In the middle of all this the famous Field Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair was held. The project had slumbered the while people thought peace so near. It sprang up with renewed and vigorous life the moment the echo of those guns at Williamsburg reached our ears. And of course at its head was Julia Parmalee.
It would take a long time and a powerful ransacking of memory to catalogue the remarkable things which this active young woman did toward making that fair the success it undoubtedly was. Even more notable were the things which she coaxed, argued, or shamed other folks into doing for it. Years afterward there were old people who would tell you that Octavius had never been quite the same place since.
For one thing, instead of the Fireman's Hall, with its dingy aspect and somewhat rowdyish associations, the fair was held in the Court House, and we all understood that Miss Julia had been able to secure this favor on account of her late uncle, the Judge, when anyone else would have been refused. It was under her tireless and ubiquitous supervision that this solemn old interior now took on a gay and festal face. Under the inspiration of her glance the members of the Fire Company and the Alert Baseball Club vied with each other in borrowing flags and hanging them from the most inaccessible and adventurous points. The rivalry between the local Freemasons and Odd Fellows was utilized to build temporary booths at the sides and down the centre—on a floor laid over the benches by the Carpenters' Benevolent Association. The ladies' organizations of the various churches, out of devotion to the Union and jealousy of one another, did all the rest.
At the sides were the stalls for the sale of useful household articles, and sedate and elderly matrons found themselves now dragged from the mild obscurity of homes where they did their own work, and thrust forward to preside over the sales in these booths, while thrifty, not to say penurious, merchants came and stood around and regarded with amazement the merchandise which they had been wheedled into contributing gratis out of their own stores. The suggestion that they should now buy it back again paralyzed their faculties, and imparted a distinct restraint to the festivities at the sides of the big court-room.
In the centre was a double row of booths for the sale of articles not so strictly useful, and here the young people congregated. All the girls of Octavius seemed to have been gathered here—the pretty ones and the plain ones, the saucy ones and the shy, the maidens who were "getting along" and the damsels not yet out of their teens. Stiff, spreading crinolines brushed juvenile pantalettes, and the dark head of long, shaving-like ringlets contrasted itself with the bold waterfall of blonde hair. These girls did not know one another very well, save by little groups formed around the nucleus of a church association, and very few of them knew Miss Parmalee at all, except, of course, by sight. But now, astonishing to relate, she recognized them by name as old friends, shook hands warmly right and left, and blithely set them all to work and at their ease. The idea of selling things to young men abashed them by its weird and unmaidenly novelty. She showed them how it should be done—bringing forward for the purpose a sheepishly obstinate drug-store clerk, and publicly dragooning him into paying eighty cents for a leather dog-collar, despite his protests that he had no dog and hated the whole canine species, and could get such a strap as that anywhere for fifteen cents—all amid the greatest merriment. Her influence was so pervasive, indeed, that even the nicest girls soon got into a state of giggling familiarity with comparative strangers, which gave their elders concern, and which in some cases it took many months to straighten out again. But for the time all was sparkling gaiety. On the second and final evening, after the oyster supper, the Philharmonics played and a choir of girls sang patriotic songs. Then the gas was turned down and the stereopticon show began.
As the last concerted achievement of the firm of Pulford & Shull, this magic-lantern performance is still remembered. The idea of it, of course, was Julia's. She suggested it to Marsena, and he gladly volunteered to make any number of positive plates from appropriate pictures and portraits for the purpose. Then she pressed Newton Shull into the service to get a stereopticon on hire, to rig up the platform and canvas for it, and finally to consent to quit his post among the Philharmonics when the music ceased, and to go off up into the gallery to work the slides. He also, during Marsena's absence one day, made a slide on his own account.
Mr. Shull had not taken very kindly to the idea when Miss Julia first broached it to him.
"No, I don't know as I ever worked a stereopticon," he said, striving to look with cold placidity into the winsome and beaming smile with which she confronted him one day out in the reception-room. She had never smiled at him before or pretended even to know his name. "I guess you'd better hire a man up from Tecumseh to bring the machine and run it himself."
"But you can do it so much better, my dear Mr. Shull!" she urged. "You do everything so much better! Mr. Pulford often says that he never knew such a handy man in all his life. It seems that there is literally nothing that you can't do—except—perhaps—refuse a lady a great personal favor."