That hospitality and charity which had so long been the rule of his life he was not now prepared to forego through fear of any penalties which the law would inflict upon him.
It was while suffering from the infirmities of advanced years, and from the solicitude which this abominable enactment had called forth, that Samuel destroyed the record which he had kept for so many years of the slaves that had taken refuge with him. This record was contained in about forty pages of his day-book, and these he cut out and burned. How would they now be prized had they not thus been lost!
Samuel Wilson saw, with the prophetic eye of faith and hope, what he did not live to behold in the flesh,—the abolition of slavery. His mortal remains repose beside the Quaker meeting-house where he so long ministered as an elder. No monumental stone marks that humble resting-place; but these simple lines of mine, that portray a character so rare, may serve for an affectionate memorial.
COUSIN JEMIMA.
“Well, Phebe, I guess thee did not expect me this afternoon. Don’t get up. I will just lay my bonnet in the bedroom myself. Dinah Paddock told me thy quilt was in; so I came up as soon as I could. Laid out in orange-peel! I always did like orange-peel. Dinah’s was herring-bone; and thine is filled with wool, and plims up, and shows the works, as mother used to say. I’ll help thee roll before I sit down. Now then. Days are long, and we’ll try to do a stroke of work, for thee’s a branch quilter, I’ve heard say.
“Jethro Mitchell stopped to see me this morning. They got home from Ohio last week, and he says that Cousin Jemima Osborne’s very bad with typhoid fever. Poor Jemima! It had been pretty much through the family, and after nursing the rest, she was taken down. I almost know she has no one fit to take care of her,—only Samuel and the three boys, and maybe some hired girl that has all the housework to do. The neighbors will be very kind, to be sure, sitting up nights; but there’s been so much sickness in that country lately.
“Jemima was Uncle Brown Coffin’s daughter, thee knows, who used to live down at Sandwich, on the Cape, when thee and I were girls. She always came to Nantucket to Quarterly Meeting with Uncle Brown and Aunt Judith; and folks used to say she wasn’t a bit of a coof, if she was born on the Cape. When Samuel and she were married, they asked me and Gorham Hussey to stand up with them. Jemima looked very pretty in her lavender silk and round rosy cheeks. When meeting was over, she whispered to me that there was a wasp or bee under her neck-handkerchief that had stung her while she was saying the ceremony. But I don’t think anybody perceived it, she was so quiet. Poor dear! I seem to see her now on a sick-bed and a rolling pillow.
“After my Edward died, I was so much alone that I thought I couldn’t bear it any longer, and I must just get up and go to Ohio, as Samuel and ’Mima had often asked me to. I stopped on the way at Mary Cooper’s at Beaver, and Mary’s son was joking a little about Cousin Samuel’s farming, and said he didn’t quite remember whether it was two or three fences that they had to climb going from the house to the barn-yard. I told him that Samuel wasn’t brought up to farming; he bought land when he moved out West.
“I found Jemima a good deal altered, now that she had a grown family; but we just began where we left off,—the same friendliness and kindness. When I was in Ohio was just when the English Friends, Jonathan and Hannah Purley, were in the country. We met them at Marlborough Quarterly Meeting. We were all together at William Smith’s house,—one of the neatest of places,—everything like waxwork, with three such daughters at home. How they worked to entertain Friends!