All this made no impression upon my father. He was resolved that I should go to Belle Air, the county town, situated twenty-five miles from Baltimore, where the school was, the next week, and he so expressed himself decidedly.
The condemned criminal, who counts the hours that speed to his execution, scarcely feels more horror at the rush of time than did I. One appalling now seemed to possess me. I was deeply sensitive, and the dread of my loneliness away from all I loved, and the fear of the ridicule and tyranny of the oldsters, haunted me so that I could not sleep, and I have lain awake all night, picturing to myself what would be the misery of my situation at Belle Air. In fact, when the day arrived, I bade my mother, aunt Betsey and my little sister Virginia farewell with scarcely a consciousness, and was placed in the gig by my father as the stunned criminal is assisted into the fatal cart.
This over-sensitiveness—what a curse it is! I lay no claims to genius, and yet I have often thought it hard that I should have the quality which makes the “fatal gift” so dangerous, and not the gift. My little sister Virginia, who had been my playmate for weeks, cried bitterly when I left her. I dwelt upon her swimming eye with mine, tearless and stony as death. The waters of bitterness had gathered around my heart, but had not yet found an outlet from their icy thrall, ’neath which they flowed dark and deep.
Belle Air, at the time I write of, was a little village of some twenty-five or more houses, six of which were taverns. It was and is a county town, and court was regularly held there, to which the Baltimore lawyers used to flock in crowds; and many mad pranks have I known them play there for their own amusement, if not for the edification of the pupils of Mr. Sears.
My father drew up at Mr. Kenny’s tavern, and as it was about twelve when we arrived, and the pupils were dismissed to dinner, he sent his card to the principal, who in a few minutes made his appearance. Talk of a lover watching the movements and having impressed upon his memory the image of her whom he loveth!—the schoolboy has a much more vivid recollection of his teacher. Mr. Sears was a tall, stout man, with broad stooping shoulders, he carried a large cane, and his step was as decided as ever was Doctor Busby’s, who would not take his hat off when the king visited his school, for the reason, as he told his majesty afterwards, that if his scholars thought that there was a greater man in the kingdom than himself, he never could control them. The face of Mr. Sears resembled much the likeness of Alexander Hamilton, though his features were more contracted, and his forehead had nothing like the expansion of the great statesman; yet it projected very similarly at the brows. He welcomed my father to the village with great courtesy, and me to his pupilage with greater dignity. He dined with my father, with me by his side, and every now and then he would pat me on the head and ask me a question. I stammered out monosyllabic answers, when the gentleman would address himself again to his plate with renewed gusto.
Mr. Sears recommended my father to board me at the house of a Mr. Hall, who had formerly been the sheriff of the county, and whose wife and daughters, he said, were very fine women. He repented, he said, when he first took charge of the academy, that there was not some general place attached to it where the pupils could board in common, but after reflection had taught him that to board them about among the towns-people would be as well. He remarked that I was one of his smallest pupils, but that he could look on me in loco parentis, and doubted not that he could make a man of me.
After dinner he escorted my father, leading me by the hand, down to the academy, which was on the outskirts of the town, at the other end of it from Mr. Kenny’s. The buzz, which the usher had not the power to control in the absence of Mr. Sears, hushed instantly in his presence, and as he entered with my father, the pupils all arose, and remained standing until he ordered them to be seated. Giving my father a seat, and placing me in the one which he designed for me in the school, Mr. Sears called several of his most proficient scholars in the different classes, from Homer down to the elements of English, and examined them. When a boy blundered, he darted at him a look which made him shake in his shoes, and when another boy gave a correct answer and took his fellow’s place, and glanced up for Mr. Sears’ smile, it was a picture which my friend Beard, of Cincinnati, would delight to draw. The blunderer looked like one caught in the act of sheep-stealing, while the successful pupil took his place with an air that would have marked one of Napoleon’s doubtful soldiers, when the Emperor had witnessed an act of daring on his part. As for Mr. Sears, he thought Napoleon a common creature to himself. To kill men, he used to say, was much more easy than to instruct them, he felt himself to be like one of the philosophers of old in his academy; and he considered Doctor Parr and Doctor Busby, who boasted that they had whipped every distinguished man in the country, much greater than he of Pharsalia or he of Austerlitz.
When the rehearsal of several classes had given my father a due impression of Mr. Sears’ great gifts as an instructor, and of his scholars’ proficiency, he took my father to Mr. Hall’s, to introduce us to my future host.
We found the family seated in the long room in which their boarders dined. To Mr. Sears they paid the most profound respect. Well they might, for without his recommendation they would have been without boarders. Hall was a tall, good humored, careless man. His wife was older than himself, tall too, but full of energy. He had two daughters, Harriet and Jane. Harriet was a quick, active, lively girl, and withal pretty, while Jane was lolling and lazy in her motions, and without either good looks or prettiness. The matter of my boarding was soon arranged, and it had become time for my father to depart. All this while the variety and excitement of the scene had somewhat relieved my feelings, but when my father bade me be a good boy and drove off, I felt as if the “last link” was indeed broken, and though I made every effort, from a sense of shame, to repress my tears, it was in vain, and they broke forth the wilder from their previous restraint. Harriet Hall came up instantly to comfort me. She took a seat beside me at the open window at which I was looking out after my father, and with a sweet voice, whose tones are in my memory yet, she told me not to grieve because I was from my friends; that I should soon see them again, and that she would think I feared they would not be kind to me if I showed so much sorrow. This last remark touched me, and while I was drying my eyes, one of the larger boys, a youth of eighteen or twenty, came up to the window—for the academy by this time had been dismissed for the evening—and said,
“Ah, Miss Harriet, is this another baby who is crying for home?”