Thus thinking, we pick up a little rough paper-book with marbled covers from the corner of the old hair trunk where it was long ago thrown by some careless hand. The little tumbled book proves to be a diary. Not a record of a soul's strivings and pantings after a higher life, or a curiously minute inquiry into the possible reasons which induced the Almighty to allow Satan to afflict Job, but a simple daily note-book, the memoranda of a housekeeper. The old letters had been to us what the newspapers of to-day will be to the great-grandchildren of the present generation. The diary carried us back into the immediate home-life of seventy years ago.
The diarist had been a fair and stately dame in her day, and it is easy to remove her from the frame where her portrait hangs on the walls of the south parlor, and fancy her seated in the same room before the crackling fire jotting down the memoranda of the day. She is a pretty sight, we think, sitting in her straight-backed mahogany arm-chair, with her feet on the polished brass fender and her book resting on the little stand, which also holds the two tall silver candlesticks with their tall tallow candles, for wax candles are saved for gala-nights, when diaries are not in requisition. She must have been nearly forty years old when she wrote in this little book, but we see her as her portrait shows her, very young-looking in spite of her stateliness, enhanced though it is by the high turban of embroidered muslin edged with soft lace falling over the clusters of fair curls on her temples, and by the black satin gown, short-waisted and scanty, relieved only by delicate lace frills, which shade the beautiful throat and the strong, white, shapely hands. The shadow on her face as she gazes into the fire is not marvelous, for it is winter in her quiet Connecticut home; the post comes but twice a week; her husband is representing his State in Washington, and her only child is studying in distant Yale. Perhaps, though, the shadow is not that of pure loneliness. Is there not some perplexity in it? And something also of vexation? Yes, and it is the very vexation of spirit which—in the face of Solomon's venerable testimony to the contrary—we had fancied to be peculiar to our own evil days. Almost the first entry in this quaint little diary is to the effect that "Jim was sulky to-night and gave short answers." A little farther on we find that "Yesterday Jim went away without leave, and stayed all night;" which delinquency, being accompanied by a suspicion of drunkenness, caused the anxious dame to "send for General T—— to come and give Jim a lecture." Lecturing, however, was not then so popular as now, and Jim appears to have profited little by the veteran general's discourse, for on the very next night he repeats his offence. We have reason also to fear that Jim's honesty was not above suspicion, for we read that Betsey, an American woman who acted as assistant housekeeper and companion, "found in Jim's possession a red morocco pocket-book which I had given her, but"—alas for Betsey!—"with the contents all gone."
Other entries to the effect that madam one day lost her key to the wine-cellar, and the next day discovered the bibulous Jim in the said cellar "sucking brandy through a straw inserted in the bunghole of the cask," and that, "furthermore, Jim had confessed to having stolen and sold a coffee-basin for rum," do not tend to raise in our estimation this pattern of an ancient darkey. This time it appears that madam did not need to call in the aid of General T——, for she admits that she herself "lectured Jim severely;" sarcastically adding, "he professed penitence, but that did not hinder him from stealing another basin to-day."
But the refractory Jim, we think, must have been the exception which proved the rule that all servants prior to the late Celtic invasion were models of deportment. Accordingly, we are not surprised to find that Betsey was a handmaiden held in high estimation, and that "old Jack" was a servant whose shortcomings were offset by his general good conduct and affectionate heart. But we find also that there was a certain Sally, who could be tolerated only because of her great culinary skill; and an uncertain Silvy, who appears to have been in mind, if not in fact, the twin-sister of Jim, with a spice of Topsy thrown in.
The trouble in those days was not the prospect of suddenly losing cook or nursemaid, but that there was no getting rid of either. The fact of slavery was, under the act of 1793, slowly fading away from Connecticut, but all its habits remained in full force. "I wish I could send Jim and Silvy away," writes madam, "but the poor rascals have no place to go to."
Silvy was a tricksome spright that delighted in breaking bottles of the "best Madeira wine and spilling the contents over the new English carpet" when the mistress had invited the parson's and the doctor's families to dinner. This, though of course it was "not to be endured," might have been accidental, and so was very "tolerable" in comparison with Silvy's next exploits of poisoning the beloved house-dog and throwing by the roadside the bottle of wine—possibly emptied first—the jar of jelly and the fresh quarter of lamb which had been sent to a poor and sick old woman. These two offences, occurring on the same day, we are sorry to confess, incited the stately, white-handed dame to do something more decisive than to "deliver a lecture" to Silvy. It is demurely recorded that "for these two misdeeds I whipped Silvy." What effect the whipping had upon that somewhat too frolicsome damsel we are not informed, but madam admits that it made herself ill, and adds that "if Silvy does not reform it is impossible to see what can be done for her, for she will not listen to remonstrance. Betsey is not strong enough to punish so strapping a wench, and it does not seem right that a man should be set to whip any woman or girl, even a wench, else Jack could do it."
However, Jack's own patience having been tried by the refractory Silvy, he seems to have taken the matter into his own hands, for his mistress tells us how she was scandalized, on her return from church, by "finding Jack whipping Silvy," while that young lady was "screaming vehemently, so that all the people passing by could hear her." As Jack had discovered Silvy engaged in the amiable diversion of breaking the legs of the young calves by throwing stones at them, one can have a little charity for his summary action, although, as madam gravely remarks, "he might at least have waited until Monday."
The calves, by the way, had an unlucky winter of it, and were especially shaky about the legs. We find that a few weeks later "Jack having neglected to repair the barn floor, as he had been directed, a plank had given way and three of the calves' legs had been broken by the fall." We have felt a deep interest in the fate of these calves, but with all our anxiety have failed to discover whether three calves had all their legs broken, or only three legs in all had been sacrificed to Jack's culpable neglect.
By this time we begin to think that madam would have been just as well off if she had not kept so many servants, and to wonder what they could have had to do. Perhaps it was the idle man's playmate that made the trouble. But a little farther reading in the old diary dissipates this illusion. If anybody thinks that our grandmothers must have been cursed with ennui because they did not attend three parties a night three times a week, with operas and theatres to fill in the off nights, they are mightily mistaken.
Of sociability there could have been no lack in this rural neighborhood, for besides a ball or two madam records numbers of tea-drinkings and debating clubs, and meetings of the Clio, a literary club, at which assisted at least two future judges of the supreme courts of the States of their adoption, and several other men and women whose names would attract attention even in our clattering days. Visiting, too, of the old-fashioned spend-the-day sort had not gone out of date—was indeed so common that madam one evening enters in her journal—whether in sorrow or in thankfulness there is nothing to tell us, but at least as a notable fact—that she had "had no company to-day."