none of the most polite; a piece of poetry on Love and one called
'Ridin' on a Rail,' and numerous little stories and things equally as
bad. What he means I can not tell, but silence will be the best
rebuke." Another who comes a-wooing she describes as "a real
soft-headed old bachelor," and remarks: "These old bachelors are
perfect nuisances to society." A friend marries a man of rather feeble
intellect, and she comments: "Tis strange, 'tis passing strange, that a
girl possessed of common sense should be willing to marry a
lunatic--but so it is."
Miss Anthony went to New Rochelle as assistant in Eunice Kenyon's
boarding-school, but the principal being ill most of the time, she has
to take entire charge, and the responsibility seems to weigh heavily on
the nineteen-year-old girl. She speaks also of watching night after
night, with only such rest as she gets lying on the floor. She gives
some idea of the medical treatment of those days: "The Doctor came and
gave her a dose of calomel and bled her freely, telling me not to faint
as I held the bowl. Her arm commenced bleeding in the night and she
lost so much blood she fainted. Next day the Doctor came, applied a
blister and gave her another dose of calomel."
She meets some colored girls from the school at Oneida and writes home:
"A strict Presbyterian school it is, but they eat, walk and associate
with the white people. O, what a happy state of things is this, to see
these poor, degraded sons of Afric privileged to walk by our side." On
Sunday she hears Stephen Archer, the great Quaker preacher, who was at
the head of a large Friends' boarding-school at Tarrytown, and says:
He is a much younger man than I expected to see, and wears a sweet
smile on his face.... The people about here are anti-Abolitionist
and anti-everything else that's good. The Friends raised quite a
fuss about a colored man sitting in the meeting-house, and some
left on account of it. The man was rich, well-dressed and very
polite, but still the pretended meek followers of Christ could not
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