Once upon a time, in a great house standing at the corner of Bond Street and Broadway, New York city, there lived a little girl. She was named Julia, after her lovely young mother; but as she grew she showed no resemblance to that mother, with her great dark eyes and wealth of black ringlets. This little girl had red hair, and that was a dreadful thing in those days. Very fine, soft hair it was, thick and wavy, but—it was red. Visitors, coming to see her mother, would shake their heads and say, “Poor little Julia! what a pity she has red hair!” and the tender mother would sigh, and regret that her child should have this misfortune, when there was no red hair in the family so far as one knew. And the beautiful hair was combed with a leaden comb, as one old lady said that would turn it dark; and it was soaked in honey-water, as another old lady said that was really the best thing you could do with it; and the little Julia felt that she might almost as well be a hunchback or a cripple as that unfortunate creature, a red-haired child.

When she was six years old, her beautiful mother died; and after that Julia and her brothers and sisters were brought up by their good aunt, who came to make her home with them and their father. A very good aunt she was, and devoted to the motherless children; but sometimes she did funny things. They went out to ride every day—the children, I mean—in a great yellow chariot lined with fine blue cloth. Now, it occurred to their kind aunt that it would have a charming effect if the children were dressed to match the chariot. So thought, so done! Dressmakers and milliners plied their art; and one day Broadway was electrified by the sight of the little Misses Ward, seated in uneasy state on the blue cushions, clad in wonderful raiment of yellow and blue. They

had blue pelisses and yellow satin bonnets. And this was all very well for the two younger ones, with their dark eyes and hair, and their rosy cheeks; but Julia, young as she was, felt dimly that blue and yellow was not the combination to set off her tawny locks and exquisite sea-shell complexion. It is not probable, however, that she sorrowed deeply over the funny clothes; for her mind was never set on clothes, either in childhood or in later life. Did not her sister meet her one day coming home from school with one blue shoe and one green? Her mind was full of beautiful thoughts; her eyes were lifted to the green trees and the blue sky bending above them: what did she care about shoes? Yes; and later is it not recorded that her sisters had great difficulty in persuading her to choose the stuff for her wedding-gown? So indifferent was she to all matters of dress!

Auntie F. had her own ideas about shoes and stockings,—not the color, but the quality of them. She did not believe in “pompeying” the children; so in the coldest winter weather Julia and her sisters went to school in thin slippers and white cotton stockings. You shiver at the bare thought of this, my girl readers! You look at your comfortable leggings and overshoes (that is, if you live in upper New England, or anywhere in the same latitude), and wonder how the Ward children lived through such a course of “hardening”! But they did live, and Julia seems now far younger and stronger than any of her children.

School, which some children regard with mingled feelings (or so I have been told), was a delight to Julia. She grasped at knowledge with both hands,—plucked it as a little child plucks flowers, with unwearying enjoyment. Her teachers, like the “people” in the case of the

all turned aside, and started away in surprise, as this little red-haired girl went on learning and learning and learning. At nine years old she was studying Paley’s “Moral Philosophy,” with girls of sixteen and eighteen. She could not have been older when she heard a class reciting an Italian lesson, and fell in love with the melodious language. She listened, and listened again; then got a grammar and studied secretly, and one day handed to the astonished Italian teacher a letter correctly written in Italian, begging that she might join the class.

When I was speaking of the good aunt who was a second mother to the Ward children, I meant to say a word of the stern but devoted father who was the principal figure in Julia’s early life. She says of him: “He was a majestic person, of somewhat severe aspect and reserved manners, but with a vein of true geniality and a great benevolence of heart.” And she adds: “His great gravity, and the absence of a mother, naturally subdued the tone of the whole household; and though a greatly cherished set of children, we were not a very merry one.”

Still, with all his gravity, Grandfather Ward had his gleams of fun occasionally. It is told that Julia had a habit of dropping off her slippers while at table. One day her father felt a wandering shell of kid, with no foot to keep it steady. He put his own foot on it and moved it under his chair, then said in his deep, grave voice, “My daughter, will you bring me my seals, which I have left on the table in my room?” And poor Julia, after a vain and frantic hunting with both feet, was forced to go, crimson-cheeked, white-stockinged and slipperless, on the required errand. She would never have dreamed of asking for the shoe. She was the eldest daughter, the companion and joy of this sternly loving father. She always sat next him at table, and sometimes he would take her right hand in his left, and hold it for many minutes together, continuing to eat his dinner with his right hand; while she would rather go dinnerless than ask him to release her own fingers.

Grandfather Ward! It is a relief to confess our faults; and it may be my duty to say that as soon as I could reach it on tiptoe, it was my joy to pull the nose of his marble bust, which stood in the great dining-room at Green Peace. It was a fine, smooth, long nose, most pleasant to pull; I fear I soiled it sometimes with my little grimy fingers. I trust children never do such naughty things nowadays.

Then there was Great-grandfather Ward, Julia’s grandfather, who had the cradle and the great round spectacles. Doubtless he had many other things besides, for he was a substantial New York merchant; but the cradle and the spectacles are the only possessions of his that I have seen. I have the cradle now, and I can testify that Great-grandfather Ward (for I believe he was rocked in it, as his descendants for four generations since have been) must have been an extremely long baby. It is a fine old affair, of solid mahogany, and was evidently built to last as long as the Wards should last. Not so very long ago, two dear people who had been rocked together in that cradle fifty—or is it sixty?—years ago, sat down and clasped hands over it, and wept for pure love and tenderness and lÉal souvenir. Not less pleasant is its present use as the good ship “Pinafore,” when six rosy, shouting children tumble into it and rock violently, singing with might and main,—

That is all about the cradle.

My mother writes thus of Great-grandfather Ward, her own grandfather:—

I have called Great-grandfather Ward a merchant, but he was far more than that. The son of Governor Ward of Rhode Island, he was only eighteen when, as a gallant young captain, he marched his company to the siege of Boston; and then (as his grandson writes me to-day) he “marched through the wilderness of Maine, through snow and ice, barefoot, to Quebec.” Some of my readers may possess an engraving of Trumbull’s famous painting of the “Attack on Quebec.” Look in the left-hand corner, and you will see a group of three,—one of them a young, active figure with flashing eyes; that is Great-grandfather Ward. He rose to be major, then lieutenant-colonel; was at Peekskill, Valley Forge, and Red Bank, and wrote the official account of the last-named battle, which may be found in Washington’s correspondence. Besides being a good man and a brave soldier, he was a very good grandfather; and this made it all the more naughty for his granddaughter Julia to behave as she did one day. Being then a little child, she sat down at the piano, placed a music-book on the rack, and began to pound and thump on the keys, making the hideous discord which seems always to afford pleasure to the young. Her grandfather was sitting by, book in hand; and after enduring the noise for some time patiently, he said in his kind, courtly way, “Is it so set down in the book, my dear?”

“Yes, Grandpapa!” said naughty Julia, and went on banging; while grandpapa, who made no pretense of being a musician, offered no further comment or remonstrance.

Julia grew up a student and a dreamer. She confesses to having been an extremely absent person, and much of the time unconscious of what passed around her. “In the large rooms of my father’s house,” she says, “I walked up and down, perpetually alone, dreaming of extraordinary things that I should see and do. I now began to read Shakspere and Byron, and to try my hand at poems and plays.” She rejoices that none of the productions of this period were published, and adds: “I regard it as a piece of great good fortune; for a little praise or a little censure would have been a much more disturbing element in those days than in these.” I wish these sentiments were more general with young writers.

Still, life was not all study and dreaming. There were sometimes merrymakings: witness the gay ball after which Julia wrote to her brother, “I have been through the burning fiery furnace; and I am Sad-rake, Me-sick, and Abed-no-go.” There was mischief, too, and sometimes downright naughtiness, Who was the poor gentleman, an intimate friend of the family, from whom Julia and her sisters extracted a promise that he would eat nothing for three days but what they should send him,—they in return promising three meals a day? He consented, innocently thinking that these dear young creatures wanted to display their skill in cookery, and expecting all kinds of delicacies and airy dainties of pastry and confectionery. Yes! and being a man of his word, he lived for three days on gruel, of which those “dear young creatures” sent him a bowl at morning, noon, and night; and on nothing else!

In a certain little cabinet where many precious things are kept, I have a manuscript poem, written by Julia Ward for the amusement of her brothers and sisters when she was still a very young girl. It is called “The Ill-cut Mantell; A Romaunt of the time of Kynge Arthur.” The story is an old one, but the telling of it is all Julia’s own, and I must quote a few lines:—

Julia sometimes tried to awaken in her sisters’ minds the poetic aspirations which filled her own. One day she found the two little girls playing some childish game, which seemed to her unnecessarily frivolous. (You all know, I am sure, the eldest sister’s motto,—

and the companion sentiment of the younger sister,—

Miss Ward,—she was always called Miss Ward, poor little dear! and her dolls were taken away from her when she was only nine years old, that she might better feel the dignity of her position!—Miss Ward rebuked the little sisters, and bade them lay aside their foolish toys and improve their minds by composing poetry. Louisa shook her black curls, and would not,—moreover, did not, being herself a child of some firmness. But little sweet Annie would try, to please Sister Julia; and after much thought and labor she produced the following pious effusion:—

I never can recall these lines without having an instant vision of a pillared hall, fair and

stately, with ravens standing in niches along the sides, between the marble columns!

So this maiden, Julia, grew up to womanhood, dreamy and absent, absorbed in severe study and composition, yet always ready with the brilliant flashes of her wit, which broke like sunbeams through the mist of dreams. She was very fair to look upon. No one now pitied her for the glorious crown of red-gold hair, which set off the rose and ivory of her matchless complexion; every one recognized and acknowledged in her “stately Julia, queen of all.”

Once, while on a visit to Boston, Julia heard the wonderful story of Laura Bridgman, who had just been led out of darkness into the light of life and joy by a certain Dr. Howe, a man of whom people spoke as a modern paladin of romance, a Roland or Bayard. She saw him, and felt at once that he was the most remarkable man she had ever known. He, on his part, saw a youthful prophetess, radiant and inspired, crowned with golden hair. Acquaintance ripened into friendship, friendship into love; and so it happened that, in the year 1843, Samuel G. Howe and Julia Ward were married. The next chapter shall tell you of Julia Ward Howe, as we, her children, have known her.