BOYHOOD.
In a curious little almanac for 1809 may still be seen against the date
of August 29, the simple record, "Son b." Twice before had good Parson
Holmes recorded in similar manner the births of his children, for Oliver
Wendell, who bore his grandfather's name, was his third child; but this
was the first time he could write "son."
A few years later another son came--the "brother John" whose wit and
talents have gladdened so many hearts--and, last of all, another
daughter came to brighten the family circle for a few brief years.
The little Oliver was a bright, sunny-tempered child, highly imaginative
and extremely sensitive. Speaking of his childhood in after years, and
of certain superstitious fancies that always clung to him, he says:
"I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of impressible
nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted,
locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret; ... There was a dark
store-room, too, on looking through the keyhole of which I could dimly
see a heap of chairs and tables and other four-footed things, which
seemed to me to have rushed in there frightened, and in their fright to
have huddled together and climbed up on each other's backs--as the
people did in that awful crush where so many were killed at the
execution of Holloway and Haggerty. Then the lady's portrait up-stairs
with the sword-thrusts through it--marks of the British officers'
rapiers--and the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red
coats--confound them for smashing its mate!--and the deep,
cunningly-wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy used to sit while his
hair was dressing; he was a gentleman, and always had it covered with a
large _peignoir_ to save the silk covering my grandmother embroidered.
Then the little room down-stairs from which went the orders to throw up
a bank of earth on the hill yonder where you may now observe a granite
obelisk, the study in my father's time, but in those days the
council-chamber of armed men, sometimes filled with soldiers. Come with
me, and I will show you the 'dents' left by the butts of their muskets
all over the floor. With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by
the wild stories those awful country boys that came to live in our
service brought with them--of contracts written in blood and left out
over night not to be found the next morning (removed by the Evil One who
takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed away for future
use), of dreams coming true, of death-signs, of apparitions, no wonder
that my imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious
fancies."
What some of these fancies were, he tells us elsewhere:
"I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never tell. The masts looked
frightfully tall, but they were not so tall as the steeple of our old
yellow meeting-house. At any rate, I used to hide my eyes from the
sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and
I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted very long. One
other source of alarm had a still more fearful significance. There was
a great wooden hand, a glovemaker's sign, which used to swing and creak
in the blast as it hung from a pillar before a certain shop a mile or
two outside of the city. Oh, the dreadful hand! Always hanging there
ready to catch up a little boy who would come home to supper no more,
nor yet to bed, whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth,
and his half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.
"As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to think I
must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but I now believe
that half the children of the same age go through the same experiences.
No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of omens as I found in the
sibylline leaves of my childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at a
tree and attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing, which you
will find mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember.
Stepping on or over certain particular things or spots--Doctor Johnson's
special weakness--I got the habit of at a very early age.
"With these follies mingled sweet delusions which I loved so well I
would not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to put
a momentary trust in them. Here is one which I cannot help telling you.
"The firing of the great guns at the Navy Yard is easily heard at the
place where I was born and lived. 'There is a ship of war come in,' they
used to say, when they heard them. Of course I supposed that such
vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite years of absence,
suddenly as falling stones, and that the great guns roared in their
astonishment and delight at the sight of the old war-ship splitting the
bay with her cut-water. Now, the sloop-of-war the _Wasp_, Captain
Blakely, after gloriously capturing the _Reindeer_ and the _Avon_, had
disappeared from the face of the ocean, and was supposed to be lost. But
there was no proof of it, and of course for a time, hopes were
entertained that she might be heard from. Long after the last real
chance had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion
that somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there
were _years_ during which I never heard the sound of the great guns
booming inland from the Navy Yard without saying to myself, 'the _Wasp_
has come!' and almost thinking I could see her as she rolled in,
crumpling the waters before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with
shattered spars and threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears
of thousands. This was one of those dreams that I mused and never told.
Let me make a clean breast of it now, and say, that, so late as to have
outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood, when the
roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have started with a
thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight, and the long unspoken
words have articulated themselves in the mind's dumb whisper, _The Wasp
has come!_
"Yes; children believe plenty of queer things. I suppose all of you have
had the pocket-book fever when you were little? What do I mean? Why,
ripping up old pocket-books in the firm belief that bank-bills to an
immense amount were hidden in them. So, too, you must all remember some
splendid unfulfilled promise of somebody or other, which fed you with
hopes perhaps for years, and which left a blank in your life which
nothing has ever filled up. O.T. quitted our household carrying with
him the passionate regrets of the more youthful members. He was an
ingenious youngster; wrote wonderful copies, and carved the two initials
given above with great skill on all available surfaces. I thought, by
the way, they were all gone, but the other day, I found them on a
certain door. How it surprised me to find them so near the ground! I had
thought the boy of no trivial dimensions. Well, O.T., when he went, made
a solemn promise to two of us. I was to have a ship, and the other a
martin house (last syllable pronounced as in the word _tin_). Neither
ever came; but oh! how many and many a time I have stolen to the
corner--the cars pass close by it at this time--and looked up that long
avenue, thinking that he must be coming now, almost sure as I turned to
look northward that there he would be, trudging toward me, the ship in
one hand and the mar_tin_ house in the other!"
At an early age the merry, restless little fellow was sent to a
neighboring school, kept by Ma'am Prentiss, a good, motherly old dame,
who ruled her little flock, not with a scourge of birches, but with a
long willow rod that reached quite across the schoolroom,
"reminding,[4] rather than chastening." Among her pupils was Alfred
Lee, afterwards the beloved Bishop of Delaware.
"It is by little things," says the Autocrat, "that we know ourselves; a
soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once
disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from
those of others only in details seemingly trivial. All of us have been
thirsty thousands of times, and felt with Pindar, that water was the
best of things. I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one
particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which the
pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a red-faced
and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a fragment in his haste
to drink; it being then high summer, and little full-blooded boys
feeling very warm and porous in the low studded schoolroom where Dame
Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled over young children. Thirst belongs to
humanity everywhere, in all ages, but that white-pine pail and that
brown mug belong to me in particular."
The next school to which the Cambridge pastor sent his little son was
kept by William Biglow, a man of considerable scholarship and much
native wit. Five years were spent at a school in Cambridgeport, which
was kept by several successive teachers, and it was here, as
schoolmates, that Oliver Wendell Holmes first met Margaret Fuller and
Richard Henry Dana.
"I was moderately studious," says Doctor Holmes, "and very fond of
reading stories, which I sometimes did in school hours. I was fond also
of whispering, and my desk bore sad witness to my passion for whittling.
For these misdemeanors I sometimes had a visitation from the ferule, and
once when a Gunter's scale was used for this purpose, it flew to pieces
as it came down on my palm."[5]
It was about this time, doubtless, that the _Autocrat_ learned that
important fact about the "hat."
"I was once equipped," he says, "in a hat of Leghorn straw, having a
brim of much wider dimensions than were usual at that time, and sent to
school in that portion of my native town which lies nearest to the
metropolis. On my way I was met by a 'Port-Chuck,' as we used to call
the young gentlemen of that locality, and the following dialogue ensued:
"_The Port-Chuck_: 'Hullo, you sir, joo know th' wus goin' to be a race
to-morrah?'
"_Myself_: 'No. Who's goin' to run, 'n' wher' 's't goin' to be?'
"_The Port-Chuck_: 'Squire Mico 'n' Doctor Williams, round the brim o'
your hat.'
"These two much-respected gentlemen being the oldest inhabitants at that
time, and the alleged race-course being out of the question, the
Port-Chuck also winking and thrusting his tongue into his cheek, I
perceived that I had been trifled with, and the effect has been to make
me sensitive and observant respecting this article ever since. The hat
is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument."
FOOTNOTES:
[4] From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes.
[5] From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes.