AUGUST 27, 1840
In the month of August, 1840, the twenty-seventh day, to be exact, I was still at the “old H——n Place” with my grandparents. “Just before bedtime” of the night of that day my grandmother called the attention of the household to the mournful and unusual howls of the little house dog that was sitting in the front yard with his nose pointed straight up, crying most piteously.
The incident connected with that sad sound was destined to affect me so nearly that I have never lost it, and can hear it to-day as clearly as I heard it fifty-four years ago. In about three weeks after the demonstration by the little dog, the news arrived that my father, Lorenzo Dow Hawkins, to whom I was passionately attached, had died at St. Louis, Mo., late in the afternoon of August 27th. My kind-hearted old grandmother looked down tenderly upon me, and said, “I knew something dreadful had happened. Poor child, you will never see your father again!”
In 1854 I visited St. Louis and saw Dr. Simmons, who had attended my father during his last illness, and he remembered his death having occurred in the afternoon, probably, between five and six o’clock. The difference in time between Vermont and Missouri, would make the moment of his death late in the afternoon at one place and between eight and nine at the other.
Since writing this account, a doubt has arisen in my mind in relation to the time when the two important incidents occurred. I am not quite certain that the death of my father and the howling of the dog took place at the same moment. I do remember, however, that both incidents occurred about the same time, and I have a vague recollection of having heard my grandmother say, that the unusual and peculiar howl meant a death in the family. And when the news of my father’s decease arrived she expressed her belief in the certain connection between the two incidents.