had blue pelisses and yellow satin bonnets. And this was all very well for the two younger ones, with their dark eyes and hair, and their rosy cheeks; but Julia, young as she was, felt dimly that blue and yellow was not the combination to set off her tawny locks and exquisite sea-shell complexion. It is not probable, however, that she sorrowed deeply over the funny clothes; for her mind was never set on clothes, either in childhood or in later life. Did not her sister meet her one day coming home from school with one blue shoe and one green? Her mind was full of beautiful thoughts; her eyes were lifted to the green trees and the blue sky bending above them: what did she care about shoes? Yes; and later is it not recorded that her sisters had great difficulty in persuading her to choose the stuff for her wedding-gown? So indifferent was she to all matters of dress!
Auntie F. had her own ideas about shoes and stockings,—not the color, but the quality of them. She did not believe in “pompeying” the children; so in the coldest winter weather Julia and her sisters went to school in thin slippers and white cotton stockings. You shiver at the bare thought of this, my girl readers! You look at your comfortable leggings and overshoes (that is, if you live in upper New England, or anywhere in the same latitude), and wonder how the Ward children lived through such a course of “hardening”! But they did live, and Julia seems now far younger and stronger than any of her children.
School, which some children regard with mingled feelings (or so I have been told), was a delight to Julia. She grasped at knowledge with both hands,—plucked it as a little child plucks flowers, with unwearying enjoyment. Her teachers, like the “people” in the case of the
“Young lady whose eyes
Were unique as to color and size,”
all turned aside, and started away in surprise, as this little red-haired girl went on learning and learning and learning. At nine years old she was studying Paley’s “Moral Philosophy,” with girls of sixteen and eighteen. She could not have been older when she heard a class reciting an Italian lesson, and fell in love with the melodious language. She listened, and listened again; then got a grammar and studied secretly, and one day handed to the astonished Italian teacher a letter correctly written in Italian, begging that she might join the class.
When I was speaking of the good aunt who was a second mother to the Ward children, I meant to say a word of the stern but devoted father who was the principal figure in Julia’s early life. She says of him: “He was a majestic person, of somewhat severe aspect and reserved manners, but with a vein of true geniality and a great benevolence of heart.” And she adds: “His great gravity, and the absence of a mother, naturally subdued the tone of the whole household; and though a greatly cherished set of children, we were not a very merry one.”
Still, with all his gravity, Grandfather Ward had his gleams of fun occasionally. It is told that Julia had a habit of dropping off her slippers while at table. One day her father felt a wandering shell of kid, with no foot to keep it steady. He put his own foot on it and moved it under his chair, then said in his deep, grave voice, “My daughter, will you bring me my seals, which I have left on the table in my room?” And poor Julia, after a vain and frantic hunting with both feet, was forced to go, crimson-cheeked, white-stockinged and slipperless, on the required errand. She would never have dreamed of asking for the shoe. She was the eldest daughter, the companion and joy of this sternly loving father. She always sat next him at table, and sometimes he would take her right hand in his left, and hold it for many minutes together, continuing to eat his dinner with his right hand; while she would rather go dinnerless than ask him to release her own fingers.
Grandfather Ward! It is a relief to confess our faults; and it may be my duty to say that as soon as I could reach it on tiptoe, it was my joy to pull the nose of his marble bust, which stood in the great dining-room at Green Peace. It was a fine, smooth, long nose, most pleasant to pull; I fear I soiled it sometimes with my little grimy fingers. I trust children never do such naughty things nowadays.
Then there was Great-grandfather Ward, Julia’s grandfather, who had the cradle and the great round spectacles. Doubtless he had many other things besides, for he was a substantial New York merchant; but the cradle and the spectacles are the only possessions of his that I have seen. I have the cradle now, and I can testify that Great-grandfather Ward (for I believe he was rocked in it, as his descendants for four generations since have been) must have been an extremely long baby. It is a fine old affair, of solid mahogany, and was evidently built to last as long as the Wards should last. Not so very long ago, two dear people who had been rocked together in that cradle fifty—or is it sixty?—years ago, sat down and clasped hands over it, and wept for pure love and tenderness and léal souvenir. Not less pleasant is its present use as the good ship “Pinafore,” when six rosy, shouting children tumble into it and rock violently, singing with might and main,—