Chapter I: Early Life. 1824-1837 (2)

In the town of Milford lived my uncle, William Godfrey, with my aunt Nancy, and of them and their home I have many pleasant memories. The very first of them all was not so pleasant to me at the time. My parents had just arrived, and had not been ten minutes in the house ere a tremendous squall was heard, and my mother, looking from the window, beheld me standing in the open barn-door holding a tiny chicken in my right hand, while an old hen sat on my head flapping her wings and pecking me in wrath. I, seeing the brood, had forthwith captured one, and for that was undergoing penance. It was a beautiful tableau, which was never forgotten! We went there on visits for many summers. Uncle William was a kind-hearted, "sportive" man, who took _Bell's Life_, and I can remember that there was a good supply of English reading in the house. My uncle had three sons, all much older than I. The eldest, Stearns, was said to have first popularised the phrase "posted up," to signify well-informed. The second, Benjamin, became in after years a great manufacturer and somewhat noted politician, and owner of a famous racehorse. The third, Samuel, went into business in Philadelphia, and crossed the Atlantic with me. He died quite young. All of them, like their father and grandfather, were very good-natured or gentle, and men of perfect integrity. The Lelands, however, were rather _dour_ and grim in their honesty, or more Northern than the Godfreys. This was accounted for by the fact, that while my father's family was Puritan of the purest, and only intermarried with Puritan stock, the Godfreys had in Rhode Island received an infusion of French Huguenot blood, which was indeed very perceptible in their faces and lively pleasant manner.

There was a strange tradition, to which my mother sometimes jestingly referred, that there had been among her Rhode Island ancestors a High German (_i.e._, not a Hollander) doctor, who had a reputation as a sorcerer or wizard. He was a man of learning, but that is all I ever heard about him. My mother's opinion was that this was a very strong case of atavism, and that the mysterious ancestor had through the ages cropped out again in me. Something tells me that this was the High German doctor who, according to Washington Irving, laid the mystic spell on Sleepy Hollow, which made of it such a pleasant, ancient, dreamy fairy- land. Whether his friendly spirit still watches over me, or whether I am the man himself, is a problem which I leave to my friend Francis Galton, who indeed personally often reminds me of Irving. High German sorcerers were not common in those days north of Pennsylvania, so that I trow mine was the very man referred to by Geoffrey Crayon. And it is true beyond all doubt that even in infancy, as I have often heard, there was a quaint uncanniness, as of something unknown, in my nature, and that I differed in the main totally from every relative, and indeed from any other little boy, known to anybody; though I was a perfect Godfrey in face when very young, as I am now a typical Leland. I was always given to loneliness in gardens and woods when I could get into them, and to hearing words in birds' songs and running or falling water; and I once appalled a visitor by professing seriously that I could determine for him some question as to what would happen to him by divination with a bullet in an Indian moccasin. We had two servants who spoke old Irish; one was an inexhaustible mine of legends, which she related to me--she surpassed Croker; the other, less versed, still knew a great deal, and told me how her own father, Jackey Mooney, had seen the fairies with his own eyes. Both of these sincerely and seriously regarded me as "gifted" or elfin- favoured, and the latter said in proof thereof, "Only listen to his voice; sure whin he spakes he'd while a burred aff a tree." For my uncanny ways made a deep impression on them, as also on the darkies.

Once I had a wonderful dream. I thought that I was in Dr. Furness's chapel, but that, instead of the gentle reverend clergyman, the devil himself was in the pulpit preaching. Feeling myself inspired, I went up into the pulpit, threw the Evil One out, and preached myself in his place. Now our nurse had a dream-book, and made some pretence to mystic fairy knowledge learned in Kilkenny, and she interpreted this dream as signifying that I would greatly rise in this world, and do strange things. But she was greatly struck with such a vision in such an infant.

Now, I was a great reader of Scripture; in fact, I learned a great deal too much of it, believing now that for babes and sucklings about one-third of it had better be expurgated. The Apocrypha was a favourite work, but above all I loved the Revelations, a work which, I may say by the way, is still a treasure to be investigated as regards the marvellous mixture of Neo-Platonic, later Egyptian (or Gnostic), and even Indian Buddhistic ideas therein. Well, I had learned from it a word which St. John applies (to my mind very vulgarly and much too frequently) to the Scarlet Lady of Babylon or Rome. What this word meant I did not know, but this I understood, that it was "sass" of some kind, as negroes term it, and so one day I applied it experimentally to my nurse. Though the word was not correctly pronounced, for I had never heard it from anybody, its success was immediate, but not agreeable. The passionate Irish woman flew into a great rage and declared that she would "lave the house." My mother, called in, investigated the circumstances, and found that I really had no idea whatever of the meaning of what I had said. Peace was restored, but Annie declared that only the divil or the fairies could have inspired such an infant to use such language.

I was very fond of asking my nurse to sing in old Irish or to teach me Irish words. This she did, but agreed with her sister Biddy that it was all very uncanny, and that there must have been a time when I was perfectly familiar with the owld language, as I had such unearthly fondness for it.

I must have been about seven years old when my parents took a house in Arch Street, above Ninth Street, Philadelphia. Here my life begins to be more marked and distinct. I was at first sent, _i.e._, walked daily to the school of Jacob Pierce, a worthy Quaker, who made us call him Jacob, and who carefully taught us all the ordinary branches, and gave us excellent lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry with experiments, and encouraged us to form mineralogical collections, but who objected to our reading history, "because there were so many battles in it." In which system of education all that is good and bad, or rather _weak_, in Quakerism is fully summed up. Like the Roman Catholic, it is utterly unfit for _all_ the world, and incapable of grappling with or adapting itself to the natural expansion of science and the human mind. Thus the Quaker garb, which was originally intended by its simplicity to avoid the appearance of eccentricity or peculiarity (most dress in the time of the Stuarts being extravagant), has now become, by merely sticking to old custom, the most eccentric dress known. The school was in a very large garden, in which was a gymnasium, and in the basement of the main building there was a carpenter's shop with a turning-lathe, where boys were allowed to work as a reward for good conduct.

I could never learn the multiplication table. There are things which the mind, like the stomach, spasmodically rejects without the least perceptible cause or reason. So I have found it to be with certain words which _will_ not be remembered. There was one Arab word which I verily believe I looked out one hundred times in the dictionary, and repeated a thousand, yet never could keep it. Every teacher should be keen to detect these antipathies, and cure them by gentle and persuasive means. Unfortunately no one in my youth knew any better way to overcome them than by "keeping me in" after school to study, when I was utterly weary and worn--a very foolish punishment, as is depriving a boy of his meals, or anything else levelled at Nature. I think there must have been many months of time, and of as much vain and desperate effort on my part to remember, wasted on my early arithmetic. Now I can see that by _rewards_ or inducements, and by the very simple process of only learning "one time one is one" for the first lesson, and that and one line more for the second, I could have mastered the whole book in time. But oh! the weary, dreary days, and the sad waste of time, and the anxious nervous suffering, which arithmetic cost me in my youth, and mathematics in after years!

But there was one class at Jacob's in which I was _facile-princeps_ and habitual past-grand-master. This was the class which was, like the professorship of Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, for Matters and Things in General. That is to say, we read aloud from some book--it may have been selections from English writers--and then Jacob, picking out the hard words or facts or phrases, required of them definition or explanation. One day there arose in these questions a sum in arithmetic, when I shot down to the tail of the class as a plummet drops to the bottom of the well. I shall never forget the proud fierce impatience which I felt, like an imprisoned chieftain who knows that he will speedily be delivered and take dire vengeance on his foes. I had not long to wait. "'Refectory,' what is a 'refectory'? Hillburn Jones, does thee know? Joseph Widdifield, does thee?" But none of them knew till it came to me "down tail," when I cried "An oyster-cellar." "That is quite right, Charley; thee can go up head," said Jacob, and as I passed Hillburn Jones he whispered, half in fun, half enviously, the "Kemble Refectory." This was an oyster-cellar which had been recently opened under the Arch Street Theatre, and whence Hillburn and I had derived our knowledge of the word, the difference being that I remembered more promptly and risked more boldly. But I missed it one day when I defined a _peasant_ as "a nest full of young birds;" the fact being that I recalled a picture in AEsop's fables, and confused _peasant_ with _pheasant_. One day Jacob rebuked the class for letting me always be at their head, when Hillburn Jones, who was a very honest little boy, said, "Indeed, Jacob, thee must know that all that we do know, Charley tells us." For I was already an insatiable reader, and always recalling what I read, and always communicating my knowledge to others in the form of small lectures. I had a book of Scripture stories, with a picture of Pharaoh in his chariot, with the title, "Pharaoh's host sunk in the Red Sea." Hence I concluded that a _host_ was a vehicle of a very superior description. A carriage-builder in our neighbourhood had executed a chaise of very unusual magnificence, and as I stood admiring it I informed Hillburn that this was what was called by the learned a _host_, and that it was in such a host that Pharaoh perished. I remember elevating my voice somewhat for the benefit of a bystander, being somewhat proud of this bit of knowledge.

Unfortunately, not only my father, but also my teacher, and with them the entire population of North America, in those days regarded a good knowledge of arithmetic as forming nine-tenths of all that was most needful in education, while indulgence in a taste for general information, and "literature" especially, was glared at with a very evil eye indeed, as tending to injure a "practical business man." That there could be any kind of profitable or respectable calling not based upon arithmetic did not enter into the heart of man to conceive, while among the bankers and merchants of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia there was a deeply-seated conviction that even a wealthy and successful editor, literary man, or artist, was really an inferior as compared to themselves. As this sublime truth was severely rubbed into me several times daily during the greater portion of my youthful life, and as in its earlier stage I rarely met with a man grown who did not look down on me as an unfortunate non-arithmetical, unbusinesslike creature, and let me know it too, I very naturally grew up with a low estimate of my own capacities; and as I was proud and sensitive, this was to me a source of much suffering, which often became terrible as I advanced in years. But at that time the position of the literary man or scholar, with the exception of a very few brilliant magnates who had "made money," was in the United States not an enviable one. Serious interest in art and letters was not understood, or so generally sympathised with, as it now is in "Quakerdelphia." There was a gentleman in Philadelphia who was a scholar, and who having lived long abroad, had accumulated a very curious black-letter and _rariora_ library. For a long time I observed that this library was never mentioned in polite circles without significant smiles. One day I heard a lady say very meaningly, "I suppose that you know what kind of books he has _and how he obtained them_?" So I inquired very naturally if he had come by them dishonestly. To which the reply, half- whispered in my ear lest it should be overheard, was, "They say his books are all _old_ things, which he did not buy at any first-class stores, but picked up at old stalls and in second-hand shops at less than their value; in fact, _they did not cost him much_."

Yet these remarks must not be regarded as too sweeping or general. Firstly, I am speaking of sixty years since. Secondly, there were many people of literary tastes in Philadelphia--a little isolated, it is true; and finally, there was a great culture of science, founded by Franklin, and fostered by the medical schools. I could cite a brilliant array of names of men distinguished in these matters. What I am writing is simply a sincere record of my own--somewhat peculiar--or personal experiences. There are doubtless many who would write very differently. And now times are _very_ greatly changed.

I have again a quaint early reminiscence. It would happen that now and then a new carriage, always of the same sober description, with two very good, but seldom showy, horses would appear in the streets. Then its owner would be greeted on Market Street with the remark, "Well, Sammy, I see thee's got thee fifty thousand dollars." This sum--ten thousand pounds--constituted the millionaireism or moneyed aristocracy of those days. On it, with a thriving business, Samuel could maintain a family in good fashion, and above all, in great comfort, which was sensibly regarded as better than fashion or style. Fifty thousand dollars entitled a man to keep a carriage and be classed as "quality" by the negroes.

It may be worth noting that although the Quakers did not allow the piano in their families, as being too worldly, they compromised by having musical boxes. And I have heard that in the country, where still older fashioned ideas prevailed, the one bit of finery allowed to a Quaker damsel was a red ribbon; but it must be red, not of any other colour.

Let it be remembered that at this time Philadelphia, and even the world, were as yet to a great degree in the Middle Ages as compared to the present day. We had few steamboats, and no railroads, or telephones, or percussion-caps, or a tremendous press, or Darwinism, or friction matches. Even the introduction of ice-cream, and stone coal as fuel, and grates was within the memory of our elders. Apropos of matches, the use of tinderbox and brimstone matches was universal; bold young men had tinder pistols; but the wood fire was generally kept under ashes all night, and I can well remember how our negro servants, when it had gone out, were used early on winter mornings to borrow a shovelful of coals from the cook of our next-door neighbour, and how it was handed over the garden fence, the recipient standing on our pump handle and the donor on hers.

I forget in what year the railroad (with locomotives) was first built from Philadelphia to Columbia, a distance of sixty miles. I believe it was the first real road of the kind in America. On the day when the first train ran, the City Council and certain honoured guests made the journey, and among them was my father, who took me with him. There were only a few miles of the road then completed. It was a stupendous marvel to me, and all this being drawn by steam, and by a great terrible iron monster of a machine. And there was still in all souls a certain unearthly awe of the recently invented and as yet rather rare steamboats. I can (strangely enough) still recall this feeling by a mental effort--this meeting the Horror for the first time! My father remembered, and had been in the first steamboat which was a success on the Delaware. I saw its wreck in after years at Hoboken. The earlier boat made by John Fitch is still preserved in Bordentown.

I can remember that when gas was introduced to light the city, it was done under a fearful opposition. All the principal people signed a petition against it. I saw the paper. It would burst and kill myriads; it was poisonous; and, finally, it would ruin the oil trade. However, we got it at last. Somebody had invented hand gas-lamps; they were sold in the Arcade; and as one of these had burst, it was naturally supposed that the gasworks would do the same.

The characteristics of old Philadelphia were in those days so marked, and are, withal, so sweet to the memory, that I cannot help lingering on them. As Washington Irving says of the Golden Age of Wouter van Twiller, "Happy days when the harvest moon was twice as large as now, when the shad were all salmon, and peace was in the land." Trees grew abundantly in rows in almost every street--one before every house. I had two before mine till 1892, when the Street Commissioners heartlessly ordained that one must be cut down and removed, and charged me ten dollars for doing it. It is needless to say that since Street Commissioners have found this so profitable, trees have disappeared with sad rapidity. Then at twilight the _pea-ak_ of the night-hawk could be heard all over Arasapha, which is the Indian name for the place where our city stands; there were in Coaquannoc, or the Schuylkill, abundant gold fish and perch, of which I angled divers. Yes, there was, and still is, a Fisher Club, which claims to be the oldest gentleman's club in Anglo-Saxony, and which has for two centuries brewed for itself a "fish-house punch" as delicious as that of London civic banquets. There be no fish in the fair river now; they have all vanished before the combined forces of petroleum and the offal of factories and mines, but the Fish-House Club still has its merry banquets in its ancient home; for, as the French say, "_Chacun peche a sa maniere_." In graveyards lone or over gardens green glittered of summer nights millions of fireflies; there was the scent of magnolias, roses, pinks, and honeysuckles by every house; for Philadelphians have always had a passion for flowers, and there never was a Quaker, much less a Quakeress, who has not studied botany, and wandered in Bartram's Garden and culled blue gentians in the early fall, or lilies wild in Wissahickon's shade. There still remains a very beautiful relic of this olden time in the old Swedes Church, which every stranger should visit. It is a quaint structure of more than two hundred years, and in its large churchyard (which is not, like Karamsin's graves, "deserted and drear," but charming and garden-like) one can imagine himself in rural England.

In the spring of the year there was joyous activity on the Delaware, even in town; for, as the song hath it--

"De fishin' time hab come at last,
De winter all am gone and past;"

and there was the casting of immense seines and the catching of myriads of shad, the typical fish or emblem of the Quaker Philadelphian, because in the profile outline of the shad people professed to discern the form according to which the Quaker coat was cut. With the shad were many herring, and now and then a desperate giant of a sturgeon, who in his struggles would give those concerned enough to do. Then the yells of the black fishermen, the flapping of the horny knife-backed prey--often by the flashing of a night-fire--formed a picture worthy of Rembrandt. Apropos of these sturgeon, the fresh caviare or roe (which has been pronounced at St. Petersburg to surpass the Russian) was always thrown away, as was often the case with sweetbreads, which were rarely eaten. But if the caviare or roe was really in those days "caviare to the general" multitude, the _nose_ of the fish was not, it being greatly coveted by us small boys wherewith to make a ball for "shinny," which for some occult reason was preferred to any other. Old people of my acquaintance could remember when seals had been killed at Cape May below the city, and how on one or two occasions a bewildered whale of no small dimensions had found its way to Burlington, some miles above.

Now and then there would be found in the bay below the city a tremendous, square-shaped, hideous, unnatural piscatorial monster, known as a devil- fish, or briefly devil. It was a legend of my youth that two preachers or ministers of the Presbyterian faith once went fishing in those waters, and having cast out a stout line, fastened to the mast, for shark, were amazed at finding themselves all at once careering through the waves at terrible speed, being dragged by one of the diabolical "monsters of the roaring deep" above mentioned. Whereupon a friend, who was in the boat, burst out laughing. And being asked, "Wherefore this unrestrained hilarity?" replied, "Is it not enough to make a man laugh to see the Devil running away with two clergymen?"

There was a very excellent and extensive museum of Matters and Things in General, founded by an ancient artist named Peale, who was the head-central charm and delight of all young Philadelphia in those days, and where, when we had been good all the week, we were allowed to repair on Saturday afternoons. And here I may say by the way, that miscellaneous collections of "curiosities," oddities, and relics are far more attractive to children, and stimulate in them far more interest and inquisitiveness and desire for general information, than do the best scientific collections, where everything is ranked and numbered, and wherein even an Etruscan tiara or a Viking's sword loses much of its charm when placed simply as a "specimen" in a row of others of the kind. I am not arguing here in the least against scientific or properly arranged archaeologic collections, but to declare the truth that for _children_ museums of the despised curiosities are far more attractive and infinitely more useful.

I owe so very much myself to the old Peale's Museum; it served to stimulate to such a remarkable degree my interest in antiquities and my singular passion for miscellaneous information, and it aided me so much in my reading, that I cannot pass it by without a tribute to its memory. How often have I paused in its dark galleries in awe before the tremendous skeleton of the Mammoth--how small did that of a great elephant seem beside it--and recalled the Indian legend of it recorded by Franklin. And the stuffed monkeys--one shaving another--what exquisite humour, which never palled upon us! No; _that_ was the museum for us, and the time will come when there will be such collections made expressly for the young.

"Stuffed monkey" was a common by-word, by the way, for a conceited fellow. Therefore the _Louisville Journal_, speaking of a rival sheet, said: "Reader, if you will go into the Louisville Museum, you will see two stuffed monkeys reading the _Courier_. And if you will then go into the office of the _Louisville Courier_, you may see two living stuffed monkeys editing the same." The beautiful sallies of this kind which appeared in these two newspapers for years would make a lively volume.

Never shall I forget one evening alone in that Museum. I had come with Jacob Pierce's school, and strayed off alone into some far-away and fascinating nook, forgetful of friends and time. All the rest had departed homewards, and I sought to find them. The dark evening shades were casting sombre tones in the galleries--I was a very little boy of seven or eight--and the stuffed lions and bears and wolves seemed looming or glooming into mysterious life; the varnished sharks and hideous shiny crocodiles had a light of awful intelligence in their eyes; the gigantic anaconda had long awaited me; the grim hyaena marked me for his own; even deer and doves seemed uncanny and goblined. At this long interval of sixty years, I can recall the details of that walk, and every object which impressively half-appalled me, and how what had been a museum had become a chamber of horrors, yet not without a wild and awful charm. Of course I lost my way in the shades, and was beginning to speculate on having to pass a night among the monsters, and how much there would be left for my friends to mourn over in the morning, when--Eureka! Thalatta!--I beheld the gate of entrance and exit, and made my latter as joyously as ever did the souls who were played out of Inferno by the old reprobate of the Roman tale.

Since that adventure I never mentioned it to a living soul till now, and yet there is not an event of my life so vividly impressed on my memory.

My father took me very rarely to the theatre; but my Quaker school-mates had never seen the inside of such places at all, and therefore listened greedily to what I could tell them of the sights. One of the wonders of my youth was the seeing the great elephant Columbus perform in a play called "The Englishman in Siam." It was indeed very curious, and it is described as such in works on natural history. And I saw Edwin Forrest (whom I learned to know in later years) in "Metamora," and Fanny Kemble in "Beatrice," and so on. As for George Boker, he went, I believe, to every place of amusement whenever he pleased, and talked familiarly of actors, some of whom he actually knew, and their lives, in a manner which awoke in me awe and a feeling as being humble and ignorant indeed. As we grew older, Boker and I, from reading "Don Quixote" and Scott, used to sit together for hours improvising legends of chivalry and marvellous romances. It was in the year when it first appeared that I read (in the _New Monthly_) and got quite by heart the rhyming tale of "Sir Rupert the Fearless," a tale of the Rhine, one of the Ingoldsby legends, by Barham. I can still repeat a great part of it. I bore it in mind till in after years it inspired (allied to Goethe's _Wassermadchen_) my ballad of _De Maiden mit Nodings on_, which has, as I now write, been very recently parodied and pictured by _Punch_, March 18, 1893. My mother had taught me to get poetry by heart, and by the time I was ten years of age, I had imbibed, so to speak, an immense quantity; for, as in opium-eating, those who begin by effort end by taking in with ease.

There was something else so very characteristic of old Philadelphia that I will not pass it by. In the fall of the year the reed-bird, which is quite as good as the ortolan of Italy, and very much like it (I prefer the reed-bird), came in large flocks to the marshes and shores of the Delaware and Schuylkill. Then might be seen a quaint and marvellous sight of men and boys of all ages and conditions, with firearms of every faculty and form, followed by dogs of every degree of badness, in all kinds of boats, among which the _bateau_ of boards predominated, intermingled with an occasional Maryland dug-out or poplar canoe. Many, however, crept on foot along the shore, and this could be seen below the Navy Yard even within the city limits. Then, as flock after flock of once bobolinks and now reed-birds rose or fell in flurried flight, there would be such a banging, cracking, and barking as to suggest a South American revolution aided by blood-hounds. That somebody in the _melee_ now and then got a charge of shot in his face, or that angry parties in dispute over a bird sometimes blazed away at one another and fought _a l'outrance_ in every way, "goes without saying." Truly they were inspiriting sights, and kept up the martial valour, aided by frequent firemen's fights, which made Philadelphians so indomitable in the Rebellion, when, to the amazement of everybody, our Quaker city manifested a genius or love for hard fighting never surpassed by mortals.

There were, of course, some odd episodes among the infantry or gunners on foot, and one of these was so well described by my brother Henry in a poem, that I venture to give it place.

REED-BIRDING.

Two men and a bull-dog ugly,
Two guns and a terrier lame;
They'd better stick out in the marsh there,
And set themselves up for game.

But no; I mark by the cocking
Of that red-haired Paddy's eye,
He's been "reeding" too much for you, sir,
Any such game to try.

"Now, Jamie, ye divil, kape dark there,
And hould the big bull-dog in;
There's a bloody big crowd of rade-birds,
That nade a pepperin'!"

_Ker-rack_! goes the single barrel,
_Flip-boong_! roars the old Queen Anne;
There's a Paddy stretched out in the mud-hole,
A kicked-over, knocked-down man.

"Och, Jamie, ye shtupid crature,
Sure ye're the divil's son;
How many fingers' load, thin,
Did ye putt in this d---d ould gun?"

"How many fingers, be jabers?
I nivir putt in a wan;
Did ye think I'd be afther jammin'
Me fingers into a gun?"

"Well, give me the powder, Jamie."
"The powder! as sure as I'm born,
I put it all into yer musket,
For I'd nivir a powder-horn!"

Then we all had reed-bird suppers or lunches, eked out perhaps with terrapins and soft-shell crabs, gumbo, "snapper," or pepper-pot soup, peaches, venison, bear-meat, _salon la saison_--for both bear and deer roamed wild within fifty or sixty miles--so that, all things considered, if Philadelphians, and Baltimoreans did run somewhat over-much to eating up their intellects--as Dr. Holmes declares they do--they had at least the excuse of terrible temptation, which the men of my "grandfather-land" (New England), as he once termed it in a letter to me, very seldom had at any time.

Once it befell, though a few years later, that one winter there was a broad fair field of ice just above Fairmount dam, which is about ten feet high, that about a hundred and fifty men and maidens were merrily skating by moonlight. I know not whether Colonel James Page, our great champion skater, was there cutting High Dutch; but this I know, that all at once, by some strange rising of the stream, the whole flake of ice and its occupants went over the dam. Strangely enough, no one was killed, but very few escaped without injury, and for some time the surgeons were busy. It would make a strange wild picture that of the people struggling in the broken floes of ice among the roaring waters.

And again, during a week on the same spot, some practical joker amused himself with a magic-lantern by making a spirit form flit over the fall, against its face, or in the misty air. The whole city turned out to see it, and great was their marvelling, and greater the fear among the negroes at the apparition.

Sears C. Walker, who was an intimate friend, kept a school in Sansom Street, to which I was transferred. I was only seven years old at the time, and being the youngest, he made, when I was introduced, a speech of apology to his pupils. He was a good kind man, who also, like Jacob, gave us lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry. There I studied French, and began to learn to draw, but made little progress, though I worked hard. I have literally never met in all my life any person with so little natural gift or aptitude for learning languages or drawing as I have; and if I have since made an advance in both, it has been at the cost of such extreme labour as would seem almost incredible. I was greatly interested in chemistry, as a child would be, and, having heard Mr. Walker say something about the colouring matter in quartz, resolved on a great invention which should immortalise my name. My teacher used to make his own ink by pounding nut-galls in an iron mortar. I got a piece of coarse rock-crystal, pounded it up in the same mortar, pouring water on it. Sure enough the result was a pale ink, which the two elder pupils, who had maliciously aided and encouraged me, declared was of a very superior quality. I never shall forget the pride I felt. I had, first of all scientists, extracted the colouring matter from quartz! The recipe was at once written out, with a certificate at the end, signed by my two witnesses, that they had witnessed the process, and that this was written with the ink itself! This I gave to Mr. Walker, and could not understand why he laughed so heartily at it. It was not till several days after that he explained to me that the ink was the result of the dregs of the nut-galls which remained in the mortar.

We had not many books, but what we had I read and reread with great assiduity. Among them were Cooper's novels, Campbell's poems, those of Byron, and above all, Washington Irving's "Sketch Book," which had great influence on me, inspiring that intense love for old English literature and its associations which has ever since been a part of my very soul. Irving was indeed a wonderful, though not a _startling_ genius; but he had sympathised himself into such appreciation of the golden memories and sweet melodies of the olden time, be it American or English, as no writer now possesses. In my eighth year I loved deeply his mottoes, such as that from Syr Grey Steel:--

"He that supper for is dight,
He lies full cold I trow this night;
Yestreen to chamber I him led,
This nighte Grey Steel has made his bed."

Lang--not Andrew--has informed us that no copy of the first black-letter edition of Sir Grey Steel is known to exist. In after years I found in the back binding of an old folio two pieces of it, each about four inches square. It has been an odd fatality of mine that whenever a poet existed in black-letter, I was always sure to peruse him first in that type, which I always from childhood preferred to any other. To this day I often dream of being in a book-shop, turning over endless piles of marvellously quaint parchment bound books in _letres blake_, and what is singular, they are generally works quite unknown to the world--first discoveries--unique! And then--oh! then--how bitter is the waking!

There was in Mr. Walker's school library a book, one well known as Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History." This I read, as usual, thoroughly and often, and wrote my name at the end, ending with a long snaky flourish. Years passed by, and I was at the University, when one evening, dropping in at an auction, I bought for six cents, or threepence, "a blind bundle" of six books tied up with a cord. It was a bargain, for I found in it in good condition the first American editions of De Quincey's "Opium-Eater," "The Rejected Addresses," and the Poems of Coleridge. But what startled me was a familiar-looking copy of Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History," in which at the end was my boyish signature.

"And still wider." In 1887 I passed some weeks at a hotel in Venice. A number of Italian naval officers dined at our _table-d'hote_ every evening. One of them showed us an intaglio which he had bought. It represented a hunter on an elephant firing at a tiger. The owner wished to know something about it. Baron von Rosenfeld, a chamberlain of the Emperor of Austria, remarked at once that it was as old as the days of flint-locks, because smoke was rising from the lock of the gun. I felt that I knew more about it, but could not at once recall what I knew, and said that I would explain it the next day. And going into the past, I remembered that this very scene was the frontispiece to Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History." I think that some gem engraver, possibly in India, had copied it to order. I can even now recall many other things in the book, but attribute my retention of so much which I have read _not_ to a good memory, such as the mathematician has, which grasps _directly_, but simply to frequent reading and mental reviewing or revising. Where there has been none of this, I forgot everything in a short time.

My father took in those years _Blackwood's_ and the _New Monthly Magazine_, and as I read every line of them, they were to me a vast source of knowledge. I remember an epigram by "Martial in London" in the latter:--

"In Craven Street, Strand, four attorneys find place,
And four dark coal-barges are moored at the base;
Fly, Honesty, fly--seek some safer retreat,
For there's craft on the river, and craft in the street."

I never pass by Craven Street without recalling this, and so it has come to pass that by such memories and associations London in a thousand ways is always reviving my early life in America.

The _Noctes Ambrosianae_ puzzled me, as did the Bible, but I read, read, read, _toujours_. My uncle Amos lent me the "Arabian Nights," though my father strictly prohibited it. But the zest of the forbidden made me study it with wondrous love. The reader may laugh, but it is a fact that having obtained "Mother Goose's Melodies," I devoured them with a strange interest reflected from Washington Irving. The truth is, that my taste had been so precociously developed, that I unconsciously found a _literary_ merit or charm in them as I did in all fairy-tales, and I remember being most righteously indignant once when a young bookseller told me that I was getting to be too old to read such stuff! The truth was, that I was just getting to be old enough to appreciate it as folk- lore and literature, which he never did.

The great intellectual influence which acted on me most powerfully after Irving was an incomplete volume of about 1790, called "The Poetical Epitome." It consisted of many of Percy's "Relics" with selections of ballads, poems, and epigrams of many eminent writers. I found it a few years after at a boarding-school, where I continually read it as before.

As I was backward in my studies, my parents, very injudiciously so far as learning was concerned, removed me from Mr. Walker's school, and put me under the care of T. Bronson Alcott, who had just come to Philadelphia. This was indeed going from the frying-pan into the very fire, so far as curing idleness and desultory habits and a tendency to romance and wild speculation was concerned. For Mr. Alcott was the most eccentric man who ever took it on himself to train and form the youthful mind. He did not really teach any practical study; there was indeed some pretence at geography and arithmetic, but these we were allowed to neglect at our own sweet will. His forte was "moral influence" and "sympathetic intellectual communion" by talking; and oh, heaven! what a talker he was! He was then an incipient Transcendentalist, and he did not fail to discover in me the seeds of the same plant. He declared that I had a marvellous imagination, and encouraged my passion for reading anything and everything to the very utmost. It is a fact that at nine years of age his disquisitions on and readings from Spenser's "Faerie Queen" actually induced me to read the entire work, of which he was very proud, reminding me of it in 1881, when I went to Harvard to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem. He also read thoroughly into us the "Pilgrim's Progress," Quarles's "Emblems," Northcote's "Fables," much Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Milton, all of which sunk into my very soul, educating me indeed "ideally" as no boy perhaps in Philadelphia had ever been educated, at the utter cost of all real "education." It was a great pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true. The word _ideal_ was ever in his mouth. All of the new theories, speculations, or fads which were beginning to be ventilated among the Unitarian liberal clergy found ready welcome in his dreamy brain, and he retailed them all to his pupils, among whom I was certainly the only one who took them in and seriously thought them over. Yet I cannot say that I _really_ liked the man himself. He was not to me exactly sympathetic-human. Such training as his would develop in any boy certain weaknesses--and I had mine--which were very repulsive to my father, who carried plain common-sense to extremes, and sometimes into its opposite of unconscious eccentricity, though there was no word which he so much hated.

Bulwer's "Last Days of Pompeii," "The Disowned," and "Pilgrims of the Rhine" made a deep and lasting impression on me. I little thought then that I should in after years be the guest of the author in his home, and see the skull of Arbaces. Oh, that by some magic power every author could be made to feel _all_ the influence, all the charm, which his art exerts on his readers, and especially the young. Sometimes, now and then, by golden chance, a writer of books does realise this, and then feels that he has lived to some purpose. Once it happened to me to find a man, an owner of palaces and millions, who had every facility for becoming familiar with far greater minds and books than mine, who had for years collected with care and read everything which I had ever written. He actually knew more about my books than I did. I was startled at the discovery as at a miracle. And if the reader knew _what_ a _melange_ I have written, he would not wonder at it.

It is very probable that no man living appreciates the vast degree to which any book whatever which aims at a little more than merely entertaining, and appeals at all to thought, influences the world, and how many readers it gets. There are books, of which a thousand copies were never sold, which have permeated society and been the argument of national revolutions. Such a book was the "Political Economy" of H. C. Carey, of which I possess the very last copy of the first, and I believe the only, edition. And there are novels which have gone to the three hundred thousand, of whose authors it may be said that

"Over the barren desert of their brains
There never strayed the starved camel of an idea,"

and whose works vanish like wind.

What is very remarkable is the manner in which even the great majority of readers confuse these two classes, and believe that mere popular success is correlative with genius and desert. A great cause of this really vulgar error is the growing conviction that artistic skill alone determines merit in literature, and that intellect, as the French, beginning mildly with Voltaire and ending violently with Sainte-Beuve, assert is of far less importance than style. "_Le style_, _c'est l'esprit du siecle_." Apropos of which I remarked that in the warlike Middle Age in France the motto might have been "_L'homme c'est le_ STEEL." Then came the age of wigs, when the cry was, "_L'homme c'est le_ STYLE." And now we are in the swindling and bogus-company-promoting age, when it might be proclaimed that "_L'homme c'est le_ STEAL."

There was another book which I read through and through in early childhood to great profit. This was Cottle's "Alfred," an epic of some merit, but chiefly in this, that it sets forth tolerably clearly the old Norse life and religion. George Boker owned and gave me some time after a book entitled "Five Norse Poems," in the original, and translated. This with Grey's poems, which latter I possessed, laid the basis for a deep interest in after years in Northern antiquities; they were soon followed by Mallett; and if I have since read many sagas in Icelandic and studied with keenest interest the museums of the North, the first incentive thereto came from my boyish reading. When I was sixteen I executed a poetic version of the "Death Song of Regner Lodbrog," which, though it was never published, I think was at least as good as any translation which I have since executed, "however that may be." I very seriously connected this Norse spirit with my grandfather and his stern uncles and progenitors, who had fought in Canada and in the icy winters of New England; grim men they were all; and I daresay that I was quite right. It always seems to me that among these alternately fighting and farming Icelanders I am among my Leland relatives; and I even once found Uncle Seth in his red waistcoat in the Burnt Njals saga to the life. There was a paragraph, as I write, recently circulating in the newspapers, in which I was compared in appearance to an old grey Viking, and it gave me a strange uncanny thrill, as if the writer of it were a wizard who had revealed a buried secret.

My parents, on coming to Philadelphia, had at first attended the Episcopal church, but finding that most of their New England friends held to the Rev. W. H. (now Dr.) Furness, an Unitarian, they took a pew in his chapel. After fifteen years they returned to the Episcopal faith, but allowed me to keep the pew to myself for one or two years, till I went to college. In Dr. Furness's chapel I often heard Channing and all the famous Unitarian divines of the time preach, and very often saw Miss Harriet Martineau, Dr. Combe, the phrenologist, and many other distinguished persons. In other places at different times I met Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, to whom I was introduced, Daniel Webster, to whom I reverently bowed, receiving in return a gracious acknowledgment, Peter Duponceau, Morton, Stephen Girard, Joseph Buonaparte, the two authors of the "Jack Downing Letters"; and I once heard David Crockett make a speech. Apropos of Joseph Buonaparte, I can remember to have heard my wife's mother, the late Mrs. Rodney Fisher, tell how when a little girl, and while at his residence at Bordentown, she had run a race with the old ex-king of Spain. A very intimate friend in our family was Professor John Frost, the manufacturer of literally innumerable works of every description. He had many thousands of woodcut blocks, and when he received an order--as, for example, a history of any country, or of the world, or of a religion, or a school geography, or book of travel or adventure, or a biography, or anything else that the heart of man could conceive--he set his scribes to write, scissors and paste, and lo! the book was made forthwith, he aiding and revising it. What was most remarkable was that many of these _pieces de manufacture_ were rather clever, and very well answered the demand, for their sale was enormous. He had when young been in the West Indies, and written a clever novelette entitled "Ramon, the Rover of Cuba." Personally he was very handsome, refined, and intelligent; a man meant by Nature for higher literary work than mere book-making.

Miss Eliza Leslie, the writer of the best series of sketches of American domestic life of her day, was a very intimate friend of my mother, and a constant visitor at our house. She was a sister of Leslie, the great artist, and had been in her early life much in England. I was a great favourite with her, and owed much to her always entertaining and very instructive conversation, which was full of reminiscences of distinguished people and remarkable events. I may say with great truth that I really profited as much by mere hearing as many boys would have done by knowing the originals, so deep was the interest which I felt in all that I heard, and so eager my desire to learn to know the world.

Then I was removed, and with good cause, from Mr. Alcott's school, for he had become so very "ideal" or eccentric in his teaching and odd methods of punishment by tormenting without ever whipping, that people could not endure his purely intellectual system. So for one winter, as my health was bad and I was frequently ill, for a long time I was allowed to do nothing but attend a writing-school kept by a Mr. Rand. At the end of the season, he sadly admitted that I still wrote badly; I think he pronounced me the worst and most incurable case of bad writing which he had ever attended. In 1849 Judge (then Mr.) Cadwallader, with whom I was studying law, said that he admired my engrossing hand more than any he had ever seen except one. As hands go round the clock, our hands do change.

I was to go the next summer to New England with my younger brother, Henry Perry Leland, to be placed in the celebrated boarding-school of Mr. Charles W. Greene, at Jamaica Plains, five miles from Boston; which was done, and with this I enter on a new phase of life, of which I have very vivid reminiscences. Let me state that we first went to Dedham and stayed some weeks. There I found living with his father, an interesting boy of my own age, named William Joshua Barney, a grandson of the celebrated Commodore Barney, anent whom was written the song, "Barney, leave the girls alone," apropos of his having been allowed to kiss Marie Antoinette and all her maids of honour. William had already been at Mr. Greene's school, and we soon became intimate.

During this time my father hired a chaise; I borrowed William's shot-gun, and we went together on a delightful tour to visit all our relations in Holliston, Milford, and elsewhere. At one time we stopped to slay an immense black snake; at another to shoot wild pigeons, and "so on about" to Providence and many places. From cousins who lived in old farmhouses in wild and remote places I received Indian arrow-heads and a stone tomahawk, and other rustic curiosities dear to my heart. At the Fremont House in Boston my father showed me one day at dinner several foreign gentlemen of different nations belonging to different Legations. In Rhode Island I found by a stream several large pot-holes in rocks of which I had read, and explained to my father (gravely as usual) how they were made by eddies of water and gravel-stones. One day my father in Boston took me to see a marvellous white shell from China, valued at one hundred pounds. What was the amazement of all present to hear me give its correct Latin name, and relate a touching tale of a sailor who, finding such a shell when shipwrecked on a desert island, took it home with him, "and was thereby raised (as I told them) from poverty to affluence." Which tale I had read the week before in a children's magazine, and, as usual, reflected deeply on it, resolving to keep my eye on all shells in future, in the hope of something turning up.