In love and fear the wives of the Yankees were always gleaning. They found a certain joy in trouble. Sorrow was a form of dissipation to many, disappointment a welcome means of grace, and weariness a comforting sign of duty done. Their fears were an ever-present trouble in time of need. They were three—idleness, God, and the poorhouse. Whatever the men might do or fail to do in Griggsby, it was the part of the women to work and save. They squandered to save; squandered their abundant strength to save the earnings of the family, the souls of husbands, sons, and daughters, the lives of the sick. If ever they thought of themselves it was in secret. Their hands were never idle.
The Yankee was often an orator to his own wife at least, and had convinced his little audience of one of two things, either that he had achieved greatness or was soon to be crowned. The lures of politics, invention, horsemanship, speculation, religion, and even poesy, led their victims from the ax and the plow. In certain homes you found soft-handed, horny-hearted tyrants of vast hope and good nature, and one or more slaves in calico. In my humble opinion, these willing slaves suffered from injustice more profound than did their dark-skinned sisters of the South.
You might see a judge or a statesman strutting in purple and fine linen, or exchanging compliments in noble rhetoric at a mahogany bar, while his aproned wife, with bare arms, was hard at work in the kitchen, trying to save the expense of a second hired girl. And you would find her immensely proud of her rhetorical peacock. His drinking and his maudlin conduct were often excused as the sad but inevitable accessories of Websterian genius.
But the Websterian impulse had begun to show itself in a new generation of women. It flowered in resounding rhetoric.
Now and then Florence Dunbar called at the home of the Smeads, and had learned to enjoy the jests of Dan'l, and especially his talk about social conditions in Griggsby. It was there that she got the notion of buying the Corporal and hiring Smead to help her reform the place.
One evening a number of my schoolmates were asked to meet the daughters of Smead, who had attended the normal school before going out to teach.
“Ruth, won't you get up and give us a piece?” Mrs. Smead asked one of her daughters.
“Mince, apple, or pumpkin, mother?” Dan'l W. inquired, playfully.
“Oh, stop your joking!” said Mrs. Smead.
The young lady stepped to the middle of the floor, after the fashion of Charlotte Cushman in the sleep-walking scene of “Lady Macbeth.” She gave us Warren's “Address,” trilling her (r's) and pronouncing “my” like “me.”