I could have been spared from the printing-office for the study of the
law, when I could not be spared from it otherwise, because I might soon
begin to make my living by practising before justices of the peace in
the pettifogging which was then part of the study in the country
offices. My labor, which was worth as much as a journeyman compositor's,
could not have been otherwise spared; much less could my father have
afforded the expense of my schooling; and I cannot recall that I thought
it an unjust hardship when it was decided after due family counsel, that
I could not be sent to an academy in a neighboring village. I had not
the means of estimating my loss; but the event seemed to have remained a
poignant regret with my brother, and in after years he lamented what he
felt to have been an irreparable wrong done me: now he is dead, and it
touches me to think he should have felt that, for I never blamed him,
and I am glad he gave me the chance to tell him so. I may have shed some
tears when first denied; I did shed a few very bitter ones when I once
confessed the hope I had that the editor of the _Ohio Farmer_ might give
me some sort of literary employment at a sum I named, and he said, "He
would never pay you three dollars a week in the world for that," and I
had to own in anguish of soul that he was doubtless right. He worked
every day of the week and far into every night to help my father earn
the property we were all trying to pay for, and he rightfully came into
the eventual ownership of the newspaper. By an irony of fate not wholly
unkind he continued for half a century in the printing-business, once so
utterly renounced. Then, after a few years of escape to a consular post
in the tropics which he used to say was the one post which, if it had
been whittled out of the whole universe, would have suited him best, he
died, and lies buried in the village, the best-beloved man who ever
lived there.
It was the day with us of self-denials which I cannot trust myself to
tell in detail lest I should overtell them. I was willing to make a
greater figure in dress than nature has ever abetted me in, but I still
do not think it was from an excess of vanity that I once showed my
father the condition of my hat, and left him to the logic of the fact.
He whimsically verified it, and said, "Oh, get it half-soled," as if it
had been a shoe; and we had our laugh together, but I got the new hat,
which, after all, did not make me the dashing presence I might have
hoped, though the vision of it on the storekeeper's counter always
remained so distinct with me that in Seville, a few years ago, it seemed
as if its ghost were haunting me in the Cordovese hats on all the heads
I met. Like them it had a wide flat brim, and it narrowed slightly
upward to the low flat crown of those hats which I now knew better than
to buy.
But if we seem to have spared on dress, our table was of as unstinted
abundance as it might be in a place where there was no market, except as
the farmers brought us chickens and butter and vegetables and the small
fruits of the pastures and clearings, where every sort of wild berries
grew. The region had abounded in deer, and after we came to the village
in 1852 venison was only three cents a pound. Once a black bear was
chased from forest to forest across our land, but he did not wait to fix
the market price of his meat; half the sky was often hidden with wild
pigeons, and there was a summer when the gray squirrels swarmed through
the streets in one of their mystical migrations from west to east. Such
chances of game scarcely enriched our larder; and the salt-pork barrel
was our constant reliance. This was a hardship, after the varied
abundance of the larger places where we had lived, but we shared it with
our fellow-villagers, and in this as in other conditions of our life we
did not realize as deprivation what was the lot of the whole community.
If we denied ourselves it was to meet the debts which would not be
denied, and to possess ourselves of the roof over our heads and an
ampler future in the ownership of our means of living. But I think we
denied ourselves too much, and that we paid far beyond its moral worth
for the house we were buying. To own the house she lived in had always
been my mother's dream since her young married days when my father built
the first little house where they dwelt together, and where I was born.
In all the intervening quarter of a century they had lived in rented
houses, and she could not help feeling that the rent they paid ought to
have gone toward buying a house of their own. In this she was
practically right, but now the house which we all worked so hard to buy
belongs to strangers, and unless there is an effect of our self-denial
in some other world, the purchase was as much waste as rent paid to a
landlord. We were in fact always paying a certain rent in the interest
on the notes which we slowly accumulated the money to meet, but my
mother could not feel that the same, and I am glad she had her wish long
before she died, and her last years were passed under a roof which she
owned.
In time, but I do not know how long time, for such things did not
interest me, though I was doing my share in helping pay off our debt,
the promissory notes which my father had given for the purchase of our
newspaper were taken up, and the newspaper was also our property. Nobody
could molest us or make us afraid in its possession; and in my hope of
other things it did not concern me that the title vested in his
partnership with my brother, who had most justly earned his half, and
who by an enterprise of his own finally established the family fortunes
in undreamed-of prosperity. It was characteristic of my father that as
long as their partnership existed there were no accounts between them;
after my brother had a family of his own each drew from the common
income at his wish or need, and when I came of sufficient worldly
wisdom to realize the risks to their peace from this anomalous
arrangement, I protested against it in vain. They agreed with me that it
was precarious and in a way ridiculous, and that it certainly ought to
cease, but as long as they continued together they remained partners on
these terms. After my father withdrew, my brother took his own son into
partnership, and when he came in his turn to retire, he contritely owned
to me that they had not departed from the same old unbusiness-like
community of ways and means, though he had promised me very earnestly
many times to end it. While I am upon these matters it is a pleasure for
me to record that when I came home from Venice with the manuscript of
_Venetian Life_ promised publication by a London house if I could find
an American house to take half the proposed edition, and I confessed
that I had very little hope of getting this taken in New York or Boston,
my brother promptly offered to take it himself. He was then in that
undreamed-of prosperity which I have mentioned, and though he had no
expectation of becoming a book-publisher, he was very willing to incur
the risks involved. As all my world knows, the book found an equally
courageous friend in New York, and came out with the American imprint of
Hurd & Houghton instead of Joseph A. Howells & Co.
It is not surprising to me that I cannot date the time of our acquiring
the newspaper, free and clear, as the real-estate phrase is, but I am
certainly surprised and more pained that I cannot remember just when the
house, endeared to us as home, became our very own. Its possession, as I
have said, had been the poetry of my mother's hard-working, loving life,
and no doubt she had watched with hope and fear the maturing of each of
the notes for it, with the interest they bore, until the last was paid
off. In my father's buoyant expectation of the best in
[Illustration: _The four-story office erected by Mr. Howells's father.
In it the father and his oldest son, Joseph, published the Ashtabula
"Sentinel" for many years_]
everything, I do not think he had any misgiving of the event; my brother
must have shared my mother's anxiety, but we younger children did not,
and the great hour arrived without record in my consciousness. Years
later, when I came back from long sojourn abroad, I found that the
little ground-wren's nest, as it looks to me in the retrospect, had
widened by half a dozen rooms without rising above its original story
and a half. All round it the garden space was red and purple with the
grapes which my father had induced, by his steady insistence, the
neighboring farmers to plant. My mother and he were growing sweetly old
in the keeping of the place, and certain wild furred and feathered
things had come to share their home with them. Not only the door-yard
trees which we boys had brought from the woods had each its colony of
birds, but in the eaves a family of flying-squirrels had nested. I do
not know whether I can impart the sense of peace and security which
seemed to have spread from the gentle household to them, but I am sure
that my mother could not have realized a fonder vision of the home she
had longed for through so many years.