“How happily the days of Thalaba went by!”
I said over the strangely musical line to myself scores of times in the two months of my stay in the dear old county. “Homestead,” the home of the D.’s, was never more beautiful, and the days were full of innocent fun, and junketings without number. College and University boys were at home, and city people were flocking to the country. There were walks, drives, “dining-days,” early and late horseback parties, setting out from one hospitable house before sunrise, and breakfasting at another ten or twelve miles away; or, better yet, leaving home at sunset, and pacing, cantering, and galloping (women never rode trotting horses) along highroad and plantation lane to a house, buried in ancestral woods, in the very heart of the county, for supper, returning by the light of the harvest moon, as fresh as when we set forth. With no premonition that this was to be the most eventful summer and autumn of my hitherto tranquil life, I gave myself up, wholly and happily, to the influences that sweetened and glorified it.
Late in August I resolved rather suddenly to go home. My sister was in Boston; my father would not leave his business for so much as a week; my mother and the younger children ought to be in the country. Since she would not resign my father to what she spoke of as “Fate and servants,” I would throw my now rejuvenated body into the breach, abide by the stuff and her husband and sons, while she took a sadly needed rest with old friends in Nottoway County.
Recollecting how persistently I clung to the decision in the face of a tempest of protest, my own heart in secret league with the protestants, I acknowledge with humble gratitude the guidance of the “moving finger that writes” out the destinies we think to control for ourselves.
The glow of the halcyon summer had not passed from my spirit when I wrote to my late hostess two days after my return:
“Richmond, August 29th, 1854.
“My Own Friend,—I said ‘I will write next week,’ but it suits my feelings and convenience to write this morning.
“In the first place, my heart is so full of happiness that it overflows upon and toward everybody that I love, and don’t you dear Homesteadians—yourself and Powhie, especially—come in for a share?
“Mrs. Noble was very pleasant, but the journey was a bit tedious. It always is! Richmond looked enchanting when at last the spires and chimneys appeared upon the horizon, and my sweet home was never so pretty before.
“Mother had planned an agreeable surprise, and not told me that the painters had been at work elsewhere than in my room. So the freshly painted shutters and the white window-facings and cornices, contrasted with the gray walls, were doubly beautiful, because not expected. Then Percy came tumbling down the steps, clapping his hands and shouting in glee, and Alice’s bright smile shone upon me at the gate, and mother left company in the parlor to give me four kisses—and all I could say was, ‘I have had such a pleasant visit, and now I am so glad to see you all!’