At the close of the Civil War she even undertook to redeem two fallen Irish women by taking them into her house to work. But their appetite for whiskey was too strong, and they would steal butter, barter it for liquor, and come home drunk. On one occasion one of these women took little Asaph along to visit the saloon; and there his mother found him, with the servant standing by joking with rough men, her dress in shreds.
Mrs. Hall had no time or strength for such charitable enterprises, and soon abandoned them. She was saved from most of the follies of philanthropy by the good sense of her husband, whom she rewarded with the devotion of a faithful wife. His studies and researches, almost from the first, were much too deep for her entire comprehension, but she was always enthusiastic about his work. In the introduction to his “Observations and Orbits of the Satellites of Mars,” Professor Hall chivalrously says:
In the spring of 1877, the approaching favorable opposition of the planet Mars attracted my attention, and the idea occurred to me of making a careful search with our large Clark refractor for a satellite of this planet. An examination of the literature of the planet showed, however, such a mass of observations of various kinds, made by the most experienced and skillful astronomers that the chance of finding a satellite appeared to be very slight, so that I might have abandoned the search had it not been for the encouragement of my wife.
In fact, Mrs. Hall was full of enthusiasm. Each night she sent her husband to the observatory supplied with a nourishing lunch, and each night she awaited developments with eager interest. I can well remember the excitement at home. There was a great secret in the house, and all the members of the family were drawn more closely together by mutual confidence.
The moral and intellectual training of her sons has already been referred to. Summer vacations were often spent with her sisters in Rodman, N.Y. Her mother, who reached the age of eighty years, died in the summer of 1878, when Mrs. Hall became the head of the Stickney family. Her sisters Mary and Elmina were childless. Ruth had six children, in whose welfare their Aunt Angeline took a lively interest. The three girls each spent a winter with her in Washington, and when, in the summer of 1881, Nellie was seized with a fatal illness, Aunt Angeline was present to care for her. Now and then Charlotte Ingalls, who had prospered in Wisconsin, would come on from the West, and the Stickney sisters would all be together. The last reunion occurred in the summer of 1891, a year previous to Angeline’s death. It was a goodly sight to see the sisters in one wagon, near the old home place; and when, at Elmina’s house, Angeline was bustling about attending to the needs of the united family, it was good to hear Charlotte exclaim, “Take care, old lady!” She was thirteen years older than Angeline, and seemed almost to belong to an earlier generation. She remembered her father well, and had no doubt acquired from him some of the ancient New Hampshire customs lost to her younger sisters. Certainly her exclamations of “Fiddlesticks,” and “Witch-cats,” were quaint and picturesque.
But it was Angeline who was really best versed in the family history. She had made a study of it, in all its branches, and could trace her descent from at least eleven worthy Englishmen, most of whom arrived in New England before 1650. She made excursions to various points in New England in search of relatives. At Belchertown, Mass., in 1884, she found her grandfather Cook’s first cousin, Mr. Thomas Sabin. He was then one hundred years old, and remembered how in boyhood he used to go skating with Elisha Cook.
How brief the history of America in the presence of such a man! I remember seeing an old New Englander, as late as 1900, who as a boy of eleven years had seen General Lafayette. It was a treat to hear him describe the courteous Frenchman, slight of stature, bent with age, but active and polite enough to alight from the stage-coach to shake hands with the people assembled to welcome him in the little village of Charlton, Mass.
Mrs. Hall had no time for travel. At the close of life she longed to visit Europe, but death intervened, and her days were spent in her native country. She passed two summers in the mountains of Virginia. In 1878, with her little son Percival, she accompanied her husband to Colorado, to observe the total eclipse of the sun. Three years before they had taken the whole family to visit her sister Charlotte’s people in Wisconsin.
It was through her family loyalty that she acquired the Adirondack habit. In the summer of 1882, after the severe sickness of the preceding winter, she was staying with a cousin’s son, a country doctor, in Washington County, N.Y. He proposed an outing in the invigorating air of the Adirondacks. And so, with her three youngest sons and the doctor’s family, she drove to Indian Lake, and camped there about a week. Her improvement was so marked that the next summer, accompanied by three sons and her sister Ruth, she drove into the wilderness from the West, camping a few days in a log cabin by the side of Piseco Lake. In 1885, setting out from Rodman again, she drove four hundred miles, passing north of the mountains to Paul Smith’s, and thence to Saranac Lake village, John Brown’s farm, Keene Valley, and Lake George, and returning by way of the Mohawk Valley. In 1888 she camped with the three youngest sons on Lower Saranac, and in 1890 she spent July and August at the summer school of Thomas Davidson, on the side of Mt. Hurricane. One day I escorted her and her friend Miss Sarah Waitt to the top of the mountain, four or five miles distant, and we spent the night on the summit before a blazing camp-fire. Two years later she was planning another Adirondack trip when death overtook her—at the house of her friend Mrs. Berrien, at North Andover, Mass., July 3, 1892.
Her poem “Heracles,” written towards the close of her career, fittingly describes her own herculean labors: