I do not know with which of the two estimates--Mr. Taylor's or the Virginian's--you
agreed. Did you think that Miss Mary Stark Wood of Bennington, Vermont, was forty
years of age? That would have been an error. At the time she wrote the letter to Mrs.
Balaam, of which letter certain portions have been quoted in these pages, she was in her
twenty-first year; or, to be more precise, she had been twenty some eight months
previous.
Now, it is not usual for young ladies of twenty to contemplate a journey of nearly two
thousand miles to a country where Indians and wild animals live unchained, unless they
are to make such journey in company with a protector, or are going to a protector's arms
at the other end. Nor is school teaching on Bear Creek a usual ambition for such young
ladies.
But Miss Mary Stark Wood was not a usual young lady for two reasons.
First, there was her descent. Had she so wished, she could have belonged to any number
of those patriotic societies of which our American ears have grown accustomed to hear so
much. She could have been enrolled in the Boston Tea Party, the Ethan Allen
Ticonderogas, the Green Mountain Daughters, the Saratoga Sacred Circle, and the
Confederated Colonial Chatelaines. She traced direct descent from the historic lady
whose name she bore, that Molly Stark who was not a widow after the battle where her
lord, her Captain John, battled so bravely as to send his name thrilling down through the
blood of generations of schoolboys. This ancestress was her chief claim to be a member
of those shining societies which I have enumerated. But she had been willing to join none
of them, although invitations to do so were by no means lacking. I cannot tell you her
reason. Still, I can tell you this. When these societies were much spoken of in her
presence, her very sprightly countenance became more sprightly, and she added her
words of praise or respect to the general chorus. But when she received an invitation to
join one of these bodies, her countenance, as she read the missive, would assume an
expression which was known to her friends as "sticking her nose in the air." I do not think
that Molly's reason for refusing to join could have been a truly good one. I should add
that her most precious possession--a treasure which accompanied her even if she went
away for only one night's absence--was an heirloom, a little miniature portrait of the old
Molly Stark, painted when that far-off dame must have been scarce more than twenty.
And when each summer the young Molly went to Dunbarton, New Hampshire, to pay her
established family visit to the last survivors of her connection who bore the name of
Stark, no word that she heard in the Dunbarton houses pleased her so much as when a
certain great-aunt would take her by the hand, and, after looking with fond intentness at
her, pronounce: "My dear, you're getting more like the General's wife every year you
live."
