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By Root 1683 0

I thought, Mary Simmons, Eliza Carson, Bella Morton. But of course, I did not think, Lydia Harkness, not once. I had looked at the pictures of my bones and muscles and brain and sacrum and nerves and spine and heart and lungs. I wondered if Thomas Newton had ever seen such pictures or knew that "the throbbing of the heart is caused by its alternate expansion and contraction, as it receives and expels the blood." I wondered if he knew that one’s skin was continuously "exhaling waste matter in a form which is called insensible perspiration." I looked at the back of my hand and smelled its skin. I wondered if he knew, as I now did, that frequent changes of garments worn next to the skin prevented the reabsorption of those very noxious products earlier thrown off by the skin and the decay that resulted therefrom. I wondered for a moment about the organ of touch. "This office," Miss Beecher wrote, "is performed through the instrumentality of the nerves of feeling, which are spread over all parts of the skin." Miss Beecher seemed to know a great deal more than I or my friends in school had ever given her credit for.

Excitement suffused me. It felt like dread, but a sort of eager dread, which moves toward its object rather than away. I knew that I should not have kept reading Miss Beecher’s manual, because now, in addition to looking forward to a strange future in a strange place with a strange man (and all men were strange enough to me), I, with my cerebellum and my left ventricle and my lacteals and my follicles, was strange as well. I remembered one thing Harriet had said to me years before in exasperation when I threw down the sampler I was attempting to stitch and declared that I hated sewing most of all. She said, "If you don’t furnish your brain with what everyone knows, then it will furnish itself with what no one else knows! And a female’s brain is too weak to hold those sorts of things!"

Our courtship, of necessity, proceeded apace, as it was foreshortened by the arrival of Mr. Newton’s boxes and the knowledge that September was at hand and therefore those who were departing for Kansas must make haste and do so, so as to make as much use of the mild fall weather as possible. Mr. Newton was, in general, a reserved suitor, though kind, always kind. We sat in silence much of the time, which he seemed comfortable in breaking only by raising two subjects, my virtues and Kansas. Both subjects were delicious to me. Mr. Newton had never met anyone quite like me, so strong and vigorous, so freely spoken, manifesting so few traits of false modesty and fearfulness, in which, he led me to believe, I was unique among females of his experience. I could ride a horse! I could shoot a gun! (Frank’s character reference.) I could swim! I was fond of reading! I could walk many miles in an afternoon! All of a sudden, my uselessness had been turned upside down. These qualities, he assured me, prepared me wonderfully well for Kansas, and I had every reason to believe him. One night, in particular, I remember quite well. The August heat had mitigated somewhat, and we were sitting by a window in Alice’s parlor just at dusk, with our heads together, enjoying the cool breeze. Mr. Newton was talking enthusiastically about Kansas, and I was soaking up every word. This was, possibly, the only time in my experience of Mr. Newton up to that time that he spoke with such enthusiasm.

"You can’t imagine such a fine and intelligent man as Dr. Robinson!" His eyes glittered with admiration. "Of course he maintains the highest principles, or Mr. Thayer—he’s our benefactor—would never have associated himself with the man, but added to that, well, he’s been everywhere, to California, even, and made a great profit, and he’s said to be a wonderful doctor, compassionate and knowledgeable far beyond the general run! He has matters at Lawrence—that’s where we are going—entirely in hand. We had assurances of that before we left the east. We couldn’t have chosen a superior leader to Dr. Robinson, and his wife is just the thing for the west—you’ll admire her, I know.