Lives of Girls Who Became Famous | Page 2

were scarlet wintergreen berries; there were pink
shell blossoms of trailing arbutus, and feathers of ground pine; there
were blue and white and yellow violets, and crowsfoot, and bloodroot,
and wild anemone, and other quaint forest treasures."
A single incident, told by herself in later years, will show the
frolic-loving spirit of the girl, and the gentleness of Roxana Beecher.
"Mother was an enthusiastic horticulturist in all the small ways that
limited means allowed. Her brother John, in New York, had just sent
her a small parcel of fine tulip-bulbs. I remember rummaging these out
of an obscure corner of the nursery one day when she was gone out,
and being strongly seized with the idea that they were good to eat, and
using all the little English I then possessed to persuade my brothers that
these were onions, such as grown people ate, and would be very nice
for us. So we fell to and devoured the whole; and I recollect being
somewhat disappointed in the odd, sweetish taste, and thinking that
onions were not as nice as I had supposed. Then mother's serene face

appeared at the nursery door, and we all ran toward her, and with one
voice began to tell our discovery and achievement. We had found this
bag of onions, and had eaten them all up.
"There was not even a momentary expression of impatience, but she sat
down and said, 'My dear children, what you have done makes mamma
very sorry; those were not onion roots, but roots of beautiful flowers;
and if you had let them alone, ma would have had next summer in the
garden, great, beautiful red and yellow flowers, such as you never saw.'
I remember how drooping and disappointed we all grew at this picture,
and how sadly we regarded the empty paper bag."
When Harriet was five years old, a deep shadow fell upon the happy
household. Eight little children were gathered round the bedside of the
dying mother. When they cried and sobbed, she told them, with
inexpressible sweetness, that "God could do more for them than she
had ever done or could do, and that they must trust Him," and urged her
six sons to become ministers of the Gospel. When her heart-broken
husband repeated to her the verse, "You are now come unto Mount
Zion, unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an
innumerable company of angels; to the general assembly and church of
the first-born, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all,
and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of
the New Covenant," she looked up into his face with a beautiful smile,
and closed her eyes forever. That smile Mr. Beecher never forgot to his
dying day.
The whole family seemed crushed by the blow. Little Henry (now the
great preacher), who had been told that his mother had been buried in
the ground, and also that she had gone to heaven, was found one
morning digging with all his might under his sister's window, saying,
"I'm going to heaven, to find ma!"
So much did Mr. Beecher miss her counsel and good judgment, that he
sat down and wrote her a long letter, pouring out his whole soul,
hoping somehow that she, his guardian angel, though dead, might see it.
A year later he wrote a friend: "There is a sensation of loss which
nothing alleviates--a solitude which no society interrupts. Amid the

smiles and prattle of children, and the kindness of sympathizing friends,
I am alone; Roxana is not here. She partakes in none of my joys, and
bears with me none of my sorrows. I do not murmur; I only feel daily,
constantly, and with deepening impression, how much I have had for
which to be thankful, and how much I have lost.... The whole year after
her death was a year of great emptiness, as if there was not motive
enough in the world to move me. I used to pray earnestly to God either
to take me away, or to restore to me that interest in things and
susceptibility to motive I had had before."
Once, when sleeping in the room where she died, he dreamed that
Roxana came and stood beside him, and "smiled on me as with a smile
from heaven. With that smile," he said, "all my sorrow passed away. I
awoke joyful, and I was lighthearted for weeks after."
Harriet went to live for a time with her aunt and grandmother, and then
came back to the lonesome home, into which Mr. Beecher had felt the
necessity of bringing a new mother. She was a refined and excellent
woman, and won the respect and affection of the family. At