“Rice Hill” was a commodious dwelling, one mile from the seminary, and not quite so far from the college. Doctor Rice had literally spent and been spent in the work which had crowned his ministry—the foundation and endowment of a Southern School of Divinity. At his death, friends and admirers, North and South, agreed that a suitable monument to him would be a home for the childless widow. She had a full corps of family servants, who had followed her to her various residences, and she eked out her income by supplying table-board to students from college and seminary. Thus much in explanation of the references to the coming in of “the gentlemen” in the “evening”—rural Virginian for afternoon.
A kindly Providence had appointed unto us these pleasant paths at the impressionable period of our lives. The goodliest feature in that appointment was that Robert Reid Howison, subsequently “LL.D.,” and the author of a History of Virginia, and The Student’s History of the United States, became the tutor of my sister and myself.
He came to us at twelve o’clock each day, and we dined at half-past two. Hence, all our studying was done out of school-hours. The arrangement was eccentric in the extreme in the eyes of my father’s acquaintances and critics. Other girls were in the class-room from nine until twelve, and after recess had a session of two hours more. That this, the most outré of “Mr. Hawes’s experiments,” would be a ludicrous failure was a foregone conclusion. Whereas, the cool brain had reckoned confidently upon the fidelity of the tutor and the conscientiousness of pupils accustomed to the discipline of a home where implicit obedience was the law.
Never had learners a happier period of pupilage, and the cordial relations between teacher and students testified to the mutual desire to meet, each, the requirements of the other party to the compact.
To the impetus given our minds by association with the genial scholar who directed our studies, was added the stimulus of the table-talk that went on in our hearing daily. It was the informal, suggestive chat of men eager for knowledge, comparing notes and opinions, and discussing questions of deep import—historical, biological, and theological. In the main, they were a bright set of fellows; in the main, likewise, gentlemen at heart and in bearing. It goes without saying that the exception in my mind to the latter clause was our late and hated tutor. I might write to Dorinda, in constrained goody-goodyishness, of the impropriety of “drawing comparisons” between him and Mr. Howison, whose “easy” laugh and winning personality wrought powerfully upon my childish fancy. At heart I loved the one and consistently detested the other.
To this hour I recall the gratified thrill of conscious security and triumph that coursed through my minute being when, Mr. Tayloe having taken it upon himself to reprove me for something I said—pert, perhaps, but not otherwise offensive—Mr. Howison remarked, with no show of temper, but firmly:
“Mr. Tayloe, you will please recollect that this young lady is now under my care!”
He laughed the next moment, as if to pass the matter off pleasantly, but all three of us comprehended what was implied.
We began French with our new tutor, and geometry! I crossed the Pons Asinorum in January, and went on with Euclid passably well, if not creditably. Mathematics was never my strong point. The patience and perfect temper of the preceptor never failed him, no matter how far I came short of what he would have had me accomplish in that direction.
“Educate them as if they were boys and preparing for college,” my father had said, and he was obeyed.