A Visit to the "Laureate of Hens"

— An interesting interpretation of Miss Nancy Luce’s Works in the July number of the Club recalls a visit once made to the author of those original writings.

I see again the old gray-shingled front of her dwelling, startlingly set off by green door and window casings, and attracting further attention by this sign, close to its entrance : —

“ I forbid all persons coming here on the Sabbath. NANCY LUCE.”

On the right a high board fence is set thickly with three rows of nails that suggest a question which is answered by many tales afloat on the island. We were told that Miss Nancy underwent malicious teasing which sometimes amounted to torture; not from her neighbors or any of the islanders, it is justice to say, but from strange visitors. “ So few folk have feeling,” she wrote ; and one day, upon the knocking of an old and most kind acquaintance, who answered, in response to her “Who ;s there ?”

“ A friend,” she replied, “ A friend ? That means an enemy.”

Within that spiked inclosure, under green sod and dignified by neat marble headstones, whose original epitaphs have already been quoted in The Atlantic, rest Miss Nancy’s dear dead hens. We “ step into” Miss Nancy’s “ parlor,” once “ neat as a pin.” In these her declining days it is close and dusty, with an atmosphere suggestive of nightmare. Its chairs crowd each other in straight lines, like boys at a country party. Irregularly and at eccentric angles highly colored pictures are pasted on the walls, near tacked-up mottoes in her own handwriting ; and her letters, formed as they are of minute leaves, or waving lines twined and linked together, or tiny dots and scrolls and hearts, are a study.

Down cellar, each in its own particular box, screened from the common gaze by a calico curtain, roosted her hens ; and we learned that well-disposed folk would buy eggs of her, but on the few occasions that she consented to sell them these wares were found to be dated, marked with the name of the hen that laid them, and kept so long that they were worse than useless.

She herself was said never to touch chicken, and to live entirely upon milk. Did I say that the hens roosted down cellar ? All except the favorite, who had her quarters upon the hearth of Miss Nancy’s chamber. There sits the occupant, not as represented in the frontispiece of her odd pamphlet, or as, in her best days, she was wont to receive her visitors, in an antique, short-waisted silk gown, with cape and apron of the same hue and fabric, a string of gold beads around her neck, and Beauty Sinna clasped to her heart. An old tester bedstead and a massive mahogany bureau seem to glower at us from behind her ; a heavily beamed and smoke-darkened ceiling frowns from overhead ; and a broad, paneled chimneypiece forms the prospect upon which her gaze is bent rather than upon us. Whenever her glance does turn upon us we meet it with a thrill, — a thrill at first of repulsion, then of eeriness ; and next pity half blots out both sensations, but not wholly, for she is a grotesque figure.

From under a short woolen skirt protrude her feet clad in carpet slippers, and the loose blouse that covers her narrow and humped body is fastened with big brass buttons. Over her head, down on her forehead, and close under her chin, so that not one strand of hair is visible, is drawn a thick woolen hood. This accents the unusual length and pallor of her face, which reminds one of an unlighted dwelling. Her dark, heavy eyes, unshaded by lashes, are eloquent of pain and reproach. But it is her hands that bear chief witness to her sufferings, for they are gaunt and colorless, — so colorless, indeed, that they look as if no ruddy drop of blood had ever warmed them.

She talks most about her physical suffering, and scolds us shrilly for coming at such an unheard-of hour — it is four o’clock in the afternoon — expecting to see her pets, which have all been put to bed. The air about her is hot and bad, and, leaving behind us many good wishes and the sum of fifty cents, we take with us one of her books, and step with great and mighty relief into the invigorating purity of the October atmosphere without. But a depression clings to us, as does the memory of Miss Nancy’s face and figure. We heard much speculation as to whether she was thoroughly demented, or had wit enough to turn her condition into a source of revenue; and the story ran that her peculiarity developed alter the death, in quick succession, of her nearest relatives. Then she shut hersell up with a goat as companion; and when the creature died her wildly extravagant grief was something strange indeed to see. She turned for solace to her hens, never quitting their society; and when we made her acquaintance, in 1887, we were assured that for thirty years she had not set foot upon the ground.