● ● ● when she was in a state of extreme physical debility; but an incident which she reported in a letter to her brother in 1848 throws light on Ladd’s opinion of her.
She had been to a lecture on phrenology, that fashionable pseudoscience which was to the middle nineteenth century what psychoanalysis has been to the twentieth. The lecturer “called for a lady’s head,” and Ladd, Hamilton Tilton, and the ubiquitous William Sleeper all urged her to go forward. She did, and the phrenologist spoke “of my atachment to friends—said I would stick with a friend through evil report or good report, yes, he added this lady would die for a friend! he said there were three marked points in my character— what do you suppose these were dear Geo?—Philosophy—truth combined with conscience—and affection.”
Afterwards the phrenologist asked whether someone present who knew the lady would be “good enough to say if he told right—whereupon Dr. Ladd answered, ‘You have in no point exaggerated!!’ only hear this Geo. from him. Oh! this deceiving world.”86 Her last comment indicates that the relations between Ladd and herself were not always smooth; but, as she wrote George in another connection, “My temper is hasty but not sullen,” and Ladd evidently recognized beneath the ups and downs of her volatile temperament the fundamental seriousness of her character.87
A further strain was soon to be put on that character. To live alone with her father, young George, and a hired girl was not in itself easy. Then Luther Pilsbury suddenly died of cholera on a Mississippi steamboat, and the household was augmented by Martha and her two children—for Ellen now had a baby sister, called Mary after her aunt. There was a melancholy pleasure in having the grief-stricken Martha with her, but this was only the prelude to a much more drastic change.
Thanksgiving Day, 1850, was a sad affair. Mrs. Baker had died less than a year before, Pilsbury less than a month. Mrs. Glover wrote George: “This anniversary has indeed passed—but the absent and the dead—where were they? Not with us as we gathered slowly and silently ● ● ●