There are two writers, among them all, to whom I owe thanks for
countless hours of complete pleasure. Not the pleasure that stirs
and fires one, but the pleasure which enters into the entire
personality, and rests and satisfies a common, unstrained mind.
’Tis the same pleasure that comes with eating all by myself--eating
peaches and a fine, tiny lamb chop in the middle of the day.
One of these two writers is J. T. Trowbridge who has written
young-books.
Often I have thought, Life would be different, and duller colored,
and less thickly sprinkled with marigolds-and-cream, had I never
known my Trowbridge.
Often I have thanked the happy fate that put into my hands my first
young-book of Trowbridge. ’Twas when I was fourteen--one day in
October, when I lived in a flat, windy town that was named Great
Falls, in Montana. Since that time I have never been without the
young-books of J. T. Trowbridge. There have but seven years passed
since then, but when seven years more, and seven years again, up to
threescore, have gone, I still shall spend one-half my rest-hours,
my pleasure-hours, my loosely-comfortable, unstrained hours with
the young-books of Trowbridge.
When I go to a theater I enjoy it thoroughly. A theater is a good
thing, and the actor is a stunning person--but how eagerly and
gladly I come back into my own room where there is a faithful,
little, tan deer standing waiting, all so pathetic and sweet, upon
the desk.
When I go out into two crowded rooms among some fascinating persons
that I have heard of before--women with fine-wrought gowns--I like
that, too, and I wouldn’t have missed it--but how utterly restful
and adorable it is to come back to my own room where there is my
comfortable quiet friend in a rusty black flannel frock, sitting
waiting--and her hands so soft and good to feel.
When I read gold treasures of literature--Vergil, it may be, or
a Browning, or Kipling--I am enchanted and enthralled. I marvel
at these people and how they can write. I think how marvelous is
writing, at last--but how gladly and thankfully, after two hours
or three, I return back to these my young-books of Trowbridge.
They are about people living on farms, and they are written so that
you know that red-root grows among wheat-spears, and must be weeded
out, and that the farmer’s boys have to milk the cows mornings
before breakfast and evenings after supper. For they have supper in
the Trowbridge books--and it is even attractive and tastes good.
When the lads go to gather kelp to spread on the land, and are
gone for the day by the seashore, they eat roasted ears of corn,
and cold-boiled eggs, and bread-and-butter, and three bottles of
spruce beer--and if you really know the Trowbridge books you can
eat of these with them, and with a wonderful appetite.
When a slim boy of sixteen goes to hunt for his uncle’s horse that
had been stolen in the night (because the boy left the stable
door unlocked), along pleasant country roads and smiling farms in
Massachusetts--if you really know the Trowbridge books--the slim boy
of sixteen is not more anxious to find the horse than you are. When
the boy and the reader first start after the horse they are far too
wretched and anxious to eat--for the crabbed uncle told them they
needn’t come back to the farm without that horse. But long before
noon they are glad enough that they have a few doubled slices of
buttered bread to eat as they go. When at last they come upon the
horse calmly feeding under a cattle-shed at a county fair twenty
miles away, they are quite hungry, and in their joy they purchase
a wedge of pie and some oyster crackers, so that they needn’t be
out of sight of the horse while they eat. And the reader--if he
really knows the Trowbridge books--would fain stop here, for there
is trouble ahead of him. He would fain--but he can not. He must go
on--he must even come in crucial contact with Eli Badger’s hickory
club--he must go with the boy until he sees him and the horse at
last safely back at Uncle Gray’s farm, the horse placidly munching
oats in his own stall, and the boy eating supper once more with
appetite unimpaired, and the crabbed uncle once more serene. And--if
you know Trowbridge’s books--you can eat, too, tranquilly.
When a boy is left alone in the world by the death of his aunt and
starts out to find his uncle in Cincinnati--if you know Trowbridge’s
books--you prepare for hardship and weariness, but still occasional
sandwiches and doughnuts (but not the greasy kind). And always you
know there must be a haven in the house of the uncle in Cincinnati.
Only--if you know the Trowbridge books--you are fearful when you
get to the uncle’s door, and you would a little rather the boy
went in to meet him while you waited outside. Trowbridge’s uncles
are apt to be so sour as to heart, and so bitter as to tongue, and
so sarcastic in their remarks relating to boys who come in from
the country to the city in order that they--the uncles--may have
the privilege of supporting them. Though you know--if you know
the Trowbridge books--that Trowbridge’s boys never come into the
city for that purpose. The heavy-tempered uncles, too, are made
aware of this before long, and change the tenor of their remarks
accordingly--and after some just pride on the part of the nephews,
all goes well. Whereupon your feeling of satisfaction is more than
that of the boy, of the uncle, of Trowbridge himself.
But these roasted ears of corn and cold-boiled eggs are among
the lesser delights of the young-books of Trowbridge. The most
fascinating things in them are the conversations. They are so real
that you hear the voices and see the expressions of the faces.
Trowbridge is one of the kind that listens twice and thrice to
persons talking, so that he hears the key-note and the detail, and
his pen is of the kind that can write what he hears. It is never
too much, never too little; it is not noticeable at all, because
it is all harmony.
It is entirely and utterly common.
And it is real.
In the young-books of Trowbridge, and nowhere else, I have heard
boys talking together so that I knew how their faces looked, and how
carelessly and loosely their various collars were worn, and their
dubious hats. I have heard a grasping, grouty old man pound on the
kitchen floor with his horn-headed cane--he had come over while the
family were at breakfast to inform them that their dog had killed
five of his sheep, and to demand the dog’s life. I have heard the
lessons and other things they said in a country school-room sixty
years ago, where boys were sometimes obliged, for punishment, to sit
on nothing against the door. I have heard the extreme discontent
in the voice of another grouty, grasping farmer when it became
evident to him that he would be obliged to give up a horse that had
been stolen before he bought him. But here I must quote, as nearly
correctly as I can without the book:
“‘And sold him to this Mr. Badger’ (said Kit) ‘for seventy dollars.’
“‘Seventy gim-cracks!’ exclaimed Uncle Gray, aghast. ‘I should
think any fool might know he’s worth more than that.’
“He was thinking of Brunlow, but Eli applied the remark to himself.
“‘I did know it,’ he growled. ‘That’s why I bought him. And mighty
glad I am now I didn’t pay more.’
“‘Sartin!’ replied Uncle Gray; ‘but didn’t it occur to you ’t no
honest man would want to sell an honest hoss like that for any
such sum?’
“‘I didn’t know it,’ said Eli, groutily. ‘He told a pooty straight
story. I got took in, that’s all.’
“‘Took in!’ repeated Uncle Gray. ‘I should say, took in! I know
the rogue and I’m amazed that any man with common sense and eyes
in his head shouldn’t ’a’ seen through him at once.’
“‘Maybe I ain’t got common sense, and maybe I ain’t got eyes in my
head,’ said Eli, with a dull fire in the place where eyes should
have been if he had had any. ‘But I didn’t expect this.’
“Kit hastened to interpose between the two men.”
Always I have been sorry that the boy interposed just there.
I have read the book surely seven-and-seventy times. Each time
this talk over the horse comes exceeding pungent to my ears. How
impossible it is to weary of Trowbridge, because there is no effort
in the writing, and no effort in the reading, and because of a
deep-reaching, never-failing sense of humor.----
How flat seem these words!
The young-books of Trowbridge can not be set down in words. What
with the simplicity, what with the quality of naturalness, what
with a delicate tenderness for all human things, what with the
rare, rare quality of commonness that is satisfying and quieting
as the vision of a little green radish-bed, what with an inner
sympathy between Trowbridge and his characters and, above all, an
inner sympathy with his readers, what with Truth itself and the
sweet gift of portraying the sunshiny days as they are--why talk
of Trowbridge?
Is it not all there written?
Can one not read and rest in it?