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The President's house is a very nice one, and the rooms are really very fine and comfortably furnished. Washington is a fine looking town and contains striking buildings . . . all the Public offices are in the same building and we might easily take some hints for our own buildings which are very bad.

Mount Vernon is a much revered spot by the Americans, as the House in which General Washington lived and also died stands there. The visit therefore was a very interesting one; the house itself is unfortunately in very bad repair, and is rapidly falling into decay: we saw all the different rooms and the one in which Washington died. We also visited his grave and by the wish of the President, I planted a chestnut near it.

On arrival at New York he wrote:

The people cheered and waved flags most enthusiastically. I think it was by far the greatest reception we have had, and shows that the feeling between the two countries could not be better. I never dreamt that we should be received as we were. I believe there were 300,000 people in the streets, which was wonderful.

But the famous ball given in his honor was not, according to his description, an unqualified success:

The great ball took place, but it was not successful. Three thousand people were invited and five thousand came, which of course was not an improvement, the ball room being the Academy of Music, which did not even hold 3,000 people comfortably. We arrived at 10 o'clock and before the dancing had begun a great part of the floor gave way and it took two hours to set it right so that dancing did not begin until 12 o'clock and the crowd was so great that it was very difficult to move, but in spite of these disasters I must say it was a very pretty sight.

It will be recalled that when the present Prince of Wales visited New York in 1919, all survivors of the company which had assembled in the same place nearly sixty years before, in honor of the Prince's grandfather, attended in the same building a similar ball.

The same continual fêting, the same popular acclamation, the same spon

taneous enthusiasm of the public, rendered the Prince's journey through America as triumphal a progress as that of his grandson so many years after.

Beyond his disappointment at the denial of a military career, the Prince was to suffer one even more bitter in the refusal of his mother to allow him, for many years after the death of her husband, any part of her queenly duties or obligations. Against the advice of her chosen counselors and the wishes of the heir to the throne, she systematically kept him without political influence. Even when he had passed his fortieth year he was pointing out to her that he was less trusted with official information than the private secretaries of ministers, and that no official intelligence regarding the proceedings of the Cabinet had ever been placed at his disposal.

Yet always he was asking "to be of use", and to place at the service of his country that intimate familiarity with world affairs which had now become generally recognized.

Sir Sidney Lee tells us that it is at the request of King George V that this biography has been written, and that much of the information it contains is based on documents in the royal archives and on collections of personal letters never before made available. To these documents we are indebted for new light on the relations between the late King Edward VII and his nephew, the ex-Kaiser William II. Sir Sidney is emphatic in his statements that jealousy of an uncle who, though not theatrical and less assertive, usually received in foreign courts a warmer welcome than himself, was the foundation of the antagonism between Kaiser and Prince. But the biographer goes further when he states that force tempered by cunning was

the decisive controller of human affairs in the Kaiser's philosophy of life. It was this cunning, this wish to deceive, this anxiety to be tortuous in his dealings with his fellow sovereigns, that called down upon the nephew the wrath of the uncle. The most sinister of the quotations refer to the period of the Boer War, when documentary proof is given that it was the Emperor, and none other, who was responsible for the oft discussed attempt at the encirclement of England by her European neighbors. In those days he was in one and the same hour sending messages of sympathy and unasked for military advice to the aged Queen Victoria, and through the Russian Ambassador in Berlin making suggestions to the Tsar that if Russia should be moved to attack India, he, the Kaiser, "would guarantee that none should stir in Europe. He would mount guard over Russia's European frontiers". Then, as the suggestion came to naught, the Kaiser plied his uncle with assurances of friendship and warnings against "sundry people".

Before this the Emperor had dic

tated his famous telegram to President Kruger at the time of the Jameson Raid. The message was never delivered, but word for word it was soon known throughout England and interpreted there and in the Chancelleries of Europe as an ultimatum threatening war. Never did a sovereign apologize more humbly, yet when the Boer War three years later followed the Jameson Raid we find, from these documents now published, definite proof of that duplicity which caused the Prince of Wales to appeal to Queen Victoria "to rebuke her grandson sharply, to administer to him a 'good snubbing'".

The first volume ends with the death of Queen Victoria and the accession to the throne of King Edward VII. Sir Sidney Lee here gives us a book of deep social, personal, and political interest, and none will dispute his claim that he presents "a signally humane, human, and many sided personality, very rare among princes".

King Edward VII, A Biography. By Sir Sidney Lee. Volume I: From Birth to Accession, 9th November 1841 to 22nd January 1901. Macmillan Company.

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LUCRETIA PEABODY HALE

The Author of "The Peterkins"
By Ellen Day Hale

T must be over ninety years ago now that four Boston children, brothers and sisters, used to take walks together in the country. They were Nathan, Sarah, Lucretia, and Edward Everett Hale. Though Boston was a little town then, it must have taken a long time to get into any sort of country at all from their home near the Common, whether that joyous company crossed Cambridge Bridge, or took the journey into Roxbury by Boston Neck. It is no wonder, then, that little Lucretia, the younger sister, used to get terribly tired as the walks went on. She had no idea, however, of going home, or of letting the others go on without her. Her more strenuous method was to run violently ahead until nature was exhausted and her little legs would go no farther. Then followed a few minutes of delicious repose, while her well grown and hearty brothers and sister were catching up with her at a reasonable rate; and then the interesting, if fatiguing, search of adventures would continue.

This method of traveling through the world has seemed to me characteristic of my Aunt Lucretia. She was the delicate member of an extremely strong and vivacious family. Her life had its short intervals of intense action, and its longer periods when she was almost an invalid. But invalid or not, her main interests lay where health and illness do not count. When you are the possessor not only of an invincibly gay and

cheerful spirit but of the faculty of finding interest in every phase of life, and when you have also the power of living in a world quite your own, into which you can introduce all sorts of reflections from this gaiety and interest, you are by no means to be pitied, whether you are sick or well.

Her parents' house was certainly no difficult place to find interest in. It was not only a literary but a newspaper house, for her father, Nathan Hale, was editor of the Boston "Daily Advertiser". Everybody in the family might be called upon, at unexpected moments, to write a book review or make a translation; and a modest refusal on Lucretia's part would have shocked her mother as an evidence of disobliging affectation. She herself had been her husband's secretary while the elder of her eleven children were young, and she was constantly at work on one or another literary task during the long night hours when she was waiting for his return from the newspaper office. Work with pen and ink must have appeared to Lucretia, as to the rest of the family, as much a part of woman's home life as washing up the breakfast things or helping with the massive family sewing of those days. I think this matter-of-course hack work had a good effect on her writing, as a whole. It had the advantage of making her feel that there is nothing very unusual in the power of writing for the press.

She was sent to Miss Elizabeth Peabody's school, as a little girl, with her lifelong friend Margaret Harding, the daughter of Chester Harding the portrait painter, and later the wife of the Reverend William Orne White. Afterward they went together to Mr. George B. Emerson's school. There they had another companion destined to be a friend for life, Susan Lyman of Northampton, who was to become Mrs. Peter Lesley, and whose kind and practical wisdom Lucretia was long after to commemorate in that good fairy of the Peterkins, the Lady from Philadelphia. I have been surprised, in looking over Margaret Harding's recollections of those days, and some of Lucretia's letters, to see how stiff the courses were in the two schools. They were both considered highly "advanced" in those days, and in fact they were so. From these notes I get the picture, very like Chester Harding's portrait of Lucretia Hale, of a graceful girl, not handsome but distinguished, wearing well the dress of the later Thirties, highly imaginative, endlessly gay, and shivering merrily through the desperately cold winter weather to and from school.

In her childhood, she had made her dolls the actors in many dramas, rather than the objects of parental care. As she grew older she still made dramas about them for the younger children. My father, her brother Edward, used to tell me about her accounts of Mrs. Rideout's boarding school for dolls. It was a traveling school, so that the pupils could learn both geography and the modern languages as they passed from country to country. In those days of enthusiasm for internal navigation, it

NOTE: The drawings accompanying this article were made by Susan Hale during the trip with her sister Lucretia to Egypt and the Holy Land. They are to be found in the volume of "Letters of Susan Hale" (Marshall Jones).

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and Lucretia went to dancing school. I think from the first it was that of Mr. Lorenzo Papanti, the revered and admired dancing master of Boston, in whom his pupils gloried for two generations at least. The deep respect with which dancing, as an art, was considered by my grandparents is shown in the fact that at a time even earlier they sent their two eldest children to dancing school, in what was then called a hack. The children were of such tender years that, on falling off the seats into the bottom of the carriage, they could not climb up upon them again.

"We had great pleasure", writes Margaret, "at Mr. Papanti's, where, to our unspeakable pride and delight, we were taught the Gavotte." This gavotte, so called, contained much of the old minuet, and nobody ever was allowed to learn it who did not dance well. Later, at seventeen, Lucretia returned there as an old graduate for a special party at which, she writes to Margaret, there was an orchestra. Mr. Papanti's fiddle was laid aside,

while he moved about "in his light blue satin vest, in great glory". Long after, he still played a delicate little air Italian, I suppose on that small violin or kit, while taking his beautiful and finished steps.

All the arts were loved at Lucretia's home, though cultivated with varying success. Margaret Harding writes that the only time Mr. George Emerson ever showed Lucretia any partiality was when "we were both very eager to go to the drawing-class, which privilege was granted to those whose penmanship was approved of. Now we did not consider Lucretia a master of that art, and I privately thought that my copy-book was more to be commended than hers, but she was allowed to join the drawingclass, while I was left lamenting." Margaret really wrote a beautiful hand, and Lucretia a bad one.

But however

that may have been, she enjoyed both drawing and painting. As for music, all the children of the family loved it. Their mother's early attempts on the pianoforte seem to have been unsuccessful; her music master, perhaps Mr. Graupner, was remembered to have made her cry by the reproach, "Miss Sally, it seems as if Satan led you on." But she did play and, fortunately for her descendants, she had learned to sing, and to accompany herself on the "harp guitar". She had an amazing repertoire, not only of the fashionable songs of her youth but of the old North

End ballads dating back to the Siege of Boston, and beyond it. Her daughters had musical taste, and there was singing and playing in the house.

Outside the literary art, which was part of their daily life, the art they most excelled in, as time went on, was the dramatic. They acted charades, they acted ballads. I suppose they may sometimes have produced the tableaux vivants which were in the taste of that time, but I am inclined to doubt it, for I cannot imagine their action and change of expression being quelled for a moment. Margaret Harding says the tradition was that, in dying at the end of one of their melodramas, "the boys slid their heels so often over the straw matting of their mother's front parlour that they wore it through to the floor!"

As these young people grew older they went joyously to the Italian opera, and to numberless concerts and plays for which, as in other editors' families, tickets sprang daily from the newspaper office. There was a good deal of fortunate social life at the house too. Nathan Hale, the eldest son, brought home his classmates, James Russell Lowell, William Abijah White, William Story, and John King. These young men had charming sisters, none more charming than Maria White, the sister of one, the fiancée of another. For years this knot of young people met often in that front parlor of my grandmother's. She might well say, when asked what her favorite amusement was, that she liked to hear young people talk.

Together with all this social pleasure, and more, there was a strong current of religious life and interest in the household, in the form which would now be called Channing Unitarianism. That exact name, however, would have been inappropriate, for my grandmother's passionate loyalty to Brattle Street

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