Part 10 (2/2)
Congenial as they were in many ways, the possession of the latchkey, Dr. Bagby tells us, did not argue an intimate personal relation, as the fancy of the brilliant editor of the _Examiner_ was apparently changeable, and wavered when he discovered that his a.s.sistant neither played chess nor talked sufficiently to inspire him to conversational excellence. But the key opened to the younger man, whenever he so willed, the pleasant three-storied brick house on Broad Street where the valiant editor kept bachelor's hall in a manner that would suggest the superfluity of complicating the situation with a wife and family.
That latchkey gave to its holder entrance to the first floor front room parlor where hung two fine paintings, the special treasures of the fastidious owner, and if he could not play chess upon the handsome mosaic chess-table he could at least enjoy its artistic beauty. The dining-room contained a set of solid antique-patterned tables to which Mr. Daniel was wont to refer as the former property of ”old Memminger,” that is, Secretary Memminger of the Confederate Treasury, who had sold his household effects on leaving his home on Church Hill.
Over the mantel in the bachelor's chamber hung a miniature on ivory, ”the most beautiful I have ever seen,” said the doctor, an unknown beauty whose charms mystified as well as enchanted the observer; a wondrously accomplished lady of t.i.tle and wealth whom Mr. Daniel had known abroad. The visitor must have viewed with some degree of curiosity the effective arrangement of mirrors in the dressing-room, whereby the owner of the mansion surveyed himself front, rear, head and foot, as he made his toilet, perhaps reflecting humorously upon the dismay of his manager, Mr. Walker, upon being advised as to the necessity of wearing a white vest to a party: ”But, Mr. Daniel, suppose a man hasn't got a white vest and is too poor these war times to buy one?” ”---- it, sir! let him stay at home,” was the decisive answer.
On a second floor pa.s.sage was an object which must have excited more envy than the magnificent mirrors and solid old furniture were capable of arousing--a bag of Java coffee, and coffee thirty dollars a pound--the latter fact not deterring the luxurious owner of this stately abode from imbuing his pet terriers with the coffee-drinking habit. A little room cut off from a pa.s.sage in the third story was a library of old and rare editions of the cla.s.sics. A back room, sunlit and warm, gave a view of James River, the Henrico Hills, and the s.p.a.cious dells and forests of Chesterfield. To the mind of Dr. Bagby all these things were represented by ”John M. Daniel's Latchkey” and, for all the charm of ”Home, Sweet Home,” is it not better to have the privileges without the responsibilities of a latchkey?
Next to the editorial office of the _Messenger_ that of the _Daily Examiner_ was the place with which Dr. Bagby was, perhaps, best acquainted in Richmond. There, with the fiery editor, he spent his evenings in reading proof, comforted by a mild cigar and protected by a Derringer which Mr. Daniel would put on the table when he first arrived, a not unnecessary precaution, for if there was one place more dangerous than another in the Richmond of war days it was almost any point in the near vicinity of the belligerent editor of the _Examiner_.
Dr. Bagby was married to Miss Parke Chamberlayne of Richmond, and we may be sure that she was the model from which he drew his charming study of ”the Virginia lady of the best type,” who accompanies ”The Old Virginia Gentleman” in his pages.
After the close of the war Dr. Bagby attained high distinction as a lecturer on Southern topics and later served his State as a.s.sistant secretary. But in all that he did there was with him the lost dream of the nation he had served so well through the dark and stormy years of strife, and in August, 1883, he pa.s.sed beyond into the land where earth's broken hearts are renewed to youth.
It was written of him: ”There is no man left in Virginia fit to lift the lid of his inkstand.”
”WOMAN AND POET”
MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON
”Whoever has the good fortune to follow its trails and s.h.i.+mmering waters is already half a poet,” wrote Professor Harris of the road that leads down from the verdant hills of the Alleghanies over picturesque gorge and crag and fissure into the quiet of the valley and brings us by exquisite stages to the beautiful town of Lexington, Virginia. Making that journey in taking my boy, fourteen years old, to the Virginia Military Inst.i.tute, I entered at once two charming regions--Lexington with its romantic environment, and the heart of Margaret Junkin Preston.
When I spoke of the beautiful scenery Mrs. Preston asked me if I had read Professor Maury's description of it. I replied that I had not. ”I am glad,” she said, ”because now that you have seen our Nature-pictures you will enjoy the description so much more.”
Though the name and work of Margaret Preston had long been shrined in the hearts of a host of known friends and endeared to many unknown readers whose lives had been cheered by the buoyant hopefulness expressed in her writings, she was very modest in regard to her productions, yet held it a duty to continue writing for others the thoughts which had helped her. When we were at supper in the home of Professor Lyle, who was gifted with an unusually poetic mind, he repeated pa.s.sages from favorite authors. On being asked if he did not sometimes write poetry, he replied that he had often written rhymes and loved to do it, but when he would afterward read Virgil and Shakespeare and Tennyson he would tear up his own verses, feeling that he ought not to make the effort.
”Then,” replied Mrs. Preston, ”the gardener should not plant the seeds that bring forth the little forget-me-nots and snowdrops. He should plant only the great multiflora roses and the Lady Banks.h.i.+res and magnolias.”
Mrs. Preston spent much of her time in knitting because the weakness of her eyes made reading and writing difficult. ”Are you never tired of knitting?” I asked. She replied that it did not tire her, and told me that Mrs. Lee said she loved to knit because she did not have to put her mind on the work. She could think and talk as well when she was knitting for the reason that she did not have to keep her eyes nor her attention upon what she was doing. She knew perfectly well when she came to a seam. In a letter from a soldier to Mrs. Lee he thanked her for the socks she had sent him, and wrote; ”I have fourteen pairs of socks knitted by my mother and my mother's sisters and the Church Sewing Society, and I have not a s.h.i.+rt to my back nor a pair of trousers to my legs nor a whole pair of shoes to my feet.” ”But,” said Mrs. Lee as she concluded the story, ”I continued to knit socks just the same.”
The first open-end thimble I ever saw was one Mrs. Preston used when I was with her at the Springs. I remarked upon it and she said that when she used a thimble she always had that kind. ”I feel about a thimble as I do about mitts, which I always wear instead of gloves, because I like to see my fingers come through. So I like to see my finger come through my thimble. It is a tailor's thimble. Tailors always use that kind. I do not know whether they like to see their fingers come through or not.” I had heard it said that it takes nine tailors to make a man and now I reflected that it would take eighteen tailors to make a thimble. Upon presenting this mathematical problem to Mrs.
Preston she told me about the origin of the old saying:
”It was not that kind of tailor at first. In old England the custom was to announce a death by tolling a bell. After the bell had ceased tolling, a number of strokes, called 'tailers,' indicated whether the death was of a child, a woman or a man; three for a child, nine for a man. People counting would say, 'Nine tailers, that's a man,' which in time became colloquially 'Nine tailers make a man.' When the custom became obsolete the saying remained, its application was forgotten, _o_ was subst.i.tuted for _e_ and it was used in derogation of a most worthy and necessary member of the body politic.”
Margaret Preston was very small, in explanation of which fact she told me there was a story that she had been tossed on the horns of a cow.
There was Scotch blood in the Junkin family and with it had descended the superst.i.tion that this experience dwarfs a child's growth. When she sat upon an ordinary chair her little feet did not touch the floor. She had a way of smoothing the front of her dress with her hands as she talked.
Knowing her as she was then and remembering her devotion to the South and the sacrifices she had made for her home through the dark years, one might have thought that she was a native daughter of Virginia. In the village of Milton, Pennsylvania, where her father, Reverend George Junkin, was pastor of the a.s.sociate Reformed Church, Margaret Junkin was born on the 19th of May, 1820, in a small, plain, rented house, a centre of love and harmony, with simple surroundings, for the family finances did not purchase household luxuries, but were largely expended in a.s.sisting those less fortunately placed.
In this little home, where rigid economy was practised and high aspirations reigned, our future poet entered upon the severe intellectual training which caused her at twenty-one, when the door of scholastic learning was closed upon her by the partial failure of her sight, to be called a scholar, though she sorrowfully resented the t.i.tle, asking, ”How can you speak of one as a scholar whose studies were cut short at twenty-one?”
She received her first instruction from her mother, pa.s.sing then under the tutors.h.i.+p of her father, who fed his own ambition by gratifying her scholarly tastes, teaching her the Greek alphabet when she was six years old and continuing her training in collegiate subjects until she was forced by failing sight to give up her reading.
When she was ten the family removed to Germantown, where her father had charge of the Manual Labor School, and Margaret enjoyed the advantages at that time afforded by the city of Philadelphia, gathering bright memories which irradiated her somewhat sombre life then and lightened her coming years.
In Lafayette, a new college in Easton, Pennsylvania, Dr. Junkin soon found opportunity to carry on his system of training for practical and religious life and here Margaret spent sixteen happy and busy years--happy but for the gray veil that fell between her and her loved studies before those years had pa.s.sed. She was obliged to prepare her Greek lessons at night, and the only time her father had for hearing her recitations was in the early morning before breakfast, which in that household meant in the dim candlelight of the period; not a wholesome time for perusing Greek text. For Margaret Junkin it meant seven years of physical pain, a part of the time in a darkened room, and the lifelong regret of unavailing aspirations. It was in Easton that she began to write in any serious and purposeful fas.h.i.+on, the result of her semi-blindness, as, but for that, she would have devoted her life to painting, for which she had decided talent. In the beautiful environment of Easton the young soul had found the poetic glow that tinged its early dawn. Hills crowned with a wealth of forests, fields offering hospitality to the world, glimmering of the Delaware waters rippling silverly along their happy way, auroral dawns and glorious sunsets, all inspired the youthful poet's imagination to melodious effort. Of Margaret as she was in the Easton days in 1836, a Lafayette freshman thus writes:
A taste for literary pursuits soon drew us together and a warm friends.h.i.+p sprang up, which continued unbroken to the day of her death. Her remarkable poetic talent had even then won the admiration of her a.s.sociates, and to have been admitted into the charmed circle of which she was the center, where literature and literary work were discussed, admired and appreciated, I have ever counted a high privilege.
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