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A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.

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A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD

EDWARD E. HALE
AUTHOR OF "east AND WEST," "SYBIL KNOX," " HO-W
THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON," ETC., ETC.

NEW YORK
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
104 & 106 Fourth Avenuis

COFmiGHT, 1893, ET
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY.

All rights reserved.

THB MEBSHON COMPANY PREBR,
BAHWAT, K. J.

INTRODUCTION.

A OHAEMiNG writer, Miss Lucy Larcom, pub
lished a few years ago a charming book called
"A New England Girlhood." She described
in it her own early life, first in Beverly,
opposite Salem on the seashore of Massachu
setts, with its gardens and beaches and fishing
boats ; then in Lowell in its infant days, with
its river and waterfalls and Arcadian cotton
factories. Mr. Horace Scudder, editor of the Atlantic
Monthly, was as much attracted by this pleas
ant book as the rest of us. It suggested to
him the possibility of another book, which
should deal with the same years, now becoming
mythical, as a New England boy saw life in the
little New England city of those days— the
only city of New England which took that
name before 1826, excepting the city of Ver-

IV INXEODtrCTION.
gennes in Vermont and that of Hartford in
Connecticut. Quite leaving Hartford out, in my earliest
days it was always a joke at home, if anyone
spoke of Boston as the only city, for some one
to say, "Boston and Vergennes." Vergennes
was incorporated in 1788, by the legislature
of Vermont, which was then an independent
nation, not belonging either to the Confed
eracy of the United States or sharing in the
deliberations for the new constitution.
Mr. Scudder asked me to furnish some
chapters, with the attractive title of "A New
England Boyhood," from my own memories,
in such form that they might be published
in the Atlantic Monthly. And this I was
glad to do. Those chapters, published in that
magazine in 1892, make more than half of the
book now in the reader's hands.
I have to say this byway of introduction,
because here is my only excuse for what else
seems the conceit of introducing little bits
of personal experience into my story, of no
earthly value to anybody but myself and my
children, excepting as they illustrate the sim-

INTEODUCTION. V
plicity and ease of a phase of New England
life, which has now wholly passed away. I do
not flatter myself that I have succeeded in
presenting to the reader the simplicity and the
dignity of that life, so curiously combined as
simplicity and dignity were. Those people,
in the little seaport of Boston, lived and moved
as if they were people of the most important
city of the world. What is more, they meant
to make Boston the purest, noblest, and best
city in the world. And they lived there in
some forms of social life which would have be
come princes of sixty-four quarterings, with
some which were identical with those of the
log-cabin. Every man of them was an Ameri
can, and believed to the sole of his feet that
there was no fit government for men but that
of a republic. All the same, their leaders,
men and women, were dignified, elegant, and
gracious in their bearing and manner; and
there was no prince in the world who better
understood the bearing and the customs of
gentlemen and gentlewomen.
It was a good place in which to be born, and
a good place in which to grow to manhood.

vi INTKODtJOTION.
From 1630, when Boston was founded by an
important branch of Winthrop's colony, to
1826, when these reminiscences begin, it had
grown, slowly and not very regularly, from a
little hamlet of settlers, sick and half starved,
to a brisk commercial town of about forty -five
thousand people. There is no better descrip
tion than Mr. Emerson's, which I heard him
read, fresh from his own notes, on the platform
of Faneuil Hall, on the centennial of the
Boston Tea-Party, December 16, 1873. It was
said that he had written the last verses in the
train as he rode from Concord. The notes
in his hand were on various bits of paper,
and I believe that the poem was born on
that day.

The rocky nook, -with hill-tops three.
Looked eastward from the farms.
And twice each day the flowing sea
Took Boston in its arms.

The wild rose and the barberry thorn
Hung out their summer pride.
Where now on heated pavements ¦worn
The feet of millions stride.

INTRODUCTION-. vii
Fair rose the planted hills behind
The good town on the bay.
And -where the western hills declined
The prairie stretched away.

Each street leads downward to the sea,
Or landward to the west.
The first certaia description of the place is
that in Bradford : ' ' We came into the bottom
of the bay ; but being late we anchored and
lay in the shallop, not having seen any of the
people. The next morning we put in for the
shore. There we found many lobsters that
had been gathered together."
This camping ground is Copp's Hill at the
very northern end of the peninsula. The
lobsters were taken near the landing of the
ferry, which afterward took men to Charles
town. If Tom, Dick, and Harry had been left
to their own devices, if no paternal or frater
nal government had protected their industries
and done better for them than nature did, if
successive generations had been left to do
what nature bade, as is now the theory of the
"let alones," making head again in the midst

viii INTRODXTCTION.
of our matchless prosperity — a few hundred of
us, who had survived in the struggle for exist
ence, would be trapping lobsters at the North
End to-day. Where the other hundred thou
sand people would be, who now inhabit the old
peninsula, I do not know — or, indeed, if they
would have been at all.
A peninsula it was ; but no geographer in
his senses would give that name now to the
bulging cape which has expanded on either
side of the old almost island. At high tides,
in gales, the water washed across what was
then called the Neck, and is still called so by
old-fashioned people. Three hills, of which
the highest was 138 feet high from the sea,
broke the surface of the peninsula, and of
these the top of the highest was broken again
by three smaller hills. This highest hill is
Beacon Hill. Copp's Hill was at the north,
and Fort Hill on the east. For the conven
ience of trade Fort Hill has been entirely
removed, and a little circular bit of greensward
marks the place where, in my boyhood, was a
hill fifty feet high.
In old days a canal was cut across the town,

INTRODUOTION. Ix
separating the Copp's Hill elevation from
those south of it. A tidal mill was arranged
here, by retaining the water at high tide in
the mill-pond, and letting it dribble out when
the tide had fallen. The average rise and fall
of the tide in Boston is about ten feet, so thai;
this contrivance gave power enough for grind
ing corn when there was corn to grind. The
mill-pond was filled up about the period to
which the reminiscences in this book belong.
If this book should stray into the hands of
persons who do not know the physical Boston
of to-day, or the physical Boston of history, it
may be worth while, "for the greater caution, ' '
as the lawyers say, to give an outline map of
both. In the sketch in the margin the white
nucleus represents the Boston which Bradford
found, and where we should have been catch
ing lobsters had there been no paternal govern
ment or other government, until to-day. The
outline of the larger cape, as I have called it,
is the outline of Boston now, when what we
called the "flats" have been filled in by suc
cessive improvements — if improvements they
are. Any person, who desires to know my

OLD BOSTON AND NEW

INTRODUCTION. xi
opinion on such improvements, may consult
the study I have made on similar subjects in
my book called " Sybaris." I am, however,
an optimist, and after a thing has been done I
accept it. I dictate these words as I lie on my
back on a comfortable sofa in a comfortable
room in the vestry of the church which stands
where, in boyhood, I could have skated, or
could have caught smelts for the next day's
breakfast. For the temperature outside, at
this moment, is ten degrees above zero, a tem
perature which was very favorable for the
catching of smelts in those daf^s.
Politically or socially, the period between
1820 and 1835 belongs to the period when
Boston was turning to internal commerce and
the development of manufacture, and was
relinquishing that maritime commerce which
had created her. The Southern and Western
leaders of the country, not disinclined to
thwart the maritime industries of New England,
had attempted to build up what Mr. Clay
called "the American system" of home manu
facture. So soon as this system established
itself, the New Englanders adapted themselves

Xll INTRODUCTION.
to the new conditions, and set up their manu
factories on the borders of their streams—
Pawtucket, Waltham, Lowell, and, afterwards,
Manchester, Lawrence, and Holyoke came
into being. The necessity of closer communi
cation with the interior was as distinctly felt
in New England as in the Middle States. The
Middlesex Canal, an elaborate system of turn
pikes, and, later yet, the present system of
railroads were established. But in the year
1830 Boston still retained a large East Indian
and European commerce. It is interesting to
see how largely the exports were still products
of the forests and %he fisheries.
And, not to smirch the pages of this little
book with any of the ashes of theological con
troversy which is long since dead, it may be
mentioned that, in the years between 1820 and
1840, Boston was the centre of theological dis
cussion, which undoubtedly greatly quickened
the religious life of New England. In those
years there was a certain expectation of a
speedy improvement, not to say revolution, in
social order, such as men do not often expe
rience. Dr. Channing was preaching the gos-

INTRODUCTION. - xiii
pel of the divinity of man. Dr. Tuckerman,
Frederick Gray, Charles Barnard , and Robert
Cassie Waterston, -with others, were introduc
ing practical illustrations of improvement.
There was plenty of money, and the rich men
of Boston really meant that here should be a
model and ideal city. The country was pros
perous ; they were prosperous, and they looked
forward to a noble future.
At the same time they had the advantage of
having a university close under their lee, which
they were themselves managing. They had
started their Athenaeum, with the collections of
pictures and statues, and a good library. They
had a good deal of leisure ; and a certain inter
est, not wholly the interest of dilettanti, in
fine arts and literature, gave distinction to the
little town.
Into such a community it was my good for
tune to be born, on the morning of the 3d of
April, 1822.
I do not attempt anything so ambitious as
an autobiography. But a man sees with his
own eyes, and a boy even more than a man ;
and what I remerober of a New England boy-

Xiv INTRODUCTION.
hood is what mine was, not what anyone else
lived through in the same time. There will
be a certain convenience, then, to the reader
if he knows a little of tHfe household and family
in which the boyhood was spent which in these
chapters is described.
In the ship Lion, in the voyage of Win
throp's fleet, came to Boston Robert Hale,
who was, I suppose, of the Hales of Kent.
Searching in the wills of that time in Canter
bury, in Kent, I found this :
7. "To my sonne John Hales, five pounds
and my best silver guilt sword, yet neverthe
less and on this condition" — ^that he do not
intercept the execution of the rest of the
vdll. And I have a fancy that that son was cut ofl
with a "guilt sword" because he was a Puri
tan, while the rest of the Hales, or Haleses,
were very High Church. So High Church
have they been in later times that it was one
of them. Sir James Hales, who accompanied
James II. into exile. Somehow I connect him
with the throwing the Great Seal into the
Thames. Within my own memory Hales

INTRODUCTION. XV
Place, near Canterbury, has become the
seat of a Jesuit school for the training of
priests. This Robert Hale is called a blacksmith, and
he settled at Charlestown, opposite Boston.
He seems to have had the taste for surveying
or engineering which crops out in alternate
generations in the family. He was of the
party which was sent to Winnipiseogee to run
the northern line of Massachusetts. The stone
which they set there is to be seen to this day.
He married Joanna Cutter. He sent his son
John Hale to Harvard College, where he was the
fourth in social rank of his class of eight. He
became the minister of Beverly, is the John
Hale who went to Quebec as chaplain and was
taken prisoner, and the John Hale of the
Salem witchcraft. A missal given him by a
Catholic priest in Quebec is in the library of
Harvard College to this day. He was the
grandfather, by his oldest son, of King Hale, as
Robert Hale (H. C, 1686) was familiarly called
in Beverly ; and by his fourth son, Samuel, was
grandfather of my father's grandfather, Rich
ard Hale, who lived in Coventry, Conn., and

XVi INTRODUCTION.
died in 1802. This Richard Hale was father
of Captain Nathan Hale of the Revolutionary
history, and of Enoch Hale, my grandfather,
alluded to in chapter vii. of this book.
In 1636 Richard Everett, or Everard, appears
in Watertown, and afterwards in Springfield
and Dedham. In Dedham he died. From
him came a line of farmers, who are called
captain, deacon, and so on till we come to
Ebenezer Everett of Tiot, now called Nor
wood, a village of South Dedham. He was
father of Rev. Oliver Everett (H. C, 1772),
who was minister of the New South Church
in Boston, and was my grandfather on my
mother's side.
For my father, Nathan Hale, oldest son of
Rev. Enoch Hale above, on a day to be marked
with vermilion with me and mine, namely,
September 5, 1816, married Sarah Preston
Everett, my mother, daughter of Rev. Oliver
Everett. On that day she was twenty years
old ; he was thirty- two.
It is pity of pities that we never made him
write "A New England Boyhood" as he saw
it, For he was born in 1784, the year after

INTRODUCTION. xvii
the peace with England. He grew up in the
very purest conditions of the simplest and,
indeed, the best life of New England. His
father had been for eight years the minister of
a frontier town, Westhampton, in the days
when the minister was chosen by the town in
open town meeting, was paid by the town,
and regarded himself as personally respon
sible for the moral and spiritual life of every
body in the town.
Hoeing corn or potatoes one day in the
summer of 1800, my father, a boy of sixteen,
was called into his father's study, where he
found Dr. Fitch, then the president of Wil
liams College, which had been established as
a college seven years before. Dr. Fitch had
stopped in a journey across country, to accept
the hospitalities of the parsonage. The boy
was told to show Dr. Pitch how well he could
read Latin ; then he read to him from the
Greek Testament, and Dr. Fitch said he was
i^eady to enter Williams College. His father
and he had not expected that he would enter
until the next year. But this fortunate visit
of the president qarried him to WiHiamstown

XVlll INTRODUCTION.
that summer, and he graduated there in the
class of 1804.
He and the other boys from that region
used to ride across Berkshire County on
horseback when the college terms began. A
younger boy drove the horses back in a drove,
and, when vacation came, took them to the
college again for the students to ride back
upon. A part of the road was a turnpike
where tolls were collected. When they
approached the gate they would all dismount,
and on foot drive the horses in front of them,
and demand the right of passing at the rate
for a drove of horses or cattle. Nothing,
as they said, was said about saddles or
bridles. When I asked once if the toll-keeper
submitted meekly to this, I was told that
they generally had to pay the full toll, but
that the tollman expected to treat them to
cider all* round.
The college was divided into two societies—
the Philomathian and the Philotechnian. I
think the latter exists in Williamstown in
some form still. I have seen the records of
debates ; " Question, Whether the purchase of

INTRODUCTION. xix
Louisiana is desirable. Decided in the nega
tive, 17 to 1." For they were high and hot
Federalists. I have my father's part when he graduated.
It is on the improvements in social order
made in the last fifty years.
So soon as he left college he engaged as
tutor in the family of John J. Dickinson in
Troy, not far from Williamstown. But he
went home first, and on his way to Troy went
to the city of New York for the flrst time.
The population was only about seventy-flve
thousand. It was three years before Fulton's
Clermont, his first steamboat, went up the
Hudson, and the tradition in our family is
that my father went up the river in a sloop to
Troy, was a fortnight in going, and read
through Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" on
the way.
Judging from his accomplishments Wil
liams College must have done its work well.
He read Latin well and with pleasure to the
end of his life. He did not keep up his Greek
with the same interest, but he was an accurate
Greek scholar. He was a mathematician of

XX INTRODUCTION.
high rank in the mathematics of those days,
and was afterward quite the peer in those
lines of the engineers with whom he worked
on the great public works of which he had the
charge. He studied some Hebrew in college,
and could always read a little. I asked him
once if this was with any thought of being a
minister, but he said, "No, but there was
nothing else to study." He had to learn his
French and German afterward, and did, I
think that in my boyhood there were more
German books in our house than perhaps in
any other house in Boston. But that is say
ing very little ; as late as 1843 I could buy
no German books, even in Pennsylvania, but
Goethe and Schiller and the Lutheran hymn-
book. After a year in Troy he received the appoint
ment of preceptor in mathematics in Exeter
Academy in New Hampshire. He crossed
Massachusetts to Boston on his way to Exeter.
Here is a memorandum of the way in which
this was done :
The arrangement of the stages was that if the stages
coming from Springfield and Northampton had more

INTRODUCTION. Xxl
passengers than Could go on one stage some of them had
to stop ; and those who got on last were the ones who
had to stop.
I arrived at Brookfield at night, having left North
ampton in the morning. The person -who had come th^
shortest distance was a lady. She -was in great distress
that she could not go on. I had a sort of desire to stay
there to see Howe and Henshaw, but I should not have
thought of staying a day but to let this lady go on.
At Exeter, in the charming society of that
place, he met the Peabodys and Alexander
Hill Everett, who was the other "preceptor,"
the preceptor of Greek and Latin. He gradu
ated at .Harvard in 1806. These two young
men became very fond of each other, and when,
in 1808 my father determined to leave Exeter
and come to Boston to study law, he became
acquainted with all Mr. Everett's Boston
friends. Meanwhile, when he was twelve years old,
my mother had been born, in Dorchester, now
a part of the municipality of Boston. Her
father, in delicate health, had left his charge
in 1793. Her mother was a Boston girl, one of
the daughters of Alexander Sears Hill and
Mary Richey of Santa Cruz. The tradition
was that Alexander Sears Hill had gone to

XXll INTRODUCTION.
Philadelphia for a milder climate in winter,
had fallen in love with Mary Richey, and that
they had married without the knowledge of
their parents. A handsome couple they were,
as the full-length portraits by Copley attest to
this day. They both died young. I have the
love-letters which passed between Lucy Hill
and Oliver Everett ; it was a happy marriage
until his death, but he died in consumption in
1802. After this the family lived sometimes
in the North End of Boston, sometimes in the
old house in Dorchester. In 1812 Edward
Everett, the third son, was ordained minister erf
Brattle Street Church in Boston. He was not
married — ^was, indeed, but twenty years old.
His mother and sister moved into the parsonage
in Court Street, where are now the offices
of Adams Express. Mr. Everett left that
church in the year 1815, and my grandmother
and her family established themselves in a
house in Bumstead Place — a place which
exists no longer — and there my mother was
married. The newly married couple lived first in Ash-
burton Place, then called Somerset Court, in a

INTRODUCTION. Xxiii
house now standing. A year or two after they
removed to Tremont Street to a house which
has been absorbed by Parker's Hotel, the
second from where the Tremont Theatre was
built in 1827. Here I was born. The family
afterwards lived at the corner of School Street
in a house which also has been absorbed by-
Parker's. In 1828 we removed to No. 1 Tre
mont Place, a house still standing; and in
1833 to one of Mr. Andrews's houses in Central
Court, a property now covered by Jordan &
Marsh's, just behind where old Judge Sewall
lived most of his life. It is in the four
houses last named that the scenery of the
home life described in these chapters is to
be placed.

CONTENTS.

CHA-PTER PAGE
I. 'Tis Seventy Tears Since, .... 1
II. School Life  11
III. The Swimming School,  55
IV. Life at Home,  59
V. Out op Doors,  88
VI. Social Relations  135
VII. The World Near Boston, . . . .171
VIII. The World Beyond Boston, . . . 196
IX. At College,  311

A NE¥ ENGLAND BOYHOOD.

CHAPTER I.
'tis seventt years since.
THE reader and I ought not to begin with
out my reminding him that the Boston
of which I am to write was very different from
the Boston of to-day. In 1825 Boston was still
a large country town. I think some one has
called it a city of gardens ; but that som:e one
may have been I. As late as 1817, in a d^rip-
tion of Boston which accompanied a show which
a Frenchman had made by carving and paint
ing the separate houses, it was said, with some
triumph, that there were nine blocks of build
ings in the town. This means that all the
other buildings stood with windows or doors
on each of the four sides, and in most instances
with trees, or perhaps little lanes, between ;
as all people will live when the Kingdom of

2 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Heaven comes. To people in this neighbor
hood to-day, I may say that the upper part of
the main street in Charlestown gives a very
good idea of what the whole of Washington
Street south of Winter Street was then. And,
by the way, Washington Street was much
more often called Main Street than by its
longer name.
The reader must imagine, therefore, a large,
pretty country town, where stage-coaches still
clattered in from the country, and brought all
the strangers who did not ride in their own
chaises. Large stables, always of wood, I
think, provided for the horses thus needed. I
remember, as I write, Niles's stable in School
Street, a large stable in Bromfield Street, after
ward Streeter's, the stables of the Marl
borough Hotel in Washington Street, and what
seemed to us very large stables in Hawley
Street — all in the very heart of the to-syn, and
on a tract which cannot be more than twelve
acres. When, in 1829, it was reported that the
new Tremont House was to have no special
stables for its guests, the announcement
excited Surprise almost universal ; and to us

'tis SEVENTY YEARS SINCE. 3
children the statement that there was to be
a tavern, or a hotel, without a sign, was still
more extraordinary. We were used to seeing
swinging signs on posts in front of the taverns.
Thus I remember "The Indian Queen" in
Bromfield Street, " The Bunch of Grapes " in
State Street, " The Lamb " I think where the
Adams House now is, "The Lion" where the
Boston Theatre is, and nearly opposite these
the Lafayette Tavern. This means that large
pictures of an Indian queen, a bunch of grapes,
a lamb, a lion, and of Lafayette swung back
ward and forward in the wind. There was a
sign in front of the Marlborough Tavern, and
one nearly opposite, south of Milk Street, but
I do not remember what these were. All these
inns would now be thought small. They were
then called taverns, and to New Englanders
seemed very large. Of course they were large
enough for their purpose. When I was nine
or ten years old my father, who was thought
to be a fanatic as a railroad prophet, offered in
Faneuil Hall the suggestion that if people
could come from Springfield to Boston in five
hours an average of nine people would come

4 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
every day. This prophecy was then consid
ered extravagant. I have told the story, in
the Introduction, of his coming to Boston for
the first time, in 1805, when the Northampton
passengers joined the Springfield passengers at
Brookfield. There was room in the carriage
for six only. He therefore gave up his seat to
a lady who had pressing duties, and waited
in Brookfield twenty-four hours to take his
chances for the next stage.
The more important business streets of this
town of Boston were paved in the middle with
round stones from the neighboring beaches,
then as now called cobble-stones — I do not
know why ; but an accomplished friend, who
reads this in manuscript, says that the lapstone
on which a cobbler stretches his leather is a
cobble-stone. I recommend this etymology to
Dr. Murray and Dr. Whitney. The use of
bricks for sidewalks was just coming in, but
generally the sidewalks were laid with flat
slates or shales from the neighborhood, which
were put down in any shape they happened
to take in splitting, without being squared at
the corners. Bromfleld Street, Winter Street,

'tis SEVENTY YEARS SINCE. 5
Summer Street, and Washington Street (old
Marlborough Street) between School and
Winter seem to us now to be narrow streets,
but they have all been widened considerably
within my memory. Bromfield Street was
called Bromfleld' s Lane.
On-the other hand, so far as I remember the
houses themselves and the life in them, every
thing was quite as elegant and finished as it is
now. Furniture was stately, solid, and expen
sive. I use chairs, tables, and a sideboard in
my house to-day, which are exactly as good
now as they were then. Carpets, then of Eng
lish make, covered the whole floor, and were
of what we should now call perfect quality.
In summer, by the way, in all houses of which
I knew anything, these carpets were always
taken up, and India mattings substituted in
the "living-rooms." Observe that very few
houses were closed in summer. Dress was
certainly as elegant and costly as it is now ; so
were porcelain, glass, table linen, and all table
furniture. In the earlier days of which I write,
a decanter of wine would invariably have stood
on a sideboard in every parlor, so that a glass

6 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
of wine could readily be offered at any moment
to any guest. All through my boyhood it
would have been matter of remark if, when
a visitor made an evening call, something to
eat or drink was not produced at nine o'clock.
It might be crackers and cheese, it might be
mince pie, it might be oysters or cold chicken.
But something would appear as certainly as
there would be a fire on the hearth in winter.
Every house, by the way, was warmed by open
fires ; and in every kitchen cooking was done
by an open fire. I doubt if I ever saw a stove
in my boyhood except in a school or an office.
Anthracite coal was first tried in Boston in
1824. Gas appeared about the same time. I
was taken, as a little boy, to see it burning
in the shops in Washington Street, and to
wonder at an elephant, a tortoise, and a cow,
which spouted burning gas in one window.
Gas was not introduced into dwelling-houses
until Pemberton Square was built by the
Lowells, Jacksons, and their friends, in the
years 1835, 1836, and later. It was a surprise
to everyone when Papanti introduced it in
his new Papanti' s Hall. To prepare for that

'TIS SEVENTY YEARS SINCE. 7
occasion the ground-glass shades had a little
rouge shaken about in the interior, that the
white gaslight might not be too unfavorable
to the complexion of the beauties below.
Whether this device is still thought necessary
in ballrooms I do not know ; but I suggest
it as a hint to the wise.
A handsome parlor then, differed from a
handsome parlor now, mostly in the minor
matters of decoration. The pictures on the
walls were few, and were mostly portraits.
For the rest, mirrors were large and hand
some. You would see some copies from well-
known paintings in European galleries, and
any one who had an AUston would be glad
to show it. But I mean that most walls were
bare. In good houses, if modern, the walls of
parlors would invariably be painted of one
neutral tint ; but in older houses there would
be paper hangings, perhaps of landscape
patterns. The furniture of a parlor would
generally be twelve decorous heavy chairs,
probably hair-seated, with their backs against
the walls ; a sofa which matched them, also
with its back against the wall ; and a heavy,

8 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
perhaps marble-topped centre table. There
might be a rocking-chair in the room also ;
but, so far as I remember, other easy-chairs,
scattered as one chose about a room, were
unknown. Try to recall, dear reader, or to imagine,
the conditions of a town without any rail
roads, and without any steam navigation
beyond fifteen miles. The first steamboat in
Boston harbor went to Nahant and back
again, about 1826. The first steam railway
ran trains to Newton, nine miles, in 1833.
Please to remember, then, that everybody
lived in Boston the year round, excepting a
handful of rich people who had country
places in Dorchester, Roxbury, Newton,
Brookline, Watertown, Waltham, Brighton,
Cambridge, Charlestown, or Medford, acces
sible by a horse and chaise. What we call
buggies were unknown, and a gentleman and
lady would certainly ride in a chaise, which
was not the English chaise, but a two-wheeled
covered vehicle, hung on C-springs. In such
a town the supplies of food, unless brought
from the immediate neighborhood, came from

'tis SEVENTY YEARS SINCE. 9
the seaboard or the Western rivers in sloops
or schooners. We drew our flour from points
as far south as Richmond. I remember that,
in more than one winter, when my grand
mother, in Westhampton, had sent us a keg
or two of home apple-sauce, the sloop which
brought the treasure was frozen up in Con
necticut River below Hartford, so that it was
four or five months before we hungry children
enjoyed her present. Great wagons with
large teams of horses brought from the inte
rior such products as did not come in this
way. For these horses and wagons there were,
on "the Neck" and beyond, great sheds
and stables. The country teamster left his
horses and his load there while he came
into town to make sure where it was to be
delivered. To pick up the stray corn which
was scattered in these sheds great flocks of
pigeons congregated, of whom a wretched
handful survive to this day. I mention these
little details to give some idea of the country
fashion of our lives. Two or three weeks out
of town in summer was a large allowance

10 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
of vacation. Nobody dreamed of closing a
church in summer. The school vacation was
a fortnight and three days in August, to
which, in later days, was added first one
week, and then two weeks in June. The
summer break-up which now divides every
body's Boston year was then wholly unknown.

CHAPTER II.
SCHOOL LIFE.
yfVFTER studying with great care Mr.
-0_ Howell's "Boy's Town" and Miss Lar
com' s "New England Girlhood," I have
determined not to follow a strict order of
time. For better, for worse, I will throw in
together in one chapter a set of school
memories which range from about 1825 for
ten years. At my own imprudent request,
not to say urgency, I was sent to school with
two sisters and a brother, older than I, when
I was reckoned as about two years old. The
school was in an old-fashioned wooden house
which fronted on a little yard entered from
Summer Street. We went up one flight of
narrow stairs, and here the northern room of
the two bedrooms of the house was occupied
by Miss Susan Whitney for her school, and
the southern room, which had windows on

12 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Summer Street, by Miss Ayres, of whom Miss
Whitney had formerly been an assistant.
Miss Whitney afterwards educated more than
one generation of the children of Boston
families. I supposed her to be one of the
most aged, and certainly the most learned,
women of her time. I believe she was a kind-
hearted, intelligent girl of seventeen, when I
first knew her. I also supposed the room to
be a large hall, though I knew it was not
nearly so large as our own parlors at home.
It may have been eighteen feet square. The
floor was sanded with clean sand every Thurs
day and Saturday afternoon. This was a
matter of practical importance to us, because
with the sand, using our feet as tools, we
made sand pies. You gather the sand with
the inside edge of either shoe from a greater
or less distance, as the size of the pie requires.
As you gain skill, the heap which you make
is more and more round. When it is well
rounded you flatten it by a careful pressure
of one foot from above. Hence it will be seen
that full success depends on your keeping the
sole of the shoe exactly parallel with the

SCHOOL LIFE. 13
plane of the floor. If you And you have suc
ceeded when you withdraw the shoe, you
prick the pie with a pin or a broom splint pro
vided for the purpose, pricking it in whatever
pattern you like. The skill of a good pie-
maker is measured largely by these patterns.
It will readily be seen that the pie is better if
the sand is a little moist. But beggars cannot
be choosers, and while we preferred the sand
on Mondays and Fridays, when it was fresh,
we took it as it came.
I dwell on this detail at length because it is
one instance as good as a hundred of the waj
in which we adapted ourselves to the condi
tions of our times. Children now have car
pets on their kindergarten floors, where sand
is unknown ; so we have to provide clay for
them to model with, and put a heap of sand
in the back yard. Miss Whitney provided for
the same needs by a simpler device, which I
dare say is as old as King. Alfred.
I cannot tell how we were taught to read,
for I cannot remember the time when I could
not read as well as I can now. There was a
little spelling-book called "The New York

14' A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Spelling-Book," printed by Mahlon Day.
When, afterwards, I came to read about Mah
lon in the book of Ruth, my notion of him
was of a man who had the same name as the
man who published the spelling-book. My
grandfather had made a spelling-book which
we had at home. Privately, I knew that,
because he made it, it must be better than the
book at school, but I was far too proud to
explain this to Miss Whitney. I accepted her
spelling-book in the same spirit in which I
have often acted since, falling in with what I
saw was the general drift, because the matter
was of no great consequence. For reading-
books we had Mrs. Barbauld's "First Lessons,"
"Come hither, Charles, come to mamma";
and we had "Popular Lessons," by Miss Rob-
bins, which would be a good book to revive
now, but I have not seen it for sixty years.
The school must have been a very much
"go-as-you-please" sort of place. So far it
conformed to the highest ideals of the best
modern systems. But it had rewards and pun
ishments. I have now a life of William Tell
which was given me as a prize when I was flve

SCHOOL LIFE. 16
years old. By way of showing what was then
thought fit reading for boys of that age I copy
the first sentence: "Friends of liberty, mag
nanimous hearts, sons of sensibility, ye who
know how to die for your independence and
live only for your brethren, lend an ear to my
accents. Come ! hear how one single man,
born in an uncivilized clime, in the midst of
a people curbed beneath the rods of an
oppressor, by his individual courage, raised
this people so abased, and gave it a new
being" — and so on, and so on. My brother
Nathan had "Rasselas" for a prize, and my
sister Sarah had a silver medal, " To the most
amiable," which I am sure she deserved,
though the competition extended to the whole
world. But these were the great prizes. In an old
desk, of which the cover had been torn ofl, in
the closet at the left of the fireplace, were a
number of bows made of yellow, pink, and
blue ribbon. When Saturday came, every
child " who had been good" during the week
was permitted to select one of these bows,
choosing his own color, and to have it pinned

16 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
on his clothes under his chin to wear home.
If, on the other hand, he had been very bad, he
had a black bow affixed, willy nilly. I hardly
dare to soil this page with the tale, but there
was an awful story that a boy, whom I will
call Charles Waters, unpinned his black bow
and trod it in the dirt of the street. But I
hasten to add, that in that innocent com
munity no one believed this dreadful story.
Indeed, it was whispered from one to another,
rather as an index of what terrible stories
were afloat in the world than with any feeling
that it could possibly be true.
It is certainly a little queer that in after
years one remembers such trifles as this, and
forgets absolutely the weightier matters of the
law ; how he learned to read and write ; how
he fought with the angel of vulgar fractions
and compelled him to grant a blessing ; how,
in a word, one learned anything of importance.
But so it is ; and thus, as I have said, I have no
memory of any time when I could not read as-
well as I can now. Perhaps that is the reason
why I am too apt to rank teachers of elocution
with dancing-masters and fencing-masters, and

' I "WAS BEADING A BOOK "WITH PBKFECT SATISFACTION. —Page 17.

SCHOOL LIFE. 17
other professors of deportment. Dear Miss
Whitney must have taught us well, or we
should have remembered the process more
sadly. If this is a book of confessions I ought to
tell my crimes, and one sin I certainly com
mitted at Miss Whitney's school. But alas, I
do not know what it was, and I never did.
Only this I know. We were all too small to
go home through Main Street alone. Fullum
came for us at twelve, and again at flve in the
afternoon. Who Fullum was shall appear by
and by. One day, when Fullum came at noon,
he found me seated in a large yellow chair in
the middle of the school-room. I was reading
a book with perfect satisfaction. So soon as
Fullum appeared, I was lifted from the chair
and my "things" were put on. When we
were in the street Fullum said, "What have
you been doing that was naughty, doctor ? ' '
I told him, with perfect sincerity, that I had
done nothing wrong. But this he did not
believe. He reminded me of what I then recol
lected, that that yellow chair was always a seat
of punishment. I had certainly never seen

18 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
any one in it before — unless it were Miss Whit
ney herself — excepting the sinners of the
school, placed there for punishment. But alas,
it had not occurred to any one to tell me why
I was put there ; and as my own conscience
was clear, I have not known from that day to
this what my offence was.
I could probably without much difficulty
make a volume on Miss Whitney's school, and
the various aspects of life as they there pre
sented themselves to me. But these papers
must be severely condensed, and I omit such
details. To me personally they have a little
value, as bearing on the question how far back
our memory really runs. There is a French
man who says that he recollects the relief pro
duced on his eyes when he was a baby, thirty-
six hours old, and a nurse lowered a curtain to
screen him from the light. I am not able to
fix any facts as early as this ; but I am inter
ested in the observation that, among these
early recollections of Miss Whitney, there is
not included the slightest memory of my first
interviews with her. I had a brother and two
sisters older than myself, who were my home

SCHOOL LIFE. 19
playmates. I saw them go to school from day
to day, and I flnally cried because I wanted to
go with them. Miss Whitney was therefore
persuaded to receive.a pupil two years old at
the school. It speaks well for her, I think,
that she found it possible to adapt such a
young gentleman to the exercises of the
academy. This makes me think, as I have said, that
those exercises must have been conducted
on the individual plan. But my chief mem
ories of the school are of conducting observa
tions, similar to Tyndall's, on the effect pro
duced by sunlight upon dust floating in the
air. Such luxuries as window-shades or blinds
were unknown ; if the sun shone in on the
south side of the room you shut an inside shut
ter. This reminds me that inside shutters are
almost wholly unknown to the rising gener
ation, but then every house of which I knew
anything had them. At the top of this shutter,
which was of panelled wood, a heart was cut,
so as to let a little light into the room when the
shutters were closed. It will readily be seen
that this heart made very curious forms on the

20 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
floating dust in the school-room. What with
the manufacture of sand pies and other enter
prises going on, there must have been a good
deal of dust in the school-room, and I remember
far better the aspects of this dust, as the sun
lighted it and as it floated in different cur
rents, than I do any single lesson which I
acquired from books.
It will give some idea of the simplicity of
manners and of the quietness of the little town
if I tell how " we four " — by which I mean the
four oldest children of my father's family —
went to school and returned, in the winter.
In winter Fullum put my two sisters, my
brother, and myself into a little green sleigh
which he had had made, in which he dragged
us over the snow to school. I believe that if
any Fullum of to-day should start from the
upper door of the Parker House, and drag
four little children down School Street, through
Washington Street, to Summer Street, and
stop at a door opposite Hovey's, he would
attract a fair share of attention. But there
was room enough for all then. The " main
street" was what the chief street of a good

SCHOOL LIFE. 21
country town would be now, and this equipage
seemed strange to nobody.
School kept only in the morning on Satur
day, and Thursday afternoon was always a holi
day, in memory of the "Thursday lecture." *
But as the lecture was delivered at eleven
o'clock in the morning, and every school kept
until twelve, there was, of course, no real con
nection between the holiday and the lecture.
The half- holiday was changed to Wednesday,
a few years later than the time I am speaking
of. It is on this account that Wednesday and
Saturday appear to me, to this moment, the
happiest days of the week. For I may as well
say, flrst as last, that school was always a bore
*The Thursday lecture was a regular function, in which
one of the Congregational ministers of Boston addressed such
audiences as came together on Thursday. At this time the
congregation consisted simply of the ministers of the town
and neighborhood, and such ladies, generally past youth, as
liked to go to hear the city clerk read the intentions of mar
riage. The law then required that these intentions should be
read three times before some public assembly, and the Thurs
day lecture was dignified by the name of a public assembly.
But in older times the lecture had been much more important.
To tell the whole truth, the restrictions in England, on such
week-day addresses as were made by distinguished preachers,
drove the particular thorn in the side of the Puritan which did

22 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
to me. I did not so much hate it, as dislike
it, as a necessary nuisance. I think all my
teachers regarded it as such ; I am sure they
made me so regard it.
Just before I was six years old I was trans
ferred from Miss Whitney's school to another
school which was in the immediate neighbor
hood, being in the basement of the First
Church, which was then in Chauncy Street.
It stood, I think, just where Coleman & Mead's
great store is to-day. There were three or four
large rooms under the church, which were
rented as school-rooms ; and it being thought
that I was large enough to go to a man's

most to drive him to his new home in the West. Cotton and
the other preachers had all been imprisoned, or threatened
with being imprisoned, because they would deliver these
week-day lectures. The people who emigrated were abso
lutely determined that they would hear them, and that is prob
ably the reason why the reader and I are in this country —
because our ancestors chose to' go to church in the middle of
tlie week. When they came here they established the Thurs
day lecture. Cotton's fame and eloquence were such that the
Thursday lecture gave Boston its pre-eminence in the Bay, a
pre-eminence which it did not have before Cotton arrived. So
that the Thursday lecture has a definite historical interest to a
Boston born man. But the average Boston man long since
ceased to go to hear it, and it is now discontinued.

SCHOOL LIFE. 23
school, I was sent there, to my great delight,
with my friend Edward Webster. We were
very intimate from days earlier than this, of
which I will speak in another chapter, and it
was a great pleasure to us that we could go to
school together. He had been at Miss Ayres' s,
so that only an entry parted us. There was
no thought of sending me to a public school.
My father and mother had both very
decided, and, I have a right to say, very
advanced, views on matters of education ; and
advanced education was then a matter every
where in the air. The Boston Latin School
had been made a first-rate school for prepar
ing boys for college, under the eye and care
of Benjamin Apthorp Gould, some ten years
before. But there was no public school of any
lower grade, to which my father would have
sent me, any more than he would have sent me
to jail. Since that time I have heard my con
temporaries talk of the common school train
ing of the day, and I do not wonder at my
father's decision. The masters, so far as I
know, were all inferior men ; there was con
stant talk of " hiding " and " cow-hides " and

24 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
" ferules " and "thrashing," and I should say,
indeed, that the only recollections of my con
temporaries about those school-days are of one
constant low conflict with men of a very low
type. So soon as a boy was sent to the Latin
School — and he was sent there at nine years of
age — all this was changed into the life of a
civilized place. Why the Boston people toler
ated such brutality as went on in their other
public schools I do not know, and never have
known; but no change came for some years
after. For the next three years the only object, so
far as I was concerned, was to have me live
along and get ready for the Latin School. I
have always been glad that I was sent where I
was — to a school without any plan or machin
ery, very much on the go-as-you-please prin
ciple, and where there was no strain put upon
the pupil. I disliked it, as I disliked all
schools ; but here, again, I regarded the whole
arrangement as one of those necessary nui
sances which society imposes on the individual,
and which the individual would be foolish if he
quarrelled with, when he did not have it in his

SCHOOL LIFE. 25
power to abolish it. I had no such power, and
therefore went and came as I was bidden, only
eager every day to exchange the monotonies
of school life for the more varied and larger
enterprises of the play-room or of the Common.
I have said that advanced education was in
the air. It will be hard to make boys and
girls of the present day understand how much
was then expected from reforms in education.
Dr. Channing was at his best then, and all
that he had to say about culture and self-
culture impressed people intensely — more in
tensely, I think, than was good for them.
There were rumors from Europe of Fellenberg's
school at Hof wyl. At Northampton the Round
Hill School was started in 1823 on somewhat
similar plans. In England. Lord Brougham and
the set of people around him were discussing
the " march of intellect," and had established
a Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowl
edge, whose name has lived after it. I may
say here, in a parenthesis, that the first time I
ever heard of the "march of intellect" was
when I saw a very funny play, in which a
clever boy named Burke was the hero in the

26 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
" march of intellect." He appeared in half a
dozen characters, to teach half a dozen sub
jects ; and it was a capital satire on the idea
that everything could be taught by professors.
Mr. Webster, Mr. Edward Everett, my father,
and other gentlemen in their position estab
lished a society in Boston which did the same
thing. The reign of Lyceums and Mechanics'
Institutes had begun. Briefly, there was the
real impression that the kingdom of heaven
was to be brought in by teaching people what
were the relations of acids to alkalies, and
what was the derivation of the word " cord-
wainer." If we only knew enough, it was
thought, we should be wise enough to keep
out of the fire, and we should not be burned.
So it was that any novelty, when it was pre
sented at a school-room door, was even more
apt to be accepted than it is now ; and, as
every reader of these lines knows, such things
are accepted pretty willingly now. So I remem
ber that I was taught " geometry " when I was
six years old — or that I thought I was — from
a little book called " The Elements of Geom
etry." I could rattle off about isosceles tri-

SCHOOL LIFE. 27
angles when I was six, as well as I can now.
And I had other queer smattering bits of
knowledge, useful or useless, which were
picked up in the same way.
At school there was a school library, from
which we borrowed books, because we liked
the mechanism of it. We had much better
books at home ; but of course it was good fun
to have your name entered on a book, and to
return them once a week, and so on.
My father was one of the best teachers I ever
knew. When he had a moment, therefore,
from other affairs to give to our education, it
was always well used ; and we doubtless owed
a great deal to him which we afterwards did not
know how to account for. Among other such
benefactions, I owe it that for these three or
four years, when really I had nothing to do but
to grow physically, I was placed with a simple,
foolish man for a teacher, and not with one
of the drivers, who had plans and would want
to make much of us.. Among other notions of
my father, right or wrong as the case may be,
was this : that a boy could pick up the rudi
ments of language quite early in life. So the

28 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
master was told that Edward Webster and I,
and perhaps some other boys, were to be
taught the paradigms of the Latin grammar at
once. We also had given to us little Latin
books, which we spelled away upon. One was
a translation of Campe's German version of
"Robinson Crusoe" into Latin. It was
thought that the interest of the book would
induce us to learn the meaning of the words.
But the truth was, we were familiar with
Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," and regarded this
as a low and foolish imitation, of which we made
a great deal of fun. All the same, the agony
with which some boys remember their first
studies of " amo, amas, amat," is wholly
unknown to me. I drifted into those things
simply, and by the time I was sent to the
Latin School the point had been gained, and
I knew my "penna, pennce, penncB,^'' and my
" amo, amas, amat,^^ as well as if I had been
born to them.
The Latin School stood, at that time, where
the lower part of Parker's Hotel is now, in
School Street. School Street received its name
from this school. At the beginning the school

SCHOOL LIFE. 29
was on the other side of the street, where the
Franklin statue now stands. But when the
King's Chapel people had increased so much,
that they wanted to enlarge their little wooden
tabernacle and carry their church farther down
the street, about the middle of the last century,
they applied to the town for the use of the
school-house lot.
This was the occasion of a fierce battle in
more than one town meeting. Really, the
question divided the old line Puritans, or the
people who held to their traditions, from the
new people, who were either conscientious
members of the Episcopal Church or were quite
indifferent to the matter. But the town gave
its consent, by a very small majority, to the
removal of the school-house, and the King's
Chapel people had to build a new school-house
on the southern side of the street. This
stood till 1814, when a larger house was
built in the same place. This school-house
made the side of what is now known as
Chapman Place ; but in my time this was
called Cooke's Court, in honor of a certain
Elisha Cooke, who was a very eminent man

30 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
in colonial times. There were one or two
old wooden houses in the court, one of which
was covered with Virginia creeper, the first I
ever saw. I remember thinking that the berries
of the Virginia creeper were, in some sort,
discovered by me, and that no one had known
of their existence before, and I was disap
pointed that they proved to be such poor
eating. Above the school, on School Street, was a
wooden house, with a garden in front of it, and
further up still a new brick house, where, in the
early part of these reminiscences, my father's
family lived. From the back windows of this
house, when I was a very little boy, I used to
look out and see the boys at play. It will
amuse the boys of the present generation to
know that in summer most of them wore long
calico gowns, quite like the gowns which min
isters sometimes wear now, only without the
flowing sleeves.
Boys were then admitted into the Latin
School when they were nine years old. They
were examined so far as to see if they could
spell decently and whether they had some

SCHOOL LIFE. 31
slight knowledge of arithmetic. As for writing,
we were expected to learn that after we entered
the school. Once there we were all put into
the same class, and were set to studying our
Latin grammar.
We always came to school early, all of the
fun of the school being enjoyed before the bell
rang. Different classes grouped in different
corners of the neighborhood, and talked of the
school news or the news of the day with the
other fellows. We had some South End boys,
who came to school highly excited one day
with the announcement that an "omnibus"
had been put upon Washington Street. No
one had ever seen an omnibus before. This
omnibus was called the Governor Brooks, and
it had four horses, and it was twice as long as
any omnibus which any Boston boy has seen
in our streets now for twenty years. I felt,
afterwards, quite sure that I rode up the long
hill at Granada in Spain in the same omnibus,
and I was terribly afraid that the linchpin
might give way, but this may have been a
delusion of mine. The first " omnibus " in the
world was put on its work in Paris. It was

32 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
called "La Dame Blanche," from the White
Lady of Scott's novel of "The Monastery,"
about the year 1821.
We had not much room for playing, but we
might take a turn at tag or some other out
door game before the school-bell rang. But at
last, at eight o'clock in summer and at nine
in winter, the bell began to ring. It rang for
five minutes, and before the end of the five
minutes every boy must be in his place. The
masters, four or five of them, had been stand
ing in the meanwhile on the sidewalk in front
of the school door ; as the bell rang they bowed
to each other and repaired one by one to their
rooms. About this bell there were various tradi
tions, and its experience had, indeed, been
somewhat singular. I believe it had been the
bell of the Huguenot Church lower down on
the same street. It hung, as church bells
do, on the wheel in the cupola, but it had
long since been found that no rope on the
wheel would give to the bell the regular stroke
which for some reason was thought desirable.
Some strong, quick boy was therefore sent up

SCHOOL LIFE. 33
into the belfry, and he took hold of the
tongue and struck it rapidly and sharply on
the side of the bell. It may readily be seen
that to do this for five minutes was quite an
exhausting bit of physical labor, but, for all
that, it was rather a privilege to be permitted to
ring the bell. For, in compensation for doing
so the boy was awarded certain credits on his
conduct or recitation lists ; and the boy who
found himself going to the bad, in his studies
or by any other bad marks, would ask to be
assigned to the bell that he might work off
these misdemeanors by the diligence of his
bell-ringing. Some boys rang the bell well,
some rang it badly, and a certain distinction
attached to the .business. I remember per
fectly that, when on some occasion the bell
boy was absent, Mr. Dillaway, looking around
for a substitute, sent me up into the belfry ;
but I made wretched work of the bell, and was
not sorry to be relieved before a minute was
over by some more stalwart boy who was more
used to the business.
By the time the bell struck its last stroke
every boy would be in his seat. The boys of

34 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
the present generation have little idea what
such seats were. At first they were simply
long benches with what we call long " forms"
in front. About midway of my school career,
there were substituted for these benches sepa
rate desks, somewhat like what boys have now,
but with the very hardest and smallest seat
which was ever contrived for an unfortunate
boy to wriggle upon. Still we could open the
desks and support them with our heads while
we pretended to be arranging our books. No
school-boy who has ever had the felicity of
such a desk, needs to be told what various
orgies we could carry on under such shelter of
protection. A certain good-natured courtesy assigned to
our school as a teacher of penmanship one of
the old masters who was supposed to have out
lived his usefulness in the "grammar school."
This was Mr. Jonathan Snelling. We used to
call him familiarly "Old Johnny Snelling,"
but we always treated him with the respect
which was due to an old man. The days of
quill pens had not gone by, and it was then a
part of a boy's or girl's education to know

SCHOOL LIFE. 35
how to make a pen well — an accomplishment
which, I am afraid, is not now possessed by all
the readers of these lines. Johnny Snelling had
his own little room apart from the room of the
head-master, and the boys in that room went
in "to him to write ; but the other boys wrote
in different hours assigned for the purpose,
and Johnny Snelling went from room to room
to give them their instruction. For me, I
wrote wretchedly, and was always marked very
low on the calendar, but I would persuade this
good old gentleman to assign to me copies
in German text or old English or the other
variations from the deadly monotony of the
copybook, rather in the hope that I might
conciliate the masters, by the enterprise of
this break out into new fields. At all events
this was some variety, and as I have said it was
on the monotony of school life that my dislike
of it was founded.
I entered the school in 1831, being then nine
years old. That was the minimum for the
entrance of boys at that time, and the course
was five years. I saw Mr. Leverett, who was
the principal when I w^s adnaittedj but in the

36 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
course of a few weeks he left the school to the
charge of Mr. Charles Knapp Dillaway, who is
well remembered by everyone who has had
anything to do with education in Boston for
the last sixty years. I may say in passing that
I was permitted to speak at his funeral, and I
could not but remember then that, from the
time when he entered the Latin School in 1818
till he died in 1889, he had been personally
connected more or less distinctly with our
system of public education. He had, there
fore, seen the working of that system for more
than a quarter part of the period since it was
established by Winthrop and his companions
in 1635.
The system of the school was rigid, but I do
not think boys object to rigidity. It carried
to the extreme the cultivation of verbal mem
ory. We had a very bad Latin grammar,
which I suppose was the best there was, made
by Mr. Gould himself from Principal Adam's
"Latin Grammar," Avhich was used in all
English schools. "Principal Adam" is the
Edinburgh Adam of whom you read in Walter
Scott and other Scotch books. The late

SCHOOL LIFE. 37
Joseph Gardner, laughing about such things
a few years ago, said to me, "I can remember
the block on which I was standing in the Place
Venddme in Paris, when, as by a revelation,
it occurred to me that Andrews and Stoddard's
" Latin Grammar" was made from the Latin
language, and that the Latin language was not
made from Andrews and Stoddard's gram
mar, as up to that moment I had always sup
posed." I am quite clear that I went well through
the Latin School with the distinct feeling that
Adam's grammar stated the eternal truth with
regard to the language, and that Cicero and
the rest of them had had to adapt themselves
to it. I cannot think that the masters thought
so, but I doubt if they cared much about it,
and certainly they left that impression on the
minds of the pupils. The first year of the
little boys was spent in committing the words
of this grammar to memory. Unless a boy
were singularly advanced he had no school-
book in hand from September to the next
August excepting this Latin grammar. I can
not conceive of any system more disposed to'

38 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
make him hate the language ; and in fact
about half the boys withdrew from the school,
as not having "a gift for language," before
they had been there two years. These were
generally the boys of quick and bright minds,
who went off "into business," as it was called,
because they were thought not fit to be
scholars. The professional lines of life thus
lost those who would have been ornaments in
whatever profession they had chosen, simply
because those lads had not the verbal memory
to remember and recall long lists of words,
which Adam had noticed, such, for one instance
in a thousand, as had or had not an i before
um in the genitive plural.
I will say in passing, what I have often
had occasion to say in public, that it would be
easy to prepare a bright boy or girl of sixteen
years of age to pass the Harvard Greek
entrance examination in four months of inter
ested study.
But I do not propose to go into the niceties
of education in these papers. Thanks to the
prescience of my father, of which I have
spoken, I was put in with the ten-year-old

SCHOOL LIFE. 39
boys, who had ground through this mill.
Till this moment I am their inferior in certain
of those details of words to which I have
referred, but I enjoyed life at school a great
deal better than they did.
The "march of intellect" fad had not
swept over Boston without bringing in the
German notions about gymnasiums. Dr. Lie-
ber arrived, an exile from Germany, with Dr.
Beck, who was also an exile, and they estab
lished a swimming school where Brimmer
Street is now, and a gymnasium in Tremont
Street — then called Common Street — at the
corner of West Street. That place was then
called the "Washington Gardens." Mr.
Hartwell, in his recent interesting essay on
gymnastics in Boston, says that the first year
Lieber's gymnasium in the Washington Gar
dens had two hundred pupils, which increased
to four hundred in the second, and in the
third year he had four pupils. These figures
show only too fatally what was the fall of the
athletic thermometer. More learned people
than I must say, whether the system of gym
nastics carried on by fixed machinery ever

40 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
maintains its popularity for a long time,
unless it is seconded by athletics such as we
now class under that name, and by a certain
rivalry. My brother Nathan, to whom I owe most of
what I am and have been in the world, was
entered as one of the pupils in the Washing
ton Gardens gymnasium. It must have been
in the year 1827, or possibly 1828, that he
took me with him there. All that I remem
ber about it is my terror when I had climbed
up a ladder and cut off my retreat. I had
seen the other boys climb between the rounds
and slide down the pole which supported
the ladder, and I wished to do this. I got
through the rounds and then was afraid to
slide. But a competent teacher came up,
instructed me in the business, and I won the
high courage by which to loosen my feet from
the rounds and slide safely down. I went
home to tell this story with delight, but never
repeated the experiment.
At the same time — and I think this shows
the courage with which our education was
carried on — I made my first essays in riding

SCHOOL LIFE. 41
on horseback. My father owned a handsome
horse, with which he took our mother and
some one of the children out to ride on half-
holidays. On some occasions another horse,
which was called the "Work-bench" from his
quiet habits— white, I recollect — was taken
with us, saddled. This was that "we boys"
might learn to ride. We were not permitted
to ride in the streets in town, and father
would ride the horse out so far, while my
mother drove the chaise. But once in the
country the boy mounted, and followed the
chaise for the afternoon tour. At five years
old I was so small that my feet would not reach
the stirrups, and I rode with my feet in the
straps which sustained the stirrups. All went
well till, in South Boston, as we came home,
some boys stoned my horse, and he ran and I
was thrown. I remember repeating the ex
periment with the same success and failure,
and it ended in my poor father having to ride
the "Work-bench" home, while I ignomini-
ously returned in the chaise as I had started.
The drift for athletics had swept over the
Latin School also, and the square yard behind

42 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
the school, which seemed immense, but must
have been only thirty feet in each measure
ment, was fitted up with a vaulting-horse, par
allel bars, and so on. But, as the fad wore
itself out, the boys were permitted to destroy
these things ; and when I entered the school,
in 1831, there were only the vaulting-horse
and, perhaps, a pair of parallel bars left ; and
these gradually disappeared from the curric
ulum. This play-ground was the only play
ground of the school, and was accessible only
to the boys in the lowest room. Upstairs we
were confined to a very limited passage-way, I
might call it, at recess, in which we used to
play " tug-of-war," though we never called it
by that name. Practically the recesses were
very short, for the simple reason that they did
not like to have us in the street.
Earlier than this, I can remember, when I
was only four or five years old, that we looked
from the windows of the house out upon the
street, to see the sports of the boys there,
when rather more liberty was granted them.
Among these sports I remember distinctly
seeing the older boys kick their pails to

SCHOOL LIFE. ^ 43
pieces at the end of the school term. They
would subscribe for pails in which to keep the
water which they wanted to drink in the hot
days ; and when the term was done, not wish
ing to leave the pails to their successors, they
kicked them about the sidewalk and street
until they were ruined.
To this school we repaired at eight o'clock
in the morning for the months between April
and October, and at nine o'clock from the 1st
of October to the 1st of April. School lasted
till twelve o'clock, excepting for the little
boys, who, in the latter part of my time, were
"let out" at eleven o'clock. School began
again at three, and lasted, in winter, as long
as there was light, and in summer till six
o'clock. I remember the bitter terror which
we had one afternoon, which must have been
in May, 1833, when we were to go and see
Fanny Kemble in the evening. As it happened,
the school committee chose to come that after
noon for an examination, and our class was
kept in for the completion of the examination
after six o'clock. We sat there terrified for
fear the examination would last until the play

44 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
began in the Tremont Theatre, hard by. I am
afraid the boys of to-day would consider it
rather hard lines, if they were ever kept at
school till the beginning of their theatrical
entertainment. In Mr. Freeman Clarke's autobiography
there is a charming passage about his stay at
this school. He does not in the least overstate
the admirable democratic effect of the whole
thing. We were side by side with the sons of
the richest and most prominent men in Boston ;
we were side by side with the sons of day
laborers, I suppose. The odd thing about it is
that we did not know, and we did not care,
whose sons they were. They were all dressed
alike, they spoke equally good English, their
hands were equally clean, and all we knew of
themwas that one fellow was at the head of
the class, and one was not. There was a
charming boy named Carleton — Charles Muz-
zey Carleton — who was at the head of my
class. He was a pure, manly, upright, gentle
manly fellow, a much better boy than any of
the rest of us were, and we therefore chose to
nickname him " Piety Carleton." I am afraid

SCHOOL LIFE. 45
we made him very unhappy by the nickname,
but he bore himself in just as manly a way in
spite of it. I wish I had known him as a man
— and I ought here to record my shame that
we treated him so ill.
It was a queer transition time for schools.
The present murderous and absurd system of
" examinations " was wholly unknown. Each
master got along as well as he could with his
boys, and the boys got along as well as they
could with the master. There was one head
master, a sub-master, and two others, who
were called ushers on the printed catalogue,
but were never so called by the boys. What
ever the age of these gentlemen, they were
always called "old." It was "Old Dillaway,"
"Old Gardner," " Old Streeter," or "Old Ben
jamin." I now know that the oldest of them
was not thirty-five, and that most of them were
not twenty-five.
We were changed from room to room, sel
dom staying in one room more than three
months, but the highest class was always with
the head-master. I remember one occasion —
I was about ten years old — when, to our

46 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
delight, we were ordered upstairs from the
"English room." We were pleased because
it was known that the new master there was
very easy, and that the "fellows did as they
chose." It was so, indeed. I recollect my
amazement when I saw Hancock cross the
room without leave, make a snowball from
the snow in a pail, and carry it back ostenta
tiously to place it on the front of his desk.
The snow was provided for use on the stove,
where there was a provision for a pan of
water. From this he then made little snow
balls with which to pelt the other boys, all
without interruption from the master.
But other things went on with the same free
dom, which were of more import. I was seated
next to Hay ward, whom I then met for the first
time, and who has since been a life-long friend.
His class was reading Cicero's orations. He
asked me what I knew about Cicero ; and,
when I told him I knew nothing, he kindly
went into a somewhat elaborate history of his
life and analysis of his character as they
appeared to a boy of his age. He has forgotten
this, but I remember it perfectly. It seems to

SCHOOL LIFE. 47
me that this extempore private lecture must
have lasted the whole afternoon. The poor
master made no sort of interference with it,
probably glad if two of his scholars were doing
nothing worse than talking.
But alas, and alas ! this paradise of King
Log came to an end in a day or two. This
amiable gentleman, whose name I have for
gotten, was removed, and Francis Gardner
was put in his place. For forty years after
he was master in that school, and is now well
known as a distinguished classical teacher and
editor. That was his baptism in a school
master's life, and a baptism of fire it was.
We were afterwards intimate friends, and he
told me once that his first month, when he was
bringing those wild-cat boys into order, was
the hardest experience of his life.
In the English room, according to the absurd
theory of many schools, the whole class was
kept together, without any reference to what
they knew of the subject. That is to say, we
were classed for our knowledge of Latin, and
nobody seemed to care how much or how little
we knew of arithmetic. I used to do " the

48 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
sums" and write down the numerical answers
in advance, so far as my slate would hold
them . I was fond of arithmetic, and so I would
be days ahead of the class. Such was also the
case with Richard Storrs Willis, the eminent
musician, who sat by me. He brought to
school Kettell's " Specimens of American
Poetry," a book of that time, in three closely
printed octavo volumes. We read the three
volumes through, and a deal of trash there is
in them. Still it was better than doing noth
ing ; and so I suppose the master thought, for
he never interfered.
To me this was all a curious double life. I
was on perfect terms of companionship with
the fellows in school in recess and in the few
minutes before school. But as soon as school
was over I rushed home, without these com
panions, to join my brother Nathan, who has
been spoken of, for the occupations vastly
more important, which I will describe in
another chapter. The other fellows would
urge us to go down on the wharves, as they
did. Tlie fathers of most of them were in mer
cantile life, for Boston was still largely a ship-

SCHOOL LIFE. 49
ping town. I can remember asking one of
them what we should do on the wharves, with
a horrified feeling which I have to this day
about any vague future entertainment of which
the lines are not indicated. He said, " Oh, we
can go about the vessels, we can talk with
the men." Perhaps they would be landing-
molasses, and we could dip straws in the bung-
holes ; or once a cask had broken open, and
the fellows had gathered up brown sugar in
their hands. To this day, when I hear of per
sons going abroad or anywhere else in search
of an undefined amusement, I imagine them
dipping straws into casks of West India
molasses, and then drawing those straws
through their mouths.
For me and my brother such temptations
were idle. Till the last year of my school life
we had more attractive work at home. In that
year Edward Renouf, afterwards au Episcopal
clergyman, told us that he had access to the
wood wharves on Front Street, near where the
United States Hotel now stands. He said there
were no other fellows there. For some reason
not known to me there were no wharfingers or

50 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
other attendants. With him, and possibly
with Atkins, we used to spend hours on those
wharves. The Boston reader will please
observe that Beach Street means a street on
the beach, and that Harrison Avenue, then
called Front Street, was the front of that part
of the town. Why there were no keepers on
those wharves I never asked, and do not know.
Whether what we did were right or wrong in
the view of magistrates I do not know. I do
know that it was morally and eternally right,
because we thought it was. That is one of the
queer things about a boy's conscience. I do
not remember that, till the time when I dictate
these words, for nearly sixty years, it has once
occurred to me to ask whose was the property
we used on these occasions, or what the owners
would have said to our use of it. But they
did not suffer much, if at all. There were
great stacks of hemlock bark, which was then
coming into use in winter as kindling for
anthracite coal. You could take one of these
pieces of bark, three or four feet long, bore
three holes for masts, and fit this hull with
three masts made from shingles or laths. Stiff

SCHOOL LIFE. 51
wrapping-paper made good sails, and writing-
books were big enough for topsails. Then you
could sail them from wharf to wharf, on voy
ages much more satisfactory than the shorter
voyages of the Frog Pond. I do not know but
that, with a favorable western wind, one might
come out at Sallee, on the coast of Morocco,
with the location of which we were familiar
from the experience of RoMnson Crusoe and
Xury. We knew much more of that port
than of Lisbon, Oporto, or Bordeaux.
But this is an excursus which belongs rather
to the chapter on amusements. The home rule
was absolute, and always obeyed, that we must
report at home as soon as school was done.
This rule undoubtedly interfered with excur
sions to the wharves, which, indeed, had my
father been a shipping merchant, might have
been more frequent. School life of itself had
little to relieve it of its awful monotony. Sat
urday was better than the other days, because
we all went upstairs into the master's room to
hear the declamations. Every boy spoke from
the stage once a month. And here I have
heard William Evarts, Fletcher Webster,

62 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Mayor Prince, Thomas Dawes — ah ! and many
others who have been distinguished since as
orators. Phillips, Hillard, Sumner, and the
Emersons were a little before my time, but I
have seen the prize exercises of all of them
among the treasures of the school.
I remember perfectly the first time I spoke.
It must have been in September, 1831. At my
mother's instigation I spoke a little poem by
Tom Moore, long since forgotten by everybody
else, which I had learned and spoken at the
other school. It is a sort of ode, in which
Moore abuses some poor Neapolitan wretches
because they had made nothing of a rebellion
against the Austrians. I stepped on the stage,
frightened, but willing to do as I had been
told, made my bow, and began :
Ay, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are !
I had been told that I must stamp my foot
at the words, "Down to the dust with them,"
and I did, though I hated to, and was sore
afraid. Naturally enough all the other boys,
one hundred and fifty of them, laughed at such

SCHOOL LIFE. 53
an exhibition of passion from one of the
smallest of their number. All the same, I
plodded on ; but alas I I came inevitably to
the other line:
If there linger one spark of their fire, tread it out !
and here I had to stamp again, as much to the
boys' amusement as before. I did not get a
"good mark" for speaking then, and I never
did afterwards. But the exercise did what it
was meant to do, that is, it taught us not to be
afraid of the audience. And this, so far as I
know, is all of elocution that can be taught, or
need be tried for. In college, it was often very
droll when the time came for one of the South
ern braggarts to speak at an exhibition. For
we saw then the same young man who had
always blown his own trumpet loudly, and
been cock of the walk in his own estimation —
we saw him with his knees shaking under him
on the college platform because he had to
speak in the presence of two hundred people.
I owe to the public school, and to this now de
spised exercise of declamation, that ease before
an audience which I share with most New

54 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Englanders. This is to say that I owe to it the
great pleasure of public speaking when there
is anything to say. I think most public men
will agree with me that this is one of the most
exquisite pleasures of life.

CHAPTER III.
THE SWIMMING SCHOOL.
JOY, joy, joy ! Of a hot summer day in
June, when I was nine years old, I was
asked how I would like to learn to swim.
Little doubt in the mind of any boy who
reads this what my answer was. I and my
elder brother, who was twelve, were to be f>er-
mitted to go to the swimming school. This
was joy enough to have that year marked with
red in our history.
As I have said. Dr. Francis Lieber, who
had been exiled from Germany a few years
before, had come to Boston, and had estab
lished first his gymnasium and then his swim
ming school. Swimming schools were and are
thoroughly established on the continent of
Europe, and the Germans have a special repu
tation for skill in swimming. With the gym
nasium I had little or nothing to do but what
66

56 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
I have told. I was, indeed, quite too small to
be put through its exercises.
The swimming school was in water which
flowed where Brimmer Street and the houses
behind it are now built. It was just such a
building as the floating baths are now which
the city maintains, but that it enclosed a much
larger space. Of this space a part had a floor
so that the water flowed through ; the depth
was about flve feet. To little boys like me it
made little difference that there was this floor,
for we could be as easily drowned in flve feet
of water as if there were flfteen.
With great delight I carried down my little
bathing drawers, which were marked with my
own number so that they might always hang
upon my peg. With the drawers and my
towels I proceeded to a little cell, just such as
bathers have at South Boston now, with the
great advantage, however, that its door was
made of sail-cloth. You selected a cell on the
northern side, so that when you went into the
water you could draw your sail-cloth into tlie
sun, and the sun would heat it well through ;
then, after your bath, you stood wrapped up

THE SWIMMING SCHOOL. 57
in this warm linen shroud, and the luxury was
considered exquisite.
So soon as you were undressed and ready —
and this meant in about one minute — you took
your turn to be taught. A belt was put
around you under your arms ; to this belt a
rope was attached, and you were told to jump
in. You jumped in and went down as far
as gravity chose to take you, and were then
pulled up by the rope. The rope was then
attached to the end of a long belt, and you
were swung out upon the surface of the water.
Then began the instruction.
"0-n-e; — two, three:" the last two words
spoken with great rapidity — "one" spoken
very slowly. This meant that the knees and
feet were to be drawn up very slowly, but
were to be dashed out very quickly, and then
the heels brought together as quickly.
Boys who were well built for it and who
were quick learned to swim in two or three
lessons. Slender boys and little boys who
had not much muscular force — and such was
I — were a whole summer before they could be
trusted without the rope. But the training

58 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
was excellent, and from the end of that year
till now I have been entirely at home in the
water. I think now that scientiflc and sys
tematic training in swimming is a very impor
tant part of public instruction, and I wish
we could see it introduced everywhere where
there is responsible oversight of boys at
school.

CHAPTER IV.
LIFE AT HOME.
I AM certainly not writing my autobiogra
phy ; but I cannot give any idea of how
boys lived in the decade when I was a
boy — that is, in the years between 1826 and
1836 — without giving a chapter to home life
as I saw it. In passing I will say that I first
remember the figures 1826, thus combined,
as I saw them on the cover of Thomas's
Almanac of 1827. Here Time, with the
figures 1827 on his head, was represented
as mowing in a churchyard, where a new stone
with the figures 1826 was prominent ; 1825,
1824, and the others were on stones somewhat
overgrown by grass and sunken in the ground.
The conceit seemed to me admirable, and the
date fixed itself on my memory.
I was born in a house which stood where
Parker's larger lunch-room now fronts the
69

60 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Tremont House. We moved from this house
to that on the corner of School Street, lately
purchased by Mr. Parker to enlarge his hotel,
and in 1828 we moved again to the new house,
which was, and is, No. 1 Tremont Place. It
is now two or three stories higher than it was
then ; but some parts of the interior are not
changed. Behind it was a little yard, with a
wood-house, called a " shed," on top of which
the clothes were dried. This arrangement
was important for our New England childhood.
I was the youngest of four children who
made the older half of a large family. By a
gap between me and my brother Alexander, —
who afterwards was lost in the government
service in Pensacola, — "we four" were sepa
rated from the "three little ones." It is
necessary to explain this in advance, in a his
tory which is rather a history of young life in
Boston than of mine alone.
My father, as I have said, was an experi
enced teacher in young life, and he never lost
his interest in the business of education. My
mother had a genius for education, and it is a
pity that, at an epoch in her life when she

LIFE AT HOME. 61
wanted to open a girls' school, she was not
permitted to do so. They had read enough of
the standard books on education to know how
much sense there was in them, and how much
nonsense. Such books were about in the
house, more or less commented on by us young
critics as we grew big enough to dip into them.
At the moment I had no idea that any sci
ence or skill was expended on our training. I
supposed I was left to the great American
proverb which I have already cited : "Go as
you please." But I have seen since that the
hands were strong which directed this gay
team of youngsters, though there was no stim
ulus we knew of, and though the touch was
velvet. An illustration of this was in that
wisdom of my father in sending me for four
years to school to a simpleton.
The genius of the whole, shown by both my
father and mother, came out in the skill which
made home the happiest place of all, so that
we simply hated any engagement which took
us elsewhere, unless we were in the open air.
I have said that I disliked school, and that I
did not want to go down on the wharves, even

62 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
with that doubtful bribe of the molasses casks.
At home we had an infinite variety of amuse
ments. At home we might have all the other
boys, if we wished. At home, in our two
stories, we were supreme. The scorn of toys
which is reflected in the Edgeworth books had,
to a certain extent, its effect on the household.
But we had almost everything we wanted
for purposes of manufacture or invention.
Whalebone, spiral springs, pulleys, and cat
gut, for perpetual motion or locomotive car
riages ; rollers and planks for floats — what they
were I will explain — all were obtainable. In
the yard we had parallel bars and a high cross-
pole for climbing. When we became chemists
we might have sulphuric acid, nitric acid, lit
mus paper, or whatever we desired, so our
allowance would stand it. I was not more
than seven years old when I burned off my
eyebrows by igniting gunpowder with my
burning-glass. I thought it was wisest not to
tell my mother, because it might shock her
nerves, and I was a man, thirty years old,
before she heard of it. Such playthings as
these, with very careful restrictions on the

' I WAS NOT MORE THAN SEVEN YEABS OLD WHEN I BURNED
OFF MY EYEBROWS." — Page 62.

LIFE AT HOME. 63
amount of powder, with good blocks for build
ing, quite an assortment of carpenter's tools,
a work-bench good enough, printing materials
ad UMtum from my father's printing-office,
furnished endless occupation.
Before I attempt any account of the home
life which grew out of swch conditions I must
make a little excursus to describe the domestic
service of those days, quite different from ours.
I wish particularly to describe Fullum, who
outlived the class to which he belonged, and
had, when he died, in 1886, long been its last
representative. The few New England children who still
read the Rollo books will have pleasant
remembrances of Jonas and Beechnut, in
whom Mr. Jacob Abbott has presented for
posterity the hired boy of New England coun
try life. In life in a little town like Boston
this hired boy might grow to be the hired man,
and, as in Fullum' s exceptional case, might
grow to be a hundred years old, or nearly that,
without changing that condition. If that hap
pened his presence in a family became a fac
tor of importance to the growing children. In

64 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
the case of Fullum, if, as he supposed, he was
born in 1790, he was thirty-two years old
when, in 1822, he took me in his arms when I
was an hour old.
Fullum, then, had been a country lad, who
came down from Worcester County to make
his fortune. I do not know when, but it was
before the time of the short war with England.
He expected to be, and was, the hired boy and
hired man in one and another Boston family.
Early in the business he was in Mr. William
Sullivan's service. He was driving Mr. Sulli
van out of town, one day, when they found
Roxbury Street blocked up by the roof of the
old meeting-house, which had been blown into
the street by the gale of September, 1815.
Afterward he was in Daniel Webster's ser
vice, and here also he took care of horses and
carriages. He was a born tyrant, and it was
always intimated that Mr. Webster did not
fancy his rule. Anyway he came from the
Websters to us, I suppose when Mr. Webster
went to Congress, in the autumn of 1820. And,
in one fashion or another, he lived with our
family, as a most faithful vassal or tyrant, for

LIFE AT HOME. 65
sixty-six years from that time. I say " vassal
or tyrant," for this was a pure piece of feudal
ism; and in the feudal system the vassal is
often a tyrant, while the master is almost
always a slave. So is it that the memories of
my boyhood are all mixed up with memories
of Fullum.
I have spoken of him in connection with
Miss Whitney's school. Here was a faithful
man Friday, who would have died for any of
us, so strong was his love for us, yet who
insisted on rendering his service very much
in his own way. If my father designed a
wooden horse for me, to be run on four
wheels, after the fashion of what were called
velocipedes in those days, he would make the
drawings, but it would be Fullum' s business
to take them to the carpenter's and see the
horse made. If we were to have heavy hoops
from water-casks, Fullum was the person who
conducted the negotiation for them. There
was no harm in the tutorship to which we
were thus intrusted. He never used a pro
fane or impure word while he was with us
children ; and as he was to us an authority in

66 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
all matters of gardening, of carpentry, of driv
ing and the care of horses, we came to regard
him as, in certain lines, omniscient and omnip
otent. If now the reader will bear in mind
that this omniscient and omnipotent person,
at once the Hercules and the Apollo of our
boyhood, could not read, write, or spell so
well as any child four years old who had been
twelve months at Miss Whitney's school, that
reader may understand why a certain scorn of
book-learning sometimes stains these pages,
otherwise so pure. And if the same reader
should know that this same Fullum always
spoke in superlatives, and multiplied every
flgure with which he had to do by hundreds
or by thousands, he may have a key to a cer
tain habit of exaggeration which has been
detected in the present writer. "They was
ten thousand men tryin' to git in. But old
Reed, he wouldn't let um." This would be
his way of describing the effort of four or five
men to enter some place from which Reed,
the one constable of Boston, meant to keep
them out.
The reader must excuse this excursus, for I

LIFE AT HOME. 67
think it necessary. I think it necessary for
the civilized child to be kept in touch, in his
childhood, with animals and with savages.
Fullum was the person through whom savage
life touched ours. To Fullum, largely, we
owed it that we were neither prigs nor dudes.
We had no cats, nor dogs, nor birds ; and
Fullum' s place in these reminiscences is far
more important than is that of any pet, any
school-master, or any minister.
The oldest child of "us four" was but
four years and nine months older than the
youngest. She had, as I have said, received,
and deserved, at Miss Whitney's a medal
given to the "most amiable." Next to her
came a boy, then another girl, and then this
writer. The movements of "us four" had
much in common ; but at school and in most
plays the boys made one unit and the girls
another, to report every evening to one
another. It is to the boyhood experiences
that these pages belong.
But it was a Persian and Median rule of
that household, which I recommend to all
other households, that after tea there were to

68 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
be no noisy games. The children must sit
down at the table — there was but one — and
occupy themselves there till bedtime. It has
been well said that the ferocity of infancy is
such that, were its strength equal to its will,
it would long ago have exterminated the
human race. This is true. And it is to be
remarked, also, that the strength of infancy,
and of boyhood and girlhood, is very great.
Thus is it that, unless some strict rules are
laid down for limiting its use and the places
of its exhibition, and kept after they are laid
down, the death of parents, and of all persons
who have passed the age of childhood, may
be expected at any moment. One of such
rules was this of which I have spoken.
Everybody of whom we knew anything
dined at one or two o'clock in Boston then.
After dinner men went back to their places of
business. At six, or possibly as late as seven
in summer, came "tea." After tea, as I have
said, the children of this household gathered
round the table. Fullum came in and took
away the tea things, folded the cloth and put
it away. Our mother then drew up her chair

LIFE AT HOME. 69
to the drawer of the table, probably with a
baby in her arms awaiting the return of its
nurse. We four drew up our chairs on the
other sides. Then we might do as we chose —
teetotum games, cards of all sorts, books,
drawing, or evening lessons, if there were any
such awful penalty resulting from the sin of
Adam and Eve. But nobody might disturb
anyone else.
Drawing was the most popular of the occu
pations, and took the most of our time and
thought. The provisions for it were very
simple, and there was only the faintest pre
tence at instruction. There was one particu
lar brand of lead pencils, sold by one particular
grocer in West Street at twelve cents a dozen.
These were bought at this wholesale rate, and
kept in the drawer. One piece of India rubber
was also kept there for the crowd. As we
gathered at the table, a quarter-sheet of fools
cap was given to each child and to each
guest — as regularly as a bit of butter had been
given half an hour before — and one pencil.
The reader must imagine the steady flow
of voices. "Who's got the India rubber?"

70 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
"Here it is under the Transcript." "This
horse looks as if he were walking on foot-balls."
"Oh, you mustn't draw his shoes ; you never
see his shoes!" "I wish I knew how to
draw a chaise." " I don't see how they make
pictures of battles. My smoke covers up all
the soldiers." Battle pieces, indeed, were, as
usual with children, the favorite compositions.
We were not so far from the last war with
England as the children of to-day are from the
Civil War.
Perhaps two of us put together our paper,
folded it and pinned it in the fold, and then
made a magazine. Of magazines there were
two — The New England Herald, composed
and edited by the two elders of the group, and
The Public Informer, by my sister Lucretia
and me. I am afraid that the name "Public
Informer" was suggested wickedly to us little
ones, when we did not know that those words
carry a disagreeable meaning. But when we
learned this, afterwards, we did not care. I
think some of the Everetts, my uncles, had
had a boy newspaper with the same name.
When things ran with perfect regularity The

LIFE AT HOME. 71
New England Herald was read at the brfeak-
fast-table one Monday morning, and ThePuhlic
Informer the next Monday morning. But
this was just as it might happen. They were
published when the editors pleased, as all
journals should be, and months might go by
without a number. And there was but one
copy of each issue. It would be better if this
could be said of some other journals.
Once a year prizes were offered at school
for translations or original compositions. We
always competed, not to say were made to
compete, by the unwritten law of the family.
This law was simply that we could certainly
do anything if we wanted to and tried. I
remember a long rhythmical version I made of
the story of the flood, in Ovid, and another of
Phaeton. Where Dryden makes Jupiter say,
"Short exhortations need," I remember that
my halting line jumbled along into the ten
syllables, "Long exhortations are not needed
here." I stinted myself in this translation
to four lines before dinner and four lines after
tea ; and by writing eight lines thus, in fifty
days I accomplished the enterprise. I would

72 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
come home from the swimming school ten
minutes earlier because this translation was to
be made ; and, while Fullum was setting the
table for dinner, I would stand at the side
board. There was always an inkstand on it,
with two or three quill pens. I took out the
poem from the upper drawer of the sideboard,
which I never see to this moment without
thinking of Ovid. Then I wrote my four lines,
such as they were, put the manuscript away
again, and proceeded to dinner.
Other boys and other girls liked to come in to
such an evening congress as I have described,
but nothing was changed in the least because
the visitor came, excepting that room was made
at the table. He or she had a quarter-sheet of
foolscap, like the others.
This literature is connected with that of the
world by one reminiscence, which belongs as
late as some of the very last of these evening
sessions. One evening my father came in from
his room, which was next to that we sat in, with
the London Morning Chronicle. He pointed
out an article and said : " Read that to them,
Edward; it will make them laugh." And I

LIFE AT HOME. 73
read the flrst account of Sam Weller as he
revealed himself to Mr. PicTcwick. Of course
we all laughed, as thousands have done since.
But I said sadly : ' ' What a shame that we
shall never hear of Sam Weller again I " This
must have been in the college vacation of the
spring of 1837.
I must not give the idea, however, by speak
ing of these evenings thus that our lives
were specially artistic or literary. They were
devoted to play, pure and simple, with no
object but having a good time. The principal
part of the attics — or, as we called them, gar
rets — in every house we lived in was surren
dered to us boys. In Tremont Place Ave had
the valuable addition of a dark cockloft over
the garret chambers. It had no windows, but
was all the better place to sit and tell stories
in. Then we controlled the stairs to the roof,
and we spent a good deal of time, in the sum
mer days, on the ridge-pole. There were not
twenty houses in Boston on higher land, so
that from this point we commanded a good
view of the harbor. I was amused the other
day when an infantile correspondent of a New

74 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
York newspaper asked how Napoleon could
have used a telegraph before what is called
Mr. Morse's invention, for as early as 1831 we
read all the telegraphic signals of all the vessels
arriving in Boston harbor, and the occasional
semaphoric signals on the lookout on Central
Wharf. About the year 1830, under the pressure of
the " march of intellect," were published some
books for young children from which the
present generation is proflting largely. There
were "The Boy's Own Book," "The GiiTs
Own Book," "The American Girl's Own
Book," and "The Young Lady's Own Book,"
each of them excellent in its way. I think
"The Boy's Own Book," which has since
been published with the double title " An
Encyclopaedia for Boys," led the way in this
affair ; and I still regard it as rather the best
of the series. It had subdivisions for indoor
games, outdoor games, gymnastics, chemistry,
chess, riddles, riding, walking, and I think
driving, boxing, and fencing. Perhaps there
were more heads, but these were those which
occupied our attention most. Somebody made

LIFE AT HOME. 75
me a New Year's present of this book in the
year 1830 or 1831, and from that moment it was
the text-book of the attic. Professor Andrews
and President Eliot would feel their hair grow
ing gray, if for five minutes they were obliged
to read the chemistry which soaked into us
from this book. Whoever wrote it still used
the old nomenclature a good deal. We knew
nothing of HO, and little of the proportions in
which they go into the constitution of things.
We read of ' ' oil of vitriol ' ' and ' ' muriatic
acid," and had other antiquarian names for
agents and reagents. All the same, the book
gave us experiments which we could try —
taught us how to manufacture flreworks in a
fashion, and even suggested to us the painting
of our own magic lantern slides. Our appa
ratus was of the most limited kind. It
was a high festival day when one went
down to Gibbens' grocer's shop and bought
for three cents an empty Florence flask ;
this was the retort of that simple chem
istry. In connection with this, like all other
boys of that time known to me, we made what
were called electrical machines, which gave us

76 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
good sparks and Leyden jar shocks quite suf
ficient to satisfy the guests who visited us.
It is in connection with one of these machines
that I remember one of my mother's gospels.
I was trying to catch a fly, to give him an elec
tric shock, and she would not permit me. I
pleaded in vain that it would not hurt him, but
she said: "It would certainly not give him
pleasure, and it might give him pain."
My father was a civil engineer, somewhat in
advance of his time. He was the first person
to propose the railroad system of Massachu
setts ; and that system would not be what it is,
but for his work for it, in season and out of
season. I cannot remember the time when we
did not have a model railway in the house ; in
earlier years it was in the parlor, so that he
might explain to visitors what was meant by a
car running upon rails. I can still see the
sad, incredulous look, which I understood then
as well as I should now, with which some intelli
gent person listened kindly, and only in manner
implied that it was a pity that so intelli
gent a man as he should go crazy. His crazi-
ness, fortunately, led his associates, and in the

LIFE AT HOME. 77
year 1831, after endless reverses, a charter was
given for the incorporation of the Boston and
Worcester Railway. In the earlier proposals
for such work it was always suggested that
horses should be the moving power. In point
of fact the first railway, which carried the
Quincy granite from Quincy to the sea, was
operated by the weight of the descending
trains, which pulled up the empty cars. I was
with him, as a little boy, sitting on a box in
the chaise, when he drove out once to see the
newly laid Quincy track, and I perfectly re
member his trying with his foot the steadiness
of the rail where it crosses the road to Quincy.
His tastes, of course, led ours. There was a
lathe in the house, which we were permitted to
run under severe conditions ; and we very early
made our own locomotives, which were pro
pelled by whalebone springs.
But the carriage we liked most was the
"float." I have never seen it in the plays of
other boys, though perhaps it is well known.
For a good float you want a board a foot wide,
an inch thick, and four feet long. You want
two rollers, which had better be of hard wood.

78 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
each a foot long and an inch or more in diame
ter ; two inches would be better than one, but
you take what you can get ; a broomstick
furnishes two or three good ones. Placing
these rollers two feet apart on the ground, you
put the float upon them, with one roller at the
end, and the other in the middle. You then
seat yourself carefully on the board, having
two paddles in your hands, made from shingles.
With these two paddles you will find that you
can propel yourself over any floor of reason
able smoothness. You can even pass a thresh
old, and you can run into the most unexpected
corners. If you have a companion on another
float in the same room, you can have naval
battles, or you can go to the assistance of ship
wrecked crews. You can go forward or you
can go backward, every now and then running
a roller out, but skilfully placing it under the
float at such an angle as will direct you in the
way in which you wish to go afterwards. For
this game or sport you should not have too
many companions ; you should have a good
large attic or barn floor, and you should have
unlimited patience. You can make a float, of

LIFE AT HOME. 79
course, out of a museum door, or out of any
plank that happens to be going. I remember
once, when we were hard pressed, one of my
companions went to sea in a soap box. But
what I have described is the ideal float for
young people.
We played all the tame games, such as
checkers, chess, loto, battledoor and shuttle
cock, graces, vingt-et-un, cup and ball, coro-
nella, and the like, but I think under a cer
tain protest. For that matter, I danced under
the same protest. I regarded all these as con
cessions to the social order in which we lived,
and I obeyed that social order as I did in
going to school. But, precisely as I looked
upon school with a certain sense of con
descension, I think we all looked upon these
games as being something provided for an
average public, while we supposed that all
children of sense invented their own games.
I have never, by the way, seen in print the
statement that our teetotum games of that
day were a survival of games of the same kind
running well back into the dark ages. In the
great German museum at Nuremberg I saw

80 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
such games of as early a date, I think, as the
year 1300. Any boy who will look at his tee
totum game of to-day, if such things still
exist, will probably find that it comes out at
63. This means that 63 is the "grand climac
teric," in the old theory of the climacterics;
and then, if he will look back, he will find
that at 7, 14, 21, 28, and so on are the other
climacterics. All this belongs to those happy
ages which knew nothing of modern science.
I have stated already the absolute rule that
we must report at home before we went any
where to play after school. I think this rule
affected our lives a great deal more than my
mother meant it should in laying it down.
She simply wanted to know at certain stages
of the day where her children were. I do not
recollect that she ever forbade our going any
where, where we wanted to. But practically
the rule worked thus : We rushed home from
school, very likely with a plan on foot for the
Common, or for some combined movement with
the other boys. We went into the house to re
port. There was invariably gingerbread ready
for us, which was made in immense quantities

LIFE AT HOME. 81
for the purpose. This luncheon was ready not
only for us, but for any boys we might bring
with us. When once we arrived at home the
home, attractions asserted themselves. There
was some chemical experiment to be continued,
or there was some locomotive to be displayed
to another boy, or there had come in a new
number of the Juvenile Miscellany. In a
word, we were seduced up into the attic, and
up in the attic we were very apt to stay. I
once asked my mother what she supposed the
mothers of the other boys said who came
home with us and partook of luncheon and
entered into our affairs. She simply said that
that was their lookout, it was not hers. She
was perfectly ready to provide luncheon for the
crowd. I rather think that the other mothers
knew that the boys were well off.
There were but few companions who were
admitted into the profoundest mysteries of the
attic. Edward Webster was one, who after
ward died in command of a regiment in the
Mexican War. My cousin John Durivage was
one, and there were others whose companion
ship was notas long oras steady as that of these

82 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
two. In the year 1829 my brother Nathan,
who was my adviser, teacher, companion, and
inspirer in everything, being three years older
than myself, went to the newly established
English High School for two years. Here his
smattering of science and taste for mechanics
were fostered, and from such a laboratory as
was there he brought home suggestions for our
workshop. I have always known that I am
thus largely indebted, at second hand, to the
suggestions which he received from Mr. Miles
and Mr. Sherwin there. And this is not a bad
instance of the way in which the power of a
great educator extends itself beyond the lives
of the pupils whom he has under his eye at
school. My father was editor of the Daily Adver
tiser ; and in that day this meant that he
owned the whole printing plant, engaged all
the printers, and printed his own newspaper.
He was never a practical printer, but, with his
taste for mechanics, he understood all the proc
esses of the business. Not unnaturally this
grew into his establishing a book office, which
did as good work in its time as was done any-

LIFE AT HOME. 83
where. The first American edition of Cicero's
' ' Republic," after the discovery of that book in
a Pompeian manuscript by Mai, was printed
by him. Naturally he went forward into the
study of power-press printing, and, at his sug
gestion, Daniel Treadwell made the first power
presses which worked to advantage in this
country. In the years between 1820 and 1825
the Boston Mill-dam was constructed, for the
purpose of making a water power out of the
tide power of the Back Bay. My father then
introduced power-press printing there, and
that printing-office was maintained until the
year 1836. When the time came he was presi
dent of the first type foundry in New England,
perhaps in America. All the arrangements
for these contrivances were, of course, interest
ing to his sons. So, as I have said, we had
type from the printing-office, and we all learned
to set type and to arrange it. When, in 1834,
my brother went to college, and I was left
alone, I used to repair every day to the book
office for my printing, and there learned the
case and all the processes of imposing scientifi
cally. I used to work off my own books on a

84 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
hand press. I have never lost the memories of
the case, and am rather fond of saying, now
that, if it were necessary, I could support my
family as a compositor.
I would not have gone into this detail but
that I am always urging people to let their
boys have printing apparatus in early life,
because I think it is such a good educator.
The absolute accuracy that is necessary is good
for a boy. The solid fact that 144 ems will go
into a certain space, and will require that space,
and that no prayers nor tears, hopes nor fears,
will change that solid fact — this is most impor
tant. I do not mean the mere convenience to
an author of being able to talk familiarly with
the compositor who has his book in hand : that
is a good thingi But I mean that human life
in general has lessons to teach which every
compositor requires which few other experi
ences, of life teach so well. I think also that,
as a study of English style, the school of
Franklin and Horace Greeley is a good one.
For home reading we had the better maga
zines of that day, including the English New
Monthly, which was then under the editorial

LIFE AT HOME. 85
charge of Campbell. We had the weekly lit
erary newspapers which were beginning, such
as the New World, edited by Park Benjamin ;
the Spirit of the Times, which had a great deal
of sporting news ; the Albion, a weekly which
was made up of extracts from good foreign
papers. I remember the issue of the last of
Scott's novels — "Anne of Geierstein," "Cas
tle Dangerous," and " Count Robert of Paris."
There was a sort of grief in the family, as if a
near friend had died, or as if some one had
gone crazy, when "Castle Dangerous" and
"Count Robert" appeared, because they were
so poor. The last part of " Harry aud Lucy"
was published within our day, and we read of
those children almost as if they were personal
friends — a good deal as a younger generation
has read of Rollo and Jonas, and a certain
Susy in the Susy books. Of course the phys
ical science in "Harry and Lucy" had its
part in our philosophical experiments. Miss
Edgeworth's "Helen" was published within
my memory, and we had friends who occasion
ally brought in letters from the Edgeworths
and read them.

86 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
We were all instinct with the love of nature
and of the country, and of our excursions
outside the old peninsula of Boston I will say
something in another chapter. But we could
hardly have lived without some sort of garden
ing at home — certainly not under my mother's
lead. In the yard at the corner of School
Street there was a very, very little space where
we could plant seeds, and did. But when we
came to Tremont Place there was no such
space, and we were obliged to do as they did
at Babylon. We each, therefore, had on the
"shed," which was made for the drying of
clothes, a raisin box filled with earth for our
horticultural experiments. You can do a good
deal with a raisin box, if you are careful and
not too ambitious. Practically I planted
morning-glories along one long side, with sweet
peas between. These were to climb up on the
posts. There is a tradition in the family that,
when I was a boy of eight, I threw over a
morning-glory to a baby six or eight months
old, who was being carried by in the street,
whom I married twenty-two years after. I
need not say that this tradition, well founded

LIFE AT HOME. 87
as a matter of art, has no foundation in
fact excepting that "it might have been."
Behind the vines divide your box into even
parts. The right-hand side is for agriculture :
there you will plant your radishes and pepper-
grass. The left-hand side is for flowers : here
you can put in four rows ; for instance, touch-
me-nots, flytrap, Venus' looking-glass, and
ten-week stocks. I think we generally selected
our seeds from something which seemed
romantic in the name more than with any
reference to what would be produced. I do
not mean that one had the same things one
summer which he had the year before.
These gardens, covering perhaps a square
foot and a half each, were of the greatest
interest to us. I remember we were very
much amused when some children on the
other side of the way, who lived in one of
those elegant houses where the Bellevue now
stands, whose terraces ran up the grades of the
old Beacon Hill, said to us that they envied
us our raisin boxes on the shed. From the
same shed I observed the annular eclipse of
the sun in the spring of 1829,

CHAPTER V.
OUT OF DOCKS.
WE were close by the Common. The
Common was still recognized as
1. A pasture for cows.
2. A play-ground for children.
3. A place for beating carpets.
4. A training ground for the militia.
It had served these purposes, or some of
them, for two hundred years, since Black-
stone had first turned in his cows among its
savins and blackberries and rocks to pick up
a scanty living. In modern days it had not
been fenced until 1815. After the war with
England there was some money left from a
popular subscription for fortifying the harbor,
which the Virginian dynasties had, in their
way, neglected. This money was used for
making a wooden fence around the Common.
The rails of this fence were hexagonal — two or
three inches in diameter, perhaps. If a flat

OUT OF DOOES. 89
side were on top, as was generally the case, it
made a good seat for boys, as they sat on the
top rail with their feet on the second. If the
corner came uppermost it was not so good.
The fence was double — inside the mall and
outside. When a muster took place, or Artil
lery Election, or when the Sacs and Foxes
danced on the Common, the space within the
inner fence was cleared. Then boys and girls
sat on it to witness the sports within, and
those taller stood in rows behind.
There cannot be a square yard of the Com
mon on which I have not stood or stepped,
and the same could be said of most boys of
that time. As for the cows, we saw but little
of them. I cannot think that in our time
there were ever fifty at once there. They
retired to the parts near Charles Street, with
which we had less, though much, to do. So
did the people who beat carpets. Practically
the Common was ours to work our own sweet
will upon. On musters, and on the two elec
tion days and Independence Day, we shared
it with the rest of the town. On those days
"Old Reed" would appear with his con-

90 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
stable's pole; but on other days itwas ours,
and ours only.
Even Mrs. Child, in her Juvenile Miscel
lany, gave the impression that the coasting
scene, in which the Latin School boys defied
General Gage, began with coasting on the
Common. But she was wholly wrong there.
In 1775 no boy went out of town to coast
on the Common. And the famous embassy
which the Latin School boys sent to General
Haldimand, to complain that their rights were
violated, negotiated about a coast which went
down Beacon Street, across Tremont Street,
and down School Street, opposite their school.
The story was told me by Mr. Robins, the last
survivor of the delegation.
Fifty- five years later we coasted on Beacon
Street when we dared. But this was in face
of the ordinances of the young city. In one of
Dr. Jacob Bigelow's funny poems, printed in
the Advertiser in 1820, he made himself our
spokesman :
Mr. Heyward, Mr. Hey ward, be a little kinder.
Can't you wink a little bit, or be a little blinder ?
Can't you let us coasting fellows have a little fun ?
Were you born old, or was't your way all childish
sports to shun ?

OUT OF DOOES. 91
Did you ne'er know how slick it is to coast from top to
bottom ?
And can't we use our ironers and planers, now we've got
'em?
Five dollars makes our pas look cross — that's proper bad,
you know ;
Our youth will soon be gone, alas ! and sooner still the
snow.
Caleb Heyward was the police officer of the
day. Practically we went to the Common for
coasting. The smaller boys made a coast on
Park Street mall. But the great coast was
from the foot of Walnut Street, where a well-
marked path runs now, leaving the great elm
on the right as you went down.
This may be my last chance to put on paper
a note of Lord Percy's encampment. His
brigade, in the winter of 1775-76, and perhaps
of the previous year, was encamped in tents, in
a line stretching south-west from the head of
West Street. As the weather grew cold the
tents were doubled, and the space between the
two canvas roofs was filled with straw. The
circles made by such tents and the life in them
showed themselves in a different color of the
grass for a hundred years after Percy's time.
The line is now almost all taken up by what I

92 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
may call the highway from the Providence
station down town.
As the snow melted, and the elms blossomed,
and the grass came, the Common opened itself
to every sort of game. We played marbles in
holes in the malls. We flew kites everywhere,
not troubled, as boys would be now, by trees
on the cross-paths, for there were no such trees.
The old elm and a large willow by the Frog
Pond were the only trees within the pentagon
made by the malls and the burial-ground.
Kite-fiying was, as it is, a science ; and on a fine
summer day, with south-west winds, a line of
boys would be camped in groups, watching or
tending their favorite kites as they hung in
the air over Park Street. Occasionally a string
Avould break. It was a matter of honor to save
your twine. I remember following my falling
kite, with no clue but the direction in which I
saw it last, till I found that the twine was lying
across a narrow court which opened where the
Albion Hotel is now. There were two rows of
three-story houses which made the court, and
my twine festooned it, supported by the ridge
poles of the roofs on either side. I rang a door-

OUT OF DOOES. 93
bell, stated my case, and ran up, almost with
out permission, into the attic. Here I climbed
out of the attic window, ran up the roof as
Teddy the Tyler might have done, and drew in
the coveted twine. For the pecuniary value of
the twine we cared little ; but it would have
been, in a fashion, disgraceful to lose it.
Boats on the Frog Pond were much what
they are now. The bottom of the pond was not
paved until 1848. There were no frogs, so far
as I know, but some small horned pout were
left there, for which boys fished occasionally.
The curb around the pond was laid in Mr.
Quincy' s day, in 1823 ; I mean when he was
mayor. To provide the stone the last of the
boulders on the Common were blasted. In old
days, as appears from Sewall, they were plenty ;
he blasted enough for the foundations of a barn.
I think the old Hancock House was built from
such boulders. Among those destroyed was
the Wishing Stone. This stood — or so Dr.
Shurtleff told me — where two paths now join,
a little east of the foot of Walnut Street. If
you went round it backward nine times, and
repeated the Lord's Prayer backward, what-

94 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
ever you wished would come to pass. I once
proposed to the mayor and aldermen to go
round the Frog Pond nine times backward and
wish that the city debt might be reduced fifty
per cent. But they have never had the faith
to try. Mr. Quincy proposed that the Frog
Pond should be called Crescent Lake. But
nobody ever really called it so. I have seen
the name on maps, I think, but it is now for
gotten. Charles Street was new in those days, and the
handsome elms which shade the Charles Street
mall were young trees, just planted, in 1825.
By the building of the mill-dam, about that
time, the water was shut out from the southern
side of Charles Street. There existed a super
stition among the boys that law did not
extend to the flat, because it was below high-
water mark. On holidays, therefore, there
would be shaking of props and other games of
mild gambling there, which " Old Reed" did
not permit on the upland. This was, of course,
a ridiculous boyish superstition. In those
days, however, we had a large number of sea
faring men, who brought with them foreign

OUT OF DOOES. 95
customs. Among others was the use of
"props," a gambling game which the boys had
introduced perfectly innocently as an element
in playing marbles. I dare say people played
props for money on the dried surface of the
Back Bay.
Of all the entertainments of the Common,
however, nothing, to our mind, compared with
the facilities which the malls gave for driving
hoop and for post-offices. The connection of
the two may not be understood at first, and I
will describe it. When the season for driving
hoops came round — for, as Mr. Howells has
remarked, such things are regulated by seasons
as much as is the coming of apple blossoms —
we examined last year's hoops, and, if they
had come to grief, Fullum negotiated some
arrangements by which we had large hoops
from sea-going casks. I see none such now.
These hoops were as distinguished in their way
as Sufiol is to-day in hers. My hoop was
named Whitefoot. With these hoops it was
our business to carry a daily mail.
The daily mail was made chiefly from small
newspapers, which were cut from the leading

96 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.,
columns of larger ones. In an editor's house
we had plenty. The Quebec Gazette was spe
cially chosen, because its column head was a
small copy of its larger head, and squares cut
from that column made very good little papers.
With a supply of these folded, we started at
the head of Park Street, two or three of us,
secret as the grave, to leave the day's mail.
No, I will not, after sixty years, tell where
those post-offices were. I have no doubt that
the ashes of the Quebec Gazette are now fertil
izing some of those elms. But one was near
Joy Street, one was in a heart which some land
scape gardener had cut in the turf near Spruce
Street, one was half-way along Charles Street.
They were holes in the ground, or caches be
tween the roots of trees. At each was a box —
or, in one case, two tight-fitting oyster shells —
which received the mail. From it the yester
day's mail was taken to the next office.
When the mail-riders with their hoops
arrived at one of these post-offices they threw
themselves negligently upon the ground, as
if tired ; but one dug with care for the box
buried below. Of course he found it, unless

OUT OF DOOES. 97
some fatal landscape gardener, of whom the
Common knew but few, had interfered. When
found, the paper or letter from the last offlce
was left here, the sods or stones or sand were
replaced, and the cautious mail-riders galloped
on. At the end of a winter the chances were
worse for flnding a mail, or after a long rain or
vacation. There was then no mall on Boylston Street.
The burial-ground, with a brick wall, ran
close to the street, and there was no sidewalk
on that side, so that we generally crossed by
the line of Percy's encampments. And to all
boys, I imagine, that little corner where the
deer park is was comparatively little known.
It is, however, a waste of honest paper to be
telling of such trifles about the Common, when
its great importance was as a training field, or
for holidays, as one may read in Sewall's
Diary, and in the old votes of the town. There
were four holidays in the year — 'Lection
proper. Artillery Election (generally called
'Tillery 'Lection), the Fourth of July (called
Independence Day, I think, more than it is
now), and, in October, Muster, or the Fall

98 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Training. By good luck, of course, Lafayette
might come along, or General Jackson, or the
Sacs and Foxes might dance, but these could
not be expected.
Since I first printed these notes, a dozen
letters have informed me that people have for
gotten who the Sacs and Foxes were. The
Sacs and Poxes were an important branch of
the great Chippewa race, and they lived in
Northern Illinois, in the region which is now
called Wisconsin, and farther north. Under
the lead of Black Hawk, a famous fighter, and
Keokuk, they made head against the settlers
in that region, and their power was only
broken by a military campaign, in which the
United States Army repressed them. It was
then thought that it would be a good thing
for the Indians of the frontier to show them
the greatness of the cities of the East. So
Black Hawk and Keokuk and some other
braves were brought round- from Washington
to the Northern cities, and they appeared in
Boston in the autumn of 1838. Governor
Everett received them at the State House, and
they made speeches to him, and he made

OUT OF DOOES. 99
speeches to them. After this they danced
a war dance, or what was called such, on the
Common, to the great delight of all the people
of the neighborhood.
And alas ! by a utilitarian revolution, in
1831, the real old Election Day was changed
from the last Wednesday in May to the 1st 'of
January. When my father confessed to me
that he had himself voted for the change in
the constitution of Massachusetts, I think he
did it with a certain shame. I was at that
time nine years old, so that I could not rebuke
him as the vote seemed to require. But he
knew, and they all knew, that if the vote had
been submitted to the children of Boston, no
such innovation would have been made.
Unlearned readers, unhappily not born in
Massachusetts, must be informed that, under
the first charter of Massachusetts, " yearly
once in the year forever after, namely, the last
Wednesday in Easter term yearly, the Gov
ernor, deputy governor, and assistants of the
said company, and all other officers shall be in
the General Court duly chosen." Under the
charter of the province, given by WiUiam and

100 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Mary, the last Wednesday in May was fixed
for the beginning of the political year ; and
when the constitution of the State was made,
in 1779, the same date was retained. The
General Court met — that is the name to this
day of the legislature of Massachusetts ; in the
first charter it meant what we should call
a stockholders' meeting. In old days the
General Court elected the Governor on this
day ; so Winthrop, Dudley, and all the early
governors were elected. Under the constitu
tion the election returns were examined on
this day, and perhaps reported on. Anyway
the legislature met, referred them to a com
mittee, and, under escort of the Cadets, who
were the Governor's guard, they marched to
the Old South Meeting House to hear the elec
tion sermon.
With these intricacies of government I need
not say the boys of Boston had nothing to do.
What was truly important was the festivity,
principally on the Common, of Election Day.
Early in the morning, perhaps even Tuesday
evening, hucksters of every kind began to put
up their tables, tents, and stalls on each side

OUT OF DOOES. 101
of the Tremont Street mall, and, to a less
extent, on the other malls. On the Common
itself a mysterious man — in a mysterious
octagonal house painted green and red, as I
remember — displayed camera views of the
scene. Of these I speak from hearsay, for I
never had money enough to pay for admission
to this secret chamber.
I found in Hawthorne's "English Note
book" some curious bits of information about
fairs in England, which reminded me, queerly,
of some of these customs of our New England
holidays on the Common.
To prepare for these festivities every child
in Boston expected "'Lection money." 'Lec
tion money was money given specifically to be
spent on the Common on Election Day. The
day before Election my mother sent Fullum
to the office for three or four dollars' worth of
silver ; and she knew that all her train of vas
sals, so far as they could pretend to be chil
dren, would expect "'Lection money" from
her. First, she had her own children, to
whom she gave twelve and a half cents each.
There was a considerable number of nephews

102 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
and nieces who might or might not look in;
but if they did, each of them was also sure to
have a "ninepence," which was the name
given to the Spanish piece which was half a
"quarter dollar." American silver coinage
was still very rare.
It may be of use to young orators, getting
ready to speak on the silver question, to know
that when, in 1652, the colony of Massachu
setts Bay assumed the royal privilege of the
mint and coined its own silver, the leaders
thought they could keep this silver at home by
making the coin two-thirds the weight of the
king's silver. The Massachusetts shilling,
therefore, was two-thirds the weight of the
English shilling. Six shillings went to the
Spanish dollar. It proved that SpRaish coin
became very largely the currency of the colo
nies, and so of the States, for long years after
independence. We took the Spanish dollar
for our unit when we made a national cur
rency. Twelve and a half cents of that
currency, the old Spanish real piece, became
worth ninepence in the Massachusetts stand
ard ; and fourpence-halfpenny and ninepence.

•A

'-< ^'

^

' IF I HAPPENED TO MEET AN UNCLE, HE WOULD ASK ME IP
I DID NOT WANT SOME ELECTION MONEY." — Page 103.

OUT OF DOOES. 103
the half-real and real of the early time, were
the coins most familiar to children. The
"piece of eight" in "Robinson Crusoe" is a
dollar piece, amounting to eight of our nine-
pences. Old-fashioned New Englanders will
to this hour speak of seventy-five cents as
" four-and-sixpence," or of thirty-seven and
a half cents as " two-and-threepence." These
measures are in pine-tree currency.
To come back to Election money. Other
retainers expected it. There were families of
black children, who never appeared at any
other time, who would come in with smiling
faces and make a little call. Mother would
give each one his or her ninepence. On the
other hand, if in the street I happened to meet
an uncle, he would ask me if I did not want
some Election money, and produce his nine-
pence. I never heard of "tipping" in any
other connection, except when a boy held
water for a horse as you rode anywhere ; then
you always gave him a bit of silver or a few
cents. Thus provided with the sinews of war, we
went up on the Common with such company

104 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
as might have happened along — girls with
girls, and boys with boys. The buying and
selling were confined almost wholly to things
to eat and drink ; though there is a bad story
told of me, that, having gone out with a
quarter of a dollar one morning, I spent the
whole of it for a leather purse, into which,
for the rest of the day, I had nothing to
put. This is my experience of Ben Franklin's
whistle. Certain things were sold there which
we never saw sold anywhere else, and which
we should never have thought of buying any
where else. Boston was then in active trade
with the West Indies, more than it is now.
You could not bring bananas in the long
schooner voyages of that time, but we had
cocoanuts in plenty, and occasionally a bit of
sugarcane. I do not think I had ever seen a
banana when I was twenty years old.
It happened oddly enough that tamarinds,
in the curious "original packages," were
always for sale, and dates, of which we did
not see much on other occasions. At home we
never had oysters, I believe because my father
did not like them ; but on the Common we could

OUT OF DOOES. 105
buy two oysters for a cent, and we ate them
with rapture. To this day I doubt if a raw
oyster is ever as good, as it was when eaten
under the trees of Park Street mall, with vine
gar and pepper and salt ad libitum, and this
in May ! Candy of all kinds then known was
for sale, but the kinds were limited. There
was one manufactured form which, I am sorry
to say, has died out. One or two dealers sold
large medals of checkerberry stamped with a
head. Whom this originally represented I do
not know, but very early we all said it was
John Endicott, because he was the first Gov
ernor of Massachusetts Bay, and we called
them "John Endicotts." I advertised in a
newspaper, a few years ago, for anybody who
knew how to make these things, but I had no
answer. You wo uld see sailor-looking men eat
ing lobsters, but those we were quite sure of at
home. Ginger beer and spruce beer were sold
from funny little wheelbarrows, which had
attractive pictures of the bottles throwing out
the corks by their own improvised action.
You might have a glass of spruce beer for two
cents, and, to boys as impecunious as most of

106 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
us were, the dealers would sell half a glass for
one cent. Why we did not all die of the
trash which we ate and drank on such occa
sions I do not know. But we are alive, a
good many of us, to tell the story to this hour.
In all this we had little thought or care for
the election itself. Independence Day passed
in much the same fashion. I remember, as
I returned home from the Common, having
expended every cent of my money, one Inde
pendence Day, I saw a procession of children
going into Park Street Church. To see a
church open on a week-day was itself extraor
dinary. To see children going in procession
into a church was more extraordinary. With
a disposition to find out what was going on I
followed in the train, and went into the gallery.
We were not orthodox at our house, but I had
been in that meeting-house before. I soon
perceived that this was a Sunday-school enter
tainment, at which I remained as long as
seemed pleasing to me, and then retired. I
have no recollection of anything that passed
there, but, by putting the dates together, I am
fond of believing that then and there I heard

OUT OF DOOES. 107
Dr. Smith's national song, "My Country, 'tis
of Thee," sung for the first time that it was
ever sung in public. Possibly my untrained
voice joined in the enthusiasm of the strain.
It was at one of the first of the elections
after the anniversary had been changed to
January that an event took place which made
quite a mark in the local history, and to which
boys attached immense importance. Governor
Lincoln had been escorted to the Old South
Meeting- House by the Cadets, whose force was
not large at that time. The escort had opened
to the right and the left for the civic proces
sion to pass in, and then, instead of following
them, had repaired to the Exchange Coffee-
House for refreshment. The commander had
left a messenger, who was to inform him when
the sermon approached its close, so that he
might be ready with the escort at the door of
the church to go back with the Governor to
the State House. Unfortunately the preacher
wound up too suddenly, the hymn which fol
lowed the sermon was too short, and when the
Governor, who was the prince of punctilio in
such matters, came, with the council and the

108 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
legislature, to the door, there was no escort.
Governor Lincoln walked up Winter Street
with the gentlemen of his personal staff, but
without any Cadets. The colonel of the
Cadets arrived at the church a minute too
late. He put his men at double quick, and
they fairly ran up Bromfield Street, and came
to the corner of the Common in time to meet
the Governor, and presented arms. But the
Governor declined to recognize his escort, and
proceeded on the sidewalk to the State House
or his lodging-house, with the melancholy
Cadets following as they might. A court-
martial ensued, of which the proceedings are
in print ; and military circles and the circles
of school-boys were highly excited about it.
Itwas one of the fortunate events of my early
life that I stumbled on the Governor and his
staff as they walked up Winter Street on that
fatal occasion.
On the evening of Independence Day there
was sometimes a display of fireworks on the
Common ; but the science of pyrotechnics was
then but little advanced in America, and there
Was much more waiting than there was exhibi-

OUT OP DOOES. 109
tion. My recollections of these displays are
of our always leaving to go home, tired out,
before the successful pieces were shown. To
the boys and girls of to-day it will be interest
ing to know that the pieces were set up either
for spectators who stood on the hill and looked
down toward St. Paul's Church, or near the
foot of Walnut Street for groups of spectators
below, who were to look up to them there.
The entire absence of trees from the Common
inside the malls, enabled those in charge to
make the stages for the flreworks just where
they pleased.
The military system of the State in those
days required two annual parades, in which
every militiaman should appear with his gun
and other equipments. It is by a 'compara
tively modern arrangement that the State or,
the United States furnishes the arms for the
militia. Under the simpler arrangements of
the colony, and of the State at the beginning,
every man who considered himself a man was
obliged to have a gun, a cartridge-box, a belt,
a "primer," and the other necessaries for an
infantry soldier. We therefore had, in the

110 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
attic, Fullum's gun, cartridge-box, and primer,
which made good properties, in any theatricals
which required the presence of an army. My
father had been a member of the New England
Guards, but his gun was kept in their armory.
These arms the militiaman bought with his
own money, and he must produce them once a
year for inspection. I believe that they were
shown at a certain spring meeting, to which
comparatively little attention was given by
boys. But in the autumn, every man between
the ages of eighteen and forty-five, unless he
were on the list of "exempts," had to appear
in person, with his gun, belt, and cartridge-
box, to show that the commonwealth had him
as a soldier, and that he knew something of
the art of arms.
Young men who had a real interest in the
military art did as they do now. They volun
teered into what were called the "volunteer
companies," or sometimes the "flank com
panies." These companies had uniforms, had
generally their own separate charters as fusi
leers, rangers, light infantry, or guards ; they
were proud of their history ; the State or

OUT OF DOOES. Ill
somebody provided them with armories — gen
erally over Faneuil Hall — and they had fre
quent parades, while they had sufficient
instruction for keeping up their military dis
cipline. All this was precisely as uniformed
militia companies exist to-day. But now the
other militiamen are simply on a certain regis
ter, which they never see and of which they
know nothing — though they are counted to
the credit of Massachusetts in the quota which
exists at Washington. Then, the militiaman
had to appear and show himself ; and this he
did at the annual training. A man knew to
what company he belonged. He was notified
that he must attend at a certain place on the
morning of the Fall Muster ; he did attend
there, and thence he marched to the Common
for the fall training.
The military zeal of the War of 1812 had not
wholly died out, but there was beginning to
be a suspicion that the conditions of peace
were such that it was not necessary for every
man to be trained to arms. A certain ridicule,
therefore, attached itself to what was called
the "militia" in distinction from the "vol-

112 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
unteer companies." Occasionally a militia
company, under spirited lead, tried to distin
guish itself by its drill, but this seldom hap
pened. Old Boston people will remember a
joke of that time about the Berry Street
Rangers. The particular company, which met
in front of Dr. Channing' s church in Berry
Street, chose one year as their captain a gen
tleman who, they thought, would let them ofl
lightly. But he interested himself at once in
bringing up the company's equipment and
drill, and gave them the name of the Berry
Street Rangers, so that for some years we
heard of their exploits in one way or another.
The interest among young men which now
goes largely to the keeping up of military com
panies was then expended in great measure
on the volunteer fire department. Still, when
the fall training came, the interest of the boys
was naturally in the companies which were in
uniform ; and when the parade was formed on
the Common these companies always held the
right of the line, either by courtesy or because
they were entitled to it by law. According as
the major-general commanding had more or

OUT OF DOOES. 113
less enthusiasm there would or would not be
a sham fight. The whole Common was cleared
for these exercises. Of course a considerable
detail of melancholy sentinels was required to
keep the boys from running in, and the princi
pal fights, sham or real, on these occasions,
were their contests with these sentinels. But
as the army to be reviewed really amounted to
one-fifth of the men of Boston, even after this
large detail of sentries, there would be a con
siderable force in the field. It seems to me
that the line always extended, with its back to
the Tremont Street mall, for the whole length
of that mall. The reviewing officers would pass
it, as in any review to-day, and then the sham
fight would begin. We boys, sitting on the
fence, criticised the manoeuvres of this Water
loo, with such information on tactics as we
had got from reading Botta's " History of the
American Revolution " or Caesar's "Commen
taries on the War with Gaul." I recollect a
sham fight in which the hill — still fortified, as I
have said — was defended against an attack. It
appears to me, however, that the attacks were
generally made by the whole force against an

114 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
unseen enemy. This mode of fighting has its
advantages. Practically, however, after the
Rangers had been thrown out as skirmishers,
and the different companies had moved back
ward and forward across the Common, at about
five in the afternoon the whole line was formed
again, and a discharge of blank cartridges
began, which lasted till all the cartridges of all
the soldiers were burned up. I say all the
cartridges, but we would solicit Fullum to slip
one or more cartridges into his pocket instead
of firing them ofl, and on rare occasions he
succeeded in doing this. Then there were
superstitions that individual soldiers were
afraid to burn their cartridges, and dropped
them surreptitiously on the grass, so that, the
next morning, we always went over to the
Common to see if we could not find some of
these. I cannot recollect that any boy ever
did. The actual presence of war, as it showed
itself in this discharge of powder, was of
course very attractive, and "Muster" had
a certain value which belonged to none of the
other holidays of the year.
There was great antipathy in the ruling cir-

OUT OF DOOES. 115
cles at our house to boating, in any of the
forms then pursued in the harbor. On the
other hand, my father and mother were both
country bred, and, as I believe I have said,
my mother was very fond of flowers. As
soon as spring opened, in the earlier days,
father and mother went to drive very often
on Thursday and Saturday afternoons. This
drive was taken in the chaise, and, for the pur
pose of the ride, a little seat was fitted in,
which was in fact a trunk, in which mother
brought home any wild flowers which she
picked. On this trunk one of "us four"
went, in a regular order laid down by the
Medes and Persians. This entertainment of
a holiday was one of the great joys of my
early life. But, for the half -holidays which
were not thus provided for, my brother and
I took care by using " the means which God
and nature put into our hands." That is to
say, we walked out of town to such woodland
generally as we had not explored before, until
we were personally acquainted with the whole
country for a circle of five miles' radius around
the State House,

116 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
An enterprising English surveyor named
John G. Hales had lived in Boston long enough
to make a good working map of the suburbs
of Boston. He printed a little book, still
known to the curious, on that region. He
was rather in advance of the times, I suppose,
and when he succumbed to adversity, my
father bought from him all the plates and
drawings of his different maps. Among these
was the map of Boston and vicinity, which
is still a good map, and is still regularly
stolen from by anybody who wants to pub
lish such a map, without much regard to
any copyright which existed in the original
surveys. Two or three times new editions of
this map were published, and in such a case
"we four" generally had more or less to do
with the painting of the different towns, so
that their lines might be the better designated.
It thus happens that at this moment I could
pass, with some credit, any competitive exam
ination which should turn on the township
lines of the various towns within fifteen miles
of Boston.
But the personal knowledge, gained by

OUT OF DOOES. 117
tramping through the interior circle of such
towns, was worth much more than the paint
ing. The Hales map indicated the several
pieces of scrub woodland which were then
left, and to such woodland we boys regularly
repaired. I need not say that such expe
ditions were encouraged at home. Whenever
we chose to undertake one two cents were
added to our allowance for the purchase of
luncheon. We always kept for such expeditions what
were known as phosphorus-boxes, which were
the first steps in the progress that has put the
tinder-boxes of that day entirely out of sight.
Most of the young people of the present day
have not so much as seen a tinder-box, and I
do not know where I should go to buy one.
But, in the working of the household, the
tinder-box was the one resource for getting a
light. We boys, however, with the lavishness
of boys, used to buy at the apothecary's phos
phorus-boxes, which were then coming in. We
had to pay twenty-five cents for one such box.
These boxes were made in Germany ; they
were of red paper, little cylinders about four

118 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
inches high and an inch in diameter. You
could carry one, and were meant to carry it,
in your breast pocket. In the bottom was a
little bottle which contained asbestos soaked
with sulphuric acid, and in the top were about
a hundred matches, made, I think, from chlo
rate of potash. One of these you put into the
bottle, and pulled it out aflame. We never
should have thought of taking one of these
walks without a phosphorus-box. When we
arrived at the woodland sought we invariably
made a little fire. We never cooked anything
that I remember, but this love of fire is one of
the earlier barbarisms of the human race which
dies out latest. I suppose if it had been the
middle of the hottest day in August we should
have made a fire.
So soon as the morning session of school was
over, in the summer or autumn months, if it
were a half-holiday, we would start on one of
these rambles. Sometimes, if the walk were
not to a great distance, we invited, or per
mitted, the two girls to come with us. We
had a tin box for plants, and always brought
home what seemed new or pretty. On rare

OUT OF DOOES. 119
occasions, when we had made up a larger
party, we took the "truck" with us, that we
might treat any weaker member of the party
to a ride. The truck was quite a fashionable
plaything at that time ; I do not see it much
now, excepting in the hands of boys who have
to use it for freight. But in those days boys
rode on trucks a good deal. A truck was a
pair of wooden wheels on a stout axle — gen
erally not stout enough — with two thills, in
which the boy harnessed himself by the simple
process of taking hold of them with his hands.
If he chose to be jaunty he had twine reins
passed under his arms, that the person who
sat on the seat of the truck might pretend to
be driving.
When, in 1833, the Worcester Railroad was
opened, this walking gave way, for a family
as largely interested in that railroad as we
were, to excursions out of town to the point
where the walk was to begin. The line to
West Newton was opened to the public on the
7th of April, 1833, but from the day when the
Meteor, which was the first locomotive engine
in New England, ran on her trial trip, we two

120 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
boys were generally present at the railroad, on
every half-holiday, to take our chances for a
ride out upon one of the experimental trips.
We knew the engine-drivers and the men who
were not yet called conductors, and they knew
us. My father was the president of the road,and
we thought we did pretty much as we chose.
The engine-drivers would let us ride with them
on the engine, and I, for one, got my first les
sons in the business of driving an engine on
those excursions. But so soon as the road
was open to passengers, these rides on the
engine dropped off, perhaps were prohibited.
Still we went to Newton as often as we could
in the train, and afterwards to Needham.
There were varied cars in those days, some of
them open, like our open horse-cars of to-day,
and all of them entered from the side, as in
England up to the present time. After this
date our long walks out of town naturally
ceased. Nothing was more common in our
household than for the whole family to go out
to Brighton or to Newton, and, with babies
and all, to establish ourselves in some grove,
where we spent the afternoon very much as

OUT OF DOOES. 121
God meant we should spend it, I suppose ;
returning late in the evening with such spoils
of wild flowers as the season permitted.
More methodical excursions out of town
took forms quite different from what they
would take to-day. At our house the custom
was to deride canals in proportion as we glori
fied railroads. All the same, I think in the
summer of 1826 — still recollected as the hottest
summer wliich has been known in this century
in New England — it was announced one day
that we were going to Chelmsford, and that we
were going by the canal. I have no recollec
tion of the method by which we struck the
Middlesex Canal ; I suppose that we had to
drive to East Cambridge and take the General
Sullivan there. The General Sullivan was
what was known, I think, as a packet-boat,
which carried passengers daily from Boston to
the Merrimac River, where the name "Lowell"
had just then been given to a part of the town
ship of Chelmsford. Mr. Samuel Batch elder,
the distinguished engineer and manufacturer,
to whom New England owes so much, was one
of my father's most intimate friends. He was

122 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
engaged in some of the flrst works at Lowell,
and, by way of escape from the heat, father
had arranged that the whole family should go
down to the tavern at Chelmsford and spend
a few days.
The present generation does not know it,
but travelling on a canal is one of the most
charming ways of travelling. We are all so
crazy to go fifty miles an hour that Ave feel as
if we had lost something when we only go five
miles an hour. All the same, to sit on the
deck of a boat and see the country slide by
you, without the slightest jar, without a cin
der or a speck of dust, is one of the exquisite
luxuries. The difficulty about speed is much
reduced if you will remember, with Red
Jacket, that " you have all the time there is."-
And I have found it not impossible to imag
ine that the distance over which I am going is
ten times as great as in fact the statistical
book would make it. Simply I think a man
may get as much pleasure out of a journey to
Lowell on a canal which is thirty miles long as
he may out of a journey of three hundred
miles by rail between Albany and Buffalo.

OUT OF DOOES. 123
But this leads into metaphysical considera
tions which do not belong to the boyhood of
New England.
What did belong to it was a series of very
early reminiscences which have clung to me
when more important things have been for
gotten. Fullum, of course, was of the party.
He would spring from the deck of the General
Sullivan upon the tow-path, and walk along
collecting wild flowers, or perhaps even more
active game. I have never forgotten my terror
lest Fullum should be left by the boat and
should never return. When he did return
from one of these forays he brought with him
for us children a very little toad, the flrst
I had ever seen. My mother put him in her
thimble he was so small. Not long after we
heard that a delicate friend of hers had taken
cold because she put on her thimble when it
was damp. With a child's facility, I always
associated the two thimbles with each other ;
and I think I may say I never see a little toad
now, without imagining that he is carrying the
seeds of catarrh or influenza to some delicate
invalid.

124 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
We stayed at the old tavern on the Merri
mac, which, I suppose, was long ago pulled
down. A story of that time tells how Mr.
Isaac P. Davis, who was, I think, one of the
proprietors of the locks and canals which
made Lowell, went to this same hotel with a
party, and inquired what they were to have for
dinner. The keeper said that a good salmon
had come up the river the night before,
and he proposed to serve him — with which
answer Mr. Davis was well pleased. Later in
the morning he said he should like to see the
salmon. But the man only expressed his
amazement at such folly on the part of a Bos
ton man. "You don't suppose I would take
him out of the water, do you ? He 'is in the
water at the foot of the falls, and has been
there since last night. When it is time to
cook him, I shall go out and catch him."

CHAPTER VL
SOCIAL EELATIONS.
I AM painfully aware that, to the diligent
reader of the last two parts of this histor
ical study, it may seem as if the boys described
were a sort of Robinson Crusoe and man
Friday who lived alone on their happy island.
I feel as if I had gpoken as though there were
an occasional invasion of savages or Spaniards,
but that practically we had little to do with
the outside world. This is by no means true,
and I will now try to give some idea of the
social conditions which surrounded boyhood
in Boston in the years between 1826 and 1837.
For we were "in the swim," as the current
expression puts it, and no countenance would
have been given to us, either in any shyness
or for any arrogance which kept us out of it.
I have already said that, while on the most
cordial terms with our school companions, it
125

126 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
seemed as if we left them in another world as
soon as school was over. As I have said, I
think the reason was that most of the fathers
of the other boys were in mercantile pursuits,
and the boys' business, therefore, called them
quite regularly to the wharves to inspect the
large foreign trade of Boston. As it happened,
our father was in other affairs, and, as natu
rally, these attracted us.
In an old New England family, church-
going, of course, was an element which had a
great deal to do with social life. I was carried
to "meeting" on the fourth Sunday after I
was born, and was christened at the same time
with two or three other children. I afterwards
knew their names. They were in families with
whom we were well acquainted, and to this
hour that mystic tie seems to form a relation
ship between me and them and their children.
I have to this moment a little bit of yellow
paper which is, I fancy, the flrst document but
one among the memoirs which form my biog
raphy. It is the bill of the " stable man " who
sent his carriage on this occasion. "For car
rying three to meeting, sixty cents." My poor

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 127
nine or ten pounds of avoirdupois went as
nothing to the hack-driver, and no estimate is
made of the cost to him or to the community
ofthe carrying to "meeting" of the person
who was, as I must still say, the most impor
tant individual in the transaction.
In those days children were taken to church
for regular attendance very early. I do not
see any children in my own church who are as
young as those who went or were taken then.
On our annual visits to Westhampton we were
always interested because the young mothers
carried their babies to "meeting," at all ages.
They did not like, I suppose, to stay at home
when all the men "went to meeting," and
accordingly they went with the children. If a
baby cried the mother got up, carried it out,
and sat on the steps of the meeting-house
until the ebullition of feeling was over,
when she returned. But this was rather edi
fying as an interesting curiosity to us Boston
children. No babies were carried to Brattle
Street Church except for baptism ; but as soon
as the children could walk, and be relied upon
not to cry, I should think the custom began.

128 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Such reliance was sometimes misplaced. I
am so unfortunate that I do not remember
ever hearing Dr. Channing preach ; but it is
among the disgraceful records of my life that
once, when my mother thought she would hear
him, and, because Brattle Street Church was
being painted, went to Federal Street, she took
me with her. She sat with friends, far forward
in the broad aisle, and I, dissatisfied with the
interior arrangements of the church, I suppose
— ^probably dissatisfied because I was not where
I was used to be on Sunday — wept with such
loud acclaim that in the middle of the service
she was obliged to rise and take me out of the
church. I think it was the last experiment of
the sort that she tried. In fact, we were very
loyal to our church. I think all people were
loyal to the churches they went to. And to
such unfortunate loyalty I owe it that, while I
knew Dr. Channing personally, and he was
very kind to me as a boy, I never had the
pleasure of hearing him preach, excepting on
the occasion named, although I was twenty
years old when he died. I have, more than once,
heard him speak, but never from the pulpit.

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 129
We "went to meeting" morning and after
noon always, and so, I am apt to think, did
all respectable people ; certainly in the earlier
part of those years. I know that I never
observed' any distinction between the size of
the congregation in the afternoon and that of
the morning. I know that any person who
had been seen driving out of town on Sunday,
either in the morning or in the afternoon,
would have lost credit in the community. Fre
quently Mr. Palfrey, the minister, would say,
at the end of the morning's sermon, " I shall
continue this subject in the afternoon." He
did so with the perfect understanding that he
would have the same hearers. I wonder, in
passing, whether that phrase "my hearers"
is as familiar ^^o young people now as it was
then. It was a bit of pulpit slang, such as
one never hears in a lecture-room or in a
political meeting. The people, instead of
being addressed as "you" or as "friends,"
or as "members of the Church of Christ,"
were spoken to as "hearers." I doubt if I
ever hear that word now without giving it a
certain ecclesiastical connection.

130 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
It was a wonder to me then, and has been
ever since, why the hour and a quarter spent
in "meeting" of a Sunday morning seemed
as long as the four hours spent in school every
other morning. I was early aware of the curi
ously interesting fact, Avhich nobody ever
explained to me, that the afternoon service
was ten minutes shorter than the morning
service ; but why that hour and five minutes
should seem as long as the three hours spent
in school of an afternoon I have never known,
and do not know now. Besides these two
services, we had the Sunday-school. It seems
to me it was always after the afternoon ser
vice ; I know it was in the earlier days. A
Sunday-school then was a very different thing
from what it is now. Then you were expected
to learn something, and you did. For my
own part, I have often said, and I think it is
true, that fully one half of the important
information which I now have with regard
to the Scriptural history of mankind — with
regard to the history of the Jews, for instance,
or the travels of Paul right and left, or any
thing else which can be called the intellectual

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 131
side of the Bible — was acquired in Brattle
Street Sunday-school before I was thirteen
years old. We had little books which con
tained facts on these subjects. We had to
study these books as we did any other school-
books, and we recited from them as we recited
any other lesson. I do not think there was
much said or thought about making Sunday-
school agreeable to the children. We were
told to go, and we went ; we were told to
learn a lesson, and we learned it. As I
observe Sunday-schools now, this has been
driven out, and driven out, I believe, by the
pressure of the week-day school system — a
pressure which I am fighting against in every
quarter without success. For myself, I liked
to go where my brother and sisters went. They
went to the Sunday-school, so I expressed a
wish to go.
Pupils were received there then, on the 1st
of January, and on the first Sunday of the year
1827 I presented myself with the rest. But
it proved that the rule of the school was that
no one should be admitted before he was six.
I suppose they did not want children who

132 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
could not read. I could read as well as I can
now, and was disgusted, therefore, when I
was rejected on examination. I rather think
I was the only child in New England who was
ever told that he must not go to Sunday-
school. But I was sent away on the ground
that I was not six years old. I went home
with the others, saying, " It is a pretty way to
hear a fellow say his catechism by asking him,
' How old are you ? ' ' How old are you ? '
'How old are you?' " And I was not per
mitted to go for the next year. I had already
taken the first steps in the catechism. I had
learned in words what I probably knew
already — all, indeed, that is very important
to learn in the business of theology.
Such was going to meeting on Sunday.
I suppose the sons of Episcopalian families
spoke of "going to church," but we did not
in my earlier childhood. I make the note
here, however, for the benefit of ' ' Notes and
Queries," that, in Boston, the meeting-houses
were always called churches from the very
beginning. I think they were not in other
parts of Massachusetts. In Hales' s map of this

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 133
neighborhood, of the date of 1826, you will
see "Rev. Mr. Gray's M. H.," "Rev. Mr.
Gile's M. H.," meaning "meeting-house" in
each instance.
Of week-day exercises connected with
churches Boston knew almost nothing, not
even in Evangelical circles. The fact was
known that there was a chandelier in the Old
South Church, but I do not think the chande
lier was often lighted. When Park Street
Church was built, as a sort of banner of a
new dispensation for latitudinarian Boston,
it had arrangements for lighting the church
for an evening service. But this was all
a heresy to the old Boston Puritan, whether
he were Evangelical or Unitarian.
For the original theory of the Puritans is
that the family is the church, and that each
family is a church. The father of each family
is a priest, and is competent to carry on wor
ship. Accordingly he does carry on worship in
the morning and in the evening ; and any pro
posal for an evening service anywhere else was
regarded by the old Puritans as being, to a cer
tain extent, an innovation, because it broke up

134 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
that family worship which was so essential in
their plan. I think that in every family of
which I had any acquaintance the forms of
family worship were maintained in this earlier
period ; every morning certainly, and probably
every evening. When, therefore, the religion
of Connecticut was introduced into Boston by
the building of Park Street Church, and by
the arrival of my children' s great-grandfather,
Lyman Beecher, and the custom of an occa
sional evening service on Sunday or on a week
day came with it, it was considered as an entire
innovation by old-fashioned Boston. It was
quite as much an innovation as calling an Epis
copal minister a "rector" is now to old-
fashioned Episcopalians, or as having lighted
candles in the daytime would be at Trinity.
To the last moment of its conscious existence
the West Church was never arranged for even
ing service; and at this moment you will find,
in old Boston families, the habit of going to
visit one another on Sunday evening, but not of
going to church. Where people go to church
steadily on Sunday evening you may generally
guess they are not of old Boston blood.

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 135
In the interior of the State, as at my grand
father's, for example, the observance of "the
Sabbath " stopped at sunset. For instance, we
watched at his house for the sun to go down
on Sunday afternoon, and then brought out
our little cannons and fired a feu dejoie in
honor of its departure. We then played blind-
man's-buff all Sunday evening, and this in the
parsonage of a stiff Calvinistic minister. No
such excesses as this would have been per
mitted in Boston. But gradually Sunday
evening concerts came in, if only they were
religious concerts ; and the Handel and Haydn
Society, I think, would hardly have been in
existence now but for the midway opportunity
which Sunday evening gave for their perform
ances. The theatres, on the other hand, were
compelled to be closed on Saturday evening
and on Sunday, until a period later than that
I am describing, when some of the more enter
prising managers defied the State and the city,
and our statutes were changed so that perform
ances on Saturday evening were possible.
After they had gained the point as a matter of
right I think they generally found it more

136 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
convenient to have the performances of Satur
day in the afternoon. Our present statute,
which defines the Lord's Day as from mid
night to midnight, is as late as 1844. Before
that time there were certain restrictions on
Saturday evening, such as the theatrical
licenses indicated.
Perhaps the great central day which gave
distinction and hope to the duty of going to
meeting was the proclamation of Thanksgiving.
Let me describe a scene in Brattle Street Meet-
ing-House. The time is the middle of November, on a
Sunday morning. A boy of four years old,
who has the fortunate privilege of sitting on
the cross-seat of the pew, is the person who
describes, after sixty-six years, what he remem
bers. Be it understood by architectural read
ers that Brattle Street Meeting-House was a
fine old church in Boston, built after the best
traditions of Wren's churches in London. It
has been well said that in the social life of
London in the days of Wren there were reasons
for the high walls, as they might be called,
which in those churches concealed the wor-

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 137
shippers in one pew from those in the next.
Whatever was the reason, such high pew walls
were the effect. The little boy, whose self and
successor is now trying to reproduce him,
could sleep, if he chose, extended on the cross-
seat with his head in his mother's lap, while
she listened to the minister. I will not say
that on this particular day he, or I, had been
asleep. What is important to the present
business is that she whispers to him that he
had better listen now, for the minister is going
to read the proclamation. The boy stands up
on his seat, and with that delight with which
even conservative childhood sees any custom
defied watches with rapture Mr. Palfrey
unfolding the large paper sheet, which might
have been a large newspaper, and sees the
sheet cover even the pulpit Bible.
Mr. Palfrey is a young man of thirty or
thereabouts, who is afterwards to be the distin
guished Dr. Palfrey, a leader of the Anti-
Slavery opinion of Massachusetts. He reads
the Governor's proclamation with sense and
feeling, so that even a child follows along,
about the taking care of the poor, the happi-

138 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
ness of home, but specially about the success
of the fisheries. It is only in the latest times
that any Massachusetts Governor is so disloyal
to that ocean from whose breasts she has
drawn her life that he fails to mention The
Fisheries in his proclamation. But home, poor
people, fisheries, and all sink into their own
insignificance when with resonant voice the
minister ends — with the grand words :
Given in the Council Chamber at Boston, in the
year of our Lord, 1826, and of the Independence of the
United States the fiftieth. Levi Lincoln, Governor.
This fine relationship between " Thanksgiv
ing Day" and " Independence Day," of which
the glories, six months ago, are a certain hazy
dream, is not lost upon the child. And then
follow the words, most grand in all rituals :
By his Excellency the Governor, with the advice and
consent of the Council. Edward D. Bangs, Secretary.
GOD SAVE THE COMMONWEALTH OF
MASSACHUSETTS!
That words so inspiring, pronounced with
such a clarion voice, should be uttered in a

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 139
church on Sunday — this was indeed something
to fill high the cup of wild, intoxicating joy.
That Edward D. Bangs, the secretary, should
be sitting himself, watching, as it were, his own
petard, on the other side of the aisle, with his
finger resting on his right ear, in a peculiar
manner such as was unknown to others — he
clad in a brown coat with a velvet collar — that
he should see and hear all this unmoved — this
added to the grandeur and solemnity and high
dignity of the whole. The minister said that,
in accordance with the instructions of the
Executive, the church would be open on
Thanksgiving Day, and that, before that day
— namely, on the next Sunday — a contribution
would be taken for the poor. The boy asked
his mother if he might bring some money —
and was told that he should have a fo' pence for
the occasion. " Fo' pence " in the language of
the time meant fourpence-halfpenny of the
currency of New England. But New Eng
land, though she coined threepences with her
own pine tree^ never coined fourpence-ha'-
penny pieces. She used instead the half-real
of the Spanish coinage. The boy was to put

140 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
in the box, and did put in for many years at
Thanksgiving, one of these coins, small to
kings, but almost the largest known in familiar
use to children.
Passing by the contribution, and the vague
ideas which the children had of the immense
results to be obtained by the distribution of
their wealth among the poor, I will come
directly to Thanksgiving Day itself. Had we
children been asked what we expected on
Thanksgiving Day we should have clapped
our hands and said that we expected a good
dinner. As we had a good dinner every day
of our lives this answer shows simply that
children respect symbols and types. And
indeed there were certain peculiarities in the
Thanksgiving dinner which there were not on
common days. For instance, there was always
a great deal of talk about the Marlborough
pies or the Marlborough pudding. To this
hour, in any old and well-regulated family in
New England, you will find there is a tradi
tional method of making the Marlborough
pie, which is a sort of lemon pie, and each
good housekeeper thinks that her grandmother

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 141
left a better receipt for Marlborough pie than
anybody else did. We had Marlborough pies
at other times, but we were sure to have them
on Thanksgiving Day ; and it ought to be said
that there was no other day on which we had
four kinds of pies on the table and plum
pudding beside, not to say chicken pie. In
those early days ice creams or sherbets or any
of the kickshaws of that variety would have
been spurned from a Thanksgiving dinner.
Every human being went to "meeting" on
the morning of Thanksgiving Day, the boy of
four years included. At that age he did not
know that the sermon was, or might be, polit
ical. Still an attentive ear might catch words
from the pulpit which would not have been
heard on Sunday. It was when all parties
came home from " meeting " that the real fes
tival began. Not but what frequent visits to
the kitchen the day before had familiarized
even Young Boston with the gigantic scale on
which things were conducted. For it was the
business of the kitchen, not simply to supply
the feast in that house, but the other feasts in
the houses of feudal dependents of different

142 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
colors, who would render themselves for their
pies and their chickens.
The hours absolutely without parallel in the
year were the two hours between twelve and
two. We were in our best clothes and it was
Thanksgiving Day. We therefore did not do
what we should have done on other days, and
we were the least bit bored by the change.
On other days we should have gone and
coasted had the snow fallen ; or we should
have gone into the "garret" and fought an
imaginary battle of Salamis on the floats. But
this was Thanksgiving Day, and we therefore
went into the best parlor, not very often
opened, and entertained ourselves, or enter
tained each other, by looking at picture-
books which we could not always see. The
Hogarths were out, the illustrated books of
travel, the handsome annuals which were
rather too flne for our hands at other periods.
We were in the position of the boy and girl
invited to a party where they know nobody,
standing in a corner and pretending to be
interested by photographs. But before a
great while the cousins would begin to arrive,

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 143
and then all would be well. The cousins also
were in their best clothes, to which we were
not accustomed. But if we could show them
the Hogarths, or they could tell us some
experience of theirs in private theatricals,
then the joys of society began. And at two
the party, larger than we ever saw it at any
other time, went into the back parlor, where
the large table was set. Observe that this
large table never appeared, unless the club
met with my father, except on Thanksgiving
Day. Christmas Day, as a holiday of this
sort, was absolutely unknown in this Puritan
family. There would be a side-table for the chil
dren at which the oldest cousin in a manner
presided, with his very funny stories, with
his very exciting lore about the new life on
which he was entering, either in the first class
at the Latin School or possibly after he had
left the Latin School. Occasionally the revelry
at the side-table became so loud that it had to
be suppressed by a word from the elders. At
the elders' table great talk about genealogy :
whether Gib Atkins did or did not leave a

144 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
particular bit of land to certain successors who
now own it ; whether the Picos and the Robbs
were on good terms after the marriage of one
of them to another. I will say, in passing,
that, as we grew older, we children had the
wit to introduce these subjects for the purpose
of seeing the mad rage with which different
aged cousins advanced to the attack, as a bull
might to a red flag.
It may readily be imagined that, with twenty
or thirty guests and the innumerable courses,
the company, who were indeed in no haste, sat
a good while at the table. This was one of the
marvels to us children, that it was possible to
be at dinner two hours. There was no desire
to slip down from the chair and go off to play.
There was no soup dreamed of, and I think, to
this day, that there never should be any at a
Thanksgiving dinner. Neither did any fish
follow where no soup led the Avay. You began
with your chicken pie and your roast turkey.
You ate as much as you could, and you then
ate what you could of mince pie, squash pie,
Marlborough pie, cranberry tart, and plum
pudding. Then you went to work on the

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 145
fruits as you could. Here, in parenthesis, I
will say to young Americans that the use of
dried fruits at the table was much more fre
quent in those days than in these. Dates,
prunes, raisins, figs, and nuts held a much
more prominent place in a handsome dessert
than they do now. Recollect that oranges
were all brought from the West Indies or
from the Mediterranean in sailing vessels, and
were by no means served in the profusion with
which they are served now. It has not much
to do with a Thanksgiving dinner, but bananas
as I have said above, somewhere, were wholly
unknown. With such devices the children at the side-
table and the elders at the large table whiled
away the time till it was quite dark, and it
might well be that the lamps were lighted.
Observe, gas was wholly unknown in private
residences. And when at last the last philo-
poena had been given between two of the chil
dren, or the last "roast turkey" had been
broken out of an English walnut and saved as
a curiosity, all parties slid from their chairs,
or rose up from them, as the length of their

146 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
legs might be, and adjourned to the large par
lor again.
At the bottom of my heart I think that here
came a period in which the elders quailed. I
think it was rather hard for them to maintain
the conversation about genealogy and lost
inheritances. But we children never quailed.
We either returned to the picture-books or we
sat in the corner and told stories, or possibly
the expert cousins, who were skilled in the
fine arts, drew pictures for us. I have not
the slightest recollection, either at that first
Thanksgiving or on any subsequent Thanks
giving of childhood, of any moment of tedious-
ness or gloom, such as I have since found to
hang over even the bravest in the midst of a
high festivity. Before long we would be in
the corner playing commerce, or old maid, or
possibly "slap everlasting"; or the Game of
Human Life would be produced, with the tee
totum, and one would find himself in the
stocks, or in a gambling-room, or in prison
perhaps, or happily, at the age of sixty-three
years, in glory. Memorandum : It is seven
years since I passed that grand climacteric of

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 147
7x9 with which the teetotum games ended,
and I am not in glory yet, unless the beauty
of an October day, when leaves of gold shine
out between me and the blue heavens may be
considered glory enough for one who believes
that this world was made by a good God.
There was nothing to prevent blind-man's-buff,
but that the elders had to have their share of
the room. In later days charades came in,
and it is now forty years since I have assisted
at a Thanksgiving, without annually acting the
part of Toung LocJiinvar, ov Lord Ullin, or of
the "Captain bold of Halifax." But this I
did not do when I was four years old. Of
those first Thanksgiving Days my memories
are simply of undisguised delight. I wonder
now that I did not die the day after the first
of them from having eaten flve times as much
as I should have done. But there seems to be
a good Providence which watches over boys
and girls, as over idiots and drunken people.
This is sure, that I have survived to tell the
story. Social existence in all forms of civilization

148 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
requires a certain knowledge of dancing ; and
in conventional civilization this dancing is not
left to the spontaneous joy of children, but,
willingly or unwillingly, they have to be taught
to dance. This fell upon us as upon other
children, and to the very end of his life Mr.
Lorenzo Papanti, cordial, graceful, and digni
fied old man, remembered kindly that I was
one of the first four pupils whom he had in
Boston. He has become so far an historical
character to many of the best in Boston that
the reader will excuse me if I give a few words
to his dancing-school. It was in Montgomery
Place, now Bosworth Street ; I think in the very
house which was removed to open the passage
through to what we called Cooke's Court, and
what the present generation calls Chapman
Place. It was in the third story of that
house, where a partition had been cut away
to make a hall large enough for a dancing-
school. The papering at one end still differed
from the papering at the other. To this hall
of Terpsichore I repaired with three others,
and we were the only pupils on the first Thurs
day afternoon of our attendance. On the next

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 149
Saturday there arrived more, one of them one
of my brothers in baptism, of whom I have
already spoken ; and from that time the school
increased, and, as one is glad to say, maintains
at this moment, under the direction of another
generation, the high and well-deserved regard
and esteem of everybody in Boston who knows
anything ^about it. This hall was near our
house, so that we could always go on foot.
But there was a rather tragic story in the
family of the school of M. Labass6, to which
my older brother and sister went, which
was so far away that they had to be sent in
a carriage. Unfortunately in the jolting of
the carriage they were shaken off the seats,
and they were so small that they could not
climb up on them again before they arrived at
their destination. Thus early was the art of
graceful movement impressed upon them.
For me, dancing-school shared in the dislike
with which I regarded all other schools. Dear
Ml"3. Papanti — I remember her with gratitude
to this moment — did her best for me, but never
was a pupil less likely to add to the reputation
of an institution. The school was afterwards

150 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
removed to Bulfinch Place, where the Papantis
had an elegant house. I was at that time bribed
to attend by being told I might take a book
with me to read. One afternoon, when the
boys were carrying on awfully, dear Mrs.
Papanti bore down upon us, and said, "Why
is it that Master Hale is so quiet, while Master
Champernoon behaves so badly ? " and looked
over my shoulder, to see that I was reading
" Guy Mannering." " Ah ! " she cried, " I will
give Master Champernoon a set of the Waver
ley novels if he will behave as well as Master
Hale does ! " But alas. Master Champernoon
was one of the boys who enjoyed dancing, and
wanted to dance, and had unwarranted arrange
ments with the girls with regard to partners,
and so on, while Master Hale detested the
whole thing. Good soul, she did her best in
dragging me about, as a favorite pupil, in the
waltz ; but my poor head swam, and I think
ray partners, from that day to this, have
generally preferred to "stand through a
waltz," when they have found the alternative
was sharing it with me.
All this led, of course, to little evening par-

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 151
ties of the boys and girls, just as it does now.
The boys would stand at the foot of the stairs
and in the entries, just as they do now, and
maiden aunts would make incursions upon
them to tell them that they must take part
ners, just as they do now. They took these
partners, and then retired from the field to
similar clusters, to be broken up again, just as
they do now.
I have tried to describe in my story "Bast
and West" the way in which refreshments were
generally served at evening parties, unless
these were on the grandest scale. There
would frequently be such a party without
a proper supper-table. I believe this was
largely due to the fact that, in very few houses
in Boston^then, was there a special dining-room.
People dined in their back parlors, and when
the house was given up to dancing the back
parlor was not available as a supper-room. At
the simpler parties to which boys and girls
went, in place of the supper a little proces
sion of servants brought in large trays with
cake of different kinds, even with ice cream,
perhaps with jelly or blanc mange, with wine

152 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
or lemonade ; and these processions recurred
half a dozen times in the course of the
evening. Another function which brought young
people together, and brought them together
with older people, was the arrangement for
evening lectures. These were much more
familiar and homelike than the lectures of
to-day, to which we go hardly with any
idea of social enjoyment. But, as I have in
timated, the " march of intellect " had begun.
One feature of the march of intellect was the
introduction of lectures for people who wanted
to learn something. They were exactly what
is called the university extension system
to-day, which I observe, however, is spoken of
everywhere as if it were an entirely new inven
tion. A lecture course is now undertaken by
a director, or entrepreneur, who means to pro
vide entertainment for the people. He does
not pretend to teach the people ; he proposes
to entertain them. Therefore, if his course
consists of eight lectures, he provides eight
different entertaining speakers ; and this
makes almost a class of men, each of whom

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 153
has a few entertaining addresses prepared with
this definite purpose. But in'the earlier days
of what we called the lecture system, or the
lyceum, a body of public-spirited men, who
really wanted to improve the education of the
community, banded themselves together into
a society for that purpose. This society,
among other instrumentalities, established
courses of lectures, generally in the winter,
for the instruction of the people.
In Boston such lectures had been heralded
by courses arranged by individuals. Dr. Jacob
Bigelow had courses on botany ; Henry Ware
gave a course of very popular lectures on
Palestine ; Edward Everett delivered lectures
on Greek antiquities ; and there were other
similar courses, just as there might be now, if
anybody would attend them. The success of
these courses showed that a systematic arrange
ment might be made for courses of popular
lectures in the evenings, and such were, in
fact, carried on by different societies for
a period of years. They culminated in the
great success which Mr. John Lowell achieved,
in the establishment of the Lowell Institute ;

154 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
and I suppose it was this foundation which
broke down at once all weaker foundations
with the same purpose. It does its work so
well that nobody in Boston need have any tears
for them. I remember the Society for the
Promotion of Useful Knowledge, the Mercan
tile Library Association, the Mechanics' Ap
prentices' Association, the Natural History
Society, and the Historical Society, as main
taining such courses of lectures as I describe.
There would be from ten to fifteen lectures in
a course. The tickets for the cheapest were
fifty cents a course ; for the others they were
a dollar, or even two dollars. At our house
this made no difference, because tickets to
everything — concerts, lectures, and the rest —
were sent to the newspaper office, and prac
tically we children went to any such entertain
ments as we liked.
One of these societies would arrange a course
of lectures. The whole course might be on
chemistry. I remember such a course from
Professor Webster. It was conducted with
all his brilliant power of experiment, and
listened to with enthusiasm by four or five

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 155
hundred people. I remember another course
by John Farrar on the steam-engine. I heard
in the Useful Knowledge course several of
Mr. Waldo Emerson's biographical lectures.
The Useful Knowledge course would be per
haps on Tuesday evening, the Mercantile
Library on Wednesday, the Mechanics' on
Thursday. Eventually halls were built spe
cially for such lectures. There was one favor
ite hall in the Masonic Temple, which is now
occupied, as rebuilt, by Messrs. Stearns. I
suppose this hall would hold five hundred
people. The seats rose rapidly, as in the
lecture-room of a medical college, so that
people could see all the experiments or pict
ures on the platform.
To such an entertainment you went, and if
you were old enough you took a friend of the
other sex. You arrived there half an hour
before the lecture began, and walked from
seat to seat, talking with the people whom you
found there. After the lecture had gone on
half an hour or more there was a recess, and
again you walked about from seat to seat,
perhaps chose another seat, if the first had not

156 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
been satisfactory. At the end of a lecture
of maybe an hour and a half in length you
went home with anybody who chose to invite
you. At the house you went to there was
the invariable dish of oysters, or crackers and
cheese, or whatever was the evening meal of
that particular evening. And thus the lyceum
lecture of that time played a quite important
part in the social arrangements of growing
boys and girls.
Of its advantage as a system of instruction
I can, say hardly too much. Of course the
instruction given was superficial. I have
lived seventy years in the world, and I have
never found any instruction that was not
superficial. But it was instruction ; it was
instruction given by first-rate men, who knew
how to teach ; and it was systematic in
struction. The lecturer of to-day takes an
epigrammatic phrase for his subject, as he
calls it; it is the "Philosophy of Mathe
matics," or it is the "Mathematics of Phi
losophy." He speaks well, he brings in
interesting stories, he gives a little informa
tion, and the public which sees him and hears

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 157
him is amused. Someone asked James Rus
sell Lowell once whether he supposed that
the average audience of an interior town in
New York cared much for Beaumont and
Fletcher. He said very frankly: "I do not
suppose they care for Beaumont and Fletcher
at all. But I suppose they have heard of me
and want to see me, and a good way to see me
is to pay for my lecture, sit in front of me,
and see and hear me for the hour in which I
am reading something which interests me."
This is very genuine ; it is all right ; it is a
good bit of public entertainment for people
who have been tired to death by the work
of the day. But it is not instruction. Dear
Starr King used to say: "A lyceum lecture
consists of five parts of sense and five of non
sense. There are not more than five people in
New England who know how to mix them.
But I am one of the five." All lecturers do
not keep to his recipe.
On the other hand, I believe that if we could
wipe out the whole nonsense of the evening
lessons from the school curriculum ; if we
could make teachers teach, where now they

158 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
simply hear the lesson which somebody else
has taught ; if then we would reserve our
evenings for instructing intelligent boys and
girls in the fundamental principles of a good
many things which are best taught by lectures,
I believe that we should improve the system
of public instruction to-day. It would require
a good deal of work on the part of a great
many intelligent people. Possibly some time
there will be a school committee which will
think such an enterprise worthy of attention.
A few years ago I looked in, late in the
evening, upon a pretty little party of one of
the largest classes in my own Sunday-school.
I met there perhaps thirty of the sweetest and
most charming of the younger women in Bos
ton. They had assembled at the invitation of
their teacher, who had recently travelled in the
East, and they had been spending the evening
in conversation with one another and with
her, and in examining the curiosities, and
especially the photographs, which she had
brought from Egypt, Syria, and Greece. In
this large and brilliant company I was the
only gentleman. At half-past ten, after a

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 159
little supper, we all gathered to go home.
Comparing the detail of Boston life with what
it would have been fifty years before, I was
interested to see that these young ladies all
went home without escort from the other sex.
Some of them had ordered their carriages ;
many took street cars, which passed the house
in one direction or the other, and which would
leave them within a block of their own resi
dences. It is certainly highly creditable to
Boston that a body of women, young or old,
can use the evening in such a way, and can
disperse to their homes at such an hour with
no companionship but what they give to one
another, and with no hazard of insult.
But I thought then, and I have often said
since, that such a social order was wholly
unlike the social order in which I grew up.
When I was a boy of eight, or nine, or ten, no
sister of mine would have gone to take tea
with a friend but one of her brothers would
have been detailed to go for her and bring her
home at eight or nine o'clock. I am quite
clear that in those days the life of young
people involved a great deal more of the visit-

160 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
ing of both sexes together than it does now. I
do not mean to speak of the life of boys of fif
teen years old and over. I speak of the life of
boys of all ages, from five or six years upward.
The function of tea-parties was quite differ
ent from that of dinner-parties. You would
invite two or three boys and girls who were
friends of your children to come and take tea,
where now you would hardly invite children
of the same age to come and dine. Now if
this function happened to be exercised in the .
house of old-fashioned people it had some
rather queer attendants — or what would seem
queer to the boy of the present day. For
instance, one of the relics of Revolutionary
times was the general impression that no boy
could ever serve his country, unless he were
trained as a public speaker. I think this is
true now, and it was known to be true then.
Consequently when you were at such a party
as I have described, the evening's entertain
ment of playing old maid, teetotum games,
jack-straws, or whatever might occupy the
young people, would be interrupted, from time
to time, by an appeal to the boys of the

I 1 n \M, I. hi 'vJ

¦ ¦ MASTER EDWARD, THB COMPANY -WOULD LIliE TO HEAB YOU SPEAK
A PIECE."— Pa^« 161.

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 161
party to "speak a piece" for the benefit of
the elders. There was a certain compliment
implied in being asked to "speak a piece,"
but it was not a great compliment, for every
boy was asked, not to say compelled, to do so.
It would have been bad form to decline to
speak, quite as much as it would be to sit at a
dinner- table and decline to eat anything before
you, as if it were of a quality poorer than that
to which you were accustomed.
Accordingly you had one or two "pieces"
in mind which you were prepared to " speak."
When you were called upon — when the old
ladies, at their side of the room, had made up
their minds that it was time for this exercise
to go forward — you were told, "Master Ed
ward" (or Master Oliver, or Master Alexan
der), "the company would like to have you
speak a piece." You demurred as little as
you could, you went into a corner, you made
a bow, and you spoke a piece. You then went
back to your cards or other entertainment. I
do not remember that the girls sang songs, as
it seems to me they should have done, under
the circumstances,

162 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
At such a little party, again, invariably the
tray was brought in as the evening went by,
and you ate the nuts and raisins or figs, which
were generally something you did not have at
home. Perhaps this is always one of the
charms of social life.
There may be, by the way, no other oppor
tunity in these papers to quote, the amusing
passage from Dr. Palfrey on salt codfish. It
is in his admirable chapter on New England
life, in which he followed the example of
Macaulay's celebrated chapter describing the
family institutions of England.
Forty years ago I was so situated as to know un
commonly well the habits of different classes of people
in different parts of the country. TiU a later period
than this the most ceremonious Boston feast was never
set out on Saturday (then the common dinner-party day)
without the dunfish at one end of the table ; abundance,
variety, pomp of other things, but that unfailingly. It
was a sort of New England point of honor ; and luxuri
ous livers pleased themselves, over their nuts and wine,
with the thought that, while suiting their palates, they
had been doing their part in a wide combination to
maintain the fisheries and create a naval strength.
There was one function of those days which
has been admirably improved in the customs

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 163
of later days. Franklin left a small fund to
the city, to be expended in medals for the most
deserving scholars. The Franklin medal was
first awarded in 1792, is awarded to the present
time, and is a good badge of honor to the
genuine Boston boy. The school committee
and the government of the city dined together,
on the day of the school anniversary, in Fan
euil Hall, and the boys who received the
Franklin medals were then first initiated into
the forms of a public dinner. There must
have been some sort of a procession — I do not
know, for I never had a Franklin medal — and
the boys sat in Faneuil Hall and heard the
speaking. But as years went on, after the
time of which I speak, and particularly after
the girls began to receive city medals, it was
seen that a much pleasanter entertainment
could be devised for the children than a feast
at which the officers of the city government
took the principal part, and in which almost
all parties drank more wine than was good
for them. And in these later days the mayor
holds a great reception in the large Me
chanics' Hall ; he gives to every graduating

164 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
girl a bouquet, and the boys and girls
dance together to music wliich the city pro
vides. I mention the contrast, because I am
quite sure that in the years between 1826 and
1837 there would have been a religious prejudice
in some quarters against dancing, which would
have prevented any such public celebration.
The boys were in touch with the large public
in their unauthorized and unrecognized con
nection with the fire department. Boston was
still a wooden town, and the danger of fire
was, as it is in all American cities, constantly
present. There hung in our front entry two
leather buckets ; in each of them was certain
apparatus which a person might need if he
were in a burning house. Strange to say,
there was a bed-key, that he might take down a
bedstead if it were necessary. These were relics
of a time when my father had been a member
of one of the private fire companies. In those
associations each man was bound to attend at
any fire where the property of other members
of the association was in danger ; and there
were traditions of father' shaving been present
at the great Court Street fire, for instance.

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 165
But these fire clubs either died out or be
came social institutions, as the Fire Club in
Worcester exists to this day; and nothing was
left but the bucket as a sort of memorial
of a former existence.
Before our day the volunteer fire depart
ment system of Boston had been created, and
there were similar systems in all large cities.
Of course we boys supposed that ours was the
best in the world ; each boy in Boston sup
posed that the engine nearest his house was
the best engine in the world, and that, on
occasion, it could throw water higher than
any other engine. It could likewise, on
occasion, pump dry any engine that was in
line with it. I need not say that these notions
of the boys were simply superstitions, wholly
unfounded in fact. Our engine was the New
York. The engine-house was one of a curious
mass of public buildings that occupied the
place where Franklin's statue now stands, in
front of what was the court-house of that day.
There was no electric fire alarm in those early
days. The moment a fire broke out every
body who had any lungs ran up the street or

166 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
down the street, or both ways, crying "Fire ! "
and as soon as the churches could be opened,
all the bells in Boston began to ring. Then
the company which was to drag the New TorTc
to the fire began to assemble at its house, and
naturally there was great pride in seeing that
your engine was first in place. You learned
where the fire was, not by any signal, but by the
rumor of the street. It was at the North End,
or at the South End, or on the wharves, or on
"Nigger Hill." As soon as boys and men, of
whatever connection, arrived, sufficient to drag
the engine, it started, under the direction of
such officer of the company as might be pres
ent. The members of the company had no
. uniforms, so far as I remember ; they joined
the lines as quickly as they could, but there
were always enough people to pull. As I have
intimated, it was everybody's business to
attend at the fire.
When' you arrived at the spot there would
be a general caucus as to the method of attack,
yet I think there were people in command.
Afterwards a gentleman named Amory, highly
respected by all of us, was chief engineer.

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 167
Whatever the caucus directed was done, with
as much efficiency as was possible under such
democratic institutions. But, in the first
place, the probability was that there was no
water near. The Jamaica Pond aqueduct car
ried water in log pipes to the lower levels of the
city ; but, for fully half the city, there was no
such supply, and wells had to be relied upon.
Every engine, therefore, which was good for
anything was a "suction engine," as it was
called; that is, it was able to pump from a well,
as well as able to throw •^ter to an indefinite
height. The engine that arrived first repaired
to the well best known in that neighborhood,
or, if the occasion were fortunate, to the sea, and
began to pump. The engine that arrived next
took station next to this, and pumped from it
through a long line of hose ; and so successive
engines carried the water to the place where
some foreman directed it upon the flames. It
was thus that the different engines attained
their celebrity, as one pumped the tub of
another dry, while the unfortunate members
were "working the brakes" to their best to
keep it full.

168 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
The buckets of which I have spoken were
the remains of a yet earlier period, when
people formed themselves in line to the well
or to the sea, and passed buckets backward
and forward — full if they were going toward
the fire, empty if they were going away ; and
the water was thus thrown upon such flames
as chose to wait for it.
When one writes this, one wonders that
Boston was not burned down four times a
year ; indeed, there were many bad flres in
those days. The system called out some of
the most energetic and public-spirited young
fellows of the town, and after a while they
were exempt from service in the militia. Well
they might be, for their service as flremen was
far more valuable to the community, and far
more oppressive in time and health, than any
service in the militia of those days. They felt
their power, and asserted it once too often.
In the mayoralty of Mr. Samuel A. Eliot a
company did something it should not have
done, or refused to do something it was told
to do ; with a firm hand, he turned them
all out, and created the system of the fire

SOCIAL EELATIONS. 169
department of to-day, in which every man is
paid for his services, and may be regularly
called upon, whether he will or no, as a ser
vant of the city. The introduction of steam
fire-engines, and a sufficient supply of water,
would in themselves have been enough to
revolutionize the whole of the primitive
method of extinguishing fire, had no such
revolt of the fire companies compelled a rev
olution. I need hardly say that the old method
interested to the full every boy in town. If
his father and mother would let him, he
attended the fire, where he could at least scream
"Fire ! " if he could not do anything else. If
a boy were big enough he was permitted
almost to kill himself by working at the brakes.
This was the most exhausting method for the
application of human power that has been
contrived ; but there was power enough to be
wasted, and, until the introduction of steam,
it was everywhere used. It is still used on
board ships which have no steam power.
Every enterprising boy regarded it as the one
wish of his life that he might be eighteen years

170 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
old, SO that he could join the company in his
particular neighborhood ; and even if he had
not attained that age, he attached himself to
the company as a sort of volunteer aid, and,
as I say, was permitted, as a favor, to assist in
running through the streets, dragging at the
long rope which drew the engine.

CHAPTER VII.
THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON.
THE Broad Street Riot, so called, on the
afternoon of June 11, 1837, was an event
which of course had great interest for the boys
of the period. It was the fortune of very few
of them, however, who were decently brought
up, to have any hand in that conflict ; for, as
I have said in another chapter of these recol
lections, people in those days went to " meet
ing" as regularly in the afternoon as they did
in the morning.
If there should be need to-day for the sud
den appearance of the military forces of
Boston on a Sunday afternoon I think that
the officers of those forces would be looked for
quite as readily at the Browning Club or a
chess club, or possibly even exercising their
horses somewhere within ten miles of Boston,
as at any place of public worship. But my
whole personal recollection of the Broad
171

172 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Street Riot is that, of a sudden, the bell of
Brattle Street Church struck "backward,"
and the gentlemen who were of the First Regi
ment rose and left their seats, and went down
to the armory at Faneuil Hall to join their
companies, not to say lead them. It was said,
and I believe truly, that a sergeant formed the
first men who arrived in skeletons of compa
nies, and in a skeleton of a regiment. George
Tyler Bigelow, afterwards chief justice of the
Supreme Court, was the first commissioned
officer who arrived. He was a lieutenant in
the New England Guards or the Light In
fantry. He ordered the regiment out of the
armory, and commanded it till he met a supe
rior officer. The story was that the command
changed half a dozen times before the regi
ment reached Broad Street, where firemen and
Irishmen were fighting. Of which I saw and
remember nothing. But the departure of
those gentlemen from church, whom we would
have joined so gladly, fixed the whole affair in
our memories. In a boy journal of the time,
I find the comment, after I had read the news
paper account, " The Irish got well beaten, but

THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. 173
the firemen appear to have been as much in
the wrong as they."
In all these reminiscences I am well aware
that our lives were much less affected by the
daily news from abroad than are the lives of
people now. Certainly Boston regarded itself
more as a metropolis than it does now. And
for this there was good reason : for Boston had
much less connection with the rest of the
world than it has now. It had a foreign com
merce, and the average boy expected to go to
sea some time or other. But I recollect times
when a vessel from England brought thirty-
five days' news ; all through the time of which
I am writing it took three days for a letter to
go to Washington ; and although people no
longer offered prayers for their friends when
they were going to New York, still a journey
to New York was comparatively a rare busi
ness. In my third year in college I wanted
to send a parcel of dried plants to a botanist
in New York. There was no proper ' ' express,"
and I asked it as a personal favor of a young
man named Harnden, whom I knew as a con
ductor on the Boston and Worcester Railroad,

174 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
that he would give the parcel to someone who
would give it to someone else who would give
it to my correspondent. It was because Mr.
Harnden had so many such personal favors in
hand that he established Harnden' s Express,
which was, I think, the first of the organized
expresses which existed in this country.
I find it difficult to make the Boston boy or
girl of to-day understand how different was
Boston life, thus shut in from the rest of the
world, from our life, when, as I suppose, at
least one hundred thousand people enter Bos
ton every day, and as many leave it for some
place outside.
As late as May, 1845, when I was twenty-
three years old, I had an engagement to go
from Boston to Worcester Saturday afternoon.
I was to preach there the next day. When, at
three o'clock, I came to the station of the
Worcester road, there was an announcement
that, from some accident on the line above,
no train would leave until Monday. The
three o'clock train, observe, was the latest
train of Saturday. I crossed Boston to the
Fitchburg station and took the train for

THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. 175
Groton or Littleton. There I took a stage for
Lancaster, where I slept.* In the morning,
with a Worcester man who had been caught in
Boston as I was, I took a wagon early, and we
two drove across to Worcester. That is to
say, as late as 1845 there were but two men in
Boston to whom it was necessary that they
should go to Worcester that afternoon. And
this was ten years after railroad communica
tion had been established.
Before railroad communication was open,
intercourse with other States, or with what
now seem neighboring cities, was very infre
quent. In 1832 my father went to Schenectady
to see the Albany and Schenectady Railroad,
and, I believe, to order some cars for the Bos
ton and Worcester road. He also went to
New York City on the business of that road.
* As I write these memoranda, in September, 1893, just as
we have heard of Mr. Wliittier's death, tliere is a certain
interest in saying that it was on this occasion that I first met
him. As the handful of passengers entered the stage which
was to take us to Lancaster, Mr. Whittier was one of the num
ber. He did not tell his name to anyone, and it was many
years before I knew that he was one of those whose pleasant
conversation enlivened the dark ride. I can hardly say that I
sa^w him, but he was kind enough afterwards always to remem
ber that I made his acquaintance on that occasion.

176 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
I think he had been to that city but once since
1805, when he went there on his way from
Northampton to Troy. Yet if anybody was
to travel he would have been apt to. He was
a journalist, intensely interested in internal
improvement. He had a large business cor
respondence in New York, and was well known
there. I was myself nineteen years old when
I first visited New York.
In 1841 I had a chance to overhaul the old
register at the hotel at Stafford Springs in Con
necticut. Stafford Springs was, and is, a
watering-place of a modest sort, where is a
good, strong iron spring — good for boys with
warts, and indeed for anyone who needs iron
in his blood. It was quite the fashion to go
to Stafford Springs from different parts of New
England, in the earlier part of the century.
In this old register it was interesting to see
how universal was the custom by which people
came there in their own carriages. What fol
lowed was that people who had no carriages
of their own hardly travelled for pleasure at all.
So was it that, in the years of my boyhood,
Boston people, with very few exceptions, lived

THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. 177
in Boston the year round. People did not
care to go to the theatre in midsummer, and I
think the theatres were generally closed for
six or eight weeks when the days were
longest. Perhaps Boston used the matchless
advantages of her bay more when she had
little communication with points beyond it.
Perhaps the entertainments of the bay seemed
more important because there were few, if any,
excursions for pleasure excepting those which
the water offered.
Nahant was seized upon as a sea-shore resort
as early as 1819. The sea serpent had appeared
in 1817. The hotel on the south-eastern point,
long since burned down, was a pretty, piazza-
guarded building ; and, as the steamboat
Housatonic went down to Nahant every morn
ing, and came back every night, a day at
Nahant made a charming summer expedi
tion, which we young folks relied upon at
least once a year. At Nahant, at Chelsea
Beach, at Nantasket, at Sandwich, and at
Gloucester I made my acquaintance with the
real ocean. At Nahant I made my first
acquaintance with the joy of the bowling

178 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
alley, and flrst saw the game of billiards.
By the way, I remember that, in lecturing to
my class in college, as late as 1837, Professor
Levering had to tell the class, as a fact which
half of them did not know, that when one
billiard-ball strikes another it may stop itself,
while it communicates its motion to the other.
I doubt if half the young men who heard him
had ever seen a billiard-table at that time.
There were but one or two steamboats in the
harbor, so that the " excursion" of to-day was
very infrequent. But all the more would peo
ple go down the bay for fishing-parties, on
sailing vessels — more, I should think, than
they do now. Perhaps there Avas something
in foreign commerce which gave to those
engaged in it a sort of absolute freedom some
times, sandwiched in with hard work at others,
in an alternate remission of work and play,
which the modern merchant seldom enjoys.
Your ship came in from Liverpool or from
Calcutta, and you and all your staff, down to
the boy who swept out the office and trimmed
the lamps, were busy, morning, noon, and
night, till her cargo was disposed of, and per-

THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. 179
haps till she was fitted for another voyage.
But then, if no other of your ships arrived,
there would be a lull ; and if Tom, Dick, or
Harry came in to propose a fishing-party you
were ready.
However this may be, the history and expe
riences of such parties made a considerable
element of summer life. The anecdote of Gen
eral Moreau belongs to them, and I will print
it, though it was told a generation before my
time. When General Moreau was in exile
from France he came on his travels to Boston.
Among other entertainments he was taken
down the bay on a fishing-party. As they
dined, or after dinner, excellent Colonel Mes
senger, whose singing is still remembered with
pleasure, was asked to favor the company
with a song, and he sang the fine old English
song of "To-morrow." The refrain is in the
words : To-morrow, to-morrow,
Will be everlasting to-morrow.
The French exile did not understand English
as well as he did the art of war, and when

180 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Colonel Messenger came to these words, at
the end of each verse, he supposed, naturally
enough, that he was hearing a song made in
his own honor : ,
To Moreau, to Moreau,
Je n'entends pas bien, mais to Moreau.
And so he rose, as each verse closed, put his ¦
hand to his heart, blushed, and bowed grate
fully, as to a personal compliment. And his
hosts were too courteous to undeceive him.
The Harvard Navy Club, an institution long
since dead, used to "go down," as the abbre
viated phrase was, every year. "Go down"
was short for "go down the bay and fish."
The Navy Club was a club of those men who
received no college honors. The laziest man iu
a class was the "Lord High Admiral"; the
next to the laziest was the "Admiral of the
Blue," and so on.
Perhaps there are not so many fish in the
bay as there were then. Perhaps I am not so
much interested in the boys who take them.
But I do not see, when I cross the bridge to
East Cambridge, any boy patiently sitting on

THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. ]81
the rail waiting to catch flounders, as I have
done many a happy afternoon. Perhaps, as
civilization has come in, the flounders have
staged loAver down the bay.
Travelling, in short, was done by retail in
those days, and such combinations as those of
to-day, by which a hundred thousand people
are thrown upon Boston daily, and as many
taken away, were wholly unknown, not to say
not dreamed of. Retail travelling, if we are
to use that expression, had some points of
interest which do not enliven the career of a
traveller who is boxed up in a train with three
hundred and ninety-nine others, all of them to
be delivered, "right side up with care," at
the place they wish to go to, while none of
them have what John Locke would call an
"adequate idea" of the places on the way, if
indeed any of them have any idea.
The first of such expeditions which I remem
ber, excepting one on the Middlesex Canal,
which has been referred to, was in August and
September of 1826, when my father took all of
us — that is, my mother and four children — to
Sandwich, where he was going to enjoy a

182 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
week's shooting. The other gentlemen of the
party were Daniel Webster, Judge Story, and
Judge Fay. Mr. Webster took his family
with him ; I think the other gentlemen did
not take theirs. All of us stayed at Fessen-
den's tavern — charmingly comfortable then, I
fancy, as I know it was afterwards. My early
memories of the expedition are quite distinct.
It was here and then that I first fired the gun
which is the oldest sporting gun here at Matu-
nuck ; and a good gun it is, if people are not
above an old-fashioned percussion cap. But
in those days it had a flintlock. The general
use of what are now unknown to young sports
men, percussion caps, belongs some years
later. The bigger boys, Fletcher Webster and
my brother Nathan, would be taken out with
the gentlemen to hold the horses (in chaises,
observe) on the beach, while their fathers
walked about and shot what they might.
But we little fellows stayed at home, to be
lifted to the seventh heaven if a loaded gun
were brought home at night which we might
aim and fire at a shingle. For us and the
girls the principal occupation, I remember,

THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. 183
^s playing dinner and tea with the pretty
glassware which the Sandwich works were
just beginning to make. I believe I have
somewhere at this day some specimens of
their work for children.
On this expedition we went and returned,
some in the "stage" and some in my father's
chaise — making the journey, I think, in a day.
But generally, with so large a host as ours —
which included Fullum — we went on the sum
mer journey, whatever it was, in what was
then, as it is indeed now, called a " barouche."
The names "landau," "victoria," and the like
were, I think, unknown. As this business was
by no means peculiar to our family, and as it
belongs to a civilization quite unlike ours, I
will describe it in detail.
We were to go to Cape Ann, and for perhaps
a week to take such comfort as the great
" tavern " at Gloucester would give. Observe
that the word "tavern" was still used, as
I think it now is where a tavern exists in the
heart of New England, for what the English
man calls an "inn." We talk now of the
Wayside Inn, the Wayland Inn, and so on,

184 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
but this is all in a labored, artificial, and indeed
foreign speech introduced from England within
a generation past. To prepare for such an
expedition Fullum would be sent from stable
to stable to hire the best barouche he could
find, and a span of horses. Happy the boy
who selected himself, or was selected by des
tiny, to accompany him on this tour of inspec
tion ! When the happy morning arrived
Fullum brought round his carriage and horses
early, fastened on the trunk behind — for
I think there never was but one ; and the
two elders, and in this case of Cape Ann
the five children, with books and hand bag
gage, always with maps of the country,
were packed away in and on the carriage.
Both of us boys, of course, sat on the box
with Fullum, who drove. If, on any such
occasion, there were a very little boy, Fullum
would arrange a duplicate set of reins for the
special use of the youngster, which were
attached, not to the horses' bits, but to the
rings on the pads. In this particular expe
dition to Cape Ann we stopped at the Lynn
Mineral Spring Hotel, long since abandoned.

THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. 185
I think, and reached Gloucester only perhaps
on the second day.
What happened to the old people there
I am sure I do not know. To us children
there were those ineffable delights of playing
with the ocean, the kindest, safest, and best
playmate which any child can have. Sand
wich had given us only the first taste of it.
Here we had our first real knowledge of what
sea-urchins are, and what people call "sand
dollars," horseshoe crabs, cockles, rays' eggs,
and the various sea- weeds, from devil's aprons
up or down. The cape had not assumed the
grandeur of a summer watering-place. The
modern names were unknown. There was no
Rockport or Pigeon Cove to go to. It was
Sandy Bay or Squam to which one drove.
I remember the ejaculation of some fisher
men's children, as they saw the barouche for
the first time: "What is it? It aint the
mail, and it aint a shay."
At that time, and certainly as late as 1842,
a group of children in the country, if they
saw a carriage approaching, would arrange
themselves hastily in a line on one side of the

186 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
road and "make their manners." That is,
they would all bow as the carriage passed.
The last time that I remember seeing this was
in 1842, in Hampshire County, as the stage
passed by. It was done good-naturedly, with
no sign of deference, but rather, I should say,
as a pleasant recognition of human brother
hood in a lonely region — as two men, if they
were not Englishmen, might bow to each other,
wherever they were far from other men.
In our particular family an annual journey
was made to my grandfather's house in West
hampton, a pleasant town among the hills in
Hampshire County, where my father was born.
He took his wife there in his chaise when they
were married, in 1816, and hardly a summer
passed, until 1837, when he did not make the
same journey with his whole family. This
then numbered seven children, besides himself
and my mother, and of course Fullum. To my
father it was a matter of pride that on the
last of these journeys we went on his own rail
road to Worcester. In 1835 the carriage was
taken on a truck on the passenger train, in
which we rode ; but I need not say that Fullum

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THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. 187
preferred to sit in the carriage all the way, and
did so.
There was a charm in such half-vagrant
journeying about which the Raymond tourist
knows nothing. There was no sending in
advance for rooms, and you took your chances
at the tavern, where you arrived, perhaps, at
nine o'clock at night. It may be imagined
that the sudden appearance at the country
tavern of a party of ten, of all ages from three
months upwards, was an event of interest. In
those times the selectmen knew what they
meant, when they said that no person should
dispense liquor who did not provide for trav
ellers. Practically it was a convenience to any
village to have a place where travellers could
stay; and practically the people of that vil
lage said to the man whom they licensed to
sell liquor, "If you have this privilege, you
must provide a decent place of entertainment
for strangers." One man kept the tavern,
perhaps, for his life long. It had its reputa
tion as good or poor, and you avoided certain
towns because So-and-So did not keep a good
house. The practical difficulty of such travel-

188 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
ling in New England now, is that you are by
no means sure of finding a comfortable place
to sleep when your day*s journey is over.
The New England tavern of the old fashion
held its own to the most advantage in later
times in the State of Maine, on the roads back
into the lumber region, and I dare say such
comfortable houses for travellers may be found
there now.
These country taverns always had signs,
generally swinging from a post with a cross
bar, in front of the house. The sign might be
merely the name of the keeper ; this was a sad
disappointment to young travellers. More
probably it was the picture of the American
eagle or of a rising sun. Neptune rising from
the sea was a favorite device. I remember at
Worcester the Elephant. The portrait of Gen
eral Wolfe still hangs at the Newburyport
tavern, and there remain some General Wash-
ingtons. After I was a man I had occasion to
travel a good deal one summer in Northern
Vermont, where the tavern signs still existed.
Almost without exception their devices were
of the American eagle with his wings spread,

THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. 189
or of the American eagle holding the English
lion in chains, or of the lion chained without
any American eagle. These were in memory
of Macomb's aud McDonough's victories at
Plattsburg and on the lake. They also, per
haps, referred to the fact that most of these
taverns were supported by the wagons of
smugglers, who, in their good, large peddlers'
carts, provided themselves with English goods
in Canada, which they sold on our side of the
line. In our generation one is more apt to see
a tavern sign in a museum than hanging on a
gallows-tree. Meandering along through Leicester, Spen
cer, Belchertown, Ware, Amherst, North
ampton, or some of these places, we arrived
at my grandfather's pretty home in West
hampton on the morning of the third day.
Then, for three or four days, came absolute
and infinite joy. We had cousins there just
our own ages of whom we were very fond.
For the time of our visit they gave themselves,
without stint or hindrance, to the entertain
ment of their friends front Boston. First of
all, horses were to be provided, and saddles,

190 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
that we boys might ride. Little did the
country boys understand what joy it was to us
to find ourselves scampering over the hills.
Then there was the making of traps for wood-
chucks. If it chose to rain we were in the
great workshop of the farm, using such tools
as we had never seen at home. In the evening
there were "hunt the slipper" and "blind-
man's-buff," the latter an entertainment which
we could follow even on Sunday evening, as I
believe I have said, and follow then with more
enthusiasm than on other evenings, because
other cousins and the children of neighbors
came in to join with us. In that New England
parsonage — never so called, by the way — the
old Connecticut customs prevailed, and " the
Sabbath" began promptly as the sun went
down on Saturday night, and was well ended
when the sun set on Sunday. The hills of
Westhampton are high, and sunset on Sunday
evening came early.
So it was that the great joy of life was the
visit at grandfather's every summer. My
grandfather was the minister of this town for
fifty-seven years. I think I saw the dear old

THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. 191
gentleman last in 1834. It must have been
in 1837, after his death, that we made the last
visit there, when my grandmother was still
living. I did not myself return to West
hampton for fifty years, when it was to preach
in his pulpit. It was pleasant to find that,
after two generations, the people of the town
remembered him fondly. I found the pulpit
of the meeting-house and the chancel behind
it decorated with flowers, and the word " Wel
come," wrought in flowers, hung above me.
So I went back to the happiest days of my
New England boyhood.
I have already alluded to the infrequency of
communication between this country home — for
it was such to all of us children — and the home
in Boston. The cousins in the country, when
autumn came, would not forget us in Boston,
and would crack butternuts and walnuts for
us, of kinds they thought we should not have,
pick out the great meats, and pack them care
fully to be sent down.. Such a box would be
sent to Northampton, and put on board a
boat which went to Hartford. There it would
be put on board a sloop, in which it was to sail

192 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
out of the Connecticut River and around Cape
Cod to Boston. In the same sloop was perhaps
a keg of my grandmother's apple sauce, or
some other treasure from the farm. Great joy
for us if all these pleasant memorials arrived
in time ; great sorrow if a letter came, stating
that the sloop was frozen up opposite Lyme,
or somewhere else in the Connecticut River,
and would not appear with its precious cargo
until the next spring. Such were the difficul
ties of sending a box one hundred and ten
miles across Massachusetts in the year 1830.
To putting an end to such difficulties by
the railroad system, my father gave much of
the active part of his life, as I have before said.
When it was thought crazy to talk about such
tilings he talked about the possibilities of a
railroad westward. When it was necessary to
induce men of capital to subscribe, with infi
nite difficulty he obtained a subscription of
a million dollars capital for the Boston and
Worcester Railroad. He was the first president
and first superintendent of that railroad, and
had the great joy of importing its first engine
from Liverpool. This, as I have said, was the

THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. 193
Meteor ; she was ordered from George Stephen
son himself, immediately after the success of
the Rocket in the famous railway trial between
Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. The arrival
of the Meteor in Boston, with the engine-
driver who was to set her up and to run her
first trips, was a matter of great joy to us
boys. At the same time the Yankee was built
by a company in Boston, at their works at
the cross-dam of the Mill-dam ; and an engine
always called the Colonel Long was built for
the Boston and Worcester Railroad at Phila
delphia, under the auspices of the same Colo
nel Long who gave the name to Long's Peak
at the West. He was in the engineer service
of the United States, and this engine was built
to burn anthracite coal.
The Meteor viSiS at once setup in Boston, and
started on her experimental trips. It is easy
to see how much this would interest the men
who had looked forward to her success, and,
equally, how much it would interest their sons.
The engine-driver was good to my brother and
me, and we had the great pleasure of making
some of the earliest of her trips with him, I

194 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
have spoken of the opening of the road to West
Newton. I think they must still have there
the sign which was put up on David's hotel,
representing the engine and car of the period.
It ought to be preserved in some historical
collection there. Boston roused itself to the
new interest, and every afternoon eight cars
went out to Newton and back, that people
might say they had ridden on the new rail
road. Many a straw hat was burned, through
by the cinders which lighted upon it, and many
notions were gained for the future.
What is now called the American system
of the interior arrangement of cars, was first
tried in the cars built for the Worcester
Railroad at Worcester, by the founder of the
present firm of Bradley. The suggestion
was made, I believe, by my father ; he saw
very early the difficulty of the old system, in
which the conductor ran around on a plat
form on the outside. I remember, as among
the close approaches to death which in any
man's life stand out distinctly, that, when I
was in college, I ran after a train on which I
was to go to Natick, sprang upon it when in

THE WOELD NEAE BOSTON. 195
motion, and felt myself falling. I supposed
that the last instant of my life had come
while I fell for the first few inches. Then I
found myself astride of the long, narrow plat
form on which I had intended to stand.
Risks like this were what all the conductors
of the early railroads ran ; and I suppose,
indeed, the English guards may have to run
them, to a certain extent, to the present day.
The Boston and Worcester station in 1833,
and for some time after, was on the ground
now occupied by Indiana Street and by Brig-
ham's milk depot, between Washington Street
and Tremont Street. Tremont Street had just
been laid out on the level of the salt marshes.
It was at the instance of the Worcester Rail
road that its grade was raised, many years
after, and that company was obliged to take
the cost of lifting the houses which had been
built on the lower level. It is to that change
of level that we owe it that the whole South
End of Boston is now built on the level above
the marsh, instead of being built, as the few
houses originally on it were, scarcely above
the level of high tide.

CHAPTER VIIL
THE WOELD BEYOND BOSTON.
ALL boys, from the nature of their make-
-lA_ up are great politicians. The boys of
sixty years ago were not unlike boys of to-day
in this matter, and, when an election day came
around, we were glad to spend as much time
as we could at the places where people were
voting. Happy the boy to whom some vote
distributor would give a handful of votes, and
happier he who could persuade someone to
take a ballot from those which he had given to
him. This, by the way, was not very long
after the time when a certain superstition held
in Massachusetts by which every ballot was
written. Early in the century gentlemen
interested in an election would call on the
women of the family, if they could write well,
to write out ballots which could be used at
the polls. But I never saw such written
ballots.
199

THE WOELD BEYOND BOSTON. 197
The separation between Boston and the rest
of the world affected a good deal the political
combinations. I do not suppose that our
present compact system of national political
parties could possibly exist without the con
venience of the telegraph and the railroad. I
should say, historically, that it began in the
great convention of young men which was
held in the city of Baltimore in the year 1840
by way of advancing the election of President
Harrison. Independent and sovereign as
Massachusetts was in the election of 1836,
her National Republicans, as they called
themselves, nominated Mr. Webster as candi
date for President, though nobody else nomi
nated him, and the electoral votes of Massa
chusetts were given for him and for Mr.
Granger. The leaders of any American party
would hesitate before they should make such
a separate demonstration now. And this habit
of separation shows itself more distinctly in
the newspapers of the time.
I have already said that I was a great deal
in the printing-office of the Daily Advertiser,
which my father edited, as well as in his book-

198 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
office. He maintained with care and interest
the old system of apprenticeship, and always
had one or more bright boys, whom he had
taken into his office that they might learn the
whole art and mystery of printing and what
concerned the publication of a newspaper.
One of these young men, to whose counsels
and help we boys were largely indebted, still
lives, honored in the community where he has
been known for many years, as the director of
the Barnstable Patriot — Mr. Sylvanus Phin-
ney. To have a boy a little older than your
self as your comrade in the office, to have him
show you what you could handle and what
you could not handle, was in itself a piece of
education. Mr. Phinney could perhaps tell better than
I can, a newspaper story, not of my boyhood,
but of girlhood in Boston. In the year 1820
the convention met which revised the con
stitution of Massachusetts. The Advertiser
published the full report of the proceedings,
and this report was made up in my father's
workroom, in the lower story of the house in
Tremont Street. He was suffering at that

THE WOELD BEYOND BOSTON. 199
time from an accident by which he nearly lost
the sight of one of his eyes, and all his writing
was done at home by my mother. So it
would happen of an evening that the gentle
men most interested in the convention would
look in at the house to revise the reports of
their own speeches, and perhaps to consult
about the work of the next day. Mr. Web
ster and Judge Story were two of the promi
nent leaders of that convention. They were
on terms of the closest intimacy at our house,
and would come in almost every evening for
this purpose. Mother would be sitting in the
room to do any writing which might be
required, and, lest she should be called away
to the baby of the time, the baby lay asleep
in the cradle while the work of dictation went
on. Speeches were made, proofs corrected,
baby rocked, and undoubtedly a great deal of
the fun of such bright young people passed to
and fro with every evening.
Afterwards, in friendly recognition of the
hard night-work of the winter, when the con
vention was well over, and its proceedings
were published in a volume which is now one

200 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
of the cherished nuggets of the collectors,
mother had a great cake made for the work
men at the office. She frosted it herself, and
dressed it with what in those days they used
to call "cockles" of sugar. These cockles
generally had little scraps of poor verses,
which were supposed to be entertaining. But
in this case she had cut out from the proofs
the epigrams of the convention debates, and
as the apprentices and journeymen ate their
cake they found, to their amusement, that the
work of their own hands had furnished what
were called the mottoes.
The journalist of to-day thinks he is much
ahead of the journalist of that time, and in
many regards he is ; but there were certain
excitements which belonged to newspaper life
then which do not belong to it now. The day
when the TJnicorn arrived in Boston, the first in
the line of Cunard vessels which have arrived
regularly from that day to this, was one of
these exciting days. My father went over in
person upon the Unicorn, talked with the
officers, and came back with English news
papers almost as fresh as he had ever seen. I

THE WOELD BEYOND BOSTON. 201
say " almost as fresh," because the passage of
the Unicorn was, I think, twenty days, and we
had traditions in the office of rapid runs of
Baltimore clippers or other fast vessels which
had come over in less time. It was after this
that, in a winter passage, the Great Western
at New York brought news which was thirty-
five days later than the latest news which we
had from Europe. In earlier times there
would be many instances of longer periods
when neither continent knew anything of the
other. Under such circumstances the newspaper
editor depended much more upon his foreign
correspondent than he does now. The foreign
correspondent of to-day digests news of which
he knows the details have already gone by
telegraph. He is in some sort a foreign editor,
but he does not expect to send the detail of
news. And there was an element of chance
about the arrival of sailing vessels which
added to the curiosity of your morning paper.
In our office Mr. Ballard, who had the charge
of the ship news, "might board a vessel below
in the harbor, whose captain had no idea that

202 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
he had brought the latest news. Then this
poor captain would be beset to hunt up every
newspaper that he had on board. Perhaps
he had been so foolish that he had not bought
the last paper of the day on which he started.
Whether he had or had not it was the busi
ness of the boat which boarded him first to get
every paper he had, so that no other paper in
town might have a word of his intelligence.
Perhaps all these papers arrived at the office
but a little while before you went to press ;
then it was your business to make the best
show you could of the news, and possibly it
was your good fortune to be able to say that
no other paper had it.
I remember that we had the news of the
French Revolution of 1830, which threw
Charles X. from the throne, on a Sunday
morning. When such things happened the
foreman in the office made up what was really
an "Extra" by throwing together, as quickly
as he had them in type, a few galleys of the
news ; in that case probably rapidly trans
lated from the French papers. Then these
galleys would be struck off on a separate

THE WOELD BEYOND BOSTON. 203
hand-bill, and such hand-bills were circulated
as " Extras." And it is to this habit that the
present absurd nomenclature is due by which
one buys every day an ' ' Extra ' ' which is
published at a certain definite time. All this
is fixed upon my mind, because, when I came
home from "meeting" on that particular
Sunday, I was told the news that there was
another revolution in France, and had the
"Extra" given me to carry down to Summer
Street, where one of my uncles lived. There
is a certain picturesqueness about the receipt
and delivery of news, when it comes in such
out-of-the-way fashions, which the boy or girl
of to-day finds it hard to understand.
Of course with type as much as we wanted,
and all the other facilities for home printing,
we printed our own newspapers. I do not
think that at our house we did it so much as
boys would to whom the making-up of a news
paper was not a matter of daily observation,
involving a good deal of errand running and
other work which was anything but play.
But we older boys had the Fly, which was our
newspaper, and my brother Charles, not long

204 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
after, started the Coon, in the midst of the
Harrison campaign, which survived for a good
many years.
I believe that the last issue of the Fly is
that which records the death of Lafayette, in
1836. We had not type enough then to print
more than one page at a time. Three pages of
the Fly had been printed, and the fourth was
still to be set up when the news of Lafayette's
death arrived. This was too good a para
graph to be lost, and we knew we could antici
pate every other paper in Boston by inserting
it. But unfortunately the Ti's had given out.
We had turned upside down all them's we
had, till they too had given out. Also, still
more unfortunately for printers in this diffi
culty, Lafayette had chosen to die of an
•"influenza," Avhich disease was at that
moment asserting itself under that name in
France. It had not yet been called "la
grippe," which would have saved us. We
succeeded in announcing the death of "the
good, generous, noble Lafayette," although
"generous" needed one n and one u, and
" noble" took one of the last w's. The para-

THE WOELD BEYOND BOSTON. 205
graph went on to say that the death was
" caused by," and the last u was devoured by
"caused." Then came the word " infiuenza."
"The boldest held his breath for a time."
But we were obliged ignominiously to go to
press with tho statement that his death was
"caused by a cold." This was safe, and
required no n and no u. Alas ! in the mak
ing-up of the form the precious n of the word
"noble" fell out; and any library which
contains a file of the Fly will show that its
last statement to the world is that " the good,
generous, oble Lafayette has died ; his death
being caused by a cold." Such are the exi
gencies of boy printers in all times.
I have gone into detail as to the communica
tions between the people in the country and
the people who lived in Boston, in the hope of
making the reader feel distinctly the isolation
which separated Boston from the rest of the
world. That isolation has left its marks on
the character of Boston till this day. It
explains the amusing cockneyisms of Boston
which make other people laugh at us, and a

206 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
certain arrogance of provincialism which crops
out very oddly among people who have sons
and daughters in every part of the world, and
whose communication is now so free in every
direction. " In the beginning it was not so."
The people of Boston had a very large foreign
trade from its origin till comparatively recent
times. Now they have a little, and half their
population is of a stock which came very
recently from Europe. But in the beginning
of this century there was very little immigra
tion from Europe. Indeed, what there was
was looked upon with a certain distrust.
About the time I went to college, or a little
later, a society of the most intelligent people
in Boston was organized for the express pur
pose of keeping out foreign "immigration."
We purists made a battle against that word.
Professor Edward Channing would have
resented the use of it in a college theme with
the same bitterness with which Mr. Webster
resented " in our midst" — a phrase which, I am
sorry to say, you may now find almost every
where. One of the most intelligent gentle
men in Boston was appointed to the business

THE WOELD BEYOND BOSTON. 207
of keeping out immigrants— a business which
can only be compared to Mrs. Partington's
determination to sweep out the tide when it
was rising in the English Channel I He had
his office on Long Wharf, and wrote and for
warded circulars to Ireland to explain to the
people of Ireland that they had better not
come to this country. At the same moment
the very people who paid his salary were
building up a system of manufacturing and
internal improvements which was actually
impossible without the immigration which
they had appointed him to check.
There was at that time, however, a distinct
determination on the part of the best people in
Boston that it should be absolutely a model
city. They had Dr. Channing preaching the
perfectibility of human nature ; they had Dr.
Joseph Tuckerman determined that the gospel
of Jesus Christ should work its miracles
among all sorts and conditions of men ; they
had a system of public education which they
meant to press to its very best ; and they had
all the money which was needed for anything
good. These men subscribed their money

208 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
with the greatest promptness for any enter
prise which promised the elevation of human
society. In speaking of the lecture system I have
already stated their notion that if people only
knew what was right they would do what was
right. So they founded first the Massa
chusetts Hospital, then its annex for the
insane ; then they made the State contribute
to the deaf and dumb asylum in Hartford ;
they established their asylum for the blind
at South Boston. Indeed, they expected to
trample out every human ill, exactly as the
most optimistic young medical expert in New
York at the moment when I write these lines
expects to trample out every cholera bacillus
who shall present its little head in sight of
the lens of the most powerful microscope.
What these excellent people might have done
had Boston remained the funny little town it
was in the year 1820 I do not know. But it
did not remain any such place. The popula
tion was then 43,298 ; in 1830 it was 61,392.
The increase in ten years is forty-one per cent
of the population at the first enumeration —

THE WOELD BEYOND BOSTON. 209
an increase which would be thought very
remarkable in the growth of any old city now.
It indicates great prosperity. In the same
ten years the population of the city of New
York increased from 123,706 to 202,589, an
increase of sixty-four per cent. Such figures
should be remembered, by the way, by people
who tell us that the present rate of the
increase of cities is without precedent.
The growth, though rapid, and on the whole
encouraging for the manufacturing system of
New England, tended to divert capital to a
certain extent from that foreign commerce
which had been created and nourished by
European wars. So soon as capital placed
itself in one or another site of the interior, as
Lowell, Manchester, Fall River, Holyoke, and
the rest came into existence, so soon, of course,
the Boston boy found out that there was a
world outside of State Street and Milk Street.
And now that Boston capital loves to place
itself at any point where capital is needed,
between Lockwood's Cape in 82' north lati
tude and Terra del Fuego on the outside of
the Strait of Magellan, there is no longer an

210 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
opportunity for a Boston boyhood to be spent
in the conditions which surrounded me.
These were physically almost the same as
those which surrounded the boyhood of
Samuel Sewall in the seventeenth century, or
Henry Knox in the eighteenth.

CHAPTER IX.
AT COLLEGE.
I WAS but thirteen years and five months
old when I entered Harvard College,
so that these memories of a New England
boyhood carry us into college life. For as
early an entrance as this was not unusual
in those days. My friend Dr. Andrew Pres
ton Peabody entered college as sophomore
in his thirteenth year — at the precise age
of twelve years and six months ; Edward
Everett, twenty years before, entered at the
age of thirteen. The first scholar of my own
class, Samuel Eliot, afterward president of
Trinity College, was but a few months older
than I. I think we were the two youngest
members of the class.
I have no idea that my father would have
sent me to college so young but that my older
brother was already there. We had always
been together, and were absolutely attached
m

212 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
to each other. In point of fact, at this
moment, I should find it hard to think of any
real knowledge of any sort which I have ever
had, on any subject, of which I did not trace
the "origins" to him. I suppose my father
thought that he was the best adviser and
instructor that I could have. Certainly he
could not have sent me to Europe with any
private tutor, with nearly the advantage
which I received from being sent to Cam
bridge to live with my brother. Accordingly
to Cambridge I was sent, although everybody
knew that this was at a younger age than
would be otherwise advisable. I should not
certainly advise any one to send a boy to
Cambridge at thirteen years of age now,
though I believe there would be no difficulty
in passing the Cambridge examinations at that
age now, if a boy had been sensibly brought
up, by teachers who understood what that
examination is and is not. But the college
was not then what it is now, and life after one
left college was not quite what it is now. I
have certainly never regretted that after I
left college I had six clear years for seeing the

AT COLLEGE. 213
world, before there was ^ even an apparent
necessity of my binding myself to the regular
work of my profession. Now this could
hardly have been had I entered college at the
age of sixteen or seventeen, which was, I sup
pose, the age of most of my classmates.
It must have been on a morning in the end
of August that this brother of mine and I
started together, in my uncle's "chaise,"
which had been borrowed for the occasion,
that I might present myself at six o'clock at
University Hall for examination. The exami
nations are absurd enough now, but I think
they do not make them begin at six in the
morning. At that time, however, morning
prayers were at six o'clock as soon as the term
began, and it was considered proper that we
should be introduced into the college routine
at the beginning.
The examination was to last from six in the
morning to seven in the evening on that day,
and from six till two on the next day ; and
with the exception of an hour for dinner we
were kept in the various recitation rooms all
the time. After two on the second day we

214 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
loafed round the yard, keeping near enough
to the door of University Hall to know when
we were called, one by one. Each person as
he was called then entered what we after
wards called the "corporation room," where
he found the president and members of the
faculty, and each one received the announce
ment of his success or of his failure. You
were admitted on probation,' as it was called,
there being a theory that you were not matric
ulated until the end of the first term. But
we all knew that everybody who was admitted
was matriculated ; and this was merely one of
a set of traditional forms of Which I will
speak in another place,
I rather think that I derived a certain con
tempt which I have always felt for these
mechanical functions called examinations
from my experience on this occasion. As it
happened, my brother and I arrived, in the
chaise alluded to, early enough indeed, but
later than the great body of the candidates, of
whom there were about eighty. For instance,
my own classmates of the Latin School had
come out in an omnibus, which had been

AT COLLEGE. 215
engaged to come at that early hour. We
found, therefore, that they were already regis
tered on the list of applicants, while my name
came in at the very end, with certain other
boys who had arrived separately. It is an
illustration of the simplicity of those days
that one of these boys at least had ridden
twenty miles that morning, with his father,
in the chaise in which they had come from
Berwick in Maine. This was Francis Brown
Hayes ; his place in the alphabet brought him
next to me in all the lists of our class, and we
were intimate friends till the end of his life.
Samuel Longfellow, who has lately died, was
another of these sporadic persons ; he had
come with his father in a chaise from Port
land in Maine, by a two days' journey.
We were told off into twelve sections, and
proceeded to the examination. It was on
much the same lines on which the examina
tion is conducted, now, with perhaps less of
writing and' more oral questions. There was,
however, no examination in French or in
German. I think the Latin and Greek and
mathematics went as far as the required

216 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
examination does now ; but if a person
wanted to enter in advance he presented him
self on another day. In every class there
were a great many persons in those days
who "entered sophomore," as the phrase was.
That is to say, the course was abridged to
three years by these boys who had remained
for two freshman years in the preparatory
school. I believe that the persons most com
petent in the university are very glad to have
some such course as this taken now ; it is an
easy way of solving the question whether the
undergraduate course should be three years or
four, and how much work should be thrown
upon the preparatory schools.
I afterwards knew as teachers most of the
gentlemen who conducted that examination.
But there was one of them, who assigned us
our places, gave us all general directions, and,
in short, looked after us through the two days
in the kindest manner possible, whom I did
not meet again for many years. I now think
it was Theodore Parker, whom I did not know
personally till long after this time. I have
ever since liked to think of him as showing

AT COLLEGE. 217
such friendly sympathy and untiring con
sideration for the needs of seventy or eighty
dazed and bewildered boys.
To us Latin School boys the examination was
easy enough in most of its details. I know I
went to it, and through it, with the light-
hearted spirit in which it is best to meet life
always, taking it for granted, that is, that I
was at least equal to the average, and that,
with good luck, I should come out better than
the average. There was not one of us who had
the slightest idea that he should not pass the
examination. In fact, the only question I
remember is the question whether Amster
dam were north of London ; this was put to a
dozen or more of us, in a good-natured, friendly
way, by George F. Simmons, afterwards an
interesting and valuable preacher. Every one
of the twelve answered the question wrong.
We were not, however, conditioned on geogra
phy, although I do not remember that any
other questions were put to me than this, on
which I came out so badly.
When the examination was over it proved
that but six of the eighty had passed "without

218 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
conditions" ; that was the phrase then, as I
think it is now. Rather to the disgust and
mortification of the five best scholars of our
Latin School class, they were all conditioned.
They were the five highest of the six Franklin
Medal boys, and a Franklin medal is a type of
the highest scholarship in a Boston school.
Perkins, who was the sixth Franklin Medal
boy, and I, who never had a Franklin medal,
were the two from our school who passed with
out any conditions. I am disposed, as I say,
to think that to this accident — for it was a
mere accident — I owe the suspicion which I
entertained as early as that period of my life
that all these examinations are in a large
measure humbugs. The persistence in them
is one of the follies of our time, which will
drop out, as various other follies drop out,
from one generation after another. It seems
to belong where patches on a lady's face
belong, or similar customs, which one age
thinks important and another age laughs at.
Of course I went home very light-hearted, not
to say proud ; and from that day to this day
I have never dreaded any of these formal f unc-

AT COLLEGE. 219
tions, in whatever shape they have presented
themselves. I am glad to think that my chil
dren have inherited something of the same
light-hearted readiness to accept, without pro
test, any folly of the time, so it do not involve
an essential principle.
But when the business of actually going to
college began I had none of this light-hearted
feeling. It was all very pleasant to go around
with Fullum to furniture stores, with money
enough to buy the chairs, and carpet, and
washbowl, and other apparatus with which
one was to begin independent life. It was
interesting to go out with him to 22 Stoughton,
and assist in putting the carpet down, in hang
ing the curtains, and in determining where my
desk should be, and where my brother's should
be, and so in beginning upon house-keeping.
But when all this was over, when I had been
to morning prayers for the first time, and had
gone through the routine of morning recita
tions, and the first recitation of the afternoon
— recitations which were all child's play to
boys who had been as well trained as we —
when I sat in the broad window seat, and

220 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
looked out on the setting sun, behind Mount
Auburn, as it happened, then the bitterness
of the situation revealed itself to me. I was
thoroughly and completely homesick.
I said to myself, perhaps I said aloud,
" This is one day of three hundred and sixty-
five, and that will make one year. At the end
of that year I shall have gone through one of
four such years." And I wondered how I
ever could survive the deadly monotony of such
a service. It was not till the next year that I
read, in Miss Martineau's "Travels," thathappy
anecdote of the Jersey apprentice boy, who,
when nine years old, was forever wishing for
the Fourth of July. Some one asked him why
he was so eager to have the Fourth of July
come, and he said: "When that has come I
shall have only eleven more years to serve."
I repeat this tale of homesickness because,
although it was an exaggerated feeling, it
expresses well enough my dislike for the rou
tine of college, a dislike which accompanied
me to its very close. Other fellows took the
thing more simply and philosophically. New
ton, of my own class, a fine fellow who died

AT COLLEGE. 221
young, said to me once that he attended every
chapel exercise, morning and evening through
the whole time he was in Cambridge. " Why
should I not?" he said. "I had not the
attractions which you had in Boston ; Cam
bridge was my home. The rule was to be in
chapel twice a day ; I might as well be there
as anywhere else." He was undoubtedly the
happier and, I think, the better man, because
he could accept the routine of life with such
good nature.
As for the business which took us to college,
more than half of us soon found out that we
had been too well prepared. As Hayward
used to say, "We had overrun the game."
That is the great merit of the elective system,
if it holds in the freshman year of a college —
that a boy or young man can take hold where
he is prepared to go forward. For us, how
ever, we were set on reading Livy and Xen-
ophon. These authors are easier after you
have "the hang of it" than the Latin and
Greek which we had been reading for some
time before at school. We could almost read
them at sight. Our teachers in these two

222 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
languages regarded the whole thing as a bore ;
they were preparing for other fields in life,
and they had taken their tutorships by the
way, without any idea that they were to inter
est us in language or that there was much
interest in it ; at least that is the impression
which they left upon our minds. It was
simply a dull school exercise. It may be said
in passing that one of the great difficulties
of our present college system comes from
the fact that in general boys, for the last year
they are in the preparatory school, have been
under the care of a gentleman of spirit,
and intelligence, and eagerness in educa
tion, who makes them his companions, who
gives them such enthusiasm as he has in the
studies which they are pursuing. For then
they pass into the hand of some instructor
who has just graduated, who does not know
much, and very likely does not know how to
teach what he knows. From a superior, picked
man, one of the best educators in the country,
perhaps, a boy passes under the direction of
a frightened novice, with whom the college is
trying an experiment whether he will or will

AT COLLEGE. 223
not succeed. Of course, in theory, the best
educators ought to have the charge of those
pupils who need education most. But in
practice, I fancy, it is very hard, in the charge
of colleges, to make the professors of most
ability take those elementary duties upon
themselves. Certainly in very few colleges do
they take any such duty.
In the business of mathematics the whole
thing was different. I find by the Quinquen
nial Catalogue that Professor Peirce, now well
known as one of the most distinguished math
ematicians of the century, was appointed two
years before this time as Hollis Professor of
Mathematics. He was but twenty- six years of
age. It has been the custom to say that he
was not a good teacher of mathematics, because
his insight was so absolute that he made one
long step where a pupil needed to make four
or five, and that he could not understand the
difficulty of the boy who did not see what he
saw. I suppose this is true ; but, on the other
hand, he was an enthusiast in his business,
he was sympathetic and kind where he saw
real interest in the pupil, and he devised the

224 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
best method for the handling of a class which
I have ever seen. In his case, certainly, there
was no right to complain that an inferior
teacher was put in charge of novices. At two
o'clock in the afternoon we went into one of
the large dining-rooms of University Hall,
which was not needed for commons. As one
went into the room he took from a pile of
manuscript books his own book, as he had left
it the day before. In this book he found a
slip of paper with the problem of geometry
which he was to work ou t that day. Now if
he had failed the day before the problem
given him would be one on the lesson of the
day before ; if he had not failed it would take
him on in the regular order.
Of course it happened, before many weeks
were over, that the different members of the
class were in different places ; but it also was
sure, that nobody had been advanced any
farther than he had understood what he was
about. In point of fact, only six or eight
members of the class went through without
any failures at all, and the others straggled
along in their places behind. If you had any

AT COLLEGE. 225
real hitch, and did not understand the thing,
you were encouraged in every way to sit down
by Mr. Peirce and work out the problem with
him. We came to be, from that very moment
forward, on terms of a certain sort of intimacy
with him, which did not exist with five other
teachers in college. He was very cordial and
sympathetic, if anybody used his own brains
enough to work out the problem in a way dif
ferent from that in the book ; and I doubt if I
have ever received any honor in life which I
prized more than the words "excellent and
original," which once or twice he wrote at the
bottom of my exercise. Probably I hardly
need say that this sort of intimacy led to a
cordial friendship between him and me, which
lasted till the very end of his distinguished
life. But there is a queer thing about this recita
tion with him, which shows the absolute indif
ference of the American world of the first half
of this century to matters of physical health.
When, in the year before, Francis Lieber was
intrusted with the preparation of the funda
mental rules for Girard College, he prepared a

226 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
curious code of such rules, in which he made
this his Article 227 :
No scientiflc instruction proper should be given
within a full hour after dinner. The contrary leads to
vice. In utter indifference to any such rule as
this — probably in utter ignorance that there
was any connection between body and mind
worth notice — our whole class was ordered
into this mathematical exercise at two o'clock,
after we had dined at a dinner beginning at
one. It was not till flve years afterwards that
I stumbled on Lieber's axiom, which is based
on absolute experience ; and I think one may
doubt whether anybody at Cambridge cared
whether there were any such axiom or not.
Take, for another instance, the morning recita
tions. We went into chapel at six, to a per
functory service which lasted rather less than
ten minutes. Half the class then went at once
into a recitation — whatever happened to be
convenient — although breakfast was not to be
served until twenty minutes past seven. All
through the college year this same distance be
tween breakfast and prayers prevailed ; what

AT COLLEGE. 227
was called the "half -hour bell" being rung
half an hour after prayers were over, so that
some sections went in then, as some sections
had gone in immediately on the close of
chapel. The absolute wickedness of working
the brains of boys who had taken no food per
haps since five o'clock in the afternoon before,
did not seem to occur to a human being in the
administration. My friend the late Dr. Muzzey, who was in
college a dozen years before me, told me that,
until he was a senior in college, nobody had
ever told him that students ought to take
physical exercise daily. He told me that he
lived in the college yard, at work on his stud
ies, day in and day out, without thinking that
physical exercise was necessary for any reason,
and that nobody told him that it was. It was
not till he broke down, in a confirmed dyspep
sia, from the results of which he suffered till
the end of his days, that some physician
explained to him that he ought to have taken
some physical exercise every day of his life.
It was true that Dr. John Ware, a person
eniinently fit for the duty, delivered lectures

228 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
on the art of preserving health, to which we
were obliged to go in our senior year. But
the joke was that we did not go till our con
stitutions were destroyed.
Through the freshman and sophomore years
it was impossible for any boy of more than
average training and sense to spend more than
three hours a day in preparing for recitations.
Lectures, observe, were almost wholly unknown
in those years. Then the college required
three hours of recitation, — on some rare occa
sion possibly four. Here were six hours
taken up by studies of the university. Sup
posing you slept nine hours out of the twenty-
four (and I certainly did) here were nine hours
to be got rid of in amusement of whatever
kind, where we were absolutely our own
masters. The requisition was simply that we
should attend these recitations and chapel
twice a day. In the summer half of the year
chapel was at six in the morning, as I have
said. As the sun began to rise later than six,
the chapel Avas pushed forward so that the
exercises might be carried on by daylight, for
it had been proved, by sad experience, that the

AT COLLEGE. 229
undergraduates took measures to put out the
candles on which the chapel then depended
for its light, if there were not light from the
heavenly bodies. Given these requisitions,
we might do as we chose for the rest of the
time. For many of us — certainly for me — a con
siderable part of this time was used in the
library. The library then consisted of about
fifty thousand volumes, which occupied the
second story of Harvard Hall. With perhaps
twenty exceptions every one of these books
might be taken down by every comer and read,
so only he remained in the library while read
ing. I think Mr. Emerson refers somewhere
to the facility thus given and to the use of it,
as the best advantage which a college has to
offer. I remember that there was a proposal
made once that he should reside in Cambridge,
with a college appointment, as director of the
reading of the undergraduates. Without any
director or direction we browsed over the whole
range of English literature, and, when we could,
dipped into other languages. I wonder, when
I look back on the miscellaneous reading of

230 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
those days, that even two or three hours a day
gave time for it. But, practically, when you
had nothing else to do between ten and four,
you went into the library. You sat at the
great table, where was Rees's Cyclopaedia, and
you read the articles which you fancied or
needed. You worked up your themes and
forensics there. For me, I know I dipped
through the Gentleman) s Magazine, from
1720 down. I remember reading the folios of
adventure on the North-west coast, so that ten
years afterwards I was not unprepared for
Sutter, the Sacramento, the wreck of the
Peacock, and the discovery of gold. It had,
in fact, been discovered by Shelvocke in 1718.
For home reading, that is, reading in our
rooms, we had the society libraries. All this
has changed since you can buy a paper-cov
ered novel for ten cents. The society assess
ments were not large — perhaps two dollars a
year. For sixty members this gave an income
of one hundred and twenty dollars, to be spent
on the two-volume novel of the period, gener
ally in Carey & Lea's Philadelphia reprint.
Cooper's later novels, James's novels, Mrs.

AT COLLEGE. 231
Trollope's, Mrs. Gore's, and plenty more, of
which names and authors are now forgotten,
were regularly bought and ready for distribu
tion at our mutual circulating libraries. The
first of Dickens's came in my time, and Bulwer
still held the field. I and my brother were
entitled to four such novels a week — eight
volumes. I doubt if I averaged more than
four volumes a week. But I am sure I read as
many as that, and I think they did me much
more good than hurt. The novelists of that
day did their best in conversation, and for
care in conversation I doubt if there is better
training than the reading of good novels of
that school. Of course we went back to the
older books. Scott still reigned supreme. I
knew Miss Austen by heart, almost, and we
r.ead everything else which the law of selection
had preserved.
The necessity of these libraries — a necessity
which no longer exists — kept the literary soci
eties alive. The clubs, like the Hasty Pudding
and the Porcellian, were a different thing ;
they had their libraries also.
The I. 0. H. and the Institute were the

232 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
freshman and sophomore societies — the
Union and the Hasty Pudding ciame later.
There was the slightest possible pretence of
rivalry between the societies of the Institute
and the I. O. H., but it amounted to nothing.
In practice each society met once a fortnight,
and the Tuesdays of meetings alternated with
each other. In each society the exercises
began with a lecture, so called, which lasted
five or ten minutes. You had to get up some
subject, and make it as interesting as you
could, and read it to the assembled thirty or
forty fellows. Then there was a debate, to
which two or three speakers were assigned on
the affirmative, and two or three on the nega
tive. The fellows sat round the tables, which
were built into the floor, for use when they
should be needed in commons, and, after the
regular speakers, anybody might join in the
discussion. The discussions were of course as
good and as bad as the discussions of boys
generally are. But we were all trained by
them to think on our feet, and all learned
there to stand without our knees shaking
under us, and that is the great thing to be

AT COLLEGE. 233
learned. For the rest, if a man has anything
to say he will be very apt to find out how to
say it.
I am always sorry when I hear of any
college that there is no interest in debating
societies. Somehow or other you want to
have Americans used to face an audience, and
to tell -the truth in as simple a way as it can
be told ; and I know of no training so good
for this as that of the debating club. I am
glad to see that, under the auspices of the
Lyceum League, there is a chance that the
old-fashioned debating club may be revived.
Once or twice a year there was a more
formal function in society life. You cele
brated Washington's birthday, or something
else which it was convenient to celebrate, by
an oration and a poem. Then you invited the
members of the other societies to come in.
The Davy Club had been in existence some
years, under one and another name, before
my day, and had the north-east corner room in
the basement of Massachusetts for a labora
tory. Dr. Webster, who was the professor of
chemistry, gave us the most good-natured and

234 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
kindly assistance. Many a bit of old appara
tus, for which substitutes had been found in
the college laboratory, was transferred for our
use ; and we might, at any moment, run over
to him for advice or information. We had
quite a little store of chemicals, and, on the
whole, the facilities of the Davy laboratory
were so much better than those which we
could concoct in our own wash basins and
what were called the "studies" — the little
closets by the sides of our chimney-places
— that we ordinarily stained our trousers and
our fingers in that laboratory rather than in
our own rooms.
In my senior year a dramatic event crossed
the deadly monotony of college life, which
sent a knot of us into the laboratory for the
whole of one Sunday. At morning chapel
President Quincy, with a good deal of
emotion, told us that breakfast at commons
must be delayed a little while on account of
an accident which had happened in the
kitchen. It proved that two of the waiters
had gone to sleep, in one of the rooms in the
basement which was assigned for their bed-

AT COLLEGE. 235
room, with a pan of charcoal burning. They
had only been discovered just before chapel,
and both of them were unconscious. At that
moment the doctors were with them, hoping
to re-arouse the vitality which was almost
gone. When we came to breakfast a message
came upstairs from this sick room, to know
who there was at breakfast who could make
oxygen. I ran down at once, and Dr. Wyman
and Dr. Webster explained to me that they
wanted to try the experiment of feeding the
exhausted lungs with pure oxygen. When I
found that it was not for immediate use only,
but that the treatment was to be continued
through the day, I told Dr. Webster that we
should have to start the furnace in the Davy
Club laboratory, and he bade me do so. With
two or three others of the men most interested
in chemistry I went up to that laboratory,
and till ten o'clock in the evening we were
sending down rubber bags of oxygen for these
poor fellows to breathe. Whether it did
them any good or not I do not know ; event
ually one of them recovered and the other
died.

236 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
I remember that our feet were wet through
with the overflow of our pneumatic troughs ;
and, when we were notifled that our work was
needed no longer, I brought the whole crew
up into my room in the third story of the
same building to dry their feet and to take
something warming within. We sat together
for some time, and then they bade me good
night ; but in two minutes one came rushing
back for my water pails. It proved that the
intense heat from our furnace, through the
day, had cracked off the plaster in the
chimney of old Massachusetts, and had
exposed a timber which the careless builders
of the year 1720 had only protected by rough
cast. Our fellows had prudently looked in at
the laboratory as they went by, to see that all
was safe, and had found themselves blinded
with smoke. We went to work with a will to
extinguish the fire we had lighted, but it was
wholly shut in and was quite too much for us.
That was the only night when I ever heard
the traditional call of " Harvard." Some one
ran out and called "Harvard, Harvard, Har
vard ! " two or three times lustily, and in two

AT COLLEGE. 237
minutes we had all Harvard to help us. But
all would not do. We had to call in the Cam
bridge fire department, to our great shame and
grief ; and it was not till, with their axes and
pickaxes, they had cut away the chimney that
we got at the beam to which we had set fire.
Fortunately the old building was saved from
destruction by the care of the men— Henry
Parker is the one whom I remember — who
looked in to see that all was safe after our
day's work.
Another of these out of the way dabblings
in science was our observations for meteors
in the winter of 1838-39. This was organized
by William Francis Channing, now so well
known as the electrician. The New Haven
astronomers had made the suggestion, which
has since been generally accepted, that on the
12th of November annually the earth passes
through a belt of meteors. Channing had had
some conversation with Professor Levering,
who had told him that it was desirable that in
November, 1838, there should be a careful obser
vation on this subject ; and we made a club
of eight, which we called the Octagonal Club,

238- A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
for the special purpose of making these obser
vations. We sent a table and five chairs out
to the Delta. We met there in a squad at
midnight and after, and, back to back, sat, all
wrapped up, looking at the clear sky. We
were quite incredulous as to the "Novembre-
ity" of the shower ; we said that there would
be as many on any clear night ; and we under
took to demonstrate it. So, month by month,
that winter, when there was no moon, we met
on the Delta in the same way to hunt for
meteors. We have all been pleased since to see that
those observations are referred to in the care
ful studies of this business. We certainly
fixed the fact on the minds of the astron
omers that on any fine winter night two or
three hundred meteors may be seen in our
clear sky, if there are enough people to look
for them. I doubt if this was generally
believed before the interest aroused by the
meteoric shower of November 12, 1833.
The recent observation, which seems to be
now generally accepted, that there are black
meteors, or moving bodies which reflect almost

AT COLLEGE. 239
no light to our world, has recalled to me these
nights of observation. Tliere were three or
four of us who insisted upon it that now and
then we saw black meteors. The others, of
course, said this was merely the reaction of the
retina, and all that. But it was one of the
jokes which, found expression in the little
jingling poetry which among us we composed
on those nights of observation :
While Morisoh and Parker
In south-east cry, " Marker,
One jet black and darker
From zenith above " ;
But Adams and Longfellow,
Watching the throng below,
Won't all night long allow
Black meteors move.
I think it was in the Natural History Society,
however, that more of us were personally inter
ested from day to day, than any other of these
outside occupations. In imitation of the
Davy Club we applied very early for one of
the recitation rooms in the basement of Mas
sachusetts, which the government cordially
g'ave us, because they liked to help in such
plans. Eventually we occupied all four of

240 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
those rooms between the two entries. The
whole basement is now given up to a large lect
ure room, the same which is used by the Phi
Beta Kappa at its annual dinners. We were
as poor as rats, and why we did not ask the col
lege to furnish these rooms for us I am sure I
do not know ; I do not doubt they would have
done it willingly. But we assessed ourselves
terribly for the cases in which we were to keep
our collections. And half my recollections of
the Natural History Society are not of botany
or mineralogy, but of bargains with carpenters
and painters and other people who were to
work for us in such details. I remember, on
one occasion, we were very anxious to have the
new rooms ready for a college exhibition, but
two days beforehand the painters had not come.
When they came I stood over them and made
them promise that the paint should be dry by
nine o' clock the next morning. They explained
to me that if enough turpentine were used it
would certainly be dry, and dry it was ; but
whether the fair friends whom we took to see
our exhibition enjoyed the smell of the turpen
tine I have always since doubted.

AT COLLEGE. 241
And thus I am reminded that I have said noth
ing about college exhibitions. They have died
out in the face of the pressure of modern life, I
think from the difficulty that it was impossible
to secure an audience. Probably the great fes
tivity of class day takes the place of all such
minor festivities. But in these prehistoric
times of which I write the minor festivities
held tlieir own, and at the three exhibitions
and at commencement there were large parties
of ladies and gentlemen who visited the college,
and who were entertained with more or less fes
tivity. Exhibitions were divided into junior
and senior exhibitions. This meant that the
highest part in the junior exhibition was taken
by the highest junior, while in the two senior
exhibitions the highest parts were taken by the
second and third seniors. This shall be
explained more fully hereafter.
Now, as will appear, if you were in the
upper twenty-four of the class you spoke
twice before commencement came, and at
commencement you had another part — ora
tion, dissertation, disquisition, or a Latin or
Greek part, according to your ability. So

242 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
much was matter of college regulation ; but
the custom was that men who spoke invited
their friends out to hear them, and as there
were sixteen speakers at each exhibition, this
made a company of two or three hundred
ladies and gentlemen, who came out to "see
the colleges" on those particular days. On
those days there were no other college exer
cises ; generally the Pierian was in attendance,
and they made pretty /e^es on a small scale, as
class day makes one of the grandest events of
the year now. If you had a part you rehearsed
for it, of course, with the teacher of elocution.
What was quite as important, you went down
to see Ma'am Hyde, who had a little shop on
Dunster Street, and you hired your silk gown.
You paid her flfty cents for a day's use of it.
She had enough of these gowns to answer for
the whole class, and unless a boy was the son
of a clergyman, or otherwise connected with a
good silk gown, he hired one of these for use.
They were very sleazy silk, and certainly
would not stand alone, but they answered the
purpose. The exhibition itself began with a Latin

AT COLLEGE. 243
salutatory, in which you said civil things
about the pretty girls, and thanked the pro
fessors and the president for their kindness to
you. Then went on discussions of the charac
ter of Napoleon or of Alexander the Great, or
speculations why there were or were not liter
ary men in America, with a Latin or Greek
dialogue translated backward from some mod
ern poet. And after every four or five num
bers there would be " music by the Pierian
Sodality." While the music went on you
walked around and talked with your pretty
friends, or your uncles, or your aunts, and
invited them to the spread at your own room ;
but the word " spread " was not then invented.
So the sixteen numbers pulled through, every
speaker bowing to the president and then to
the audience, making his speech, bowing
again, and retiring. There were certain " silent
parts," as they were called, because the math
ematical and chemical departments wanted to
show who were their best men, irrespective of
general college rank. These were assigned to
three or four men, who wrote them out and
tied them up in rolls with highly colored rib-

244 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
bon, and when their time came marched across
the stage, made a bow to the presiding officer,
gave the roll to him, made another bow to the
president, and, again retired.
This will be as good a place as any to tell
the varying fortunes of class day itself, of
which I happen to remember one of the most
important crises. Class day seems to have
originated as early as the beginning of the
century. The class itself chose a favorite
speaker as orator, and some one who could
write a poem, and had its own exercises of
farewell. There grew up side by side with
those farewell exercises the custom by which
the class treated the rest of the college, and
eventually treated every loafer in Cambridge.
As I remember the first class days which I ever
saw, they were the occasions of the worst
drunkenness I have ever known. The night
before class day some of the seniors — I do not
know but what all — went out to the lower part
of the plot, where there was still a grove of
trees, and "consecrated the grove," as the
phrase was, which meant drank all the rum
and other spirits that they liked. Then, on

AT COLLEGE. 245
the afternoon of class day, around the old elm
tree, sometimes called Rebellion Tree and
sometimes Liberty Tree, which stood and
stands behind Hollis, all the college assembled,
and every other male loafer who chose to come
where there was a free treat. Pails of punch,
made from every spirit known to the Cam
bridge innkeepers, were there for everybody
to drink. It was a horrid orgy from end to
end, varied, perhaps, by dancing round the
tree. With such memories of class day President
Quincy, in 1838, sent for my brother and one
or two others of the class of that year in whom
he had confidence, to ask what could be done
to break up such orgies. He knew he could
rely on the class for an improvement in the
customs. They told him that if he would give
them for the day the use of the Brigade Band,
which was then the best band we had in Boston,
and which they had engaged for the morning,
they felt sure that they could change the fete.
The conditions, observe, were a lovely July day,
the presence in the morning at the chapel, to
hear the addresses, of the nicest and prettiest

246 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
girls of Boston and neighborhood with their
mammas, and the chances of keeping them
there through the afternoon. Mr. Quincy
gladly procured the band, and when the day
came it became the birthday of the modern
"class day," the most charming of fetes.
Word was given to the -girls that they must
come to spend the day. In the chapel Cool-
idge delivered a farewell oration. Lowell,
alas ! was at Concord, not permitted to come
to Cambridge to recite his poem ; it had to be
printed instead. When the ode had been
sung the assembly moved up to that shaded
corner between Stoughton and Holworthy.
The band people stationed themselves in the
entry of Stoughton, between 21 and 24, with
the window open, and the "dancing on the
green," of which there are still traditions,
began. The wind instrument men said after
ward that they never played for dancing
before, and that their throats were bone dry ;
and I suppose there was no girl there who had
ever before danced to the music of a trombone.
When our class came along, in 1839, we had
the honor of introducing fiddles, I shall send

AT COLLEGE. 247
this paper to the charming lady — the belle of
her time — with whom I danced in the silk
gown in which I had been clad when I deliv
ered the class poem of my year. Does she
remember it as well as I do ?
Commencement was a function far more
important than the exhibitions or than class
day, which, to speak profanely, were side
shows. No audience can ever be persuaded to
sit six hours or more to hear perhai)s thirty
addresses. So now, while a certain theory is
maintained that certain of the best scholars in
the large graduating class prepare addresses,
by far the larger number of them are excused,
and only five or six speakers, representing four
or five branches of the university, actually
address the audience. No one has to be in the
theatre more than two hours.
But in the first half of the century the func
tion consumed the day. People had more
time, and, with a certain ebb and flow of the
assembly of auditors, the First Church was
kept full all day. Originally there was a recess
in the middle of the day for dinner, I think,
hut of this I am not sure. In our day about

248 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
twenty-five of the graduating class spoke, and
there were one or two addresses by speakers
who represented the "Masters," that is, those
who took their second degree, three years after
they graduated.
A "Master" might have fifteen minutes, I
think. The three seniors who had "orations,"
that is, the highest scholars in the graduating
class, had ten minutes. In order of rank there
followed dissertations, disquisitions, and, if
anybody could write verse, a poem. A dis
sertation was eight minutes long, and a disqui
sition four. Of all this you were notified when
you were appointed.
My sophomore year began at the time
when the high consulting powers had de
termined to celebrate the second centen
nial of the college. It was two hundred
years since the granting of the charter, and
that was, fairly enough, taken as the birth-.
day. Preparations were made to illuminate the
buildings, and a great tent, in which two
thousand people might dine, was pitched near
where President Eliot's house now stands.

AT COLLEGE. 249
The president's house then was what we now
call "Wadsworth," the house built for Benja
min Wadsworth by the province when he
came from the First Church in Boston to be
president of the college in 1726. Students
would not be students if they did not connect
some utter absurdity with every function ;
accordingly there was circulated among us a
rumor, for which there was not the slightest
foundation, that, in revenge for the burning of
the Ursuline convent two years before, the
Irish of Boston proposed to attack the college
and destroy the illuminations the night before
the celebration. To prepare for this attack
the undergraduates met, and chose their
officers for a night watch to protect the uni
versity. We took our turns as patrols all
round the college yards, challenging every
poor night wanderer who passed, and making
him give the countersign. If he did not know
it we bid him pass, and thanked God we were
rid of a knave. It was, of course, an admirable
preparation, worthy of our years, for a very
fatiguing day of festival, thus to knock out
three or four hours of sleep from the night

250 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
before. The military company, called the
Harvard Washington Corps,
" The hybrid band of Mercury and Mars,"
had been extinct for some years, but there lin
gered still, as "transmittenda," a few guns,
sashes, and belts, with a sword or two, which
served for the equipment of our officers. I
doubt if there were a pound of powder among
us all ; certainly not a bullet, flint, or percus
sion cap.
President Quincy delivered a historical
address at this celebration which makes the
opening chapter of his "History." I think
it was on this occasion that the old motto
"Tensas" was first drawn out from a manu
script record and used across the face of the
three open books which are the bearing on
the college seal.
At the dinner Mr. Webster, Mr. Everett,
and Judge Shaw spoke, and I had, for the first
time, the joy of hearing Wendell Holmes recite
his own verses :
" Lord! how the seniors kicked about
That freshman class of one."

AT COLLEGE. 251
Perfect as they are to the reader, they are
more than perfect when he stands on a bench
at a college dinner and, with all his overflow
of humor, of pathos, and of eloquence, recites
them. Of how many Phi Beta dinners has he
been the joy and crown ! It is the first busi
ness of a Phi Beta president to make Dr.
Holmes say he will come to the annual dinner,
and the next is to catch any other celebrity
who may have been a guest at commencement.
Phi Beta is so free and easy that it is at that
table that the brightest things are said. I
remember to have heard there Lord Dufferin,
Lord Ashburton, and Sir Edward Thornton
among the travellers, and of our home orators
Mr. Everett, Mr. Sumner, Mr. Hillard, Mr.
Emerson, all the Quincys — yes, and so many
more All this gossip implies that we were kept
alive and in motion for four years, but I have
not told how the machine was fed and oiled.
In earlier days every student ate his breakfast
and supper in his room, taking "a size" from
the buttery, and dining in commons. But we

262 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
took all three meals in commons or at some
private boarding-house.
University Hall had been built twenty-seven
years before, for the general purpose of chapel,
commons, and for providing reading-rooms.
It was then supposed that one of the four
large halls which crossed the building on the
first floor would be used by each class in com
mons. But when I was in college only two
halls were thus used ; the two at the ends of
the building, and the middle dining halls, as
they were called, were reserved for large reci
tation rooms. It was in one of these that we
recited to Mr. Peirce. As freshmen we all
met for meals in the northern hall with the
juniors. About half the undergraduates at
that time lived in commons. Looking back on
the fare which was served us I am rather sur
prised that they were able to do so much for
us as they did, and do it so well. The bill of
fare appears rather Spartan to young men of
the habits of most of the young men who meet
in Cambridge to-day. But the quality of our
food was always good, and the quantity was
such as would have satisfied a savage of the

AT COLLEGE. 253
plains. I remember to have observed that I
lost weight in vacations and gained weight
during the months of term time.
The tables were firmly fixed into the floor,
as if in memory of some time when, in rage,
the guests had turned the tables up and flung
them out of the window. We went to com
mons three times a day, the custom of men
serving their own breakfasts and suppers in
their own rooms having been given up not
many years before. The buttery, as it was
called, used to be at the east end of Harvard
Hall, where a slight trace of the roof of that
temporary building may, I think, still be seen ;
but in our days there was no buttery, and it
was not necessary for any person to cook in
his room. Everything which we really needed
was provided for us at commons.
Eighty minutes after the morning prayer bell
stopped we were rung in to breakfast. The
breakfast was coffee or milk ad libitum, hot
and cold bread, and butter. I think no meat
was served at breakfast. We knew what
would be the variety of the hot bread ; it was
made in different rolls or biscuits for different

254 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
days, and the order was never changed. Din
ner was at one, and always consisted of one
sort of meat, potatoes, and something called
pudding. Here, again, the bill of fare was as
absolute as if it had been laid down by the
Medes and Persians, and never changed. I
think it is burned in on my memory so that, to
this day, when certain provisions appear on
certain days of the week, I take it as some
thing preordained. For meats, Sunday was
roast beef, Monday was corned beef, Tuesday
was roast veal, Wednesday was beefsteak,
Thursday was roast lamb or mutton, Friday
meat-pie with fish, Saturday was salt fish. I
think we never had pork in any form, either
fresh or in the shape of ham. To make the
Friday dinner more substantial meat-pie was
added ; I suppose a house-keeper would tell
us that it was made out of such meat as had
not been eaten in the preceding days. We
remember it because after eating this solid
meat-pie we went to our rooms to write our
Friday themes. The puddings were boiled
rice, baked rice, hasty pudding, baked Indian
pudding, apple pudding, and, on one day.

AT COLLEGE. 255
some sort of pie took the place of pudding.
Every now and then there would be a com
plaint that the butter was bad ; in that case
we did not stand it. Somebody went right
round to the president and told him, and he
sent for the contractor and gave him a blow
ing up. We always pretended at home and
elsewhere that the fare was not good, but it
was good.
Now the wonder to me is that they man
aged to feed a set of ravenous wolves — for that
is what we were — on such a bill of fare, at the
prices at which food was then sold in Eastern
Massachusetts. Flour ranged in those years
from $4.90 a barrel to $11.50. But we paid
only $1.90 a week for our board in the first
year when I was in college, and $2.25, for every
year afterwards. It must be remembered that
this charge involved for the contractor no
expenses for crockery, silver, knives and forks,
rent, or fuel. The college had these to see to.
The table at which I sat became, in fact, a
club table ; we were the same little company
from the beginning to the end of our college
life. While we were in college Dickens's

256 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
books began to appear, and we made it a rule
that the table should buy the serial parts for
its own use ; one man bought the first number,
the next man the second, and we passed them
round. We introduced into commons the
institution of salt-spoons. Up to our time
every man put his knife into the salt-cellar ;
but we subscribed twenty-five cents and bought
two salt-spoons made of bone, which we used
through our college course. It was agreed
that they should be given to the man who was
first married. Six years after, our excellent
friend Watson of Plymouth was married,
and we sent him the salt-spoons, set in silver
in a careful design made by Richard Green-
ough, who was the friend of all of us. Long
fellow and I were intrusted with the business
of mounting the salt-spoons, and we did so.
The inscription was from Lucian, suggested by
Longfellow : "'AXcSv aMoivcovov/iEv " — " We
have shared each other's salt."
It is a little unsentimental, perhaps, to have
spent so much space on the physical business
of feeding the engines. Still it must be con
fessed that in all human life armies have to be

AT COLLEGK 257
fed, and even the future poets, philosophers,
statesmen, and men of affairs of a country
have to be fed for the same reasons. In point
of fact, we were a healthy and a happy race.
I have said, I believe, almost nothing about
our athletic amusements ; but there were
enough of them, although they were conducted
with utter lack of system, and would bring
scorn, I suppose, on any one of us, or any
eleven, who should reproduce them to-day.
We had foot-ball in tumultuous throngs ; we
had base-ball, in utter ignorance that there
were ever to be written rules for base-ball, or
organized clubs for playing it ; and we had
cricket, in a way. So we wrought through
the four years, which for me were, as I have
said, tedious, as I had expected they would be.
But every one of us made friends to whom he
has clung through life, and we got an outlook
into a larger world, even if we did not look
into the largest. The jest with regard to Cam
bridge is that nobody who lives in Cambridge
knows anything five miles from the sound of the
college bell. This is not true now, and it was
not any more true then; we acquainted ourselves

1 1

258 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
Avith friends from all parts of the United States;
we got broader views of politics and society
than those we had picked upat home ; and we
left college certainly willing to do our duty.
The great functions of college life which
attract the outside world are now in the hands
of the students. They are the boat races,
or the ball matches, or the other athletic
"events"; or they are, perhaps, the theatrical
performances of the Hasty Pudding, the con
certs of the glee clubs, or the great annual
festival of class day. In our time this was
hardly so ; when strangers came to college
they came at the invitation of the government.
There were three annual exhibitions, and com
mencement day was still the great festival of
all. The exhibitions were arranged with per
fect deference to precedent and with absolutely
mathematical care, so that you might know
what was the precise grade of scholarship to
which each student had attained, if he only
belonged to the "upper half" of the class.
"Upper half" was not a strictly accurate
expression, but was sufficiently so to include
the twenty-four men who had had the highest

AT COLLEGE. 259
rank on the numerical scale to which every
thing bent. In this scale every person was
marked for every recitation. If you made a
perfect recitation your mark was 8 ; if you
"deaded," as the phrase was — that is, if you
failed absolutely — the mark was 0 ; and the
mark took any figure between, according as the
teacher thought you were well prepared. For
certain exercises the mark was higher ; for in
stance, a perfect theme, such as Longfellow used
to write, was marked 48, and a theme might
bear any mark below. Of these marks a great
total was kept. If you were absent from any
recitation, eight was deducted from your total.
If you were absent from chapel I think two
was deducted ; every offence and every success
had its correlative weight on this absolute
standard. I used to say, and it was perfectly true, that
if a man entered college absolutely well fitted,
so that at his first recitation he received 8 for
every exercise, and from that moment declined
in morals, in scholarship, and in intelligence,
so that at his last recitation he received 0 for
everything, his rank on the college scale the

260 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
day he graduated would be absolutely the
same as that of some unfortunate who, having
got into the college by mistake, received 0 for
every mark on his first recitation, and then by
assiduous study, virtue, and intelligence rose
so that at the end of his course he received
the highest mark for everything, and was the
best scholar in his class. This statement was
absolutely correct. The rank list, so called, of
all colleges simply gives a miserable average
of what a person has been in a certain period
of time, and does not reveal, to men or to
angels, anything of his present capacity or his
present wish and intention.
By such a rank list, however, we were all
measured. I think the result was a very great
indifference to college rank on the part of most
of the students. But in the bosoms of our
families there was a great respect for it ; every
body knew who the first scholar was, and there
were traditions of the first scholars of a hun
dred years before us, so that a certain interest
attached to knowing who the first scholar was.
This interest was met in our case, and it would
have been in the case of all other classes of our

AT COLLEGE. 261
time, when what was called the sophomore
exhibition, which has been already alluded to,
came on. With us it was at the end of the
college year of 1836-37. On a certain morning
in May eight of our fellows were sent for to
go to the president. They had little slips of
paper given them, telling them what parts were
assigned them for the exhibition, which was to
take place just before the end of the college
year. These parts were translations into Latin
and Greek, or from Latin and Greek into Eng
lish ; but these eight then knew that they were
the eight highest scholars in our class. For
the same exhibition one English oration was
assigned, with which the exhibition closed.
The junior who received this part knew that
he was the highest scholar in his class then ;
unless he failed badly in the next year this
man would be sure to receive the highest honor
at commencement.
There were, as I. have said, three of these
exhibitions in a year, and at each exhibition
eight of one class and eight of another were
appointed, making sixteen in all. The exhi
bition consisted of declaiming these parts, of

262 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
which, the half were translations and half were
original, in English, Latin; or Greek, before such
an audience as chose to come together. Most of
the students were at that time from the eastern
part of Massachusetts ; it would therefore
happen that sixteen students might call to
gether two or three hundred of their friends to
hear their performances on such occasions.
You spoke, in a black silk gown, for four min
utes, for six minutes, for eight minutes, or for
twelve, according to your rank ; you delivered
a poem, or a disquisition, or a dissertation, or an
oration, or you had your part in a " forensic,"
or perhaps simply declaimed in a dialogue
which you had translated from some English
drama into Greek or Latin. After the exhi
bition you asked your friends to your room,
where there was a modest entertainment pro
vided ; the word "spread" is now used for
such entertainments, but that has come in
since my time.
At the end of the whole business, when your
boyhood was all but over, and your manhood
was about to begin, the college commencement
ended the whole. Still it was rightly enough

AT COLLEGE. 263
named, for it was the beginning of life. To
prepare for this the president's freshman car
ried round, not sixteen notes, but twenty-four
or more, to call to the president's study the
seniors who were highest in rank of the class
which was to graduate. They were to receive
their bachelor's degree. You went round to
the president, and he gave you a slip of paper :
" Jones, a disquisition, four minutes " ;
or, " Smith, an English dissertation, eight
minutes"; or, "Brown, an English oration, twelve min
utes." Then you had the summer term to get up this
part. You carried it down to Mr. Channing,
who struck out its exuberant rhetoric, you
rehearsed it to the teacher of elocution, you
hired your black silk gown of Mrs. Hyde, and
all was ready. The morning of commencement,
before daylight, there began a queer procession
from Boston of people, who were generally
black people, with little covered handcarts or
other vehicles, with which they established

264 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
themselves around the Cambridge Common to
feed the thirst and the hunger of the loafers of
that town. With them and theirs, however,
students had little or nothing to do. But, for
the multitude of Cambridge, commencement
was thus made much more a public holiday
than was any other day in the year.
At eight o'clock in the morning the Governor
rode out from the State House in a barouche
with an escort of cavalry ; the officers and
the corporation rendered themselves; and at
the First Church, which had been fitted up
with a platform, the exercises began at nine
o'clock. Lucky was the class and lucky were
the spectators if they were done at half-past
three in the afternoon. Perhaps one or two
speakers had been •added to the twenty-four
who had had parts at exhibitions. It was gen
erally considered that, out of respect to the
nine Muses, if you had a poet of marked excel
lence in the class, he had a part whether he
had or had not earned it by being one of the
first twenty-four. Some fellow who wrote
Latin decently well made a Latin salutatory.
He said something funny about the girls, he

AT COLLEGE. 265
complimented the professors, and told the
governor that all men considered themselves
fortunate that the Commonwealth of Massa
chusetts was under his direction. Then in
stages of four or five parts at a time you went
forward and satisfied yourself whether Alex
ander the Great were or were not a robber,
whether literature would or would not flourish
in America, and whether Julius Caesar or
Napoleon were the greater general. For
glimpses of relief, as these numbers flowed on,
the band performed some music, and people
who could not stand it any longer then got up
and went out, and people who had been wait
ing outside came in. So the exercises flowed
on in a steady stream till, as I say, between
three and four o'clock, when the president
was ready to give the degrees. He gave the
bachelor's degree to these youngsters who had
been speaking the pieces and to the rest of the
class. The classes, on an average, were about
sixty at that time. Then he called up those
who were to be admitted as Masters. This was
simply a flle of such of the graduates of
three years before as chose to pay the fee for

266 A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD.
another diploma. All the same, they were
represented in the speaking by some one who
delivered what was known as "the Master's
oration." It was rather longer than the other
orations, and was supposed to be more manly.
I may say in passing that I think the only
tribute to college rank which I have ever
known conferred by this active world of Amer
ica was in connection with one of these Masters'
orations. A man whom I knew rather well
when I was in college had the Master's oration
of his year. Ten years afterwards, as it hap
pened, he was in a distant city, where, he told
me, he had gone to see the lady whom he was
afterwards to marry. Rather to his surprise,
he found himself quartered in his hotel in
what was known as the " Governor's room,"
a handsome parlor on the first floor, with all
the conveniences of bedroom on one side, a
bathroom, and the rest, such as in those days
were not often dispensed in a travellers' hotel.
When he paid his bill he asked to what acci
dent he owed this distinction. And the "gen
tlemanly clerk " at the office said : "I heard
you speak your Master's oration at Cambridge

AT COLLEGE. 267
ten years ago." So it seems that feudal insti
tutions did linger in America almost as late as
the middle of this century, and that the men
of the carnal world had still some honors to
confer on those who had in any sort been
favored by the Muses.
And with this distribution of degrees college
life ended. The degree is in Latin, and it does
not promise much. It does give you the priv
ilege of speaking in public whenever anybody
asks you to. This privilege is one apt to be
claimed by the American boy or the American
man when he has not studied in a university.
That is to say, any man may "hire a hall."
There is, perhaps, a satisfaction in being
authorized to do so in a language which few
people understand, by a body of men who have
received from the commonwealth the right to
give such authority. However that may be, it
is quite true that at the moment when one
receives a piece of parchment which gives him
this privilege his boyhood may be said to end
and his manhood to begin.
THE END.

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