Yet, with the notable exception of my father, I have less than the usual store of personal acquaintance with the "people who most influenced me." Of my grandfather, Moses Stuart, I have but two recollections; and these, taken together, may not be quite devoid of interest, as showing how the law of selection works in the mind of an imaginative child.
I remember seeing the Professor of Sacred Literature come into his dining-room one morning in his old house on Andover Hill which was built for him, and marked the creation of his department in the early days of the seminary history. He looked very tall and imposing. He had a mug in his hand, and his face smiled like the silver of which it was made.
The mug was full of milk, and he handed it ceremoniously to the year-old baby, his namesake and grandson, my first brother, whose high-chair stood at the table.
Then, I remember—it must have been a little more than a year after that—seeing the professor in his coffin in the front hall; that he looked taller than he did before, but still imposing; that he had his best coat on—the one, I think, in which he preached; and that he was the first dead person I had ever seen.
Whenever the gray-headed men who knew him used to sit about, relating anecdotes of him—as, how many commentaries he published, or how he introduced the first German lexicon into this country (as if a girl in short dresses would be absorbingly interested in her grandfather's dictionaries!)—I saw the silver mug and the coffin.
Gradually the German lexicon in a hazy condition got melted in between them. Sometimes the baby's mug sat upon the dictionary. Sometimes the dictionary lay upon the coffin. Sometimes the baby spilled the milk out of the mug upon the dictionary. But for my personal uses, the Andover grandfather's memoirs began and ended with the mug and the coffin.
The other grandfather was not distinguished as a scholar; he was but an orthodox minister of ability and originality, and with a vivacious personal history. Of him I knew something. From his own lips came thrilling stories of his connection with the underground railway of slavery days; how he sent the sharpest carving-knife in the house, concealed in a basket of food, to a hidden fugitive slave who had vowed never to be taken alive, and whose master had come North in search of him. It was a fine thing, that throbbing humanity, which could in those days burst the reformer out of the evangelical husk, and I learned my lesson from it. ("Where did she get it?" conservative friends used to wail, whenever I was seen to have tumbled into the last new and unfashionable reform.)
From his own lips, too, I heard the accounts of that extraordinary case of house-possession of which (like Wesley) this innocent and unimaginative country minister, who had no more faith in "spooks" than he had in Universalists, was made the astonished victim.
Night upon night I have crept gasping to bed, and shivered for hours with my head under the clothes, after an evening spent in listening to this authentic and fantastic family tale. How the candlesticks walked out into the air from the mantelpiece, and back again; how the chairs of skeptical visitors collected from all parts of the country to study what one had hardly then begun to call the "phenomena" at the parsonage at Stratford, Connecticut, hopped after the guests when they crossed the room; how the dishes at the table leaped, and the silver forks were bent by unseen hands, and cold turnips dropped from the solid ceiling; and ghastly images were found, composed of underclothing proved to have been locked at the time in drawers of which the only key lay all the while in Dr. Phelps's pocket; and how the mysterious agencies, purporting by alphabetical raps upon bed-head or on table to be in torments of the nether world, being asked what their host could do to relieve them, demanded a piece of squash pie.