Years of My Youth

Years of My Youth
William Howells

William Dean Howells

Years of My Youth

I

IT is hard to know the child’s own earliest recollections from the things it has been told of itself by those with whom its life began. They remember for it the past which it afterward seems to remember for itself; the wavering outline of its nature is shadowed against the background of family, and from this it imagines an individual existence which has not yet begun. The events then have the quality of things dreamt, not lived, and they remain of that impalpable and elusive quality in all the after years.

I

Of the facts which I must believe from the witness of others, is the fact that I was born on the 1st of March, 1837, at Martin’s Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio. My father’s name was William Cooper Howells, and my mother’s was Mary Dean; they were married six years before my birth, and I was the second child in their family of eight. On my father’s side my people were wholly Welsh, except his English grandmother, and on my mother’s side wholly German, except her Irish father, of whom it is mainly known that he knew how to win my grandmother Elizabeth Dock away from her very loving family, where they dwelt in great Pennsylvania-German comfort and prosperity on their farm near Harrisburg, to share with him the hardships of the wild country over the westward mountains. She was the favorite of her brothers and sisters, and the best-beloved of her mother, perhaps because she was the youngest; there is a shadowy legend that she went one evening to milk the cows, and did not return from following after her husband; but I cannot associate this romantic story with the ageing grandmother whom I tenderly loved when a child, and whom I still fondly remember. She spoke with a strong German accent, and she had her Luther Bible, for she never read English. Sometimes she came to visit my homesick mother after we went to live in southern Ohio; once I went with my mother to visit her in the little town where I was born, and of that visit I have the remembrance of her stopping me on the stairs, one morning when I had been out, and asking me in her German idiom and accent, “What fur a tay is it, child?”

I can reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German, and Irish in me that I feel myself so typically American, and that I am of the imaginative temperament which has enabled me all the conscious years of my life to see reality more iridescent and beautiful, or more lurid and terrible than any make-believe about reality. Among my father’s people the first who left Wales was his great-grandfather. He established himself in London as a clock and watch maker, and I like to believe that it is his name which my tall clock, paneled in the lovely chinoiserie of Queen Anne’s time, bears graven on its dial. Two sons followed him, and wrought at the same art, then almost a fine art, and one of them married in London and took his English wife back with him to Wales. His people were, so far as my actual knowledge goes, middle-class Welsh, but the family is of such a remote antiquity as in its present dotage not to know what part of Wales it came from. As to our lineage a Welsh clergyman, a few years ago, noting the identity of name, invited me to the fond conjecture of descent from Hywel Dda, or Howel the Good, who became king of Wales about the time of Alfred the Great. He codified the laws or rather the customs of his realm, and produced one of the most interesting books I have read, and I have finally preferred him as an ancestor because he was the first literary man of our name. There was a time when I leaned toward the delightful James Howell, who wrote the Familiar Letters and many books in verse and prose, and was of several shades of politics in the difficult days of Charles and Oliver; but I was forced to relinquish him because he was never married. My father, for his part, when once questioned as to our origin, answered that so far as he could make out we derived from a blacksmith, whom he considered a good sort of ancestor, but he could not name him, and he must have been, whatever his merit, a person of extreme obscurity.

There is no record of the time when my great-grandfather with his brothers went to London and fixed there as watchmakers. My tall clock, which bears our name on its dial, has no date, and I can only imagine their London epoch to have begun about the middle of the eighteenth century. Being Welsh, they were no doubt musical, and I like to cherish the tradition of singing and playing women in our line, and a somehow cousinship with the famous Parepa. But this is very uncertain; what is certain is that when my great-grandfather went back to Wales he fixed himself in the little town of Hay, where he began the manufacture of Welsh flannels, a fabric still esteemed for its many virtues, and greatly prospered. When I visited Hay in 1883 (my father always call it, after the old fashion, The Hay, which was the right version of its Norman name of La Haye), three of his mills were yet standing, and one of them was working, very modestly, on the sloping bank of the lovely river Wye. Another had sunk to be a stable, but the third, in the spirit of our New World lives, had become a bookstore and printing-office, a well-preserved stone edifice of four or five stories, such as there was not the like of, probably, in the whole of Wales when Hywel Dda was king. My great-grandfather was apparently an excellent business man, but I am afraid I must own (reluctantly, with my Celtic prejudice) that literature, or the love of it, came into our family with the English girl whom he married in London. She was, at least, a reader of the fiction of the day, if I may judge from the high-colored style of the now pathetically faded letter which she wrote to reproach a daughter who had made a runaway match and fled to America. So many people then used to make runaway matches; but when very late in the lives of these eloping lovers I once saw them, an old man and woman, at our house in Columbus, they hardly looked their youthful adventure, even to the fancy of a boy beginning to unrealize life. The reader may care to learn that they were the ancestors of Vaughan Kester, the very gifted young novelist, who came into popular recognition almost in the hour of his most untimely death, and of his brother Paul Kester, the playwright.

II

My great-grandfather became “a Friend by Convincement,” as the Quakers called the Friends not born in their Society; but I do not know whether it was before or after his convincement that he sailed to Philadelphia with a stock of his Welsh flannels, which he sold to such advantage that a dramatic family tradition represents him wheeling the proceeds in a barrel of silver down the street to the vessel which brought him and which took him away. That was in the time of Washington’s second Presidency, and Washington strongly advised his staying in the country and setting up his manufacture here; but he was prospering in Wales, and why should he come to America even at the suggestion of Washington? It is another family tradition that he complied so far as to purchase a vast acreage of land on the Potomac, including the site of our present capital, as some of his descendants in each generation have believed, without the means of expropriating the nation from its unlawful holdings. This would have been the more difficult as he never took a deed of his land, and he certainly never came back to America; yet he seems always to have been haunted by the allurement of it which my grandfather felt so potently that after twice visiting the country he came over a third time and cast his lot here.

He was already married, when with his young wife and my father a year old he sailed from London in 1808. Perhaps because they were chased by a French privateer, they speedily arrived in Boston after a voyage of only twenty-one days. In the memoir which my father wrote for his family, and which was published after his death, he tells that my grandmother formed the highest opinion of Boston, mainly, he surmises, from the very intelligent behavior of the young ladies in making a pet of her baby at the boarding-house where she stayed while her husband began going about wherever people wished his skill in setting up woolen-mills. The young ladies taught her little one to walk; and many years afterward, say fifty, when I saw her for the last time in a village of northwestern Ohio, she said “the Bostonians were very nice people,” so faithfully had she cherished, through a thousand vicissitudes, the kind memory of that first sojourn in America.

I do not think she quite realized the pitch of greatness at which I had arrived in writing for the Atlantic Monthly, the renowned periodical then recently founded in Boston, or the fame of the poets whom I had met there the year before. I suspect that she was never of the literary taste of my English great-grandmother; but her father had been a school-teacher, and she had been carefully educated by the uncle and aunt to whom she was left at her parents’ early death. They were Friends, but she never formally joined the Society, though worshiping with them; she was, like her husband, middle-class Welsh, and as long as they lived they both misplaced their aspirates. If I add that her maiden name was Thomas, and that her father’s name was John Thomas, I think I have sufficiently attested her pure Cymric origin. So far as I know there was no mixture of Saxon blood on her side; but her people, like most of the border Welsh, spoke the languages of both races; and very late in my father’s life, he mentioned casually, as old people will mention interesting things, that he remembered his father and mother speaking Welsh together. Of the two she remained the fonder of their native country, and in that last visit I paid her she said, after half a century of exile, “We do so and so at home, and you do so and so here.” I can see her now, the gentlest of little Quaker ladies, with her white fichu crossed on her breast; and I hesitate attributing to her my immemorial knowledge that the Welsh were never conquered, but were tricked into union with the English by having one of their princes born, as it were surreptitiously, in Wales; it must have been my father who told me this and amused himself with my childish race-pride in the fact. She gave me an illustrated Tour of Wales, having among its steel engravings the picture of a Norman castle where, by favor of a cousin who was the housekeeper, she had slept one night when a girl; but in America she had slept oftener in log cabins, which my grandfather satisfied his devoted unworldliness in making his earthly tabernacles. She herself was not, I think, a devout person; she had her spiritual life in his, and followed his varying fortunes, from richer to poorer, with a tacit adherence to what he believed, whether the mild doctrine of Quakerism or the fervid Methodism for which he never quite relinquished it.

He seems to have come to America with money enough to lose a good deal in his removals from Boston to Poughkeepsie, from Poughkeepsie to New York City, from New York to Virginia, and from Virginia to eastern Ohio, where he ended in such adversity on his farm that he was glad to accept the charge of a woolen-mill in Steubenville. He knew the business thoroughly and he had set up mills for others in his various sojourns, following the line of least resistance among the Quaker settlements opened to him by the letters he had brought from Wales. He even went to the new capital, Washington, in a hope of manufacturing in Virginia held out to him by a nephew of President Madison, but it failed him to his heavy cost; and in Ohio, his farming experiments, which he renewed in a few years on giving up that mill at Steubenville, were alike disastrous. After more than enough of them he rested for a while in Wheeling, West Virginia, where my father met my mother, and they were married.

They then continued the family wanderings in his own search for the chance of earning a living in what seems to have been a very grudging country, even to industry so willing as his. He had now become a printer, and not that only, but a publisher, for he had already begun and ended the issue of a monthly magazine called The Gleaner, made up, as its name implied, chiefly of selections; his sister helped him as editor, and some old bound volumes of its few numbers show their joint work to have been done with good taste in the preferences of their day. He married upon the expectation of affluence from the publication of a work on The Rise, Progress and Downfall of Aristocracy, which almost immediately preceded the ruin of the enthusiastic author and of my father with him, if he indeed could have experienced further loss in his entire want of money. He did not lose heart, and he was presently living contentedly on three hundred dollars a year as foreman of a newspaper office in St. Clairville, Ohio. But his health gave way, and a little later, for the sake of the outdoor employment, he took up the trade of house-painter; and he was working at this in Wheeling when my grandfather Dean suggested his buying a lot and building a house in Martin’s Ferry, just across the Ohio River. The lot must have been bought on credit, and he built mainly with his own capable hands a small brick house of one story and two rooms with a lean-to. In this house I was born, and my father and mother were very happy there; they never owned another house until their children helped them work and pay for it a quarter of a century afterward, though throughout this long time they made us a home inexpressibly dear to me still.

My father now began to read medicine, but during the course of a winter’s lectures at Cincinnati (where he worked as a printer meanwhile), his health again gave way and he returned to Martin’s Ferry. When I was three years old, my grandmother Dean’s eldest brother, William Dock, came to visit her. He was the beloved patriarch of a family which I am glad to claim my kindred and was a best type of his Pennsylvania-German race. He had prospered on through a life of kindness and good deeds; he was so rich that he had driven in his own carriage from Harrisburg, over the mountains, and he now asked my father to drive with him across the state of Ohio. When they arrived in Dayton, my father went on by canal to Hamilton, where he found friends to help him buy the Whig newspaper which he had only just paid for when he sold it eight years later.

III

Of the first three years of my life which preceded this removal there is very little that I can honestly claim to remember. The things that I seem to remember are seeing from the window of our little house, when I woke one morning, a peach-tree in bloom; and again seeing from the steamboat which was carrying our family to Cincinnati, a man drowning in the river. But these visions, both of them very distinct, might very well have been the effect of hearing the things spoken of by my elders, though I am surest of the peach-tree in bloom as an authentic memory.

This time, so happy for my father and mother, was scarcely less happy because of its uncertainties. My young aunts lived with their now widowed mother not far from us; as the latest comer, I was in much request among them, of course; and my father was hardly less in favor with the whole family from his acceptable habit of finding a joke in everything. He supplied the place of son to my grandmother in the absence of my young uncles, then away most of their time on the river which they followed from the humblest beginnings on keel-boats to the proudest endings as pilots and captains and owners of steamboats. In those early days when they returned from the river they brought their earnings to their mother in gold coins, which they called Yellow Boys, and which she kept in a bowl in the cupboard, where I seem so vividly to have seen them, that I cannot quite believe I did not. These good sons were all Democrats except the youngest, but they finally became of my father’s anti-slavery Whig faith in politics, and I believe they were as glad to have their home in a free state as my father’s family, who had now left Wheeling, and were settled in southwestern Ohio.

There were not many slaves in Wheeling, but it was a sort of entrepôt where the negroes were collected and embarked for the plantations down the river, in their doom to the death-in-life of the far South. My grandfather Howells had, in the anti-slavery tradition of his motherland, made himself so little desired among his Virginian fellow-citizens that I have heard his removal from Wheeling was distinctly favored by public sentiment; and afterward, on the farm he bought in Ohio, his fences and corn-cribs suffered from the pro-slavery convictions of his neighbors. But he was dwelling in safety and prosperity among the drugs and books which were his merchandise in the store where I began to remember him in my earliest days at Hamilton. He seemed to me a very old man, and I noticed with the keen observance of a child how the muscles sagged at the sides of his chin and how his under lip, which I did not know I had inherited from him, projected. His clothes, which had long ceased to be drab in color, were of a Quaker formality in cut; his black hat followed this world’s fashion in color, but was broad in the brim and very low-crowned, which added somehow in my young sense to the reproving sadness of his presence. He had black Welsh eyes and was of the low stature of his race; my grandmother was blue-eyed; she was little, too; but my aunt, their only surviving daughter, with his black eyes, was among their taller children. She was born several years after their settlement in America, but she loyally misused her aspirates as they did, and, never marrying, was of a life-long devotion to them. They first lived over the drug-store, after the fashion of shopkeepers in England; I am aware of my grandfather soon afterward having a pretty house and a large garden quite away from the store, but he always lived more simply than his means obliged. Amidst the rude experiences of their backwoods years, the family had continued gentle in their thoughts and tastes, though my grandfather shared with poetry his passion for religion, and in my later boyhood when I had begun to print my verses, he wrote me a letter solemnly praising them, but adjuring me to devote my gifts to the service of my Maker, which I had so little notion of doing in a selfish ideal of my own glory.

Most of his father’s fortune had somehow gone to other sons, but, whether rich or poor, their generation seemed to be of a like religiosity. One of them lived in worldly state at Bristol before coming to America, and was probably of a piety not so insupportable as I found him in the memoir which he wrote of his second wife, when I came to read it the other day. Him I never saw, but from time to time there was one or other of his many sons employed in my grandfather’s store, whom I remember blithe spirits, disposed to seize whatever chance of a joke life offered them, such as selling Young’s Night Thoughts to a customer who had whispered his wish for an improper book. Some of my father’s younger brothers were of a like cheerfulness with these lively cousins, and of the same aptness for laughter. One was a physician, another a dentist, another in a neighboring town a druggist, another yet a speculative adventurer in the regions to the southward: he came back from his commercial forays once with so many half-dollars that when spread out they covered the whole surface of our dining-table; but I am quite unable to report what negotiation they were the spoil of. There was a far cousin who was a painter, and left (possibly as a pledge of indebtedness) with my dentist uncle after a sojourn among us a picture which I early prized as a masterpiece, and still remember as the charming head of a girl shadowed by the fan she held over it. I never saw the painter, but I recall, from my father’s singing them, the lines of a “doleful ballad” which he left behind him as well as the picture:

A thief will steal from you all that you havye,
But an unfaithful lovyer will bring you to your grave.

The uncle who was a physician, when he left off the practice of medicine about his eightieth year, took up the art of sculpture; he may have always had a taste for it, and his knowledge of anatomy would have helped qualify him for it. He modeled from photographs a head of my father admirably like and full of character, the really extraordinary witness of a gift latent till then through a long life devoted to other things.

We children had our preference among these Howells uncles, but we did not care for any of them so much as for our Dean uncles, who now and then found their way up to Hamilton from Cincinnati when their steamboats lay there in their trips from Pittsburg. They were all very jovial; and one of the younger among them could play the violin, not less acceptably because he played by ear and not by art. Of the youngest and best-loved I am lastingly aware in his coming late one night and of my creeping down-stairs from my sleep to sit in his lap and hear his talk with my father and mother, while his bursts of laughter agreeably shook my small person. I dare say these uncles used to bring us gifts from that steamboating world of theirs which seemed to us of a splendor not less than what I should now call oriental when we sometimes visited them at Cincinnati, and came away bulging in every pocket with the more portable of the dainties we had been feasting upon. In the most signal of these visits, as I once sat between my father and my Uncle William, for whom I was named, on the hurricane roof of his boat, he took a silver half-dollar from his pocket and put it warm in my hand, with a quizzical look into my eyes. The sight of such unexampled riches stopped my breath for the moment, but I made out to ask, “Is it for me?” and he nodded his head smilingly up and down; then, for my experience had hitherto been of fippenny-bits yielded by my father after long reasoning, I asked, “Is it good?” and remained puzzled to know why they laughed so together; it must have been years before I understood.

These uncles had grown up in a slave state, and they thought, without thinking, that slavery must be right; but once when an abolition lecturer was denied public hearing at Martin’s Ferry, they said he should speak in their mother’s house; and there, much unaware, I heard my first and last abolition lecture, barely escaping with my life, for one of the objections urged by the mob outside was a stone hurled through the window, where my mother sat with me in her arms. At my Uncle William’s house in the years after the Civil War, my father and he began talking of old times, and he told how, when a boy on a keel-boat, tied up to a Mississippi shore, he had seen an overseer steal upon a black girl loitering at her work, and wind his blacksnake-whip round her body, naked except for the one cotton garment she wore. “When I heard that colored female screech,” he said, and the old-fashioned word female, used for compassionate respectfulness, remains with me, “and saw her jump, I knew that there must be something wrong in slavery.” Perhaps the sense of this had been in his mind when he determined with his brothers that the abolition lecturer should be heard in their mother’s house.

She sometimes came to visit us in Hamilton, to break the homesick separations from her which my mother suffered through for so many years, and her visits were times of high holiday for us children. I should be interested now to know what she and my Welsh grandmother made of each other, but I believe they were good friends, though probably not mutually very intelligible. My mother’s young sisters, who also came on welcome visits, were always joking with my father and helping my mother at her work; but I cannot suppose that there was much common ground between them and my grandfather’s family except in their common Methodism. For me, I adored them; and if the truth must be told, though I had every reason to love my Welsh grandmother, I had a peculiar tenderness for my Pennsylvania-Dutch grandmother, with her German accent and her caressing ways. My grandfather, indeed, could have recognized no difference among heirs of equal complicity in Adam’s sin; and in the situation such as it was, I lived blissfully unborn to all things of life outside of my home. I can recur to the time only as a dream of love and loving, and though I came out of it no longer a little child, but a boy struggling tooth and nail for my place among other boys, I must still recur to the ten or eleven years passed in Hamilton as the gladdest of all my years. They may have been even gladder than they now seem, because the incidents which embody happiness had then the novelty which such incidents lose from their recurrence; while the facts of unhappiness, no matter how often they repeat themselves, seem throughout life an unprecedented experience and impress themselves as vividly the last time as the first. I recall some occasions of grief and shame in that far past with unfailing distinctness, but the long spaces of blissful living which they interrupted hold few or no records which I can allege in proof of my belief that I was then, above every other when,

Joyful and free from blame.

IV

Throughout those years at Hamilton I think of my father as absorbed in the mechanical and intellectual work of his newspaper. My earliest sense of him relates him as much to the types and the press as to the table where he wrote his editorials amidst the talk of the printers, or of the politicians who came to discuss public affairs with him. From a quaint pride, he did not like his printer’s craft to be called a trade; he contended that it was a profession; he was interested in it, as the expression of his taste, and the exercise of his ingenuity and invention, and he could supply many deficiencies in its means and processes. He cut fonts of large type for job-work out of apple-wood in default of box or olive; he even made the graver’s tools for carving the letters. Nothing pleased him better than to contrive a thing out of something it was not meant for, as making a penknife blade out of an old razor, or the like. He could do almost anything with his ready hand and his ingenious brain, while I have never been able to do anything with mine but write a few score books. But as for the printer’s craft with me, it was simply my joy and pride from the first things I knew of it. I know when I could not read, for I recall supplying the text from my imagination for the pictures I found in books, but I do not know when I could not set type. My first attempt at literature was not written, but put up in type, and printed off by me. My father praised it, and this made me so proud that I showed it to one of those eminent Whig politicians always haunting the office. He made no comment on it, but asked me if I could spell baker. I spelled the word simple-heartedly, and it was years before I realized that he meant a hurt to my poor little childish vanity.

Very soon I could set type very well, and at ten years and onward till journalism became my university, the printing-office was mainly my school. Of course, like every sort of work with a boy, the work became irksome to me, and I would gladly have escaped from it to every sort of play, but it never ceased to have the charm it first had. Every part of the trade became familiar to me, and if I had not been so little I could at once have worked not only at case, but at press, as my brother did. I had my favorites among the printers, who knew me as the Old Man, because of the habitual gravity which was apt to be broken in me by bursts of wild hilarity; but I am not sure whether I liked better the conscience of the young journeyman who wished to hold me in the leash of his moral convictions, or the nature of my companion in laughter which seemed to have selected for him the fit name of Sim Haggett. This merrymaker was married, but so very presently in our acquaintance was widowed, that I can scarcely put any space between his mourning for his loss and his rejoicing in the first joke that followed it. There were three or four of the journeymen, with an apprentice, to do the work now reduced by many facilities to the competence of one or two. Some of them slept in a den opening from the printing-office, where I envied them the wild freedom unhampered by the conventions of sweeping, dusting, or bed-making; it was next to camping out.

The range of that young experience of mine transcends telling, but the bizarre mixture was pure delight to the boy I was, already beginning to take the impress of events and characters. Though I loved the art of printing so much, though my pride even more than my love was taken with it, as something beyond other boys, yet I loved my schools too. In their succession there seem to have been a good many of them, with a variety of teachers, whom I tried to make like me because I liked them. I was gifted in spelling, geography, and reading, but arithmetic was not for me. I could declaim long passages from the speeches of Corwin against the Mexican War, and of Chatham against the American War, and poems from our school readers, or from Campbell or Moore or Byron; but at the blackboard I was dumb. I bore fairly well the mockeries of boys, boldly bad, who played upon a certain simplicity of soul in me, and pretended, for instance, when I came out one night saying I was six years old, that I was a shameless boaster and liar. Swimming, hunting, fishing, foraging at every season, with the skating which the waters of the rivers and canals afforded, were my joy; I took my part in the races and the games, in football and in baseball, then in its feline infancy of Three Corner Cat, and though there was a family rule against fighting, I fought like the rest of the boys and took my defeats as heroically as I knew how; they were mostly defeats.

My world was full of boys, but it was also much haunted by ghosts or the fear of them. Death came early into it, the visible image in a negro babe, with the large red copper cents on its eyelids, which older boys brought me to see, then in the funeral of the dearly loved mate whom we school-fellows followed to his grave. I learned many things in my irregular schooling, and at home I was always reading when I was not playing. I will not pretend that I did not love playing best; life was an experiment which had to be tried in every way that presented itself, but outside of these practical requisitions there was a constant demand upon me from literature. As to the playing I will not speak at large here, for I have already said enough of it in A Boy’s Town; and as to the reading, the curious must go for it to another book of mine called My Literary Passions. Perhaps there was already in my early literary preferences a bent toward the reality which my gift, if I may call it so, has since taken. I did not willingly read poetry, except such pieces as I memorized: little tragedies of the sad fate of orphan children, and the cruelties of large birds to small ones, which brought the lump into my throat, or the moralized song of didactic English writers of the eighteenth century, such as “Pity the sorrows of a poor old man.” That piece I still partly know by heart; but history was what I liked best, and if I finally turned to fiction it seems to have been in the dearth of histories that merited reading after Goldsmith’s Greece and Rome; except Irving’s Conquest of Granada, I found none that I could read; but I had then read Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels, and had heard my father reading aloud to my mother the poems of Scott and Moore. Since he seems not to have thought of any histories that would meet my taste, I fancy that I must have been mainly left to my own choice in that sort, though he told me of the other sorts of books which I read.

I should be interested to know now how the notion of authorship first crept into my mind, but I do not in the least know. I made verses, I even wrote plays in rhyme, but until I attempted an historical romance I had no sense of literature as an art. As an art which one might live by, as by a trade or a business, I had not the slightest conception of it. When I began my first and last historical romance, I did not imagine it as something to be read by others; and when the first chapters were shown without my knowing, I was angry and ashamed. If my father thought there was anything uncommon in my small performances, he did nothing to let me guess it unless I must count the instance of declaiming Hallock’s Marco Bozzaris before a Swedenborgian minister who was passing the night at our house. Neither did my mother do anything to make me conscious, if she was herself conscious of anything out of the common in what I was trying. It was her sacred instinct to show no partiality among her children; my father’s notion was of the use that could be combined with the pleasure of life, and perhaps if there had been anything different in my life, it would not have tended more to that union of use and pleasure which was his ideal.

Much in the environment was abhorrent to him, and he fought the local iniquities in his paper, the gambling, the drunkenness that marred the mainly moral and religious complexion of the place. In A Boy’s Town I have studied with a fidelity which I could not emulate here the whole life of it as a boy sees life, and I must leave the reader who cares for such detail to find it there. But I wish again to declare the almost unrivaled fitness of the place to be the home of a boy, with its two branches of the Great Miami River and their freshets in spring, and their witchery at all seasons; with its Hydraulic Channels and Reservoirs, its stretch of the Miami Canal and the Canal Basin so fit for swimming in summer and skating in winter. The mills and factories which harnessed the Hydraulic to their industries were of resistless allure for the boys who frequented them when they could pass the guard of “No Admittance” on their doors, or when they were not foraging among the fields and woods in the endless vacations of the schools. Some boys left school to work in the mills, and when they could show the loss of a finger-joint from the machinery they were prized as heroes. The Fourths of July, the Christmases and Easters and May-Days, which were apparently of greater frequency there and then than they apparently are anywhere now, seemed to alternate with each other through the year, and the Saturdays spread over half the week.

V

The experience of such things was that of the generalized boy, and easy to recall, but the experience of the specialized boy that I was cannot be distinctly recovered and cannot be given in any order of time; the events are like dreams in their achronic simultaneity. I ought to be able to remember when fear first came into my life; but I cannot. I am aware of offering as a belated substitute for far earlier acquaintance with it the awe which I dimly shared with the whole community at a case of hydrophobia occurring there, and which was not lessened by hearing my father tell my mother of the victim’s saying: “I have made my peace with God; you may call in the doctors.” I doubt if she relished the involuntary satire as he did; his humor, which made life easy for him, could not always have been a comfort to her. Safe in the philosophy of Swedenborg, which taught him that even those who ended in hell chose it their portion because they were happiest in it, he viewed with kindly amusement the religious tumults of the frequent revivals about him. The question of salvation was far below that of the annexation of Texas, or the ensuing war against Mexico, in his regard; but these great events have long ago faded into national history from my contemporary consciousness, while a tragical effect from his playfulness remains vivid in my childish memory. I have already used it in fiction, as my wont has been with so many of my experiences, but I will tell again how my mother and he were walking together in the twilight, with me, a very small boy, following, and my father held out to me behind his back a rose which I understood I was to throw at my mother and startle her.

My aim was unfortunately for me all too sure; the rose struck her head, and when she looked round and saw me offering to run away, she whirled on me and made me suffer for her fright in thinking my flower was a bat, while my father gravely entreated, “Mary, Mary!” She could not forgive me at once, and my heart remained sore, for my love of her was as passionate as the temper I had from her, but while it continued aching after I went to bed, she stole up-stairs to me and consoled me and told me how scared she had been, and hardly knew what she was doing; and all was well again between us.

I wish I could say how dear she was to me and to all her children. My eldest brother and she understood each other best, but each of us lived in the intelligence of her which her love created. She was always working for us, and yet, as I so tardily perceived, living for my father anxiously, fearfully, bravely, with absolute trust in his goodness and righteousness. While she listened to his reading at night, she sewed or knitted for us, or darned or mended the day’s ravage in our clothes till, as a great indulgence, we fell asleep on the floor. If it was summer we fell asleep at her knees on the front door-step, where she had sat watching us at our play till we dropped worn out with it; or if it had been a day of wild excess she followed us to our beds early and washed our feet with her dear hands, and soothed them from the bruises of the summer-long shoelessness. She was not only the center of home to me; she was home itself, and in the years before I made a home of my own, absence from her was the homesickness, or the fear of it, which was always haunting me. As for the quick temper (now so slow) I had from her, it showed itself once in a burst of reckless fury which had to be signalized in the family rule, so lenient otherwise, by a circumstantial whipping from my father. Another, from her, for going in swimming (as we always said for bathing) when directly forbidden, seems to complete the list of my formal punishments at their hands in a time when fathers and mothers were much more of Solomon’s mind in such matters than now.

I never was punished in any sort at school where the frequent scourging of other boys, mostly boys whom I loved for something kind and sweet in them, filled me with anguish; and I have come to believe that a blow struck a child is far wickeder than any wickedness a child can do; that it depraves whoever strikes the blow, mother, or father, or teacher, and that it inexpressibly outrages the young life confided to the love of the race. I know that excuses will be found for it, and that the perpetrator of the outrage will try for consolation in thinking that the child quickly forgets, because its pathetic smiles so soon follow its pathetic tears; but the child does not forget; and no callousing from custom can undo the effect in its soul.

From the stress put upon behaving rather than believing in that home of mine we were made to feel that wicked words were of the quality of wicked deeds, and that when they came out of our mouths they depraved us, unless we took them back. I have not forgotten, with any detail of the time and place, a transgression of this sort which I was made to feel in its full significance. My mother had got supper, and my father was, as he often was, late for it, and while we waited impatiently for him, I came out with the shocking wish that he was dead. My mother instantly called me to account for it, and when my father came she felt bound to tell him what I had said. He could then have done no more than gravely give me the just measure of my offense; and his explanation and forgiveness were the sole event. I did not remain with an exaggerated sense of my sin, though in a child’s helplessness I could not urge, if I had imagined urging, that my outburst was merely an aspiration for unbelated suppers, and was of the nature of prayers for rain, which good people sometimes put up regardless of consequences. With his Swedenborgian doctrine of degrees in sin, my father might have thought my wild words prompted by evil spirits, but he would have regarded them as qualitatively rather than quantitatively wicked, and would not have committed the dreadful wrong which elders do a child by giving it a sense of sinning far beyond its worst possible willing. As to conduct his teaching was sometimes of an inherited austerity, but where his own personality prevailed, there was no touch of Puritanism in it.

Our religious instruction at home was not very stated, though it was abundant, and it must have been because we children ourselves felt it unseemly not to go, like other children, to Sunday-school that we were allowed to satisfy our longing for conformity by going for a while to the Sunday-school of the Baptist church, apparently because it was the nearest. We got certain blue tickets and certain red ones for memorizing passages from the New Testament, but I remember much more distinctly the muscular twitching in the close-shaven purplish cheek of the teacher as he nervously listened with set teeth for the children’s answers, than anything in our Scripture lessons. I had been received with three or four brothers and sisters into the Swedenborgian communion by a passing New Church minister, but there were no services of our recondite faith in Hamilton, and we shared in no public worship after my mother followed my father from the Methodist society. Out of curiosity and a solemn joy in its ceremonial, I sometimes went to the Catholic church, where my eyes clung fascinated to the life-large effigy of Christ bleeding on His cross against the eastern wall; but I have more present now the sense of walks in the woods on Sunday, with the whole family, and of the long, sweet afternoons so spent in them.

If we had no Sabbaths in our house, and not very recognizable Sundays, we were strictly forbidden to do anything that would seem to trifle with the scruples of others. We might not treat serious things unseriously; we were to swear not at all; and in the matter of bywords we were allowed very little range, though for the hardness of our hearts we were suffered to say such things as, “Oh, hang it!” or even, “Confound it all!” in extreme cases, such as failing to make the family pony open his mouth for bridling, or being bitten by the family rabbits, or butted over by the family goat. In such points of secular behavior we might be better or worse; but in matters of religious toleration the rule was inflexible; the faith of others was sacred, and it was from this early training, doubtless, that I was able in after life to regard the occasional bigotry of agnostic friends with toleration.

During the years of my later childhood, a few public events touched my consciousness. I was much concerned in the fortunes of the Whig party from the candidacy of Henry Clay in 1844 to the fusion of the anti-slavery Whigs with the Freesoil party after their bolt of the Taylor nomination in 1848, when I followed my father as far as a boy of eleven could go. He himself went so far as to sell his newspaper and take every risk for the future rather than support a slave-holding candidate who had been chosen for his vote-winning qualities as a victorious general in the Mexican War. I did not abhor that aggression so much as my father only because I could not understand how abhorrent it was; but it began to be a trouble to me from the first mention of the Annexation of Texas, a sufficiently dismaying mystery, and it afflicted me in early fixing my lot with the righteous minorities which I may have sometimes since been over-proud to be of. Besides such questions of national interest I was aware of other things, such as the French Revolution of 1848; but this must have been wholly through sympathy with my father’s satisfaction in the flight of Louis Philippe and the election of the poet Lamartine to be the head of the provisional government. The notion of provisional I relegated to lasting baffle in its more familiar association with the stock of corn-meal and bran in the feed-stores, though I need but have asked in order to be told what it meant. The truth is I was pre-occupied about that time with the affairs of High Olympus, as I imagined them from the mythology which I was reading, and with the politics of Rome and Athens, as I conceived them from the ever-dear histories of Goldsmith. The exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha had much to do in distracting me from the movement of events in Mexico, and at the same time I was enlarging my knowledge of human events through Gulliver’s Travels and Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.

My father had not only explained to me the satire which underlay Gulliver’s Travels; he told me so much too indignantly of De Foe’s appropriation of Selkirk’s narrative, that it long kept me from reading Robinson Crusoe; but he was, as I have divined more and more, my guide in that early reading which widened with the years, though it kept itself preferably for a long time to history and real narratives. He was of such a liberal mind that he scarcely restricted my own forays in literature, and I think that sometimes he erred on that side; he may have thought no harm could come to me from the literary filth which I sometimes took into my mind, since it was in the nature of sewage to purify itself. He gave me very little direct instruction, and he did not insist on my going to school when I preferred the printing-office. All the time, perhaps, I was getting such schooling as came from the love of literature, which was the daily walk and conversation of our very simple home, and somehow protected it from the sense of narrow means and the little hope of larger. My father’s income from his paper was scarcely over a thousand dollars a year, but this sufficed for his family, then of seven children, and he was of such a sensitive pride as to money, that he would hardly ask for debts due him, much less press for their payment; so that when he parted with his paper he parted with the hope of much money owing him for legal and even official advertising and for uncounted delinquent subscriptions. Meanwhile he was earning this money by the work of his head and hand; and though I must always love his memory for his proud delicacy, I cannot forget that this is not a world where people dun themselves for the debts they owe. What is to be said of such a man is that his mind is not on the things that make for prosperity; but if we were in adversity we never knew it by that name. My mother did the whole work of her large household, and gave each of us the same care in health and sickness, in sickness only making the sufferer feel that he was her favorite; in any other case she would have felt such a preference wicked. Sometimes she had a hired girl, as people then and there called the sort of domestic that in New England would have been called a help. But it must have been very seldom, for two girls alone left record of themselves: a Dutch girl amusingly memorable with us children because she called her shoes skoes, and claimed to have come to America in a skip; and a native girl, who took charge of us when our mother was on one of her homesick visits Up-the-River, and became lastingly abhorrent for the sort of insipid milk-gravy she made for the beefsteak, and for the nightmare she seemed to have every night, when she filled the house and made our blood run cold with a sort of wild involuntary yodeling.

Apparently my mother’s homesickness mounted from time to time in an insupportable crisis; but perhaps she did not go Up-the-River so often as it seemed. She always came back more contented with the home which she herself was for us; once, as my perversely eclectic memory records, it was chiefly because one could burn wood in Hamilton, but had to burn coal at Martin’s Ferry, where everything was smutched by it. In my old age, now, I praise Heaven for that home which I could not know apart from her; and I wish I could recall her in the youth which must have been hers when I began to be conscious of her as a personality; I know that she had thick brown Irish hair and blue eyes, and high German cheek-bones, and as a girl she would have had such beauty as often goes with a certain irregularity of feature; but to me before my teens she was, of course, a very mature, if not elderly person, with whom I could not connect any notion of looks except such as shone from her care and love. Though her intellectual and spiritual life was in and from my father, she kept always a certain native quality of speech and a rich sense in words like that which marked her taste in soft stuffs and bright colors. In the hard life of her childhood in the backwoods she was sent to an academy in the nearest town, but in the instant anguish of homesickness she walked ten miles back to the log cabin where at night, as she would tell us, you could hear the wolves howling. She had an innate love of poetry; she could sing some of those songs of Burns and Moore which people sang then. I associate them with her voice in the late summer afternoons; for it was at night that she listened to my father’s reading of poetry or fiction. When they were young, before and after their marriage, he kept a book, as people sometimes did in those days, where he wrote in the scrupulous handwriting destined to the deformity of over-use in later years, such poems of Byron or Cowper or Moore or Burns as seemed appropriate to their case, and such other verse as pleased his fancy. It is inscribed (for it still exists) To Mary, and with my inner sense I can hear him speaking to her by that sweet name, with the careful English enunciation which separated its syllables into Ma-ry.

VI

My mother was an honored guest on one or other of my uncles’ boats whenever she went on her homesick visits Up-the-River, and sometimes we children must have gone with her. Later in my boyhood, when I was nine or ten years old, my father took me to Pittsburg and back, on the boat of the jolliest of those uncles, and it was then that I first fully realized the splendor of the world where their lives were passed. No doubt I have since seen nobler sights than the mile-long rank of the steamboats as they lay at the foot of the landings in the cities at either end of our voyage, but none of these excelling wonders remains like that. All the passenger boats on the Ohio were then side-wheelers, and their lofty chimneys towering on either side of their pilot-houses were often crenelated at the top, with wire ropes between them supporting the effigies of such Indians as they were named for. From time to time one of the majestic craft pulled from the rank with the clangor of its mighty bell, and the mellow roar of its whistle, and stood out in the yellow stream, or arrived in like state to find a place by the shore. The wide slope of the landing was heaped with the merchandise putting off or taking on the boats, amidst the wild and whirling curses of the mates and the insensate rushes of the deck-hands staggering to and fro under their burdens. The swarming drays came and went with freight, and there were huckster carts of every sort; peddlers, especially of oranges, escaped with their lives among the hoofs and wheels, and through the din and turmoil passengers hurried aboard the boats, to repent at leisure their haste in trusting the advertised hour of departure. It was never known that any boat left on time, and I doubt if my uncle’s boat, the famous New England No. 2, was an exception to the rule, as my father perfectly understood while he delayed on the wharf, sampling a book-peddler’s wares, or talking with this bystander or that, while I waited for him on board in an anguish of fear lest he should be left behind.

There was a measure of this suffering for me throughout the voyage wherever the boat stopped, for his insatiable interest in every aspect of nature and human nature urged him ashore and kept him there till the last moment before the gang-plank was drawn in. It was useless for him to argue with me that my uncle would not allow him to be left, even if he should forget himself so far as to be in any danger of that. I could not believe that a disaster so dire should not befall us, and I suffered a mounting misery till one day it mounted to frenzy. I do not know whether there were other children on board, but except for the officers of the boat, I was left mostly to myself, and I spent my time dreamily watching the ever-changing shore, so lost in its wild loveliness that once when I woke from my reverie the boat seemed to have changed her course, and to be going down-stream instead of up. It was in this crisis that I saw my father descending the gang-plank, and while I was urging his return in mute agony, a boat came up outside of us to wait for her chance of landing. I looked and read on her wheel-house the name New England, and then I abandoned hope. By what fell necromancy I had been spirited from my uncle’s boat to another I could not guess, but I had no doubt that the thing had happened, and I was flying down from the hurricane roof to leap aboard that boat from the lowermost deck when I met my uncle coming as quietly up the gangway as if nothing had happened. He asked what was the matter, and I gasped out the fact; he did not laugh; he had pity on me and gravely explained, “That boat is the New England: this is the New England No. 2” and at these words I escaped with what was left of my reason.

I had been the prey of that obsession which every one has experienced when the place where one is disorients itself and west is east and north is south. Sometimes this happens by a sudden trick within the brain, but I lived four years in Columbus and as many in Venice without once being right as to the points of the compass in my nerves, though my wits were perfectly convinced. Once I was months in a place where I suffered from this obsession, when I found myself returning after a journey with the north and south quite where they should be; and, “Now,” I exulted, “I will hold them to their duty.” I kept my eyes firmly fixed upon the station, as the train approached; then, without my lifting my gaze, the north was back again in the place of the south, and the vain struggle was over. Only the other day I got out of a car going north in Fourth Avenue, and then saw it going on south; and it was only by noting which way the house numbers increased that I could right myself.