Vaucluse, originally laid out by a French landscape architect, was in those days the finest country seat I had ever seen, although already a good deal fallen from its high estate and not maintained as it should have been. The remains of a labyrinth could still be traced by the windings of its box-bordered paths. The long alley leading to the summerhouse was bordered by a neglected box hedge higher than a man’s head. The trees here seemed larger and handsomer than all other oaks, elms, or maples, and in the month of May two superb specimens of Magnolia grandiflora were covered with enormous creamy white blossoms, whose perfume haunts me still. The house was of colonial design, with very large white columns at the entrance of the main building, flanked by two wings used in the olden time as servants’ quarters, but now devoted to seeds and bulbs and all sorts of quaint garden tools. Before the entrance a graveled path swept round a circle of greensward, in whose midst stood the old lichen-covered sundial, clasped by a scarlet honeysuckle. It was here one breathless midsummer afternoon that we gave the memorable amateur circus. As the crowning event, Sultan, the Mayers’ old Arabian pony, trotted round and round the ring, while Esther Hazard, in a blue bathing suit and scarlet cap, balanced lightly on his venerable back!
Mr. Hazard was a confirmed spiritualist. He read “The Banner of Light”, if, indeed, he did not contribute to that journal, then the chief organ of the spiritualists. I often went with him to séances, which had a great interest for me, though I was never for a moment shaken in my belief that the manifestations and materializations I witnessed were vulgar shams. Fannie Hazard, the eldest daughter, a girl of great sweetness and a good deal of will power, refused to allow mediums at Vaucluse; I remember some battles royal on this point. After her death, however, the mediums came, and a cabinet was arranged in one of the summerhouses, where the séances took place. Once Frederick Myers of the London Society for Psychical Research was present with me at a séance. The medium was a dull one, the grossness of her manifestations, it seemed to me, could not deceive the veriest child. They deceived Mr. Myer, however, who was deeply impressed with all that he saw and heard. Later, when I read accounts of the impartial manner in which the investigations of psychical phenomena were carried on by the society of which Frederick Myer was the leading spirit, the testimony left me quite cold.
At the close of the evening sessions, Mr. Hazard used to walk in the mysterious old garden where, he told me, his dead wife often joined him, walked with him, leant upon his arm. On one occasion she allowed him to cut a small piece from the spirit lace drapery in which she was arrayed. He showed me the fragment the next day; it proved to be the same “wash blonde” I had bought at Edward Lawton’s shop in Thames Street. The materialized spirits allowed Mr. Hazard to cut off locks of their hair for remembrance. The last time I was in the parlor of Vaucluse, there hung on the wall a glass case with strands of hair of every shade and degree of fineness: the name of the friend or relative from whose head it had been cut while the medium was in trance was written beside each. I remember that in the glass case the hair of Uncle Jonas Minturn was dark red, though my impression is that in life it was of another shade!
Among the young faces that look at me from the old garden at Vaucluse, the fairest is that of my “Twin”, Edith Blackler, a tall girl with skin like a sunburnt peach, eyes like a clear brown brook, teeth like fresh peeled almonds, and a laugh that made the old feel young, and the young feel immortal. We were as nearly inseparable as the four miles that lay between Lawton’s Valley and Vaucluse allowed: together we tramped the country roads, swam the waters of Narragansett, waded the streams and sailed the seas that bound our island home. When I was not at Vaucluse, my Twin was with me at Lawton’s Valley. Here Mama was mistress of the revels, and here young and old, grave and gay, fashionable and unfashionable, gladly gathered when she waved her fairy wand. One afternoon when all Newport, both the “intellectuals” of the Point and the frivolous of the Avenue, mingled in a friendly crowd in the Valley for afternoon tea, we had some famous charades. The final scene represented Blondin crossing Niagara Falls. A plank was laid across the summit of the waterfall just below the old mill, the “middle fall”, we called it, for at that time there were three falls in Lawton’s Valley. A tiny camp chair was placed in the middle of the plank, and here one of my mother’s familiars (was it William Hunt or Hamilton Wilde?) proceeded to compound an omelette, while the brook sang, the silver birch rustled, and the insects trilled their evening hymn. Henry James was of the company that day; something of its magic always lingered in his tenacious memory, as it does in my random recollections.
At this time Newport’s summer colony was in the wooden age. Bellevue Avenue was thickly settled with pleasant, substantial cottages, some of which still survive. The word cottage was, however, always a misnomer; these commodious, well-furnished houses should more properly have been called villas. The first symptom of the impending change was the sudden transformation of the cottage from a simple, medium-sized country house to a large ambitious structure like the George Francis Train villa in the atrocious style of the early seventies, the darkest period of American architecture. After the wooden age, the brick, stone, and marble ages followed in quick succession.
The Emperor Caesar Augustus “found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.” Richard Hunt might well have said, “I found Newport a town of wood; I left it a town of marble.” At about the time I am writing of, Hunt built Linden Gate for Mr. Henry Marquand and the John N. A. Griswold house on Touro Park, now the home of the Art Association. While maintaining something of the cottage characteristics, both these are far handsomer and more substantial than the earlier houses, and mark the summer colony’s second stage of architectural evolution.
I spent part of one season with my mother’s friend, Mrs. Charles H. Dorr, in Newport, and entered more fully into the social life of the place than I had done before. Compared to our life in Portsmouth, Newport seemed formal, dull, cut and dried. Everybody bathed then on the First Beach, except the few people who lived near “Bailey’s.” The ladies’ hour was from ten to twelve. At noon a flag was run up on the bathing pavilion, announcing that the “gentlemen’s hour” had begun, when women and children were banished from the beach, and the men were free to take their swim dressed or undressed as they pleased. Most people dined early, though the seven or half-past seven o’clock dinner parties were beginning. In the afternoon society took its drive up and down Bellevue Avenue from five to seven. The horses, harnesses, carriages, lap dogs, ladies, and toilettes were the handsomest that money could buy. While I admired the style of it all, the artificiality fretted me, and after a few days of Bellevue Avenue I was glad to scurry home to Portsmouth to embrace my parents and go for a tramp with my Twin. The introduction of polo by James Gordon Bennett was a great boon to the colony. I can see him now on his swift broncho, tearing across the polo field after the ball, the blood streaming from a cut on his forehead, made by the mallet of one of the opposing players.
Among the distinguished people of summer Newport at this time were the George Bancrofts, old friends of my mother’s. Every summer we were invited to see Mr. Bancroft’s roses, held to be well-nigh miraculous. There was a tradition that Newport was not a good place for flowers, and beyond the formal blue hydrangeas that fashion demanded, few people made any attempt to grow them. Mr. Bancroft’s roses and artichokes became famous, people were quick to follow the fashion he set, and now Newport is rich in beautiful gardens.
In the early seventies my father bought Oak Glen. He had sold our beloved Lawton’s Valley a few years before, partly on account of the endless difficulties of transportation.
I think he regretted this lovely place, and partly because my mother grieved so for it, bought the small estate of five acres a little higher up on the stream that runs through the valley. He improved the property and built a large addition to the house, where he spent the last summers of his life. As long as she lived my mother made Oak Glen her summer home, and after her death it passed into our hands.