“Yes. You were good enough to send me a copy, you know. It is quite a creditable school-girl production.”
I moved clean out of hearing. I told Mr. Derby, afterward, what I had heard, adding that my chief regret was at the lowering of my ideal of professional generosity. Up to that moment I had met with indulgent sympathy and such noble freedom from envious hypercriticism, as to foster the fondly-cherished idea that the expression of lofty sentiment presupposes the ever-present dwelling of the same within the soul. In simpler phrase, that the proverb—“Higher than himself can no man think,” had its converse in—“Lower than himself can no man be.”
In this I erred. I grant it, in this one instance. I had judged correctly of the grand Guild to which I aspired, with yearnings unutterable, to belong.
It was an eventful summer. My father and I had gone on to Boston from New York, setting out, the same week, for a tour through the White Mountains. I was the only woman in the party. Our friend, Ned Rhodes, a distant cousin, Henry Field, of Boston, and my father completed the quartette. Ten days afterward, we two—my father and I—met a larger travelling party in New York. Mr. and Mrs. William Terhune, Mrs. Greenleaf, the widow of Doctor Hoge’s friend; “Staff” Little, the brother of Mrs. William Terhune, and Edward Terhune, now the pastor of a church at Charlotte C. H., Virginia, composed the company which joined itself to us, and set forth merrily for Niagara and the Lakes.
The trip accomplished, I settled down comfortably and happily in Boston and the charming environs thereof for the rest of the season.
Another halcyon summer!
If I have made scant mention of my father’s kindred in the land of his birth, it is because this is a story of the Old South and of a life that has ceased to be, except in the hearts of the very few who may take up the boast of the Grecian historian—“Of which I was a part.”
I should be an ingrate of a despicable type were I to pass by as matters of no moment, the influences brought to bear upon my life at that date, and through succeeding years, by my association with the several households who made up the family connection in that vicinity.
My grandmother’s brother, Uncle Lewis Pierce, owned and occupied the ancient homestead in Dorchester. He was “a character” in his way. Handsome in his youth, he was still a man of imposing presence, especially when, attired in black broadcloth, and clean shaven, he sat on Sunday in the pew owned by the Pierces for eight generations in the old church on “Meeting House Hill.” He did not always approve of the doctrine and politics of the officiating clergyman. He opened his mind to me to this effect one Sunday that summer, as we jogged along in his low-hung phaeton, drawn by a horse as portly and as well-set-up as his master.
“The man that is to hold forth to-day is what my wife scolds me for calling ‘one of those higher law devils,’” he began by saying. “He is of the opinion that the law, forbidding slavery and denying rights to the masters of the slaves and all that, ought to set aside the Constitution and the laws made by better men and wiser heads than his. He’d override them all, if he could. I’ve nothing to say against a man’s having his own notions on that, or any other subject, but if he’s a minister of the gospel, he ought to preach the truth he finds in the Bible, and keep his confounded politics out of the pulpit.”