After my father sold his paper and was casting about for some other
means of livelihood, there were occasional shadows cast by his
anxieties in the bright air of my childhood. Again I doubt if any boy
ever lived a gladder time than I lived in Hamilton, Butler County, Ohio:
words that I write still when I try a new pen, because I learned to
write them first, and love them yet. When we went to live in Dayton,
where my father managed to make a sort of progressive purchase of a
newspaper which he never quite paid for, our skies changed. It was after
an interval of experiment in one sort and another, which amused his
hopeful ingenuity, but ended in nothing, that he entered upon this long
failure. The Dayton _Transcript_ when he began with it was a tri-weekly,
but he made it a daily, and this mistake infected the whole enterprise.
It made harder work for us all than we had known before; and the
printing-office, which had been my delight, became my oppression after
the brief moment of public schooling which I somehow knew. But before
the change from tri-weekly to daily in our paper, I had the unstinted
advantage of a school of morals as it then appeared among us.
The self-sacrificing company of players who suffered for the drama
through this first summer of our life in Dayton paid my father for their
printing in promises which he willingly took at their face value, and in
tickets which were promptly honored at the door. As nearly as I can make
out, I was thus enabled to go every night to the theater, in a passion
for it which remains with me ardent still. I saw such plays of
Shakespeare as "Macbeth" and "Othello," then the stage favorites, and
"Richard III." and evermore "Richard III." I saw such other now quite
forgotten favorites as Kotzebue's "Stranger" and Sheridan Knowles's
"Wife," and such moving actions of unknown origin as "Barbarossa" and
"The Miser of Marseilles," with many screaming farces such as helped
fill every evening full with at least three plays. There was also at
that time a native drama almost as acceptable to our public everywhere
as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" afterward became. It seemed as if our public
would never tire of "A Glance at New York," with its horribly vulgar
stage conceptions of local character, Mose the fireman and Lize his
girl, and Sikesy and their other companions, which drift up before me
now like wraiths from the Pit, and its events of street-fighting and I
dare say heroic rescues from burning buildings by the volunteer fire
companies of the day. When it appeared that the public might tire of the
play, the lively fancy of the theater supplied a fresh attraction in it,
and the character of Little Mose was added. How this must have been
played by what awful young women eager to shine at any cost in their
art, I shudder to think, and it is with "sick and scornful looks averse"
that I turn from the remembrance of my own ambition to shine in that
drama. My father instantly quenched the histrionic spark in me with
loathing; but I cannot say whether this was before or after the failure
of a dramatic attempt of his own which I witnessed, much mystified by
the sense of some occult relation to it. Certainly I did not know that
the melodrama which sacrificed his native to his adoptive patriotism in
the action, and brought off the Americans victors over the British in a
sea-fight, was his work; and probably it was the adaptation of some tale
then much read. Very likely he trusted, in writing it, to the chance
which he always expected to favor the amateur in taking up a musical
instrument strange to him. He may even have dreamed of fortune from it;
but after one performance of it the management seems to have gone back
to such old public favorites as Shakespeare and Sheridan Knowles.
Nothing was said of it in the family; I think some of the newspapers
were not so silent; but I am not sure of this.
My father could, of course, be wiser for others than for himself; the
public saved him from becoming a dramatist, but it was he who saved me
from any remotest chance of becoming an actor, and later from acquiring
the art of the prestidigitator. The only book which I can be sure of his
taking from me was a manual professing to teach this art, which I had
fallen in with. The days of those years in Dayton were in fact very
different from the days in Hamilton when I was reaching out near and far
to feed my fancy for fable and my famine for fact. I read no new books
which now occur to me by name, though I still kept my interest in Greek
mythology and gave something of my scanty leisure to a long poem in the
quatrains of Gray's Elegy based upon some divine event of it. The course
of the poem was lastingly arrested by a slight attack of the cholera
which was then raging in the town and filling my soul with gloom. My
dear mother thought it timely to speak with me of the other world; but
so far from reconciling me to the thought of it, I suppose she could not
have found a boy in all Dayton more unwilling to go to heaven. She was
forced to drop her religious consolations and to assure me that she had
not the least fear of my dying.
It was certainly not the fault of the place that we were, first and
last, rather unhappy there. For one thing, we were used to the greater
ease and simplicity of a small town like Hamilton, and Dayton was a
small city with the manners and customs of cities in those days: that
is, there was more society and less neighborhood, and neither my father
nor my mother could have cared for society. They missed the wont of old
friends; there were no such teas as she used to give her neighbors, with
a quilting, still dimly visioned, at the vanishing-point of the
perspective; our social life was almost wholly in our Sunday-evening
visits to the house of my young aunt whose husband was my father's
youngest brother. The pair were already in the shadow of their early
death, and in the sorrow of losing their children one after another till
one little cousin alone remained. I had not yet begun to make up
romances about people in my mind, but this uncle and aunt were my types
of worldly splendor in the setting of the lace curtains and hair-cloth
chairs of their parlor, with her piano and his flute for other æsthetic
grace. He was so much younger that he had a sort of filial relation to
my father, and they were both very sweet to my mother, always lonely
outside of her large family.
As usual, we lived in more than one house, but the first was very
acceptable because of its nearness to the canal; the yard stretched
behind it quite to the tow-path, with an unused stable between, which
served us boys for circus-rehearsals, and for dressing after a plunge.
As in a dream, I can still see my youngest brother rushing through this
stable one day and calling out that he was going to jump into the canal,
with me running after him and then dimly seeing him as he groped along
the bottom, with me diving and saving him from drowning. Already, with
the Hamilton facilities, I could hardly help being a good swimmer, and
at Dayton I spent much of my leisure in the canal. Within the city
limits we had to wear some sort of bathing-dress, and we preferred going
with a crowd of other boys beyond the line where no such formality was
expected of us. On the way to and fro we had to pass a soap-factory,
where the boys employed in it swarmed out at sight of us stealing along
under the canal bank, and in the strange outlawry of boyhood murderously
stoned us, but somehow did not kill us. I do not know what boys we
played with, but after we had paid the immemorial penalty of the
stranger, and fought for our standing among them, the boys of our
neighborhood were kind enough. One, whose father was a tobacconist,
abetted our efforts to learn smoking by making cigars flavored with
cinnamon drops; I suppose these would have been of more actual advantage
to me if I had learned to like smoking. When we went from his house to
another, in what may have been a better quarter, we made no friends that
I can remember, and we were never so gay. In fact, a sense of my
father's adversity now began to penetrate to his older children, with
the knowledge of our mother's unhappiness from it.
I am not following any chronological order here, and I should not be
able to date my æsthetic devotion to a certain gas-burner in the window
of a store under the printing-office. It was in the form of a
calla-lily, with the flame forking from the tongue in its white cup; and
I could never pass it, by day or night, without stopping to adore it. If
I could be perfectly candid, I should still own my preference of it to
the great painting of Adam and Eve by Dubuffe, then shown throughout our
simple-hearted commonwealth. This had the double attraction of a
religious interest and the awful novelty of the nude, for the first time
seen by untraveled American eyes; the large canvas was lighted up so as
to throw the life-size figures into strong relief, and the spectator
strickenly studied them through a sort of pasteboard binocle supplied
for the purpose. If that was the way our first parents looked before the
Fall, and the Bible said it was, there was nothing to be urged against
it; but many kind people must have suffered secret misgivings at a sight
from which a boy might well shrink ashamed, with a feeling that the
taste of Eden was improved by the Fall. I had no such joy in it as in
the dramas which I witnessed in the same hall; as yet there was nothing
in Dayton openly declared a theater.
The town had many airs of a city, and there were even some policemen who
wore a silver-plated star inside their
[Illustration: _The now abandoned canal at Dayton as it appears on the
borders of the city._]
coats for proof of their profession. There were water-works, and there
was gas everywhere for such as would pay the charge for it. My father
found the expense of piping the printing-office too great for his means,
or else he preferred falling back upon his invention, and instead of the
usual iron tubes he had the place fitted with tin tubes, at much less
cost. Perhaps the cost was equalized in the end by the leaking of these
tubes, which was so constant that we breathed gas by day as well as
burned it by night. We burned it a good deal, for our tri-weekly was now
changed to a daily, and a morning paper at that. Until eleven o'clock I
helped put the telegraphic despatches (then a new and proud thing with
us) into type, and between four and five o'clock in the morning I was up
and carrying papers to our subscribers. The stress of my father's
affairs must have been very sore for him to allow this, and I dare say
it did not last long, but while it lasted it was suffering which must
make me forever tender of those who overwork, especially the children
who overwork. The suffering was such that when my brother, who had not
gone to bed till much later, woke me after my five or six hours' sleep,
I do not now know how I got myself together for going to the
printing-office for the papers and making my rounds in the keen morning
air. When Sunday came, and I could sleep as late as I liked, it was
bliss such as I cannot tell to lie and rest, and rest, and rest! We were
duteous children and willing; my brother knew of the heavy trouble
hanging over us and I was aware of the hopeless burden of debt which our
father was staggering under and my mother was carrying on her heart; and
when I think of it, and of the wide-spread, never-ending struggle for
life which it was and is the type of, I cannot but abhor the economic
conditions which we still suppose an essential of civilization.
Lest these facts should make too vivid a call upon the reader's
compassion, I find it advisable to remember here an instance of
hard-heartedness in me which was worthier the adamantine conscience of
some full-grown moralist than a boy of my age. There was a poor girl,
whose misfortune was known to a number of families where she was
employed as a seamstress, and the more carefully treated because of her
misfortune. Among others my mother was glad to give her work; and she
lived with us like one of ourselves, of course sitting at table with us
and sharing in such family pleasures as we knew. She was the more to be
pitied because her betrayer was a prominent man who bore none of the
blame for their sin; but when her shame became known to me I began a
persecution of the poor creature in the cause of social purity. I would
not take a dish from her at table, or hand her one; I would not speak to
her, if I could help it, or look at her; I left the room when she came
into it; and I expressed by every cruelty short of words my righteous
condemnation. I was, in fact, society incarnate in the attitude society
takes toward such as she. Heaven knows how I came by such a devilish
ideal of propriety, and I cannot remember how the matter quite ended,
but I seem to remember a crisis, in which she begged my mother with
tears to tell her why I treated her so; and I was put to bitter shame
for it. It could not be explained to me how tragical her case was; I
must have been thought too young for the explanation; but I doubt if any
boy of twelve is too young for the right knowledge of such things; he
already has the wrong.
My wish at times to learn some other business was indulged by a family
council, and my uncle made a place for me in his drug-store, where, as
long as the novelty lasted, I was happy in the experiments with
chemicals permitted to me and a fellow-apprentice. Mainly we were busied
in putting up essence of peppermint and paregoric and certain favorite
medicinal herbs; and when the first Saturday evening came, my companion
received his weekly wage over the counter, and I expected mine, but the
bookkeeper smiled and said he would have to see my uncle about that; in
the end, it appeared that by the convention with my father I was somehow
not to draw any salary. Both my uncle and he treated the matter with
something of the bookkeeper's smiling slight, and after an interval, now
no longer appreciable, I found myself in the printing-office again. I
was not sorry, and yet I had liked the drug business so far as I had
gone in it, and I liked that old bookkeeper, though he paid me no money.
How, after a life of varied experiences, he had lodged at last in the
comfortable place he held I no longer know, if I ever knew. He had been
at one time what would once have been called a merchant adventurer in
various seas; and he had been wrecked on the Galapagos Islands, where he
had feasted on the famous native turtle, now extinct, with a relish
which he still smacked his lips in remembering.
This episode, which I cannot date, much antedated the period of my
father's business failure, though his struggles against it must have
already begun; they began, in fact, from the moment of his arrival in
Dayton, and the freest and happiest hours we knew there were when the
long strain ended in the inevitable break. Then there was an interval, I
do not know how great, but perhaps of months, when there was a casting
about for some means of living, and to this interval belongs somehow the
employment of my brother and myself in a German printing-office, such as
used to be found in every considerable Ohio town. I do not know what we
did there, but I remember the kindly German printer-folk, and the merry
times we had with them, in the smoke of their pipes and the warmth of
their stove heated red against the autumnal cold. I explore my memory
in vain for proof that my father had some job-printing interest in this
German office, but I remember my interest in the German type and its
difference from the English. I was yet far from any interest in the
German poetry which afterward became one of my passions, and there is no
one now left alive whom I can ask whether the whole incident was fact,
or not, rather, the sort of dream which all the past becomes when we try
to question it.
What I am distinctly aware of, through a sense of rather sullen autumnal
weather, is that a plan for our going into the country evolved itself in
full detail between my father and uncle. My uncle was to supply the
capital for the venture, and was finally, with two other uncles, to join
my father on a milling privilege which they had bought at a point on the
Little Miami River, where all the families were to be settled. In the
mean time my father was to have charge of a grist-mill and sawmill on
the property till they could be turned into a paper-mill and a sort of
communal settlement of suitable people could be gathered. He had never
run a sawmill or a grist-mill, much less evoked a paper-mill from them;
but neither had he ever gathered a community of choice spirits for the
enjoyment of a social form which enthusiasts like Robert Owen had
dreamed into being, and then non-being, in the Middle West in those or
somewhat earlier days. What was definite and palpable in the matter was
that he must do something, and that he had the heart and hope for the
experiment.