Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/540

Rh who had been a chaplain in the British army. Mrs. Whitney's father, Enoch Train the younger, was a pioneer merchant and ship-owner of Boston in his day. Her maternal grandparents, Silas Button and Nancy Tobey, who were married in Boston on July 17, 1800, belonged to old New England families.

For four years in her early teens Mrs. Whitney was a student in the excellent private school for girls kept in Boston from 1823 to 1855 by George B. Emerson, one of the best of teachers New England has ever produced, and for one year she was at Northampton in the noted school of Miss Margarette Dwight, who was very thorough, systematic, and successful in her vocation.

The first in the long list of publications which have given Mrs. Whitney her enviable position among American authors, and won for her a host of admiring readers, was "Mother Goose for Grown Folks," issued by Rudd & Carleton in 1859. Then came "Boys of Chequasset," "Faith Gartney's Girlhood," and "The Gay-worthys," published by Loring. "A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life" first appeared as a serial in Our Young Folks in 1866; "Patience Strong's Outings" in the Christian Register, 1868–70. Among her books of later date may be mentioned "We Girls," "Real Folks," "Sights and Insights," "Bonnyborough," "Ascutney Street," four volumes of poems, one of them entitled "Pansies," and five miscellaneous volumes, one being "Just How, a Key to the Cook-book." "Square Pegs, a Novel," came out in the autumn of 1894, marking the completion of her seventieth year, and was well received, being a worthy successor of the foregoing, not one of the ephemera, but a book to be read and reread.

It was of Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote some twenty or more years ago: "We have in New England a lady writer who for our times and seasons has done very much the work for young people that Miss Edgeworth did in hers; while her writings are spicy and amusing, they have a decided influence upon the character, an influence any parent might be thankful for.  She excels in painting simple, lovely, perfect homes and nice, gentle, natural young people.  The religious teachings of her books have no cant phraseology, but they show how the spirit of Christ may be brought into actual life."

In the words of another thoughtful critic: "Mrs. Whitney is a sworn foe to sentimentalism. She hates fine language, fine speeches, fine professions of virtue and piety and friendship. Her characters, if her favorites, are seldom afflicted with long tongues. She has read much and knows much, and shows incidentally and without pedantry her botany and geology and astronomy, and that she keeps up with the science and philosophy of the day, and is familiar with the best authors.  But, after all, we return to her genius for religion and for teaching religion by fictitious characters, characters working out their own salvation under ordinary human and New England circumstances, as the cardinal glory and charm of these books."

Mrs. Whitney has had four children&mdash;three daughters and a son, Theodore T. One daughter died in infancy. The eldest married in 1867 Major (now Colonel) Suter, of the United States army, and died in the same year. Theodore Train Whitney occupies the old Whitney homestead in Milton, his mother living in a little house that she built for herself a few years since in his grounds. Mr. Whitney has a son, Theodore T., Jr., and three daughters.

Mrs. Whitney's youngest daughter, Caroline Leslie, married James A. Field, of Beloit, Wis. At the time of his death, in 1884, their home was in Lakewood, N.J. Mrs. Field was the author of "High Lights," a novel, and of "Nannie's Happy Childhood," an attractive book for girls. She died December 1, 1902, leaving three sons. The eldest son, William L. W., is instructor of natural science in Milton Academy and at the summer school in Alstead, N.H. The second, James A., is a teacher at Harvard University, where he was graduated with honors in 1903. The third, Douglas Grahame, is still a Harvard student, as is his cousin Theodore, above named. Mrs. Whitney has also a great-grandchild, the son of William L. W. Field, who was married in 1902.

Mrs. Whitney, it is pleasant to record in closing, expresses herself as being very happy, in these latter days of her eightieth year, in