Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe | Page 7

black velvet bandeau, and to us she seemed
very beautiful.
"Never did stepmother make a prettier or sweeter impression. The
morning following her arrival we looked at her with awe. She seemed
to us so fair, so delicate, so elegant, that we were almost afraid to go
near her. We must have appeared to her as rough, red-faced, country
children, honest, obedient, and bashful. She was peculiarly dainty and
neat in all her ways and arrangements, and I used to feel breezy, rough,
and rude in her presence.
"In her religion she was distinguished for a most unfaltering Christ-
worship. She was of a type noble but severe, naturally hard, correct,
exact and exacting, with intense natural and moral ideality. Had it not
been that Doctor Payson had set up and kept before her a tender, human,
loving Christ, she would have been only a conscientious bigot. This

image, however, gave softness and warmth to her religious life, and I
have since noticed how her Christ-enthusiasm has sprung up in the
hearts of all her children."
In writing to her old home of her first impressions of her new one, Mrs.
Beecher says: "It is a very lovely family, and with heartfelt gratitude I
observed how cheerful and healthy they were. The sentiment is greatly
increased, since I perceive them to be of agreeable habits and some of
them of uncommon intellect."
This new mother proved to be indeed all that the name implies to her
husband's children, and never did they have occasion to call her aught
other than blessed.
Another year finds a new baby brother, Frederick by name, added to
the family. At this time too we catch a characteristic glimpse of Harriet
in one of her sister Catherine's letters. She says: "Last week we interred
Tom junior with funeral honors by the side of old Tom of happy
memory. Our Harriet is chief mourner always at their funerals. She
asked for what she called an epithet for the gravestone of Tom junior,
which I gave as follows:--
"Here lies our Kit, Who had a fit, And acted queer, Shot with a gun,
Her race is run, And she lies here."
In June, 1820, little Frederick died from scarlet fever, and Harriet was
seized with a violent attack of the same dread disease; but, after a
severe struggle, recovered.
Following her happy, hearty child-life, we find her tramping through
the woods or going on fishing excursions with her brothers, sitting
thoughtfully in her father's study, listening eagerly to the animated
theological discussions of the day, visiting her grandmother at Nut
Plains, and figuring as one of the brightest scholars in the Litchfield
Academy, taught by Mr. John Brace and Miss Pierce. When she was
eleven years old her brother Edward wrote of her: "Harriet reads
everything she can lay hands on, and sews and knits diligently."

At this time she was no longer the youngest girl of the family, for
another sister (Isabella) had been born in 1822. This event served
greatly to mature her, as she was intrusted with much of the care of the
baby out of school hours. It was not, however, allowed to interfere in
any way with her studies, and, under the skillful direction of her
beloved teachers, she seemed to absorb knowledge with every sense.
She herself writes: "Much of the training and inspiration of my early
days consisted not in the things that I was supposed to be studying, but
in hearing, while seated unnoticed at my desk, the conversation of Mr.
Brace with the older classes. There, from hour to hour, I listened with
eager ears to historical criticisms and discussions, or to recitations in
such works as Paley's Moral Philosophy, Blair's Rhetoric, Allison on
Taste, all full of most awakening suggestions to my thoughts.
"Mr. Brace exceeded all teachers I ever knew in the faculty of teaching
composition. The constant excitement in which he kept the minds of his
pupils, the wide and varied regions of thought into which he led them,
formed a preparation for composition, the main requisite for which is to
have something which one feels interested to say."
In her tenth year Harriet began what to her was the fascinating work of
writing compositions, and so rapidly did she progress that at the school
exhibition held when she was twelve years old, hers was one of the two
or three essays selected to be read aloud before the august assembly of
visitors attracted by the occasion.
Of this event Mrs. Stowe writes: "I remember well the scene at that
exhibition, to me so eventful. The hall was crowded with all the literati
of Litchfield. Before them all our compositions were read aloud. When
mine was read I noticed that father, who was sitting on high by