We sisters were in the school-room at recess one day when I was fourteen, Mea sixteen. I was preparing a French exercise for M. Guillet, Mea writing to Boston. We had the room to ourselves for the time. My sister looked up from her paper to say:
“What shall I say to Lizzie for you?”
“Give her my love, and tell her to provide me with a correspondent as charming as herself.”
In her reply Lizzie begged leave to introduce a particular friend of her own, “intelligent and lovable—altogether interesting, in fact.” This friend had heard her talk of her Southern cousins and wished to know them; but I must write the first letter. I caught at the suggestion of what commended itself to me as adventure, and it was an epistolary age. Letters long and numerous, filled with details and disquisitions, held the place usurped by telephone, telegraph, and post-cards. We had time to write, and considered that we could not put it to a better purpose. So the next letter from my sister to my cousin contained a four-pager from me, addressed to “Quelqu’une.” I gave fancy free play in conversing with the unknown, writing more nonsense than sober reason. I set her in the chair opposite mine, and discoursed at her of “divers sayings.” If not
“Of ships and shoes and sealing-wax
And cabbages and kings”—
of wars and rumors of wars, and school duties, and current literature.
In due time I had a reply in like strain, but to my consternation, written in a man’s hand, and signed “Quelqu’un.” He apologized respectfully for the ambiguous terms of the introduction that had led me into a mistake as to his sex, and hoped that the silver that was beginning to stipple his dark hair would guarantee the propriety of a continued correspondence.
“Time was,” he mused, “when I could conjugate Amo in all its moods and tenses. Now I get no further than Amabam, and am constrained to confess myself in the tense at which I halt.”
We had written to one another once a month for two years before the sight of a note to Lizzie tore the mask from the face of my graybeard mentor, and confirmed my father’s suspicions as to his identity with Ossian Ashley, the husband of Aunt Harriet’s elder daughter. The next visit I paid to Boston brought us together in the intimacy of the family circle. He never dropped the rôle of elderly, and as time rolled on, of brotherly friend. He was, at that date, perhaps thirty-five years of age, and a superb specimen of robust manhood. I have seldom beheld a handsomer man, and his port was kingly, even when he had passed his eightieth birthday. Although a busy man of affairs, he was a systematic student. His library might have been the work-shop of a professional litterateur; he was a regular contributor to several journals upon financial and literary topics, handling each with grace and strength. His translation of Victor Cherbuliez’s Count Kosta was a marvellous rendering of the tone and sense of the original into elegant English. He was an excellent French and Latin scholar, and, when his son entered a German university, set himself, at sixty-odd, to study German, that he “might not shame the boy when he came home.”