Library Collections: Document: Full Text

This aged, poverty-stricken widow, had seen a fair supply of misfortune, as we call it, in her life. She was early married to Mr. Samuel Prescott -- afterwards, Deacon Samuel Prescott. She became the mother of eight children, most of whom died before they were twenty years of age, although her eldest son and one of the daughters lived to get married and settle down in comfortable homes near the paternal dwelling. But the daughter died when her second child was born, which in a fortnight followed her, and the husband becoming intemperate died on the eve of another marriage with a dissolute woman. Their first child lived with his grand parents till he was ten years of age, when a cold which he had taken threw him into a fever and soon ended his days. So the family branch in that direction failed. -- The married son had no children, and both husband and wife fell victims to a malignant fever in the neighborhood during the tenth year of their married life.

Deacon Prescott and his wife were nearly the whole time of their married life in mourning. Is it not strange! A married pair always clad, however green and fair the world, sunny and joyous and gay, themselves always, always in mourning! Their little property by degrees failed them in consequence of their repeated trials, and the deacon himself was stricken with paralysis, and lay five years helplessly on his couch. He was not a man of much worldly thrift, though a Christian man of great experience and readiness in divine things. When at last he gave up life, his property was about gone, and his wife left childless, feeble, poor, dependent -- after several years of effort to support herself aided by the charities of the church, and of her friends, cast herself on the town. And here, in the poor-house is Mrs. Prescott, as comfortable as the poor-house customs will allow.

She is a little childish or simple, it is true -- not precisely what she once was, although she has got through a great sum of earthly trouble with much fortitude, and with as much strength of mind as might be expected, left to one in her circumstances. But whatever weakness of mind she may occasionally exhibit, her recollections of Scripture are ever fresh, and on religious matters her conversation is remarkably clear and happy. There's a good deal in old mother Prescott after all. She'll cost the town something yet, even at five cents a day.

The cool mornings and evenings of late October days have come, the trees drop off their autumn-dyed leaves, heavy frosts often crisp the grass, the sheep and fowls begin to seek the warm side of the old buildings where the morning brings up the rays of the sun. And one of these mornings, directly after breakfast, at the poor-house, a breakfast of gruel, potatoes, and poor bread and molasses, served on the old pine table, served with iron spoons, broken knives and forks, on blue-edged and glazed-cracked plates, Mrs. Prescott, in one of her last white cambric caps, with that old-fashioned, motherly, wide, starchless, flapping border, in dark woolen skirt, and apron with long strings -- a neat "fix on" even for herself and her "indulgences," is in her little room, putting it to rights, and then brushing back the gray locks that hang out here and there a fluttering signal of old age, when in comes aunt Dorothy Brinsmade. This old woman, say of sixty-five, appears as usual in a very tattered, ragged rig, carelessly hitched together, and unequally equipoised on her curving frame, shuffling along in old shoes she comes, smoking at a broken pipe, with heavy clouds of strong smoke curling in her wake, and, her advance noted by the odd and even tune of her old crooked staff and crutch on the floor. She comes in humming some strange thing between a march and a psalm tune, as aunt Dorothy is now rather weak-headed -- having got on the slippery side of her life's hill. Twenty years of her time have been penitentiary years, a long flight of years truly; some of them, we would say, passed in poor-houses. She has had, at times, a reputation by no means the best, including in the category, the matters of lying, pilfering and wantonness, although it was always hard to "spot" her in the very matters that this gossip was built on, and at all events, since aunt Dorothy came, eight or ten years ago, to the staff and the crutch, light fingering and frolicsomeness have been of her rather matters of the historic past, than of actual present recurrence. She is rather a good soul among the poor ones of the poor-house, and bears up tolerably well under her day of trial. She is a native of the town, and was once married, but marriage and she had little to say of one another.

"And how does Mrs. Prescott do this morning?" said she, "ai?"

"Drum, drum, drum; dro, de-dro, de-dri, dri dri;
The mountains melt, the seas retire.

"Pretty well, Mrs. Prescott?

"Bubadub -- rubadub, rubadub, dub, dub;
The seas retire -- ."

"I'm tolerable for an old woman, aunt Dorothy, thank ye."