OUSIN BURWELL CARTER fell in love with our handsome, amiable Boston governess, Miss Davidson, and married her when I was ten years of age. She comforted my mother for her loss by sending for her younger sister, who was even prettier than herself, and had such winsome ways that Mr. John Morton, Cousin Frank's bachelor brother, married her at the end of her first session in our school-room.
My father looked quizzically grave when the two sisters recommended a Miss Bradnor of Springfield, Massachusetts, as a person who was sure to please our parents and to bring us on finely in our studies.
"Is she pretty and marriageable?" he asked. "My business, nowadays, seems to be providing the eligible bachelors of Powhatan with wives. It is pleasant enough from one standpoint, and that is the young men's. But my children must be educated."
Both young matrons assured him, earnestly, that Miss Bradnor was "a predestined old maid—a man-hater, in fact—and was likely to remain a fixture in our school-room as long as we needed her." When she arrived I was surprised to see a prim, quiet little personage who looked too gentle to hate any one. She fitted easily into her place in our family and soon proved herself the prize we had been promised, being a born instructor, and loving her profession. She awoke my mind as nobody else had done. I fancied that I could feel it stretch, and grow, and get hungry while she taught me. The more it was fed, the hungrier it grew, and the more eagerly it stretched itself. I studied Comstock's Natural Philosophy with Miss Bradnor, and Vose's Astronomy, and Lyell's Elements of Geology, Bancroft's History of the United States, and Watts on the Mind, and began French and Latin. It was such a busy, happy year that I was actually sorry when vacation began.
I was sorrier yet when a letter was received from Miss Bradnor, saying that she "had been betrothed for ten years to an exemplary gentleman who now claimed the fulfilment of her pledge. Before the letter could reach us she would (D. V.) have become Mrs. Calvin Chapin. She hoped the unforeseen reversal of her plans for the ensuing year would not occasion serious inconvenience to her dear and respected friends, Mr. and Mrs. Burwell."
"It takes the prim sort to give us such surprises!" exclaimed my mother.
"It takes all sorts and conditions of women, I think!" rejoined my father, dryly. "I foresee that the Richmond plan will have to be carried out, after all. Governesses are kittle cattle, at the best. And we have had three of the very best."
As may be supposed, I was consumed by curiosity to know what "the Richmond plan" could be. The city I had never yet seen had been made tenfold more interesting to me within a year by the removal of the Frank Mortons to that place. Cousin Frank had gone into the Commission business there with an uncle who had no son to succeed him in the firm. But, although I pricked up my ears smartly at my father's unguarded remark, I had to smother my excitement as best I could, and study patience—surely the hardest lesson ever set for the young. When older people were talking with one another, it was esteemed an impertinence in children to interrupt them by questions.
"If it were best for you to understand what we were saying, we would take pains to explain it to you," my mother would say when we broke this one of her rules. And, still oftener, "Little girls should trust their fathers and mothers to tell them at the right time all that they ought to know."
The right time in this instance was one moonlight September night, soon after Mary 'Liza and I had gone to bed. My mother had a habit of coming up to our room, and sitting down by the bed in the dark, or without other light than the moon, to have a little talk with us. "To give us a good appetite for our dreams," she would say in her merry way. We dearly enjoyed these visits, especially on Sunday nights, when we told her what we had been reading and thinking that day, and repeated the hymns we loved best.