“Mrs. Cummings says we should not like America; ‘it is a country utterly without perspective; one must go up to the Indians and the Jesuit missionaries for that.’ She has been describing Miss Louisa Alcott,[539] the well-known authoress. ‘She lived with her old father and her beautiful mother and her three sisters. They used to write little stories. One day her sisters said, “Louisa, you must write something more than these.”—“I would, but I can’t do it here,” she answered. So the sisters clubbed their little savings together, and they sold a few things, and Louisa went to Boston. There she called upon Roberts, the publisher of all American good things, and said, “I want to write a story.”—“Very well,” he answered; “what kind will you take?”—“Oh, I can’t make up anything,” said Louisa; “I can only just write what I know.”—“Oh, you can just write what you know,” said Roberts; “then don’t stay talking here; go away at once and begin.” So she went and lived by herself and wrote, and in five weeks she brought him her “Little Women.” He took it and said, “Come again to-morrow.” And when she went next day he said, “Well, I will take your story, and I will offer you one of two things; either you can take two hundred dollars down for it, or you can take your chance.”—“But what would you do if you were me?” asked Miss Alcott. Roberts said he had never been placed in such an awkward predicament in his life, but he spoke the truth and said, “I would take my chance.” She did, and soon after he had to pay her 10,000 dollars.[540] She wrote “Little Men” afterwards, but it did not answer as well; boys do not take books to their pillows as girls do.’
“‘I love crying,’ said Mrs. Cummings, ‘but then I must have somebody to cry to. I cried as a little girl because I thought my mother might die, but I cried most because I thought that then I should have no one to cry to.’ Miss Alcott said to her, ‘My dear, I shouldn’t mind dying if it wasn’t for the funeral.’
“‘Mr. Tennyson was very rude and coarse,’ said Mrs. Cummings, ‘but he died well—reading his little book in the moonlight: he really couldn’t have done it better.’
“‘Louisa Payson, who wrote “The Pastor’s Daughter” and many other books,[541] would not say “thank you” when she was a little girl. Her father, the stern minister, punished her in various ways, but it was no good—she said she couldn’t. So at last, at five years old, he turned her out of doors late on a winter’s evening. He went to his affairs, forgot her, I suppose; but her mother was in an agony, and she prayed for her child with all the spirit that was in her. At last she could bear it no longer, and she opened the door a little way, and then she heard a little wail of “I can’t say thank you: I can’t say thank you.” What was the end I do not know, but at any rate Louisa did not die, and lived to write books.’
“These are some snatches from the Holmhurst tea-table.”
To Herbert Vaughan.
“Kingston Vicarage, Wareham, Nov. 10.—You would have liked going with us to Wool, on a ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ pilgrimage, for there, rising by the reedy river-side, is the old gabled house to which Tess was taken after her marriage. It is exactly as Hardy describes it;[542] even the plank bridge remains across which Angel carried her in his sleep to the stone coffin at Bindon Abbey. The two old pictures mentioned in the book really hang at the top of the staircase, and the lady in one of them is supposed to blow out the candle of any one who ventures up the stairs after midnight. The whole country-side is full of memories of the D’Urbervilles, and there are many still living who depose to having met their phantom coach and four with outriders. The family still exists at Kingston as—Tollerfield!
“We had an awful storm last night, but such hurricanes are the fashion in Purbeck. A Mr. Bellasye, returning home, met, not his bathing-machine, but his bathing-house coming to meet him across the hedges and ditches. Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth had a huge hole blown into their roof by one gust; but that did not much signify, as the next gust blew a haystack on to the roof and filled the hole up. All the cabbages and other vegetables in the kitchen-garden are frequently blown out of the earth and into a heap in a corner, and on one occasion those in the rectory-garden were all blown into the church porch.”