participles are sometimes“dangling” or “misrelated.” The uses of“most”
and “quite,” of “and which” and the “historical present,” are not
always according to the rhetorician’s rules. Flaws may also be picked
with the way some of the characters are introduced, transitions made,
and statements repeated. But considering the number of stories the
author wrote in these sixteen years, such mistakes are surprisingly
few. Mr. Kellogg had an ear sensitive to the flow of a sentence and
a memory in which words stuck. The rhythm of his prose is noticeably
good and his vocabulary excellent. Well acquainted alike with farmers
and sailors, with mechanics and students, he could put fitting words
into the mouth of each. The language of his characters does not
stultify them: his carpenters are not fishermen; his sailors are
not landlubbers; his farmers are not caricatures. He knew well the
“down-east” vernacular. In the use of the dialect--if such it may be
called--of rural New England, Tim Longley and Isaac Murch can give
points even to Hosea Biglow.
All of these books are not of the same merit, and concerning them boys’
opinions differ. Next to “Good Old Times,” perhaps the Elm Island and
the Pleasant Cove stories are most after a boy’s heart. An island
far enough out at sea so that the dwellers thereon cannot easily
supply their wants and consequently have to use inventiveness and
daring, is an interesting element in any story, whether it be“Robinson
Crusoe,” “Masterman Ready,” or “Lion Ben.” Although not a tropical
land abounding in cocoanuts, turtles, and parrots, Elm Island affords
abundant opportunity for boys’ play and boys’ work. “Does such an
island really exist?” writes a mother to the author. “No,” he replied,
“only in my own imagination.” And yet for many boys it does exist.
There is no need to describe Elm Island to the boys of New England.
They have trod every foot of it and know its every nook and cranny.
They know that it is six miles from the Maine coast, “broad off at
sea,” and that in the early days fishermen used to land there and make
a fire on the rocks and take a cup of tea before going out to fish
all night for hake. They have looked admiringly upon its rich coronal
of spruce, fir, and hemlock, the large grove of elms on its southern
end, and the big beech tree which often has in it as many as ten blue
herons’ nests at one time. They can tell you of its precipitous shores,
its remarkable harbor, its beautiful cove into which runs the little
brook where come the frostfish and smelts, and where the wild geese,
coots, whistlers, brants, and sea-ducks galore come to drink. That big
rock where the waves roar hoarsely is White Bull; and this smaller one,
white with the foaming breakers, is Little Bull.
They know that “it was a glorious sight to behold and one never to be
forgotten in this world or the next, when the waves, which had been
growing beneath the winter’s gale the whole breadth of the Atlantic,
came thundering in on those ragged rocks, breaking thirty feet high,
pouring through the gaps between them, white foam on their summits and
deep green beneath, and--when a gleam of sunshine, breaking from a
ragged cloud, flashed along their edges--displaying for a moment all
the colors of the rainbow.... And how solemn to listen to that awful
roar, like the voice of Almighty God!”
This island and the neighboring mainland Mr. Kellogg peopled with
likable and interesting characters. Strong, good-natured Joe Griffin,
beneath whose hat is ever hatching a practical joke, Uncle Isaac Murch,
full of Indian lore, skilled in the use of tools, always able to look
at things from a boy’s point of view, Captain Rhines, John Rhines,
Charlie Bell, and old Tige Rhines are dear to many a boy’s heart. And
Lion Ben, powerful, overgrown, agile, slow-tempered, warm-hearted Lion
Ben! Almost as soon could a boy forget Leather-Stocking as forget Lion
Ben.
Situated as was Narragansett No. 7 some ten miles inland, in “Good Old
Times” Mr. Kellogg had but little to say of sailors and the sea. But
Elm Island and its sea-loving people afforded him large opportunity to
use the knowledge of ships and seamen gained during the three years he
had sailed before the mast, or the twenty he had ministered to sailors
in Harpswell and Boston. He knew all the pleasures which the sea and
shore afford inventive, resourceful boys like John Rhines and Charlie
Bell. Fishing and swimming, making kelp siphons, spearing flounders,
shooting coot and geese, building boats and sailing them into the teeth
of the gale--no author has told of these more entertainingly. Mr.
Kellogg loved the sea dearly and knew the words and ways of sailors
well. “Here,” says a reviewer, “is an author who knows just what he
is writing about. He never orders his sailors to lower the hatch
over the stern or coil the keelson in the forward cabin.” He liked
nothing better than to build an “Ark” or a “Hard-Scrabble,” load her
with lumber and farm produce, man her with Griffins and Rhineses, a
snappy crew of home boys, who would “scamper up the rigging racing with
each other for the weather earing,” and sail away to the West Indies.
Through hurricanes, blockades, or pirates, they would sail with colors
flying, reach their port in safety, sell their cargo for a handsome
profit, and come back laden with coffee, molasses, and Spanish dollars
to gladden the hearts of the dwellers on Elm Island and in Pleasant
Cove.
The Wolf Run stories depict characters and events similar to those
in “Good Old Times.” They tell of the way a handful of Scotch-Irish
settlers in the mountain gorge of Wolf Run on the western frontier of
Pennsylvania, about the middle of the eighteenth century, built up
their homes; and of the “fearful ordeals through which they passed in
consequence of their deliberate resolve never with life to abandon
their homesteads won by years of toil from the wilderness.” Here, as in
“Good Old Times,” is a scattered community of a few families, frugal
and hardy, hating injustice and loving righteousness, to whom food
and shelter of the rudest kind are luxuries, and life itself is often
at stake. These stories are full of vivid pictures of frontier life,
making the “birch” and the “dug-out,” devising ingenious makeshifts
for tools and furniture, trapping the wolf and beaver, building and
defending the stockade. Here are many enlivening accounts of Indian
battles, ambushes, midnight attacks, hair-breadth escapes, and long,
hard chases on the trail of the Mohawks or the Delawares. Across the
pages of these stories walk sinewy men of oak, in moccasins, buckskin
breeches and coonskin caps, ready to fight or fall, keen of eye and
lithe of limb, skilled in forest lore, tireless on the chase, sagacious
in finding or covering a trail, keen marksmen, “delicate in nothing
but the touch of the trigger.” Sam Summerford, Ned Honeywood, Seth
and Israel Blanchard, Bradford Holdness, Black Rifle,--twin brother
of Cooper’s Long Rifle,--are characters which live in a boy’s memory.
These are stories of strong lights and dark shades; but they are true
to the life of that day, and show well “what the heritage of the
children has cost the fathers.”
In the Whispering Pine stories the author relates the struggles,
achievements and pranks of a group of students in Bowdoin College. In
these books he has given us a good look into the lives of students in
a small college in the first half of the nineteenth century, and has
preserved in the amber of his story many Bowdoin customs.
He pictures vividly the early Commencement, when nearly the whole
District of Maine kept holiday. From far and near people came in
carryalls and stages, on horseback, in packets and pleasure boats,
to join in the college merry-making. Hundreds of carriages bordered
the yard, and barns and sheds were filled with horses; hostlers were
hurrying to and fro sweating and swearing, and every house was crammed
with people. To Commencement came not only the beauty, wit, and wisdom
of the district, but also those who cared little for art or learning.
With dignified officials, sober matrons, and gay belles and beaux came
also horse-jockeys, wrestlers, snake-charmers, gamblers, and venders
of every sort. The college yard was dotted with booths where were sold
gingerbread, pies, egg-nog, long-nine cigars, beers small, and, alas!
too often, for good order, beers large. While Seniors in the church
were discoursing on “Immortality,” jockeys outside were driving sharp
trades and over-convivial visitors engaging in free fights.
In his “Sophomores of Radcliffe” Mr. Kellogg tells us of the Society of
Olympian Jove, whose customs perhaps sprang partly from the author’s
imagination and partly from his experience. In those days the initiate
was made to rush through the pines and ford the dark Acheron, and was
carefully taught the signals of distress--signals which James Trafton,
with work unprepared, the morning after his initiation, much to the
merriment of the class, proceeded to give to the irritated professor by
squinting at him through his hand.
Perhaps the most interesting of the early Bowdoin customs described
in these books is the “Obsequies of Calculus.” This custom was in
vogue many years, and a headstone can yet be seen upon the campus
marking the spot where the sacred ashes were consigned to dust. At
the end of Junior year when Calculus was finished, the Junior class
gathered in the mathematical room and there deposited their copies of
Calculus in a coffin. The coffin was then borne sorrowfully to the
chapel, where amid wailing and copious lachrymation a touching eulogy
was pronounced. The orator was wont to discourse of the “gigantic
intellect of the deceased, his amazing powers of abstraction, his
accuracy of expression, his undeviating rectitude of conduct,” his
strict observance of the motto that, “The shortest distance between two
points is a straight line.” Then came the elegy in Latin; after which,
amid the grief-convulsed mourners, the coffin was placed upon a vehicle
called by the vulgar a dump cart, and the noble steed Isosceles, which
“fed upon binomial theorems, parabolas, and differentials, and every
bone of whose body and every hair of whose skin was illustrative of
either acute or obtuse angles,” drew the sacred load to its last
resting-place. The funeral procession, consisting of the college
band, Bowdoin artillery, the eulogist and elegist, and the Freshman,
Sophomore, and Junior classes, moved slowly down Park Row, through
the principal streets of the village to the rear of the college yard.
Here the books were “placed upon the funeral pyre and burned with
sweet odors, the solemn strains of the funeral dirge mingling with the
crackling of flames.
‘Old Calculus has screwed us hard,
Has screwed us hard and sore;
I would he had a worthy bard
To sing his praises more.
Peace to thine ashes, Calculus,
Peace to thy much-tried shade;
Thy weary task is over now,
Thy wandering ghost is laid.’
The ashes were collected, placed in an urn, and enclosed in the coffin.
A salute was then fired by the college artillery. The epitaph, like
that upon the grave of the three hundred who fell at Thermopylæ, was
brief but full of meaning, having on the tablet at the head,--
CALCULUS,
on that at the foot,--
_dx_/_dy_ = 0.”
But the Whispering Pine books were written for other purposes than
simply to depict the life of the college or to let us into the
escapades of the students. The dictum that “all art must amuse” did not
go far enough for Mr. Kellogg. With all his fun and “frolic temper”
he was too much of a Puritan to make amusement the chief end of his
writing. All of his stories were written with the avowed purpose of
making boys more robust and genuine and manly, of giving them redder
blood and broader chests and larger biceps, and at the same time making
them hate gloss and chicanery and love straightforward, courageous,
Christian dealing. So imbued was the author with this purpose that he
wrote his books, as he expressed it, “while upon his knees.” Often at
first he felt that he should be preaching rather than writing stories;
and it was not until letters came to him from all over the country
that he realized he was reaching more boys with his pen than he could
possibly have reached with his voice.
Although written with a purpose, it is noticeable that his books
are not of the wishy-washy type. His boys are not Miss Nancies and
plaster saints. They do not die young and go to heaven; they live and
make pretty companionable kind of men. Mr. Kellogg was too much of a
story-teller and too strong a believer in truth to distort life for
ethical purposes.
One does not have to delve deep, however, to find the lessons which
this author would teach. To college boys his advice is, choose your
chums well. College is not simply a place where learning is bought and
sold, where you pay so much money and get so much Greek or so much
philosophy. Not all college lessons are in your books, neither are
they all taught in the class-rooms. You will learn them on the college
paths, in your sports, in your dormitories; and generally it is your
chums who teach them to you. The set of fellows with whom you cast your
lot may make or mar you. College ties are strong. The boys with whom
you eat and sleep, those with whom you solve the difficult problems and
pick out the tangles in Greek and Latin, with whom you stroll of an
evening to the falls or a Wednesday afternoon to the shore, to whom you
tell your future plans, your love affairs, and your religious doubts,
whose sympathies mingle with yours “like the interlacing of green,
summer foliage,” those fellows are going to mould your ideals and
determine your character.
Again, he believed that boys must not be afraid to lock horns with an
obstacle. A difficult job may be their greatest blessing. Richardson
coddled at home feels himself a weakling by the side of Morton whom
difficulties have made self-reliant. William Frost, who begins a
business career with good looks, good clothes, and parental influence,
returns to his home in disgrace because he “disregards the claims
of others, esteems labor drudgery, and expects recompense without
service rendered”; while Arthur Lennox, who sets out from his Fryeburg
home barefoot and penniless, his only inheritance “a strong arm and
a mother’s blessing,” wins success by unflinching toil. “Hardship,”
said Mr. Kellogg, “is a wholesome stimulant to strong natures,
quickening slumbering energies, compelling effort, and by its salutary
discipline reducing refractory elements.” The boy who is always dodging
difficulties will make a gingerbread man. Only by grappling can we gain
power to achieve. Only by having tough junks to split can we learn “to
strike right in the middle of the knot.”
The value and dignity of labor is the ever recurring burden of these
stories. They teach boys to work as well as to play. Through them all
resounds the merry music of labor. The ring of the axe, the crack of
the whip, the song of the teamster, the screech of the plane, the
ring of the anvil, the swish of the scythe, the chirp of the tackle,
the creak of the windlass, the shout of the stevedore--all in these
books make a happy harmony and witness that man’s primal curse has
become his choicest blessing. Mr. Kellogg believed with Carlyle that
all work is divine, that to labor is to pray. Especially did he wish
to get out of boys’ minds the false notion that only mental work is
honorable. He thought that often it is as honorable to sweat the body
as to sweat the brain. As honorable and as necessary; for he believed
that it is only by keeping the lungs full of fresh air, and the pores
open by perspiration, and the limbs strong by activity, that a man
can keep his vision from being distorted. “The essence of hoe handle,
if persistently taken two hours a day,” would, he believed, cure
many diseases of the mind and heart. The devils of fretfulness and
fault-finding are not always to be cast out with prayer and fasting.
Often it requires labor in the fresh open air,--a good pull against
the tide, a long ride on horseback, or an hour’s chopping with the
narrow axe. Many a disheartened preacher who now mopes in his study
and who “takes all his texts out of Jeremiah,” would get “Sunday’s
harness-marks erased from the brain,” and preach glad tidings of great
joy if he would only start the perspiration by healthful, outdoor
exercise. Mr. Kellogg thought a boy should learn to work with his hands
as well as with his brain. All wisdom, he knew well, is not in school
and college. He appreciated the value of book learning; but democrat
as he was and well acquainted with common people, he knew that an
illiterate Jerry Williams or an Uncle Tim Longley can teach scores of
valuable lessons to many a schoolman. The boy who is too lazy to do
some of the practical duties of life, who thinks it disgraceful to work
with his hands, can have no part or lot in his kingdom. His boys are
always able “to cut their own fodder.” His ideal college boy is Henry
Morton, who is a keen debater, a good writer, a lover of the classics
and a lover of nature, but who, at the same time, can hew straight to
the line, cut the corners of many a farmer, and take the heart of a
tree from many a woodsman.
Elijah Kellogg gave to the boys of America, at a time when they
needed them most, fresh, wholesome, stirring stories of out-of-door
life. With these stories he both entertained and taught the
boys,--entertained them so well that they never suspected they were
being taught,--taught them endurance, pluck, integrity, self-sacrifice.
He stimulated them to effort, inspired them with a respect for labor,
taught them to despise effeminacy, showed them that “the manly
spirit, like Dannemora iron, defies the fury of the furnace, and even
beneath the hammer gathers temper and tenacity,” that “pure motives,
warm affections, trust in God, are by no means incompatible with the
greatest enterprise and the most undaunted courage.” Such was his work
as an author, and it was a work worth while.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE KELLOGG HOMESTEAD AT HARPSWELL, MAINE.]
LAST DAYS IN HARPSWELL
AS SEEN IN LETTERS AND JOURNAL
WILMOT BROOKINGS MITCHELL
Mr. Kellogg accepted the call to the Mariners’ Church in 1854, not
because he had tired of his Harpswell farm or pastorate. They were as
dear to him as ever. But fitted by nature and by experience to work
among sailors, he saw in the Boston pastorate increased opportunities
for doing good. Doubtless, too, financial considerations had their
weight in this decision; for he had been unable to pay for his farm,
and he hoped from the larger salary he would receive at the Mariners’
Church to save money enough to cancel that debt. While he was in
Boston, he did not sever his connection with his Harpswell parish. Each
summer he spent some time on his farm and preached a Sunday or two at
the church. And now and then these people would see him in the winter,
when some special errand of love or of business called him hither. At
such times they were reminded that the city was not spoiling their
minister, but that he was the same unique, unselfish, fearless man.
On one November, for example, he appeared at “Uncle” William
Alexander’s with two sailors. These men, who had been dissipated, he
had persuaded to sign the pledge. He feared, however, that if they went
off to sea at once, they would forget their good resolutions and fall
back into their old ways of drinking. They tried to get work in Boston
and failed. At length they said if they only had a boat, they could
fish for a living. Mr. Kellogg thought of his own twenty-five-foot
boat, and at once they set out for Harpswell to get it. The morning
after their arrival a northeast wind was blowing a gale, kicking up a
rough sea. Mr. Kellogg doubted the feasibility of starting for Boston
in such a gale. Whereupon the sailors questioned his courage! They did
not know their man. “Don’t dare to, eh? We’ll see who dares.” Quickly
making ready, he set out in his little boat, while his old neighbors,
knowing his absence of caution or of fear, prophesied disaster. By the
time the boat was off Cape Elizabeth, the old sailors were begging
their captain to make harbor. But no; they must see who dared! When,
cold and drenched, they reached Gloucester that evening, they had fully
decided never to stump the sailor-preacher again.
From 1865, when he resigned as acting pastor of the Mariners’ Church,
until 1882 Mr. Kellogg continued to reside in Boston, busily engaged
in writing his books and in preaching. During these years he supplied
pulpits at Wellesley, Massachusetts (1867), Cumberland Mills, Maine
(1869), Portland, Maine (1870), and Pigeon Cove, Massachusetts
(1874-1875). To the Warren Church at Cumberland Mills, the Second
Parish Church at Portland, and the Congregational Church at New Bedford
he received calls; all of which he declined.
In 1882 Mr. Kellogg came back to Harpswell to live for the rest of
his life. He had worked hard in Boston and had made there many firm
friends, but a large city was not the place for one who loved the
smell of earth as well as he. He had often told his Harpswell friends
that if he could consult only his own wishes, he would rather pass a
winter in a brush camp built on the lee side of William Alexander’s
stone wall than return to Boston. Like many another, “he found himself
hungry to throw aside the tame and trite forms of existence and to
penetrate the harsh, true, simple things behind. His imagination and
his heart turned towards the primitive, indispensable labors on which
society rests,--the life of the husbandman, the laborer, the smith, the
woodman, the builder; he dreamed the old enchanted dream of living with
nature.”
Though glad to return, Mr. Kellogg came back to his first parish a poor
man. His books had made his name known throughout the United States,
but fame and the consciousness of having done much good were his only
remaining proceeds from years of writing. By the fire of 1872, and
the consequent failure of his publishers, he had lost money that he
could ill afford to lose. Pressed for funds, he had even been obliged
to sell all his copyrights, with one exception--that of “Good Old
Times.” He came back to his Harpswell home in debt, his farm run down,
blindness threatening his wife, deafness and old age beginning to
creep upon him. But his old grit and courage were still left; and he
found his Harpswell friends unchanged, they and their children eager to
welcome him back and to help him in every way they could. As General
Chamberlain so well shows in the next chapter, he went to work with a
will to do his best,--farming, preaching, going wherever duty called on
errands of charity and consolation.
These were undoubtedly hard years. His struggle with debt was often
embarrassing; his growing deafness caused him anxiety; and in 1890 the
death of her who had been his companion and counsellor for more than
forty years bowed him in grief. His son and daughter besought him to
come and make his home with them. But that was not his way. He must
stay in Harpswell and do his work.
Between 1883 and 1889 Mr. Kellogg preached in the neighboring town of
Topsham, driving up Saturday afternoon and returning Monday morning. In
1889 he came back to his old pulpit, and there, in the church that had
been built for him, he continued to preach, until he died, on March 17,
1901, with this message to his faithful flock upon his lips, “I want
to send my love to all these people.”
[Sidenote: Journal.]
As one reads the journal which Mr. Kellogg kept during these years of
struggle, “the years,” as he called them, “of the right hand of the
Most High,” one feels that out of the struggle came a character which
ease and plenty could not have given him. His boyish enthusiasm, his
ready wit, his fun and humor, are all here; and here, too, is the
faith of one who walked as seeing the Invisible. He indeed proved the
promise, “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden
manna.”
His abounding gratitude, his childlike faith, his willingness to put
his hand in God’s and be led of Him, his love for his people, and the
way prayer and deed were beautifully intermingled in his life, may be
seen on every page that he wrote during these last years.
[Sidenote: May 29, 1882.]