Mother went about all these duties with cheerfulness and alacrity. She more than kept up her end of the farm work. She was more strenuous than father. How many hours she sat up mending and patching our clothes, while we were sleeping! Rainy days meant no let-up in her work, as they did in Father's.
The first suit of clothes I remember having, she cut and made. Then the quilts and coverlids she pieced and quilted! We used, too, in my boyhood to make over two tons of butter annually, the care of which devolved mainly upon her, from the skimming of the pans to the packing of the butter in the tubs and firkins, though the churning was commonly done by a sheep or a dog. We made our own cheese, also. As a boy I used to help do the wheying, and I took toll out of the sweet curd. One morning I ate so much of the curd that I was completely cloyed, and could eat none after that.
I can remember Mother's loom pounding away hour after hour in the chamber of an outbuilding where she was weaving a carpet, or cloth. I used to help do some of the quilling—running the yarn or linen thread upon spools to be used in the shuttles. The distaff, the quill-wheel, the spinning-wheel, the reel, were very familiar to me as a boy; so was the crackle, the swingle, the hetchel, for Father grew flax which Mother spun into thread and wove into cloth for our shirts and summer trousers, and for towels and sheets. Wearing those shirts, when new, made a boy's skin pretty red. I dare say they were quite equal to a hair shirt to do penance in; and wiping on a new home-made linen towel suggested wiping on a brier bush. Dear me! how long it has been since I have seen any tow, or heard a loom or a spinning-wheel, or seen a boy breaking in his new flax-made shirt! No one sees these things any more.
Mother had but little schooling; she learned to read, but not to write or cipher; hence, books and such interests took none of her time. She was one of those uneducated countrywomen of strong natural traits and wholesome instincts, devoted to her children; she bore ten, and nursed them all—an heroic worker, a helpful neighbor, and a provident housewife, with the virtues that belonged to so many farmers' wives in those days, and which we are all glad to be able to enumerate in our mothers.
She had not a large frame, but was stout; had brown hair and blue eyes, a fine strong brow, and a straight nose with a strong bridge to it. She was a woman of great emotional capacity, who felt more than she thought. She scolded a good deal, but was not especially quick-tempered. She was an Old-School Baptist, as was Father.
She was not of a vivacious or sunny disposition—always a little in shadow, as it seems to me now, given to brooding and to dwelling upon the more serious aspects of life. How little she knew of all that has been done and thought in the world! and yet the burden of it all was, in a way, laid upon her. The seriousness of Revolutionary times, out of which came her father and mother, was no doubt reflected in her own serious disposition. As I have said, her happiness was always shaded, never in a strong light; and the sadness which motherhood, and the care of a large family, and a yearning heart beget was upon her. I see myself in her perpetually. A longing which nothing can satisfy I share with her. Whatever is most valuable in my books comes from her—the background of feeling, of pity, of love comes from her.
She was of a very different temperament from Father—much more self-conscious, of a more breeding, inarticulate nature. She was richly endowed with all the womanly instincts and affections. She had a decided preference for Abigail and me among her children, wanted me to go to school, and was always interceding with Father to get me books. She never read one of my books. She died in 1880, at the age of seventy-three. I had published four of my books then.
She had had a stroke of apoplexy in the fall of 1879, but lived till December of the following year, dying on father's seventy-seventh birthday. (He lived four years more.) We could understand but little of what she said after she was taken ill. She used to repeat a line from an old hymn—"Only a veil between."
She thought a good deal of some verses I wrote—"My Brother's Farm"—and had them framed. (You have seen them in the parlor at the Old Home. I wrote them in Washington the fall that you were born. I was sick and forlorn at the time.)
I owe to Mother my temperament, my love of nature, my brooding, introspective habit of mind—all those things which in a literary man help to give atmosphere to his work. In her line were dreamers and fishermen and hunters. One of her uncles lived alone in a little house in the woods. His hut was doubtless the original Slabsides. Grandfather Kelly was a lover of solitude, as all dreamers are, and Mother's happiest days, I think, were those spent in the fields after berries. The Celtic element, which I get mostly from her side, has no doubt played an important part in my life. My idealism, my romantic tendencies, are largely her gift.