● ● ●  from these anecdotes is that of a baby who howled lustily and refused to be comforted. Mrs. Baker at one point asked her daughter if there was anything she had longed for during her pregnancy in the South, and Mrs. Glover like a true daughter of New England answered that she had longed for Boston baked beans. The liquid from the beans was thereupon tried on the baby, who gulped it down with relish but continued to howl.²⁰

More effective than this old wives’ treatment was the psychology of a young man who was a friend of the family—possibly John Bartlett of Hill. Visiting them one day, he found the baby screaming in his mother’s arms. With her permission he took the child into the next room, where she could hear him addressing it: “I know what you want: you want a father, you want your Pa-pa: I am going to be your father, little man, I’ll be your Pa-pa.” The baby quieted down and never again screamed in the same inconsolable fashion.²¹ The incident gave Mrs. Glover something to think about, but it did not give the baby a permanent father.

As George grew, he developed into a boisterous, headstrong child who seemed to have inherited all his father’s bouncing energies and none of his mother’s sensitiveness. In temperament he might almost have been the child of Mahala, who was good-hearted and coarse-grained, not particular about niceties of behavior and totally without “nerves.” Mrs. Glover simply lacked the health and independence to bring up George in accordance with her own ideas.

It is doubtful that in any case she would have conformed to the Victorian ideal of a penniless widow with a child. In Catharine Sedgwick’s novel Home, which Harriet Martineau had praised for its high moral tone, the author told of a pastor’s daughter who “married a merchant, lived prosperously in a city for two or three years, and then returned a widow, penniless, and with an only son, to her father’s house”—a New England farm, as it happened. “She bore her reverses meekly,” wrote Miss Sedgwick, “and directed all her energies to one  ● ● ●