“‘O dear!’ said Tina, ‘I was just wishing that I could go to church.’
“‘Well, you are going to-morrow, dear.’
“‘I just wish I could go now and say one prayer.’
“‘And what is that, my dear?’
“‘I just want to say, “O Lord, open thou my lips,”’ said Tina with effusion.... ‘I am so tired of not talking. But I promised Miss Mehitable that I wouldn’t talk unless I was spoken to,’ she added with an air of virtuous resolution.”
The irresistible child was given permission to talk all she wanted, and from then on she rattled and sparkled and went on with a verve and gusto that waked everybody up. The icy chains of silence being thus broken, everybody talked and Lady Lothrop looked from one to another in a sort of pleased surprise, for the childless woman had a loving heart beneath her decorous breast.
All this is but the beginning of the story. Would it be possible to guess what is going to happen? The old Dench House with its secret drawers should afford a suggestion to a good guesser, and the “visionary boy,” who is the teller of the whole story, will think a great deal about Tina, we may be sure. A first-class, fascinating rascal will be introduced as new material, and the threads of the plot will work up into tragic crises. Far be it from me, however, to make known how it is to come out!
When “Oldtown Folks” was published, the reading world was so charmed with Sam Lawson that they cried out for more. Like Shakespeare with “Merry Wives,” the writer had to exhibit a favored hero under new conditions. More, more of Sam Lawson’s stories, they said. For the garrulous fellow kept up his story-telling habit to the very end of the book, telling his very best story last of all; therefore, the thought of the lazy, delightful Sam was in the mind even while the reader was sighing over the woes of Tina. Hence, after a while Mrs. Stowe wrote another book called “Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories,” in which she gathered some tales of adventure, ghostly and otherwise, and let Sam tell them in his inimitable way. To be sure, everybody does not care for such a character as Sam Lawson; but, as he himself says, “‘Wal, you know there an’t no pleasin’ everybody; and ef Gabriel himself, right down out o’ Heaven, was to come.... I expect there’d be a pickin’ at his wings, and sort o’ fault-findin’.’”
As Mrs. Stowe’s first book had been a reflection of her love for old New England, and her two greatest, considered purely from the artistic point of view, had also come from the same source, so the last novel that she wrote, “Poganuc People,” is again an echo from this music of her youth. The Tina of “Oldtown Folks” is said to be modeled upon her own daughter, Georgiana May; if this is so, the Dolly of “Poganuc People” must be Harriet herself. In fact, a copy of “Poganuc People” exists with Mrs. Stowe’s marginal notes, telling where it is “exact” in its delineation, “my own experience,” “my own childish experience,” “the whole chapter drawn from life,” etc. This book has a pathetic and joyous interest as the very tender memoranda of the child’s life recalled by that all-remembering mind in declining years.