Part 8 (1/2)

Upon questioning Minna, she gave us a graphic description of the gentlemen. One was ”tall, oh so tall! with dark hair and red cheeks”--in him we recognized Mr. Walworth Ward--the other was a blonde gentleman whom she had seen here before.

”Lina has already made wine _padding_,” she said, seeing Ida about to descend and inspect the larder. ”Miss no fret--all right.”

Ida and I then started to walk to the grove, where we thought we would probably find our guests awaiting our return. Not there, indeed, but in the vegetable garden we found them, where they were kindly looking after the interests of the family by weeding the strawberry-beds, regardless of the Sabbath, and notwithstanding one of the gentlemen was a grandson of a D.D. In answer to our regrets that we should have been absent when they arrived, they mildly intimated some surprise, one having telegraphed his proposed coming, and the other sent a message through papa the day previous; dear papa, however, had as usual forgotten to deliver the message, and whither the telegram went, no one could imagine.

_July 1_.

A visit yesterday from the little colored sculptress, Edmonia Lewis.

Miss Lewis was accompanied by a box of formidable size, containing, she told us, a marble bust of Mr. Greeley, which she had brought out here for the opinion of the family; but as Ida was in the city where she had gone for a day's shopping, we reserved our judgment until she should return and see it with us.

I was very glad to learn that Miss Lewis was prospering in both a pecuniary and an artistic point of view. She had, she told me, received two orders for busts of uncle--one from the Lincoln Club, and one from a Chicago gentleman. She intends returning to Rome before long.

Miss Lewis had already opened a studio while we were in Rome four or five years ago, and I heard much talk about her from her brother and sister artists. I intended at one time to visit her studio and see her work, but several sculptors advised me not to do so; she was, they declared, ”queer,” ”unsociable,” often positively rude to her visitors, and had been heard to fervently wish that the Americans would not come to her studio, as they evidently looked upon her only as a curiosity.

When, therefore, I did see her for the first time (last summer), I was much surprised to find her by no means the morose being that had been described to me, but possessed of very soft and quite winning manners.

She was amused when I told her what I had heard of her, and remarked, quite pertinently:

”How could I expect to sell my work if I did not receive visitors civilly?”

Miss Lewis expressed much grat.i.tude to Miss Hosmer and Miss Stebbins for their kindness to her in Rome, and of Miss Cushman she said enthusiastically, ”She is an angel!”

She is, I have been told, very well received in society abroad, and when baptized a Catholic in Rome, two ladies of high position, Countess Cholmondeley and Princess Wittgenstein, offered to stand G.o.dmother for her. Edmonia chose Lady Cholmondeley, whom I remember well in Rome as a great belle and a highly accomplished woman. She wrote poetry, I was told, and modelled in clay with much taste, and her finely trained voice and dainty playing of the harp I well remember as one of the attractions of Miss Cushman's receptions.

Edmonia has, beside her somewhat hard English appellation, two pretty baptismal names--Maria Ignatia.

CHAPTER X.

Cataloguing the Library--A Thousand Volumes--Contrasting Books--Some Rare Volumes--Mr. Greeley's Collection of Paintings--Authenticity of the Cenci Questioned--A Portrait of Galileo--Portrait of Martin Luther--Portrait of Greeley at Thirty--Powers' Proserpine--Hart's Bust of Mr. Greeley--Mosaics and Medallions.

_July 2_.

This morning we have had a family picnic at the side-hill house, where the amus.e.m.e.nt was, however, neither ”Twenty Questions,” gossip, nor croquet; but arranging and cataloguing uncle's large library. The books had hitherto been kept in the house in the woods, with the exception of those in daily use, filling three good-sized bookcases in our present residence; but as the house in the woods had been twice broken into last winter, Ida thought it safer to move them all down this summer to the side-hill house, where Bernard sleeps. Accordingly, a wagon-load or two was brought down the other day and deposited in the dining-room, and this morning, as we had no guests, and no very pressing occupations, we all, including Minna, went up there directly after breakfast to look them over.

”I am resolved,” Ida had said, ”to have the books catalogued, that I may know in future how many I yearly lose by lending them to my friends.” Consequently the work was doubled by the necessity of writing down the names, and we had unluckily chosen the hottest day that we had so far experienced for this laborious task. We all went to work, however, with as much energy as though the temperature was at a reasonable degree, and I felt quite proud of my achievements when the work was done, having catalogued, myself, over three hundred volumes.

Our work was divided: mamma read off the names of the books, and Marguerite and I wrote them down, and Minna then dusted and carried them into the next room to Ida, who placed them upon the shelves, dividing the library into compartments for poetry, biography, science, fiction, etc. An endless task it seemed at first to sort the books, for more than one thousand volumes of all sizes and in every variety of binding from cloth to calf, had been thrown promiscuously on the floor, and the hottest antagonists in the political and religious world were now lying side by side in the apparent enjoyment of peace and good-will. ”Slavery Doomed” and ”Slavery Justified” composed one externally harmonious group, while ”Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World,” ”How I became a Unitarian,” and Strauss' ”Life of Jesus,” lay beside their rigidly orthodox neighbors, the ”Following of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis, Cardinal Wiseman's ”Doctrines of the Church,” and a Jesuit Father's idea of the Happiness of Heaven.

Uncle's fondness for his country home was manifested by thirty or more large volumes upon Agriculture, and several others upon Rural Architecture, while his literary and aesthetic taste was displayed by a superb edition of Macaulay, in eight octavo volumes, combining the whitest of paper and the largest and clearest type, with richest binding; Lord Derby's translation of the Iliad, Mackay's ”Thousand and One Gems,” a large and elegant volume of Byron's complete works, and Bryant's ”Library of Poetry and Song”--the two latter beautifully bound and ill.u.s.trated. Xenophon, Herodotus, Josephus, and Caesar lay off at an aristocratic distance from their neighbors, and looked down with scorn upon anything so modern as Noel's ”Rebellion,” or Draper's ”Civil War in America;” while memories of the buried ”Brook Farm” arose from the past as mamma took up a volume or two upon Co-operative a.s.sociations.

Uncle's strict temperance principles were ill.u.s.trated by half a dozen volumes upon the ”Effects of Alcohol,” including ”Scriptural Testimony against Wine;” and a work or two upon the Tariff Question recalled many a _Tribune_ editorial penned by the dear, dead hand.

A large dark pile of some twenty volumes loomed up from a distant corner--Appleton's useful Cyclopaedia--and beside them lay an enormous Webster's Dictionary, handsomely put up in a chocolate-colored library binding.

Many elegantly bound volumes were presentation copies from their authors--among them a magnificent alb.u.m of languages, beautifully illuminated, and bound in scarlet morocco, containing the Lord's Prayer in one hundred different tongues. This book sold, Ida said, for one hundred dollars a copy.

In striking contrast with this gorgeous volume were two little yellow-leaved, shabbily bound books, valued, however, at one hundred dollars each, and treasures which no money could have bought from uncle--one a copy of Erasmus, dated Basle, 1528, and the other ”The tvvoo Bookes of Francis Bacon on the Proficience and Aduancement of Learning, diuine and humane,” printed, the fly-leaf states, at London, in 1605.

_July 3_.