[Mr. Barnard’s subsequent labors and successes, including his services in connection with the United States Bureau of Education, will be the subject of another article, which will be accompanied by a portrait from a photograph recently taken.—Ed.]
A DAUGHTER OF THE PURITANS.
BY ANNA B. BENSEL.
“Have you known sorrow?”
“No.”
“Then this sketch is not for you.”
In one of the loveliest towns in New England there stood, many years ago, a large, old-fashioned, rambling house, known to all the villagers as the old Vincent Manor. It was such an old place, full of strange, dark corners and winding halls; a place that would have been famous for a game of hide-and-seek; but there were no children to roam at will over the house, to laugh out of its dusky corners, or to set the high rafters a-ring with noise. It had stood there—the house—before and after the Revolution. It had been turned into a small garrison more than once. Its walls had heard anxious councils, as men of strong nerve and resolute will made their vows of independence. Stately dames and grand gentlemen, in powder and ball dress, in ruffles and periwigs, had paced its weird corridors, or danced the slow minuet in its great salon.
But now all was changed, and Mistress Marjory—as the neighbors called her—lived alone in the old manor, the last of all her kin. She was a tall, pale woman, bearing in her stately, gracious ways all the trace of her proud ancestry, living alone, yet living for others, helping the poor and the suffering, answering the call of sorrow everywhere it reached her, loving and beloved. And her story—The story I learned one day in the great drawing-room at Vincent Manor! Ah, well, after all, perhaps it will not interest you as much as it did me. All lives have their sorrows; does the telling of one matter, after all?
But perhaps the charm and the pathos lay in the way Mistress Marjory told it, sitting in the shadows before the open wood fire, with her hands, so seldom idle, folded listlessly in her lap, and her beautiful gray eyes looking far into the past. What a pretty picture she was in her black silk dress, with its lace kerchief crossed on her bosom, with her hair, white as snow, drawn back high from her brow! I like to think of her as she looked that night so long ago.
And so it is that I think you may like the story best if I tell it to you in her own words, just as she told it to me. So here it is:—