“I came in to save the books. Your office and half Boston burned down last night.”
“I thought there was a good deal of disturbance!” Aunt Jenny placidly remarked.
The fire occurred on a Saturday night. Sunday morning Miss Elizabeth Peabody was found trying to make her way across one of the danger zones roped off and guarded by the police.
“Where did you want to go, Ma’am?” asked a policeman.
“To Sunday school! Please let me pass—my class is waiting.”
“Nary a scholar is waiting for you, Ma’am. There ain’t no church, nor yet no Sunday school.”
The presidential election of this year was one of the most exciting I remember. General Grant was running for his second term; he had been first elected in 1868 with Schuyler Colfax as vice president. In 1872 Colfax withdrew in favor of our friend Henry Wilson. My father was a Grant man, and our house was, as usual, the center of much activity as the election drew near. My mother gave a reception for General and Mrs. Grant, where there was a great gathering of the Republican clan, and my father was constantly receiving committees and delegations. A section of the Republicans, dissatisfied with party politics during Grant’s first term, “split off” and nominated Horace Greeley for president, with Gratz Brown as his running mate, the Democrats indorsing the nomination. Greeley was then sixty-one years old. Judging by the portraits, he must have been rather rustic in appearance, wearing old-fashioned chin whiskers. The campaign was a bitter one. Greeley was unmercifully caricatured by Thomas Nast and other cartoonists. My parents, who had great respect for Greeley, resented the ridicule to which he was subjected. I remember, among other instruments of torture, an absurd portrait of him on a paper fan with a long white cotton fluff representing his beard. This was widely circulated. Greeley’s death, a few weeks after his defeat at the polls, was said to have been caused by the suffering he endured in this cruel campaign. As founder and for thirty years editor of the New York Tribune, as a patron of artists and men of letters, he might have hoped for better treatment at the hands of the press. The very papers whose ridicule broke his heart were full of handsome obituary notices after he was gone. It was deeply impressed on me at this time that to run the gantlet of a presidential election, a man must have more than common courage.
In Boston it seemed as if every waking hour of my father’s and mother’s existence was filled with labor for city, state, or nation. At Portsmouth the pressure was somewhat relaxed. I remember both parents as steadily at work here during the morning, but there were delicious afternoons when they were free to play with us. Those were the palmy days of the Newport catboats, small, steady, centerboard sloops, the best craft for pleasure sailing I have known. Memories arise of delightful summer days when a gay party of us drove to town in the old carryall, which was “put up” in the shed of the Newport Reading Room, of which my father was one of the founders. At Bannister’s wharf, if we were lucky, we engaged Cap’n Anthony and his boat, The Two Sisters, for the day. The ecstasy of the motion of that little cockleshell as she danced over the water is something unforgettable. If the wind were light, we steered our way out of the harbor towards Beaver Tail for a taste of the ocean; if there was too much sea on, the course lay within the landlocked waters of the bay. At high noon we landed at Conanicut Island just below old Fort Dumpling. Conanicut now goes mostly by the more prosaic name of Jamestown. Sometimes, when a householder of this pleasant summer resort drives me about the island, pointing out this or that view, a miracle happens! Some wind of memory blows Jamestown, with its hotels, its nice comfortable houses, clean away, and gives me back the bare rocky Conanicut of my youth that I loved as I can never love Jamestown. The commodious ferry boat from which I have just stepped disappears, I am sitting once more at the masthead of The Two Sisters, flying over Narragansett Bay, the salt taste on my lips, the salt wind in my hair. I am climbing the steep rough path to the old ruined fort, a lunch basket in one hand, a camp stool in the other. On the farther side of the Island is a little sheltered silver stretch of beach where one day, when the party is small and intimate, we make out to rig a shelter to shield us in our undressing and to slip into the delicious cool water. The joy of such a stolen sea bath, where there is no curious crowd to watch, can hardly be known to the ladies and gentlemen who now disport themselves on summer mornings at Bailey’s Beach.
These joyous outings were often shared by the young people from Vaucluse, where every summer “Shepherd Tom” (Thomas Hazard) gathered about him the clans of Hazard and of Minturn. Mr. Hazard’s wife, dead long before this time, was one of the beautiful Minturn sisters; from her Shepherd Tom inherited a large family connection, to every branch of which he showed endless hospitality. Beside the five Hazard children there were relays of Minturns, Mayers, Halls, Blacklers, Birckheads, and Hunters, who came and went in dazzling succession. Taken altogether, they were the handsomest family I have ever seen. Beside their beauty and charm, they had certain characteristics that set them apart from the rest of us. They seemed to hold some secret knowledge of and communion with nature that gave them a power over animals; they understood the language of horses, dogs, even insects; they had no fear of any living thing,—knew snakes, bees, spiders, toads, for their friends. They seemed more like a race of fauns and dryads than mere flesh-and-blood boys and girls. The four slim, graceful Hazard girls were overshadowed by their father, a rustic, vigorous man, who left his mark on his generation, and is remembered to-day by a volume of essays, “Johnny Cake Papers”, later handsomely reprinted by a nephew of the Peacedale branch of the clan. The Hazards were Friends; when I first remember him Shepherd Tom went regularly to Quaker Meeting. He was rough in manner, careless in dress, and thought too little about his appearance. One Sunday morning on his return from meeting, he was seen to go hurriedly to a mirror, where he gazed hard at his reflection. He quickly saw why the folks at meeting had looked at him so curiously. He had a thick crop of tiny blond curls. The mirror showed each of these curls tied up with a bit of scarlet wool. While he slept on the porch before going to meeting, some of the younger children had played this scurvy trick upon him. If it were meant as a lesson, perhaps he deserved it, for the relatives of his beautiful young wife remembered her mortification when he came into the drawing-room where she was receiving guests from Newport, fresh from killing a sheep, his white smock showing the telltale scarlet stains.
Mr. Hazard took some pains to win great influence in the Rhode Island Legislature. This was a puzzle to his friends till they learned that his object was the abolition of capital punishment in the State. He did not rest until the death penalty was done away with, after which he retired into private life, and, as I think, never again meddled with public affairs.