Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/62

38 general, a little more stately, than their predecessors'. With their administration came a touch of the worldly in the general appearance of the president's house, always so plain and simple before. Rich odd cabinets, carved chairs and treasures sent home from a son in India, as well as inherited silver of aristocratic pattern, lent an air of elegance agreeable and suitable. Quoting again:

There was little social variety sixty years ago; never dinners, a rare evening party perhaps, and sometimes the small friendly suppers, or tea parties. The parlors of Deacon Luke Sweetser set the standard of elegance and struck the grand note in these affairs. There was more light, more inherited silver, a certain pomposity on the part of the hostess, who always received in purple gloves, and with a long dipping backward curtsy, a relic of her gay education at boarding school. She waved aloft a feather fan sent her from a thousand miles up the Nile by a missionary friend, and after supper Syrian relics were handed about, musky curios of Arab and Greek,—lentils, from the Holy Land, husks,—"such-as-the-swine-did-eat,"—inlaid coffee cups, attar of rose bottles, sent home by their niece the wife of the Rev. Daniel Bliss, founder of the Protestant College at Beyrut, Syria. Later came music, Lavinia Dickinson singing "Are we almost there? said the dying girl," "Coming Through the Rye,"—and a local Basso of a profundity beyond all known musical necessity after prolonged urging giving "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," with such sustained power that the glasses tinkled in the cupboard from the jar. Later everybody sang "America" and "Auld Lang Syne," and all in a glow the party broke up with the host standing at the top of the stone steps holding an oil lantern in the air for his guests' safety,—at that time the only beacon in Amherst.

The diversions of these days were pallid and calm, leading almost inevitably back to the religious activities of the church. There was an occasional lecture, there were the Wednesday evening prayer meetings, and the Sewing Society once a fortnight, clergyman and husbands coming