But a living for two must be provided. They went southward into Ohio, where they spent a month with Angeline’s Aunt Achsah Taylor, her mother’s sister. You may be sure they earned their board, Angeline in the house and Asaph in the hayfield. Uncle Taylor was a queer old fellow, shedding tears when his hay got wet, and going off to the hotel for dinner when his wife happened to give him the wrong end of a fish.
August 6, 1856, they arrived at Shalersville, Ohio, where they had engaged to teach at the Shalersville Institute. Here they remained till about May 1 of the next year, when Angeline returned to Rodman with funds enough to pay with interest the money borrowed from her cousin Joseph Downs; and Asaph proceeded to Cambridge, Mass., where the director of the Harvard Observatory was in need of an assistant.
Let it not be inferred that teaching at Shalersville was financially profitable. Asaph Hall concluded that he preferred carpentry. And yet, in the best sense they were most successful—things went smoothly—their pupils, some of them school teachers, were apt—and they were well liked by the people of Shalersville. Indeed, to induce them to keep school the last term the townspeople presented them with a purse of sixty dollars to eke out their income. Asaph Hall turned his mechanical skill to use by making a prism, a three-sided receptacle of glass filled with water. Saturdays he held a sort of smoke-talk for the boys—the smoke feature absent—and at least one country boy was inspired to step up higher. The lad became a civil engineer.
The little wife was proud of her manly husband, as the following passage from a letter to her sister Ruth shows:
He is real good, and we are very happy. He is a real noble, true man besides being an extra scholar, so you must never be concerned about my not being happy with him. He will take just the best care of me that he possibly can.
It appears also that she was converting her husband to the profession of religion. Before he left Ohio he actually united with the Campbellites, and was baptized. In the letter just quoted Angeline says:
We have been reading some of the strongest arguments against the Christian religion, also several authors who support religion, and he has come to the conclusion that all the argument is on the side of Christianity.
She looked after his physical welfare, also. When he was threatened with a severe fever, she wrapped him up in hot, wet blankets, and succeeded in throwing the poison off through the pores of the skin. So they cherished each other in sickness and in health.
Angeline’s cousin Mary Gilman, once a student at McGrawville, came to Shalersville seeking to enlarge the curriculum of the institute with a course in fine arts. She hindered more than she helped, and in January went away—but not till she had taught Angeline to paint in oil.
The old home ties were weakening. News came of the death of Joseph Downs, and Angeline wrote to her aunt, his mother: