Alice Cogswell Bemis: A Sketch by a Friend

								

year they engaged the same rooms for the following season and said they
meant to do this as long as they lived. It became a real home to them.
Mr. and Mrs. Smiley, wonderful host and hostess to all, were soon their
warm personal friends, and many pleasant acquaintances with guests were
renewed each year. Among their most valued friends there was Dr. Faunce,
president of Brown University, who conducted the Sunday services year
after year. They considered his sermons as among the best and most
helpful they ever heard, and after each season thought and talked much
of them, always looking forward to the coming of the summer Sundays,
their brightest days at Mohonk. Here every condition met their tastes
and their needs; the great beauty of the place itself, the quiet and
peace of the house, the wise and unusual way in which it is ordered, all
combined to give them an ideal residence for the summer. The fact that
young people of a fine type were always there added much to Mrs. Bemis's
pleasure. She enjoyed watching their sports and their life in the open.
Her windows overlooked the lake, and she sat there hour after hour
watching the parties coming and going in boats and climbing the hills.
Her delight in the beauties of the whole picture before her, than which
there are few to compare with it the world over, grew steadily with each
day there. Just before leaving Mohonk for the last time, she wrote to a
young cousin: "I wish I could transport you all here. I have always said
that I would like to live on a beautiful estate and have no care of it;
and here I have been for seven summers and no place by any possibility
could be finer. Mr. Smiley did not spoil nature but kept its wonderful
beauty and added to it."



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During the last years they were together, Mr. and Mrs. Bemis made
several interesting trips to California and to Seattle, to be with their
daughter, Mrs. Parsons. The mere recital of all these journeyings may
give the impression that the life in Colorado Springs was a very broken
one, but it did not seem so to her friends there, for at each return it
was resumed so quickly and so quietly that they think of it rather as
continuous. No friend and no interest she had in any work that helped on
the general welfare was ever ignored or forgotten by her wherever she
might be.
Probably there has never been any one in Colorado Springs with so many
enforced absences and the same limitations of strength who has done as
much as she in enriching individual lives with friendship and the
community life with sympathy and generous material aid. Nothing that she
counted a duty sat lightly on her mind or conscience.
Miss Ellen T. Brinley, who was for many years a friend and neighbor of
Mrs. Bemis, wrote shortly after her death: "She was a real New Englander
of a type all too rare in these degenerate days. For many years she was
not very strong, and yet she was one of the least self-indulgent people