Memories grave and gay

by Florence Howe Hall

And yet, after a suitable interval of time, she married again, as the inconsolable usually do. Instead of smiling at the fickleness of the human mind, we should remember that for persons of a highly sympathetic nature the loneliness caused by the loss of a beloved helpmeet is almost insupportable. They must, for their own happiness, find another mate. The woman who can live alone, after the loss of her husband, is made of sterner stuff.

Lawton’s Valley is on the west side of the island of Aquidneck. On the east side lived Mr. Thomas R. Hazard—“Shepherd Tom,” as he was familiarly called—in the historic mansion of “Vaucluse,” the finest example of Colonial architecture north of Virginia. The grounds were worthy of the house. They were adorned with a labyrinth of box surrounding a sun-dial, and with a number of summer-houses scattered through groves of trees.

Mr. Hazard was a remarkable but eccentric person. He had a genuine love for his fellow-man and a hatred of tyranny and oppression. He did great service in securing better treatment for the insane in Rhode Island, as Dorothea Dix and my father did in Massachusetts.

After the death of his beautiful wife he became much absorbed in spiritualism. When we first made his acquaintance he was a widower with a delightful family of four daughters and one little boy.

The eldest, Fannie, kept house for her father, while a governess instructed the children. Mr. Hazard was the very soul of hospitality. Relations, young and old, made “Vaucluse” their headquarters for long stays during the summer, while friends also paid copious visits.

“Vaucluse” was liable to sudden inroads of aunts bringing their six children, even though there were already visitors in the house. The hospitality of those days was not confined to the South. My mother once jestingly said to our nearest neighbor that she kept a boarding-house.

“Well, if you do, then I keep a hotel,” replied Mrs. Anderson, whose large house was well filled by the family connection. To take high tea at “Vaucluse” was always delightful. I should be afraid to say how many people sat around the long, well-polished mahogany table. Yet there were always plenty of hot Indian-meal griddle-cakes, as well as other good things, for every one. When there were many guests, it was necessary to set the table a second time. Fannie, who presided over the household, was as hospitable as her father, but the strain of this heavy entertaining was too much for her strength. Her housekeeping ideals were high, and servants hard to get and to keep. In one of his crusades Mr. Hazard, who had been brought up in the Society of Friends or Quakers, attacked the Roman Catholic Church. This made it more difficult for him to procure servants, who, at that time, were almost all Roman Catholic Irishwomen.

So Fannie and her sisters did a great deal of the housework themselves. Mr. Hazard was a most devoted father, but, being extremely vigorous himself, he failed to realize that his daughters were of a less robust type. All four died before reaching the age of forty, three of tuberculosis.

He himself held various singular beliefs upon which he loved to expatiate to his friends. Chief among his hobbies was spiritualism. He would quote to my mother, as remarkable new truths, views with which she, a student of philosophy, was perfectly familiar. We were all gathered at the Anderson mansion one evening, to witness a clever exhibition of legerdemain by Mr. Elbert Anderson. After witnessing the various conjuror’s tricks, Mr. Hazard declared that they were done by spiritualism! When he was with difficulty convinced that they were not, he naïvely observed that just such things were done by spiritualists! Toward the end of his life, when his wife appeared to him as a materialized spirit, he gladly received some cotton lace from her celestial robe!

In the efficacy of Brandreth’s pills for typhoid fever and minor ills he was a fervent believer. Even calves he dosed with them. He scorned the aid of surgeons, holding that the only persons who could properly attend to broken bones were a certain family of Sweets, “natural bone-setters,” as they were called. In spite of all these eccentricities, he was a very intelligent man. His extreme credulity was due, in part, to lack of early education.