BIRTH AND EARLY YOUTH
For nine years after moving to St. Louis his profession was the sole
mistress of Roswell Field's "laborious days" and bachelor nights.
Almost coincident with his becoming interested in the case of the
slave, Dred Scott, he met, and more to the purpose of this narrative,
became interested in Miss Frances Reed, then of St. Louis, but whose
parents hailed from Windham County, Vermont. Whether their common
nativity, or the fact that her father was a professional musician,
first brought them together, the memory of St. Louis does not disclose.
Miss Reed was a young woman of unusual personal charm. All accounts
agree that she was quiet and refined in her ways and yet possessed that
firmness of mind that is the salt of a quiet nature. They were married
in May, 1848, and in the love and domestic happiness of his mature
manhood, Roswell Field found the sweet balm for the bitterness that
followed from his youthful romance and the nullification of the Putney
marriage.
Of this union six children were born in the eight years of Mrs. Field's
wedded life, only two of whom, Eugene, the second, and Roswell,
survived babyhood. There is some uncertainty as to the exact date and
location of Eugene's birth. When his father was married he took his
bride home to a house on Collins Street, which, under Time's
transmuting and ironical fingers, has since become a noisy boiler-shop.
There their first child was born. Subsequently they moved to the house,
No. 634 South Fifth Street (now Broadway), which is one in the middle
of a block of houses pointed out in St. Louis as the birthplace of
Eugene Field. Although Eugene himself went with the photographer and
pointed out the house, his brother Roswell strenuously maintains that
Eugene was born before the family moved to the Walsh row, so-called,
and that to the boiler-shop belongs the honor of having heard the first
lullabies that greeted the ears of their greatest master.
[Illustration: EUGENE FIELD'S MOTHER.
_From a daguerreotype taken a year or two before his birth._]
Roswell's view receives negative corroboration from the testimony of
Mrs. Temperance Moon, of Farmington, Utah, who for a time lived in
their father's family. Under date of February 25th, 1901, Mrs. Moon
wrote to me:
"I can give you very little information in regard to Mr. Field's place
of birth. It was on Third Street. I do not remember the names of the
cross streets, I think Cherry was one. Eugene was four months old when
I went to live with them. I stayed until the family went east for the
summer. Mrs. Field's sister was living with them. Her name was Miss
Arabella Reed. When they came back Roswell was a few months old. They
went to live on Fifth Street in a three-story house. Mrs. Field sent
word for me to come and take care of Eugene. I was twelve years old.
She gave me full charge of him. I was very proud of the charge. He was
a noble child. I loved him as a dear brother. He took great delight in
hearing me read any kind of children's stories and fairy tales. His
mother was a lovely woman. I have a book and a picture Eugene sent to
me. The picture is of him and his mother when he was only six months
old."
Equal and illusive doubt hangs over the date of Eugene Field's birth.
Was it September 2d or 3d, 1850? In his "Auto-Analysis," of which we
shall hear more further along, Field himself gives preference to the
latter figure. But as his preference more than half the time went by
the rule of contraries, that would be prima-facie evidence that he was
born on the earlier date. There again the testimony of the younger
brother is to the effect that in their youth the anniversary of Eugene's
birth was held to be September 2d. Their father said he could not
reconcile his mind to the thought that one of his children was born
on so memorable an anniversary as September 3d, the day of Cromwell's
death. I have little doubt that Field himself fostered the irrepressible
conflict of dates, on the theory that two birthdays a year afforded a
double opportunity to playfully remind his friends of the pleasing
duty of an interchange of tokens on such anniversaries. If they forgot
September 2d, he could jog their memories that Cromwell's death on
September 3d, two centuries before, was no excuse for ignoring his
birth on September 3d, 1850.
Whether born on the anniversary of Cromwell's death or in the
boiler-shop, no stories of the youthful precocity of Eugene Field
survive to entertain us or to suggest that he gave early indication of
the possession either of unusual talent or of that unique personality
that were to distinguish him from the thousands born every day.
But Eugene and Roswell, Jr., were not long to know the watchful
tenderness and ambitious solicitude of that "mother love" of which the
elder has so sweetly sung. In November, 1856, when Eugene was six
years old, their mother died and their father's thoughts instinctively
turned to his sister, hoping to find with her, amid scenes familiar to
his own youth, a home and affectionate care for his motherless boys.
How the early loss of his mother affected the life of Eugene Field it
is impossible to tell. Not until the boy of six whom she left had
become a man of forty did he attempt to pay a tribute of filial love
to her memory. The following lines, under the simple title, "To My
Mother," first appeared in his "Sharps and Flats" column, October
25th, 1890. It was reprinted in his "Second Book of Verse." The
opening lines summon up a tender picture of a "grace that is dead":
_How fair you are, my mother!
Ah, though 'tis many a year
Since you were here,
Still do I see your beauteous face
And with the glow
Of your dark eyes cometh a grace
Of long ago._
The Mistress French of our earlier acquaintance, who was a widow when
we last knew her in Newfane, had married again and, as Mistress Thomas
Jones, had moved with her daughter, Mary Field French, to Amherst,
Mass. To the home of Mrs. Jones and the loving care of Miss French,
Eugene and Roswell, Jr., were entrusted. Miss French was at this time a
young woman, a spinster--Eugene delighted to call her--of about thirty
years. His old Munson tutor thus describes her:
"Mary Field French, a daughter of Mrs. Jones by her first husband, was
a lady of strong mind, and much culture, with a sound judgment and
decision of character and very gracious manners. She was always
sociable and agreeable and so admirably adapted to the charge of the
two brothers." They retained through manhood the warmest affection for
this cousin-mother, and never wearied in showing toward her the
grateful devotion of loyal sons.
"Here," continues Dr. Tufts, "in this charming home, under the best of
New England influences and religious instruction, with nothing harsh or
repulsive, the boys could not have found a more congenial home. Indeed,
few mothers are able or even capable of doing so much for their own
children as Miss French did for these two brothers, watching over them
incessantly, yet not spoiling them by weak indulgence or repelling them
by harsh discipline."
[Illustration: EUGENE FIELD'S COUSINS, MARY FIELD FRENCH AND HER
YOUNGER HALF SISTER, AUGUSTA JONES.
_From a daguerreotype taken before Eugene and Roswell became members
of Miss French's family in Amherst, on the death of their mother._]
Here it was that Eugene was brought up in the "nurture and admonition
of the Lord," as he would often declare with a mock severity of tone,
that left a mixed impression as to the beneficence of the nurture and
the abiding quality of the admonition. Here he spent his school days,
not in acquiring a broad or deep basis for future scholarship, but in
studying the ways and whims of womankind, in practising the subtile
arts whereby the boy of from six to fifteen attains a tyrannous mastery
over the hearts of a feminine household, and in securing the leadership
among the daring spirits of his own age and sex, for whom he was early
able to furnish a continuous programme of entertainment, adventure, and
mischief.
Of this period of Eugene Field's life we get the truest glimpse through
the eyes of his brother, who has written appreciatively of their
boyhood spent in Amherst. "His boyhood," writes Roswell, "was similar
to that of other boys brought up with the best surroundings in a
Massachusetts village, where the college atmosphere prevailed. He had
his boyish pleasures and his trials, his share of that queer mixture of
nineteenth century worldliness and almost austere Puritanism, which is
yet characteristic of many New England families."
If the reader wishes to know more of the New England atmosphere, in
which Eugene Field was permitted to have pretty much his own sweet way
by his cousin and aunt, let him have recourse to Mrs. Earle's "The
Sabbath in Puritan New England," which I find in my library commended
to my perusal, "with Eugene Field's love, December 25th, 1891"--and to
other books by the same author. In a letter to Mrs. Earle, from which I
quoted in the opening paragraph of this narrative, I find the following
reference to the period of his life which we are now considering:
"Fourteen years of my life were spent in Newfane, Vt., and Amherst,
Mass. My lovely old grandmother was one of the very elect. How many
times have I carried her footstove for her and filled it in the
vestry-room. I have frozen in the old pew while grandma kept nice and
warm and nibbled lozenges and cassia cakes during meeting. I remember
the old sounding-board. There was no melodeon in that meeting-house;
and the leader of the choir pitched the tune with a tuning-fork. As a
boy I used to play hi-spy in the horse-shed. But I am not so very
old--no, a man is still a boy at forty, isn't he?"
[Illustration: THE FIELD HOMESTEAD AT NEWFANE, VT.]
Eugene Field would have been a boy at fifty and at eighty had he lived,
and he was very much of a boy at the period of which he wrote to Mrs.
Earle. I have no doubt that he was a very circumspect lad while under
the loving yet stern glance of that dear old grandmother, in whose
kindly yet dignified presence three generations of Fields moved with
varying emotions of love and circumspection. "Her husband" (General
Martin Field of our acquaintance), wrote "Uncle Charles Kellogg," "was
genial and social, full of humor and mirth, oftentimes filling the
house with his jocund laugh." She, however, "true to her refined
womanly instinct, her sense of propriety, rarely disturbed by his merry
and harmless jests, with great discretion pursued 'the even tenor of
her way.' Patiently and with unfaltering devotion to the higher and
nobler purposes of life, she always maintained her self-possession,
strenuously avoided all levity and frivolity, rarely relaxed the
gravity of her deportment, and never failed in the end of controlling
both husband and household."
Eugene's own picture of his grandmother is contained in the following
passage in an article contributed by him to the Ladies' Home Journal:
"Grandma was a pillar in the Congregational Church. At the decline
and disintegration of the Universalist society, she rejoiced
cordially as if a temple of Baal or an idol of Ashtaroth had been
overturned. Yes, grandma was Puritanical--not to the extent of
persecution, but a Puritan in the severity of her faith and in the
exacting nicety of her interpretation of her duties to God and
mankind. Grandma's Sunday began at six o'clock Saturday evening; by
that hour her house was swept and garnished, and her lamps trimmed,
every preparation made for a quiet, reverential observance of the
Sabbath Day. There was no cooking on Sunday. At noon Mrs. Deacon
Ranney and other old ladies used to come from church with grandma to
eat luncheon and discuss the sermon and suggest deeds of piety for
the ensuing week. I remember Mrs. Deacon Ranney and her frigid
companions very distinctly. They never smiled and they wore austere
bombazines that rustled and squeaked dolorously. Mrs. Deacon Ranney
seldom noticed me further than to regard me with a look that seemed
to stigmatize me as an incipient vessel of wrath that was not to be
approved of, and I never liked Mrs. Deacon Ranney after I heard her
reminding grandma one day that Solomon had truly said, 'spare the
rod and spoil the child.' I still think ill of Mrs. Deacon Ranney
for having sought to corrupt dear old grandma's gentle nature with
any such incendiary suggestions. The meeting-house was cold and
draughty, and the seats, with their straight backs, were oh, so
hard. Grandma's pew was near the pulpit. I remember now how ashamed
I used to be to carry her footstove all the way up that long aisle
for her--I was such a foolish little boy then--and now, ah me, how
ready and glad and proud I should be to do that service for dear old
grandma!
"When grandma went to meeting she carried a lovely big black velvet
bag; it had a bouquet wrought in beads of subdued color upon it, and
it hung by two sombre silk puckering ribbons over grandma's arm. In
the bag grandma carried a supply of crackers and peppermint
lozenges, and upon these she would nibble in meeting whenever she
felt that feeling of goneness in the pit of her stomach, which I was
told old ladies sometimes suffer with. It was proper enough, I was
assured, for old ladies to nibble at crackers and peppermint
lozenges in meeting, but that such a proceeding would be very wicked
for a little boy."
From which it might appear that the atmosphere of Newfane, under the
grave and serious deportment of his grandmother, must have been a
change from the freedom Eugene and his brother enjoyed under the fond
rule of Miss French at Amherst. But when I was in Newfane in 1899 I was
informed by a dear old lady in bombazine, who remembered their visits
distinctly, that "Eugene and Roswell were wild boys. Not bad, but just
tew full of old Nick for anything."
[Illustration: THE HOMESTEAD AT AMHERST, MASS.
_Now owned by Mr. Hiram Eaton of New York._]
It was in Amherst, however, and not in Newfane, from Cousin Mary, and
not from his dear Grandmother Esther, that Eugene got the New England
"bent" in his Missouri mind. It is hard to separate the fact from the
fancy in his story of "My Grandmother." His youth from 1856 to 1865 was
lived in Amherst. His only visit to the Field homestead in Newfane was
when he was nine years old. And of this he has written, "we stayed
there seven months and the old lady got all the grandsons she wanted.
She did not invite us to repeat the visit." He also confessed that all
his love for nature dated from that visit. As a boy he would never have
been permitted to indulge the fondness for animal pets under "the dark
penetrating eyes" of his grandmother, that was tolerated and became a
life-habit by the "gracious love" of Mary Field French. Of this
fondness for pets, Roswell has written that it amounted to a passion.
"But unlike other boys he seemed to carry his pets into a higher sphere
and to give them personality. For each pet, whether dog, cat, bird,
goat, or squirrel--he had the family distrust of a horse--he not only
had a name, but it was his delight to fancy that each possessed a
peculiar dialect of human speech, and each he addressed in the humorous
manner conceived. When in childhood he was conducting a poultry annex
to the homestead, each chicken was properly instructed to respond to a
peculiar call, and Finniken, Minniken, Winniken, Dump, Poog, Boog
seemed to recognize immediately the queer intonations of their master
with an intelligence that is not usually accorded to chickens."
I cannot forbear to introduce here a characteristic bit of evidence
from Eugene Field's own pen of the survival of the passion for pets to
which his brother testifies:
"It is only under stress," said he in his allotted column in the
Chicago Record of January 9th, 1892, "nay, under distress, that the
mysterious veil of the editorial-room may properly be thrown aside
and the secret thereof disclosed. It is under a certain grievous
distress that we make this statement now:
"For a number of months the silent partner in the construction of
this sporadic column of 'Sharps and Flats' has been a little fox
terrier given to the writer hereof by his friend, Mr. Will J. Davis.
We named our little companion Jessie, and our attachment to her was
wholly reciprocated by Jessie herself, although (and we make this
confession very shamefacedly) our enthusiasm for Jessie was by no
means shared by the prudent housewife in charge of the writer's
domestic affairs. Jessie contributed to and participated in our work
in this wise: She would sit and admiringly watch the writer at his
work, wagging her abridged tail cordially whenever he bestowed a
casual glance upon her, threatening violence to every intruder,
warning her master of the approach of every garrulous visitor, and
oftentimes, when she felt lonely, insisted on climbing up into her
master's lap and slumbering there while he wrote and wrote away. We
have tried our poems on Jessie, and she always liked them; leastwise
she always wagged her tail approvingly and smiled her flatteries as
only a very intelligent little dog can. Some folk think that our
poetry drove Jessie away from home, but we know better; Jessie
herself would deny that malicious imputation were she here now and
could she speak.
"To this little companion we became strongly, perhaps foolishly,
attached. She walked with us by day, hunting rats and playing
famously every variety of intelligent antics. Whither we went she
went, and at night she shared our couch with us. Though only nine
months old Jessie stole into this life of ours so very far that
years seemed hardly to compass the period and honesty of our
friendship.
"Well, last Tuesday night Jessie disappeared--vanished as
mysteriously as if the earth had opened up and swallowed her. She
had been playing with a discreet dog friend in Fullerton Avenue, and
that was the last seen of her! Where can she have gone? It is very
lonesome without Jessie. Moreover there are poems to be read for her
approval before they can be printed; the great cause of literature
waits upon Jessie. She must be found and restored to her proper
sphere.
"Jessie perhaps was not beautiful, yet she was fair to her master's
eyes. She was white with yellow ears and a brownish blaze over her
left eye and warty cheek. She weighed perhaps twenty pounds (for
Jessie never had dyspepsia), and one mark you surely could tell her
by was the absence of a nail from her left forepaw, the honorable
penalty of an encounter with an enraged setting hen in our barn last
month.
"Jessie's master is not rich, for the poetry that fox terriers
approve is not remunerative; but that master has accumulated (by
means of industrious application to his work and his friends) the
sum of $20, which he will cheerfully pay to the man, woman, or child
who will bring Jessie back again. For he is a weak human creature,
is Jessie's master, in his loneliness, without his faithful,
admiring little dumb friend."
Two days later Field printed the following letter and his answer
thereto, both written by the same hand in his column:
CHICAGO, January 10th.
_To the Editor_: I am very sorry for the gentleman who writes your
Sharps and Flats, for I know what it is to lose a little dog. I had
one once and some boy I guess took it off and never brought it back
again. I have got a maltese cat and four beautiful kittens, and
should like to send the gentleman one of the kittens if he wants
one. Maybe he would get to like the kitten as much as he did the
little dog. Respectfully, your little friend,
EDITH LONG.
"Many thanks to our charming little correspondent; she has a gentle
heart, we know. What havoc one of those mischievous creatures would
make! In the first place it would accomplish the destruction of
these little canaries of ours which now flit about this lovely
disordered room, perching confidently upon folios and bric-a-brac
and hopping blithely over the manuscripts and papers on the table.
In the basement against the furnace, three beautiful fleecy little
chickens have just hatched out. How long do you suppose it would be
before that wicked little kitten discovered and compassed the
demolition of those innocent baby fowls? Then again there are
rabbits in the stable and very tame pigeons and the tiniest of
bantams. It would be very dreadful to introduce a truculent kitten
(and all felines are naturally truculent) into such society. And our
blood fairly congeals when we think that perhaps (oh, fearful
possibility) that kitten might nose out and wantonly destroy the too
lovely butterflies stored away in yonder closet, which we have
appropriately named the cage of gloom.
"Miss Edith must keep her kitten and may she have the pleasure of
its pretty antics. However, she must bear this in mind, that sooner
or later our pets come to grief.
"Very, very many years ago, we read and cried over a little book
written by Grace Greenwood and entitled 'The History of My Pets.'
Even as a child we wondered why it was that evil invariably befell
the pets of youth.
"We all know that most little folks are tender-hearted, yet there
are some who seem indifferent to pets, to have little sympathy with
the pathos of dumb animals. And we have so often wondered whether
after all these latter did not get more of pleasure or should we say
less of pain out of life than the others. The tender heart seldom
hardens; in maturer years its comprehensions and sympathies broaden,
and this of course involves pain. Are the delights of sympathy a
fair offset to the pains thereof?"
The boy at Amherst was the father of the man at forty-two. It was to
the prototype of "The Bench-Legged Fyce," known in Miss French's
household as "Dooley," that the boy Eugene attributed his first verse,
a parody on the well-known lines, "Oh, had I the wings of a dove!"
Dooley's song ran:
_Oh, had I wings like a dove I would fly
Away from this world of fleas;
I'd fly all round Miss Emerson's yard
And light on Miss Emerson's trees._
It was rank disloyalty to the memory of "Dooley" to rename the
bench-legged fyce "Sooner" and locate the scene of his "chronic repose"
in St. Jo rather than under the flea-proof tree of Mrs. Emerson in
Amherst. But who regrets the poetic license as he reads:
_We all hev our choice, an' you like the rest,
Allow that dorg which you've got is the best;
I wouldn't give much for the boy 'at grows up
With no friendship subsistin' 'tween him and a pup;
When a fellow gits old--I tell you it's nice
To think of his youth and his bench-legged fyce!_
Although Eugene Field never forgot or forgave the terrors of the New
England Sabbath, its strict observance, its bad singing, doleful
prayers and interminable sermons, the impress of those all-day sessions
in church and Sunday-school was never eradicated from his life and
writings. Nothing else influenced his work or affected his style as
much as the morals and the literature of the Bible and the sacred songs
that were lined out week after week from the pulpit under which he
literally and figuratively sat when a youth. "If," he has said, "I
could be grateful to New England for nothing else I should bless her
forevermore for pounding me with the Bible and the Spelling-Book."
There is in the possession of the family the "Notes of a Sermon by E.P.
Field," said to have been written by Eugene at the age of nine, when he
affected the middle initial of P in honor of Wendell Phillips. It was
more probably written when he was twelve or fourteen, as he showed at
nine none of the signs of precocity which such a composition indicates.
The youthful Channing took for his text the fifteenth verse of the
thirteenth chapter of Proverbs: "Good understanding giveth favor: but
the way of transgressors is hard." Upon this he expounded as follows:
"The life of a Christian is often compared to a race that is hard
and to a battle in which a man must fight hard to win, these
comparisons have prevented many from becoming Christians.
"But the Bible does not compare the Christian's path as one of hard
labor. But Solomon says wisdom's ways are ways of pleasantness and
her paths are peace. Under the word transgressor are included all
those that disobey their maker, or, in shorter words, the ungodly.
Every person looking around him will see many who are transgressors
and whose lot is very hard.
"I remark secondly that conscience makes the way of transgressors
hard; for every act of pleasure, every act of guilt his conscience
smites him. The last of his stay on earth will appear horrible to
the beholder. Sometimes, however, he will be stayed in his guilt. A
death in a family of some favorite object, or be attacked by some
disease himself, is brought to the portals of the grave. Then for a
little time, perhaps, he is stayed in his wickedness, but before
long he returns to his worldly lusts. Oh, it is indeed hard for a
sinner to go down into perhaps perdition over all the obstacles
which God has placed in his path. But many, I am afraid, do go down
into perdition, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that
leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in after it.
"Suppose now there was a fearful precipice and to allure you there
your enemies should scatter flowers on its dreadful edge, would you
if you knew that while you were strolling about on that awful rock
that night would settle down on you and that you would fall from
that giddy, giddy height, would you, I say, go near that dreadful
rock? Just so with the transgressor, he falls from that height just
because he wishes to appear good in the sight of the world. But what
will a man gain if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul."
Whenever this was written it shows on its face that it is more an
effort of memory or the effect of one of the fearful sermons of fifty
years ago on the impressionable mind of youth, than the original
production of a precocious boy struggling with the insoluble problem of
life and judgment to come. Mark how the stock words of the pulpiteer,
"transgressor," "worldly lusts," "dreadful," "awful," "perdition" stalk
fiercely through the sermon of the youthful saint or sinner!
Roswell Field says that his brother without instruction early acquired
the habit of drawing amusing pictures of his playmates and his pets,
and that later in life he gave it as his honest opinion that he would
have been much more successful as a caricaturist than as a writer. But
Eugene's drawings at all periods were never more than grotesque or
fanciful illustrations of the whimsical ideas he harbored respecting
everything that came to his attention.
In after life Eugene Field gave frequent proof that he cherished
contradictory sentiments toward Vermont and New England. One view was
tinged, I think, with the recollection of the wrong his father suffered
at the hands of the Green Mountain courts, and reflects the general
tenor of his comment whenever Vermont men or affairs came under
discussion in the public press. It is illustrated in the following
paragraph:
The Vermont papers agreed that Colonel Aldace Walker is the very
best man in Vermont for the Inter-State Commerce Commission. This
may be true. At the same time, however, we fail to see what interest
Vermont can possibly take in inter-state commerce. She has no
commerce of her own, and she probably never will have. There is a
bobbin factory at Williamsville, and a melodeon factory at
Brattleboro, but the commerce resulting from them is not worthy of
mention. There is talk about the maple-sugar that Vermont exports,
but we have noticed that all the "genuine Vermont maple-sugar" in
the Western market comes from the South, and is about as succulent
as the heel of a gum-boot. In all the State of Vermont there is but
one railroad, the Vermont Central; it begins at Grout's Corner,
Mass., and runs in a bee-line north until it reaches the southern
end of the Montreal bridge. This remarkable road has a so-called
branch operating once per week between White River Junction and
Montpelier, and a triweekly branch extending to Burlington.
Montpelier is the home of Hiram Atkins, the famous "Nestor uv
Checkerberry Journalism," and White River Junction is the whistling
station and water-tank from which our country gets its election
returns every four years. Burlington is located on Lake Champlain,
and contains the summer residence of that grand old survivor of the
glacial period, George F. Edmunds. Thus in a brief paragraph have we
compressed all that can be said of the commerce and the railways of
Vermont.
The other view is softened with the haze that hangs over the scenes of
childhood in the minds of all men of feeling when interpreted by an
artist in expressing the thought "that unbidden rises and passes in a
tear." It is from Field's little-known memorial to Mrs. Melvin L. Gray,
written while he was in Southern California:
The quiet beauty of these scenes recalls a time which, in my life,
is so long ago that I feel strangely reverential when I speak of it.
I find myself thinking of my boyhood, and of the hills and valleys
and trees and flowers and birds I knew when the morning of my life
was fresh and full of exuberance. Those years were spent among the
Pelham hills, very, very far from here; but memory o'erleaps the
mountain ranges, the leagues upon leagues of prairie, the mighty
rivers, the forest, the farming lands, o'erleaps them all; and
to-day, by that same sweet magic that instantaneously undoes the
years and space, I seem to be among the Pelham hills again. The
yonder glimpse of the Pacific becomes the silver thread of the
Connecticut, seen, not over miles of orange-groves, but over broad
acres of Indian corn; and instead of the pepper and eucalyptus, the
lemon and the palm, I see (or I seem to see) the maple once more,
and the elm and the chestnut trees, the shagbark walnut, the
hickory, and the birch. In those days, these rugged mountains of
this south land were unknown to me; and the Pelham hills were full
of marvel and delight, with their tangled pathways and hidden stores
of wintergreen and wild strawberries. Furtive brooks led the little
boy hither and thither in his quest for trout and dace, while to the
gentler-minded the modest flowers of the wild-wood appealed with
singular directness. A partridge rose now and then from the thicket
and whirred away, and with startled eyes the brown thrush peered out
from the bushes. I see these pleasant scenes again, and I hear again
the beloved sounds of old; and so with reverence and with welcoming
I take up my task, for it was among these same Pelham hills that the
dear lady of whom I am to speak was born and spent her childhood.