Americans, who not only remained in town, but also attended the execution. When he finally left Paris, a proscribed nobleman, disguised as a footman, accompanied the carriage, and so cheated the guillotine of one expected victim.
“Colonel Ward, as my grandfather was always called, was a graduate of Brown University, and a man of scholarly tastes. He possessed a diamond edition of Latin classics, which always went with him in his campaigns, and which is still preserved in the family. In matters of art he was not so well posted. Of the pictures in the gallery of the Luxembourg he remarks in his diary: ‘The old pictures are considered the best. I cannot think why.’
“I remember him as very tall, stooping a little, with white hair and mild blue eyes, which matched well his composed speech and manners.”
I have called Great-grandfather Ward a merchant, but he was far more than that. The son of Governor Ward of Rhode Island, he was only eighteen when, as a gallant young captain, he marched his company to the siege of Boston; and then (as his grandson writes me to-day) he “marched through the wilderness of Maine, through snow and ice, barefoot, to Quebec.” Some of my readers may possess an engraving of Trumbull’s famous painting of the “Attack on Quebec.” Look in the left-hand corner, and you will see a group of three,—one of them a young, active figure with flashing eyes; that is Great-grandfather Ward. He rose to be major, then lieutenant-colonel; was at Peekskill, Valley Forge, and Red Bank, and wrote the official account of the last-named battle, which may be found in Washington’s correspondence. Besides being a good man and a brave soldier, he was a very good grandfather; and this made it all the more naughty for his granddaughter Julia to behave as she did one day. Being then a little child, she sat down at the piano, placed a music-book on the rack, and began to pound and thump on the keys, making the hideous discord which seems always to afford pleasure to the young. Her grandfather was sitting by, book in hand; and after enduring the noise for some time patiently, he said in his kind, courtly way, “Is it so set down in the book, my dear?”
“Yes, Grandpapa!” said naughty Julia, and went on banging; while grandpapa, who made no pretense of being a musician, offered no further comment or remonstrance.
Julia grew up a student and a dreamer. She confesses to having been an extremely absent person, and much of the time unconscious of what passed around her. “In the large rooms of my father’s house,” she says, “I walked up and down, perpetually alone, dreaming of extraordinary things that I should see and do. I now began to read Shakspere and Byron, and to try my hand at poems and plays.” She rejoices that none of the productions of this period were published, and adds: “I regard it as a piece of great good fortune; for a little praise or a little censure would have been a much more disturbing element in those days than in these.” I wish these sentiments were more general with young writers.
Still, life was not all study and dreaming. There were sometimes merrymakings: witness the gay ball after which Julia wrote to her brother, “I have been through the burning fiery furnace; and I am Sad-rake, Me-sick, and Abed-no-go.” There was mischief, too, and sometimes downright naughtiness, Who was the poor gentleman, an intimate friend of the family, from whom Julia and her sisters extracted a promise that he would eat nothing for three days but what they should send him,—they in return promising three meals a day? He consented, innocently thinking that these dear young creatures wanted to display their skill in cookery, and expecting all kinds of delicacies and airy dainties of pastry and confectionery. Yes! and being a man of his word, he lived for three days on gruel, of which those “dear young creatures” sent him a bowl at morning, noon, and night; and on nothing else!
In a certain little cabinet where many precious things are kept, I have a manuscript poem, written by Julia Ward for the amusement of her brothers and sisters when she was still a very young girl. It is called “The Ill-cut Mantell; A Romaunt of the time of Kynge Arthur.” The story is an old one, but the telling of it is all Julia’s own, and I must quote a few lines:—
“I cannot well describe in rhyme
The female toilet of that time.
I do not know how trains were carried,
How single ladies dressed or married;
If caps were proper at a ball,
Or even if caps were worn at all;
If robes were made of crape or tulle,
If skirts were narrow, gored, or full.
Perhaps, without consulting grace,
The hair was scraped back from the face,
While on the head a mountain rose,
Crowned, like Mont Blanc, with endless snows.
It may be that the locks were shorn;
It may be that the lofty puff,
The stomacher, the rising ruff,
The bodice, or the veil were worn,
Perhaps mantillas were the passion,
Perhaps ferronières were in fashion,—
I cannot, and I will not tell.
But this one thing I wot full well,
That every lady there was dressed
In what she thought became her best.
All further notices, I grieve,
I must to your imagination leave.”
Julia sometimes tried to awaken in her sisters’ minds the poetic aspirations which filled her own. One day she found the two little girls playing some childish game, which seemed to her unnecessarily frivolous. (You all know, I am sure, the eldest sister’s motto,—