1 10 4 https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/2b91f565073d0b4462101db161921345.pdf?Expires=1773878400&Signature=jWSQICLXj%7EIodGyNIG2naIOlJYpxqD9Gt7bU1%7EsV7zx2Le1Z10OQZQJzuJiPRmGGdefqxpMwFMe6ghjCos%7Es4NAnrQ8wfm4YytrLpMBJOY7mhLNhRm4hJox3XpmKWj9w5zL1qH1q%7EDYR-jOgnisAfMd3U%7EPFmh%7EoHX2g9wrxLXOtB-7CXnGzl9tKUu7rhXCNL68WrHh1xsAZGYiHAkEuNZKX3mQAHFJ-QtKZ3h0H%7E7csn5HBdS73P7-Jp2lwzRbVrF-wMmsE7PbxQNnXGNPT3r1MSgGVF8GlzQdGw72zYoqeX5ucjHTLWT1AIa2jsz22B6YBzZLRh2evL-kS7nubng__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 47eac4d2e188a6c2c969113dc31829e9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1840 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. THE BEAUTY OF SONINBERG. (A LETTER from WIESBADEN.) _____ By Miss Catharine M. Sedgwick, Author of ‘Hope Leslie,’ &c. _____ MY DEAR J ----: You have often laughed at me for my ‘knack,' as you call it, of picking up stories by the way-side. Certainly my sympathies are not more diffusive than yours, but I am a more patient listener. You have but to listen to get those little personal revelations every one is ready to make, if you but touch the electric chord aright that binds you to your humble fellow-beings. In going from Brussels to Waterloo a few weeks since, I took a seat on the box beside the coachman—a frank true-hearted looking youth—for the advantage of gaining answers to the questions that are constantly occurring to the traveller in a scene so full of novelty as is every part of the Old World to an American eye. Before he set us down again in Brussels, he had told me a history of personal hopes, projects and disappointments, that with a little skilful spinning would have furnished warp and wool for an octavo volume, with an appendix of ancestral anecdotes that he had better have effaced from the family archives. This will be a pretty good proof to you that I have not foregone my habits in crossing the ocean, but here at Wiesbaden I am cut off from their indulgence by my ignorance of the language. That does not, however, quite isolate me, for by a lavish use of half a dozen words that are common to the English and German, and by gracious tones and a decent kindness in return for the devotedness of the ‘Mädchen’ who attends us, I am so far in favor that I am sure she would confide to me her ‘petite belle histoire’ if she has any. ‘If!’ shame on that hypothetical ‘if!’ No one could hear the gentle tone of my good friend Cristine's voice, or see how easily the unbidden tear comes to her eye,* (her only eye, for in common with a large portion of her country-people she sees but with one,) without being sure that Cristine, though now in the depths of shady forty, might tell as ‘ower true tale’ of her losses. However, the period for the egotism of love is long past, and Cristine, instead of damming up her feelings to fret and wear inwardly, permits them to flow out in all kindly sympathies. I just saw her in a position to illustrate this gracious disposition. She was standing on the platform of the well before the Duke of Nassau's new palace. She had filled her tub with water, and with the aid of a friend (these people by a sort of general social compact always interchange this kind office) had placed it on her head. My attention was arrested by seeing Cristine, who is no dawdler—no loiterer—stopping to listen to this friend, and as I came near enough to see her friend's face, I thought I too would have stood with the tub of water on my head, or up to my throat in the fountain, if necessary, to listen to the earnest speech of this peasant girl who had one of the sweetest faces I ever saw—and her whole heart was in it. I think she cannot be more than nineteen, but I will ask Cristine, and perhaps she will tell me some particulars of the girl's history, for Cristine, like all sympathizers, likes to tell as well as to hear. If I were a painter, I would paint them just as I saw them, the well and all. The girl in the peasant's dress, the dark blue woollen full petticoat fluted from top to bottom as neatly as a French frill, the close boddice, and the snow-white chemise sleeves. Her hair was (as is every creature’s of woman-kind’ in Germany) long, [p. 235] thick, and neatly combed and braided. But that of this gifted girl is longer and thicker than I have often seen, and of a rich full brown, darker than the national hue. She had, in common with other peasant-girls, a black silk cap covering just the back of the head, made of ribbon and with half a dozen streamers, or rather ends, for they only hang over the back of the neck. Cristine's friend's cap had a trifle of embroidery, and was garnished with beads; indeed I remarked in her whole dress an attention to becomingness that indicated a village beauty—a dressing for the world's eye, or, I should rather think, from a certain symptomatic ‘careless desolation’ in her manner, that the eye, for which she employed the limited art of the toilette, was all the world to her. She stood with her hand on Cristine's shoulder. I hardly knew which countenance I liked the best. The peasant-girl was evidently absorbed in some precious interest of her own at stake, while Cristine's honest kindly face expressed that entire unconsciousness of self and sympathy with another, that I fancy must characterize an angel's. I stood rivetted, gazing at them till Cristine caught my eye; and as I, unluckily, reminded her of the waiting mistress and home, and her diverse forgotten household duties, she murmured over and over again “Ja—ja—ja—wohl”, (“Yes—yes—yes—sure) and hastened homeward; and her friend too left the well. This stone-well is to me the most interesting of the locales of this pretty town of Wiesbaden; an aqueduct brings to it from the Taunus Hills (a distance of a league and a half) an abundant supply of pure, soft and wholesome water. There is a stone column in the centre, surmounted by a lion grasping the arms of Nassau. The water rises within this column, and pours through ever-flowing pipes into a large reservoir. This is surrounded by a rudely carved curb, and a platform. Standing on this platform and leaning against the curb, you may see the maidens of Wiesbaden at all hours of the day, gossipping while their tubs are filling. Innocent gossip it is I am sure, from their sweet, low-toned voices and perennial good humor. Why is it, dear J--, that a well is linked with our poetic associations? Is it because it recalls home, and the thought of home unseals the fountain of poetry in the soul? Or is it because a well is a common feature in these Oriental stories that first awakened the poetic powers of our imaginations? The scene of the first love- story we probably ever read, the sacred story of Isaac and Rebecca's courtship, is, you know, at a well. Whether the well owes its immaterial beauty to all these sources I cannot say, but I never see one—whether it be like our own most rustic structures, composed of a single curb-pole and old oaken bucket, or like that which we went to see among the Carisbrook lions, or like that beautiful one of stone I saw the other day (still in perfection) among the ruins of Marksburg, or like this of Nassau–with- out seeing for the moment much more than the eye can see, and hearing more than the ear can hear. I listened for an instant, and then quickened my steps after Cristine. By the way, I wonder no one has ever thought to drill young ladies into a graceful gait, by making them walk with burdens on their heads. I do not see but the German ladies go shooling and shambling along much in the fashion of other ladies, while the peasant-girls with large market-baskets piled with vegetables, or tubs of water containing three or four pails full, walk with a true, light step, and a quiet grace that a fine lady might envy, but could scarcely equal. I overtook Cristine, before she reached our door steps. I communicated my desire to know her friend's story, and she was willing enough gratify it, but I could comprehend but one word—and that word one which every woman would understand as, Falstaff knew the heir apparent, ‘by instinct’—“Liebehaber”—“Ah! a lover in the case, Cristine. Then I understand why the spoke so eagerly and you listened so patiently. # # # I have just returned from a walk to the Weeping Oak. Its name indicates its peculiarity. It stands a little off the high road to Schwalbach, in advance of a wood of dwarf pines, and seems a fit type of the monarch of a fallen dynasty. The bark and boughs have the characteristic ruggedness and nodosity of the oak; and there is something touching in the drooping of the magnificent old limbs. It affects you like seeing an old man in sorrow and tears, and if you were ever inclined to believe the fanciful theory that gives to every tree a spirit, I am sure the old oak would persuade you to this faith. I set off alone, and passing the Koch-brunnen, where these boiling waters are forever steaming up from their great cauldron, I turned into the Acacia walk, and out of it as soon as I could; for there is something in this long formal walk between pretensionary little trees, that are so trimmed as to look like barber's poles with a bushy wig on top, that is particularly disagreeable to me. At the foot of the Geisberg is a station for asses. Here these miserable animals, whose sad destiny in this world, it seems to me, must have some unforeseen compensation, stand all day awaiting the pleasure of the Wiesbaden visiters. I wish I could sketch them for you, with their grotesque calico housings, and their attendants, men and boys, in their dark blue blouses, lounging round them. Even these ass-drivers, the lowest class of hacks, importunate by profession, here partake the national good manners, and never importune you. If a look expresses a wish for them, they spring to your service, but they do not beset you with offers. So, thinking me probably no wiser than I should be for walking when I might ride, they let me pass, unmolested, up the Geisberg ascent. The name of Wiesbaden—meadow-baths—describes its position. It is a little interval in the lap of the hills, and the Geisberg is one of the prettiest of the elevations that surround it. In our country, where, if we would have a rural walk, we must scramble over fences, and think ourselves fortunate if we can find a foot-path skirting a ploughed field, we can have no idea of the facilities an old country furnishes for this blessed recreation. Here there are no enclosures, no fences or hedges, and however devious your taste may be, you are sure of finding a path to wander whither you will. I turned from the high road and wound round a plantation attached to an agricultural school. Orchards were on the slopes below me, and bits of rich green in the valley, while on the opposite hills the many colored crops were spread out much like pattern silks in the shop window. From the town rose up the vapor that is always steaming up from the boiling springs; and as I mounted higher, my eyes caught the spires of Mayence, and the gleaming Rhine, and away went my thoughts with it to the sea, and over the sea, and I had forgotten Wiesbaden and all that belong to it, till I found myself again on the high road, and not alone there. A sturdy young man passed me with the pack on his back which denotes the pedestrian traveler. He seemed wholly occupied with his own emotions, and though after passing me he often turned, stopped and looked back, he was evidently unconscious of my presence. His eyes saw only what his heart was full of, and, as he frequently passed his hand over his eyes as if to clear his vision, I came to the natural conclusion that he was leaving his home—that seeming to me, just now, the saddest circumstance of life. The traveller was attended by a little terrier dog, who seemed to me not quite to have made up his mind whether he would attend his master or not, for every now and then he turned and retraced his steps toward Wiesbaden, with his nose to the ground and his tail down, stopping and looking first toward the traveller and then toward his home, as if he were not sure which was the right way to pursue, having a divided love, or a divided duty, which is as bad. I pitied him. Presently he sprang up on a hillock by the read-side, cocked up his ears, then wagged his tail, vehemently, barked and darted into the wood. The traveller stopped, looked after him and shook his head, as much as to say–Well! you have made up your mind at last, poor fellow!". But presently he appeared again, issuing from a foot-way which, cutting through the pine wood on our left, entered the high road between me and the traveller. The dog was followed by the peasant girl I had seen at the well. An exclamation of surprise burst from the young man. I was too far off to hear what they said, and if I had heard I could not have understood. But their action was in a universal language. I saw she had followed for a last farewell, and that farewell seemed impossible. They walked on together, her hand upon his shoulder and his arm around her waist. The poor little dog seemed frantic with joy. He had now everything he desired in life. He ran first on one side, then on the other, barking, wagging his tail, jumping first on to his master then on to his mistress, till, neither noticing him, he ran along side looking wistfully in their faces as if saying, “Now you are together, what in the world can you be sorry for?” At that moment, I doubt not, they could have envied the dog's nature and thought it a happiness to look neither before nor behind them. I followed slowly after them till they reached the oak—the weeping oak I mentioned to you. There they stopped, and as they stood leaning against the old trunk, and in the deep shadow of its drooping branches, I thought how much stronger, firmer, more resisting is the true love of two pure hearts than even this old tree that has stood here for centuries. That will perish at last; true love never. It was a broad stretch of imagination to suppose the love of these young people of this [p. 236] high nature, but never mind; I honestly give you my thoughts as they came, and if you had seen these humble lovers, you would not have wondered that they embodied my abstraction of true love. I saw this was to be the parting place. I was near enough to hear the girl's sobs, and I turned away, ashamed to be an unpermitted though an unseen spectator. I walked very slowly, and for five minutes, (it seemed to me half an hour,) I did not look again. When I did look the lover was gone, and the girl was sitting on the little embankment formed by a trench that has been dug round the oak. Her face was buried in her lap, and one arm was round the little dog, whose paws were on her knees and his head lying disconsolately against her. I came straight home, unconscious by what way, and the moment I reached my own room, I rang the bell for Cristine, and keeping K---- by me for an interpreter, I told what I had just seen. “Poor Grettel; poor Grettel!” she ejaculated as I proceeded; “God help her!” and when I finished she wiped away the shower of tears that had poured over her face, and smiling, said, “Never mind, Grettel has done right, and das ist besser!” ‘That is better,’ is a favorite phrase of Cristine's, and she always employs it when she wishes to express to me her entire satisfaction. I will not set down all the particulars of my rather circumlutory conversation with Cristine, since I can very briefly tell the few circumstances explanatory of the love-scene I witnessed. It seems that Grettel lives at Soninberg, a most picturesque old village about two miles from here, close nestled under the ruins of the old castle of that name. She is the only child of her mother, a poor blind old woman, a widow who has no support comfort or solace under Heaven but Grettel.—Grettel is the Beauty of Soninberg, but as Cristine assured me, so discreet is her conduct that the old people say it is just as well her mother should be blind, for Grettel wants no eye to watch her. And she bears her honors so meekly that the prettiest girls of Soninberg are content Grettel should be first. “But what will Grettel care for that,” said Cristine, “now Johanne is gone'.” This Johanne, it seems, is a worthy youth who has served his apprenticeship with Leising, (our host,) a master builder here. He is a steady youth and a good workman, and having completed his term of service, including the itinerary year which is a part of every German artisan's education*[*] he was just about to set up for himself, when an unexpected course of duty and worldly advantage opened upon him, and overset all his castles in the air, beside the happy humble home which he fancied he had founded upon a rock, when Grettel promised to be its mistress. Johanne, it seems has an uncle who went many years ago to America, and who is now a wealthy man in New-York.—He has written to Johanne that if he will come to America with his three young and orphan brothers, he will pay their passage, and take charge of their education and establishment there. For himself, Johanne said, he would not have given the offer a second thought—but the little boys! he stood in the place of a father to them, and he had no right to refuse. “Oh! why,” he asked, “should their uncle, who had forgotten them so many years, just now remember them?”—The ‘why’ is easily told. He had lost his only son, and was too far advanced in life to hope to repair the loss. The next thing to be done, after Johanne had made up his own mind, Cristine said, was to pursuade Grettel to go with him. “Johanne knew this would not be right, but men wereso used to having every thing their own way, that to pleasure themselves they were ready to pull down the walls God had set up.” “Surely, surely,” Grettel said, “God would never forgive her if she forsook her old blind mother; and if in His mercy He should forgive her, she would never forgive herself!” Johanne urged that her mother was very old—that she could live but a little while-and he must live a life-time without Grettel; that the neighbors could be kind to the old woman; that she would have a florin a month from the poor's box, beside many a casual gift when she was known to be quite alone; that his first earnings should be sent to her succor. He even went so far as to get the consent of a kind-hearted dame that the old woman should be removed to her house. Some of the neighbors, too, feeling it to be a very hard case for the lovers, joined their entreaties to Johanne's, and promised Grettel they would do all in their power for her mother. But as Cristine again and again assured me, the good child never ſaltered, and “das ist besser,” said the honest creature. “Never, never will I bring tears from her blind eyes,” said Grettel. “God gave me to her, and till he separates us, I will not leave her.” No arguments, no entreaties made her waver. The generous girl would not even permit her mother to know the sacrifice she was making, and when the old woman remarked that Grettel's step was heavy and her voice sickly, and begged her to take some odious nostrum, Grettel swallowed it and said nothing. “And then, when Johanne saw how good she was, he loved her better than ever, and before he went away, he said she had done right, and he did not deserve her. And for my part,” concluded Cristine, “if any man on earth gets Grettel, I think it will be more than he deserves.” By the way, our friend Cristine has contracted rather an humble opinion of the deserts of mankind; and, as often happens with ancient maidens, her charities for them contract as her sympathies with her own sex expand. It is, as Cristine says, “a hard case.” Grettel has but obeyed the strong law of nature in setting her affections on one who, according to that law, should supersede father, mother and home, and when I think on the ease, social dignity and competence that reward the children of toil in our happy land, and see what a life of privation and hardship she must endure in this mouldering village of Soninberg, the sacrifice appears to me much greater than she knows it to be. However, she is, after all, rather to be envied than pitied. Strait and narrow is the way of self-denial, and she has entered therein—and obscure and unknown as she is, she will be one of ‘the few’ who, having resolutely chosen her duty for her law, will be rewarded with more than all the glory of this world; or even than all its love, which is a good deal more seducing. ---------- Our detention at Wiesbaden, dear J–, gives us an opportunity of seeing the strange chances of human life exemplified in the story of our poor friend of Soninberg. It is ten days since the parting at the Old Oak. When Cristine came into our room this morning, she looked haggard and sorrowful, and instead of her usual cheerful “Gutten Morgen,” she muttered something about “God's time and our time never coming together;" and before this first of Cristine's murmurings at Providence was interpreted to me, the cause of it was fully explained by her telling us that Grettel's mother was dead. “If her poor dark life had ended but ten days ago,” Cristine said, “all would have been well enough, but now Johanne was on the sea, and who could reach him there? But it is I only, ladies, that am wicked enough to think of all this: Grettel grieving only that her mother has gone from her and thinks but of that. Grettel let the old woman believe that Johanne had gone to Frankfort to work at his trade, and was a comfort to her to think that he was just waiting to earn money enough to come back and marry Grettel. Oh! It made my heart beat as though it would come out of me when the old woman, in her last strength, rose up from her pillow and said, “Grettel, give my love and my blessing to Johanne; he is a good boy, and you will be a happy wife, and God send you as good a child for your old age as you have been to me—light to my heart when all other light was gone—God be thanked I have had you to the last—to the last.’—She sank back and did not speak again, and poor Grettel fell on her knees and said, “God be praised that I am here!’ And so I try to say to,” added Cristine in conclusion, “but indeed had it pleased God so, it would seem to work better round that the old body should have died ten days ago. But it's too late now, and so it does not signify; and poor Grettel must go on as I have done, working for others and caring for others—it's a lonesome life, ladies.” Christine sighed deeply. It was a moment when the harness of life was galling, and though I felt how truly the poet’s words applied to her, “With cheerful heart, and purpose pure, So—our onward way is sure,’ I shall take a happier moment to enforce their consoling moral. [p. 237] I have elsewhere, my dear J----, described to you the various rural “Gast-hauser,' (guest-houses,) eating-gardens, and multiplied walks, provided about this place for the recreation of the Wiesbaden visitors. If you would lose yourself in a romantic solitude, you have but to go up the lovely valley of the New-Thal, to the forest of the New-Berg, where, in the green arched walks you will meet no one, not even such as should be found ‘In their assigned and native dwelling-place.’ Or you may mount to the old Roman water-tower, and see all these hills with their wavy outlines sloping down to Wiesbaden, and hung with vines and grain of every color, and in the distance the Rhine (its very name giving charm to the scene) for many a mile. Or if you have a town taste, and like the ‘sweet security of streets,’ you may promenade up and down the long walks in William street, where from the broad shadows of the double row of sycamores you may look out on the sunny pavement, the hotels, museum, &c., opposite to you, and the traveling post-equipages that are entering and leaving Wiesbaden, and to which it must take a long time to accustom an American eye, so that the horses without blinders, looking round as if they were on the point of speaking to you, the frightful distance between the wheel-horses and leaders, and the mystery of the safe guiding of the immense machine that comes lumbering on after him by the one postillion, shall cease to be a matter of curiosity. Or if you like to hide yourself while you hear the din of the world all around you, you can go to the dark walks behind the colonnade. Or if you prefer ‘happy human faces,’ where there seems nothing but the spirit God has given them to make them happy, stray up the Acacia walk. There on the wooden seats you will see groups of the Bourgeois—men, women and children—looking as if they had not an anxiety or care on earth. But probably you, like myself and most of the world here, would prefer, day after day, and evening after evening, to all other resorts, the garden of the Cur-Saal. This garden, or rather pleasure-ground, occupies the whole interval between the hills from the centre of Wiesbaden to the village of Soninberg. The valley gradually narrows for two miles, and finally closes at the rocks on which the old castle of Soninberg was erected. The garden is a part of the Duke's private domain, and is kept in ducal order. You enter on each side of the Cur-saal, a public building about 300 feet long, where there are splendid apartments devoted to gambling all day and all night, excepting two or three times a week, when the roulette tables give place to music and dancing. Passing through a wood of catalpas, (unless you prefer going through the Cur-saal, and seeing the gentlemen and ladies standing round the table, losing and winning gold with apparent unconcern) you find a plot of ground behind the Cur-saal, occupied by tables and chairs, and coteries of Germans and English, regaling on Rhenish wines, coffee, cake and ices. I turned my back on all this, as usual, last evening, and took the way to Soninberg, skirting along the piece of artificial water—a clear large mirror to reflect the fine-dressed gentlemen and ladies and the far better dressed flowers that are flourishing round its brim. These gentlemen and ladies, by the by, seem to me to be travestied by a stately pair of white swans and a family of ducks that live on this water; the swans pompously sailing back and forth without an object in life, apparently, but to show off their beautiful forms and dress; and the ducks whirling and turning, and gabbling, and feeding—always feeding. But I am ashamed of an ill-natured thought here, where every living thing contributes to the cheerfulness of the scene. Flowers, and choice ones too, are in profusion; for besides the rich fringe of geraniums, roses, pinks, myrtles and other precious plants around the edge of the water, you are constantly passing plots of heart's ease, astres, hydrangeas, strips of roses, and plantations of splendid dahlias. The walks are as intricate and multiplied as the space admits. As the valley narrows they diminish in number, and finally end in one which follows the windings of a little brook, too wide for you or me to leap, dear J----, but which H----, or any other active boy would think it no feat to jump over. It is this little brook, murmuring with a voice as soft and low as a German woman's, that gives the peculiar charm to this walk to Soninberg. The scenery is tame enough; indeed you see nothing but the garden, and the hills that slope to it. But the water is natural; it has a familiar home look and sound; and the tree (willows, locusts and poplars) and the clematis that hangs over them, and the clusters of bright red berries, all seem to have grown there at their own will and pleasure. For more than two miles, you follow the windings of the stream, and then as you approach the ruins of Soninberg, the valley has come to an end, and you mount the side of the hill. Soninberg was one of the fortified castles of the Middle Ages. It must have occupied an important position, commanding the only pass from the upper to the lower valley.—The remains are still extensive. Arches and fragments of wall are standing at many hundred yards' distance from the Keep, and other masses of masonry in good preservation on the height. You can hardly imagine anything more picturesque in its way than this old village of Soninberg, with its little angular rookeries of rough beams and plaster all huddled together under the protecting shadow of the castle, like a brood of frightened chickens under the wing of their mother. Some of these little dwellings are niched in an angle of the old wall; others in part built of its fragments. Here a street runs under a narrow stone arch of the old fortification; there it passes the simplest of all rustic bridges over the very little stream that gladdens the garden, and here it ends against the mouldering chapel of the castle. These abodes of extremest poverty have at this moment a beauty and luxury that our gentlemen with their hot house graperies might envy. Between the lower and upper windows there is a grape vine in a regular festoon, and pendent from it just now (for it is a most fortunate season for the vine growers) bunches of grapes so full and beautiful that they could never seem ‘sour grapes,’ even to those who could not get them! A rich drapery,’ is it not, for these poor cottages? and some counterbalance for the luxuries of space and pure air which the poorest of our country poor enjoy. But I have forgotten in the village, that I am drawing near to the ruins, and am admonished by the rose color on the evening clouds that there is no time to loiter. I passed through the great arched way where I suppose the port-cullis was, and ascending a steep acclivity by the side of a wall overgrown with wild plants, I went round the tower and through the labyrinthine walk, which has been formed by the Duke's order I suppose, of hawthorn and clematis, and which is a very simple and excusable bit of pretty petitesse amid these grand old ruins. I smiled at seeing here and there a table arranged with a circular seat. I do not believe the Germans could be tempted to go where there was not a table on which to set a bottle of their precious Rhenish, and half a dozen social glasses. After rambling around till I was tired, I seated myself at a projecting point, a good look-off; but instead of looking off I looked up, and directly above, seated on the ground and leaning her head against a broken wall, I saw my pretty peasant girl, Grettel. She had come here to think her own thoughts, I suppose, drawn by the mysterious sympathies of Nature that even the most uncultivated feel at some moments of their lives. And here, soothed by their maternal influence, she had fallen asleep. Her knitting-work, the ‘idlesse’ of every German woman, had dropped from her hand and lay on her lap. The delicate white flowers of a clematis that fringed the broken wall, shaded her cheek, and to complete the picture (for with the rose-colored clouds above mentioned it was a picture that might have tempted Cole's Heaven-loving pencil) the little terrier-dog was sleeping at her feet. Suddenly he awoke, raised his head, and cocked up his ears. His manner quickened my senses, and I fancied I heard a quick footstep behind a wall which intervened between me and the path. Grettel was still sleeping. A smile played on her lips. I thought she had forgotten her sorrows and was dreaming of Johanne, and I would have muzzled the little dog if I could, when he sprang up, barked and bounded off. Grettel awoke, and to a reality better than any bliss of dreams, for at the next instant I saw her in Johanne's arms. We leave Wilsbaden to-morrow, but not till the last act in this drama of my peasant girl is played out. I have just seen Cristine in her gala dress, and with a truly fête-day face, prepared to go to Grettel's wedding, and to-morrow the happy pair set off for their home in the New World. It seems that the good school-master of Soninberg, who, if he did not think with Helóise that letters were invented for the love-stricken maiden, was eager to make them subserve her use—at the moment of the death of Grettel's mother, wrote to Johanne at Hamburg. It had so happened that Johanne, ‘by the good will of Providence,’ as Cristine says, had failed in getting there at the time he intended, and was awaiting the sailing of an American ship. The letter reached him, and in Cristine's favorite phrase, ‘das ist besser;’ that is to say, all has ended as well as if Cristine's kind and loving heart had arranged the catastrophe. __________ [Sedgwick’s notes] * One is painfully struck on first going to the Continent with the prevalence of diseases of the eye among the lower classes. In an infant Charity School I visited at Wiesbaden, I think out of a hundred at least ten had diseased eyes. The women live out of doors, their babies in their laps or on the ground beside them. Bonnets are not worn by females of the lower orders of any age; there is therefore no protection for the eyes. * [*] There is a law throughout Germany, requiring the artisan, when he has finished his apprenticeship to travel a year from city to city (visiting, if he pleases, Paris and London,) in order to improve himself in his art. When he arrives in a German town, he goes to the herberg, a tavern kept for artisans, and there, after reporting himself to the police, finds employment. This is an admirable provision tending to facilitate the diffusion of the arts, and the enlargement of the artist's knowledge out of his art. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Beauty of Soninberg. A Letter from Wiesbaden. Subject The topic of the resource Germany, travel, love and devotion. Description An account of the resource The narrator writes a letter describing her travels in Germany, and recounts a love story about a beautiful young woman in the town of Soninberg. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. [Miss Catharine M. Sedgwick, Author of 'Hope Leslie' &c.] Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Evergreen (May 1840), pp. 234-37. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available New York: J. Winchester Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1840 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource D. Gussman Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Document Language A language of the resource English "God Soul and World" 1840 aqueduct artisans As You Like It beauty blindness Carisbrook lions Dogs donkeys Duke of Nassau eye-disease Falstaff filial piety Frankfurt Geisberg Germany Goethe Héloïse Isaac Kursaal Gardens letters Marksburg Mothers New York old maid Old World peasants Rebecca Rhine Schwalbach servant Shakespeare Soninberg Taunus Hills The Evergreen Thomas Cole tourism Travel wells Wiesbaden https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/17f943d264855c13cfda3b831f514b46.pdf?Expires=1773878400&Signature=qZ9Zn6%7Eef8o7flS65BCNqvvfpRkrEbfwqb1nZ%7E2aFiedQ2Tyn1StFHKnHwjxYFqF4qjJQeK-9QhnvqrP4z3w9TV73dEgyVqTt7lKq8SE7%7EZP5WzphRH1CnncMHsCoHh%7Eluuz5thhMl1-VLXaxLS2fTwSNZCiHKmriKcoWTCHLfqdketdK1IqaOhIAJXDMKgjNcHFeh1rQLTYvJxJ185FBdS2TTG6EdUlx9V3wt2hW6Uyagf27lqiN1eZND%7ElnE3voM05Gzdr0B8bkxnieHHWBdLDTRr3uNBzi7fy89sMVK21WApRM9SNzd4DkRpjK503f8PUCvRC38HPyk7b0s1ZiA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 8242f257b768f73e7d3313d043431303 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1853 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. SLAVERY IN NEW ENGLAND. BY MISS SEDGEWICK. [p. 417] SLAVERY IN NEW ENGLAND. BY MISS SEDGEWICK. Before the American Revolution, slavery extended throughout the United States. In New England it was on a very limited scale. There were household slaves in Boston, who drove the coaches, cooked the dinners, and shared the luxuries of rich houses; and a few were distributed among the most wealthy of the rural population. They were not numerous enough to make the condition a great evil or embarrassment, but quite enough to show its incompatibility with the demonstration of the truth, on which our declaration of Independence is based, that "all men are born equal," and have "an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The slaves in Massachusetts were treated with almost parental kindness. They were incorporated into the family, and each puritan household being a sort of religious structure, the relative duties of master and servant were clearly defined. No doubt the severest and longest task fell to the slave, but in the household of the farmer or artisan, the master and the mistress shared it, and when it was finished, the white and the black, like the feudal chief and his household servant, sat down to the same table, and shared the same viands. No doubt there were hard masters and cruel mistresses, and so there are cruel fathers and exacting mothers: unrestrained power is not a fit human trust. We know an old man, who, fifty years ago, when strict domestic discipline was a cardinal virtue, and "spare the rod and spoil the child" was written on the lintel, was in the unvarying habit, "after prayers" on a Monday morning, of setting his children, boys and girls, nine in number, in a row, and beginning with the eldest, a lad of eighteen, he inflicted an hebdomadal prospective chastisement down the whole line, to the little urchin of three years. And the tradition goes, that the possible transgressions of the week were never underrated—that these were supererogatory stripes for possible sins, or chance misdemeanors! But this was a picturesque exception from the prevailing mildness of the parental government, and so were the cruelties exercised upon her slaves by a certain Madame A----, who lived in Sheffield, a border-town in the western part of Massachusetts, exceptional from the general course of patriarchal government. This Madame A---- belonged to the provincial gentry, and did not live long enough for the democratic wave to rise to her high-water mark. Her husband, as was, and is, not uncommon in New England, combined the duties of the soldier and the magistrate, and honourably discharged both. He won laurels in "the French war," (the war waged in the Northern British provinces), and wore them meekly. The plan of Providence to prevent monstrous discrepancies, by mating the tall with the short, the fat with the lean, the sour with the sweet, &c., was illustrated by General A---- and his help-meet. He was the gentlest, most benign of men; [p. 418] she, a shrew untameable. He was an 'Allworthy,' or 'my Uncle Toby.' He had pity, tolerance, and forgiveness for every human error. There was no such word as error in Madame A---- 's vocabulary. Every departure from her rule of rectitude was criminal. She was the type of punishment. Her justice was without scales as well as blind, so that she never weighed ignorance against error, nor temptation against sin. He was the kindest of masters to his slaves; she, the most despotic of mistresses. Happily for the servile household, those were the days of the fixed supremacy of man. No question of the equality of the sexes had impaired woman's contentment, or provoked man's fear or ridicule. The current of his authority had run undisturbed since first the river Pison flowed out of Eden. No "woman's rights' conventions" had dared to doubt the primitive law and curse, "thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee:" so that, as we intimated, the servants of Madame A----, suffering under her despotism, had always a right of appeal to a higher tribunal. Whatever petty tyrannies the magnanimous General might quietly submit to in his own person, he never acquiesced in oppression of his people. Among them was a remarkable woman of unmixed African race. Her name was Elizabeth Freeman, transmuted to "Betty," and afterwards contracted by lisping lips from Mammy Bet, to Mum-Bett, by which name she was best known. It has since been luminously translated in a French notice, into Chut Babet. This woman,* who was said by a competent judge to have "no superiors and few equals," was the property, "the chattel" of General A---- . She had a sister in servitude with her, a sickly timid creature, over whom she watched as the lioness does over her cubs. On one occasion, when Madame A was making the patrol of her kitchen, she discovered a wheaten cake, made by Lizzy the sister, for herself, from the scrapings of the great oaken bowl in which the family batch had been kneaded. Enraged at the "thief," as she branded her, she seized a large iron shovel red hot from clearing the oven, and raised it over the terrified girl. Bet interposed her brawny arm, and took the blow. It cut quite across the arm to the bone, "but," she would say afterwards in concluding the story of the frightful scar she earned to her grave, "Madam never again laid her hand on Lizzy. I had a bad arm all winter, but Madam had the worst of it. I never covered the wound, and when people said to me, before Madam,—' Why, Betty! what ails your arm?' I only answered—' ask missis!" Which was the slave and which was the real mistress? [p. 419] She had another characteristic story of the days of her servitude; and she retained so vivid an impression of its circumstances, that when she related them in her old age, the blood of her hearers would curdle in their veins. "It was in May," she would say, "just at the time of the apple blossoms; I was wetting the bleaching linen, when a smallish girl came in to the gate, and up the lane, and straight to me, and said, without raising her eyes, 'where is your master? I must speak with him.' 1 told her that my master was absent, that he would come home before night. 'Then I must stay,' she said, 'for I must speak with him.' I set down my watering pot, and told her to come with me into the house. I saw it was no common case. Gals in trouble were often coming to master." ('Girls in trouble,' is a definite rustic phrase, indicating but one species of trouble). "But," she continued, " I never saw one look like this. The blood seemed to have stopped in her veins; her face and neck were all in blotches of red and white. She had bitten her lip through; her voice was hoarse and husky, and her eyelids seemed to settle down as if she could never raise them again. I showed her into a bedroom next the kitchen, and shut the door, hoping Madam would not mistrust it, for she never overlooked anybody's wrongdoing but her own, and she had a partic'lar hatred of gals that had met with a misfortin; she could not abide them. She saw me bring the gal in—it was just her luck—she always saw everything. I heard her coming and I threw open the bedroom door; for seeing I could no way hide the poor child—she was not over fifteen—I determined to stand by her. When Madam had got half across the kitchen, in full sight of the child, she turned to me, and her eyes flashing like a cat's in the dark, she asked me, 'what that baggage wanted?' 'To speak to master.' 'What does she want to say to your master?' 'I don't know, ma'am.' 'I know,' she said—and there was no foul thing she didn't call the child; and when she had got to the end of her bad words, she ordered her to walk out of the house. Then the gal raised her eyes for the first time; she had not seemed to hear a word before. She did not speak—she did not sigh—nor sob—nor groan—but a sharp sound seemed to come right out of her heart; it was heart-breaking to hear it. "' Sit still, child,' I said. At that Madam's temper rose like a thunder-storm. She said the house was hers, and again ordered the gal out of it. 'Sit still, child,' says I again. 'She shall go,' says madam. 'No, missis, she shan't,' says I. 'If the gal has a complaint to make, she has a right to see the judge; that's lawful, and stands to reason beside.' Madam knew when I set my foot down, I kept it down; so after blazing out, she walked away." One should have known this remarkable woman, the native majesty of her deportment, the intelligence of her indomitable, irresistible will, to understand the calmness of the stranger-girl under her protection, and her sure victory over her hurricane of a mistress. "When dinner-time came," she continued, " I offered the child [p. 420] a part of mine; I had no right to take madam's food and give it to her, and I didn't; but, poor little creature, she could no more eat than if she were a dead corpse; she tried when I begged her, but she could not. Master came home at evening." (It might have been noticed of Mum-Bett, that, to the end of her life, when referring to the days of her servitude, she spoke of General A---- as "my master," and tenderly, " my old master!" but always of her mistress as "Madam.") "I got speech of master as he was getting off his horse. I told him that there was a poor afflicted gal—a child, one might call her—had been waiting all day to speak to him. He bid me bring her in, after supper. I knew Madam would berate her to master, but that did not signify with him. When he sent word he was ready, 1 took a lighted candle in each hand, and told the child to follow me. She did not seem frightened; she was just as she was in the morning, 'cept that the red blotches had gone, and she was all one dreadful waxy white. "We went to the study. Master was sitting in his high-backed chair, before his desk. Master could not scare her, he looked so pitiful. I sets down the candles, walked back to the wall, and stood there; I knew master had no objections,—master and 1 un- derstood one another. 'Come hither,' says master. The gal walked up to the desk. 'What is your name?'—' Tamor Graham.'—' Take off your bonnet, Tamor.' She took it off. Her hair was brown—a pretty brown, and curly, but all a tangle. Master looked at her." When Mum-Bett got to the point of her story, (every word, as she often repeated it, is "cut in" my memory), the tears started from her eyes, and she quietly wiped them away with the back of her hand. She was not given to tears. They were not her demonstration. "If ever there was a pitiful look," she continued, " it was that look of master's. I can see it yet. 'Now hold up your hand, Tamor,' he said,' and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God!' She did. 'Sit down now, child,' he said, and drew a chair himself. She kind of fell into the chair, and clasped her hands tight together." We cannot, and it is not needful for our purpose that we should, go into the particulars of the wretched girl's story. It was steeped in horrors; in homely rustic life, a repetition of the crime of the Cenci tragedy. The girl had knit her soul to her task, and she went unfalteringly through it. "Once," said Mum-Bett, "my master stopped her, and said, 'Do you know, child, that if your father is committed, and convicted, on your oath, he must die for the crime?' 'Yes, sir, I know it!" 'You say he has pursued you again and again; why did you not complain before?' 'I escaped, sir,—and for my mother's sake—and my little brother's—poor boy !' and then she burst out like a child, and cried, and cried, and wrung her hands." After the examination, General A---- gave the girl into Mum-Bett's hands, with orders that every thing should be done for her security and comfort. The father was apprehended—his child was confronted with him. "He was an awful-looking man," [p. 421] Mum-Bett said, "He had short grey hair, but not close cropped, and when I led Tamor in, it rose, and every hair stood stiff and upright on his head. I've seen awful sights in my day, but nothing near to that." Much corroborative testimony was obtained. There was then no court for capital trials in Berkshire, the county of General A---- 's residence. The culprit was transferred to Hampshire to be tried. While Tamor remained at the General's she received a message, requesting her to come to a sequestered lane at twilight, to meet her mother. Nothing suspecting, she went, and was seized and carried off, by two men, agents of her father, who hoped to escape by abducting the witness. A posse of militia was called out, and she was found in durance, in a hut in the depth of a wood. The mother and child did meet once, and but once. They locked their arms around each other. The mother shrieked—the girl was silent—livid, and when they were parted, more dead than alive. The father was condemned. The daughter, at her earnest instance, was sent off to a distant province where it was understood she died not long after. Mum-Bett's character was composed of few but strong elements. Action was the law of her nature, and conscious of superiority to all around her, she felt servitude intolerable. It was not the work—work was play to her. Her power of execution was marvellous. Nor was it awe of her kind master, or fear of her despotic mistress, but it was the galling of the harness, the irresistible longing for liberty. I have heard her say, with an emphatic shake of the head peculiar to her: "Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God's airth a free woman—I would." It was soon after the close of the revolutionary war, that she chanced at the village "meeting house," in Sheffield, to hear the Declaration of Independence read. She went the next day to the office of Mr. Theodore Sedgewick, then in the beginning of his honourable political and legal career. "Sir," said she, "I heard that paper read yesterday, that says, "all men are born equal, and that every man has a right to freedom. I am not a dumb critter; won't the law give me my freedom?" I can imagine her upright form, as she stood dilating with her fresh hope based on the declaration of an intrinsic, inalienable right. Such a resolve as hers is like God's messengers—wind, snow, and hail— irresistible. Her application was made to one who had generosity as well as intelligence to meet it. Mr. Sedgewick immediately instituted a suit in behalf of the extraordinary plaintiff; a decree was obtained in her favour. It was the first practical construction in Massachusetts of the declaration which had been to the black race a constitutional abstraction, and on this decision was based the freedom of the few slaves remaining in Massachusetts. Mum-Bett immediately transferred herself to the service of her [p. 422] champion, if service that could be called, which was quite as much rule as service. She was in truth a sort of nurse—gouvernante in his house—an anomalous office in our land. The children under her government regarded it, as the Jews did theirs, as a theocracy; and if a divine right were founded upon such ability and fidelity as hers, there would be no revolutions. Wider abuses make rebels. Soon after the close of the war, there was some resistance to the administration of the newly organised State Government in Massachusetts. Instead of the exemption from taxation which the ignorant had expected, a heavy imposition was necessarily laid upon them, and instead of the licence they had hoped from liberty, they found themselves fenced in by legal restraints. The Jack Cades banded together; dishonest men misled honest ones; the government was embarrassed; the courts were interrupted; and disorder prevailed throughout the western counties. A man named Shay was the leader; the rising has been dignified as Shay's war. There were some skirmishing, and one or two encounters called battles; but with the exception of a few wounds and three or four deaths, it was a bloodless contest—chiefly mischievous for the fright it gave the women, and the licensed forays of the dishonest and idle, who joined the insurgents. Those who had fancied that equality of rights and privileges would make equality of condition; that the mountains and mole-hills of gentle descent, education, and fortune would all sink before the proclamation of a republic, to one level, were grievously disappointed; and the old war was waged that began with the revolt in Heaven, and has been continued down to our day of socialism. The gentlemen were called the "ruffled shirts;" they were made prisoners whereever the insurgents could lay hands upon them; their houses were invaded, and their moveable property unceremoniously seized by those whose might made their right. Mr. Sedgewick was a member of the state legislature, and absent from his home on duty, at Boston. His family were transferred to a place free from danger or annoyance; all his family, with the exception of the servants, and one young invalid child, Mum-Bett's pet. Leave her castle she would not, and her particular treasure she felt able to defend. She adopted a rather feminine mode of defence. She drew her bars and bolts, hung over the kitchen fire a large kettle of beer, and sounded her trump of defiance, the declaration that she would scald to death the first invader. The insurgents knew she would keep her word, and on that occasion they preserved their distance. The fear of personal molestation having subsided, the family returned to their home. They were not, however, secure from levies by the honest insurgents, and thefts by the dishonest. For them all, Mum-Bett had an aristocratic contempt. She did not recognise their "new-made honour," but accoutered and decked as they were in epaulets and ivy boughs, they were, to her, " Nick Bottom the weaver, Robin Starveling the tailor, Tom Snout the tinker," &c. [p. 423] The captain of a company, with two or three subalterns, came to Mr. Sedgwick's with the intent to capture Jenny Gray, a beautiful young mare, esteemed too spirited for any hand but the master of the family, and "gentle as a dog in his hand," Mum-Bett would say. So a cowardly serving man obeyed the order to bring Jenny Gray from the stable, and saddle and bridle her. Mum- Bett stood at the open house-door, keenly observing the procedure. The captain, with much difficulty, for the animal was snorting and restive, mounted; but whether from an instinct of repulsion, or from some magnetic sign from Mum-Bett (I suspect the latter), she reared and plunged, and threw her unskilled rider on the turf behind her. Again the Captain mounted, and again was thrown; the third time he essayed with like default, then having got some hard bruises, he stood off, and hesitated. While he did so, Mum-Bett started out, unbuckled the saddle, threw it one side, and leading Jenny Gray to a gate that opened into a wide field skirting a wooded, unfenced, upland, she slipped off the bridle, clapped Jenny on the side, and whistled her off, and off she went, careering beyond the hope of Captain Smith, the joiner. Alas! Jenny Gray was not always so fortunate! One dark night she disappeared from the stable, and the last that was seen of her, she was galloping away into the State of New York, bearing one of the Shay leaders from the pursuit of justice. On another occasion, when a party of marauders were making their domiciliary visits to the houses of the few gentry in the village, they entered Mr. Sedgwick's, and demanded the key of the cellar. In those days, the distance now traversed in a few hours was a week's journey. The supplies of to-morrow, now sent from New York on the order of to-day, were then laid in semi-annually, and Mr. S.'s cellar was furnished for six months' unstinted hospitality. Mum-Bett led the party, embodying the dignity of the family in her own commanding manner. She adroitly directed their attention first to a store of bottled brown stout. One of the men knocking off the neck of a bottle, took a draught, and pithily expressed his abhorrence of the 'bitter stuff.' 'How should you like what gentlemen like?' she asked in a tone of derision bitterer than the brown stout. 'Is there nothing better here?' they asked. 'Gentlemen want nothing better,' she answered with contempt, and they, partly disappointed, but more crestfallen, turned back and left uutasted, liquor which they would have been as ready as Caliban to swear was 'not earthly,' was 'celestial liquor.' She managed her defensive warfare to the end with equal adroitness. She had secreted the watches and few trinkets of the ladies, and small articles of plate, in a large oaken chest containing her own wardrobe; no contemptible store either. Bett had a regal love of the solid and the splendid wear, and to the last of her long life went on accumulating chintzes and silks. When, after tramping through the house, they came to Bett's locked chest and demanded the key, she lifted up her hands, and laughed in scorn. "Ah! Sam Cooper," she said, "you and your fellows are no [p. 424] better than I thought you. You call me 'wench' and 'nigger,' and you are not above rummaging my chest. You will have to break it open to do it!" Sam Cooper, a quondam broom-pedlar (to whom Bett had pointed out, in their progress, his worthless brooms rotting in the cellar) was the leader of the party. "He turned," she said, " and slunk away like a whipped cur as he was!" We have marked a few striking points along the course of her life, but its whole course was like a noble river, that makes rich and glad the dwellers on its borders. She was a guardian to the childhood, a friend to the maturity, a staff to the old age of those she served. More than once, by a courageous assumption of responsibility, by resisting the absurd medical usages of the time, in denying cold water and fresh air to burning fevers, she saved precious lives. The time came for leaving even the shadow of service, and she retired to a freehold of her own, which she had purchased with her savings. These had been rather freely used by her only child, and her grandchildren, who, like most of their race, were addicted to festive joys. In the last act of the drama of life, when conscience upheaves the barren or the bloated past, and poor humanity quails, she met death, not as the dreaded tyrant, but as the angel-messenger of God. Some of the "orthodox" pious felt a technical yet sincere concern for her. Even her worth required the passport of " Church Membership." The clergyman of the village visited her with the rigors of the old creed, and presenting the terrors of the law, said," Are you not afraid to meet your God?" "No, Sir,'' she replied, calmly and emphatically—" No, Sir. I have tried to do my duty, and I am not afeard!" She had passed from the slavery of spiritual conventionalism into the liberty of the children of God. She lies now in the village burial ground, in the midst of those she loved and blessed; of those who loved and honoured her. The first ray of the sun, that as it rose over the beautiful hills of Berkshire, was welcomed by her vigilant eye, now greets her grave; its last beam falls on the marble inscribed with the following true words:— "ELIZABETH FREEMAN, (known by the name of Mum-Bett), died Dec. 28th, 1829. Her supposed age was 85 years. She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly thirty years. She could neither read nor write; yet in her own sphere she had no superior nor equal. She neither wasted time nor property. She never violated a truth, nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial she was the most efficient helper and the tenderest friend. Good mother, farewell!" ---------------------- * Our readers may have seen some account of this woman by Miss Martineau, I believe, in her "Society in America;" but as that account was but partial, and by a stranger, I have thought that one more extended, without exaggeration or colouring, in every particular true, might be acceptable at a time when "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has excited curiosity as to the individual character of the African race. It was said, perhaps truly, by that distinguished man, Charles Follen, that if you could establish the equality of the slave with the master in a single instance, you had answered the argument for slavery furnished by the inferiority of the African race. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Slavery in New England Subject The topic of the resource Elizabeth Freeman (Mum-Bett), Northern slavery Description An account of the resource Sedgwick tells the story of Elizabeth Freeman ("Mum-Bett"), a slave in Massachusetts, who sought and won her freedom after hearing a reading of the Declaration of Independence, with the help of Theodore Sedgwick. She also recounts many of Freeman's heroic acts on behalf of others, including her sister, an abused village girl, and the Sedgwick family for whom she worked as a paid servant. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Bentley's Miscellany, vol. 34, 1853, pp. 417-24. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1853 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource D. Gussman Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Document Relation A related resource "'Mumbett' (manuscript draft) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 1853" from the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society Collections Online, <a href="http://www.masshist.org/database/547">http://www.masshist.org/database/547</a>. Accessed 11 April 2018.<br /><br />"'Slavery in New England' by Catharine Maria Sedgwick [annotated student weblog]." Stockton University (2006), <a href="http://loki.stockton.edu/~kinsellt/projects/sedgwick/SlaveryinNewEngland.html">http://loki.stockton.edu/%7Ekinsellt/projects/sedgwick/SlaveryinNewEngland.html. </a>Accessed 10 April 2018. 1853 A Midsummer Night's Dream anti-slavery Beatrice Cenci Bentley's Miscellany Berkshires Caliban Charles Follen child abuse Church Membership Declaration of Independence Eden Elizabeth Freeman freedom Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Martineau incest Jack Cade Massachusetts Mum-Bett Mumbet Nick Bottom servant Shakespeare Shay's Rebellion Sheffield slavery Society in America The Tempest Theodore Sedgwick Uncle Toby Uncle Tom's Cabin https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/5cb7ee30556c0d0997d5f94d11646ef5.pdf?Expires=1773878400&Signature=Gz8yiG5jt962Md4rCbbvSyWOGgWoJF71bbgCrqYJwpVK9UaP7Ypv9cXysRSCFy4rHDISOBIv4Y3bW7wnYg00Fsk8SxfFQCxn-V2X7RGsJmZUi8dTBQeO3GiuB6xV0NWXrGfgtLVX8L4osEPlpTWgIGeaQ%7Er2mCkajcan9jjuZ0ZmZ0ZzJUT-J5KSxTQpG00b%7Evlv2HNJ7Zg4hOqEVdPLZbCoop-jGuvSXdlNIJ1TtEG40PYgW1Hh7DuE6iPVGET2smuHZ1m6ERt5c2E9nsl6742Ig7cWmXRF%7Ee%7E8VcBOu2F4rPdwnFHe%7EvClfsFuUYppPNGSaed1r3V3zcIMl6R5RQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 3bd02176d8e31744eaa0d53a63344f10 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1842 Subject The topic of the resource Stories published in 1842. Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. The Irish Girl. By the author of “Hope Leslie,” &c. “My peace is gone, My heart is heavy; I shall find it never And never more.” “Now sit down, Margaret, child, and rest you—here by my bedside. How comfortable my bed feels! It always has the right lay when you fix it, Margaret. Come, sit down; the work is all done up, and done as well as I could do it myself—even the outside of the teakettle is as clean as a china cup. It’s a mystery to me, Margaret, how you learned such tidy ways in a shanty.” “It’s not always that I have lived in a shanty, Mrs. Ray.” “Don’t turn your back to me, Margaret; draw your chair closer to my bed. I want to have a little talk with you, Margaret. I feel myself going down hill, and I don’t know how long I may be spared.” “God forbid you should be taken, Mrs. Ray, dear—you, that are so good to them that’s near and them that’s far off.” “You must not flatter me, Margaret,” said the old woman, in a tone of voice that indicated anything but displeasure. “And do you think I’d be after flattering you, Mrs. Ray—you, that are mother-like to me? God knows you are kind, and it’s James says the same; and you know yourself James—God forgive him!—loves no Yankee besides you in the world.” “But I mistrust, Margaret,” said the old lady, fixing her faded gray eye on the young creature, “I mistrust James’s sister can’t say the same.” Margaret’s cheek, ordinarily pale, turned to a deep crimson. The old lady cleared her voice and continued: “It’s no crime, nor nothing like it, Margaret, to love what’s good—hem—if what’s good is what’s suitable.” This seemed a mere common-placeism, but Margaret’s cheek turned pale again, and a tear trickled over it. “You say you have not always lived in a shanty, Margaret, and that’s what l have said to our people. Says I to Sister Maxwell, ‘Margaret has had as good opportunities as the most of our mountain girls;’ says I, ‘ she can read handsomely— there’s few can read like her;’ says I, ‘I wish the minister could read so;’ says I, ‘ her reading sinks right down into the heart.’ ” “Who is flattering now, Mrs. Ray, dear?” [p. 130] “Not I, Margaret—-’tis not our way to flatter.” “Nor ours. God knows, Mrs. Ray, it’s what we feel we speak, be it good or bad.” “Well, well, Margaret, I know some does call real kind heart-words flattery, but they are no such thing, I know—we won’t talk about that now. As I was saying, judging from your reading and writing, you have seen better days—haven’t you, Margaret?” “Some ways they were better, and other ways not. I had an aunt was housekeeper at Lady Kavenagh’s—and my lady respected my aunt, and she would have me to come and live with her in the housekeeper’s room; and Miss Grace took a fancy to me, and taught me to read and write, and so forth.” “Then, after all,” said Mrs. Ray, with manifest disappointment, “your parents have always lived in a shanty?” “They lived in what we call a cabin, ma’am —thank God.” “Margaret, you forget: I’ve often told you it’s not right to use the name of God in vain as you do. You should not say ‘thank God’ when you mean nothing by it.” “Indeed, Mrs. Ray, dear, and I do mean something. I never think of my home in that cabin without thanking God in my heart, and God forgive me if I don’t thank him with my lips too. That cabin was my home, Mrs. Ray; there was a kind father and the kindest of mothers always working and caring for us. There it was my little sister—God bless her! —died; there was James, my mate, always glad to see me, and sorry to part from me; there was never a harsh word among us—we laughed and we cried together—what one loved, the other loved, and what one hated, all hated: hadn’t we what’s best in castle and palace, and not always found there? I’ve often thought, wouldn’t my Lady Kavenagh gladly change with-my mother, and rough it with loving hearts and happy faces?” “Oh, I dare say, Margaret, ladies in the old countries have it hard enough, as everyone knows who reads the newspapers; but that is nothing to the purpose. What I want to come at, Margaret, is, would you—could you be content to live in a cabin again? You would hold your head above it, wouldn’t you?” Margaret’s form dilated as she impulsively rose from her seat, and raising and clasping her hands, appealingly exclaimed, “God strike me dead, then, if I would! -- it was in a cabin that my father and mother that’s gone lived -- it was in a cabin that James and l grew up together, with one heart between us. Oh, Mrs. Ray, dear, God forgive you! -- it’s such a long time ago, I think you have forgotten what a happy thing it is to be a child at home, in your own father’s place—be it castle or cabin, it’s all the same.” “Don’t be affronted, child, and don’t cry,” said kind Mrs. Ray, wiping her eyes, and somewhat overpowered by Margaret’s vehe— [p. 131] mence; “your feelings are natural, and quite right, but there is no need of such a hurricane. I am sure my sons and daughters love me and are dutiful to me, but it’s in a quiet, regular way.” “And that’s the way of your people, Mrs. Ray, dear; but our feelings come in a storm, and you may as easy keep the winds that come howling over your Becket hills quiet, as keep them still -- but it’s not always we are feeling, and God forgive me if I have said anything to fret you—you, that are so kind to me.” “It’s a satisfaction to be kind to you, Margaret, and I don’t like to leave my work half done—so sit down again. I'll be candid with you, Margaret, and you must be candid with me, and open your heart to me as if I were your own mother.” “Ah, Mrs. Ray, dear!” Margaret kissed the old lady. “I am going to use freedom, child: who gave you that blue guard-chain that you wear round your neck day and night?” “Sure it was William Maxwell, then,” replied Margaret, in a voice scarce above her breath. Margaret was learning that some of our feelings, and those of the strongest too, are stillest. “And what have you hanging by it, Margaret?” Margaret answered by drawing out a small crucifix appended to the guard-chain, kissing it, and crossing herself. “0 Margaret, Margaret! That’s to be a cross to you indeed, I fear! I must tell you the truth; there is no thing William Maxwell’s parents have such a horror of as a Romanist, and there is nothing his father despises like an Irish person.” “But it’s not William Maxwell that’s after fearing the one or despising the other,” said Margaret. “No, that’s true. William is not a serious young man: he’s thought little about religion yet, one way or the other; but when he comes to consider, Margaret, he will feel, as we all do, that it’s a dreadful thing to be a Romanist, and pray to saints, and worship images, and so forth. And besides, I know William better than you do, Margaret—I’ve known him from his cradle—he’s my own sister’s son, and I love him, and he’s a pretty young man, but William has not resolution to go against his parent’s will, be it right or wrong. Take care, child, you’ve dropped your stitches. Now, Margaret, child, hear me patiently: consider, to-day is not forever, and them that’s young and soft like you, if their feelings are cast in one mould, they can be cast over in another.” “Will ye speak plain what you are after saying to me, “Mrs. Ray, dear?” “Be patient, child—slow and sure, you know. We can’t have everything just right in this world, Margaret: when one door is opened, another is shut—young folks must be conformable.” Margaret sighed with irrepressible impatience, and Mrs. [p. 132] Ray proceeded more directly: “It’s my opinion, Margaret, that William can nowhere find a likelier girl than you are. You have just the disposition to please Sister Maxwell, and Providence somehow seems to have set you down here, making the place for you, and you for the place, as it were; and somehow you have taken an unaccountable hold of my heart, and I can’t blame William; and so I was thinking, Margaret, as the railroad is almost done, the shanties will soon be broke up, and James will have to look for work elsewhere: you’ll have a good chance, as it were, to break up your connexions with all these people, and after a little while you will be no more an Irish girl than Belinda Anne Tracy.” Margaret’s face was turned quite away, or probably Mrs. Ray would not have proceeded: “And then as to your beads, your crucifix, your confessions, &c., the sooner you give them all up, the better, my child, for soul and body too” — “Say no more, Mrs. Ray; God forsake me if I forsake Him, and deny my parents and my people, and cast off James—heart of my heart! Better for my soul, say ye! And what would be left of my soul if all faith towards God and love to man were out of it? Oh, Mrs. Ray, I would not have thought it of you!” The poor girl wept as if her heart were broken. Mrs. Ray tried in vain to soothe her. She no more argued or persuaded; she was ashamed that she had done either. Her strong innate sense of right triumphed over the prejudices of education and society; and having begun with proposing to her young friend to abjure her faith and forsake her people, she ended with respecting the loyalty that kept her true to both. Little need be said in explanation of the relations and history of the parties introduced to our readers. Margaret O’Brien had belonged to one of the encampments of Irish that are found along the lines of our railroads, while those great works are constructing by the people who, driven forth from their own land by misery and multiplied oppressions, come here to do our roughest work, and share our bread and freedom. Their shanties, built for transient use, are constructed with the least possible expense and labour; and though perhaps adequate to their ideas of comfort, are a sad contrast to the humblest homes of our own people. There is little found in them besides strong, healthy bodies and warm hearts —the best elements of happiness in any home. Would it not be well for our people to consider more maturely than they have yet done, the designs of, Providence in sending these swarms of Irish people among us? Is it not possible that their vehement feelings, ardent affections, and illimitable generosity might mingle with our colder, and (we say it regretfully) [p. 133] more selfish natures, to the advantage of both? And at any rate, by losing the opportunity of promoting their happiness, of binding them to us by the blessed links of humanity, are we not doing a wrong to our own souls? Can good be elected to them or to ourselves by condemning their nation and deriding their religion? Margaret’s father lost his life while working on the Western Railroad by the blasting of a rock. Margaret’s mother was ill at the time: the shock of seeing his mangled body brought home without warning, occasioned, as was believed, her death. The report of the melancholy fate of these people spread through the neighbourhood, and Mrs. Ray, impelled by her Christian heart, went to look after the orphan girl. She was struck with the loveliness of her countenance, her sweet manners, and the superior decency of her habitation. “Why,” said she afterward to the Maxwells, who expressed their surprise that she should take a girl from the shanties into her family, “it wasn’t like a shanty! They were not all herded together like cattle, as they commonly are, but the place was parted off into three rooms; there were bedsteads—rough, to be sure—and there were clean sheets and decent spreads; and they had some chairs; and Margaret a little table with a drawer, all made by her brother, and a work-basket, and everything tidy on it, and a picture hanging over it”— “A picture! Some saint I dare say,” interrupted Maxwell, his lip curling. “It might be, for aught I know,” replied Mrs. Ray, meekly, “but I should not think anyone need to be the worse for a saint—the picture of one, I mean, hanging up before them. I assure you, Brother Maxwell, everything had a becoming appearance; there was considerable earthenware and silver teaspoons, and it was evident they had lived like folks; and as to the poor orphan girl, she is as neat as the neatest of our Becket girls—Belinda Anne don’t exceed her—and she is so pretty spoken and pretty looking! and as I wanted help that would be company too, I was glad to get her; and her brother having to go to work on the next section, was glad to leave her in a suitable place for one so young and comely. I hope you don’t think I did wrong, Brother Maxwell,” concluded Mrs. Ray, who, though very apt to do right from her own impulses, was rather weakly nervous as to the judgment of others. “You are an independent woman, and must judge for yourself, Mrs. Ray. Everybody knows ’tis my principle to keep clear of the Paddies. I neither eat nor drink with them, and I go not in nor out among them.” “But you sell to them,” said Mrs. Ray, with a smile that faintly [p. 134] indicated what she did not say, and what she retained, because she was a woman of peace, and rarely struck a discord ant note. The complaints she had heard from these poor strangers and wayfarers in the land, of the exorbitant prices demanded by “Brother Maxwell” for his pork and potatoes, were fermenting in her mind. “Yes, I sell to them—I take care of number one. As the Bible says, he that don’t provide for his own household is worse than an infidel.” “I take that passage in another sense, Brother Maxwell; I provide for my family by buying of them: I buy Margaret’s services, and she throws in her love, and I would not change bargains with you.” “And I should not be afraid to show books with you, Widow Ray,” retorted the sordid man. “I don’t keep any books,” replied Mrs. Ray; “there are books where both accounts are kept, and where the widow’s will probably show fairest.” Maxwell is one of those who bring dishonour on the good name of his people. His industry runs into anxious toil, his enterprise into avarice, his economy into miserliness, his sagacity into cunning, his self-preserving instincts into selfishness. Having one of the largest farms in Becket, his ruling passion is to make it larger. Enjoying and imparting never enter into his calculations; and, as was said of a far loftier person, “he had not so much joy in what he had, as trouble and agony for what he had not.” His only son and heir, William, though resembling his father, had an infusion of his mother’s more generous disposition—a sprinkling of her more attractive qualities. How the proportions were balanced, and which preponderated, will be seen by his conduct. Margaret O’Brien was much less hopeful than most young people. Early changes and sorrows had superinduced a reflectiveness and sadness on the natural vehemence and cheerfulness of her character. Life seemed to her a dark and tangled path, and she shrunk from pursuing it. She had not yet learned that there is an inner light, which always shines on the patient soul. She was silent and abstracted all the day after her conversation with Mrs. Ray. She performed her usual domestic duties negligently. “I saw plainly,” Mrs. Ray afterward said, “that the poor girl’s heart was not in them; but then, Sister Maxwell, I was only thinking how pretty she looked, and what a blessing she would be to the man—be he who he would—that should marry her. Well, we are short-sighted creatures.” As the day declined, Margaret became more restless. She was [p. 135] continually going to the door, and looking up the road. “Who are you expecting?” asked Mrs. Ray. “It’s James I am looking for—he promised he would be down some day this week.” Margaret blushed deeply, conscious that, though telling the truth, it was not the whole truth. No James came. No approaching footstep, hoof, or wheel, broke the dismal silence that surrounded the widow’s dwelling. Margaret became more and more unquiet, and at last said she would go and meet James; “that would shorten the time; and if I am not at home at tea-time, don’t wait for me, Mrs. Ray, dear; it is not very far to the shanties, and if I should be late home, there is a bright moon to-night.” Margaret was already on the threshold. Mrs. Ray called her back. “My child,” she said, “don’t stay out late; you know I am of an anxious make, and easily startled, and you are not looking yourself, Margaret, since our talk this morning; and I’m not superstitious, and don’t really believe in such things, but there has been one of the neighbor’s dogs howling unaccountably lately; and last evening I fully meant to put on my purple shawl, and when I came to take it off, it was my black one, trimmed with crape! I don’t believe in signs, but they make one feel—and if any evil were to happen to you, Margaret, I should feel just as wounded as if it were one of my own daughters.” “God—the God of the fatherless—bless you, Mrs. Ray, dear, and keep all trouble far from your door.” Margaret kissed her old friend, and promised to return as early as possible, and that promise Mrs. Ray afterward said was a great comfort to her, for she was sure “she meant to keep it.” Margaret walked hastily up the road, and took a horse-path that, passing through a wood, led by a cross cut to the railroad. Winter comes on prematurely in Becket, a high, cold mountain town. Though it was yet October, the glow and almost metallic brightness of our autumn foliage had passed away. The leaves, the summer’s wealth, lay in piles on the ground, or hung in sadly-thinned companies rustling on the branches; leaden clouds were driving over the sky, and snow falling in scattered flakes. Margaret’s way lay along a leaping and gushing mountain-stream, which to the ear of the happy called up images of courage and joy, but to Margaret it may have sounded mournful and ominous. May, we say; but there is reason to think that the poor girl was deaf to the sympathies of nature; that her mind was possessed with one idea, and that it mattered not to her whether the voices of nature were cheering or sad. She did not even pause at “Hardy’s Rock,” though that had been her “trysting-tree.” This [p. 136] was a rock easy of access from the road, but precipitous towards the stream, with a broad, flat summit. The stream below it was dammed, partly by a natural accumulation of brush and stones brought from above, and partly by art, and it set back in a deep basin. The stream, swollen to a torrent by late rains, had overflowed the margin of the basin, and covered the little strip of level ground around it to the very edge of a steep cliff, whose pines and firs were darkly reflected in it. But a few weeks before Margaret had sat on this rock with William Maxwell, and while she listened to him, had woven a wreath for her bonnet of the asters and golden-rod that were now withered like her hopes. Below the dam was a saw-mill belonging to William, and he often came down to it towards evening to see what work had been accomplished during the day. It was nearly two weeks since Margaret had seen him, and in that interval she had heard that, in rustic phrase, he was “paying attention” to a young girl, who, by the recent death of her father, had become sole proprietor of a farm adjoining Maxwell’s, and was heiress to herds, pasture-land, and much rural wealth. This young person was the Belinda Anne Tracy, of whom Mrs. Ray had spoken in the morning to Margaret with more meaning than met the ear. Uncertainty was intolerable to Margaret’s impatient Irish nature, and “It will now be ended!” she exclaimed, as, listening intently, she heard the tramp of William Maxwell’s horse long before she saw him. She was hidden by a projecting point of the rock, and he did not perceive her till he was arrested by her voice, not in a loud, but thrilling tone, pronouncing his name. “Margaret! is it you? I did not think of meeting you, but I was going this evening to see you." Margaret raised her eyes to his, and a gleam of pleasure shot through them, but they were quickly cast down again, and her lips trembled as she said, “There’s many a lonesome evening come and gone since I have seen you, William Maxwell.” “That’s true, Margaret—and it is true, too, that a man may be in one place, and his heart in another.” “Where was your heart then, William, when you was after going down to Westfield with Belinda Anne Tracy!” “With you, Margaret, and with none but you, and that’s as true as that I stand here on this solid ground; but one can’t—that is—I mean—” Margaret, with hurried and trembling hands, untied the guard-chain by which her crucifix was suspended, and kissing it, and then holding it up, she said, “I have sworn on this that I would know your true mind, William Maxwell; and if you respect yourself—if ever you respected me—if you respect this sign, of what [p. 137] is best and holiest—if you respect Him that’s above, then tell it to me.” Maxwell felt the solemnity of the adjuration, and dared not evade it; and it may be that he was glad to be forced, by a superior will, to make a communication for which he had been in vain trying to summon resolution for the last two weeks. “Margaret,” he began, in a faltering voice “it is true, as I have told you many times, I do love you as I never did, nor ever shall love another. I never spoke a false word to you: you are my first love, and you will be my last; but—but—there are others to consult; I am not free to follow my own wishes; the truth is, Margaret, my father has feelings about your people, and he never will give them up. He took a solemn oath before me and my mother: ‘I swear,’ he said, ‘I’ll cast you off forever if you marry one of the Paddy folks!’ My mother, you know, is sickly, and I am her only child; and if it went to this, it would break her heart, and so she told me— and, Margaret, if I can’t marry you, I don’t care who I marry; and so, this being the true state of the case, and no help for it that I can see, I have made as—as good as an engagement with Belinda Anne Tracy.” Margaret kept her eye steadily fixed on him till he had finished. She then drew the guard chain from the crucifix, threw it away, and pressing the crucifix to her bosom, turned off without speaking a word. William followed her. “Margaret—Margaret,” he said, “do let us part friends; you cannot be more sorry than I am; only say you forgive me!” But he spoke in vain. Margaret made no reply, except by motioning to him to leave her; and, glad to escape from the piercing rebuke of that sweet countenance—more in sorrow than in anger—he mounted his horse and rode away, bearing with him—to be forever borne —the conviction that the heaviest visitation of his father’s anger would have been light in comparison with the sense of a violated faith to this loving, true-hearted orphan stranger. Maxwell had but just disappeared when Margaret met her brother James. “Is it you, Margaret?” he said: “God’s blessing on you, then! but what are you fretting at!” “I’m not fretting, James, dear.” “Now, Margaret, what’s the use of telling me that, when you don’t so much as lift your eye to me, and your cheek is as white as that bit of muslin round your neck? Is it Mrs. Ray that’s been after chiding you?” “Mrs. Ray! No, no, James; she’s every way like our own mother to me.” “Margaret, my sister, my child—for you’ve neither father nor [p. 138] mother but me—I never yet spake his name to you; if it’s William Maxwell that frets you—if it’s true, as the boys say, that he’s false to you, I’ll break every bone in his body.” “James! you’ll break my heart speaking so. Oh, James, dear, keep God’s peace, I pray you; it’s you only in the world I love now. It’s a black world. Good-night, James. You are far from your place, and you have been hard at work; don’t go farther with me.” “I would not leave you, Margaret, dear, a step short of Mrs. Ray’s, but I have promised Mr. John Richards to meet him above the bridge there. l’ll come down tomorrow and remember, Margaret, we two are alone in the world; and for my sake, and for the sake of them that’s in their graves, keep up a brave heart. Good-night.”—“She did not answer me,” thought James. He stopped and looked after her till she was hidden from him by a turn in the road: “God’s heaviest curse will surely fall on him if he’s broke her heart, and she so young, and innocent, and beautiful to look upon!” Such blistering thoughts were in James’s mind till he joined Mr. Richards. In the meantime Margaret retraced her steps along the margin of the stream till she reached again Hardy’s Rock. The heavy clouds had rolled down over the setting sun, and left the eastern sky, where the full moon was rising, cloudless. The moonbeams glanced athwart the firs, silvering their branches, and fell on the summit of the rock; the water under it was still in deep shadow. It was on this rock that, two months before, the moon shining as it now shone, but then on summer beauty, that Margaret met her lover “With hinnied hopes around her heart, Like simmer blossoms—” there and then she had plighted faith with William Maxwell. Again she felt herself drawn to that spot—probably without any ill design—with only an intolerable sense of disappointment and misery. The scene brought back with intense vividness her past happiness. What it is to remember that under the pressure of present wretchedness, most have felt, and one has described in words never to be forgotten: “Nessun maggior delore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria;” James met Mr. Richards at the appointed place. After a few moments, he said, “James, you are thinking of one thing and talking of another. What is the matter?” James confessed he was anxious; said he had just met his sister, and that he had left her to go home alone, that she [p. 139] seemed very unhappy—and he was sorry he had left her to go home alone. Mr. Richards is a young engineer of most kind and active sympathies. James had worked under him on the railroad, and he particularly liked him. He at once entered into the good brother’s feelings. “Let us walk down the road, James,” he said; “you can easily overtake your sister, and we can as well talk over our business walking as standing here.” Accordingly, they proceeded. When they reached the little bridge we have mentioned, Mr. Richards involuntarily paused and looked down the stream, which here and there seemed playing with the moonbeams. “Why, there is your sister, James,” he said, “sitting on Hardy’s Rock." “The Lord bless ye! and so she is!” said James. The words were scarcely uttered out of his lips when Margaret slid down the steep side of the rock into the pool beneath. James uttered a wild scream, and both young men ran down the road together at their utmost speed. The place was soonest accessible by the road, but that was winding, and the distance was full an eighth of a mile. When they reached the spot, a white muslin scarf Margaret had worn was floating on the water. Both jumped in. James, impelled by the instinct of his affection, forgot he could not swim, and Richards, to his dismay, saw him sinking. He dragged him out, bade him remain quiet, and plunging in again, he very soon brought up Margaret’s body. But the time had been fatally prolonged by poor James, and every effort to restore her was unavailing. A company of Irishmen coming from their work below joined them. They entered into the scene with hand, heart, and tongue. “Ha!” said one of them, “it was Judy yesterday was afther saying, ‘He’ll never marry Margaret’ -- maning William Maxwell. It’s that Thracy girl, with houses and lands, he’s afther. Curse the Yankees, there’s no sowl in them!” “It’s not William Maxwell at all,” said another: “he’s a dacent young man; it’s his father’s rule upon him!” Richards bade them all be silent, saying it was no time now for such a discussion. “Sure that’s rasonable,” said one—“And sure I did not mane you at all, Mr. Richards,” said the man of the sweeping anathema, “for it’s an Irish heart you have, anyway, and that’s what all the boys say.” James seemed to hear nothing. He was rubbing and kissing alternately one of Margaret’s hands that was firmly closed, and he at last succeeded in taking from it the crucifix which it firmly grasped. Just at this moment a man had alighted from a wagon, and was looking on. “The Almighty be praised!” cried James, pressing the disengaged crucifix vehemently to his lips. Mar- [p. 140] garet having died with it in her hand was to him a token of infinite good. The looker on, at this action of James, turned to his companion in the wagon, saying -- “It’s only a Paddy girl,” * got in, and drove on. The Irishmen, who till then had been too much absorbed to notice him, looked up, and perceiving it was the elder Maxwell,, they uttered curses deep and loud, and threatening summary vengeance, they were following, when James interposed. “No, no,” he said, with fearful calmness, “lave him to me, boys—when her wake is over will be time enough.” Richards saw him turn away, murmur something in a low voice, lay the crucifix on Margaret’s hand, and kiss them both together. Margaret was carried to the dwelling of an Irish friend; a priest was brought, and the ceremonies of their religion were strictly observed. Immediately after the funeral, Mr. Richards, who had scarcely lost sight of James, took him aside—poor fellow, he looked as if he had lived twenty years in the three preceding days. “James,” he said, “tell me truly, did you not make a vow to revenge your sister’s death?” “Sure I did that same, sir—on her crucifix, and on the poor, dead cold hand that held it. God forgive me—but could I help it? There she lay-- dead! -- dead! -- the sweetest flower that ever blossomed trampled under their feet—when I heard the very man that had done it say, ‘ it’s only a Paddy girl!’ Oh, Mr. Richards, my heart’s blood boiled, and my father and my mother it was, and all my people, I heard crying me on to vengeance, and I did swear to take their lives—father and son; and I have made confession of the same to Father Brady.” “And that has saved you from this horrid crime, James” “Not that, sir.” “What then!” “It’s just yourself, Mr. Richards—you and Mrs. Ray. --It was just your goodness to me that stilled the howling tempest in my breast -- and for your sake and Mrs. Ray’s, I forgave all your people. It was Margaret said—they were almost her last words—‘Mrs. Ray is every way mother-like to me;’ and didn’t I see the old lad after crying hot tears over her? Sure, Mr. Richards, if there were more like you and the old lady—God bless her!—there would be an end of cruelty and hate, and love would bind all hearts together—even your people’s and mine!” ------------------------------------------------- *This expression was in fact uttered by one of our people, and heard by the brother of the girl at such a moment as we have described. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "The Irish Girl" Subject The topic of the resource Prejudice against Irish immigrants, Catholics, Protestants, love, Christian virtue. Description An account of the resource A young Irish servant is in love with a man whose father will not let him marry her because she is a “Paddy girl.” The young woman drowns, shortly after learning of her beloved's decision to marry a non-Irish woman. Her brother vows revenge, but changes his mind. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sedgwick, Catharine M. By the author of "Hope Leslie," &c. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Vol. X, P. 129-140 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available John L. O'Sullivan Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource February 1842 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource J. Robinson, D. Gussman Relation A related resource Also collected (with revisions) in: The Dollar Magazine, Vol. II, 1842 Tales and Sketches, Series two, New York. 1842. P. 191-244 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Document 1842 Becket Catholics crucifix drowning God Immigrants Irish orphan Pittsfield prejudice Protestants Providence railroad religion servant shanty snow The United States Democratic Review widow https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/16ce29c58ebf4a7a454b607474f0bada.pdf?Expires=1773878400&Signature=J-UmFCT%7EWG6euCwLb%7EyS1w42oq2gI1Z9ESx9SaxArNXVG4n9Q%7E1tUZlbRiEojQQoymzs4z091wkPihAshvMkWguOyVU6hxg0zJSHCjtrGPnneI5y8omyQnrIO35gq15-FLd5RqhlF3OAtUtHUSrT4CtV6u8K7I-SpHj3e36dhsUo2nCXSow8Z7qq13c1hqRWb%7EA%7EfeBNDXeW1Ky57u%7EVP4m7B2e76x3d8QtdZSdZur6aiIp8TZadqjPvXqLC-TuNT3ZZkFyjne98jHJScSFVPrX2pjtgpaQb9aFu9iphmcXH9AdkdumngiADiVmlfq1PodaXOcKV633kDvOLYK8pqA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM d081a5a0ae4a2185d059030b940d23be Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1846 Subject The topic of the resource Stories published in 1846. Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “The Patch-Work Quilt” BY MISS C.M. SEDGWICK THE Germans are the best economists in all the small details of life. They have the true husbandry of social means. Their faculties as well as their outer world are under the dominion of a wise economy. They carry it into the work of their imaginations. An every-day household circumstance, a piece of relic furniture or a common domestic event will supply them warp and woof for a complicated fabric, which they adorn with quaint or, it may be, brilliant fancies. In their illustrations of homely domestic life, they have the great advantage of awakening general sympathy and appealing to universal experience. Rare events and great deeds are for the few, while all share in the family history—the daily bread of life. The furniture and utensils of our childhood's home are idealized by affection and consecrated in after life. Poetry may chance to be written about them, but if it be not, they are poetry to us. They have life and a living agency. In the German fable "needles and pins come out of the tailor's shed and lose themselves in the dark, and the shovel and the broom stand upon the step and quarrel and fight." Our fancies are more subdued, but still old household things are instinct with our early lives. They embody hopes and memories long ago faded; laughs that rang out in merrier days, forgotten like the thrush's song, or the Summer's rose. What woman but can recall some bundle-drawer, or piece-bag, into which, as a girl, she was permitted to dive when a new doll was to be dressed, to explore its rolls of chintz and silk, and to gather up bits of fringe and fragments of lace, muslin and embroidery: and in long after years when the chapter of life is nearly read out, when the eye is dim and the hand tremulous, a fragment of these stuffs, made to perish in the using, which, nevertheless, have survived the frames fearfully and wonderfully made, meets the eye and unseals the fountains of emotion. A piece of puttied china will recall the family gathering and the festive dinner, and the whole array of the pantry to which the hungry school-child was admitted for the bit of pudding that thoughtful kindness had set aside. I went, a few mornings since, to see an old family servant who had passed her childhood and youth in the service of my parents. M__, 'Little Lil' as she was called, and is even now, though a bulky old woman, was not born to serve, but to enjoy. She is the very incarnation of hilarity. She has floated down the current of life without dread, anxiety, or regret. Not 'sans reproche,' for Lilly lives in a strict community, and her morals are not of the sternest, but feeling no responsibility (that she evidently looks upon as the exclusive privilege of "white folks") she has escaped anxiety and remorse. She is the most vivacious of that race whom God seems to have endowed with cheerfulness, as a divine armor against the evils of man's infliction. Lil, at three score and ten, has a face as smiling as a child's— not a mark of time or sorrow upon it. One of the boasted Saxon race, one of our New England matrons, who had met with a tithe of the dark events of Lilly's life would never smile again. She lives in a wretched hut where food and clothing seem to come to her by happy chances. She is the survivor of nearly all her cotemporaries; she has buried parents, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and has lost some half dozen husbands, by death or desertion, yet, I doubt not, she would dance like a girl of eighteen to a merry measure. She is as earnest and indefatigable as she ever was in all good natured gossiping, and if, by any chance, she sheds a tear, it is like the rain when the sun shines—a smile chases it. She loves her old friends, but when they drop off she turns to new ones. Like most of the colored people she is fond of merry-making and all social cheerfulness—all gatherings of human beings together, except in churches or at funerals. Solemnity is night and darkness to Lilly. She likes the excitement of a camp-meeting, but she likes it not for its religious purposes, but for any little chance crum of folly or absurdity that may be dropped there. She can even tolerate a funeral if there is a gleam of fun upon it. I once saw her at one where her side glances and stolen gesticulations were subjects for Wilkie, or Mount, the true painter of our home humorous scenes. The chief mourner, being of our Saxon race, Lilly pointed out to me as the white widow. The ceremony was marshaled by a servant of a militia colonel, and the procession of wretched one-horse vehicles, equestrians mounted on broken-down hacks, and pedestrians scrambling after, ranged with as much show of ceremony as a [p. 124] Roman ovation. Our master of ceremonies—being mounted on a black steed of " the colonel's"—calling out, as if he were commanding forces at a battle of Waterloo, now " to the right! " and now " to the left!" and now " close your ranks, gentlemen and ladies ! "—himself, sometimes a hundred yards in advance of the procession, and then curveting and galloping among the old women and children to their infinite dismay. "It is as good as 'lection-day,'" said Lilly, aside, to me. Though Lilly is a precious element in our country contentments, I rarely visit her. She saves her friends the trouble of looking after her, by dropping in once or twice a week, with an ample basket on her arm, which goes much heavier than it comes, for Lilly is in good fellowship with the servants, and she pays the heads of the house in sunshine (the best of coins) for all she gets. She is to the kitchen what the newspaper is to the parlor, and better, inasmuch as the spoken is better than the written word. I met Lilly outside her door, and without her wonted smile, and on my asking her why she had been absent for a week, she answered: "Why, Miss__, don't you know Hector is dying!" Hector was a' fiddler by profession, and was dying, as most of our colored people do, of a galloping consumption. After adding a few particulars of his illness, Lilly led the way in and I followed. Her little room, its rafters blackened with smoke, was darker than usual, being filled with men, women and little children of her own color. Any occasion, it matters not much what, calls these social people together. A mess was boiling over the fire for their future cheer, the only future they look to, and the dying man was very gently sinking away. He was bolstered with pillows on a chair, and he kindly nodded to me as his friends, with their customary civility, fell back to give me a view of him. He beckoned to Lilly and said something to her, but so faintly that I did not hear him. She gave me a significant glance, and going to the other side of the room took Hector's fiddle from the case in which it was hanging and brought it to him. He dimly smiled and took the bow—he could not hold the fiddle—Lilly held it for him. He essayed a last tune, and, the ruling passion strong in death, attempted a lively one, but he was too far gone: the notes were few and solemn—the bow fell from his hand and he breathed his last. There was one moment of death-stillness, then Lilly taking up the instrument as reverently as if it contained a living spirit, replaced it in its case and, brushing away a tear, said: "I wish you all to take notice that Hector said to me last night, ' Lilly,' says he,' do you keep my violin as long as you live'—and I will, and let the select men and Deacon Bates talk!" She then went into her bed-room, beckoning to me to follow her. She selected in a hurried and troubled manner the articles necessary to the last offices for Hector, and having given them to his friends in the next room, she said to me: "This is the worst of taking boarders, having them die, and seeing to things. It’s a chore I don't like, but then I ought not to complain, for Hector was lively as long as he lived. It’s only a week ago he played for our folks to dance, and come what would, there was always a pleasant tone in Hector's fiddle! We shall be lonesome now. He's gone—he drew company as the sun draws water, and shone on them when they came. It was always bright where Hector was!" "Has he saved anything," I asked her," to pay the expenses of his sickness?" "Saved, Miss! Fiddlers never save—they enjoy themselves—and what's the use of saving? What would he be the better for it now if he had gold in his trunk and two full suits? He was welcome every where, and the best was set before him. Nobody grudged Hector, and why should they? He paid in fiddling; he was the best fiddler that ever walked the country, and if he had laid up clothes, as some foolish folks do, what good would they do him now! A very little serves now, you see, and while he wanted it he had enough. Major Smith gave him that military coat he died in. The collar was silk velvet and the old epaulette kept bright to the last. That red and yellow plaid handkerchief round his neck was given to him by a New York lady at the Pittsfield Hotel. Old Aunt Esther wanted me to take them off from him this morning. She said they did not seem suitable for a dying man to die in. ' Pooh!' says I, ' what's that to Hector? He likes to look lively as long as he lives.' 'Lilly,' she whined out, ' it will be a solemn change to his winding-sheet!' ' Never mind, Aunt Esther,' says I,' he won't see that, and you can enjoy it as much as you please.' You are thinking I am wicked, Miss, but white folks does enjoy such things! I heard old Aunt Esther say to Miss Babcock the other day:— 'Sally,' says she, 'you and I have enjoyed a great many sicknesses and a great many deaths together,' says she." The difference in the spirit of the two races as elucidated by Lilly is certainly striking. Those who look farthest back and forward may be most exalted in the intellectual scale, but there is a blessed compensation for a lower graduation, in the buoyant, cheerful, enjoying spirit, that gilds the dark cloud, makes pleasant waters to spring from rocks, and plucks away flowers from thorns. It was evident that Lilly was ingeniously prolonging our conversation to escape from the solemnities of death in the next room, and I smiled at [p. 125] the eagerness she betrayed when having, as I fancied, listened, to the last thing she could have to say, she cut short my leave-taking by "Oh ! Miss, don't you want to see that quilt I told you about, that's made of pieces of all our folks' gowns ?" "Our folks" is, you know, Lilly's designation for my own family, of which she was a member for the first thirty years of her life. I did wish to see the quilt. It was one of those memorials that in a German household would have been held a sacred history. Lilly produced it from among a store of quilts which she has been her whole life amassing, not as property—no saint or hermit was ever freer from the desire of accumulation than Lilly. Diogenes himself had not a truer contempt for it. Her instincts are limited to the present. She has not the power of forecast. She is grateful to any one who will give her a present pleasurable sensation, but she would not thank her best friend for an ample annuity to become due a year hence. The quilts are not in her eye property. They are not the means of warmth and comfort—they are never used as such—they are story-books—family legends—illustrated traditions. Lilly reverses the French maxim," I'l n'ya a run de beau que utile;" with her there is nothing useful but the beauty that touches the spring of her imagination. The Italians have a saying that a transplanted tree will not take root till it has been danced around. The merry gathering that forms the quilt perpetuates its pleasant associations to Lilly. The quilt in question is what is called a beggar's patch-work, formed of hexagonal bits of calico and silk. Being originally made of unwashed materials and wisely kept for show, it has preserved its original gloss. Yes, these base, perishable materials have remained unchanged, when those of whose garments they were the fragments, have long ago, played out their parts in life, and are now clothed in the white robes of the saints. In these little bits of silk and cotton is stored the memory of many a tear or smile. "There, Miss__," said Lilly, "there is a bit of your mother's wedding-gown, worn long before you were born, of course, or I either, as to that matter; but 1 have heard my mother say there was not such another this side of Boston. "Woman, or gown, Lilly!" "Either, Miss__, either, but I mean gown. Gowns was gowns then, that could stand alone. It was a merry time they had, ma'am." Thus, Lilly, always calls her beloved mistress. "Ma'am's grandmother, old as the hills, she came over from Hampshire, came to the wedding—riding all the way on a pillion behind her grandson—a deal pleasanter that, than railway-ing. That is a bit of the old lady's chintz. Mother has told me how straight she stood in it, and how she curtsied to show your mother and Miss Susan—Kin—Ken— Kemp—Oh, I forget her name. The young folks learned manners in her day. The old lady did not live to mount her pillion again. She died soon after the wedding and was buried here, and her tombstone is one of the oldest in the burying ground. It does not stand as straight as the old lady did. Is not that square pretty? pink shot on white. That was a bit of Miss Susan's dress. She came all the way from New York to be your mother's bride's-maid. She was the beauty of the city, and gay as a bird, or butterfly. She sang, and danced and frolicked, but for all that, she gained the old lady's heart and her son's too. Your uncle, he was a young minister then—a missionary to the Stockbridge Indians. They were here yet, and he had them all dressed up in the fine scarlet and purple broadcloths Queen Anne sent them, to show off to Miss Susan. But the old lady was the master hand, she did the courting, and one bright day she had two horses brought for them to ride together. She had given him a hint to tell his love-tale, as they rode up the hill and through the woods by the green pond. But when the horses came, the one for the minister was prancing and gay, and when he would have mounted he could not or dared not. So Miss Susan, a little fear-naught she was, ordered the saddles changed, and rode away laughing and cheering, and he, poor creature, after her. But they were not to hitch their horses together, for us often as he began to hem and ha, and stammer and so on, Miss Susan's horse would get the deuce into him, and off he would go, and at last it got through poor Mr. John's hair, that for love of his kin, she did not want to say him no and she could not say yes. Now, Miss__, can't you see her in that silk square! so rosy and so lively! " I wiped away a tear that Lilly's bright vision had called forth. I saw this "Miss Susan" a few weeks since, now, herself, a granddame past ninety and blind! But that precious oil of a glad disposition that burned SO brightly in her youth still burns cheerily on; and though the fire of her earlier days be somewhat diminished, she is still the central light of her home circle. "That's a piece of ma'am's dressing-gown," resumed Lilly, "that your father brought her from Philadelphia. It was handsome enough to wear to meeting, but ma'am always took most pains to look well at home. Your father's eyes was her looking-glass. She had it on when the little girl you were named for died. I can see her now as she bent down over the dead child, and I heard her soft voice saying 'The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be his name.' I had heard the minister preach from that text a thousand times, but it seemed to me then that I heard those words for the first time, as they rose [p. 126] out of her heart. She was bending over—that was the way she always took trouble—rising up against it only makes the blow the harder you know. They named you after her, but I minded it was long and long before ma'am called your name. It was Russy, or Rosy, or any thing but that name. "All the children had frocks like that," she continued, pointing to a pink and green plaid; "I can see them all now. One running out to feed the chickens, another bringing in eggs, one dressing dolls, and little Harley telling how many lions and tigers he had killed. Oh, dear, dear! Miss__, can it be they have all grown up, men and women, and are dead, gone forever! But that," she added, turning instinctively from these sad thoughts, "that is a bit of the gown your cousin Olive wore when the French Doctor came to court her, and slipped into the saddle-room to put on his nankins. Ben, unknowingly locked the door, and when the poor little fellow was let out he was as blue as indigo, and his teeth chattered so that Miss Olive could not tell whether he talked French or English." "He got his answer in the shortest of all English words, did he not, Lilly?" "Why, yes, he was French," reason enough, Lilly would have thought, had he issued from a Parisian dressing-room instead of a country saddle-house. " Miss Olive was odd," continued Lilly. "She kept 'on saying, no, no, to every one that came. I used to say, it’s just like winding a tangled skein, Miss Olive; if you begin with putting through your thread, so you will do to the 'end. But that Miss Olive did not mean, for she vowed if she lived to turn the old maid's corner she would kill herself. She did for all go fairly round it, and married a widower at last, who was looking out, as he said, for a permanent housekeeper. Even ma'am could not help smiling when she heard that. There's a season for all things," wisely added Lilly, though she had herself, tried the conjugal experiment at all seasons. Lilly now came down to the epoch of my own memories, and visions of the past crowded upon me. My school days, our breakfasts and dinners, our meetings and partings at the old home, our merry-makings and our tragedies, my school-mates, the partners of my life, the partners of my hoped-for immortality, all were brought forth into actual presence and glowing life by these little talismans! My blinding tears fell thick and heavy over them. Lilly dashed off the great drops that came in spite of her, and rolling up the quilt thrust it back into the old cupboard, muttering something about there being no use in crying. We parted without exchanging another word. As I retraced my way to the village I marked the changes since this patchwork history was constructed. The Indians that figured in Queen Anne's broadcloths have been driven from their loved homes here farther and farther into the shadowy West and are melted away. The wooded sides of our mountains have been cleared to feed yonder smoking furnace. Those huge fabrics for our friend H.'s chemical experiments indicate discoveries in science that have changed the aspect of the world. The whistle reached my ear from the engine plying over the very track where our good old granddame found but a bridle-path. The meadows enriched by the overflowings of the river, and ploughed by the sun-beams remain, much as they were, when the Indians planted their corn here; but the white man has let the sun in upon the hill-side, has made his plantations and his drainings. Churches have been built and decayed and built again. The Bishop visits his Diocesan where 'Miss Susan's' missionary lover preached in an Indian dialect, and Puritanism holds kindly fellowship with the church. Houses have decayed and new ones have been built over the old hearthstone. New friends almost as good as the old have come among us. Families have multiplied, and sent forth members to join the grand procession towards the Oregon, and at this very moment the bell is ringing for a meeting of the town to extend the limits of our burying-ground, it being full! All these changes, and the patch-work-quilt remains in its first gloss! Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "The Patch-Work Quilt" Subject The topic of the resource Servants and family history Description An account of the resource An elderly Black woman's story of a patchwork quilt that was sewn during the thirty years she worked in the home of a White family. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sedgwick, Catharine M. Miss C. M. Sedgwick Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine [edited by John Inman and Robert A. West] p. 123-26. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Columbian Magazine Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource March 1846 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource J. Robinson Relation A related resource Also collected in: Sedgwick, Catharine M. "The Patch Work Quilt." Love of Quilts: A Treasury of Classic Quilting Stories. Ed. Margaret Aldrich. Minneapolis: Voyageur, 2004. 24-33. Google Books. Web. 17 Mar. 2014. Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Document 1846 Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine Consumption Death Germans God Indians marriage missionaries Patch-work quilts Race Relics Saxon servant Stockbridge Waterloo West