Humor he has, and of the very highest order. It is as delicate
as Washington Irving’s, and quite as spontaneous. But humor is
hardly his predominant quality. He has all the wit of Holmes,
and all the tenderness of Ik Marvel. He is often charmingly
thoughtful, earnest and suggestive.—_San Francisco Bulletin._
There is only one other pair of microscopic eyes like his owned
by an American, and they belong to W. D. Howells. These two men
will ferret out fun from arid sands and naked rocks, and in one
trip of a league, less or more, over a barren waste, see and hear
more that is amusing and entertaining than the rest of the world
will discover in crossing a continent. Such men should do our
traveling for us.—_Chicago Tribune._
From “Back-Log Studies.”
The fire on the hearth has almost gone out in New England; the hearth has
gone out; the family has lost its center; age ceases to be respected;
sex is only distinguished by the difference between millinery bills and
tailors’ bills; there is no more toast-and-cider; the young are not
allowed to eat mince pies at ten o’clock at night; half a cheese is no
longer set to toast before the fire; you scarcely ever see in front of
the coals a row of roasting apples, which a bright little girl, with many
a dive and start, shielding her sunny face from the fire with one hand,
turns from time to time; scarce are the grey-haired sires who strop their
razors on the family Bible, and doze in the chimney corner. A good many
things have gone out with the fire on the hearth.
I do not mean to say that public and private morality have vanished
with the hearth. A good degree of purity and considerable happiness are
possible with grates and blowers; it is a day of trial, when we are all
passing through a fiery furnace, and very likely we shall be purified
as we are dried up and wasted away. Of course the family is gone as an
institution, though there still are attempts to bring up a family round
a “register.” But you might just as well try to bring it up by hand as
without the rallying-point of a hearth-stone. Are there any homesteads
now-a-days? Do people hesitate to change houses any more than they do
to change their clothes? People hire houses as they would a masquerade
costume, liking, sometimes, to appear for a year in a little fictitious
stone-front splendor above their means. Thus it happens that so many
people live in houses that do not fit them. I should almost as soon
think of wearing another person’s clothes as his house; unless I could
let it out and take it in until it fitted, and somehow expressed my own
character and taste.
From “Being a Boy.”
It is a wonder that every New England boy does not turn out a poet, or a
missionary or a peddler. Most of them used to. There is something in the
heart of the New England hills to feed the imagination of the boy and
excite his longing for strange countries. I scarcely know what the subtle
influence is that forms him and attracts him in the most fascinating and
aromatic of all lands, and yet urges him away from all the sweet delights
of his home to become roamer in literature and in the world a poet and a
wanderer. There is something in the soil and in the pure air, I suspect,
that promises more romance than is forthcoming, and that excites the
imagination without satisfying it, and begets the desire of adventure.
* * * * *
What John said was, that he didn’t care much for pumpkin pie; but that
was after he had eaten a whole one. It seemed to him then that mince
would be better. The feeling of a boy toward pumpkin pie has never been
properly considered.… His elders say that the boy is always hungry; but
that is a very coarse way of putting it. He has only recently come into
a world that is full of good things to eat, and there is on the whole
a very short time in which to eat them; at least he is told, among the
first information he receives, that life is brief. Life being brief, and
pie and the like fleeting, he very soon decides on an active campaign.
It may be an old story to people who have been eating for forty or fifty
years; but it is different with a beginner. He takes the thick and thin
as it comes—as to pie, for instance. Some people do make them very thin.