It is a parody on old Grimes is dead, which is in our reader, only that is a very long poem. I am not going to show mine to Grandfather till he gets over feeling bad about the horse.
Sunday.—Grandmother gave Anna, Doddridge’s “Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul” to read to-day. Anna says she thinks she will have to rise and progress a good deal before she will be able to appreciate it. Baxter’s “Saints Rest” would probably suit her better.
Sunday, April 5.—An agent for the American Board of Foreign Missions preached this morning in our church from Romans 10: 15: “How shall they hear without a preacher and how shall they preach except they be sent.” An agent from every society presents the cause, whatever it is, once a year and some people think the anniversary comes around very often. I always think of Mrs. George Wilson’s poem on “A apele for air, pewer air, certin proper for the pews, which, she sez, is scarce as piety, or bank bills when ajents beg for mischuns, wich sum say is purty often, (taint nothin’ to me, wat I give aint nothin’ to nobody).” I think that is about the best poem of its kind I ever read.
Miss Lizzie Bull told us in Sunday School to-day that she cannot be our Sunday School teacher any more, as she and her sister Mary are going to join the Episcopal Church. We hate to have her go, but what can’t be cured must be endured. Part of our class are going into Miss Mary Howell’s class and part into Miss Annie Pierce’s. They are both splendid teachers and Miss Lizzie Bull is another. We had preaching in our church this afternoon, too. Rev. Samuel Hanson Cox, of Le Roy Female Seminary, preached. He is a great man, very large, long white hair combed back. I think if a person once saw him they would never forget him. He preached about Melchisidek, who had neither “beginning of days or end of life.” Some people thought that was like his sermon, for it was more than one hour long. Dr. Cox and Mrs. Taylor came to call and asked Grandfather to let me go to Le Roy Female Seminary, but Grandfather likes Ontario Female Seminary better than any other in the world. We wanted Grandmother to have her picture taken, but she did not feel able to go to Mr. Finley’s, so he came up Tuesday and took it in our dining-room. She had her best cap on and her black silk dress and sat in her high back rocking chair in her usual corner near the window. He brought one up to show us and we like it so much. Anna looked at it and kissed it and said, “Grandmother, I think you are perfectly beautiful.” She smiled and very modestly put her handkerchief up to her face and said, “You foolish child,” but I am sure she was pleased, for how could she help it? A man came up to the open window one day where she was sitting, with something to sell, and while she was talking to him he said, “You must have been handsome, lady, when you were young.” Grandmother said it was because he wanted to sell his wares, but we thought he knew it was so. We told her she couldn’t get around it that way and we asked Grandfather and he said it was true. Our Sunday School class went to Mr. Finley’s to-day and had a group ambrotype taken for our teacher, Miss Annie Pierce; Susie Daggett, Clara Willson, Sarah Whitney, Mary Field and myself. Mary Wheeler ought to have been in it, too, but we couldn’t get her to come. We had very good success.
Thursday.—We gave the ambrotype to Miss Pierce and she liked it very much and so does her mother and Fannie. Her mother is lame and cannot go anywhere so we often go to see her and she is always glad to see us and so pleasant.
May 9.—Miss Lizzie Bull came for me to go botanising with her this morning and we were gone from 9 till 12, and went clear up to the orphan asylum. I am afraid I am not a born botanist, for all the time she was analysing the flowers and telling me about the corona and the corolla and the calyx and the stamens and petals and pistils, I was thinking what beautiful hands she had and how dainty they looked, pulling the blossoms all to pieces. I am afraid I am commonplace, like the man we read of in English literature, who said “a primrose by the river brim, a yellow primrose, was to him, and it was nothing more.”
Mr. William Wood came to call this afternoon and gave us some morning-glory seeds to sow and told us to write down in our journals that he did so. So here it is. What a funny old man he is. Anna and Emma Wheeler went to Hiram Tousley’s funeral to-day. She has just written in her journal that Hiram’s corpse was very perfect of him and that Fannie looked very pretty in black. She also added that after the funeral Grandfather took Aunt Ann and Lucilla out to ride to Mr. Howe’s and just as they got there it sprinkled. She says she don’t know “weather” they got wet or not. She went to a picnic at Sucker Brook yesterday afternoon, and this is the way she described it in her journal. “Miss Hurlburt told us all to wear rubbers and shawls and bring some cake and we would have a picnic. We had a very warm time. It was very warm indeed and I was most roasted and we were all very thirsty indeed. We had in all the party about 40 of us. It was very pleasant and I enjoyed myself exceedingly. We had boiled eggs, pickles, Dutch cheese and sage cheese and loaf cake and raisin cake, pound cake, dried beef and capers, jam and tea cakes and gingerbread, and we tried to catch some fish but we couldn’t, and in all we had a very nice time. I forgot to say that I picked some flowers for my teacher. I went to bed tired out and worn out.”
Her next entry was the following day when she and the other scholars dressed up to “speak pieces.” She says, “After dinner I went and put on my rope petticoat and lace one over it and my barège de laine dress and all my rings and white bask and breastpin and worked handkerchief and spoke my piece. It was, ‘When I look up to yonder sky.’ It is very pretty indeed and most all the girls said I looked nice and said it nice. They were all dressed up, too.”
Thursday.—I asked Grandfather why we do not have gas in the house like almost every one else and he said because it was bad for the eyes and he liked candles and sperm oil better. We have the funniest little sperm oil lamp with a shade on to read by evenings and the fire on the hearth gives Grandfather and Grandmother all the light they want, for she knits in her corner and we read aloud to them if they want us to. I think if Grandfather is proud of anything besides being a Bostonian, it is that everything in the house is forty years old. The shovel and tongs and andirons and fender and the haircloth sofa and the haircloth rocking chair and the flag bottomed chairs painted dark green and the two old arm-chairs which belong to them and no one else ever thinks of touching. There is a wooden partition between the dining-room and parlor and they say it can slide right up out of sight on pulleys, so that it would be all one room. We have often said that we wished we could see it go up but they say it has never been up since the day our mother was married and as she is dead I suppose it would make them feel bad, so we probably will always have it down. There are no curtains or even shades at the windows, because Grandfather says, “light is sweet and a pleasant thing it is to behold the sun.” The piano is in the parlor and it is the same one that our mother had when she was a little girl but we like it all the better for that. There are four large oil paintings on the parlor wall, De Witt Clinton, Rev. Mr. Dwight, Uncle Henry Channing Beals and Aunt Lucilla Bates, and no matter where we sit in the room they are watching and their eyes seem to move whenever we do. There is quite a handsome lamp on a mahogany center table, but I never saw it lighted. We have four sperm candles in four silver candlesticks and when we have company we light them. Johnnie Thompson, son of the minister, Rev. M. L. R. P., has come to the academy to school and he is very full of fun and got acquainted with all the girls very quick. He told us this afternoon to have “the other candle lit” for he was coming down to see us this evening. Will Schley heard him say it and he said he was coming too. His mother says she always knows when he has been at our house, because she finds sperm on his clothes and has to take brown paper and a hot flatiron to get it out, but still I do not think that Mrs. Schley cares, for she is a very nice lady and she and I are great friends. I presume she would just as soon he would spend part of his time with us as to be with Horace Finley all the time. Those boys are just like twins. We never see one without being sure that the other is not far away.
Later.—The boys came and we had a very pleasant evening but when the 9 o’clock bell rang we heard Grandfather winding up the clock and scraping up the ashes on the hearth to cover the fire so it would last till morning and we all understood the signal and they bade us good-night. “We won’t go home till morning” is a song that will never be sung in this house.