[Hanover—Friday, 6 June 1873]
Friday morning Mr Wright proudly showed us the library, the Ninevah figures the gift of his father through Sir Henry Rawlinson, Culver hall as it is called and we called on the minister and his wife. It was here George MacDonald and his wife stayed and Dr.Wright lives and it was pleasant to see what a bond of union there was between us at once.
There is one fine house I have omitted to mention, Mr. & Mrs Hitchcock’s. Here is a large portion of the antiquities found by General di Cesnola at Cyprus, a gift to Mr. Hitchcock. The house just escapes being interesting. The view is beautiful but the house is so terribly clean and polished and the pictures so bad that you rather wish on the whole to hush it all up. Nevertheless the good people interested me at last when I learned they had lost their two only children and are endeavoring poor souls! to make themselves content in this paradise of scenery by building what seems to them a perfect place to make others happy in it. After J’s lecture on Christopher North.
Friday Evening they arranged a reception for us. Students and Professors were again trying to smile out of their element and a few overdressed ladies tried to extinguish each other with New York fashions. In spite of all this we managed to help to make the thing go off more easily and perhaps we succeeded as everybody said it was unusually social. To my amazement the regulation ice-cream and cake of the cities was produced. Mrs Holmes told J. that when she was here 30 years ago two or three parties were made for them and ice-cream was produced for the first time. Three old ladies rose on the night of its advent and said to her “Now doan’t ye tech it, doan’t ye tech the stuff, it’ll jest chill ye and ye may never git over it”--
Thirty years has made a great change—one old lady told me that Dr. Holmes undoubtedly drew his Deacon Sprout’s party from things he heard & saw in Hanover for she had heard just such things herself! Of course there is still a great deal that is primitive and simple and it is only when they try to become otherwise that they are absurd—good Mrs Sanborn herself has the most extraordinary affectations for so good & so sensible a woman. Mr. Sanborn is a dear old man. He said to me yesterday “there is nothing pleasanter to me than to teach young men when they are amiable—when they come to me and want help and are so much like children I think there is nothing better, but when they get their wills excited in the wrong direction and you can do nothing to influence them I feel
“I would not live alway[s]—in a college”—
this was all said with such a mild pleasant old man’s manner that I was delighted with it and with him. The young men delight on him as well they may for he waits upon them in his study with most patient sweetness.
