V

One of the last log houses to survive in the vicinity of Jefferson. When Mr. Howells lived in the town such dwellings were common in the surrounding farm regionOne of the last log houses to survive in the vicinity of Jefferson. When Mr. Howells lived in the town such dwellings were common in the surrounding farm region

so much less that fifty dollars seldom passed through a farmer’s hands in a year. Payment was made us in kind rather than in coin, and every sort of farm produce was legal tender at the printing-office. Wood was welcome in any quantity, for our huge box-stove consumed it with inappeasable voracity, and even then did not heat the wide, low room which was at once editorial-room, composing-room, and press-room. Perhaps this was not so much the fault of the stove as of the building. In that cold, lake-shore country the people dwelt in wooden structures almost as thin and flimsy as tents; and often in the first winter of our sojourn the type froze solid with the water which the compositor put on it when he wished to distribute his case, placed near the window so as to get all the light there was, but getting all the cold there was, too. From time to time the compositor’s fingers became so stiff that blowing on them would not avail; he made many excursions between his stand and the stove; in severe weather he practised the device of warming his whole case of types by the fire, and, when they lost heat, warming it again.

The first floor of our office-building was used by a sash-and-blind factory; there was a machine-shop somewhere in it, and a mill for sawing out shingles; and it was better fitted to the exercise of these robust industries than to the requirements of our more delicate craft. Later, we had a more comfortable place, in a new wooden “business block,” and for several years before I left it the office was domiciled in an old dwelling-house, which we bought, and which we used without much change. It could never have been a very comfortable dwelling, and my associations with it are of a wintry cold, scarcely less polar than that we were inured to elsewhere. In fact, the climate of that region is rough and fierce; I know that there were lovely summers and lovelier autumns in mytime there, full of sunsets of a strange, wild, melancholy splendor, I suppose from some atmospheric influence of the lake; but I think chiefly of the winters, so awful to us after the mild seasons of southern Ohio; the frosts of ten and twenty below; the village streets and the country roads drowned in snow, the consumptives in the thin houses, and the “slippin’,” as the sleighing was called, that lasted from December to April with hardly a break. At first our family was housed on a farm a little way out, because there was no tenement to be had in the village, and my father and I used to walk to and from the office together in the morning and evening. I had taught myself to read Spanish, in my passion forDon Quixote, and I was now, at the age of fifteen, intending to write a life of Cervantes. The scheme occupied me a good deal in those bleak walks, and perhaps it was because my head was so hot with it that my feet were always very cold; but my father assured me that they would get warm as soon as my boots froze. If I have never yet written that life of Cervantes, on the other hand I have never been quite able to make it clear to myself why my feet should have got warm when my boots froze.

It may have been only a theory of his; it may have been a joke. He had a great many theories and a great many jokes, and together they always kept life interesting and sunshiny for him. With his serene temperament and his happy doubt of disaster in any form, he was singularly fitted to encounter the hardships of a country editor’s lot. But for the moment, and for what now seems a long time after the removal of our paper to the county-seat, these seem to have vanished. The printing-office was the center of civic and socialinterest; it was frequented by visitors at all times, and on publication day it was a scene of gaiety that looks a little incredible in the retrospect. The place was as bare and rude as a printing-office seems always to be: the walls were splotched with ink and the floor littered with refuse newspapers; but, lured by the novelty of the affair, and perhaps attracted by a natural curiosity to see what manner of strange men the printers were, the school-girls and young ladies of the village flocked in and made it like a scene of comic opera, with their pretty dresses and faces, their eager chatter and lively energy in folding the papers and addressing them to the subscribers, while our fellow-citizens of the place, like the bassos and barytones and tenors of the chorus, stood about and looked on with faintly sarcastic faces. It would not do to think now of what sorrow life and death have since wrought for all those happy young creatures, but I may recall without too much pathos the sensation when some citizen volunteer relaxed from his gravity far enough to relieve the regular mercenary at the crank of our huge power-press wheel, amid the applause of the whole company.

We were very vain of that press, which replaced the hand-press hitherto employed in printing the paper. This was of the style and make of the hand-press which superseded the Ramage press of Franklin’s time; but it had been decided to signalize our new departure by the purchase of a power-press of modern contrivance and of a speed fitted to meet the demands of a subscription-list which might be indefinitely extended. A deputation of the leading politicians accompanied the editor to New York, where he went to choose the machine, and where he bought a second-hand Adams press of the earliest pattern and patent. I do not know, or at this date I would not undertake to say, just what principle governed his selection of this superannuatedveteran; it seems not to have been very cheap; but possibly he had a prescience of the disabilities which were to task his ingenuity to the very last days of that press. Certainly no man of less gift and skill could have coped with its infirmities, and I am sure that he thoroughly enjoyed nursing it into such activity as carried it hysterically through those far-off publication days. It had obscure functional disorders of various kinds, so that it would from time to time cease to act, and would have to be doctored by the hour before it would go on. There was probably some organic trouble, too, for, though it did not really fall to pieces on our hands, it showed itself incapable of profiting by several improvements which he invented, and could, no doubt, have successfully applied to the press if its constitution had not been undermined. It went with a crank set in a prodigious fly-wheel which revolved at a great rate, till it came to the moment of making the impression, when the whole mechanism was seized with such a reluctance as nothing but an heroic effort at the crank could overcome. It finally made so great a draught upon our forces that it was decided to substitute steam for muscle in its operation, and we got a small engine which could fully sympathize with the press in having seen better days. I do not know that there was anything the matter with the engine itself, but the boiler had some peculiarities which might well mystify the casual spectator. He could easily have satisfied himself that there was no danger of its blowing up when he saw my brother feeding bran or corn-meal into its safety-valve in order to fill up certain seams or fissures in it which caused it to give out at the moments of the greatest reluctance in the press. But still he must have had his misgivings of latent danger of some other kind, though nothing ever actually happened of a hurtful character. To this day I do not know just wherethose seams or fissures were, but I think they were in the boiler-head, and that it was therefore suffering from a kind of chronic fracture of the skull. What is certain is that, somehow, the engine and the press did always get us through publication day, and not only with safety, but often with credit; so that many years after, when I was at home, and my brother and I were looking over an old file of the paper, we found it much better printed than either of us expected; as well printed, in fact, as if it had been done on an old hand-press, instead of the steam-power press which it vaunted the use of. The wonder was that, under all the disadvantages, the paper was ever printed on our steam-power press at all; it was little short of miraculous that it was legibly printed, and altogether unaccountable that such impressions as we found in that file could come from it. Of course, they were not average impressions; they were the very best out of the whole edition, and were as creditable as the editorial make-up of the sheet.

Upon the whole, our paper was an attempt at conscientious and self-respecting journalism; it addressed itself seriously to the minds of its readers; it sought to form their tastes and opinions. I do not know how much it influenced them, if it influenced them at all, and as to any effect beyond the circle of its subscribers, that cannot be imagined, even in a fond retrospect. But since no good effort is altogether lost, I am sure that this endeavor must have had some tacit effect; and I am sure that no one got harm from a sincerity of conviction that devoted itself to the highest interests of the reader, that appealed to nothing base, and flattered nothing foolish in him. It went from our home to the homes of the people in a very literal sense, for my fatherusually brought his exchanges from the office at the end of his day there, and made his selections or wrote his editorials while the household work went on him, about and his children gathered around the same lamp, with their books or their jokes; there were a good many of both.

Our county was the most characteristic of that remarkable group of counties in northern Ohio called the Western Reserve, and forty years ago the population was almost purely New England in origin, either by direct settlement from Connecticut, or indirectly after the sojourn of a generation in New York State. We were ourselves from southern Ohio, where the life was then strongly tinged by the adjoining life of Kentucky and Virginia, and we found these transplanted Yankees cold and blunt in their manners; but we did not undervalue their virtues. They were very radical in every way, and hospitable to novelty of all kinds. I imagine that they tested more new religions and new patents than have been even heard of in less inquiring communities. When we came among them they had lately been swept by the fires of spiritualism, which left behind a great deal of smoke and ashes where the inherited New England orthodoxy had been. They were temperate, hard-working, hard-thinking folks, who dwelt on their scattered farms, and came up to the county fair once a year, when they were apt to visit the printing-office and pay for their papers. They thought it droll, as people of the simpler occupations are apt to think all the more complex arts; and one of them once went so far in expression of his humorous conception as to say, after a long stare at one of the compositors dodging and pecking at the type in his case, “Like an old hen pickin’ up millet.” This sort of silence, and this sort of comment, both exasperated the printers, who took their revenge as they could. They fed it full, once, when a country subscriber’s horse, hitchedbefore the office, crossed his hind legs and sat down in his harness like a tired man, and they proposed to go out and offer him a chair, to take him a glass of water, and ask him to come inside. Fate did not often give them such innings; they mostly had to create their chances of reprisal, but they did not mind that.

There was always a good deal of talk going on, but, although we were very ardent politicians, our talk was not political. When it was not mere banter, it was mostly literary; we disputed about authors among ourselves and with the village wits who dropped in, and liked to stand with their backs to our stove and challenge opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and Macaulay, Pope and Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare. But it was Shakespeare who was oftenest on our tongues; indeed, the printing-office of former days had so much affinity with the theater that compositors and comedians were almost convertible. Religion entered a good deal into our discussions, which my father, the most tolerant of men, would not suffer to become irreverent. Part of his duty, as publisher of the paper, was to bear patiently with the type of farmer who thought he wished to discontinue his paper, and really wished to be talked into continuing it. I think he rather enjoyed letting such a subscriber talk himself out, and carrying him from point to point in his argument, always consenting that he knew best what he wanted to do, but skilfully persuading him at last that a home paper was more suited to his needs than any city substitute. Once I could have given the heads of his reasoning, but they are gone from me now.

He was like all country editors then, and I dare say now, in being a printer as well as an editor, and he took a just share in the mechanical labors. These were formerly much more burdensome, for twice or thrice the present type-setting was then done in the country offices.In that time we had three journeymen at work and two or three girl-compositors, and commonly a boy-apprentice besides. The paper was richer in a personal quality, and the printing-office was unquestionably more of a school. After we began to take girl-apprentices it became coeducative, as far as they cared to profit by it; but I think it did not serve to widen their thoughts or quicken their wits as it did those of the boys. They looked to their craft as a living, not as a life, and they had no pride in it. They did not learn the whole trade, as the journeymen had done; but served only such apprenticeship as fitted them to set type; and their earnings were usually as great at the end of a month as at the end of a year.

The printing-office had been my school from childhood so largely that I could almost say I had no other, but the time had come, even before this, when its opportunities did not satisfy the hunger which was always in me for knowledge convertible into such beauty as I imagined and wished to devote my life to. I was willing and glad to do my part in helping my father, but he recognized my right to help myself forward in the line of my own longing, and it was early arranged that I should have a certain measure of work to do, and when it was done I should be free for the day. My task was finished early in the afternoon, and then my consuming pleasures began when I had already done a man’s work. I was studying four or five languages, blindly and blunderingly enough, but with a confidence at which I can even now hardly smile; I was attempting many things in verse and prose which I seldom carried to a definite close, and I was reading, reading, reading, right and left, hither and yon, wherever an author tempted me. I was notmeaning to do less than the greatest things, or to know less than the most, but my criticism outran my performance and exacted of me an endeavor for the perfection which I found forever beyond me. Far into the night I clung to my labored failures in rhyme while I listened for the ticking of the death-watch in the walls of my little study; or if I had imagined, in my imitations of others’ fiction, some character that the poet had devoted to an early death, I helplessly identified myself with that character, and expected his fate. It was the day when this world was much more intimate with the other world than it is now, and the spiritualism which had evoked its phenomena through most houses in the village had left them haunted by dread sounds, if not sights; but it was not yet the day when nervous prostration had got its name or was known in its nature. For me this malady came in the hypochondria which was misery not less real because at the end of the ends I knew it to be the exaggeration of an apprehension without ground in reality.

I have hesitated to make any record of this episode, but I think it essential to the study of my very morbid boyhood, and I hope some knowledge of it may be helpful to others in like suffering. Somehow as a child I had always had a terror of hydrophobia, perhaps from hearing talk of that poor man who had died of it in the town where we then lived, and when years afterward I was, as I have told, bitten by a dog, my terror was the greater because I happened to find myself alone in the house when I ran home. I had heard of excising a snake-bite to keep the venom from spreading, and I would now have cut out the place with my knife, if I had known how. In the end I did nothing, and when my father came home he did not have the wound cauterized. He may have believed that anything which tended to fix mymind upon it would be bad, and perhaps I forgot it the sooner for his decision. I have not forgotten the make of the gloomy autumnal afternoon when the thing happened, or the moment when years afterward certain unguarded words awoke the fear in me which as many more years were needed to allay. By some chance there was talk with our village doctor about hydrophobia, and the capricious way the poison of a dog’s bite may work. “Works round in your system,” he said, “for seven years or more, and then it breaks out and kills you.” The words he let heedlessly fall fell into a mind prepared by ill-health for their deadly potency, and when the summer heat came I was helpless under it. Somehow I knew what the symptoms of the malady were, and I began to force it upon myself by watching for them. The splash of water anywhere was a sound I had to set my teeth against, lest the dreaded spasms should seize me; my fancy turned the scent of the forest fires burning round the village into the subjective odor of smoke which stifles the victim. I had no release from my obsession, except in the dreamless sleep which I fell into exhausted at night, or that little instant of waking in the morning, when I had not yet had time to gather my terrors about me, or to begin the frenzied stress of my effort to experience the thing I dreaded. There was no longer question of work for me, with hand or head. I could read, yes, but with the double consciousness in which my fear haunted every line and word without barring the sense from my perception. I read many novels, where the strong plot befriended me and formed a partial refuge, but I did not attempt escape in the poor boyish inventions, verse or prose, which I had fondly trusted might be literature. Instinct taught me that some sort of bodily fatigue was my safety; I spent the horrible days in the woods with a gun, or in the fieldsgathering wild berries, and walked to and from the distant places that I might tire myself the more. My father reasoned to the same effect for me, and helped me as best he could; of course I was released from my tasks in the printing-office, and he took me with him in driving about the country on political and business errands. We could not have spent many days in this way, when, as it seems, I woke one morning in a sort of crisis, and having put my fear to the test of water suddenly dashed from a doorway beside me and failed of the convulsion which I was always expecting, I began imperceptibly to get the better of my demon. My father’s talk always distracted me somewhat, and that morning especially his disgust with the beefsteak fried in lard which the landlady gave us for breakfast at the country tavern where we had passed the night must even have amused me, as a touch of the comedy blent with the tragedy in the Shakespearian drama of life. But no doubt a more real help was his recurrence, as often as I chose, to his own youthful suffering from hypochondria, and his constantly repeated assurance that I not only would not and could not have hydrophobia from that out-dated dog-bite, but that I must also soon cease to have hypochondria. I understood as well as he that it was not the fear of that malady which I was suffering, but the fear of the fear; that I was in no hallucination, no illusion as to the facts, but was helpless in the nervous prostration which science, or our poor village medicine, was yet many years from knowing or imagining. I have heard and read that sometimes people in their apprehension of the reality can bring on a false hydrophobia and die of it in the agonies their fancy creates. It may be so; but all that fear could do was done in me; and I did not die.

I could not absolutely fix the moment when I began to find my way out of the cloud of misery which loweredon my life, but I think that it was when I had gathered a little strength in my forced respite from work, and from the passing of the summer heat. It was as if the frost which people used to think put an end to the poisonous miasm of the swamps, but really only killed the insect sources of the malaria, had wrought a like sanitation in my fancy. My fear when it once lifted never quite overwhelmed me again, but it was years before I could endure the sight of the word which embodied it; I shut the book or threw from me the paper where I found it in print; and even now, after sixty years, I cannot bring myself to write it or speak it without some such shutting of the heart as I knew at the sight or sound of it in that dreadful time. The effect went deeper than I could say without accusing myself of exaggeration for both good and evil. In self-defense I learnt to practise a psychological juggle; I came to deal with my own state of mind as another would deal with it, and to combat my fears as if they were alien.

I cannot leave this confession without the further confession that though I am always openly afraid of dogs, secretly I am always fond of them; and it is only fair to add that they reciprocate my liking with even exaggerated affection. Dogs, especially of any more ferocious type, make up to me in spite of my diffidence; and at a hotel where we were once passing the summer the landlord’s bulldog, ugliest and dreadest of his tribe, used to divine my intention of a drive and climb into my buggy, where he couched himself on my feet, with a confidence in my reciprocal tenderness which I was anxious not to dispel by the least movement.

As soon as my nerves regained something of theirformer tone, I renewed my struggle with those alien languages, using such weapons as I could fit my hand to. Notably there was a most comprehensive manual which, because it proposed instruction in so many languages, I called (from my father’s invention or my own, for I had early learnt the trick of his drolling) a sixteen-bladed grammar. I wish now I could see that book, which did not include Greek or Hebrew or German, but abounded in examples of Latin, Italian, French, Spanish and probably Portuguese, and other tongues of that kinship, with literal versions of the texts. These versions falsified the native order of the words to the end that the English of them might proceed in the wonted way, and when I detected the imposition, I was the more offended because the right order of the words in those idioms was always perplexing me. The sixteen-bladed grammar was superseded by the ordinary school-books, Arnold’s for Latin, and Anthon’s for Greek, but the perplexities of one sort or other persisted. Such a very little instruction would have enlightened me; but who was to give it me? My father, perhaps, but he may not have known how, though in his own youth he had written an English grammar and more or less taught it, or he may have thought I would find it out for myself. He would have temperamentally trusted to that; he was always prouder than I of what I did unaided; he believed I could do everything without help. That was an error, but more than I ever could say do I owe to his taste in literature and the constant guidance up to a certain limit which he gave me. When I came back from the fields and woods with the sense of their beauty, and eager to turn it into literature, he guarded me against translating it in the terms of my English poets, with their larks and nightingales, their daisies and cowslips. He contended that our own birds and flowers were quite as good, besides being genuine; but he taught me to love the earlier English classics; andif I began to love the later classics, both English and American, and to be his guide in turn, this is only saying that each one is born of his generation. The time came early in our companionship when he thought fit to tell me that he regarded me as different from other boys of my age; and I had a very great and sweet happiness without alloy of vanity, from his serious and considered words. He did not say that he expected great things of me; though I had to check his fondness in offering my poor endeavors for the recognition of print, and I soon had the support of editors in this. But he justified himself and convinced me by once bringing to our house a kindly editor from a neighboring city whom he showed some of my things, and who carried away with him one of the minutely realistic sketches in which I had begun to practise such art as I have been able to carry farthest. When week after week the handsomely printedOhio Farmercame with something in it, verse or prose, which I had done, I am not sure I had greater joy in it than my father, though now he thought it well to hide his joy as I always did mine.

All the while I was doing sketches and studies and poems for our own paper, which I put into type without first writing them, and short stories imitated from some favorite author of the moment with an art which I imagined must conceal itself from the reader. Once I carried Shakespeare beyond himself in a scene transferred from one of the histories, with such comedy characters as Pistol and Bardolph speaking the interchangeable prose and verse of his plays in adapting themselves to some local theme, which met with applause from the group of middle-aged cronies whom I most consorted with at the time. Once, also. I attempted a serial romance which, after a succession of several numbers, faltered and atlast would not go on. I have told in another place how I had to force it to a tragic close without mercy for the heroine, hurried to an untimely death as the only means of getting her out of the way, and I will not repeat the miserable details here. It was a thing which could not meet with praise from any one, not even my father, though he did his best to comfort me in the strange disaster.

If my mother was the heart, he was the soul of our family life. In those young days when he did so much of his newspaper work at home he would always turn from it to take part in our evening jollity. He was gladly our equal in the jokes which followed around our table; and when he was stricken in his great age with the paralysis which he rallied from for a time, it was his joy to join his gray-haired children at the board in his wheeled chair and share in their laughing and making laugh. It seems to me that I can render him intelligible by saying that while my very religious-minded grandfather expected and humbly if fervently hoped to reach a heaven beyond this world by means of prayers and hymns and revivals and conversions, my not less religious-minded father lived for a heaven on earth in his beloved and loving home; a heaven of poetry and humor, and good-will and right thinking. He made it that sort of heaven for himself, and as he was the bravest man I have known because he never believed there was any danger, I think he must have felt himself as safe from sorrow in it as if he were in the world beyond this. When one of my younger brothers died, he was as if astonished that such a thing could be; it burst his innocent and beautiful dream; and afterward when I first met him, I was aware of his clinging, a broken man, to what was left of it. Death struck again and again, and he shrank under the bewildering blows; but a sense ofthat inexpressible pathos of his first bereavement remains with me.

The family scene that passed in that earlier time was not always as idyllic as I have painted it. With five brothers in it there was often the strife which is always openly or covertly between brothers. My elder brother, who was four years my elder, had changed from the whimsical tease and guardian angel of our childhood to the anxious taskmaster of our later boyhood, requiring the same devotion in our common work that his conscience exacted of himself. I must say that for my own part I labored as faithfully as he, and I hotly resented his pressure. Hard words passed between us two, as blows, not very hard, had passed, while we were still children, between me and my younger brothers. But however light the blows were, they had to be disclaimed, and formal regret expressed, at my father’s insistence. He would ascertain who struck the first blow, and when he had pronounced that wrong he would ask, “And you struck him back?” If the fact could not be denied, he went on to the further question, “Well, do two wrongs make a right?” Clearly they did not, and nothing remained but reluctant apology and reconciliation. Reason and civic morality were on his side, but I could not feel that justice was, and it seems to me yet that the primary offender was guiltier than the secondary.

Long ago, long before our youth was passed, utter forgiveness passed between my elder brother and me. The years since were years of such mutual affection as I could not exaggerate the sense of in tenderness and constancy, and the exchange of trust and honor. He came even in our youth to understand my aim in life, and feel whatwas always leading me on. He could not understand, perhaps, why poetry in literature should be so all in all with me, but he felt it in nature as keenly and deeply as I; and I have present now the experience of driving with him one September afternoon (on some chase of the delinquent subscriber), when he owned by his few spare words the unity of the beautiful in everything as I spoke the melting lines of Tennyson:

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.Tears from the depths of some divine despairRise in the heart and gather to the eyes,In looking on the happy autumn-fields,And thinking of the days that are no more.”

He had a grotesque humor which vented itself in jokes at the expense of my mother’s implicit faith in everything he said, as when she wondered how the cow got into the garden, and he explained, “She pulled out the peg with her teeth and put it under her fore leg and just walked through the gate,” and my mother answered, “Well, indeed, indeed, I believe she did, child.” She had little humor of her own, but she had a childlike happiness in the humor of us others, though she would not suffer joking from any but him. She relied upon him in everything, but in some things she drew a sharp line between the duties of her boys and girls in the tradition of her Pennsylvania origin. Indoor work was for girls, and outdoor for boys, and we shared her slight for the Yankee men who went by our gate to the pasture with their milk-pails. That was woman’s work though it was outdoor work; and though it was outdoor work to kill chickens for the table, none of us boys had the heart to cut their heads off because we could not bear to witness their post-mortem struggles; but my brother brought out his gun and shot them, and this pursuit of them as gamein our barnyard got us over a difficulty otherwise insuperable. The solution of our scruple, which my father shared, must have amused him; but my brother took it seriously. His type of humor was in the praise which long afterward he gave a certain passage of my realistic fiction, when he said it was as natural as the toothache.

Throughout that earlier time my father’s chief concern was first that very practical affair of making his paper pay for the office and the house, and then incidentally preventing the spread of slavery into the territories. He was willing enough, I fancy, to yield his silent partnership in my studies to the young printer who now, for no reason that I can remember, began to take an active share in them. I have told inMy Literary Passionshow J. W. and I read Cervantes and Shakespeare together; but I could not say just why or when we began to be boon companions in our self-conducted inquiries into Latin and Greek, and then into German, which presently replaced Spanish in my affections through the witchery of Heine. He had the definite purpose of making those languages help him to a professorship in a Western college, but if I had any clear purpose it was to possess myself of their literature. To know them except to read them I do not think I cared; I did not try to speak or write the modern tongues; to this day I could not frame a proper letter in Spanish, German, French, or Italian, but I have a literary sense of them all. I wished to taste the fruit of my study before I had climbed the tree where it grew, and in a manner I did begin to gather the fruit without the interposition of the tree. Without clear knowledge of their grammatical forms, I imitated their literary forms. I cast my poetry, such as it was, into the metres of the Spanish poets I was reading, and without instruction or direction I acquainted myself with much of their literary history. I once even knew from thearchaic tragedy of her name who Iñez de Castro was; I do not know now.

My friendship with J. W. early became chief of the many friends of a life rich in friendships. He was like most of his craft in his eccentric comings and goings to and from our employ, when sometimes we had no work to give him, and sometimes he had none to give us. When he left us he always went to Wisconsin, where he had once lived; and when he came back from one of these absences he would bring with him bits of character which he gave for our joy in his quaint observance, such as that of the mother who complained of her daughter because “she didn’t cultivate her featur’s none; she just let ’em hing and wallop,” or the school-mistress who genteelly explained in the blackberry-patch where he found her, that she was “just out picking a few berries for tea-he-he-he,” or the country bachelor who belatedly made up his mind to marry, and in his default of female acquaintance took his place on the top rail of a roadside fence, and called to the first woman who passed, “Say! You a married woman?” and then at the frightened answer, indignantly gasped out, “Yes, sir!” offered a mere “Oh!” for all apology and explanation, and let himself vanish by falling into the corn-field behind him.

J. W. literally made his home with us, for as if the burden of work for our own large family were not enough for my mother, we had always some of the printers, men or maids, to board. He entered into the spirit of our life; but it was recognized that he was peculiarly my friend, and we were left to our special comradeship. In that village nearly everybody played or sang, and in the summer nights the young people went about serenading one another’s houses, under the moon which was then always full; and J. W. shared in every serenade where a tenor voice was welcome. At the printing-office, in the afternoonwhen the compositors were distributing their cases, he led the apprentice-girls in the songs which once filled the whole young world. The songs were often poverty-stricken enough in sentiment, and I suppose cheap and vulgar in music, but they were better than the silence that I should once have said had followed them. Yet only last winter in a hotel on the New Jersey coast, where there was some repairing in the corridor outside my room, the young painters and carpenters gathered at their lunch near my door, and after they had begun to joke they suddenly began to sing together as if it were still the habit for people of their lot to do so, in a world I had thought so hushed, except for its gramophones; and though I could not make out the words, the gentle music somehow saved them from seeming common. It went to my heart, and made me glad of life where youth still sang as it used to sing when I was young.

Sometimes the village serenaders came to me, and then I left my books and stumbled down to the gate, half dazed, to find the faces I knew before they flashed away with gay shrieking and shouting; and J. W. among them, momentarily estranged from me, jealous in that world where we had our intimacy. My ambition was my barrier from the living world around me; I could not beat my way from it into that; it kept me absent and hampered me in the vain effort to be part of the reality I have always tried to portray. Though J. W. expected to make a more definite use of our studies, he seemed to understand me as well at least as I understood myself in my vaguer striving. I do not now remember reading him the things I was trying to write; or of his speaking to me of them. Perhaps my shyness, my pride, went so far as keeping them from him, though I kept from him so few of my vagaries in that region of hopes and fears where youth chiefly has its being.

The songs he had were as many as the stories, but there was one song, often on the tongues of the village serenaders, which was oftenest on his, and which echoes to me still from those serenades and those choral afternoons in the printing-office, and more distinctly yet from what we felt a midnight of wild adventure, when he sang it alone. We had gone to call together on two of our village girls at school fifteen miles away, and had set out in the flattering temperature of a January thaw; but when we started home, many hours into the dark, the wind had whipped round from the south to the north and had frozen the curdling slush into icy ruts under the runners of our sleigh. Our coats were such as had suited the thaw, but J. W. had a pair of thin cotton gloves for driving, while I had none. We took turns in driving at first, but as the way lengthened the cold strengthened and I cowered definitively under our buffalo robe, then the universal provision against the rigor of winter travel. For a while we shouted together in some drama of the situation, but by and by our fun froze at our lips, and then J. W. began to sing that song he used oftenest to sing:

“Talk not to me of future bliss,Talk not to me of joys gone by!The happiest time is this!”

He kept the measure of the tune by beating on the robe above my head, first with one fist and then the other, as he passed the reins from hand to hand, and by pounding with both feet on the floor of the sleigh beside me. We lived through the suffering of that drive partly because he was twenty-two years old and I was eighteen, but partly also because we realized the irony of the song, with all the joke of it. Yet it was a long nightmare of misery, with a moment of supreme anguish, when we stopped at the last toll-gate, two miles from home, and the keeper cameshuddering out with his red blot of a lantern. Then the song stopped for an instant, but seems to have begun again, and not ended till we sat with our feet in the oven of the kitchen stove at home, counting our adventure all gain. The memory of it brings before me again the face of my friend, with its beautiful regularity of feature, its pale blue eyes, its smooth, rich, girlish complexion, and its challenging, somewhat mocking smile. But the date when I saw him last in life is lost to me. He went to Wisconsin, as usual, but there was no wonted return; we kept each other present in the long letters which we wrote so long, but they faltered with time and ceased, and I can only make sure now that he got the professorship he aimed at in some seat of learning so modest that it has kept its name from me; and then, years after, that he went into the war for the Union and was killed.

I had now begun to be impatient of the village, and when it came to my last parting with J. W., which I did not know was the last, I felt the life very dull and narrow which I had once found so vivid and ample. There had come the radiant revelation of girlhood, and I had dwelt in the incredible paradise where we paired or were paired off each with some girl of his fancy or fancied fancy. There had been the ranging of the woods in autumn for chestnuts and in the spring for wintergreen; there had been the sleigh-rides to the other villages and the neighboring farms where there was young life waiting to welcome us through the drifting snows; there had been the dances at the taverns and the parties at the girls’ houses with the games and the frolics, and the going home each with the chosen one at midnight and the long lingering at the gate: there had been the moonlight walks; there hadbeen the debating societies and the spelling-matches; there had been the days of the County Fair and the Fourths-of-July, and the Christmases rehabilitated from Dickens; and there had been the impassioned interest of the easily guessed anonymous letters of St. Valentine’s day. But these things had passed, and with a certain disappointment suffered and yet prized there had come the sense of spent witchery and a spell outworn, and I chose to revolt from it all and to pine for a wider world and prouder pleasures. Distance in time and space afterward duly set the village I had wearied of in a truer and kinder light, and I came to value it as the potential stuff of such fiction as has never yet been written, and now never will be by me. I came to see that it abounded in characteristics and interests which differenced it from any other village, and I still think the companionship to which I passed in the absences of J. W. such as would make into the setting for as strange a story as we could ask of reality in the days when we wished life to surpass romance in strangeness.

I have told inMy Literary Passionsof the misanthropical Englishman who led in our Dickens-worship and played the organ in the little Episcopal church, and built the organs for such country churches about as could afford to replace their moaning melodions with them. I have said, I hope without too much attempt to establish the fact, that he was also a house-painter, and that in the long leisures of our summer days and winter nights and in the throes of his perpetual dyspepsia he was the inveterate antagonist in argument of the vivid Yankee who built steam-engines among us, and had taught school, and turned his quick head and hand to any art or trade which making an easy living exacted of him. They both lavishly lent me their books, and admitted me on equal terms to their intellectual enmity and amity, which was sharedin some tacit way with a clever New England trader in watches, clocks, and jewelry. He came and went among us on visits more or less prolonged from some Eastern center of his commerce (my memory somehow specifies Springfield, Massachusetts), and he had a shrewd smile and kindly twinkling eye which represent him to me yet. He seldom took part in the disputes nightly held at the drug-and-book store; but not from want of spirit, when he had the boldness to deny some ferocious opinion exploded by the organ-builder in an access of indigestion.

The disputes nearly always involved question of the existence of a God, which was thought improbable by both of the debaters, and the immortality of the soul, which was doubted, in spite of the spiritualism rife in every second house in the village, with manifestations by rappings, table-tippings, and oral and written messages from another world through psychics of either sex, but oftenest the young girls one met in the dances and sleigh-rides. The community was prevalently unreligious; there was an ageing attendance at the Baptist and Methodist churches, but there was no stated service of the Congregationalists, though there was occasional preaching at their house and sometimes a lecture from an anti-slavery apostle, who wasted his doctrine on a community steeped in it already. Among many of the young people of the village the prevalent tone was irreverent to mocking in matters of religion; but their unlimited social freedom was without blame and without scandal, and if our villagers were not religious, they were, in a degree which I still think extraordinary, literary. Old and young they read and talked about books, and better books than people read and talk about now, as it seems to me, possibly because there were not so many bad ones; the English serials pirated into our magazines were followed and discussed, and any American author who made aneffect in the East became promptly known in that small village of the Western Reserve. There were lawyers, of those abounding at every county-seat, who were fond of reading, and imparted their taste to the young men studying law in their offices. I might exaggerate the fact, but I do not think I have done so, or that I was much deceived as to a condition which reported itself, especially to me whose whole life was in books, through the sympathy I met in the village houses. I was always reading whatever came to hand, either with an instinct for what was good in my choice of books or with good fortune in my chance of them. Literature was so commonly accepted as a real interest, that I do not think I was accounted altogether queer in my devotion to it. To be sure, at an evening session in one of the dry-goods and grocery stores where question of me came up, it was decided that I would be nowhere in a horse-trade, but this was a rare instance of slight, and I do not believe that my disability would have been generally counted against me.

Somewhere about this time I gave a month to the study of law in the office of the United States Senator dwelling among us. I have never regretted reading a first volume of Blackstone through, or not going on to the second; his frank declaration that the law was a jealous mistress and would brook no divided love, was upon reflection quite enough for one whose heart was given to a different muse. I was usually examined in this author by the Senator’s nephew, my fellow-student, whom I examined in turn; but once, at least, the Senator himself catechized me, though he presently began to talk about the four great English quarterly reviews which I was known in the village for reading, and which it seemedhe read too. No doubt he found me more perfect in them than in Blackstone; at least I felt that I did myself more credit in them. I have elsewhere spoken more fully already of this episode of my life; but I speak of it again because I think that the commonly accepted Wade legend scarcely does justice to a man not only of great native power, but of wider cultivation than it recognizes, and I would like to do what I can to repair the injustice. He was famed in contemporary politics as Old Ben Wade before he had passed middle life, and he was supposed to stand up against the fierce pro-slavery leaders in Congress with an intrepidity even with their own. He had a strong, dark face, and a deep, raucous voice, with a defiant laugh, and these lent their support to the popular notion of him as a rude natural force unhelped by teaching, though he had taught himself in the days of his early struggle, as Lincoln and most public men of his time had done, and later had taught others as country schoolmaster. Farm-boy and cattle-drover and canal-digger, more had remained to him from schoolmaster and medical student, than from either of his other callings, and though he became part of our history without the help of great intellectual refinement, he was by no means without intellectual refinement, or without the ability to estimate the value of it in others. Naturally he might also underestimate it, and perhaps it was from an underestimate that he judged the oratory of such a man as Charles Sumner, to whom he told me he had said of a speech of his, “It’s all very well, Sumner, but it has no bones in it.”

Wade was supposed by his more ill-advised admirers to lend especial effect to his righteous convictions by a free flow of profanity, but I have to bear witness that I never heard any profanity from him, though profanity must have been the common parlance of the new country and the rude conditions he grew up in. He was personallya man of silent dignity, as we saw him in the village, going and coming at the post-office, for he seldom seemed to pass the gate of his house yard on any other errand, in the long summer vacations between the sessions of the many Congresses when he sojourned among us. I have the sense of him in a back room of the office which stood apart from his house, after the old-fashioned use of country lawyers’ and doctors’ offices; and I can be sure of his visiting the students in the front room only that once when he catechized me in Blackstone, but I cannot say whether I stood in awe of him as a great lawyer, or quite realized his importance as United States Senator from the State of Ohio for eighteen years. Historically it has been thought his misfortune to outlive the period when the political struggle with slavery passed into the Civil War, and to carry into that the spirit of the earlier time, with his fierce alienation from the patient policy of Lincoln, and his espousal of the exaggerations of the Reconstruction. But it would be easy to do injustice to this part of his valiant career, and not easy to do justice to that part of it where he stood with the very few in his defiance of the pro-slavery aggression.

Probably he would not have understood my forsaking the law, and I evaded the explanation he once sought of me when we met in the street, dreading the contempt which I might well have fancied in him. I wish now that, knowing him a little on his æsthetic side, I might have had the courage to tell him why I could not give my heart to that jealous mistress, being vowed almost from my first days to that other love which will have my fealty to the last. But in the helplessness of youth I could not even imagine doing this, and I had to remain in my dread of his contempt. Yet he may not have despised me, after all. It was known with what single-handed courage I was carrying on my struggle with thealien languages, and their number was naturally over-stated. The general interest in my struggle was reflected in the offer of a farmer from another part of the county to be one of three or four who would see me through Harvard. It was good-will which, if it had ever materialized, my pride would have been fierce to refuse; but now I think of it without shame, and across the gulf which I would fain believe has some thither shore I should like to send that kind man the thanks which I fancy were never adequately expressed to him while he lived. It remains vaguely, from vague personal knowledge, that he was of Scotch birth and breeding; he had a good old Scotch name, and he lived on his prosperous farm in much more than the usual American state, with many books about him.

I went back not without shame, but also not without joy from the Senator’s law-office to my father’s printing-office, and I did not go to Harvard, or to any college or school thereafter. I still think that a pity, for I have never agreed with Lowell, who, when I deplored my want of schooling, generously instanced his own over-weight of learning as an evil I had escaped. It still seems to me lamentable that I should have had to grope my way and so imperfectly find it where a little light from another’s lamp would have instantly shown it. I still remain in depths of incredible ignorance as to some very common things; for at school I never got beyond long division in arithmetic, and after my self-discovery of grammar I should be unable to say,in due piedi, just what a preposition was, though I am aware of frequently using that part of speech, and, I hope, not incorrectly.

I did what I could to repair the defect of instruction, or rather I tried to make myself do it, for I had the nature of a boy to contend with, and did not love my work so much as I loved the effect of it. While I live I must regret that want of instruction, and the discipline whichwould have come with it, though Fortune, as if she would have flattered my vanity when she could bring her wheel round to it, bore me the offer of professorships in three of our greatest universities. In fact, when I thought of coming home from my consulship in Venice, ten years after my failure to achieve any sort of schooling, it had been my hope that I might get some sort of tutorship in a very modest college, and I wrote to Lowell about it, but he did not encourage me. Yet I was hardly fixed in the place which much better suited me as the assistant editor of theAtlantic Monthly, when one of the faculty came to me from Schenectady to offer me the sub-professorship of English in Union College, and no long time after I was sounded by the first educational authority in the country as to whether I would accept a like place in Washington University at St. Louis. It was twice as long after this that those three supreme invitations which I have boasted came to me. But I knew better than any one, unless it was Fortune herself, the ignorance I had hidden so long, and I forbore to risk a middling novelist on the chance of his turning out a poor professor, or none. In every case the offer was such as might well have allured me, but when, after a sleepless night of longing and fearing over that of Harvard which Lowell conveyed me with the promise, “You shall wear the gown that Ticknor wore, and Longfellow wore, and I wore,” I had the strength to refuse it, he wrote me his approval of my decision. It was a decision that I have rejoiced in ever since, with the breathless gratitude, when I think of it, of one who has withheld himself from a step over the brink of a precipice.

The other allurements to a like doom were hardly less gratifying. What indeed could have been more gratifying, except the Harvard offer of the professorship of the languages of the south of Europe (with the privilege oftwo years’ preparation in the Latin countries, whose tongues I had tampered with), than the offer of the English professorship in Yale? It was Lounsbury, now lately lost forever to these skies, Lounsbury the fine scholar, the charming writer, the delightful wit, the critic unsurpassed in his kind, who came smiling with the kind eyes, dimmed almost to blindness on the field of Gettysburg in the forgotten soldiership of his youth, to do me this incredible honor. Later came the offer of the same chair in Johns Hopkins, twice repeated by the president of that university. When in my longing and my despair I asked, What was the nature of such a professorship, he answered, Whatever I chose to make it; and this still seems to me, however mistaken in my instance, the very measure of the wisest executive large-mindedness. President Gilman had written to me from New York, and had come to see me in London, and again written to me in Boston, and I could not do less than go down to Baltimore and look at the living body of the university and see what part in it I might become. A day sufficed; where so many men were busy with the work which they were so singularly qualified to do, I could not think of bringing my half-heartedness to an attempt for which all the common sense I had protested my unfitness, my entire unlikeness to the kind of man he had so magnanimously misimagined me. I turned from that shining opportunity of failure as I turned from the others, and if the reader thinks I have dwelt too vaingloriously upon them he shall have his revenge in the spectacle of my further endeavors not to be the stuff which professors are made of.

I could have been spared from the printing-office for the study of the law, when I could not be spared from itotherwise, because I might soon begin to make my living by practising before justices of the peace in the pettifogging which was then part of the study in the country offices. My labor, which was worth as much as a journeyman compositor’s, could not have been otherwise spared; much less could my father have afforded the expense of my schooling; and I cannot recall that I thought it an unjust hardship when it was decided after due family counsel, that I could not be sent to an academy in a neighboring village. I had not the means of estimating my loss; but the event seemed to have remained a poignant regret with my brother, and in after years he lamented what he felt to have been an irreparable wrong done me: now he is dead, and it touches me to think he should have felt that, for I never blamed him, and I am glad he gave me the chance to tell him so. I may have shed some tears when first denied; I did shed a few very bitter ones when I once confessed the hope I had that the editor of theOhio Farmermight give me some sort of literary employment at a sum I named, and he said, “He would never pay you three dollars a week in the world for that,” and I had to own in anguish of soul that he was doubtless right. He worked every day of the week and far into every night to help my father earn the property we were all trying to pay for, and he rightfully came into the eventual ownership of the newspaper. By an irony of fate not wholly unkind he continued for half a century in the printing-business, once so utterly renounced. Then, after a few years of escape to a consular post in the tropics which he used to say was the one post which, if it had been whittled out of the whole universe, would have suited him best, he died, and lies buried in the village, the best-beloved man who ever lived there.

It was the day with us of self-denials which I cannottrust myself to tell in detail lest I should overtell them. I was willing to make a greater figure in dress than nature has ever abetted me in, but I still do not think it was from an excess of vanity that I once showed my father the condition of my hat, and left him to the logic of the fact. He whimsically verified it, and said, “Oh, get it half-soled,” as if it had been a shoe; and we had our laugh together, but I got the new hat, which, after all, did not make me the dashing presence I might have hoped, though the vision of it on the storekeeper’s counter always remained so distinct with me that in Seville, a few years ago, it seemed as if its ghost were haunting me in the Cordovese hats on all the heads I met. Like them it had a wide flat brim, and it narrowed slightly upward to the low flat crown of those hats which I now knew better than to buy.

But if we seem to have spared on dress, our table was of as unstinted abundance as it might be in a place where there was no market, except as the farmers brought us chickens and butter and vegetables and the small fruits of the pastures and clearings, where every sort of wild berries grew. The region had abounded in deer, and after we came to the village in 1852 venison was only three cents a pound. Once a black bear was chased from forest to forest across our land, but he did not wait to fix the market price of his meat; half the sky was often hidden with wild pigeons, and there was a summer when the gray squirrels swarmed through the streets in one of their mystical migrations from west to east. Such chances of game scarcely enriched our larder; and the salt-pork barrel was our constant reliance. This was a hardship, after the varied abundance of the larger places where we had lived, but we shared it with our fellow-villagers, and in this as in other conditions of our life we did not realize as deprivation what was the lot of the whole community. If we denied ourselves it wasto meet the debts which would not be denied, and to possess ourselves of the roof over our heads and an ampler future in the ownership of our means of living. But I think we denied ourselves too much, and that we paid far beyond its moral worth for the house we were buying. To own the house she lived in had always been my mother’s dream since her young married days when my father built the first little house where they dwelt together, and where I was born. In all the intervening quarter of a century they had lived in rented houses, and she could not help feeling that the rent they paid ought to have gone toward buying a house of their own. In this she was practically right, but now the house which we all worked so hard to buy belongs to strangers, and unless there is an effect of our self-denial in some other world, the purchase was as much waste as rent paid to a landlord. We were in fact always paying a certain rent in the interest on the notes which we slowly accumulated the money to meet, but my mother could not feel that the same, and I am glad she had her wish long before she died, and her last years were passed under a roof which she owned.

In time, but I do not know how long time, for such things did not interest me, though I was doing my share in helping pay off our debt, the promissory notes which my father had given for the purchase of our newspaper were taken up, and the newspaper was also our property. Nobody could molest us or make us afraid in its possession; and in my hope of other things it did not concern me that the title vested in his partnership with my brother, who had most justly earned his half, and who by an enterprise of his own finally established the family fortunes in undreamed-of prosperity. It was characteristic of my father that as long as their partnership existed there were no accounts between them; after my brother had a family of his own each drew from the common income at his wishor need, and when I came of sufficient worldly wisdom to realize the risks to their peace from this anomalous arrangement, I protested against it in vain. They agreed with me that it was precarious and in a way ridiculous, and that it certainly ought to cease, but as long as they continued together they remained partners on these terms. After my father withdrew, my brother took his own son into partnership, and when he came in his turn to retire, he contritely owned to me that they had not departed from the same old unbusiness-like community of ways and means, though he had promised me very earnestly many times to end it. While I am upon these matters it is a pleasure for me to record that when I came home from Venice with the manuscript ofVenetian Lifepromised publication by a London house if I could find an American house to take half the proposed edition, and I confessed that I had very little hope of getting this taken in New York or Boston, my brother promptly offered to take it himself. He was then in that undreamed-of prosperity which I have mentioned, and though he had no expectation of becoming a book-publisher, he was very willing to incur the risks involved. As all my world knows, the book found an equally courageous friend in New York, and came out with the American imprint of Hurd & Houghton instead of Joseph A. Howells & Co.

It is not surprising to me that I cannot date the time of our acquiring the newspaper, free and clear, as the real-estate phrase is, but I am certainly surprised and more pained that I cannot remember just when the house, endeared to us as home, became our very own. Its possession, as I have said, had been the poetry of my mother’s hard-working, loving life, and no doubt she had watched with hope and fear the maturing of each of the notes for it, with the interest they bore, until the last was paidoff. In my father’s buoyant expectation of the best in

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