases, memories might be so full of sin, error, and even crime, that the details carried forward, would fill the soul with despair at the outset.
Few indeed remember anything of the first two years of their present life, at seventy most people have forgotten nine out of ten incidents of their past days. They know that they are the result of all that they have come through, that their identity is the same with that of the infant, the schoolboy and girl, the 472 over-confident young man or woman, the wiser ones of middle life, and the tranquil saddened ones of old age, but their memory has only linked results, not incidents. They are the creation of their past, and the nature they have evolved, is its memory.
And if we could remember our former lives it would seriously hinder the present one. The soul knowing the significance of the trials reserved for it, would become hardened and careless, and perhaps paralyzed by the hopelessness of mastering them. The struggle must be free, voluntary, and safe from past influences. The field of combat must seem new. It would be bad for a soul to know it had failed before, much harder for it to pluck up its courage, and to try again; beside the backward-looking soul, would dwell in the past, instead of the present, and so miss the best uses of life.
Others object to reincarnation because they assert it is unjust for us to suffer in this life, for acts done in past ones and forgotten. But does the forgetting of any sinful act, absolve us from its consequences? Under this strange ethical law, a murderer might be hypnotized into forgetfulness, become unconscious of his crime, and absolved from all its moral and legal consequences. And there is this great alleviation, that even while suffering the effects of the sins of our past lives, the effect changes into a new cause, according to our attitude towards it. For by a courageous, patient fortitude in the bearing of our just punishment, we can “rise on the stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things.”
It is objected also, that reincarnation will separate us forever from those we loved in life. Nothing is further from the truth. Like every phenomenon in Nature, reincarnation proceeds under the law of cause and effect. We ourselves set up the causes which will affect our re-birth. These causes originate in the acts and feelings, which relate us to those with whom we have daily associations, and who are the objects of our thoughts and acts, whether of love or of hatred. We cannot set up causes which will bind our lives with people, whom we have never met; we are bound to those only, with whom we have been closely connected by bonds of love or of hatred.
Yes, hatred; for attraction and repulsion are but opposite poles of the same force, and are of equal strength. This fact explains the hatred that sometimes exists between parents and children, and other ties of close relationship. It also explains “the black sheep” in the family. It has been drawn thither by antecedent hatred, and has none of the family’s traditions, tastes or moralities. So powerful is this attraction, that it can draw souls to, or from existence. How often do husband and wife follow each other quickly to the grave! How often does the newborn babe pine away after its mother’s death, and the nurses declare she is “drawing it to her.” The association of a family is likely to continue as long as there is any attraction or repulsion between the souls that composed it, and is a far wiser provision for human happiness, than the mere ties of fleshly relationship; for soul attraction brings to each soul its own, and we daily see its superior power evinced in this life. The youth leaves father and mother for the wife of his choice; the girl leaves her family, and her home, and goes happily far away, with some stranger whom her soul loves.
We may also claim for reincarnation, the great law which causes all things in Nature, to take the path of least resistance. Every soul will be actuated in a greater or less degree by this law, and the path of least resistance would naturally be towards its own kindred. I have my pedigree to five generations before the Conquest, and I feel as if I had always incarnated among my kindred, scattered through the beautiful Valley of the Duddon, and the mountains of the western part of the Lake Country. This is the corner of England I love the best. I feel it is my home country. I am a daughter of its soil, and may have been so for a thousand years.
The doctrine of inherited sin and its consequences unto the third and fourth generation, is a hard lesson to learn; but no one can complain if the disposition and endowments which he has inherited from his former self, are the source of his troubles and punishments. We reap what we sow. The seeds of sin and sorrow spring from some old sowing of our own. There is no use to blame Adam and Eve. We alone are responsible, and the character with which we leave this life, is inevitably the one 474 with which we shall begin a new life. We can only begin with what we have.
“The tissue of the life to be,
We weave with colors all our own;
And in the field of Destiny,
We reap as we have sown.”
I have now named the principal objections to reincarnation, let me speak of its great hope and blessing. It is this—we can always remedy the errors of the past. We can say, this evil is of my making, I can therefore unmake it. This hatred sprang from my injustice. It shall not trouble my next life. I will put the wrong right while it is called to-day. In this way, we can truly bury the evil past.
I have heard from believers in reincarnation some remarkable reminiscences, but in all of the flashes of past existence that have come to me, my chief interest appears to be in household matters, except in one sharp vision, when I was a man, and the captain of a great ship. This ship was quite familiar to me, and here I mark an interesting thing. I have written in a number of romances, scenes which were on ships, and on the sea. I never studied anything about ships, or nautical terms. When I was writing the proper words came without effort. Yet Captain Young of the Devonia and the City of Rome told me, that there was not a nautical error in them. This can only be accounted for, as a sub-conscious remembrance of what I learned in this incarnation, when I sailed the sea. Socrates declared that “all that we called learning, was recollection.”
My last recollection of this life is a vivid and terrible one. It comes always in a swift flash of consciousness, with every detail clear as noonday. I find myself on the ship standing by the main mast. We are in the midst of a mighty typhoon. The skies are riven with lightning. Black clouds are tossed upon an horizon, where there is a pale livid glow. The waves thunder, and there is a roaring howl of wind in my ears. The sailors are lying face downward on the deck. I alone stand upright. There is nothing more. I do not see the death of the ship, but I know that she went to the bottom with every soul on her.
With this exception any fleeting vision I have had from the past refers to household matters, and ordinary events. The image of one man is the most persistent. He always flings the door open violently, looks steadily at me, and appears to be approaching my chair. Then I tremble and turn sick, and the whole vanishes; but I know the man was once my husband. I know it because I fear him so much. That was a common attitude of English wives in the past centuries, and was far from being extinct at the beginning of this century.
I will not here speak of the teachers of reincarnation. They comprise the greatest men of every epoch. It will be enough to name some of our own day whom all remember. Among the clergy Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks dared to preach it. James Freeman Clarke warmly espoused its justice and its hope. Professor William Knight, the Scotch metaphysician of St. Andrew, and Professor Francis Brown of Harvard University, clearly show their belief in our pre-existence. Orlando Smith in his wonderful book called “Eternalism” advances arguments impossible to answer, in favor of the soul’s existence from all eternity; and Dr. Edward Beecher in his works called “The Conflict of Ages” and “The Concord of Ages” casts the seed of our pre-existence through a large portion of the clergy, and of the thoughtful readers of this country. I have two beautiful letters on this subject from the Reverend Charles Beecher, one of which I transcribe.
Wysox, PA.
February 6, 1891.Mrs. Amelia Barr:
Dear Madam:
I have been a diligent reader of your works, reading them aloud to my family, which is our custom.
I have noticed in several of them intimations of a belief in a former life before this pilgrimage of earth life. Such ideas have ever possessed a peculiar charm for me, and I have wondered that they have not often been used in fiction.
In some of the Erkmann-Chatrian novels there are indications of it; also in the writings of Lucy Larcom, and some others. 476 In the hymns of the common people, such allusions are very frequent, and often very beautiful.
It is not merely a poetical fancy, the idea that we have seen better days, and that heaven is fatherland and home—though it is poetical, the very heart and soul of all poetry—but it is more than a fancy or dream; it is a grand and glorious truth, and lights up the Valley of the Shadow, through which we are all passing.
I thank God for the work he is enabling you to do. May it long continue.
Sincerely your friend,
Charles Beecher.
Reincarnation is like the message of the stars, there is no speech or language where its voice is not heard. There is indeed at the present time an universal, though unsuspected, prevalence of this ancient knowledge; shed by flower-like souls of all past ages, and blossoming again firmly and finely in all our poetry, fiction, religious and philosophical writings. It has taken possession of men’s most secret thoughts, for it has its own way of convincing them. It is a good sign. For heaven no longer allures and hell no longer terrifies; but if a man can be persuaded that he has a soul, and that he must save his soul alive, because it is possible to lose it, he is brought face to face with a reality he cannot ignore. I have talked with a very large number of young men on this subject, and in every case, their souls rose up courageously to meet its obligations.
“It will be a fight to your last day,” I tell them, “but be men, and fight for your soul’s life. For Christ says it can be lost, even while you go to church every Sunday morning, and are diligent in business all the week. It can be lost. If you should lose your money, what a lamentation there would be; but a soul can be lost without noise, without observation.” What reincarnation has to say on this subject, I do not fully accept. My early Methodism clings to me, and I believe firmly that God is not willing, that any soul should be lost, but that all should find the safety of his Great Father Love.
The future is not a torture chamber nor a condemned cell nor a reformatory. Even if we do make our bed in hell, God is 477 there, and light, and truth, and love are there; and effort shall follow effort, and goal succeed goal, until we reach the colossal wisdom and goodness of spiritual beings. “Yet,” and reincarnation has a yet, though many like myself are loth to entertain it; but this “yet” is better expressed in the following verses than I can frame it. No one can be the worse for considering the possibility they infer:
“If thou art base and earthly, then despair;
Thou art but mortal, as the brute that falls.
Birds weave their nests, the lion finds a lair,
Man builds his halls,
“These are but coverts from earth’s war and storm;
Homes where our lesser lives take shape and breath.
But if no heavenly man has grown, what form
Clothes thee at death?
“And when thy meed of penalty is o’er
And fire has burned the dross where gold is none,
Shall separate life but wasted heretofore,
Still linger on?
“God fills all space—whatever doth offend
From His unbounded Presence shall be spurned;
Or deem’st thou, He should garner tares, whose end
Is to be burned.
“If thou wouldst see the Power that round thee sways,
In whom all motion, thought, and life are cast,
Know that the pure who travel heavenward ways,
See God at last.”
Further I press upon the young, not to be ashamed of their disposition to be sentimental or religious. It is the sentimental young men who conquer; it is the men steeped in religious thought and aspiration, who do things. Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural. But science is the magical word of the day, and scientists too often profess to doubt, whether we have a soul for one life, not to speak of a multitude of lives. “There is no proof!” they cry. “No proof! No proof of the soul’s existence.” 478 Neither is there any proof of the existence of the mind. But the mind bores tunnels, and builds bridges and conceived aviation. And the soul can re-create a creature of clay, and of the most animal instincts, until he reaches the colossal manhood of a Son of God. Religion is life, not science.
It is now the twenty-seventh of October, 1912, and a calm, lovely Sabbath. I have been quite alone for three weeks, and have finished this record in unbroken solitude and peace. Mary is in Florida, and Alice is in New York with her sister Lilly. Sitting still in the long autumn evenings, I have drawn the past from the eternity into which it had fallen, to look at it again, and to talk to myself very intimately about it; and I confess, that though it is the nature of the soul to adore what it has lost, that I prefer what I possess. Though youth and beauty have departed, the well springs of love and imagination are, in my nature, too deep to be touched by the frost of age. Nourished by the dews of the heart and the intellect they will grow sweeter and deeper and more refreshing to the end of my life; for the things of the soul and the heart are eternal.
I have lived among “things unseen” as well as seen, always nursing in my heart that sweet promise of the times of restitution. Neither is the fire of youth dead, it glows within, rather than flames without—that is all. And there is a freshness, all its own, reserved for the aged who have come uphill all the way, and at last found the clearer air, and serener solitudes of those heights, beyond the fret and stir of the restless earth.
I have told my story just as I lived it; told it with the utmost candor and truthfulness. I have exaggerated nothing, far from it. This is especially true as regards all spiritual experiences. I hold them far too sacred to be added to, or taken from. My life has been a drama of sorrow and loss, of change and labor, but God wrote it, and I would not change anything He ordained.
“I would not miss one sigh or tear,
Heart pang, or throbbing brow.
Sweet was the chastisement severe,
And sweet its memory now.”
For as my day, so has my strength been; not once, but always. There was an hour, forty-five years ago, when all the waves and billows of the sea of sorrow went over my head. Then He said to me, “Am I not sufficient?” And I answered, “Yes, Lord.” Has He failed me ever since? Not once. Always, the power, has come with the need.
Farewell, my friends! You that will follow me through the travail and labor of eighty years, farewell! I shall see very few of you face to face in this life, but somewhere—perhaps—somewhere, we may meet and know each other on sight. And if you find in these red leaves of a human heart, a word of strength, or hope, or comfort, that is my great reward. Again farewell! Be of good cheer. Fear not. (2 Esdras, 6:33.) There is hope and promise in the years to come.
I will now let the curtain fall over my past, with a grateful acknowledgment that every sorrow has found its place in my life, and I should have been a loser without it. Even chance acquaintances have had their meaning, and done their work, and the web of life could not have been better woven of love alone.
God has not spoken His last word to me, though I am nearly eighty-one years old. When I have rested my eyes, I am ready for the work, ready for me. And I do not feel it too late, to offer daily the great prayer of Moses for consolation, “Comfort us again, for the years wherein we have seen evil.” As for the cares and exigencies of daily life, I commit them to Him, who has never yet failed me, and
“If I should let all other comfort go,
And every other promise be forgot,
My soul would sit and sing, because I know
He faileth not!
“He faileth not! What winds of God may blow,
What safe or perilous ways may be my lot,
Gives but little care; for this I know,
He faileth not!”
Sustained by this confidence, I can face without fear the limitations of age, and the transition we call death. I have love and friendship around me; I give help and sympathy whenever I can, and I do my day’s work gladly. The rest is with God.