I attempted to offer a few words of consolation to Miss Catharine, but she wept bitterly and would not be comforted. “Ah!”—said she—“this is one of the consequences of living in a republic. Had we been still under a king, he would have known nothing about our little property, and we could have enjoyed it in our own way as long as we lived. There is one comfort, that not a creature in the states will be any the better for what we shall leave behind us—Sister and I have taken care of that. We have bequeathed every article to our relations in Nova Scotia since our nephew, poor boy, was so unfortunate as to die before us. In all our trials it has been a great satisfaction to us to reflect that when everything was changing around, grace has been given us to remain faithful to our church and king.”
The loyal old lady then informed me that, on his accession to the throne, she had written a letter of congratulation to his Britannic Majesty, William the Fourth, whom she remembered having seen in Boston before the revolution, when he was there as Duke of Clarence and an officer in his father’s navy. In this epistle she had earnestly assured him that the family of Dr. Byles always were, and always would be, most true and fervent in their devotion to their liege lord and rightful sovereign the king of England.—To have attempted to argue her out of this feeling, the pride and solace of her declining life, would have been cruel; and moreover entirely useless—I did not hint to her the improbability of her letter ever having reached the royal personage to whom it was addressed.
The old lady told me that her chief occupation now was to write serious poetry, and she gave me a copy of some stanzas which she had recently composed. The verses were tolerably good, and written in a hand remarkably neat, handsome, and steady.
Miss Catharine Byles survived her sister Miss Mary about two years, and died of gradual decay in the summer of 1837. Her remains repose with those of her father and sister beneath the flooring of Trinity Church. They left the whole of their property to their loyalist relations in Nova Scotia, true to their long-cherished resolution that no republican should inherit the value of a farthing from them. The representative of the family is said to have come to Boston and taken possession of the bequest.
It is curious, as well as instructive, to contemplate the infinite varieties of human character, and the strange phases under which human intellect presents itself. The peculiarities of these two sisters strikingly evinced the lasting power of early impressions, almost always indelible when acting upon minds that have not been expanded by intercourse with the world. For instance—their steadfast, gratuitous and useless loyalty, cherished for monarchs whom they had never seen, and who had forgotten the very existence of Dr. Byles (if indeed they had ever remembered it) and who, of course, neither knew nor cared anything about his daughters; their rooted antipathy to the republic in which they lived, and where if they had not persisted in shutting their eyes they must have seen everything flourishing around them; the strict economy which induced them to deny themselves even the comforts of life, and their willingness to be assisted by the benevolent rather than render themselves independent by an advantageous disposal of their property. The almost idolatrous devotion with which they clung to the inanimate objects that had been familiar to them in early life, showed an intensity of feeling which was both pitied and respected by their friends, though reason perhaps would not have sanctioned its entire indulgence. By living so much alone, by visiting at no other house, by never going out of their native town, by perpetually thinking and talking over the occurrences of their youth, they had wrought themselves into a firm belief that no way was right but their own way, no opinions correct but their own opinions: and above all, that in no other dwelling-place but their paternal mansion was it possible for them to be happy or even to exist.
As a set-off to their weaknesses, their vanities and their prejudices, it gives me pleasure to bear testimony to the kindness of their deportment, the soft tones of their voices, and to the old-fashioned polish of their manners; which at once denoted them to be ladies, even in their short-gowns and petticoats.
Though, in the latter part of their lives, the daughters of Dr. Byles were subjected to the sore trial of seeing the little green lawn on which they had played when children converted into a dusty street, and the fine old trees (which would take a century to replace) demolished in a few minutes before their eyes: still they were both permitted to die beneath the same roof under which their existence had commenced. The house of their heavenly father has many mansions; and there, in their eternal abode, now that their mental vision has cleared, and their souls have been purified from the dross of mortality, they have learnt the futility of having set their hearts too steadfastly on a dwelling erected by human hands; and more than all, of fostering prejudices in favor of that system of government which, according to the signs of the times, is fast and deservedly passing away. Is it too much to hope that ere the lapse of another half century, not a being in the civilized world will render the homage of a bended knee, except to the King of Heaven.