the director of the smallpox hospital in Newport, then an institution
of grave importance to the community, as the practice of obligatory
inoculation prevailed, and all the young people of the colony had to
go up in classes to the hospital and pass the ordeal. Her mother's
death left her the matron of the hospital and caretaker of her sister
and brothers, and the stories of her life at that time, which she
told me now and then, showed that, with the position, she assumed the
effective authority, and ruled her brothers with a severity which my
own experience of her maturer years enables me to understand. "Spare
the rod and spoil the child" was the maxim which flamed in the air
before every father and mother of that New England, and my mother's
physical vigor at sixty, when her conception of authority began to
relax,--I being then a lad six feet high and indisposed to physical
persuasion,--satisfied me that when her duty had required her to
assume the responsibility bequeathed her by her mother, she was fully
competent to meet it.

Accustomed to the hardest life, the most rigid economy in the
household, and without servants, for, except rare and lately
emancipated negro slaves, there was then no servile class in that
colony, the children had to perform all the duties pertaining to the
daily life, official or private, and my mother was able to pull an oar
or manage the sail-boat with her brothers, and catch the horses and
ride them bareback from pasture, when necessary for the daily work,
which was not insignificant, for Newport was really the seaport of
that section of the State, and as it was on an island of importance,
the intercourse with the mainland called for sea and land service. The
boys were all fishermen, for a large part of the subsistence of the
family came from the fishing-grounds outside the harbor, and, as the
oldest brother took early to the sailor's life, my mother had to