Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

My Dearest H——,

You ask me if I do not write anything; yes, sometimes reviews, for which I am solicited. It is an occupation, but returns neither reputation, the articles being anonymous; nor remuneration, as they are also gratuitous; and I do it without much interest, simply not to be idle. As to anything of more literary pretension, I never shall attempt it again: I do not think nature intended mothers to be authors of anything but their babies; because, as I told you, though a baby is not an "occupation," it is an absolute hindrance to everything else that can be called so. I cannot read a book through quietly for mine; judge, therefore, how little likely I am to write one....

FRIVOLOUS CREATURES. You ask me if I take no pleasure in gardening; and suggest the cutting of carnations and raising of lettuce, as wholesome employments for me. The kitchen-garden is really the only well-attended-to horticulture of this place. The gardener raises early lettuces and cauliflowers in frames, which remunerate him, either by their sale in market or by prizes that he may obtain for them. His zeal in floriculture is less; as you will understand, when I tell you that, discovering some early violets blowing along a sunny wall in the kitchen-garden, and seizing joyfully upon them, with reproaches to him for not having let me know that there were any, he replied—"letting fall a lip of much contempt,"—"Well, ma'am, I quite forgot them violets. You see, them flowers is such frivolous creatures." Profane fellow!

I spend generally about three hours a day pottering in my garden, but, alas! my gardening consists chiefly of slaughter. The heat of the climate generates the most enormous quantity of insects, for the effectual prevention or destruction of which the gardeners in these parts have yet discovered no means. The consequence is that, in spite of my daily executions, every shrub and every flower-bush is fuller of bugs (so they here indiscriminately term these displeasing beasts) than of leaves. They begin by eating up the roses bodily (these are called distinctively, rose-bugs; of course, they have a pet name, but it's Latin, and is only used by their familiars); they then attack and devour the large white lilies, and honeysuckles; finally, they spread themselves impartially all over the garden, and having literally stripped that bare, are now attacking the fruit. It is an insect which I have never seen in England; a species of beetle, much smaller, but not unlike the cockchafer we are familiar with. Their number is really prodigious, and they seem to me to propagate with portentous rapidity, for every day, in spite of the sweeping made by the gardener and myself, they appear as thick as ever. But for the dread of their coming in still greater force next year, if we do not continue our work of extermination, I should almost be tempted to give it up in despair.

I have a few flower-beds that I have had made, and keep under my own especial care; also some pretty baskets, which I have had expressly manufactured with exceeding difficulty; these, filled with earth, and planted with roses, I have placed on the stumps of some large trees, which were cut down last spring and form nice rustic pedestals; and thus I contrive to produce something of an English garden effect. But the climate is against me. The winter is so terribly cold that nothing at all delicate can stand it unless cased up in straw-matting and manure. We have, therefore, no evergreen shrubs, such as the lauristinus, and Portugal and variegated laurels, which form our English garden shrubberies; nor do they seem to replace these by the native growth of their own woods, the kalmias and rhododendrons, but principally by hardy evergreens of the fir and pine species, which are native and abundant here. Then, with scarcely any interval of spring to moderate the sudden extreme change, the winter becomes summer—summer, without its screen of thick leaves to shelter one from the blazing, scorching heat. Everything starts into bloom, as it were, at once; and, instead of lasting even their proverbially short date of beauty, the flowers vanish as suddenly as they appeared, under the fierce influence of the heat and the devastations of the swarming insects it engenders.

To make up for this, I have here almost an avenue of fine lemon-trees, in cases; humming-birds, which are a marvel and enchantment to me; and fire-flies, which are exquisite in the summer evenings.

I have, too, a fine hive of bees, which has produced already this spring two strong young swarms, whose departure from the parent hive formed a very interesting event in my novel experiences; especially as one of the stablemen, who joined the admiring domestic crowd witnessing the process, proved to be endowed with the immunity some persons have from the stings of those insects, and was able to take them by handfuls from the tree where they were clinging, and put them on the stand where the bee-hive prepared for them was placed. I had read of this individual peculiarity with the incredulity of ignorance (incomparably stronger than that of knowledge); but seeing is believing, and when my fiery-haired Irish groom seized the bees by the handful, of course there was no denying the fact.

OPERATIONS OF ANTS. There is a row of large old acacia-trees near the house, inhabited by some most curious ants, who are gradually hollowing the trees out. I can hear them at work as I stand by the poor vegetables, and the grass all round is literally whitened with the fine sawdust made by these hard-working little carpenters. The next phenomenon will be that the trees will tumble on my head, while I am pursuing my entomological studies. [To avert this catastrophe, the trees had all to be cut down].... Dear H——, I never contemplated sacrificing my child's, or anybody else's, health to my desire for "doing good." There is a difference between living all the year round on a rice-swamp, and retiring during the summer to the pinewood highlands, which are healthy, even in the hot season; nor am I at all inclined to advocate the neglect of duties close at hand for quixotical devotion to remote ones. But you must remember that we are slave owners, and live by slave-labor, and if the question of slavery does not concern us, in God's name whom does it concern? In my conviction, that is our special concern.... There is a Convention about to meet at Harrisburg, the seat of Government of this State, Pennsylvania, for the election of Van Buren, the Democratic candidate for the Presidency....

The politics of this country are in a strange, uncertain state, but I have left myself no room to enlarge upon them.

I have just finished reading Judge Talfourd's "Ion," and Lamartine's "[Pélérinage]" to Palestine. God bless you, dearest H——.