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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Harriet Beecher Stowe's "The Pearl of Orr's Island" is a poignant exploration of love, loss, and the complicated interplay between personal desire and societal expectations. Set against the backdrop of a New England coastal community, Stowe employs a rich, descriptive literary style that vividly captures the beauty and harshness of island life. The novel navigates themes of faith, morality, and the transformative power of nature, reflecting the transcendentalist ideals that influenced much of 19th-century American literature. Through her complex characters, Stowe invites readers to ponder the tensions between individual happiness and communal responsibility. Stowe, an ardent abolitionist and a passionate advocate for social justice, crafted this novel after her initial success with "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Her personal experiences as a mother and her engagement with the pressing moral issues of her time significantly shaped her narrative. "The Pearl of Orr's Island" further illustrates her commitment to highlighting the struggles faced by women and the poor, echoing her own beliefs about compassion and empathy in a rapidly changing society. I highly recommend "The Pearl of Orr's Island" to readers interested in 19th-century American literature and those who appreciate nuanced character development intertwined with social commentary. This novel not only showcases Stowe's literary prowess but also serves as a lens through which to examine the moral dilemmas that continue to resonate today. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Pearl of Orr's Island
Table of Contents
Introduction
On a wind-swept island where the tide measures every heartbeat, a fragile conscience meets the implacable sea, and a small community learns how love, faith, and duty reshape what storms and time appear determined to erode.
The Pearl of Orr’s Island stands as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s luminous portrait of coastal Maine, a novel that exchanges political tumult for intimate moral weather. Here the sea is more than scenery; it is a testing ground for human bonds, a register of courage, and a mirror of spiritual hunger. Stowe invites us to watch ordinary people confront elemental forces, tracing the quiet heroism of daily life. Her story finds grandeur in modest rooms, dignity in humble labor, and revelation in the rhythms of tide and season. The result is a narrative charged with atmosphere and anchored in feeling.
This book endures as a classic because it embodies the best of American local color writing while deepening it with ethical nuance. Stowe captured the dialects, crafts, and rituals of a region without reducing its inhabitants to curiosities, instead granting them interior lives shaped by conscience and community. The novel’s attention to place anticipates later regional masterworks, yet its central concerns—how compassion survives hardship, how a person becomes a moral self—give it a reach beyond geography. Its artistry lies in pairing sensory detail with spiritual inquiry, creating a landscape that is at once physical and inward.
Within literary history, The Pearl of Orr’s Island helped chart the path from sentimental romance to realist portraiture, demonstrating how domestic fiction could carry the weight of social and ethical thought. Stowe’s method—attentive to speech, custom, and environment—foreshadowed the New England regionalism that would flourish later in the century. Writers who explored coastal Maine and rural New England found in her pages a model of sympathy joined to precision, a way to honor local life without condescension. The novel’s influence resides not merely in subject but in stance: a patient, listening art that treats ordinary experience as worthy of full narrative amplitude.
Key facts situate the book clearly. Harriet Beecher Stowe, celebrated for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, wrote The Pearl of Orr’s Island during the American Civil War era; it was published in 1862. Set on the Maine coast, the narrative follows islanders whose lives are braided by kinship, labor, and the sea’s unpredictable mercies. Without relying on sensational events, Stowe builds tension from the moral choices that shape a life and a community. The novel belongs to her sequence of New England fictions, where she turns from national controversy to the ethics of home, neighborliness, and the unseen threads of responsibility.
Stowe’s purpose here is both artistic and reformist in the quietest sense. She seeks to show how virtue is apprenticed in small acts, how faith takes form in practical care, and how character is tested by want, rumor, and weather as much as by grand dilemmas. Her intention is not to sermonize but to immerse readers in a moral ecology where every decision ripples outward. The sea, in this vision, disciplines vanity; the village holds memory; and compassion is a learned craft. The story’s design favors the gradual illumination of souls rather than dramatic revelation or tidy resolution.
Stylistically, the book blends detailed observation with a cadence shaped by hymns, scripture, and seafaring talk. Stowe’s sentences move with the swell and slack of tidal life, lingering over the angle of light on water or the creak of a worn stair. She uses vernacular sparingly and respectfully, grounding feeling in the textures of work—mending nets, kindling fires, tending the sick. The narrator stands close to her people without presuming to speak for them entirely, allowing motives to emerge in action and habit. Through this craft, the island becomes a living character, a keeper of stories and a tutor in endurance.
Context deepens appreciation. Writing in the early 1860s, Stowe had already altered American letters with a novel that confronted slavery’s horrors; here she turns to the moral continuities of everyday life during a fractured national moment. The Pearl of Orr’s Island suggests that the work of conscience persists in kitchens, chapels, coves, and schoolrooms, even when headlines thunder elsewhere. It also reveals Stowe’s rooted knowledge of New England households and maritime realities, drawn from years spent in the region. That proximity lends her descriptions authority while allowing her to interrogate the limits of custom and the quiet courage of reform.
Although overshadowed by Stowe’s most famous book, this novel has been valued for its finely grained evocation of place and its persistent moral clarity. Readers return to it for the weather of its prose and the steadiness of its regard: it treats poverty, gossip, and loss without spectacle, finding meaning in patient care and communal memory. In classrooms and studies of regional literature, the book is recognized as an early, influential articulation of New England local color. Its endurance rests less on plot than on presence—the sense that a whole community breathes within its pages, sustained by work, affection, and a bracing sea air.
Thematically, the novel explores conscience and belonging, the costs and consolations of neighborly duty, and the interplay between providence and chance. It traces how identity forms under pressure, how kindness reckons with scarcity, and how a stern landscape can tutor tenderness. Nature is not merely backdrop but moral companion, rewarding humility and exposing pretense. Stowe also examines the social life of reputation—how rumor binds and harms—and the ways women’s labor, often uncounted, upholds a community’s material and spiritual health. Across these strands runs a belief that mercy is both a feeling and a practice learned over time.
For contemporary readers, The Pearl of Orr’s Island remains strikingly relevant. Coastal communities still navigate precarious economies and changing environments; families still measure themselves by how they care for the vulnerable; and public life continues to be shaped by small, daily choices that rarely make news. The novel’s attention to mutual aid, to the ethics of speech, and to the sustaining power of shared work resonates beyond its setting. Its portrayal of female resilience and community leadership speaks clearly to present conversations about caretaking and social trust. By honoring ordinary dignity, Stowe offers a counterpoint to spectacle-driven culture and hurried judgment.
To enter this book is to accept a pace that prizes listening over noise and steadfastness over flourish. Readers will find a shore where weather and conscience converse, where the glow of a lamp in a modest window carries as much drama as any tempest. The Pearl of Orr’s Island invites us to feel how character is built from attention, patience, and care, and to sense how landscapes enter the soul. Its lasting appeal lies in this union of place and moral vision: a classic that gathers strength like a rising tide, and, in its quiet way, leaves the heart remade.
Synopsis
Set on the rocky inlets and tidal coves of Orr's Island off the Maine coast, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel opens with a storm and a wreck that sends ripples through a small, close-knit community. Fishermen, their wives, and a few independent spinsters respond with brisk competence and scriptural resignation, embodying the village's blend of practicality and piety. From the wreck comes an infant whose mysterious arrival unites neighbors and awakens protective instincts. The act of taking the child in establishes the book's central concerns: Providence at work in humble lives, the social weave of obligation and affection, and the shaping force of place.
The child, named Mara, grows under the care of capable women and a circle of neighborly oversight, learning early the rhythms of thrift, seamwork, and seashore wandering. Stowe outlines her character with quiet strokes: a receptive spirit, steady industry, and a tendency to think of others before herself. The descriptive passages dwell on clam flats, spruce edges, and changing weather, using landscape to trace Mara's inner education. Scenes of kitchen talk, Sunday meeting, and small generosities set the tone of the narrative, which prefers domestic detail and moral reflection over spectacle while building an intimate portrait of a community.
Alongside Mara's childhood runs the story of Moses, a boy from a nearby household marked by scarcity and maternal anxiety. He is proud, sensitive, and eager to rise, yet tethered by duty and the island's limited prospects. The two children form an early bond that blends companionship with moral influence, their differences sharpening each other's strengths. Under the watch of a sensible guardian and kindly neighbors, they attend schoolhouse lessons, share chores, and absorb a steady current of scripture and sea lore. These formative chapters establish loyalties and aspirations that will later be tested by work, distance, and desire.
As adolescence unfolds, social life widens to include quilting bees, prayer meetings, and gatherings around returning vessels. A spirited friend brings a contrasting model of quick wit and worldly charm, complicating the gentle alignment between Mara and Moses. Their village becomes a stage for talk - half counsel, half gossip - in which ambition and propriety are weighed. Moses feels the pull of seafaring and trade as paths to independence, vowing to make a place for himself beyond the island's confines. Stowe juxtaposes these longings with domestic constancy, allowing quiet scenes of caretaking to counterbalance the restless energy of youth.
Young adulthood sends Moses to sea and to mercantile apprenticeships, with absences measured in seasons and letters. Reports drift back of opportunity and temptation, while at home illness and want press on his family. Mara's role deepens into unshowy service - nursing, managing, and stepping into needs before they are spoken. Religious life intensifies through sermons and revival stirrings, and the narrative threads questions of duty, election, and self-surrender through ordinary choices. Stowe sets different religious tempers side by side - stern doctrine, warm-hearted zeal, and pragmatic charity - anchoring the moral stakes not in abstract debate but in daily conduct.
External pressures tighten. Hard bargains and shifting markets threaten livelihoods; sudden sickness forces decisions; the allure of urban society tests integrity. Admiration from more polished circles flatters ambition, and prospects of courtship arise that promise comfort or esteem. Within the island, neighbors measure reputations with their own inherited standards, amplifying uncertainty. Mara meets these crosscurrents with quiet steadiness, choosing patience and usefulness over self-assertion, while Moses wrestles with pride, obligation, and the kind of success he seeks. The seascape mirrors this tension: calms that invite reflection, squalls that punish haste, and a horizon that both beckons and warns.
A culminating maritime emergency brings private struggles into public view. A gale, a hazardous voyage, and the sight of signals on the outer ledges draw the whole settlement to the shore. Decisive acts of courage and sacrifice occur within this crisis, reordering expectations about who leads, who serves, and what commitments mean. Stowe treats the episode as a proving ground rather than a spectacle, letting the physical danger clarify moral positions without overt rhetoric. The event functions as a hinge in the plot, changing the terms of several relationships while preserving the novel's restraint about ultimate outcomes.
In the wake of danger, households rearrange themselves to meet new circumstances, and characters recalibrate their aims. Some ambitions soften into duties willingly embraced; other hopes brighten into plausible futures. Mara's constancy becomes a quiet center around which reconciliation and renewed labor gather, while Moses's choices take more definite shape under the weight of experience. The community's sustaining habits - work shared, meals exchanged, worship kept - reassert their power to heal and guide. Stowe remains attentive to small economies and daily courtesies, suggesting that fidelity in the ordinary is the ground from which larger peace and usefulness grow.
The novel closes by affirming the value of spiritual beauty formed through trial, the dignity of service, and the binding strength of communal bonds. The Maine setting, with its stark seasons and exacting work, proves less a backdrop than a formative teacher, shaping conscience and affection. Without exhausting every thread or declaring a triumphant resolution, the story leaves its central figures oriented toward sober hope and responsible love. The message is consistent: true worth is measured by patience, truthfulness, and self-forgetting care, and the rare pearl Stowe names is found not in display, but in steadfast, neighborly life.
Historical Context
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island is set along the rock-bound coast of southern Maine, chiefly on Orr’s Island in the town of Harpswell, looking into Casco Bay. The temporal horizon is the early nineteenth century, a generation marked by small, kin-knit maritime communities, long winters, and a mixed economy of fishing, coasting, and subsistence agriculture. The setting predates large-scale industrialization, so daily life turns on tides, weather, and seasonal labor. Portland, Bath, and Brunswick serve as regional hubs, yet the island’s relative isolation preserves older New England manners. Stowe draws on this distinctly Maine milieu to examine piety, neighborly duty, and the hazards of seafaring life.
The social landscape reflects Congregational and Baptist parishes, town meetings, and customary law, with reputations sustained by gossip and mutual aid as much as by formal institutions. Harpswell was incorporated in 1758, and by the early 1800s families on its islands practiced boatbuilding, net-mending, and small-stock husbandry. The coastal climate—fogs, nor’easters, and shifting ledges—imposed continual risk. Stowe, who lived in nearby Brunswick from 1850 to 1852, transfers observed dialects, domestic rituals, and Sabbath-centered rhythms into the novel. The place and time together frame a moral economy: credit and trust are personal, charity is practical, and the sea’s perils press religious introspection and communal solidarity.
Maine’s statehood in 1820, carved from Massachusetts under the Missouri Compromise, crystallized a regional identity that informs the novel’s sense of place. The compromise admitted Maine as a free state while admitting Missouri as a slave state, preserving congressional balance. Portland briefly served as the state capital until Augusta took the role in 1832, consolidating administrative life upriver. Although The Pearl of Orr’s Island does not dramatize legislative debates, it mirrors the era’s self-conscious Maine distinctiveness—coastal habits, Yankee thrift, and local governance—emerging as the district became a state. Stowe’s islanders embody the sturdy provincial confidence that statehood helped to affirm.
Religious revivalism shaped New England from the 1790s through the 1840s, often termed the Second Great Awakening. Figures such as Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), Stowe’s father, preached moral reform, Sabbath observance, and conversion, while ministers like Edward Payson (1783–1827) in Portland modeled evangelical piety in Maine. Camp meetings spread in rural areas, but coastal congregations pursued disciplined parish life, catechism, and mission giving. The novel’s emphasis on conscience, providence, and neighborly sacrifice reflects this revival culture. Its portrayal of prayerful households, strict Sabbath norms, and benevolent visiting aligns with the reformist Christianity that saturated Maine’s towns when the story is set.
Maritime disruption between 1807 and 1815 profoundly affected coastal Maine. The Embargo Act of December 22, 1807, signed by President Thomas Jefferson, halted American foreign trade to pressure Britain and France amid the Napoleonic Wars. For fishing and coasting communities in Casco Bay, the embargo meant idle wharves, unsold catch, and financial distress; smuggling and evasion proliferated along inlets near Harpswell and up the Kennebec and Penobscot. Congress modified the policy with the Non-Intercourse Act (1809) and Macon’s Bill No. 2 (1810), but instability persisted. The U.S. declared war on Britain on June 18, 1812. British naval blockades and coastal raids intensified risks; Eastport fell to British forces in July 1814, and Castine was occupied from September 1814 until April 1815 as part of a proposed “New Ireland.” Impressment controversies, epitomized by the Chesapeake–Leopard affair of 1807, haunted Maine seafarers who feared seizure at sea. Insurance rates spiked, fishermen shifted to inshore grounds, and households depended more heavily on gardens and barter. The Treaty of Ghent (December 24, 1814; ratified February 1815) restored peace, but recovery was gradual. The Pearl of Orr’s Island, centered on shipwreck, precarious livelihoods, and the moral testing of a sea-dependent village, echoes these years’ insecurity. Even when not naming the embargo or the war, the narrative’s attention to vessels lost on ledges, anxious vigils for overdue boats, and the economics of coasting reflects the prolonged shock that 1807–1815 delivered to Maine’s maritime world, shaping memory and custom well into the subsequent decades.
Shipbuilding and the coasting trade formed the economic backbone of the region. Bath, on the Kennebec River, became a premier American shipbuilding center by the mid-nineteenth century, but its craft traditions reached back to the 1790s. Yards along the New Meadows and Harraseeket built schooners for cod, mackerel, and the West Indies rum–molasses circuit. By the 1840s, Maine ranked among the nation’s leaders in tonnage built. The novel’s attention to spars, rigging, and the skills of carpenters and sailmakers reflects this technical culture. Its characters’ fortunes rise and fall with hulls launched and cargoes landed, mirroring the state’s wooden-ship economy.
Lighthouses and aids to navigation were critical in Casco Bay’s maze. The United States Lighthouse Establishment, created in 1789, oversaw Portland Head Light, first lit in 1791 under orders associated with President George Washington, and Seguin Light near the Kennebec in 1795. Fogs, shoals, and sudden gales made wrecks common, with keepers and local crews mounting rescues. The novel’s formative shipwreck and its reverence for vigilant seamanship echo this reality. By embedding signal horns, beacons, and the lore of dangerous ledges into its fabric, the book registers the public infrastructure and communal courage that safeguarded Maine’s coastal life.
The “Year Without a Summer” in 1816, caused by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, brought June frosts and crop failures to New England. Grain prices rose, and many families supplemented scarce provisions with fish and foraged foods; a stream of out-migrants left for the Old Northwest (Ohio and beyond). Though islands relied less on field crops, scarcity sharpened thrift and mutual support. The novel’s ethic of frugality—careful provisioning, sharing stores with neighbors, and stoic response to hardship—mirrors this climatic shock. It situates piety and charity not in abstraction, but amid historical memories of cold seasons that threatened household survival.
Maritime reform and benevolent societies spread through port towns after 1820. The American Seamen’s Friend Society, organized in 1828, established chaplains, bethels, and mariners’ homes from Boston to Portland, aiming to curb vice and aid widows and orphans. Female charitable circles sewed clothing, visited the sick, and raised funds for shipwrecked families. The novel’s strong women—organizing care, mediating conflicts, and sustaining moral order—reflect this benevolent infrastructure. By showing kitchens as centers of relief and island homes as shelters for the vulnerable, the book maps the era’s grassroots philanthropy onto daily coastal life.
The temperance movement reshaped New England’s social politics. The American Temperance Society formed in 1826, led by reformers including Lyman Beecher, whose 1825 Six Sermons on Intemperance influenced public opinion. Maine pioneered prohibition with the “Maine Law,” enacted June 2, 1851, championed by Portland mayor Neal Dow. Enforcement controversies culminated in the Portland Rum Riot of June 2, 1855, when one protester was killed. While The Pearl of Orr’s Island focuses on earlier decades, its moral suspicion of drunkenness and celebration of sober industry echo temperance ideals. The island’s informal sanctions against disorder mirror the legal ferment unfolding on the mainland.
Educational and clerical networks anchored by Bowdoin College in Brunswick (chartered 1794) connected coastal villages to national debates. Calvin Ellis Stowe, Harriet’s husband, taught at Bowdoin from 1850 to 1852, when the family lived within walking distance of Harpswell’s communities. Alumni such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Class of 1825) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (Class of 1825) signaled the region’s cultural reach. The college’s libraries, missionary societies, and lectures circulated reform ideas through nearby parishes. The novel’s confident use of Scripture, moral reasoning, and local history reflects this milieu in which educated clergy and laypeople shaped the values of fishing towns.
Antislavery conflict framed the novel’s publication years. The Fugitive Slave Act (1850) galvanized Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in Brunswick, making her a national voice. The Dred Scott decision (1857) deepened polarization, and the American Civil War began in 1861; The Pearl of Orr’s Island appeared in 1862. Although it tells a Maine story, the book’s insistence on Christian compassion, the dignity of the poor, and the moral claims of the vulnerable resonates with abolitionist ethics. In wartime America, its portrayal of a humane, duty-bound community offered a counter-image to national fracture and cruelty.
Wabanaki dispossession forms an often-silent backdrop to Maine’s coastal settlements. Through late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century treaties orchestrated by Massachusetts (before 1820), the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy peoples ceded large tracts, losing ready access to traditional fisheries and islands. Place-names—Casco, Kennebec, Androscoggin—preserve Indigenous presence even as settler towns expanded. The novel’s settler focus and absence of Native characters mirror this historical erasure. Its confident occupation of shorelines and ledges reflects a world already reordered by treaty, displacement, and the legal marginalization of Wabanaki rights by the time Stowe’s coastal society takes shape.
Health and mortality patterns in the early nineteenth century intensified communal bonds. Cholera pandemics reached the United States in 1832 and 1849, and coastal ports faced quarantines and fear of contagion. Seafaring added injuries, drownings, and intermittent fevers contracted abroad. Child mortality remained high, and cemeteries in villages like Harpswell filled with mariners lost “at sea.” The novel’s rituals of mourning, prayer, and consolation arise from this epidemiological reality. By depicting widows’ households, orphan care, and funerals guided by Scripture and song, it registers the social institutions that absorbed recurrent loss and taught endurance to a maritime people.
The Market Revolution altered Maine’s connections without erasing island particularity. Before midcentury, coasting schooners and stage roads tied Harpswell to Portland and Bath; steamboats began appearing in New England waters by the 1820s–30s. The Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad linked Portland to Montréal by 1853, redirecting trade flows and urban growth. Yet the era portrayed in the novel precedes or only brushes these changes, preserving the cadence of sail, hand tools, and neighborhood barter. Stowe’s focus on face-to-face credit, home production, and local governance mirrors the pre-rail, pre-factory economy that defined Casco Bay communities in the book’s world.
As social critique, the book exposes the precariousness of maritime labor and the moral insufficiency of status-based respectability. It highlights how widows, orphans, and the poor depend on communal duty rather than distant institutions, challenging complacent prosperity in ports that profit from ships yet neglect seamen’s families. The narrative scrutinizes harsh judgments rooted in rigid Calvinist reputation-keeping, elevating charity over censoriousness. By centering women’s organizing, it questions the narrowness of male public authority, implying that true civic health requires the everyday ministries of kitchens, sickrooms, and rescue boats as much as votes and bylaws.
Politically, the story quietly rebukes the era’s tolerance of structural risk—unregulated coasting, thin welfare provisions, and the moral hazards of liquor—by dramatizing their human costs. It models a counter-politics of mutual aid that anticipates reform: temperance, seamen’s welfare, and parish relief. In a nation riven by slavery and war when the book appeared, its Maine village functions as an ethical lens, insisting that a republic’s greatness is measured by its care for the vulnerable. The novel thereby critiques class divides, patriarchal certainties, and profit-first maritime capitalism, proposing a commonwealth knit by mercy, prudence, and steadfast communal responsibility.
Author Biography
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was an American author whose fiction and nonfiction shaped nineteenth-century debates over slavery, religion, and domestic life. Best known for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she joined the ranks of the most widely read writers of her era, reaching audiences across the United States and the Atlantic world. Writing in a persuasive, sentimental mode grounded in Protestant moral philosophy, she connected private feeling to public reform, and helped expand the cultural authority of women’s voices in print. Her career spanned sketches, novels, travel writing, and household manuals, and she remains central to studies of American literature, reform movements, and popular reading.
Raised in New England during the ferment of the Second Great Awakening, Stowe received a rigorous education unusual for women of her time. She studied and later taught at the Hartford Female Seminary, where classical subjects, moral philosophy, and composition were emphasized. Early exposure to evangelical theology and the era’s reform ethos shaped her literary imagination. In the early 1830s she moved to Cincinnati, a border city across the river from slaveholding Kentucky. There she encountered antislavery activism, proslavery backlash, and the complexities of a nation divided, experiences that informed her developing views and supplied material for future stories and essays.
While living in the West and after returning to the Northeast, Stowe honed her craft in periodicals, a primary gateway for nineteenth-century authors. She contributed sketches, tales, and reviews that blended regional observation with moral reflection. The Mayflower, an 1840s collection of New England pieces, established her reputation for domestic realism and religiously inflected sentiment. Her prose balanced humor and pathos, sought to instruct as well as entertain, and frequently addressed readers directly. These practices placed her within a growing transatlantic market for women’s writing, even as she adapted the conventions of sentimental fiction to argue for ethical responsibility in everyday life.
In the early 1850s Stowe composed Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first serialized in an antislavery newspaper and then issued as a two-volume novel. The book quickly became a bestseller, translated widely and adapted for the stage in numerous productions. Its narrative strategies—appeals to Christian conscience, domestic scenes of loss and endurance, and a focus on families sundered by slavery—made a moral case that resonated with many readers while provoking fierce opposition from defenders of the institution. The novel’s success transformed Stowe into a public figure, placing her work at the center of political and cultural arguments in the decade preceding the Civil War.
Facing denunciations that her portrayal of slavery exaggerated abuses, Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, assembling legal cases, testimony, and reportage to document sources for the novel’s episodes. She continued the antislavery project in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, broadening her canvas to include insurrectionary resistance and Southern legal strictures. Travel to Britain expanded her readership and networks, and she issued Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, which combined observation with reflections on reform. These books underscore her method: pairing sentiment and evidence, narrative sympathy and argument, to enlist readers in a moral critique of slavery’s social order.
After the war’s onset and in its aftermath, Stowe diversified her subjects while retaining religious and domestic themes. The Minister’s Wooing explored New England theology and courtship; Oldtown Folks combined regional history with community portraiture. With educator Catharine Beecher she co-authored The American Woman’s Home, a widely circulated guide to household management grounded in health, efficiency, and moral stewardship. Palmetto-Leaves drew on time spent in Florida, and Poganuc People returned to remembered New England landscapes. Across these works she examined conscience, home, and social responsibility, extending the reach of domestic fiction into cultural criticism and helping define an American regional imagination.
In later years Stowe divided her time between the Northeast and the South, continued to write, and managed the public consequences of unprecedented fame. She died in the late nineteenth century, leaving a body of work that remains central to discussions of literature’s role in social change. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is read today with both appreciation and critique: praised for galvanizing antislavery sentiment and scrutinized for racialized conventions of sentimentality. Scholars situate Stowe within women’s authorship, print culture, and religious history, while public history sites preserve her memory. Her influence persists wherever narrative is wielded to connect private feeling to public justice.
The Pearl of Orr's Island
CHAPTER I
NAOMI
On the road to the Kennebec[1], below the town of Bath, in the State of Maine, might have been seen, on a certain autumnal afternoon, a one-horse wagon, in which two persons were sitting. One was an old man, with the peculiarly hard but expressive physiognomy which characterizes the seafaring population of the New England shores. A clear blue eye, evidently practiced in habits of keen observation, white hair, bronzed, weather-beaten cheeks, and a face deeply lined with the furrows of shrewd thought and anxious care, were points of the portrait that made themselves felt at a glance.
By his side sat a young woman of two-and-twenty, of a marked and peculiar personal appearance. Her hair was black, and smoothly parted on a broad forehead, to which a pair of penciled dark eyebrows gave a striking and definite outline. Beneath, lay a pair of large black eyes, remarkable for tremulous expression of melancholy and timidity. The cheek was white and bloodless as a snowberry, though with the clear and perfect oval of good health; the mouth was delicately formed, with a certain sad quiet in its lines, which indicated a habitually repressed and sensitive nature.
The dress of this young person, as often happens in New England, was, in refinement and even elegance, a marked contrast to that of her male companion and to the humble vehicle in which she rode. There was not only the most fastidious neatness, but a delicacy in the choice of colors, an indication of elegant tastes in the whole arrangement, and the quietest suggestion in the world of an acquaintance with the usages of fashion, which struck one oddly in those wild and dreary surroundings. On the whole, she impressed one like those fragile wild-flowers which in April cast their fluttering shadows from the mossy crevices of the old New England granite,—an existence in which colorless delicacy is united to a sort of elastic hardihood of life, fit for the rocky soil and harsh winds it is born to encounter.
The scenery of the road along which the two were riding was wild and bare. Only savins and mulleins, with their dark pyramids or white spires of velvet leaves, diversified the sandy wayside; but out at sea was a wide sweep of blue, reaching far to the open ocean, which lay rolling, tossing, and breaking into white caps of foam in the bright sunshine. For two or three days a northeast storm had been raging, and the sea was in all the commotion which such a general upturning creates.
The two travelers reached a point of elevated land, where they paused a moment, and the man drew up the jogging, stiff-jointed old farm-horse, and raised himself upon his feet to look out at the prospect.
There might be seen in the distance the blue Kennebec sweeping out toward the ocean through its picturesque rocky shores, docked with cedars and other dusky evergreens, which were illuminated by the orange and flame-colored trees of Indian summer[2]. Here and there scarlet creepers swung long trailing garlands over the faces of the dark rock, and fringes of goldenrod above swayed with the brisk blowing wind that was driving the blue waters seaward, in face of the up-coming ocean tide,—a conflict which caused them to rise in great foam-crested waves. There are two channels into this river from the open sea, navigable for ships which are coming in to the city of Bath; one is broad and shallow, the other narrow and deep, and these are divided by a steep ledge of rocks.
Where the spectators of this scene were sitting, they could see in the distance a ship borne with tremendous force by the rising tide into the mouth of the river, and encountering a northwest wind which had succeeded the gale, as northwest winds often do on this coast. The ship, from what might be observed in the distance, seemed struggling to make the wider channel, but was constantly driven off by the baffling force of the wind.
"There she is, Naomi," said the old fisherman, eagerly, to his companion, "coming right in." The young woman was one of the sort that never start, and never exclaim, but with all deeper emotions grow still. The color slowly mounted into her cheek, her lips parted, and her eyes dilated with a wide, bright expression; her breathing came in thick gasps, but she said nothing.
The old fisherman stood up in the wagon, his coarse, butternut-colored coat-flaps fluttering and snapping in the breeze, while his interest seemed to be so intense in the efforts of the ship that he made involuntary and eager movements as if to direct her course. A moment passed, and his keen, practiced eye discovered a change in her movements, for he cried out involuntarily,—
"Don't take the narrow channel to-day!" and a moment after, "O Lord! O Lord! have mercy,—there they go! Look! look! look!"
And, in fact, the ship rose on a great wave clear out of the water, and the next second seemed to leap with a desperate plunge into the narrow passage; for a moment there was a shivering of the masts and the rigging, and she went down and was gone.
"They're split to pieces!" cried the fisherman. "Oh, my poor girl—my poor girl—they're gone! O Lord, have mercy!"
The woman lifted up no voice, but, as one who has been shot through the heart falls with no cry, she fell back,—a mist rose up over her great mournful eyes,—she had fainted.
The story of this wreck of a home-bound ship just entering the harbor is yet told in many a family on this coast. A few hours after, the unfortunate crew were washed ashore in all the joyous holiday rig in which they had attired themselves that morning to go to their sisters, wives, and mothers.
This is the first scene in our story.
CHAPTER II
MARA
Down near the end of Orr's Island, facing the open ocean, stands a brown house of the kind that the natives call "lean-to," or "linter,"—one of those large, comfortable structures, barren in the ideal, but rich in the practical, which the workingman of New England can always command. The waters of the ocean came up within a rod of this house, and the sound of its moaning waves was even now filling the clear autumn starlight. Evidently something was going on within, for candles fluttered and winked from window to window, like fireflies in a dark meadow, and sounds as of quick footsteps, and the flutter of brushing garments, might be heard.
Something unusual is certainly going on within the dwelling of Zephaniah Pennel to-night.
Let us enter the dark front-door. We feel our way to the right, where a solitary ray of light comes from the chink of a half-opened door. Here is the front room of the house, set apart as its place of especial social hilarity and sanctity,—the "best room," with its low studded walls, white dimity window-curtains, rag carpet, and polished wood chairs. It is now lit by the dim gleam of a solitary tallow candle, which seems in the gloom to make only a feeble circle of light around itself, leaving all the rest of the apartment in shadow.
In the centre of the room, stretched upon a table, and covered partially by a sea-cloak, lies the body of a man of twenty-five,—lies, too, evidently as one of whom it is written, "He shall return to his house no more, neither shall his place know him any more." A splendid manhood has suddenly been called to forsake that lifeless form, leaving it, like a deserted palace, beautiful in its desolation. The hair, dripping with the salt wave, curled in glossy abundance on the finely-formed head; the flat, broad brow; the closed eye, with its long black lashes; the firm, manly mouth; the strongly-moulded chin,—all, all were sealed with that seal which is never to be broken till the great resurrection day.
He was lying in a full suit of broadcloth, with a white vest and smart blue neck-tie, fastened with a pin, in which was some braided hair under a crystal. All his clothing, as well as his hair, was saturated with sea-water, which trickled from time to time, and struck with a leaden and dropping sound into a sullen pool which lay under the table.
This was the body of James Lincoln, ship-master of the brig Flying Scud, who that morning had dressed himself gayly in his state-room to go on shore and meet his wife,—singing and jesting as he did so.
This is all that you have to learn in the room below; but as we stand there, we hear a trampling of feet in the apartment above,—the quick yet careful opening and shutting of doors,—and voices come and go about the house, and whisper consultations on the stairs. Now comes the roll of wheels, and the Doctor's gig drives up to the door; and, as he goes creaking up with his heavy boots, we will follow and gain admission to the dimly-lighted chamber.
Two gossips are sitting in earnest, whispering conversation over a small bundle done up in an old flannel petticoat. To them the doctor is about to address himself cheerily, but is repelled by sundry signs and sounds which warn him not to speak. Moderating his heavy boots as well as he is able to a pace of quiet, he advances for a moment, and the petticoat is unfolded for him to glance at its contents; while a low, eager, whispered conversation, attended with much head-shaking, warns him that his first duty is with somebody behind the checked curtains of a bed in the farther corner of the room. He steps on tiptoe, and draws the curtain; and there, with closed eye, and cheek as white as wintry snow, lies the same face over which passed the shadow of death when that ill-fated ship went down.
This woman was wife to him who lies below, and within the hour has been made mother to a frail little human existence, which the storm of a great anguish has driven untimely on the shores of life,—a precious pearl cast up from the past eternity upon the wet, wave-ribbed sand of the present. Now, weary with her moanings, and beaten out with the wrench of a double anguish, she lies with closed eyes in that passive apathy which precedes deeper shadows and longer rest.
Over against her, on the other side of the bed, sits an aged woman in an attitude of deep dejection, and the old man we saw with her in the morning is standing with an anxious, awestruck face at the foot of the bed.
The doctor feels the pulse of the woman, or rather lays an inquiring finger where the slightest thread of vital current is scarcely throbbing, and shakes his head mournfully. The touch of his hand rouses her,—her large wild, melancholy eyes fix themselves on him with an inquiring glance, then she shivers and moans,—
"Oh, Doctor, Doctor!—Jamie, Jamie!"
"Come, come!" said the doctor, "cheer up, my girl, you've got a fine little daughter,—the Lord mingles mercies with his afflictions.[1q]"
Her eyes closed, her head moved with a mournful but decided dissent.
A moment after she spoke in the sad old words of the Hebrew Scripture,—
"Call her not Naomi; call her Mara, for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me."
And as she spoke, there passed over her face the sharp frost of the last winter; but even as it passed there broke out a smile, as if a flower had been thrown down from Paradise, and she said,—
"Not my will, but thy will," and so was gone.
Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey were soon left alone in the chamber of death.
"She'll make a beautiful corpse," said Aunt Roxy, surveying the still, white form contemplatively, with her head in an artistic attitude.
"She was a pretty girl," said Aunt Ruey; "dear me, what a Providence! I 'member the wedd'n down in that lower room, and what a handsome couple they were."
"They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided," said Aunt Roxy, sententiously.
"What was it she said, did ye hear?" said Aunt Ruey.
"She called the baby 'Mary.'"
"Ah! sure enough, her mother's name afore her. What a still, softly-spoken thing she always was!"
"A pity the poor baby didn't go with her," said Aunt Roxy; "seven-months' children are so hard to raise."
"'Tis a pity," said the other.
But babies will live, and all the more when everybody says that it is a pity they should. Life goes on as inexorably in this world as death. It was ordered by the Will[3] above that out of these two graves should spring one frail, trembling autumn flower,—the "Mara" whose poor little roots first struck deep in the salt, bitter waters of our mortal life.
CHAPTER III
THE BAPTISM AND THE BURIAL
Now, I cannot think of anything more unlikely and uninteresting to make a story of than that old brown "linter" house of Captain Zephaniah Pennel, down on the south end of Orr's Island.
Zephaniah and Mary Pennel, like Zacharias and Elizabeth, are a pair of worthy, God-fearing people, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless; but that is no great recommendation to a world gaping for sensation and calling for something stimulating. This worthy couple never read anything but the Bible, the "Missionary Herald," and the "Christian Mirror,"—never went anywhere except in the round of daily business. He owned a fishing-smack, in which he labored after the apostolic fashion; and she washed, and ironed, and scrubbed, and brewed, and baked, in her contented round, week in and out. The only recreation they ever enjoyed was the going once a week, in good weather, to a prayer-meeting in a little old brown school-house, about a mile from their dwelling; and making a weekly excursion every Sunday, in their fishing craft, to the church opposite, on Harpswell Neck.
To be sure, Zephaniah had read many wide leaves of God's great book of Nature, for, like most Maine sea-captains, he had been wherever ship can go,—to all usual and unusual ports. His hard, shrewd, weather-beaten visage had been seen looking over the railings of his brig in the port of Genoa, swept round by its splendid crescent of palaces and its snow-crested Apennines. It had looked out in the Lagoons of Venice at that wavy floor which in evening seems a sea of glass mingled with fire, and out of which rise temples, and palaces, and churches, and distant silvery Alps, like so many fabrics of dreamland. He had been through the Skagerrack and Cattegat,—into the Baltic, and away round to Archangel, and there chewed a bit of chip, and considered and calculated what bargains it was best to make. He had walked the streets of Calcutta in his shirt-sleeves, with his best Sunday vest, backed with black glazed cambric, which six months before came from the hands of Miss Roxy, and was pronounced by her to be as good as any tailor could make; and in all these places he was just Zephaniah Pennel,—a chip of old Maine,—thrifty, careful, shrewd, honest, God-fearing, and carrying an instinctive knowledge of men and things under a face of rustic simplicity.
It was once, returning from one of his voyages, that he found his wife with a black-eyed, curly-headed little creature, who called him papa, and climbed on his knee, nestled under his coat, rifled his pockets, and woke him every morning by pulling open his eyes with little fingers, and jabbering unintelligible dialects in his ears.
"We will call this child Naomi, wife," he said, after consulting his old Bible; "for that means pleasant, and I'm sure I never see anything beat her for pleasantness. I never knew as children was so engagin'!"
It was to be remarked that Zephaniah after this made shorter and shorter voyages, being somehow conscious of a string around his heart which pulled him harder and harder, till one Sunday, when the little Naomi was five years old, he said to his wife,—
"I hope I ain't a-pervertin' Scriptur' nor nuthin', but I can't help thinkin' of one passage, 'The kingdom of heaven is like a merchantman seeking goodly pearls, and when he hath found one pearl of great price, for joy thereof he goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that pearl.' Well, Mary, I've been and sold my brig last week," he said, folding his daughter's little quiet head under his coat, "'cause it seems to me the Lord's given us this pearl of great price, and it's enough for us. I don't want to be rambling round the world after riches. We'll have a little farm down on Orr's Island, and I'll have a little fishing-smack, and we'll live and be happy together."
And so Mary, who in those days was a pretty young married woman, felt herself rich and happy,—no duchess richer or happier. The two contentedly delved and toiled, and the little Naomi was their princess. The wise men of the East at the feet of an infant, offering gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh, is just a parable of what goes on in every house where there is a young child. All the hard and the harsh, and the common and the disagreeable, is for the parents,—all the bright and beautiful for their child.
When the fishing-smack went to Portland to sell mackerel, there came home in Zephaniah's fishy coat pocket strings of coral beads, tiny gaiter boots, brilliant silks and ribbons for the little fairy princess,—his Pearl of the Island; and sometimes, when a stray party from the neighboring town of Brunswick came down to explore the romantic scenery of the solitary island, they would be startled by the apparition of this still, graceful, dark-eyed child exquisitely dressed in the best and brightest that the shops of a neighboring city could afford,—sitting like some tropical bird on a lonely rock, where the sea came dashing up into the edges of arbor vitæ, or tripping along the wet sands for shells and seaweed.
Many children would have been spoiled by such unlimited indulgence; but there are natures sent down into this harsh world so timorous, and sensitive, and helpless in themselves, that the utmost stretch of indulgence and kindness is needed for their development,—like plants which the warmest shelf of the green-house and the most careful watch of the gardener alone can bring into flower. The pale child, with her large, lustrous, dark eyes, and sensitive organization, was nursed and brooded into a beautiful womanhood, and then found a protector in a high-spirited, manly young ship-master, and she became his wife.
And now we see in the best room—the walls lined with serious faces—men, women, and children, that have come to pay the last tribute of sympathy to the living and the dead. The house looked so utterly alone and solitary in that wild, sea-girt island, that one would have as soon expected the sea-waves to rise and walk in, as so many neighbors; but they had come from neighboring points, crossing the glassy sea in their little crafts, whose white sails looked like millers' wings, or walking miles from distant parts of the island.
Some writer calls a funeral one of the amusements of a New England population. Must we call it an amusement to go and see the acted despair of Medea? or the dying agonies of poor Adrienne Lecouvreur? It is something of the same awful interest in life's tragedy, which makes an untaught and primitive people gather to a funeral,—a tragedy where there is no acting,—and one which each one feels must come at some time to his own dwelling.
Be that as it may, here was a roomful. Not only Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey, who by a prescriptive right presided over all the births, deaths, and marriages of the neighborhood, but there was Captain Kittridge, a long, dry, weather-beaten old sea-captain, who sat as if tied in a double bow-knot, with his little fussy old wife, with a great Leghorn bonnet, and eyes like black glass beads shining through in the bows of her horn spectacles, and her hymn-book in her hand ready to lead the psalm. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, and brethren of the deceased; and in the midst stood two coffins, where the two united in death lay sleeping tenderly, as those to whom rest is good. All was still as death, except a chance whisper from some busy neighbor, or a creak of an old lady's great black fan, or the fizz of a fly down the window-pane, and then a stifled sound of deep-drawn breath and weeping from under a cloud of heavy black crape veils, that were together in the group which country-people call the mourners.
A gleam of autumn sunlight streamed through the white curtains, and fell on a silver baptismal vase that stood on the mother's coffin, as the minister rose and said, "The ordinance of baptism will now be administered." A few moments more, and on a baby brow had fallen a few drops of water, and the little pilgrim of a new life had been called Mara in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,—the minister slowly repeating thereafter those beautiful words of Holy Writ, "A father of the fatherless is God in his holy habitation,"—as if the baptism of that bereaved one had been a solemn adoption into the infinite heart of the Lord.
With something of the quaint pathos which distinguishes the primitive and Biblical people of that lonely shore, the minister read the passage in Ruth from which the name of the little stranger was drawn, and which describes the return of the bereaved Naomi to her native land. His voice trembled, and there were tears in many eyes as he read, "And it came to pass as she came to Bethlehem, all the city was moved about them; and they said, Is this Naomi? And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi; call me Mara; for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and the Lord hath brought me home again empty: why then call ye me Naomi, seeing the Lord hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?"
Deep, heavy sobs from the mourners were for a few moments the only answer to these sad words, till the minister raised the old funeral psalm of New England,—
"Why do we mourn departing friends,Or shake at Death's alarms? 'Tis but the voice that Jesus sendsTo call them to his arms. "Are we not tending upward too,As fast as time can move? And should we wish the hours more slowThat bear us to our love?"
The words rose in old "China,"—that strange, wild warble, whose quaintly blended harmonies might have been learned of moaning seas or wailing winds, so strange and grand they rose, full of that intense pathos which rises over every defect of execution; and as they sung, Zephaniah Pennel straightened his tall form, before bowed on his hands, and looked heavenward, his cheeks wet with tears, but something sublime and immortal shining upward through his blue eyes; and at the last verse he came forward involuntarily, and stood by his dead, and his voice rose over all the others as he sung,—
"Then let the last loud trumpet sound,And bid the dead arise! Awake, ye nations under ground!Ye saints, ascend the skies!"
The sunbeam through the window-curtain fell on his silver hair, and they that looked beheld his face as it were the face of an angel; he had gotten a sight of the city whose foundation is jasper, and whose every gate is a separate pearl.
CHAPTER IV
AUNT ROXY AND AUNT RUEY
The sea lay like an unbroken mirror all around the pine-girt, lonely shores of Orr's Island. Tall, kingly spruces wore their regal crowns of cones high in air, sparkling with diamonds of clear exuded gum; vast old hemlocks of primeval growth stood darkling in their forest shadows, their branches hung with long hoary moss; while feathery larches, turned to brilliant gold by autumn frosts, lighted up the darker shadows of the evergreens. It was one of those hazy, calm, dissolving days of Indian summer, when everything is so quiet that the faintest kiss of the wave on the beach can be heard, and white clouds seem to faint into the blue of the sky, and soft swathing bands of violet vapor make all earth look dreamy, and give to the sharp, clear-cut outlines of the northern landscape all those mysteries of light and shade which impart such tenderness to Italian scenery.
The funeral was over; the tread of many feet, bearing the heavy burden of two broken lives, had been to the lonely graveyard, and had come back again,—each footstep lighter and more unconstrained as each one went his way from the great old tragedy of Death to the common cheerful walks of Life.
The solemn black clock stood swaying with its eternal "tick-tock, tick-tock," in the kitchen of the brown house on Orr's Island. There was there that sense of a stillness that can be felt,—such as settles down on a dwelling when any of its inmates have passed through its doors for the last time, to go whence they shall not return. The best room was shut up and darkened, with only so much light as could fall through a little heart-shaped hole in the window-shutter,—for except on solemn visits, or prayer meetings, or weddings, or funerals, that room formed no part of the daily family scenery.
The kitchen was clean and ample, with a great open fireplace and wide stone hearth, and oven on one side, and rows of old-fashioned splint-bottomed chairs against the wall. A table scoured to snowy whiteness, and a little work-stand whereon lay the Bible, the "Missionary Herald" and the "Weekly Christian Mirror," before named, formed the principal furniture. One feature, however, must not be forgotten,—a great sea-chest, which had been the companion of Zephaniah through all the countries of the earth. Old, and battered, and unsightly it looked, yet report said that there was good store within of that which men for the most part respect more than anything else; and, indeed, it proved often when a deed of grace was to be done,—when a woman was suddenly made a widow in a coast gale, or a fishing-smack was run down in the fogs off the banks, leaving in some neighboring cottage a family of orphans,—in all such cases, the opening of this sea-chest was an event of good omen to the bereaved; for Zephaniah had a large heart and a large hand, and was apt to take it out full of silver dollars when once it went in. So the ark of the covenant could not have been looked on with more reverence than the neighbors usually showed to Captain Pennel's sea-chest.
The afternoon sun is shining in a square of light through the open kitchen-door, whence one dreamily disposed might look far out to sea, and behold ships coming and going in every variety of shape and size.
But Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey, who for the present were sole occupants of the premises, were not people of the dreamy kind, and consequently were not gazing off to sea, but attending to very terrestrial matters that in all cases somebody must attend to. The afternoon was warm and balmy, but a few smouldering sticks were kept in the great chimney, and thrust deep into the embers was a mongrel species of snub-nosed tea-pot, which fumed strongly of catnip-tea, a little of which gracious beverage Miss Roxy was preparing in an old-fashioned cracked India china tea-cup, tasting it as she did so with the air of a connoisseur.
Apparently this was for the benefit of a small something in long white clothes, that lay face downward under a little blanket of very blue new flannel, and which something Aunt Roxy, when not otherwise engaged, constantly patted with a gentle tattoo, in tune to the steady trot of her knee. All babies knew Miss Roxy's tattoo on their backs, and never thought of taking it in ill part. On the contrary, it had a vital and mesmeric effect of sovereign force against colic, and all other disturbers of the nursery; and never was infant known so pressed with those internal troubles which infants cry about, as not speedily to give over and sink to slumber at this soothing appliance.
At a little distance sat Aunt Ruey, with a quantity of black crape strewed on two chairs about her, very busily employed in getting up a mourning-bonnet, at which she snipped, and clipped, and worked, zealously singing, in a high cracked voice, from time to time, certain verses of a funeral psalm.
Miss Roxy and Miss Ruey Toothacre were two brisk old bodies of the feminine gender and singular number, well known in all the region of Harpswell Neck and Middle Bay, and such was their fame that it had even reached the town of Brunswick, eighteen miles away.
They were of that class of females who might be denominated, in the Old Testament language, "cunning women,"—that is, gifted with an infinite diversity of practical "faculty," which made them an essential requisite in every family for miles and miles around. It was impossible to say what they could not do: they could make dresses, and make shirts and vests and pantaloons, and cut out boys' jackets, and braid straw, and bleach and trim bonnets, and cook and wash, and iron and mend, could upholster and quilt, could nurse all kinds of sicknesses, and in default of a doctor, who was often miles away, were supposed to be infallible medical oracles. Many a human being had been ushered into life under their auspices,—trotted, chirruped in babyhood on their knees, clothed by their handiwork in garments gradually enlarging from year to year, watched by them in the last sickness, and finally arrayed for the long repose by their hands.
These universally useful persons receive among us the title of "aunt" by a sort of general consent, showing the strong ties of relationship which bind them to the whole human family. They are nobody's aunts in particular, but aunts to human nature generally. The idea of restricting their usefulness to any one family, would strike dismay through a whole community. Nobody would be so unprincipled as to think of such a thing as having their services more than a week or two at most. Your country factotum knows better than anybody else how absurd it would be
