“Vaucluse” was liable to sudden inroads of aunts bringing their six
children, even though there were already visitors in the house. The
hospitality of those days was not confined to the South. My mother once
jestingly said to our nearest neighbor that she kept a boarding-house.
“Well, if you do, then I keep a hotel,” replied Mrs. Anderson, whose
large house was well filled by the family connection. To take high tea
at “Vaucluse” was always delightful. I should be afraid to say how many
people sat around the long, well-polished mahogany table. Yet there were
always plenty of hot Indian-meal griddle-cakes, as well as other good
things, for every one. When there were many guests, it was necessary to
set the table a second time. Fannie, who presided over the household,
was as hospitable as her father, but the strain of this heavy
entertaining was too much for her strength. Her housekeeping ideals were
high, and servants hard to get and to keep. In one of his crusades Mr.
Hazard, who had been brought up in the Society of Friends or Quakers,
attacked the Roman Catholic Church. This made it more difficult for him
to procure servants, who, at that time, were almost all Roman Catholic
Irishwomen.
So Fannie and her sisters did a great deal of the housework themselves.
Mr. Hazard was a most devoted father, but, being extremely vigorous
himself, he failed to realize that his daughters were of a less robust
type. All four died before reaching the age of forty, three of
tuberculosis.
He himself held various singular beliefs upon which he loved to
expatiate to his friends. Chief among his hobbies was spiritualism. He
would quote to my mother, as remarkable new truths, views with which
she, a student of philosophy, was perfectly familiar. We were all
gathered at the Anderson mansion one evening, to witness a clever
exhibition of legerdemain by Mr. Elbert Anderson. After witnessing the
various conjuror’s tricks, Mr. Hazard declared that they were done by
spiritualism! When he was with difficulty convinced that they were not,
he naïvely observed that just such things were done by spiritualists!
Toward the end of his life, when his wife appeared to him as a
materialized spirit, he gladly received some cotton lace from her
celestial robe!
In the efficacy of Brandreth’s pills for typhoid fever and minor ills he
was a fervent believer. Even calves he dosed with them. He scorned the
aid of surgeons, holding that the only persons who could properly attend
to broken bones were a certain family of Sweets, “natural bone-setters,”
as they were called. In spite of all these eccentricities, he was a very
intelligent man. His extreme credulity was due, in part, to lack of
early education.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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