Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

A few days after the tea-party, Colonel and Mrs. Davenport came to take tea at the parsonage. It was an engagement of long standing, and eagerly looked forward to by the children, who with one accord begged that they might be allowed to sit up and hear the Colonel's stories.

For, stories of the war it was known the Colonel could tell; the fame of them hovered in vague traditions on the hills and valleys of Poganuc, and whenever he was to be in the circle it was always in the programme of hope that he might be stimulated and drawn out to tell of some of the stirring scenes of his camp-life.

In a general way, too, the children were always glad to have company. The preparations had a festive and joyous air to their minds. Mrs. Cushing then took possession of the kitchen in person, and various appetizing and suggestive dainties and condiments stood about in startling profusion. Dolly and the boys stoned raisins, pounded cinnamon, grated nutmegs and beat eggs with enthusiasm, while Nabby heated the oven and performed the part of assistant priestess in high and solemn mysteries. Among her many virtues and graces, Mrs. Cushing had one recommendation for a country minister's wife which commanded universal respect: she could make cake. Yea, more, she could make such cake as nobody else could make—not even Colonel Davenport's Venus.

So the children had stoned raisins, without eating more than the natural tribute to be expected in such cases; they had been allowed in perquisites a stick of cinnamon apiece; and the pound-cake, the sponge-cake, the fruit-cake and the tea-rusks were each in their kind a perfect success.

During tea-time every word uttered by the Colonel was eagerly watched by attentive and much-desiring ears; but as yet no story came. The vivacity imparted by two or three cups of the best tea was all spent in denunciations of the Democrats, their schemes, designs and dangers to the country, when the Colonel and Dr. Cushing seemed to vie with each other in the vigor and intensity of their prognostications of evil.

But after tea there came the genial hour of the social sit-down in front of the andirons, when the candles were duly snuffed, and the big fore-stick had burned down to glowing coals, and the shadows played in uncertain flashes up and down the walls of the fire-lighted room; and then the Colonel's mind began traveling a road hopeful to his listening auditors.

From Democracy to Jefferson, from Jefferson to France and the French Revolution, the conversation led by easy gradations, and thence to the superior success of our own Revolution—from La Fayette to Washington.

Now, the feeling of the Doctor and of his whole family for General Washington was to the full as intense as that of the ancient Israelites for Moses. They were never tired of hearing the smallest particular about him—how he looked; how he walked; what he wore; the exact shade of his eyes; the least word that ever dropped from his lips.

"You have no doubt whatever that the General was a religious man?" said the Doctor, propounding what was ever his most anxious inquiry with regard to one who had entered on the Invisible Verities.

"Not a doubt, sir," was the Colonel's reply, in those ringing and decisive tones which were characteristic of him.