But the more I think of it, the more unlikely it seems.
ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD
b. 1787; m. 1808; d. 1874
Of course I never saw her. She died years before I was born. But she left behind her a portrait so full of her personality that no living figure is more human to me than my great-grandmother.
I do not at all refer to the portrait over the dining-room mantelpiece, showing her as a withered old woman in a frilled cap, which is now the only tangible sign of her existence left in her old home. No; that might have been any withered old woman in a frilled cap.
There is another portrait of my great-grandmother not done on canvas with oils. Here are some of the strokes which one by one, at long intervals, as if casually and by chance, have painted it for me.
When I was about eight years old, I went out one day to watch old Lemuel Hager, who came once a year to mow the grass in the orchard back of the house. As he clinked the whetstone over the ringing steel of his scythe, he looked down at me and remarked: “You favor the Hawley side of the family, don’t you? There’s a look around your mouth sort o’ like Aunt Almera, your grandmother—no—my sakes, you must be her great-granddaughter! Wa’l—think of that! And it don’t seem more’n yesterday I saw her come stepping out same’s you did just now; not so much bigger’n you are this minute, for all she must have been sixty years old then. She always was the littlest woman. But for all that she marched up to me, great lummox of a boy, and she said, ‘Is it true, what I hear folks say, Lemuel, that you somehow got out of school without having learned how to read?’ And I says, ‘Why, Mis Canfield, to tell the truth, I never did seem to git the hang of books, and I never could seem to git up no sort of interest in ’em.’
“And she says back, ‘Well, no great boy of eighteen in the town I live in is a-goin’ to grow up without he knows how to read the Declaration of Independence,’ says she. And she made me stop work for an hour—she paid me just the same for it—took me into the house, and started teaching me.