IV.

O, friend of Faith! let her not deem thee foe, Though thou dost drive her from the Paradise To which she clings with backward turning eyes, Thou art her angel still, and biddest her go To wider lands where the great rivers flow, And broad and green many a valley lies, Where high and grand th’ eternal mountains rise, And oceans fathomless surge to and fro. Thus thou dost teach her that God’s true and real, Fairer and grander than her dreams _must_ be; Till she shall leave the realm of the Ideal To follow Truth throughout the world with thee, Through earth and sea and up beyond the sun Until the mystery of God is won.

Whatever the literary defects, these are noble sonnets. But I had rather take my chances in a good Unitarian church than try to nourish the soul with such Platonic love of God. She disliked the Unitarian habit of clinging to church traditions and ancient forms of worship; but better these than the materialism of a scientific age.

Perhaps I do her an injustice. She was absolutely loyal to truth, not guilty of that shuffling attitude of modern theologians who have outgrown the superstition of Old Testament only to cling more tenaciously to the superstition of the New. In the Concord School of Philosophy, and later in her studies as a member of the Ladies’ Historical Society of Washington, she was searching for the new faith that should fulfil the old. It might be of interest here to introduce selections from some of her Historical Society essays, into the composition of which she entered with great earnestness. Written toward the close of life, they still retain the freshness and unspoiled enthusiasm of youth. One specimen must suffice:

In thinking of Galileo, and the office of the telescope, which is to give us increase of light, and of the increasing power of the larger and larger lenses, which widens our horizon to infinity, this constantly recurring thought comes to me: how shall we grow into the immensity that is opening before us? The principle of light pervades all space—it travels from star to star and makes known to us all objects on earth and in heaven. The great ether throbs and thrills with its burden to the remotest star as with a joy. But there is also an all-pervading force, so subtle that we know not yet how it passes through the illimitable space. But before it all worlds fall into divine order and harmony. It is gravitation. It imparts the power of one to all, and gathers from all for the one. What in the soul answers to these two principles is, first, also light or knowledge, by which all things are unveiled; the other which answers to gravitation, and before which all shall come into proper relations, and into the heavenly harmony, and by which we shall fill the heavens with ourselves, and ourselves with heaven, is love.

This is better than most philosophy. But after all, Angeline Hall gave herself to duty and not to philosophy—to the plain, monotonous work of home and neighborhood. Like the virtuous woman of Scripture, she supplied with her own hands the various family wants—cooked with great skill, canned abundance of fruit for winter, and supplied the table from day to day with plain, wholesome food. Would that she might have taught Bostonians to bake beans! If they would try her method, they would discover that a mutton bone is an excellent substitute for pork. Pork and lard she banished from her kitchen. Beef suet is, indeed, much cleaner. The chief article of diet was meat, for Mrs. Hall was no vegetarian, and the Georgetown markets supplied the best of Virginia beef and mutton. Like the virtuous woman of Scripture, she provided the family with warm clothing, and kept it in repair. A large part of her life was literally spent in mending clothes. She never relaxed the rigid economy of Cambridge days. She commonly needed but one servant, for she worked with her own hands and taught her sons to help her. The house was always substantially clean from roof to cellar. No corner was neglected. Nowhere on the whole premises was a bad smell tolerated.

While family wants were scrupulously attended to, she stretched forth a hand to the poor. The Civil War filled Washington with negroes, and for several winters Mrs. Hall helped to distribute supplies among them. In 1872 she was “Directress” of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth wards; and for a long time she was a member of a benevolent society in Georgetown, having charge of a section of the city near her residence. For the last fourteen years of her life, she visited the Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children in north Washington. Her poor colored neighbors regarded her with much esteem. She listened to their stories of distress, comforted them, advised them. The aged she admitted to her warm kitchen; and they went away, victuals in their baskets or coins in their hands, with the sense of having a friend in Mrs. Hall. Uncle Louis, said to be one hundred and fourteen years old, rewarded her with a grape-vine, which was planted by the dining room window. And “the Uncle Louis grape” was the best in the garden.

At the close of the Civil War she even undertook to redeem two fallen Irish women by taking them into her house to work. But their appetite for whiskey was too strong, and they would steal butter, barter it for liquor, and come home drunk. On one occasion one of these women took little Asaph along to visit the saloon; and there his mother found him, with the servant standing by joking with rough men, her dress in shreds.

Mrs. Hall had no time or strength for such charitable enterprises, and soon abandoned them. She was saved from most of the follies of philanthropy by the good sense of her husband, whom she rewarded with the devotion of a faithful wife. His studies and researches, almost from the first, were much too deep for her entire comprehension, but she was always enthusiastic about his work. In the introduction to his “_Observations and Orbits of the Satellites of Mars_,” Professor Hall chivalrously says:

In the spring of 1877, the approaching favorable opposition of the planet Mars attracted my attention, and the idea occurred to me of making a careful search with our large Clark refractor for a satellite of this planet. An examination of the literature of the planet showed, however, such a mass of observations of various kinds, made by the most experienced and skillful astronomers that the chance of finding a satellite appeared to be very slight, so that I might have abandoned the search had it not been for the encouragement of my wife.

In fact, Mrs. Hall was full of enthusiasm. Each night she sent her husband to the observatory supplied with a nourishing lunch, and each night she awaited developments with eager interest. I can well remember the excitement at home. There was a great secret in the house, and all the members of the family were drawn more closely together by mutual confidence.

The moral and intellectual training of her sons has already been referred to. Summer vacations were often spent with her sisters in Rodman, N.Y. Her mother, who reached the age of eighty years, died in the summer of 1878, when Mrs. Hall became the head of the Stickney family. Her sisters Mary and Elmina were childless. Ruth had six children, in whose welfare their Aunt Angeline took a lively interest. The three girls each spent a winter with her in Washington, and when, in the summer of 1881, Nellie was seized with a fatal illness, Aunt Angeline was present to care for her. Now and then Charlotte Ingalls, who had prospered in Wisconsin, would come on from the West, and the Stickney sisters would all be together. The last reunion occurred in the summer of 1891, a year previous to Angeline’s death. It was a goodly sight to see the sisters in one wagon, near the old home place; and when, at Elmina’s house, Angeline was bustling about attending to the needs of the united family, it was good to hear Charlotte exclaim, “Take care, old lady!” She was thirteen years older than Angeline, and seemed almost to belong to an earlier generation. She remembered her father well, and had no doubt acquired from him some of the ancient New Hampshire customs lost to her younger sisters. Certainly her exclamations of “Fiddlesticks,” and “Witch-cats,” were quaint and picturesque.

But it was Angeline who was really best versed in the family history. She had made a study of it, in all its branches, and could trace her descent from at least eleven worthy Englishmen, most of whom arrived in New England before 1650. She made excursions to various points in New England in search of relatives. At Belchertown, Mass., in 1884, she found her grandfather Cook’s first cousin, Mr. Thomas Sabin. He was then one hundred years old, and remembered how in boyhood he used to go skating with Elisha Cook.

How brief the history of America in the presence of such a man! I remember seeing an old New Englander, as late as 1900, who as a boy of eleven years had seen General Lafayette. It was a treat to hear him describe the courteous Frenchman, slight of stature, bent with age, but

## active and polite enough to alight from the stage-coach to shake hands

with the people assembled to welcome him in the little village of Charlton, Mass.

Mrs. Hall had no time for travel. At the close of life she longed to visit Europe, but death intervened, and her days were spent in her native country. She passed two summers in the mountains of Virginia. In 1878, with her little son Percival, she accompanied her husband to Colorado, to observe the total eclipse of the sun. Three years before they had taken the whole family to visit her sister Charlotte’s people in Wisconsin.

It was through her family loyalty that she acquired the Adirondack habit. In the summer of 1882, after the severe sickness of the preceding winter, she was staying with a cousin’s son, a country doctor, in Washington County, N.Y. He proposed an outing in the invigorating air of the Adirondacks. And so, with her three youngest sons and the doctor’s family, she drove to Indian Lake, and camped there about a week. Her improvement was so marked that the next summer, accompanied by three sons and her sister Ruth, she drove into the wilderness from the West, camping a few days in a log cabin by the side of Piseco Lake. In 1885, setting out from Rodman again, she drove four hundred miles, passing north of the mountains to Paul Smith’s, and thence to Saranac Lake village, John Brown’s farm, Keene Valley, and Lake George, and returning by way of the Mohawk Valley. In 1888 she camped with the three youngest sons on Lower Saranac, and in 1890 she spent July and August at the summer school of Thomas Davidson, on the side of Mt. Hurricane. One day I escorted her and her friend Miss Sarah Waitt to the top of the mountain, four or five miles distant, and we spent the night on the summit before a blazing camp-fire. Two years later she was planning another Adirondack trip when death overtook her—at the house of her friend Mrs. Berrien, at North Andover, Mass., July 3, 1892.

Her poem “Heracles,” written towards the close of her career, fittingly describes her own herculean labors:

HERACLES.