My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands, Dictated in My Seventy-Fourth Year — John Shaqi
My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands, Dictated in My Seventy-Fourth YearTrain, George Francis
History
My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands, Dictated in My Seventy-Fourth Year
Train, George Francis
Train, George Francis, 1829-1904
Sixty years passed away. One day I received a letter from one of my
cousins, Louisa Train, who was living in Michigan. She told me that her
father and mother had died, and that the furniture of the old house, in
which they and her grandparents had lived, had fallen to her. "In moving
an old bureau," she wrote, "it fell to pieces, and, to my surprise, two
documents rolled upon the floor. These papers relate to you. One of
them was a letter from your father to his mother, written from New
Orleans shortly before you left that city. In it he says:
"'You can imagine my loneliness in being in this great house, always so
lively, with eleven persons in it, including my own family--now all
alone. George is with his tutor. He is a very extraordinary boy, though
only four years old. The other day he repeated some verses, of which I
can remember these lines:
"'I am monarch of all I survey;
My right there is none to dispute;
From the center all round to the sea,
I am lord of the fowl and the brute.'"
I was to receive one other message from my father. Since I began writing
this autobiography, my aged aunt, Abigail Pickering Frost, now in her
ninetieth year, discovered a letter that my father had written to her
and to her sister, my aunt Alice, who afterward married Henry A.
Winslow, upon the day that he placed me on the ship Henry, and sent me
to my grandmother at Waltham, Mass. Aunt Abigail, after the death of
aunt Alice, who was one of the victims in the wreck of the Lexington, in
January, '40, hid the letter in the garret of the old Waltham farmhouse,
where she later discovered it. She now sends it to me from her home in
Omaha, Neb., where it had again been lost, and found after a long
search, as she knew that I would appreciate it as a part of my
life-story.
The letter came to me as a wail from the dead. I was very young, and
childish, and thoughtless when I parted from him forever; but his letter
brought back to me in a flood the bitterness of our life in New Orleans,
the loneliness of my father in his great grief, and made me suffer,
nearly seventy years afterward, for the pain that I was then too young
to understand or feel. I give this letter, which is inexpressibly dear
to me, just as it was written.
"NEW ORLEANS, _June 10th, 1833_.
"DEAR SISTERS ABIGAIL AND ALICE:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account