Marion Harland's Autobiography. Marion Harland
XLII A CHRISTMAS REUNION—A MIDNIGHT WARNING—HOW A GOOD MAN CAME TO “THE HAPPIEST DAY OF HIS LIFE”
XLIII TWO BRIDALS—A BIRTH AND A PASSING—“MY LITTLE LOVE”—“DRIFTING OUT”—A NONPAREIL PARISH
XLIV TWO YEARS OVERSEAS—LIFE IN ROME AND GENEVA
XLV SUNNYBANK—A NEW ENGLAND PARISH—“MY BOYS”—TWO “STARRED” NAMES
XLVI RETURN TO MIDDLE STATES—THE HOLY LAND—MY FRIENDS THE MISSIONARIES—TWO CONSULS IN JERUSALEM
XLVIII THE CLOUDS RETURN AFTER THE RAIN—ABROAD AGAIN—HEALING AND HEALTH—IDYLLIC WINTER IN FLORENCE
XLIX THE GOING-OUT OF A YOUNG LIFE—PRESENT ACTIVITIES—“LITERARY HEARTHSTONES”—GRATEFUL REMINISCENCES
THE REV. EDWARD PAYSON TERHUNE, D.D.
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FOREWORD
From the time when, as a mere baby, I dreamed myself to slumber every night by “making up stories,” down to the present hour, every human life with which I have been associated, or of which I had any intimate knowledge, has been to me a living story. All interest me in some measure. Many enlist my sympathy and fascinate the imagination as no tale that is avowedly fictitious has ever bewitched me.
I hold and believe for certain that if I could draw aside the veil of conventional reserve from the daily thinking, feeling, and living of my most commonplace acquaintance, and read these from “Preface” to “Finis,” I should rate the wildest dream of the novelist as tame by comparison.
My children tell me, laughingly, that I “turn everything into a story.” In my heart I know that the romances are all ready-made and laid to my hand.
In the pages that follow this word of explanation I have essayed no dramatic effects or artistic “situations.” “The Story of My Long Life” tells itself as one friend might talk to another as the two sit in the confidential firelight on a winter evening. The idea of reviewing that life upon paper first came to me with the consciousness—which was almost a shock—that, of all the authors still on active professional duty in our country, I am the only one whose memory runs back to the stage of national history that preceded the Civil War by a quarter-century. I, alone, am left to tell, of my own knowledge and experience, what the Old South was in deed and in truth. Other and far abler pens than mine have portrayed scenes of those days with skill I cannot emulate. But theirs is hearsay evidence—second-hand testimony as truly as if they wrote of Shakespeare’s haps and mishaps in the grammar-school at Stratford-on-Avon, or of Master George Herbert’s early love affairs.
True, the fathers told it to the generation following, and the generation has been faithful to the traditions committed to it. What I have to say in the aforesaid gossip over the confidential fire is of what I saw and heard and did—and was in that hoary Long Ago.
Throughout the telling I have kept the personal touch. The story is autobiography—not history. I began it for my children, whose importunities for tales of the olden—and now forever gone—“times” have been taken up by the least grandchild.
It was my lot to know the Old South in her prime, and to see her downfall. Mine to witness the throes that racked her during four black and bitter years. Mine to watch the dawn of a new and vigorous life and the full glory of a restored Union. I shall tell of nothing that my eyes did not see, and depict neither tragedy nor comedy in which I was not cast for a part.
Mine is a story for the table and arm-chair under the reading-lamp in the living-room, and not for the library shelves. To the family and to those who make and keep the home do I commit it.
Marion Harland.
New York City, November, 1909.
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MARION HARLAND’S
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I
FOREBEARS AND PATRON SAINT
My father, Samuel Pierce Hawes, was born in the town of Dorchester, Massachusetts, July 30, 1799.
The homestead, still standing and reckoned among the notable sites of the region, was built in 1640, by Robert Pierce, who emigrated to the New World in 1630, having sailed from Plymouth, England, in the Mary and John, in company with others of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On the voyage, he married Ann Greenaway—registered as “Daughter of Goodman Greenaway,” a fellow-passenger.
The family trace their descent, by old domestic and town records, from the Northumberland Percies. Traditions, cherished by the race, affirm that Godfrey of Bouillon was a remote ancestor. It is unquestionably true that “Robert of Dorchester,” as he is put down in the genealogy of the Percies, was a blood relative of Master George Percy, John Smith’s friend, and his successor in the presidency of the Jamestown colony.
The emigrants had a temporary home in Neponset Village, prospering so far in worldly substance as to justify the erection of the substantial house upon the hill overlooking the “village,” ten years after the landing. So substantial was it, and so honest were the builders, that it has come down in a direct line from father to son, and been inhabited by ten generations of thrifty folk who have left it stanch and weatherproof to this day.
My father’s mother, a handsome, wilful girl of seventeen, ran away to be married to one whom her father—“Squire Pierce”—considered a presumptuous adventurer. He was from Maine, a stranger in the neighborhood, and reputed (justly) to be wild and unsteady. When he asked for the girl’s hand he was summarily commanded to hold no further communication with her. He had served as a private in the Revolutionary War; he had winning ways and a good-looking face, and Ann had a liberal spice of her sire’s unbending will. She would have him, and no other of the youths who sued for her favor.
The family genealogy records that “Squire Pierce,” as he was named by his neighbors, received a captain’s commission from the parent government at the outbreak of the Rebellion, and on the self-same day one from the Continental Congress appointing him as a colonel in the Massachusetts forces. As “Colonel Pierce,” he fought throughout the eight bloody years to which we owe our national life.
In his home he was a despot of the true Puritan, patriarchal type.
For three years after the elopement the