REVISITING THE EARTH

CHAPTER I

REVISITING THE EARTH

To revisit the earth after one's departure from it has always been a common wish among men. The frequency with which this desire is expressed in biographies and in literature, keeps the project alive, and works it to the front in one's plans. Benjamin Franklin presents the thought in such attractive dress that we incline to adopt it for a programme. There is one item in his proposition that calls for argument at the bar of public opinion. It touches the length of the interval that should be suffered to elapse before the visit is made. So rapid is the growth, so radical are the changes, that if one's reappearance is too long delayed he would recognize nothing in the new conditions. He might as well set himself down in some other unfamiliar place. The postponement should not exceed a third of a century. It is his world that a man wants to see, and each one has his own. His antecedents and experiences have given to it a distinctive character.

To Open Books that are Sealed

On a golden day the thought came to me unbidden, I have seen three and thirty years rise and fall since I have viewed the identical spots that I would care most to look upon. Instantly I made the resolve, I will visit, in the first eight weeks of summer, every place in which I have lived or loved or labored. I ascertained, in advance, the name of some kindly disposed person at each point in my itinerary, who could identify the site of the house in which I lived, if it is not still standing, also of the school and church that I attended. The letter I had written was handed in one case to the editor of the local paper, who featured it, in his columns, asking for the names of persons now living who remembered me. Here is plainly seen an insuperable objection to waiting Ben Franklin's interval of one hundred years before revisiting the earth. This correspondence, which contributed immeasurably to the pleasure and profit of the project, ought to be undertaken, while there are two parties to conduct it. Where one's coming is expected and welcomed he passes at once into the right relations to the place, also into the atmosphere he desires.

Let Me Drop a Hint Here Like a Seed

I care not how widely you have traveled if you have never made a pious pilgrimage to your childhood's shrines—you have still missed your superlative pleasure.

It is possible for you to live your life over and the part commended for you to live over again is when you were young.

Here is rejuvenation. To live one's life over is to live it twice. This amounts to doubling it. Who would not do it? If the period of time during which one may live on the earth is fixed, it certainly is limited, if there is a possible way to live twice, what one does live, he would better be extremely hospitable to the scheme. Opposition will come from three sources, first from the man who thinks himself taken up by the future and by his hopes. But it is patience that works "experience and experience hope." Hope detached from the present and the past is such a baseless fabric of a vision that it probably will not leave even so much as a wreck behind. Another man will counter with the familiar statement that his eyes are on the front of his head and he only travels in the direction that they lead.

Now my kind, optimistic brother, I have a word here for you. You are traveling in blinders. You are a mechanical pace-setter. All your training is for the middle of the road. It is counted a physical deformity if a person cannot turn his head. It is an expression of opprobrium to find people stiff-necked. The chief office of a vehicle is to carry on, yet for use at home, a carriage that cannot be turned round would be extremely inconvenient.

Pausing for a Fore-taste

The observation car giving the best view to be had of the mountain landscape as it waltzes by, is placed at the rear of the train. The most extravagant demonstrations of joy and gratitude, our most hallowed feelings come from looking back on what has been done unto us and for us.

Hesitancy about revisiting the earth comes lastly from those who think they have lost their interest in days that are gone, that forgetfulness has done its sad work, that the dead past has buried its dead. It is to witness the miracle of a resurrection that we are uttering our cry.

Waymarks of the Journey

They assume that a fact or a name is gone into oblivion when, for example, they are unable by a repeated effort to recall it. The mind is a delicate organism. You cannot well force things. It has its own laws of suggestion. Once coming into the old surroundings, which rake up the past, standing again on a recognized corner, which carry one's thoughts back with delight into familiar haunts, the law of association will put on the tip of your tongue names and incidents that you supposed to be clean forgotten. If a person had asked me to give the name of the first barber that ever set foot in the town of my boyhood home, I would have believed it sunk in oblivion. In the summer coming upon the cross-roads, I said, "Here stood the first barber shop in town." The name of the negro, even, that kept it flashed on my mind. It was Stanbach, the last syllable as he pronounced it ended with the German guttural. His son, a little freckled mulatto, was called Johnnie Stanbach. When a little full-blooded negro appeared, Johnnie would not associate with him. He was "too black," "black enough to smut a body."

The Mind's Re-invigoration

When Hon. James O. Crosby, an eminent lawyer, in my native village, having a large practice in the courts of the county, met the father of John R. Mott of merited distinction, a living force, this was the dialogue: "How do you do, Mr. Mott!" "How do you do, Mr. Crosby!" and then taking Mr. Crosby's hand Mr. Mott said to him, "Your face seems familiar but I cannot seem to recall your name." This occurrence gives a volume of experience in revisiting the earth. When Mr. Mott badgered his mind to recall Mr. Crosby's name, his intellect balked, utterly, and continuously refused to act. The mind often halts, even as to common words. One's mental powers come to a sudden pause, like circus horses, and a man recovers their use, not by any effort of will, but by some sudden, and almost impulsive, suggestion. Recent events and dates are easily lost or pass into confusion while those of long prior time still hold firm root and their right place in remembrance. As we have seen, a quick, unerring, even unconscious mental spring, acting according to the laws of the association of ideas will unaided and without effort, bring a name, pent up in one's memory, promptly forward for his instant use. The value of this power is beyond estimation. Occurrences supposed to be forgotten are very much alive, when upon old familiar ground. Revisiting the earth is a simple string of these acts of spontaneous recollection. If you hear a few notes of music, the inseparable association, that exists in the mind, suggests the rest of the tune. That is a very apt expression, when a person says he is haunted by a tune. It implies an existence, in the chambers of the brain, that is making a stir and which he supposed to be dead. The simple act of thus recalling an event is in itself the most wonderful of all mental processes.

The Re-creation of the World

I heard of a man who had over-looked the fact that memory paints with fast colors, also that a recollection that is dim in one locality is bright in another. On reaching a scene of early associations, on picking up a thing, he found it was like one of the links of a chain, that one being stirred, others were moved and the man was found discoursing on How I improved my memory in one evening. On revisiting the earth, memories are awakened which, but for coming upon the old soil, would probably have slept silently to the end of life. It is given to me, to have a distinct testimony in this matter. Many others can corroborate these hints by startling facts in their own lives and without any stretch of their imagination. I was brought to the belief, that a person may not ever forget anything. The recollection turns out to be a faithful, painstaking, autobiographer. This almost scares a person. A wand seemed to be waved and forth came people and anecdotes and events that he supposed were in oblivion. There turns out to be, not only a recollection of the head, but also a memory of the heart. The process is different. On the one hand a boy commits to memory and learns by rote, on the other hand there are some things he loves. All these he knows by heart. This is an undying, imperishable recollection. It is the immortality of the affections. Vividness of feeling does it. All that pertains to home, he learns by heart. It is as indestructible as his eternal being. "Dot must be der vonderful blace Ohm, to make der British cry. I tink to myself, I vill go and see dis blace, Ohm, vot der vos no blace like. Vich is der vay to 'Ohm, Sweet Ohm?'" Where the affections have been unlocked and the whole inner man has been stirred,—a high water mark has been registered in one's memory that can never be eradicated. Your heart shall live forever, so shall all of your heart's histories. They give you something that the thieving years can never take away. I have pleasure in adding to the assurance of it.

Blessing in the Guise of an Excursion

It is now only one hundred and eighty generations, as we used to be taught, since Adam, peace to his memory and his ashes, who was grandfather of us all. There are thus but one hundred and seventy-eight generations between us and him. This would take but one hundred and seventy-eight father-to-son steps to bring us to the original family home in the Garden of Eden. There are only one hundred and eighty life-times to review. The grandfather of Noah, who was six hundred years old when he encountered the flood, was Methuselah, who remembered Adam. If our line of ancestry is so short, and if all the progress we have made has been accomplished within a history so brief, it is little wonder that the transformations to be witnessed in one of these not numerous generations are so incredible and so instructive.

I do not know, but I may class traveling among our duties. It opens new spheres of thought and observation and places us in new relations to mankind and makes us better students of human nature. Leisure is sweet to the taste and for that reason it soon palls. Pleasure is a by-product. Enjoyment is greatest when it is incidental to some well-advised quest. Idleness is the least pleasure of a holiday. To make high festival of a pilgrimage to a shrine is more common in the older nations than in our own. It is the habit of the human mind to love that which is memorial in its character. We cannot, as Longfellow says, buy with gold the old associations. "He that is searching for rare and remote things will neglect those that are obvious and familiar. It is remarkable," continues Dr. Johnson in the preface to his dictionary, "that in reviewing my collection of words I found the word 'sea' unexemplified." I have had many vacations, in places wide apart. Having gone further and fared worse, returning to what is nearer, having an inspiration of beauty upon it, I say, touching Revisiting the Earth, as David declared of Goliath's sword, There is none like that, give me it. Never did a child perform an errand with more alacrity than I executed this mission.

CHAPTER II

THE PICTURE LAND OF THE HEART

The day is blue above, without a cloud. Will you walk with me through our village, gentle reader? We will begin at the handsome open square. Now as we advance my heart leaps at the sight of my birthplace. What a pretty location it is! Here is "the cot of my father:" "In youth it sheltered me." It is the "loved spot which my infancy knew." "How dear to my heart" is this "scene of my childhood." Happy childhood thus early blessed with blessings hereditary to all after hours! There is no place so suggestive and interesting in our adult years as that in which we began life. It is one of those exquisite situations which paint their own picture insensibly in the memory while you look on them, natural, daguerreotypes, as it were. Considered only as a house, it left some things to be desired but it is never to be considered only as a house. Why is it that we thus love the place of our birth? Why have all men done the same? The son of the mist, in Scott, in his dying hour, begged that he might be turned so that his eyes could rest once more upon his native hills and close with their latest vision fixed there. Why did the hero of Virgil, in his death hour, manifest his love for the place of his birth which is so beautifully narrated by that immortal bard? It is an instinct, which gives to it a place in the human heart, and such an expression in human thought. Like poetry it is born with us, not made. There probably is no stronger feeling in us than that of attachment to our first home. A man transplanted to another field may have succeeded well. His condition may have been vastly improved and yet he may have drooped without apparent cause, in his temporary home, pining for those days which were passed in the Eden of his life. I could not get enough of the place. Must I leave thee, dear sacred spot, how can I leave thee? My heart was full and the tears started to my eyes as I gazed around upon every object. The words of my earliest progenitor, on leaving our ancestral garden, as quoted by Milton, came to me, "Must I leave thee, paradise?"

The Vine Must Have the Wall

Luther could appear in battle scenes for social and religious reform with undaunted spirit. He could oppose the enemies of his faith without a trembling nerve. He could resist those, bent on his destruction, with the courage and calmness of a Christian hero, but when upon a journey to meet the Counts of Mansfield, he came in sight of his own native Eisleben, the great man was overcome with emotion and he bowed his head and wept.

"The Man Returned who Left these Haunts a Boy"

Congress voted unanimously in 1824 to invite Lafayette to visit this country. He was received everywhere with great demonstrations of popular enthusiasm and his progress through the country resembled a continuous triumphal procession. He visited, in succession, each of the twenty-four states, and all the principal cities which vied to do him honor, but relatively he was unmoved. A splendid coach was at his service. He passed beneath an elaborate arch blazoned with words of welcome, but Lafayette relatively was unmoved. Sitting quietly with no expectation excited, before a screen in a public assembly, the curtain lifted and there stood his birthplace, in speaking beauty and suggestiveness and all the deeps of his heroic nature were broken up and he sobbed audibly like a child. The strong old home still held him to its heart.

How is such a birthplace marked? Chiefly by a gush of rich emotion in the heart of him who claims it as his own. Nature attends to that. A boy has warm affections. A birthplace may have no Forefathers' Rock. Peregrine White was not born there. No Charter Oak or Washington Elm, with living dignity may identify the place. There may be no cellar which concealed the royal judges, nor any door pierced by Indian bullets, nor drums which awaked the sleepers at Lexington and Concord, yet it is distinctively sacred to one's childhood days. It has the deep endearment of a darling home.

"I remember, I remember
The house where I was born
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn."

"Where is my home? I want to go before dark," said a spirited little fellow of three years. The action of his inner nature was like the turning of the needle to the pole. Thus an unfortunate child will put up a fight for his birthright and he will not yield without returning to the struggle. He wants his heritage.

"I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER, THE HOUSE WHERE I WAS BORN"

The Gate to Life

Somehow my heart keeps flying back to my birthplace as Antony's kept flying back to Egypt. If a man has no heart, if he is altogether lacking in veneration the attention given to his birthplace by other persons would impress it upon his notice. "Where were you born?" asks the life insurance agent. What has that to do with it? How does that affect the situation? Why does he not limit himself to vital statistics, like your age, habits, general health? Through more than three thousand closely printed pages, Who's Who in America, carefully mentions in each biography the birthplace of the subject. There must be some reason for making this one of the chief facts when the space is needed to tell of positions held, wealth and fame acquired.

At this point a daily paper comes to my desk containing an interesting recital touching America the Beautiful. We are informed that Miss Bates "has a most sympathetic personality" and "is a native of Falmouth on Cape Cod." Are the song and person better or different from that which they would have been if instead of Falmouth the birthplace had been Yarmouth or Barnstable or Wellfleet Several towns in France are disputing the honor of being the birthplace of General Foch. The papers and magazines speak of his genius, of his responsible position, the most distinguished in military history, of his never-resting blow-on-blow method of conquering, but they cut the thread of an interesting narrative short, to consider the question of his birthplace as if that, after all, was a principal question. It seems that "the Lord shall count when he writeth up the people that this man was born there." Agents and learned men, and it appears even the deity, attach significance to the place of one's birth. So then will I.

"Dear native village, I foretell,
Though for a time I say farewell,
That wheresoe'er my steps shall tend,
And whensoe'er my course shall end,
My soul will cast the backward view,
THE LONGING look alone on you."

But there are spots on the sun. There's a fly in the ointment. I am suffering from an incurable complaint. I was born too soon. I cannot now put the clock back. Besides we are entering on a new era. There is to be an overturning. Society and the ways of government and the methods of business are to be changed and I want to be a witness and would like to be a factor. The temper of each generation is a surprise. This new period is to be different in its ideals, employments, and conditions and I would like to be entirely of it.

Footprints on the Sands of Time

I took up the other day a book of fiction that is equally the delight of the child and of the man and opened it where a picture represented the surprise of Robinson Crusoe at discovering the print of a man's foot on the seashore. On revisiting the earth it touches one's emotion after being orphaned, islanded, for a generation from one's father to come upon his footprints in his old haunts. Without the experience of it, on visiting an early home, no one would imagine, what a shadowy train of memory, involving all the past, would come crowding before his eyes, filling his heart with a pleasant pain, and a sweet bitterness. Only once stand in the old environment and feel the atmosphere of early living conditions and a vivid panorama of faces that it was thought had vanished and scenes that it was supposed had faded will unroll "when fond recollection presents them to view." I hardly realized how sweet those memories were to me until my visit. I began to see that one must get away from home, be exiled for a while, to gain a pensive mood. Homesickness is in reality a spiritual instinct, a needed, useful force. Howard Payne felt its power when living in a garret in Paris, on the edge of starvation, he longed for his "lowly thatched cottage again," as David longed for a drink of the water of the well of his birthplace, which is by the gate of Bethlehem. This locality was the playground of my childhood. It is connected with the sweetest ties that can bind one's thoughts to the past. I stand in a fixed position. This is the location of my earliest recollection. Here memory began. This was a new birth. Commencing in the community and continuing all along thereafter, by inquiry, I have sought widely to ascertain at what point in the lives of other persons, recollection made a start. From his biography by his daughter I learn that my whilom instructor, Professor Austin Phelps, remembered Napoleon's death, an event that occurred when he was two. Franklin says he was a reader from his infancy. Samuel Johnson, before he was two, had begun to take a permanent hold upon events. One of my associates recalls a theatric incident that occurred when he was two. My recollection made no registration until after I was three and this was a scene here in my father's new unfinished church, and among its primitive temporary seats which were without backs. Thus I stand where my outlook on the world began. At that point I see myself for the first time in my career. Other events follow in close order but it has been a great pleasure that my angel mother and her beloved church are ineffaceably pictured on the front page of my book of remembrance.

Things Sweet to Remember

To discover that modest House of Prayer in which my father began his ministry was like a miracle, like finding someone who had risen from the dead. My eye was not satisfied with seeing it twice or thrice. I contemplated it as I would the "House not made with hands," I could have kneeled and kissed the threshold of this historic but very lowly temple. It seemed a construction transported, ready-built into this world and located in one of its most delightful spots. It seemed different, like a piece of meteoric stone which for a fact appears here but whose home has been in the skies, and like the stony pillow on Judea's plain it became to my vision a House of God. This is a holy land to me. It savors of the assemblies of the saints. If I were looking for beauty I would return to that divine abode. A stranger not knowing the antecedents of the little sanctuary would discern no form nor comeliness in it. It was an hour when one could think of but two things, one was home, and one was heaven. These earthly objects have a comeliness, a simple dignity, and nattiness which are beyond the reach of art. How it elevates the spirit to stand, thrilled by a beautiful romance and find that it is not romance at all but unspeakably sacred reality.

"Aye call it holy ground
The soil where first they trod."

THE LITTLE SANCTUARY

Oh the brave, the noble souls who have laid foundations. They were elect people set apart to a sacred service which has no equal in this world's history. I am not "the wretch

Who never to himself hath said
This is my own my native land."

CHAPTER III

THE DEAREST SPOT ON EARTH TO ME

The flood gates of memory opened wide as the lamented Queen of England, with the weight of eighty years resting upon her, was wheeled in her chair, from room to room in the old fashioned brick palace at Kensington. Here in this unpretentious princely abode with its beautiful name, she was born, and here when she was waked very early out of heavy sleep to be hailed, Queen, she said prettily, "I will be good."

She kept her word. Here remain, as she left them her doll's house, the miniature counter where she sold ribbons and laces to imaginary customers, the doll's linen, marked with her own childish cross-stitch and the furniture and mementoes which cause the plain, irregular, rather homely structure to be hallowed as the shrine of Victoria. Here she saw her little set of cooking utensils, her child's scrapbook and little boxes of paints with camel's hair brushes. She lingered lovingly over these objects, which once meant so much to her, and as the vivid association and tender suggestiveness of her surroundings touched her feelings, in the presence of a group of dolls, being amid her toys, she desired the attendants who accompanied her to withdraw, expressing the desire, in that sacred place, to be alone.

The Glory of Life in its First Spring

On revisiting the earth I wanted to be alone on reaching my memory room. In that corner stood my trundle bed and about here, well say about there, is where I kneeled to say my earliest prayers. I have never felt so rich since, as I did when I came into the undisputed and sole possession of a hair-covered trunk which I could lock and bear away the key. Into this trunk I emptied the week's accumulation of all my week-day pockets as often as I put on my Sunday clothes. In this old hide-bound trunk were my sainted mother's letters, and missives with my own name in large John Hancock looking letters on the back, from my grandfather who kept store and sometimes sent me pocket pieces of money. On the outside of the pack, always in view, always to be kept, no more resembling others than an electric light resembles a tallow dip, was the first letter personally addressed to me that I ever received. Here was a child's cheap album containing photographs of Commodore Nutt and Minnie Warren, of a family of Albinos having white hair and pink eyes, and of a fat boy only 16 years old that had struck me with wonder. Here is a red morocco bag in which I kept my ill-gotten gains in marbles. Although forbidden to play "keeps" myself, the neighbor's boy, a surer shot, did not hesitate with my capital to engage in the excitement and to make a "divy" of the proceeds, while I watched the game, and as a better disciple carried the bag. I used to feel a real pride in my collection. I knew the price of each kind and computed the value of them all to a cent. That day was marked by the event when I exchanged so many of the brown, baked, clay sort, for a big taw alley (made of alabaster). Some of the big chinas were striped in varied colors and we made a sharp difference between those where the bright color was laid on and soon began to wash and wear and those where it was baked in like the pictures on cups, where it is as indestructible as the material itself. To this day I cannot see boys playing at marbles without feeling a strong desire to join them.

The Rule of the Shekel

Among playthings my specialty was marbles. I specialized on three lines, blue clays, real agates, the handsomest of all marbles, and big glass center-pieces. I knew well just what I must hold to dominate the market and just how many of the common sort a boy would give for an alley taw, or tor, as we used to pronounce it. Taw is the line or limit from which the players shoot. Others would have returned from the visit to the old time school-house to the hotel. I knew a merchant well, who being delighted with his entertainment in Lucerne did not think it worth while to go out to the leaf-embowered pool to see Thorwaldsen's Lion. Naples has such outstanding beauty that the visitor is ready to "die" and thus omits any visit to Vesuvius, the most famous elevation in the world. But I went from the school-ground to the place, where the soil was once beaten to the hardness of a floor, by the village boys, who, each of them, placed one or two marbles in a ring and in turn shot at them and he who obtained most of them by beating them out of the ring was the winner. We were happy

"To kneel and draw
The chalky ring and knuckle down at taw."

Here in this trunk were my old club skates which I used to sharpen myself and tie on with strings and leathern thongs, and here was an old ball which, I, having first ravelled the yarn, wound myself and cut the cover out of an old boot top in the good democratic days of town-ball or of "Two-old-cat," when we chose up, for the ins, and did not leave the playing to a few, and half of them from out of town, when a "foul" and "daisy-cutter" were unknown terms. While one dear, sweet, not-to-be-valued-with-the-Gold-of-Ophir object remained among them, it has been hard for me to "put away childish things." Most people are extremely like one's self, and choosing among relics would be supposed to first take one of the sandals of Empedocles, fabled to have been cast forth by Aetna. This father of rhetoric, statesman, prophet, and reformer threw himself into that volcano to disappear and leave no trace and thus establish a belief that he was so beloved of the gods that he was translated. But the volcano would not stand for this imposition and threw out one of his sandals. But I am not interested in such a relic when it is compared with a little token that tells of the deep desire there is in every heart to be remembered.

The Last Wish of Ambitious Minds

We shrink from the fate of being dropped out of sight and out of thought. It strikes a pang to a mother's heart to even hear the adage "out of sight, out of mind." Trading upon her warm feelings, she was solicited to buy, as a birthday gift for her boy, a little china cup, highly colored, inscribed with the words, "remember me." This little token proved to be the best seller on the market. The longer it is kept the greater is the desire to keep it. The child is not asked to prize the gift. The legend upon it tells rather her intensest longing. Her one deepest wish at the moment of final parting could not be better expressed.

"A place in thy memory, dearest,
Is all that I claim:
To pause and look back when thou hearest
The sound of my name."

The absence of the giver makes the gift more dear. I do not call this idolatry. A German doctor of divinity has expressed the common feeling in an exaggerated form, by saying that he loved God, in his mother and in his wife and children. He saw God-likeness in them and they commended the love of God to him. Certainly next to pleasing God the desire to honor the memory of my father and mother has been my highest incentive in life. One of these motives does not leave off when the other begins. It is a kind of piety which is natural to me. It is spontaneous and seems divinely implanted. Reverence toward Godly people is at least a schooling in piety. I mean of course God's church and God's Book when I speak of my mother's church and my mother's bible. When one is given his old seat in his childhood's home, his mother seems near, and he feels like saying to her,

"I've passed through many a changing scene
Since thus I sat by thee;
O, let me look into thine eyes;

Their meek, soft, loving light
Falls like a gleam of holiness
Upon my heart tonight."

That great truth which Gray tells us he discovered for himself, and which very few people learn, till they find it by experience, went to my heart, that in this world a human being never can have more than one mother.

It is a peculiar expression that people use when they say that they "keep" Lent, or "keep" Sunday, or "keep" Christmas, or "keep" a birthday. They mean that they observe it, and by thus marking it they get something out of it which is pleasant and suggestive. We all have our little festivals, life's private anniversaries, these jubilees of the heart which we love to celebrate. That day is a high day, when the old homestead becomes an inspiration point. Stores, long ago laid by in the memory, come forth from their hiding places. In unexpected exaltation of spirit, one is lifted above himself.

Strikes a Chord Unconsciously

He gets out of himself and lives for the hour a sort of sublime life. It was worth the trip to obtain such a revelation of my own mind. Of all the works of the Creator's power and wisdom the mind bears most plainly the private mark of the invisible God. Things have almost a miraculous power to visualize persons. This is true to an extent that will not be believed. And here is a perplexity. Shall I insist upon the point? The incredible part is the particular thing I want to emphasize. The trundle bed, the hair-covered trunk, the stairs, the door, the window become active factors, and the faculties awaking out of long heavy slumber become vocal. Faces and tones are at once recalled and intensely vivid remembrances take shape, hue and voice. Spirits of father and mother, are ye here, entering into the high communion of this hour? The suggestiveness of the environment was such that somehow and suddenly, I was a boy again. This is such a day as that in which our parents blessed us, and such a day as that in which our mother fulfilled both of those relations to us. Her love was like spikenard, perfuming the house. Two good friends I there summoned to go with me, memory and resolution. One of these friends reinforces the work of the other. When I vividly remember, I want to make a consecration. I want to do some sacrificial act, and to do it distinctively for mother's sake. Now, henceforth, "No day without something learned: no day without something done." I took some live coals off the home altar to start new fires. Our ancestors had, what they styled "living" money and "dead" money. In emergencies they sought to convert dead resources into currency. My legacy is a memory and the old battered trunk which was a little world in itself.

Old Home Looks Young Again

In the days of my top and kite-hood, the trunk had constantly to be opened because something had been forgotten. How small a thing it was to contain as much as I thought there was in it. I showed my regard for it by the things I entrusted to it. The germ of every home I ever had was in it. Its contents I have almost idolized. I speak advisedly, I would rather lose the house than what, reserved from it, has come down with me through the years, taken with their setting. A boy likes a place to keep his things. A boy accumulates. That's his nature. An associate has just said that his first memory was a suit that had pockets. There is something in a boy's constitution that gives him a large use for pockets. To empty them is not a convenience, merely, but a necessity, as in his use of them they project like two bay-windows. His nature necessitates a trunk. There must be a secret spot around which can rally the sentiments that a home awakens and conserves. A mother loves to get a Bible into this trunk, which is to be the center-point to his heart and home. Mother's sentiment was well chosen. This book will keep you from sin and sin will keep you from this book. They do not go together. They do not keep company. This Bible had about it what it calls "a sweet smelling savor." A new pocket book, a gift from my grandfather, was also quite redolent but the odor of these was different.

The Odor of Apple Blossoms

I read in an old legend that a Damascus Blade gave forth both sparks and perfume. My sense of smell was always exceedingly acute. It has guarded me often against exposure. I can instantly detect invisible forms of peril. I knew a way to find out about those qualities of a Damascus Blade. A boy is always ready to educate himself by the use of his sense perceptions, and is particularly prompt with taste and smell. I had from the first a rare, refreshing pleasure from flowers, perfumes, aromatic materials producing a sweet odor when burned and the smell of fruits. I used to love the fragrance of new hay and of the freshly plowed ground and of the earth when moistened by a quick summer shower, the scented fumes wafted from the land when approached from the ocean, and the fishy smell of the shore when you have reached it. The odor of a well-kept light harness when well warmed up on a fine gaited horse, and the odor of the varnish on the carriage, I, to this hour, remember from my boyhood days. I loved the intensity of odors so peculiar, so unlike those of summer, that we used to notice after the frost had fallen, when the winter was at hand, and the aroma of the woods having been first imprisoned, was exhaled by a warm sun, in a cloud of incense. All the sense perceptions were wide open to the mind. We were constantly learning. Life was a school without recesses or vacations and had a full corps of instructors in all the departments.

"Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee." "There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification."

CHAPTER IV

THE LAND OF USED-TO-BE

The particular thing taught in the early school, as I recall it, was to make a bow. When a boy was about to speak a piece he made his manners and at the conclusion of his address he again caused his head to descend and made a quick nervous stoop. Declamation was made of three parts, two of which were the introductory bow and the concluding one. If the bow was grotesque, the speaker was recalled, not only to bow, but to do it gracefully. It is nothing to the credit of those scholars that in later life they sometimes forgot to perform the gracious act, which this master sacrificed other items to teach. The schedule, day by day, was a mere overture to the main performance which came at the end of the term which was the exhibition. This came "the last day." As the libraries were small the pupils searched high and low to find a "piece." This was a new task to those who had been simple answer-hunters. In arithmetic they were informed in advance what result they must attain and to reach it was to do their sums. But now there is involved also the human equation.

Dolling Up

When they came "to speak in public on the stage," they were noisily dressed. They would have looked better and felt better in customary apparel, but they were ill at ease and this helped to mark a red-letter day.

The whole town was moved. The scholars were full of excitement over the glory of the occasion. The country side was deserted. The farmers with all the members of their families appeared in town. There was no room to stable the horses and so they were covered with many other articles besides blankets, there being no uniformity to their uniform. They were tied for the very long evening in the lee of some stack or shed. The boy who spoke the last piece excited great admiration, particularly, in the minds of his proud father and of his adoring mother.

"So sleeps the pride of former days,
So glory's thrill is o'er,
And hearts that once beat high for praise
Now feel that pulse no more."

Interest in these things so then developed that Mr. Caldwell had to compose dialogues of a spicy picturesque character for our public use. He incited his scholars to enter into the spirit of their single pieces and dialogues and his exhibitions surprised and delighted the audiences so admirable became the performance of children and youth. Fine declamation was to him what painting is to an artist, or melody to the musician, it was a passion, and nerved him for effort. Scholars still live all about who can "witness if I lie." The stage afterward must have claimed many of those actors for they showed unquestioned genius for the art of theatrical representation. The conditions were primitive, but for the platform we must have curtains, so when the eventful moment came, sheets and table-cloths instead were pulled aside, these being the only curtains that were available and we had to live with what we had. The "stage properties" were hastily gathered from the homes of participants.

Fitted for a Day Sure to Come

As the parents attended these exhibitions, the contagion caught them and then followed the lyceum. It swept the town, it was the most popular thing ever. I distinctly remember the evening when they discussed Neal Dow's Maine liquor law, my father participating. One of our neighbors carried the honor of out-talking the whole field. Let his thoughts slide into the familiar current and they flowed on easily and indefinitely. For debate they caught at Bulwer's dramatic sentence, The pen is mightier than the sword, and they argued the pros and cons without getting a verdict, leaving thus to Germany and the Allies to bring the time honored discussion to an end with a demonstration that no one will ever be able effectively to question. To these meetings each man brought a candle but no candle-stick. From the lighted end, he would drop a little tallow on the desk, and thus set up the candle, that it would give light to all that were in the house. What a sight greeted us the next morning.

"The Isles of Greece!
The Isles of Greece!"

Friction matches, which according to Faraday, were the most useful invention of the age were not then sold, loose in boxes, but were made in cards, each match being detached only a part of its length from the others which stood with it in a thin layer of wood. The word, Lyceum, marks an era in the United States. It means a great school of debate, a college that grants no degrees. It gives me a sadness that is not akin to pain, to hear a young person designate a building as Lyceum Hall, using the word as if it were Grampian Hall or Hamilton Hall, having no glorious, clear conception of what the name of the hall signified to the early community. Tradesmen, farmers, professional men, themselves readers and thinkers, above all restless and eager disputants would meet night after night to discuss the unselfish problems of life. At first they were not allowed to speak upon irritable subjects. They tried to escape both the Scylla and the Charybdis of religious and political contentions, but in early days narrow was the way. Some sanguine souls sought to build a suspension bridge over the foaming waters of controversy and to find a way of union for the bitter strife and dissension that only cases of conscience can supply. This little community-university was co-educational. The women too were welcomed, not only to the meeting where their presence was a stimulus to the debaters, but to participation in the conduct of the lyceum paper, which, read by one of the sterner sex, often contained contributions by the women. In it were witty conundrums, based on local names and conditions, pointed suggestions, humorous hits at the hardships they were at the moment experiencing, which enabled the people to laugh at their own privations. Deep feeling and marked literary ability were often shown in the contributions to this unprinted paper. It was for just such pages as these that the first poems of Lucy Larcom were produced, and she says that if she had learned anything by living it was that education may proceed "not through book learning alone, sometimes entirely without it."

Flights of Oratory

The outstanding feature of the lyceum was the report of the critic. He must be a bright glad witty man without a shade of vulgarity, a perfect master of all those nice little arts which give zest to conversation and a quaint coloring and a good deal of it, to his thoughts. I have a pleasant record of him. His chief theme was always, The Ladies. No one of them could do anything poorly enough to get anything but a warm encomium. If the debaters did well it was because the ladies by their presence gave just such cheer as bands of music contributed to Napoleon's army, when getting their heavy cannon over St. Bernard Pass. This critic never had the affrontery to lecture the participants. "Who made thee a ruler and a judge over us?" Mathew Arnold came over here to lecture us, from the know-it-all point of view, and began his work without any specific preparation for any evening, discussing no sympathetic theme, and the people declined to hear. The great benefit of the lyceum, to say the least of it, was that the whole conduct of it rested solidly on the men who blended in it and habitually attended it. It came right up out of the intellectual force, the convictions, the good neighborhood feeling and intelligence of the community. These debates developed leaders in the various departments of mental effort. It sent debaters straight into the State legislature. It was like running a magnet over a dust heap, in that it revealed metal, and drew it out, and this was what people were looking for. Any one who looks over the surface of our towns finds many minds, endowed by nature with brilliant faculties and framed by their Creator for great usefulness and honor, waiting to have their energies awakened and invigorated.

Choosing the Front Subject

The thing that made the lyceum was in the air. What is discussed now in the papers was then a theme for argument, evenings, in the stores and taverns. Our word caucus, is derived from the Caulkers, ship-builders, hardy, upright efficient men who gave tone and character to the meeting that they with others held, to discuss politics and the other live issues of the day. To increase the number of parts taken, certain grave, slow men, not likely to share in the discussions, noted chiefly for their moderation and caution, were named in advance as judges, and their decision was to be based first, on the weight of argument, and then on the merits of the question. To keep up the excitement, the decision was sometimes appealed to the house. If I close my eyes and open the chambers of memory I distinctly see the young men, with many signs of diffidence rising timidly to participate in the proceedings. At the earlier meeting, two persons had been appointed to maintain the affirmative and two other members were requested to maintain the negative. The free-for-all fray was let loose with the old time question, Does any one desire to debate that question? Sometimes we had "rough house" which was always followed at the next meeting of the lyceum by a capacity audience. As Samson found the honey, so these lyceums discovered talent where it would be looked for least. Men came to look for good in each other under these conditions, and that helped some. And there is a partial explanation of the fact that so many men, who became prominent in early politics, were from small towns. Great opportunity was given for discovering and developing latent literary and oratorical talent and for invigorating and confirming every germ of reform and political aspiration. Leaders were discovered in the various departments of investigation and of influence. It must be kept in mind that the communities were to an exceptional degree homogeneous and over-whelmingly American.

Educating Themselves

I never look upon the panorama of the past where vivid life forms have lost little of their original distinctness without thinking of the village oracles who exercised their eloquence in these local, free schools of debate. They gave a permanent bias and coloring to the genius and taste and style, in all their subsequent years, to men distinguished for their talents, whom the lyceums discovered and trained, who shone splendidly in after life. To find the place of the lyceum in the evolution of the debaters, we will eliminate genius. To draw a rude likeness was once genius. In mechanics genius ceased to be recognized as soon as labor could equal the result, once attributed to nature's gift, acting unaided. Whittier tells us that when he began life verse-making was a monopoly. Good citizenship is not a gift or an inheritance any more than is good soldiering. Courage alone does not make the soldier nor honesty alone the citizen. Training is essential to both. In the recent constitutional convention held in Massachusetts those who worked like Trojans, looked forward with apprehension, to the oratorical assaults, that would be made upon their results. They recognized the disproportionate advantage, but a real advantage never-the-less, of oratory, and this was not over-looked but acknowledged. For a fact, some excellent ideas went begging for the support of those who had talents and training for speaking exceptionally well. One who surpasses the ordinary standards, but a little, takes a position quite in advance of his fellows. Superiority on the race course is a matter of seconds and half-seconds. The honor bestowed by us on excellence in public address is greater than that attributed to men in literature or the professions, in business, or invention. The difference becomes so plain and is so conspicuous that it gains attention. The ablest speaker arouses the sympathies and gains the result. Where a cause is to be presented I have heard this formula. A poor cause, a good speaker. A good cause, any speaker. All of us have been present when a fine speaker having what may be called the wit of speech where a laugh was loaded with a principle where the address was clear, sparkling, above all things witty, wit being the rarest of qualities and surest of appreciation, the audience worked up by the rough and ready eloquence of a popular orator, reaching indeed an extraordinary pitch of excitement, has swept everything with the weaker side of the case. No accomplishment gains consideration for its possessor and his cause so speedily as public speaking. When billions were being raised in Liberty Loans, during the German war, the telling factor was the four-minute speakers that came out of the Phillips debating societies in the various communities, and these speakers having come to the front show some disposition to remain there.

A New Impetus

Here is brought to light the reason, that those northern states in which these elementary schools of patriotism and freedom have existed, cling so tenaciously, for local government, to the old town meeting. In this country where the motive power is public opinion, the ability to help in forming it is greatly to be coveted. The power of the lyceum would be instantly admitted, if we could use it for a moment as a negative quantity, and show how completely unfitted for public work many of our strongest factors would have been, had these little schools of oratory never opened their doors. I share in the well expressed opinion that there are four kinds of human activity for which a man must have a natural preparation, music, the sculptor's art, the painter's art, these three, and the highest forms of oratory. For these, most successful men must have aptitude. But to a person with the gift of utterance, occasion must say, Oratory, come forth! Money does not talk. Culture not wealth is the mark of distinction. Take a man whose father was poor and also the descendant of poor men with all their ideas of life associated with conditions of extreme poverty. The atmosphere and practices were such that Henry Wilson besought the legislature to change his name from Jeremiah Jones Colbaith to that one that he made famous as United States senator and as vice-president being elected on the ticket with Grant. He had known what it was to ask his mother for bread when she had none to give. Before he was twenty-one he had never had but two dollars and had never spent more than one dollar. At the end of an eleven years' apprenticeship to a farmer, he received a yoke of oxen and six sheep which he sold for eighty-four dollars. During these eleven years he never had more than twelve months schooling. The turning point in his life was the lyceum which he attended, following the lines of argument, but lacking courage to share in the debate. But one evening when the discussion was thrown open to the audience he engaged in it to the delight of his friends. His pastor called upon him and expressed his gratification and the lyceum increased in popularity as a place to hear him. His pastor urged him to seek an education. The lyceum had awakened his dormant powers. His special forte, his biographer says, was extemporaneous speaking and debate. In meetings held once or twice a week he acquired the drill he needed for coming conflicts.

The Onward Upward Course

Henry Clay rose to fame, by a sudden impulse at the meeting of a lyceum in Lexington. He overcame timidity and embarrassment, that had oppressed him, and in this favorite forum for the display of youthful talent, first exhibited the evidence of his extraordinary powers of oratory. His hour had struck. In this school for the highest powers of debate he discovered himself. He used a very common expedient and made it great and was proud to descend from the summit of political preferment to honor that arena, such as any community can provide, in which any ambitious young man can educate himself. Both Mr. Beveridge's brilliant oratory and Dolliver's success, as the greatest campaigner America has produced, are proof, that a training field is an indispensable condition of getting results, in the study of eloquence and in the art of oratory.

CHAPTER V

SEEN THROUGH THE LONG VISTA OF DEPARTED YEARS

In Bates Hall in the old public library in Boston, lying open on one of the ledges to any visitor, was an Ignorance Book, in which any one could ask a question on which he desired information, and after an interval, return to find it was answered. The Redwood library at Newport, R. I., has had, upon a commodious desk, a book by means of which readers can take their intellectual needs to those who have the ability to meet them. The Lyceum was once a great solvent. Nothing has taken its place. It was an evil day when this profoundly useful educational institution closed its doors. People are sitting on its front steps awaiting a reopening. They have, before them, a new map, a new world, and a new set of questions.

What is Your Problem

Can a person change his disposition? The features of children are as diverse as their faces, all have the family likeness, but each has his own peculiar temperament.

Is it the brain, and not the soul, that does the thinking? Is man a machine and not a living spirit, inhabiting a physical body? Do people speak advisedly who use the expression "Keeping soul and body together?"

Why did not the slaves in the South do more for their own emancipation?

Why does a minister use a text? This custom prevails among pulpit orators who do not believe in miracles or in the inspiration of the Scripture or in the authority of the Bible. There's a reason. What is it?

Our teachers, in faithfulness and friendship, used to stand next to our parents and are entitled to and will ever receive our most grateful recollections. They are happy men whose natures sort with their vocations. On revisiting the earth there was one instructor who beside exercising a benign and stimulating personal influence had high qualities and remarkable fitness for his noble profession, whom I would cheerfully make a sabbath day's journey to honor. Let me preserve his name, S. H. Folsom. Schoolmaster was about the right word for him for he was master as well as teacher. His severity is to be attributed to the times rather than to him. It is said that a drowning man can in two minutes live over again every incident in a long and checkered career, and a boy does not doubt the possibility of such phenomena, if he has been publicly requested, by the master, to remain after school to be whipped. We all remember him with kindly feelings and there are hundreds of his pupils living who have not lost their sense of indebtedness to him.

On the Road to Learning

A boy lays up nothing against a noble, faithful, patient teacher who whips him. Pain is nothing to boys. They give it, and suffer it, in their sports, many of which have penalties. They uplift tearful eyes, but it is in entreaty, and not in rage. It was from him I acquired a life-long practice of the little economies of time. We are now so interlocked with others, we are so far from living or laboring alone that our time is much disposed of by other people. "Do you ever reflect how you pass your life? If you live to seventy-two, which I hope you may, your life is passed in the following manner: an hour a day is three years. This makes twenty-seven years sleeping, nine years dressing, nine years at table, six years playing with children, nine years walking, drawing, and visiting, six years shopping, and three years quarrelling."

I now save the time I used to spend in going to the postoffice. I used to reckon how many trips would make twenty miles. Still the flight of time grieves me. I must draw tighter and tighter every string. The school that I attended was a mere vest-pocket edition of the one which, year by year, like a starling, keeps adding to the nest, on which Mr. Folsom now looks down in benediction. This building has a telephone switchboard. I recognized only the switch which in my day was a weeping willow. When a gone feeling was experienced, a boy could dig up a small coin, go to a grocery and buy a pickle, but now schools have a buffet car attachment supplied by the woman's club.

The By-product of Development

It was an unrealized deprivation, but I do not seem to remember, when I was under the ferule, the teacher's maid, such as waits upon the children at the new training school here, nor do I seem to recall the school physician, such as the city now elects, nor the piano, nor the victrola, nor do I remember any free transportation to and from school except by "punging" when we had to take what came in terms of the sleigh driver's whip.

The principle of the Declaration of Independence was taken literally that all are created equal, which makes in education a Procrustes' bed and every boy or girl in a class, supposed to be equally capable, as they were not, was to be stretched to learn lessons of equal length. They trained up a child in the "way." The way was first fixed. It was a grown up theory. They thought more of the way than of the child. The child's primitive nature had no play. The process often lost the scholar his childhood. He was robbed of his birthright. The old maxims even, also taught that anything saved from sleep was so much saved.

With his pen, Mr. Folsom could, with unerring grace, draw an eagle, put an inscription into his mouth and thus stir in his pupils astonishment and patriotic feeling. In writing he made a specialty of capital letters, which had the last touch of nicety. Any line of his writing was as neatly molded as Spencerian copy. We had thus two epochs in our school, the Ciceronian and the Spencerian periods. One was distinguished by the graces of speech, the other by waves of ink. We have always been given to understand, that if the cradles in a neighborhood were assembled the occupant of one of them would call those present to order. It is thought to be a wonder that an American is born knowing how to conduct a public meeting. He early learns how to make motions. It is instinctive to know that a motion cannot have more than two amendments offered, at the same time, and to know the order in which they must be put, the second amendment before the first. When we wonder at some of the traits of colts we are told that they are born with their peculiarities; so with boys. The crown of everything was public declamation.

Best When Most Catching

All paths led to the exhibition as we have seen. Other studies were subordinated to the all absorbing preparation for it. Other branches suffered from eclipse. The taste for it became very great. It fixed the boy's bent. The men having a lyceum, the boys took the infection and even had a relapse. In our community they formed a lyceum, and among the questions discussed was this: Which is preferable, city or country life? Having the stern rule that the less favored one must also stand up I was invited at the age of ten to share in the deliberations. I became so absorbed in some of the follies, presented by my opponents, and so lost sight of the occasion, that, when called upon by name, I was startled. The boys took sides in the universal conflicts of opinion. Nobody could find rest on a fence. It was a picket fence. The ground was the only safe place to stand on. As a regiment takes on the character of its colonel, so a school in a particular degree, reflects the teacher. I cannot tell how we all came out of the craze. When penmanship was the rage and writing became epidemic the scholars developed the villainous habit of scribbling always and everywhere. As stationery was not plentiful they used the leaves and margins, not only of their own books, but those of the others. They decorated the walls and desks. As the nights were extremely cold, the ink would be turned by the frost from a liquid to a solid state. Hence the bottles were placed on the stove for thawing purposes and would sometimes decorate the ceiling or empty their contents on the stove and floor, accompanied by a detonation like that of a pistol.

The Love of Conquest

Now this man Folsom understood human nature in its initial stages. His insight showed him that boys and girls crave some reward and recognition, so when he could approve a youngster's conduct and application, he would award him a diminutive ticket on which, in his beautiful writing, was the word Perfect. By touching up emulation he ruled the school. When ten small tickets were carefully acquired they would be proudly cashed up into a somewhat larger chromo with the same device. Before we call anyone lucky, who takes a prize, let us call him unlucky, who is without the desire to make the effort to win it. It is fine for him to contend to the uttermost for even the meanest prize that is within his reach, because by such strenuous contention, his nature grows and by lack of it, nature decays. A poor boy cannot rival the wealthy, in items of luxury, but in a school he finds himself in a little republic, where the prizes do not fall to the rich, because they are such. A boy out of an humble home may have lacked recognition and to receive it makes him a new creature. To find himself appreciated and well-liked touches a spring at the center of his being. A boy is often made over by the quickening thought that to him might fall one of the little early prizes of life.

The Impulse From Incentive and Reward

The fire and the force to do great things were slumbering in Senator Wilson's soul.... "His future course of life," his biographer says, was affected by Mrs. Eastman, who handed him, when he was eight years old, a little book. "Now carry it home with you and read it entirely through and you shall have it." A book he had never owned. To him it was a golden treasure. He hurried home to read it. He coveted the prize. In seven days he called to say that he had read it from end to end. This little book, a Testament, he kept all his living days, saying, that the presentation of it was the starting point in his intellectual life. The reason, as Sir Walter Scott believed, why the passion for books so lifts up a poor boy, is that he makes himself a master of what he possesses, before he can acquire more. Queen Judith, a princess of rare accomplishment, promised a finely illuminated book of Saxon poems, to which, her son, Alfred the Great, when young had been listening with enthusiasm, to such of her sons as should the soonest be able to read them. The innate energy of those dormant talents of "the Darling of the English" was roused and he made his name the brightest that adorns Anglo-saxon history. He became the most illustrious monarch that ever filled the English throne. He founded the University of Oxford, established trial by jury, and sought to emulate the deeds, to the recital of which he so early loved to listen. It is said that when this promise of the book was made, "Alfred returning to Queen Judith, eagerly inquired if she actually intended to give the book to the person who would soonest learn to read it?" His mother repeated the promise, with a smile of joy at the question; the young prince took the book, found out an instructor, and learned to read, and soon recited all its contents to her.

The Fascination of Matching Abilities and Efforts

Oh for some angel visitant to stir the waters of the Bethesda of self-improvement as it was once done by the use of this principle of emulation in our class in spelling. Alphabetically the scholars were called out into a line, toeing a crack in the floor. Beginning at the head of the class the master puts out the word and those who have studied their lesson pass above those who have not. It is an unequalled revelation for a boy's later life. How came I at the foot? When one boy has competitors and they attend to their business and he does not, he will gravitate downward. I had been trained in the catechism to believe that it was first Adam and then Eve, but this theory was upset, when we stood up to spell. I can still see one of those girls stick to the head of the class. Blessed be the bad roads, "kind the storm" that housed the girl, for a day, as on her return she went to the foot. At length she modestly said to the master, "Put out any word in the book and I will spell it." With such proficiency we challenged the nearest district school to a spelling match.

The Tug of War

Before the interest began to flag, it was understood that as a final test, every body in the house should rise and spell down. With blushing honors, under the spell of emulation, this unobtrusive girl would rally her powers, and hold her timid self up to meet all comers by sheer force of a moral courage, unsurpassed by men who go over the top and look into the cannon's mouth. The audience grows breathless. She clings to her position like that which Oliver Wendell Holmes called The Last Leaf. Our best girl won. Our boys seeing any members of the defeated school would use their two palms for a trumpet and shout the pivotal word, on which our victory turned, "Phthisic." It was a great incitement to strive to equal or excel when a rival was seen to take a reward for doing what we might have done, but didn't. The name of the winner became a household word and was garlanded. I have felt depressed by my consciousness of the unworthiness of the response, that my life has made, to such an excellent instructor in penmanship and spelling. His name is embalmed in all our hearts. The terms of school soon ended. Beyond this we have no record of our eminent teacher's life and as Bunyan says of one of his characters "We saw him no more."

CHAPTER VI

WHERE WE PLAYED MUMBLE-THE-PEG

It is with diffidence that I name a suggestion that has been very much on my heart since retreading these streets and revisiting these early haunts. It is to get rich, not with dollars in the purse, but deposits in the bank of memory. No other human faculty can be more rapidly and strongly and surely developed than an ability to keep things in mind. Yet many people are making use of methods that impoverish recollection. Devices are increasing for memory-saving which have the effect of memory destroying. A faculty's development is arrested from want of use. The memory has not grown, but the habit of putting things down with a pencil has developed. Our schedule of work is not unfolded in the mind and committed to memory but is committed to little slips of paper. Things are not carried in the brain but in the pocket and are in danger of being laid off with one's apparel. We feel dependent on the memoranda. Our best power, that likes to be trusted, that responds to discipline, has no growth, but wastes away instead, owing to defective nutrition, and lack of exercise. The memory falls into a stunted and partially disabled condition. That minister, the most widely read of any American clergyman, sharply points out, that a capacity falling into disuse, falls also into a dying process, and is extirpated and withdrawn. Any capacity kept under, allowed no range or play, suppressed, is soon stupefied and blunted. A man was endowed with a fine faculty, and has not turned it to account, "Take, therefore, the talent from him."

Developing a Real and Fixed Deformity

We once had to remember our errands but parents now hand to children a written list. Facts, stories, incidents are not stored in the intellect, but in a cabinet. Mental equipment, then, is all gone in the event of a fire. Instead of being thankful that the cabinet maker was preserved it would have been better to have saved the cabinet. There is more in that than in him.

In the intemperate man the better parts of his nature do not have fair play. His body is disordered, his brain confused, by a succession of trespasses. All diseases and abuses are self limited. Improvement would come, by a delivery from his baneful habit, and by strengthening his principles. Memory when respected, when it uses its wings and makes nothing of time or distance is an angel power. It is full of rural incidents and has a great deal of nature and of soul in it. The past is not altogether dead. It must be used to enable us to understand the real living history around us. Now look. Do you observe that every child has a health instinct? Intuitively it seeks the open air. A child is not fussy about the weather. Those have the best health that go out under all skies. Take notice that a child's birthright is freedom. When walking with his mother he seeks to unclasp his hand from hers and make a little detour in the grass along the way. His nature revolts at following, forever, when out for pleasure, a beaten path. Seeing real life reflected, you do not fail to notice, that in coasting, which in childhood could be called, The Great Joy, the girls take a prominent part, and there is no effort by the elders to play the spy nor block the sport. Here are boys and girls together, oblivious of sex, like a family, in beautiful, healthful, animating sport. It is remarkable that coasting keeps first place, seeing that it involves climbing up as well as sliding down. The return walk, involving a change of position, an interchange of mind, a fine spirit of comradeship, a greatly increased intake of ozone became for a fact a cordial of incredible virtue. God sets all little children playing for this. He lays the necessity of play upon them, and the restless little fellows hunger and thirst for physical activities. On a holiday the city is emptied into the country to enjoy for a few hours the true conditions of a healthy physical condition.

An Increased Reverence for the Human Organization

The bashful athlete, as if by mere chance, takes hold of the rope just opposite to the pretty girl of the party, I mean to one of the pretty girls of the party, whose ear he wishes to command. As the boys owned the sleds, the spirit of gallantry greatly promoted proprietorship, in a double runner, which was vital to the social spirit of the sport. One that could fly was the ideal aimed at. It seemed animate. It was well shod. A heavy load gave momentum. It was guided with rare judgment, watched, compared with others, improved, made to look better, until its associated owners prided themselves in it, as a thing of life and beauty and speed, as mariners do in a ship. Some people have to go abroad to find folks who seem eager for an excuse to get out, to even take their meals in the open air. The European seems chafed in his own house. He takes his supper with his family in the face of all the world, and enjoys the publicity. He walks about to see how other families are faring, and they do not resent it. It would not disturb him to take his dinner on the side-walk on Broadway. So in Southern California, nobody shuts a door. The weather, being about like our April, the barber shops and restaurants have no heat and often a strong current of air, that the natives would enjoy, came streaming in through wide-open doors and windows.

The Open-door Policy

Book stores were not warmed at all. One morning at breakfast I rose and put on my overcoat, and a visitor at the next table, at the conclusion of the meal said, What part of the country do you come from, that you have to put on your overcoat? The reason those people put their doctors out of business is not alone in the climate but in their becoming accustomed to living in God's great and good out-of-doors. We could live much colder than we do, and live more largely out of doors, and reap at least some of the benefits that people gain by going abroad.

In looking over the familiar places, when revisiting the earth, that were once the haunts of the idlers of the town, I was struck by the entire absence of whittling in which they formerly engaged. Who could reckon their indebtedness to the pine, which supplied the favorite material? Each man kept in pretty good order, if he owned nothing else, a fine piece of cutlery, with a history which he had made familiar to the minds of his easy-going associates. To whittle with an edgeless knife is dull sport, hence at intervals, each loafer would lay his right foot upon his left knee, and upon the leather of his heavy boot characteristic of that day, would strop the blunt blade until he had put it again on edge.

Our Knives Confiscated by Teachers

Every loss is thought to have its compensation. If whittling is out of vogue, the benches before the boys at school are, for that reason, better preserved. A common present to a boy in that day was a pretty good knife. Boys are very imitative. They sought to whittle and would notch the school desks until their edges were serried into a semblance of a cross-cut saw. As the term of school wore on the teacher had made himself the custodian of most of the fancy hardware owned by the ingenious scholars. Not remote from the school-house door we turn aside and stand over the identical spot where we sat, with our heels wide apart, facing a chum, and played mumble-the-peg, or mumblety-peg, as the boys pronounced it.

"The boys were playing some old game, beneath that same old tree;
I have forgot the name just now,—you've played the same with me,
On that same spot; 'twas played with knives, by throwing so and so;
The loser had a task to do,—there, twenty years ago."

As the knives were thrown from a series of positions, the winner would show himself something of the savage still, for when the loser failed to make the knife blade stick in the ground, he would, with the heavy handle of the knife, drive a peg into the ground, by a certain number of blows, which the loser was compelled to draw out with his teeth. The severity of the penalty was not in using a long peg, like a wooden tooth-pick, but a short one that could still be struck a blow or two after it was below the surface of the soil. Thus the unskillful player had to root for it, while the boys, being called together, encircled him and jeered.

Happy Hours by Living Streams

The appearance and needs of this dirty-faced boy caused the whole bunch to hie away to the swimming-hole. The Romans seem always to have been looking out for places to bathe and always finding them. So with boys. Where is the boy that did not strive to get to the water? Who is there that did not, in his youth, love some stream? Here is the landscape toward which the mind, during the interval of a generation, has fondly turned. Last summer I followed the same old path to exactly the same square foot of ground on the willow-lined shore from which I had a hundred times stepped into the stream. I could locate exactly the spot where a bigger boy, who wanted to race, raised an oar and told me to jump over to lighten the boat, which I had to do, and there in deep water, as it was sink or swim, survive or perish, I paddled the best I could and learned to swim in one short, self-taught lesson.

Healing in the Pool

This illustrates again the health instincts of boys which they seek to obey without knowing the why and wherefore of the feeling that impels them to bathe often. Swedenborg had to have a revelation from heaven to enable him to catch a glimpse of his malady which he ought to have known by intuition. His nature was all the time complaining, and what an expression that is when men speak of their "complaints," when by pains, which are warnings, nature is reporting her grievances at head-quarters. But the heavens were opened and Swedenborg went into ecstasy over the kindness of the angel whose message to him was a warning not to eat so much. The body shows divine workmanship as well as the soul. When young we follow nature and the result is a red-blooded, vigorous youngster, and if, as we went on in life, we had souls enough to appreciate the free air and sunlight with their health-giving properties, which are so lavishly bestowed upon us, we should better reverence the temple in which the spirit dwells. A recent association formed in Boston for the erection of a monument to Franklin, used in the picture, on their certificate of membership, the figure of Franklin with a kite leaning against him and a view of the telegraph. The kite employed by the philosopher in his experiment is a plaything of the young, while the experiment it served to make so successful, is the last word in science when applied to light, heat and transportation. The picture shows the connection between our sport and the great realities of life.

And That Reminds Me

Play underlies the future responsibilities and events of life. Recreation has a direct relation to efficiency. I wish that some boys that I know would play a little more. To watch boys is to study their character. The story of a boy's life deserves to be written as well as the life of a man. A boy has been pointed out who on returning from school is seized and imprisoned in a back parlor with nothing to look at but his weary lessons. He is pining. His eye needs brightening. His blood wants reddening. An Oriental traveler, watching a game of cricket, was astonished to hear that some of those playing were rich. He asked why they did not pay some poor people to do it for them. The play will show itself in still greater riches when radical important work is undertaken and when an entire revolution in the world's methods is to be accomplished. Exercise, like mathematics, cannot be seized by might nor purchased by money. It is not true that every hour taken from a child's play is an hour saved. In some cases, where a boy is given a little time to play, it is done grudgingly. Thinking now of efficiency they hire, here, leaders to teach children to play. Vivacious representatives of the Young Women's Christian Association sent word through the little villages along the Volga that there would be games for the Russian children on the village squares. These refugee children had seen so many sorrows that they had forgotten that they were young. Whole towns turned out. They looked on in wonder. "Have you brought us bread?" they asked, as the games were about to be started. The spirit of joy had forsaken them and needed to be recalled. Little games of competition and emulation, that were mirth-producing and health-giving, gave the impression that "Some angels must have been at play." As Thoreau says of animals, so we may say of human beings, that their most important part is their anima, their vital spirit.

One of Life's Schools

When revisiting the earth I met on intimate terms a classmate. I was in and out of his place of business many times. He had plenty to do. Indeed he had too much to do. The distinct impression he made upon me was, that he was being hurried, all the time, a little faster than he could well travel. Hurry, if continuous, becomes simply worry under another name. Let a person catechize his own experiences on this subject: it will have a salutary effect. He drew me into a confidential conversation, in which he said, that he was not earning a good living and asked me what I thought of his situation. I advised him at once to take a vacation and refresh his mind. He was working like a quarry slave. A person needs to stand away from a house to see it. He needed to readjust himself. His mind had lost its spring. A little recreation would do him more good, than the same time in the treadmill. Sometimes you see that a man made up what mind he has, when he was too tired; it was no proper expression of him.

Loafing and Laboring

What was once play has become work and what was once work in the garden, wood-yard, and barn may now become play. A person can stop work and yet not have any recreation. When a person after excessive physical exertion is resting he is not recreating. You do not say of persons at rest that "they shout for joy, they also sing." After sunset, the lonely twilight hours, with Jacob, represented the accepted, needed rest and after that came the pensive reverie, the dream and with it the ladder and the angel ministration. In his own person, every one must have noticed, that after a period of rest, often as late as Sabbath afternoon, come the holy influences of the hour, the music that is audible to the fine ear of thought, the stillness, the purity, the balm. A man, who is busy all the time or tired all the time, breaks the curfew law of God. The evening concentrates the retrospect, also the prospect of our lives. If you are communing with a confidential friend you do not like to have any body else talking in the room at the same time. You want to become attuned, like musicians, about to begin to play.

Foibles of the Famous

These persons are often quarrelsome, in spite of the fact, that their constant employment is the production of harmony. It is the effect of play, to bring into harmony. This is one of its most benign results. A man, found to be out of harmony with the spirit of the place, or of the time, only awaits displacing. M. Protopopoff, the last minister of the interior under the old regime in Russia, told nearly the whole truth when he said to an Associated Press representative, who visited him in prison, that his crime consisted of "not understanding the spirit of my age." Mistaking the time, he became a worker for a separate peace with Germany. That man of the past is not as black as he first appeared, for he has at least this redeeming trait, finding himself out of harmony with the temper of his time, he confesses it, and incriminates himself, and does not bitterly criticise those participating in the advent of a new era, which is the common practice, under such conditions.

CHAPTER VII

THE SCENE OF THE SCHOOL FIGHTS

The proof that a robust, daring, well-fed boy starts by being a sort of half domesticated little animal as well as a Sunday school immortal is set out in his school fights. These best illustrate how hard it is to eradicate the savage, hereditary traits of our early barbaric ancestry. It is suggested that all fully domesticated animals dislike children. They have an instinctive fear of their tricks and their thoughtlessness.

The rude jostle, pretty nearly instinctive with boys coming from school, breaks the peace. There is the quick impulse to resist aggression with violence, particularly on the part of an impulsive unrelenting temper, not adverse to battle. Wrestling and boxing were very much in vogue, a generation ago, which made the average boy very ready with his fists and anxious if there was to be a clinch, to get "the underholt." This preparedness increased the likeliness of a clash. If a boy took occasion to state the events that led up to Armageddon, we used to hear, He called me names. His budding sense of honor, an exaggerated feeling of obligation to take care of his better self, his name, was the most frequent incentive to try conclusions.

Precipitating a Fracas

The tendency to give a nickname, to remind a boy in a word of the color of his hair, or the cut of his clothes, or of some unfortunate incident in his life or that of his family was painfully wide-spread, and it hurt like a blow and started resentment. A boy, that by his disposition and taste, was too proud to fight could not always keep out of it as the active belligerent might be overbearing or might be, at the time, imposing on some helpless party. This is an unprovoked declaration of war when peace can only be had by conquering it. It is interesting to study a man's life in terms of those early scuffles. In Pilgrim's Progress the fight of Christian and Apollyon was the kernel of the story. Henry Higginson, "Bully Hig," a business man of remarkable success in Boston, was the leader of the Latin school forces and engagements which were as fiercely fought as some in which the same boys later took part on the battle fields of the South. A boy's anger and a boy's pain pass away like clouds on a summer morning and leave the sky purer and fairer than before. Boy's fights often began with snow-balling. They were implied by the use of the word snow-forts, on the old site of which we took occasion to stand. For days the boys would roll up immense snow-balls to form the redoubt. They worked, like the ants, those sociologists of the insect-world who combine their efforts to move an object toward the ant hill, approach the thing to be moved, using all their strength wherever they can apply it, causing the object to stagger along, and the small, industrious, courageous creatures by frantic partisan effort landed it where individual work never could have so well located it. Those who built the fort were determined to defend it. They talked over their grievances until they seemed bigger than they were. Trouble would soon begin to boil, like the witches' brew into which all kinds of ingredients entered and the situation soon forced all boys to take sides.

Sectional and Factional Fights

It was common to hear the inquiry, Are you on my side? It started a campaign. There was no neutral zone. There were no pacifists. If a snow fort was to be stormed the snow-balls were dipped in water and were as hard as canister. The contending forces were under boy commanders. The volatile spirit of the organization lasted after the snow was gone. The contending parties were easily provoked. Boys used to take off their coats and lay them aside like those that stoned Stephen. The question to be settled was Who is bigger? The custom was to place a chip upon the shoulder and flatly dare a fancied antagonist to knock it off, which being done, hostilities were let loose with a spring. The other boys would gather about and witness the excitement, their only concern being to see that there was every way a square deal. Until such a time as one or the other would say, Hold, enough, I am through. Things were then deemed settled. An incidental indication that boys before re-birth were little animals, was the use of their nails. The face of him that was worsted would bear a diagram of the battle.

Suffering From Personal Collision

On reaching home his mother's consternation and sympathy and displeasure at the injury he had received, causing her haste to apply a soft sponge and remedial lotions, would displace all effort to ascertain if her boy was in any degree at fault in bringing on the fray. It is no wonder that there is an enormous increase in the number of physicians in these days if boys thus settle who is the best man. The doctors, we are told, got rich upon small pay, yet now they flourish in treble numbers, as they are required, upon all foot-ball grounds, in particular, and upon all athletic fields in general. Life in miniature is exhibited by the petty incidents of a school boy's history. A single bold adventure is decisive sometimes of a campaign. A challenge to fight two boys at once has been known to give a courageous youngster reputation. The opposition did not want to fight but was intent to discover if the new lad in school would keep his ground saying, like the Scotch thistle, Don't touch me.

There has been during a generation such a fine growth of sentiment that many of the former things, like corporal punishment, have passed away. In school Luther was flogged every day. We have no other right to associate ourselves with a great reformer except in the matter we are now considering. The school thrashing was shown to be a method of separating the chaff from the wheat.

Birch, Beech, and Willow Were the Branches Taken

It certainly was not the custom in our day for the teacher to get down on his knees to the pupils and offer them peppermints if they would only consent to behave. In the government exhibit at Omaha, in a World's Fair, was a series of framed pictures, filled with painful suggestions, illustrating what may be termed, the evolution of the disuse of the switch. The world has moved on to some new conception of moral suasion. These pictures, however, were from real life, as many of us can testify. If any one wanted glimpses of the good old time, there they were. First was a small boy being flogged by a pretty lady teacher. I know that picture to be correct. In the next instance the boy was curled up in bitter anticipation of what was going to happen to him. Next a boy was holding out a ruler at arm's length. Then followed very properly the dunce cap and the fool stool. Then we witnessed the process of shaking or churning where the churner grasps the lapels of the churnee's coat and proceeds to violently agitate the latter with many oscillations. The most suggestive picture of an old-fashioned school was where the discipline appeared to be founded on Solomon's warning. The master stands near the stove with his book in one hand and switch in the other with only one eye on the book. New Jersey now prohibits by law corporal punishment in schools. Eight states prescribe a penalty for excess amounting to cruelty. In Arizona alone the law gives authority to whip. In ten states the courts have decided that, as flogging has been the commonest mode of discipline from time immemorial, the teacher requires no permission to use the birch. In Providence a teacher in the primary grade has to get the written consent of the parents to whip a boy and have it filed with the city superintendent. All these formalities have been developed since the period that we are canvassing.

America's Unhappy Hour

The incident of flogging a pupil did not seem to disturb the school nor seem to interrupt the studies appreciably except when it was one of the big boys that had incurred the master's displeasure. When it was obvious that there was to be a battle royal it became the custom for the tender-hearted, larger girls to rise, without a word or sign from them or the teacher, and pass quietly out of the room at the instant it became plain that hostilities were to begin. The ruler, introduced into the school as an aid in drawing, was often used as a punitive instrument. When the old attendants upon the school get together as jolly good fellows, their word being now unquestioned on any matter of fact, it is noticeable that in reciting their sufferings, it was never the master's fortune to get hold of the guilty party. According to their testimony, the boy that introduced the disorder was not the one that stood for the infliction of punishment. There is usually one boy in school that can on occasion, look cross-eyed and another boy that can move his ears. This comes to the attention of the apple-cheeked girl, who laughing, showed all her teeth like a row of white piano keys. Her fear of discipline made her press the palm of her hand over her pretty mouth, in a sudden, forced attempt to suppress a giggle. The boy, who came next into the comedy, was likeliest to meet the frown of him who must, at once, rule his little empire into a terrified silence.

Putting on the Character with the Coats of Gentlemen

The gymnasium, organized athletics, the ambition of boys to gain a place on the various teams has brought in a milder reign. Another influence is the reflex effect of wearing better clothes. Dress strangely changes the person and curiously affects the character. One of the best preventives of rude Sabbath breaking is a nicely folded, well-fitting Sunday suit. With a rough, coarse, untearable suit goes rough usage all around, and with fine clothes goes politeness of manner. The clothing worn used to be much thicker and heavier. About the neck was a comforter, tippet, scarf, or even a small sized shawl. Men wore fur standing collars, cow-hide boots, and tucked the lower ends of their trousers' legs into them, in rough weather and when engaged in rough work. A bootjack was the commonest kind of household furniture. Boys wore heavy calf-skin boots with attractive red tops, which they desired to have seen, and this foot-wear was copper-toed so that a boy could lie on his face on his sled and steer it in its swift descent of the hill, by ploughing first one toe and then the other into the icy roadway. Any one's feelings will indicate to him, that he must treat himself, and that he must be treated differently by others, when he is clad in light woolens and in thin foot-wear. He must have more civilized walks, a more even warmth in the house, and a more genteel order of life. It shows the reflex influence of refined dress.

New Facings to Old Opinions

On revisiting the earth it is an amazement to find, that in so short a time, most boys are made millionaires. They sit in a building at school, that cost scores of thousands of dollars. In their own right, they walk into a library, worth tens of thousands, housed in a building that is high priced. The latest books are added to their library. Money has been expended to have a card catalogue made. It used to be tiresome to get about town, and to visit the metropolis, but great stores of money have been used to give them ease and save the wear and tear. Boys have parks to play in and have artificial skating rinks and table luxuries and new forms of furniture and free text-books. Boats drop down the James river loaded with melons. At Norfolk one negro tosses a watermelon to another colored man and he to another until they are loaded in a car which starts express at night, when it is cool, for the northern cities. Boats and trains and service cost money, but it seems very little to a boy in his new circumstances, who has luxuries which we used to do without. Not much was done for us children, compared with present home furnishings, which have Hawthorne's "Wonder Books" and Longfellow's "Evangeline" and pictured illustrations of the world and of life. In our early days most of our picture books were brought from England. If boys then lived in a poor part of the city it was a chosen location for saloons but now boys do not have to live in a location where they have saloons. This improvement of a boy's environment is greatly to his advantage.

Fair to Illustrate by the Best Examples

The most frequent question asked the visitor is how things, taking the years together, seem to be going. The improvement in conditions is glaring. This is not, and cannot be, without result. This of itself makes a showing in men. It was the same quality of seed that fell among thorns and by the way-side and upon stony places. In visiting the field, the first observation is not touching the seed, but outside conditions, and their direct relation to the product. Men reveal even more plainly the effect of extraneous influences. It is said that on hearing the younger Silliman lecture, an enthusiastic auditor exclaimed, "Why, he beats the old gent!" The elder Silliman, who had been listening to the lecture, overheard the remark, and gaining the attention of its author, quietly observed, "Of course he does. He stands upon my shoulders." The old stock was good and stood high but the new generation has the advantage of better position and of a finer outlook.

CHAPTER VIII

TOUCHING A LONG SLUMBERING CHORD

If houses have souls, as Hawthorne believed and taught, and can admire and remember, there is one residence, toward which I turn my willing pilgrim feet, on revisiting the earth, which supports his way of thinking. I was hardly within the door of this dwelling, once occupied by my father, himself a clergyman, when it began to reel off to me, the impressions it had received and retained, for a generation. First, came in minute detail, with all the vividness of moving pictures, a recital touching the old-fashioned donation party which, like the husking-bee and the quilting-bee or house-raising, requires a good deal of interpretation to those, living in days, when money flows like water. The mingling of work and pleasure, combining philanthropy and social enjoyment was the custom of the time. All came together in a fine spirit of neighborliness and all the labor and all the supplies for the feast were gratuitously furnished. A Donation Party was featured particularly by spare-ribs, also by cake, bags of flour, and pies, also by all kinds of things both from the cellar and larder of the members of the parish. The soiree with refreshments, was always a surprise, with this exception that the minister's wife was asked, with a knowing look, if the dominie was to be at home. The outstanding fact was the overwhelming abundance of everything. The party over, when we sat down to a meal, we began just where we left off at the last repast.

The Past at Least is Secure

Wood, in sled lengths, used to be dragged to our door. Coal was unknown to our experience. When a man had a pig-sticking, in anticipation of the school-teacher's coming to his house to board, he brought a portion of the result to the manse, as if to obtain and enjoy a blessing on the rest. A minister's salary was by necessity used for pocket money. The occasions were joyous, social, extremely helpful, and welcome. The cake left a precious memory behind. Sometimes the lambs of the flock combined to procure something that the shepherd was known to need. What killed the Donation Party and buried it, beyond the hope of resurrection, was the fun and ridicule and wit that came to be aimed at its ludicrous features. A colored porter, on a Pullman car, said he had a good position until the comic papers took up the prevalent method of collecting tips and made it ridiculous. One must orient himself to place the right estimate upon this party at the minister's house. He was not in those days independent to the point of being defiant. There was no beggary, no humiliation, and the people were generous, considering that they had, in many cases, difficult problems of their own. If a minister went into a community to live, as they did, there was a fine feeling all around.

Where a Critical Struggle was Beginning

As I stood in the floor of my early home all the situations were plainly outlined for me. In the front corner of one of the best rooms, stood the study table of the dominie, on which he wrote the ministerial recommendations. Ministers used to be mediators: that was their office. This kindly disposition, to put the influence of one's name, and the weight of his ministerial character, behind any good thing, that seemed to need promoting, could be developed into a form of second nature. The new form of charity, "Not alms, but a friend," did not reduce the number of letters of recommendation. We were taught that a little kindness is often worth more than a great deal of money. The poor, unemployed man lacked opportunity, acquaintance, and recognition. The minister, in pure disinterestedness, brothers him. The usual form of helpfulness is a letter. The misfortune is that everybody can recommend anybody. Exaggerations can be given to certain qualities and a discreet silence observed with regard to others. Thus Mrs. Stowe accentuates the negro's peculiarly religious character and disposition. Thus Wendell Phillips never tells the truth, and yet he always tells truth.

Rising Young Men

The relation of this subject to the book canvasser is extremely suggestive. Some of those who have written their names highest on the rolls of deserved honor have followed this laudable calling. The foremost American, George Washington, sold two hundred copies of Bydell's "American Savage." Our most melodious poet, Longfellow, sold books by subscription. Our pre-eminent orator, Daniel Webster, handled de Tocqueville's "America." Our greatest general, the hero of Appomattox, Ulysses S. Grant, canvassed for Irving's "Columbus." And our magnetic statesman, James G. Blaine, began his career as a canvasser for a life of Henry Clay. In the small, dark, dingy parlors of country hotels, travelers on rainy days often now find copies of books that were sold, or rather traded, to the well-fed, good natured, boniface in exchange for entertainment. I can remember items that I have read in these books. I can now go to the tavern and the table where I read after dinner from Butler's book his explanation of the reason that he lost more cases after he became celebrated as a lawyer than he did before. After his fame was established clients flocked to him, with desperate cases. They did not balk at the amount of his retaining fee. As these hotly contested cases had been put through all of their preliminary stages, in all the lower courts, Benjamin F. Butler has lost each one of these chances to get his client by. The case was substantially decided adversely before the great lawyer appeared in it at all.

Tendency to Exaggerate Rather than to Daguerreotype

The dependence of the agent upon ministers is a testimonial to their sympathy. It stamps them as leaders and establishes the fact that their influence in the community is effective. Great evils are wrought in churches and communities by the fact that indorsements are so easily obtained. A man who wants testimonials can get them. Some of our little home missionary churches in the West, that deserve better things, are grievously tormented. This department of religious helpfulness has been so sadly overworked that it is suggestive to find one Christian association of young men that now omits to give letters of recommendation, feeling that discrimination is always difficult and certainly invidious.

The Practice Has Boomerang Implications

When one is in doubt about recommending a person or thing he ought to take the elder Weller's advice with regard to widows, "Don't." A letter of recommendation ought not to express the judgment of him who seeks it, but of him who gives it. Recommendations too often embody the opinion of the applicant only voiced in the words of a man of influence and position. The pen had over-employment as compared with the feet. We ought to help convicts, released from prison, at the expiration of their sentence, to get employment; but the employer ought to be put in possession of the facts. There is probably no one of us but can say that his letters of recommendation have surpassed in fruitfulness every other form of helpful service. By them currents have been set in motion that have changed the course of many a life. Among those eminent deeds that have caused most of happiness to others, that the angels unmistakably approved, stand out foremost in all one's past those instances in which a letter of introduction and of unhesitating recommendation has brought certain rare spirits into appropriate positions of usefulness and honor. An aged clergyman, loving and beloved, tells a wondering company, how one of Boston's merchant-princes went up to the metropolis of New England, cherishing in his pocket as his chief possession, a letter that meant every word it said and into which a whole country church, through its minister, had put its true estimate of a young, manly, Christian character, also its well wishes and its hopes.

Things with a Difference

There is a saying that Adam once returned to the earth where he recognized no country but Spain. "Ah," said he, "this is exactly as I left it." Since 1880 we have built more than five hundred cities in America, among them some of the smartest in the world. We once lived here, in a plain country town, and now forsooth they have a little doll of a city. In a Boston burial ground there is an enclosed grave-lot. The iron fence is warping and rusting and crumbling. On the iron gate-way to the lot is moulded the caption, "Never to be disturbed." Nature the same, everything else changes is the rule. Even in hoarse, brutal, unprogressive Russia everything is becoming new fangled, dress, features, manners, pursuits, all are becoming new. The alterations, in our former place of abode, have been so unconsciously and so gradually made, as to escape the attention of the resident. The secrecy with which all forms of business was conducted is an example. "No admittance" signs were once so much used that the form could have been manufactured in lots and kept in stock to supply the constant demand. It used to be the custom, in paying a bill, for a man as he drew out his pocket-book, to turn half way around, and with his back to the gentleman he was dealing with, open the wallet and examine his money.

There has been an astonishing increase in the number of employments, as compared with the few different vocations of earlier days. Medical men and lawyers had no specialties as they do now. Many doctors today, who would like an all-round development, would better enjoy a country practice. The sons of the physicians have gone into vocations that were hardly recognized when their fathers began practice. One of the electrical firms asked to be given, for their work alone, the entire graduating class of 1900 from Cornell University.

The Changing World

The slang of a generation ago, some of it is given a permanent place in our language, and while in the dictionaries it is rated as a colloquialism, it is thus recognized. It has increased so greatly in the speech of the people, it comes freely also from student bodies, from the trades and sports and from the war camps, that it will now keep the lexicon makers busy.

PARADISE LOST—BEFORE THE SALEM FIRE]

PARADISE REGAINED—AFTER THE CONFLAGRATION

Swearing has grown milder. The grossness and blasphemy are largely barred, while the expletives that technically may not be swearing at all, being used for raciness, vigor and emphasis, have increased one hundred fold.

A symptom of decadence is the elimination of book-stores. Speaking broadly it is impossible to find a stall with a stock of books except in the larger cities. When desirous of substantial reading matter I am sometimes able to buy biographies and other books, worth while, at the drug store in a country town. On moving into flats, families commit an unpardonable sin in disposing of their books. The most sickening sight in New York, Chicago, or Boston is to see second-hand books faded and weather-beaten exposed on the street for sale at a seedy, feeble price.

In spite of the strong drift of governments toward democracy, in revisiting the earth, I detected an exaggeration of class feeling as compared with the early days when there were no poor in the whole town and hardly any very rich. Our pleasures were then more simple and our life, on the whole, more serious.

The increased height in houses is apparent. As the family prospers, it seeks to have the walls in the second story carried up full height, that they may not show inside the pitch of the roof which is the distinguishing mark of a cottage.

The Unexpected Happens

I suppose that the passing years make little or no impression on a well-built stone wall, but where growth and prosperity abound they are not likely to preserve many of the primitive buildings and land-marks, but if any living man had predicted the entire remaking and reshaping of this place of my early residence the reply would have been that if the Lord would work a miracle then might this thing be. The man who professed to know just how we are made, as an automobile maker knows a car, tells us that in seven years we get, physically, a brand new outfit, that old things pass away, and all things become new. As we have not now the same bodies so we have not the same mind. Our ideals, our manners are different. We are different. We have had many a re-birth. Time has brought changes that could no more be withstood than you could resist the earth in its revolution. It is the miracle of a generation, which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to many ears like a fable. The growth in population and in wealth, during a long constructive period, has kept up the clatter of the hammer, the cry of "mort," and the scent of the resinous odor of the pine. Inventions and improvements have placed man in a new relation to the globe he inhabits. Since new ideas began to prevail former methods have been discarded. Even a snake, with years, sheds its scales and envelopes itself in a new skin. The sun once stood still, and the Jordan was arrested in its banks, but life and the stream of events have flowed on without pause or rest. People who have never made a visit, like ours, will talk freely, far from wisely, about what they have always said, and always thought, as if they had always looked through the same eyes, and judged by the same standards. Not so. You looked on life as it seemed then and are looking again with the picture shifted. Your whole point of view is changed. When a man says, "I have always felt," he means that he has felt thus, back part way, or to a given point, but not so certainly much beyond it.

The Past Looks Like a Dream

We made from recollection and were aided by inquiry, a catalogue of the false prophets who early moved away, to the big cities, saying that the place where we had lived would never increase much in business or population. There is a French proverb which warns people not to use the words "never or always." The Wall Street Journal has just used that unreliable forbidden word "never." It heads an article, "Cheap Food Never Again." Any man living in our old place of residence would be wary of the use of the term "never." He would feel that almost any good fortune may come. With tractors and gang-plows operating in the Land of the Dakotas, South Dakota alone being a quarter larger than all New England, and Montana, the third largest state in the union, very much more than equal in size to England, Scotland, Ireland combined and Texas as big as Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland together, these states being now chiefly unfarmed, with shoals of immigrants after the war to work these fields, bounded only by the sky line, how can a man use the expression, Cheap Food Never Again? The statesman Cambon said that never would Rome cease to belong to the people and that never would Rome be the capital of the king of Italy. A Clergyman here, of high authority and position, showed how all the sovereigns of the chief European nations were blood relatives and announced that there could never be another great war. He became positive. He said such a thing was unthinkable. Look next at the harvest of death in the German war. "He who, outside of mathematics, pronounces the word 'impossible' lacks prudence."

Achilles Pondered in His Tent

Yankee Doodle's criticism was quite just. He could not see the town because there were so many houses. We need to get away from the crowded streets and narrow lanes and talkative people to win a true perspective. I wanted to sit down alone and think things over. The people, generally, were as strange to me as I was to them, and yet there was a time, when I was as well-known to everybody, as a child is to his own mother, and when I knew everybody in town. All the alterations of things are wondrously complete, but these were nothing to the change of appearance in the faces of the people. The old familiar countenances, where were they? I looked here and I looked there and everywhere but they had largely vanished from above and below the earth. The character of the dog has undergone less change, than that of the human master, to whom he is so strangely attached. Change, that immutable law of nature, had wrought such shifts in the faces among old acquaintances that all smiles of recognition were wanting. But when I look in the glass I see no change. To the people I must have appeared as the veriest Rip Van Winkle. It was not the fault of the thrifty, prosperous place that I had slept so long, but like Rip Van Winkle it was in me to come back, and I am trying to learn to say with him, Everything is changed and I am changed. He recalled the occurrences before he entered upon his extended slumber and returned to find that the place was altered. It was enlarged and more populous and had rows of houses which he had not seen before. The dress of the people, too, was of a different fashion from that to which he was accustomed but whether under the somnolent influences of his lethargies, or free from them, he mused amid all the changes of outward affairs upon one immutable scene, "the lordly river moving on its silent but majestic course."

CHAPTER IX

WHAT HAD BECOME OF THE OLD ECCENTRICITIES

On revisiting the earth nothing is more remarkable than to find that with each man goes one striking characterization. There is usually one prevalent well-founded recollection based upon a temperamental peculiarity, and the impression was made, that the former citizen was fortunate to leave that one item in the memory of the people. You make reference to him, "Oh, yes, he was our town clerk for twenty years." As often as you mention him you are told again the fact which distinguishes him. One beloved character was Abiel Bassett. "Oh yes, he was our good deacon, Deacon Bassett." He was a farmer. As such, he made his living, but that was nothing to the point. "Deacon Bassett"—that was all. Cain stands in the catechism for one fact. There are two things beside, that could be said of him. It is not usual to mention them. Judas must have had excellent qualities or he would not have been made an apostle. One thing attaches to him. If a person's picture is to be taken he might like to designate the occasion and expression, but then he might show self-consciousness which spoils everything. He must not appear to want "to be seen of men." History wants to make his picture a likeness, just as he is, and as his friends see him, every day. On revisiting the earth I find that one act is always stated of my father. It gave him earthly immortality. It was not his greatest act nor his best. He took no pose for the permanent picture. Joseph Jefferson, Kate Claxton and Edwin Booth had, each of them, one part that fitted them like a garment and fully expressed them. It would inevitably become the favorite selected for a "Benefit Night." Audiences in part determined their public character. My father took his permanent position thus by a kind of election.

He was not consulted. History does not say, "How would you like to have your picture taken now?" He is caught like a fly in the amber and there he remains. His repute is imperishable. Thus statuesque is history.

Forgetting all Except One Truth

My mother left one clear-cut impression. It remained like the imprint of a fern leaf on a rock, a suggestive though accidental record of the years gone by. It was a simple picture stamped with a strange indelibility, like the patience of Job, the meekness of Moses, the daring of Daniel, the greed of Shylock, the indecision of Hamlet, the jealousy of Othello, the furious driving of Jehu. One story was told with endless iteration by the old-time neighbors who feel themselves under no obligation to laboriously dig up a second story when the usual one is the best and is so thoroughly characteristic. Thus all other occurrences are suffered to fade from the community's recollection. When a patriarch was returning from battle with his spoils, a priest, meeting him, stretched forth his arms and blessed him. In this pose history's snap-shot was taken. After thousands of years we find that he "abideth a priest continually." Such men are the moral pivots of society. Their claim on remembrance, like William the Silent, Charles the Bold, Richard the Lion-Hearted turned upon one conspicuous thing and history will so nail that one fact down and so hammer it that it is practically impossible to effect a readjustment, as in the matter of Daniel Webster's physical condition while making his Rochester speech and of the obloquy cast upon Chief Justice Taney in the Dred-Scott decision, that the negro "had no rights that the white man was bound to respect." The learned judge never made that affirmation. His sympathies in the recital were against, rather than with, the sentiment he named. In revisiting the earth you find that history did not fasten upon the best form of characterization and you try to argue. Oh never mind now, our story is a good one; it will have to stand. It has been attacked before.

Personalities of Rarest Types

The difficulty has been pointed out of recalling our childhood, exactly as it was, for the reason that as we travel backward, we take our present selves with us. Imagination is now less active, and so things are shorn of their size and of their exaggerated features. On coming to town we miss the lion of the place. Our juvenile Hall of Fame was featured by the Sagamore of the tribe. In the good old days society had its leader, its model, its dictator who would have led an army or governed a kingdom. He merited the description by which the Norse sages so often carried a meaning of high praise when they declared one to be "not an every-day man." His individual life was less lost in the crowd. His isolation reacted on his character. His residence was one of the show places of the town. It was the resort for the itinerant politician, holding out the glad hand, who was to speak in the evening, and was with us to electioneer. In such a community it falls usually to one and the self-same family to entertain. The house is known as the Quaker tavern, or the Methodist tavern. Its hospitality is proverbial. It had its spare room. This became locally quite famous for the celebrities it had welcomed, before they had come to their later fame. Hospitality in this form is the grace of small, remote, detached places. The minister's house had a prophet's chamber, with a "bed and a table and a stool and a candle-stick" so that when any "holy man of God" passed by he could turn in thither. A minister's wife said plaintively that she never knew how many she was cooking a meal for. On one occasion she had provided a custard pie, more than ample, for the few she then had in mind. It was however necessary later to cut it into six pieces and that, notwithstanding the fact that it was imperative, by an unforseen situation, for the mother herself and her daughter not to "care for any" that day. The minister's family adopted a code of S. O. S. signals which it would sound around F. H. B., "Family hold back," M. I. K., "more in the kitchen." To the manse any minister, though a total stranger and unannounced, could come with complete assurance. The itinerant and his horse were now and then forced by a snow-storm to remain a few days until the roads were broken up and settled.

Poet of the One-Hoss Shay Said, "No Extra Charge"

The lobby, in the earlier country tavern, was universally called the bar-room. Travel was thus staging from one bar-room to another. The tables were served by the village belles. Other employment, as in factories or stores, did not then exist. The inn holder was a conspicuous man. He picked up the news from the stage driver and his passengers. When the old-fashioned Concord stage coach approached town the four fine horses were slowed down into an easy pace for a few furlongs but reaching the suburbs, the horses were given the word, and the long whip was cracked and they dashed into town, making the arrival peculiarly enlivening.

Presently the country landlord would appear on the long broad platform to sound the summons to the table. This was done by the loud violent ringing of a dinner bell, which was swung by a whole arm-movement on both sides of the artist's body, and made to publish in double tones its noisy welcome. The ringer's whole anatomy entered for the time being into the contortion for producing sound.

Every institution is said to be the lengthened shadow of some personality. It was a happy thought that gave those men the title of fathers of their country. The term is very significant of their munificence or of some real thing that made them kings in the hearts of men. Those names are enshrined in some academy, or other school, or bank, or business house, or attached to some central conspicuous street. A return to the residence discovers that imagination had given it a part of its size and that its proportions were carried over from the local prominence of its occupant. "I saw an angel standing in the sun," said St. John. Position gives size. A man who stands near a camp fire projects portentous dimensions on space behind him. The aristocracy of such a man sometimes was certainly not in his dress. He wore the old-fashions, walked in the old ways, and was a revelation of things that had passed away. He wore a heavy, tall, silk cylinder hat in which he carried a bandana handkerchief, valuable papers, and a large pocket-book that was wrapped round with a thin band of leather that was passed under a succession of loops. We used to call him a gentleman of the old school. We used to secretly wonder how he escaped the flood.

Links with the Past

When he adopted his style of dress his apparel was the last word in fashion. It suited his taste, was becoming, comfortable, and satisfactory. His course was consistent. He adhered to it and kept right on. Toward the last of his career he depended somewhat upon it to make him a marked man. Such an individual with obsolete manners was, like Melrose Abbey, impressive in its decay. In his age, disliking changes, his distrustful mind would cling to what was nearest to him, his appearance. He did not see why his style of dress should be interfered with. He made no reckoning with time. That item alone gives a rude awakening to a recruit. In a call for troops he was passed by. Again in a call for troops he is summoned. He is substantially what he felt himself before to be, only time, simply time has passed and he is twenty-one and takes a new relation to his own parents and to his country and to his fortune. The city of Washington used to contain a set of pensioned admirals, retired army officers and officials, who still wore the hall marks of their life when at its climax. The simple revolution of the earth made them fossils and relics and reminders that the procession of which they had been honored members had now for the greater part turned the corner and passed out of view. Sometimes an old man and his wife, tall and antique in appearance, resembling Abraham and Sarah of old, are distinguished chiefly for looking "like the afternoon shadow of other people."

Boys Did Not Know What to Make of Them

On revisiting the earth the old albums are the first things inevitably brought out and was there ever anything more grotesque and unearthly than that which is shown in their hideous, faded contents? A woman, in those days, so deformed her fine form, that the wonder was expressed, and the surprise, that with that make-up she ever got a husband.

When de Tocqueville was in this country looking for evidences of democracy in America, he frankly states in the introduction to his epoch-making book that he saw more than there was. Impossible. You cannot find what does not exist, yet his untruth is the exact unqualified truth. He that seeketh findeth. He plainly saw signs of democracy before he left the company's dock as he landed from the ship. He saw it too at the hotel. It takes a big volume to tell all the tokens he discovered. If he had been accompanied by a twin brother, different in heart, in sympathies, and in his specialty he could in turn have found money kings, railroad kings, kings of fortune, landlords, laborers in a stand-up fight with capitalists. McAllister found a social set limited in number to four hundred. A real estate man takes a different view of the Hawthorne house or of Independence Hall or the Old South Church from the antiquarian. Dr. W. J. Dawson knew a man who sailed with Napoleon but could tell of him later but two items, one of which had some reference to silk hosiery, that his mind probably revolted at, as extravagant or as prudish. Of the same incident, some said it thundered, others said an angel spake. An artist and a banker traveled together abroad and on hearing their recital you would suppose they visited different lands.

Heroes and Fine Old Gentlemen

One of the curiosities of history was the great game of follow-my-leader, that the whole community used to play. Under the hat of the great man of the village was a brain large enough for the ruler of a nation. He seemed the peer of a Bismarck in executive force. We have had since a high grade of general education but then we had a giant. He had an individuality peculiar and surprising. His mental traits were exceptional. The dominant features of his character were energy, industry, and courage. He was an able, genial, hard-working man, a treasure and a blessing, but giving some evidence of rusty mental machinery and of being belated in the world's history and of absolute inability to train a successor. A modern, typical exhibition of the relation of the big man to the town was given at Three Oaks, Michigan, when Admiral Dewey gave a cannon to the committee that after the Spanish war was arranging a memorial to the dead soldiers and sailors. It was offered to the city that in proportion to its population would make the largest contribution to the monument. Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco all vied with each other. The case turned on the clear swung conception of one master mind. It would never be possible, Mr. E. K. Warren observed, "to rouse all the inhabitants of a large city to give to such a cause," but every man, woman and child in Three Oaks would give a dime or a dollar on condition that he himself gave a thousand times the amount. The people owe a debt of gratitude to such a man, a marked individual specimen of human worth, with a character of his own, who plays the part of fountain to their reservoir. There is a fine reflex influence in being what the New Testament calls "a lover of good men." There is nothing better that can enter the human soul than admiration and reverence for high character. They are the crown of our moral nature. One element in them is appreciation. It was a fine training for boys to show and feel deference. This is one thing that a boy does not bring into the world with him. It is not natural to look up.

Sounds a Characteristic Note

We live in an age of interrogation when all things are questioned, not only as to their right to exist, but particularly as to their right in any degree to rule. Every age has its own lesson and adds its own peculiar gift to those preceding it. Are we better or worse? This only I know that these men were beacon lights to the young, illuminating their path and beckoning them on, and deserve to be enshrined in a perpetual and revered remembrance. From all this there has come a reaction. Congressmen and legislators have not lowered in grade, far from that, as the elimination of the bar from the capital would be one of many evidences, but the public intelligence has risen so that they, relatively, seem to have descended. Instead of a century plant the usual attraction now is a garden. A great social revival has been abroad; the people are getting together. There is now more concerted action. In the business world individuals are forming alliances. Interests are being confederated. As the community spirit comes to consciousness the individuality of men diminishes. Society forms into clubs, chambers of commerce, and into boards of directors in which men are less marked individually and much, even of their personality, is concealed by the extravagant multiplication of societies and institutions and meetings of every kind. The churches have pretty nearly lost the individual, since the introduction of team work, itself a blessing, but the individual has withered. He is leveled down and smoothed out by the necessity of acting only in conjunction with groups.

Some Incongruities of Character

The Arabian Nights would make queer history, yet they would prove a wet fuse and fail to kindle the mind if they did not suggest actual experience. Who is your "old man" that sticks to your shoulders putting you in Sinbad's class? Each village carries its unconventional character. He gives a touch of color to the place. Rip Van Winkle, an old drunkard, who slept for twenty years in the Catskills was a great favorite with the children. They would shout for joy whenever he approached. He assisted at their sports, made their playthings, and taught them to fly kites. He was surrounded by a troop of them. He had a distinct individuality. He was a hero, with all his characteristics well marked. A person on revisiting the earth misses such a striking familiar figure in the neighborhood. We saw Mrs. Van Winkle beat up old Rip with a broom-stick, but although she was a clean, tidy, thrifty person who kept her house swept and garnished in spite of her improvident husband, in the estimation of the boys she was not to her well-known husband a companion character.

"Jack Sprat could eat no fat
His wife could eat no lean."

Young eyes are sharply drawn to persons so dissimilar in their tastes. Children are quick to see that this very difference in taste produced a peculiar situation. Our early life is peopled with distinctive and marked characters and they have gone along with us through life. It is the peculiar outstanding people that, like a burr, stick to the memory.

CHAPTER X

TO SEE AND FEEL THE PAST

It is a matter of common knowledge that Washington at the time of his death was the richest man in the country. All are familiar with the fact that he acquired property through his brother Lawrence, and the widow Custis whom he married, but less attention is given to the suggestive fact that he invested widely in land in what was then the West. We have letters to his agents. Judson destroyed all his own letters and papers touching private matters, but there they are, in Washington's case, and he who runs may read. He had been a surveyor. He knew a good thing when he saw it. His invariable rule was to buy quality. Showing the same wisdom he did in his campaigns and his farewell address, which has never lost its influence, he turned to the West to do his buying. Entirely aside from the Revolution, if Washington had not been a great general, he was well started on lines that would have made him a very substantial citizen. The confidence he expressed in the West is believed to be, and has been stated to be, a higher monument to his fame than the metal-tipped, slender, tapering sky-pointing and heaven-reaching obelisk reared in his honor near the banks of the Potomac. He was invited to visit France but could not, he said, bring his affairs into a state of order, during the remainder of his life, and the matters that most needed his care were his large purchases of land in the West which now, with some little contiguous territory are worth Twenty Million Dollars. Washington remains our richest president not only relatively but absolutely.

People Looked, People Wondered, People Praised

We find him making a sixth journey to see his lands which were located on the right and left banks of the river, and bounded thereby, forty-eight miles and a half. This portrayal makes very obvious what is implied when it is said of an individual that he is not a good business man. He simply lacks what Washington had, intensity of interest in his affairs, energy of mind, promptness. We do not say foresight, there is no such thing as foresight, we mean insight, good judgment, and a fine knowledge of the trend of things, a perception of the direction taken by popular movements. Washington was accused of being close-fisted, but some one takes the ground that a man must close his fist if there is something in it that others were seeking by illegitimate means to get. At his death he was worth a half million dollars, and four hundred thousand dollars of it lay in western lands. "Would God we may have wisdom to improve the opportunity," a prayer in which many persons who have had much better chances than ever came to him, pressed as he was with patriotic service, wished they had joined, but who allowed opportunity to knock at the door and turn away, unwelcomed. What a sight to Washington, now revisiting the earth, would a night view of Pittsburgh be with her deep fires and the lid off. Washington's insight was apparent by locating his purchases near the possibilities of a city whose tonnage exceeds that of any other city of the Union, whose vast manufacturing interests send up volumes of smoke that become a pillar of cloud by day and whose furnaces are pillars of fire by night, to lead the people on to prosperity and success. The mind has less influence on the will than many persons suppose. A man may know a fact and then do nothing about it. A lazy man may know the advantage of wealth and yet be without the motive to attain it. It is often a poor boy who has felt poverty and has some feeling about it that makes success with him a passion. He who hesitates is lost. It was the plunge of Curtius that saved Rome.

Making Hay While the Sun Shines

That great orator of nature to whom school-boys are so much indebted for energetic, passionate, effective declamations, Patrick Henry, father of fifteen children, made his widow and eleven surviving children rich by his early judicious purchases, like Washington, of lands. This much needs to be said, lest fortune be thought of as a blind goddess. A man that once was cutting grass and herding cattle earning his bread by the sweat of his brow is now Prince Fortunatus. No chance luck about it, for the opportunity that beckoned him called to others but their ears were dull of hearing. All of us, who are interested in vital reforms, must have been attracted to the career of Gerrit Smith, who gave thirty thousand dollars to destitute old maids and widows in the state of New York. No public subscription lacked his name, and he always gave away $50,000.00 and not seldom $100,000.00 each year. In his business life of fifty-six years he gave away $8,000,000.00 and left an estate of more than a million dollars. Such a recital, as in the case of Washington, makes us curious to find the sources of such philanthropy. We find that with rare acumen he developed the business of his father, who when a poor youth, kept a small store and traded for furs at first hands with the Indians. When his partner Mr. Astor bought real estate in New York city, the elder Smith purchased sixty thousand acres of land in the central part of the state of New York, of which enough was sold at auction to repay the purchase price and still leave enough to make him the largest landholder in the state. Subsequent additions made him the owner of more acres than any other man in the Union. Such a preparative study as this gave me intensest interest, when revisiting the earth, in treading the beautiful field, my birthplace, that my father bought in Iowa at the Government price of a dollar and a quarter an acre, that has since been sold at $205.00 an acre and the price paid for it at the last sale of it was $300.00 an acre and the buyer was offered $3,000.00 for his bargain. It is the percentage of gain that tells the story. It seems like the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

The Death of the Mortgage

Besides learning these items and handling the papers that confirmed them, out came a fact that took my breath away. Once men profited by nature's bounty. To him that hath is given. That is the common way. Now comes the uncommon thing. From him that hath not is (not) taken away even that he hath. The sun and stars now look down upon a changed condition. The wildest dream has come true, a by-product of the war. It is one of the many things begun under circumstances which the German treaty-breakers, the disturbers of the peace, thrust upon us, a thing designed to aid agriculturists to feed our armies and allies, which, with the war over, will never be abated. We raise our eyes, and see a moneyed millennium coming down a common country road. It is in the form of an original system of rural credits. The Treasury Department of the United States has inaugurated a Federal Farm-Loan Bureau. Its outstanding feature is, if a borrower of a large amount pays his interest, he never hears again of the debt. Interest at six and a half per cent not only takes care of that item, but it pays it off, in less than a generation, also the money borrowed. A farmer at the start requires money for buildings, machinery, and herds. The aching heart of many a widow bereft of her home by the foreclosure of a mortgage on her property will see the deep significance in the sacrament that I am seeking to describe. The process is called amortization. The syllable "mort" as in "mortal," means death of the debt. From the first the mortgage is struck with death.

A Heaven-sent Device

So happy to all concerned is this method, resembling a co-operative bank, of obtaining a greatly needed working capital that we may well rejoice with a large class of deserving people, who for the first time have the means of doing a larger, more profitable business, with the sting and hazard graciously removed. With what bitterness we have all heard the children of the poor recite the anguish that came into the home when the mortgage, like the naked sword suspended by a hair over the head of Damocles, came to do its dreaded office! "But the children began to be sorely weary," says Bunyan, "and they cried out unto Him that loveth pilgrims to make their way more comfortable." We have come to see the Government make the way of the children who inherit a mortgage more comfortable. All's well! You have no trouble with the interest. Only go on as you have been going. The farm, the home, are all yours. The mortgage is dead.

They Were a Family Again

A day on a real farm did not have a dull moment in it. It was not only full of incident and instruction but as compared with a generation ago it was different. Immediately a very young calf was noticed that, to use the farmer's unexpected phrase, his mother does not "claim." I supposed he would say that his mother would not "own." The cow was put in a stall, in a barn, the calf being nourished and thus openly adopted by the mother they became effusively chummy. At first the cow "did not care" for the calf. When care began a noticeable regard commenced.

How Much Like Folks

More curious still it seemed to find that in breaking out of a pasture the cattle were led by one member of the herd. The community of cattle would be quiet and contented except for one breaching individual. Here again I went to school to a farmer in the use of words. In his reference to this creature he designated the trouble maker as an "outlaw." I had not thought of applying that word to cattle.

Absence of the Big Stick

I stood still and wondered at the constant and varied use of the voice by a farmer as he moves about among the creatures that he owns. Armed with a whip, like an Irishman with his shillalah at a fair, I supposed he would keep it flourishing about his head and that he would be accompanied by a dog. An owner will not trust his cattle to the care of a man that employs a shepherd dog. Cattle must be kept quiet. A dog wakes them all up and sets back the gain that they would make for the day. Farmers and drovers are whistling, singing, calling, shouting, talking, all the time to their creatures and they like it.

An Outlaw in the Herd

It is everywhere, I suppose, well known that the western spirit has always been less tolerant of an outlaw than the people of the East are. I asked the ranch man what course he took with an outlaw among cattle. "As soon as I detect him I get rid of him, not stopping at anything to do it." On the fourth of July I went out upon the piazza of the hotel, and looking up the street I saw a man, hung in effigy, upon a telephone pole in front of his own store, with his name placarded upon the suspended figure, that it should not be a case of mistaken identity. He had offended the decencies of life. The townspeople waited for a day or two to see if the authorities took it up. There was nothing doing. Then the citizens made public what they thought of the outlaw.

Testing Mighty Principles by Small Experiments

It seems that Schopenhauer had a gold piece which he used to put beside his plate at the table where he ate, surrounded by the young officers of the German army, and which was to be given to the poor, the first time he heard any conversation that was not about promotion or women. If this experiment were tried one's contribution to charity would not be large, provided the subjects were changed in the various well known localities. In the time of the great inflation in Chicago when any one could make his fortune by simply buying building sites and selling out before the ink had dried with which the first transfer was recorded, the subject discussed in hotels and offices would be Corner Lots.

These locations were sold and resold, each time at a large advance on the former price, and became the inexhaustible topic of conversation. Everybody was growing rich on paper and The City of the Lakes was the Mecca of speculators, a genuine Eldorado, where affluence was made easy, and first lessons in finance were given. The original gold coin was staked amid specific well understood surroundings. When environment changes topics change. In one town all the talk is money, money. At a public table in some localities where once it was all horse talk, in one corner of the dining room, the interchange of mind is on the speed of automobiles, the improvement made in cars since two years ago, the amount of gasoline to the mile, and the comparative excellence of the different manufactures.

Revisiting the Earth

REVISITING THE EARTH

BY JAMES L. HILL, D.D.

Author of "The Immortal Seven," "The Scholar's Larger Life," "The Worst Boys in Town," "Favorites of History," "The Century's Capstone," "Memory Comforting Sorrow," "A Crowning Achievement," etc.

RICHARD G. BADGERTHE GORHAM PRESSBOSTON

Copyright, 1920, by Richard G. Badger

All Rights Reserved

Made in the United States of America

The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.

THE LITTLE SEMINARY OF LETTERS

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS