“I think that mother must have entirely regained her spirits during the four years that we lived in Vermont, for I remember that men, women, and children alike delighted in her society, and our house was the centre of the little neighborhood.  We resided very near the school-house, and rarely did a morning pass without a visit from some of the girls, to have a few words of greeting from mother on their way to their lessons.  When recess time came, they would arrive in numbers to spend the time with her, and beg for a song or a story from the inexhaustible supply with which her memory was stored, and there they would remain, fascinated by her sweet, low voice until she would be obliged to playfully chase them out of the house to compel them to return to school.  From the teacher, for tardiness, punishment was a very frequent occurrence, but it made slight impression upon the girls in comparison with the enjoyment of listening to one of mother’s thrilling or romantic stories, for the following day they would return to our house to again risk the penalty.

“I told you that brother taught me after we were taken out of school.  He was the gentlest and kindest of instructors, and was always ready to lay down his own book to help me out of any difficulty that my lesson presented, although it was by no means easy to make him close his book under other circumstances; such as the solicitations of his young friends to join them in a game.

“I have described father to you as a stern man in his every-day intercourse with us, but although his motto was ‘Work,’ he was always willing to grant us a holiday or a play-hour, when he thought we had earned it.  He would relax his dignity, too, somewhat when young people came to pass the evening with us; would encourage us to play games and dance, and would often join us; for, although he never played cards himself, nor would he allow them to be played in his house, he himself taught us how to dance.

“When our young friends came to see us, there was much rejoicing from brother Barnes, who was full of life and spirits, and always ready to play, and from Arminda and myself; but brother Horace, not at all allured by blind-man’s-buff or a dance, would retire to a corner with a pine knot (for in those days candles were few), preferring the companionship of his book to our merry games.  Coaxing was all in vain:  the only means of inducing him to join us was to snatch away his book and hide it; but even then he preferred to gather us quietly about him and tell us stories.  I remember that before he left home he had related to us, among other things, the thousand and one stories of the ‘Arabian Nights,’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe.’  This gift of story-telling he inherited from mother, whose talent in that line certainly equalled that of the beautiful Sultana Scheherazade herself.  At this time, although I had never seen a copy of Shakespeare, I was familiar with the names and plots of all his imaginative, and many of his historical plays, which mother would relate to us in her own words, embellished now and then with bits of the original verse, as she sat at her spinning-wheel, or busied herself about the household work.