Hempfield: A Novel

by David Grayson

I do not wish to imply that Anthy was a mere dreamer. She was not, decidedly; but she had, always, her places of retirement. From a child she had friends of her own imagining. The first of them I have already referred to, a certain Richard and Rachel who came out through the wall near the stairway in her father's house, to be the confidants of a lonely child. Others came later as she grew older. I know the names of some of them, and just what they meant to Anthy at particular moments in her life. They came to her, as friends come to us in real life, as we are ripe for them.

It was some time after her father's death, when she felt very much alone, that Anthy wrote her first letter to Mr. Lincoln. Her father had made Lincoln one of the most vivid characters of her girlhood: a portrait of him hung over the mantel in the living-room, and there was another at the office. One day, almost involuntarily, she began a letter:

Dear Mr. Lincoln: I wish you were here. My father knew you well and trusted you more than he trusted any other man. He used to say that no other American who ever lived had such an understanding of the hearts of people as you had. I think you would understand some of the troubles I am now having with the Star, and that you would help me to be sensible and strong. When I was in college I thought I had begun to know something, but since I have come back here I feel like a very small girl again. I don't know enough to run the Star, and yet I cannot let it go——

She turned around quickly—but there was no one there to see

Once started, she poured out her very heart to Mr. Lincoln: and having completed the letter she folded it, placed it in an envelope, on which she wrote "Abraham Lincoln," and going to the mantel slipped it behind Mr. Lincoln's picture. Then she turned around quickly, looked all about—but there was no one there to see. She told me long afterward that it seemed at first a little absurd to be actually writing letters to Mr. Lincoln, but that it relieved her mind and made her feel more cheerful in her loneliness. After that it became an almost daily practice for her to pour out her thoughts and difficulties to Mr. Lincoln. And the place behind the portrait was the post office. She said that sometimes during the busiest parts of the day the thought would suddenly flash across her mind that she would tell Mr. Lincoln this or that, and it gave her a curious deep sense of comfort. Each evening she destroyed the letter she had written on the day before—destroyed them all, except those which lie here on my desk.

I am sure that this practice meant a great deal in Anthy's life. One cannot know much about any great human being, think what he would do under this or that circumstance, or what he would say if he were here, without coming to be something like him. We are strangely influenced in this world by those whom we admire most. Harriet and I know a little old maid—I have written about her elsewhere—who has thought so much about the Carpenter of Nazareth that she has come to be wonderfully like Him.

It would be impossible for any one to understand Anthy, or, indeed, the life of the Star, or Nort, without knowing of the deep inner forces which were influencing her. I know now why she maintained through all the earlier days, those trying days, the front of quiet courage.

And so I come to the letter open here on my desk. It is the one that Anthy wrote on the night that Nort went home with her for the first time. It is not a long letter, and was evidently written hastily at the little table I have so often seen, at which I once sat quietly for a long time, where one may easily glance up at the portrait over the mantel. It is the first letter in which she ever referred at any great length to Nort. And this is the letter: