Read Ebook: Village Life in America 1852-1872 Including the Period of the American Civil War As Told in the Diary of a School-Girl by Richards Caroline Cowles Sangster Margaret Elizabeth Munson Author Of Introduction Etc

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to see which we would marry. The last leaf tells the story. Anna's came "rich man" every time and she thinks it is true because Eugene Stone has asked to marry her and he is quite well off. She is 13 and he is 17. He is going now to his home in St. Paul, Minn., but he is coming back for her some day. Tom Eddy is going to be groomsman and Emma Wheeler bridesmaid. They have all the arrangements made. She has not shown any of Eugene Stone's notes to Grandmother yet for she does not think it is worth while. Anna broke the seal on Tom Eddy's page in her mystic book, although he wrote on it, "Not to be opened until December 8, 1859." He says:

Dear Anna,--

I hope that in a few years I will see you and Stone living on the banks of the Mississippi, in a little cottage, as snug as a bug in a rug, living in peace, so that I can come and see you and have a good time.--Yours, Thos. C. Eddy."

Anna says if she does marry Eugene Stone and he forgets, after two or three years to be as polite to her as he is now she shall look up at him with her sweetest smile and say, "Miss Anna, won't you have a little more sugar in your tea?" When I went to school this morning Juliet Ripley asked, "Where do you think Anna Richards is now? Up in a cherry tree in Dr. Cheney's garden." Anna loves cherries. We could see her from the chapel window.

Old Friend Burling brought Grandfather a specimen of his handwriting to-day to keep. It is beautifully written, like copper plate. This is the verse he wrote and Grandfather gave it to me to paste in my book of extracts:

DIVINE LOVE.

Transcribed by William S. Burling, Canandaigua, 1859, in the 83rd year of his age.

Amid the changing scenes of life If any storm should rise, May you ever have a handkerchief To wipe your weeping eyes.

Here is Mr. Morse's letter:

"My Dear Young Friend.--It is very cold here and the pole is covered with ice. I climbed it yesterday to take an observation and arrange our flag, the Stars and Stripes, which I hoisted immediately on my arrival here, ten years ago. I thought I should freeze and the pole was so slippery that I was in great danger of coming down faster than was comfortable. Although this pole has been used for more than 6,000 years it is still as good as new. The works of the Great Architect do not wear out. It is now ten years since I have seen you and my other two Christian Graces and I have no doubt of your present position among the most brilliant, noble and excellent women in all America. I always knew and recognized your great abilities. Nature was very generous to you all and you were enjoying fine advantages at the time I last knew you. I thought your residence with your Grandparents an admirable school for you, and you and your sister were most evidently the best joy of their old age. You certainly owe much to them. At the time that I left my three Christian Graces, Mrs. Grundy was sometimes malicious enough to say that they were injuring themselves by flirting. I always told the old lady that I had the utmost confidence in the judgment and discretion of my pupils and that they would be very careful and prudent in all their conduct. I confessed that flirting was wrong and very injurious to any one who was guilty of it, but I was very sure that you were not. I could not believe that you would disappoint us all and become only ordinary women, but that you would become the most exalted characters, scorning all things unworthy of ladies and Christians and I was right and Mrs. Grundy was wrong. When the ice around the pole thaws out I shall make a flying visit to Canandaigua. I send you a tame polar bear for a playfellow. This letter will be conveyed to you by Esquimaux express.--Most truly yours, E. M. Morse."

I think some one must have shown some verses that we girls wrote, to Mrs. Grundy and made her think that our minds were more upon the young men than they were upon our studies, but if people knew how much time we spent on Paley's "Evidences of Christianity" and Butler's Analogy and Kames' Elements of Criticism and Tytler's Ancient History and Olmstead's Mathematical Astronomy and our French and Latin and arithmetic and algebra and geometry and trigonometry and bookkeeping, they would know we had very little time to think of the masculine gender.

Abbie Clark had a large tea-party this afternoon and evening--Seminary girls and a few Academy boys. We had a fine supper and then played games. Abbie gave us one which is a test of memory and we tried to learn it from her but she was the only one who could complete it. I can write it down, but not say it:

A good fat hen.

Two ducks and a good fat hen.

Three plump partridges, two ducks and a good fat hen.

Four squawking wild geese, three plump partridges, etc.

Five hundred Limerick oysters.

Six pairs of Don Alfonso's tweezers.

Seven hundred rank and file Macedonian horsemen drawn up in line of battle.

Eight cages of heliogabalus sparrow kites.

Nine sympathetical, epithetical, categorical propositions.

Ten tentapherical tubes.

Eleven flat bottom fly boats sailing between Madagascar and Mount Palermo.

Twelve European dancing masters, sent to teach the Egyptian mummies how to dance, against Hercules' wedding day.

Abbie says it was easier to learn than the multiplication table. They wanted some of us to recite and Abbie Clark gave us Lowell's poem, "John P. Robinson, he, says the world'll go right if he only says Gee!" I gave another of Lowell's poems, "The Courtin'." Julia Phelps had her guitar with her by request and played and sang for us very sweetly. Fred Harrington went home with her and Theodore Barnum with me.

Imogen Power and I went down together Friday afternoon to buy me a Meteorology. We are studying that and Watts on the Mind, instead of Philosophy.

I was laughing to-day when I came in from the street and Grandmother asked me what amused me so. I told her that I met Mr. and Mrs. Putnam on the street and she looked so immense and he so minute I couldn't help laughing at the contrast. Grandmother said that size was not everything, and then she quoted Cowper's verse:

"Were I so tall to reach the skies or grasp the ocean in a span, I must be measured by my soul, the mind is the stature of the man."

I don't believe that helps Mr. Putnam out.

In Latin class to-day Anna translated the phrase Deo Volente "with violence," and Mr. Tyler, who always enjoys a joke, laughed so, we thought he would fall out of his chair. He evidently thought it was the best one he had heard lately.

We went to a concert at the Seminary this evening. Miss Mollie Bull sang "Coming Through the Rye" and Miss Lizzie Bull sang "Annie Laurie" and "Auld Lang Syne." Jennie Lind, herself, could not have done better.

Grandfather was requested to add his picture to the gallery of portraits of eminent men for the Court Room, so he has had it painted. An artist by the name of Green, who lives in town, has finished it after numerous sittings and brought it up for our approval. We like it but we do not think it is as good looking as he is. No one could really satisfy us probably, so we may as well try to be suited.

I asked Grandmother if Mr. Clarke could take Sunday night supper with us and she said she was afraid he did not know the catechism. I asked him Friday night and he said he would learn it on Saturday so that he could answer every third question any way. So he did and got along very well. I think he deserved a pretty good supper.

"To the Editor of the Repository:

"Dear Sir--June roses, etc., make our loveliest of villages a paradise this week. The constellations are all glorious and the stars of earth far outshine those of the heavens. The lake shore, 'Lovers' Lane,' 'Glen Kitty' and the 'Points' are full of romance and romancers. The yellow moon and the blue waters and the dark green shores and the petrified Indians, whispering stony words at the foot of Genundewah, and Squaw Island sitting on the waves, like an enchanted grove, and 'Whalesback' all humped up in the East and 'Devil's Lookout' rising over all, made the 'Sleeping Beauty' a silver sea of witchery and love; and in the cottages and palaces we ate the ambrosia and drank the nectar of the sweet goddesses of this new and golden age.

"I may as well say to you, Mr. Editor, that the Ontario Female Seminary closed yesterday and 'Yours truly' was present at the commencement. Being a bachelor I shall plead guilty and appeal to the mercy of the Court, if indicted for undue prejudice in favor of the charming young orators. After the report of the Examining Committee, in which the scholarship of the young ladies was not too highly praised, came the Latin Salutatory by Miss Clay, a most beautiful and elegant production . The 'Shadows We Cast,' by Miss Field, carried us far into the beautiful fields of nature and art and we saw the dark, or the brilliant shades, which our lives will cast, upon society and history. Then 'Tongues in Trees' began to whisper most bewitchingly, and 'Books in the Running Brooks' were opened, and 'Sermons in Stones' were preached by Miss Richards, and this old bachelor thought if all trees would talk so well, and every brook would babble so musically, and each precious stone would exhort so brilliantly, as they were made to do by the 'enchantress,' angels and dreams would henceforth be of little consequence; and whether the orator should be called 'Tree of Beauty,' 'Minnehaha' or the 'Kohinoor' is a 'vexata questio.'

"In the evening Mr. Hardick, 'our own,' whose hand never touches the piano without making delicious music, and Misses Daggett and Wilson, also 'our own,' and the musical pupils of the Institution, gave a concert. 'The Young Volunteer' was imperatively demanded, and this for the third time during the anniversary exercises, and was sung amid thunders of applause, 'Star of the South,' Miss Stella Scott, shining meanwhile in all her radiant beauty. May her glorious light soon rest on a Union that shall never more be broken.--Soberly yours,

A Very Old Bachelor."

A young man asked Anna to take a drive to-day, but Grandmother was not willing at first to let her go. She finally gave her consent, after Anna's plea that he was so young and his horse was so gentle. Just as they were ready to start, I heard Anna run upstairs and I heard him say, "What an Anna!" I asked her afterwards what she went for and she said she remembered that she had left the soap in the water.

When we were down at Sucker Brook the other afternoon we were watching the water and one of the girls said, "How nice it would be if our lives could run along as smoothly as this stream." I said I thought it would be too monotonous. Laura Chapin said she supposed I would rather have an "eddy" in mine.

We went to the examination at the Academy to-day and to the gymnasium exercises afterwards. Mr. Noah T. Clarke's brother leads them and they do some great feats with their rings and swings and weights and ladders. We girls can do a few in the bowling alley at the Seminary.

Dr. Hoyt wrote home: "God bless the dear ones we leave behind; and while you try to perform the duties you owe to each other, we will try to perform ours."

We saw by the papers that the volunteers of the regiment before leaving camp at Geneva allotted over ,000 of their monthly pay to their families and friends at home. One soldier sent this telegram to his wife, as the regiment started for the front: "God bless you. Hail Columbia. Kiss the baby. Write soon." A volume in ten words.

"Blest be the tie that binds Our hearts in Christian love."

In returning thanks to the people of Canandaigua for their generous entertainment, Mr. Ralph Wells facetiously said that the cost of the convention must mean something to Canandaigua people, for the cook in one home was heard to say, "These religiouses do eat awful!"

"One hundred years from now, Carrie dear, In all probability you'll not be here; But we'll all be in the same boat, too, And there'll be no one left To say boo hoo!"

Grandfather gave me for a present a set of books called "Irving's Catechisms on Ancient Greeks and Romans." They are four little books bound in leather, which were presented to our mother for a prize. It is thus inscribed on the front page, "Miss Elizabeth Beals at a public examination of the Female Boarding School in East Bloomfield, October 15, 1825, was judged to excel the school in Reading. In testimony of which she receives this Premium from her affectionate instructress, S. Adams."

I cannot imagine Grandmother sending us away to boarding school, but I suppose she had so many children then, she could spare one or two as well as not. She says they sent Aunt Ann to Miss Willard's school at Troy. I received a birthday letter from Mrs. Beaumont to-day. She wants to know how everything goes at the Seminary and if Anna still occupies the front seat in the school room most of the time. She says she supposes she is quite a sedate young lady now but she hopes there is a whole lot of the old Anna left. I think there is.

Sarah Gibson Howell has had an answer to her letter. His name is Foster--a Major. She expects him to come and see her soon.

"Canandaigua, Feb. 13, 1863.

"Maj. Gen. Geo. McClellan:

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