My Great-Grandmother
My great-grandmother was the widow of an Episcopal clergyman, the Rev. Titus Welton, whose son was the first rector of the village church. My only acquaintance with my great-grandfather was connected with the white headstone that bore his name in the graveyard. With the exception of a quaint water-color portrait in profile of my grandmother in a mob-cap bound with a black ribbon, which was equally a portrait of the flowered back of the rocking-chair in which she sat, she survives in my memory in a series of pictures. I see her sitting before the open fire, knitting, with one steel needle held in a knitting-sheath pinned to her left side, or taking snuff from a flat, round box that contained a vanilla bean to perfume the snuff. Her hands were twisted with rheumatism, and she walked with a cane. On one occasion I trotted by her side to church and carried her tin foot-stove, warm with glowing coals.
She slept in a high post bed in her particular room over the sitting-room, which was warmed in winter by a sheet-iron drum connected with the stove below, and in one corner was a copper warming-pan with a long handle. When I sat at table in my high-chair eating apple-pie in a bowl of milk, she sat on the side nearest the fire eating dipped toast with a two-tined fork. The fork may have had three tines, but silver forks had not yet made their appearance.
My great-grandmother lived just long enough to have her picture taken on a plate of silvered copper by the wonderful process of Daguerre,[29] a process so like something diabolical that she protected her soul from evil, as all sitters in that part of the country did, by resting her hand on a great Bible, the back turned to the front, so that the letters “Holy Bible” could be read, proving that the great book was not a profane dictionary. The operator who took her daguerreotype traveled from town to town, hiring a room in the village tavern furnished with a chair, a stand on tripod legs, a brown linen table-cloth, and the aforesaid Bible, and when such of the people as had the fee to spare, the courage to submit to a new-fangled idea, and no fear that the face on the magical plate would fade away like any other spirit face when they opened the stamped-leather case with the red plush lining after it had lain overnight in the darkened parlor, he moved on like the cracker baker or any other itinerant showman.
My great-grandmother had never sent or received a message by telegraph or ridden in a railway-carriage, and died in peace just before those portentous inventions came to destroy forever the small community life in which she had lived.