Confessions of Boyhood
J >> John Albee >> Confessions of BoyhoodCONFESSIONS OF BOYHOOD
By JOHN ALBEE
BOSTON
RICHARD G. BADGER
THE GORHAM PRESS
1910
Copyright 1920 by John Albee
All Rights Reserved
The Gorham Press, Boston, U.S.A.
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Walls of the World
Shadows and Echoes
Holidays
The Amputation
Country Funerals
My Mother's Red Cloak
My Uncle Lyman
The Dorr War and Millerism
Woods and Pastures
Apprenticeships
Home and Homesickness
The Saw Mill
Bootmaking
Love and Luxury
Shop Boy
Pistol Maker
The Awakening
Student Life
School Master
Farm Hand
Conclusion
Ave Atgue Vale
INTRODUCTION
For so many years Bellingham has had its abode in my fancy that I find
it hard to associate the town with a definite geographical location. I
connect it rather with the places of dreams and wonderland; the lost
cities of the Oxus and Hydaspes, the Hesperian Gardens and those
visionary realms visited and named by poets. My birthplace grows
unfamiliar when I take down an atlas and run my finger over the
parti-colored divisions of the Norfolk County of Massachusetts and trace
the perimeter which confines Bellingham to its oblong precinct,
surrounded by those mythical lands of Mendon, Milford and Medway. They
wear an authoritative appearance on the map; but for me they occupied no
such positions in my childhood and stand as stubborn realities hindering
my feet when I wish to return to the Red House of my fathers. Once
there, memory and fact are no longer conflicting. I find, as of old, the
gently undulating hills, the gently loitering stream.
The legends concerning the founding of Bellingham are missing. I am
sorry; for I could believe the most extravagant, feeling with Plutarch,
that fortune, in the history of any town, often shows herself a poet.
The Delphian Pythoness advised Theseus to found a city wherever in a
strange land he was most sorrowful and afflicted. There at length he
would find repose and happiness. Thus it happened when the wanderers
from Braintree settled on the shores of the upper Charles. They brought
their unhappy fortunes so far, and there, in due time, found comfort and
contentment.
The traveller, journeying through the highways of Bellingham, would see
nothing to attract his attention or interest. It has no monuments, ruins
nor historic associations; no mountain, nor hill even. The Charles river
has travelled so little way from its source as hardly yet to be a river.
The soil is stony and pays back not much more than is put into it. The
fine forests of white oak have been mostly reduced to ashes in the
stoves of Milford, and their oracles have ceased. My father, who could
cut as clean a scarf as any man of his day, helped to fell them. Scrub
oak and gray birch have taken their places, but do not fill them. One
great elm remains; it seemed to me the largest and oldest tree in the
world. My mother nursed her children in its shade; under it my world
began. In its top lived the wind and from the longest spray of its
longest limb the oriole hung her artistic basket and brooded her golden
babies. Like many another ancient dooryard tree it carried back its
traditional origin to a staff stuck in the ground and left to its fate.
Bellingham was incorporated in 1719 by yeoman farmers, and later settled
largely by Revolutionary soldiers from neighboring communities on the
east, particularly from old Braintree. On the Mendon tablet placed in
memory of the founders of the town appears the name of my earliest
ancestor. He was a surveyor and plotted the land and built the first
mill, being called from Braintree for that purpose. Permit me to take
pride in my learned ancestor, especially in his talent for figures--the
distress of my life. The most interesting periods in the annals of the
New England people are when they began to organize themselves into
communities for the promotion of law, learning and piety. Their efforts
were primitive yet affecting. Their language halted, but they knew what
they wanted and meant to have.
Such are the records of Bellingham. And other history it has little out
of the common incidents of humanity. No eminent sons have as yet
remembered it with noble benefactions. It has had no poet and no mention
in literature. The reporters pass it by. It is not even a suburb, last
sad fate of many towns and villages. This is one of the reasons for my
attachment--its unchangeableness, its entire satisfaction of sentiment.
Yet such is the charm of one's native soil that he is able to find in it
the most wonderful of all the beautiful things of the soul, namely,
those which no one else can see or believe. After long years of absence,
on returning to Bellingham, my memory sees more than my eyes. She who
accompanies me in my rambles over the town often takes photographs of
the places dearest to me; but her pictures show not what I behold, and
she wonders what it can be that so infatuates me. I see a hand she
cannot see--forms, faces, happenings not registered on the camera;
places where linger the invisible spirits of joyful or painful
experiences; playmates, companions, whole families now dust, a thousand
events recalled only when time begins to obliterate those of the present
moment.
Although the sun went down over venerable Mendon town, it lingered
longer over Bellingham in summer days than in any place I have known.
There was hardly any night; just a few attic stairs, a dream, and the
sun and I were again at play. Nor elsewhere were ever the summer clouds
so high, so near the blue, so impetuous in the constant west wind to
follow each other into the unknown, mysterious east.
Fortunate is the town with a river flowing through its whole length and
boys and girls to accompany its unhasting waters. It was made for them,
also for the little fish and the white scented lilies. For a few hours
of the day the great floats of the mill wheel drank of it, sending it
onward in the only agitation it ever permitted itself. Then there was
Bear Hill, though never a bear in the oldest memory, yet the name was
ominous to children. I feared it and liked to visualize its terrors from
a safe distance in the blackberry field behind the Red House. To kill a
bear or an Indian was the very limit of imaginative prowess. It was too
easy, and in an hour, tiresome, to kill birds, snakes and anything one
chanced upon that had life. Only the grasshopper could escape with the
ransom of some molasses from the jug he carries hidden, no one knows
where. You never knew a grasshopper was provisioned with a molasses jug?
Well then you have never studied the boy's traditional natural history.
Therein are recorded things unknown to science; discoveries never
divulged, secrets more deep than the Elusinian, passed on from initiate
to initiate for countless generations. Nature has told them only to
children, and when grown to manhood, seals their lips with that impious
injunction to put away childish things.
It is not a river nor a landscape that gives to a town its real
importance; it is the character of its men and women. That is the
pinnacle from which to view its landscape. Before cities and factories
had begun to stir the ambition and attract the young by opportunities
for fortune and fame, Bellingham was the home of an intelligent,
liberty-loving people; a community self-sufficing, sharing its abundance
with those less abounding. It was thus the best place in the world to be
born about the first third of the last century--to be explicit, in
eighteen hundred and thirty-three. And I wish that I and the companions
of my childhood could have imitated Plutarch who said "I live in a
little town and choose to live there lest it should become smaller."
All that is dear remains as it was, and it is my delight to remember and
magnify what it is to me. My friends laugh when I say it is better to be
remembered in Bellingham than to be famous in ten cities. It has been my
misfortune never to have lived in any other place that in a few years,
did not change and forget itself. I cannot find anything in my later
residences that continues to connect me with them. They have cut a
street through me, they have torn down and rebuilt my old nests; and I
know no more melancholy intimation of the small consequence of one's
life and associations than this. Therefore I thank Heaven for a town
removed from the track of progress, uninvaded by summer visitors and all
business enterprises; land left sacred to its native inhabitants, a
sluggish stream, unprofitable earth, huckleberry bushes and the
imagination. Since this is so, and there is little fear of intrusion by
the curious or the mercenary, I will confide to my readers the situation
of the town with the understanding that they will never attempt to
verify my description.
It lies in the southwestern corner of Norfolk county, is eight miles
long from north to south, from three to four in width. The brooks and
ponds in the southern part have their outlet into the Blackstone river;
those of the north into the Charles, which is the natural but tortuous
bound between eighteen towns and cities of the county. It was named for
one of the Provincial governors of Massachusetts, Richard Bellingham--a
fine name. Farming is the chief occupation of the inhabitants at present
as it always has been. In former times there were two or three small
cotton and woollen mills on the river. The oldest of them, on the banks
of the Charles, is as picturesque a ruin as time, fire and neglect are
able to achieve in a hundred years. The walls of heavy blocks of stone,
roofless and broken in outline, are still standing. Great trees have
grown up within them and now overtop them. Here and there a poplar leans
forth from a broken window casement, leaving scant room for the ghosts
of ancient spinners and weavers to peer into the outer world at
midnight. From a distance it resembles a green, enclosed orchard. Decay
may mantle itself in newest green but cannot obliterate memories of
former generations. On these fallen floors the young women of Bellingham
once labored and were merry on fifty cents a day, a working day never
less than twelve hours long. They sang at their work, and when the loom
was running in good order, they leaned out of the windows or gossiped
with each other. On Sundays the roads and fields were gay with these
respectable Yankee maidens, becurled and beribboned, philandering with
their sweethearts or in bevies visiting each other's houses. Every girl
had her album in which her friends wrote their names, and usually they
were able to contribute an original stanza; or, if not, a line from the
hymn-book, or a sentiment from the school reader or Bible. They dressed
in calico in summer and in winter linsey-woolsey, and wore at their work
ample aprons of osnaburg, a small checked blue and white cloth. Vice was
unknown; at least the annals record no flagrant examples.
I fear those who only know the cotton and woollen mills of this day
cannot realize or believe what an immense blessing they were to New
England when they first began to dot all the streams offering sufficient
water power to operate their machinery. For the first time they opened a
way for young women to earn money whereby they could assist their
families and promote the improvement of their own condition. Work in
these mills was sought as a temporary employment generally; or for the
purpose of gaining money enough to attend an academy for a few terms,
from whence they were graduated qualified to teach a district school. It
is said, that formerly, when the factory girls were all American, five
hundred could have been found at any time in the Lowell mills competent
to teach school. What a contrast these girls were in health, beauty and
intelligence to the pale, pinched faces and bedraggled dresses now seen
hurrying to the Fall River and Manchester mills. The mill girls of 1840
were self-respecting, neat in their dress, religious, readers of good
books, members of all kinds of clubs for study, and many of them could
write excellent English. The _Lowell Offering+, a magazine conducted by
factory girls at the period I have mentioned, now seems very remarkable;
not so much perhaps for its contributions, as that it should have
existed at all. Yet the writing in the _Operatives' Magazine+ and the
_Lowell Offering+ was as good as that now appearing in periodicals, in
some respects superior, being the free, unpaid and spontaneous
utterances of the human heart. It is mentioned with praise in Emerson's
_Dial+. One of our sweetest New England poets, Lucy Larcom, began her
career as a writer in them. I write that name where I can see from my
window a mountain named in her honor. Although her childhood was widely
different from mine in outward circumstances, I find in her
autobiography something of her inward experiences that reminds me of my
own.
All the old-time life of farm and factory is gone. It is refreshing to
know a single remnant of it left anywhere; and I was never more
surprised and delighted than to find in Florence, Massachusetts, a few
years ago, a large class of silk mill girls reading and studying Chaucer
under the direction of a farmer's wife of the same place. Bellingham
mill, may you continue to be filled with goodly trees until you can
assemble a class in Chaucer!
Near this ruined mill stands a row of tenement houses fast falling to
pieces and one large house where some of the operatives were boarded. In
the neighboring hamlet nearly every house is standing that was there
fifty years ago, and there are no new ones. There was an ancient law of
Solon that houses in the country should be placed a bowshot apart, and
this regulation seems to have been observed in Bellingham. You could see
their lights in the evening, hear the dogs bark and the cock crow at
dawn.
Over the Green Store is a hall where formerly Adin Ballou used to preach
his various gospels of Universalism, temperance, peace and abolition on
Sunday afternoons following the morning services in his neighboring
parish, the Hopedale Community. As my family was attached to the Baptist
and Methodist persuasions I cannot now imagine what drew them to hear
this famous reformer of society and religion. They must have attended in
this hall, for although I cannot recall anything else, I do remember
going to sleep there in the hot summer afternoons in my sister's lap.
But any kind of a meeting was a temptation not to be resisted in that
little community. Adin Ballou was in full sympathy with all the other
reformers and transcendentalists of the Commonwealth, and when I search
myself for an explanation of my early and intuitive attraction to their
ideals I sometimes fancy they must have visited me in my sleep in that
old hall; or perhaps I heard something which lay like a seed in the
unconscious, secret recesses of my being until time and favoring
circumstances called it forth. For I find it recorded, that he fired his
hearers with aspirations for "grand objects and noble ideas."
Regarding the topography of Bellingham, the most that can be said is,
that it has none, none that distinguishes it either by lakes or hills.
The best soil is in the northern and southern parts of the town and
along the valley of the Charles river. The white oaks were once the most
abundant of the deciduous trees. They seem to love a lean and stubborn
soil. I have seen graves laid open to a considerable depth where oaks
had once stood, and still uncovering nothing but coarse gravel. I have
talked with ancient well-diggers who declared that the bottom of
Bellingham was just like the top and only good for grey birch and beans.
Yet they may not have dug after all to the veins which supply the floral
and arboreal life of the earth. A poor soil is usually porous, admitting
more wholesome air and sunshine, and it is through these vital forces
that trees and men grow taller and hardier. Thus do I like to compensate
the sterile fields of my native place by their stalwart, thin,
straight-backed citizens, all bone and muscle, living with undimmed eyes
and ears to ripe old age, mowing their meadows to the last summer of
their lives and dying conveniently in some winter month when work was
slack.
The dial of my childhood marked none but sunny days; the dry air and
drier earth of Bellingham gave me health and strength. I never found any
road in the town too long for my walking if only the summer afternoon
were as long. I knew the roads and byways foot by foot, and could find
my way, if need were, in the night as well as in the day. All the houses
I knew and their occupants; all the good apple trees and whose was every
cow grazing in the roadside pastures or resting beneath a tree. If I
could have my will I would spend the remainder of my days rambling once
more and every day those familiar roads and lanes, like Juno descending
the Olympian path--
"Reflecting with rapid thoughts
There was I, and there, remembering many things."
The most perfect picture of contentment is a cow lying in the green
grass under a green tree chewing her cud; and this contentment I could
realize, give me back the sandy highways and green meadows, my bare
feet, idleness and long summer days.
I was even more familiar with the pastures and the woods than with the
roads. The whole surface of my ambit was spread out like a miniature map
in my eye, and continues to be. Especially I knew the convenient ways of
reaching the river and Beaver pond and the brook which connects it with
the river Charles. It grieves me that this stream has never been
celebrated in verse or prose; while the Concord, which rises on the same
water-shed with the Charles and almost from the same spring, has had
several famous poets and is historic in Revolutionary annals. Longfellow
sang one short song to our river, but he looked out only on the foul
mudbanks of its Cambridge course, shut the door, went back to his study
and composed his subjective Charles.
Slowly did I learn the actual extent and course of the river Charles
which, in my childhood, rose as a shallow stream in the green depths of
a wood lying to the north of Bellingham, flowing east, then south under
the arched bridge near the school house, emptying somewhere in the
southern sky; for, in my childish apprehension, I thought it must run up
from where I was most familiar with it. Its youth and mine were
coincident, and as years were added, the river broadened and lengthened
until I found myself one day at its mouth, in reaching which, it had
touched and watered eighteen towns. It is the father of no considerable
stream, but innumerable rivulets add to its waters. It is about thirty
miles from source to mouth in a direct course though it wanders a
hundred miles in its efforts to find the ocean.
"There runs a shallow brook across our field
For twenty miles where the black crow flies five."
It never has any headlong haste to arrive. It saunters like a schoolboy
and stops to visit a thousand recesses and indentations of upland and
meadow. It stays for a cow to drink, or an alder to root itself in the
bank, or to explore a swamp, and it rather wriggles than runs through
its eighteen townships. It is likely to stop at any one of them and give
up the effort to reach the sea. For my part I wish it had, and actually,
as in my memory and fancy, ended at the outermost shores of Bellingham.
The revolution of the earth can only account for the flow of the Charles
for there is no perceptible descent of the land. I like to think it is
ruled by the stars and not by the configuration of the earth's surface.
It is vagrant and nomadic in its habits, moving on a little, returning,
winding and doubling, uncertain of its own intentions, a brother of the
English Wye, said to derive its name from _Vaga_, the wanderer, or
vagabond. Since its waters sprang from their fountain head and learned
that their destiny was to become a river, they have never been in haste
to reach its turbid outlet, but go reluctantly from town to town with
whole days before them, yes, perhaps, it was an age in making its first
journey. It loses its way often, but cares not so there be a pleasant
meadow to meander through or a contemplative fisherman to companion its
course. The Charles has never gained force, as man is said to do, by
having obstacles to overcome. It treats all the dams which intercept its
current with a lenient benevolence, never having been known to carry one
away. Meeting a dam, it turns the other cheek; in other words it
patiently retires into its higher channels and fountains, filling and
stilling the little babbling brooks by its backward impulse, contented
to be a pond when it cannot be a river. It scarcely resisted the
ancients of Dedham, when they attempted to steal it. Having no water-shed
of its own, the Charles is not subject to those floods and frenzies
which make so many other streams dangerous. Sedges and flags, the skunk
cabbage and marsh marigold, grape vines, alders, willows and button bush
abound along its shores. White and yellow lilies and the pickerel weed
almost choke its course in many places. Under the leaves of these hides
himself that fish which old anglers named the water-wolf, the pickerel,
who preys upon his smaller brothers and sisters. All is fish that comes
into his net. There was no more exciting moment in my boyhood than when
a pickerel swallowed the frog's leg on my hook and began to retreat with
it under the lily pads. In the stream also were horned pouts, perch,
shiners and that silly little fish we called "kivers," for which my
earliest fishing was done with a bent pin. I was naturally capacitated
for fishing by my fondness for silence and solitude. The mystery of
water drew me from one pool to another and a constant expectancy of a
larger fish than had ever been caught. I was not aware that words could
make him as big as one chose; but I had pictured him in my mind in all
his immense and shining length. What I most wished to catch was a
leviathan; my mother when reading the word in the Bible had told me it
meant some kind of great fish, the largest in the world. Once indeed I
thought I had him on my hook, but it proved only a sunken log. Of
stillness and solitude I had my fill strolling along the banks of the
river. It seemed like Sunday without the requirements imposed upon me by
that day, stiff shoes and Sunday-school. I became as still as the nature
around me, stepping softly and almost hushing my breath. If I might
describe in one word the sensation which I commonly experienced in my
earliest lonely intercourse with stream and forest it was a breathless
expectation, made up in part of fear, in part of a vague hope of
discovering something wonderful. This quest never wearied nor
disheartened me; I only became more eager in its pursuit the more it
evaded me; another search, another day and it would be revealed. What
would be revealed? There are no words given to man in which he can
clearly portray the striving of the spirit for that which shall resemble
and satisfy its visions and aspirations. The child sees these visions
and feels these aspirations and strives to put his finger upon them;
they exist for him as physical objects which he wishes to capture and
carry home to his mother with a proud consciousness of his valor. As
soon as she had praised my handful of flowers, my pocketful of nuts, or
little string of fish they palled upon me and I began immediately to
feel an uneasy sense of disappointment, of disillusion, knowing I had
miserably failed. The bombastic brag to my mother and her praise were a
kind of mockery and falsehood. Illusion followed illusion, defeat
followed defeat, yet the morrow was ever to be their healer and
compensation. How often have I been soothed by the waveless waters of
the Charles river, its whispering ripples scarcely reaching the shores
and making no impression upon it. But on my ear they sounded like words
interjected with soft laughter. There I made acquaintance with the
earth, the waters, the shadows of the sky, trying often to sink my hook
to the edge of a cloud. It was not in the heavens that I first noticed
the stars, but their trembling images in water.
Thus by the humble and narrow environment of my childhood was it made
doubly dear to me; the very limitations themselves enforcing and
promoting the growth of wonder and healthy imagination. It is this which
has kept alive my early memories and made them pleasant and suggestive
throughout my life. Nor do I think my experiences peculiar. Sir Henry
Wotton in the last years of his life happily expressed the feeling
common to men. "Seeing that very place where I sat when I was a boy
occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth which then
possessed me; sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years
numerous pleasures without mixture of cares; and those to be enjoyed
when time, which I therefore thought slow-paced had changed my youth
into manhood".
As I have already said unchangeableness is the characteristic of
Bellingham, and I repeat it, that I may add that it is the counterpart
of something in myself. I have been swept on with my race and my time
and while sharing all their tendencies, at heart what I value most, that
which is most native and dearest to me is the simple undisturbed life,
full of friendliness, piety and humble amusements into which I was born.
What this life was, as reflected in a happy childhood, a neglected youth
and idealised by its irrecoverable loss the following pages attempt to
portray.