● ● ● describes the scene, we see the country schoolgirl of ten years before, still a dependent daughter in a Puritan home:
I was placed in peculiar circumstances Sleeper . . . . would get off his jokes about a ledge and Martha would blush! well I didn’t know just how to manage—that but I tried to make the evening as pleasant as I could to all, but we got pretty loud once a laughing and the door opened, and Mother came in, Father was abed and I supposed she was—Well she governs her own house, so she sat till they left. I tried to keep up the sport with her . . . . Do forgive this horrid writing Geo is at my elbow and I have been but a short minute writing it Little Geo often speaks of you and asks me when he is in the parlor to lift him up to kiss uncle Geo. [i.e., his picture] and I have done it.58
A letter to her sister Martha shows the same vacillation of mood. Looking forward to the time when she and little George would be able to greet Martha and her Nell “with a torrent of screams resembling some semi-savages,” she went on to lament the fact that her life seemed to have no direction, and then she continued with a rapid alternation of melancholy and high spirits:
My heart aches for you and Luther both, to be separated as you have been; besides I know how to sympathise with all the sons and daughters of poverty or distress! and then I know what it is to be sick and alone from home; and last tho not least, what it is to feel completely unhappy at home But I hope to be able to take care of myself again sometime at least by the help of friends . . . . There has been some sleigh ridding—and because of the license of Leap Year I and Miss Lane the Sem. teacher and Miss Rand invited our Driver and took a ride to Concord! after driving, returned to Loudon; supped; then came home, had a real spree with ourselves no Gents. Made the driver ● ● ●
58 Mary Baker Glover to George Sullivan Baker, 22 January 1848, 1919.001.0008, LMC [bracketed text Peel’s]. The letter mentions that she has been able to “fix the bosoms” of his shirts for him—“the first I ever did for anyone.” From other references in the Baker letters, it is clear that she participated in domestic tasks when her health permitted, but she was evidently spared much of the routine and drudgery of farm life. See statement of Abigail Baker on p. 131.