IIIBOARDING SCHOOL IN THE FORTIES
I wonder if the parents of the present do not sometimes contrast the fashionable schools in which their daughters are being educated with the fashionable schools to which their aged mothers, mayhap grandmothers, were sent sixty and more years ago? Among my possessions that I keep—according to the dictum of my grandchildren—“for sentimental sake,” is a much-worn “Scholar’s Companion,” which they scorn to look at when I bring it forth, and explain it to be the best speller that ever was; and a bent, much overworked crochet needle of my schooldays, for we worked with our hands as well as with our brains. The boarding school to which I refer was not unique, but a typical New England seminary of the forties. It was both fashionable and popular, but the young ladies were not, as now, expected to appear at a 6 o’clock dinner in a low neck (oh, my!) gown.
Lately, passing through the now much expanded city to which I was sent, such a young girl, on asailing ship from New Orleans to New York in the early spring of 1847, I spent a half hour walking on Crown Street looking for No. 111. It was not there, not a trace of the building of my day left; nor was one, so far as I know, of the girls, my old schoolmates, left; all three of the dear, painstaking teachers sleeping in the old cemetery, at rest at last were they. Every blessed one lives in my memory, bright and young, patient and middle-aged—all are here to beguile my twilight hours....
The school routine was simple and precise, especially the latter. We had duties outside the schoolroom, the performance of which was made pleasant and acceptable, as when the freshly laundered clothes were stacked in neat little piles on the long table of the yellow room on Thursdays, ready for each girl to carry to her own room. There were also neat little stacks on each girl’s desk, of personal articles requiring repairs, buttons to replace, holes to patch, stockings to darn, and in the schoolroom on Thursday afternoons—how some of us hated the work!—it was examined and passed upon before we were dismissed. The long winter evenings we were assembled in the library and one of the teachers read to us. I remember one winter we had “Guy Mannering” and “Quentin Durward,” Sir Walter Scott’s lovely stories. We girls were expectedto bring some work to occupy our fingers while listening to the readings, with the comments and explanations that illuminated obscure portions we might not comprehend.
There was an old-fashioned “high boy” (haut bois) in the library, in the capacious drawers of which were unmade garments for the missionary box. Woe unto the young lady who had no knitting, crocheting or hemstitching of her own to do! She could sew on red flannel for the little Hottentots! After hymn singing Sunday afternoons there was reading from some suitably saintly book. We had “Keith’s Evidences of Prophecy” (I have not seen a copy of that much-read and laboriously explained volume for more than sixty years). The tension of our minds produced by “prophecy” was mitigated once in a while by two goody-goody books, “Lamton Parsonage” and “Amy Herbert,” both, no doubt, long out of print.
There also were stately walks to be taken twice a day for recreation; walks down on the “Strand,” or some back street that led away from college campus and flirtatious students. Our school happened to be too near the college green, by the way. We marched in couples, a teacher to lead who had eyes both before and behind, and a teacher similarly equipped to follow. With all these precautionswe—some of us were pretty—were often convulsed beyond bounds when “we met by chance, the only way,” on the very backest street, a procession of college fellows on mischief bent, marching two and two, just like us. In bad weather we were shod with what were called “gums” and wrapped in coats long and shaggy and weighing a ton. Waterproofs were a later invention. Wet or dry, cold or warm, those exercises had to be taken to keep us in good physical condition. I must mention in this connection that no matter what ailed us, in stomach or back, head or foot, we were dosed with hot ginger tea. I do not remember ever seeing a doctor in the house, or knowing of one being summoned. The girls hated that ginger tea, so no doubt many an incipient headache was not reported.
With the four spinsters (we irreverently called No. 111 Old Maids’ Hall) who lived in the house, there were scraggly, baldheaded, spectacled teachers from outside—a monsieur who read Racine and Molière with us and taught usj’aime, tu aime, which he could safely do, the snuffy old man; a fatherly sort of Turveydrop dancing master, who cracked our feet with his fiddle bow; a drawing master, who, because he sometimes led his class on sketching trips up Hillhouse Avenue, was immensely popular, and every one of us wantedto take drawing lessons. We did some water colors, too; some of us had not one particle of artistic talent. I was one of that sort, but I achieved a Baltimore oriole, which, years after, my admiring husband, who also had no artistic taste, had framed and “hung on the line” in our hall. Perhaps some Yankee may own it now, for during the war they took everything else we had, and surely a brilliant Baltimore oriole did not escape their rapacity!
Solid English branches were taught by the dear spinsters. We did not skin cats and dissect them. There was no class in anatomy, but there was a botany class, and we dissected wild flowers, which is a trifle more ladylike. Our drilling in chirography was something to marvel at in these days when the young people affect such complicated and involved handwriting that is not easily decipherable. And grammar! I now slip up in both grammar and rhetoric, but I have arrived at the failing age. We spent the greater part of a session parsing Pope’s “Essay on Man,” and at the closing of that book I think we knew the whole thing by heart. Discipline was, so to say, honorary. There were rules as to study and practice hours, and various other things. Saturday morning, after the “Collect of the day” and prayers, when we were presumed to be in a celestial frame of mind, each girl reportedher infringement of rules—if she was delinquent, and she generally was. That system served to make us more truthful and conscientious than some of us might have been under a different training.
It was expressly stipulated that no money be furnished the pupils. A teacher accompanied us to do necessary shopping and used her discretion in the selection. If one of us expressed the need of new shoes her entire stock was inspected, and if a pair could be repaired it was done and the purchase postponed. Now, bear in mind, this was not a cheap, second rate school, but one of the best known and most fashionable. There were several young ladies from the South among the twenty or so boarders. The Northern girls were from the prominent New York families—Shermans, Kirbys, Phalens, Pumpellys and Thorns. This was before the fashionables of to-day came to the fore.
Speaking of reporting our delinquencies, we knew quite well that it was against the custom, at least, to bring reading matter into the school. There was a grand, large library of standard works of merit at our free disposal. In some way “Jane Eyre” (just published) was smuggled in and we were secretly reading it by turns. How the spinsters found it out we never knew, but they always foundout everything, so we were scarcely surprised one Saturday morning to receive a lecture on the pernicious character of the book “Jane Eyre,” so unlike (and alas! so much more interesting than) Amy Herbert, with her missionary basket, her coals and her flannel petticoats. We were questioned, not by wholesale, but individually, if we had the book? If we had read the book? The first two or three in the row could reply in the negative, but as interrogations ran down the line toward the guilty ones they were all greatly relieved when one brave girl replied, “Yes, ma’am, I am almost through, please let me finish it.” Then “Jane” vanished from our possession.
When the Church Sewing Society met at our house, certain girls who were sufficiently advanced in music to afford entertainment to the guests were summoned to the parlor to play and sing, and incidentally have a lemonade and a jumble. I was the star performer (had I not been a pupil of Cripps, Dr. Clapp’s organist, since I was able to reach the pedal with my foot?). My overture of “La Dame Blanche” was quite a masterpiece, but my “Battle of Prague” was simply stunning. The “advance,” the “rattle of musketry,” the “beating of drums” (did you ever see the music score?) I could render with such force that the dear, busy ladies almostjumped from their seats. There were two Kentucky girls with fine voices also invited to entertain the guests. Alas! our fun came to an end. On one occasion when I ended the “Battle of Prague” with a terrific bang, there was an awful moment of silence, when one of the ladies sneezed with such unexpected force that her false teeth careered clear across the room! Not one of the guests saw it, or was aware that she quietly walked over and replaced them, but we naughty girls were so brimful of fun that we exploded with laughter. Nothing was said to us of the unfortunate contretemps, but the musical programmes were discontinued.
College boys helped to make things lively for us, though we did not have bowing acquaintance with one of them. Valentines poured in to us; under doors and over fences they rained. The dear spinsters laughed over them with us. Thanksgiving morning, when the front door was opened for the first time, and we were assembled in the hall ready to march to 11 o’clock church service, a gaunt, skinny, starved-to-death turkey was found suspended to the door knob, conspicuously tied by a broad red ribbon, with a Thanksgiving greeting painted on, so “one who ran could read.” No doubt a good many had read and run, for there had been hours allowed them. The dear spinsters were so mortifiedand shocked that we girls had not the courage to laugh.
By reason of my distance from home, reached by a long voyage on a sailing ship—the first steamer service between New York and New Orleans was in the autumn of 1848, and the Crescent City was the pioneer steamer—I spent the vacations under the benign influence of the teachers, always the only girl left, but busy and happy, enjoying all the privileges of a parlor boarder. I still have a book full of written directions for knitting and crocheting, and making all sorts of old-timey needle books and pincushions, the initial directions dated 1846, largely the collection and record of more than one long summer vacation at that New England school. What girl of to-day would submit to such training and routine? What boarding school, seminary or college is to-day conducted on such lines? Not one that you or I know. The changes in everything, in every walk of life, from the simple in my day and generation to the complicated of the present, sets me to moralizing. Like all old people who are not able to take an active interest in the present, I live in the past, where the disappointments and heartaches, for surely we must have had our share, are forgotten. We old people live in the atmosphere of a day dead—and gone—and glorified!