“How did she do it?”
“What was her secret?”
“Why did she die ninety-one years young, instead of ninety-one years old?”
If she herself had tried to tell you her secret, to account for her rare powers preserved so late in life, spent so prodigally at an age when the lean and slippered pantaloon hoards his scant store of strength as a miser hoards his gold, she would have said something like this:
“You must remember I had a splendid Irish wet-nurse!”
Perhaps she laid too much stress on that excellent woman’s share in making her all she was (no foster-mother was ever more faithfully remembered by nursling); she owed something, surely, to her forebears. She came of good old fighting stock; in her veins thrilled the blood of Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of Virginia, of General Greene, both heroes of the Revolution, of that staunch old rebel, Roger Williams, of the Wards, for two generations colonial Governors of Rhode Island. All this fighting blood, together with her red hair, gave a certain militant touch to her character; she was a good fighter for every just cause, especially the cause of Peace. Though she spoke oftener of the Irish wet-nurse than of her ancestors, she did not altogether forget them as an anecdote told by my sister, Mrs. Richards, proves. They were at some meeting, a religious gathering I think, where one speaker—rather an effete pessimist—closed a speech in the key of the “Everlasting No,” with the doleful words:
“I feel myself weighed down by a sense of the sins of my ancestors.”
My mother, who was the next speaker, sprang to her feet with the retort:
“And I feel myself lifted up on the virtues of mine!”
There rang out the key-note of her life, the “Everlasting Yea,” the trumpet-tone to which all high souls rally.