poor. He had a hasty temper but a generous heart, and while his hand was always open to the poor and unhappy, it was a closed fist ready to strike straight from the shoulder to resent an insult or defend the oppressed. Like his ancestor of the Andalusia cemetery, he could not endure to owe any man a debt. It was from our father that my sister Fanny inherited her broad and tolerant outlook on life, her hatred of injustice and cruelty, her punctiliousness in money matters, and her steadfast loyalty to friends.[Back to Contents]

CHAPTER II

EARLY DAYS IN INDIANA

When Jacob Van de Grift arrived in Indianapolis in 1836 the first rawness of frontier life had passed away, and many of the comforts of civilization had made their way out from the East or up from New Orleans. When he married Esther Keen he took her to live in the little red house, which, as I have already said, he had built next door to Henry Ward Beecher's church, opposite the Governor's Circle. Seven children in all were granted to them, of whom the eldest, a daughter, was born on March 10, 1840, in this same little red house on the Circle. When the infant was two years old she and her mother were taken into the Second Presbyterian Church, and were baptized by Henry Ward Beecher in the White River, in the presence of a concourse of several thousand spectators. The record of this noteworthy occasion is still preserved in the church at Indianapolis.

The little girl was named Frances Matilda, but when she grew older the second name was finally dropped. To her family and friends she was known as "Fanny."

The main source, in fact almost the only one, from which I have been able to draw a description of the childhood of Fanny Stevenson is an article on early reminiscences written by my sister herself, which was found among her papers after her death. As she was always her own worst critic, she has dwelt on mischievous childish escapades and has said little of the sweetness and charm and warm generosity that even then drew all hearts to her. From this article, called A Backwoods Childhood, I quote the following extracts for the sake of the vivid picture they give of those Indiana days:

"Our life in the backwoods was simple and natural; we had few luxuries, but we had few cares. In our kitchen gardens potatoes, cabbages, onions, tomatoes, Indian corn, and numerous other vegetables grew most luxuriantly; and of fruits we had great abundance. We lived a natural life and were content. The loom and the spinning-wheel, though they had by this time largely disappeared from the towns, still had a place in every farmhouse. We raised our own food and made our own clothing, often of the linsey-woolsey woven by the women on their home-made looms. We breakfasted by the light of a tin lamp fed with lard, four o'clock being a not unusual hour, dined at noon, supped at five, and went to bed with the chickens. Our carpets were made of our old cast-off garments torn into strips, the strips then sewn together at the ends and woven into carpet breadths by a neighbor, who took her pay in kind. Wheat broken and steeped in water gave a fine white starch fit for cooking as well as laundry work. We tapped the maple tree for sugar, and drank our sassafras tea with relish. The virgin forest furnished us with a variety of nuts and berries and wild fruits, to say nothing of more beautiful wild flowers than I have seen in any other part of the world, and, laid up in the trunks of hollow trees, were rich stores of wild honey.

"Except for ague we had little sickness, and for ordinary ailments healing herbs waited everywhere for seeing eyes. These were calamus, bloodroot, snakeroot, slippery elm, tansy, and scores that I do not remember the names of. There was sumach for tanning and butternut for dyeing; hickory wood for our fires and hard black walnut for our house-building and fences. Everything that we needed for comfort or health was within reach of our hands. Nor in this wholesome simple life were the arts forgotten. Among us lived a poetess who is quoted wherever English is spoken.[1] Theatricals were cultivated, and my father belonged to a Thespian society. We had good painters, too, and at this moment there hangs before me my father's portrait at the age of twenty, done by Cox of Indianapolis, which has been praised and admired by both French and English artists of reputation.

"When we made maple sugar there were the great fires built out-of-doors with logs that needed the strength of two men to carry; the bubbling cauldrons, and the gay company of neighbors come to help; the camp where the work went on all night to the sound of laughter and song.

"And the woods, traversed by cool streams, where wild vines clambering from tree to tree made bowers fit for any fairy queen—what a place of enchantment for a child! There were may apples to be gathered and buried to ripen, and as you turned up the earth there was always the chance that you might find a flint arrowhead.

"Then, too, there were shell barks, hickory nuts, walnuts, and butternuts to be gathered, husked and dried, an operation which produced every fall a sudden eruption of the society of the 'Black Hand' among the boys and girls. Haw apples, elderberries, wild gooseberries, blackberries, and raspberries provided variety of refreshment. Or you might, as I often did, gather the wild grapes from over your head, press them in your hands, catch the juice in the neck of a dried calabash, and toss off the blood-red wine. With my romantic notions, imbibed from my reading, I always called it the blood-red wine, though it was in reality a rather muddy looking gray-colored liquid with the musky flavor peculiar to wild grapes. This wild dissipation I felt compelled to abandon after I joined a temperance society and wore a tinsel star on my breast.

"Through the little hamlet where I was born ran, like a great artery, the National Road. Starting in the far East, it crossed the continent, looked in on us rustics, and finally lost itself in the wilds of Illinois. Though we lay on the banks of a romantic river, and a canal, a branch of the Erie, languidly crawled beside us, breathing fever and ague as it passed, the Road was our only real means of communication with the outside world. The river, though of a good breadth, had too many shoals and rapids to be navigable; and though now and then boats crept along by the towpath of the canal, I never heard that they landed or received any produce. The streets of Indianapolis had no names then; it was too lost a place for that, and we just said the 'main street.' This was afterwards called Washington Street, and was really a part of the National Road. Oh but that was romantic to me, leading as it did straight out into the wide, wide world! At certain intervals, about once in two weeks, the weather and the state of the road allowing, a lumbering vehicle called a 'mud wagon' left for regions unknown to me with passengers and freight. I don't know where it came from, but on its return it brought letters to my father from his mother, who lived in Philadelphia.

"Sometimes bands of Indians, wrapped in blankets, came through the town. They seemed friendly enough and no one showed any fear of them.

"We little girls wore pantalettes, to our ankles, and our