University of Virginia Library

LETTER XXIII.

My Dear Sir,—It is all up now! Everybody knows
it! The secret is out, and I am distressed beyond measure.
I wouldn't for the world it should have been
known I write these letters; and I have done my best
that it shouldn't be suspected; and if it had not been for
certain over-wise busy bodies, the colonel and Isabel
would have been none the wiser; for they never see your
paper—I have taken nice care of that. I will tell you
how it was, Mr.—. You must know that on the evening
of the day we left the Park for the Springs, we
reached the village of Columbia, where there is a celebrated
Institute for Young Ladies, romantically situated
near the town. Isabel had a friend or two there, and
proposed to call and pay them a visit. The colonel said
he would accompany us; and off we set on foot through
the principal street. On the way we passed a one story
white cottage house, with a little shaded green yard in
front. This, the colonel told us, was the residence of
Mr. Polk, when he was called to occupy the White
House. It is wholly unpretending, and might rent for
one hundred and fifty dollars per annum. In coming to
Columbia, six miles out, we had passed a small country
dwelling, of the humblest aspect, which we were told was
his birth-place.

After looking a moment at the plain dwelling on the
street, and reflecting from what various positions of society
our Presidents spring, the abode of Madam, the
venerable mother of the late President Polk, was shown
to me—a two story brick house, without ornament or
grounds, and approached only by an uncomfortable looking
side-walk. She is greatly beloved, and is said to be
both an intelligent and witty old lady. Near her resides
Mrs. Dr. Hays, a sister of the late President, and said
strikingly to resemble him in talents and appearance.

At length we came in sight of the Gothic turrets and
Norman towers of the battlemented structure towards
which we were directing our steps. It is truly a noble
edifice, commandingly situated, and complete in all its
appointments to the eye. Its color is a grayish blue.
It is approached through imposing gate-ways, by winding
avenues that bring the visitor soon upon a green
plateau. The entrance is spacious, and hung with pictures.
We were ushered by a well-dressed female slave
into a parlor on the left, handsomely furnished, but not
a single book to be seen in it. This showed that the
proprietors regarded books as tools in that place, and
kept them for the shop—that is the study-room. The
colonel sent up our names to the Rector; for the Institution,
which numbers three hundred pupils, is Episcopalian,
and is under the charge of a clergyman of the
Church.

A gentleman shortly made his appearance, dressed
with the nicest care and attention to his personal appearance.
He was rather a handsome man, inclined to genteel
corpulency, wore gold rimmed glasses, nankeen
trousers, white vest, and full whiskers accurately trimmed

to a hair. He was the beau ideal of preceptor-in-chief
of a large and fashionable boarding-school of young
misses. He was the most polite man I ever saw. Lord
Chesterfield would have embraced him with demonstrations
of enthusiasm. Yet, with all this formality of
courteousness, which the head of a ladies' school must
of necessity get into the habit of exercising towards all,
his face bore the impress of a scholarly mind. I always
note with great particularity the peculiarities of those
who educate youth, for so much depends upon example,
and is learned by involuntary imitation. The young
ladies, whom Isabel had sent for, soon made their appearance,
both dressed plainly in white, and I observed
that they both eyed me askance and curiously in a peculiar
way, and then both whispered to Isabel, and then
looked mysteriously again at me harder than before.

At length, we rose to accompany the courteous Rector
over the vast establishment which calls him lord. I was
amazed at its extent, at the number of its rooms, at the
profusion of its pictures and maps, hanging from all the
walls, at the crowd of girls, so many of them, and so
full of the promise of future loveliness, and the perfect order
and system which prevailed throughout. But if these
gratified me, I did not a little marvel at finding myself
waylaid and watched by knots of juvenile belles, with
rosy lips buzzing, and their handsome eyes flashing and
staring at me as if I was a “show” of some kind, while
Isabel and the colonel were scarcely noticed. “What
can have happened to me?” I asked myself, and imagined
I had in some way disfigured my face, and so made
a fright and sight of myself; but happening to pass a
mirror, and finding my “beauty” unimpaired, and my

appearance as it should be, I was excessively annoyed
and curious to know why I was stared at and whispered
about so. It was not done rudely, however, but civilly,
and with a sort of pleased reverence.

I did not discover the secret of it all until we had returned
to the inn, when a gentleman, who is a poet, but
I believe has never published any thing, called and sent
in his card for me, his name written gracefully in a scroll
held in the bill of a dove, all done with shining black
lead.

When he was admitted, he approached me with a dozen
bows, and said he was happy to have the honor of welcoming
me to Columbia. He had just heard from some
young ladies of the Academy that I had honored it with
a visit, and he begged to assure me that I was appreciated,
in the most distinguished manner, by all intellectual
persons who had had the pleasure of reading my Letters
from Overton Park, published in the Model Courier.

“I trust I have also the honor,” here the young gentleman
turned and bowed low to the amazed colonel, “of
seeing the celebrated colonel whom your pen has immortalized,
and this”—and here he made two very low bows
to the puzzled Isabella—“is, without doubt, the bold
and beautiful Miss Peyton, whom I have learned to admire,
though I have never before had the happiness of
paying my respects to her.”

Mr. —! can you appreciate, have you nerves and
sensibility enough to appreciate my position at that awful
moment? I felt that the crisis had arrived! I did
not open my lips, but pale and motionless I sat and
looked him into annihilation, and then I moved my eyes
towards the colonel and Isabel, in a sort of helpless

despair, to see the effect of this contretemps upon their
unsuspecting minds.

“What is this, Kate, eh? What is it the gentleman
would say?” he asked, in an amusingly bewildered way.

“I can explain, dear father! Don't look so like the
white lady in wax, dear Kate!” added Isabel, smiling.
“I heard something of it at the school, and the girls
all wondered I had never heard of it before, especially
as I was spoken of in the Letters.”

“What letters, Bel?” asked her father. “You mystify
me! I heard something once, I now recollect, but
it passed from my mind.”

“Why, sir, the truth is, there is a spy in the camp,
dear father,” answered Bel, with an arch smile, and
glancing aside at me, “and this gentleman has been so
good as to let the poor kitten loose in sight of everybody.
Kate has been writing letters to a paper in Philadelphia,
which have been printed, at least, so I was told at the
Academy, a score of them, and every one of them dated
at Overton Park, and descriptive of every thing that she
saw or experienced there that she thought would be interesting;
and in these letters she has been so naughty as
to speak of both of us, at least so I was told, for I have
not seen one of the letters, but I am dying to do so.”

“Nor I,” said the colonel. “So! so! Then we have
a literatteuriste in our family, `takin' notes an' printin'
'em' too, i' faith! You sly rogue, Kate,” he added,
turning to me, “you have got the advantage of me. So
you have been making us all sit for our portraits, poor
innocents!”

“But she has not written one word, she would be
afraid to have us read, that I know,” said Isabel.

“That I'll vouch for, Kate! so don't look so blank!”

“That she hasn't, sir,” officiously exclaimed the
wretched poet, as if he were eager to atone for his faux
pas. “Dear me! I didn't know but—but—every body
knew—or—! But sir! but, Miss! you may rest assured
that not a word is written, that,

She has alluded to you in every instance in the most
princely, and affectionate, and respectful—”

“My very good sir,” interrupted the colonel, “the
lady needs no apologist. We know well she has not.
Now, Kate, if I had these Letters, I would, as a punishment
to you, make you read every one of them aloud to
us when we get back to the Park.”

“It would be a punishment,” I said, smiling and
taking heart again, at the kind and affectionate manner
in which the discovery had been received by my two
dear friends. “But if it will be received in full atonement—”

“Full—complete,” answered the colonel.

“I have most all the Letters, sir; seventeen in number,
sir, up to the last week,” eagerly remarked the poet;
“they are at your service, sir!”

“And so, sir,” said I, half angrily, “you would complete
the mischief you have involuntarily done by a
voluntary proposition to contribute to my punishment.”

“Ten thousand pardons, Miss Kate—I beg pardon,
Miss Conyngham—I will withhold the Letters, then.”

“Nay, since you have them,” said I, “and are willing
to part with them for a time, (they shall be returned to
your address again,) I will accept the offer; for, Colonel,

I wish you to see all that I have written, and the sooner
my mind will be relieved.”

“I am full of curiosity to read them,” said Isabel
eagerly.

Thereupon the blabbing poet departed to bring them,
when the colonel and Isabel, feeling for my chagrin,
succeeded in reconciling me to myself; and when the
miserable youth came back with the bale of Couriers under
his arm, I was in a mood to receive them with a
merry laugh, though still a tear or two of vexation
trembled in my eyes, that the discovery had been made,
and I heartily wished I had never written a line. But,
who ever dreamed of my Letters being read here, out
West, or being thought of a week after they were written?
You know, sir, how insensibly they were drawn out from
paper to paper, and increased to their present number,
almost without my knowledge.

“If I had reflected,” as I now said to the colonel and
Isabel, “that what is published in an Eastern paper is
read as well in the West as if it had been printed there,
for newspapers circulate everywhere, I should not have
written, or written less freely in my use of names and
places. I did not then understand that communications
sent out from Tennessee, to a widely circulating paper
in Philadelphia, will as certainly come back to Tennessee,
and be read by all the next door neighbors of the writer,
as certainly as if they had been printed in his own town.
I did not understand, as I now do, that newspapers are
without geographical limits and boundaries, but that their
voices, like those of the stars, `go into all lands, and their
words to the end of the world!' that to them belong
neither climates nor latitudes; that the same journal

which is read around the elegant fireside of glowing anthracite
in Walnut street, is also read, word for word
and column, before the light of the log fire
in the woodman's hut on the Mississippi.”

I have decided to continue to write my Letters, Mr. —,
for the colonel and Isabel have read all which I have
written, (this being the third day since the discovery,) and
find nothing that I should not have set down, save names,
and, as they say, giving them both better characters than
they deserve. I shall therefore resume my “journey”
and give you an account of a delightful day passed at
Ashwood, en route to the watering place, seven miles west
of Columbia.

The unlucky poet felt so badly at the scrape he had
unwittingly got me into, that in the morning, when we
left the inn, he came to the carriage, and bidding me
good bye, begged me to pardon him, a request which I
very cheerfully complied with. The last I saw of him,
as the carriage turned the corner, was standing fixed to
the spot where I had charitably shaken hands with him,
his hat raised, and his body bowing, with his left hand
frantically placed on his heart.

Mr. —, if you receive a piece of poetry from these
parts, addressed to me, “On meeting me” in Columbia,
I implore you not to insert it, for I saw the mad phrensy
of such an act in his eyes as I parted with him, and he
will be sure to perpetrate the deed there fore-shadowed.