When we walked down the railway platform at Bath, I saw a pink placard pasted on the window of a first-class carriage. It had ‘VAN TYCK: RESERVED,’ written on it, after the English fashion, and we took our places without question. Presently Aunt Celia’s eyes and mine alighted at the same moment on a bunch of yellow primroses [p43] pinned on the stuffed back of the most comfortable seat next the window.
‘They do things so well in England,’ said Aunt Celia admiringly. ‘The landlord must have sent my name to the guard—you see the advantage of stopping at the best hotels, Katharine—but one would not have suspected him capable of such a refined attention as the bunch of flowers. You must take a few of them, dear; you are so fond of primroses.’
Oh! I am having a delicious time abroad! I do think England is the most interesting country in the world; and as for the cathedral towns, how can anyone bear to live anywhere else?
She
Oxford, June 12,
The Mitre.
It was here in Oxford that a grain of common-sense entered the brain of the [p44] flower of chivalry; you might call it the dawn of reason. We had spent part of the morning in High Street, ‘the noblest old street in England,’ as our dear Hawthorne calls it. As Wordsworth had written a sonnet about it, Aunt Celia was armed for the fray—a volume of Wordsworth in one hand, and one of Hawthorne in the other. (I wish Baedeker and Murray didn’t give such full information about what one ought to read before one can approach these places in a proper spirit.) When we had done High Street, we went to Magdalen College, and sat down on a bench in Addison’s Walk, where Aunt Celia proceeded to store my mind with the principal facts of Addison’s career, and his influence on the literature of the something or other century. The cramming process over, we wandered along, and came upon ‘him’ sketching a shady corner of the walk.
[p45]
Aunt Celia went up behind him, and, Van Tyck though she is, she could not restrain her admiration of his work. I was surprised myself; I didn’t suppose so good-looking a youth could do such good work. I retired to a safe distance, and they chatted together. He offered her the sketch; she refused to take advantage of his kindness. He said he would ‘dash off’ another that evening and bring it to our hotel—‘so glad to do anything for a fellow-countryman,’ etc. I peeped from behind a tree and saw him give her his card. It was an awful moment; I trembled, but she read it with unmistakable approval, and gave him her own with an expression that meant, ‘Yours is good, but beat that if you can!’
She called to me, and I appeared. Mr. John Quincy Copley, Cambridge, was presented to her niece, Miss Katharine Schuyler, New York. It was over, and a [p46] very small thing to take so long about, too.
He is an architect, and, of course, has a smooth path into Aunt Celia’s affections. Theological students, ministers, missionaries, heroes, and martyrs she may distrust, but architects never!
‘He is an architect, my dear Katharine, and he is a Copley,’ she told me afterwards. ‘I never knew a Copley who was not respectable, and many of them have been more.’