BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD OF WILLARD GLAZIER.
The infant stranger.--A mother's prayers.--"Be just before you are
generous."--Careful training.--Willard Glazier's first battle.--A
narrow escape.--Facing the foe.--The happy days of
childhood.--"The boy is father to the man."
The Glazier Homestead, as we have said, is upon the main road leading
from Little York to Fullerville. It is a substantial and comfortable
farm-house, with no pretension to architectural beauty, but,
nevertheless, is a sightly object in a pleasant landscape. Standing back
two hundred feet from the road, in a grove of gigantic elms, with a
limpid brook of spring water a short distance to the right, and rich
fields of herd grass stretching off rearwards towards the waters of the
Oswegatchie, which hurry along on their journey of forty miles to the
St. Lawrence River, the old house is sure to attract the attention of
the traveller, and to be long remembered as a picture of solid and
substantial comfort.
In this old house, upon the morning of August twenty-second, 1841, to
Ward Glazier and Mehitable, his wife, a son was born who was
subsequently named Willard. The father and mother were by no means
sentimental people--they were certainly not given to seeing the poetical
side of life; they were plain, earnest people, rough hewn out of the
coarse fibre of Puritanism, but the advent of this little child brought
a joy to their hearts that had its softening influence upon the home in
which he was to be reared.
The thoroughness of Ward Glazier's nature, that conscientiousness in
excess which made him radical in all things, was of the _heart_ as well
as of the head, and though not a demonstrative man, the intensity of his
paternal love cropped out in many ways. As to his wife, hers was truly
"mother's love." And what notes are there attuned to sacred music, in
all the broad vocabulary of the English tongue, which gives any idea of
the sentiment that links a woman to her babe, except the three simple
syllables, "mother's love!" Brooding over the tiny stranger, ready to
laugh or cry; exultant with hope and pride, despondent with fear,
quivering with anguish if the "wind of heaven doth visit its cheek too
roughly," and singing hosannas of joy when it lisps the simpler
syllables that she so patiently has taught, covering it with the broad
wing of her measureless affection, and lavishing upon it such "sighs as
perfect joy perplexed for utterance, steals from her sister sorrow,"
there is nothing except God's own illimitable affection for his
creatures, that can rival in depth and strength and comprehensiveness, a
mother's love.
The heart of Ward Glazier's wife, at this time, blossomed in absolutely
rank luxuriance with this feeling, and ran riot in the joy of its
possession; but she determined within herself that it should be no blind
or foolish worship. It grew, therefore, into a sober, careful, provident
affection.
Quiet and unobtrusive in manner, her face always wore a look of gravity
befitting one who felt that God had entrusted to her charge a fresh
human soul to mould for good or evil. She fully realized the fact that
her son would grow up with honor or sink down into ignominy just as she
should guide or spoil him in his youth. She quite comprehended the
stubborn truth, that while the father to some extent may shape the
outward career of his son, the mother is responsible for the coloring of
his inner life: and that
"All we learn of good is learned in youth,
When passion's heat is pure, when love is truth."
Though of Puritan stock, though reared in the austere faith of John
Knox, there was nothing hard or harsh in this mother's character, and
still less was there anything of the materialist about her. She would
have utterly scouted the doctrine of Cabanis and his school, which held
that the physical was the whole structure of man; that all instincts,
passions, thoughts, emanated from the body; that sensibility is an
effect of the nervous system, that passion is an emanation of the
viscera, that intellect is nothing more than a cerebral secretion, and
"self-consciousness but a general faculty of living matter." She had
drunk inspiration of a different kind from her infancy. In her New
England home the very atmosphere was charged with religious influences.
She was taught, or rather she had learned without a teacher, not only to
see God in the flowers and in the stars, but to recognize his immediate
agency in all things terrestrial.
Night after night, listening to the tremulous tones of her father as he
read a lesson from the sacred page, not only to those of his own blood,
but to his "man-servant, his maid-servant, and the stranger within his
gates," she had felt the presence of a tangible God, and when, at last,
she followed the fortunes of the chosen one of her heart far into the
great North Woods, nature spoke to her from the forest and the cataract,
deepening each early impression and intensifying each early belief,
until she realized as a living fact that the "Lord was ever in his holy
temple" and that his temple was the universe.
To a woman like this every act of life became a matter of conscience,
and the training of her child of course became such to Mrs. Glazier. She
had watched the pitfalls which the "world, the flesh and the
devil"--that trinity of evil--provide for the feet of the unwary, and
she determined that young Willard's steps, if she could prevent it,
should never stray that way.
Her husband took life and its duties much more easily. He was less rigid
in his sense of parental responsibility. While a man of great rectitude
of purpose, he was good-natured to a fault--somewhat improvident,
careless of money, ever ready to extend aid to the needy, and especially
disinclined to the exercise of harshness in his home, even when the
stern element of authority was needed. In short, he was one of those
big-hearted men who are so brimful of the "milk of human kindness" that
the greatest pain they ever feel is the pain they see others suffer. His
plan therefore was, spare the rod even if you _do_ spoil the child.
But--perhaps fortunately for young Willard--Mrs. Glazier held different
views. From his very infancy she endeavored to instil into his nature
habits of truthfulness, industry and thrift. "Never waste and never lie"
was her pet injunction. Her aim was not to make her son a generous, but
a _just_ man. "One hour of justice is worth an eternity of prayer,"
says the Arabian proverb, but Mrs. Glazier, while she exalted justice as
the greatest of the virtues, also believed that in order to make man's
heart its temple, prayer was an absolutely necessary pre-requisite. She
likewise endeavored from the first to habituate the boy's mind to
reflect upon the value of money and the uses of economy. She would have
"coined her blood for drachms" if that would have benefited her husband
or her son. Her savings were not spent upon herself, but in the hard
school of a bitter experience she had learned that money means much more
than dollars and cents--that its possession involves the ability to live
a life of honor, untempted by the sordid solicitations that clamor round
the poor man's door and wring the poor man's heart.
The result was that as soon as he began to comprehend her words, young
Willard had impressed upon his memory maxims eulogizing all who practise
habits of sobriety, industry and frugality, and denunciatory of all who
fail to do so.
His mother never wearied of teaching him such sayings of Dr. Franklin as
these: "Time is money," "Credit is money," "Money begets money," "The
good paymaster is lord of another man's purse," and "The sound of a
man's hammer heard by his creditor at six o'clock in the morning makes
him easy six months longer, while the sound of his voice heard in a
tavern, induces him to send for his money the next day;" "Trifling items
aggregate into large totals," while the text that ruled the house was
that of the Scripture, "If any would not work neither should he eat."
The effect of the constant teaching of such lessons was not however
perceptible in the lad's habits in very early life. He was no model
little boy, no monster of perfection--he was like the boys that we see
around us every day--not one of the marvels we read about. But the seed
was sown in his soul which was destined to quicken into fruit in after
life.
At the early age of four years his mother began to teach him to read and
write, and under her loving tuition he acquired a knowledge of these two
branches of culture quite rapidly.
Just about this time an incident occurred which came near finishing
young Willard's career in a manner as sudden as it would have been
singular.
The "Homestead Farm" was at that time pretty well stocked for a place
only containing one hundred and forty acres, and among the cattle was a
sturdy Alderney bull whose reputation for peace and quietness was
unusually good.
On a certain morning, however, early in the spring of the year 1845,
young Master Willard happened to overhear a conversation between two of
the farm hands, in the course of which one of them declared that "old
Blackface was tarin' round mighty lively." This statement interested the
lad to such an extent that he concluded to go and see how this "tarin'
round" was done.
Accordingly, taking advantage of a moment when his mother's attention
was occupied, he started for the barnyard, into which Mr. Bull had been
turned only a few moments before. Now as young Willard was somewhat
smaller than the visitors our bovine friend was in the habit of
receiving, such an unwarrantable intrusion was not to be tolerated for
a moment. Accordingly, no sooner had Willard set his little feet within
the enclosure of the barn-yard than the bull gave a roar of rage, and
catching the boy on the tips of his horns, which fortunately were
buttoned, sent him twenty feet up in the air, preparing to trample him
out of existence when he should come down. Luckily some of the men were
attracted to the scene, who secured his bullship and rescued the child.
Willard was not seriously hurt, and the instant he regained his feet, he
turned round, shook his tiny fist at the now retreating animal and
shouted out in a shrill treble, "When I get to be a big man I'll toss
you in the air!"
Having thus taken the bull by the horns in a literal as well as
figurative sense, the lad began gradually to develop into that terrible
embodiment of unrest--a boy. He exhibited no very marked peculiarities
up to this time to distinguish him from other youths; but just grew into
the conglomerate mass of good, bad and indifferent qualities which go to
make up the ordinary flesh-and-blood boy--brimful of mischief and
impatient of restraint.