Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/30

Rh always stood ready — the very genius of hospitality — to feed the hungry and to clothe the poor. When I reflect on all that a housewife had to meet in cold New Hampshire winters, with the thermometer at 28° below zero and no furnace, I can but wonder at and admire her pluck and her ingenuity, for her parlor windows were full of hot-house plants all winter; and I think I never went to a party for thirty years in after-life that I did not seem to breathe the scent of the little bouquet which she always had ready for me in those early days — a white rose, a sprig of geranium, and a clove pink, with some sweet-scented verbena. I can see her almost statuesque dignity still, and the rich, red lips, which rarely parted in a smile; but when they did, what a perfect set of teeth! A slice of fresh cocoanut was not more deliciously white and fresh, and her complexion of lilies and roses remained with her to the last. How could such wonderful beauty have survived that cold climate? Years after, at Washington, these charms of hers excited national admiration. She received it with the calmness of the mother of the Gracchi; indeed, she was a study after the antique.

Perhaps the early death of her boys — victims to those cruel winters, victims of croup and scarlet-fever — had saddened her; but I do not remember my mother as enjoying her beauty or as ever seeming frivolous or vain. She was apt to be well dressed — that seemed to crop out of her inner consciousness — and she had "love, honor, obedience, troops of friends"; but she died at fifty, looking only twenty, and I often wish that I could go back and make her smile that too rare smile, too often interrupted by tears.

Her large, populous, and busy household was presided over below-stairs by Roxana, the last of a noble race —