LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 Cluip..Ei! Copyright No..42iX. 
 Shelf. SS 
 
 12?7 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
Bg t\)t same autljor. 
 
 In the Land of Lorna Doone. 
 
 l6mo, gilt top, $1.00, 
 
 The delightful flavor which is cliaracteristic of all 
 these papers is manifestly due to the fact that on the 
 one hand, the writer's mind is saturated with historical 
 and literary associations ; while on the other hand, he 
 has a keen, we might almost say, a painter's eye for 
 the beauties of scenery. — JVczu York Sun. 
 
 At Hawarden with Mr. Gladstone. 
 
 l6mo, gilt top, $1.00. 
 
 The initial essay of Mr Rideing's choice little book 
 is such a striking piece of portraiture that one would 
 wish to continue longer in Mr. Gladstone's company 
 in the peaceful retreat into which the author has given 
 us such an alluring glimpse. The six papers that fol- 
 low are vivid bits of description. The author throws 
 his scenes into good perspective by a background of 
 historical and literary association. — Evangelist. 
 
 T. Y. CROWELL & COMPANY. 
 
THE BOYHOOD 
 
 FAMOUS AUTHORS 
 
 WILLIAM H. RIDEING 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THACKERAY'S LONDON," ETC. 
 
 " The spirit of a youth 
 That means to be of note." 
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 NEW YORK: 46 East Fourteenth Street v) T * 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY 
 
 BOSTON : 100 Purchase Street 
 
 A 'C' 
 
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<L1 
 
 Copyright, 1SS7 and 1S97, 
 By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
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 ^ PREFACE. 
 
 This little book having run entirely out 
 of print, a new edition has been prepared, 
 which it is believed will be found more 
 attractive than the earlier ones. Some of 
 the authors represented in the first edi- 
 tion having- passed away (Holmes, Lowell, 
 Whittier, and Boyesen), the title has been 
 changed from " The Boyhood of Living 
 Authors " to the more comprehensive one 
 of' " The Boyhood of Famous Authors." 
 New chapters on Robert Louis Stevenson 
 and Rudyard Kipling have been substi- 
 tuted for others deemed less iriterestino- ; 
 and portraits of the authors, together with 
 their autographs in the form of original 
 letters or extracts from their works, have 
 been added to the embellishments. What 
 was said in the preface to the first edition 
 
IV PKKFACE. 
 
 may be repeated now : Every chapter has 
 been prepared with the approval, and in 
 most cases with the assistance, of the au- 
 thors represented, and may therefore be 
 taken as entirely trustworthy. 
 
 WILLIAM II. RIDEING. 
 
COXTEXTS. 
 
 ^ PAGE 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES i 
 
 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 'f i6 
 
 JOHN TOWNSEND TROWBRIDGE ."..... 28 
 
 WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL 39 
 
 EDWARD EGGLESTON 52 
 
 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 64 
 
 JAMES PAYN 76 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 92 
 
 FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON m 
 
 EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 121 
 
 EDWARD EVERETT HALE 130 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL ........ 140 
 
 HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN i55 
 
 THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 170 
 
 CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 178 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 187 
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING . 200 
 
BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 There is a pleasant little house in Bea- 
 con Street, Boston, which is occupied by a 
 gentleman who has written some books 
 which have made his name famous wher- 
 ever the English language is spoken, and 
 also in many other countries into the lan- 
 guage of which they have been translated. 
 As he goes along the streets of the town, 
 with a friendly, observant eye, which has 
 a bird-like quickness, people who see him 
 whisper — those who are unmannered point 
 at him — and say, " See, the Autocrat ! " 
 
 He is probably referred to thus as often 
 as by his proper name ; and this is because 
 one of his books is called "The Autocrat 
 of the Breakfast Table," a volume full of 
 
2 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 wisdom and humor, which on one page 
 moves us to tears, and in the next sets us 
 shaking with laughter. He is a rather 
 slender gentleman, with white hair, though 
 no one would ofuess him to be over seven- 
 ty-five ; and the wavy white hair on his 
 head is matched by white side-whiskers 
 of an English cut. He is not distinctly a 
 writer for the young ; writing of any kind 
 has not been the business of his life, in- 
 deed, and aside from it he has made him- 
 self famous in the medical profession : but 
 there are few boys or girls who, though 
 they may not have read " The Autocrat of 
 the Breakfast Table " all through, do not 
 know by heart "The Chambered Nautilus" 
 and the story of the deacon's " One-hoss 
 Shay." 
 
 " Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay 
 That was built in such a logical way ? 
 It ran a hundred years to a day, 
 And then, of a sudden, it — Ah, but stay ! 
 I'll tell you what happened without delay ; 
 Scaring the parson into fits. 
 Frightening people out of their wits, — 
 Have you heard of that, I say?" 
 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 3 
 
 It is Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes I am 
 speaking" about ; one of the two survivors 
 of that splendid period of American litera- 
 ture which gave us Longfellow, Motley, 
 Emerson, and Lowell. 
 
 The doctor's study in the house in 
 Beacon Street looks out over the Charles 
 River ; and it is a question whether the 
 view from the windows is more beautiful 
 at night, when the electric lights on the 
 bridge cast their reflections on the water 
 like javelins of glittering silver, or in the 
 day, when the gray stream flowing to the 
 sea, and the spires and towers of Cam- 
 bridge, with the green hills of Arlington 
 and Belmont beyond, are visible. It is at 
 all times a view of which Boston people 
 are ver)^ proud ; and, aside from its beauty, 
 it has the added interest to the doctor of 
 encompassing nearly all the scenes of his 
 youth, and of his manhood too. 
 
 He was born at Cambridge, and went to 
 school at Cambridgeport, and both of those 
 places are in sight from his windows. All 
 his past is unfolded there ; and when he 
 turns from the book or manuscript on his 
 
4 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 desk, near which hangs the portrait of 
 his renowned ancestress, " Dorothy O.," 
 he can see the paths his feet have followed 
 since the beofinninof. 
 
 He can see himself at various aees : the 
 urchin straggling to school, through fields 
 which are green only in the memory now ; 
 the Harvard student ; and then, in one 
 person, the college professor and the fam- 
 ous author. No doubt he finds it hard 
 to believe that the urchin was not another 
 fellow altogether, instead of the self-same 
 sapling that he himself once was ; but, 
 though the identity is confusing, he can 
 remember the boy well, and all his queer 
 fancies, amusements, and chums. 
 
 A moderately studious boy he was, fond 
 of reading stories, especially " The Arabian 
 Nights ; " fond of whispering, and whittling, 
 as his desk showed ; a little mischievous ; 
 sound in mind and in body, but more than 
 usually imaginative. " No Roman sooth- 
 sayer," he says in one of his books, " ever 
 had such a catalogue of omens as I found 
 in the sibylline leaves of my childhood. 
 That trick of throwing a stone at a tree. 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 5 
 
 and attaching some mighty issue to hitting 
 or missing, which you will find mentioned 
 in one or more biographies, I well remem- 
 ber. Stepping on or over certain par- 
 ticular things, — Dr. Johnson's especial 
 weakness, — I got the habit of at a very 
 early age. 
 
 " With these follies mingled sweet delu- 
 sions, which I loved so well I would not 
 outgrow them, even when it required a 
 voluntary effort to put a momentary trust 
 in them. Here is one I cannot help telling 
 you : — 
 
 " The firing of the great guns at the 
 Navy- Yard is easily heard at the place 
 where I was born and lived. ' There is a 
 ship of war come in,' they used to say when 
 they heard them. Of course, I supposed 
 that such vessels came in unexpectedly, 
 after indefinite years of absence, — sud- 
 denly as fallen stones, — and that the 
 great guns roared in their astonishment 
 and delight at the sight of the old war- 
 ship splitting the bay with her cut-water. 
 Now, the sloop-of-war the ' Wasp,' Capt. 
 Blakely, after gloriously capturing the 
 
6 BOYHOOD OF J'AMOL'S AUTHORS. 
 
 ' Reindeer ' and the ' Avon,' had disap- 
 peared from the face of the ocean, and was 
 supposed to be lost. But there was no 
 proof of it, and of course, for a time, hopes 
 were entertained that she might be heard 
 from. Long- after the last chance had 
 utterly vanished, I pleased myself with 
 the fond illusion that somewhere on the 
 waste of waters she was still floating ; and 
 there were years during which I never 
 heard the sound of the great guns boom- 
 ing inland from the Navy- Yard without 
 saying to myself, 'The " Wasp " has come! ' 
 and almost thinking I could see her, as she 
 rolled in, crumpling the water before her, 
 weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered 
 spars and threadbare canvas, welcomed by 
 the shouts and tears of thousands. 
 
 " This was one of the dreams that I 
 nursed and never told. Let me make a 
 clean breast of it now, and say, that so late 
 as to have outgrown childhood, perhaps to 
 have ofot far on to manhood, when the roar 
 of the cannon has struck suddenly on ni)' 
 ear, I have started with a thrill of vague 
 expectation and tremulous delight, and the 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 7 
 
 long-unspoken words have articulated them- 
 selves in the mind's dumb whisper, ' The 
 " Wasp " has come ! ' " 
 
 Dr. Holmes was born on the 29th of 
 August, 1809, and one of the earliest things 
 he can remember is giving three cheers for 
 the close of the war of 18 12. Until about 
 two years ago, when it was pulled down, 
 his birthplace stood on the edge of the 
 college crrounds at Cambrido^e ; and the old 
 " gambrel-roofed " house was one of the 
 sights of the town which visitors seldom 
 missed. 
 
 " ' Gambrel ! gambrel ! ' — Let me beg 
 You'll look at a horse's hinder leg, — 
 First great angle above the hoof, — 
 That's the gambrel : hence gambrel-roof." 
 
 It had been the headquarters of the 
 American army during the siege of Boston ; 
 and when Oliver Wendell was born, it was 
 the parsonage of his father, who was pastor 
 of the First Church. A rambling, roomy 
 old house it was, with untenanted upper 
 chambers that were always locked, and a 
 garret where strange noises could be heard, 
 
8 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 — the very place, in the imagination of a 
 little boy, for ghosts and creatures from 
 fairy-land. Then there was a dark store- 
 room ; and peeping through the keyhole 
 he could see heaps of chairs and tables, and 
 he fancied that somehow they had rushed 
 in there frightened, and had huddled to- 
 gether and climbed upon each other's backs 
 for protection. Sometimes he thought he 
 could hear the swords and spurs of soldiers 
 clanking in the passages ; and the floor of 
 his father's study was covered with dents 
 left by the butts of the muskets of the 
 armed men who had used it as a council- 
 chamber. 
 
 Upstairs there was the portrait of a lady, 
 with sword-thrusts through it, — marks of 
 the British officers' rapiers, — and this is 
 the same picture that now hangs on the 
 wall of the library in Beacon Street. 
 
 On her hand a parrot green 
 
 Sits unmoving, and broods serene. 
 
 Hold up the canvas full in view — 
 
 Look, there's a rent the light shines through ! 
 
 Dark with a century's fringe of dust, 
 
 That was a Red-coat's rapier thrust." 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 9 
 
 Who has not heard of that picture of 
 Dorothy Ouincy, or, as she is famiharly 
 called Dorothy O., the Autocrat's great- 
 grandmother ? His musical verses have 
 engraved it in the minds of thousands who 
 never saw it, or even a reproduction of it. 
 
 Cambridge was then a country village, 
 and it was a pleasant walk through fields 
 and lanes to the school in Cambridgeport, 
 to which Oliver Wendell was sent when he 
 was scarcely out of his infancy, — pleasant 
 when he had company ; but he had more 
 than his share of childish fancies, and on 
 his way there was a great wooden hand — 
 a glove-maker's sign — which used to 
 swing and creak, and fill him with terror. 
 
 "Oh, the dreadful hand!" he says in 
 one of his essays, " always hanging there 
 ready to catch up a little boy who would 
 come home to supper no more, nor get to 
 bed, — whose porringer would be laid away 
 empty thenceforth, and his half-worn shoes 
 wait until his smaller brother orrew to fit 
 them ! " 
 
 Then there were encounters with the 
 " Port-chucks," — as the Cambridge boys 
 
lO BO]'NOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 called the boys of Cambridgeport, — and 
 any new article of dress was sure to be 
 criticised by these young Philistines. One 
 morninof Oliver Wendell had on a new hat 
 of Leghorn straw. 
 
 " Hullo, you-sir," said a " Port-chuck," 
 " yoo know th' wuz gon-to be a race to- 
 morrah ? " 
 
 " No," replied Oliver innocently. "Who's 
 gon-to run, 'n' where 's 't gon-to be ?" 
 
 " Squire Mico 'n' Doctor Williams, round 
 the brim o' your hat." 
 
 The "Port-chuck" put his tongue into 
 his cheek, and Oliver saw that he had been 
 trifled with. 
 
 The school was kept by a stout old lady, 
 called Dame Prentiss, who ruled the chil- 
 dren with a long willow rod, which reached 
 across the room. It w'as used for remind- 
 ing rather than for chastising, how^ever ; 
 and when one rod sf^ve out, the scholars 
 had no hesitation in providing her with a 
 new one, which they went into the fields 
 for themselves. Now and then a ferule 
 was the instrument of punishment ; and on 
 one occasion, when Oliver had been caught 
 
OLIVER IVEXDELL HOLMES. II 
 
 whittline his desk, the dame brought it 
 down across his hand with startHng results: 
 it fell into pieces as it touched his palm, 
 though this was probably clue to a flaw in 
 the material of the ferule rather than to the 
 toughness of the boy. 
 
 When he had outgrown petticoats, he 
 went to other schools in Cambridgeport ; 
 and he had among his schoolmates Alfred 
 Lee, who afterwards became Bishop of 
 Delaware ; Margaret Fuller ; and Richard 
 Henry Dana, the author of that fascinating 
 sea-story, "Two Years Before the Mast." 
 
 So far he had always lived in the old 
 home with the gambrel roof, which had 
 been growino- dearer and dearer to him ; 
 but at the ao-e of fifteen he entered the 
 Phillips Academy at Andover, and then for 
 the first time he felt the pangs of home- 
 sickness. His year there was not very 
 happy. 
 
 "The clock was dreadfully slow in strik- 
 ing the hour when recess began, and the 
 professors looked as if they were always 
 thinking of death," he said to the writer of 
 this sketch not lono- ao-o. 
 
12 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 But he had pleasant memories of Ando- 
 ver, too; and in 1878, when the academy 
 was a century old, he went back and read 
 a beautiful poem describing the sensations 
 with which he entered it : — 
 
 "The morning came : I reached the classic hall ; 
 A clock-face eyed me staring from the wall ; 
 Beneath its hands a printed line I read : — 
 Youth is life's seed-time ; so the clock-face said. 
 Some took its counsel, as the sequel showed — 
 Sowed — their wild oats, and reaped as they had 
 sowed. 
 
 " How all comes back ! the upward slanting floor ; 
 The masters' thrones that flank the central door ; 
 The long outstretching alleys that divide 
 The rows of desks that stand on either side ; 
 The staring boys, a face to every desk, 
 Bright, dull, pale, blooming, common, picturesque. 
 
 " Grave is the Master's look ; his forehead wears 
 Thick rows of wrinkles, fruits of worrying cares ; 
 Uneasy lie the heads of all that rule, — 
 His most of all whose kingdom is a school. 
 Supreme he sits ; before the awful frown 
 That bends his brows, the boldest eye goes down ; 
 Not more submissive Israel heard and saw 
 At Smai's foot the (iiver of the Law." 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 13 
 
 After a year at Andover, Oliver Wendell 
 entered Harvard University ; and while he 
 was there, he maintained a fair rank for 
 scholarship. Then he studied law for a 
 year ; and after that he chose what was to 
 be the occupation of his life, — the study 
 and practice of medicine. 
 
 His literary gifts were already known. 
 When he was about twenty-one, the old 
 frigate " Constitution," or the " Old Iron- 
 sides " as she was called, lay in the Charles- 
 town Navy- Yard, and the Government 
 proposed to break her up. Some stirring- 
 lines protesting against her destruction ap- 
 peared in "The Boston Advertiser," from 
 which they were copied by other news- 
 papers, and then x:irculated on printed slips. 
 They aroused such enthusiasm in favor of 
 the old ship, that the Government con- 
 sented to her preservation, and the author 
 found his name on every lip : it was Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes. Other verses, including 
 " The Height of the Ridiculous," came from 
 the same pen, which were no less popular ; 
 and the young poet had encouragement 
 enough to leave the laborator)^ and devote 
 
14 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 himself to the quill. But he remembered, 
 no doubt, what a wise man once said about 
 literature as a profession : it is a good 
 walking-stick, but a poor crutch. He con- 
 tinued to be a doctor, and rose to eminence 
 as a professor in the Harvard Medical 
 School ; but in his spare hours he culti- 
 vated the Qf-enius which is as radiant as a 
 star in his books. 
 
 THE HEIGHT OF THE RIDICULOUS. 
 
 BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 I wrote some lines once on a time, 
 
 In wondrous merry mood, 
 And thought, as usual, men would say 
 
 They were exceeding good. 
 
 They were so queer, so very queer, 
 I laughed as I would die : 
 
 Albeit, in the general way, 
 A sober man am I. 
 
 I called my servant, and he came : 
 How kind it was of him 
 
 To mind a slender man like me. 
 He of the mighty limb ! 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 15 
 
 "These to the printer ! " I exclaimed, 
 
 And in my humorous way 
 I added (as a trifling jest), 
 
 " There'll be the devil to pay." 
 
 He took the paper, and I watched, 
 
 And saw him peep within : 
 At the first line he read, his face 
 
 Was all upon the grin. 
 
 He read the next : the grin grew broad, 
 
 And shot from ear to ear ; 
 He read the third : a chuckling noise 
 
 I now began to hear. 
 
 The fourth : he broke into a roar ; 
 
 The fifth : his waistband split ; 
 The sixth : he burst five buttons off. 
 
 And tumbled in a fit. 
 
 Ten days and nights, with sleepless eyes 
 I watched that wretched man ; 
 
 And since, I never dare to write 
 As funny as I can. 
 
l6 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. 
 
 A GOOD many years ago now, a small 
 bare -legged boy set out from his home in 
 Portsmouth, N.H., for an afternoon's sport 
 with a gun. He rambled along, as boys 
 will, with his eyes wide open for every thing 
 that came under them, as well as for the 
 game that was the special object of his 
 expedition ; and he had not gone far when 
 he saw a chaise approaching, driven by the 
 Governor of the State. 
 
 The Governor was a very popular and 
 distinguished man, who was being talked 
 of for the Presidency ; and we should not 
 have liked the small boy if he had not been 
 a little overawed by finding himself alone 
 in the presence of so august a personage. 
 He was equal to the occasion, however ; 
 and as the chaise reached him, he stood 
 aside to let it pass, and gravely presented 
 arms. The Governor at once pulled up his 
 
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THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. ij 
 
 horse, and looked with amusement at the 
 Httle fellow standing there as serious as a 
 sentry, with his gun held rigidly before him. 
 
 "What is your name?" said the Gov- 
 ernor. 
 
 " Thomas Bailey Aldrich," replied the 
 boy, with a military salute. 
 
 He was invited into the chaise ; and . 
 though he lost his shooting, what was that 
 in comparison with the distinction of rid- 
 ing into Portsmouth Town with Governor 
 Woodbury ? 
 
 This was forty years ago, and since then 
 Thomas Bailey Aldrich has earned a place 
 amone the foremost of American authors 
 by a series of books, some in prose and 
 some in verse, which are distinguished by 
 the purity of their tone, the refinement of 
 their style, and the picturesqueness of their 
 invention. One oT them is called " The 
 Story of a Bad Boy ; " and except that some 
 of the names of persons and places are 
 changed, it is so faithful a picture of the 
 author's boyhood that it might be called an 
 autobiography. If any one has not read 
 that book, I advise him to do so at once ; 
 
1 8 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 and when he has finished it, he will, I think, 
 be ready to thank me for introducing it to 
 him. 
 
 " Not such a very bad boy, but a pretty 
 bad boy," the author says of himself. A 
 pretty good boy we should call him, — a 
 boy who would do nothing mean, cruel, or 
 vulgar, though he was as ready for mischief 
 as any of his playfellows. 
 
 One cannot imagine a better place than 
 Portsmouth for the bringing up of such a 
 boy. It is a romantic old town by the sea, 
 full of quaint old homesteads. It is built 
 at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, and 
 may be said to have been founded by Capt. 
 John Smith, the famous adventurer, who, 
 after slaying Turks in hand-to-hand com- 
 bats, and doing all sorts of doughty deeds in 
 various parts of the globe, visited the coast 
 of New Hampshire in' 1612, and recom- 
 mended this as the site of a future seaport. 
 
 Time was when Portsmouth carried on a 
 great trade with the West Indies, and 
 threatened to eclipse both Boston and New 
 York ; it turned out the best ships and the 
 smartest sailors, and in the war of 18 12 it 
 
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. 19 
 
 equipped many a daring privateer. But its 
 prosperity slipped away from it ; and all the 
 old wharves are now deserted, though when 
 the sun shines upon them it brings out a 
 vague perfume of the cargoes of rum, 
 molasses, and spice, that used to be piled 
 upon them. 
 
 What boy wandering along wharves like 
 these, and hearing from superannuated 
 sailors of the former glories of the place, 
 would not long to go to sea ? There were 
 few boys in Rivermouth, as it is called in 
 "The Story of a Bad Boy," who had not 
 this ambition ; and early in life Aldrich 
 began the study of navigation, though he 
 was not destined to use his knowledge in 
 picking paths across the sea by the aid of 
 the sun and stars. 
 
 The wharves were not the only stimulus 
 to the spirit of romance in this old town. 
 In the shady streets were historic houses 
 in which Washington, Lafayette, and the 
 King of the French had been entertained ; 
 the ghosts of former greatness seemed to 
 haunt them ; dark wainscot stood high 
 against the walls ; strange carvings with 
 
20 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 winged heads clustered about the doors ; 
 shadowy portraits of bewigged gentlemen 
 and furbelowed dames, each with some 
 legend attached to it, hung from the mould- 
 ings ; and winding stairways led into mys- 
 terious chambers under the roofs. It seems 
 to me that an imaginative boy brought up 
 amid such surroundings was bound to 
 become either a sailor or an author, — that 
 he would either yield to the fascinations of 
 the wharves, and go to sea, or stay ashore 
 to write the stories and the poems which 
 would be sure to come into his head in 
 the presence of these relics of an historic 
 past. 
 
 In one of those old houses which still 
 stand in Court Street, where it is now used 
 as a hospital, Aldrich was born, just forty- 
 nine years ago; that is, in 1837. His 
 father was a merchant and banker who had 
 opened a business in New Orleans ; and 
 it was the custom of his parents to keep 
 the boy, who was their only child, with 
 them in the South during the winter, and 
 to send him back to Portsmouth for the 
 summer. These visits were continued 
 
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. 21 
 
 until he reached the age of thirteen, when 
 he returned to Portsmouth to remain there 
 for several years ; and it was in this old 
 town that all which was most memorable 
 in his boyhood occurred. 
 
 He was a rather slender little fellow, but 
 sound and vigorous, and ever ready for 
 either sport or mischief. As many mis- 
 haps befell him as usually fall to the lot of 
 a high-spirited and adventurous boy. He 
 could defend himself from imposition, and 
 he was expert in the various games which 
 occupied his comrades. He was not a 
 prodigy in any way ; not marvellous either 
 for his scholarship or his promise of future 
 distinction. But he was very fond of read- 
 ing, and spent many hours in a delightful 
 old attic, where he found a lot of old 
 books, among others being " Robinson 
 Crusoe," "Baron Trenck," "Don Quixote," 
 "The Arabian Nights," Defoe's "History 
 of the Plague in London," and "Tristram 
 Shandy." Of all these, Defoe's " History 
 of the Plague " was his favorite. 
 
 Like all attics in old New - England 
 houses, this one was the receptacle of all 
 
22 BOYHOOD OF FAMOl/S AUTHORS. 
 
 kinds of rulobish. " They never throw 
 any thing away in New England," Aldrich 
 said to me one day: " they always put it 
 up in the attic." And here were cast-off 
 clothing, legless chairs, crazy tables, and 
 all sorts of things which time, and changes 
 in fashions, had rendered useless. 
 
 Among the rest was an old hide-covered 
 trunk ; and seeing how little hair was left 
 on it, Thomas Bailey thought he would 
 attempt to restore it. He had seen in the 
 window of a barber's shop a preparation 
 which was highly recommended as a sure 
 cure for baldness ; and he purchased a bot- 
 tle of this, and carefully applied it to the 
 trunk. Then he went up stairs from day 
 to day to watch the effect, but the result 
 was not satisfactory ; the trunk remained 
 as bald as ever, and Thomas Bailey felt 
 that he had wasted his money. 
 
 The first school he went to was Dame 
 Bagley's ; and from what he has told me 
 of her, I shall always think of her as a 
 character who ought to have belonged to 
 one of Hawthorne's romances. She was 
 a severe and angular person, who had a 
 
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. 23 
 
 peculiar method of punishing her pupils. 
 She constantly wore on the second finger 
 of her right hand an uncommonly heavy 
 thimble, and with this she would sharply 
 rap the offender on the head. "Thomas 
 Bailey, come here ! " Tap, tap, tap, tap ! 
 It does not seem like a severe penalty ; 
 but she brought her finger down with such 
 force, that the culprit often felt that it was 
 going right through him. 
 
 The boy was not ver}- happy with Dame 
 Bagley, whose school was a dreary, uncom- 
 fortable place. The yard was bricked, and 
 just one brick had been lifted out to allow 
 a solitary cucumber-vine to spring up ; this 
 was what Dame Bagley would probably 
 have called " a richly- wooded landscape," 
 And then the benches in the schoolroom 
 were too hi^jh for his lees. His feet could 
 not reach the floor, and his back would 
 grow so tired that sometimes he threw 
 himself backward upon the floor in sheer 
 desperation. 
 
 It was an altogether pleasant change 
 when he left Dame Bagley's, and became 
 enrolled as a pupil at the Temple School. 
 
24 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 The Temple School is constantly referred 
 to in "The Story of a Bad Boy" as the 
 Temple Grammar School, and nearly every 
 thing which relates to the latter is true of 
 the former ; so that the reader can get a 
 better idea of Aldrich's bo)hood from tliat 
 book than I can give him here. The mad 
 pranks of the boys when he was initiated 
 as a member of the Rivermouth Centi- 
 pedes ; the fight on Slatter's Hill, that 
 Gettysburg of snowballs ; the burning of 
 the stage-coach, — all the adventures were 
 described from real life. There is a won- 
 derful pony in the book, and the pony is 
 from real life too. According to the stor)', 
 the Temple Grammar School was burned 
 down one Fourth of July by a fire-cracker 
 that flew in through a window. This was 
 fiction at the time the book was published ; 
 but five years afterward, as if to make the 
 chronicle veracious in every particular, the 
 school was burned in just that way. 
 
 To my mind, one of the earliest signs 
 Aldrich gave of his literary bent was his 
 distaste for figures ; arithmetic staggered 
 him, and he confesses that he often had 
 
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. 25 
 
 to seek help from his school-fellows. This 
 was very wTong, of course; and the only 
 excuse I can think of may not be regarded 
 as an excuse at all, but rather as an aggra- 
 vation of the offence. In return for the 
 help he received in arithmetic, he revised 
 the compositions of the class, and even 
 went so far as entirely to write the essays 
 of the boys w^ho. though clever enough at 
 figures, had no talent for literary exercises. 
 
 Before he reached the age of twelve, he 
 had written a story called " Colenzo." It 
 was about pirates and buccaneers, and the 
 scene was on a tropical island, which was 
 supposed to lie somewhere out at sea, about 
 seven miles from Portsmouth. Then he 
 wrote articles for one of the local papers ; 
 and to these utterances of precocious 
 wisdom he signed the nom dc plume, 
 " Experience." 
 
 At sixteen, his school days came to an 
 end ; and, his father having died, he was 
 ''sent to New York to become a clerk in his 
 uncle's office. But day-books and ledgers 
 had no more charm for him than element- 
 ary arithmetic ; and by the time he reached 
 
26 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 twenty, he had broken loose from the 
 counting-room, and won a recognized place 
 for himself amono- the most orio-inal of 
 American authors. Fourteen books now 
 stand to his credit, — stories that linofer in 
 the mind like memories of sunny days, and 
 poems that have the polish and brilliance 
 of diamonds, Portsmouth, sometimes with 
 its own name, sometimes as Rivermouth, is 
 revived ao^ain and ao-ain in them ; and in 
 some charming verses he has celebrated 
 his days on the Piscataqua, which were 
 among the happiest, no doubt, that he has 
 ever seen. 
 
 PISCATAQUA RIVER. 
 
 BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. 
 
 Thou singest by the gleaming isles, 
 By woods, and fields of com, — 
 
 Thou singest, and the sunlight smiles 
 Upon my birthday morn. 
 
 But I within a city, I, 
 
 So full of vague unrest, 
 Would almost give my life to lie 
 
 An hour upon thy breast ! 
 
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. 2/ 
 
 To let the wlierry listless go, 
 
 And, wrapt in dreamy joy. 
 Dip, and surge idly to and fro, 
 
 Like tlie red harbor-buoy ; 
 
 To sit in happy indolence, 
 
 I'o rest upon the oars, 
 And catch the heavy earthy scents 
 
 That blow from summer shores \ 
 
 To see the rounded sun go down. 
 
 And with its parting fires 
 Light up the windows of the town. 
 
 And burn the tapering spires ; 
 
 And then to hear the muffled tolls 
 
 From steeples slim and white, 
 And watch, among the Isles of Shoals, 
 
 The Beacon's orange light. 
 
 O River ! flowing to the main 
 
 Through woods, and fields of corn. 
 
 Hear thou my longing and my pain. 
 This sunny birthday morn ; 
 
 And take this song which sorrow shapes 
 
 To music like thine own. 
 And sing it to the cliffs and capes 
 
 And cra^rs where I am known ! 
 
28 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 JOHN TOWNS END TROWBRIDGE. 
 
 If any one has succeeded in representing 
 the average American boy in fiction, it is 
 Mr. Trowbridge. The boys in some books 
 we know of are so unreal that it does not 
 seem possible that the author has ever 
 been a boy himself; they are either milk- 
 sops or juvenile Munchausens. But all of 
 Mr. Trowbridge's boys give us the effect 
 of having been photographed from life, 
 and their actions are as natural as their 
 characters. 
 
 He does not picture them in marvellous 
 exploits on the Cordilleras, or beating the 
 record of Hall and Kane in the Arctic 
 regions, or doing what no boys probably 
 ever did, except in the imagination. They 
 are shrewd, active, hard-working fellows, on 
 the farm or in the country store, and their 
 struggles and adventures are just of that 
 kind which American boys go through 
 

 Jf%^ C;:;7^'7T,^^yiZ^i^^ ^^^y^^tA-A-^si^C 
 
JOHN TOW ^YS END TROWBRIDGE. 2g 
 
 everywhere. A good reason for this 
 fidehty to nature is that Mr. Trowbridge 
 himself was a typical American boy, and 
 the experiences of his own youth are re- 
 flected in those of his characters. 
 
 " My hands were filled with common tasks, 
 My head with rare romances," — 
 
 he says in one of his poems. He was 
 familiar in his boyhood with the labor of 
 the field, the drudgery of the farm, the 
 contentions of the district school, and 
 those aspirations which carry a boy up 
 stairs, when his day's work is done, to study 
 by a rush-light or a cracked lamp in a cold 
 garret. 
 
 " Some of the Jack Hazard stories, espe- 
 cially 'Jack,' 'A Chance for Himself,' and 
 ' Doing His Best,' contain very faithful 
 descriptions of the farm life and scenes in 
 which I was brought up," he said to me 
 one day. " Although you will not find 
 much of me personally in those stories, the 
 kind of school I sometimes went to is 
 exactly pictured in 'Doing His Best;' 
 
30 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 and ' Peach Hill Farm,' where so much of 
 the action takes place, was merely a fancy 
 name for my father's farm in Ogden." 
 
 His account of his boyhood is quite as 
 interesting as his stories, and I shall repeat 
 it here in almost the very words he used in 
 eivine it to me. 
 
 His father was a farmer who in 1811 
 emigrated from the East to the wilderness 
 of Western New York, making the jour- 
 ney in winter with a young wife, a little 
 load of household goods, and an ox-team. 
 Western New York was then a wilderness 
 indeed. There was only one house where 
 the city of Rochester now stands ; and 
 crossing the Genesee River on the ice, the 
 pioneer setded eight miles beyond, cut 
 rdown the trees, built a log house, and made 
 a little farm in the woods. 
 
 In this log house a boy was born in the 
 winter of 1827 ; and to him was given the 
 name of John Townsend Trowbridge, John 
 Townsend having been a benefactor of the 
 father. He was not the first born, but 
 the eighth of nine children, and it is easy 
 to understand that there was no silver 
 
JOHN TOWNS END TROWBRIDGE. 31 
 
 spoon for him. He lived the ordinary Hfe 
 of farm boys in that region, and went to 
 school six or seven months of the year 
 until he was about fourteen, after which 
 time he went only during the winter term, 
 and worked on the farm all summer. 
 
 Neither silver spoons, nor any other 
 luxuries, were there. But his mother was 
 a woman of a refined and devotional 
 nature ; and despite the load of care, his 
 father was a cheerful man, a good musician, 
 and a capital story-teller, who, when his 
 stock of bear and panther stories had been 
 exhausted, would sometimes amuse his 
 children by talking to them in rhyme. 
 There were books in the house, too ; and 
 in reading them the boy escaped the 
 poverty of his surroundings, and was borne 
 in imagination into the wonderland of the 
 poets and romancers. 
 
 " I took up the study of French by my- 
 self under peculiar disadvantages, having 
 none of the books which now render the 
 acquisition of that language so easy ; and 
 learned to read and translate it in the 
 chimney-corner, before I ever saw a person 
 
32 BOVJIOOD OF FAMOUS AUTIIOKS. 
 
 who was at all conversant with it." he tells 
 us. Then he learned German and Latin in 
 the same way and under the same dis- 
 ad\'antaoes. 
 
 A hoy who had spirit enough for this 
 was siu\^ to have ambitions ; and as he read 
 Scott, Byron, and IMoore, he had an inex- 
 tlng-uishable desire to write. Though he 
 was vigorous, and fond of out-door sports, 
 he was shy antl reticent, and he never 
 whispered his dreams even to his most inti- 
 mate friend. But w^hile he followed the 
 plough he planned romances and com- 
 posed verses, and at the end of the day 
 stole into some quiet place and wrote 
 them out. 
 
 This was the period in which he made 
 his acquaintance with IMoore's poem 
 " Lalla Rookh ; " and he has described it 
 in some verses, from which we have already 
 quoted a line or two. 
 
 " jNIy hands wore filled with common tasks, 
 My head with rare romances ; 
 My old straw hat was bursting out 
 With liiiht locks and bright tancies. 
 
JOHN TOWNSEND TROWBRIDGE. 33 
 
 " In field or wood, my thoughts threw off 
 The old jjrosaic trammels : 
 The sheep were grazing antelopes, 
 The cows, a train of camels. 
 
 " Under the shady apple- boughs. 
 The book was my companion ; 
 And while I read, the orchard spread 
 One mighty branching banyan. 
 
 " To mango-trees or almond groves, 
 
 Were changed the plums and quinces ; 
 /was the poet Feramorz, 
 
 And had, of course, my Princess. 
 
 " The well-curb was her canopied 
 Rich palanquin ; at twilight, 
 'Twas her pavilion overhead. 
 And not my garret skylight. 
 
 " Ah, Lalla Rookh ! O charmed book ! 
 First love, in manhood slighted ; 
 To-day we rarely turn the page 
 In which our youth delighted." 
 
 When he was sixteen years old his father 
 died ; and a year later he went to Illinois, 
 where he had a sister living in DuPage 
 County. The following winter he taught a 
 school in the neighborhood ; and then he 
 
34 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 tried farming, though he had no taste for it. 
 He spent more time in shooting grouse 
 and hunting deer than in looking after his 
 land ; and his crop was a failure, though not 
 through any fault of his. His heart was 
 set on authorship, and nothing else would 
 satisfy him. Essays and poems were de- 
 spatched now and then to country papers, 
 and he tasted the never-to-be-forgotten 
 ecstasy of seeing his name in print. 
 
 The eeneral who has been victorious in 
 battle, the astronomer who has found a new 
 star, the explorer who leaps upon a shore 
 which his feet are the first to touch, and 
 even the poet himself when laurels are 
 thick upon him, does not feel the exulta- 
 tion which throbs in the boy who sees his 
 earliest song in print, and stands trembling 
 at the portals of the temple which enshrines 
 those who have enriched the world with 
 good books. It is only a mirage, perhaps ; 
 but though it fades and leaves him far away 
 from that glorious company, for the mo- 
 ment it dazzles his sight. 
 
 A few bits of prose and verse in the 
 columns of a country paper, for which he 
 
JOHN TOWNS END TROW BRIDGE. 35 
 
 received no pay, were followed by " A New 
 Year's Address," written for the carriers of 
 the " Niagara Courier ; " and this was the 
 first literary work which brought him money. 
 The amount was one dollar and a half, not 
 a larg-e sum, to be sure, but it convinced 
 him that literature was his proper vocation ; 
 and he set out for New- York City to earn 
 a living by his pen. 
 
 Even now, when publishers pay twenty 
 times as much as they did then, an un- 
 known lad coming to the city with such a 
 purpose would have the hardest kind of 
 a struesfle. The chances are ten to one, 
 that after a period of semi-starvation and 
 repeated disappointments, he would have 
 to give up, and seek his bread in some 
 other employment. In Trowbridge's youth 
 the circumstances were still harder, but his 
 ambition was justified and fortified by a 
 natural gift which was bound to find recog- 
 nition. He had to climb the editorial stairs 
 very often, and to go down them with a 
 heavy heart, — a heart so heavy that if the 
 rejected manuscript had been lead, it could 
 not have made it heavier, — before success 
 
36 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 came to him. Once he had to drop the 
 pen ahogether, and to work at engraving 
 gold pencil-cases in Jersey City, an employ- 
 ment which, if less cono-enial, was much 
 more certain in its rewards than literature. 
 
 " I was more than once reduced to my 
 last loaf," he says in a fragment of auto- 
 biography which he intrusted to me. " I 
 lodged at that time in a house on Broad- 
 way, nearly opposite the Cafe des Mille 
 Colonnes, where a band used to come out 
 upon a balcony in the summer evenings 
 and play tunes which to this day I can 
 never hear without being instantly trans- 
 ported back to my garret and my crust. I 
 do not remember, however, that I once 
 lost hope in the darkest of these dark 
 hours." 
 
 When looking about for employment 
 in New York, he took- some verses to Major 
 Noah, the editor of "The Sunday Times," 
 who treated him with great kindness, and 
 counselled him to make literature his pro- 
 fession, but to write prose instead of poetry. 
 Major Noah introduced him to some pub- 
 lishers, and to the editor of "The Dollar 
 
JOH.Y TOIVNSEND TROWBRIDGE. 37 
 
 Magazine," which was so called because it 
 was sent to subscribers for a dollar a year, 
 though it earned a still further claim to the 
 title by paying writers one dollar a page 
 for their contributions. One of the stories 
 which "The Dollar Magazine" accepted was 
 copied into a popular London magazine, 
 and into many publications in the United 
 States ; and Trowbridge thought that his 
 fortune was made. But he found it im- 
 possible to live by writing for one dollar a 
 page ; and fancying that he had taken a step 
 higher by sending to " The Knickerbocker 
 Magazine " an article which was speedily 
 published in its pages, he learned from the 
 polite editor, with deep disappointment, 
 that that highly respectable periodical never 
 paid any thing at all for contributions from 
 new writers. 
 
 Fame, which had been hovering over the 
 garret in an uncertain way for some time, 
 at last knocked at the door, however ; and 
 the farm - boy became the distinguished 
 author. 
 
 Mr. Trowbridofe now lives about five 
 miles from Boston, in the pleasant suburb 
 
38 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 of Arling-ton, where he has a pleasant home 
 on the banks of the historic Spy Pond. He 
 takes high rank as a poet and as a novehst, 
 but his chief distinction has been won in 
 the field of juvenile literature. 
 
9..SydneyPlace., 
 Bath. 
 
 ^U 7L. f^e^Ju^ ny/uJW^Q c^i^<e<^J. <n*6y< 
 <^-wk-e ywvvv "i^t. Is-*^t< C4 yyyu.c4^ Ucl^v^ 
 
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL. 39 
 
 WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL. 
 
 I OFTEN hear it said that boys are not 
 as crazy to go to sea as they used to be ; 
 that the charm of a sailor's Hfe has been 
 dispelled ; that steamers making regular 
 voyages from port to port, like ferry-boats, 
 do not allow the imagination to play as it 
 did when a voyage could be made only in a 
 sailing ship, and when there were no ocean 
 cables to keep us informed of arrivals and 
 departures all over the world. 
 
 Imagination, of course, must have always 
 had a g-ood deal to do with the fascination 
 of the sea ; for a sailor's life has been rec- 
 ognized as a hard one in every period, and 
 under all flags. But in the days of bucca- 
 neers and pirates, and when ships set forth 
 on voyages to countries of which little or 
 nothing- was known, it was easier to lose 
 sight of the privations to be endured than 
 it is nov/ when every land has been ex- 
 
40 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 plorcd, and the traffic of the hig-h seas has 
 no more romance in it than a raihvay. 
 
 If the boys who think of goinq- to sea 
 are fewer than they were, however, the 
 interest in nautical stories has not abated. 
 Capt. Marryat has lost none of his charm, 
 and a new writer of sea-stories has come 
 lip, whose works are said to be more popu- 
 lar in America than those of any other 
 English novelist. 
 
 This is William Clark Russell, the author 
 of "The Wreck of the Grosvenor," "A 
 Sailor's Sweetheart," "The Lady Maud," 
 and several other books with which the 
 readers of these lines are probably ac- 
 quainted. I have no doubt that the reason 
 his books are liked so much is that they are 
 full of realities, and that he has been a sailor 
 himself, and knows whereof he writes. 
 
 Althouoh an Eno-Hshman, he was born 
 at the Carlton House, Broadway, New 
 York, on the 24th of February, 1844. His 
 father was a composer and singer ; and it 
 was natural that the son of the author of 
 that cheery song, " A Life on the Ocean 
 Wave," should make the sea his theme 
 
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL. 41 
 
 when the time came for him to use a pen. 
 He also inherited some of his hterary tastes 
 from his mother, who in her youth was 
 intimately associated with Charles Lamb, 
 De Ouincey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, 
 her father having been a brother of Charles 
 Lloyd the poet. But it was not until he 
 had been through many adventures, and 
 had tried his hand at other things, that he 
 became an author. 
 
 Returning to Europe, his father went to 
 live at Boulogne, France, in a house named 
 Chateau Lettsom, after the celebrated Dr. 
 Lettsom, who had once occupied it ; and 
 here Clark Russell's early years were passed. 
 He went to a private school in the town, 
 and he found among his fellow-scholars 
 three sons of Charles Dickens, — Frank, 
 Alfred, and Sydney. Frank became his 
 chum ; they read the same stories, dreamed 
 the same dreams, and by and by, when 
 both were about eleven years of age, they 
 conspired to run away from school and 
 enter upon an expedition which was bound 
 to make their fortunes. The purpose of 
 the expedition was to shoot eider-ducks in 
 
..p lUIVlKH)!) OF I-AMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 Norway, of whicli thc^y luul rccul in some 
 hooks of inivcl ; and Lhc-y calculated that 
 the wealth of "Monte Cristo " would be 
 exceeded hy their profits from the sale 
 of the feathers. lUit T'rank Dickens was 
 called home before their plans were ma- 
 tured ; and his companion was doomed to 
 remain at school two years more, at the 
 (;nd of which his jjarents decided that his 
 wish to o() to sea should be g-ratified. 
 
 Those who have read " My Watch Be- 
 low " and '-'The Voyage to the Cape" will 
 call to mind that in the former there is 
 a story, "The Middle's Yarn," and in the 
 latter a chapter called "It Acted Like a 
 Charm." Both of these fraonients are 
 autobiooTa[)hical, and if I want(;d to deter 
 a boy from going to sea I would not fail to 
 place them in his hands, 
 
 A berth as a midshipman was found for 
 Clark Russell in one of Duncan Dunbar's 
 merchant ships, and the little fellow (only 
 thirteen and a half years old) was sent 
 tlown to the f^asL India Docks in London 
 to join her. It was a day of dreams and 
 exultation for him. no doubt; he pictured 
 
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL. 43 
 
 himself as another " Robinson Crusoe ; " 
 and he swelled with self-importance when, 
 after struggling along the crowded wharves 
 and dodging in and out among the piles 
 of merchandise, he passed the gangway, 
 and stood upon the deck of his ship {Jiis 
 ship !) with the masts and spars and rig- 
 ging criss-crossing the sky high above 
 him. 
 
 When a boy wants to go to sea in Amer- 
 ica, he must get an appointment to the 
 Naval Academy at Annapolis, if he wishes 
 to enter the United-States service on a 
 higher grade than that of the common 
 sailor ; and if he is content with the mer- 
 chant-service, the only thing he can do is 
 to ship as a foremast hand, and subject him- 
 self to all the miseries of life in the fore- 
 castle. On many English ships, however, 
 it is the custom to take midshipmen ; and 
 in view of the fact that they are berthed 
 apart from the crew, they or their parents 
 are required to pay a good round sum to 
 the owners. This is what was done in the 
 case of Clark Russell ; but he found, as 
 many boys had done before and have done 
 
44 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 since, that the amount paid as a " premium," 
 as it is called, was money thrown away, and 
 that the lot of a midshipman in the mer- 
 chant-service is every bit as rough as that 
 of poor Jack Tar in the forecastle. He had 
 not been on board many hours before he 
 regretted the choice he had made, and the 
 life of an adventurous mariner seemed very 
 much less attractive than it had done in 
 the story-books. 
 
 The space allotted to the midshipmen 
 was " 'tween decks," a dark, narrow bit of 
 a room, with a table on stanchions running 
 down it ; and when Clark Russell stumbled 
 into it, those who were to be his mess- 
 mates were already there, skylarking, smok- 
 inor and stowino- their mattresses in their 
 bunks. 
 
 " Youngster," cried one of them, recog- 
 nizing him as soon as he entered, "why 
 don't you go down on all fours, and wag 
 your tail ? Don't you know you're a dog ? 
 You must be a dog, or you wouldn't go to 
 sea. The sea's only a fit life for dogs." 
 
 " Stop till he's slung aloft to scrape 
 down the mizzen-royal-mast in a gale of 
 
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL. 45 
 
 wind," said anodier ; "then he'll find out 
 why he's come to sea. — D'ye know where 
 the mizzen-royal-mast is kept stowed ? 
 Go and ask the skipper to light you down 
 into the lazarette, where you'll find the 
 butcher's mate shelling pease. He has 
 charge of the mizzen-mast, and is the only 
 man allowed to serve out new dead-eyes 
 when the ship's figure-head goes adrift and 
 stops the fellow at the wheel from obeying 
 orders." 
 
 The boy could not understand this 
 " chafi," but it was more endurable than 
 the rough usage which followed. 
 
 The first night at sea, a storm arose ; and 
 as the green-hand lay deadly sick in his 
 bunk, he did not expect that he would have 
 to get up when all hands were called to 
 reef topsails. But, sick as he was, he was 
 dragged on to his feet, and sent aloft. It 
 was pitch dark, the rain driving along as if 
 it meant to blind a man, and the wind 
 blowing a gale ; but he knew it would not 
 do to skulk, and he staggered up the 
 companion-way, and began to haul on a 
 rope. Seeing him doing this, the third 
 
4<^) liovnoon oi' i-\imous auiiiors. 
 
 m 
 
 mate roared out his name, and ordered 
 him to lay alt and jump alolt and hc-lp the 
 other midshipmen to reei the mizzen- 
 topsail. 
 
 The mizzen-topsall ag^ain ! How hate- 
 ful it souncUxl ! " All three tojjsail 
 halyards vv(ire loose," he tells us in " The 
 Middie's Yarn," and " the canvas was 
 hani^ino" in the darkness like <rrcat g-uns 
 going- off, all {\u\ crew, and idlers as well, 
 singing out at the ropes, and the second 
 mate in the waist and the chief mate aft 
 shouting at the top of tlu'ir voices." 
 
 1 le got inl{> the lee shrouds, and climbed 
 up until he came to the mizzen-top ; but 
 once there he was too dizzy and too weak 
 to go higher. lie sat down dreadfully 
 sick, and wished himstdf ck^ad. llis cap 
 was l)lown off his head, his boots were full 
 of water, and, as he had no oilskins on, he 
 was soaked to the skin by the; rain and the 
 spra)'. 1 1 ere the sailors found him, and 
 one of them, taking i)it)' on him, shoved 
 him through the " lubber's hole," and 
 helped him down on d(.:ck again. 
 
 This was only the beginning; and when 
 
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL. 47 
 
 he came to have as little fear of going 
 aloft as the best of them, he still had to 
 put up with poor and insufficient food, and 
 with all kinds of drudgery. 
 
 " I've scraped and greased down masts," 
 he says, " painted the ship's side, tarred 
 down, cleaned the brass-work, painted the 
 quarter-boats ; and I only wonder that 
 the skipper didn't put us to washing 
 up the cuddy-dishes and cleaning the 
 knives." 
 
 Taking his own word for it that "The 
 Middle's Yarn " is autobiographical, we 
 find another passage in that sketch which 
 shows us how much he endured on his 
 first voyage : — 
 
 " I was in the chief mate's watch, — the 
 port watch, it's called. Well, suppose we 
 have the middle watch in ; at four o'clock 
 we're turned out and come on deck. It's 
 still dark, and there's nothing to be done 
 if the wind's steady and the ship is holding 
 her course. But soon after the sun rises 
 the pumps are rigged, and the watch turns 
 to and washes the decks down. If it's 
 fine warm weather, I pull off my boots ; if 
 
43 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 not, I keep them on — sea-boots, of course. 
 The midshipmen have to scrub the poop 
 clown ; they lay hold of the brushes, and 
 the third mate swills the water alonor. 
 That was our way ; but, of course, cus- 
 toms are difterent in different ships. We 
 scrub under the hencoops, scrub the grat- 
 ings abaft the wheel, clean the paint-work, 
 and when that housemaid's iob is over we 
 swab and coil down and make the poop 
 fit for the passengers to enjoy themselves 
 upon. By the time all this is done, the 
 brass-work cleaned, and so forth, it's past 
 seven bells, and we go below to breakfast. 
 I've already described our cabin, but you 
 could never understand it without seeing 
 a drawing of it. I once killed twenty- 
 eight cockroaches in my bunk in twelve 
 minutes. It wasn't only that our cabin 
 was dark, and lumbered up with table and 
 bunks, and our ' stores ' stowed away in a 
 corner alongside a dresser full of plates 
 and dishes : we had a heap of emigrants 
 in the 'tween decks ; and what with the 
 womens quabbling, and the children squall- 
 ing, and the men growling, the row al: 
 
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL. 49 
 
 day long was like an Irish riot. I say 
 nothinof of the different smells of the food 
 and the washing-tubs. Well, we'd go be- 
 low to breakfast ; but what was there to 
 eat ? Biscuit, with a bit of yesterday's 
 pork or beef, — but seldom that, for, bad 
 as the food was, we youngsters were never 
 so well supplied with salt meat but that 
 we weren't always ready to eat each other's 
 allowance, — and some black liquor called 
 tea, with a mass of short yellow sticks float- 
 ing atop of it. When I used to look at 
 that food, how my conscience would prick 
 me for having turned up my nose at the 
 dinners on my father's table, saying, as I 
 used to, to my mother, ' Mutton again — 
 it's always mutton ! ' Or, ' Apple-tart ! 
 Why don't you give us plum-pudding for 
 a change ? ' I'd have put up with mutton 
 and apple-tart every day at sea, for months 
 at a stretch, could I've got 'em. After 
 breakfast the starboard watch would go on 
 deck, and we of the port watch .would turn 
 in. At a quarter before 't\v^lvew^< rouse 
 out to get dinner. This consisted of pork 
 or beef. If it was pork day, we'd have 
 
so BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 some lukewarm, greasy water with a few 
 dozen of yellow shot knocking about in it, 
 called pea-soup, served out to us ; if beef 
 day, we'd get a calker of duff, looking to 
 the eye like old yellow soap, and tasting — 
 well, and tasting like duff; and more than 
 that I can't say. Sometimes we'd have a 
 few of our own preserved spuds — spuds 
 means potatoes — cooked ; but I could 
 never endure the smell, much less the 
 taste, of those things. Then we'd go on 
 deck, where we'd be set to work at once 
 on different jobs." 
 
 One voyage of this kind would cure any 
 boy who had only a fancy for the sea, and 
 send him home penitent ; but Clark Russell 
 had a deep love of blue water, and though 
 he found that a sailor's life was not just 
 what he had pictured it to be, there were 
 charms in it that induced him to remain 
 in the service of Duncan Dunbar. From 
 midshipman he rose to be mate ; and 
 he made voyages to Australia, Madras, 
 Calcutta, Hong Kong, and other places. 
 On one occasion he lay for ten months 
 in the Gulf of Pe-Chee-Lee, his ship 
 
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL. 51 
 
 being a transport carrying troops from 
 Calcutta. 
 
 Wliile he was still a very young man, 
 however, he gave up the sea as a calling; 
 and after two months spent in a stock- 
 broker's office, he took up the pen, and 
 entered on a literary career. Did he find 
 this much easier than the sea ? Not in the 
 beginning. He sent a novel to an eminent 
 firm of publishers ; and after eight months 
 of weary waiting, his manuscript was re- 
 turned to him, " in a basket, like a leg of 
 mutton," as he says. Other attempts were 
 more successful, but the novel by which he 
 afterward made his mark was rejected by 
 at least one publisher before it was ac- 
 cepted. This was " The Wreck of the 
 Grosvenor." Since that he has gone on 
 writing sea stories, and it is his own expe- 
 riences that give them life and interest. 
 
52 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 EDWARD EGGLESTON. 
 
 One of the chief uses of biography is 
 in the power it has to cheer up those 
 whose hves are beset with difficukies, and 
 to awaken aspiration where hope has 
 scarcely dared to sit. Many a boy has 
 learned from the printed page the lesson 
 that Bow bells ranof out to Dick Whit- 
 tington, and has found his courage re- 
 newed for fresh endeavor by the example 
 set forth in the narrative of some life in 
 which a greater adversity than his own has 
 been doggedly resisted and overcome. 
 Turninof over the leaves of the book, he has 
 seen the black letters of despair vanish, and 
 all earthly attainments made possible to the 
 youth who has patience and industry. 
 
 Such a lesson as this, not a new one, to 
 be sure, is brought home to us once more 
 when we look at the boyhood of Edward 
 Eggleston, whose stories, among which are 
 
"^T Un^ tiui. Hcro6f^yu ^CLkcriytCrtn^ , 
 
 [JIM dZiA<cu ly) tuzA. 'to a^^c/iJxjuv f Oa^cL, 
 
 CA.VtO'C^^^y^ ^ ^^"t (Xu^U- LiZcCt tt> LyRX^^ Ciut>(_ 
 
. EDWARD EGGLP:ST0N. 53 
 
 "The Hoosier Schoolmaster," "The Mys- 
 tery of iMetropohsville," and "The End of 
 the World," have placed him among the 
 most successful and most original writers 
 of fiction in America, while he has added 
 to the distinction thus acquired by his 
 work as an editor, an historian, and a poet. 
 
 He was born on the loth of December, 
 1837, at Vevay, Indiana, — a country boy 
 who had to contend not only with the dis- 
 advantages which loom up before every 
 country boy who wants to lead an intel- 
 lectual life, but also with frequent illnesses 
 which came and paralyzed the hand when 
 the lamp of ambition burned the brightest, 
 and showed Fame in her most alluring 
 garb. 
 
 A country boy is at a certain disadvan- 
 tage in the matter of education now, but his 
 opportunities are incalculably greater than 
 what they were in the days of Edward 
 Eggleston's boyhood. Then the rule of 
 three was the objective point of all study, 
 and it was thought that he who had ci- 
 phered through that had well- nigh ex- 
 hausted human knowledge. The school- 
 
54 JhUW/ih)/) OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 master himself was often unable to spell 
 the simplest words. 
 
 "The teaching was absurd," Mr. Eggles- 
 ton says in one of his sketches. " I was 
 made to go through Webster's spelling- 
 book five times before I was thought fit to 
 begin to read, and my mother, twenty years 
 earlier, spelled it through nine times before 
 she was allowed to begin Lindley Murray's 
 ' English Reader.' As I recall the old- 
 time school, I cannot but think that if its 
 discipline was somewhat more brutal than 
 the school discipline of to-day, its course 
 of study was far less so. To a nervous 
 child the old discipline was, indeed, very 
 terrible. The long birch switches hanging 
 on hooks aoainst the wall haunted me nioht 
 and day from the time I entered one of the 
 old schools. And whencn-er there came 
 an outburst between master and pupils, the 
 thoucrhtless child often cfot the beatine that 
 should have fallen upon the malicious mis- 
 chief-makers. As the master was alwa)s 
 quick to fly into a passion, the fun-loving 
 boys were always happy to stir him up. It 
 was an exciting sport, like bull-baiting, or 
 
EDWARD EGGLESTOX. 55 
 
 like poking sticks through a fence at a 
 cross doof. Sometimes the ferocious mas- 
 ter showed an abiHty on his own part to get 
 some fun out of the conflict, as when on 
 one occasion in a school in Ohio the boys 
 were forbidden to attend a circus. Five 
 or six of them went in spite of the prohibi- 
 tion. The next morninof the schoolmaster 
 called them out on the floor, and addressed 
 them : — 
 
 " ' So you went to the circus, did you ? ' 
 
 " ' Yes, sir.' 
 
 '"Well, the others did not get a chance 
 to see the circus. I want you boys to show 
 them what it looked like, and how the 
 horses galloped around the ring. You will 
 join your hands in a circle about the stove. 
 Now start ! ' 
 
 " With that he began whipping them as 
 they trotted around and around the stove." 
 
 But, few as the opportunities were, there 
 never was a time in Indiana when a o-ood 
 
 o 
 
 school was not accounted a thing of the 
 greatest value, and Mr. Eggleston tells a 
 story of a raw-boned boy who knocked at 
 the schoolmaster's door early one winter's 
 
56 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 morning' to ask how he should do a " sum " 
 which puzzled him. He had ridden a farm- 
 horse many miles for this purpose, and had 
 to be back home in time to begin his day's 
 work as usual. The kind-hearted school- 
 master, chafing his hands to keep them 
 warm, sat down by the boy, and taught 
 him how to do the " sum." Then the poor 
 little fellow straightened himself up, and, 
 thrusting his hand into his trousers pocket, 
 pulled out a quarter of a dollar, explaining 
 with a blush that it was all he could pay, 
 for it was all he had. Of course the master 
 made him put it back, and told him to come 
 whenever he wanted any help. 
 
 The father of Edward Eggleston was a 
 Virginian, a graduate of William and TVlary 
 College, who went to Indiana in early man- 
 hood, and achieved a place among the 
 foremost men at the bar in the West. He 
 died when he was a little more than thirty 
 years of age, but he had already spent no 
 little time in moulding the character of Ed- 
 ward, who was his oldest child. One day 
 he said to him, — 
 
 " I'll tell you what my father told me, and 
 
EDWARD EGGLESTON. 57 
 
 his father told him, — never tell a lie, and 
 knock down any man that says you do." 
 
 The Eesflestons were Southerners, and 
 had always lived up to this family pre- 
 cept ; but Edward omitted the knocking 
 down part. On another occasion, when his 
 father was a candidate for Congress, he 
 said to the son, — 
 
 " I'm not going to live very long. Never 
 do you have any thing to do with politics. 
 In politics a man is as much disgusted 
 with the rascality of his friends as of his 
 enemies." 
 
 It was not an eventful boyhood, this of 
 Edward Eggleston. Part of it was spent 
 in farm labor, and part in a country store. 
 All his school days did not cover more than 
 two years, and he may claim to be self- 
 educated. Until he was ten years old he 
 had the reputation of being dull despite 
 his shrewdness, but after that he never had 
 a schoolmate who could acquire knowledge 
 more rapidly. He got more out of his 
 habit of readinor than out of his attendance 
 at school, and he learned several languages 
 by solitary study. 
 
58 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 " Of the books that impressed me deeply 
 when I was a boy," he says in a letter to 
 the author of this sketch, " I remember 
 particularly Franklin's autobiograph)^ cer- 
 tain essays of Bishop Thomson, Young's 
 ' Night-Thoughts,' and Pope's poetry, espe- 
 cially the ' Essay on Man.' When I was 
 a little less than sixteen I was strongly im- 
 pressed by Priestley's ' Exposition of the 
 Hartleian System of Mental Philosophy,' 
 and by Locke on the ' Conduct of the 
 Human Understanding.' At sixteen I read 
 with keen relish, but without entire agree- 
 ment, certain of Lord Jeffrey's essays. I 
 read few novels, for I was brought up a 
 Methodist. I remember the delight I had 
 at seventeen in Milton's ' Paradise Lost,' 
 Irving's ' Sketch Book,' and Virgil's Ec- 
 logues, which last I read in the original 
 alone. I was throughout my childhood 
 and youth strongly influenced by Method- 
 ist literature, of which I read much, for my 
 life was double. I was almost an enthu- 
 siast on one side, and a lad with a strong 
 bent toward literature and learning on the 
 other." 
 
EDWARD EGGLESTON. 59 
 
 Ambitious as he was to be a scholar, 
 there were weeks and months when he 
 could not study, owing to illness, and the 
 enforced idleness was a sore trial to him. 
 Every road seemed barred to him by his ill 
 health and uncertain tenure of life. There 
 were times, however, when he was strong 
 enough to take long walks with his brother, 
 George Gary Eggleston, who has also be- 
 come a notable author. They spent days 
 together tramping over the hills and revel- 
 ling in the beauties of the landscape spread 
 out before them from the summits. They 
 followed a plan of Edward's devising to 
 economize strength, and secure the best re- 
 sults of exertion. He had observed that 
 lonor rests stiffen the muscles, and he there^ 
 fore determined that they should walk 
 steadily for ten minutes, and then rest for 
 three. This they did frequently for an 
 entire day, from sunrise to sunset, without 
 apparent hurt even to him; and to harden 
 themselves still more, as they thought, they 
 gave up their beds, and slept on the floor of 
 their room. Edward made their walks still 
 more interesting by his knowledge of geol- 
 
6o BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 oj4y, and gave the history of trilobitcs 
 which George knocked out of perilous 
 places in the face of the cliffs. Naturally 
 Edward was too great an invalid for many 
 of the sports of his playfellows. He was 
 only a middling ball player, but he was a 
 first-rate hand at king's base, which re- 
 quires the fleetness of foot which he pos- 
 sessed in a remarkable degree, and in 
 " bull-pen " — an old Middle State game, — 
 he was the best dodger of them all. 
 
 " In all intellectual ways," says one of 
 his old schoolfellows, " he was the recog- 
 nized captain of every school he ever at- 
 tended. Curiously enough he maintained 
 another sort of ascendency less easily ac- 
 counted for. We were a robust set of fel- 
 lows, rough in sport and energetic in all 
 physical ways, and usually we had pity 
 rather than sympathy or respect for physi- 
 cal weakness ; but Edward always com- 
 manded the school on the playground as 
 well as elsewhere. His word was as nearly 
 law with us as any thing could be among a 
 rather lawless set of youngsters. He was 
 never thought of as a weakling at all ; he 
 
EDWARD EGGLESTON. 6 1 
 
 asked no odds of anybody on account of 
 his illness, and he took all his knocks as 
 manfully as the most robust of us. But 
 the peculiar regard in which he was held 
 by his companions, and the undisputed 
 command he exercised upon occasions, 
 were due in a large part to two facts : first, 
 that we all recognized him as our superior 
 in knowledge and ability; and, secondly, 
 that we knew him to be just in all his judg- 
 ments and absolutely without fear or favor." 
 
 When he was about seventeen years old, 
 he went in quest of health among his fa- 
 ther's relatives in Virginia, and for five 
 months he attended a boarding-school in 
 Amelia County. This was the last school- 
 ing he ever had. His health continued 
 poor, and in 1856, two years later, he went 
 to Minnesota, where he became a jack-of- 
 all-trades. He made himself useful on a 
 farm, he joined the chain-gang of a sur- 
 veying party, and he opened a photograph- 
 gallery. 
 
 Then he returned to his native State, 
 and, having always had a deep religious 
 feeling, he started out as a circuit preacher. 
 
62 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 travelling- from town to town with the Gos- 
 pel in his saddle-bags. From hut to hut, 
 we ought to say, rather than from town to 
 town, for the path of the circuit preacher 
 lay through the wilderness to places in 
 which there were no regular churches. 
 
 All this time, however, he was gathering 
 materials for the stories that were afterward 
 to make him famous. As many others 
 have done, he made his entrance into the 
 profession of literature through journal- 
 ism, which is a sort of half-sister to it ; and 
 he w^as successively connected with "The 
 Little Corporal " (then an excellent maga- 
 zine for young people), "The Independent" 
 and "Hearth and Home," a once popular 
 weekly. It was while he was editor of the 
 latter that he wrote "The Hoosier School- 
 master," which a distinguished critic has 
 said is as faithful a picture of life m South- 
 ern Indiana forty years ago as Sir Walter 
 Scott's " Ivanhoe " is of life in Eno-land 
 after the Norman conquest. Its success 
 was extraordinary from the appearance of 
 the first instalnient ; and, when it afterward 
 came out in book form, it rivalled in pop- 
 
EDJVARD ECCLESrON. 6^ 
 
 iilarlty " Uncle Tom's Cabin " and " Little 
 Women." Even now, after fifteen years, it 
 sells better than most new works ; and the 
 reason is, that it is true to life. It has 
 been followed by half a dozen other sto- 
 ries, among Avhich are " Roxy " and "The 
 Hoosier Schoolboy." We are probably not 
 violating- a confidence in repeating what the 
 author has said to us : "I have drawn my 
 native village — Vevay, Indiana — in ' Roxy' 
 and in ' The Hoosier Schoolboy ; ' and my 
 stories are full of the reflections of my child- 
 hood, but of undiluted autobiography there 
 is little." 
 
64 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS. 
 
 As the dusk was setting in on a beauti- 
 ful autumnal day about thirty-seven )-ears 
 ago, a man and a boy were driving a cow 
 along a country road in Ohio. They had 
 come a long distance, and were wear)' ; but 
 though the boy limped, the conversation 
 did not flag as they trudged along ; and 
 you might have seen that while they 
 talked with such animation, they were ali\-e 
 to the gold and crimson of the autumn 
 woods, which seemed to have borrowed 
 their flashes of color from the sunset sky. 
 
 They were evidently not farmers ; both 
 had the appearance of living a city life, but 
 had they been observed, the things they 
 were saying, and not their looks, would 
 have attracted attention ; for they were 
 talking of Cervantes and Shakspeare. 
 
 The cow needed much urging, and it 
 was late at night when they reached some 
 
yM~- ^/- ^/ ^ //d 
 
 O^.^ /^^^^'L^^ f,t^r-r^c^ ^^.^.^/_ ^ 
 
 ^y*^y- /7'*^-«»-X^ ^LA-^r^/^ <6-©v"-»^"*** a^-*-*^ 
 
 / 
 
IVILL/AM DEAN HO WELLS. 
 
 65 
 
 white-limbed sycamores beside die tail-race 
 of a grist-mill on the Little Miami River, 
 on the other side of which was the small 
 log cabin in which they lived. A question 
 then arose as to how they should get the 
 cow across. They did not know the depth 
 of the water, but they knew it to be cold, 
 and they did not care to swim it. The 
 elder wanted the boy to run up under the 
 sycamores to the saw-mill, cross the head- 
 race there, and come back to receive the 
 cow on the other side of the tail-race. But 
 with all his literature, the boy was young 
 enough to be superstitious, and afraid of 
 the dark ; and though the elder urged him 
 to go, he would not force him. They could 
 see the lights in the cabin twinkling cheer- 
 fully, and they shouted to those within, but 
 no one heard them. They called and 
 called in vain, and were answered only by 
 the cold rush of the tail-race, the rustle of 
 s)'camore leaves, and the homesick lowing 
 of the cow. 
 
 They determined to drive her across 
 from the shore, and then to run up to the 
 saw-mill and down the other bank, so as to 
 
66 no \ noon on jamous AurnoRs. 
 
 catch her as slu" rcaclu'd it, \Vh(;n tlicy 
 came ihcrc, she was not to Ix; lound, liow- 
 cvcr; she had inslaiUl)' turned aL^ain, and 
 (hn'ino the ni^ht she niatlc licr way l)ack 
 to the town from which they had brought 
 
 h.T. 
 
 The 1()<;' cabin was a small one, with a 
 cornfield of eighty acres bt:hind it, and it 
 was nearly a cjuarter of a century old. The 
 boy who entenxl it after this adventure was 
 William Dean 1 lowells, and thi; man was 
 his father, who had recently brought his 
 family from Dayton to take charge of the 
 saw-mill antl grist-mill on the river. Th(i 
 incident illustrates, with what follows, the 
 simplicity of the early life of one who has 
 since become- one of the foremost Anu^-ican 
 novelists. 
 
 Mr. Howells was born March i, 1837, ^'^^ 
 Martin's b\'rr)\ Ohio, oi)i)osite Wheeling, 
 West Virginia. Mis father was of WVlsh 
 descent, his mother of German stock, and 
 both were superior by education and tastes 
 to tlu- moderate circumstances in which 
 they found themselvc^s when this bo)', who 
 was one of eiLiht children, came: into the 
 
IVILIJAM DEAN IIOWELLS. 6y 
 
 world. When he was only three years old, 
 they left Martin's Ferry to live in Mamil- 
 ton, Ohio, and there the father bought and 
 edited the " Intelligencer," a weekly news- 
 paper, and his son was scarcely out of his 
 cradle before he learned to set type. He 
 had little regular schooling, but he was a 
 great reader, and had a natural gift for 
 composition. He does not remember how 
 young he was when he mastered the mys- 
 teries of the printer's trade, but it* was cer- 
 tainly long before he was twelve ; at that 
 age he remembers having helped in his 
 father's office to set in type President Zach- 
 ary Taylor's inaugural message. 
 
 There were leisure moments between the 
 working hours, and he occupied these in 
 printing compositions of his own. How- 
 ever precocious they may be, few young 
 authors see their work immortalized by the 
 dignity and permanence of type before 
 they reach their teens ; but when this lad 
 was only eleven, he set up and printed an 
 ambitious work of his own. A thorough- 
 bred is not less fearless of ditch and hedge 
 than the budding author is of the magni- 
 
68 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 tilde of his theme. A veteran will stoop to 
 write about rag-pickers or Punch and Judy, 
 and go afoot in search of a commonplace 
 subject ; but the beginner plunges his spurs 
 into the flanks of Pegasus, and sends the 
 winged horse galloping along the edge of 
 the dizziest precipices of Olympus. Mr. 
 Howells is called a "realist" now. He 
 writes about men and women as they are, 
 and will have neither villains of deep d)'e 
 nor paragons of virtue in his stories ; for 
 he believes that good and evil are mixed 
 in all of us. But he was of a different 
 mind when he wore a white apron, and 
 stood before the printer's case, with its 
 alphabetical compartments full of little 
 metal letters. He boldly launched out 
 then, not in any cockle-shell of rhyme, but 
 in a hve-act blank-verse tragedy ; and it 
 should be needless to say that the subject 
 was the death of a Roman emperor. Such 
 ventures carry too much sail for their bal- 
 last ; and, like other lightly laden ships, 
 this has not been heard from since. 
 
 The literary ambition was fixed in him 
 while he was v^ery )-oung, and it was stimu- 
 
WILLIAM DEAN HO IV ELLS. 69 
 
 lated by the scholarly tastes of his father 
 and by his own appetite for reading. In a 
 desultory way he went first to a public and 
 then to a private school. His favorite 
 study was history, and the study he cared 
 least for, and for which he had the least 
 aptitude, was arithmetic. He liked to read 
 aloud, and could do it well. Probably he 
 lost less through the infrequency and irreg- 
 ularity of his attendance than many others 
 would have done, for he was one of the 
 exceptional boys who do more for their 
 education by observation and by reading, 
 than schoolmasters are able to do for them. 
 His favorite book at this period of his 
 life was Goldsmith's History of Greece, 
 ■and side by side with it in his estimation 
 were " Don Quixote " and the inexhaust- 
 ible delights of the " Arabian Nights." 
 The first novel he read was "The Trip- 
 pings of Tom Pepper ; or, the Effects of 
 Romancing," and the moral it was intended 
 to inculcate struck him so sharply that he 
 entered into a solemn pledge with his 
 brother to avoid prevarication under every 
 circumstance. His admiration for " Don 
 
70 BOYHOOD OF I'AAfOL/S AUTHORS. 
 
 Quixote " was so <'Tcat that the author of 
 it became his hero, and instead of content- 
 ing- himself with the romance of the " mad 
 knight " and Sancho Panza, as most read- 
 ers do, he read besides the other works of 
 the great Spanish author Cervantes, whom 
 he still reckons as a peer of Shakspeare. 
 He was a rather delicate boy, and though 
 he was fond of outdoor sports and games, 
 he was not expert in any one of them. 
 
 In 1849 his father ^^^^^ ^^"^^ "Intelligen- 
 cer," and moved his family to Dayton, 
 where he purchased another paper, called 
 the " Transcript." which he changed from 
 a semi-weekly to a daily. This movement 
 was not a success, and at the end of two 
 years the failure of it was confessed. All 
 the editor's sons, of whom there were four, 
 could set type, and all of them had helped 
 in producing the paper. After working in 
 the composing-room until eleven at night, 
 the boy we are writing about was often 
 obliged to get up at four to carry the 
 paper and deliver it to subscribers. But 
 the boys took their misfortunes cheerfully, 
 and when the last issue was printed, they 
 
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. 71 
 
 all went down to the Miami and had a 
 good swim. 
 
 It was then that they took possession 
 of the log cabin, and the year they spent 
 there has been beautifully described by 
 Mr. Howells himself. They did not regret 
 this change from town to country. The 
 father's passionate fondness for nature had 
 been nourished by the English poets, and 
 he had taught his children all that he felt 
 for the woods and fields and open skies. 
 They glazed the narrow windows, relaid 
 the rotten floor, patched the roof, and 
 papered the walls. 
 
 " Perhaps it was my father's love of 
 literature which inspired him to choose 
 newspapers for this purpose," says Mr. 
 Howells ; "at any rate he did so, and the 
 effect, as I remember it, was not without 
 its decorative qualities. He had used a 
 barrel of papers bought at the nearest 
 post-office, where they had been refused 
 by the persons to whom they had been 
 experimentally sent by the publisher ; and 
 the whole first page was taken up by a 
 story which broke off in the middle ot a 
 
72 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 sentence at the foot of the last column, and 
 tantalized us forever with fruitless conjec- 
 tures as to the fate of the hero and 
 heroine." 
 
 It took some days to make the repairs ; 
 but when they were completed, the boys 
 laid their mattresses on the sweet, new 
 oak-plank of the floor, and slept hard — in 
 every sense. One night they awoke, and 
 saw their father sitting upright in his bed. 
 
 "What are you doing?" they asked. 
 
 " Oh, resting ! " he answered, jokingly 
 referringf to the hardness of his bed. 
 
 Their life was full of privations, but it 
 was sweetened by their love of nature and 
 their unfailing good-humor. The boys 
 slept in the loft. "The rude floor rattled 
 and wavered loosely under our tread, and 
 the window in the gable stood open or 
 shut at its own will. There were cracks in 
 the shino-le through which we could see 
 the "stars, and which, when the first snow 
 came, let the flakes sift in upon the floor. 
 I should not like to step out of bed into 
 a snow-wreath in the morning, now ; but 
 then I was glad to do it, and so far from 
 
WILLI AM DEAN HO WELLS. Ji 
 
 thinking that or any thing in our life a 
 hardship, I counted it all joy. 
 
 " Our barrels of paper-covered books 
 were stowed away in the loft, and, over- 
 hauling them one day, I found a paper 
 copy of the poems of a certain Henry 
 Wadsworth Longfellow, then wholly un- 
 known to me ; and while the old grist-mill, 
 whistling and wheezing to itself, made a 
 vague music in my ears, my soul was filled 
 with this strange, new sweetness. I read 
 ' The Spanish Student ' there, and ' Coplas 
 de Manrique,' and the solemn and ever- 
 beautiful ' Voices of the Nieht.' There 
 were other books in those barrels which I 
 must have read also, but I remember only 
 those that spirited me again to Spain, 
 where I had already been with Irving, and 
 led me to attack seriously the old Spanish 
 grammar, which had been knocking about 
 our house ever since my father bought it 
 from a soldier of the Mexican war. But 
 neither those nor any other books made 
 me discontented with the small-boy's world 
 around me. They made it a little more 
 populous with visionary shapes, but that 
 
7-1 novii{)on oi-' f.imocs ai'TIIors. 
 
 was well, aiul ihcrc was room lor tlicin all. 
 It was nol darkened vviUi cares, antl the 
 duties in il \\v\v not many." 
 
 At the end ol a year the foreman of a 
 ])rintino--officc in Xcnia canu; to the loo- 
 cahin, and asked the Ik))' to take; tlu' i)lace 
 of a delin(|nent hand, as he was known to 
 be a good c'omj)ositor, swift and clean and 
 steady. He tried the job, and qave satis- 
 faction ; but time did not cam' the home- 
 sickness lu; felt on leavinL;- tht; simpk; little 
 cabin in the. woods, and he was obliged to 
 return ; lew as its comforts were, he w-as 
 held to it 1))' a bond of affection which no 
 oflc-r of worldly prosperity could induce 
 him to break. As long- as the lamily re- 
 mained there, he staid with them ; and 
 when at last th(>y again went to li\c; in 
 the town, he took a place as compositor on 
 the '• ( )hio State Journal," at a salar)- of 
 four dollars a week. 
 
 For sev(M-al )'ears after this, his litt:rar)' 
 ambitions were subordinated to the neces- 
 sities of mechanical labor as a printer and 
 reporlcM-, but all the time he was equipi)ing 
 himself for a luLiher and better kind ol 
 
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. 75 
 
 work ; lie added French and Italian to his 
 knowledge of languages, and made tlie 
 great authors of the world his comi^anions. 
 Then one morning he gathered courage 
 to knock at the door of "The Atlantic 
 Monthly" with a bundle of verses in his 
 hand, and they were so good that the 
 editor accepted and printed them. 
 
 His advance was rapid after that, and 
 in tim(t he became the editor of the 
 " Atlantic," a position which Ik; held for 
 nine years. Meanwhile, he was doing ori- 
 ginal work of his own, and he has earned 
 distinction as a poet, as a writer of plays, 
 and, above all, as a novelist. 
 
 Quite recently he went back to the place 
 where the old log cabin had stood, but it 
 was there no mon^ Thirty years had 
 passed, and all that had happened since 
 seemed so much like a dream, that, when 
 he spoke of his boyhood to a little fellow 
 who followed him, he himself could scarce- 
 ly believe that what he told was true, and 
 he says that he had a sense of imposing 
 ujjon his listener. 
 
76 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 JAMES PAYN. 
 
 It must be quite twenty years ago that I 
 read a story called " A Perfect Treasure," 
 as it came out week after week in a certain 
 Enorlish maei'azine. The leadinof character 
 was a youth with literary aspirations, and 
 it was like readinoj" one's own autobios'- 
 raphy to follow his adventures in search of 
 a publisher ; the application of his expe- 
 riences as possibilities to one's self was 
 much more fascinating than the plot. 
 
 If my memory is not at fault, a carriage 
 runs away in the story, and the hero stops 
 the horses, an incident which is always 
 turning up, like the proverbial bad six- 
 pence; but in tliis case the occupant of the 
 carriage does not prove to be a beautiful 
 heiress, nor does she instantly fall in love 
 with her deliverer, as she niiofht be ex- 
 pected to do. It is not a )ou ng and lovely 
 person at all, but an old lady whom the 
 hero recognizes as a famous authoress liv- 
 
A 
 
 
 ♦w-t-. 
 
 ^ 
 
 h^ 
 
 
 '^-'t*-;^^*— >v/^ 
 
 ^^/"^-T-^T^Xr-^^^-^^^^^l-^Z^^ 
 
JAMES PAVN. 77 
 
 ing in the neighborhood ; and instead of 
 marrying him and sharing a fortune with 
 him, she only becomes his friend, and 
 helps him to get a start in literature. 
 
 Something in the character made me 
 think at the time that it was drawn from 
 life, though the runaway was, of course, an 
 invention ; and many years afterward when 
 I met James Payn, the author of the story, 
 he admitted to me that the original was 
 Mary Russell Mitford, who was actually his 
 own literary godmother. 
 
 She had been a friend of his father's, 
 and lived at Swallowfield, not far from his 
 own home at Maidenhead, on the Thames ; 
 and she was a constant friend to the son, 
 guiding him with advice and criticism, and 
 opening doors for him which less fortunate 
 beginners find closed and barred. A lit- 
 erary godmother is a useful relation, and 
 though she cannot make an author out of 
 a boy who has no gift for literature, her 
 experience and connections enable her to 
 clear the way for one who has abilit)-, and 
 only needs opportunity. Such a boy was 
 James Payn. 
 
7.S iioMinon or- i-WMors ,u77/()h's. 
 
 She ;il (irsi Iricd lo dissuade liiin li-oin 
 inakiiiL; lilcraliirc a | nolcssioii, l)y |i(»mlin_t^ 
 oiil ils iiic\ital>lc trials; and, lailiiiL^ in this, 
 she used licr inlliicncc lo adxancc him in 
 the LM'cat world ol literature wliicii he was 
 l)()iiiul to explore. I low sound hei' ad\ ICC 
 was, he prox'ed hy ex| »erieiu-e, and thoUL^ii 
 he has vindicated the wisdom ol his own 
 course, he has re echoed in his matui'it)' 
 her \oi((' ol warning h'r the hcaieht ol the 
 present L^cneralion : — 
 
 " liiere is no pursuit so donbtliil, so lull 
 ol risks, so snl)j(Ht lo despondenc)' and 
 disappointments, so open to despair itsell," 
 he sa)'s, m one ol his hooks. "Oh, m\' 
 Noiidl; Iriend, w idi ' a turn lor liler.ilure,' 
 think twice and ihrice helore c(»minitlin^' 
 N'onrsell to it, or \on ma\ hitterK ic^ret to 
 lind \onrsell where that 'Imn' ma)' lal<e 
 yon! I he lilerar\' callinL^ is an excep- 
 tional one, and excn at ihe ix'sl you will 
 ha\(' trials and troiiMes ol which nou dream 
 not, and Lo which no odicr calling' is ex- 
 posed." 
 
 This is distini-tl\- ol a piece willi tin; 
 advice Miss Millord -'.uc him; hut as her 
 
JAMES PAYN. y() 
 
 adiTionit ion did iioi hold him hack, his, I 
 am ah^aid, will nol n_:straiii ihc amhilioiis 
 youth who sees more i4'lory in the pen than 
 in the sword or the sce[jtre. 
 
 'rh(i lett(!rs she wrote to him \ver(! re- 
 ccMitly in my possession, — a hundN; of 
 them, tattered and stained, after the hoard- 
 '\\v^ of forty years or more, and written in 
 a small, crabljed, an_L^ular hand, which, 
 after lilJiniLj' ^dl sidc'S of tlK; paper with tJK; 
 closest lin(;s, had economized still further 
 by running- ed^ewisc^ alonj^ the margin ; 
 even the naj)s of the envelopes had been 
 utilized for im'croscopic postscripts. 1 wish 
 ever)' boy who is thinkiuL; of literature as 
 a profession mi^^ht read them. 
 
 " Be careful as to style," she wrote, in 
 one of them ; " i^ive as much character as 
 you can, anti as much Irulh, that beiiiL^ th(i 
 foundation of all merit in literature and 
 art." This was after her attempt to dis- 
 suade him from e'nt(!rin_ir on a literary 
 career had failetl, and previous to it she 
 had endeavored to induce him to cK-vote 
 himself to a business hfe, and make litera- 
 ture the recreation of his leisure. As an 
 
Ho /;o]7/0()/) or /-'.i.uol^s auti/oks. 
 
 cxampK' ol what could l)i' done in lliis di- 
 rc^ctioii slu' poinlc'd oiil a nuTclianl, whom 
 \\v. may call Mr. A. "II J had \\\{\ sons 
 th('\' should all he in tratlo," she cUH-larcd, 
 in anotluT ol dir Icttors. " It is du- most 
 iiuU'|)(Mulont cariHM", tho most iiseliil, the 
 most powerful for i^ood, as the press is the 
 most powerlul for evil. I wish you knew 
 Mr. A., — his frankness, his cordiality, his 
 cheerlulness, his unix'ersal inlormation, his 
 knack of l)rinoino' frientls too-ether, his per- 
 lect hio"hd)ree(,lino-. If \ou knew Mr. A. 
 )'ou would s(>e al once that the callini^ 
 which such a man has lollowed can ha\e 
 nolhini;' in it that is not honorahle. lie 
 and James T. kields. the American book- 
 seller (f(M- tlu'se i^reat })ublishers keep a 
 store), are by far the most princely persons 
 in heart and manner wIumh 1 ha\e v\v\' 
 known, and each of them has mack' his 
 own fortune — the one at five-and-thirt\', 
 certainly not more — the otluM', ])erhaps. 
 ten )'ears older, — both \\\{\\ hair as l;1oss\- 
 and curly as \(nw own, and not a single 
 silver ihreatl amono- the curls," 
 
 Nothing;' but literature would satisfy his 
 
JAMES PAYN. 8 1 
 
 soul, however ; he would not stoop to a 
 desk and a ledger, through Mr. A. was 
 willing to give him employment which 
 would have allowed him from five o'clock 
 to ten for his poetic studies, " more by 
 four hours, on an average, than I ever 
 had," that gentleman wrote. But the boy's 
 resolve was inflexible, and authorship in an 
 attic, even with only a crust to eat, seemed 
 better than commerce and affluence. 
 
 This was when he was about seventeen 
 or eighteen years old ; and it will be inter- 
 esting now to look back to his earlier years. 
 His family held an excellent social position, 
 and his education was amply provided for. 
 First he was sent to a preparatory school ; 
 then to Eton ; next to the Military Acad- 
 emy at Woolwich ; and finally to Trinity 
 College, Caml)ridge, from which he was 
 graduated in 1854. He was not a studious 
 boy in the sense of one who rapidly memo- 
 rizes lessons, and shines at examinations ; 
 he had the usual antipathy of persons with 
 a literary bent for mathematics and formu- 
 las of all kinds : but he was a diligent 
 reader, and picked up knowledge in the 
 
82 UOYIIOOI) OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 unseen and unconscious ways which are 
 unintelligible and impracticable to closer 
 and more systematic scholars. 
 
 I le was, no doubt, thought a cjueer Ijoy 
 by his schoolfellows, but he had one gift 
 that made him popular, as it has done 
 since in a much larger circle. He was a 
 born story-teller, and could weave the most 
 wonderful stories out of his own head. 
 Many a night he was compelled to sit up 
 in bed romancing until one after another 
 the older boys fell asleep. 
 
 His school life was unhappy, both at the 
 preparatory school and at Eton, b'^igging, 
 or hazing, prevailed at tht- latter school, 
 and flogging too. The head master was a 
 dandified gentleman, who held the birch 
 with jewelled fmgers. 
 
 " Please, sir, it's my hrst fault," the 
 culprit would sometimes plead. 
 
 " I think I remember your name before," 
 the pedagogue would reply to this. 
 
 " It was my brother, sir." 
 
 "V(M-y well, I'll look at my book ; " and 
 the boy would shuffle away reprieved. 
 
 One bo)', s(;venteen years of age, who 
 
JAMES PAVN. 83 
 
 was leaving Eton to enter the army, was 
 flogged a few days before his departure. 
 It was a custom then (it may be still) for 
 the boys to present the master with a ten- 
 pound note when they left, dropping it 
 delicately into a jar where he could find 
 it after they had gone. But smarting from 
 his punishment the departing scholar only 
 pretended to drop his ten-pound note into 
 the jar, and chuckled as he pictured to 
 himself the master's fruitless hunt after 
 that precious bit of tissue paper. " I can't 
 flog him for flogging me unjustly," he re- 
 flected, "but, dash it, I cany^?26^ him." 
 
 The boys in the higher classes were fond 
 of snubbing and patronizing those of the 
 lower classes. " Lower Boy, what might 
 be your name?" a diminutive fellow, with 
 a white choker, inquired in a drawling voice 
 of Payn one day. 
 
 " Well, it uiight be Beelzebub, but it 
 isn't," Payn replied ; whereupon the " fifth- 
 form " boy attempted to thrash him. "It 
 was the only proper punishment for 
 ' cheek.' no doubt, but I thought it hard 
 that a repartee should be so ill-received," 
 
84 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 the victim has since said in describing this 
 incident. 
 
 Unless a boy had a taste for the classics, 
 Eton in those days did little for him, except 
 in establishing certain moral attributes ; 
 and at the end of a year or so Payn, who 
 cared more for Shakspeare than for all the 
 Greeks, went away from the gray old aca- 
 demic buildings with little added to his 
 stock of knowledge. Resolute as he was 
 in his choice of a profession, his relatives 
 still persisted in other plans for him, and 
 they now procured a nomination for him to 
 the Military Academy at Woolwich, which, 
 except that it educates boys for the British 
 army, is identical in its purpose with the 
 academy at West Point. 
 
 To prepare him for Woolwich, he was 
 sent to another preparatory establishment, 
 and the system of "cramming" practised 
 here was more hateful to him than any 
 thing at his first school or at Eton. He 
 had lonof and tedious lessons to learn of 
 which he never knew the meaning, and he 
 recited them as mechanically as a phono- 
 graph. The purpose of the school was not 
 
JAMES PAYN. 85 
 
 to instruct the mind and develop the rea- 
 son, but to make the pupil seem to be 
 familiar with studies of which he was icrnor- 
 ant. The master was confident that Payn 
 could pass the ordinary examination, but 
 was afraid he could not stand the physical 
 test, as he was near-sighted. 
 
 "The examiners at Woolwich," said the 
 master, " will tell you to look out of the 
 window and describe the colors of the 
 horses on the common. Mind you say 
 * bay ' or ' gray ' very rapidly, for all horses 
 are either bay or gray, and if you make 
 a mistake they will not notice it." This 
 illustrates the methods which were followed 
 in all the studies. 
 
 The work was so hard and so continu- 
 ous, that little time was left for reading; 
 but while he was here, Payn had the de- 
 light of seeing his compositions published 
 for the first time, though they were not yet 
 printed. He had one schoolfellow named 
 Raymond who could draw, another named 
 Jones who could write like print, and a 
 third named Barker who had a taste for 
 finance. Together they started a weekl)- 
 
86 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 paper full of stories and poems, for circula- 
 tion among their companions. Payn pro- 
 vided the literary part, which Raymond 
 illustrated, and Jones made as many copies 
 as were needed. The circulation of the 
 paper was left to Barker, who fixed the 
 price at sixpence a copy. Their school- 
 fellows did not appreciate the venture, but 
 Barker was the treasurer of the school, and 
 held in trust for the scholars a certain 
 fund out of which he had to o-ive them two 
 shillings weekly for pocket-money. See- 
 ing that they would not buy the paper will- 
 ingly, he calmly deducted sixpence from 
 each allowance, and gave a copy of the 
 paper to make up for it. "The 'masses' 
 never know what is good for them," Mr. 
 Payn says, in referring to this, " and our 
 schoolfellows were no exception to the 
 rule ; they called Barker a Jew, and, so to 
 speak, ' murmured against Moses.' He 
 was tall and strong, and fouo^ht at least 
 half a dozen pitched battles for the mainte- 
 nance of his object ; I think he persuaded 
 himself, like Charles I., that he was really 
 in the right, and set down their opposition 
 
JAMES PAYN. 8/ 
 
 to mere ' impatience of taxation,' but in 
 the end they were one too many for him, 
 and, indeed, much more than one. He fell 
 fiehtine, no doubt, in the sacred cause of 
 literature, but also for his own sixpences, 
 for we — the workers — never saw one 
 penny of them." 
 
 Payn succeeded in passing the examina- 
 tion at Woolwich, but he distinguished 
 himself there by his humorous escapades 
 rather than by his scholarship, and before 
 he was seventeen he had to resign on ac- 
 count of illness. His friends then decided 
 that he should enter the Church, and he 
 was sent to a private tutor's to be prepared 
 for the university. 
 
 He was more content now, and for the 
 first and only time in his life found pleas- 
 ure in out-door exercise. " I had some 
 companions of my own age who taught me 
 the use of the leaping-pole. We scoured 
 the country with fourteen-foot poles in our 
 hands, and rarely found brook or lane 
 too broad for us. Many a time, like 
 Commodore Trunion, have I astonished 
 a wagoner b)' fi)'ing from steep bank to 
 
88 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 bank, over the heads of himself and his 
 horses." 
 
 But the pen lost none of its attractions, 
 and verse and prose poured from it. He 
 went through all the agonies of the rejected 
 contributor ; time and again he dropped 
 his poems and essays into the post-office, 
 only to receive them back in a month or so 
 with an intimation that they would not do, 
 and the dream of fame faded away in the 
 wintry morning of despair. The sun be- 
 gan to shine by and by, and never did it 
 seem so splendid as the day when it re- 
 vealed one of his poems printed in a 
 periodical called " Leigh Hunt's Journal." 
 Soon after this he wrote an article on cadet 
 life at Woolwich, which was accepted by 
 " Household Words," the paper edited by 
 Charles Dickens. He thought that his 
 fortune was made now, but there were 
 many disappointments and many set-backs 
 still in store for him. Fame is a coquettish 
 maiden to woo, and pouts as easily as she 
 smiles. The bo)^ with his first article in 
 print thinks he has won her, but, though 
 she stands by his side for a moment, she 
 
JAMES PAVjV. 89 
 
 quickly runs away, and beckons to him 
 from a milestone farther along the road. 
 Payn had to pass many such milestones 
 before he came up with her. Many things 
 he wrote were published, but there was no 
 certain acceptance for his work, and much 
 of it came back. He published two little 
 books of poems, which were civilly treated 
 by the critics ; he made the acquaintance 
 of Miss Mitford, who introduced him to 
 Harriet Martineau, and also through the 
 kindness of Miss Mitford he was intro- 
 duced to De Ouincey, the famous essayist 
 and opium-eater. At luncheon with De 
 Ouincey, he was asked what wine he would 
 take, and he was about to pour out a glass 
 from the decanter that stood next to him, 
 when De Ouincey's daughter whispered, 
 " You must not take that ; it is not port 
 wine as you seem to think." It was, in 
 fact, laudanum, the drug to which her 
 father was the most pitiable slave, and he 
 presently helped himself to it as if it had 
 been wine. 
 
 A second time Fame seemed to have 
 taken the young author by the hand. The 
 
90 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 publishers of a periodical placarded a stor}' 
 which they had bought of him, over all the 
 walls of Cambridge, where he was an un- 
 dergraduate ; but he was again mistaken, 
 though, as he says, he was not the first to 
 confuse a placard on the wall wnth genuine 
 reputation. He had twenty-six articles re- 
 jected in one year, and it was fortunate that 
 he was not wholly dependent on his pen 
 for a living. He took his degree at the 
 University, and quickly added to his aca- 
 demic honors those which come by mar- 
 riage. His earnings for the first year of his 
 married life were thirty-two pounds fifteen 
 shillings, or about one hundred and sixty- 
 three dollars and seventy-five cents. The 
 tide was turning, however, and the next 
 year his income was quadrupled. 
 
 Mr. Payn is now the editor of the " Corn- 
 hill Magazine,'" and about a hundred vol- 
 umes stand to his credit on the shelves of 
 the library of the British Museum. What 
 reader of English fiction is unfamiliar with 
 his stories, in which humor, and wit, and 
 great dramatic power are united ? He has 
 gone on improving in his art ever since 
 
_/.I.U/:\ /'A )/\'. 91 
 
 \\r. sat lip in l)ccl iinciUiiiL; stories lor his 
 sclioollcllows, lik(; a lilllc Scliclicrc/adc, 
 and \\v. is now a t)i)(' ol the |)ros|)croiis 
 literary man ; hnt he is modest, and it 
 seems to him, no donht, that he has not yet 
 ov(>rtaken lame, who is still beckoninLT 
 Iiim another leasjue ahead. 
 
92 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 The life of Whittier may be read in his 
 poems, and by putting a note here and a 
 date there, a full autobiography might be 
 compiled from them. His boyhood and 
 youth are depicted in them with such de- 
 tail that little need be added to make the 
 story complete ; and that little, reverently 
 done as it maybe, must seem poor in com- 
 parison with the poetic beauty of his own 
 revelations. 
 
 What more can we do to show his early 
 home than to quote from his own beautiful 
 poem "Snow-Bound"? There the house 
 is pictured for us, inside and out, with all 
 its furnishings ; and those who gathered 
 around its hearth, inmates and visitors, are 
 set before us so clearly that, long after the 
 book has been put away, they remain as 
 distinct in th(' memory as portraits that are 
 visible day after day on the walls of our 
 
^ L^^m^io^i 7lii-&.-d-^-u^ cw^aJj^ <mn>(^ 
 (M<J^ in)^' TA^L^^^ro-i c^^-JiJu^ of-juJuJ^ 
 
 c^r-tn^jkj J\M^ JhjJ'J-LAJ-' 
 
 I// IS iJ-^^^^ 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 93 
 
 homes. He reproduces in his verse the 
 landscapes he saw, the legends of witches 
 a;id Indians he listened to, the school-fel- 
 luws he played with, the voices of the 
 woods and fields, and the round of toil and 
 Pleasure in a country boy's life. And in 
 other poems his later life, with its impas- 
 sioned devotion to freedom and its lofty 
 faith, is reflected as lucidly as his youth is in 
 "Snow-Bound" and "The Barefoot Boy." 
 
 He himself was " the barefoot boy," 
 and what Robert Burns said of himself 
 Whittier might repeat: "The poetic gen- 
 ius of my country found me, as the pro- 
 phetic bard Elijah did Elisha, at the 
 plough, and threw her inspired mantle 
 over me." *■ 
 
 He was a farmer's son, born at a time 
 w^ien farm-life in New England was more 
 fruofal than it is now, and with no other 
 heritage than the good name and example 
 of parents and kinsmen, in whom simple 
 virtues — thrift, industry, and piety — 
 abounded. 
 
 His birthplace still stands near Haverhill, 
 Mass., — a house in one of the hollows of 
 
94 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 the surrounding hills, little altered from 
 what it was in 1807, the year he was born, 
 when it was already at least a century and 
 a half old. 
 
 He had no such opportunities for culture 
 as Holmes and Lowell had in their youth. 
 His parents were intelligent and upright 
 people of limited means, who lived in all 
 the simplicity of the Quaker faith, and 
 there was nothing in his early surround- 
 ings to encourage and develop a literary 
 taste. Books were scarce, and the twenty 
 volumes on his father's shelves were about 
 Quaker doctrines and Quaker heroes. 
 There was one novel in the house, but it 
 was hidden away, for fiction was forbidden 
 fruit in that household. No library or 
 scholarly companionship was within reach ; 
 and if his gift had been less than genius it 
 could never have triumphed over the many 
 disadvantages it had to contend with. In- 
 stead of a poet, he would have been a 
 farmer like his forefathers. But literature 
 was a spontaneous impulse with him, as 
 natural as the song of a bird, and he was 
 not wholly dependent on training and op- 
 
JOHN GREEXLEAF IVHITTIER. 95 
 
 portiinlty as he would have been had he 
 possessed mere talent. 
 
 Frugal from necessity, the life of the 
 Whittiers was not sordid or cheerless to 
 him, moreover, and he looks back to it as 
 tenderly as if it had been full of luxuries. 
 It was sweetened by strong affections, sim- 
 ple tastes, and an unflinching sense of duty, 
 and in all the members of the household 
 the love of nature was so genuine that 
 meadow, wood, and river yielded them all 
 the pleasure they needed, and they scarcely 
 missed the refinements of art. 
 
 Surely there could not be a pleasanter 
 or more homelike picture than that which 
 the poet has given us of the family on the 
 nieht of the crreat storm when the old 
 house was snow-bound : — 
 
 " Shut in from all the world without, 
 We sat the clean-winged hearth about, 
 Content to let the north-wind roar 
 In baffled rage at pane and door, 
 While the red logs before us beat 
 The frost-line back with tropic heat ; 
 And ever, when a louder blast 
 Shook beam and rafter as it passed, 
 The merrier up its roaring draught 
 The great throat of the chimney laughed. 
 
96 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 The house-dog on his paws outspread 
 Laid to the fire his drowsy head ; 
 The cat's dark silhouette on the wall 
 A couchant tiger's seemed to fall ; 
 And, for the winter fireside meet, 
 Between the andiron's straddling feet, 
 The mug of cider simmered slow, 
 The apples sputtered in a row. 
 And close at hand the basket stood 
 With nuts from brown October's wood." 
 
 The father was a plain, taciturn, yet 
 prompt and decisive man, who in early life 
 had explored the vast wilderness which 
 extended from New Hampshire to Canada ; 
 and sitting before the fire he told of his 
 adventures : — 
 
 " Our father rode again his ride 
 On Memphremagog's wooded side ; 
 Sat down again to moose and samp 
 In trapper's hut or Indian camp." 
 
 The mother was a woman of gentle 
 
 ways, much loved and honored in the 
 
 neighborhood, with a low voice and a 
 benign face. 
 
 " Our mother, while she turned her wheel. 
 Or run the new-knit stocking-heel. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 97 
 
 Told how the Indian hordes came down 
 At midnight on Cocheco town, 
 And how her own great-uncle bore 
 His cruel scalp-marks to fourscore, 
 Recalling in her fitting phrase, 
 So rich and picturesque and free, 
 (The common unrhymed poetry 
 Of simple life and country ways,) 
 The story of her early days." 
 
 Her sister, Mercy Hussey, lived with the 
 family, and, like Mrs. Whittier, wore the 
 gray dress and white cap of the Quakers. 
 
 " The sweetest woman ever Fate 
 Perverse denied a household mate. 
 
 Through years of toil and soil and care. 
 From glossy tress to thin gray hair, 
 All unprofaned she held apart 
 The virgin fancies of the heart." 
 
 The father's brother, Moses Whittier, 
 also was a member of the family, — "a 
 simple, guileless, childlike man," — and a 
 great favorite, especially with the boys, as 
 may be supposed from this picture: — 
 
 " Our uncle, innocent of books, 
 Was rich in lore of fields and brooks. 
 The ancient teachers, never dumb, 
 Of Nature's unhoused lyceum. 
 
98 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 In moons and tides and weather wise, 
 He read the clouds as prophecies, 
 And foul or fair could well divine. 
 By many an occult hint or sign, 
 Holding the cunning-warded keys 
 To all the woodcraft mysteries. 
 
 He told how teal and loon are shot, 
 
 And how the eagle's eggs he got, 
 
 The feats on pond and river done, 
 
 The prodigies of rod and gun ; 
 
 Till, warming with the tales he told. 
 
 Forgotten was the outside cold, 
 
 The bitter wind unheeded blew ; 
 
 From ripening corn the pigeons fiew, 
 
 The partridge drummed i' the wood, the mink 
 
 Went fishing down the river-brink ; 
 
 In fields with bean or clover gay. 
 
 The woodchuck, like a hermit gray, 
 
 Peered from the doorway of his cell ; 
 
 The muskrat plied the mason's trade, 
 
 And tier by tier his mud-walls laid ; 
 
 And from the shagbark overhead 
 
 The grizzled squirrel dropped his shell." 
 
 There were four children, two boys and 
 
 two girls. 
 
 " Our elder sister plied 
 Her evening task, the stand beside ; 
 A full, rich nature, free to trust, 
 Truthful, and almost sternly just. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF IVHITTIER. 99 
 
 Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act, 
 And make her generous thought a fact, 
 Keeping with many a hght disguise 
 The secret of self-sacrifice. 
 
 Upon the motley-braided mat 
 Our youngest and our dearest sat. 
 Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes. 
 Now bathed within the fadeless green 
 And holy peace of Paradise." 
 
 For a picture of the poet himself, we 
 must turn to the verses on "The Barefoot 
 Boy " in which he says, — 
 
 " Oh for boyhood's time of June, 
 Crowding years in one brief moon. 
 When all things I heard or saw, 
 Me, their master, waited for ! 
 I was rich in flowers and trees. 
 Humming-birds and honey-bees ; 
 For my sport the squirrel played. 
 Plied the snouted mole his spade ; 
 For my taste the blackberry cone 
 Purpled over hedge and stone ; 
 Laughed the brook for my delight 
 Through the day and through the night, 
 Whispering at the garden wall, 
 Talked with me from fall to fall ; 
 Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond. 
 Mine the walnut slopes beyond ; 
 
lOO /lit ]//(>(>/> <)J' {■AMUl'S .UIJIORS. 
 
 Mine, oil liciidiiij.' OK h.iid irccs, 
 Apples ol I Icspfiidt's ; 
 Still, iis my hori/oii j^tcw, 
 ],;irf<i-;r ^rt-vv my ik lies too: 
 All llic world I :,;i\v oi kiu'w 
 Sccini'd ;i ( ompl<x < 'liiiicsL- toy, 
 l''.i:,liioii((l lor ;i IliicIooI. hoy ! " 
 
 'Hie n('io]il)or.s wero as simple and ns fru- 
 gal as llic Whilticrs, llioiioh sniiK- of \\\v.\w 
 were not so inlclliL-ciil. 'ilu'y still Ix.'licvcd 
 in vvinlx's; and one iii'^du at a luiskin''-. 
 when a l)ii>- l)|;i( k hiii- (anic Ijn/ziiio" into 
 the room, il was dc^clarcd lo ix- an old 
 woman who was siispcclcd ol wilcluralt. 
 '\\\v\j struck at it, and kno(:k('<l it down; 
 and when on the next day the old woman 
 was lonn<l ill in lua' coLtagc, they wonid not 
 believe llial llic hniises with which slu- was 
 covered had Ixcii received in a fall down 
 stairs as she cl. timed, and insi'iled that 
 they were the marks of the blows struck 
 
 at the i)nL;. ( )l(l C'a|)lain V , who lived 
 
 near her, and had a honse and sevi;ral 
 barns, covered them all o\'er with horse- 
 shoes to keep the witch ont. 
 
 Their ?;implicily is shown by still another 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. lOl 
 
 Story. A man was seen looking- about in 
 the woods with a irun, and orazini^ into all 
 the bushes and up into the trees. At first 
 they thought he wa.s a lunatic, and then, 
 deciding that he was a British spy, they 
 had him arrested. The judge examined 
 him and found out that his only business 
 was shooting birds. 
 
 "Well," said the judge, "what do you 
 do with them, — eat them ? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Do you sell them?" 
 
 " No ; I study them." 
 
 He was a celebrated ornithologist, but 
 the statement that he devoted all his time 
 to studying birds was so incredible that he 
 would have been sent to jail as a spy if 
 he had not been able to prove his truthful- 
 ness by a letter from a Boston gentleman, 
 which was in his possession. 
 
 There must have, been some appeal to 
 the imagination of a poetic youth in this 
 mediaeval zVzexperience, and what charm 
 there was in it Whittier certainly found. It 
 is not his nature to complain, and there is 
 no word of self-pity in all his works to show 
 
102 /!()]■ J /l)()/> OF FAMOUS AC/TI/OA'S. 
 
 tliat h(' was ever dissatisfKxl with his con- 
 tlition in boyhood ; hut one cannot help 
 tliinkinL;" tliat tlic hiidchnc^ poet, with his 
 dehcate sensibilities and perceptions, must 
 have pined, now and then, for more books 
 and the conversation of scholars. 
 
 I d()ii])t if any boy ever rose to intellect- 
 ual eminence who had fewer opportunities 
 for education than Whittier. He had no 
 such pasturage to browse on as is open to 
 every reader, who, by simply reaching them 
 out, can lay his hands on the treasures 
 of English literature. He had to borrow 
 books wherever they could be found among 
 the neighbors who were willing to lend, and 
 he thought nothing of walking several miles 
 for one volume. The only instruction he 
 received was at the district school, which 
 was op(m a few weeks in midwinter, and at 
 the. 1 laverhill Academy, which he attended 
 two terms of six months each, paying for 
 his tuition by work done In his spare 
 hours. A feeble spirit would have lan- 
 guished under such disadvantages, and 
 how he would have l)ewailed them after 
 outli\-ing them ! Ihit Whittier scarcely re- 
 
JOHN CKEENLEA1-- Hill 111 J:R. 103 
 
 f(;rs to tlKMii, and, insK^ad of lK"i:;,L,^inc,^ for 
 jjity, he takes th('in as jjart of the common 
 lot, and seems to rememher only what was 
 Ixjautiful and c^ood. 
 
 Occasionally a stranger knocked at the 
 door of the old homestead in the valley. 
 Somelim(;s it was a distinguished Quaker 
 from abroad, but oftener it was a pedler, 
 or some vagabond begging for food, which 
 was seldom refused. Once a foreigner 
 came, and asked for lodgings for the night, 
 — a dark, repulsive man, whose appearance 
 was so much against him that Mrs. Whit- 
 tier was afraid to admit him. No sooner 
 had she sent him away, however, than she 
 repented. " What if a son of mine were in 
 a .strange land ! " sh(' thought. The young 
 poet (who was not recognized as such) 
 offered to go out in search of him, and he 
 presently returned with him, having found 
 him standing in th(; roadwayjust as he had 
 been turned away from another house. 
 
 " He took his seat with us at the supper 
 tabl(;," says Whittier, in one of his jjrose 
 skelch(.'s, " and when we were all gathered 
 around the h(-arth that cold autumnal even- 
 
I04 iiovnoon of famous authors. 
 
 ing-, he toltl us, partly l^y words, partly by 
 gestures, the story of his life and misfor- 
 tunes, amused us with descriptions of the 
 grape-gatherings and festivals of his sunny 
 clime, edified my mother with a receipt 
 for making bread of chestnuts, and in the 
 morning, when, after breakfast, his dark, 
 sullen face lighted up, and his fierce eye 
 moistened with grateful emotion as, in his 
 own silvery Tuscan accent, he poured out 
 his thanks, we marvelled at the fears which 
 had so nearly closed our doors against him, 
 and, as he departed, we all felt that he had 
 left with us the blessing of the poor." 
 
 This reads like a passage from the 
 " Vicar of Wakefield," and we are reminded 
 of the same book by the poet's description 
 of Jonathan Plummer, " maker of verses, 
 pedler and poet, physician and parson," 
 who came twice a year to the Whittier 
 homestead. "lie brought with him pins, 
 needles, tape, and cotton thread for my 
 mother; jack-knives, razors, and soap for 
 my father ; and verses of his own compos- 
 ing, coarsely printed, and ilhistrat(xl with 
 rude woodcuts, for the delectation of the 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITHER. 105 
 
 younger branches of the family. No love- 
 sick youth could drown himself, no deserted 
 maiden bewail the moon, no rogue mount 
 the gallows, without fitting memorial in 
 Plummer's verses. Earthquakes, fires, and 
 shipwrecks he regarded as personal favors 
 from Providence, furnishing the raw mate- 
 rial of song and ballad. Welcome to us in 
 our country seclusion, as Autolycus to the 
 clown in ' A Winter's Tale,' we listened with 
 infinite satisfaction to his readings of his 
 own verses or to his ready improvisation 
 upon some dramatic incident or topic sug- 
 gested by his auditors. . . . He was scru- 
 pulously conscientious, devout, inclined to 
 theological disquisitions, and withal mighty 
 in Scripture. He was thoroughly independ- 
 ent, flattered nobody, cared for nobody, 
 trusted nobody. W^hen invited to sit down 
 at our dinner-table, he invariably took the 
 precaution to place his basket of valuables 
 between his legs for safe-keeping. ' Never 
 mind thy basket, Jonathan,' said my father, 
 ' we sha'n't steal thy verses.' — ' I'm not sure 
 of that,' returned the suspicious guest ; ' it 
 is written, "Trust ye not in any brother.'"" 
 
I06 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 Another o-uest came to the house one 
 day. It was a vagrant old Scotchman, who, 
 when he had been treated to bread and 
 cheese and cider, sang some of the songs 
 of Robert Burns, which Whittier then heard 
 for the first time, and which he never for- 
 got. Coming to him thus, as songs reached 
 the people before printing was invented, 
 through gleemen and minstrels, their sweet- 
 ness lingered in his ears, and he soon found 
 himself singing in the same strain. Some 
 of his earliest inspiration was drawn from 
 Burns, and he tells us of his joy, when, one 
 day after the visit of the old Scotchman, 
 his schoolmaster loaned him a copy of that 
 poet's works. " I began to make rhymes 
 myself, and to imagine stories and adven- 
 tures," he says in his simple way. 
 
 Indeed, he began to rhyme almost as 
 soon as he had learned to read, and he kept 
 his gift a secret from all except his oldest 
 sister, fearing that his father, who was a 
 prosaic man, would think that he was wast- 
 ing his time. He wrote under the fences, 
 in the attic, in the barn, — wherever he 
 could escape observation ; and, as pen and 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. to/ 
 
 ink were not always available, he sometimes 
 used chalk, and even charcoal. Great was 
 the surprise df the family when some of his 
 verses were unearthed — literally unearthed 
 — from under a heap of rubbish in a garret. 
 But his father frowned upon these evidences 
 of the bent of his mind, not out of unkind- 
 ness, but because he doubted the suffi- 
 ciency of the boy's education for a literary 
 life, and did not wish to inspire him with 
 hopes which might never be fulfilled. 
 
 His sister had faith in him, nevertheless, 
 and without his knowledge she sent one of 
 his poems to the editor of the " Free Press," 
 a newspaper published in Newburyport. 
 Whittier was helping his father to repair 
 a stone wall by the roadside, when the 
 carrier flung a copy of the paper to him, and, 
 unconscious that any thing of his own was 
 in it, he opened it, and glanced up and down 
 the columns. His eyes fell on some verses 
 called " The Exile's Departure : " — 
 
 " Fond scenes which delighted my youthful existence, 
 With feelings of sorrow I bid ye adieu, — 
 A lasting adieu, for now, dim in the. distance, 
 The shores of Hibernia recede from my view. 
 
I08 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 Farewell to the cliffs, tempest-beaten and gray, 
 
 Which guard the loved shores of my own native 
 land ! 
 Farewell to the village and sail-shadowed bay, 
 The forest -crowned hill, and the water -washed 
 strand ! " 
 
 His eyes swam. It was his own poem, 
 — the first he ever had in print. 
 
 " What is the matter with thee ? " his 
 father demanded, seeinof how dazed he was ; 
 but, though he resumed his work on tlie 
 wall, he could not speak, and he had to 
 steal a glance at the paper again and again 
 before he could convince himself that he 
 was not dreaming. 
 
 Sure enough, the poem was there with 
 his initial at the foot of it, "W., Haverhill, 
 June I, 1826;" and, better still, this edi- 
 torial notice:" If 'W.,' at Haverhill, will 
 continue to favor us with pieces, beautiful 
 as the one inserted in our poetical depart- 
 ment of to-day, we shall esteem it a favor." 
 
 The editor thought so much of " The 
 Exile's Departure " and some other verses 
 which followed it from the same hand, that 
 he resolved to make the acquaintance of 
 
JOHN GREEiXLEAF U'HITTIER. 109 
 
 his new contributor, and he drove over to 
 see him. Whittier, then a boy of eighteen, 
 was summoned from the fields where he 
 was working, clad only in shirt, trousers, 
 and straw hat ; and having slipped in at 
 the back door, so that he might put his 
 shoes and coat on, came into the room 
 with " shrinking diffidence, almost unable 
 to speak, and blushing like a maiden." 
 The editor was a young man, not more 
 than twenty-two or twenty-three, and the 
 friendship that began with this visit lasted 
 until death ended it. How strong and 
 close it was, and how it was made to serve 
 the cause of freedom, may be learned in 
 the life of the great abolitionist, W'illiam 
 Lloyd Garrison, for that was the editor's 
 name. 
 
 The poet's corner of the newspaper did 
 not prove to be the temple of fame which 
 Whittier imaofined it to be when the " Free 
 Press " was dropped into his hands with his 
 poem in it, and he still had an up-hill path 
 before him. But he was not consumed with 
 the desire for the glitter and noise which 
 satisfy some ambitions, and he lost thought 
 
no BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 of himself in the great struggle for the 
 emancipation of the negro which he joined 
 with his friend Garrison. Fame never 
 passes true genius by, however, and when 
 it came it brought with it the love and 
 reverence of thousands who recognize in 
 Whittier a nature abounding in patience, 
 unselfishness, and all the sweetness of 
 Christian charity. 
 

 ./ 
 
 ^/7^i-'</>L^C^<^^p^ /t^^ •^/=w<_ <^/>z^ ^^^^-c — 
 
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON. 1 1 1 
 
 FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON. 
 
 Mr. Stockton may be said to have been 
 half a city boy and half a country boy, for 
 his early years were divided between a life 
 in town and a life in the country. He was 
 born in Philadelphia, on April 5, 1834, and 
 was one of twelve children, three of whom 
 were by his father's first wife, and nine by 
 a second wife. Six of the latter children 
 survived to an adult age, and of these 
 Frank was the first-born. His full name is 
 Francis Richard Stockton, and he owes 
 this, he tells us, to the romantic tastes of 
 one of his half-sisters, who insisted on his 
 being called Francis after the first King 
 of France, who bore that name, and Rich- 
 ard after Richard the Lion-hearted, King 
 of England. 
 
 When he was ten years old, his family 
 moved from Philadelphia to a farmhouse 
 in Bucks County, Penn., and, as no school 
 
112 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 was within reach, he and his brothers were 
 allowed to run wild, and to amuse them- 
 selves in the various ways that were sure 
 to occur to high-spirited and healthy boys 
 when left to their own resources. 
 
 Nothing that Mr. Stockton has written 
 is more amusing than the story of his own 
 boyhood, as I have had the privilege of 
 hearing him tell it. 
 
 The house in Bucks County was one of 
 the most fascinating places in the world 
 for a boy. It was near the woods, where 
 game could be found ; neighbors were few 
 and far between ; and about a mile away 
 there was a wild tract called Green Swamp, 
 to which all sorts of awe-inspiring legends 
 attached. It was said to be impenetrable 
 to man, though haunted by strange beasts ; 
 and in the middle of it was a upas-tree, 
 which, like that of the fable, stifled all 
 things that came near it. The rumored 
 impenetrability of the swamp, and the 
 legend of the upas, made it all the more 
 inviting to the boys, of course, and they 
 attempted again and again to explore it. 
 The water and bog were dotted with hum 
 
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTOX. II3 
 
 mocks of solid land, like j)luins in a pud- 
 ding, and they had to leap from one to the 
 other of these. vSometimes they slipped, 
 and got soaked in the ooze, but they were 
 never able to get very far, and whether the 
 upas is there or not is still a mystery. 
 
 Somewhere under the roof of the house 
 there was an apartment which was called 
 the gun-room, — probably to distinguish it 
 froni the other rooms, rather than from its 
 use as the family arsenal. Exploring this 
 one day, Francis the First and Richard the 
 Lion-hearted, united in the small and mis- 
 chievous person commonly called Frank, 
 found an old gun without a lock, which 
 had been condemned as useless. The idea 
 of condemning a gun merely because it 
 had no lock, struck him as a piece of folly ; 
 it was easy to repair so slight a defect as 
 that. So he loaded the gun, and took it 
 out with him into the garden, carrying an 
 ordinary hammer with him as he went. 
 He put a percussion-cap on the nipple, 
 and having rested his weapon on the frame 
 of a hot-bed in the garden, — for it was a 
 heavy old blunderbuss, — he took aim at 
 
114 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 a neighbor's chickens, and then struck the 
 cap with the liammer in his hand. The 
 gun went off, and three of the chickens 
 fell. For a moment his experiment seemed 
 to have been an unqualified success, but 
 there was a stinging sensation near his eye. 
 The cap had flown off the nipple, and struck 
 him, and he nearly lost his sight. This 
 was one of the many lessons he had, that it 
 is not wise to assume that one's elders are 
 all fools. 
 
 The boys slept in a great, old-fashioned, 
 four-post bed, and one night they turned 
 it over, and climbed up into the high plat- 
 form which it made when inverted. They 
 were within a few inches of the ceilinfj, 
 and they proposed to sleep in this way ; 
 but their mother was brought to the scene 
 by the noise they had made, and they 
 had to replace the bed in its proper 
 position. 
 
 They told stories after they went to bed, 
 Frank and his brother John collaborating 
 for the amusement of their younger brother 
 William, who lay at the foot of the bed. 
 Frank would start the story, and at the 
 
FRAXCIS RICHARD STOCKTON. 115 
 
 point where he left off, John would take it 
 up, depending on his own imagination for 
 the continuation. The end was often very 
 different from what the beofinner had in- 
 tended it to be ; but the uncertainty of the 
 development quickened the interest, both 
 for the narrator and the listener, who, if he 
 dared to go to sleep during the story, was 
 immediately kicked out of bed. 
 
 Frank was small, and rather slio-ht of 
 figure, but he was as athletic as the rest. 
 They were all good riders and swimmers, 
 and were fond of gardening and carpentr)-. 
 Their knack in the latter was remarkable. 
 They used the full -sized tools of a working 
 carpenter, and built houses which, though 
 not fitted for human occupation, would 
 have been too large for any doll but one 
 of extravagant tastes. 
 
 At the end of three years their parents 
 decided that the untrammelled life the boys 
 were leading would not do any longer, and 
 they returned to Philadelphia. Frank had 
 already been in a private school, and he 
 was now sent to a public school, from 
 which he passed into the Central High 
 
Il6 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 School. He was graduated with the de- 
 gree of Bachelor of Arts. 
 
 He was not an ambitious boy, but a 
 clever one, and it was easy for him to 
 stand second in his class. His natural 
 bent was in the direction of literature, and 
 he was not more than ten years old when 
 he began to write verses. On one occa- 
 sion he sent a poem to a religious paper 
 published in Baltimore, and when it was 
 returned to him he made up his mind that 
 the editor was an ignorant person, who 
 could not appreciate a good thing, and 
 who would have rejected the works of 
 Shakspeare and Milton had they been 
 offered to him. To prove this point, he 
 copied out one of Milton's devotional 
 poems, and, having attached a fictitious 
 name to it, he sent it to the same editor. 
 He was chagrined to find, however, that 
 the editor at once recognized its merits 
 and printed it, though he, this arbiter of 
 the destiny of literary aspirants, did not 
 detect the fictitious character of the alleged 
 author. 
 
 The restraints of the city did not curb 
 
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON. 1 17 
 
 the frolicsome propensities of Frank and 
 his brothers. Their father was a devout 
 man, who frequently entertained the minis- 
 ters of his denomination ; and one day, 
 when some of these gentlemen were guests 
 at dinner, it was noticed with surprise that 
 all the boys refused mince-pie. They 
 seemed to be choking, and rushed away 
 from the table when It was offered to them. 
 The pie had been made the evening before, 
 and during the night the boys had stolen 
 into the pantry, and substituted mush for 
 the mince-meat. They had many a clan- 
 destine supper in their night-dresses, and 
 used to slide down the banisters, because, 
 as one of their number impressed upon 
 them (very likely it was Frank) , the crack- 
 ing of their knees would perhaps have 
 awakened the household. 
 
 They had a secret society, and when a 
 candidate presented himself for admission, 
 this question was asked him : "If your 
 mother was being chased by an Indian who 
 wanted to tomahawk her, and she hid her- 
 self in some place that you knew of, what 
 would you say to the Indian if he asked 
 
Il8 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 you where she was ? " If the candidate 
 admitted that he would deceive the Indian 
 under such circumstances as these, he was 
 considered worthy of admission, but if he 
 said his adherence to truth would compel 
 him to sacrifice his mother to the savage, 
 he was rejected. 
 
 They also belonged to another society, 
 the Crazy Club, of which Frank was the 
 chief officer, his title being the Grand 
 Worthy Maniac. The meetings of the 
 club were held in boats on the river, and 
 the Grand Worthy Maniac exercised a des- 
 potic authority over the members. They 
 were required to obey his mandates im- 
 plicitly, and he would sometimes order one 
 of them to take off his clothes, and swim, 
 on a moonlight night, into the middle of 
 the stream, and singr comic sones while 
 floating there. 
 
 Once they ventured to play at pirates, 
 and rowed out in chase of another boat 
 which some boys were pulling. The latter 
 did not seem in the least alarmed, nor did 
 they make any attempt to avoid capture. 
 When they were overtaken, the pirate chief 
 
FRAXCIS RICHARD STOCKTOX. 119 
 
 demanded, " What do you mean by coming 
 out on this river ? " But they made no 
 answer, and showed no intention of resist- 
 ance. Tliis nonplussed the pursuers, who 
 had imagined that there would be a hand- 
 to-hand combat, in which they would be 
 the victors. " What do you mean?" they 
 repeated. Still the other boys had nothing 
 to say ; and instead of making them walk 
 the plank as they had intended, the pirates 
 rowed off very quietly, saying, " Now, never 
 do it again, that's all." Piracy did not 
 seem to be as exciting as some stories 
 made it appear. 
 
 Behind all this nonsense and mischief 
 there was plenty of hard work and solid 
 readinof. Frank was crraduated from the 
 Central Hip-h School when he was eifjhteen 
 years old, and was intended to be a physi- 
 cian ; but, for some unexplained reason, he 
 took up the art of wood-engraving. His 
 ambition was to be an author, and he p-ave 
 his leisure to writinor articles and stories, 
 many of which were accepted and printed 
 while he was still a boy. Then he gave 
 up w^ood-engraving altogether, and entered 
 
I20 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 on a journalistic career, which, when " St. 
 Nicholas" was started, in 1873. led him 
 into the position of assistant editor of that 
 attractive magazine, under the editorship 
 of Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge. Long before 
 this he had made a reputation as a humor- 
 ous and fanciful writer, but it was not 
 until he was forty years old, or more, that 
 he made his greatest hit with the Rudder 
 Grange stories, in which the rare quality 
 of his genius was first discovered. Thir- 
 teen years have gone by, each year bring- 
 ing him some new honor, and he does not 
 look a day older now than he did then. 
 He still looks like a man of thirty-five, and 
 he may be considered an instance of what 
 he terms " protracted youth." 
 
/^ ^>U^ ^^ -^ '^^^^ /^/fe^t^le^ ,_ 
 ^ ^^ (lu.H*k^ ;^i^H^ib ^^^^S'^ 
 
 7^^-A^ r"<^ a«^^ ^ *^ i<<jf^'^*y , 
 
EDMUiM) CLARI:.\CI: S 11. DM AN. 121 
 
 l'. DM UNI) CI.ARI'.NCI'. S'll'.nMAN. 
 
 \a:\ {he reader pictiii-e to liiniscll an old 
 iium ill such a cosUinu' as a iJiospcroiis 
 lawyer would wear lorly years ai;o, vvilli a 
 (leliaiil I)oy standinii; Ix'lore liim. 'I'lie old 
 man is icproviiii^-, and \\\v. hoy lias noL yet 
 heen reduced to the point ol pe.ililcnce. 
 
 "Couie. sir." says the elder severely, 
 vvishini;- to show that the culprit's ollence is 
 without a parallel, "did you ever hear ol 
 any j;reat man who lan away h-om home in 
 his youlh ? " 
 
 " Yes," the hoy hlurls oul lo ihe surprise 
 of his (luestioner. 
 
 " And who was it, pray?" 
 
 " Mastei-m;ui Ready, sir." 
 
 " Masteiinan Ready" is not a name to Ix; 
 found in dictionaries of illustrious pei'soii- 
 a^es, hut to the imaL;inaliv(^ hoy C"a|)L. 
 MarryaL's lun'o set-med to aflord a very 
 good i)recedent in justilicaLiun ot" his (on 
 duct. 
 
122 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 The okl man's sense of humor was 
 touched; and for some time afterwards — 
 long- enough for him to see the folly of his 
 excuse — the boy was nicknamed " Master- 
 man Ready." 
 
 His real name was Edmund Clarence 
 Stedman ; and his Mentor was his great- 
 uncle, James Stedman of Norwich, Conn., 
 who was bringing him up. 
 
 Thouoh born in Hartford, Conn., he was 
 taken while an infant to Plainfield, N.J. ; 
 and in his sixth year, when his mother, 
 who had been widowed, married a second 
 tinie, he was transferred to the care of this 
 uncle at Norwich, where he remained until 
 he reached the age of fifteen. 
 
 It was Norwich Town, two miles away 
 from the city of Norwich ; a quaint old 
 place not unlike Portsmouth, full of colo- 
 nial houses, and historic families like the 
 Huntinetons, the Trumbulls, and the 
 Stedmans themselves. It was the birth- 
 place of Benedict Arnold. Old traditions 
 were believed in, and old customs observed. 
 No town in New England celebrated 
 Thanksgiving as Norwich Town did. Enor- 
 
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. 123 
 
 mous bonfires were burned, such as re- 
 duced ordinary bonfires to glow-worms by 
 comparison ; barrels strung on masts sixty 
 feet high, begged or bought by gangs of 
 boys in the surrounding neighborhood for 
 months before. A capital place for any 
 boy, one would say, and especially for a boy 
 of an imaginative turn of mind with a taste 
 for romance. 
 
 There were six boys in the house of 
 
 James Stedman, so that there was no lack 
 
 of companionship ; and a curious thing 
 
 about these six boys was that they were 
 
 three pairs of brothers, the elder of each 
 
 pair being two years the senior of the 
 
 younger, while the respective ages of each 
 
 pair were alike; or, in other words, the 
 
 eldest of one pair was the same age as 
 
 the eldest of the other pairs, and the age 
 
 of the youngest was the same in each case 
 
 also. There was not a place for berr>'ing 
 
 or nutting that they did not know, nor was 
 
 there an adventure in which they did not 
 
 unite. And at night, when they reached 
 
 home, they sat up in bed telling stories; and 
 
 in this amusement, as in their expeditions 
 
124 BOYHOOD OF IwlMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 in the woods, Edmund Clarence Stedman 
 was tlie leader. 
 
 A small, active, sinewy little fellow he 
 was, of a slender frame but great endur- 
 ance, sensitive, impulsive, passionate ; and 
 though he was what may be called an out- 
 of-door boy, rejoicing in physical exercises, 
 — a good swimmer, a champion runner, 
 and expert in woodcraft, into the mysteries 
 of which he was initiated by a half-breed 
 named Ira, — he was as eaofcr for learninof 
 as for sport, and he stood at the head of 
 his class in the Norwich Academy. 
 
 But despite his vitality he was not a 
 happy boy. He had all the painful sensi- 
 bilities of the poetic temperanicmt, and 
 often withdrew from companionship to be 
 alone with his own thoughts. His great- 
 uncle vv^as a disciplinarian, a just, well-mean- 
 ing but exacting man, quite incapable, ap- 
 parently, of understanding the ultimate 
 value of the fiery and imaginative character 
 of his nephew, though he was of the great- 
 est use to the latter in his studies, and 
 found in him such a pupil as a thorough- 
 going scholar loves. 
 
EDMUND CLAREXCE STEDMAX. 1 25 
 
 Except in their love of learning they had 
 little in common, however, and the boy re- 
 belled against the ascetic life around him. 
 and that bitter sectarian feeling which ran 
 so high in Norwich Town that the young 
 people of one denomination were forbidden 
 to play with those of other churches. Then 
 — and this was the principal source of his 
 unhappiness — he was separated from his 
 mother, and to a boy of his temperament 
 no deprivation could be more serious than 
 this. How pitifully his soul year^ied for 
 her through all the years he spent in Nor- 
 wich Town ! How in every moment of de- 
 spair it seemed that only her presence was 
 needed to make him happy, and set him 
 right ! How clearly she would have been 
 able to see what all the rest misunderstood ! 
 He was much like her in his tastes, and he 
 had inherited from her a love of poets and 
 poetry which deepened the sympathy be- 
 tween them. She did nor discourage or 
 disparage the poetic faculty, as parents 
 often wisely do. "My son, be a poet," she 
 said, and he hardly needed her direction, 
 for he had begun to rhyme in infancy. 
 
126 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron 
 cast the spell of their genius over him, and 
 lightened the burdens of many of his 
 weary hours. 
 
 At the aee of fifteen he went to Yale, 
 with the largest class that ever entered that 
 college, — a class, too, that was notable for 
 its literary ability. George W. Smalley 
 (" G. W. S."), the London correspondent 
 of the "Tribune;" Andrew D. White, 
 afterwards president of Cornell University; 
 Isaac H. Bromley, Charlton T. Lewis, and 
 Delano Goddard, the latter three all jour- 
 nalists of wide reputation, — were among 
 the members. 
 
 Here he distinguished himself by his 
 Greek and English compositions, and took 
 a first prize in his sophomore year. But 
 he did not remain to graduate, though in 
 after years the college placed him among 
 its alumni with the degree of M.A. He 
 wanted to see the world, and he set out 
 in search of adventure, on an expedition 
 which ended with less romantic results 
 than he expected. 
 
 He wavered between the choice of liter- 
 
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. 127 
 
 ature and journalism, but the latter seemed 
 to offer the more solid ground ; and one 
 day when he was in New York he sought 
 an audience with Horace Greeley, who was 
 his ideal of a great editor. Mr. Greeley 
 sat in an armchair, reading a paper, while a 
 shoe-black was polishing his shoes, a lux- 
 ury to which, it is said, the famous journal- 
 ist did not often treat himself. The boy 
 approached timidly and reverently, and in- 
 quired whether there was any vacancy on 
 the staff. " No, young man," was the curt 
 reply, and this one word closed the inter- 
 view as a shutter extinguishes a dancing 
 sunbeam. The novice had been in the pres- 
 ence of his hero, however, and the brief 
 speech lingered in his ear as if it had been 
 a burst of eloquence. 
 
 The poetic quality was not an enfeebling 
 trait in this youth. He had fine courage 
 and manly resolution. He went back to 
 Norwich, and at nineteen became the ed- 
 itor of the Norwich " Tribune," engaging 
 his old classmate, Isaac H. Bromley, to 
 assist him. Then he took charee of the 
 " Herald," published at Winsted, Conn., im- 
 
128 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 parting to it a dignity and an originality 
 which country newspapers do not usually 
 have ; and a year or two later he removed 
 to New York, where, after a while, he 
 found the vacancy on Horace Greeley's 
 staff for which he had been lookinof. 
 
 He went to the front as war correspond- 
 ent, and showed all the courage, endur- 
 ance, and fertility of resource, which that 
 post requires. Had he chosen, he might 
 have filled the highest positions in journal- 
 ism ; but literature in the form of poetry 
 and criticism had a greater attraction for 
 him, and his work in this direction has re- 
 vealed the unusual combination of creative 
 imagination and dispassionate judgment. 
 All sorts of honors have come to him, but 
 he remains a boy in the earnestness of his 
 friendships and the freshness of his enthu- 
 siasms. His mother is an idol still, and of 
 her he has written in one of his poems, — 
 
 " She seemed an angel to our infant eyes ! 
 Once when the glorifying moon revealed 
 Her who at evening by our pillow kneeled, — 
 Soft-voiced and golden-haired, from holy skies 
 Flown to her loves on wings of Paradise, — 
 
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. I2g 
 
 We looked to see the pinions half concealed. 
 
 The Tuscan vines and olives will not yield 
 Her back to me, who loved her in this wise, 
 
 And since have little known her, but have grown 
 To see another mother tenderly 
 
 Watch over sleeping children of my own. 
 
 Perhaps the years have changed her : yet alone 
 This picture lingers ; still she seems to me 
 The fair young angel of my infancy." 
 
I30 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 EDWARD EVERETT HALE. 
 
 The boyhood of Edward Everett Hale 
 reads like a chapter in one of his own 
 stories of home life. There was nothing 
 miraculous or romantic in it ; no prodi- 
 gious feats of learning, no martyrdom, and 
 no canonization of saints. 
 
 His father and mother were just the 
 kind of people that he holds up to admira- 
 tion in his books, — full of good sense, 
 liberality, and originality ; controlling their 
 children with a secure hand, but directing 
 instead of driving them, and reasoning with 
 them instead of scolding. Piety in that 
 household never wore a long face ; benevo- 
 lence worked in deeds and not in words. 
 
 At the end of his first month in the 
 Boston Latin School, the boy came home 
 with a report which showed that he was 
 ninth in a class of fifteen ; and he dreaded 
 handing it to his mother, as he thought 
 she would be displeased to find him so low 
 
FROM 
 
 EDWARD'E..HALE. 
 
 39 Highland St. 
 
 ROXBURY. Mass.^ 
 
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EDWARD EVERETT HALE. 131 
 
 in the class. " Oh," she said, " that is 
 no matter. Probably the other boys are 
 brighter than you. God made them so, 
 and you cannot help that. But the report 
 says that you are among- the boys who be- 
 have well. That you can see to, and that 
 is all I care about." 
 
 This little incident shows the reasona- 
 bleness which guided the conduct of the 
 Hale household. A boy was expected to 
 do all in his power, but no more ; and if 
 he could not do it one way, he was allowed 
 to attempt it by some new method, which 
 often proved to be no less successful on 
 account of its novelty. He was not forced 
 to conform to patterns, simply because they 
 fitted other boys, though there was no lack 
 of discipline and no toleration of the wilful 
 misuse of time. The motto that has since 
 become famous was so closely lived up to, 
 that it might have been as unceasingly in 
 the ears of the family as the ticking of the 
 
 clock : — 
 
 " Look up, and not down ; 
 Look forward, and not back ; 
 Look out, and not in ; 
 Lend a hand." 
 
132 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 The boy who was born in Boston on 
 April 3, 1822, came of a stock which justi- 
 fied the expectation of a brilHant and use- 
 ful career for him. His grand-uncle was 
 Nathan Hale, who, when he was led out 
 to execution as a spy in the Revolutionary 
 war, said with his last breath, " I regret 
 that I have only one life to surrender for 
 my country ; " and his uncle on his mother's 
 side was Edward Everett the orator, after 
 whom he was named. His father was a 
 man who combined scholarship with activ- 
 ity in public affairs, and it was through his 
 advocacy that the first steam railway was 
 built in Massachusetts. 
 
 Great are the chansfes that have taken 
 place in Boston since then. The boy is 
 a man, and looking back says, "I have 
 sailed my bark boat on the salt waters, 
 where I now can sit in the parlors of 
 my parishioners. I have studied botany 
 on the marshes, where I now sit in my 
 own study to prepare the notes which I 
 read to you. I rode in triumph on the 
 locomotive which hissed over the first five 
 miles that were ready of that highway to 
 
EDWARD EVERETT HALE. 133 
 
 the West, where now she might run five 
 thousand." 
 
 A good half of Boston is buih on land 
 recovered from the sea ; and there are 
 solid streets and houses where, less than 
 half a century ago, the water flowed, sink- 
 ing- and risinor with the tides. 
 
 He was sent to a dame-school while he 
 was still an infant ; but he learned little 
 there, and probably was not expected to 
 learn. As the children droned through 
 their lessons, he sat quietly watching the 
 motes of dust dancing in the sunbeams 
 that streamed through the blinds, and his 
 o-reatest interest was in the makine of 
 sand-pies on the floor. When he was 
 placed in a big yellow chair in the middle 
 of the room, he could not be made to un- 
 derstand that it was lor some misconduct. 
 
 Then he was sent to a school kept by 
 a man who was amiable but incompetent, 
 and he gathered scarcely more here than 
 he did in watching the sunbeams. " A 
 feather-pillow sort of a man was ' Simple ' 
 the master, — a good-natured, innocent 
 fellow, who would neither set the bay on 
 
134 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 fire nor want to, who could and would 
 keep us out of mischief for five or six 
 hours a day, and would never send us 
 home mad with rage, or injustice, or am- 
 bition." 
 
 He was sometimes late in coming to 
 school ; and in order to reproach him, 
 Edward Everett Hale, then a small and 
 audacious lad, marshalled all the boys in 
 their seats, and had a class out to recite 
 before he arrived. 
 
 This saucy boy had strong opinions on 
 many subjects at this early age, and he put 
 little value on schools and schoolmasters. 
 But he was a great reader, and his reading 
 fertilized his mind as a field is fertilized 
 before the sower scatters the seed. 
 
 Grimm's " Fairy Stories " opened the 
 world of magic to him ; and the poems of 
 Sir Walter Scott had such a fascination for 
 him, that there never was a time after he 
 had read them, when he could not quote 
 long passages from memory. As with all 
 imaginative boys, a book of travels trans- 
 ported him to the very spot described ; 
 and as he read an account of the Arctic 
 
EDWARD EVERETT HALE. 135 
 
 regions, the house melted into air, and he 
 seemed to be sittinor in the cabin of an 
 ice-bound ship, held fast in the jaws of 
 the polar sea, with the aurora flashing up 
 and down the sky. Happy is the boy 
 whose imagination has such a spread of 
 wing that he can leave every care on 
 earth behind, and forget himself in a book ! 
 Life has no greater boon than this, and it 
 is the special gift of youth which age can 
 seldom claim. 
 
 When he was nine years of age he was 
 sent to the Boston Latin School, where 
 Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, John 
 Hancock, Edward Everett, and Charles 
 Sumner had been educated. It is the 
 oldest school in America, and one of the 
 best ; and in it the subject of our sketch 
 made substantial progress, though he sel- 
 dom stood higher than ninth in a class of 
 fifteen. Unlike most budding authors, he 
 was fond of arithmetic ; and another pecu- 
 liarity of his was, that he could not for the 
 life of him see why his opinions on mat- 
 ters of education were not regarded with 
 as much consideration as the master's. " I 
 
136 nO'HOOI) OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 had a very decided feeling" that it was as 
 fittincr that he should consult me as I 
 hini," he says with charming frankness. 
 
 All the while he was reading diligently ; 
 and two summers he was taken out of 
 school to read at home, an excellent plan 
 when a boy is growing fast, though it 
 would be a pity if he should miss the 
 hardening and sharpening which come 
 from association with other boys. 
 
 Another privilege he had which any boy 
 who aspires to become an author or a 
 journalist might well envy. Who that is 
 stirred with such an ambition has not 
 looked up with awe and longing, to the 
 front of a great newspaper-office, wishing 
 that he might be admitted to its secrets, 
 its labors, and its honors? Nothing in the 
 world has seemed so o-lorious, not even 
 the Capitol, pillars, steps, dome, and all, 
 as a newspaper-building in some by-street 
 of the city, with its lights shining in the 
 upper story where the compositors are 
 setting type, tjie presses rattling in the 
 basement, and the entrance with editors, 
 reporters, and messengers coming and go- 
 ing at all hours of the day and night. 
 
EDWARD EVERETT HALE. 1 37 
 
 Well, the father of Edward Everett Hale 
 was the editor of the Boston "Adver- 
 tiser," and the offices of that paper resem- 
 bled a nursery to his son, who, like Wil- 
 liam Dean Howells, learned to set type 
 almost as soon as he had learned to read. 
 He not only mastered the mechanical parts 
 of the business of making a newspaper, 
 but wrote articles for the "Advertiser" 
 while he was still a boy, and he translated 
 an article from a French paper for it 
 before he was eleven : a good beginning 
 for one who in after-life was to fill in turn 
 every position, from that of a reporter, to 
 the much loftier perch of the controlling 
 editor. 
 
 In 1835 he entered Harvard University, 
 where Lowell was already a student ; and 
 his literary tastes were fostered there by 
 Edward Tyrrel Channing, the professor of 
 English language and literature, who also 
 taught Dana, Story, Holmes, Parkman, 
 and many others who have since made 
 their mark in authorship. Longfellow was 
 another of the professors. " He came to 
 Cambridge in our first years. He was not 
 
138 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 SO much older than we as to be distant, 
 was always accessible, friendly, and sympa- 
 thetic. All poor teachers let the book 
 come between them and the pupil. Great 
 teachers never do : Longfellow never did. 
 We used to call him ' Head,' which meant 
 head of the modern language department." 
 
 Hale was graduated in 1839, and about 
 that time he made the acquaintance of two 
 new authors through their books. One 
 was Alfred Tennyson, and the other John 
 Ruskin. The first copy of Tennyson that 
 fell into his hands had been brought 
 from England by Emerson, who was 
 always kind to young people, and lent 
 his books freely. Then Ruskin appeared, 
 and his writings developed the love of the 
 beautiful in the young student, and gave 
 him the habit of a close observation of 
 nature out of doors. Scarcely any thing 
 in the shape of a book was uninteresting 
 or unprofitable to him ; but he confesses 
 that he could not enjoy Locke's " Essay 
 on the Human Understanding," and that 
 he went to sleep over it. 
 
 After his graduation, he taught Latin and 
 
EDWARD EVERETT HALE. 139 
 
 Greek for two years, and at the same time 
 wrote articles and stories for the papers. 
 He is as widely known now as an author 
 as he is as a preacher; but when he was 
 twenty-four he entered the Christian min- 
 istry, and he has never given it up. The 
 best of his endeavors have been devoted 
 to it, and in his life he has been governed 
 by a principle which he uttered before a 
 college society, — " We professional men 
 must serve the world, not, like the handi- 
 craftsman, for a price accurately repre- 
 senting the work done ; but as those who 
 deal with infinite values, and confer bene- 
 fits as freely and nobly as Nature." 
 
I40 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Some winter's evening, when the reader 
 of this is in a mood to beguile himself with 
 a pleasant book of essays, I would advise 
 rhim to take down from the shelf the " Fire- 
 side Travels " of James Russell Lowell, in 
 which he will find among other good things 
 a picturesque account of Cambridge as it 
 was in the poet's boyhood. " Cambridge 
 Thirty Years Ago " he calls it, but the time 
 he describes has crept back twenty years 
 more since it was written, and to us it is 
 a picture, not of thirty years, but of half a 
 century, ago. 
 
 Cambridge was not the noisy and popu- 
 lous place then that it is now. It was not 
 linked to Boston by the endless chain of 
 horse-cars which are runninof to and fro 
 night and day. It was a quiet country 
 village, resembling the country villages of 
 England, and resting in the shade of wide- 
 
eLMWOOO, 
 CAMBRIDGE MASS. 
 
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JAMl'lS RifSSKIJ. LOWELL. I41 
 
 branched, thick-leaved elms, lindens, and 
 horse-chestnuts. TIk; lv(;volution was as 
 fresh in t]i(; ])ul)lic mind as th(' Civil War 
 is to-day ; and the recent presence of the 
 British soldiers could be traced in the 
 hooks from which they had hun^- \\\v'\\' 
 hammocks, and in the dents made by their 
 muskets on the floor of the minister's 
 library in the old gambrel-roofed house 
 where the picture of a lady was shown with 
 a slit in the canvas, which a red-coat had 
 made with a thrust of his rapier. 
 
 People were still living who remained 
 loyal to King George ; and women still 
 washed clothes in the town spring. One 
 coach carried all the passengers there were 
 between the village and Boston. A youth 
 named Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had 
 just gone forth from the gambrel-roofed 
 house to study medicine in the schools of 
 Paris, was spoken of as a sprightly versifier, 
 who might make his mark in literature if 
 he chose. The poetical accomplishments 
 of another young man named Longfellow 
 had been heard of in the community, 
 though Ik; had not yet been invited to take 
 
142 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 a professorship In the college as he was a 
 few years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson 
 was preaching in Boston,, and John Green- 
 leaf Whittier, a young Quaker of Haverhill, 
 was fillinof an editor's chair, and sendinor 
 out verses that thrilled with the promise of 
 genuine lyric feeling. 
 
 Though he was destined to become their 
 intimate in after-years, Lowell knew none 
 of these at this time. They had all begun 
 the battle of life, while he was still a 
 schoolboy, with his hands In his pockets, 
 and his eyes open to all the sights of the 
 little world around him. 
 
 " Everybody knew everybody, and all 
 about everybody," he says In " Fireside 
 Travels ; " " and village wit, whose high 
 'chanofe was around the little market-house 
 In the town square, had labelled every 
 more marked individuality with nicknames 
 that clunof like burs." There was the 
 village whitewasher, all of whose belong- 
 Ines emblemized his trade. He white- 
 washed his trees, and grew the whitest of 
 china asters In his garden. He wore a 
 white neckcloth; and kept white fowls. 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 1 43 
 
 white ducks, and white geese. There was 
 an old Scotch gardener who told romantic 
 stories, and showed an imaginary French 
 bullet, sometimes in one leg, sometimes in 
 the other, and sometimes toward nightfall 
 in both. One of the two grocers was a 
 deacon, upon whom the boys were fond of 
 playing a familiar joke. 
 
 One of them would enter the shop, and 
 ask, " Have you any sour apples, deacon ? " 
 
 ** Well, no, I haven't any just now that 
 are exactly sour ; but there's the bell-flower 
 apple, and folks that like a sour apple gen- 
 erally like that." 
 
 Another boy would then come in, and 
 say, " Have you any sweet apples, dea- 
 con : 
 
 " Well, no," the deacon would reply, " I 
 haven't any just now that are exactly sweet ; 
 but there's the bell-flower apple, and folks 
 that like a sweet apple generally like that." 
 
 Thus it was that the deacon's apples 
 were suited to the customer's taste, whether 
 he wanted them sour or sweet. 
 
 The barber's shop was a sort of museum, 
 and no boy ever went rfiere to have his 
 
144 I'OYIIOOn OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 hair cut tliat \\v. was not accompanied by 
 troops of friends, wlio thus inspected the 
 curiosities o;;ratis. 
 
 " What a charming- place it was, how full 
 of wonder and delight ! " says Lowell in the 
 essay already quoted. "The sunny little 
 room, fronting south-west upon the com- 
 mon, rang with canaries and Java sparrows, 
 nor were the familiar notes of robin, thrush, 
 and bobolink wanting ; antl a large white 
 cockatoo harangued vaguely at intervals, 
 in what we believed on R., the barber's, 
 authority to be the I lottentot language. 
 . . . The walls were covered with curious 
 old Dutch prints, beaks of albatross and 
 penguin, and wliales' teeth fantastically 
 engraved. Inhere was b^redcM'ick the Great, 
 \\\\\\ head drooped plottingly, and keen 
 sidelong glance from iind(;r the three- 
 cornered hat. There hung Bonaparte, too, 
 the long-haired, haggard general of Italy, 
 his eyes sombre with prefigured destiny ; 
 and there was his silent grave, — the 
 dream and the fulfilment. (lood store of 
 sea-fights there was also ; above all, Paul 
 Jones in the ' Bonhomme Richard,' the 
 
JAMES RUSSELL L^OWELL.. 1 45 
 
 smoke rolling courteously to leeward, that 
 we might see him dealing thunderous work 
 to the two hostile vessels, each twice as 
 large as his own, and the reality of the 
 scene corroborated by streaks of red paint 
 leaping from the mouth of every gun. 
 Suspended over the fireplace, with the 
 curling-tongs, were an Indian bow and 
 arrows ; and in the corners of the room 
 stood New Zealand paddles and war-clubs, 
 quaintly carved. The model of a ship in 
 glass we variously estimated to be worth 
 from a hundred to a thousand dollars — 
 the barber rather favoring the higher valu- 
 ation, though never distinctly committing 
 himself. Among these wonders, the only 
 suspicious one was an Indian tomahawk, 
 which had too much the peaceful look of a 
 shingling-hatchet. Did any rarity enter 
 the town, it gravitated naturally to these 
 walls, to the very nail that waited to receive 
 it, and where, the day after its accession, it 
 seemed to have hung a lifetime." 
 
 Lowell's home was at Elmwood, about a 
 mile away from Harvard Square, and it 
 was in this roomy mansion that he was 
 
146 I'yOYlIOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 born on Fel). 22, 1819. His father was a 
 Unitarian clergyman, and he was descended 
 from a long line of prosperous people 
 who had originally come to America from 
 Bristol, Eng. The city of Lowell was 
 named after one of them, and another 
 was the founder of the Lowell Institute 
 in I)Oston, an educational establishment to 
 which he left two hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand dollars by a will written while he was 
 on the summit of the Great Pyramid. 
 
 The house is still screened from the 
 highway by the giant trees around it, 
 though the jingle of the horse-cars and the 
 rumble of passing carriages and carts now 
 jar upon its quiet ; but when the poet was 
 a boy it was in a solitude, and the only 
 noises were the cries of the birds which 
 thronofed the rarden. 
 
 He was fond of birds, as the reader can 
 well believe who knows an essay of his 
 called " My Garden Acquaintance ; " and 
 the feathered visitors who came to Elm- 
 wood and gossiped in its cavernous shade 
 were always treated as welcome guests. 
 There were robins, catbirds, blue-jays, 
 
JAMES JWSSELL LOIVI-ILL. 147 
 
 orioles, bobolinks, blackbirds, and herons. 
 What could be better than Lowell's de- 
 scription of the robins ? 
 
 "They are feathered Pecksniffs, to be 
 sure ; but then how brightly their breasts, 
 that look rather shabby in the sunlight, 
 shine in a rainy day against the dark 
 green of the fringe-tree ! After they have 
 pinched and shaken all the life out of an 
 earth-worm, as Italian cooks pound all the 
 spirit out of a steak, and then gulped him, 
 they stand up in honest self-confidence, ex- 
 pand their red waistcoats with the virtuous 
 air of a lobby member, and outface you 
 with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry, 
 ' Uo / look like a bird that knows the 
 flavor of raw vermin ? I throw myself 
 upon a jury of my peers. Ask any robin 
 if he ever ate any thing less ascetic than 
 the frugal berry of the juniper, and he will 
 answer that his vow forbids him ! ' Can 
 such an open bosom cover such depravity ? 
 Alas, yes ! I have no doubt his breast was 
 redder at that very moment with the blood 
 of my raspberries. On the whole, he is a 
 doubtful friend in the garden. He makes 
 
148 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 his dessert of all kinds of berries, and is 
 not averse from early pears. But when 
 we remember how omnivorous he is, eat- 
 ing his own weight in an incredibly short 
 time, and that Nature seems exhaustless 
 in her inventions of new insects hostile 
 to vegetation, perhaps we may reckon that 
 he does more good than harm. For m)- 
 own part, I would rather have his cheerful- 
 ness and kind neighborhood than many 
 berries." 
 
 The birds returned the friendship of the 
 inmates of the house with unwonted confi- 
 dence, and would sometimes fly through 
 the hall or the library. But, though the 
 boy had so much interest in them, he 
 never " oologized" them, and if they would 
 not come near for him to observe them, he 
 brought them closer with an opera-glass — 
 a much better weapon, as he sa)"s, than a 
 gun. 
 
 No school can ever do as much for a 
 sensitive boy as the influence and example 
 of parents of scholarly tastes, with whom 
 the habit of reading is as regular as eating 
 or sleeping. Lowell's father was a scholar, 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 149 
 
 and his mother, as well, was a person of 
 liberal culture and literary capacity, who, 
 as soon as her children could read, opened 
 to them the treasures of Eno-lish litera- 
 
 o 
 
 ture, — 
 
 " The old melodious lays 
 Which softly melt the ages through, 
 The songs of Spenser's golden days, 
 Arcadian Sidney's silvery phrase." 
 
 Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Milton were 
 familiar to them at an age when most chil- 
 dren are still reciting nursery rhymes ; and 
 in James Russell Lowell, who was the 
 youngest of them, the influence of these 
 masters struck with deeper roots than in 
 the others, bringing forth in good time a 
 fruit of its own. 
 
 Elmwood was full of books, and they 
 were not allowed to lie dusty and unused 
 on the shelves. Access to them under the 
 direction of as discriminatinsf a student as 
 Mrs. Lowell was in itself an education ; 
 but it was not deemed to be enoutrh, and 
 the young poet was sent to a classical 
 school in the neighborhood, where he was 
 prepared for Harvard College. 
 
150 BOYHOOD OF F.IMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 What sort of a boy was lie at this tunc ? 
 A letter from one of his classmates, the 
 Hon. G. B. Loring, lies open before the 
 writer o{ these lines : " He was a rapid 
 reader, and had a keen appreciation of all 
 noble thoughts, alid a deep sympathy with 
 all noble characters. He learned his les- 
 sons with great ease, but was not fond 
 of mathematics, though he comprehended 
 readily philosophical theories. He loved 
 poetry, and his own faculty of versification 
 was notable even then. He had decided 
 political views, and was a Whig in those 
 days of Whiggery and Democracy, because 
 he thought the latter a pretence, and not 
 the embodiment of doctrines accordant 
 with the? name. He was by nature devout 
 and conservative in his religious views, antl 
 he was an advocate of temperance obliga- 
 tions as a safeguard against temptation. 
 Perhaps he did not set an example of 
 intense application, but he acquired knowl- 
 edge more easily than many of his tellows. 
 His wit Hashed about in away which some- 
 times startled the dull, and always whetted 
 the vxV^n of the bright; but he was a boy 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 151 
 
 without malice, and with strong attach- 
 ments, a dutiful son, and a devoted friend. 
 His tastes were simple, and free from all 
 desire for display. Althoug-h at times sub- 
 ject to those moods which fall upon boys 
 as well as men who have sensitive natures, 
 he struggled alone through his cloudy hours, 
 and gave only his sunshine to his friends." 
 He was a brilliant letter-writer, and his 
 private correspondence was sprinkled with 
 verses, many of which have never been 
 published. Mr. Loring has a bundle of 
 such letters from him, in which prose is 
 often dropped for a cantering rhyme. In 
 one, describing an early trip to the White 
 Mountains, he writes : — 
 
 " 1 suppose you remember when Time was young ; 
 
 Say ! What made him so crabbed and cross ? 
 Did he speculate largely in Eastern lands, 
 
 Which the deluge made all a dead loss? 
 Did he lose his affianced (poor soul) in the flood? 
 
 Or write a small poem or two, 
 And turn misanthropic on reading a squib 
 
 In some acid pre-Adam Review?" 
 
 Again, answering his friend, a student 
 of medicine, who had tried his hand at a 
 
152 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 verse or two, as a tribute to his genius^ he 
 wrote : — 
 
 " Dear friend and true, I take your hand, 
 
 A hand I love to clasp, 
 And welcome you to Muse's land 
 
 With warm and hearty grasp. 
 Not that you need a welcome there, 
 
 For what you wrote to me 
 Would justly claim a right to wear 
 
 The wreath of poesy. 
 But I dare trust that smile of mine 
 
 Will never come amiss, 
 Although it scarce may hope to shine 
 
 Through fog-verse such as this. 
 You have more legal right than I 
 
 To build the lofty rhyme, 
 (Though when my shingle shines on high 
 
 I may enjoy more time), 
 For Esculapius was the son 
 
 Of golden-haired Apollo, 
 And if you win the heart of one, 
 
 The other's sure to follow." 
 
 Lowell entered Harvard in his sixteenth 
 year, and he has said of himself that he 
 read every thing except the text-books pre- 
 scribed by the Faculty, He was graduated 
 in the class of 1838, and then entered the 
 Law School, intending, like Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes, to become a lawyer. He even 
 went so far as to open a law-office in 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 153 
 
 Boston, but it is more than suspected that 
 one of his early attempts at fiction, bearing 
 the title of " My First Client," referred to 
 an entirely imaginary person. "The old 
 melodious lays " were still more fascinating 
 to him than the law-books bound up in 
 yellow sheepskin, and his circumstances 
 were so easy that he was not forced to con- 
 tinue work that was distasteful to him. 
 
 He published a little book of verse, and 
 when he was twenty-four he started a 
 magazine ; but, though neither the book 
 nor the magazine met with success, he 
 soon afterwards proved that by the closing 
 of the little office and Blackstone's Com- 
 mentaries, literature had gained more than 
 law had lost. 
 
 Elmwood is still the home of Mr. Lowell 
 when he is in the United States, and though 
 many of the birds have now disappeared, 
 the herons which lingered in its shade were 
 made the subject of one of Longfellow's 
 last poems : — 
 
 " Warm and still is the summer night, 
 As here by the river's brink I wander, 
 White overhead the stars, and white 
 
 The glimmering lamps on the hillside yonder. 
 
154 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 " Silent are all the sounds of day ; 
 
 Nothing I hear but the chirp of crickets, 
 And the cry of the herons winging their way 
 O'er the poet's house in the Elmwood thickets. 
 
 " Call to him, herons, as slowly you pass 
 
 To your roosts in the haunts of the exiled thrushes ; 
 Sing him the song of the green morass. 
 
 And the tides that water the reeds and rushes. 
 
 " Sing to him, say to him, here at his gate. 
 
 Where the boughs of the stately elms are meeting, 
 Some one hath lingered to meditate, 
 
 And send him unseen this friendly greeting ; 
 
 •'That many another hath done the same. 
 
 Though not by a sound was the silence broken : 
 The surest pledge of a deathless name 
 
 Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken." 
 
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IIJALMAR JIJORTJI BOVESEN. J 55 
 
 HJALMAR TTJORTII BOYESRN. 
 
 Ix a ca[)ital story l)y Hjalmar Hjorth 
 Boyesen, called " A Norseman's Pilgrim- 
 age," there is a chapter headed "Retro- 
 spect ; " and if any one wishes to learn 
 something about the youth of the author, 
 he cannot do better than read that, for I 
 have good reason to know that it is auto- 
 biographical. 
 
 " Olaf Varberg was by birth a Norwegian. 
 His childhood had been spent in the fjords 
 of Norway, where the grand solemnity of 
 nature had tended to foster a certain 
 brooding disposition of mind. Every hill, 
 every stone, and every tree was a monu- 
 ment of past heroism, or at least to his 
 wakeful sense suggested some untold 
 record of the Norseman's forgotten glory. 
 Not a hundred steps from his home stood 
 King Bele's venerable tomb ; and on this 
 very strand, where so often he had sat 
 
156 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUFHORS. 
 
 pensively gazing down into the blue deep, 
 it was that Frithjof landed in the summer 
 nights, and hastened to those forbidden 
 meetings with his beloved in Balder's 
 grove ; and not very far from the house 
 there was a huge birch which certainly 
 must have been centuries old. It erew 
 upon a green hillock which the boy fan- 
 cied looked like a tomb. Here under this 
 tree he had spent perhaps the happiest 
 moments of his life. In the long, light 
 summer evenings, he would sit there for 
 hours listenino- to the strantxe, soft melo- 
 dies of the wind as it breathed through the 
 full-leafed crown. 
 
 " He felt sure that it was a scald who was 
 buried here ; for in the songs of the wind 
 he had seemed to recognize the same 
 strain that had rung in his ears so often 
 while reading the scaldic lays in the old 
 sagas. Then strange emotions would thrill 
 through his breast ; he felt that he was 
 himself a scald, and that he was destined 
 to revive the expiring song and the half- 
 forgotten traditions of the great old time. 
 
 " When he was twelve years old he had 
 
HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN. 157 
 
 himself written a long poem which he had 
 entitled ' The Sac^a of the Scald.' He had 
 only ventured to read it to his grandmother ; 
 but she had cried over it for a whole day, 
 and that he felt to be a great reward." 
 
 Although all this is said of Olaf V^arberg, 
 the fictitious character, it is true of Hjal- 
 mar Hjorth Boyesen, as is much more in 
 the same chapter ; though his father was 
 not killed in the war, but is still alive. 
 
 Mr. Boyesen was born on Sept. 23, 
 1848, at Fredricksvern, a small seaport on 
 the southern coast of Norway. " Why 
 cannot the Scandinavian Peninsula sail ? " 
 is an old conundrum ; to which the answer 
 is, " Because it was launched with the keel 
 up." A huge granite ridge runs north and 
 south, separating Norway from Sweden, 
 with ribs of rock springing from it like the 
 ribs of a ship. The sea flows in between 
 the ribs, and the gulfs and bays- thus shut 
 in by the mountains are the fjords, amid 
 the majestic scenery of which the boyhood 
 of Mr. Boyesen was passed. 
 
 " How often," he says, " have I drifted 
 through the spacious summer days in my 
 
158 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 sharp-keeled wherry, upon those hght, glit- 
 tering waters, while the seablrds surged in 
 airy waves above me, and the white clouds 
 with a bewildering distinctness pursued 
 their tranquil paths far down in the deep 
 below ! It gave one a feeling of being 
 suspended in the midst of the vast blue 
 space, hovering between two infinities; and 
 it seemed at the moment often hard to 
 determine whether the real heavens were 
 above or below. Then to watch the sub- 
 tile play of color, how the lucid green vies 
 with the feebler air-tints ; to listen with 
 luxurious listlessness to the musical plash- 
 ing of the water against the bow ; to follow 
 the placid soaring of the large, white- 
 breasted sea-gulls, as they float on broad, 
 motionless wings, through the viewless 
 ether ; and to feel all the while the vast 
 presence of the heaven-piercing peaks and 
 o^laciers, like a huee, dim backo-round, 
 upon which your sensations trace them- 
 selves in a deliciously vague and rich 
 relief, — ah! it is the perfection of pure 
 and simple being, one of those moments 
 when the mere fact of living seems a great 
 and Horious thino-." 
 
HJALMAR HJORTH BO YES EN. I 59 
 
 " I remember how as a boy my whole 
 being thrilled with the proud consciousness 
 that I was a Norseman, a Goth of the pure 
 old stock, a descendant of those daring- 
 V^iking-s who conquered Normandy and 
 England, and who spread the terror of their 
 name even to Italy and Constantinople." 
 
 His mother died while he was still young, 
 and he was brought up by her father, Judge 
 Hjorth of Systrand. His most pronounced 
 trait at this period was his love of animals: 
 he had several hundred pigeons, and be- 
 sides these a lot of rabbits, dogs, cows, and 
 even horses. All his pigeons were named 
 after characters in the books he read, both 
 historic and fictitious ; and in his imagina- 
 tion they repeated the adventures ascribed 
 to the originals. 
 
 There was an old tenant on the estate, 
 named Gunnar, who took a great fancy to 
 the boy, and initiated him into all the mys- 
 teries of wood-craft. He knew every sight 
 and sound in the woods, and what they 
 meant. Sometimes the boy spent entire 
 nights with him in the woods, sleeping in 
 the mountain chalets or " saeters," in order 
 
l6o BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 to be In time for the birds and beasts that 
 came to drink at the springs and lakes in 
 the mornings. As aresuk, his senses were 
 as alert as those of an Indian, and he was 
 a good shot and an expert fisherman. 
 Signs of the weather, the proper season of 
 the year and time of day for all kinds 
 of game, the best way of making flies for 
 trout, — such things as these were quite 
 familiar to the boy, who wandered through 
 the forests of spruce, fir, birch, and hem- 
 lock, on the steep slopes of the fjords, with 
 old Gunnar. 
 
 " I assure you," said Mr. Boyesen to me 
 one day, " that I have never since had so 
 keen an enjoyment of life as I had then. 
 I need only shut my eyes to see the clear 
 mountain tarns at sunrise, where the fish 
 leaped in the sun, or the dark rivers at 
 nis'ht where we went trout-fishino-, and the 
 great splashes in the stream as the line 
 flew off the reel. By the way, have you 
 ever sat through the night at a lonely 
 river, and seen the otter go a-fishing ? He 
 plumps so quietly into the stream, and you 
 see nothing but perhaps a little black 
 
HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN. l6l 
 
 moving speck, and the gleam of his eyes, 
 and his lono- whiskers." 
 
 It was a rule in Judge Hjorth's house, 
 that the children should cro to bed at nine 
 o'clock ; but the servants' hall had an irre- 
 sistible attraction for Hjalmar (whose name, 
 and many other Norse names, will not be 
 so difficult to pronounce, by the way, if the 
 reader will remember that they is sounded 
 like the y in "yacht" and "Yankee.") 
 Hjalmar loved to sit up, and listen to the 
 rough peasant dialect of the servants as 
 they sang ballads, and told stories of trolls 
 and brownies, and the achievements of 
 their ancestors. In spite of all prohibitions 
 he could not keep away from this enchant- 
 ed world ; and he confesses that often after 
 having kissed his grandfather and grand- 
 mother " good night," he would steal down 
 into the kitchen, and sit spell-bound, gaz- 
 ing and listening, until his disobedience was 
 discovered, and he was ignominiously un- 
 dressed and put to bed. 
 
 The day came for him to leave home to 
 go to school in the city, but when his trunk 
 had been packed, and the steamer was due, 
 
l62 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 he could not be found. Messenorers were 
 sent hither and thither ; they searched 
 every nook and corner, and shouted his 
 name, without gettinor any answer. The 
 household was distracted. The steamer 
 loomed up in the fjord, and slowly came to 
 the landing. Still the boy did not return. 
 He had been seen in the morning, on the 
 pier, and boats were sent out with dragnets 
 to search for him in the water. There was 
 no trace of him there. At last one of the 
 dairymaids suggested that he might have 
 gone to the pasture where the calves were 
 kept, to say good-by to the cattle ; and there, 
 sure enough, he was discovered, with his 
 arms around the neck of a calf, over which 
 he was weeping bitter tears. He had 
 started out to say farewell to all his pets 
 on the estate, and had been so overcome 
 with grief at having to leave this particular 
 calf, which had been given to him, that he 
 had forgotten all about the steamer, which 
 lay shrieking impatiently, and belching 
 forth smoke, in the fjord. 
 
 His incurable homesickness made his 
 school life miserable, although he was 
 
HJALMAR }{JORTH BOYESEN. 163 
 
 amply able to hold his own with the other 
 boys, who had a great respect for his 
 knowledge of fishing and hunting and all 
 those thinors that he had learned in his 
 excursions with Gunnar. Those excur- 
 sions, with all their sic{hts and sounds, — 
 the rainbow flicker of the trout, the ripples 
 in the otter's wake, the music of the water- 
 falls, the calm twilight of the woods, the 
 scent of the pines, — came back to him 
 now in such vivid sensations that he could 
 not apply himself to his books ; but he had 
 so much natural aptitude, that, though he 
 rarely took up a lesson until it was within 
 a few minutes of the time to recite it, he 
 managed to keep about the middle of his 
 class, and occasionally advanced towards the 
 top on account of the literary ability of his 
 compositions. These were the only exer- 
 cises that interested him in the befilnninor 
 but the praise he received for them gradu- 
 ally aroused his ambition in other direc- 
 tions. 
 
 He was a plucky boy, and was not with- 
 out some " noble scars." There was a 
 feud of ancient standing between the boys 
 
1 64 JIOVJJOOI) OF FAMOUS Al'TlloRS. 
 
 of tlu^ Lalin School' and those wlio did not 
 rejoice in a classical education, and a Latin- 
 School boy who ventured upon hostile 
 territory was sure to be pounced upon by 
 the " plebs" and unmercifully beaten it he 
 was not abk; to defend himself. Boyesen 
 had no f("ar of th(-s(! (encounters, and often 
 souf£ht them, thoutj-h he was now and then 
 routed in the fortunes of war, 
 
 Durinir the summer vacations he re- 
 turiK^l to his ])eautiful home on the 
 Sognefjord, making the journey <:)W foot, — 
 a distance of nearly two hundred miles, — 
 with a knapsack on his back, at a season 
 of the year when the country w^as at its 
 loveliest ; and thus he was enabled to re- 
 new his acquaintance with peasant life, 
 and to listen again to the legends that had 
 charm(;d him in the servants' hall. 
 
 lie did not like city life, or the ancient 
 languages which he had to learn at school; 
 arK.1 he sought relief in his compositions. 
 He wrote the most blood-curdling trage- 
 dies and romances ; and like Olaf Varberg, 
 th(i hero of "A Norseman's Pilgrimage," 
 he found an aj)preciati\'e listener in his 
 
HJALMAR HJORTH BO YES EN. 165 
 
 grandmother. After seeing " Hamlet" for 
 the first time at the Christiania Theatre, 
 he wrote a play in which the hero was 
 killed in the first act and re-appeared as a 
 ghost in the remaining four acts: even thus 
 did his juvenile imagination parody Shak- 
 speare's greatest work! But his talent was 
 genuine, and only needed direction and 
 development to rise above such imitative 
 efforts as these ; though the only encour- 
 agement he received was from his grand- 
 mother. 
 
 " Norway is too small a country to 
 support poets," his father said. " If you 
 are serious in your aspirations to become 
 a man of letters," he added, " you ought 
 to conquer a language in which you can 
 address the great world, — English, French, 
 or German, — that is, if you have any thing 
 to say which the world will care to listen 
 to." 
 
 His father had a restless and ambitious 
 spirit, which rebelled against the slow and 
 conservative methods of Norway. He had 
 been to America, and he liked this country 
 better than his own, and thouc{ht that it 
 
1 66 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 would be well for his sons if they would 
 come here. He had even deposited a sum 
 of money with a friend in Chicag-o, which 
 was to be paid to any one of his sons who 
 should appear to claim it in person. 
 
 Hjalmar himself was as eager to try his 
 fortunes in the new country as his father 
 was to have him ; but Judge Hjorth vio- 
 lently opposed the idea at first, though after- 
 wards, when the boy had taken his degree 
 at the university, the old gentleman yielded 
 to his persuasions. This was in 1868, when 
 Hjalmar was only twenty years old ; and 
 thouo-h his intention on startinof out was to 
 return to Norway in a year, he found the 
 United States so attractive that he made 
 this country his home. 
 
 For a time he was employed in editing 
 a Scandinavian paper ; then he became a 
 teacher ; and he acquired the language so 
 rapidly, that at the end of two years he was 
 able to write a book which is a model of 
 racy and vigorous English. He was not 
 without homesickness, and it was natural 
 that in composing this book his thoughts 
 should go back to the deep, mountain- 
 
HJALMAR HJORTH BO YES EN. 1 67 
 
 clasped fjords, and the high valleys, shel- 
 tered in which he had so often sat before 
 the peasant's fire listening to the legends 
 of the wonderful North-land. Gunnar came 
 back to his mind, and he gave that name to 
 his hero, thouo;h the latter had not at all 
 the character of the old woodman. 
 
 The originality and power of the book 
 were recoofnized at once: it was full of life 
 and motion, and gave one the sensation of 
 walking side by side with a vigorous com- 
 panion, across some clear upland on an ex- 
 hilarating autumn morning. Here was an 
 author who had new stories to tell, and 
 who could tell them so well that the pulse 
 of the listener bounded in unison with his, 
 in watching the movements of his charac- 
 ters. Norway had given America a new 
 novelist. 
 
 Since then Mr. Boyesen has fortified his 
 position in literature by many delightful 
 books, all glowing with nervous vitality and 
 sparkling like the water in his native cas- 
 cades. So many of them are there, that 
 an ordinary writer might point to them 
 alone in proof of his industry; but their 
 
1 68 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 production has been merely a recreation 
 to him, and the greater part of his time is 
 given to the duties of a professorship in 
 Columbia College, New York. 
 
 How"Gunnar" found a publisher, he 
 has told us as follows : — 
 
 "One day in July, 1871, I happened to be in the 
 Harvard College Library, Cambridge. Professor Ezra 
 Abbot, who was then assistant librarian, begged me to 
 write my name in the visitors' book. He became in- 
 terested in it, philologically. He asked about my 
 nationality, and, hearing that I was a Norseman, 
 begged leave to make me acquainted with Professor 
 Child, who just then was in need of a Norseman. 
 
 " Professor Child was sent for and arrived. He gave 
 me Landstadt's collection of Norwegian ballads, and 
 begged me read and translate a number of passages 
 which he had marked. He was then at work upon his 
 great book on ballads, two volumes of which have now 
 appeared. We spent the whole afternoon reading 
 Norse ballads written in different dialects which were 
 all familiar to me. 
 
 " When we parted, Professor Child exclaimed, ' You 
 have a lot of valuable material in your possession. 
 Why don't you make use of it? It would make an 
 interesting article.' 
 
 " I replied that I had written something. He 
 begged me to bring the MS. to him, and a few days 
 later I was invited to dine at his house. Howells was 
 
HJALMAR HJORTH BO YES EN. 169 
 
 among the guests ; he was then editor of ' The Atlantic' 
 After dinner I was requested to read a portion of my 
 MS. ; and I selected the chapter on the ' Skee Race,' 
 and, being asked for more, read the chapter entitled 
 'The Wedding of the Wild Duck.' 
 
 " Howells became greatly interested ; begged me to 
 spend a couple of days at his house as his guest, and 
 read the rest of the tale. This invitation was accepted, 
 and likewise the MS. 
 
 " It was this incident which had the most decisive 
 influence upon my life, as it was probably the cause 
 of my remaining in this country. I then became 
 acquainted with Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Lowell, Henry 
 James, Jr., and others. It changed the face of the 
 United States to me, and launched me fairly upon my 
 career as a man of letters." 
 
I70 llOYIIOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 THOMAS WENTWORrn IIIGGINSON. 
 
 Till'! quaint old village, with its strag- 
 gling houses, and deep shade and quiet- 
 ude, which Lowell pictures for us as the 
 Cambridge of his youth, was the scene 
 of the boyhood of Thomas Wentworth 
 Higginson also ; and he too, though four 
 years the junior of Lowell, was among the 
 eager boys who buzzed around the door of 
 the wonderful barber's shop, described in 
 " Fireside Travels," where tomahawks and 
 weapons from the antipodes hung upon 
 the wall, and a parrot harangued the spec- 
 tators and the customers in a gibberish 
 which the barber said was the Hottentot 
 lanofuaq^e. 
 
 He went to the same school as Lowell, 
 and sat under the same frowning eye, 
 though the; poet, who, as he says, seemed 
 " immeasiu'ably ancient," had been trans- 
 ferred to colleo'e ; and his earliest recollec- 
 
^^^v^^. y 
 
 
 
 f/^hK^ /4>v^".^V^ ^^jW/vW^H^ 
 
 ■ O^w/^rS-c, '^'^Ut^/: 
 
THOMAS WEXTIVORTH HIGGINSON. lyi 
 
 tions are of the library in the gambrel- roofed 
 house where OHver Wendell Holmes was 
 born, and where he was as much at home 
 as in his father's house, which adjoined 
 that celebrated dwelling. 
 
 He was born in an atmosphere of learn- 
 inor and literature ; the walls of the house 
 seemed to be made of books, and when he 
 looked out of the windows, the college 
 buildings were visible to remind him of 
 further learning still. If ever a boy could 
 claim to belong to the " academic races," 
 as Dr. Holmes calls the families whose 
 names have appeared generation after 
 generation on the college rolls, it was 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who came 
 of a long line of Puritanic clergymen and 
 scholars, and who was himself born at the 
 head of a street called Professors' Row 
 (now Kirkland Street) because all the 
 houses were occupied by professors in the 
 neighboring university, of which his own 
 father was the steward or bursar. The 
 society in which his parents moved was 
 intellectual, and many of their visitors were 
 famous, like Edward Everett the orator, 
 
1/2 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 Judge Story, and Margaret Fuller. Even 
 his nurse added something to the influence 
 of the literary current into which he was 
 plunged, for she was Rowena Pratt, the 
 wife of the oriofinal of Lon2:fellow's " Vil- 
 lage Blacksmith." 
 
 It would have been easy to make such 
 surroundings odious to a boy, for a diet of 
 learning alone is quite as likely to excite 
 repugnance as a diet of pudding. Books 
 may be as darkening as prison-bars, and 
 they may be as full of sunlight and en- 
 chanting hues as windows filled with cathe- 
 dral glass ; the difference depends partly 
 on the boy himself, and partly on the 
 manner in which he is educated. Thomas 
 Wentworth Higginson was a born scholar, 
 however, and in the reminiscences of his 
 youth, books are not associated with con- 
 finement and restraint, but with pleasures 
 as keen as any he found in the play- 
 ground ; he never sighed to escape from 
 them, but derived from them all the de- 
 lights which they possess for the boy who 
 loves them. Even his Latin text-book 
 had charms for him, as he has shown us 
 
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 173 
 
 in one of his many graceful essa^-s. " I 
 remember the very day when the school- 
 master gave it to me," he says. " He 
 was that vigorous, rigorous, kind-hearted, 
 thorough - bred Englishman, W. W. It 
 was the beginning of a new school-year. 
 Lowell, and Story, and the other old boys, 
 who seemed so immeasurably ancient, had 
 been transferred to college, and last year's 
 youngest class was at length youngest but 
 one, and ready for the ' New Latin Tutor.' 
 Then W. W. called us to his desk, and 
 opening it, — I can hear the very rattle of 
 the birch, as it rolled back from the up- 
 lifted lid, — he brought out for us these 
 books, in all the glory of fresh calf binding, 
 and gave each volume into trembling boy- 
 ish hands. To some of us there was more 
 of birch than of bounty in the immediate 
 associations of that desk ; and I fancy that 
 we always trembled a little when we had a 
 new book, as if all the proverbial floggings 
 which it might involve were already tin- 
 gling between its covers. Yet those of us 
 whose love of the book was wont to save 
 us from the rod, ma}^ have felt the thrill of 
 
1/4 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 delight predominate ; at any rate, there was 
 novelty, and the 'joy of eventful living,' 
 and I remember that the rather stern and 
 aquiline face of our teacher relaxed into 
 mildness for a moment. But we and our 
 books must have looked very fresh and 
 new to him, though we may all be a little 
 battered now ; at least, my ' New Latin 
 Tutor ' is. The change undergone by the 
 volume which Browning put in the plum- 
 tree cleft, to be read only by newts and 
 beetles, — 
 
 " With all the binding all of a blister, 
 And great blue spots where the ink has run, 
 And reddish streaks that wink and glister," — 
 
 could hardly exceed what this book shows, 
 when I fish it up from a chest of literary 
 lumber coeval with itself. It would smell 
 musty, doubtless, to any nose unregulated 
 by a heart ; but to me it is redolent of 
 the alder-blossoms of boyish springs, and 
 the aromatic walnut odor which used in 
 autumn to pervade the dells of ' Sweet 
 Auburn,' that lay not so very far from our 
 schoolhouse. It is a very precious book, 
 
THOMAS WENTIVORTH HICGINSON. 175 
 
 and it should be robed in choice Turkey 
 morocco, were not the very covers too 
 much a part of the association to be 
 changed. For between them I gathered 
 the seed-grain of many harvests of deHght ; 
 through this low archway I first looked 
 upon the immeasurable beauty of words." 
 
 In his own house there was a library rich 
 in the literature of the age of Queen Anne ; 
 and when he was tired of reading himself, 
 his mother read to him, while he stretched 
 himself out on the hearth-rug and gazed 
 into the fire. The library in the minister's 
 house next door was open to him also, — 
 that fascinating place which the " Autocrat 
 of the Breakfast Table " (then a student of 
 medicine) has described for us in both prose 
 and verse ; the old gambrel-roofed house, 
 with the picture of Dorothy O., and the 
 marks of the redcoats' muskets on the floor. 
 
 The father of the "Autocrat" was fond 
 of his neighbor's children, as well as of his 
 own, and, without a murmur of complaint, 
 allowed them to romp in his library among 
 the books, which were as varied in their 
 uniforms as the members of the Ancient 
 
1/6 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 and Honorable Artillery Company. Once, 
 when the weather was cold, he joined them 
 at the window where they stood admiring 
 the traceries of frost on the panes; and. 
 seeing the twinkling points of light among 
 the crystals, he wrote underneath a motto 
 wdiich remained with them as though the 
 w^ords had been cut in their memories 
 rather than in the vanishing frost, — Per 
 aspera ad astra, — which they all knew 
 meant " Through difficulties to the stars." 
 
 Though a bookish boy, Thomas Went- 
 worth Higginson was as vigorous as any 
 dunce ; but he was precocious, and though 
 only thirteen years of age when he entered 
 Harvard College, he looked much older. 
 The studiousness of his earlier years was 
 not abated now, and at a time when most 
 boys are only freshmen, or at preparatory 
 schools, he was graduated. Curiously 
 enoueh he was fond of mathematics, which 
 are usually the aversion of students of liter- 
 ary tastes ; but literature had the greatest 
 charm for him, and during his college years 
 a group of new authors came into promi- 
 nence who had a lifelong influence upon 
 
THOMAS WEXTWORTH HIGGIXSOX. 1 77 
 
 him as upon the rest of the world. " Ten- 
 nyson's thin early volumes were being 
 handed about, and seemed to bring a richer 
 coloring into the universe ; Carlyle was 
 talked of in the evening by my elder broth- 
 ers ; and one day the fresh wit and wisdom 
 of • Pickwick ' came to delight us all. . . . 
 Emerson had often lectured at Cambridge, 
 and his volume of essays had just appeared. 
 Tnis was given to me by my mother, and was 
 read as I never had read any other book." 
 
 After his graduation, the young student 
 said that he would like to be a black- 
 smith, — thinking that by working at the 
 forore and anvil he could learn how to 
 sympathize with that great division of man- 
 kind which such as he usually know only 
 through books ; but he was dissuaded from 
 this, and became a teacher, a preacher, and 
 an author. Perhaps it is as an author that 
 he is most distinguished now, but we ought 
 not to forget, in enumerating his accom- 
 plishments, that " Colonel" is not a brevet 
 honor in his case, and that it was honorably 
 acquired in the Civil War when he com- 
 manded a black reo-iment. 
 
178 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. 
 
 " One of the best things in the world is 
 to be a boy. It requires no experience, 
 though it needs some practice to be a good 
 one. The disadvantage of the position is 
 that it does not last long enough ; it is 
 soon over. Just as soon as you get used 
 to being a boy, you have to be something 
 else, with a good deal more work to do, 
 and not half so much fun." 
 
 This is said by Charles Dudley Warner, 
 in a delightful little volume called " Being 
 a Boy," the copy of which that lies before 
 me, borrowed from the public library, bears 
 on its titlepage the pencilled comments of 
 two previous readers, in schoolboy hand : 
 " Putty gud book," " Rawther Sawcastick." 
 
 It is a " putty gud book," and it is " raw- 
 ther sawcastick ; " it leaves nothing unsaid 
 that is worth knowing about the life of a 
 boy on a New-England farm, and it is as 
 
^u^^ cZ^ A-^ ^^ >--< '^--^ 
 
CHARLES DUDLEY WARMCR. 1 79 
 
 natural and as shyly humorous as Aldrich's 
 history of Tom Bailey at Rivermouth. 
 No doubt those who have read it, or who 
 may read it in the future, will be glad to 
 know that it is in a measure autobiograph- 
 ical ; that in writing it, Mr. Warner sat for 
 his own portrait, and painted what he saw 
 in the lookinp-'Mass. 
 
 He was born on Sept. 12, 1827, in 
 Plainfield, Mass., a hilly town in the west- 
 ern part of the State, where his father had 
 a farm of about six hundred acres, with 
 large flocks of sheep and herds of cattle ; 
 and his boyhood was like that of the typ- 
 ical farmer's boy who appears in his book, 
 thouQfh in his case the labor and the trials 
 were sweetened by a love of Nature, which 
 gathered something more than pliysical 
 enjoyment from his surroundings. 
 
 The summer soon passed away, and the 
 winters seemed to be never-ending on that 
 lofty plateau. The snows drifted high 
 above the fences, and sleighs could go any- 
 where over the fields. The winds blew 
 strong ; and once, when Charles Dudley 
 Warner started across the solid shining 
 
l8o BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 crust of the snow for the schoolhouse that 
 was about half a mile away, with his din- 
 ner-basket in his hand, and a red cloak 
 drawn around him, the tempest reversed 
 the fable, and snatched both basket and 
 cloak away from him, carrying them off 
 into the forest, where they were not recov- 
 ered until the following spring. 
 
 He hated cold, and says now that the 
 so-called inviororatinof climate of New Eno-- 
 land fills the graveyard with young tenants ; 
 but sometimes he could forget it, as when, 
 having an apple to eat, he came home from 
 school on a bitter day without noticing that 
 the flaps of his cap were loose, and that 
 his ears were frozen. 
 
 The house was an old-fashioned place, 
 with rambling woodsheds and out-buildings, 
 and a big kitchen. There were no stoves, 
 but great cavernous fireplaces, hedged in 
 by settles, the backs of which protected 
 the family from draughts when they sat be- 
 fore the blazing fire. One curious article 
 of furniture was a round table with a seat 
 under it, and when the top was swung back 
 it formed another settle. 
 
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. i8r 
 
 A glorious place this kitchen was on a 
 winter's evening. Stories were told, and 
 songs sung, and it was the scene of Whit- 
 tier's " Snow-bound " over again. 
 
 " Between the andiron's straddling feet, 
 The mug of cider simmered slow, 
 The apples sputtered in a row, 
 And close at hand the basket stood 
 With nuts from brown October's wood." 
 
 And in addition to the cider, the nuts, and 
 the apples, there were dishes of toasted 
 cheese of a particular kind called " white 
 oak," which was made from skimmed milk, 
 and which would toast without melting. An 
 enormous cellar was underneath the kitchen, 
 full of cider-barrels, vegetables, and apples, 
 which grew in abundance on the farm. 
 
 The principal events of the year were 
 the cider-making in the fall, and the sugar- 
 making in the spring. There were fine 
 groves of sugar-maples on the farm ; and 
 in March or April, when the skies began 
 to have a soft look and the steely light of 
 winter to grow more like gold, when there 
 was a constant drip, drip, drip, from the 
 
1 82 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 eaves, and the elbows of the rocks showed 
 through the white garment that was shp- 
 ping away from them, the trees were 
 tapped, and the buckets hung from them 
 to catch the oozing sap. A camp was 
 estabHshed in the woods, and all the family 
 would be there for the " suofarinof-off," 
 which was clone in the primitive way, with 
 a biof fire between two loQfs and the cal- 
 drons hung from a pole above. They 
 make sugar now in brick houses, with 
 elaborate apparatus ; but, though the prod- 
 uct is said to be improved, it is not half 
 as sweet as it was at the old-fashioned 
 " sugaring-off " with the logs blazing in 
 the woods and the merry-making of former 
 days, — the days of fifty years ago when 
 Charles Dudley Warner was a boy. 
 
 Of course he knew somethino- about 
 traps, and trapping too ; and he was 
 devoted to the " hired man " who taught 
 him how to make and use various kinds 
 of snares. He used to go to bed and get 
 up with this man, and help him to build 
 the great fire, first raking the embers and 
 then piling the sticks high up : it used to 
 
CHARLES DUDLEY WARXER. 1 83 
 
 take a quarter of a cord of wood to build 
 that fire. 
 
 Oh tlie winters, the everlasting winters ! 
 Often the snow would be heaped up in 
 drifts higher than the windows, and a perma- 
 nent tunnel had to be made from the house 
 to the barn. The cellar was as dark as mid- 
 nio-ht, for tan-bark was banked all around 
 the house to kee'p out the besieging cold. 
 
 Occasionally his father took him on 
 journeys : once to the Connecticut River, 
 and he craned his neck out of the window 
 to see Suofar Loaf Mountain. It was in 
 vain, for all the hills were more or less 
 round and green, and there was not one 
 that looked at all like the conical loaf of 
 sugar which they had at home. And then 
 his grandfather took him to the city, not 
 New York City, or Boston, or any large 
 city, but to Hudson ; which, small as it 
 was, struck him as no other place has ever 
 done since. The fruit-stalls are remem- 
 bered more vividly than any thing else, 
 and a man at one of the stalls offered to 
 trade an orange for all the buttons on his 
 coat ; he was afraid of that man. 
 
1 84 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 Though active, he was an imaginative 
 and a dreamy boy, and his fancy trans- 
 formed the common sights of the woods 
 and fields to objects of chivalry and 
 romance as he leaped from rock to rock 
 in the high pastures ; he was not afraid of 
 being alone, though there seemed to be 
 strange voices in the trees. 
 
 When he was five years old he lost his 
 father, who, though not a college-bred 
 man, was fond of reading, and owned the 
 largest library in the town excepting the 
 minister's ; and then he was sent to live 
 with a relative at Charlemont, nine miles 
 from Plainfield, where he attended the 
 district school. It is Charlemont that is 
 described in " Being a Boy." 
 
 He was a pretty fair scholar, but the 
 " chores " took most of his time, and 
 books were scarce. Had he been able to 
 choose, he would have entered on a mil- 
 itary career. But when he was about 
 twelve he went to live at Cazenovia, N.Y., 
 and there his literary tastes were encour- 
 aged by access to the books for which he 
 had been starving. He was a clever hand 
 
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. 185 
 
 at cumposition, and took Washinfrton Irvini^ 
 as a model. His guardian intended him 
 for trade, however; and for a time he was 
 employed in a drug--shop, and then in the 
 post-office. Afterwards he entered Hamil- 
 ton Colleore, from which he was graduated 
 in 1 85 1. He filled reams of paper with 
 rhymes, essays, and romances, and was 
 always active in the debating society. But 
 he had no idea of becoming a professional 
 author. Having given up his military 
 aspirations, he turned his eyes towards 
 public life ; speech-making seemed to be 
 a great accomplishment, and a Congress- 
 man a star of considerable magnitude. 
 This dream of glory was not fulfilled ; his 
 health was poor after his graduation, and 
 in order to restore it he went to Missouri 
 with a party of surveyors. After this 
 adventure he studied law, and practised 
 a little in Chicago ; but at last (though 
 not until he was thirty-one) he took 
 up journalism as a profession, and event- 
 ually, like Howells and Stedman, branched 
 out in the direction of more permanent 
 literature. 
 
1 86 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 His books sometimes remind iis of 
 Holmes by their philosophical playfulness ; 
 of Lamb by the quaintness of their humor ; 
 of Irving by their placidity ; and of Steele 
 or Addison by the purity of their style. 
 They have a surface of smiles, but under 
 the smiles are the deep thoughts of an 
 earnest nature. 
 

 
 A^tv"»'w*^ 
 
 V'^U'v^^ V^ \\^(l>WV^'ivr . 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 1 8/ 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 
 
 If there is any boy who has not yet read 
 " Treasure Island " and '' Kidnapped," he 
 may be pitied in one sense and envied in* 
 another sense ; for though he has lost much, 
 he has much to gain, — he has joys be- 
 fore him which others have already known. 
 Of all modern books that a boy should 
 rejoice in, there is none comparable with 
 those two, both of them equal in a way to 
 "Robinson Crusoe," and both, like Defoe's 
 masterpiece, so permanent as works of art 
 that they can never be outgrown. 
 
 A boy who cares for reading at all 
 usually reads everything he can reach ; but 
 if he is a healthy boy, and has any choice, 
 he soon shows his preference for romance. 
 He will give up Bunyan for Scott, Miss 
 Edgeworth for Marr3-at, and a bushel of 
 moral tales for a handful of stirring adven- 
 tures. 
 
1 88 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 Through the magic of a hint of a bucca- 
 neer, such a boy will snap his teeth upon 
 an imaginary cutlass, and slap his hip in 
 search of an unsubstantial pistol ; see him- 
 self (much larger than life) parading coral 
 beaches, or lolling under crimson sails in 
 the midday heat of tropical reefs, or under 
 the mild light of the southern stars, — a 
 fire-eater, a dare-devil, an exploiter of un- 
 told riches ; in turn, a Drake, a Frobisher, 
 or a Magellan. 
 
 But let him return to the mass of such 
 fiction when he has grown older, and the 
 sadness of experience has clipped his 
 wings, as it were. What rubbish most of 
 it seems ; and how he will yawn over the 
 narratives that once transported him, now 
 to the ice-bound ship in the clutch of the 
 Arctic, then to the pampas, now to the 
 African lakes, and then to the Indian jun- 
 gle ! The lights have Qrone out on that 
 wonderful panorama in which icebergs, 
 palms, and banyans had life and move- 
 ment, and all the beasts of the ark swung 
 in a fascinatinof rotation. 
 
 But thouirh other books fade, "Robin- 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVE A'SOX. 1 89 
 
 son Crusoe " keeps as fresh as ever for the 
 boys of these days as it was for the boys 
 who saw Defoe in Fleet Street when 
 Wilham the Third was king ; and not for 
 boys alone, but also for graybeards. 
 
 So it is with Stevenson's stories of ad- 
 venture. One can never be too old to lose 
 interest in David Balfour or Alan Breck 
 Stewart, and never fail to smell the heather 
 and the brine in all their exciting experi- 
 ences by sea and by land. 
 
 Defoe wrote other books besides " Rob- 
 inson Crusoe," and was the author of some 
 virulent pamphlets which led him to the 
 pillory ; but how many boys think of him 
 except for that one^story ? Stevenson has 
 written essays and poems which show his 
 genius as clearly as his fiction ; but there 
 is a possibility that posterity will remember 
 him more gratefully for "Treasure Island" 
 and " Kidnapped " than for anything else. 
 
 He was not at all shy in describing him- 
 self. Indeed, few authors of equal rank 
 and permanence ever confided so much as 
 he did to his readers. He held himself up 
 as a mirror in which they might see them- 
 
1 90 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 selves ; he lets us into all his little secrets, 
 and yet discloses nothing ig-noble, nothing 
 that does not create s}'mpathy, and amuse 
 or elevate. By reading his " Memories 
 and Portraits," one might take the story 
 of his youth from his own lips, as it were, 
 and that revelation only needs the confir- 
 mation of a few friends, which it already 
 has. 
 
 He was born in Edinburgh in 1850, and 
 came of a family distinguished as inven- 
 tors and eno-ineers. Mariners, who sail the 
 stormy and rock-bound seas of Scotland, 
 have reason to be grateful to the Steven- 
 sons; for the grandfather, father, and uncles 
 of Robert Louis designed and superin- 
 tended the erection of the lighthouses that 
 now beam on many of the most fearsome 
 reefs and headlands on the coast. Robert 
 himself was intended by his parents to be 
 an engineer, and to pursue the family call- 
 ing; but he was not that sort of a boy. He 
 could not learn by rote what other boys 
 learnt ; he was delicate, dreamy, unprac- 
 tical — a reader, but not a scholar. 
 
 There is very little doubt that he caused 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. IQI 
 
 his father and mother much anxiety and 
 some disappointment. " From my earliest 
 childhood," he says, " it was mine to make 
 a plaything of imaginary events ; and as 
 soon as I was able to write I became a 
 good friend to the paper-makers." He 
 scribbled and read a <yreat deal, and, in- 
 stead of going to school, explored the hills 
 and glens of the Pentlands, until there was 
 hardly a rivulet that he did not know, from 
 its source to the sea ; and in all his rambles 
 one may be sure his mind was full of the 
 imaginings which are fed by the romantic 
 past and aspect of such a country as Scot- 
 land. " A Scottish child," he says, " hears 
 much of shipwreck, outlying iron skerries, 
 pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights ; 
 much of heathery mountains, wild clans, 
 and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come 
 to him in song of the distant Cheviots, and 
 the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories in 
 his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle 
 and the handful of oatmeal, who rode so 
 swiftly and lived so sparsely on their raids." 
 Sometimes he was taken by his father or 
 his uncles on their expeditions to the wild 
 
192 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 islands and headlands where they were 
 building lighthouses ; and thus he made the 
 acquaintance of the island of Earraid, on 
 which David Balfour was wrecked in the 
 briof " Covenant." 
 
 " Fifteen miles away to seaward a certain 
 black rock stood environed by the Atlantic 
 rollers, the outpost of the Torran reefs. 
 Here was a tower to be built, and a star 
 lio^hted for the conduct of seamen. But as 
 the rock was small, and hard of access, and 
 far from the land, the work would be one 
 of years ; and my father was now looking 
 for a shore station where the stones might 
 be quarried and dressed, the men live, 
 and the tender, with some degree of safety, 
 lie at anchor. . . . Here was no livino- 
 presence save for the limpets on the rocks, 
 for some old, gray, rain-beaten ram that I 
 might rouse out of a ferny den betwixt 
 two bowlders, or for the haunting and 
 piping of the gulls. It was older than 
 man ; it was found so by incoming Celts 
 and seafaring Norsemen and Columba's 
 priests. The earthy savor of the bog- 
 plants ; the rude disorder of the bowlders ; 
 
EGBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 1 93 
 
 the inimitable seaside brightness of the 
 air, the brine, and the iodine ; the lap of 
 the billows among the weedy reefs ; the 
 sudden springing-iip of a great run of 
 dashing surf along the sea-front of the isle, 
 — all that I saw and felt my predecessors 
 must have seen and felt with scarce a dif- 
 ference." 
 
 To say that he was idle is less true than 
 to say that he revolted against discipline 
 and ordinary lessons, though we find him 
 frequently bewailing his own indolence. 
 He describes himself as being, when he 
 entered the University, a " lean, idle, un- 
 popular student . . . whose changing hu- 
 mors, fine occasional purposes of good, 
 flinching acceptance of evil, shiverings on 
 wet, east-windy, morning journeys up to 
 class, infinite yawnings during lecture, and 
 unquenchable gusto in the delights of tru- 
 ancy, made up the sunshine and shadow 
 of colleofe life." 
 
 When he presented himself for a certifi- 
 cate in the engineering class. Professor 
 Fleming Jenkin, whose life he afterwards 
 wrote, said, " It is quite useless for yoii, 
 
194 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 to come, Mr. Stevenson. There may be 
 doubtful cases : there is no doubt about 
 yours. You have simply not attended my 
 class." 
 
 He was odd in dress, and odd in manner. 
 A friend (Miss Eva Blantyre Simpson) who 
 knew him in his college days says, "He 
 wore the same dress on all occasions, — 
 a shabby, short, velveteen jacket, a loose, 
 Byronic-collared shirt, and meagre, shabby- 
 looking trousers. His straight hair he 
 wore long ; and he looked like an unsuc- 
 cessful artist, or a poorly clad but eager 
 student. 
 
 " We teased him unmercifully for his 
 peculiarities in dress and manner," says 
 Miss Simpson. " It did not become a 
 youth of his years, we held, to affect a 
 bizarre style ; and he held he lived in a free 
 country, and could exercise his own taste 
 at will. Nothing annoyed him more than 
 to affirm his shabby clothes, his long cloak, 
 which he wore instead of an orthodox great- 
 coat, were eccentricities of genius. He 
 certainly liked to be noticed, for he was 
 full of the self-absorbed conceit of youth. 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 195 
 
 If he was not the central figure, he took 
 what we cahed Stevensonian ways of at- 
 tracting notice to himself. He would 
 spring U23 full of a novel notion he had 
 to expound (and his brain teemed with 
 them) , or he vowed he could not speak 
 trammelled by a coat, and asked leave to 
 talk in his shirt-sleeves. For all these 
 mannerisms he had to stand a good deal 
 of chaff, which he never resented, though 
 he vehemently defended himself, or fell 
 squashed for a brief space in a limp mass 
 into a veritable back seat." 
 
 Without thirsting for academic honors, 
 he took his degree at the University, and 
 in obedience to his father's wishes joined 
 the Scottish bar. For some time " R. L. 
 Stevenson, Advocate," was on the door- 
 plate of 1 7 Heriot Row, Edinburgh ; but he 
 never practised. He had no more inclina- 
 tion towards law than towards enorineerino-: 
 he loved the skies, he loved the moor, he 
 loved to observe his fellow-men. There 
 was everything in him to show to anybody 
 who could understand that he was born 
 for literature, and saturated with literature. 
 
196 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 While he was apparently dreaming by the 
 rills of the Pentland Hills, he was dipping 
 into Spenser's " well of En'glish undefiled." 
 into the crystal springs of the best of lite- 
 rature. The reader knows, of course, that 
 when Spenser spoke of this " well of Eng- 
 lish undefiled," he spoke of the style of 
 Chaucer. In some other ways Stevenson 
 reminds us of that poet. There was no 
 game that had such an attraction for him 
 as his books ; and there were no books that 
 could keep him in-doors, and make a pedant 
 of him to the exclusion of his interest in 
 nature. 
 
 An idler? When his teachers reproached 
 him, and his parents had misgivings, he 
 was quietly cultivating the art on which 
 his mind was set, and cultivating it by a 
 method which, frankly confessed by him, 
 may be studied with the same advantage, 
 though it has its defects, by all who hope to 
 find the best expression for their thought. 
 
 Listen to this from his essay on "A Col- 
 lege Magazine." " All through my boyhood 
 and youth I was known and pointed out 
 for the pattern of an idler ; and yet I was 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 19/ 
 
 always busy on my own private end, which 
 was to learn to write. I kept alwa\-s two 
 books in my pocket, one to read, one to 
 write in. As I walked, my mind was busy 
 fitting" what I saw with appropriate words ; 
 when I sat by the roadside, I would either 
 read, or a pencil and a penny version-book 
 would be in my hand, to note down the 
 features of the scene, or commemorate 
 some halting" stanzas. ... It w^as not 
 so much that I wished to be an author 
 (though I wished that too) as I had vowed 
 that I would learn to write. . . . When- 
 ever I read a book or a passage that par- 
 ticularly pleased me, in which a thing was 
 said or an effect rendered with propriety, 
 in which there was either some conspicu- 
 ous force or some happy distinction in the 
 style, I must sit down myself and ape that 
 quality. I w^as unsuccessful, and I knew it, 
 and tried again, and was again unsuccess- 
 ful ! but at least, in these vain bouts I got 
 some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in 
 construction, and the co-ordination of parts. 
 I have thus played the sedulous ape to 
 Hazlitt, to Lowell, to Wordsworth, to Sir 
 
iqS boyhood of famous authors. 
 
 Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, 
 to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Ober- 
 mann. . . . Even at the age of thirteen 
 I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants 
 of the famous city of Peebles in the style 
 of the ' Book of Snobs.' . . . But enough 
 has been said to show by what arts of im- 
 personation and what puny ventriloquial 
 effects I first saw my words on paper. . . . 
 It was so Keats learned, and there never 
 was a finer temperament for literature than 
 Keats's." 
 
 I should like to quote more of this es- 
 say — not to quote it, but to reproduce it 
 from beginning to end ; but there is not 
 space here. Whoever desires a lesson in 
 the art of writinof English can have it crra- 
 tuitously in the pages of " Memories and 
 Portraits." 
 
 Enough has been said, however, to show 
 that when he seemed to be idling, Steven- 
 son was serving, in a quiet, undemonstrative 
 way, his apprenticeship to the profession 
 of literature ; and though popular recog- 
 nition did not come until he was over 
 thirty, when, strange to say, it was the 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 1 99 
 
 brilliance of a story written for boys 
 ("Treasure Island") which opened the 
 eyes of readers who had failed to see his 
 genius in earlier and profounder writing, he 
 lived long enough, brief as his years were, 
 to find himself celebrated, and perhaps 
 immortal — perhaps immortal as one who 
 uses words with a sense of their true value, 
 certainly immortal for a keen sense of the 
 noblest things in life, and a constant aspira- 
 tion towards heaven. 
 
 He was busy to the last, brave to the 
 last, gay to the last ; though his thoughts 
 (not all confessed) wandered back lovingly 
 from the pleasant natives and the perennial 
 foliage of the tropics to the crags and gray 
 mist of his native Edinburgh. Two things 
 should be borne in mind about him : as a 
 famous French critic said of another author, 
 he put a book into a page, a page into a 
 phrase, a phrase into a word, a thought 
 into a sinorle imaoje. This is true of his 
 work. Of his personality we may say that 
 he resembled in many ways his hero, Alan 
 Breck Stewart ; and like him he might have 
 cried, "O man ! am I no a bonny fighter." 
 
200 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING. 
 
 Very different in most respects were 
 Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard 
 Kipling. Unlike Stevenson, Kipling was 
 gay, not moody ; active, not contempla- 
 tive; vigorous, not delicate ; an enthusiast 
 in all boyish games, a lover of mischief, 
 and the boon companion of the rough- 
 and-tumble, hard-fisted, hard-headed boys 
 who filled a military school in Devonshire. 
 
 The one thing in which they were closely 
 akin was their delight in the military and 
 naval prowess of their native lands, and 
 their passion for the ballads and stories 
 which recount the deeds of valor done by 
 the great soldiers and mariners of British 
 history. 
 
 Otherwise one cannot conceive a greater 
 contrast than that between the lank, over- 
 grown, queerly dressed school-boy of Ed- 
 inburgh, who haunted churchyards, and 
 
ch^ ■ y • ^^. 
 
 
 
RUDVARD KIPLING. 20I 
 
 hatched melancholy thoughts in them hke 
 a young Hamlet, and the small, lithe, mis- 
 chievous, prankish youth, who had been 
 sent back to England by his parents in 
 India for education in an academy filled 
 by the sons of officers in the army and 
 navy, and who relished the Spartan life he 
 had to lead. 
 
 Kipling is usually reticent, very reticent, 
 about himself (and in that, too, he is un- 
 like his contemporary, who, as we know 
 very well, poured out his confidences like 
 a friendly child) ; but he has described his 
 life at the school in "The Youth's Com- 
 panion" in a rare chapter of autobiography, 
 from which we may quote. 
 
 The United Service College, as it was 
 called, was on the shores of Bristol Chan- 
 nel, near a litde place known as Westward 
 Ho, so named after Rev. Charles Kingsley's 
 famous story, the scene of which is laid 
 in the days of Queen Elizabeth, when the 
 safety of England was threatened by the 
 Spanish Armada. Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir 
 Richard Grenville, Admiral Hawkins, and 
 Sir Francis Drake appear in the story ; and 
 
202 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 the reader who loves romance can imagine 
 what visions of adventure must have come 
 to a boy who found liimself hving amidst 
 such association. 
 
 The college " stood within two miles of 
 Am)'as Leigh's house at Northam, over- 
 looking the Burrouofhs and the Pebble- 
 ridee, and the mouth of the Torrido^e, 
 whence the ' Rose ' sailed in search of 
 Don Guzman. From the front dormitory 
 windows, across the long rollers of the At- 
 lantic, you could see Lundy Island and the 
 Shutter Rock, where the ' Santa Cathe- 
 rina ' galleon cheated Amyas put of his ven- 
 geance by going ashore. Inland lay the 
 rich Devonshire lanes and the fat orchards ; 
 and to the west the gorse and the turf 
 rose and fell along the tops of the clifts 
 Ml combe after combe, till you came to 
 Clovelly and the Hobby and Gallantry 
 Bower, and the homes of the Carews and 
 the Pinecoffins, and the Devonshire people 
 that were old when the Armada was new." 
 
 A milksop, a boy without spirit, a boy 
 without a vigorous constitution, could not 
 have been happy in such a school, and, 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING. 203 
 
 indeed, he would have been entirely out 
 of place. The discipline was severe, as ex- 
 ercised by the masters and by the students 
 themselves, who never forgot that they 
 were preparing themselves to be soldiers. 
 
 "The school motto," says Kipling, "was, 
 ' Fear God, Honour the Kinor; ' and so the 
 men she made went out to Boerland and 
 Zululand, and India and Burma, and Cyprus 
 and Hongkong, and lived or died as gen- 
 tlemen and officers. 
 
 " Even the most notorious bully, for 
 whom an awful ending was prophesied, 
 went to Canada, and was mixed up in 
 Riel's rebellion, and came out of it with 
 a fascinating reputation of having led a 
 forlorn hope, and behaved like a hero. 
 The first officer killed in the last Burma 
 war was one of our boys, and the school 
 was well pleased to think it should be so. 
 
 "All these matters were noted by the 
 older boys ; and when their fathers, the gra)-- 
 whiskered colonels and generals, came 
 down to see them, or the directors, who 
 were K. C. B's., and had been desperate, 
 hard-fiehtinof men in their time, made a 
 
204 BOYJIOOD OF J-AMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 tour of inspection, it was reported that the 
 school-tone was ' healthy.' This meant 
 that the boys were straining- on their 
 leashes, and tliat there w^as a steady clatter 
 of sino-lcsticks and clinkin^- of foils in the 
 c^ymnasium at the far end of the corridor, 
 where the drill-sercff^ant was barkin"" out 
 the regulation cuts and guards." 
 
 They were great swimmers, and there 
 was not a single boy who could not do his 
 quarter of a mile. The links at Westward 
 Ho are considered amonof the best in Encj- 
 land, and the boys played golf long before 
 it became fashionable. 
 
 " We were weak in cricket ; but our foot- 
 ball team at its best devastated the coun- 
 try from Blundell's ' — we always respected 
 lihinde-ll's, because ' Great John Ridd * 
 had been educated there — to Exeter, 
 whose team were grown men. Yet we, 
 who had been taught to play together, 
 drove th(*m back over the November mud, 
 back to their own goal-posts, till the ball 
 was hacked througli and touched down, 
 
 1 I51iintlcll's is the old school at Tiverton which John Ridd, 
 the hero of " Lorna Doone," attended. 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING. 20 5 
 
 and you could hear the long-drawn yell of 
 ' Schoo-<?^/ / Schoo-<?^/ / ' as far as Apple- 
 dore. 
 
 " When the enemy would not come to 
 us, our team went to the enemy, and if 
 victorious, would return late at night in 
 a three-horse brake chanting : — 
 
 ' It's a way we have in the Army, 
 It's a way we have in the Xav)-, 
 It's a way that we have in the Public Schools, 
 Which nobody can deny ! ' 
 
 "Then the boys would flock to the dormi- 
 tory windows, and wave towels, and join in 
 the ' Hip-hip-hip-hurrah! ' of the chorus; 
 and the winning team would swagger 
 through the dormitories, and show the 
 beautiful blue marks on their shins, and the 
 little boys would be allowed to get sponges 
 and hot water." 
 
 There was a school paper ; and Kipling 
 tells us of that also in his characteristic 
 style : — 
 
 " Three of the boys, who had moved up 
 the school side by side for four years, and 
 were allies in all thinq-s, started the notion 
 
206 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 as soon as they came to the dignity of a 
 study of their own with a door that would 
 lock. The other two told the third boy 
 what to write, and held the staircase against 
 invaders. 
 
 " It was a real printed paper of eight 
 pages ; and at first the printer was more 
 thoroughly ignorant of type-setting, and 
 the editor was more completely ignorant 
 of proof-reading, than any printer and 
 any editor that ever was. It was printed 
 off by a gas-engine, and even the engine 
 despised its work ; for one day it went 
 through the floor of the shop, and crashed 
 
 — still working furiously — into the cellar. 
 "The paper came out at times and sea- 
 sons ; but every time it came out there was 
 sure to be trouble, because the editor was 
 learning for the first time how sweet and 
 good and profitable it is — and how nice it 
 looks on the page — to make fun of people 
 in actual print. 
 
 " For instance, there was friction among 
 the study- fags once ; and the editor wrote 
 a descriptive account of the lower school, 
 
 — the classes whence the fags were drawn, 
 
RUDYARD KIPLIiVG. 20J 
 
 — their manners and customs, their ways 
 of cooking half-plucked sparrows and im- 
 perfectly cleaned blackbirds at the gas-jets 
 on a rusty nib, and their fights over sloe- 
 jam made in a gallipot. It was an abso- 
 lutely truthful article ; but the lower school 
 knew nothing about truth, and would not 
 even consider it as literature. 
 
 "It is less safe to write a study of an 
 entire class than to discuss individuals one 
 by one ; but apart from the fact that boys 
 throw books and inkpots very straight in- 
 deed, there Is surprisingly little difference 
 between the abuse of grown-up people and 
 the abuse of children. 
 
 "In those days the editor had not 
 learned this ; so when the study below the 
 editorial study threw coal at the editorial 
 legs, and kicked in the panels of the door, 
 because of personal paragraphs in the last 
 number, the editorial staff — and there 
 never was so loyal and hard-fighting a 
 staff — fried fat bacon till there was half 
 an inch of grease in the pan, and let the 
 greasy chunks down at the end of a string 
 to bob against and defile the lower study 
 windows. 
 
208 BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 "When the lower study — and there 
 never was a public so low and unsympa- 
 thetic as that lower study — looked out to 
 see what was frosting their window-panes, 
 the editorial staff emptied the hot fat on 
 their heads, and it stayed there for days 
 and days, wearing shiny to the very last." 
 
 It is not avowed that Kipling was the 
 editor of that paper, but I think he was. 
 The incident of the bacon certainly seems 
 to fit him. 
 
 When they left school, most of the boys 
 entered the army ; but for some reason not 
 explained Kipling did not do so. He re- 
 turned to his family in India, and became, 
 at the age of nineteen, a reporter, editor, 
 and war correspondent of an Anglo-Indian 
 newspaper. 
 
 The trying conditions under which his 
 work was done, he himself has described : — • 
 
 "The paper began running the last is- 
 sue of the week on Saturday night, which 
 is to say Sunday morning, after the custom 
 of a London paper. This was a great con- 
 venience ; for immediately after the paper 
 was put to bed, the dawn would lower the 
 
RUDYARD KIPLIXG. 209 
 
 thermometer from 96 to almost 84 for half 
 an hour ; and in that chill — you have no 
 idea how cold is 84 on the grass until you 
 begin to pray for it — a very tired man 
 could set off to sleep ere the heat aroused 
 him. 
 
 "One Saturday night it v/as my pleasant 
 duty to put the paper to bed alone. A 
 king or courtier or a community was go- 
 ing to die, or get a new constitution, or 
 do something that was important, on the 
 other side of the world ; and the paper 
 was to be held open till the latest possible 
 minute in order to catch the teleoram. It 
 was a pitchy black night, as stifling as a 
 June night can be ; and the loo, the red- 
 hot wind from the westward, was booming 
 among the tinder-dry trees, and pretend- 
 ing that the rain was on its heels. Now 
 and again a spot of almost boiling water 
 would fall on the dust with the flop of a 
 frog, but all our weary world knew that 
 was only pretence. It was a shade cooler 
 in the press-room than the office ; so I sat 
 there, while the type ticked and clicked, 
 and the night jars hooted at the windows, 
 
2IO BOYHOOD OF FAMOUS AUTHORS. 
 
 and the all but naked compositors wiped 
 the sweat from their foreheads, and called 
 for water. The thing that was keeping us 
 back, whatever it was, would not come off, 
 though the loo dropped, and the last type 
 was set, and the whole round earth stood 
 still in the chokingr heat, with its finder on 
 its lip, to wait the event. I drowsed, and 
 wondered whether the telegraph was a 
 blessing, and whether this dying man, or 
 struggling people, was aware of the in- 
 convenience the delay was causing. There 
 was no special reason beyond the heat and 
 worry to make tension ; but as the clock- 
 hands crept up to three o'clock, and the 
 machines spun their fly-wheels two and 
 three times to see that all was in order 
 before I said the word that would set them 
 off, I could have shrieked aloud. Then 
 the roar and rattle of the wheels shivered 
 the quiet into little bits." 
 
 His daily work was to prepare for press 
 all the telegrams of the day ; to provide 
 all the extracts and paragraphs; to make 
 headed articles out of official reports, etc. ; 
 to write such editorial notes as he might 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING. 211 
 
 have time for ; to look generally after all 
 sports, out-station and local intelligence, 
 and to read all proofs. 
 
 Hard as the work in the office was, he 
 found time to write verses and stories of 
 his own. Others could see all there was 
 to see in that mixed life of British India. 
 This young man, however, could not only 
 see, but depict, and depict as no one else 
 had done the redcoats and the natives and 
 the o-overninof classes. He had failed to 
 enter the army; but he taught himself the 
 speech, the ways, and the thoughts of the 
 men in the ranks (remember his "Soldiers 
 Three "), and of the commissioned officers, 
 from the young lieutenant up to the com- 
 mander-in-chief. Before he was twenty- 
 five he found himself famous, and not only 
 famous, but unique in qualities of observa- 
 tion and style among British authors. 
 
■ s «■;<«-, .ry 7 ■-■tie '"'i 
 
 
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