V.

The home-life of Mr. Grady was peculiarly happy. He was blessed, in the

first place, with a good mother, and he never grew away from her

influence in the smallest particular. When his father was killed in the

war, his mother devoted herself the more assiduously to the training of

her children. She molded the mind and character of her brilliant son,

and started him forth on a career that has no parallel in our history.

To that mother his heart always turned most tenderly. She had made his

boyhood bright and happy, and he was never tired of bringing up

recollections of those wonderful days. On one occasion, the Christmas

before he died, he visited his mother at the old home in Athens. He

returned brimming over with happiness. To his associates in the

_Constitution_ office he told the story of his visit, and what he said

has been recorded by Mrs. Maude Andrews Ohl, a member of the editorial

staff.

“Well do I remember,” says Mrs. Ohl, “how he spent his last year’s

holiday season, and the little story he told me of it as I sat in his

office one morning after New Year’s.

“He had visited his mother in Athens Christmas week, and he said: ‘I

don’t think I ever felt happier than when I reached the little home of

my boyhood. I got there at night. She had saved supper for me and she

had remembered all the things I liked. She toasted me some cheese over

the fire. Why, I hadn’t tasted anything like it since I put off my round

jackets. And then she had some home-made candy, she knew I used to love

and bless her heart! I just felt sixteen again as we sat and talked, and

she told me how she prayed for me and thought of me always, and what a

brightness I had been to her life, and how she heard me coming home in

every boy that whistled along the street. When I went to bed she came

and tucked the covers all around me in the dear old way that none but a

mother’s hands know, and I felt so happy and so peaceful and so full of

tender love and tender memories that I cried happy, grateful tears until

I went to sleep.’

“When he finished his eyes were full of tears and so were mine. He

brushed his hands across his brow swiftly and said, laughingly: ‘Why,

what are you crying about? What do you know about all this sort of

feeling!’

“He never seemed brighter than on that day. He had received an ovation

of loving admiration from the friends of his boyhood at his old home,

and these honors from the hearts that loved him as a friend were dearer

than all others. It was for these friends, these countrymen of his own,

that his honors were won and his life was sacrificed.”

From the home-life of his boyhood he stepped into the fuller and richer

home-life that followed his marriage. He married the sweetheart of his

early youth, Miss Julia King, of Athens, and she remained his sweetheart

to the last. The first pseudonym that he used in his contributions to

the _Constitution_, “King Hans,” was a fanciful union of Miss King’s

name with his, and during his service in Florida, long after he was

married, he signed his telegrams “Jule.” In the office not a day passed

that he did not have something to say of his wife and children. They

were never out of his thoughts, no matter what business occupied his

mind. In his speeches there are constant allusions to his son, and in

his conversation the gentle-eyed maiden, his daughter, was always

tenderly figuring. His home-life was in all respects an ideal one; ideal

in its surroundings, in its influences, and in its purposes. I think

that the very fact of his own happiness gave him a certain restlessness

in behalf of the happiness of others. His writings, his speeches, his

lectures—his whole life, in fact—teem with references to home-happiness

and home-content. Over and over again he recurs to these things—always

with the same earnestness, always with the same enthusiasm. He never

meets a man on the street, but he wonders if he has a happy home—if he

is contented—if he has children that he loves. To him home was a shrine

to be worshiped at—a temple to be happy in, no matter how humble, or how

near to the brink of poverty.

One of his most successful lectures, and the one that he thought the

most of, was entitled “A Patchwork Palace: The story of a Home.” The

Patchwork Palace still exists in Atlanta, and the man who built it is

living in it to-day. Mr. Grady never wrote out the lecture, and all that

can be found of it is a few rough and faded notes scratched on little

sheets of paper. On one occasion, however, he condensed the opening of

his lecture for the purpose of making a newspaper sketch of the whole.

It is unfinished, but the following has something of the flavor of the

lecture. He called the builder of the Palace Mr. Mortimer Pitts, though

that is not his name:

Mr. Mortimer Pitts was a rag-picker. After a patient study of

the responsibility that the statement carries, I do not hesitate

to say that he was the poorest man that ever existed. He lived

literally from hand to mouth. His breakfast was a crust; his

dinner a question; his supper a regret. His earthly wealth,

beyond the rags that covered him, was—a cow that I believe gave

both butter-milk and sweet-milk—a dog that gave neither—and a

hand-cart in which he wheeled his wares about. His wife had a

wash-tub that she held in her own title, a wash-board similarly

possessed, and two chairs that came to her as a dowry.

In opposition to this poverty, my poor hero had—first, a name

(Mortimer Pitts, Esq.) which his parents, whose noses were in

the air when they christened him, had saddled upon him

aspiringly, but which followed him through life, his condition

being put in contrast with its rich syllables, as a sort of

standing sarcasm. Second, a multitude of tow-headed children

with shallow-blue eyes. The rag-picker never looked above the

tow-heads of his brats, nor beyond the faded blue eyes of his

wife. His world was very small. The cricket that chirped beneath

the hearthstone of the hovel in which he might chance to live,

and the sunshine that crept through the cracks, filled it with

music and light. Trouble only strengthened the bonds of love and

sympathy that held the little brood together, and whenever the

Wolf showed his gaunt form at the door, the white faces, and the

blue eyes, and the tow-heads only huddled the closer to each

other, until, in very shame, the intruder would take himself

off.

Mr. Pitts had no home. With the restlessness of an Arab he

flitted from one part of the city to another. He was famous for

frightening the early market-maids by pushing his white round

face, usually set in a circle of smaller white round faces,

through the windows of long-deserted hovels. Wherever there was

a miserable shell of a house that whistled when the wind blew,

and wept when the rain fell, there you might be sure of finding

Mr. Pitts at one time or another. I do not care to state how

many times my hero, with an uncertain step and a pitifully

wandering look—his fertile wife, in remote or imminent process

of fruitage—his wan and sedate brood of young ones—his cow, a

thoroughly conscientious creature, who passed her scanty diet to

milk to the woeful neglect of tissue—and his dog, too honest for

any foolish pride, ambling along in an unpretending,

bench-legged sort of way,—I do not care to state, I say, how

many times this pale and melancholy procession passed through

the streets, seeking for a shelter in which it might hide its

wretchedness and ward off the storms.

During these periods of transition, Mr. Pitts was wonderfully

low-spirited. “Even a bird has its nest; and the poorest animal

has some sort of a hole in the ground, or a roost where it can

go when it is a-weary,” he said to me once, when I caught him

fluttering aimlessly out of a house which, under the influence

of a storm, had spit out its western wall, and dropped its upper

jaw dangerously near to the back of the cow. And from that time

forth, I fancied I noticed my poor friend’s face growing whiter,

and the blue in his eye deepening, and his lips becoming more

tremulous and uncertain. The shuffling figure, begirt with the

rag-picker’s bells, and dragging the wobbling cart, gradually

bended forward, and the look of childish content was gone from

his brow, and a great dark wrinkle had knotted itself there.

And now let me tell you about the starting of the Palace.

One day in the springtime, when the uprising sap ran through

every fibre of the forest, and made the trees as drunk as

lords—when the birds were full-throated, and the air was woven

thick with their songs of love and praise—when the brooks kissed

their uttermost banks, and the earth gave birth to flowers, and

all nature was elastic and alert, and thrilled to the core with

the ecstasy of the sun’s new courtship—a divine passion fell

like a spark into Mr. Mortimer Pitts’s heart. How it ever broke

through the hideous crust of poverty that cased the man about, I

do not know, nor shall we ever know ought but that God put it

there in his own gentle way. But there it was. It dropped into

the cold, dead heart like a spark—and there it flared and

trembled, and grew into a blaze, and swept through his soul, and

fed upon its bitterness until the scales fell off and the eyes

flashed and sparkled, and the old man was illumined with a

splendid glow like that which hurries youth to its love, or a

soldier to the charge. You would not have believed he was the

same man. You would have laughed had you been told that the old

fellow, sweltering in the dust, harnessed like a dog to a cart,

and plying his pick into the garbage heaps like a man worn down

to the stupidity of a machine, was burning and bursting with a

great ambition—that a passion as pure and as strong as ever

kindled blue blood, or steeled gentle nerves was tugging at his

heart-strings. And yet, so it was. The rag-picker was filled

with a consuming fire—and as he worked, and toiled, and starved,

his soul sobbed, and laughed, and cursed, and prayed.

Mr. Pitts wanted a home. A man named Napoleon once wanted

universal empire. Mr. Pitts was vastly the more daring dreamer

of the two.

I do not think he had ever had a home. Possibly, away back

beyond the years a dim, sweet memory of a hearthstone and a

gable roof with the rain pattering on it, and a cupboard and a

clock, and a deep, still well, came to him like an echo or a

dream. Be this as it may, our hero, crushed into the very mud

by poverty—upon knees and hands beneath his burden—fighting

like a beast for his daily food—shut out inexorably from all

suggestions of home—embittered by starvation—with his

faculties chained down apparently to the dreary problem of

to-day—nevertheless did lift his eyes into the gray future,

and set his soul upon a home.

This is a mere fragment—a bare synopsis of the opening of what was one

of the most eloquent and pathetic lectures ever delivered from the

platform. It was a beautiful idyll of home—an appeal, a eulogy—a

glimpse, as it were, of the passionate devotion with which he regarded

his own home. Here is another fragment of the lecture that follows

closely after the foregoing:

After a month’s struggle, Mr. Pitts purchased the ground on

which his home was to be built. It was an indescribable

hillside, bordering on the precipitous. A friend of mine

remarked that “it was such an aggravating piece of profanity

that the owner gave Mr. Pitts five dollars to accept the land

and the deed to it.” This report I feel bound to correct. Mr.

Pitts purchased the land. He gave three dollars for it. The deed

having been properly recorded, Mr. Pitts went to work. He

borrowed a shovel, and, perching himself against his hillside,

began loosening the dirt in front of him, and spilling it out

between his legs, reminding me, as I passed daily, of a giant

dirt-dauber. At length (and not very long either, for his

remorseless desire made his arms fly like a madman’s) he

succeeded in scooping an apparently flat place out of the

hillside and was ready to lay the foundation of his house.

There was a lapse of a month, and I thought that my hero’s soul

had failed him—that the fire, with so little of hope to feed

upon, had faded and left his heart full of ashes. But at last

there was a pile of dirty second-hand lumber placed on the

ground. I learned on inquiry that it was the remains of a small

house of ignoble nature which had been left standing in a vacant

lot, and which had been given him by the owner. Shortly

afterwards there came some dry-goods boxes; then three or four

old sills; then a window-frame; then the wreck of another little

house; and then the planks of an abandoned show-bill board.

Finally the house began to grow. The sills were put together by

Mr. Pitts and his wife. A rafter shot up toward the sky and

stood there, like a lone sentinel, for some days, and then

another appeared, and then another, and then the fourth. Then

Mr. Pitts, with an agility born of desperation, swarmed up one

of them, and began to lay the cross-pieces. God must have

commissioned an angel especially to watch over the poor man and

save his bones, for nothing short of a miracle could have kept

him from falling while engaged in the perilous work. The frame

once up, he took the odds and ends of planks and began to fit

them. The house grew like a mosaic. No two planks were alike in

size, shape, or color. Here was a piece of a dry-goods box, with

its rich yellow color, and a mercantile legend still painted on

it, supplemented by a dozen pieces of plank; and there was an

old door nailed up bodily and fringed around with bits of board

picked up at random. It was a rare piece of patchwork, in which

none of the pieces were related to or even acquainted with each

other. A nose, an eye, an ear, a mouth, a chin picked up at

random from the ugliest people of a neighborhood, and put

together in a face, would not have been odder than was this

house. The window was ornamented with panes of three different

sizes, and some were left without any glass at all, as Mr. Pitts

afterwards remarked, “to see through.” The chimney was a piece

of old pipe that startled you by protruding unexpectedly through

the wall, and looked as if it were a wound. The entire absence

of smoke at the outer end of this chimney led to a suspicion,

justified by the facts, that there was no stove at the other

end. The roof, which Mrs. Pitts, with a recklessness beyond the

annals, mounted herself and attended to, was partially shingled

and partially planked, this diversity being in the nature of a

plan, as Mr. Pitts confidentially remarked, “to try which style

was the best.”

Such a pathetic travesty on house-building was never before

seen. It started a smile or a tear from every passer-by, as it

reared its homely head there, so patched, uncouth, and poor. And

yet the sun of Austerlitz never brought so much happiness to the

heart of Napoleon as came to Mr. Pitts, as he crept into this

hovel, and, having a blanket before the doorless door, dropped

on his knees and thanked God that at last he had found a home.

The house grew in a slow and tedious way. It ripened with the

seasons. It budded in the restless and rosy spring; unfolded and

developed in the long summer; took shape and fullness in the

brown autumn; and stood ready for the snows and frost when

winter had come. It represented a year of heroism, desperation,

and high resolve. It was the sum total of an ambition that,

planted in the breast of a king, would have shaken the world.

To say that Mr. Pitts enjoyed it would be to speak but a little

of the truth. I have a suspicion that the older children do not

appreciate it as they should. They have a way, when they see a

stranger examining their home with curious and inquiring eyes,

of dodging away from the door shamefacedly, and of reappearing

cautiously at the window. But Mr. Pitts is proud of it. There is

no foolishness about him. He sits on his front piazza, which, I

regret to say, is simply a plank resting on two barrels, and

smokes his pipe with the serenity of a king; and when a stroller

eyes his queer little home curiously, he puts on the air that

the Egyptian gentleman (now deceased) who built the pyramids

might have worn while exhibiting that stupendous work. I have

watched him hours at a time enjoying his house. I have seen him

walk around it slowly, tapping it critically with his knife, as

if to ascertain its state of ripeness, or pressing its corners

solemnly as if testing its muscular development.

Here ends this fragment—a delicious bit of description that only seems

to be exaggerated because the hovel was seen through the eyes of a

poet—of a poet who loved all his fellow men from the greatest to the

smallest, and who was as much interested in the home-making of Mr. Pitts

as he was in the making of Governors and Senators, a business in which

he afterwards became an adept. From the fragments of one of his

lectures, the title of which I am unable to give, I have pieced together

another story as characteristic of Mr. Grady as the Patchwork Palace. It

is curious to see how the idea of home and of home-happiness runs

through it all:

One of the happiest men that I ever knew—one whose serenity was

unassailable, whose cheerfulness was constant, and from whose

heart a perennial spring of sympathy and love bubbled up—was a

man against whom all the powers of misfortune were centered. He

belonged to the tailors—those cross-legged candidates for

consumption. He was miserably poor. Fly as fast as it could

through the endless pieces of broadcloth, his hand could not

always win crusts for his children. But he walked on and on; his

thin white fingers faltered bravely through their tasks as the

hours slipped away, and his serene white face bended forward

over the tedious cloth into which, stitch after stitch, he was

working his life—and, with once in a while a wistful look at the

gleaming sunshine and the floating clouds, he breathed heavily

and painfully of the poisoned air of his work-room, from which a

score of stronger lungs had sucked all the oxygen. And when, at

night, he would go home, and find that there were just crusts

enough for the little ones to eat, the capricious old fellow

would dream that he was not hungry; and when pressed to eat of

the scanty store by his sad and patient wife, would with an air

of smartness pretend a sacred lie—that he had dined with a

friend—and then, with a heart that swelled almost to bursting,

turn away to hide his glistening eyes. Hungry? Of course he was,

time and again. As weak as his body was, as faltering as was the

little fountain that sent the life-blood from his heart—as

meagre as were his necessities, I doubt if there was a time in

all the long years when he was not hungry.

Did you ever think of how many people have died out of this

world through starvation. Thousands! Not recorded in the books

as having died of starvation,—ah, no? Sometimes it is a thin and

watery sort of apoplexy—sometimes it is dyspepsia, and often

consumption. These terms read better. But there are thousands of

them, sensitive, shy gentlemen—too proud to beg and too honest

to steal—too straightforward to scheme or maneuver—too refined

to fill the public with their griefs—too heroic to whine—that

lock their sorrows up in their own hearts, and go on starving in

silence, weakening day after day from the lack of proper

food—the blood running slower and slower through their

veins—their pulse faltering as they pass through the various

stages of inanition, until at last, worn out, apathetic,

exhausted, they are struck by some casual illness, and lose

their hold upon life as easily and as naturally as the autumn

leaf, juiceless, withered and dry, parts from the bough to which

it has clung, and floats down the vast silence of the forest.

But my tailor was cheerful. Nothing could disturb his serenity.

His thin white face was always lit with a smile, and his eyes

shone with a peace that passed my understanding. Hour after hour

he would sing an asthmatic little song that came in wheezes from

his starved lungs—a song that was pitiful and cracked, but that

came from his heart so freighted with love and praise that it

found the ears of Him who softens all distress and sweetens all

harmonies. I wondered where all this happiness came from. How

gushed this abundant stream from this broken reed—how sprung

this luxuriant flower of peace from the scant soil of poverty?

From these hard conditions, how came this ever-fresh felicity?

After he had been turned out of his home, the tailor was taken

sick. His little song gave way to a hectic cough. His place at

the work-room was vacant, and a scanty bed in wretched lodgings

held his frail and fevered frame. The thin fingers clutched the

cover uneasily, as if they were restless of being idle while the

little ones were crying for bread. The tired man tossed to and

fro, racked by pain,—but still his face was full of content, and

no word of bitterness escaped him. And the little song, though

the poor lungs could not carry it to the lips, and the trembling

lips could not syllable its music, still lived in his heart and

shone through his happy eyes. “I will be happy soon,” he said in

a faltering way; “I will be better soon—strong enough to go to

work like a man again, for Bessie and the babies.” And he did

get better—better until his face had worn so thin that you could

count his heart-beats by the flush of blood that came and died

in his cheeks—better until his face had sharpened and his smiles

had worn their deep lines about his mouth—better until the poor

fingers lay helpless at his side, and his eyes had lost their

brightness. And one day, as his wife sat by his side, and the

sun streamed in the windows, and the air was full of the

fragrance of spring—he turned his face toward her and said: “I

am better now, my dear.” And, noting a rapturous smile playing

about his mouth, and a strange light kindling in his eyes, she

bended her head forward to lay her wifely kiss upon his face.

Ah! a last kiss, good wife, for thy husband! Thy kiss caught his

soul as it fluttered from his pale lips, and the flickering

pulse had died in his patient wrist, and the little song had

faded from his heart and gone to swell a divine chorus,—and at

last, after years of waiting, the old man was well!

There was nothing strained or artificial in the sentiment that led him

to dwell so constantly on the theme of home and home happiness. The

extracts I have given are merely the rough lecture notes which he wrote

down in order to confirm and congeal his ideas. On the platform, while

following the current of these notes, he injected into them the quality

of his rare and inimitable humor, the contrast serving to give greater

strength and coherence to the pathos that underlay it all. I do not know

that I have dwelt with sufficient emphasis on his humor. He could be

witty enough on occasion, but the sting of it seemed to leave a bad

taste in his mouth. The quality of his humor was not greatly different

from that of Charles Lamb. It was gentle and perennial—a perpetual

wonder and delight to his friends—irrepressible and unbounded—as antic

and as tricksy as that of a boy, as genial and as sweet as the smile of

a beautiful woman. Mr. Grady depended less on anecdote than any of our

great talkers and speakers, though the anecdote, apt, pat, and pointed,

was always ready at the proper moment. He depended rather on the

originality of his own point of view—on the results of his own

individuality. The charm of his personal presence was indescribable. In

every crowd and on every occasion he was a marked man. Quite

independently of his own intentions, he made his presence and his

influence felt. What he said, no matter how light and frivolous, no

matter how trivial, never failed to attract attention. He warmed the

hearts of the old and fired the minds of the young. He managed, in some

way, to impart something of the charm of his personality to his written

words, so that he carried light, and hope, and courage to many hearts,

and when he passed away, people who had never seen him fell to weeping

when they heard of his untimely death.