A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32

Cassie is so important to Catherine that she is mentioned in the Prologue, the much older Catherine’s letter to her great-granddaughter, and the first journal entry: “My dearest friend is Cassie” (5). She is a year older than Catherine but is her confidante in everything. She is more prudent than Catherine, although, especially in the company of her brother, Asa, she also is capable of teasing Catherine.

Cassie is gentle in temperament, and when the girls quarrel over helping the self-liberated man, she is the one to beg forgiveness. When she tells Catherine, “Kindness must be the highest virtue” (145), she convinces her friend to help the man.

Cassie, unlike Catherine, forms a romantic attachment over the course of the story. She and Daniel, Catherine’s stepbrother, pair off. Whereas Catherine can stand in the woods with her friend Joshua and think more of the oriole they are watching than the proximity of a young man, Cassie is clearly attracted to Daniel. As a result, the friends have less to say to each other. Cassie’s attachment to Daniel highlights the fact that romance is not a part of Catherine’s growth journey.

Cassie is delicate in health and easily chilled, a foreshadowing of the illness that will cause her death. However, even in death, she remains Catherine’s moral compass. When Catherine buries the lace sent by the self-liberated man by her grave, she tells nobody what she has done and says that she doesn’t need to because she knows that it is right.

Cassie’s presence in the novel supports the motif of the changing seasons. The Shipmans have a mural painted along their stairway by a stenciller, showing a hillside and farm with elms “in tiny leaf, that it may be Spring for ever” (80). Furthermore, as Catherine writes the winter after Cassie’s death, “[F]or Cassie it is Spring for ever” (139). Cassie’s death suggests that the living can—and must—embrace change.

Charles, whom Catherine calls “Father,” is a man of his time: hardworking, prone to provide lessons in the form of moral stories, a good father, and an excellent neighbor. The nature of his relationship with his neighbor Mr. Shipman, in particular, shows the extent to which survival in rural New England in the 1830s depended on cooperation. Mr. Shipman helps with the farm stock when Charles goes to Boston; in exchange, the Halls will give him two days of plowing. When Charles goes to trade in Boston, he drives Mr. Shipman’s team of horses and so must bring Shipman’s furs to trade along with his own. The relationship is as transactional as it is friendly.

Charles is very patriotic. The family spends the entire Fourth of July in town, leaving before sunrise. When a boy dies of burns received on the Fourth, from setting off explosions, Ann thinks that it is a steep price to pay. Charles, however, says that celebrating the Fourth is necessary to show love for the nation.

Charles is also prejudiced; he is initially incapable of thinking of a self-liberated person, whether a boy running away from indentured servitude or a man escaping enslavement, as a human. He opposes enslavement but thinks that formerly enslaved people should be sent to Africa to form a new nation. When Uncle Jack protests that “freeman means free” (45), Charles’s reply suggests that he would not want to have a Black man as his neighbor. His prejudice adds to Catherine’s conflict after the self-liberated man writes in her lesson book to plead for help.

Charles’s sudden engagement to a woman he has only known for a short time is a surprise. He jokes about it himself, saying that he went to a shop to buy some goods and instead found a wife. This suggests the economic proposition of marriage in this time period. However, he is clearly attracted to Ann, eagerly awaiting her letters and buying a new jacket for the wedding. The relationship humanizes Charles, who, like Catherine, changes by the end of the novel. After Cassie’s death, he stops telling Ann that country people have to learn to accept hardship. In addition, as he admires Catherine’s quilt, he is able to ask if we are “not, all of us, wand’rers and strangers” (135), suggesting that he now sees some shared humanity with others who are different.

Ann, eventually called “Mammann” by Catherine and Matty, is short and plain. She can be strict, giving Catherine the task of making a quilt to replace the one she gave away and disciplining Matty for protesting a favor she is asked. Her motto is “Work worth doing is worth doing well” (89). However, she is also eager to please, saying that she hopes that she will be equal to the task of raising Charles’s girls.

Ann is the novel’s second major catalyst for Catherine’s growth and maturation. At first, Catherine is resolved not to let Ann take her mother’s place, but Ann’s wisdom and quietly affectionate nature eventually win Catherine over. When she learns that Catherine has given one of her mother’s quilts to the fugitive, her concern is for Catherine’s safety. In giving Catherine the task of making a replacement quilt, she says, “I am here now, to teach you” (86), stretching out a hand and causing Catherine to cry. The narrative suggests that she has completely won over Catherine when she wears the bonnet Ann gave her to church.

Ann also serves to emphasize the difference between the Halls’ country life and her former Boston home. Catherine initially associates her with Boston. When Cassie falls ill and Ann wants to call another doctor, Charles replies, “You forget. This is not Boston” (107). The remark irritates Ann, who believes in taking action to fight hardship. In this way, she acts as a foil to the passive, accepting Mrs. Shipman to support the theme of Acceptance of Hardship Versus Action.

Matty, Catherine’s younger sister, is seven years old at the start of the novel and turns eight in 1831. Catherine describes her as a “sweet and trusting child” (41). She has her mother’s dark, curly hair. Catherine is like a mother to her, looking after her clothes and tending to her when she has a cough.

Matty tends to say whatever she is thinking, and it is she who reveals Catherine’s guilty secret when she urges Catherine to tell Ann the story behind the quilt. She also provides some comic relief in this scene. She had misheard the story of the various patches in the old quilt, thinking that the Hessian’s coat was a Russian’s coat and that a “drab” patch made from the first Mrs. Hall’s father’s trousers meant “grab.” Ann later has a laugh with Charles about it.

Unlike Catherine, Matty does not remember their mother. For this reason, she is quick to accept Ann as a mother figure, allowing her to hold her hand and sing her funny songs after she is stung by a bee. Whereas Catherine grows emotionally through the course of the novel, Matty grows physically. When winter school begins in October 1831, Matty is no longer the smallest student. In Chapter 9, she outgrows a dress, marking time passing. She is also able to assist Catherine with her quilt.

In the postscript to the older Catherine’s second letter to her great-granddaughter, Catherine reveals that Matty married and survived her husband and never had children. Catherine has now, in 1899, outlived her little sister.