University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
THE KITCHEN.

As I before remarked, Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited
company to tea. Strictly speaking, it is necessary
to begin with the creation of the world, in order
to give a full account of anything. But, for popular
use, something less may serve one's turn, and therefore
I shall let the past chapter suffice to introduce
my story, and shall proceed to arrange my scenery
and act my little play, on the supposition that you
know enough to understand things and persons.

Being asked to tea in our New England in the
year 17— meant something very different from the
same invitation in our more sophisticated days. In
those times, people held to the singular opinion that
the night was made to sleep in; they inferred it
from a general confidence they had in the wisdom
of Mother Nature, supposing that she did not put
out her lights and draw her bed-curtains and hush
all noise in her great world-house without strongly
intending that her children should go to sleep; and
the consequence was, that very soon after sunset the
whole community very generally set their faces bedward,

and the tolling of the nine-o'clock evening-bell
had an awful solemnity in it, announcing the end
of all respectable proceedings in life for that day.
Good society in New England in those days very
generally took its breakfast at six, its dinner at
twelve, and its tea at six. “Company tea,” however,
among thrifty, industrious folk, was often
taken an hour earlier, because each of the invitées
had children to put to bed, or other domestic cares
at home; and, as in those simple times people were
invited because you wanted to see them, a tea-party
assembled themselves at three and held session till
sundown, when each matron rolled up her knitting-work
and wended soberly home.

Though Newport, even in those early times, was
not without its families which affected state and
splendor, rolled about in carriages with armorial emblazonments,
and had servants in abundance to
every turn within-doors, yet there, as elsewhere in
New England, the majority of the people lived with
the wholesome, thrifty simplicity of the olden time,
when labor and intelligence went hand in hand in
perhaps a greater harmony than the world has ever
seen.

Our scene opens in the great, old-fashioned kitchen,
which, on ordinary occasions, is the family dining
and sitting-room of the Scudder family I know
fastidious moderns think that the working-room
wherein are carried on the culinary operations of a

The sunbeam through the window-curtain fell on his silver
hair, and they that looked beheld his face as it were the face
of an angel; he had gotten a sight of the city whose foundation
is jasper, and whose every gate is a separate pearl.
wood-fire; across the room ran a dresser, on which
was displayed great store of shining pewter dishes
and plates, which always shone with the same mysterious
brightness; and by the side of the fire, a
commodious wooden “settee,” or settle, offered repose
to people too little accustomed to luxury to ask
for a cushion. Oh, that kitchen of the olden times,
the old, clean, roomy New England kitchen! — who
that has breakfasted, dined, and supped in one has
not cheery visions of its thrift, its warmth, its coolness?
The noon-mark on its floor was a dial that
told off some of the happiest days; thereby did we
right up the short-comings of the solemn old clock
that tick-tacked in the corner, and whose ticks
seemed mysterious prophecies of unknown good yet
to arise out of the hours of life. How dreamy the
winter twilight came in there, — when as yet the
candes were not lighted, — when the crickets chirped
around the dark stone hearth, and shifting tongues
of flame flickered and cast dancing shadows and elfish
lights on the walls, while grandmother nodded
over her knitting-work, and puss purred, and old
Rover lay dreamily opening now one eye and then
the other on the family group! With all our ceiled
houses, let us not forget our grandmothers' kitchens!

But we must pause, however, and back to our
subject-matter, which is in the kitchen of Mrs. Katy
Scudder, who has just put into the oven, by the fireplace,
some wondrous tea-rusks, for whose composition

she is renowned. She has examined and pronounced
perfect a loaf of cake, which has been
prepared for the occasion, and which, as usual, is
done exactly right. The best room, too, has been
opened and aired, — the white window-curtains saluted
with a friendly little shake, as when one says,
“How d'ye do?” to a friend; — for you must know,
clean as our kitchen is, we are genteel, and have
something better for company. Our best room in
here has a polished little mahogany tea-table, and
six mahogany chairs, with claw talons grasping
balls; the white sanded floor is crinkled in curious
little waves, like those on the seabeach; and right
across the corner stands the “buffet,” as it is called,
with its transparent glass doors, wherein are displayed
the solemn appurtenances of company tea-table.
There you may see a set of real China
teacups, which George bought in Canton, and had
marked with his and his wife's joint initials, — a
small silver cream-pitcher, which has come down
as an heirloom from unknown generations, — silver
spoons and delicate China cake-plates, which have
been all carefully reviewed and wiped on napkins of
Mrs. Scudder's own weaving.

Her cares now over, she stands drying her hands
on a roller-towel in the kitchen, while her only
daughter, the gentle Mary, stands in the doorway
with the afternoon sun streaming in spots of flickering
golden light on her smooth pale-brown hair,—

a petite figure in a full stuff petticoat and white
short gown, she stands reaching up one hand and
cooing to something among the apple-blossoms, —
and now a Java dove comes whirring down and
settles on her finger, — and we, that have seen pictures,
think, as we look on her girlish face, with its
lines of statuesque beauty, on the tremulous, half-infantine
expression of her lovely mouth, and the
general air of simplicity and purity, of some old
pictures of the girlhood of the Virgin. But Mrs.
Scudder was thinking of no such Popish matter, I
can assure you, — not she! I don't think you could
have done her a greater indignity than to mention
her daughter in any such connection. She had
never seen a painting in her life, and therefore was
not to be reminded of them; and furthermore, the
dove was evidently, for some reason, no favorite, —
for she said, in a quick, imperative tone, “Come,
come, child! don't fool with that bird, — it's high
time we were dressed and ready,” — and Mary,
blushing, as it would seem, even to her hair, gave
a little toss, and sent the bird, like a silver fluttering
cloud, up among the rosy apple-blossoms. And
now she and her mother have gone to their respective
little bedrooms for the adjustment of their
toilettes; and while the door is shut and nobody
hears us, we shall talk to you about Mary.

Newport at the present day blooms like a flower-garden
with young ladies of the best ton, — lovely

girls, hopes of their families, possessed of amiable
tempers and immensely large trunks, and capable
of sporting ninety changes of raiment in thirty days
and otherwise rapidly emptying the purses of distressed
fathers, and whom yet travellers and the
world in general look upon as genuine specimens of
the kind of girls formed by American institutions.

We fancy such a one lying in a rustling silk
négligée, and, amid a gentle generality of rings,
ribbons, puffs, laces, beaux, and dinner-discussion,
reading our humble sketch; — and what favor shall
our poor heroine find in her eyes? For though her
mother was a world of energy and “faculty,” in
herself considered, and had bestowed on this one
little lone chick all the vigor and all the care and all
the training which would have sufficed for a family
of sixteen, there were no results produced which
could be made appreciable in the eyes of such
company. She could not waltz or polk, or speak
bad French, or sing Italian songs; but, nevertheless,
we must proceed to say what was her education and
what her accomplishments.

Well, then, she could both read and write fluently
in the mother-tongue. She could spin both on the
little and the great wheel; and there were numberless
towels, napkins, sheets, and pillow-cases in the
household store that could attest the skill of her
pretty fingers. She had worked several samplers
of such rare merit that they hung framed in different

rooms of the house, exhibiting every variety and
style of possible letter in the best marking-stitch.
She was skilful in all sewing and embroidery, in all
shaping and cutting, with a quiet and deft handiness
that constantly surprised her energetic mother, who
could not conceive that so much could be done with
so little noise. In fact, in all household lore she was
a veritable good fairy; her knowledge seemed unerring
and intuitive; and whether she washed or
ironed, or moulded biscuit or conserved plums, her
gentle beauty seemed to turn to poetry all the prose
of life.

There was something in Mary, however, which
divided her as by an appreciable line from ordinary
girls of her age. From her father she had inherited
a deep and thoughtful nature, predisposed to moral
and religious exaltation. Had she been born in
Italy, under the dissolving influences of that sunny
dreamy clime, beneath the shadow of cathedrals,
and where pictured saints and angels smiled in
clouds of painting from every arch and altar, she
might, like fair St. Catherine of Siena, have seen
beatific visions in the sunset skies, and a silver dove
descending upon her as she prayed; but, unfolding
in the clear, keen, cold New England clime, and
nurtured in its abstract and positive theologies, her
religious faculties took other forms. Instead of lying
entranced in mysterious raptures at the foot of
altars, she read and pondered treatises on the Will,

and listened in rapt attention, while her spiritual
guide, the venerated Dr. Hopkins, unfolded to her
the theories of the great Edwards on the nature of
true virtue. Womanlike, she felt the subtile poetry
of these sublime abstractions which dealt with such
infinite and unknown quantities, — which spoke of
the universe, of its great Architect, of man, of angels,
as matters of intimate and daily contemplation;
and her teacher, a grand-minded and simple-hearted
man as ever lived, was often amazed at
the tread with which this fair young child walked
through these high regions of abstract thought, —
often comprehending through an ethereal clearness
of nature what he had laboriously and heavily reasoned
out; and sometimes, when she turned her
grave, childlike face upon him with some question
or reply, the good man started as if an angel had
looked suddenly out upon him from a cloud. Unconsciously
to himself, he often seemed to follow
her, as Dante followed the flight of Beatrice, through
the ascending circles of the celestial spheres.

When her mother questioned him, anxiously, of
her daughter's spiritual estate, he answered, that she
was a child of a strange graciousness of nature,
and of a singular genius; to which Katy responded
with a woman's pride, that she was all her father
over again. It is only now and then that a matter-of-fact
woman is sublimated by a real love; but if
she is, it is affecting to see how impossible it is for

death to quench it; for in the child the mother feels
that she has a mysterious and undying repossession
of the father.

But, in truth, Mary was only a recast in feminine
form of her father's nature. The elixir of the spirit
that sparkled within her was of that quality of
which the souls of poets and artists are made; but
the keen New England air crystalizes emotions into
ideas, and restricts many a poetic soul to the necessity
of expressing itself only in practical living.

The rigid theological discipline of New England
is fitted to produce rather strength and purity than
enjoyment. It was not fitted to make a sensitive
and thoughtful nature happy, however it might ennoble
and exalt.

The system of Dr. Hopkins was one that could
have had its origin in a soul at once reverential and
logical — a soul, moreover, trained from its earliest
years in the habits of thought engendered by monarchical
institutions. For although he, like other
ministers, took an active part as a patriot in the
Revolution, still he was brought up under the
shadow of a throne, and a man cannot ravel out
the stitches in which early days have knit him.
His theology was, in fact, the turning to an invisible
Sovereign of that spirit of loyalty and unquestioning
subjugation which is one of the noblest capabilities
of our nature. And as a gallant soldier
renounces life and personal aims in the cause of his

king and country, and holds himself ready to be
drafted for a forlorn hope, to be shot down, or help
make a bridge of his mangled body, over which the
more fortunate shall pass to victory and glory, so he
regarded himself as devoted to the King Eternal,
ready in His hands to be used to illustrate and build
up an Eternal Commonwealth, either by being sacrificed
as a lost spirit or glorified as a redeemed one,
ready to throw not merely his mortal life, but his immortality
even, into the forlorn hope, to bridge with
a never-dying soul the chasm over which white-robed
victors should pass to a commonwealth of glory and
splendor whose vastness should dwarf the misery of
all the lost to an infinitesimal.

It is not in our line to imply the truth or the falsehood
of those systems of philosophic theology which
seem for many years to have been the principal outlet
for the proclivities of the New England mind,
but as psychological developments they have an intense
interest. He who does not see a grand side to
these strivings of the soul cannot understand one of
the noblest capabilities of humanity.

No real artist or philosopher ever lived who has
not at some hours risen to the height of utter self-abnegation
for the glory of the invisible. There
have been painters who would have been crucified
to demonstrate the action of a muscle, — chemists
who would gladly have melted themselves and all
humanity in their crucible, if so a new discovery

might arise out of its fumes. Even persons of mere
artistic sensibility are at times raised by music,
painting, or poetry to a momentary trance of self-oblivion,
in which they would offer their whole being
before the shrine of an invisible loveliness. These
hard old New England divines were the poets of
metaphysical philosophy, who built systems in an
artistic fervor, and felt self exhale from beneath
them as they rose into the higher regions of
thought. But where theorists and philosophers
tread with sublime assurance, woman often follows
with bleeding footsteps; — women are always
turning from the abstract to the individual, and
feeling where the philosopher only thinks.

It was easy enough for Mary to believe in self-
renunciation, for she was one with a born vocation
for martyrdom; and so, when the idea was put to
her of suffering eternal pains for the glory of God
and the good of being in general, she responded to
it with a sort of sublime thrill, such as it is given to
some natures to feel in view of uttermost sacrifice.
But when she looked around on the warm, living
faces of friends, acquaintances and neighbors, viewing
them as possible candidates for dooms so fearfully
different, she sometimes felt the walls of her
faith closing round her as an iron shroud, — she
wondered that the sun could shine so brightly, that
lowers could flaunt such dazzling colors, that sweet
airs could breathe, and little children play, and youth

love and hope, and a thousand intoxicating influences
combine to cheat the victims from the thought
that their next step might be into an abyss of horrors
without end. The blood of youth and hope was
saddened by this great sorrow, which lay ever on her
heart, — and her life, unknown to herself, was a
sweet tune in the minor key; it was only in prayer,
or deeds of love and charity, or in rapt contemplation
of that beautiful millennial day, which her
spiritual guide most delighted to speak of, that the
tone of her feelings ever rose to the height of joy.

Among Mary's young associates was one who
had been as a brother to her childhood. He was
her mother's cousin's son, — and so, by a sort of
family immunity, had always a free access to her
mother's house. He took to the sea, as the most
bold and resolute young men will, and brought
home from foreign parts those new modes of
speech, those other eyes for received opinions and
established things, which so often shock established
prejudices, — so that he was held as little better
than an infidel and a castaway by the stricter religious
circles in his native place. Mary's mother,
now that Mary was grown up to woman's estate,
looked with a severe eye on her cousin. She
warned her daughter against too free an association
with him, — and so — We all know what
comes to pass when girls are constantly warned
not to think of a man. The most conscientious

and obedient little person in the world, Mary resolved
to be very careful. She never would think
of James, except, of course, in her prayers; but as
these were constant, it may easily be seen it was
not easy to forget him.

All that was so often told her of his carelessness,
his trifling, his contempt of orthodox opinions, and
his startling and bold expressions, only wrote his
name deeper in her heart, — for was not his soul in
peril? Could she look in his frank, joyous face and
listen to his thoughtless laugh, and then think that
a fall from mast-head, or one night's storm, might
— Ah, with what images her faith filled the blank!
Could she believe all this and forget him?

You see, instead of getting our tea ready, as we
promised at the beginning of this chapter, we have
filled it with descriptions and meditations, — and
now we foresee that the next chapter will be equally
far from the point. But have patience with us; for
we can write only as we are driven, and never know
exactly where we are going to land.