A nice thing started happening recently, and finished today. Out of the blue I received an email from a lady in Seattle, who had found my family history website. She was Googling John W. Wheatley, my great-great-uncle, because some friends had given her a couple of his high-school essays from 1880, which they’d picked up in an antique shop. She had enjoyed them but wondered if the family would like to have them back. They arrived today. After a few days of fretting about the Timbuktu manuscripts1 it was heart-warming to have these two scraps find their way home, against all the odds.
One of them is a conventional piece on “The Childhood and Youth of Xenophon”, but the other is a reminiscence of John’s dog Ring with some valuable glimpses of family life on my great-great-grandparents’ farm in Missouri:
One day an old sow got into the back yard, where was a large kettle of soft soap - I suppose she wanted to cleanse her snout, and was just going to run her proboscis into the soap, when out sprang Ring - now hardly three months old - to defend the soap. His vigorous barks brought Papa to the scene who, happening to have a sledge hammer in his hand hurled it at the sow, but sad to relate struck poor faithful Ring right between the eyes and dropped as if he had been shot. “Ah! I have killed my dog,” exclaimed papa, as he forgot the soap and the sow and ran to where poor Ring lay bleeding. I hardly knew which of the two I felt more sorry for, the prostrate animal or Papa at having unwittingly killed a dog he prized so much. We carried him in the kitchen and after careful attention he recovered, but he ever afterwards carried a dinge in his head and his hearing always seemed to be slightly affected by that accident.