My Boyhood in a Parsonage

Some brief sketches of American Life

BY Thomas W. Lamont

The son of a Methodist pastor, Thomas W. Lamont was born in the Hudson River valley and passed his boyhood always within sight of the river and the Catskills as his family moved from parsonage to parsonage in Claverack, Coxsackie, Saugerties, and Rondout. His father’s salary was approximately $1200 a year; yet the family devoted a tenth of this income to benevolences. The house was full of books and magazines; and by good management the parents were able to send all three of their children to preparatory school and college. Here was high finance of the heart.

In a year of contention and doubt, it is a blessed relief to follow Mr. Lamont’s footsteps back to the Age of Innocence. “ We had. he writes, the plain living which Wordsworth recommended, and if the thoughts of my family and of the community failed to be high, they were at least kindly. As to the manners and customs of the Methodist people that my father served so faithfully for almost half a century, I should not be understood as speaking with the slightest disrespect. And, if I have been oversentimental about my family, it is because I feel as Sir James Barrie did about his tribute to his mother, in Margaret Ogilvy. ’Many,’he said, ’think it too intimate, but I could write of my mother in no other way.’”

A graduate of Phillips Exeter and of Harvard, class of 1892, Mr. Lamont entered the world of finance by way of the New York Tribune. He stands today internationally known, the Chairman of the Board of the J. P. Morgan &: Co. Bank. The book from which these chapters arc taken will be published this summer by Harper & Brothers.

COMPLETE IN THIS ISSUE

MY BOYHOOD IN A PARSONAGE.

by THOMAS W. LAMONT

MY MOTHER used to tell me that in the months before I was born she would sit on the porch of the little parsonage, looking westward to the Catskill Mountains, and pray that she would have a serene and sturdy son. That was at Claverack, a short distance back from the cast bank of the Hudson River and only a few miles below Albany. Claverack was a Dutch corruption of “Clover Reach,” where for miles the meadows waved and nodded with lovely pink and while clover. This region was of the Van Rensselaer tradition. In fact, back in the seventeenth century and for two hundred years thereafter the lower Manor House of the Van Rensselaers was at Claverack.

At eighteen months I shook the dust of Claverack off my feet and left its 600 inhabitants for good, my father having been transferred to another “charge,” the equivalent in the Methodist nomenclature for “parish.” But years later I found that same little frame house where I was born. I too looked across the Hudson and saw the rampart of the Catskills growing blue under the westering sun — the same that my mother had gazed at through the long spring and summer afternoons. I came upon it when I was taking a motor trip up the Hudson to have another look at the several parsonages where I spent most of my boyhood my father, in conformity with the itinerant system, having been pastor at the Methodist churches for successive periods of three years at Claverack, Coxsackie, Catskill, Saugerties, and Rondout.

I chanced to reach one of these communities on a Sunday; and just as the service was drawing to a close, I slipped into the little white Methodist church where my father had served. The preacher had finished his sermon and was taking up a special collection for the new organ. He explained pleadingly that they were $49.31 short of the full amount, and he adjured the Almighty to send down manna from Heaven to make up the deficit. So when the box came to me, sitting in a rear pew and feeling like a rich Presbyterian instead of a poor Methodist minister’s son, I dropped in a fifty-dollar bill that I sometimes carried with me for emergencies. When the deacon reached the altar, he flipped his hand towards the plate. I saw the preacher give it a quick look. Then as he glanced at me far down the aisle he raised his hands fervently and said, ” We thank Thee, O Lord, for this timely succor!” Nobody knew but the preacher and the deacon; nobody smiled but me.

Only those who have spent the impressionable years of their lives in the Hudson River valley, as I did, can imagine the sentiment that that region begets. Part of it. comes from the beauty of the river and of its banks, with the Catskill Mountains and their ever changing hues always in the background. Then too, we were brought up on the historical traditions that cluster about the river — colonial days, early and late, traces of the French of the seventeenth century, of the Dutch, of Governor Peter Stuyvesant and his wooden leg, of the English pioneers, of American Revolutionary times, and then the quiet developments of the nineteenth century.

To a child the years always stretch out at immense length. The winters, filled with snow and frost, seem endless. Skating begins at Thanksgiving, and on that small pond in the hollow of the low hills back of the church the ice lingers almost to April. The long vacation days of July and August go by, one by one, peaceful and sleepy, with the humming of the bees. And when the dusk comes dropping down, a small boy, deliciously tired from the swimming and the running and the final household chores, is glad to stumble up the stairs and fall drowsily into bed.

Lacking the intimacy and ancient background that Gray gave us in his Elegy, the Hudson valley landscape had yet the splendor of harvest, field, and forest; always before us the kindly and welcome river shimmering in the glow of its upper reaches, and behind us, towering up less than a dozen miles away, the green and blue forested slopes and peaks of the Catskill Mountains. And with the lightning flashes from the mountain fastnesses as the sultry August day drew to its close, there came those sudden claps and thunderings, the same that Washington Irving told about in his Sketch Book, which Mother read to us children — the sound of Hendrik Hudson’s men playing at bowls in the deep-hidden recesses of the mountains, whose rounded slopes turned now from blue to an inky black to match the clouds. How exciting it was for the small boy to cling to such thrilling fable! And were not those dim, delicious thoughts that came just before sleep closed in, like old Rip Van Winkle’s when that heavy drowsiness came stealing over him as he sank into his twenty years of slumber?

2. “GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN —”

WHAT are my earliest recollections? As we look back on our early childhood, we realize that there is a misty between-times — something that is part of the daydreams of those lovely years and part of the dawn of actual recollection. They intermingle, and for the happily reared child they are all romance and wonder and delight.

From out of that bright mist there emerges for me one afternoon that stands out as the first memory I can cling to and declare my own. I was hardly over four years old at the time. We were living in old Katonah (long before the new aqueduct came, which changed the whole face of the landscape), and my father’s congregation was so scattered that he kept a horse, Jennie, to make his pastoral calls every afternoon.

He always let my sister or me go with him, and we would take the ends of the reins and pretend that we were driving. On this particular afternoon he was called out hurriedly, harnessed the horse in a rush, and I just had time to clamber into the seat beside him. He urged Jennie to a much faster pace than usual, and after a couple of miles we drew up before a small farmhouse standing close to the roadside. Father hitched the mare and hurried inside.

The wait for me was never irksome. I could look over the woods and fields, breathe in the sweet air from the new-mown hay, and meantime hold the reins and drive off into far distant spaces, visit all the lands of my fairy tales and dreams, gaze upon new landscapes, forests, seas, and meet strange peoples.

But this time my small wandering mind was called back by the sound of my father’s voice. He was praying — that I knew at once. And I seemed to realize that in his supplications there were unusual tenderness, comfort, and reassurance. I had no mind that could characterize these things, but the gentleness was there and my childish dreams gave way to a sense of awe and mystery.

Finally my father emerged and with him came the farmer with tears in his eyes. He wrung my father’s hand and in broken voice murmured, “Dominie, you have opened the very gates of Paradise for my poor dear.” And my father gave him his blessing and said, “Your good wife is at rest with the saints. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ ”

Years later as a grown boy one day I reverted with my father to this episode of my childhood days. “Yes,” said he, “your memory has served you well. That poor woman had rescued a neighbor’s daughter from death. The girl had spilled on the floor some red-hot coals from a rickety kitchen stove. She had set herself and the house afire. The woman saved the girl. But she herself, with her long skirts, had been fatally burned. Yes, they summoned me and I prayed with her until she died.”

“What were you and the farmer saying, Father?” I asked. And then he told me, just as I have set the words down from my memory of this later talk. At all events, that afternoon with my father marked the end of that shadow period when childhood dreams and misty memories intermingled. From then on my recollections clearly took the lead.

3. CONVERSION AT THE AGE OF NINE

HAVING at the age of seven signed the blue-ribbon Temperance Pledge and thus put behind me for life the Demon Rum, two years later, in the course of Father’s Coxsackie pastorate, I joined the Church. Gladstone, I think it was, once said, “The sense of sin, the sense of sin — that is the want in modern life.”The weakness in my “conversion” (the term always employed) was that I was not sufficiently convicted of sin. To be truly converted one had to be overwhelmed with the knowledge that one was filled with sin, and to confess that conviction in no uncertain terms. Then and then only would the powers from on high step in and effect a conversion so thorough that one was filled with exultation and joy. The most hardened offender was not beyond the pale. His soul, upon conversion, would in the words of the old hymn be “washed whiter than snow.”All this was an intensely encouraging doctrine for sinner as well as saint.

We used to hear not infrequent instances of deathbed repentance. And we accepted without question (and still accept) the Christian precept that it is never too late to mend. The deathbed repentant, even though by ever so slight a margin, had secured a sure place for himself among the heavenly hosts. He could feel assured that after years of loose living, he had the same certainty of salvation as the prim old maid who joined the Church in her teens and ever after lived a godly, sober, righteous life. Did we not all recall the passage from St. Luke: “Likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance”?

Now this tenet, held and worked out so circumstantially by the Methodists, was indeed founded on the soundest possible doctrine as enunciated in the New Testament. Nor would I for one moment question its validity or effectiveness. But the Methodist elders of my day made such an exact formula of it that it was at times difficult for a young and rather puzzled nine-year-old convert, such as I was, to feel that he had fully qualified on the original premise — namely, a sound conviction of having led a sinful life.

I had been stirred at the revival meetings by the singing and the praying, and by the exhortation for us to come to the altar and lay down our sins, and I had for several successive evenings seen scattered groups of men and women, young men and maidens, rise and go forward to fall on their knees and confess their conviction of sin and desire for salvation. So, finally, like several others only a trifle older, I was swayed by the fervor of the gatherings — exalted, we should call it in these days — and was ready to go to the altar with some of my friends and ask for forgiveness.

Half a century later, I might say that I, like some of the others, all of us sincere, was moved by emotion more than by any intellectual process. As a matter of fact, Father, realistic as well as spiritual, while he encouraged my attendance at the revival meelings, never urged upon me privately the idea that I should confess my sins. Perhaps his restraint gave me at that time a tinge of surprise, but today it does not.

After being duly received into the Church, the formula was that you had to serve six months as a probationer, after the manner of a mild purgatory. Then if you had not backslidden you would be received as a full member. After that first induction, I say, I began to examine myself to determine whether I was as full of sin as my confession had indicated. I knew that I must be selfish, a trifle disobedient, perhaps impertinent at times. But was I just chock-full of sin as I thought I must be when I was converted? I was certainly not idle, for I was on the run all day long. But ah, yes - here it was! I hated to do chores, such as picking over the cinders and ashes from the sitting-room stove to salvage any unburned coals fallen through the grates; or drying the supper dishes; or, on a lovely spring Saturday morning, mucking over a pile of potatoes in the cellar to get the sprouts off. I did the chores. But I hated to do them. There undoubtedly was the sin. If I had not been sinful I should have loved to do chores.

This thought helped some, but even so the thought came back, Was I full of sin, a brand ready for the burning? Indeed I had always led a very happy life, never too hot or too cold (freezing my thumbs on my mile walk to school in zero weather did not really count as cold); I had always had plenty to eat and drink and wear and a good bed to sleep in; I had kind, gentle, and generous parents, who seldom either reprimanded or punished me. There was nothing that I could possibly ask for more than to continue just such a happy life. And if that meant that I had been full of sin, well, the fearful thought came to me, I could ask for nothing better than to live in sin forever! At this point I bade Satan to get behind me, for I knew that any such idea was base. Yet my early conversion, even though I was by no means satisfied with its quality, inevitably led to a more active part in the various phases of our church worship.

It is true, too, that even if at the time I was barely old enough to know my own mind, yet those early associations, even the occasionally overemotionalized meetings, all helped to give me a basic faith that I have been able to cling to ever since, no matter how far I may have strayed from some of the simple beliefs of my childhood.

We always had family prayers twice a day — first in the morning, just before breakfast, when Father read a chapter or a passage from the Bible, and then all of us, including the hired girl, knelt down while he offered a brief prayer, winding up with the Lord’s Prayer, in which everybody joined. If the morning chapter was from the New Testament, my father translated from a small, leather-bound Greek Testament, picked up by one of his brothers-in-law, a soldier in General Grant’s army, from a Rebel rifle pit after one of the bloody battles of the Wilderness.

Then immediately after our early (5.30 P.M.) supper, again we gathered in the sitting room; and beginning with my father, each spoke a verse from the Scriptures. In my tender years this was a bit of an ordeal, but I was permitted to recite more often than was my right the two shortest verses of the Bible: “Jesus wept” and “God is love.” My sister Lucy, three years older, sometimes felt that I was favored with an undue monopoly on these verses, but she was generous about it. Frequently when we had relatives or friends visiting us, which was often enough for our cramped quarters, my mother would play a hymn on the old square rosewood piano that had been given to her at the time of her wedding, and we would stand up and join in the singing before Father offered the brief final prayer. But normally we would rush out to get in as much play as we could before dark.

In wintertime our evenings were very domestic. In those days, in the country, people seldom went out for an evening meal. My family would gather in the small sitting room, my father reading, — history almost invariably, — my mother writing letters or perhaps with some of the family mending in her lap, my brother and sister at their lessons, and I, too young as yet for school, playing with my rude toys. Then, before I said good night and went up to that icy room that had no stove, and leaped into bed in no time, my mother would gather us around the piano and would play a hymn or two for us all to sing. It might be “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem!” which my brother loved to sing, or my father’s favorite to the end of his days, “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” or some other of the old familiar hymns that have come down to us through the generations.

There remains yet one childish picture that still comes back to me. It is of that gay and gifted mother of ours who used to play to us so simply and yet so movingly. She is at the piano, with me seated on her lap, held safe by her comforting arms on either side as her hands move over the keys and bring forth those magic strains. Now and then she would take my chubby forefinger in her firm clasp and with it pick out the air of “Home, Sweet Home.” That, after all these years, remains today my sole accomplishment on the pianoforte I can play “Home, Sweet Home” with one finger.

4. THE LORD’S DAY

WAS it the Lord’s Day or was it not? The question seemed as simple as that. The Methodists old and (perforce) young answered it sweepingly in the affirmative. They were so thorough about it that every waking minute on Sunday was devoted to their Maker, whether He wanted it or not. Take the services, for example. At 9.30 A.M. winter and summer, there were two or three class meetings, the members of the church having been divided into groups under class leaders, so that they could compare notes and benefit from one another’s pious experiences.

Then came church at 10.30, a full-dress affair with two or three Prince Albert coats in the congregation plus my father’s in the pulpit. My mother played the organ, a small one with no stops, and also trained the choir one evening a week. The Official Board of Church Trustees approved, and deemed this service to be so honorific as to call for no compensation.

A few members of the Board thought the tunes she played during the Sunday morning collection — a bit of Handel and Beethoven now and then — sounded “too fancy,” but they allowed on the whole that her performance would answer.

After church came more class meetings. The dread with which I attended the first one after becoming a member of the Church remains with me to this day. The class leader, Mr. Hiram Brown, ranged methodically back and forth across the three pews and asked each member to testify as to his religious experience of the week. Terror clutched my heart as he began on our pew. The fatal moment came: “What is your testimony, Brother Tommy?” he asked — everybody was supposed to call everybody else “brother” or “sister.”

Now Brother Brown kept a lumberyard, not so big as the leading Presbyterian elder’s lumberyard, yet filled with odds and ends of boards and what not half buried in the sawdust. Some friends and I that week had nipped in and taken some of these odd bits of board to play blocks with, so I was oppressed with guilt as well as terror.

“Speak up, Brother Tommy,” said Class Leader Brown. That time when Aeneas, after the fall of Troy, landed in Thrace and, pulling up some myrtle by its roots, evoked the agonized cries of Polydorus buried there — Aeneas’s hair, I say, was not in it with mine in standing on end, nor his voice in sticking in his throat. I tried to summon some spit into my parched mouth, but nothing came. My nice mother saved me from a fate that seemed worse than death to me.

“Tommy has been a very good boy this week, Brother Brown,” she said sweetly. And then, clutching my cold hand, she whispered, “Tell him you are trying to be a Christian soldier, Tommy.” I gulped twice, thought miserably of the Brown lumberyard, and managed to mumble “Christian soldier.”I didn’t have the nerve to say I was trying to be one. Brother Brown nodded and passed on to the other victims. Some of them, to my astonishment, seemed to relish the chance to talk about themselves.

Class meeting over, we went home and had our cold Sunday dinner. And at 2.30 P.M., nodding with sleep on hot summer days, we trooped to Sunday School, which, compared to the misery of class meeting, wasn’t bad fun on the whole. Then at 3.45 P.M. home again to sit “in the yard” the rest of the afternoon and watch with envious eyes the Presbyterian children walking gayly off to the woods or the brook. That is where the difference came in. The Presbyterians simply shut their eyes to the fact that, from dawn till dark, it was the Lord’s Day. During most of Sunday afternoon they simply forgot entirely Who was Who. We Methodists never forgot. We were not allowed to.

The slow afternoon dragged its weary way along. Cold supper at 5.30 gave us a break. Bread and butter, plenty of milk, applesauce and cookies. Nothing could be better. Then the Young People’s service at 6.15, with some spirited singing of old hymns, all to the good, and church service at 7.30 and another sermon. But Monday was in sight and most of the congregation seemed in better spirits. Nine o’clock came and we all trooped home, relaxed, ate apples, and laughed. The end of a perfect day!

I asked my father what about the Presbyterians — did he suppose that the Lord was vexed at their taking walks on Sunday afternoon, pairing off and doing all that other weekday stuff? Father did not seem to deplore as much as he should the conduct of the Presbyterian boys and girls. “Oh, well,”he said, “some Methodist communities are stricter than others. A young preacher like me mustn’t break the rules.” Then he added something about being in Rome and having to do as the Romans do. But there remained a question in my mind.

I must add a word on the subject of the Rich Presbyterians and the Poor Methodists. In the villages or small towns where we lived the rich Presbyterians were always the café society and we poor Methodists were the proletariat. The president of the Presbyterian Board of Trustees ran the biggest lumberyard and the largest coal pocket in the village; the clerk of the Presbyterian Board kept the number one butcher shop. The Methodists could boast for their Board president only that he had the second-best general store, and that the butcher shop of another member of the Board had fair cuts, but acknowledgedly not so tender as the Presbyterian steaks. Of course, as a matter of church politics, my father had to trade at the Methodist shops.

Then, too, the Presbyterians bespoke all the most honorific places in other activities. The Presbyterian Board president’s wife was of course president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a most enviable distinction. The Methodist Board president’s wife never got beyond the recording secretaryship of the Union. If there were a dozen horse-and-buggies in the village, at least ten of them were driven by Presbyterians.

And so it went all along the line. Socially the difference did not count for much. The Presbyterian Dominie had gone to college with my father, having been graduated in 1856 from Union College under old President Eliphalet Nott, so they had friends in common. At day school we were all friends together, Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, and Jews. And I am sure not a touch of envy ever came to my father or mother, even when they knew about the Presbyterian Board’s installing a bathroom in the Presbyterian parsonage. There were only two or three other bathrooms (all Presbyterian) in town, so why should we worry over a plumbingless parsonage — except that the outdoor privies were mighty cold and dark on zero weather nights. Perhaps now and then I had a slight inferiority complex about the Presbyterians, all seemingly suffused with wealth. But I had a forgiving nature and showed it eventually by going so far as to marry a Presbyterian girl.

5. DONATION PARTIES

OF ALL the trials that the country parson — and in this case especially his wife had to cope with, the annual Donation party was about the worst. This gathering, ostensibly for the sole benefit of the preacher and his family, seemed to work out as an invention of the Evil One. What happened was this: those country charges — many of the church members being farmers who dealt only in kind often found themselves hard up when it came to paving the preacher’s salary, meager as it was. So toward the end of December, when the deficit was looming in sight, they notified the Dominie that on a certain evening they would arrive in full force to give him a Donation. We children thought it was great fun, but from sad experience it gave our parents a sinking of heart.

The night would arrive and scores of men, women, youths, and maidens would drive up or tramp in, covered with snow, to get the hallway soaking wet and begin their tumultuous greetings. At a given moment the multifarious Donation would be bestowed. There would be lugged into the house and dumped down almost anywhere the various contributions. There were enough jelly layer cakes, heavy and light, to feed a regiment for a month, dozens of doughnuts, sinkers and what not, scores of loaves of bread, soda biscuit so manifold that, since childhood, I have never been able to look one in the face, a barrel or two of apples and of potatoes, occasional packages of butter, now and then a whole unwieldy quarter of beef, lots of pork (which our whole family, with perhaps less vigorous digestion than others, detested), and what was a white elephant, a couple of huge twenty-gallon cans of milk.

Then at the proper moment the Dominie was asked to say grace and the party fell to to test the worthiness of their own viands. Angel cake and dill pickle recipes were bandied about as on a modern radio program. The company ate up most of the butter and scattered crumbs of biscuit and pie all over the ground floor. Then, the Donation having been thus duly delivered, the women members would wander at will through the rooms upstairs and down, fingering all my mother’s bedspreads and keepsakes, while the young people in a rollicking, uproarious mood would foregather upstairs, usually in the spare room, blow out the kerosene lamps, and proceed to frolic.

On one occasion, I recall, in a mood of pure joy they emptied a large water pitcher on the spare mattress and ruined it; and then in an ecstasy of humor they threw all my mother’s best pillowcases out of the window into the storm, where they were so quickly covered with snow that they were not recovered till the following spring. All in a spirit of good fun, you know. But it was that particular night, after all the company had gone, that Mother broke down and wept over the ruin of much of her simple but precious wedding outfit. When the assets and liabilities were set forth, it was clear who had given the party. Long before it could be consumed, most of the bread and cake would be moldy and the milk gone sour.

My father always had a serene philosophy and a comforting degree of confidence in the goodheartedness of human beings. But this was too much even for him and he declared aloud that there would never be another Donation party so long as he occupied the parsonage. He said he much preferred to lose a part of his salary, and he lived up to that precept, for the accounts that he kept in the diary that he carefully wrote up from early manhood to old age show that from more than one charge he moved away with his salary still in part unpaid.

My father should have been a financier instead of a clergyman. How he and my mother ever managed we never knew, but somehow or other, even with growing expenses, he managed to keep in the black. Without any profession or ado he always made a practice of giving the first tenth of his income, a tithe, “to the Lord.” Then, in the order named, came living, educating his children, and books. The daily New York Tribune was our stand-by, and for periodical literature, Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Monthly, the Atlantic Monthly, and one or two religious weeklies that we children by-passed. As to the annual budget, here are two typical years that I have lifted bodily from my father’s diary: —

1879 Receipts $1,162.38

Expenses 1,134.05

$ 28.33

(Benevolences, part of expense $ 125.00)

1880 Receipts $1,184.40

Expenses. 1,110.19

$ 74.21

(Benevolences, part of expense $ 129.23)

I note that in each year the tithe for the Lord — the “benevolences” — exceeded the scheduled 10 per cent; yet there was a bit of margin to the good. It was by such management, I suppose, that my parents were able to send all three of their children away to preparatory school and college. Under those conditions it is little wonder that as a boy I was eminently satisfied with my spending allowance of five cents a week. According to my brother, I remarked one day rather plaintively that when I had once broken the precious nickel it was astonishing how fast the pennies went!

I must add a postscript to the sad tale of the Donation parties, to say that that particular occasion which I described was not in any of the delightful Hudson River charges that I have named, but in a rather obscure one back in the country. I ought to add too how welcome at least the Donation apples all were. They were a nightly before-going-to-bed fixture in our household, although my father would have shaken his head if anyone had recited to him the latter-day couplets: —

It was in this same “Donation” village that my father, at the close of one Sunday morning service, was inducting into his future duties a new young preacher whose education was not altogether complete. My father had allotted to him the gracious task of calling forward and welcoming into the fold thirteen new church members. The young preacher, visibly embarrassed by this honor, announced in loud rasping tones: “Will the new members kindly come forward? We shall receive into Holy Communion with us today six adults and seven adulteresses.” My father’s face became a bright pink glow. He spoke in a low murmur in the young preacher’s ear: “Just call them men and women. That will be better.”

Even I had read enough of the Bible to know that not all women are adulteresses. I looked at my mother. She had had a sudden fit of coughing and held her handkerchief over her face. At home after church my father said, although not severely, “Caddie” his diminutive for Caroline “Caddie, you should not have smiled.” At which my sweet but lively mother threw her head back and this time burst into peals of laughter.

6. THE BOARD VOTES SOME BOOKSHELVES

THE clerk of the Official Board of Father’s church was a carpenter and so had the job of putting in the additional bookshelves that, in response to my father’s plea, the Board had reluctantly voted. The members were of the impression that the Dominie had far too many books anyway — no parsonage should be cluttered up with books was their idea. The clerk-carpenter confirmed that belief emphatically. When he arrived to measure the space required in the pastor’s study, he screwed his head down and studied some of the titles reposing on the floor.

“Here’s a funny thing, Dominie,” he said. “What you doin’ with histories of England by three different men? Ain’t one enough, for heck’s sake?”

“Well,” my father said in extenuation, “when I was trying to work my way through college, I had to teach school for several months each year. So I had to know more than just the dates about English history.”

The carpenter straightened up from his measuring: “Great waste of money, Dominie, I call it, and now more good money thrown away on shelves. Can’t paint them, you know. That wa’n’t voted.”

“I didn’t waste money on them,” replied my father a little tartly, yet having to remember that this was the clerk of the Board. “ I bought all those as a young man, picked up every one secondhand. Don’t paint the shelves. My wife will cover them with some scalloped paper, she says.”

The carpenter departed unconverted. Later, after he had come in to put up the paintless shelves, he told the Official Board, one of our friends said, that “there of a Monday mornin’, when you’d think the Dominie would want to be startin’ on his next Sunday’s sermons, I found him sittin’ in his study readin’ a book and chucklin’! ‘What’s all the fun about, Dominie?’ I says. ‘Why, I was reading The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens,’ says the Dominie. ‘Ever read it ?’ ‘No, I ain’t,’ I said, ‘nor likely to either.’

“I told the Dominie I’d heard of Dickens,” the carpenter went on. “and I’d heard he was coarse, wrote a lot about liquor shops, low-down folks, and such.

“ But the Dominie stood up for him — ‘ much more good than harm in him,’he said. And there he was, lettin’ his little boy read one of them — the tenyear kid [being myself] let me see the title, The Old Curiosity Shop.”

But the colloquy proved a modest triumph for my father, because, buying some additional books for the Sunday School library, he had been having a hard time in urging the superintendent for once to by-pass the Elsie Dinsmore and Dotty Dimple types and take on some books like Tom Brown’s School Days, Tom Brown at Oxford, and Westward Ho! with its dauntless hero, Amyas Leigh. These volumes had not been in the Official Board’s world at all, but the clerk-carpenter stood by my father, and in due course Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley came into great demand at the Coxsackie Sunday School Library.

When the shelves were finally in and covered with Mother’s carefully scalloped paper, my sister and I were given the task of dusting and arranging the books, history in one place, biography in another, sermons in another, and so on. It is over sixty years since I did that chore; yet when I close my eyes a lot of the titles and the colors of the old cloth or sheep bindings still come back to me. There stood George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, and others to cover the American scene. Here was John Lothrop Motley with his Dutch Republic, and so on. Was there, I wondered as I turned to a frontispiece, a real flesh and blood John of Barneveldt? My father seemed to know them all by heart. He had an extraordinary memory. And his mother was a great reader before him.

Among the histories I should have mentioned the half-dozen dark-brown volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For general reference we had Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People, published in London in 1877. Long out of print, no doubt. I inherited our set, and while it was long ago outmoded by the Britannica, you would be surprised at its usefulness even now.

Then there were the writings of a series of English divines. First, the only set that the Official Board would have been strong for: John Wesley’s Sermons in shabby black cloth. Then came three of the liberal English churchmen whose names were outstanding in the middle and closing years of the nineteenth century. As a small boy I knew them only by the titles and the color of the bindings. There was Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, in faded scarlet. And next to him, in purple that clashed with the scarlet, was Canon Farrar of Westminster. There was another set whose author comes back to me slowly because I have seen none of those volumes for half a century. In old blue cloth, I remember that. Liddon! That was the name. But there was another name as well in the same title. I close my eyes and cudgel my brain. Bampton! That was it. I remember now — Liddon’s Bampton Lectures.

At the time, as I say, the contents of these varicolored volumes held no interest for me, but later I came to understand why my father frequently read them with such close attention. Dean Stanley, noted for his ecclesiastical tolerance, a quality that certainly appealed to my father, created a terrific furor among the High Church authorities by inviting to the Holy Communion all the group of scholars that had been working on the new Revised Version of the Bible, including, among other nonconformists, a Unitarian. (My father, I recall, was immensely interested in the new Revised Version and preserved for years the issues of the old New York Herald containing the entire text of the Revised Four Gospels that, as a newspaper beat, James Gordon Bennett had had cabled over in 1881.)

Canon Farrar’s Life of Christ was and still is a classic in its field. The margins of its pages were filled with my father’s markings and notes. Finally, who was Dr. Liddon? Henry Parry Liddon, an eloquent preacher whose Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of Our Lord gave him his first great repute. As Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London immense crowds used to flock to hear him in that stately domed edifice.

And whence came the Bampton of Liddon’s Lectures? John Bampton was an eighteenth-century English divine who established a fund so that Oxford and Cambridge Universities could choose some eminent person annually to deliver lectures on religious topics. It is worth noting that every now and then in the course of the generations there would be chosen for these lectures some heterodox churchman whose pronouncements would create tremendous controversy in church circles. Perhaps no one feature of English life through the centuries has been more striking than the growth and the influence of the Church of England — an influence almost as strong upon the secular and political life of the community as upon its religious side.

These wandering observations about these Victorian writers on religious topics may interest, no one but myself. But in my boyhood the parsonage was filled with the goings and comings of minor church dignitaries. Visiting clergymen could always be sure of a good supper and a comfortable bed because “Sister Lamont was a prime provider.” Naturally, in the early evenings from my corner behind the sitting-room stove my ears would take in a lot of the talk. So that the names and doings of divines like the Wesleys and later Dean Stanley and Canon Farrar would sink into my consciousness and become a minor but vivid part of my background.

Years afterwards I visited Greece and stood on Mars Hill, where St. Paul preached to the Athenians; and later, as a Trustee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, I was conducted through the excavations at Old Corinth. Then there came back to me the memory of my father with Dean Stanley’s Commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians before him. Perhaps more than any other one text for his sermons, Father used that lovely passage from the 13th Chapter of First Corinthians: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

How remote seems that world of beauty and delight, as it has lived through the centuries, when we think today with pity of that region and of the blow that has befallen the cradle of civilization!

7. MY EARLY YEARS IN READING

THIS chapter of my boyhood reading may sound a bit like a catalogue; yet it may perhaps be of interest to the new generation as giving a glimpse of the only way in which the children of my day, deprived of the uplifting education provided by the modern movie house, were driven to books for entertainment, and to the perusal of fairy tale, romance, and history for the stimulus of that imagination that broadens the mind and widens its horizons. At any rate that boyhood reading of mine was the open door for me to a life far beyond the bounds of day-by-day existence.

The first real book — outside of children’s stories — which I mastered, at the age of seven, was In theWilds of Africa, by W. H. G. Kingston, an English writer whose elephants, lions, and gorillas still live in my imagination. To this day any story of African life draws me as with a magnet. In the late seventies and early eighties Paul Du Chaillu, a real explorer in African jungles, also had a lure for young people of my age. And I devoured David Livingstone, and a decade later the Henry M. Stanley volumes of African exploration.

St. Nicholas Magazine was a household stand-by, then edited by Mary Mapes Dodge, author of Hans Brinker; or the Silver Skates, a mighty good story. Everybody read that in my boyhood, but for these spicier days I suppose it’s far too flat. J. T. Trowbridge in St. Nicholas was a corking good writer for boys. So was Noah Brooks, the author of The Boy Emigrants — six fine young Americans (Brooks must have been one of them!) who in the gold rush of '49 trekked out to California in a covered wagon. To this day, I can almost recite whole pages from that vivid tale.

Then there was a thrilling series of stories of life in Casco Bay in Maine, written by the Reverend Elijah Kellogg. The Casco Bay series and the Lion Ben series told of life in a primitive setting in the generations just following the American Revolution. Lion Ben was a young man of gigantic stature and prowess who was good as gold, had the disposition of a saint, and performed marvelous feats of strength and endurance.

What about Robinson Crusoe and also the Swiss Family Robinson? Do our young people still devour them as we children did? Then there was Louisa Alcott’s Little Women, which later was such a success in the movies and on the stage. Both Little Women and Little Men seemed to me more for the girls, but of course I read them. “Oliver Optic" I always had a sneaking fondness for, but was told he was a waste of time, and so with rather a sigh I gave up Tommie Toppleton and Waddie Wimpleton, and turned like a good little boy to improve my mind with The Boy’s King Arthur, Froissart, and their ilk. But they left me rather cold. It takes an artist to make over Sir Thomas Malory and keep the flavor of the original.

When it comes to the history of the American Revolution, give me every time C. C. Coffin’s Boys of '76. I had it by heart before I was ten, and I’ll wager no one can stump me on either the battles or generals of the Revolutionary War. Boys of '76 (there were four particular favorites and two of them died a hero’s death, much to my anguish) got me so thoroughly interested in the American Revolution that as a matter of course I later read maturer works on that period — a jolly good thing for me. Coffin also wrote Old Times in the Colonies, the period of the French and Indian Wars, and Boys of '61. But neither had the zest of Boys of '76. I considered General Gage, the British commander at Boston, no less than a scoundrel. Howe and Clinton weren’t much better in my eyes, but I was always a little sorry for Cornwallis — he was such a perfect dub. And yet George III or his successor, almost equally obstinate, sent Cornwallis, after his inglorious surrender at Yorktown, out to India to put a crimp in the brilliant campaigns that Wellington, then only Colonel Arthur Wellesley, was waging there.

Two other stand-bys of the youth of my time were Tom Brown’s School Days and Tom Brown at Oxford. The days of that great headmaster of Rugby, Thomas Arnold, are worth anybody’s reading, and Tom Brown at Rugby was a real fellow. But when he reached Oxford he seemed to go dead on his feet — at least the Oxford phase lacked most of the savor that the Rugby days gave.

In this same period we took up Captain Mayne Reid. Certainly I was on friendly terms with Children of the New Forest, The War Trail, The Scalp Hunters and others. Mayne Reid was a Briton, but lived much in America and served with great gallantry with the American Army in our war with Mexico a century ago. Reid gives a vivid sense of our Wild West as it was in those early days. Rattling good stories of adventure as they are, yet their old-style, elaborate phrasing would fail to make appeal to boys of the present day.

I had almost forgotten Jules Verne, who put a great kick into my young life. He was the man whose dreams came true. The first of Jules Verne’s that came my way was The Survivors of the Chancellor, a title one almost never hears mentioned nowadays. This was a moving tale of fire and shipwreck at sea, the survivors on one great raft enduring hideous agonies of famine and thirst — all this in the South Atlantic, somewhere off the coast of South America. Just as all of them are finally perishing from thirst, one falls overboard — and the water is fresh! They are off the mouth of the mighty Amazon, still out of sight of land, but with the flow of the great river eddying miles out into the ocean. Then after the Chancellor came Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — Captain Nemo and the first submarine; The Mysterious Island — a grand tale: The English at the North Pole; Around the World in Eighty Days; Journey to the Centre of the Earth (My! how that boiling lava seethed up around their frail copper-sheathed raft a thousand miles under the earth’s crust!); From the Earth to the Moon; Michael Strogoff (years later I saw this superb Russian hero on the stage and got a thrill all over again); and so on through the whole lot.

Now as to Charles Dickens, my friends in England declare that of all the early Victorian novelists, Dickens is the only one that still commands a strong following among British youth of the present day. I am not surprised: my generation took Dickens seriously and continuously. I had reached the mature age of ten when I was introduced to him through the pages of The Old Curiosity Shop. It was a cheap paper edition, poor type with folio pages. But to an eager boy little Nell was a living creature. Then followed in order Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Dombey and Son, and so on, winding up with the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. Half a century is the deuce of a long time to look back, and why I should have cluttered up my memory with the order in which I read my first six volumes of Dickens is a mystery.

After Dickens, in my scheme of things, came James Fenimore Cooper and Scott, all mixed up together, rather badly assorted, to tell the truth. The Spy was my first essay in Cooper and I still think it his best. Living on the Hudson River and knowing something of its western hinterland from summer visits to ancestral haunts in Delaware and Schoharie counties, the scene of many of the Cooper tales came close home to me, and gave me thrills which far more than offset the moralizing of many of the characters.

I think I took Sir Walter Scott with a considerable sense of duty as well as pleasure. Ivanhoe, of course, came first and Quentin Durward second. Neither the dark-eyed beauty Rebecca nor the fair Rowena ever ravished me, and Front-de-Boeuf was hardly my idea of a heavy villain, even in the age of chivalry. Nevertheless, I must confess myself upholding the Scott tradition and when the time came, not long after college, to go abroad I chose a little old, uncomfortable (3000 tons) Anchor Line vessel, the Anchoria ($65 first cabin, one way), to take me direct to Glasgow. Then Edinburgh the next day and Abbotsford the day after that — a good long day there, too. Thirty years later I went there for an hour and could hardly stand it. But on that memorable first trip, every stone was a memory, the rustling of every curtain a whisper from the Middle Ages.

Now, with a pernicious conscience I had a wretched habit of reading every word in a book. So when I came to the Bible, I read that through twice before I was fourteen, only omitting portions of the Kings and Chronicles on the second trip. What a wicked waste! How much better had I let the ancient Hebrew sovereigns go soak and learned great passages of Isaiah and Jeremiah and the Psalms and the New Testament!

Uncle Tom’s Cabin my mother started reading aloud to me as a sort of bedtime story. But the tale was bloodcurdling and the reading out loud far too slow, so I finished it in a hurry by myself. Then on the theory of “thorough,” I got hold of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s other books. But as we all know, none could hold a candle to Uncle Tom. Even Died, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, whose title was most alluring, failed to terrify.

Bret Harte was a favorite of ours among shortstory writers. Who could ever ask for two better ones than The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat? And his Plain Language from Truthful James, read to me by my mother, is one of my earliest recollections.

The life of school and college boys and girls fifty years ago was far less rushed than today. One did not have to be going every minute. In summer we used to think half the day was enough for exercise — tennis or boating or scrambling up the foothills of the Catskills. And as the afternoons had more hours for exercise, my brother and sister and I used to put in the mornings reading. Well, obviously in the course of long summer vacations, if one puts in the mornings reading, one can cover considerable ground.

For me that ground was all of Thackeray, all of Eliot and Defoe, Bulwer-Lytton (does anyone live who has not read The Last Days of Pompeii?), with a lot of other things thrown in, like Fielding with his Tom Jones (terribly improper in those days), and Victor Hugo, mostly in translation, I am sorry to say. But his Ninety-Three and his five full volumes of Les Misérables made thrilling reading for any youth in his teens. Of course, too, those were the days of General Lew Wallace and his Ben Hur; A Tale of the Christ, and then The Fair God. In the late eighties Ben Hur was almost as much in vogue as Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the fifties. For millions of churchgoing people who had always looked askance at novelreading, Ben Hur was the book that showed them that romance in which Biblical characters figured could be improving as well as delightful.

The name of Victor Hugo calls up fresh youthful memories, for it was a passage from his description of the battle of Waterloo that served me in my first school declamation contest. (Declamation contests had a great vogue when I was a boy.) I can still recall those rolling, sonorous lines of Hugo — a bad translation very likely, but good enough for me: “A few squares of the Old Guard, immovable amid the flow of the rout as rocks in running water, held out till night. Night coming on, and death also, they awaited the double terror which was surrounding them. Ulm, Wagram, Jena, Friedland were dying with them,” and so on. And then at the end, when Hugo pictures the defeated Bonaparte returning alone late that night to the scene of his disaster: “It was Napoleon — endeavoring to advance again — mighty somnambulist of a vanished dream!”

It was during those same long summer holidays that we covered the other books “thrown in,” to which I have just alluded. First came Charles Kingsley (Water Babies, of course, long years before) with his grand Westward Ho! which was followed by Hereward the Wake, that tale of outlawry in early England. After him Wilkie Collins — The Moonstone, The Woman in White, and other real thrillers; and all of our own Edgar Allan Poe, still unsurpassable. In these present days I hear little mention of Charles Reade, but I am sure young people must still devour The Cloister and the Hearth, just as we did; closely followed by Hard Cash, It Is Never Too Late to Mend, and others. And then of course Nathaniel Hawthorne. There was a quality, an atmosphere about his books that even as a youth I had detected in no others I had ever read. The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun — all of them appealing and unforgettable.

Of the books which I read again and again another was Blackmore’s romantic Lorna Doone. I must say that the Doone country, when one visits it now on a placid July day, looks neither so formidable nor perhaps so romantic as Blackmore pictured it. But why spoil that first, fine, careless rapture of youth, fired by the matchless Lorna?

It is obvious that even for a boy my reading was pretty much one-sided — novels and romances having a heavily preponderating place. In those days there wasn’t much science that was available for growing youth to read, and modern biography had not been invented. But certainly I ought to have plodded through more history. Perhaps, however, for that age romance was not so bad — certainly if one’s later life was to be filled with the pressure of daily affairs. At any rate, one gathered, as the poet says, a sense of life, lovely and intense.

Since those early years I have never had such prolonged periods for reading. For even good summer holidays or long Pacific voyages have been punctuated with affairs that interrupt and distract. Thus while I have all my life kept pegging away at books ancient and modern, I can never be glad enough that I was brought up from my earliest years to a habit of reading that, luckily enough, took me over a lot of ground in the first two decades of my life. But who can ever recapture those first raptures of an eager boy, so keen to get through his first reading of The Spy or of Oliver Twist that he would carry the book all over the house with him, snatching sentences at odd moments, the last thing to lay down beside his bed at night, the first to take up with the morning sun?

8. THE RIVER AND THE MOUNTAINS

LONG before I read of the Hudson in Revolutionary days, as narrated in Charles C. Coffin’s Boys of '76, Father had told me as a small boy much about the campaigns that had been fought from Manhattan Island all the way up through the Highlands, beyond the Mohawk, and finally to Saratoga. It was there in 1777 that the British general, “Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne, who was a much greater success as a plavwright than as a soldier, with all his hated Hessian levies, had been surrounded and forced to surrender his army to the Yankees, the first great triumph of the Americans in the War for Independence. In fact, some historians have included the struggle and surrender at Saratoga among the ten most important battles in world history.

My father, as a boy, had sat by the side of his great-grandfather, William Lament, and listened to the tale the old gentleman, then almost ninety, told him of that selfsame campaign. For in 1776, a sturdy young man of twenty, he had trudged away from his father’s farm at North Hillsdale in Columbia County and enlisted as a private in the Continental Army, and had marched and fought and finally seen with his own eyes the surrender of the scarlet-clad British forces under Burgoyne. We lived for three years at Rondout, the river portion of old Kingston that had been burned by the British; and not so very far down the west bank of the river was West Point, the scene of Benedict Arnold’s treachery.

All these Revolutionary tales as related by my father stirred my child’s imagination so much that, wilh my mother’s scores of used-up spools, which were the only toy soldiers I ever had, I fought over and over again all those old-time battles, from Concord and Lexington right down to Yorktown. I never had to study our Colonial or Revolutionary history from books — I knew it by heart by the time I was ten years old.

And then, delight of delights: my parents took me down to Newburgh to witness the One Hundredth Anniversary of Washington’s farewell to his army. There was a parade with soldiers in the blue and buff of the Continental Army, fife and drum corps Yankee Doodling with great spirit, and as a climax a pageant and reproduction of Washington grouped among his officers, delivering his Farewell Address — that text used and also misused by so many of our modern-day orators. But in my youthful days the question of close collaboration with peaceful, friendly nations overseas was quiescent. We on our side of the Atlantic had no fear of attack from aggressive tyrants whose efforts to crush and dominate less warlike nations have made a sorry world for us since 1914.

But coming back from world wars to the Hudson River, and to my present home on the northerly escarpment of the Palisades, I may explain that that whole region is filled with local Revolutionary history. Only a half mile west, at Tappan, still stands in excellent state of preservation the headquarters that Washington occupied. Not far away is the small gray stone building where Major André was confined until his execution as a British spy, after being caught at Tarrytown across the river. Lord Cornwallis’s headquarters are only a few miles down on the west bank.

Right below us at the foot of the steep descent from the summit of the Palisades lies the little hamlet of Sneden’s Landing. It gained its name from the sturdy Molly Sheden who, according to the story, rowed General Washington across the Hudson after the unhappy battle that, with few and ill-trained troops, he fought at White Plains. The transfer of Washington’s forces across the river marked the start of his New Jersey campaign, which, winding up with his Christmas night (1776) surprise attack at Trenton, achieved real success.

To me this area, so near Manhattan Island in point of time, so far removed in atmosphere, has a peculiar attraction. The spring and autumn days alternating in brilliant sunshine and haze, the vast stretches of the river to the north, and the magnificent rampart of the Palisades are surrounded with happy memories, many of them vivid and some dim and misty as are the legends of Sleepy Hollow across the river.

But my parsonage days on the Hudson were many miles to the north. In fact, all my father’s upriver pastorates had Albany for their metropolis. That was where the huge sprawling pile of a Capitol, built through decades notorious for their scandal and graft, dominated the slope west from the river. Washington was far away, but Albany with its legislators and governors was close at hand. It was the northern terminus of the great Hudson River day and night boats. I can see them now — the night boats as in the late twilight they moved down the river with all their lights aglow, in clear sight from the parsonage porch.

The names of these floating palaces, as they were called then, stick in my memory — the Dean Richmond and the Daniel Drew. The late Mr. Drew’s repute in business affairs was hardly savory, but in his day he did much for transportation on river and land. The day boats were the C. Vibbard, the Albany, and the New York, all long since gone to the junk heap. But they were fast and comfortable and each year bore thousands of New Yorkers north to Albany, whence they would scatter to their holiday abodes.

Albany was the gathering place for all upriver folk. It was there that my elder brother and sister went to school preparatory for college. There we were taken to buy our modest wardrobes. Every morning from spring till late autumn the City of Hudson, a small one-stack steamer, would leave its wharf at Catskill at 7.00 A.M., stop at the little river towns of Coxsackie and Coeymans, and at the more populous Hudson, and arrive at Albany at 10.00. It would gather its passengers again at 4.00 in the afternoon for the return trip. For me that was always an adventurous and delightful journey. One of my father’s five brothers lived in Albany, and his family of six bright children was always another attraction.

When we finally moved farther down the river to Rondout, only 88 miles from New York, the center of gravity swung south and New York City became the magnet. It was from Rondout that the queen of all the river steamers plied to New York and back each weekday till winter came. The Mary Powell, built in 1861, had kept her supremacy for speed from that time until thirty years later, in the days when we became passengers on an occasional round trip to the great city.

The river was always there but always changing. In the summer we swam in it, in winter skated on it. Small-boat sailing was not much in vogue — there were too many sudden squalls swooping down from the mountains. But we did a lot of rowing both on the Hudson and on some of its lovely tributaries. The creek that found its way into the river at Saugerties was the most charming of these, coursing its way through rocky gorges, filled with caves that we explored, and then finally reaching the Hudson over a waterfall. In the spring the running of the shad up the river was always a sight, and if we happened to meet the fishermen rowing in to the wharf with their crowded nets, we could always buy a big shad for twenty-five cents. But when the ice broke up, perhaps not till March, the river was another story. Great floes and cakes of ice went grinding up and down the waters with the ebb and flow of the tides, and crossing the stream to get to the Hudson River Railroad was an adventure.

Just at the breakup of the river ice late one winter day at Saugerties, that charming, Dutch-named town, my mother, despite our pleas, determined to cross in order to take a train (the West Shore Railroad was not yet in operation) to New York for the funeral of a greatly beloved old aunt of hers. Four men put a heavy rowboat on light runners, packed my mother in the bottom of the boat, and shoved out from the lighthouse point on our side of the river. So long as the ice held they poled the boat on runners. When it plunged into the water they rowed it. From the parsonage porch, a half mile away as the crow flies, we gazed with anxious eyes as the big cakes of ice lunged against the sides of the frail craft. Finally we heaved a sigh of relief as we saw the crew thread its way through what seemed to us small icebergs, and land Mother on the eastern shore near the railway station.

The wintertime Hudson had many attractions, but it was the river in its spring and autumn moods that was most celebrated by both painters and writers. The Hudson River School of Artists, led by Thomas Cole, later by George Inness, Frederick E. Church, and a halfscore others, had immense vogue in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Americans, especially citizens of New York State, were proud of their mountain-river, as they called it. They loved to see it and all its background depicted on canvas — in the lower reaches of the stream the Palisades and then the Highlands, in the upper reaches the rugged slopes of the Catskill Mountains.

While in my boyhood the demand for the paintings of the Hudson River artists had begun to fade out, earlier, for twoscore years or more, the best productions of these painters were eagerly sought by patrons of native American art. One still sees these pictures now and then, but only as examples of a bygone age when America was bursting into bloom and when her people were eager to see reproductions of her natural beauties. This was only a little later than the time when Washington Irving was ruling over the Hudson as its leading man of letters, and was gathering about his hospitable hearth at his Irvington “Sunnyside” many of the mighty figures in the American world of letters of that same Victorian age of the nineteenth century.

9. METHODISM AND MY FAMILY

I WOULD not for a moment give the impression that the life of the preacher and of his family was beset with afflictions. On the contrary, in general we lived a serene and happy, yes, a joyous life. That is clear to me now, gazing back over more than fifty crowded years, and such phases of Methodist parsonage life as I relate fall into their place as amusing rather than annoying.

But the ways of the communities where we dwelt were exceedingly simple and restricted; the views of most of the people were necessarily limited and overlaid by a stern Fundamentalism that might have suited the Puritan Fathers but certainly, I believe, was never the intent of the wise and kindly brothers who founded Methodism, John and Charles Wesley. (Even now I could almost sketch the features of the two brothers as during my boyhood years they looked benignly down upon us from steel engravings on the walls of my father’s study.) They were both priests of the Church of England and John Wesley especially clung to its forms. But both brothers and their followers were determined, in their worship, to find a way to bring the poorer people in the community to realize a sense of closer contact with God, “loving God with an undivided heart,”as John Wesley put it.

Even so, the Wesleys in their new denomination retained much of the old established structure. It was the “Methodist Episcopal” Church that they founded. It had a creed and a catechism modeled largely on that of the Church of England, and its affairs were administered by a board of bishops. But when Methodism developed in America it seemed to take on a stricter cast. It bristled with “Don’ts.”

Cards and dancing were prohibited as the invention of the Evil One. My enterprising and somewhat rebellious elder brother, on his first vacation home from preparatory school at Albany, brought with him fifty-two white pasteboard cards, duly inscribed in his own hand with the nomenclature of playing cards. It was with those cards that I was given my first lesson in whist. As for dancing, if a young Methodist swain had ever suggested that the way to hold a woman was by her waist, he would have been thought fit only for outer darkness.

Methodism was first brought to America about the middle of the eighteenth century. It drew to its embrace, among others, many zealots. And zealots are likely to be narrow and extreme. The stay of the Wesley brothers in America had been brief, and perhaps their converts here did not realize what a robust individual, free from dogmatism, the leader, John Wesley, was.

What an extraordinarily powerful character he was! That is a pleasing picture of him beginning his revival with a small but eager group of Oxford students. For sixty years he gladly endured hardship and traveled up and down the length of the land in Great Britain and even in Ireland, interpreting the words and life of Christ to thousands of eager listeners. So strong and determined was he that up to a fortnight of his death at the advanced age of eighty, he was still active, preaching and writing and translating hymns from medieval European sources. All the evangelical denominations have for generations past all over the world been singing Charles Wesley’s: —

My father’s people had for two or three generations been of the Methodist persuasion, my mother’s not quite so long. On her mother’s side her grandparents, born in County Armagh in the North of Ireland, had been Scotch Presbyterians. They seem to have missed all the scores of visits that John Wesley paid to that island, making nothing of the rigors and tempests of the Irish Sea. Both of them — James Ferguson, born in 1767, and Jane Dunshee, born seven years later — embarked with 430 others for the New World in 1794 in the good ship Alexander, 400 tons burden, Captain Coffin of Hudson, New York, commanding. They first met on the ship, and, youthful and eager and lonely, they fell in love. Promptly on their arrival they were married. After a few years in New York City they moved to the glades and uplands of Delaware County, settled down, and reared twelve children in the way of the Lord. Soon they became enthusiastic members of the Methodist Church. The two eldest sons enlisted in the War of 1812. Of the other brothers, three became preachers in the Methodist Church, two of them attaining distinction in their calling.

Both these two great-uncles were ardent Methodists of the circuit-riding era. But they were saved from asceticism by their delightful, frequently jovial, sense of humor. They were both mighty in the word of God, both powerful singers and very popular. My Great-uncle Samuel, whom I never saw, but an excellent portrait of whom I treasure, was indefatigable in the important posts to which he was assigned. About 1850, his health failing, he and his brother Sandford founded a little village that was named after them, Fergusonville, in one of the lovely valleys of Delaware County, and established there a large seminary for boys and girls, which flourished through the time of my boyhood.

But Great-uncle Samuel, broken down from overwork, did not long survive, and Sandford returned to active service in the Methodist ministry. He, whom I remember well, believed, like his brother, that life was made to be a thing not of gloom but of joy. That was the doctrine that he lived and preached. My mother was his favorite niece, and I used to love his frequent visits. He was mad about the game of croquet and would play up to nine or ten o’clock at night, hanging little lanterns on the wickets to guide the players. Uncle Sandford was also a great smoker (cigarettes had not been invented in those days) and altogether a very human person. He and my mother used to have many a quiet laugh over his younger sister Nancy, an independent-minded person who decided that she fancied tobacco, too, and would in the seclusion of her room fill a little clay pipe and smoke it.

My mother had always been entranced with her Aunt Nancy, who, well-educated herself, set up a select school for girls in West 9th Street in New York City, where my mother — whose own mother, Nancy’s younger sister, had died when Mother was only nine — lived and went to school. My mother used to talk about the picnic excursions that the students would take with their teachers to the old Croton Reservoir at 42nd Street, now the site of the Public Library and Bryant Park.

In those days it was so far uptown that there were few if any dwellings there — the rest field and meadow. Later, many of Aunt Nancy’s pupils went as students to the Academy at Fergusonville, which my mother attended when she was in her teens. In my early boyhood we used to spend a part of our summers there, the nights always cool, and then drive ten miles up the valley for a visit to my father’s people at Chariotteville, where he and his forebears for three generations had been born and flourished.

10. EARLY PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS

HELD in my father’s arms, I remember watching with delight my first political torchlight procession. This was at Catskill in 1876 and I was about six years old. It was the campaign between Tilden, Governor of New York State, and Hendricks, who were Democrats, and Hayes and Wheeler, who were Republicans. Samuel J. Tilden, Democrat though he was, had waged relentless war on Tammany Hall and especially against Bill Tweed, its disreputable leader, who, with his gang in control of the municipal administration for years, had been guilty of looting New York City’s Treasury of at least $50,000,000.

Thomas Nast, the most redoubtable political cartoonist that this country has ever seen, contributed enormously to Tilden’s reform effort and to Tweed’s downfall by merciless pictures in Harper’s Weekly. That publication was an important part of my family’s education in public affairs, and Nast’s weekly diatribes in drawing were awaited with breathless interest. Never in my later years, having passed through several municipal reform campaigns in New York City, have I seen anything like the public excitement aroused by the Tweed scandals.

Far up the Hudson, in the small town where we dwelt, it penetrated into our quiet and became a part of the parsonage’s daily discussions. Thus I gained an early impression of the seamier side of Tammany Hall. Long before the crooked “Boss” Tweed had been brought to book, Nast had constantly depicted him, as he declared that he should be, clad in broad convict-stripes with large signs of Sing Sing set up in the background.

To return to that Presidential campaign of 1876, at first Tilden seemed to be elected, but two sets of returns had been received from four of the states and the Electoral Commission reached a decision whereby the balance was swung the other way. I recall the great excitement over this episode, but Governor Tilden, a patriotic citizen, accepted the verdict promptly, and serious trouble was avoided. Those years were still close enough to the Civil War to make the soldier-vote, as now, a big factor.

Hayes, while he had been a good governor of Ohio, had never been a national figure, but he had been a brigadier general in the Civil War. He made an excellent executive but, astonishingly, refused to run for a second term. So in 1880, still only fifteen years after the War, we had as candidates military veterans from both sides: General Garfield, Republican, from Ohio, and General Winfield Scott Hancock, Democrat, from Pennsylvania. Hancock was a superb-looking military figure, but he was a weak candidate and was readily defeated.

I was too busy at play to remember that campaign, but I recall the hush and anguish that fell upon the country when, in the following summer, President Garfield was fatally shot by a crazy assassin. I can hear the prayers that my father offered from the pulpit Sunday after Sunday for the President’s recovery. And there comes back as if it were yesterday the September morning in 1881 when my father walked up the front path to the parsonage, bearing the New York Tribune, with heavy black mourning borders, telling us of the death of “our martyred President.”

Garfield had been a gallant figure. He had fought a heroic fight for life all during the heat of a Washington summer that had no air-conditioning processes or electric fans to help. With our modern surgery and antisepsis, an operation would have extracted the bullet from his abdomen. But in those days the risk was too great. President Garfield had been a student at Williams College and it was he who had sagely remarked: “Give me a log hut, with only a simple bench, Mark Hopkins on one end and I on the other, and you may have all the buildings, apparatus, and libraries without him.”

In those times we were far removed from foreign threat. We were living in the Age of Innocence. Frontiers were expanding, trade was increasing, industry — though we had not yet reached mass production — was moving steadily ahead, and the simple, homely life of our population that was so largely farming and rural pursued the even tenor of its way. Our greatest excitements were the Fourth of July and the four-year procession of the presidential equinoxes.

Immigrants from all over the continent of Europe were pouring in upon us, helping build our railways and penetrating to the confines of every state. I had my first glimpse of Italians when the contractors building the West Shore Railroad brought over thousands of them, and we boys used to go up to watch them at work. As a people we were almost wholly taken up with absorbing new citizens like these, with welding ourselves into a single, undivided nation of many races, with developing our agriculture and industry so that they could readily absorb all this new manpower and at the same time furnish us a higher standard of daily living.

With this gigantic task on our hands of building up a great nation-state, is it any wonder that we gave little thought to America’s place in the world? We had not begun to philosophize on international relations, and at least a quarter of a century had to elapse before World War I woke us up and began to give us a glimmering of the fact that no one nation of the world can fall in danger of losing its liberty without our own becoming imperiled almost overnight. World War I failed to teach us that lesson, that truth, completely. Has World War II, which has dissipated distance and geographically made us neighbors of peoples all over the world — has that desperate struggle led us Americans at last to give unequivocal answer to the insistent and inescapable question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

11. MY BROTHER AND SISTER

MY sister Lucy was named after my father’s eldest sister, who, he often remarked, looked after him as tenderly as my own sister, three and one-half years my senior, looked after me as a small boy. Lucy, like me, was always immensely stimulated by our elder brother, Hammond, whose lead we followed. She played a quieter and more modest role in the affairs of the family, but an effective one. She came by a studious and serious mind from my father, and had the power of close application. Thus she was always near the head of her classes, but gained that well-deserved place more from constant and wellordered diligence than from brilliant essay.

Lucy had the same traits of steadiness and sound judgment that my father had. Added to that in full measure was the capacity of prudent and effective management that my mother showed. She was always, as long as she stayed under the parsonage roof, an immense aid to the dominie and his wife, not merely in the ordering of our simple household, but in all the social and sometimes complex relations, running to occasional jealousies, that naturally marked some of those congregations that my father served. She was even-tempered and tactful, but when the times needed it she would plainly show the sense of righteous indignation that any instance of unkindness or injustice aroused in her. The most amiable of beings in the even affairs of daily existence, she had a good touch of the Scotch-Irish in her that came down straight from our mother’s side.

Our early lives, my sister’s life, in a country parsonage were greatly restricted by various denominational taboos, and in fact by the limited existence everyone must live in a community so far removed and sheltered as ours was from the great currents of the world. Yet my sister, who aside from absences at preparatory school and college lived at home until her marriage at twenty-three years of age, never for a moment allowed the limitations upon her daily life to crib or confine her own activities in mind or action. Like my brother before her, she was always striving to attain the best that offered in books and in the realm of scientific and sociological achievement, in which latter field she was active for years subsequent to her happy marriage. Through all her girlhood and later days in and out of the parsonage she was never bothered by “what the neighbors would think.” Thus the fear that stifles souls never came to oppress her.

My brother Hammond, almost seven years older than I, was from my earliest memory a source of the greatest joy and even inspiration to his younger sister and brother. In all our youthful years, in the long summer vacations and the Christmas holidays, his gay spirits, his incomparable enthusiasms, his abounding energy — which he maintained almost to the day of his death in his middle forties — made us quick and alive to the world around us. He was a born leader and he led us youngsters into the jolliest sort of pastimes. It was he who introduced to us all the latest games. And perhaps more than all else it was his interest in education and his insistence upon the reading of first-class books, qualities inherited largely from my father, that gave us our greatest ultimate satisfactions and furnished us with the background and incentive for such advance as we may have gained in the art of living. It was he who insisted that I must go to a good preparatory school, and so got me started at Phillips Exeter.

My brother was also a natural teacher, perhaps even more than a journalist, though he followed both callings with equal success. In the course of my life, in which I have had the good fortune to come in contact with many outstanding individuals, I can say without reserve that I have never met anyone whose intellectual processes and tolerant judgments were more outstanding than my brother’s. After all these years, many of them so crowded with events that at times they have seemed to become almost a blur on the horizon, my memory of my brother, my pride in his character and accomplishment, are as fresh, as eager, as grateful as they were through all the days of my life up to his untimely death thirtyseven years ago.

12. UNCLE HENRY

AFTER my grandmother’s early death, my mother had been cared for by her Aunt Jane. When Jane Ferguson married, rather late in life, her choice was a Methodist minister of the very old-fashioned type, William Henry — “I nele Henry” all the family called him. Born at Sligo, Ireland, in the closing years of the eighteenth century, Uncle Henry had come to America a poor boy in an emigrant ship. With an indifferent education, he yet felt himself drawn to the service of the Lord and as a young man had entered the ministry in the circuit-riding era of the Methodist Church. He had a sparkling blue eye, a ready Irish wit, but never attained any particular distinction in the ministry.

In middle life, having fortunately secured as a wife one of the bright, energetic women of the Ferguson family, whose ministerial brothers were outstanding figures in the church, he gave up preaching. Then he settled down in Fergusonville, where, as long as his wife lived, his little home that I visited as a child was a gathering place for many of the students at Fergusonville Academy. His merry twinkle, a delightful brogue, and his stories of North Ireland and of an immigrant’s life forty or fifty years before were always alluring to young people.

But the years sped by, his brilliant and capable wife died, and Uncle Henry was left to live his life alone. It was when I was about nine years old that my mother had word that he had suddenly grown feeble and ailing with his eighty years plus. She promptly took the arduous winter journey to Fergusonville — by train with three changes to Schenevus and then by stage over the hill and down into the Charlotte valley to Fergusonville. In a trice she had Uncle Henry packed up and off, bringing him straight to the crowded, small-roomed parsonage where he lived with us for the few remaining years of his life, contributing little to the household economy beyond a welcome amiability and a kindly wit.

To the astonishment of us children when my mother and he drove up to the parsonage from the station in freezing weather, Uncle Henry was clad in his ancient shiny black suit that he had worn in the pulpit fifty years before, and on his head was clapped an enormous stovepipe hat of antique vintage and shape, with hardly a vestige of silk remaining upon it. But Uncle Henry hung it up with tender care upon the hat-rack in the front hall.

Later in the evening I lifted it carefully off its hook and peeped inside. On the old yellow sweatband, still in strong legible characters, was written “William Henry’s Golgotha.” I turned and twisted the hat and puzzled over that inscription. Then suddenly it came to me — “Golgotha,” place of the skulls. What could be fairer than that? Uncle Henry continued to cherish that hat and wore it to every church service until he died.

Infirm as Uncle Henry was, he was yet always anxious to take some share in the household duties. ”I can peel the praties better than that hired girl of yours, Caddie,” I heard him say one day to my mother. And from that time on, almost every morning he set himself down before the fire with a big dishpan of potatoes and a fierce-looking kitchen knife. He was no wasteful peeler. “You know, Tommy boy,”he said to me, “spuds were all I had eat for days at a time when I was a lad in ould Ireland. Indeed, and we had famine times there more than once!”

Now and then Uncle Henry was a bit of a trial to my father because he still longed to preach, and Father felt he must grant his wish. At other times he joined actively in the weekly prayer meetings at the church. Uncle Henry always spoke as if he had personal acquaintance with the Almighty and reviled Satan in like familiar terms. I remember one winter’s evening at Coxsackie when my sister and I dutifully went to prayer meeting while most of the young people were out skating on the Hudson River. They had set flares upon the ice and were playing an impromptu game of hockey. Uncle Henry was politely invited by my father to lead in prayer. He promptly fell down on the knees of his old and worn black trousers and raised his voice.

“O Lord,” he announced, “there are a lot of sinful folk out there, a-cavorting on the lake [meaning the river], and O Lord, I want Thee to cast Thy eye down upon them and call them back to their rightful duties to Thy worship. I do not suggest that the ice be broken in twain and these sinners submerged in the waters, as Pharaoh’s Egyptian hosts were overwhelmed by the Red Sea in their pursuit of Moses and the Israelites. No, God, I believe that justice be tempered with mercy. But I do say, O Lord, if necessary, smite each one a mighty blow and turn his face to the shore. Otherwise, dear Lord, they will surely get committed to the ways of the Devil. Save them, unworthy as they may be — save them from the clutches of the Evil One. Thou knowest as well as I what strength the minions of Hell can wield over weak human creatures. Only Thou canst overcome that dread Adversary. Do Thou show those misguided children the error of their ways. We rely upon Thee, O Lord, to do as I have asked. Amen!”

I noticed that my father’s echoing amen was not quite so hearty as it might have been, and at home that night after prayer meeting and after Uncle Henry had gone to bed I heard my father remark mildly to my mother: “Uncle Henry believes in an anthropomorphic God and a personal Devil.”

Uncle Henry apparently took the utmost relish in his delineations of the Evil One. I have before me his old manuscript sermon that starts thus: —

From there he begins by saying: —

My dear followers and Loyal Subjects. I have thought meet and right, to give you a brief account of the prosperity of my Kingdom for your present encouragement and future exertions and action. Many of you are young and destitute of a knowledge of my origin. I am not of low and mean descendants, but of high, holy and Heavenly birth. Who my forefathers were I cannot tell, but from the first knowledge of my existence, I have been of a high order of angelic beings in Heaven. And I have always been aspiring after higher.

I must say that this sermon of Uncle Henry’s, written and labeled by him with his own hand at most not later than 1844, sounds strikingly like The Screwtape Letters, which has recently had such vogue in England and here as showing the clever approach of our modern Satan to his subjects on earth. According to Uncle Henry, the Devil winds up his exhortation, which must have taken at least an hour to deliver, with these words: —

It is not my policy . . . to give you any information respecting the state of departed Souls. I would just refer you to Christ’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus, in the Sixteenth chapter of St. Luke, commencing at the 23rd verse, in the New Testament. “And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. You will remember that this is not my Parable but Christ’s. And you may decide on the truth of it as you think best.

Finally, in Uncle Henry’s version Satan winds up his farewell with a flourish by signing himself: “I am your faithful and indulgent Prince — Diabolus.”

Winter was bursting its fetters. The bonds of the ice-chained river were being shattered with loud reports that sounded through the night. I was preparing my tiny wooden troughs to tap the fine hard maple trees that lined the road in front of the parsonage.

Uncle Henry had been feebler than usual. The night before, my father supported, indeed half carried, him up the stairs to his room, for he had insisted upon coming down to the first floor. But that next day he stayed in bed and had little relish for eating. Suddenly as we sat at supper that evening my mother said, “ I have a feeling that Uncle Henry wants me,” and she hurried up the staircase and then at once called my father.

“Finish your supper, children,” he said to my sister and me as he started up the stairs, and we could hear his footsteps moving across to Uncle Henry’s bed. So when supper was finished my sister and I, feeling alone, crept up the stairs and stood upon the landing. Uncle Henry’s breathing, which had been labored, was easier, and Mother was sitting by his bed with his hand in hers. “Hold me tight, Caddie girl,” he murmured in his cracked and feeble voice, “for I am slipping fast.”

Then a few moments more and we could hear Father easing the old gentleman back on the pillows. Suddenly Uncle Henry’s thin voice rang out, quavering but clear and with a note of triumph in it : “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

A long breath, a whisper, a sigh, and Uncle Henry had gone to his eternal reward.

13. MY FIRST TERM AT EXETER

ON a bright morning in early September my father and I set out on the day-and-a-half journey to New Hampshire. My brother Hammond had testified that the best-prepared boys in his class at Harvard had come from the Phillips Exeter Academy, and so to Exeter I went. My father was troubled over the expense, and my mother filled with tenderness and concern to have me go so far away when I was not yet fourteen. But I was duly entered and assigned to a tiny dormer-windowed room on the fourth floor of Gorham Hall, a village inn, a few floors of which the Academy had rented as a dormitory for some of the students. I took my meals at Abbot Hall, the only dormitory that the Academy then owned outright.

My father was much pleased with the personalities of Professor George A. Wentworth, a really distinguished mathematician and author of many textbooks, and of Professor Bradbury Longfellow Cilley, head of the Greek Department, in whom my father found a congenial spirit. Both these teachers had been graduated from Harvard in the Class of '56, the same year that my father took his degree from Union College.

Phillips Exeter was a new and far wider world, with boys there from all over the country, a truly national school as it always has been. It was, fortunately for me, thoroughly democratic. The fact that I had no money to spend was never a handicap, socially or in any other way. Just as many of the school leaders were scholarship boys as not. So I readily settled down in a congenial atmosphere. The whole idea of the school was and had been, for the one hundred years of its existence, hard and vigorous work. If there were any slackers they did not last long and were “fired.” This arduous hut stimulating policy accounted for the excellent preparation that my brother at Harvard found in his classmates from Exeter.

I had a lot to learn, not merely academically but in human relations. Emerging suddenly from the poorly taught and rather scatterbrained schools of my father’s pastorates, I had to adapt myself to a new and lively community, and try to make a way among two hundred fifty lads, almost every one older and more sophisticated than myself, to learn new games, now manners in some respects, and fit myself into an old-fashioned and thoroughly New England atmosphere.

Every day was a fresh education for me. Sometimes I was puzzled and perplexed, but there was never anything for discouragement in a community singularly tolerant, good-natured, and free from hazing. Greatly also to my relief, I found before long that if I had sense enough to organize my work properly, I could keep up with the rest of the class and beat out the lazy ones. My father’s former coaching of me in elementary Latin proved a help. We had nine hour-recitations a week in Latin, so it is easy to see what a backbone the training in that language gave us. And as our chief guide we had the best teacher that I have ever sat under anywhere, George Lyman Kittredge, who later at Harvard became the erudite, brilliant, and distinguished teacher of Shakespeare and early English.

My mother had always been a great person at saving letters and various family memorabilia. And only a few years ago my sister, shortly before she died, turned over to me a batch of my early letters home from Exeter that, my mother had kept. They are homely and intimate, and probably to me after a lapse of over sixty years they seem more humorous than they will to my children. My mother had apparently been much concerned as to what sort of boarding-school fare I should have, my father as to my religious surroundings. So in my letters I seemed to go out of my way to cover thoroughly both these points. At any rate I think I will insert a few of the letters in part or in whole, beginning with the first one, written about ten days after my father had left a rather homesick boy, absent for the first time from the parental roof.

30 Gorham Hall
Exeter, N.H.
Sept. 21, '84
DEAR PAPA,
I received yours and Mamma’s letter yesterday morning and it being a half holiday and rainy I thought I would answer it.
We have bath-rooms here but as you have to pay .50 every time you take a bath in them I do not patronize them. I went to church and S. S. Sunday. I did not like the teacher very much. Base-ball is not played here in the fall. They play foot-ball. A fellow got his leg broke last year here playing foot-ball. I went to prayer-meeting last night. They sung a song to the tune of “All ye fellers that have peanuts and give your neighbor none etc.” The minister said that just ten minutes before his eldest son (15 years of age) was run over and killed by the cars he (his son) climbed up a tree and got a little Irish girl her hat which some mean boys threw up there. It was his last act before he was killed. They have a prayer-meeting Sunday night instead of preaching. The minister called on me. He said you wrote to him too.
The catalogue says they begin Latin but unless a fellow has studied it before he would have to study all the time and take no exercise to keep from being dropped unless he was an unusually smart fellow. A good many of the boys have been through 1 or 2 books of Caesar so they can stand at the head of the class with ease. Not having learned to pronounce Latin to Miss Cooper like they do here it bothers me a good deal to get it straight. All the teachers are very pleasant. In our Latin book we have taken 60 pages in two weeks. They rush a fellow right through. There is a student here way from Minn, who is very sick. I will close now as it is getting dark. Give my love to Mamma and take some for yourself.
Your aff. son.

P.S. Our class has elected a president by the name of Hamm and they want to adopt a class motto in Greek or Latin. Will you please send me one and the English of it.

All my life I had been used to nothing more spacious than a tin bathtub, so the overexpensive bath facilities did not bother me at all. I might add that, while we had regular chapel exercises in the Academy each morning at 7.45, for Sunday morning service each student went to the town church that he or his parents chose.

30 Gorham Hall
Exeter, N.H.
Sept. 28
DEAR MAMMA,
I received Papa’s letter and the papers yesterday. I am well now, but I had three or four severe stomach-aches a while ago, caused by eating a few beans at Abbot two or three times. I have given up eating beans. Their beans are not baked, they are boiled. We have not had roast-beef nor eggs once since I have been here at Abbot. My lamp only works halfway well. I think it needs a wider wick. They have not put a ward-robe in my room, but the clerk put up a lot of hooks for me to hang my clothes on. I like Rev. Mr. Adams very well except that his preaching is not as edifying as I have been used to hearing. I meant that he called on me at Gorham Hall. Instead of coming up to my room he sent word up just as I was in the midst of a lesson for me to come down stairs to see somebody so I trapesed down stairs and found him in the office where he did all his talking. He seemed awfully cracked on a Conference Seminary for both sexes a few miles from here. Do you want me to send the Y. C. and St. Nich. home after I read them. We have the Metric system of weights and measures which I have never studied but I can keep up with the class. I thank Papa very much for the motto’s. I like them both. I feel the need of a clock very much. I wish Hammond would hurry up and send me one.
I subscribed for the “ Exonian” the other day, you do not have to pay till the end of the year and you can hardly do without it. Shall I send it home after I have read it? Some fellow is around with a subscription all the time. I have not subscribed but for two things .25 for a reading room in Gorham Hall and .25 for a “prep” football. I use both. The Exeter-Andover game of football is to be played the 15th of Nov. at Andover. Most of the fellows are going down as it is only a few miles from here. I have had to get a Higginson’s Hist. U. S. and “American Prose” to study out of at School. Love to all.
Your loving son

30 Gorham Hall
Exeter, N.H.
Oct. 5
DEAR PAPA,
I received your two letters in the past week. A few days ago it was very cool but for the past few days it has been very sultry again. It is cooler to-day. The boy who was so sick is better; he had a fever.
They have but very few Sunday school books and they are not interesting so I did not get any. I do not have my stomach-ache any more. I think it is because I have stopped eating beans. We have very poor meals on Sunday.
There is a very nice fellow from Dover in my class who has a court and he said he would like to have me play tennis with him and I could take the court when he was away. I like my racquet very much indeed and I am ever so much obliged for it and the clock too. Hammond sent me a picture of Samson like the one we have in the sitting room and I tacked it up in my room. It improves the appearance of the room very much.
Fifteen students attend the Methodist Church. No, I never study my lessons on Sunday. A great many of the boys do. The clerk here has not sent in my bill for the room and washing yet. I can think of nothing more to say now.
You must be very lonely now every-body is away. I am lonely now and then myself but there is lots of ways to have fun here that you dont have. Give my love to Mamma in your next letter to her.
Your loving son.

My mother was apparently away on a As to studying on Sunday, I had always been reared in the idea that it was not a sin, but was a secular duty that should be performed on a weekday. In my case my non-Sunday practice worked well, for I got my Monday lessons behind my back on Saturday night and was left free to read some novel or whatever on Sunday. The “very nice fellow from Dover” was none other than Jeremiah Smith, Jr., one of the greatest characters that Exeter ever produced, distinguished at the bar and in public service, long a trustee of Phillips Exeter, the man who chose Lewis Perry as Principal in 1914 and was always his loyal backer and friend. Jerry was my counsel at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and thereafter accompanied me in the twenties on various financial missions, twice to the Far East, once to Mexico, several times to Europe. No man, woman, or child could know Jerry without admiring and loving him.

30 Gorham Hall
Exeter, N.H.
Oct. 12
DEAR PAPA,
I received your two letters last week. I am not out of postage stamps yet. I have not got a wider wick for my lamp yet. The one I have will do well enough till I use it up. They have singing by a choir in the morning exercises in the Academy. They have to practice quite a good deal. I do not think I will join till next year.
Mr. Adams’ text this morning was in Genesis 2nd chap. 2nd verse. I attended a meeting of the “Christian Fraternity” of the students tonight in one of the rooms of the Academy. They meet every Sunday night from 6½ to 7 P.M. They sing and pray and speak. I will not need any more money for a good while now except my bill for my room and washing falls due on the 20th of this month. I have kept a strict account of my washing.
My old shoes are getting awfully short for me at the toes I cant wear them much longer. The three older classes here have issued a mandate that after snow falls we “Preps” must take off our hats when we meet them. If we do not they will roll us in the snow. They have organized a Blaine and Logan Club here, among the students. They have military drill and uniforms and torches. They are going to go to Portsmouth and Dover to parade. The proffessors are very much interested in it. The oleomargarine they have at Abbot Hall is strong. I have given up eating it. We have gone through all the conjugations and declensions in Latin. I cannot think of anything more to say now. Love to all if Mamma is home.
Your aff. son.

90 Gorham Hall
Exeter, N.H.
Oct. 19
DEAR MAMMA, —
I suppose you are home again by this time. It has been very cold here lately. I had to get out my overcoat a day or two ago but I have not worn it but once. My every-day gray pants have worn a little hole through on the seat. Shall I try to mend them? We are to have an examination in Arithmetic tomorrow morning. I have to study a great deal harder on my Arithmetic lesson than you would suppose. Two hours every day. A football eleven selected from the Boston Latin School and the English High School from Boston played our team yesterday afternoon and was beaten 52 to 9 which was a splendid victory for us. I saw the game. They cheered a good deal. The school cheer is “E-x-e-t-e-r P-E-A. Ra-ra-ra” three times repeated. It sounds splendidly when all the students shout it with all their might.
The “Prep” class have adopted a class motto a class cheer and class colors. The president appointed himself and two others as the committee on class motto and then ignored every motto but his own which he made the class motto. It is “Laborando perficies” which means “work tells.” The class do not like the motto much. The class colors are to be a red ribbon with a black border and the cheer is “P-E-A ra-ra-ra ‘88.”
The text this morning was in 2 Timothy 2 chapter and I could not hear the verse. It was about the “snares" anyway.
I am very much obliged to Papa for the St. Nicholas for the next year.
Dr. Scott the principal of the Academy is the most unpopular teacher in Latin with the “Preps" they have. He gives very long lessons. He does not seem to realize the fact that most of them are beginners in Latin.
There is but one scholarship given in the “Prep" class the first year. It is sixty dollars. Of course it is very improbable that I could get it but I shall try for it.
There are more given the second year. There is nothing specially going on now so good bye.
Your loving son.

Luckily I did get a scholarship, but the question of my expenses continued to bother me, for my brother Hammond was at Harvard, my sister was at Albany High School preparing for Smith, and my father’s yearly salary was only $1200 — really only $1080 after he had deducted his tithe for the Lord.

30 Gorham Hall
Exeter, N.H.
Oct. 26
DEAR PAPA,
I gave the check to the clerk and saw him put it down to my credit in his book. I worked out all of the examples in Arithmetic but did not get but eight of nine right. They were not so very hard. He has not given us the per cent which we passed yet. I know that I passed anyway. Just a few flakes of snow fell last week. I would not have noticed it if I had not been out doors at the time.
We recite to Dr. Scott three times a week. We recite mostly translations to him while to Profs. Cilley and Kittredge we recite the forms of the verbs and nouns. The minister’s text this morning was Phillipians 3 c. 13 v. He was a different one. Just sixty days from now to Christmas Day.
The food at Abbot is just about the same as ever. I will send Mamma a bill of fare in a few days. We have enough cake such as it is. My room is plenty warm. I have it cool at night.
Please explain the Metric System to Mamma. It would take up too much room here and she wants to know. I took two of my napkins over to Abbot Hall when I went there and I use those two. I saw a football game here yesterday between Tufts College and our team. We beat them 52 to 0.
Give my love to Mamma.
Your loving son.

Schoolboys naturally and invariably grouse a bit about the food, but certainly my time at Exeter was long before the days of modern cooking plants, housekeepers, and hygienic food experts.

30 Gorham Hall
Exeter, N.H.
Nov. 2
DEAR FATHER, —
Your letter came early in the week and the paper yesterday.
Have you a Classical Dictionary that you are not using? Please send it if you have as I need to refer to one very often and it is a good deal of trouble to go to the reference library every time.
The minister’s text this morning was “Solomon’s Dedicatory Prayer” 1 Kings 8th Chap. The minister reads all of his sermons and has them divided off into 1stlys and 2ndlys etc. It rained Thursday morning and I took a bad cold which settled on my bowels and I had a terrible pain there all the afternoon and night. I was a little better the next morning and I am all right now. I did not miss a single recitation except that I got excused from reciting at one recitation.
There has been one fellow dropped from the “Prep” class already. There will be more dropped in a few days. I got ninety per cent in the Arithmetic examination. The teacher said that in the next examination those who again got below fifty per cent would be dropped. Some got zero. We are to have a holiday Tuesday, election day.
There is going to be a harvest supper in the Methodist church Wednesday night.
There was a splendid game of football here yesterday between a picked eleven from Boston and our team in which our team beat, 22 to 0.
The great game of the season will be with Andover Academy two weeks from yesterday at Andover. About two hundred of the scholars are going. They have a special train. The school go in a body. It costs $1 round trip. I do not expect to go. Three of the best men on the football team go to the Methodist Church.
I was very sorry to hear of Uncle Ed’s sickness. I do hope he will get well. Give my love to all.
Your loving son.

P. S. Inclosed find list of things we had to eat for the past week.

As a matter of fact my father sent me the extra dollar and I did go to the Andover game. Perhaps it was my stroke of good fortune that there were three Methodists on the football eleven! As I read these two or three allusions of mine to the ExeterAndover game which bulked large in my mind, I have an uncomfortable feeling that I was not wholly without guile in the way I put the matter. Anyway, I determined to get a job to make up that dollar, which was so hard come by in the parsonage income. So I spoke to one of the teachers in whose classes I had done creditable enough work. He knew all about his neighbors in town and the next week he turned up a job for me to split kindling wood for two aging spinsters at fifteen cents an hour.

This was a chore I was familiar with, so before long I had recouped the family exchequer a bit, and the vigorous exercise was good for me. It is true that since those days I have sometimes earned more than fifteen cents an hour, but never anything that gave me as great dividends in satisfaction as that kindlingwood stipend.

30 Gorham Hall
Exeter, N.H.
Nov. 6
DEAR FATHER, —
I received your check a few days ago and paid it to-day. I received a letter and box with the mittens in Tuesday from Mamma. Tell Mamma that my gray everyday trousers have such a hole in seat that they cannot be mended with darning. They will have to have a patch and I do not feel capable of that.
Our afternoon recitation is changed so as to begin at 5 P.M. so that we do not get out till 6 P.M. Everybody is greatly excited here about the election. We cannot get any definite returns about N.Y. State. Love to Mamma and all the friends in New York and vicinity.
Your loving son.

This letter, indicating the rapidly growing crisis as to the seat of my trousers, seems to close the series for the autumn term. Perhaps my mother never saved my melancholy letter about the great ExeterAndover game played at Andover. Our eleven had been winning all the season. We had given the Harvard Freshmen a sound trouncing and were clearly the favorite for the Andover game. Perhaps our boys were a bit overconfident, but in the gathering dusk the score stood 11 to 8 for Andover and only one minute left to play. Exeter had the ball and we were lined up about thirty yards in front of Andover’s goal. The only possible chance of a win was a field goal, which counted five points. Our hearts were in our throats and we were hoarse from cheering. Center rush snapped the ball, the quarter passed it to Vic Harding, one of our halves. He paused for a moment, seemed to drop the ball to the ground, and gave it a mighty boot. It sailed off squarely between the Andover goal posts. All Exeter gave a great shout and bedlam broke loose as the referee waved his hand to signify a goal had been kicked. And the game was over.

But what was this? We saw Harding walk over to the referee and shake his head “no.” What else could he mean? Of course it was a goal. The referee said so. “No,” said Harding gloomily, “the ball never touched the ground. It was only a low kicked punt.” The referee had apparently not been quite used to such chivalry from a schoolboy. But he of course accepted Harding’s word and the game was Andover’s. We had lost, but Vic Harding’s action has resounded down the generations of Exeter boys far more loudly than any victory could have done. The story is still told with pride at many an Exeter alumni dinner today.

The long Christmas holidays were coming on apace and we were all eager with the excitement of returning home. The day before we were dismissed, several solemn members of the Board of Trustees visited the school and conducted what were known as the Trustees’ oral examinations. A trustee would wander into the Latin class and at random would pick out some question in parsing or translation and plunge it on the hapless youth on whom his eye happened to alight. But fresh from our studies we seemed to know about as much Latin as the trustee and so after the first examination the rest did not seem formidable. But as a whole the trustees were an impressive lot of men. Edward Everett Hale was one of them and he conducted the final chapel exercises.

When I got back to the parsonage shortly before Christmas my welcome was a great heart-warming for me. The family was also surprised, for despite my mother’s fear for my adequate nourishment, I had grown almost two inches, my shoes had to be discarded, and all my coat sleeves and trousers were outgrown. The bracing New England atmosphere had had its excellent results on a boy thrown on his own resources. In fact the Exeter policy of making no attempt to keep close tab on the individual life of each student has frequently been criticized. We were free to ask the teachers questions, but we had no “advisers” and every student was on his own. If he failed to qualify in study or conduct, out he went. Exeter was not a school for a mamma’s boy. He had to take the bitter with the sweet and largely work out his own salvation.

Exeter has almost three times as many students now as in my day and almost fifteen times as many teachers; so that, with classes much smaller, each student receives more individual attention. But the spirit of self-reliance and self-help is as strong as ever and the number of all-around leaders in the community turned out under the principalship of Dr. Lewis Perry in the last thirty years is probably as great as in the days a century ago when scores of Americans of later distinction got their training there.

14. ENCOUNTER WITH A RAT

THE Christmas holidays, with coasting, skating on the Hudson and, even better, on Saugerties Creek, and some mild parties, were gone in a moment, and there I was saying good-bye again and starting out on my own rather lonely way back to Exeter. My first winter term was to prove a rather adventurous period for a young boy. The letters home begin: —

Exeter, N.H.
Jan. 11, ‘85
DEAR MOTHER, —
I got here all right Wednesday night about 6 o’clock. It was awfully long and tedious, stopping at every little way station and the scenery was uninteresting as I had seen it all before.
Two fellows from Exeter whom I knew quite well got on the train at Worcester. One of them sat with me on the train and we both took the same hack across to the Boston & Maine depot. I met Hammond in the Boston & Albany depot.
He looked well. He gave me a gay banner to hang in my room. He also gave me two colored collars to correspond with those colored shirts which I have not yet worn. I staid to supper at Lucy’s in Albany and saw the two Alexander young ladies. I thought that they were kind of silly.
I suppose you got my postal saying about the board being due next Wednesday, $10. I am nearly an inch taller than Cousin David. I went skating yesterday afternoon on the Fresh River. There was a large crowd there. It was very good skating. Dr. Scott advised a fellow who came a little late last term to study all he could on Sunday to catch up.
The minister’s text this morning was Isa. 54 c. 13 v. He was as dull as usual. He reads all his sermons off word for word you know. I think I am as homesick if not a little homesicker than I was last term. Don’t tell anybody. It is awfully dull here. I did not know what a good time I was having till I came away from home. My cough is about the same. I don’t cough quite as often. Give much love to Papa from me.
Your loving son.

Exeter, N. H.
Jan. 14
DEAR PAPA —
I got Mamma’s letter and the draft this (Wednesday) morning and paid it to Child’s just now. Tell Mamma not to worry about, my cough. It is a great deal better. A very strange thing happened to me last night while I was in bed. Some kind of an animal bit my lip as I was sleeping. I think it was a rat or a weasel. Of course it hurt because the thing bit hard and woke me up. It bled a good deal last night and this morning my lip was considerably swollen. I went to the doctor with it this morning and he said that he guessed it would be all right in a. day or two. He put some court plaster on and charged .50. I think Gorham Hall ought to pay the bill for allowing such a thing to be in the house. Don’t let Mamma worry about it because it is such a little thing. George Haynes [the manager of Gorham Hall] is going to stop the hole where the thing got in. Much love to Mamma and yourself.
Your son.

Exeter, N.H.
Jan. 16
DEAR PAPA,
My lip is a great deal better today, the swelling has gone down a good deal. It was a rat. There is no danger of being hurt by any more as they have stopped the hole with a piece of tin, where he got in and have caught all the rats in the house. There is no danger of my being poisoned the Doctor says. It is snowing quite hard to-day.
Love to Mamma and yourself. I am all right.
Don’t worry.
Your son.

Exeter, N.H.
Jan. 18
DEAR MAMMA, —
Your letter and telegraph came yesterday. I will tell you about the rat story now. Ahem! Tuesday night I went to bed about 9:30, and went right to sleep and did not wake up till 12 o’clock when I woke up suddenly with the feeling that somebody was trying a pair of pincers on my lips. I got right up and lit the lamp after quite a little bother to find some matches. When I looked at myself in the glass I was kind of scared, I looked so. My lip had been bleeding all this time and my face and hands and nightshirt were covered with gore, besides my lip being swelled to about twice its ordinary size. It began to pain me then and I did not get much more sleep that night. I did not wake anybody that night. I told George Haynes about it the next morning. He advised me to go to a doctor because rat’s bites are sometimes poison. So I went. You could see the marks of the teeth of the animal on both my upper and under lip. The doctor said he thought it would be all right in a few days and it is all right now nearly. The swelling has gone down entirely. Everybody thought it was the strangest thing they had ever heard of and I think so myself. Somebody sent it. right off to the Boston Daily Journal. I sent you the paper. Of course it is exaggerated some and the name spelt wrong, as usual. Haynes has stopped the hole up with a piece of tin. He set a trap up here and caught one big rat besides killing seven more with “Rough on Rats.” It was not a pleasant experience, to wake up in the middle of the night, find yourself covered with blood.
We commenced “Viri Romae” yesterday. In the middle of a recitation the other day, Dr. Scott got up and said if any of us got tired of sitting still he would just as leave we would get up and walk around the room. He himself set the example by walking around. The minister’s text this morning was 2 Thes. lc. lOv. He was a different man today. I gave a couple of your cookies to a fellow who was in my room the other day. He desired me to send his compliments to you for them. I left my overcoat hanging in the hall at Abbot while I was getting supper the other night and when I came back I found quite a tear in the velvet collar. Shall I mend it myself, or get the tailor to? I have written quite a long letter and I am tired. I wish I was home with you and Papa to-night. Give very much love to Papa from me and I send very much to you.
Your loving son.

Exeter, N.H.
Jan. 25
DEAR PAPA, —
I received both yours and Mamma’s letters during the week. My lip is all right now, no swelling or anything. A few nights ago when a fellow named Pattee awoke in the morning he found his shoes gnawed considerably by rats or mice and this morning another fellow named Trafford woke up and found top of one of his shoes completely eaten off. The shoe was spoiled. He was very thankful they did not take him instead of the shoe. They cannot get in my room any more though. The minister’s text this morning was John 3 chap. 14 & 15 verses. We have a funny Sunday School teacher, as soon as he comes to the class he will ask them some question they don’t care anything about and has no reference to the lesson. “What was the name of David’s great great grandfather?” or “What was Paul’s last name?” Of course nobody knows and he always winds up with: “Of course I don’t know myself, but I thought maybe some of you did.” We had an examination in Arithmetic Thursday. It was very hard, a great deal harder than we have had yet. They say one-half of the class will not pass over 40%. We have not yet learned how much we have passed yet. I am going to keep this letter open till after the arithmetic session to-morrow morning, to see if they tell us then. I went skating Wednesday afternoon, I skated over 10 miles. Up to the rapids and back five miles each way. It was a splendid day for skating. I had a Bill of Fare of the past week to send to you but I lost it. I will send one next week. Mrs. Haynes mended my overcoat very neatly herself, and did not charge anything either. There is not much going on here now so there is not much to write. With the utmost love to Mamma and yourself.
Your boy.

I can see from this distance in point of time that my mother regarded my version of the rat affair as in the nature of an understatement. That boy Trafford, by the way, whose shoes the rats found so palatable, later became president and chief marshal of his class at Harvard, one of the greatest football guards that Harvard ever had, and afterwards an eminent member of the New York bar.

Exeter, N.H.
Jan. 30
DEAR MAMMA, —
I got your letter and postal and suspenders and neckties. The suspenders work very well but I am sorry to say that the neckties do not fit. They are to wide. I liked the color of the red one very much. If you could make one for me the size of the Sunday one I would like it very much. My cough seemed to be getting better without the medicine so I did not take it as I do not like to swig down medicine when I don’t need it, but I took more cold in the recitation room Wednesday morning which was very cold. It seemed to aggravate my cough and make it worse besides giving me a cold in the head so I fixed the medicine and am taking it now. I also bought some cough drops which did my throat some good. I don’t think it is on my lungs because once in a while I have a rumbling noise about there when I breathe. The board bill for February is due next Wednesday, $13 instead of $10. My mark in Arithmetic was 90%. Only one got higher, 90%. Many got very low. With the best love to you and Papa,
Your son.

15. THE WIDENING CIRCLE

LESS than three weeks after my encounter with the rat, I became very hot and uncomfortable and lost my appetite completely. Half a dozen boys piled into my little room to express sympathy and ask what they could do. So I finally suggested that one of them call in the Exeter doctor — Perry, his name was, by no means a young man and with plenty of experience. He came in a half hour and began looking me over. I said to him rather apologetically, “Doctor, my chest seems awful red and itchy.”

He opened my nightshirt, gave me one look, and said surprisedly, “Why, boy, you’ve got scarlet fever.” There was a quick scattering of the boys, for to them as to me, in those days scarlet fever was a thing not to be sneezed at. “I’ll be back soon,” said the good old doctor. “We’ll have you out of here in no time.”

I vaguely wondered how and where. There was no hospital at Exeter and it was thirty-five years before the days when the Academy had its own modern infirmary, a contagious pavilion, and a resident doctor and nurse. But within the hour the doctor came back and, wonder of wonders! there came with him Professor Wentworth — the great Professor Wentworth. Then he showed he had a heart as tender as his mind was keen.

“We are taking you up to Mrs. Graves’s on Grove Street. She’s a natural-born nurse and she and the doctor will get you well before you know it,” said he.

Then before you could say knife he wrapped me snugly in the blankets, gathered me up in his strong arms, and carried me down the three long flights to the street. An old hack on runners (the February snow was heavy and crisp) was waiting, heated with an oil stove, and we were off. I leaned back languidly and tried to tell my thanks and add some word about not letting my father and mother worry.

“I’ll take care of that,” said Mr. Wentworth, and then he gave me infinite comfort by adding: “Your father and I are good friends. We got well acquainted when he came with you last September. He knows we’ll look after you,”

The rest is more or less of a haze. The weeks sped by and hardly more than a fortnight of the winter term was left when the doctor pronounced me well enough to go home. I wanted to go back to my classes, but they said no, I must take that time to get my strength back. No, I shouldn’t be dropped. They would give me for the winter term the same marks that I had gained for the autumn term.

Spring term at Exeter is the brightest period of the whole year — perhaps of life itself. My troubles had all sloughed off with my old skin. The lovely elms in the Yard and along the streets of beautiful old Exeter and the countryside were bursting into bloom. My classmates, many of whom I had hardly known, warmed my heart, the way they flocked around to give me welcome. I did not seem to have missed anything irreparable in my classes. We were further along in Caesar’s Commentaries and in Algebra. That was about all and I fell readily enough into line.

But more than all else in that first spring term at Exeter, with its outdoor activities in the warming sunshine, there was an exhilaration in the air, a knowledge that the hard grind of the year was behind us. There were dawning hopes of athletic victories over Andover, and after all that, the long summer holiday stretching out until September and a happy return to school.

The end of the term came only too quickly. With all the strangeness worn off, with my early friendships consolidated, I could look forward to the three last years of school with eagerness and confidence. Even in lesser matters I seemed to get a break. My father had said to me just before leaving home, “Tommy, if you really don’t care for that Methodist minister’s preaching you may go to some other church.” So, as the Baptist Church, close by the Yard, was looking for a fourth to sing in its Sunday morning quartet, I happened to qualify and was taken in. There was a bit of poetic justice in that. If I had failed to make second base on my class baseball nine, at least I could make second bass on the Baptist Church choir.

Then, too, there was that debate in the Golden Branch Literary Society on Women’s Suffrage. I was cast to oppose. Even after all these years I recall my initial, ringing declaration: “It is a well-known fact that women cannot think nor feel as deeply or as strongly as men.” This was greeted with rounds of applause. From the vantage point of a man of the world I looked back over my fourteen years of youth, and as a result of my rich experiences, I declared that woman had been tried and had been found wanting. Needless to say, our side won the debate.

Over all these sixty years I look back with gladness and gratitude to my first year at Exeter. It was that first year, with its vigorous, thoroughgoing teachers, and with the intense application which they inspired, that taught me how to use my mind, such as it was, and how to work. That year laid the foundation for all my subsequent course at preparatory school and at college. It had taught me not to be a grind, but to order my tasks with economy and dispatch. I have often said that if it had been permitted me to attend only Exeter or Harvard, I should have chosen Exeter every time. And that is said in no derogation of college, which so broadened my outlook, gave me such an unconscious training in tolerance, such an introduction to life, to letters, and to loyal friendship.

Three more crowded years at Exeter were ahead of me. As to them, I shall mention only an episode of the closing days in my senior year. I had been chosen an editor of the Pean. That was the school annual, containing all the athletic and debating statistics, with grinds on ourselves, on our fellow students, and on the other school periodicals.

The Pean usually contained also some student sketches attempting to depict various drolleries of school life. I heard of a chap hailing from Indianapolis in a class below me, who had not been long in school but who, his friends said, could sketch a bit. I looked him up and invited him to contribute some sketches for the Pean. I said we might suggest some subjects to him, but preferably he could choose his own. With due modesty he accepted the invitation from the mighty senior board of the Pean. Then he proceeded to turn in some jolly sketches, with rather striking captions and amusing whimsies. We accepted them very kindly. They took well with all the editors, and as we went to press one of us remarked sagely: “We took on that Booth Tarkington chap for his drawings. But there’s no knowing — if he were to apply himself, some day he might also learn how to write.”

If youth has its troubles, the chief of them is that youth cannot last. There was stretching before me a vividly exciting prospect — four wonderful years at Harvard College. Should I be able to make my way? And then all the long span of life still ahead. What was I to become? What sort of work should I do? Could I tip the scales towards success rather than failure? Looking ahead was like embarking on new seas of adventure. Wherever they bore me, I knew well enough, with the end of Exeter, the carefree days of school life were over and I must buckle down to real responsibilities and prepare to make my own way in the world.

My parsonage days still continued in holiday times during my remaining years at school and college. But now vacations were crowded with more mature pastimes in a widening circle of friends. I had shot up, even in that first year at Exeter, from boyhood to youth. At the time nothing seemed to have changed. But now we three children were facing a larger world. The early years of constant and intimate family companionship were yielding a little to the expanding times. The sacrifices borne cheerfully together were more in the past than in the present. In the words of St. Paul, we had spoken, we had understood, we had thought as children, Now we had put away childish things. The old days were becoming a lovely memory, something to cling to and laugh over all our lives. But my Boyhood in a Parsonage was over.

(The End)