Of the first three years of my life which preceded this removal there is
very little that I can honestly claim to remember. The things that I
seem to remember are seeing from the window of our little house, when I
woke one morning, a peach-tree in bloom; and again seeing from the
steamboat which was carrying our family to Cincinnati, a man drowning in
the river. But these visions, both of them very distinct, might very
well have been the effect of hearing the things spoken of by my elders,
though I am surest of the peach-tree in bloom as an authentic memory.
This time, so happy for my father and mother, was scarcely less happy
because of its uncertainties. My young aunts lived with their now
widowed mother not far from us; as the latest comer, I was in much
request among them, of course; and my father was hardly less in favor
with the whole family from his acceptable habit of finding a joke in
everything. He supplied the place of son to my grandmother in the
absence of my young uncles, then away most of their time on the river
which they followed from the humblest beginnings on keel-boats to the
proudest endings as pilots and captains and owners of steamboats. In
those early days when they returned from the river they brought their
earnings to their mother in gold coins, which they called Yellow Boys,
and which she kept in a bowl in the cupboard, where I seem so vividly
to have seen them, that I cannot quite believe I did not. These good
sons were all Democrats except the youngest, but they finally became of
my father's anti-slavery Whig faith in politics, and I believe they were
as glad to have their home in a free state as my father's family, who
had now left Wheeling, and were settled in southwestern Ohio.
There were not many slaves in Wheeling, but it was a sort of entrepôt
where the negroes were collected and embarked for the plantations down
the river, in their doom to the death-in-life of the far South. My
grandfather Howells had, in the anti-slavery tradition of his
motherland, made himself so little desired among his Virginian
fellow-citizens that I have heard his removal from Wheeling was
distinctly favored by public sentiment; and afterward, on the farm he
bought in Ohio, his fences and corn-cribs suffered from the pro-slavery
convictions of his neighbors. But he was dwelling in safety and
prosperity among the drugs and books which were his merchandise in the
store where I began to remember him in my earliest days at Hamilton. He
seemed to me a very old man, and I noticed with the keen observance of a
child how the muscles sagged at the sides of his chin and how his under
lip, which I did not know I had inherited from him, projected. His
clothes, which had long ceased to be drab in color, were of a Quaker
formality in cut; his black hat followed this world's fashion in color,
but was broad in the brim and very low-crowned, which added somehow in
my young sense to the reproving sadness of his presence. He had black
Welsh eyes and was of the low stature of his race; my grandmother was
blue-eyed; she was little, too; but my aunt, their only surviving
daughter, with his black eyes, was among their taller children. She was
born several years after their settlement in America, but she loyally
misused her aspirates as they did, and, never marrying, was of a
life-long devotion to them. They first lived over the drug-store, after
the fashion of shopkeepers in England; I am aware of my grandfather soon
afterward having a pretty house and a large garden quite away from the
store, but he always lived more simply than his means obliged. Amidst
the rude experiences of their backwoods years, the family had continued
gentle in their thoughts and tastes, though my grandfather shared with
poetry his passion for religion, and in my later boyhood when I had
begun to print my verses, he wrote me a letter solemnly praising them,
but adjuring me to devote my gifts to the service of my Maker, which I
had so little notion of doing in a selfish ideal of my own glory.
Most of his father's fortune had somehow gone to other sons, but,
whether rich or poor, their generation seemed to be of a like
religiosity. One of them lived in worldly state at Bristol before coming
to America, and was probably of a piety not so insupportable as I found
him in the memoir which he wrote of his second wife, when I came to read
it the other day. Him I never saw, but from time to time there was one
or other of his many sons employed in my grandfather's store, whom I
remember blithe spirits, disposed to seize whatever chance of a joke
life offered them, such as selling Young's _Night Thoughts_ to a
customer who had whispered his wish for an improper book. Some of my
father's younger brothers were of a like cheerfulness with these lively
cousins, and of the same aptness for laughter. One was a physician,
another a dentist, another in a neighboring town a druggist, another yet
a speculative adventurer in the regions to the southward: he came back
from his commercial forays once with so many half-dollars that when
spread out they covered the whole surface of our dining-table; but I am
quite unable to report what negotiation they were the spoil of. There
was a far cousin who was a painter, and left (possibly as a pledge of
indebtedness) with my dentist uncle after a sojourn among us a picture
which I early prized as a masterpiece, and still remember as the
charming head of a girl shadowed by the fan she held over it. I never
saw the painter, but I recall, from my father's singing them, the lines
of a "doleful ballad" which he left behind him as well as the picture:
A thief will steal from you all that you havye,
But an unfaithful lovyer will bring you to your grave.
The uncle who was a physician, when he left off the practice of medicine
about his eightieth year, took up the art of sculpture; he may have
always had a taste for it, and his knowledge of anatomy would have
helped qualify him for it. He modeled from photographs a head of my
father admirably like and full of character, the really extraordinary
witness of a gift latent till then through a long life devoted to other
things.
We children had our preference among these Howells uncles, but we did
not care for any of them so much as for our Dean uncles, who now and
then found their way up to Hamilton from Cincinnati when their
steamboats lay there in their trips from Pittsburg. They were all very
jovial; and one of the younger among them could play the violin, not
less acceptably because he played by ear and not by art. Of the youngest
and best-loved I am lastingly aware in his coming late one night and of
my creeping down-stairs from my sleep to sit in his lap and hear his
talk with my father and mother, while his bursts of laughter agreeably
shook my small person. I dare say these uncles used to bring us gifts
from that steamboating world of theirs which seemed to us of a splendor
not less than what I should now call oriental when we sometimes visited
them at Cincinnati, and came away bulging in every pocket with the more
portable of the dainties we had been feasting upon. In the most signal
of these visits, as I once sat between my father and my Uncle William,
for whom I was named, on the hurricane roof of his boat, he took a
silver half-dollar from his pocket and put it warm in my hand, with a
quizzical look into my eyes. The sight of such unexampled riches stopped
my breath for the moment, but I made out to ask, "Is it for me?" and he
nodded his head smilingly up and down; then, for my experience had
hitherto been of fippenny-bits yielded by my father after long
reasoning, I asked, "Is it good?" and remained puzzled to know why they
laughed so together; it must have been years before I understood.
These uncles had grown up in a slave state, and they thought, without
thinking, that slavery must be right; but once when an abolition
lecturer was denied public hearing at Martin's Ferry, they said he
should speak in their mother's house; and there, much unaware, I heard
my first and last abolition lecture, barely escaping with my life, for
one of the objections urged by the mob outside was a stone hurled
through the window, where my mother sat with me in her arms. At my Uncle
William's house in the years after the Civil War, my father and he began
talking of old times, and he told how, when a boy on a keel-boat, tied
up to a Mississippi shore, he had seen an overseer steal upon a black
girl loitering at her work, and wind his blacksnake-whip round her body,
naked except for the one cotton garment she wore. "When I heard that
colored female screech," he said, and the old-fashioned word female,
used for compassionate respectfulness, remains with me, "and saw her
jump, I knew that there must be something wrong in slavery." Perhaps the
sense of this had been in his mind when he determined with his brothers
that the abolition lecturer should be heard in their mother's house.
She sometimes came to visit us in Hamilton, to break the homesick
separations from her which my mother suffered through for so many years,
and her visits were times of high holiday for us children. I should be
interested now to know what she and my Welsh grandmother made of each
other, but I believe they were good friends, though probably not
mutually very intelligible. My mother's young sisters, who also came on
welcome visits, were always joking with my father and helping my mother
at her work; but I cannot suppose that there was much common ground
between them and my grandfather's family except in their common
Methodism. For me, I adored them; and if the truth must be told, though
I had every reason to love my Welsh grandmother, I had a peculiar
tenderness for my Pennsylvania-Dutch grandmother, with her German accent
and her caressing ways. My grandfather, indeed, could have recognized no
difference among heirs of equal complicity in Adam's sin; and in the
situation such as it was, I lived blissfully unborn to all things of
life outside of my home. I can recur to the time only as a dream of love
and loving, and though I came out of it no longer a little child, but a
boy struggling tooth and nail for my place among other boys, I must
still recur to the ten or eleven years passed in Hamilton as the
gladdest of all my years. They may have been even gladder than they now
seem, because the incidents which embody happiness had then the novelty
which such incidents lose from their recurrence; while the facts of
unhappiness, no matter how often they repeat themselves, seem throughout
life an unprecedented experience and impress themselves as vividly the
last time as the first. I recall some occasions of grief and shame in
that far past with unfailing distinctness, but the long spaces
[Illustration: _Hamilton, Ohio, the "Boy's Town" of Mr. Howells's
youth_]
of blissful living which they interrupted hold few or no records which I
can allege in proof of my belief that I was then, above every other
when,
Joyful and free from blame.