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"The peace and fellowship of the people of God." (Communion Service, Presbyterian form).
The Camp into which I came in July of 1908 seemed like a little glimpse of Heaven,---or a very happy one,--of earth.
The earth itself, with the hardy mountain sun on the pine woods,--it smelled so good. The mountains were so hard
and clear, the moon so white,--and the people so harmonious.
There were the Stones first of all, John and Bessie, and their two children. (Margaret has gone from this world
now; her husband and three boys are in California. But in 1908 Elizabeth and Margaret were little girls; and Katherine,--"Baby
Tat",--now married, had not yet come.) Not long before that time beatific Grandma Stone, beloved by all of
us in Baltimore, had been living; and the bench at the middle of the Stone Trail, with its vista cut through the
trees, had been made for her by her son with his own hands. Bench and vista alike are gone, but the site can be
identified. Often there were visiting aunts: Aunts 'Jessie and Emmy were Parsons, from Toronto; Aunts "Tudu"
(Susie) and "Lillie" were Stones, from Cincinnati. Mrs. Langdon from Baltimore, founder of the Presbyterian
work at Mount Vernon, Kentucky, came to Camp with them, but not in 1908; the same is true of colored Mary the nurse,
"Mary Stone", as she was always called; both beloved by us in Baltimore.
Dr. Stone in all his work is a creator; at Camp he created an atmosphere of cheerfulness and well-being, that compelled
us all to come in. The Stone household was one long united public service, with its fish-fries for the whole Camp
and its constant song and gaiety. They originated, I am sure, most of the "Camp songs" and "cheers"
and frequently penetrated the air with spontaneous staccato outbursts of music. The words were often parodied or
borrowed intact, but I submit to you where can be found refrains so haunting or challenges so real?
"Down the Swift Diamond,
Down the Swift Diamond,
How I love that little Diamond Stream.
· · ·
Then I'll come back,
Then I'll come back,
Back to my little Diamond Pond."
The hackneyed parodies of pattered words are straight nostalgia to us who heard them, and their voices together
were all clear transparent melody.
"Goodbye, goodbye, be always kind and true. We hope you'll come again next year And bring your family too."
This one has probably echoed around the civilized globe. Another line comes back with variations, as often as not
in innocent childlike treble:
"Down with King Alcohol!"
The "yell" was theirs, I think, though it connotes the streets of Philadelphia.
"Hemlock, balsam, spruce and pine,
We think all the are fine."
Who shall give credit in this world to the phrase-makers?
Mrs. Stone had another hospital custom of getting up before 3 A. M. to cook breakfast and speed her parting guests
for the 6 o'clock morning train from Colebrook. She did this for Dr. Mahy (Dr. George Gordon Mahy of the Presbyterian
Board of Evangelism), and again for me, during that three weeks. Anyone would have been ashamed not to help (or
to "love one another") in that atmosphere.
The "Charlie" Erdmans were there that year, and I think the next season was their last, of many, (Dr.
Charles R. Erdman of Princeton Theological Seminary). The aweinspiring remark, frequently repeated through the
years, that "Mrs. Erdman was a Pardee" later caused Miss Abernethy, from across the ocean, to inquire
"whether Pardee was an American Indian tribe". They were lovely and delightful. The oldest child, Pardee,
became "the only Sky Pilot" in the first World War, i. e., an officer both as chaplain and flyer; and
later assisted Dr. Stone for a while at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago; the younger son Karl became a popular
mayor of Princeton; May and Alice married. One day that summer, seeing Alice Erdman in the trail, in white frock,
looking like a three-year old angel, with the sun glinting through the trees on her blonde gold hair, I whispered,
"Isn't Alice pretty?", and Margaret Stone, aged about four, replied with extreme propriety: "Pretty
is as pretty does". These young people played (and remarked) together like one family. The Erdmans were our
nearest neighbors.
I had a message of old affection from Dr. Erdman through Dr. Hutchison as I was writing this chapter, in the Christmas
Holidays of 1940, though I have not seen any of the Erdmans more than once or twice in thirty years. And again
in February 1941 in Los Angeles, when suddenly confronted by Dr. Frank Kellar of the China Inland Mission, I found
him as surprised as I was, and he exclaimed: "Oh, I heard Dr. Erdman speak, only a few days ago !"
"Charlie?" I asked.
"Yes, Charlie," said Dr. Kellar, "and when I said, 'You won't remember me, Dr. Erdman, but I am--',
he interrupted, 'Yes, of course I do'.--Camp Diamond!"' Obviously these are not friendships that die.
In those days it was Dr. Charles Erdman who led the Knapp's Hill walk on Sunday afternoons, always cheerful
and rounding up the climbers along the line from front to back, like a paternal shepherd dog,--with the encouragement,
"Hurrah, hurrah". Many names are associated with the Knapp's Hill trail; in the course of time it became
practically a three-generation walk. Mr. Little went with us in 1908 and carried a gun (never used) to protect
from roving bulls, as I am sure Curtis Klebe would do today if necessary. Mr. Grant carried an axe and cut so many
alternate trails that the original was lost in obscurity and the true trail became a subject for discussion, with
advocares of the various theories on "following the fence" versus "diverging from the fence";
".crossing above Aldrich's Clearing",--or below or through it. Aldrich's Hill was claimed to be the original,
almost pre-historic, at least pre-Knapp's Hill, objective of the walk. Alas, the forest has almost beaten us there,
and today it is walked too seldom. Through the years it came to connote the reading aloud at the top of "Fishin'
Jimmy" by Mr. Speer, while listeners sat on the big fiat rock and watched the clouds, and thought the long
long thoughts of youth; it was to echo the Mezzuin Call of Dr. Harrison, and lead to the North Clearing with 'rGrandfather"
Hurlburr, and with Dr. Brister; for Marnie Speer and me one August morning some eight years later it meant a climb
in the dark, with flash-lights and by morning star, drenched above our waists in the long grass, to see the sun
rise, from the summit; but in 1908 it was Dr. Erdman's "Hurrah, Hurrah Walk".
I walked it first on Sunday afternoon, August 26th, in 1908. My white linen shirt-waist and skirt, the roughest
clothes I had, were considered far too grand, and my future husband gave me his first gift, which I still possess,
a gray Wildman sweater with white buttons. You can see it in the Chalet every year. It has known with me, and with
many a borrower, the thrill of the plunge into the brush beyond the Chalet,--after you once make that plunge you
would perish rather than turn back,--the slippery sliding at the first spring, the tin cup of water at the second,
the rest on the fallen log, the eventual climbing of the last fence by the big forked tree, and the splendid emergence
at the top, on the unparalled "world-view".
Everyone walked in those days; when he or she wanted a little diversion, the usual thing was to start right out
unthinkingly and walk "around the block", eleven miles. (Some say thirteen. Refer to Dr. Corum and John
Snyder.) I was taken for the walk around the block, or perhaps it was only to Bear Rock and back, on Saturday morning,
August first, 1908. We met Dr. Mahy, who was also staying at Stony Point, returning alone, near the Sugar Grove,
and he offered to "cast my Horacescope".
The Ewings were there from India, Dr. James Carruthers Rhea Ewing, President of Lahore Christian College, later
Sir James Ewing, one of the two Americans knighted by King George the Fifth. Mrs. Ewing's sister, Miss Sherrard
of Pittsburgh, was-with them; and their two youngest children, pretty Nancy (afterwards Mrs. Edmund Lucas, whose
husband succeeded Sir James Ewing as President at Lahore); and Rhea, (in 1923 to be a great friend of all of us,
when he came from Princeton to Camp and made his decision there to become a missionary himself and carry on his
father's work by teaching at Lahore; which he d/d, and married a lovely girl--and lived happy ever after;--he preached
at our Church in Norristown, when full of years and honors, saying afterwards with amusement, "Aunt Helen,
the positions are reversed").
Mrs. Shapleigh of the C. I. M. was there, a gentle saint, whose husband and three children had recentIy died, in
China. She was brave and beautiful; her personality, combining humility with exaltation and conviction, first made
me think of the verse I have always connected in my own mind with the C. I. M., "ourselves your servants for
Jesus' sake". Her way of speaking reminded us of Mrs. Taylor, who was in Europe.
Dr. and Mrs. John Douglas Adam were there with their infant daughter Margaret. He gave us more than a reminder
of Scotland with his British voice pronouncing his favorite benediction on Sunday evenings in the Assembly Hall,--"till
the day break, and all shadows flee away". He was an eloquent and learned speaker,--never better than when
talking to the children about the puddles reflecting the lovely clouds in the sky. When the mists rose from the
Valley and obscured the view, he took it as a personal tribute, remarking "That's my Scotland". "Pious
Adam, the father of the race", he was named in Mr. Speer's celebrated verses about the fish he caught, "txvo
hundred pounds of Stone" (referred to in Chapter IV but never fully to be appreciated until read in its entirety,
with its metric version of the names of contemporary Scottish American divines, "David James Burrell"
and "Donald Sage McKay"). He was then teaching in Hartford Theological Seminary. Mrs. Adams was American.
We kenned them weel and lo'ed them dairly, for several summers in the Glen, and once my husband and I went on a
five-day trip with them to Chicoutimi, discussing Martin Luther all the way. The days on the St. Lawrence River
boat were like a British house party; in the Church of St. Anne de Beaupre near Quebec the priest in charge of
a large group of tourists cast one look at silent Dr. Adam in faultless gray tweeds, (with knickers and golf stockings),
and at his flashing blue Scottish eyes and said, "It's very hard for you Presbyterians to understand these
things." They went back to his ain counttee during the last great war; he has had a Church in London now for
many years, and Margaret married there.
Three of the Snyders were at Camp in 1908. Mr. Snyder, gentle and perpetual fisherman, looking reproachfully at
the Lake on Sundays, when it always displayed its best fishing aspect, but never remonstrating with Fate; Mrs.
Snyder, expert in bird study, glowing with much good natured laughter. With my contemporary, John Snyder, I was
once invited to walk to the Big Pond that year while I was still a maiden; we had a good talk about music which
he was then studying. This was before the days when he out-distanced records with his motorcycle and with car,
and couriered us all up the summit of Mount Washington. (I am not proffering the details: "Mr. Jefferson Snyder,
lawyer, of the Reading bar", etc., for everyone who knows Camp knows the Snyders and that it would not have
been the same Camp without them.)
The Eisenhowers were there from Norristown; he of course the long-loved principal of the High School, for whom
the building was named after his death; and a friend of my old Preparatory School principal in Baltimore, Dr. Shelley,
who was also a Pennsylvanian, and thus a bond. Two of their daughters were with them, Jean and Esther, who became
good friends of mine later in the Norristown Church and "Literary" (sic) Club. (Esther is Mrs. Clarence
Palmer; the Palmers have come to Camp in later years with their two children, Esther Bailey and Jean. Jean Eisenhower's
death some years ago was greatly mourned by us all, as was also this Spring, 1941, that of the older sister, Miss
Anna Eisenhower, who taught in my husband's old Philadelphia school, Friends' Central, and who came to Camp so
many years, at a later period, with Miss Margaret Munroe; only last summer, 1940, Anna and Margaret came and spent
one sunny Sunday at the Camp and were welcomed like charter members.)
Dr. Charles P. Emerson of Johns Hopkins came to see us and Mr. Horace Burroughs of Baltimore and Dr. John Strong,
then of Rochester, came for fishing trips, but the Strong family belongs in a later chapter, as do also the Mahys.
The Speers arrived while I was there, and Mr. Coleman with his fondness for small children walked their porch for
an hour or more with nine-months old Patty (seeaming?) in his arms, while they got their household goods settled
in at' Arden; but he continued to take his meals at the Stone table, against all bets, instead of at the Speers',
as he had usually done before. (The Stone table was towards the front, at the extreme opposite end of the diningroom
from our perennial Coleman family table. It was inherited by Mrs. Livingston Taylor along with the house and the
boat. The Speer table was the one next to ours, later the Bristers' and later still the Hutehisons').
Mr. Speer has been said by many people to be "as much like Christ" in his constant daily life as anyone
they had ever known. No one can ever estimate what joy he and Mrs. Speer and Mr. and Mrs. Stone contributed to
the Camp all the years they came there, and led its devotions and its games and its hospitality. And when the Stones
stopped coming in 1916, (when they built in at Estes Park), and the Speers in 1925, (when Marnie left for China),
something was taken away that could never come again. It is apparent that we never again had "fish for every
living scamp". This is not the place to describe all the serious aspects of our friends' lives and work. It
is rather the story of a playground, lifting the curtain on old phrases, glimpses, impressions. Mr. Speer was,
I think, already Dr. Speer in 1908 (certainly by 1910 after the second "Eeumenieal Conference" in Edinburgh),
and I suppose Dr. Stone was already Dr. Stone, but both preferred the simpler form of address from their old friends.
When all the Speer children were young, I was apt to follow their example and call the parent Speers "Father"
and "Mother", as I did the Stones. Dr. Speer reciprocally for years addressed me as "Aunt Helen".
I recall an instance at about 1920 when young Hig walked out on the farthest pinnacle of Table Rock; not wishing
to startle him by calling, I followed him out on that narrow height, and
hoped to induce him back by quiet example. Dr. Speer saw the predicament and with his usual faith in God and man
(and little boys, and mothers) said calmly, "Aunt Helen, you can do nothing but await the event." Needless
to say, the event, the crash, did not occur; the child returned alive.
Mr. Speer did in a way contribute one song to the Camp Anthology, or at least the nickname Patty for his younger
daughter Constance. In the winter months in Englewood she played on the floor and watched him shave while he sang
a ballad popular at Camp at the time, "Patsy Oiry Airy Aye",--(no doubt in that somewhat tuneless but
endearing deep voice "which in general followed the air" as George du Maurier would have said,--approximately
an octave below). I am sure the old song reminded him of Camp during the winter--and even during the many summers
when he went on missionary journeys to Persia or South America or the Philippines and Siam. During the summers
away he wrote John Stone an occasional scholarly and no doubt well-intentioned, but illegible letter. One about
the flora and fauna of Brazil was passed systematically around the Camp, day after day, for decipherment. The worst
patches were finally disentangled triumphantly by Mr. McCreary who said he "was accustomed to letters from
his illiterate patients out in the country".
Drs. Speer and Stone were more than once prosecutor (or sheriff) and prisoner respectively at the "mock trials"
in the Assembly Hall. There was one in 1908 in which Mr. Speer tried to confuse the witness, Jean Eisenhower, about
a sound she had heard in the woods--"You heard Mr. Coleman,--and you thought he was a dear !" Preparatory
to another of these trials the prisoner Stone had been brought by Sheriff Speer to a large tea held in boats on
the Lake; he leaped from the prison boat into the deep water and swam in all his heavy clothes to shore, whence
he roared from the bushes at the prosecutor, in imitation of a bear that figured in a familiar tale that the Sheriff
was narrating to the guests. (Cf. Owen Crimmen's Stories.) He was captured by the Deputy Sheriff, Dr. Brister,
and returned to the Assembly Hall and chained to the chairs which he enjoyed pretending to smash (and occasionally
smashing) throughout the afternoon and evening. This trial, I think was the occasion of Dr. Speer's famous poetic
indictment of his colleague, and prisoner, Stone:
"I used to call my wife my pet
But now I live with Arthur Sweat".
(Arthur Sweat was one of the guides in the woods,like Norman Knights of the Big Pond, and the boy ~vho wouldn't
eat butter, George Stephens?--and old Barney Reeves, whose forty-pound pack I once saw Dr. Stone lift quietly from
the old man's shoulders and place on his own, making a total of some eightly pounds with which he proceeded cheerily
on the homeward climb up the steep four miles of Chrystal Mountain and beyond.)
To Mrs. Speer and Mrs. Stone I was for many years so close that I can hardly write of them. If Mrs. Speer had given
us only Housman's "Little Plays of Saint Francis" and the memory of her serenity as she entertained us
all in the afternoons at tea on her elastic porch, or in the evenings as many as could be gathered around the oil
lamp, it would have been enough for a life-time. But these were only the beginning of what she gave.
(Trespassing now the limits of geography, for she has not been with us at the Camp, I will say to my friend Marie,
the second Mrs. Stone, whom we knew and loved in Estes Park and Chicago, that we hope some day she will come to
Camp Diamond and help us make another chapter.)
Elliott Speer was I think the most constructively social person I hav~ ever known, the most un-self-conscious.
He and Marnie, with whom I cut out paper dolls in 1908, will just keep wandering irrepressibly through these chapters,
as they did at Camp in the years when they were growing up; with Patty, and later Bill; (and eventually Holly's
name should light up one page,--who came too seldom, that is Mrs. Elliott Speer, Charlotte Rose Welles, now headmistress
of Ethel Walker School at Simsbury, Connecticut, where she lives with the three children, Carol, Eleanor and Margaret,
who are Camp Diamond grandchildren, whether they know it or not.)
But this was 1908. Mr. Coleman took us to Millsfield Pond, Mr. Stone, Aunt Jessie, "Libs" Stone (Elizabeth)
and me. We drove almost twenty miles through Dixville Notch to a spot now lost by me, (somewhere, shall we say,
between the present Genevieve Nadig house and Errol, near the place that Rudie will remember as "Inter-mont").
Our driver, Mr. Jordan, with the two horses, spent the two nights at a house on the right side of the road. The
five of us plunged up the hill, a four-mile trail, to the gala scene of high-set mountain lake and camps deluxe
with rustic furniture of twisted wood. It is now operated by the Balsams Hotel, and perhaps it was then. Next day
the record fish for the year was caught. The vision of Millsfield remains unchanged, undimmed by repetition, for
we never went back. Once later in a sermon we heard Mr. Stone describe the cold spring at Millsfield, in one of
his less felicitous moments :--"It was as cold,--as cold,"-words failed him--"as cold as a jumping
toothache". Mr. Coleman drove me to Beecher Falls, Quebec, one afternoon. I wore my "proposal hat",
white leghorn with pink roses, trimmed by my sister Clara "in jesting guise", Kipling would say, in the
last thirty minutes before she started from the house earlier that summer for Europe. "Here, this is a proposal
hat", she said, to cover the parting. ("Never dreamed she spake it true".) Truth being so much more
amazing than fiction, the proposal had taken me by surprise, on August first, a week or more before I ever wore
the hat. Dr. Stone supplemented it as hereinbefore stated with his twelve-cent hat from Oxford (but there was no
news, and no engagement, until September 25th at the Stones' house in Baltimore).
I left Camp Diamond after three weeks' visit, at three o'clock in the morning after stowing away a superb breakfast
cooked by vivacious inimitable Bessie Stone. My future husband escorted me home to Connecticut. We had two hours
in Boston, the first I had ever spent there, and did a thorough sight-seeing. His great regret was that he could
not get me out to Harvard to see the glass flowers. This was a lack only remedied thirty-two years later in September
1940, when I drove down from Camp with my baby John (at whose request I write this history, almost as old now as
I was on that first visit), when he entered Harvard Graduate School. So "life fulfills itself in many ways",-I
saw the glass flowers.
After any experience they say one is "never the same", and after that first visit my heart was in the
Highlands. I had seen the Adirondacks and tramped in Switzerland;but here on top of the first mountains I had ever
really lived with, the atmosphere of the early Apostolic Church seemed to me to be thrown in. Omitting the trip
to New York to meet my sister Clara, returned from Europe, (somewhat overcome by the unforeseen effect of the hat),
and omitting Mr. Coleman's numerous journeys back and forth to Connecticut and Baltimore, and mine to the "Fetish"
(1326 DeKalb Street) in Norristown, accompanied by Clara and Mrs. Stone, we pick up the Camp thread again at the
wedding in Baltimore "on April 11th, Nineteen-nine" (Camp Song), when any decorous citizens who may have
been present at the reception were astounded to hear the Camp cheer rend the air,--"Hemlock, balsam, spruce
and pine", etc., with due reference to bride and groom; needless to say it was led by "the officiating
clergyman", Dr. Stone, assisted in this as in the ceremony, by Dr. Speer. The effect must have been amazing,
(not unlike that of the Rebel Yell on a quiet night). After the wedding trip, (during which while in Switzerland
we visited the Taylors, who may be described as an outstation of Camp Diamond, our "sponsors" or "consultants
by mail"), we returned to the United States, and made only a short stay at Norristown (long enough for visits
from my father and from Florence and George Solter), and I a shorter one in Connecticut, so that by the time we
had known each other a year, by July 1909, we were old married people back at Camp.