As for my wicked self, as I privately confessed subsequently to my father’s young partner, “Thad” Ivey—“I could think of nothing but Franklin’s grace over the whole barrel.” In the ten months of his incumbency of the tutorship, the incipient divine had never so much as hinted to one of us that she had a soul.
“I suppose I ought to say that it is like returning thanks over the empty barrel,” I subjoined, encouraged by my interlocutor’s keen relish of the irreverent and impertinent comment upon the scene of the afternoon. “Thad” and I were great friends, and I had an idea that our views upon this subject did not differ widely.
Mrs. Willis D., our nearest neighbor, was with my mother, and when the tear-bedraggled procession from the school-room filed into the porch where the two friends were sitting with three other of the villagers, and Virginia Winfree threw herself into her aunt’s arms with a strangled sob of: “Oh, Aunt Betty, he did preach so hard!”—the dry-eyed composure of the Hawes girls was regarded with disfavor.
“Your daughters have so much fortitude!” remarked one, mopping her girl’s eyes with a compassionate handkerchief.
Another, “They show wonderful self-control for their age.”
Even our sensible mother was slightly scandalized by what she “hoped,” deprecatingly, “was not want of feeling.”
Tears were fashionable, and came easily in those early times, and weeping in church was such a godly exercise that conversation or exhortation upon what was, in technical phrase, “the subject of religion,” brought tears as naturally as the wringing of a moist sponge, water.
“What did you cry for?” demanded I, scornfully, of Anne Carus, when I got her away from the porch party. “You hate him as much as I do!”
“Oh—I don’t—know!” dubiously. “People always cry when anybody makes a farewell speech.”