Maynard a lifelong friend. I continued in this busy way,
always hearing good news of the improvement in my husband in
Melbourne. He had been gone now a year and a half and I had received
encouraging letters from him and at last he informed me he would come
soon and take me and the boys to Melbourne to live. All the time he
was gone I had been paying off this tremendous amount of indebtedness
of his failure, and keeping it as a secret from him so as to surprise
him when he arrived. I was fully established and my church and concert
music was all I could ask for. My old spirit came back and I was happy
to know I had been able to help my husband through this $30,000
failure which had been such a blow to his pride and ambition and had
brought distress to his family. I received a letter that he was
coming on a certain steamer, and the boys and I were doing all we
could to have the home-coming complete. George was now fifteen years
old and William eleven. They had been going to school and had been
promoted each year and would have much to tell their father, himself a
man of letters and a graduate of Harvard University. His desire was
that the boys should excel, as had all the Blakes, Lincolns and
Sargents before them.
Each of these old and highly honored families of Massachusetts had
celebrated men among them, and they honored their forefathers and
tried to emulate their achievements and keep up the literary standard
of the Sargents, the military dignity of their great-grandfather,
Major Benjamin Lincoln of revolutionary fame, who took the sword from
Cornwallis and handed it to his general, George Washington; Eps
Sargent, the great writer of books, poetry and the song, "The Life on
the Ocean Wave," one of the famous songs of the time.
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