The Miami Canal at HamiltonThe Miami Canal at Hamilton
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 whichhad 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 explanationand 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 theAnnexation 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 throughGulliver’s Travelsand Poe’sTales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
My father had not only explained to me the satire which underlayGulliver’s Travels; he told me so much too indignantly of De Foe’s appropriation of Selkirk’s narrative, that it long kept me from readingRobinson 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, sinceit 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 shoesskoes, and claimed to have come to America in askip; 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 abhorrentfor 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. Whenthey 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.
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 takingon 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 famousNew 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 towait for her chance of landing. I looked and read on her wheel-house the nameNew 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 theNew England: this is theNew 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.
I suppose my father promised a reform that should appease my unreason, but whether he could deny himself those chances of general information I am not so sure; we may have both expected too much of each other.As I was already imaginably interested in things of the mind beyond my years, he often joined me in my perusal of the drifting landscape and made me look at this or that feature of it, but he afterward reported at home that he never could get anything from me but a brief “Yes, indeed,” in response. That amused him, yet I do not think I should have disappointed him so much if I could have told him I was losing nothing, but that our point of view was different. The soul of a child is a secret to itself, and in its observance of life there is no foretelling what it shall loose or what it shall hold. I do not believe that anything which was of use to me was lost upon me, but what I chiefly remember now is my pleasure in the log cabins in the woods on the shores, with the blue smoke curling on the morning or the evening air from their chimneys. My heart was taken with a yearning for the wilderness such as the coast-born boy feels for the sea; in the older West the woods called to us with a lure which it would have been rapture to obey; the inappeasable passion for their solitude drove the pioneer into the forest, and it was still in the air we breathed. But my lips were sealed, for the generations cannot utter themselves to each other till the strongest need of utterance is past.
I used to sit a good deal on the hurricane-deck or in the pilot-house, where there was often good talk among the pilots or the boat’s officers, and where once I heard with fascination the old Scotch pilot, Tom Lindsay, telling of his own boyhood in the moors, and of the sheep lost in the drifting snows; that also had the charm of the wilderness; but I did not feel the sadness of his saying once, as we drifted past a row of crimson-headed whisky barrels on a wharf-boat, “Many a one of those old Red Eyes I’ve helped to empty,” or imagine the far and deep reach of the words which remained with me. Somewhere in the officers’ quarters I found a sea novel, whichI read partly through, but I have not finishedThe Cruise of the Midge, to this day, though I believe that as sea novels go it merits reading. When I was not listening to the talk in the pilot-house, or looking at the hills drifting by, I was watching the white-jacketed black cabin-boys setting the tables for dinner in the long saloon of the boat. It was built, after a fashion which still holds in the Western boats, with a gradual lift of the stem and stern and a dip midway which somehow enhanced the charm of the perspective even to the eyes of a hungry boy. Dinner was at twelve, and the tables began to be set between ten and eleven, with a rhythmical movement of the negroes as they added each detail of plates and cups and knives and glasses, and placed the set dishes of quivering jelly at discrete intervals under the crystals of the chandeliers softly tinkling with the pulse of the engines. At last some more exalted order of waiters appeared with covered platters and spirit-lamps burning under them, and set them down before the places of the captain and his officers. Then the bell was sounded for the passengers; the waiters leaned forward between these when they were seated; at a signal from their chief they lifted the covers of the platters and vanished in a shining procession up the saloon, while each passenger fell upon the dishes nearest himself.
About the time I had become completely reconciled to the conditions of the voyage, which the unrivaled speed of theNew England No. 2shortened to a three-days’ run up the river, I woke one morning to find her lying at the Pittsburg landing, and when I had called my father to come and share my wonder at a stretch of boats as long as that at Cincinnati, and been mimicked by a cabin-boy for my unsophisticated amazement, nothing remained for me but to visit the houses of the aunts and uncles abounding in cousins. Of the homeward voyagenothing whatever is left in my memory; but I know we came back on theNew England No. 2, though we must have left the boat and taken it again on a second trip at Wheeling, after a week spent with my mother’s people at Martin’s Ferry. My father wished me to see the glass-foundries and rolling-mills which interested him so much more than me; he could not get enough of those lurid industries which I was chiefly concerned in saving myself from. I feigned an interest in the processes out of regard for him, but Heaven knows I cared nothing for the drawing of wire or the making of nails, and only a very little for the blowing of the red, vitreous bubbles from the mouths of long steel pipes. With weariness I escaped from these wonders, but with no such misery as I eluded the affection of the poor misshapen, half witted boy who took a fancy to me at the house of some old friends of my father where we had supper after the long day. With uncouth noises of welcome, and with arms and legs flying controllessly about, he followed me through a day that seemed endless. His family of kindly English folk, from the life-long habit of him, seemed unaware of anything strange, and I could not for shame and for fear of my father’s reproach betray my suffering. The evening began unduly to fall, thick with the blackness of the coal smoke poured from the chimneys of those abhorred foundries, and there was a fatal moment when my father’s friends urged him to stay the night and I thought he would consent. The dreams of childhood are oftenest evil, but mine holds record of few such nightmares as this.
After my father sold his paper and was casting about for some other means of livelihood, there were occasionalshadows cast by his anxieties in the bright air of my childhood. Again I doubt if any boy ever lived a gladder time than I lived in Hamilton, Butler County, Ohio: words that I write still when I try a new pen, because I learned to write them first, and love them yet. When we went to live in Dayton, where my father managed to make a sort of progressive purchase of a newspaper which he never quite paid for, our skies changed. It was after an interval of experiment in one sort and another, which amused his hopeful ingenuity, but ended in nothing, that he entered upon this long failure. The DaytonTranscriptwhen he began with it was a tri-weekly, but he made it a daily, and this mistake infected the whole enterprise. It made harder work for us all than we had known before; and the printing-office, which had been my delight, became my oppression after the brief moment of public schooling which I somehow knew. But before the change from tri-weekly to daily in our paper, I had the unstinted advantage of a school of morals as it then appeared among us.
The self-sacrificing company of players who suffered for the drama through this first summer of our life in Dayton paid my father for their printing in promises which he willingly took at their face value, and in tickets which were promptly honored at the door. As nearly as I can make out, I was thus enabled to go every night to the theater, in a passion for it which remains with me ardent still. I saw such plays of Shakespeare as “Macbeth” and “Othello,” then the stage favorites, and “Richard III.” and evermore “Richard III.” I saw such other now quite forgotten favorites as Kotzebue’s “Stranger” and Sheridan Knowles’s “Wife,” and such moving actions of unknown origin as “Barbarossa” and “The Miser of Marseilles,” with many screaming farces such as helped fill every evening full with at least threeplays. There was also at that time a native drama almost as acceptable to our public everywhere as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” afterward became. It seemed as if our public would never tire of “A Glance at New York,” with its horribly vulgar stage conceptions of local character, Mose the fireman and Lize his girl, and Sikesy and their other companions, which drift up before me now like wraiths from the Pit, and its events of street-fighting and I dare say heroic rescues from burning buildings by the volunteer fire companies of the day. When it appeared that the public might tire of the play, the lively fancy of the theater supplied a fresh attraction in it, and the character of Little Mose was added. How this must have been played by what awful young women eager to shine at any cost in their art, I shudder to think, and it is with “sick and scornful looks averse” that I turn from the remembrance of my own ambition to shine in that drama. My father instantly quenched the histrionic spark in me with loathing; but I cannot say whether this was before or after the failure of a dramatic attempt of his own which I witnessed, much mystified by the sense of some occult relation to it. Certainly I did not know that the melodrama which sacrificed his native to his adoptive patriotism in the action, and brought off the Americans victors over the British in a sea-fight, was his work; and probably it was the adaptation of some tale then much read. Very likely he trusted, in writing it, to the chance which he always expected to favor the amateur in taking up a musical instrument strange to him. He may even have dreamed of fortune from it; but after one performance of it the management seems to have gone back to such old public favorites as Shakespeare and Sheridan Knowles. Nothing was said of it in the family; I think some of the newspapers were not so silent; but I am not sure of this.
My father could, of course, be wiser for others than for himself; the public saved him from becoming a dramatist, but it was he who saved me from any remotest chance of becoming an actor, and later from acquiring the art of the prestidigitator. The only book which I can be sure of his taking from me was a manual professing to teach this art, which I had fallen in with. The days of those years in Dayton were in fact very different from the days in Hamilton when I was reaching out near and far to feed my fancy for fable and my famine for fact. I read no new books which now occur to me by name, though I still kept my interest in Greek mythology and gave something of my scanty leisure to a long poem in the quatrains of Gray’s Elegy based upon some divine event of it. The course of the poem was lastingly arrested by a slight attack of the cholera which was then raging in the town and filling my soul with gloom. My dear mother thought it timely to speak with me of the other world; but so far from reconciling me to the thought of it, I suppose she could not have found a boy in all Dayton more unwilling to go to heaven. She was forced to drop her religious consolations and to assure me that she had not the least fear of my dying.
It was certainly not the fault of the place that we were, first and last, rather unhappy there. For one thing, we were used to the greater ease and simplicity of a small town like Hamilton, and Dayton was a small city with the manners and customs of cities in those days: that is, there was more society and less neighborhood, and neither my father nor my mother could have cared for society. They missed the wont of old friends; there were no such teas as she used to give her neighbors, with a quilting, still dimly visioned, at the vanishing-point of the perspective; our social life was almost wholly in our Sunday-evening visits to the house of my young aunt whose husbandwas my father’s youngest brother. The pair were already in the shadow of their early death, and in the sorrow of losing their children one after another till one little cousin alone remained. I had not yet begun to make up romances about people in my mind, but this uncle and aunt were my types of worldly splendor in the setting of the lace curtains and hair-cloth chairs of their parlor, with her piano and his flute for other æsthetic grace. He was so much younger that he had a sort of filial relation to my father, and they were both very sweet to my mother, always lonely outside of her large family.
As usual, we lived in more than one house, but the first was very acceptable because of its nearness to the canal; the yard stretched behind it quite to the tow-path, with an unused stable between, which served us boys for circus-rehearsals, and for dressing after a plunge. As in a dream, I can still see my youngest brother rushing through this stable one day and calling out that he was going to jump into the canal, with me running after him and then dimly seeing him as he groped along the bottom, with me diving and saving him from drowning. Already, with the Hamilton facilities, I could hardly help being a good swimmer, and at Dayton I spent much of my leisure in the canal. Within the city limits we had to wear some sort of bathing-dress, and we preferred going with a crowd of other boys beyond the line where no such formality was expected of us. On the way to and fro we had to pass a soap-factory, where the boys employed in it swarmed out at sight of us stealing along under the canal bank, and in the strange outlawry of boyhood murderously stoned us, but somehow did not kill us. I do not know what boys we played with, but after we had paid the immemorial penalty of the stranger, and fought for our standing among them, the boys of our neighborhood were kind enough. One, whose father was a tobacconist,abetted our efforts to learn smoking by making cigars flavored with cinnamon drops; I suppose these would have been of more actual advantage to me if I had learned to like smoking. When we went from his house to another, in what may have been a better quarter, we made no friends that I can remember, and we were never so gay. In fact, a sense of my father’s adversity now began to penetrate to his older children, with the knowledge of our mother’s unhappiness from it.
I am not following any chronological order here, and I should not be able to date my æsthetic devotion to a certain gas-burner in the window of a store under the printing-office. It was in the form of a calla-lily, with the flame forking from the tongue in its white cup; and I could never pass it, by day or night, without stopping to adore it. If I could be perfectly candid, I should still own my preference of it to the great painting of Adam and Eve by Dubuffe, then shown throughout our simple-hearted commonwealth. This had the double attraction of a religious interest and the awful novelty of the nude, for the first time seen by untraveled American eyes; the large canvas was lighted up so as to throw the life-size figures into strong relief, and the spectator strickenly studied them through a sort of pasteboard binocle supplied for the purpose. If that was the way our first parents looked before the Fall, and the Bible said it was, there was nothing to be urged against it; but many kind people must have suffered secret misgivings at a sight from which a boy might well shrink ashamed, with a feeling that the taste of Eden was improved by the Fall. I had no such joy in it as in the dramas which I witnessed in the same hall; as yet there was nothing in Dayton openly declared a theater.
The town had many airs of a city, and there were even some policemen who wore a silver-plated star inside their
The now abandoned canal at Dayton as it appears on the borders of the city.The now abandoned canal at Dayton as it appears on the borders of the city.
coats for proof of their profession. There were water-works, and there was gas everywhere for such as would pay the charge for it. My father found the expense of piping the printing-office too great for his means, or else he preferred falling back upon his invention, and instead of the usual iron tubes he had the place fitted with tin tubes, at much less cost. Perhaps the cost was equalized in the end by the leaking of these tubes, which was so constant that we breathed gas by day as well as burned it by night. We burned it a good deal, for our tri-weekly was now changed to a daily, and a morning paper at that. Until eleven o’clock I helped put the telegraphic despatches (then a new and proud thing with us) into type, and between four and five o’clock in the morning I was up and carrying papers to our subscribers. The stress of my father’s affairs must have been very sore for him to allow this, and I dare say it did not last long, but while it lasted it was suffering which must make me forever tender of those who overwork, especially the children who overwork. The suffering was such that when my brother, who had not gone to bed till much later, woke me after my five or six hours’ sleep, I do not now know how I got myself together for going to the printing-office for the papers and making my rounds in the keen morning air. When Sunday came, and I could sleep as late as I liked, it was bliss such as I cannot tell to lie and rest, and rest, and rest! We were duteous children and willing; my brother knew of the heavy trouble hanging over us and I was aware of the hopeless burden of debt which our father was staggering under and my mother was carrying on her heart; and when I think of it, and of the wide-spread, never-ending struggle for life which it was and is the type of, I cannot but abhor the economic conditions which we still suppose an essential of civilization.
Lest these facts should make too vivid a call upon thereader’s compassion, I find it advisable to remember here an instance of hard-heartedness in me which was worthier the adamantine conscience of some full-grown moralist than a boy of my age. There was a poor girl, whose misfortune was known to a number of families where she was employed as a seamstress, and the more carefully treated because of her misfortune. Among others my mother was glad to give her work; and she lived with us like one of ourselves, of course sitting at table with us and sharing in such family pleasures as we knew. She was the more to be pitied because her betrayer was a prominent man who bore none of the blame for their sin; but when her shame became known to me I began a persecution of the poor creature in the cause of social purity. I would not take a dish from her at table, or hand her one; I would not speak to her, if I could help it, or look at her; I left the room when she came into it; and I expressed by every cruelty short of words my righteous condemnation. I was, in fact, society incarnate in the attitude society takes toward such as she. Heaven knows how I came by such a devilish ideal of propriety, and I cannot remember how the matter quite ended, but I seem to remember a crisis, in which she begged my mother with tears to tell her why I treated her so; and I was put to bitter shame for it. It could not be explained to me how tragical her case was; I must have been thought too young for the explanation; but I doubt if any boy of twelve is too young for the right knowledge of such things; he already has the wrong.
My wish at times to learn some other business was indulged by a family council, and my uncle made a place for me in his drug-store, where, as long as the novelty lasted, I was happy in the experiments with chemicals permitted to me and a fellow-apprentice. Mainly we were busied in putting up essence of peppermint and paregoricand certain favorite medicinal herbs; and when the first Saturday evening came, my companion received his weekly wage over the counter, and I expected mine, but the bookkeeper smiled and said he would have to see my uncle about that; in the end, it appeared that by the convention with my father I was somehow not to draw any salary. Both my uncle and he treated the matter with something of the bookkeeper’s smiling slight, and after an interval, now no longer appreciable, I found myself in the printing-office again. I was not sorry, and yet I had liked the drug business so far as I had gone in it, and I liked that old bookkeeper, though he paid me no money. How, after a life of varied experiences, he had lodged at last in the comfortable place he held I no longer know, if I ever knew. He had been at one time what would once have been called a merchant adventurer in various seas; and he had been wrecked on the Galapagos Islands, where he had feasted on the famous native turtle, now extinct, with a relish which he still smacked his lips in remembering.
This episode, which I cannot date, much antedated the period of my father’s business failure, though his struggles against it must have already begun; they began, in fact, from the moment of his arrival in Dayton, and the freest and happiest hours we knew there were when the long strain ended in the inevitable break. Then there was an interval, I do not know how great, but perhaps of months, when there was a casting about for some means of living, and to this interval belongs somehow the employment of my brother and myself in a German printing-office, such as used to be found in every considerable Ohio town. I do not know what we did there, but I remember the kindly German printer-folk, and the merry times we had with them, in the smoke of their pipes and the warmth of their stove heated red against the autumnal cold. Iexplore my memory in vain for proof that my father had some job-printing interest in this German office, but I remember my interest in the German type and its difference from the English. I was yet far from any interest in the German poetry which afterward became one of my passions, and there is no one now left alive whom I can ask whether the whole incident was fact, or not, rather, the sort of dream which all the past becomes when we try to question it.
What I am distinctly aware of, through a sense of rather sullen autumnal weather, is that a plan for our going into the country evolved itself in full detail between my father and uncle. My uncle was to supply the capital for the venture, and was finally, with two other uncles, to join my father on a milling privilege which they had bought at a point on the Little Miami River, where all the families were to be settled. In the mean time my father was to have charge of a grist-mill and sawmill on the property till they could be turned into a paper-mill and a sort of communal settlement of suitable people could be gathered. He had never run a sawmill or a grist-mill, much less evoked a paper-mill from them; but neither had he ever gathered a community of choice spirits for the enjoyment of a social form which enthusiasts like Robert Owen had dreamed into being, and then non-being, in the Middle West in those or somewhat earlier days. What was definite and palpable in the matter was that he must do something, and that he had the heart and hope for the experiment.
I have told the story of this venture in a little book calledMy Year in a Log Cabin, printed twenty-odd years ago, and I cannot do better now than let it rehearse
The Little Miami River at Eureka Mills, twelve miles east of Dayton. Here the ruin of the dam, which served the mills run by Mr. Howells’s father, makes a rapid in the stream.The Little Miami River at Eureka Mills, twelve miles east of Dayton. Here the ruin of the dam, which served the mills run by Mr. Howells’s father, makes a rapid in the stream.
itself here from those pages, with such slight change or none as insists. For my father, whose boyhood had been passed in the new country, where pioneer customs and traditions were still rife, it was like renewing the wild romance of those days to take up once more the life in a log cabin interrupted by many years sojourn in matter-of-fact dwellings of frame and brick. It was the fond dream of his boys to realize the trials and privations which he had painted for them in rosy hues, and even if the only clapboarded dwelling at the mills had not been occupied by the miller, we should have disdained it for the log cabin which we made our home till we could build a new house.
Our cabin stood close upon the road, but behind it broadened a corn-field of eighty acres. They still built log cabins for dwellings in that region at the time, but ours must have been nearly half a century old when we went into it. It had been recently vacated by an old poor-white Virginian couple, who had long occupied it, and we decided that it needed some repairs to make it habitable even for a family inured to hardship by dauntless imaginations, and accustomed to retrospective discomforts of every kind.
So before the family all came out to it a deputation of adventurers put it in what rude order they could. They glazed the narrow windows, they relaid the rotten floor, they touched (too sketchily, as it afterward appeared) the broken roof, and they papered the walls of the ground-floor rooms. Perhaps it was my father’s love of literature which inspired him to choose newspapers for this purpose; at any rate, he did so, and the effect, as I remember, had its decorative qualities. He had used a barrel of papers from the nearest post-office, where they had been refused by people to whom they had been experimentally sent by the publishers, and the whole first page was taken up bya story, which broke off in the middle of a sentence at the foot of the last column, and tantalized us forever with fruitless conjecture as to the fate of the hero and heroine.
The cabin, rude as it was, was not without its sophistications, its concessions to the spirit of modern luxury. The logs it was built of had not been left rounded, as they grew, but had been squared in a sawmill, and the crevices between them had not been chinked with moss and daubed with clay in true backwoods fashion, but plastered with mortar, and the chimney, instead of being a structure of clay-covered sticks, was laid in courses of stone. Within, however, it was all that could be desired by the most romantic of pioneer families. It was six feet wide and a yard deep, its cavernous maw would easily swallow a back-log eighteen inches through, and we piled in front the sticks of hickory cord-wood as high as we liked. We made a perfect trial of it when we came out to put the cabin in readiness for the family, and when the hickory had dropped into a mass of tinkling, snapping, bristling embers we laid our rashers of bacon and our slices of steak upon them, and tasted the flavors of the wildwood in the captured juices. At night we laid our mattresses on the sweet new oak plank of the floor, and slept hard—in every sense.
In due time the whole family took up its abode in the cabin. The household furniture had been brought out and bestowed in its scanty space, the bookcase had been set up, and the unbound books left easily accessible in barrels. There remained some of our possessions to follow, chief of which was the cow; for in those simple days people kept cows in town, and it fell to me to help my father drive ours out to her future home. We got on famously, talking of the wayside things so beautiful in the autumnal day, panoplied in the savage splendor of its painted leaves, and of the books and authors so dear to the boy who limped barefooted by his father’s side, withhis eye on the cow and his mind on Cervantes and Shakespeare. But the cow was very slow—far slower than the boy’s thoughts—and it had fallen night and was already thick dark when we had made the twelve miles and stood under the white-limbed phantasmal sycamores beside the tail-race of the grist-mill, and questioned how we should get across with our charge. We did not know how deep the water was, but we knew it was very cold, and we would rather not wade it. The only thing to do seemed to be for one of us to run up to the sawmill, cross the head-race there, and come back to receive the cow on the other side of the tail-race. But the boy could not bring himself either to go or to stay.
The kind-hearted father urged, but he would not compel; you cannot well use force with a boy when you have been talking literature and philosophy for half a day with him. We could see the lights in the cabin cheerfully twinkling, and we shouted to those within, but no one heard us. We called and called in vain. Nothing but the cold rush of the tail-race, the dry rustle of the sycamore-leaves, and the homesick lowing of the cow replied. We determined to drive her across, and pursue her with sticks and stones through the darkness beyond, and then run at the top of our speed to the sawmill, and get back to take her in custody again. We carried out our part of the plan perfectly, but the cow had not entered into it with intelligence or sympathy. When we reached the other side of the tail-race again she was nowhere to be found, and no appeals of “Boss” or “Suky” or “Suboss” availed. She must have instantly turned, and retraced, in the darkness which seemed to have swallowed her up, the weary steps of the day, for she was found in her old home in town the next morning. At any rate, she had abandoned the father to the conversation of his son, for the time being, and the son had nothing to say.
I do not remember now just how it was that we came by the different “animals of the horse kind,” as my father called them, which we housed in an old log stable not far from our cabin. They must have been a temporary supply until a team worthy our new sky-blue wagon could be found. One of them was a colossal sorrel, inexorably hide-bound, whose barrel, as horsemen call the body, showed every hoop upon it. He had a feeble, foolish whimper of a voice, and we nicknamed him “Baby.” His companion was a dun mare, who had what my father at once called an italic foot, in recognition of the emphatic slant at which she carried it when upon her unwilling travels. Then there was a small, self-opinionated gray pony, which was of no service conjecturable after this lapse of time. We boys rode him barebacked, and he used to draw a buggy, which he finally ran away with. I suppose we found him useful in the representation of some of the Indian fights which we were always dramatizing, and I dare say he may have served our turn as an Arab charger, when the Moors of Granada made one of their sallies upon the camp of the Spaniards, and discharged their javelins into it; their javelins were the long, admirably straight and slender ironweeds that grew by the river. This menagerie was constantly breaking bounds and wandering off; and was chiefly employed in hunting itself up, its different members taking turns in remaining in the pasture or stable, to be ridden after those that had strayed into the woods.
The origin of a large and eloquent flock of geese is lost in an equal obscurity. I recall their possession simply as an accomplished fact, and I associate their desolate cries with the windy dark of rainy November nights, so that they must at least have come into our hands after the horses. They were fenced into a clayey area next the cabin for safe-keeping, where, perpetually waddling aboutin a majestic disoccupation, they patted the damp ground down to the hardness and smoothness of a brick-yard. Throughout the day they conversed tranquilly together, but by night they woke, goose after goose, to send forth a long clarion alarum, blending in a general concert at last, to assure one another of their safety. We must have intended to pluck them in the spring, but they stole their nests early in March, and entered upon the nurture of their young before we could prevent it; and it would then have been barbarous to pluck these mothers of families.
We had got some pigs from our old Virginian predecessors, and these kept, as far as they could, the domestic habits in which that affectionate couple had indulged them. They would willingly have shared our fireside with us, humble as it was, but, being repelled, they took up their quarters on cold nights at the warm base of the chimney without, where we could hear them, as long as we kept awake, disputing the places next to the stones. All this was horrible to my mother, whose housewifely instincts were perpetually offended by the rude conditions of our life, and who justly regarded it as a return to a state which, if poetic, was also not far from barbaric. But boys take every natural thing as naturally as savages, and we never thought our pigs were other than amusing. In that country pigs were called to their feed with long cries of “Pig, pig, pooee, poe-e-e!” but ours were taught to come at a whistle, and, on hearing it, would single themselves out from the neighbors’ pigs, and come rushing from all quarters to the scattered corn with an intelligence we were proud of.
As long as the fall weather lasted, and well through the mild winter of that latitude, our chief recreation, whereall our novel duties were delightful, was hunting with the long, smooth-bore shot-gun which had descended laterally from one of our uncles, and supplied the needs of the whole family of boys in the chase. Never less than two of us went out with it at once, and generally there were three. This enabled us to beat up the game over a wide extent of country, and while the eldest did the shooting, left the others to rush upon him as soon as he fired, with tumultuous cries of, “Did you hit it? Did you hit it?” We fell upon the wounded squirrels which we brought down on rare occasions, and put them to death with what I must now call a sickening ferocity. If sometimes the fool dog, the weak-minded Newfoundland pup we were rearing, rushed upon the game first, and the squirrel avenged his death upon the dog’s nose, that was pure gain, and the squirrel had the applause of his other enemies. Yet we were none of us cruel; we never wantonly killed things that could not be eaten; we should have thought it sacrilege to shoot a robin or a turtledove, but we were willing to be amused, and these were the chances of war.
The woods were full of squirrels, which especially abounded in the woods-pastures, as we called the lovely dells where the greater part of the timber was thinned out to let the cattle range and graze. They were of all sorts—gray, and black, and even big red fox squirrels, a variety I now suppose extinct. When the spring opened we hunted them in the poplar woods, whither they resorted in countless numbers for the sweetness in the cups of the tulip-tree blossoms. I recall with a thrill one memorable morning in such woods—early, after an overnight rain, when the vistas hung full of a delicate mist that the sun pierced to kindle a million fires in the drops still pendulous from leaf and twig. I can smell the tulip-blossoms and the odor of the tree-bark yet, and the fresh,strong fragrance of the leafy mold under my bare feet; and I can hear the rush of the squirrels on the bark of the trunks, or the swish of their long, plunging leaps from bough to bough in the air-tops.
In a region where the corn-fields and wheat-fields were often fifty and sixty acres in extent there was a plenty of quail, but I remember only one victim to my gun. We set figure-four traps to catch them; but they were shrewder arithmeticians than we, and solved these problems without harm to themselves. When they began to mate, and the air was full of their soft, amorous whistling, we searched for their nests, and had better luck, though we were forbidden to rob the nests when we found them; and in June, when a pretty little mother strutted across the lanes at the head of her tiny brood, we had to content ourselves with the near spectacle of her cunning counterfeit of disability at sight of us, fluttering and tumbling in the dust till her chicks could hide themselves. We had read of that trick, and were not deceived; but we were charmed the same.
It is a trick that all birds know, and I had it played upon me by the mother snipe and mother wild duck that haunted our dam, as well as by the quail. With the snipe, once, I had a fancy to see how far the mother would carry the ruse, and so ran after her; but in doing this I trod on one of her young—a soft, gray mite, not distinguishable from the gray pebbles where it ran. I took it tenderly up in my hand, and it is a pang to me yet to think how it gasped once and died. A boy is a strange mixture—as the man who comes after him is. I should not have minded knocking over that whole brood of snipes with my gun, if I could; but this poor little death was somehow very personal in its appeal.
I had no such regrets concerning the young wild ducks,which, indeed, I had no such grievous accident with. I left their mother to flounder and flutter away as she would, and took to the swamp where her young sought refuge from me. There I spent half a day wading about in waters that were often up to my waist and full of ugly possibilities of mud-turtles and water-snakes, trying to put my hand on one of the ducklings. They rose everywhere else, and dived again after a breath of air; but at last one of them came up in my very grasp. It did not struggle, but how its wild heart bounded against my hand! I carried it home to show it and boast of my capture, and then I took it back to its native swamp. It dived instantly, and I hope it found its bereaved family somewhere under the water.
The center of our life in the cabin was, of course, the fireplace, whose hugeness and whose mighty fires remained a wonder with us. There was a crane in the chimney and dangling pothooks, and until the cooking stove could be set up in an adjoining shed the cooking had to be done on the hearth, and the bread baked in a Dutch oven in the hot ashes. We had always heard of this operation, which was a necessity of early days; and nothing else, perhaps, realized them so vividly for us as the loaf laid in the iron-lidded skillet, which was then covered with ashes and heaped with coals.
I am not certain that the bread tasted any better for the historical romance of its experience, or that the corn-meal, mixed warm from the mill and baked on an oak plank set up before the fire, had merits beyond the hoecake of art; but I think there can be no doubt that new corn grated from the cob while still in the milk, and then molded and put in like manner to brown in the glow of such embers, would still have the sweetness that was incomparable then. When the maple sap started in February, we tried the scheme we had cherished all winter of making with it tea which should be in a manner self-sugared.But the scheme was a failure—we spoiled the sap without sweetening the tea.
We sat up late before the big fire at night, our faces burning in the glow, and our backs and feet freezing in the draught that swept in from the imperfectly closing door, and then we boys climbed to our bed in the loft. We reached it by a ladder, which we should have been glad to pull up after us as a protection against Indians in the pioneer fashion; but, with the advancement of modern luxury, the ladder had been nailed to the floor. When we were once aloft, however, we were in a domain sacred to the past. The rude floor rattled and wavered loosely under our tread, and the window in the gable stood open or shut at its own will. There were cracks in the shingles, through which we could see the stars, when there were stars, and which, when the first snow came, let the flakes sift in upon the floor.
Our barrels of paper-covered books were stowed away in that loft, and, overhauling them one day, I found a paper copy of the poems of a certain Henry W. Longfellow, then wholly unknown to me; and while the old grist-mill, whistling and wheezing to itself, made a vague music in my ears, my soul was filled with this new, strange sweetness. I read the “Spanish Student” there, and the “Coplas de Manrique,” and the solemn and ever-beautiful “Voices of the Night.” There were other books in those barrels, but these spirited me again to Spain, where I had already been with Irving, and led me to attack fitfully the old Spanish grammar which had been knocking about our house ever since my father bought it from a soldier of the Mexican War.
But neither these nor any other books made me discontented with the boy’s world about me. They made it a little more populous with visionary shapes, but that was well, and there was room for them all. It was notdarkened with cares, and the duties of it were not many. By this time we older boys had our axes, and believed ourselves to be clearing a piece of woods which covered a hill belonging to the milling property. The timber was black-walnut and oak and hickory, and I cannot think we made much inroad in it; but we must have felled some of the trees, for I remember helping to cut them into saw-logs with the cross-cut saw, and the rapture we had in starting our logs from the brow of the hill and watching their whirling rush to the bottom. We experimented, as boys will, and we felled one large hickory with the saw instead of the axe, and scarcely escaped with our lives when it suddenly split near the bark, and the butt shot out between us. I preferred buckeye and sycamore trees for my own axe; they were of no use when felled, but they chopped so easily.
They grew abundantly on the island which formed another feature of our oddly distributed property. This island was by far its most fascinating feature, and for us boys it had the charm and mystery which have in every land and age endeared islands to the heart of man. It was not naturally an island, but had been made so by the mill-races bringing the water from the dam, and emptying into the river again below the mills. It was flat, and half under water in every spring freshet, but it had precious areas grown up to tall ironweeds, which, withering and hardening in the frost, supplied us with the darts for our Indian fights. The island was always our battle-ground, and it resounded in the long afternoons with the war-cries of the encountering tribes. We had a book in those days calledWestern Adventure, which was made up of tales of pioneer and frontier life, and we were constantly reading ourselves back into that life. This book, and Howe’sCollections for the History of Ohio, were full of stories of the backwoodsmen and warriors who had made