Children take grown people for granted, accept them as fixed facts like the earth, the heaven, and the stars. They do not analyze them as they do their contemporaries. It was only in later years that I gained a sense of the incongruity of the union between Mr. and Mrs. Alger. They had a large family, and their marriage was, I believe, a happy one in spite of—perhaps on account of—the strong contrasts of tastes and character.
Mr. Alger was a pedantic Unitarian clergyman, and a student of metaphysics. He never, if he could avoid it, used a word of less than five syllables. I remember him at his own house, silent and abstracted; when he was at our house, consorting with other Owls, his language was splendid and free, if a thought paradoxical. A favorite word of his was ratiocination, which Mother once caricatured, exclaiming:
“Ours is indeed a ratty ’orssy nation!”
I was once at the Algers’ when a company of the elect gathered to hear him read from his latest work, “The Poetry of the Orient.” A few of us juveniles sat on the stairs, waiting till the reading should be over and the vanilla ice cream and escalloped oysters appear. Among the grown-up guests were the brilliant Choate sisters, Mrs. Bell, and Mrs. Pratt, cousins of Mrs. Alger’s. In discussing the reading with Mama, Mrs. Pratt exclaimed:
“Brother Alger has his limités and his extensés!” A phrase my mother quoted all her life.
I learned one lesson from “Brother Alger” that I never forgot. I was dining with them one Sunday and, as Mr. Alger plunged the carving fork into the breast of a prodigious turkey, he asked me what part of the bird I preferred. Meaning to be polite, I said I had no choice.
“Then you shall have the drumstick,” was the carver’s answer.
At one time Mr. Alger preached on Sunday mornings at the Music Hall, as years before Theodore Parker had done. He had large audiences—there was too little of ritual to warrant the term “congregation”—chiefly of men. I often went with Kitty to these services; though I did not understand much of what the speaker said, there was something democratic in the large Sunday gathering that appealed to me.
Mr. Edwin Whipple, the brilliant essayist and lecturer, was held to be a very important Owl; because he looked more like Minerva’s bird than any of the others, his solemn expression and round eyes gave him, above all, a claim to the title. There was nothing derogatory in being an Owl; indeed, it was rather “swell” than otherwise. Not all of Mama’s companions were Owls; some of the most learned of them were quite outside the group. The jovial Louis Agassiz, for instance, genial James T. Fields, our dear minister, James Freeman Clarke: these were all intimates and intellectuals, but they lacked something that Frederick Hedge, for example, possessed to a very high degree; just what this essential quality was, I despair of making any grown-up person understand. Though I have mentioned Mr. Emerson as being present at a meeting of that resort of Owls, the Radical Club, he too lacked the subtle characteristic and, though he might at times consort with Owls, he was not of them.
The only female Owl I remember was Miss Elizabeth Peabody, called the grandmother of Boston, one of the most guileless human beings that ever lived. Everybody loved Miss Peabody and, loving her so much, everybody talked about her. Some of the things they said were tender, some were funny, but none were slighting, none bitter.