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CHAPTER V.
I KNOW there are those who will kindly regard these reminiscences of things, trifling, it may be, in themselves, but affording a glimpse of manners perhaps already forgotten by most or all of those who were formerly more or less conversant with them, and which may prove of some interest in the future. We had spent our Thanksgiving at home, in the year 18—, but went all together to the farm of our uncle Richard, who was of the Episcopal Church, for the celebration of Christmas; for many of his persuasion, at that time, regarded “Thanksgiving” pretty much as the Highlander, in Scott’s novel, did “ta little government Sunday, tat tey call ta Fast.” He was a well-to-do farmer, at a place within easy reach of the town in which we lived, and where very few were at all rich, even according to the former moderate standard of wealth, and most people were poor, or at least depended on their daily labor for their daily bread. Those were very hard times following upon the war; and that had followed fast upon the Great Fire, which reduced to ruin almost the entire central business part of the town. Our family had suffered private losses, too, by a swindling failure on an extensive scale, — a rare incident in those days; 1 and again by the embargo and the war, most of my mother’s limited means having been invested in one vessel after another, employed in the coasting trade, and this source of income at length stopped altogether. Still, people bore up bravely against these misfortunes, and showed quite as much spirit and hardihood as in these latter times, and got along decently, after a fashion. To be sure, the proclamation of Peace, a few years before, had revived all hearts; though I heard of a washerwoman engaged in her avocation, while the bells were ringing, who, on learning the cause of jubilation, peevishly exclaimed, — “Peace! peace! what’s peace, when there’s no water?” 2 Our Thanksgiving had been a cheerful one, though colored, as such anniversaries are likely to be, with recollections of the absent, or the dead; for the memory of my father was always present to my mother, then and during a long widowhood of almost half a century, and my older brothers were at sea. My mother was an excellent housekeeper, and we had plenty of the usual belongings of the festival, so eagerly looked forward to by the young, and something to bestow upon others not so well supplied. It was the practice of some of this class to knock at the doors of those thought to be better off, on the evening before, begging “something for Thanksgiving;” and, by way of a joke, the children of comfortable neighbors and friends would often array themselves in cast-off bizarre habiliments, and come in bands of three or four to the houses of those whom they knew, preferring the same request. Ordinarily, the disguise was readily detected. Sometimes the little mimics would come in, and keep up the show and the fun for a while; but for the most part their courage failed them at the threshold, and they skurried away, shouting for glee, almost before they got any answer to their mock petitions. It was a queer fancy, thus to simulate poverty; but kings have sometimes done so. Did not James of Scotland find amusement in roaming through a portion of his domain, as a “gaberlunzieman?” Yes — and even composed a famous ballad to celebrate his exploits in this humble way. In the evening, we had a lively company, regaled with nuts, apples, and cider; and my grandmother, who indulged in the old-fashioned practice, that is for females, of smoking a pipe, sat in the chimney-corner, where a genial wood-fire was brightly blazing, for coal was then a thing unknown in family consumption, duly furnished with the implement, and sometimes called out to us, — “A-done, children, a-done,” when in anywise annoyed by us, and occasionally would sing us an old song, of which I remember only “Robert Kid” and “A galliant ship, launched off the stocks, from Old England she came,” etc.; and, often when a storm was raging without, repeating to us the rhymes, — “How little do” (pronounced doe) “we think, or know,
What the poor sailors undergo.” But we had a livelier time at Uncle
Richard’s; for there were more of us and merrier. Of course, those of the
household who could be spared from domestic duties had attended service in the
morning, and some of us from the town had also appeared at church; for though
our branch of the family were now Presbyterians, we remembered that our common
ancestor and the company who came over with him, a couple of centuries and more
before that time, were of the Church of England, only protesting against the
abuses which had crept into it; and Uncle Richard carefully preserved, with the
genealogy of the family on this side the water, the Orders in Council,
prescribing for the passengers, by the “Mary and John,” of which my ancestor
was one, then lying in the Thames, in the year 1633, amongst other regulations,
the daily service to be observed on board, according to the ordinances of the
Prayer Book. No doubt the dinner was all which
the domestic celebration of the festival imports, for the farm was well stocked
with every description of creature, and with most other things needful for the
purpose; but I may be excused if I remember none of the particulars, now that
so many years have intervened. I know that Uncle Richard always prided himself
upon his excellent cider, and there is little question that there was a due
allowance of spirits, which most persons of fair means kept, in those days, in
decanters openly ranged upon the parlor sideboard. Indeed, about the same
period, while I was a student at a famous Academy not many miles distant from
our own home, the English teacher, an orthodox clergyman of high repute, who
cultivated a few acres of land at the place where he lived on the outskirts of
the town, invited a few of the pupils, myself in the number, to assist him in
making hay, one play-afternoon. The boys had a good frolic, and, after work was
ended, our master treated us to milk-punch, a highly agreeable, but rather
exhilarating beverage. Our uncle’s house was of the old-fashioned New England
description, pleasantly facing the south, with a high-peaked roof, which
descended, in the opposite quarter, to not much more than a man’s stature from
the ground. In front was a spacious green yard, leading on one side to the
garden for vegetables and trees of the choicer kinds of fruit, and sprinkled
here and there with bunches of gay flowers; and at the entrance gate by the
road two magnificent elms, of an age and height which denoted that they must
have given shade to several past generations from the, summer heat, flung out
drooping branches which extended a very great distance from the parent trunks.
After dinner, our host entertained us with a narrative of his recent visit to
the capital town of Boston, to testify, in company with a former neighbor, now
resident there, in behalf of his hired man, Jasper Towne, of English birth, who
having, duly and at a long term beforehand, declared his intention, in proper
form, was at length, after a continuous residence of fourteen years in the
United States, admitted by the Federal Court to all the rights and privileges
which free citizenship could confer upon him. The scene in court my uncle
thought peculiarly solemn and impressive. The candidate for the franchise was strictly
questioned by the presiding justice, in open court, with regard to his origin
and his past life. The witnesses were subjected to a similar scrutiny as to his
character and habits, and their judgment of his fitness for the responsible
position and the new duties he was about to assume. When this part of the
transaction was completed, the oaths of renunciation of allegiance to every
foreign power, prince, or potentate whatsoever, and the oath to support the
Constitution of the United States were administered to him by the clerk in a
manner to fix it in his mind that it was a very serious business, indeed, in
which he had just been engaged. Thereupon, the judge addressed him in language
of congratulation and counsel, and our newly-made fellow-countryman
respectfully departed from the tribunal, conscious that he had attained no mean
privilege and had secured a safeguard, like that, by the declaration of which
the Apostle of the Gentiles stayed the uplifted hands of his persecutors, and
caused them to tremble at the thought of misuse or degradation inflicted upon a
Roman citizen. Now, I believe, whatever is left of the ceremony upon such
occasions is slurred over in a clerk’s office, or the part performed in court
scarcely attracts the attention of the magistrate upon the bench. The moral of
this change of practice may be left to the reflection of the judicious reader.
But it was something then to be, or to be made an American citizen. Not long before this, there had been
an earthquake, which, though of brief duration, had caused no little alarm, — a
terrific sound always, however slight the shock, — and in this instance making
houses tremble and shaking down various articles from their places of deposit.
In the early days of the colony, these phenomena were not uncommon, and are
said to have been of no little power in this part of New England. Uncle Richard
described the recent one as rumbling under the frozen ground leading to his
barns, as if a line of heavily-loaded wagons had rolled over it. Being something
of a philosopher, and better educated than usual at the time, he explained the
cause of such physical occurrences to us young ones. “The fact is,” he said, “the water
in certain parts of the earth becomes intensely heated and lets off a quantity
of steam of amazing expansive power. It is like a tea-kettle, which if you shut
the nozzle tight, may either throw off the lid with great force, or the kettle
itself bursts with the strain upon it. So the steam, under the earth, heated by
central fires, and gaining immense volume and power, seeks the hollows in its
neighborhood, and rushes into them with a force which produces the concussion
and the rumbling sound; and the shaking of the surface which we perceive is
really like the commotion in the tea-kettle and the trembling of the vessel
when the steam has no vent. It is an awful thought that we thus live over the
action of these subterranean fires; but they are in the control of the
Almighty, and all we have to do is to submit to God’s will and merciful providence.”
St. Paul’s Church, of which Uncle
Richard was a vestryman, owed its origin to the separation of certain persons
from the Congregational mode of worship, and the formation of a society for the
resumption of the Protestant Episcopal pattern, as long ago as the year 1712.
Their place of worship they named Queen Anne’s Chapel, 3 in
honor of the sovereign “at home,” the last of the direct Stuart line, whose
royal person, it is said, having grown too unwieldy to permit horseback
exercise, she was in the habit of following the hunt, of which she was
passionately fond, driving herself, helter-skelter, in a one-horse chaise. She
has the credit of having bestowed some endowment upon the Chapel, and the
Bishop of London presented it with a bell; which, if all accounts be true,
still hangs in the steeple of a congregational meeting-house within the
precinct of the “Plains,” where the Chapel once stood. For that edifice,
probably not having been very substantially built, and being situated on a
barren tract of land, afterwards known as “Grasshopper Plains,” and, for the
convenience of the scattered parishioners, placed at a distance from every one
of them, and hence subject to various causes of dilapidation, especially when
St. Paul’s, within the town, was in process of construction, at length fell to
ruin; and the bell was carried privately away — so runs the tale — and was long
buried in the ground, but has now for many years summoned the people to a style
of worship which would have appealed in vain to the good Bishop of London for
any such donation. It may be supposed that it could not be identified, after
its interment, and perhaps the obliteration, naturally or otherwise, of its
peculiar marks; or the successors of Queen Anne’s at St. Paul’s, built about
thirty years after the former, would have reclaimed their property. The motives of those who thus
revived the relation of their ancestors with the Established Church were not
altogether pious; but the fact incontestibly proves, that after nearly a
century of separation from that establishment, the objections to it, in the
minds of many of the children of the colonists, were by no means
insurmountable. Indeed, it was about a question of parish taxation that they
differed with their co-religionists. The place selected for the meeting-house
was so far distant from the homes of many of the parish, that they could not
attend without great inconvenience, and yet they were required to pay the
parish rates for the support of the minister. They remonstrated and appealed in
vain to the civil authorities in the colony and to those in England, for
relief; for the law was clearly against them, unless they chose to conform to
the doctrines and discipline of the Established Church. Finding nothing in the
Thirty-nine Articles inconsistent with the faith they professed, they easily
reconciled themselves to the ceremonies, and thus succeeded in their object of
removing from their shoulders an involuntary burden. As may be imagined, at first and for
years afterwards, they remained but “a feeble folk,” regarded with suspicion
and dislike by the more narrow-minded of their contemporaries, though the days
were long gone by, when an Episcopalian, especially if suspected of a leaning
towards Popery, was set in the pillory or the stocks. The Church, however, had
been long flourishing, in my youth, and I was always particularly impressed
when I attended service there, as I always did on Christmas Day, with the
organ, an instrument utterly unknown in our other places of public worship, and
with the comfort diffused by the large Russian stove which projected from a
corner of the building; while we, for long years afterwards, shivered in our
meeting-houses of a cold Sunday. To be sure, the younger children carried their
mothers’ hand-stoves, constructed of tin in a frame of wood and pierced with
holes in the top, to let out such heat as could be communicated by a small pan
of coals covered with ashes. But for the male part of the congregation, who
despised such a luxury, it was almost impossible to avoid occasionally striking
the benumbed feet together, and sometimes the clatter was almost as
considerable, as in letting down the seats after the long prayer, especially if
that proved to be a very protracted exercise. But I have known young ladies so
indifferent to the severity of the weather, as to attend meeting, on very cold
days of winter, with bare arms. What would delicate ladies, who, wrapped in
warm furs, listen to service in a heated church, think of such exposure now? On
one particular. occasion, however, our minister announced the text, — “Who can
stand before His cold?” and closed the services with the usual blessing, a
little to the dissatisfaction, I think, of the more staid members of the
congregation, who having come through cold and snow, or a furious wintry storm,
it might be, to hear a sermon, were not altogether contented to miss the
expected edification, or perhaps the opportunity of criticising the discourse.
Indeed, I know not what my respected great grandsire, an elder of the church in
his day, would have said to such defection from spiritual needs towards
indulgence in carnal comfort. For it is said, that when some less searching and
thorough-going preacher of the word exchanged with our minister, or casually
officiated for him, the old gentleman tottered out of the meeting-house,
leaning on his staff, and with elevated eyebrows muttered pretty audibly to
those near him, — “Peas in a bladder — thorns under a pot — no food to-day!”
And however it might be with many of his neighbors, not the minutest particle
of the quality of original Puritanism had been shaken out of his system by the
changes of the times. The family tradition is, that before the sunset of
Saturday everything necessary for the support of nature upon the Sabbath was
cooked and in readiness. Whether he allowed the accustomed beans and rye and
Indian bread to remain in the oven subject to the working heat, over Saturday
night, I am not able to certify. But in the intervals of public worship on
Sunday, — a term, by the way, which he would have scorned to employ, — the
family was assembled and ranged around the walls of the room, and the reading
of Scripture, or of some well-worn book of devotion, was proceeded with, while
the head of the family sat in the centre, with a stick in his hand long enough
to reach the head and shoulders of any inattentive or unquiet child. 1 When a trader failed, as was rarely
the case at that primitive period, his sign was taken down at night, to the
wonder of the public in the morning, and he remained fast locked from the
sheriff, or too inquisitive callers, in his house, until the disposition of his
creditors became known, — dependent upon their confidence in his good
intentions, or their sympathy with his unexpected misfortunes. 2 An anecdote quite parallel to this
is to be found in the now late lamented Dean Ramsay’s “Reminiscences.” He
relates, as a specimen of the cool Scottish matter-of-fact view of things, the
following communication of a correspondent:
“The back windows of the house where he was brought up looked upon
the Greyfriars’ Church that was burned down. On the Sunday morning in which
that event took place, as they were all preparing to go to church, the flames
began to burst forth; the young people screamed from the back part of the
house, ‘A fire! a fire!’ and all was in a state of confusion and alarm. The
housemaid was not at home, it being her turn for the Sunday ‘out.’ Kitty, the
cook, was taking her place, and performing her duties. The old woman was always
very particular on the subject of her responsibility on such occasions, and
came panting and hobbling up stairs from the lower regions, and exclaimed, ‘Oh
what is’t, what is’t?’ ‘O, Kitty, look here, the Greyfriars’ Church is on
fire!’ Is that a’, Miss? What a fright ye geed me! I thought ye said the parlor
fire was out.’” 3 It was, I believe, the oldest
Episcopal Church in Massachusetts, with the exception of King’s Chapel, in
Boston, a small wooden structure, which stood upon the place where the stone
edifice of that name is now situated. |
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