The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 12, October, 1858

"It was a beautiful October afternoon. I had been gathering the grapes that grew on the garden wall, and was carrying a basket of them to Miss Elizabeth, whom I had seen, half an hour before, with Mr. Lee, on the lawn. As I was crossing the hall, Miss Purcill, dressed in deep mourning, looking ghastly pale, entered the front door. I started as if I had seen a ghost, and dropped my basket. Miss Eleanor passed me quickly and went up-stairs. I spoke to her. She did not answer, but, entering her chamber, fastened the door behind her.

"I looked out of the window. No one was on the lawn; but presently I saw Mr. Lee coming out of the stable, leading his horse. He mounted and was out of sight in an instant. Miss Elizabeth was nowhere to be seen. What had happened I could not tell. I could only guess.

"Miss Elizabeth was the only one who came to tea, and her eyes were heavy and dull, and she seemed like one in a dream. That night was a wretched one to both. When I went to the library to see if the windows were fastened for the night, Miss Elizabeth sat by the smouldering fire with her face buried in her hands. I shut the door softly and left her, and till I slept I heard Miss Eleanor's steps across her chamber-floor.

"The day was no better than the night. Miss Purcill did not leave her room, and her cousin wandered about the house, as if her thoughts would not let her rest. Once I found her in tears at your aunt's door, and tried to console her; but she shook her head impatiently, as if I could not understand the cause of her grief.

"The next morning, while I was dressing, my niece Sally came to me in great haste, saying that Roger, the gardener, wished to see me at once. I hurried on my clothes and went down. I knew by the man's face that something dreadful had happened; but when he told me that he had been to the old well, and had found Miss Elizabeth lying dead at the bottom of it, I felt as if I was stunned.

"I roused myself at last. I ran to Miss Purcill's door. I shook it violently and called her by name. She came and opened the door in her night-dress. Somehow, I know not and cared not how, for it seemed to me that she had something to do with all this, I told her that her Cousin Elizabeth was lying dead at the bottom of the old well. She staggered and leaned against the door like one who had received a heavy blow. For a moment I repented my roughness. But she was soon herself again. She thrust her feet into her slippers, and, wrapping her dressing-gown about her, went down-stairs, and gave directions, as calmly and collectedly as if she were (Heaven help her!) ordering a dinner for the men—to bring the body home. Ah, me! I never shall forget how the poor thing looked when the four men who bore the litter set it down on the library-floor. A bruise on the temple showed where she had struck on the cruel stones. The hoarfrost, which had turned into drops of dew, glittered among her soft brown curls."

The tears which had been gathering in Mrs. Bickford's eyes fell in large drops into her lap as she went on.

"On the day of the funeral, she lay in the library, still and cold in her coffin. I had gathered a few flowers, with which I was vainly trying to cheat death into looking more like life, by placing them on her bosom and in her stiffened fingers. Miss Eleanor sat at the foot of the coffin, almost as motionless as the form within it. I had finished my task and turned away, when the door opened and Mr. Lee came in silently. A slight shudder went through him, as he came to the coffin and bent over it. What a change had three days made in the man! Ten years would not have taken so much youth and life from him and made him look so old and wan. He looked upon her as a man who looks his last upon what he loved best in the world;—his whole soul was in his eyes.

"I think he did not see Miss Eleanor till he was about to leave the room. She had not spoken, and he was unconscious of her presence. He turned towards her and held out his hand; his lips moved, but no words escaped them. I heard Miss Purcill's low, unfaltering answer to his unspoken thoughts. She did not take his proffered hand, but said, 'Nothing can unite us again, Thornton,—not even death.'

"His hand dropped by his side;—he quickly left the room, and never came to Ashcroft again. When I went to take a last look of Miss Elizabeth, I saw that the white rose which I had placed in her hand was gone;—he had taken it."

Mrs. Bickford paused. Her story was ended. In a few minutes she took up her sickle again, and Bradford stood leaning against the head-stone till the grass was all cut on the grave. He had no more questions to ask,—for the journal had told him more of the dead below, than Mrs. Bickford, with all her love and sympathy, could do. She had fallen into the well, then, while endeavoring to place the box on the stone. When Mrs. Bickford's task was done, she walked silently back to Ashcroft with Bradford.

Late in the evening he was alone in the library with his Aunt Eleanor. The picture of Hagar, now so full of interest to him, still hung on the wall, and the little desk was at the window which looked out upon the lawn. Should he show the journal to his aunt, or keep it to himself? Would Elizabeth Purcill wish her Cousin Eleanor to read her written words as she once read her untold thoughts?

Wrapped up in his own musings, he started suddenly when Miss Purcill said to him, "Rosamond tells me that you found a book to-day in the old well; what was it?"—and answered promptly, "It was Elizabeth Purcill's journal."

It was the first time Eleanor had heard the name for years. She showed no signs of emotion. "I should like to see it," said she; "give it to me."

Bradford had been brought up in such habits of obedience, that he never thought of disputing his aunt's command. He drew the journal from his pocket and handed it to her without speaking.

"You have read it?" said she, fixing her keen eyes upon him.

"Yes."

She drew the lamp towards her and opened the book. The shade on the lamp kept the light from her face; but had Bradford seen it, it would have told him no more of the thoughts beneath it than the stone in the churchyard had told him of Elizabeth Purcill.

He watched her turning over the leaves slowly, and thought that her hand trembled a little at the close. Those pages must have stirred many a memory and many a grief, as the wind shakes the bare boughs of the trees, though blossom, fruit, and leaves have long since fallen.

She closed the book, and spoke at last:—"I think, Bradford, this book belongs rightfully but to one person,—Mr. Thornton Lee. Shall I send it to him?"

Eleanor's question was uttered in a tone that seemed to admit of but one reply. Bradford assented. If he might not keep the journal himself, he would rather Thornton Lee should have it than his aunt.

The next day, Thornton Lee received a small packet, accompanied by a note which ran thus:—

"To do justice to the memory of one who, years ago, came between us, I send you this little book, found in the old well yesterday. From it you will learn how she came by her death, and—how much she loved you. ELEANOR PURCILL."

As Thornton Lee read the journal, his children climbed his knee and twined his gray curls around their fingers, and his wife came and leaned sportively over his shoulder and looked at the yellow leaves.

In some lives, as in some years, there is an after-summer; but in others, the hoar-frosts are succeeded by the winter snow.

THE DEAD HOUSE

Here once my step was quickened,Here beckoned the opening door,And welcome thrilled from the thresholdTo the foot it had felt before.A glow came forth to meet meFrom the flame that laughed in the grate,And shadows a-dance on the ceilingDanced blither with mine for a mate."I claim you, old friend," yawned the arm-chair,—"This corner, you know, is your seat.""Rest your slippers on me," beamed the fender,—"I brighten at touch of your feet.""We know the practised finger,"Said the books, "that seems like brain";And the shy page rustled the secretIt had kept till I came again.Sang the pillow, "My down once quiveredOn nightingales' throats that flewThrough moonlit gardens of HafizTo gather quaint dreams for you."Ah, me, where the Past sowed heart's-ease,The Present plucks rue for us men!I come back: that scar unhealingWas not in the churchyard then.But, I think, the house is unaltered;I will go and beg to lookAt the rooms that were once familiarTo my life as its bed to a brook.Unaltered! Alas for the samenessThat makes the change but more!'Tis a dead man I see in the mirrors,'Tis his tread that chills the floor!To learn such a simple lessonNeed I go to Paris and Rome,—That the many make a household,But only one the home?'Twas just a womanly presence,An influence unexprest,—But a rose she had worn on my grave-sodWere more than long life with the rest!'Twas a smile, 'twas a garment's rustle,'Twas nothing that I can phrase,—But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious,And put on her looks and ways.Were it mine, I would close the shutters,Like lids when the life is fled,And the funeral fire should wind it,This corpse of a home that is dead.For it died that autumn morningWhen she, its soul, was borneTo lie all dark on the hillsideThat looks over woodland and corn.* * * * *

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE

EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL

[I did not think it probable that I should have a great many more talks with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much as I could into every conversation. That is the reason why you will find some odd, miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to tell at least once, as I should not have a chance to tell them habitually, at our breakfast-table.—We're very free and easy, you know; we don't read what we don't like. Our parish is so large, one can't pretend to preach to all the pews at once. Besides, one can't be all the time trying to do the best of one's best; if a company works a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn't be straining themselves all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff. Let them wash some of those lower-story windows a little. Besides, there is no use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get through this paper.]

–—Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially in Italy. Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking. I can prove some facts about travelling by a story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed,—such as these:—He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.—To-day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould's private planets.—Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.—Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home,—which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather than increased vitality. There was a story about "strahps to your pahnts," which was vastly funny to us fellows—on the road from Milan to Venice.—Coelum, non animum,—travellers change their guineas, but not their characters. The bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans in Beacon Street.—Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct for "establishing raws" upon each other.—A man shall sit down with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take up the question they had been talking about under "the great elm," and forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting about the propriety of one fellow's telling another that his argument was absurd; one maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase, "reductio ad absurdum"; the rest badgering him as a conversational bully. Mighty little we troubled ourselves for Padus, the Po, "a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!

–—Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or annexed, or implied.

Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in undress often affects more than one in full costume.

"Is this the mighty ocean?—is this all?" says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle—alta maenia Romae—rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.

I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls of the parish (filles de la paroisse) fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the Te Deum! (Look at Carlyle's article on Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but these two "filles de la paroisse,"—gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market on that day.

Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzäpfli's restive horse sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's servant from that day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears, and all else.—I remember the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick,—the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle,—and why? Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over the water,—which breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life.

Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-axe must have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and definite pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer. "The Royal George" went down with all her crew, and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it; but the leaf that holds it is smooth, while that which bears the lines on his mother's portrait is blistered with tears.

My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the same kind that strike the imagination, especially when one is still young. You remember the monument in Devizes market to the woman struck dead with a lie in her mouth. I never saw that, but it is in the books. Here is one I never heard mentioned;—if any of the "Note and Query" tribe can tell the story, I hope they will. Where is this monument? I was riding on an English stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of considerable size and pretensions.—What is that?—I said.—That,—answered the coachman,—is the hangman's pillar. Then he told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head, and started for home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped, caught him by the neck, and strangled him. Next morning he was found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on the other; in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this monument to be erected as a warning to all who love mutton better than virtue. I will send a copy of this record to him or her who shall first set me right about this column and its locality.

And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something that may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noon-day nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's twenty digits. While I was on it, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane," a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a cat-o'nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and forward,—I think he said some feet.

Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect it. Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an old journal,—the "Magazin Encyclopédique" for l'an troisième, (1795,) when I stumbled upon a brief article on the vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so that the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pass on it) swinging like a reed, in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing's happening in a stone spire. Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like a blade of grass? I suppose.

You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way;—perhaps we will have some philosophy by and by;—let me work out this thin mechanical vein.—I have something more to say about trees, I have brought down this slice of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in my woods (that were) in 1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth;—nine feet, where I got my section, higher up. This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent family. Length, about eighteen inches. I have studied the growth of this tree by its rings, and it is curious. Three hundred and forty-two rings. Started, therefore, about 1510. The thickness of the rings tells the rate at which it grew. For five or six years the rate was slow,—then rapid for twenty years. A little before the year 1550 it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy years. In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714; then for the most part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew pretty well and uniformly until within the last dozen years, when it seems to have got on sluggishly.

Look here. Here are some human lies laid down against the periods of its growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare's. The tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches when he died. A little less than ten inches when Milton was born; seventeen when he died. Then comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson's life, during which the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter. Here is the span of Napoleon's career;—the tree doesn't seem to have minded it.

I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this section. I have seen many wooden preachers,—never one like this. How much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of those awful trees which were standing when Christ was on earth, and where that brief mortal life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of vegetable being, which remembers all human history as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless existence!

I have something more to say about elms. A relative tells me there is one of great glory in Andover, near Bradford. I have some recollections of the former place, pleasant and other. [I wonder if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, and people's ages, as they do in the country. He swore—(ministers' sons get so familiar with good words that they are apt to handle them carelessly)—that the children were dying by the dozen, of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in recess, when it began to strike eleven, but was caught before the clock got through striking.] At the foot of "the hill," down in town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been hooped with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks, (Credat Hahnemannus,) and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in its wood. Of course, this is not the tree my relative means.

Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut, telling me of two noble elms which are to be seen in that town. One hundred and twenty-seven feet from bough-end to bough-end! What do you say to that? And gentle ladies beneath it, that love it and celebrate its praises! And that in a town of such supreme, audacious, Alpine loveliness as Norwich!—Only the dear people there must learn to call it Norridge, and not be misled by the mere accident of spelling.

Nor_wich_.

Por_ch_mouth.

Cincinnat_ah_.

What a sad picture of our civilization!

I did not speak to you of the great tree on what used to be the Colman farm, in Deerfield, simply because I had not seen it for many years, and did not like to trust my recollection. But I had it in memory, and even noted down, as one of the finest trees in symmetry and beauty I had ever seen. I have received a document, signed by two citizens of a neighboring town, certified by the postmaster and a selectman, and these again corroborated, reinforced, and sworn to by a member of that extraordinary college-class to which it is the good fortune of my friend the Professor to belong, who, though he has formerly been a member of Congress, is, I believe, fully worthy of confidence. The tree "girts" eighteen and a half feet, and spreads over a hundred, and is a real beauty. I hope to meet my friend under its branches yet; if we don't have "youth at the prow," we will have "pleasure at the 'elm."

And just now, again, I have got a letter about some grand willows in Maine, and another about an elm in Wayland, but too late for anything but thanks.

[And this leads me to say, that I have received a great many communications, in prose and verse, since I began printing these notes. The last came this very morning, in the shape of a neat and brief poem, from New Orleans. I could not make any of them public, though sometimes requested to do so. Some of them have given me great pleasure, and encouraged me to believe I had friends whose faces I had never seen. If you are pleased with anything a writer says, and doubt whether to tell him of it, do not hesitate; a pleasant word is a cordial to one, who perhaps thinks he is tiring you, and so becomes tired himself. I purr very loud over a good, honest letter that says pretty things to me.]

–—Sometimes very young persons send communications, which they want forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to have right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public, and of themselves. Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young folks, but, on the whole, thought it best not to send. It is not fair to single out one for such sharp advice, where there are hundreds that are in need of it.

Dear Sir,—You seem to be somewhat, but not a great deal, wiser than I was at your age. I don't wish to be understood as saying too much, for I think, without committing myself to any opinion on my present state, that I was not a Solomon at that stage of development.