We found our old friend's memoranda so strongly resembling the grumbling of our traveling cousins from over the water, that we think it may be edifying to print it in a parallel column, as a per contra, illustrating the effects of the lights or shadows that emanate from our own minds. Providence provides the banquet; its relish or disrelish depends on the appetite of the guest.
But to Mary Langdon's letter, which, as it was begun before she left home, bears its first date there:
'Lake-Side, 28th September.—My Dear Sue: I have not much more to tell you than my last contained. Carl Heiner left our neighborhood last week, determined to return by the next steamer to Dusseldorf. We were both very wretched at this final parting. But as I have often seen people making great sacrifices to others, and then letting them lose all the benefit of the sacrifice, by the manner of it, I summoned up courage, and appeared before my father calm and acquiescing, and—you will think me passionless, perhaps hard-hearted—I soon became so. I read, over and over again, your arguments, and I confess I was willing to be persuaded by them. But, after all, my point of sight is not yours, and you can not see objects in the proportions and relations that I do. You say I have exaggerated notions of filial duty, that I have come to mature age and ripe judgment, and that I should decide and act for myself; that in the nature of things the conjugal must supersede the filial relation, and that I have no right to sacrifice my life-long happiness to the remnant of my father's days; and above all, that I am foolish to give in to his prejudices, and selfishness, you added, dear, and did not quite efface the word. Now I see there is much reason in what you say, and I have only to answer that I can not leave my father with a shadow of his disapprobation. I can not and I will not. Our hearts have grown together. God forms the bond that ties the child to the parent, and we make the other, and rotten it often proves. Susy, you lost your parents when you were so young, that you can not tell what I feel for my surviving one. Since my mother's death and Alice's marriage, he has lived in such dependence on me, that I can't tell what his life would be if I were to leave him; and I will not. You tell me this is unnatural, and a satisfactory proof to you that I do not love Carl Heiner. O Sue——'
'Here must be our first hiatus. We can only say that the outpouring of our young friend's heart satisfied us that beneath her serene surface there was an unfathomable well of feeling, and that her friend must have been convinced that 'love's reason' is not always without reason. The letter proceeds:
'I very well know that my father is prejudiced, Sue, but old men's prejudices become a part and parcel of themselves, and they can not be cured of them. My father's do not spring from any drop of bitterness, for he has not one—nor from egotism, for he has none of it; but, as you know, his early life was in Boston, and his only society is there, and he naturally partakes the opinions of his cotemporaries, who—the few surviving—believe all foreigners to be a sort of 'outside barbarians,' and especially regard those who have participated in the revolutionary movements of Europe as impertinent invaders of our exclusive birthright to 'liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness.' Artists, in the creed of these good old gentlemen, are mere vagrants; and so my father comes to look upon Carl's intense love of his art, and his confidence in his future success, justified as it is by that already achieved, as a mere hallucination. So it is all ended—for the present. How subtle is hope! it still lurks in my heart in spite of the strongest probability that all is ended forever.'
Glen-House, White Hills, October 3d.—I am resuming my unfinished letter to you, my dear Sue, much nearer heaven than I began it. The day of Carl's sailing from New-York, my father proposed to me to go to Boston, take up Alice there, and come up to the hill-country. Dear father! he was offering me a lump of sugar after the bitter medicine, and I accepted it, sure at least of a momentary sweet sensation, and very sure that my poor father felt comforted by the self-complacency flowing from the enormous sacrifice he was making in coming up to the highlands at this cold season. My sister was glad enough to get a holiday from her nursery, so, on Monday, the second of October, a mellow, beautiful day, we came into Boston to take the two o'clock cars for Portland. We had three hours upon our hands, which were pleasantly filled up by visits to a studio and a picture-shop, and finally to refresh our mortal part, which had been running down while we were feasting the immortal, to a restaurateur's.
We groped our way up-stairs into a little back-room in School street, where, if we did not find luxuries and elegance, we did wholesome fare and civility. The rail-ride to Portland was dusty but brief, and we arrived there in time to see its beautiful harbor while the water reflected the roses thrown by the last rays of the sun upon the twilight clouds. We eschewed the hotel, and were kindly received at the boarding-house of a Miss Jones, a single woman somewhere between thirty and forty, who so blends dignity with graciousness, that she made us feel more like guests than customers. One might well mistake her reception for a welcome. Her house is a model, adding variety and abundance to the perfection, in all but these attributes, of the table of an English inn, and having the quiet and completeness, neatness and elegance, that have made the English tavern a classic type of comfort. It seems this house with its high repute, was the inheritance of two sisters from their mother, of whom we were told an anecdote which may be apocryphal, but which certainly would not be discordant with the character of Sir Roger de Coverley. The old lady finished her patriarchal days serenely, and when she was dying, begged that the order of her house might be in no wise disturbed by the event of her decease, but that 'the gentlemen would play their evening game of whist as usual'!
Miss Jones's morning face was as benign as her evening countenance had been. No lady could have administered hospitality with more refinement. We were to be at the station before seven, and just as our carriage-door was closing, it was reopened, and a rough but decent country-woman was shoved in, the driver muttering something about there being no other conveyance for her. My father looked a little awry, not with any thought of remonstrating against the procedure—no native American would do that, you know—but he was just lighting his after-breakfast segar, and he shrunk from the impropriety of smoking in such close quarters, with even such a woman-stranger. 'I hope, madam,' he said, 'a segar does not offend you?' 'La! no, sir,' replied our rustic friend most good-naturedly, 'I like it.' My father's geniality is always called forth by the touch of his segar. He said, with a smile at the corners of his mouth: 'Perhaps, madam, you would try one yourself.' 'I would!' she answered eagerly. My father hospitably selected his best segar, which she took, saying: 'Thank you kindly, sir. I s'pose I can light it at the end of yours.' My dear, fastidious father heroically breasted this juxtaposition, and the good woman, unconscious of any thing but her keen enjoyment of the unlooked-for boon, smoked away vigorously. Alice, who never loses sight of her duty to avert a possible mischance from any human being, rather verdantly suggested, 'that the segar might make her sick.' 'Mercy, child! I am used to pipes,' she replied; which, indeed, we might have inferred from her manner of holding the segar. Her rapid puffs soon resulted in the necessity usually engendered by smoking, and half-rising from her seat it was too evident that she mistook the pure plate-glass for empty space. My father let down the glass as if he had been shot, but she, no wise discomposed, even by our laughing, (for Alice and I could not resist it,) merely said, coolly: 'Why, I didn't calculate right, did I?' There are idiosyncrasies in Yankeedom, there is no doubt of it. We had a long drive to the cars, but there our close companionship, and our acquaintance, too, ended, except that the woman's husband—for she had a husband, some Touchstone, whose 'humor' it was to 'take that no other man would,' came to me, and asked me to put my window down, for his 'wife was sick.' But as I had just observed the good woman munching a bit of mince-pie, I thought that, coming so close upon the segar might possibly offend her stomach more than the fresh, untainted air, so I declined, as courteously as possible, with the answer I have always ready for similar requests, 'that I keep my window open to preserve the lives of the people in the car.' 'That's peculiar!' I heard her murmur; but her serenity was no wise discomposed by my refusal, or her sickness. Surely the imperturbable good-nature of our people is national and peculiar.
By the way, there were notices posted up in these cars, which reminded us that we were near the English Provinces, and under their influence. The notices ran thus: 'Gentlemen are requested not to put their feet on the cushions, and not to spit on the floor, and to maintain a respectable cleanliness. The Conductors are required to enforce these requests.' Must we wait for the millennium to see a like request and like enforcement in our own cars?