The next May the summer school opened, taught by Miss Susan Torrey. Again, I write the name reverently, as gracing one of the most perfect of personalities. I was not alone in my childish admiration, for her memory remained a living reality in the town long years after the gentle spirit fled. My sisters were both teaching other schools, and I must make my own way, which I did, walking a mile with my one precious little schoolmate, Nancy Fitts. Nancy Fitts! The playmate of my childhood; the “chum” of laughing girlhood; the faithful trusted companion of young womanhood, and the beloved life friend that the relentless grasp of time has neither changed, nor taken from me.
On entering the wide open door of the inviting schoolhouse, armed with some most unsuitable reader, a spelling book, geography, atlas and slate, I was seized with an intense fear at finding myself with no member of the family near, and my trepidation became so visible that the gentle teacher, relieving me of my burden of books, took me tenderly on her lap and did her best to reassure and calm me. At length I was given my seat, with a desk in front for my atlas and slate, my toes at least a foot from the floor, and that became my daily, happy home for the next three months.
I partially recall an event which occurred when I was five years old; the incidents which I could not have personally remembered, must have been supplied by later relations. It seems that I was suddenly discovered to be alarmingly ill. In response to the terror of the moment, the saddle was thrown on Black Stallion, the king of the herd, his rough rider mounted and away for the doctor, on “Oxford Plain,” five miles away. “Not at home—out on a professional drive.” Followed to “Sutton Street,” six miles further on. “Gone.” Back over “Hog Hill” and across the town to the west. At length overtaken and brought back at a speed little less than that which had called him, for the doctor was a fearless driver. The thunder of the flying hoofs and the speed of the rider as they passed had alarmed the people. All the town knew the horse and the rider, and knew as well that something bad had happened at Captain Barton’s. Men dropped their work, harnessed their own teams and drove with all haste to see if, perchance, it were anything in which they could help. When the doctor arrived, the yard and road were filled with people, waiting his coming and diagnosis.
Shortly the verbal bulletin went out: “A sudden, unaccountable and probably fatal attack of bloody dysentery and convulsions.” There was no more for the sympathetic neighbors to do; they turned sadly away, and with them went the report that Captain and Mrs. Barton had lost their little baby girl.
CAPTAIN STEPHEN BARTON, MY FATHER.
SALLY STONE BARTON, MY MOTHER.
Of all this I have, naturally, no recollection—neither do I know the lapse of time till memory again got hold; but her first grasp of the event was this: I had occupied as a bed a great cradle which had been made for some grown invalid, and preserved in the household. I was bolstered up in this cradle, with a little low table at the side on which was my first meal of solid food. How I had previously been nourished I do not know, but I can see this meal as clearly as if it had been yesterday. A piece of brown bread crust, about two inches square, rye and Indian, baked on the oven bottom; a tiny wine glass, my Christmas gift, full of home-made blackberry cordial, and a wee bit of my mother’s well cured old cheese. There was no need to caution me to eat slowly; knowing that I could have no more, and in dread of coming to the last morsel, I nibbled and sipped and swallowed till I mercifully fell asleep from exhaustion.
There are a good many men over the country who would readily believe that sometimes, at the end of a long fast, food might have tasted very good to me, as it did to them; but no food through the longest fast, ever had the relish of that brown bread crust; and no royal table has ever been so kingly as that where I presided alone over my own feast.