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Updated: July 11, 2025
It was almost as if she herself enjoyed the perfection of the pathos; she sat there before the scene, as he couldn't help giving it out to her, very much as a stout citizen's wife might have sat, during a play that made people cry, in the pit or the family-circle. What most deeply stirred her was the way the poor girl must have wanted to live.
From the pockets of demure fathers, from the bags of sharp-eyed spinsters, from the folded handkerchiefs of light-fingered sisters, from the tall hats of sly-winking brothers, there was a resurrection of the missing oranges and cakes and sugar-things in many a rejoicing family-circle, enough to astonish the most hardened "caterer" that ever contracted to feed a thousand people under canvas.
It was a happy, sensible, affectionate family-circle, in which the long-lost son and brother found sweet relief from the misere of Stuttgart. The only cloud in the sky was the mother's anxiety for the welfare of her son's soul, with the resulting necessity of replying somewhat disingenuously to her tender inquiries into his religious condition.
Although the father judiciously studied to repress his son's marked precocity of talent, Arthur wrote about this time several plays in prose and in rhyme, compositions which were never exhibited, however, beyond the family-circle. At ten years of age he became a pupil at a school in Putney, under the tuition of an excellent clergyman, where he continued two years.
Not only was his father a murderer, but his wife, whom he had married for money, was the child of a most horrible incest, his sisters were prostitutes, his sons and brothers were debauchees and drunkards, and, in short, never had a distinguished man a more uncomfortable and discreditable family-circle than that which surrounded Barneveld, if the report of his enemies was to be believed.
Ludwig Rudolf has a youngest Daughter, also married, and a Mother in Germany, to this day conspicuously so; of whom next, or rather of her Husband and Family-circle, we must say a word.
Amy, the kind friend who had first welcomed me to the States, was my travelling companion, and at his house near Boston, in the midst of a happy family-circle, I spent the short remnant of my time before returning to England. We left New York just as the sun was setting, frosty and red, and ere we had reached Newhaven it was one of the finest winter evenings that I had ever seen.
Forthwith came into the family-circle a tall, well-dressed young person, grave, unobtrusive, self-respecting, yet not in the least presuming, who sat at the family table and observed all its decorums with the modest self-possession of a lady.
Modest and unassuming, with a genial frankness of manner that told pleasantly alike on quarter-deck or street, in family-circle or drawing-room, he wore his honors in the quietest way possible, never speaking of his own part in the brave deeds of the time, except when pressed to do so, and then with a reticence all too provoking, from the well-grounded suspicion that he kept back the pith of the real story of personal participation he might tell without tinge of exaggeration or boastfulness.
So long as he sits silently on some stake or bush in the neighborhood of his family-circle, you notice only his glossy black cap and the white feathers in his handsome tail; but let a Hawk or a Crow come near, and you find that he is something more than a mere lazy listener to the Bobolink: far up in the air, determined to be thorough in his chastisements, you will see him, with a comrade or two, driving the bulky intruder away into the distance, till you wonder how he ever expects to find his own way back again.
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