Many of the foreigners who came to “Green Peace” were political refugees—Poles, Austrians, Hungarians. There were, of course, many Greeks also. One of my father’s self-imposed duties was finding employment for these people, who naturally were quite helpless in a strange land. Thus many of our early teachers and governesses were foreigners. We grew up in an international atmosphere less common in those early days than now. Professor Fiester, doubtless a very learned Austrian, gave us some rudimentary lessons in Latin and German. He was a very stout, large man, with fair, curly hair and gold spectacles. Some one nicknamed him “the mastodon calf.” He understood perfectly how to amuse children, and made us the most fascinating fly-houses and other paper objects. It is evident that I was a naughty child and quite determined to have my own way. One morning the patience of our gentle master came to an end.
“No, Mees!” he exclaimed. “I haf refused to opey the Emperor of Austria, and do you think I will opey you, you little thing?”
I was about eight years old when I was thus classed with the Hapsburg tyrant of the day!
One of our early teachers, Jules M——, had deserted from the French army. The family of his Greek wife had aided him in some way, and he married her, out of gratitude. Of course they found their way, like other foreigners, to my father’s office in Boston, No. 20 Bromfield Street. As neither of them could speak the other’s language, he interpreted between husband and wife when they got into difficulties. She wore an embroidered cap on the back of her head, with her hair braided outside of it.
M—— was of the blond French type, with a military air. It was his soldierly training, doubtless, which caused him to ring the door-bell in a very decided way, and then, without waiting for the maid to answer it, open the door himself and march straight into the parlor. This gave me an injured feeling, for I was apt to be late, and counted on those few minutes in which he should have waited, to get ready.
He wrote a beautiful copper-plate hand and was a good teacher. With a military desire to see everything in good order, he one day informed me that my stockings needed pulling up. This was more than the dignity of my nine years could brook, and I made no reply. He repeated his observation several times, but in vain! The peer of the Emperor of Austria was not going to yield to a deserter from the French army!
VI
NOTED VISITORS AT “GREEN PEACE”
Charles Simmer and His Brother George.—Edwin P. Whipple. James T. Fields.—Doctor Kane.—Rev. Thomas Starr King.—Prof. Cornelius C. Felton.—Arthur Hugh Clough.—Frederika Bremer.—Laura Bridgman.
AMONG those who came to “Green Peace” was Charles Sumner, my father’s most intimate friend. The great Massachusetts Senator towered above his fellow-men physically as well as intellectually. He was a man of noble proportions, and his great height and size seemed to correspond with entire fitness to his massive brain and solid mental acquirements. The great dignity of his character and manner made him seem even larger than he really was. I cannot give his exact height, but it was at least six feet two inches. Brother Harry once said to our younger sister:
“There are two kinds of giants, Laura. There are the ogres who eat people up, and there are the harmless giants. Now Mr. Sumner is a harmless giant!”
He was a handsome man, always well dressed and scrupulously exact about his personal appearance. When I first remember him he usually wore drab-cloth gaiters with white-pearl buttons, which gave him a look of immaculate neatness. Yet we know he was not a dandy, because Mr. Longfellow tells us so. A large man—who is necessarily the target for many eyes—should certainly be careful about his appearance. Six feet three with breadth in proportion would make a large area of untidiness sad to contemplate! We children, as I have said, considered him as a good-natured giant, but he was not familiar with little people and their ways. We did not have much intercourse with him, save from an admiring distance. But he well understood that children like presents. He brought two dolls for Julia and Flossy from the anti-slavery fair. I am ashamed to say that, although the younger, I insisted on having the beautiful wax doll dressed in white with “Effie” marked on her handkerchief! Julia received the companion doll, dressed in black as a nun. She did not compare with Effie in beauty.
On a certain evening, as he was going out of the front door of “Green Peace,” I valiantly called out to him, “Good night, Mr. Sumner.” And a great voice answered me out of the darkness, “Good night, child!” He was very careful and exact in his use of English, as became a man of scholarly attainments, and did not like to have other people take liberties with our mother-tongue. Thus he rebuked our governess for saying that the clock was out of kilter. There was no such word as kilter, he averred, in the English language. Miss Seegar was rather indignant at being forbidden the use of this quaint Yankee expression; after Mr. Sumner had gone she took down the dictionary and found that kilter was duly recorded there!
It is evidently one of the many so-called Americanisms which are, in reality, words formerly used in England.
He once went away from a party at our house without taking leave of any one. My mother was rather troubled at this, and my father, who had known Mr. Sumner long and intimately, said, “Why, that is Sumner’s idea of taking French leave.” Whereupon sister Julia observed, “I should as soon think of an elephant walking incognito down Broadway as of Mr. Sumner’s taking French leave without being observed.”
Of the attack upon him in the Senate I shall speak later. Suffice it to say here that the intense and prolonged physical suffering caused by this murderous assault was not the only form of political martyrdom which he was destined to endure.
The aristocratic element of Boston was, in ante-bellum days, strongly opposed to anti-slavery doctrines and those who held them. Charles Sumner’s heroic defense of the principles of liberty gained for him social ostracism in his native city. This never fell upon my father, whose work for the public schools, for the blind, the idiots, the insane, and other unfortunates, insured him the cordial good-will of the community, in spite of his anti-slavery activities. It should also be remembered that he did not, like his friend, hold political office. It is sad to recall the unkind treatment of Sumner; it is pleasanter to remember that in his later years the great Senator was fully appreciated and honored in the city of his birth.
Charles Sumner had not what is called social talent, and I do not think that he cared much for society. His busy life of constant political activity did not leave him much leisure, and his tastes were those of a scholar and lover of books.
As he grew older and busier he had less time to devote to social functions. But he would show his interest and sympathy on all great festive occasions in the families of his intimate friends by making his appearance among the guests, even though he seldom stayed long.
The gods were ever wont, however, to make brief visits among the children of men—and if Charles Sumner stayed only fifteen minutes and said only a dozen words, at a wedding or a class-day, we rejoiced that he had been there, and his smile brightened the feast as much as the sun. His smile was one of rare sweetness and beauty; beneath the reserved exterior which distinguished him there beat a warm and true heart. He had, be it said, beautiful white teeth, and my mother remembered with amusement a certain dinner in his younger days when he resolutely refused, for obvious reasons, to eat huckleberry pie.
The reserve and apparent coldness which we New Englanders have inherited from our English forefathers—and, owing to the severity of the climate, have been unable to modify—are often a misfortune to their possessor and cause him to be considered as unsympathetic, when he is not so in reality. The great Massachusetts Senator was a man without guile and of an almost childlike simplicity of nature. His pocket was constantly