Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Gale Cottage
Betty stowed her small leather suitcase in the string shelf above her bed and lay down. A big smile spread across her face as she felt the train vibrate and slowly pull forward. A whistle blasted through the air as the Bar Harbor Express gathered steam. Betty peered out the window of the Pullman coach and into the night. The Philadelphia station was alive with activity—men carrying parcels, women wheeling babies and studying timetables. Betty loved the swirl of activity around her, almost as much as she loved the anticipation of arriving at her favorite place on earth—Gale Cottage, in the foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, about six hundred miles up the train tracks.
Soon the train settled into a steady clickity-clack rhythm, and Betty watched the dark outlines of the backs of houses and factory buildings fly by in puffs of steam and smoke. Occasionally a live ember would streak by the window like a comet, escaping from the huge funnel on the locomotive. Before long, a tired Betty pulled down the blind and settled into her compact bed.
Betty was awakened in the early hours of the morning by the jerking of the Pullman car. She opened the blind and looked out. A brakeman with his lantern was standing by the side of the track, signaling the engineer with his hands. Betty knew it could mean only one thing: they had reached New Haven, Connecticut, and the train was being split into two trains. The Bar Harbor Express would continue on to Boston and then on into Maine, while the other half of the train, with its own steam locomotive and the Howard family aboard, would head north into New Hampshire. After jolting backward and forward, the train finally pulled away from the New Haven station. Betty soon settled back to sleep, excited to know that when she awoke she would be in a whole new place.
Betty woke to the sound of the hissing of steam as the train slowed down, followed by the sound of screeching brakes. She pulled up the blind and waited for the sign bearing the station’s name to come into view. Concord. It wouldn’t be long before they got to Littleton.
Betty climbed out of bed and dressed quickly so that she could spend the last half hour of the journey staring out the window. Just as she settled into her seat to take in the unfolding scenery, Betty’s father ducked his head into her compartment. “How did you sleep?” he asked.
Betty grinned. “Just great! How about Mother and the baby?” The baby she was referring to was Thomas, the newest addition to the Howard family, born three weeks earlier.
“They did pretty well. Tommy fussed a little. Your mother will need a good rest when she gets to the cottage. Ginny slept right though. I guess she likes the rocking of the train,” Philip Howard said.
The Howard family was standing ready to disembark when the train pulled to a stop at the Littleton station. As she climbed down from the Pullman car, Betty caught a glimpse of her grandfather. She waved vigorously at him, and he waved back.
Once they were all seated in her grandfather’s Buick, Betty looked around. Everything was perfect. The weather was much cooler here in northern New Hampshire, and the constant traffic of Germantown and Philadelphia was far behind. Even the trees here were different—tall pines, wide-branching spruce, and white cedar. Best of all, an assortment of Howard family members would be waiting to greet them at the cottage.
The eight-mile drive to the cottage went quickly. As they drove, her grandfather quizzed the children on the names of the mountains that loomed in the distance: Lafayette, Bald Peak, Cannon, Kinsman, and Bluff. Betty remembered them all, and their names sounded like those of old friends to her.
Soon the Buick was click-clacking its way across the Gale River Bridge. Betty craned her neck to see, and joy swept over her when she spotted the two brick chimneys. Then the car turned into the driveway. The cottage looked just the same as she remembered. It was a two-story structure with a huge attic. The bottom story was built with large slabs of spruce, while the upper story and attic were clad in cedar shingles. A wide veranda ran all the way around the house, and standing on the veranda was Betty’s grandmother waving a welcome. The table in front of her was already set, as Betty knew it would be, so they could all enjoy a delicious breakfast together outside.
Betty took a deep breath as she ran around the house. The place still smelled the same. She recognized the scent of the sturdy spruce timbers mixed with the wood smoke that permeated them. She found the little cart she remembered playing with two years before and popped her head into the kitchen, which was a separate building behind the house. She recalled her mother explaining to her that the kitchen had to be separate in case of fire.
Breakfast on the veranda turned out to be even better than Betty remembered. Her grandmother urged her to have a second helping of pancakes. “You’re growing up fast!” she exclaimed. “You’ll be as tall as your father soon.”
Betty felt herself blush. It was true: she was growing fast. Her dresses were down to the last turn of their hems, and her socks no longer reached all the way to her knees. She was a good head taller and ganglier than the other girls her age.
Once the table had been cleared and the dishes washed in a huge enamel bowl, the Howard children were free to explore.
Gale Cottage couldn’t have been more different from the Howards’ house in Germantown. Back there Betty knew every item in every cupboard. But here at the cottage, every drawer, cupboard, or box in the attic could hold a wonderful surprise. Betty found a mummified human foot, which her Uncle Will—the owner of the cottage—had brought back from Egypt. Uncle Will had been collecting artifacts for the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and somehow this foot had never made it as far as New York. The same box that held the mummified foot also held a mechanical bear, an ancient black lace parasol, and a music box, all with stories of their own.
A shelf in the back parlor held a stereopticon, a contraption that allowed a person to look into it and see hand-retouched photographs in 3-D. The pictures were of sparkling ice caves and gushing waterfalls. Glass cases filled with pinned-down butterflies and moths also sat on the shelf. Using such “props,” Betty and her brothers acted out wonderful stories that they made up.
Betty loved the fact that the cottage held many family stories. An ash-wood paddle hung on the wall, which her father had brought with him from Maine the summer before he married her mother. He had been a camp counselor at Camp Allagash on Moosehead Lake and asked one of the guides to make the paddle for him and inscribe the initials PH, for Philip Howard, on one side, and KG, for Katherine Gillingham, on the other. Betty thought the paddle was very romantic, and she liked to imagine her mother visiting her father at the cottage and being presented with the paddle.
In the attic were two worn leather-bound books written by Betty’s great-grandfather, Henry Clay Trumbull. Her great-grandfather had been a minister in the Congregational Church and had served as the chaplain of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment during the Civil War. At one point he was even captured and held in a Confederate prison. Although poor health kept him from receiving a formal education beyond the age of fourteen, he had managed to earn three honorary degrees, one each from Yale, Lafayette, and the University of New York.
Betty’s grandfather had told her that Henry Clay Trumbull was highly respected by his regiment during the Civil War. Not only did her great-grandfather preach eloquent sermons and remain dedicated to the men, but he also was a courageous man who would get into the trenches with the rest of the men and rally them on in the thick of battle. After the Civil War he had gone on to become the founder and editor of the Sunday School Times and had written two books: The Knightly Soldier, a biography of his Civil War friend Adjutant Henry Ward Camp, and War Memories of an Army Chaplain. When she heard the stories of such relatives, Betty felt that her roots were as deep as the spruce tree in the front yard of Gale Cottage.
Each day at the cottage was an adventure. While Betty’s mother stayed home most of the time with Ginny and the new baby, her father took the other children out into the mountains to hike. He was a wonderful observer of nature, often standing for an hour or more perfectly still with his hands clasped behind his back. Betty loved to hear him imitate birdcalls and laughed when the birds answered him back as if he were one of their own.
Sometimes they hiked for miles, right to the top of one of the peaks, where Betty was rewarded with breathtaking vistas of the surrounding countryside. And no walk was complete without talking about the Bible and how God had made such an amazing world for them all to enjoy.
Aunt Anne, Betty’s father’s younger sister, often took Betty for long walks. Going with Aunt Anne was a different kind of adventure, one that Betty especially loved. Together they would ramble through the valleys, stopping to pick wildflowers, which they would bring back to the cottage to press into a small scrapbook. Soon Betty had quite a collection that included such flowers as quaker-ladies, wild orchids, devil’s paintbrush, goldenrod, and butter-and-eggs. Sometimes in the evenings she would take out her scrapbook and carefully study each flower.
Also, Aunt Anne would rig up a large white sheet on the veranda and place a lantern behind it. The light would attract moths, which would fly into the sheet. Betty and Aunt Anne would eagerly catch the moths to preserve the next day.
The whole Howard family loved nature, or so it seemed to Betty. Aunt Anne had told Betty that her great-great-aunt Annie Trumbull Slosson had been a writer and well-known entomologist. In fact, according to Aunt Anne, Annie Slosson had documented over one hundred previously unstudied insects, each of which now bore the suffix slossonii.
At night, the family gathered around the huge fire in the fireplace in the living room for hymn singing and prayer. Sometimes Betty’s father would sit in a rocking chair and tell the children stories about his adventures before he was married.
The stories Betty loved best revolved around her father’s stint as assistant to George Davis, the director of the Pocket Testament League. Philip Howard had not been called up for service in the Great War because he had the use of only one eye. Instead, he volunteered to travel throughout the western United States as far as San Francisco and south to the Mexican border. He would meet with soldiers in training camps and hand out free copies of the New Testament for the soldiers to take with them when they shipped out overseas to fight. He and George Davis gave out thousands of copies of the New Testament. They also prayed with the men, and Betty’s dad would play the piano while the men gathered to sing hymns.
The western deserts, with their sand, cactuses, snakes, and coyotes, came alive to Betty as her father talked about camping out under open skies. After he had described San Francisco, Betty longed to see the place, with ferryboats coming and going and misty fog swirling across the bay.
Sometimes, though not often, Philip Howard told the children the story of how he came to lose the use of his left eye. During the summer when he was thirteen years old, he went with his parents to D. L. Moody’s conference center in Northfield, Massachusetts. On the Fourth of July, his father had forbidden him to have fireworks to celebrate the holiday. But Philip managed to get his hands on some anyway—dynamite caps. He went to a nearby farm and asked the farmer to help him fire off the caps. The farmer agreed, and they put the caps on the ground, lit the fuse, and retreated to watch the explosion. But there was no explosion. So they walked back to the dynamite caps and the farmer kicked them. Immediately the caps exploded, and in the process a shard of copper pierced Philip’s left eye. The family made a rush overnight train trip back to Philadelphia, where the doctor declared that Philip was lucky he had not lost the use of both eyes. Mr. Howard always ended the story with a few words on the importance of obeying your parents and not doing things your own way.
Betty’s mother also had stories to tell that ignited Betty’s imagination. One cool evening she told about her great-grandfather, Frank Gillingham, who had been an officer in the Union Army. Frank had fought at Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, but had managed to come through the battle unscathed. When President Lincoln was assassinated, Frank was assigned the task of escorting the President’s body back to Illinois. Betty’s mother described how the funeral train would stop at every town along the way and how Great-Grandfather Gillingham would brush the cinders off the dead President’s face and prepare Mr. Lincoln for a viewing.
Just before summer recess, Betty had been learning at school about President Lincoln. The idea that her family had real, tangible links with such an important person from the past thrilled her. Sometimes when she lay awake at night listening to the swish of the wind through the pine trees and the gurgling of the river in the distance, she wondered how her life would turn out. Would she have amazing stories to tell her own children?