At last, after many postponements, on August 16, 1870, I found myself
face to face with my hitherto unseen correspondent. It was at her
father's house, one of those large, square, brick mansions so familiar
in our older New England towns, surrounded by trees and blossoming
shrubs without, and within exquisitely neat, cool, spacious, and
fragrant with flowers. After a little delay, I heard an extremely faint
and pattering footstep like that of a child, in the hall, and in
glided, almost noiselessly, a plain, shy little person, the face
without a single good feature, but with eyes, as she herself said,
"like the sherry the guest leaves in the glass," and with smooth bands
of reddish chestnut hair.
She had a quaint and nun-like look, as if she
might be a German canoness of some religious order, whose prescribed
garb was white pique, with a blue net worsted shawl. She came toward me
with two day-lilies, which she put in a childlike way into my hand,
saying softly, under her breath, "These are my introduction," and
adding, also, under her breath, in childlike fashion, "Forgive me if I
am frightened; I never see strangers, and hardly know what I say." But
soon she began to talk, and thenceforward continued almost constantly;
pausing sometimes to beg that I would talk instead, but readily
recommencing when I evaded. There was not a trace of affectation in all
this; she seemed to speak absolutely for her own relief, and wholly
without watching its effect on her hearer. Led on by me, she told much
about her early life, in which her father was always the chief
figure,--evidently a man of the old type, la vieille roche of
Puritanism--a man who, as she said, read on Sunday "lonely and rigorous
books;" and who had from childhood inspired her with such awe, that she
never learned to tell time by the clock till she was fifteen, simply
because he had tried to explain it to her when she was a little child,
and she had been afraid to tell him that she did not understand, and
also afraid to ask any one else lest he should hear of it. Yet she had
never heard him speak a harsh word, and it needed only a glance at his
photograph to see how truly the Puritan tradition was preserved in him.
He did not wish his children, when little, to read anything but the
Bible; and when, one day, her brother brought her home Longfellow's
Kavanagh, he put it secretly under the pianoforte cover, made signs to
her, and they both afterwards read it. It may have been before this,
however, that a student of her father's was amazed to find that she and
her brother had never heard of Lydia Maria Child, then much read, and
he brought Letters from New York, and hid it in the great bush of
old-fashioned tree-box beside the front door. After the first book she
thought in ecstasy, "This, then, is a book, and there are more of
them." But she did not find so many as she expected, for she afterwards
said to me, "When I lost the use of my eyes, it was a comfort to think
that there were so few real books that I could easily find one to read
me all of them." Afterwards, when she regained her eyes, she read
Shakespeare, and thought to herself, "Why is any other book needed?"
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