We were anxious to have all the bodies brought together in one graveyard in the North and buried side by side. The family burying-ground was at Waltham, where eight generations were then sleeping—that is, eight generations of Pickerings and Bemises. There were the bodies of my great-grandmother, and of ancestors belonging to the first Colonial days. My cousin, George Pickering Bemis, Mayor of Omaha, afterward had a monument erected over the spot where so many Bemises and Pickerings lay in their long rest, to preserve their memory. But my father's body was never to rest there; nor was it ever seen by any of his relatives.
My uncle, John Clarke, Jr., who had brought me out of New Orleans and rescued me from the plague, tried to find some trace of my father; but no record or vestige of him could be found in that city. Every trace of him had been swept away. His very existence there had been forgotten, erased. No one could be found who had ever heard of him, or knew anything about his store. So completely had the pestilence done its terrible work of destruction and obliteration. As this period was prior to the invention of the daguerreotype, we had no photographs of him. The only likenesses that were made then were expensive miniatures on ivory. I have no picture of him, except the one I carry forever in my memory.
Sixty years passed away. One day I received a letter from one of my cousins, Louisa Train, who was living in Michigan. She told me that her father and mother had died, and that the furniture of the old house, in which they and her grandparents had lived, had fallen to her. "In moving an old bureau," she wrote, "it fell to pieces, and, to my surprise, two documents rolled upon the floor. These papers relate to you. One of them was a letter from your father to his mother, written from New Orleans shortly before you left that city. In it he says:
"'You can imagine my loneliness in being in this great house, always so lively, with eleven persons in it, including my own family—now all alone. George is with his tutor. He is a very extraordinary boy, though only four years old. The other day he repeated some verses, of which I can remember these lines:
"'I am monarch of all I survey; My right there is none to dispute; From the center all round to the sea, I am lord of the fowl and the brute.'"
I was to receive one other message from my father. Since I began writing this autobiography, my aged aunt, Abigail Pickering Frost, now in her ninetieth year, discovered a letter that my father had written to her and to her sister, my aunt Alice, who afterward married Henry A. Winslow, upon the day that he placed me on the ship Henry, and sent me to my grandmother at Waltham, Mass. Aunt Abigail, after the death of aunt Alice, who was one of the victims in the wreck of the Lexington, in January, '40, hid the letter in the garret of the old Waltham farmhouse, where she later discovered it. She now sends it to me from her home in Omaha, Neb., where it had again been lost, and found after a long search, as she knew that I would appreciate it as a part of my life-story.
The letter came to me as a wail from the dead. I was very young, and childish, and thoughtless when I parted from him forever; but his letter brought back to me in a flood the bitterness of our life in New Orleans, the loneliness of my father in his great grief, and made me suffer, nearly seventy years afterward, for the pain that I was then too young to understand or feel. I give this letter, which is inexpressibly dear to me, just as it was written.
"New Orleans, June 10th, 1833.
"Dear Sisters Abigail and Alice:
"'Tis just two years since I left this place for New York, and arrived in Boston the evening of the 3d of July. I hope my dear boy will arrive safe and pass the 4th of July with you. He is now on board the ship (and the steamboat alongside the ship) to the Balize. I have written several letters by the ship, and found I had a few moments to spare which I will improve by addressing you. I refer you to the letters to Mother Pickering for particulars—as I have not time to say much. I can only say, my dear girls, that I am very unhappy here for reasons you well know. I part with George as though I was parting with my right eye—but 'tis for his good and the happiness of all that he should go; take him to your own home, care, and protection; he is no ordinary boy, but is destined for a great scholar.
"I am left here without a friend except my God! in a city where the cholera is raging to a great extent—100 are dying daily! and among them some of the most valuable citizens. A sweet little girl about the age of Ellen, and an intimate acquaintance of George's, who used to walk arm in arm with him, died this morning with the cholera, and a great number of others among our most intimate acquaintances have passed on. Mrs. Simons died in six hours! What is life worth to me? Oh, my dear sisters! could I leave this dreadful place I would, and die among my friends! The thoughts of my dear Maria and Ellen fill me with sorrow! I have mourned over their tombs in silence. I have been with them in my dreams, and frequently I meet them in my room and talk with them as though alive. All here is melancholy. When shall I see you, God only knows! I have relieved my heavy heart of a burden—a weight that was almost unsupportable.
"In parting with my lovely boy I have bequeathed him to Mother Pickering as a legacy—it being all that I possess! You will take a share of the care, and I know will be all that mothers could be for your dear sister Maria's sake!
"Give my love to Grandpa Bemis, Father Pickering, and all the rest of the family. Say to them that my mind is constantly with them, and will ever be so. I have written in great haste and very badly, as I am on board the ship and all is confusion, with the steamboat alongside. Farewell, my dear sisters! Do write me a line. If you knew how much I prize a letter from you, you would write often. Adieu, and believe me your affectionate brother,
"Oliver Train.
"To Misses Abigail and Alice Pickering,
Waltham, Mass."
The other document mentioned by my cousin Louisa, was the deed of a farm by my paternal grandfather, making a certain physician trustee of the property. I never came into that property! This was my first bequest. I had begun, even in my infancy, to give away my property, and I have thrown it away ever since. This first "bequest," however, was none of my making, although I accepted it, without trying to question the matter.
Another involuntary "bequest" of my childhood was brought about in this way. My mother, when a girl, was engaged to marry Stebbins Fiske. It was by a mere chance that they were not married—and therefore my name is "Train" by a mere accident which changed the fate of my mother and her fiancé. My father was a warm friend of Stebbins Fiske, and when Fiske was called suddenly to New Orleans, just before the day set for the marriage, he left his betrothed, Maria Pickering, in charge of my father. The result might have been foreseen. It is the common theme of romance the world over. My mother and my father fell in love with each other, and were married. There was no thought of unfaithfulness; it was merely inevitable. Fiske understood the situation, and forgave both of them, and continued the stanch friend of both.