From infancy I was under the guardianship of a village parson, who made
me the subject of daily prayer and the sufferer of innumerable stripes,
using no distinction, as to these marks of paternal love, between
myself and his own three boys. The result, it must be owned, has been
very different in their cases and mine, they being all respectable men
and well settled in life; the eldest as the successor to his father’s
pulpit, the second as a physician, and the third as a partner in a
wholesale shoe-store; while I, with better prospects than either of
them, have run the course which this volume will describe. Yet there is
room for doubt whether I should have been any better contented with
such success as theirs than with my own misfortunes,—at least, till
after my experience of the latter had made it too late for another
trial.
My guardian had a name of considerable eminence, and fitter for the
place it occupies in ecclesiastical history than for so frivolous a
page as mine. In his own vicinity, among the lighter part of his
hearers, he was called Parson Thumpcushion, from the very forcible
gestures with which he illustrated his doctrines. Certainly, if his
powers as a preacher were to be estimated by the damage done to his
pulpit-furniture, none of his living brethren, and but few dead ones,
would have been worthy even to pronounce a benediction after him. Such
pounding and expounding the moment he began to grow warm, such slapping
with his open palm, thumping with his closed fist, and banging with the
whole weight of the great Bible, convinced me that he held, in
imagination, either the Old Nick or some Unitarian infidel at bay, and
belabored his unhappy cushion as proxy for those abominable
adversaries. Nothing but this exercise of the body while delivering his
sermons could have supported the good parson’s health under the mental
toil which they cost him in composition.
Though Parson Thumpcushion had an upright heart, and some called it a
warm one, he was invariably stern and severe, on principle, I suppose,
to me. With late justice, though early enough, even now, to be
tinctured with generosity I acknowledge him to have been a good and
wise man after his own fashion. If his management failed as to myself,
it succeeded with his three sons; nor, I must frankly say, could any
mode of education with which it was possible for him to be acquainted
have made me much better than what I was or led me to a happier fortune
than the present. He could neither change the nature that God gave me
nor adapt his own inflexible mind to my peculiar character. Perhaps it
was my chief misfortune that I had neither father nor mother alive; for
parents have an instinctive sagacity in regard to the welfare of their
children, and the child feels a confidence both in the wisdom and
affection of his parents which he cannot transfer to any delegate of
their duties, however conscientious. An orphan’s fate is hard, be he
rich or poor. As for Parson Thumpcushion, whenever I see the old
gentleman in my dreams he looks kindly and sorrowfully at me, holding
out his hand as if each had something to forgive. With such kindness
and such forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next meeting be!
I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible levity
of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but wayward and
fanciful. What a character was this to be brought in contact with the
stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian! We were at variance on a
thousand points; but our chief and final dispute arose from the
pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a particular
profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence, had avowed my
purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would
have been a dangerous resolution anywhere in the world; it was fatal in
New England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my countrymen;
they will not be convinced that any good thing may consist with what
they call idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a young man
who neither studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor
takes to farming, but manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be
satisfied with what his father left him. The principle is excellent in
its general influence, but most miserable in its effect on the few that
violate it. I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt as
if it ranked me with the tavern haunters and town paupers,—with the
drunken poet who hawked his own Fourth of July odes, and the broken
soldier who had been good for nothing since last war. The consequence
of all this was a piece of light-hearted desperation.
I do not over-estimate my notoriety when I take it for granted that
many of my readers must have heard of me in the wild way of life which
I adopted. The idea of becoming a wandering story-teller had been
suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several merry
vagabonds in a showman’s wagon, where they and I had sheltered
ourselves during a summer shower. The project was not more extravagant
than most which a young man forms. Stranger ones are executed every
day; and, not to mention my prototypes in the East, and the wandering
orators and poets whom my own ears have heard, I had the example of one
illustrious itinerant in the other hemisphere,—of Goldsmith, who
planned and performed his travels through France and Italy on a less
promising scheme than mine. I took credit to myself for various
qualifications, mental and personal, suited to the undertaking.
Besides, my mind had latterly tormented me for employment, keeping up
an irregular activity even in sleep, and making me conscious that I
must toil, if it were but in catching butterflies. But my chief motives
were, discontent with home and a bitter grudge against Parson
Thumpcushion, who would rather have laid me in my father’s tomb than
seen me either a novelist or an actor, two characters which I thus hit
upon a method of uniting. After all, it was not half so foolish as if I
had written romances instead of reciting them.
The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life,
intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great
mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished like
cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary reward, I
was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty wherever chance had
collected a little audience idle enough to listen. These rehearsals
were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and, indeed,
the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly that its indulgence
was its own reward, though the hope of praise also became a powerful
incitement. Since I shall never feel the warm gush of new thought as I
did then, let me beseech the reader to believe that my tales were not
always so cold as he may find them now. With each specimen will be
given a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus
my air-drawn pictures will be set in frames perhaps more valuable than
the pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of
characteristic figures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the
villages and fertile fields, of our native land. But I write the book
for the sake of its moral, which many a dreaming youth may profit by,
though it is the experience of a wandering story-teller.