Read Ebook: Memories and Anecdotes by Sanborn Kate

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Ebook has 692 lines and 61945 words, and 14 pages

The second time I lectured in Burlington, I was delayed nearly half an hour at that dreadful Junction, about which place Professor Edward J. Phelps, afterwards Minister to England, wrote a fierce rhyme to relieve his rage at being compelled to waste so much precious time there. I recall only two revengeful lines:

"I hope in hell his soul may dwell, Who first invented Essex Junction."

Oh, yes, I do remember his idea that the cemetery near the station contained the bodies of many weary ones who had died just before help came and were shovelled over.

It happened that Mrs. Underwood, wife of the demented governor, who had alluded so truthfully to my lecture, was in the audience, and being gifted with genuine clairvoyant powers, she rose and begged the audience not to disperse, as she could distinctly see me pacing nervously up and down the platform at the Junction in a long sealskin coat and hat trimmed with band of fur. I arrived at last with the sealskin and the hat, proving her correct, and they cheered her as well as myself.

Our little village had its share of eccentric characters, as the old man who was impelled by the edict of the Bible to cut off his right hand as it had "offended him." But lacking surgical facilities, the effort left one hand hanging limp and useless. His long white beard, how truly patriarchal!

Poor insane Sally Duget--a sad story! Her epitaph in our cemetery is pathetic. With all her woe she was quick at repartee. A man once asked her, "Shall you ever marry, Sally?" "Well, yes, if you and I can make a bargain."

Elder Bawker with his difficulties in locomotion.

Rogers, who carried the students' washing home to his wife on Sunday afternoons for a preliminary soak. The minister seeing him thus engaged, stopped him, and inquired:

"Where do you think you will go to if you so constantly desecrate the Holy Sabbath?"

"Guess I'll go right on doing laundry work for the boys."

The aged janitor who, in a brief scare about smallpox, was asked if he had ever had it: "No, but I've had chances."

The rubicund butcher of that period was asked by a long-time patron how he got such a red face. "Cider apple sass." The same patron said, "You have served me pretty well, but cheated me a good deal." "Yes, sir, but you have no idea how much I've cheated you."

Our one milliner, positively brilliant in her remarks, when a lady sent back her bonnet twice on the ground that it was not becoming, said, "Remember you have your face to contend with."

Our only and original gravedigger, manager in general of village affairs.

After the death of a physician, his wife gave a stained-glass window to the Episcopal Church of St. Luke, the beloved physician. She asked Jason if he liked it. He said, "It don't strike me as a particular speaking likeness of Dr. Tom."

To one of the new professors who ventured to make a few suggestions, "Who be yaou anyway?"

He enjoyed buttonholing people he met in our "graveyard" and pointing out where they "must shortly lie."

I must not omit the strictly veracious witness who was sworn to testify how many students were engaged in a noisy night frolic at Norwich. "As fur as I know, there was betwixt six and seven."

He was obsessed by the notion that he had some trouble with a judge in Concord, New Hampshire. He said fiercely, "I will buy two guns, go to Concord, kill Judge Stanton with one, and shoot myself with the other, or else wait quietly till spring and see what will come of it." A possible precursor of President Wilson's Mexican policy.

He was accused by a woman of milking a cow in her pasture; pleaded guilty, but added, "I left a ten-cent piece on the fence."

An East Hanover man is remembered for his cheek in slyly picking lettuce or parsley in the gardens of the professors and then selling them at the back door to their wives.

And a farmer from Vermont who used to sell tempting vegetables from his large farm. He was so friendly he cordially greeted the ladies who bought from him with a kiss. Grandmother evaded this attention by stating her age, and so was unmolested. The names of his family were arranged in alphabetical order. "Hannah A., give Miss Kate another cup of coffee; Noah B., pass the butter; Emma C., guess you better hand round the riz biscuit."

I have always delighted in college songs from good voices, whether sung when sitting on the old common fence at the "sing out" at the close of the year, or merrily trolling or tra-la-laing along the streets. What a surprise when one glorious moonlight night which showed up the magnificent elms then arching the street before our house--the air was full of fragrance--I was suddenly aroused by several voices adjuring me, a lady of beauty, to awake. I was bewildered--ecstatic. This singing was for me. I listened intently and heard the words of their song:

Sweet is the sound of lute and voice When borne across the water.

Then two other sweets I could not quite catch, and the last lines sung with fervor:

But sweeter still is the charming voice Of Professor Sanborn's daughter.

Two more stanzas and each with the refrain:

The prettiest girl on Hanover Plain is Professor Sanborn's daughter.

Then the last verse:

Hot is the sun whose golden rays Can reach from heaven to earth, And hot a tin pan newly scoured Placed on the blazing hearth, And hot a boy's ears boxed for doing That which he hadn't orter, But hotter still is the love I bear For Professor Sanborn's daughter.

with chorus as before.

I threw down lovely flowers and timidly thanked them. They applauded, sang a rollicking farewell, and were gone. If I could have removed my heart painlessly, I believe that would have gone out too. They had gone, but the blissful memory! I leaned on the window sill, and the moon with its bounteous mellow radiance filled my room. But listen, hark! Only two doors beyond, the same voices, the same melodious tones, and alas, yes, the same words, every verse and the same chorus--same masculine fervour--but somebody else's daughter.

A breakfast comment: "It's a terrible nuisance this caterwauling in the middle of the night in front of the house!" For once I was silent.

There were also Edwin P. Whipple, the essayist, and Walt Whitman, who was chosen one year for the commencement poet. He appeared on the platform wearing a flannel shirt, square-cut neck, disclosing a hirsute covering that would have done credit to a grizzly bear; the rest of his attire all right. Joaquin Miller was another genius and original.

Another visitor was James T. Fields of Boston, the popular publisher, poet, author, lecturer, friend, and inimitable raconteur, who was always one of my best friends.

When Mr. and Mrs. Fields were invited to Hanover, he and his beautiful wife were always guests at our home. Their first visit to us was an epoch for me. I worked hard the morning before they were to arrive, sweeping, dusting, polishing silver, and especially brightening the large, brass andirons in father's library. I usually scoured with rotten stone and oil, but on this great occasion, adopting a receipt which I had happened to see in a newspaper, I tried vinegar and powdered pumice-stone. The result at first was fine.

I had barely time after all this to place flowers about the house and dress, and then to drive in our old carryall, with our older horse, to the station at Norwich, just across the Connecticut River, to meet the distinguished pair and escort them to our house. As I heard the train approaching, and the shrill whistle, I got nervous, and my hands trembled. How would they know me? And what had I better say? My aged and spavined horse was called by father "Rosinante" for Don Quixote's bony steed, also "Blind Guide" and "Heathen Philosopher." He looked it--and my shabby carryall! But the train was snorting for a stop, and the two guests soon came easily to my vehicle, and Mr. Fields seemed to know me. Both shook hands most cordially and were soon in the back seat, full of pleasant chat and the first exciting ordeal was over. At tea table Mr. and Mrs. Fields sat on either side of father, and the stories told were different from any I had ever heard. I found when the meal was over I had not taken a mouthful. Next we all went to the College Church for the lecture, and on coming home we had an evening lunch. All ate heartily but me. I ventured to tell one story, when Mr. Fields clapped his hands and said, "Delightful." That was food to me! I went to bed half starved, and only took enough breakfast to sustain life. Before they left I had written down and committed to memory every anecdote he had given. They have never been printed until now, and you may be sure they are just as my hero told them. My only grief was the appearance of my andirons. I invited our guests to the open fire with pride, and the brass was covered with black and green--not a gleam of shine.

Often Mr. Fields's jokes were on himself--as the opinion of a man in the car seat just beyond him, as they happened to be passing Mr. Fields's residence on the Massachusetts coast. The house was pointed out on "Thunderbolt Hill" and his companion said, "How is he as a lecturer?"

How comically he told of a country druggist's clerk to whom he put the query, "What is the most popular pill just now?" And the quick answer, "Schenk's--they do say the Craowned Heads is all atakin' of 'em!"

Or the request for his funniest lecture for the benefit of a hearse in a rural hamlet!

His experience in a little village where he and Mrs. Fields wanted to find a boarding-house: The lady of the house demurred; she had "got pretty tired of boarders," but at last capitulated with, "Well, I'll let you come in if you'll do your own stretching." This proved to mean no waitress at the table.

The morning after their arrival, he went out for a long walk in the mountain air, and returning was accosted by his host: "I see you are quite a predestinarian." As he was resting on one of the wooden chairs, the man said: "I got those chairs for piazzary purposes," and enlarged on the trouble of getting good help in haying time: "Why, my neighbour, Jake Stebbins, had a boy in his gang named Henry Ward Beecher Gooley. He was so dreadful pious that on extra hot mornings he'd call 'em all together at eleven o'clock and ask 'em to join in singing, 'Lord, Dismiss us with Thy Blessing.'"

Mr. Fields was wonderfully kind to budding authors. Professor Brown sent him, without my knowledge, my two-column appreciation of dear Tom Hood, after his memorials were written by his son and daughter. And before many weeks came a box of his newest books for me, with a little note on finest paper and wide margin, "hoping that your friendship may always be continued towards our house."

I cannot speak of Mr. Fields and fail to pay my tribute of loving admiration to his wife, Annie Fields. When I first met that lady in her home at 148 Charles Street, she was so exquisitely dainty, refined, spirituelle, and beautiful, I felt, as I expressed it, "square-toed and common." She was sincerely cordial to all who were invited to that sacred shrine; she was the perfect hostess and housekeeper, the ever-busy philanthropist, a classic poet, a strong writer of prose when eager to aid some needed reform. Never before had I seen such a rare combination of the esthetic and practical, and she shone wherever placed. Once when she was with us, I went up to her room to see if I could help her as she was leaving. She was seated on the floor, pulling straps tightly round some steamer rugs and a rainy day coat, and she explained she always attended to such "little things." As one wrote of her, after her death, she made the most of herself, but she made more of her husband. Together they went forward, side by side, to the last, comrades and true lovers.

Two of all the wonderful literary treasures in their drawing-room produced a great impression on me, one a caricature of Thackeray's face done by himself with no mercy shown to his flattened, broken nose. A lady said to him: "There is only one thing about you I could never get over, your nose." "No wonder, madam, there is no bridge to it." The other was an invitation to supper in Charles Lamb's own writing, and at the bottom of the page, "Puns at nine."

Two famous story-tellers of the old-fashioned type were Doctor Dixi Crosby of Hanover, and his son "Ben," who made a great name for himself in New York City as a surgeon, and also as a brilliant after-dinner speaker. Doctor Crosby's preference was for the long-drawn-out style, as this example, which I heard him tell several times, shows:

A man gave a lecture in a New England town which failed to elicit much applause and this troubled him. As he left early next morning on the top of the stage-coach, he interviewed the driver, who seemed not anxious to talk. "Did you hear much said about my lecture last night? Do you think it pleased the audience?"

"Oh, I guess they were well enough satisfied; some were anyway."

"Were there any who expressed dissatisfaction?"

"I would not pry into it, stranger; there wasn't much said against it anyhow."

"Now you have aroused my curiosity. I must beg you to let me know. Who criticized it, and what did they say? It might help me to hear it."

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