My father, for whose sake I learned to make bread, to care for the milk, and make the butter for the table, did his best to help me. While I wanted to be a good daughter, to make my parents happy, mine was a pleasure-loving nature. Mama was indulgent, accepted her youngest as she was. A sentence at this time expressed her attitude:
“Maud, you are frivolous; but your salads are divine.”
My poor father was much troubled by my frivolity. His letters are full of warning lest by late hours and close rooms I should lose the first bloom of youth which to loving parents is apparently so much more precious than to young people themselves. Besides arranging for my lessons in cooking, he had me taught bookkeeping. While I was not altogether successful with double entry, I learned enough about keeping accounts to be of great use to me in later life. He writes to me on August 1, 1871:
I enclose some bills for you and Mama to look over and approve, if right. You are not aware of the amount of care and perplexity occasioned by the habit of having things charged instead of settling for them on the spot. The habit is not only a source of perplexity and often of dispute, but it involves trouble to both parties and is in some sense demoralizing, because it tempts one to buy things which would not be bought if one had to pay cash.
I know that you, dear child, are without that practice in the stern training which is so very important for every girl who intends to become the responsible head of a family. You must, my darling, reflect, and shape the course of your practical education to a high and noble end; remembering ever that while you ought to have a reasonable amount of the pleasures which youth and high spirits crave, you are to prepare for the stern duties of this life and for those of the life to come, for even heaven will have its serious work and its stern duties.
Don’t phoo, phoo, my precious darling, because the time is close at hand when your loving Papa can neither praise nor scold you; though he trusts he will be blest with spiritual vision enough to watch over you and to rejoice in your joys and mourn for your sorrows.
A small precious packet of letters in my father’s neat handwriting has somehow survived the endless movings of my wandering life. I choose one to close this rambling chapter, because it shows him so exactly as he was, “A Knight like Bayard, without reproach or fear.”
Hall’s Hall
208 Second Ave., New York.
My dear Maud;
I was much gratified by hearing from Mama that you had declined to attend a pigeon-shooting match upon grounds of humanity.