NEAR TO NATURE'S HEART.
It seems but yesterday, although more than a half century ago, that I,
a puny boy, stood on the hilltop and looked for the first time upon
this, the earliest home of which I have any vivid recollection. It
was a fair scene of rustic tranquillity, where a contented mind might
delight to spend a lifetime mid hum of bees and low of kine.
Along the eastern horizon's rim loomed the blue sea beyond the sandy
dunes of old Plum Island; the lazy river born in babbling brooks and
bubbling springs flowing languidly mid wooded islands, and picturesque
stacks of salt hay, representing the arduous toil of farmers and
dry-as-dust fodder for reluctant cows. Nearer, the two church spires
of the little village, striving to lift the sordid minds of the
natives from earthly clods to the clouds, and where beckoning hands
strove vainly to inspire them with heavenly hopes; around them,
glistening in the sunlight, the marble slabs where sleep the rude
forefathers of the hamlet, some mute inglorious Miltons who came from
England in the early sixties, whose tombstones are pierced by rifle
bullets fired at the maraudering red skins. These are the cities of
the dead, far more populous than the town of the living.
Nearer, the willowy brook that turns the mill; to the south the dense
pine woods, peopled in our imaginations, with fairy elves, owls, and
hobgoblins--now, alas, owing to the rapacity of the sawmills, naught
but a howling wilderness of stumps and underbrush.
Directly below me, stands our half-century old house with its eaves
sloping to the ground, down which generations of boys had ruined their
pants in hilarious coasting; near by, the ancient well-swipe, and the
old oaken bucket which rose from the well; beyond this, of course,
as usual, the piggery and hennery to contaminate the water and breed
typhoid fever, and in the house cellar, the usual dampness from the
hillside to supply us all with rheumatism and chills.
There existed apparently in the early dawn of the nineteenth century,
an unwritten law which required the farmers to violate all the laws of
sanitation, and then to ascribe all ills the flesh is heir to, to the
mysterious will of an inscrutable Providence whose desire it was to
make the heart better by the sorrows of the countenance, and to save
the soul from hell by the punishment of the body. Vegetables were
allowed to rot in the cellars, and to make everybody sick with
their noxious odors so that we might not be too much wedded to this
transitory existence. Pork, beans, and cabbage must be devoured in
enormous quantities just before going to bed for the purpose of
inspiring midnight groans and prayers to be delivered from the pangs
of the civil war in the inner man.
This moralizing is inspired by the pessimism of disenchanted age; but
on that beautiful morning of the long ago, naught occurred to me
save the wedlock of earth and heaven: I was near to nature's heart,
listening to the ecstatic songs of the robins, the orioles and
sweetest of all the bobolink.
"Oh, winged rapture, feathered soul of spring:
Blithe voice of woods, fields, waters, all in one,
Pipe blown through by the warm, mild breath of June,
Shepherding her white flocks of woolly clouds,
The bobolink has come, and climbs the wind
With rippling wings that quiver not for flight
But only joy, or yielding to its will
Runs down, a brook of laughter through the air."
After the charm of the novelty of the scene had vanished, I descended
from my perch to explore this sleepy hollow: the barn door hung
suspended on a single hinge, like a bird with but one unbroken wing to
soar upon. The swallows twittered their love-songs under the eaves;
chipmunks scolded my intrusion and threw nuts at my head from the
beams; a lone, lorn hen proclaimed her triumph over a new laid egg,
and then, with fiery eyes, assaulted me with profanity as I filled
my hat with her choicest treasures. A litter of pigs scampered away,
wedging themselves into a hole in the wall, and hung there kicking and
squealing, while their indignant mother chased me up a ladder where
she hurled at me the vilest imprecations; a solitary Phoebe bird
wailed out her plaintive "pee wee, pee wee, pee whi itt," and a
newly-married pair of sandpipers chanted their song of the sea on the
edge of a mud puddle in the yard.
At last the infuriated sow went to liberate her wedged-in offspring,
leaving me to flee to the house where I cooked my eggs and some
ancient potatoes in the ashes of a fire smoldering in the wide old
fireplace. I have since eaten royal dinners in palatial hotels, but
nothing has ever tasted half as good as this extemporized lunch of my
boyhood.
Here the rest of the family found me later when they came bringing
their household goods; here I might have laid, broad and deep, the
foundations of a useful life, had I possessed even a modicum of the
stick-to-itiveness so essential to success.
A limited amount of discontent is a powerful stimulus to more
strenuous endeavor; but when you have intensity without continuity of
mental action, beware of imitating my example of progressing along the
lines of the least resistance; for if you do you will never attain
to that persistency of effort which can come only from overcoming
obstacles.
When my father gave me a moderate task of weeding onions, I soon
became tired of crawling on hands and knees under a scorching sun,
inundating the earth with perspiration and tears, so I substituted a
hoe for fingers, tearing up onions with the weeds that I might the
sooner secure unlimited rheumatism by bathing in the brook. Had
my father given me what he earnestly desired, and what I richly
deserved,--a sound spanking, and more weeding to do,--I might have
developed much needed perseverance, but spanking was never allowed by
my fond mother, and I became a shirk.
I was set to picking berries to replenish the family larder; but
this soon became monotonous, and I appropriated the old grain-sieve,
placing it beside the bushes, and pounding the huckleberries into it
with a stick; the result was a heterogeneous conglomeration of worms,
leaves, bugs, and crushed berries; but I succeeded in eliminating the
refuse by throwing the whole mass into a tub of water, and skimming
off the risings. I would then descant to buyers upon the freshness
of the berries wet with the dews of heaven, but my ruse was soon
discovered, and people refused to purchase such mucilaginous pulp.
Our widowed hired woman was possessed of a baby, and I was assigned
the task of rocking the cradle; but I soon sighed for the apple
blossoms and songs of birds,--we had no English sparrows then--so I
drove a nail into the cradle, tied to it the clothes-line, and went
out of doors and began pulling at the cord. Soon agonizing screams
were heard, and baby was found on the floor with the cradle pounding
on top of him.
I was sent to drive home the cows from pasture, but left the task to
the dog, who chased them over the wall into the corn-field where they
devastated the crop, and ruined the milk by devouring green apples,
while I, skylarking in a neighbor's pasture, was treed by an angry
bull, who kept me in the branches until I caught a violent cold and
became for weeks a family burden.
I was set to milking the cows, but I tied their tails to the beams,
applied a lemon-squeezer to their udders until everybody was aroused
by the bellowings of the infuriated beasts, and the milk and myself
were found carpeting the dirty floor.
At last all patience was exhausted, and as I was born on Sunday, and
was good for nothing else my parents, good, pious church-members,
concluded I must become a minister, consequently they sent me to
school. School! What memories come back to us over the arid wastes of
life at the very mention of this magic word! There is the place where
immortal minds are filled with loathing at the very sight of books,
or where the torch of learning is kindled, which burns on with
ever-increasing brightness forever more, and when I think of some of
the teachers of my youth I am reminded of what the wise pastor said to
a "stupid lunk-head" who had conceived the preposterous idea that he
was called to be a preacher. "What, you be a minister?"
"Yes," said the dunce, "are we not commanded in the holy book to
preach the gospel to every critter?"
"Verily," was the reply; "but every critter is not commanded to preach
the gospel."
So long as percentages obtained after "cramming" for examinations are
the criterions which decide the accepting or rejecting of candidates
for teaching positions, we must expect "critters" for the school
guides of our children, who, like some of my own tutors, will
"Ram it in, cram it in--
Children's heads are hollow;
Rap it in, tap it in--
Bang it in, slam it in
Ancient archaeology,
Aryan philology,
Prosody, zoology,
Physics, climatology,
Calculus and mathematics,
Rhetoric and hydrostatics.
Stuff the school children, fill up the heads of them,
Send them all lesson-full home to the beds of them;
When they are through with the labor and show of it,
What do they care for it, what do they know of it?"