This quotation is from a long article which Mrs. Grace L. Oliver, of Boston, published in an early number of Scribner's Magazine. I never had known of the existence of this learned, accomplished woman, but after reading this article I ventured to ask her to send me the material for a lecture and she responded most generously, sending books, many sketches of her career, full lists of the subjects which had most interested her, poems addressed to her as if she were a goddess, and the pictures she added proved her to have been certainly very beautiful. "She looked like Venus and spoke like Minerva."
My audience was greatly interested. She was as new to them as to me and all she had donated was handed round to an eager crowd. In about six months I saw in the papers that Dora D'Istria was taking a long trip to America to meet Mrs. Oliver, Edison, Longfellow, and myself!
I called on her later at a seashore hotel near Boston. She had just finished her lunch, and said she had been enjoying for the first time boiled corn on the cob. She was sitting on the piazza, rather shabbily dressed, her skirt decidedly travel-stained. Traces of the butter used on the corn were visible about her mouth and she was smoking a large and very strong cigar, a sight not so common at that time in this country. A rocking chair was to her a delightful novelty and she had already bought six large rocking chairs of wickerwork. She was sitting in one and busily swaying back and forward and said: "Here I do repose myself and I take these chairs home with me and when de gentlemen and de ladies do come to see me in Florence, I do show them how to repose themselves."
Suddenly she looked at me and began to laugh immoderately. "Oh," she explained, seeing my puzzled expression, "I deed think of you as so deeferent, I deed think you were very tall and theen, with leetle, wiggly curls on each side of your face."
She evidently had in mind the typical old maid with gimlet ringlets! So we sat and rocked and laughed, for I was equally surprised to meet a person so "different" from my romantic ideal. Like the two Irishmen, who chancing to meet were each mistaken in the identity of the other. As one of them put it, "We looked at each other and, faith, it turned out to be nayther of us."
The Princess Massalsky sent to Mrs. Oliver and myself valuable tokens of her regard as souvenirs.
CHAPTER VII
Elected to be the First President of New Hampshire Daughters in Massachusetts and New Hampshire—Now Honorary President—Kind Words which I Highly Value—Three, but not "of a Kind"—A Strictly Family Affair—Two Favourite Poems—Breezy Meadows.
On May 15, 1894, I was elected to be the first president of the New Hampshire Daughters in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and held the position for three years. Was then made Honorary President.