of his years, he became my mother's adviser and helper, and to me a
second father. I loved him well, and I believe he reciprocated this
boyish affection. His eyes twinkled and the wrinkles on his
weather-beaten face ran together when I approached him in the field, or
when we talked together beside the hearth fire or under the elm tree
when the day's work was done. For some reason I cannot now fathom,
unless it were the ambitious desire to put myself on a footing with his
years and wisdom, I would assume with him an unnatural gravity. My
wisdom consisted in asking him questions, any that happened to come into
my head. I took for granted that he knew everything. Had he not been to
Boston, and more than once? Yet little would he say about that town. He
liked much better to talk of places he had never seen, especially London
and London Bridge. I only learned that people in Boston dressed every
day in the week in their best clothes; that was what made the deepest
impression upon me; for our best clothes hung in the closet until
Sunday. Uncle Lyman and I went barefooted and shirtsleeved all summer.
He never had a linen shirt or collar; but how fine he looked in a snowy
white cotton shirt and broad collar, a blue coat and tall bell-shaped
hat, a hat he had worn all his life on the Sabbath and at funerals. Nor
do I think he had, during his manhood, more than one best suit of
clothing. In winter he always wore a long woolen frock made by his wife,
and a cap of woodchuck skin. Folks said it was like to be a hard winter
when he put on his overcoat. His complexion was as dark as an Indian's;
eyes as black as night, and he had straight raven hair. He used much
tobacco, always a quid in his mouth except when it was a pipe. He mostly
refrained on the Sabbath until the evening when a long quiet smoke
compensated him for abstinence during two sermons. His voice was rich
and seemed to come from deep down in his chest. When he was a bit
puzzled, he scratched his head with one finger. He was scrupulously neat
in his person and orderly in his yard and buildings. No chips, no
broken-down carts nor tools disfigured his premises. His was almost the
only barn of a working farmer I ever saw that was kept clean and
neat--except my own. He did not belong to any church; but he had a whole
pew in the body of the meeting-house and contributed his full share to
the support of the Gospel. Moreover he gave of the produce of his farm
every year something to the minister's woodshed or cellar. I never heard
him but once make any comment on the sermons he had heard, which were
more than five thousand according to his figures. "My boy", he said to
me one Sunday evening, "if you should ever be a parson, try to make your
sermons different every time. It seems to me as though I had heard the
same sermon all my life". On the Sabbath day, after the chores were
done, there were shaving and dressing, the fires to be put out and the
windows to be made fast with a button or a nail. Then the carryall was
brought out, a high narrow vehicle difficult to get into, and still more
difficult to get out of. The mare, Nancy, was called white, but she had
patches of brown along her expansive sides and was, with much effort,
squeezed between the fills, and the straps made tight in their buckles.
Nancy winced at this tightening. She did not like her Sunday harness
which had grown hard and stiff from infrequent use and too small, having
been made for her when she was younger. I also felt most uncomfortable
in my good clothes, which were ever outgrown and held me like a
corselet. At last the house door was locked and we drove the two miles
to the church, silent and serious as became our Sunday clothes and our
equipage. We felt strange to ourselves and not at ease. When the meeting
was over I had a sudden overpowering revulsion in my spirits. I wanted
to shout, to run, to jump over something and a hitching post as high as
my head offered the nearest opportunity. I forgot the Sunday school
lesson in a moment; I had not understood a word of it. On the way home
we became very cheerful. There was comment on the wayside farms and
gossip of the doings of the neighbors. We compared the height of their
corn with our own field, and always found it a little less than ours. A
heavy load of something seemed lifted from our hearts on returning from
meeting. Uncle Lyman slyly put his quid back into his mouth which at
once made him happier. There was a faint remonstrance from the back
seat, which he pretended not to hear; or he would rejoin, "mother, have
you munched all those caraway seeds you took along to meeting?" My
driving on the way home was much like the illusion which follows us
through life. Hands in front of ours direct our actions and our affairs.
We hold but the slack of the reins, and the driven imagines himself the
driver. There was a short whip in the socket, which was never taken out
in the summer, and in sleighing disappeared altogether; it was only
ornamental. "Hudup" and a flap of the reins were enough for the
encouragement of Nancy. A switch of her tail and a laying back of her
ears showed that she understood. If a letter must be written, it was
done after meeting. Uncle Lyman seldom touched pen and paper except when
an item was to be set down in his account book. Paper was scarce and
costly and postage six good cents; and the pen, a quill, was usually
dried up, and the nib opened too wide to hold the ink, and had to be
soaked a good while before it would write. There was always some excuse
for not answering a letter. But nothing pleased him more than to receive
one. It was read slowly and with great attention, stuck behind the clock
and reread for a week. The Sabbath ended with an early supper and early
sleep, for Monday was always a busy day. Corn and potatoes did not rest
on the Sabbath, neither did weeds.
At last for Uncle Lyman there came the eternal Sabbath day. He lifted
the latch of his house door for the last time, smoked his last pipe, and
laid down willingly to sleep. Other feet now traverse his lands; there
is new paint over the ancient red house walls, and new labor saving
tools; they and hired menials do the work, but no more than his two
hands in proud industrious independence were wont to accomplish. He is
forgotten by those who now possess what he made worth possessing. But I
have not forgotten him, and little do the present owners of his houses
and lands imagine that there is a title back of theirs, registered in
the court of memory which no mere occupation and ownership can
invalidate.
THE ANCIENT NEW ENGLAND FARMER
How pleasant o'er the still autumnal vale
From his great timbered barn's wide open door
The muffled sound of his unresting flail
In rhythmic swing upon the threshing floor!
How straight their tasselled tops his corn upreared!
Straight were the rows, no weed dared raise its head;
How golden gleamed their opening sheaths well eared
Whose inner husks stuffed out his bulging bed!
Full many a field of dewy grass breast-high
His long sharp scythe ere breakfast time did lay;
Full many a hurrying shower came by,
But to the mow still faster went the hay.
To him as inward fires were ice and snow,
They urged his pulse with warm vivacious blood;
How made his furrowed cheeks in winter glow
With ruddy health and iron hardihood!
Superfluous to him was coat or vest,
Let blow hot or cold or stormiest weather;
He, as his hardy fathers, liked the best
His shirt sleeves free and brimless cap of leather.
Few were his books, his learning was but small;
He boasted not of thoughts beyond his speech;
Some few and simple maxims bounded all
That he had learned, or wished to teach.
He loved his home, his farm, his native town;
These were the walls his happy world confined;
And heaven with unaccustomed joy looked down
To see fulfilled a life itself designed.
Sadly his neighbors bore him to his grave
Beneath the old perpetual mourning pine,
Where honest tears and praise they duly gave,
For all he was, the immemorial sign.
THE DORR WAR AND MILLERISM
There was trouble enough in Bellingham in 1840. The sleepy old town in
its previous existence had never felt a ripple of excitement more moving
than a sewing bee, a travelling phrenologist or temperance lecturer, a
summer picnic or a winter revival. Now it was invaded on one hand by
Millerism and on the other by the Dorr War. The seat of the latter was
in Rhode Island; but Bellingham, being a border town, was in danger of a
raid. The Dorrites did, in fact, advance as far as Crook's Tavern on the
southern boundary of the town, where, having drunk up what rum they
could find, and hearing that the other tavern in the center of the town
was kept on teetotal principles, they at once retreated. Not, however,
before an alarm had been rung out by the church bell and the militia
company called to arms. Great was the fright of the women and children.
There was no sleeping in any house, no working and little eating for
several days. My mother took her family to the top of a neighboring hill
to reconnoitre and was prepared to run for the woods in case the enemy
appeared. She was in great distress, having no man to care for and
protect her little brood. She was a small, delicate and timid woman,
extremely unfitted to play the heroine, and only used to suffering,
which she bore like a saint. On the contrary I aged seven, armed with a
long fishpole, threatened the advance of the rebels, and was eager to
have them come on. I did not go far from my mother and sisters however.
I enjoyed the situation, for I loved danger, with plenty of protection
and means of escape. I loved fire, deep and threatening water, the roofs
of houses, high, dangerous places, thin ice and a bull in the pasture.
These tempted me to trials of boyish bravery. At heart, a little coward,
I brandished my fishpole and clung to my mother's dress. We could see
our soldiers with their high hats surmounted by pompons, parading in
front of the town house and could hear the snare drum beat the time of
their movement. Nothing came of the affair beyond great excitement and
town talk. The Dorrites retreated to Smithfield, the militia men went
back to their farms and the town was saved. I was terribly disappointed,
and the succeeding days were too flat and dull to be endured. I got
through them by playing at soldiering for the remainder of the summer,
making forts and wooden guns and gay uniforms out of bright bits of
calico, cocked hats of paper stuck full of cock tail feathers. I had
also a long-handled lance which had come down in the family from
Revolutionary times with which I charged the woodpile and the hen house,
made of sods, at an angle in the orchard wall. Through this I thrust so
fiercely one day that I killed our only rooster, to the consternation of
my mother and sisters. As I was much in need of more tail feathers for
my military hat, it did not seem to me such a tragedy. I was punished by
not getting the drumstick and wishing bone when he was cooked, and the
tail feathers, to my chagrin, were made into a hearth duster.
The Dorr Rebellion was not long past when the terrifying prophecies of
Rev. William Miller began to be preached. He had figured out by Biblical
and historical dates that the world was to last six thousand years, and
that era would be reached about 1843. The Dorr scare was a trifle
compared to the panic which now seized upon many people in the country
towns of New England. Even those who disbelieved or scoffed could not
conceal their dread. It sobered everybody and banished all joy and
gaiety. A sad expectancy and presentiment of impending disaster
oppressed whole communities. Church members and serious minded persons
thought it as well to be prepared and to be on the safe side, in case
the end should come. Revivals were going on everywhere and the churches
were refilled. What impression did this talk and excitement make on
children? I can say for one that I enjoyed it almost as much as the Dorr
War. I comprehended nothing of what it meant. I never thought of
anything happening to myself, to the house or my dog and kites. The
general agitation filled me inwardly with a lively joy; the danger
seemed to threaten only our neighbors, that is, such as were Millerites.
I reasoned that they and their houses would somehow disappear while we
should remain. So every morning I climbed a little hill to see if
Sylvanus White's house was standing. He was the leading believer in the
end of the world among our neighbors, a prosperous farmer living in a
large, frame house. I heard my mother say that he had no children, and
it did not make much difference to him what happened. I pondered this
remark of my mother trying to think what she meant. I got no farther
than the curious conclusion that all the Millerites were grown up people
without children, and, by a natural deduction, that my mother and
sisters and myself were safe from the end of the world. But I was not
altogether satisfied. In my heart, so much did I delight in having
something going on, that I wanted to see the great event, which I
pictured to myself, remembering the words, flame, smoke and thunder, as
something like the mimic Indian fights I had once seen represented on
the annual training day of the militia men; only this promised to be on
a grander scale.
It is well known that children play at death and funerals without
sorrow; so I played the destruction of the world with great delight. I
made my world of small boxes for houses, one over the other, and on top
of all, a crippled kite which represented Farmer White, as I had heard
that he had prepared a white robe in which to ascend. I wanted of course
some people in my doomed world besides Farmer White. I manufactured
quite an assemblage out of one thing and another and gave them names,
mostly of older boys whom I disliked, my Sunday-school teacher, who gave
me a bad half hour every week, and my uncle Slocomb who was always
telling my mother I would never be a man if she did not stop indulging
me so much. I added a few pretended animals of corn cobs, a dead snake,
a live frog; and, as these did not seem the real thing, I tied my dog
and cat and a lame chicken close to the sacrificial heap. I surrounded
the whole with sticks, paper and pine cones and then came the exciting
moment when I "touched her off," as boys say. What fun, what glee I
experienced at that moment, no one can know, who does not keep in his
bosom a fragment of his boyish heart. Creation may please the gods, but
it cannot equal the boy's pleasure in destruction, especially by fire. I
only needed a few spectators and I soon had them. The flames began to
singe the dog and cat, and fricassee the chicken. Their howling and
screaming brought the family upon the scene, and none too soon to save
the lives of my pets. I was shut in a dark closet on bread and water for
the remainder of the day and left to meditate, as my mother charged me,
when I confessed my intentions, on "the naughtiness of mocking serious
things." Thus did I innocently anticipate in my own person that _dies
irae_ which I had prepared for my imaginary town. I took no further
interest in Millerism and in neighbor White's big house and ascension
robe. After this I made new and less destructible worlds which continue
to this day.
But the delusion did not expire by my neglect. It is still cherished as
the candid faith of many readers of scriptural oracles. And now they are
comforted by the astronomers who terrify us with their calculations on
the inexorable cataclysm impending over our trusty and splendid earth.
Never mind; we shall not be at the exit. To the vast future belong all
these disconcerting predictions--and welcome. Time has already inscribed
our urns, and, without mathematics, appointed for each one his separate
and appropriate catastrophe. We who have lived fifteen lustrums have
already witnessed the dissolution of our world. What more could the Rev.
William Miller do for us?
WOODS AND PASTURES
There are many matters in the recollections of our earliest years so
minute that to speak of them is only becoming to second childhood. "The
soul discovers great things from casual circumstances", says Porphory.
Providence provides temporary bridges through life which commonly fall
to pieces after we pass over them and are forgotten. It is not so with
me; one bridge remains whole and more beautified by time--that on which
I return to my native town. I require no daylight or lantern for the
journey. Some men can number their happy days; I more often count my
happy nights, when I soothe myself to repose by recalling the sweet and
tender joys of childhood. I travel the roads and pastures or wade the
brook hand in hand with Launa Probana.
There was no gate out of Bellingham in my childhood. Its confines I
never thought to question, or to suspect that there was anything beyond.
It had its own sun, moon and stars, its river, its pond, its pastures
and woods as full of interests and resources and as exhilarating as any
place discovered later on the map of the world. This concentration and
limitation give to children experiences and illusions which color the
whole subsequent life. They are implicit in that soil where we find the
roots of our being. They are what make us good citizens, steadfast
friends, true lovers, observers of nature, disciples of the poets. They,
whose early life is diffused over too many objects, with too many
opportunities, have only a temporary and incomplete hold and delight in
any of the advantages of their superior fortune. What is the good of
however large a circle, if it have no center?
The lean and hungry pastures of Bellingham were prolific in
inexhaustible harvests; what they bore on their surface may hint of
something deeper and more perennial. The pastures and borders of the
woods were covered with patches of huckleberry and blue-berry bushes,
and over every stone heap clambered the low blackberry vines with
racemes of luscious fruit. The pastures were named from one or the other
of these berries, and their owners never claimed private right to them.
To put up the bars as we entered and left the field, was the only
obligation expected of us. Seldom were they taken down; the women
crawled through, the boys leaped over, the small girls squeezed in
between the posts and the wall. Our forefathers left the turnstile
behind them in their English meadows, but not the short-cut from house
to house, from field to field or from village to village. There is
always a shorter way than the crowd travels. Boys and animals, those
untaught explorers and surveyors, are the first to find it. Once within
the pasture, a hundred short paths led hither and thither wherein grew a
little low, sweet grass which the red cows grazed and sheep nibbled; and
as they sauntered along they paid behind for their food in front. Then a
warning voice would be raised telling us to be careful where we stepped.
In these mazy pathways we were always returning upon our tracks and
finding the bushes we had already stripped. Children were crying out to
each other that the bottom of their pails was covered, or that they had
a pint or quart, and generally as many went into the mouth as into the
pail. The days when we went berrying were holidays, although the berries
were picked for market and added a mite to the year's supply of silver
money. Bank bills and gold we never saw, only silver and copper, and of
these, silver was the money of men and women and huge copper cents and
half cents of boys. I can remember a time when one cent was riches
unspeakable, treasured for months and often displayed in triumph to
penniless companions. Poor indeed are they who have never known the day
of small things and the size of a cent. It is said money is only good
for what it will buy, and the miser who hoards is the scoff of mankind.
I must have been a descendant of Shylock for I loved cents for
themselves and the feeling of importance they gave me. I polished them
until they shone like gold and the face of the Father of his Country
gleamed with irridescent benignity. Some were hopelessly worn and
battered; some had a hole in them or a piece nicked out of the rim.
These I exchanged with my mother for more perfect ones which I could
burnish.
For children, berrying was play, pure pastime; it brought no money to
their pockets. For the first hour it was infinitely exciting; by the
next, we wanted something else, and it was difficult to keep us in
order. What to do next is an eternal question that has followed both
children and man from Eden. It is usually resolved by doing the same
thing over again.
A little boy once sat discontentedly on the bank of a river. A traveller
asked him what was the matter. He answered "I want to be on the other
side of the stream." "What for?" inquired the traveller. "So that I
could come back here," said the restless boy.
To hide and play games was one means of escape from the fatigue of the
slow filling berry pails. Then such quiet fell over the pasture that our
elders knew some mischief was afoot. We were promptly discovered,
scolded and warned that we must fill our pails before we could play.
As milking time approached we gathered up stray hats, aprons and
handkerchiefs and prepared to go home. We painted each others' cheeks
with the red blood of huckleberries and crowned our heads with leaves of
the birch and oak, stalks of indigo weed or broad fern fronds that hung
down over the face like green veils. Thus freaked and marked, walking in
single file, our mothers and elder sisters behind us, shouting, leaping
and laughing, we presented something as near a Bacchic procession as
could be found in a community enshrouded in the black cloak of John
Calvin. What a good time it was to be alive, and never is a boy so young
as in the berry pasture, nor any place so full of enchantments. She--for
it was never a boy--who had picked the most berries that day, headed the
band and was a proud and envied person. Our elders cherished this
emulation. I was always thinking that the next time we went berrying, I
should try for the head of the procession; but the fun was too much for
me; I could not hold to my resolution above a half hour; I was
excessively fond of praise but averse to the ways of meriting it. The
only long word I brought away from childhood was approbativeness. I
never used the word, nor knew its meaning, and, least of all, could have
pronounced it. I heard it once only, together with another word, editor,
which I understood as little, from the lips of a travelling
phrenologist. It happened that my mother lodged and fed him for a night
and he paid his score by examining the heads of all the family. I was
greatly impressed when he remarked that I had a large bump of
approbativeness and would sometime be an editor. As to the bump, feeling
over my own head, I never could find it. My mother said it was inside
and that the phrenologist meant I must be a good boy. I was quite used
to that interpretation of everything concerning myself. A great many
years after, when I became editor of an obscure newspaper, so little
comfort, reputation or profit did I find in it, that I amused myself in
thinking of it as the fulfillment of the phrenologist's prophecy.
The Bacchic procession dropped its members here and there along the road
and we got to our own cottage tired, sunburnt and hungry. We ate our
suppers of berries and milk out of pewter porringers with pewter spoons
and went to bed at dark. The next day we fed on berry pies, and all the
neighborhood during the berry season bore the marks of pies in blackened
teeth and lips, except a few fastidious young women who cleaned theirs
with vinegar. Tooth brushes were as unknown as rouge and powder. Every
Saturday night the children were scrubbed in a wash tub in front of the
fire place in winter, and at the door in summer. During the session of
school my mother washed my ears and face every day, pinned my collar,
kissed me, and always her tedious parting injunction was, mind your
teacher, study your lesson and be a good boy. Then away with flying feet
I overtake my companions, whom no sooner met, than we loitered along the
road, hand in hand, or arms around another's neck, merry and playful,
quite unmindful of nine o'clock and the hateful lesson. There were no
precocious and wonderful children in our red school house. Even I did
not begin to write poetry until I was eighteen or nineteen! The only
literary prodigy among our neighbors was a maiden lady who wrote
obituary verses on the death of her pious friends.