I remember how happy all of us used to be when cousins or friends came to stay a few days in our house, and how much more we liked to be with them than with our own family. I remember, too, that I had the same feeling when I visited other houses; and I have found it so to this day. True it is, that in great trouble or in a crisis of life we seem to cling to our kindred, and stand by them, and expect them to stand by us; and yet, in the little things, day by day, we look for our comradeship and affection somewhere else.
So I think that in all of this neither I nor the rest of my people were different from the other families about us, and that the stories of the ideal life of brothers and sisters, of parents and children, are largely myths.
CHAPTER IV
MY FATHER
My father was a great believer in education,—that is, in the learning that is found in books. He was doubtful of any other sort, if indeed he believed there could be any other sort. His strong faith in books, together with the fact that there were so many of us children around the house in my mother’s way, early drove me to the district school.
Before this time I had learned to read simple sentences; for I cannot remember when my father began telling me how important and necessary it was to study books. By some strange trick of fortune, he was born with a quenchless thirst for learning. This love of books was the one great passion of his life; but his large family began to arrive when he was at such an early age that he never had time to prepare himself to make a living from his learning. He always felt the hardship and irony of a life of labor to one who loved study and contemplation; so he resolved that his children should have a better chance. Poor man! I can see him now as plainly as if it were yesterday. I can see him with his books,—English, Latin, Greek, and even Hebrew,—carrying them back and forth to the dusty mill, and snatching the smallest chance, even when the water was spilling over the dam, to learn more of the wonders that were held between the covers of these books.
All my life I have felt that Nature had some grudge against my father. If she had made him a simple miller, content when he was grinding corn and dipping the small toll from the farmer’s grist, he might have lived a fairly useful, happy life. But day after day and year after year he was compelled to walk the short and narrow path between the little house and the decaying mill, while his mind was roving over scenes of great battles, decayed empires, dead languages, and the starry heavens above. To his dying day he lived in a walking trance; and his books and their wondrous stories were more real to him than the turning water-wheel, the sacks of wheat and corn, and the cunning, soulless farmers who dickered and haggled about his hard-earned toll.
Whether or not my father had strong personal ambitions, I really never knew; no doubt he had, but years of work and resignation had taught him to deny them even to himself, and slowly and pathetically he must have let go his hold upon that hope and ambition which alone make the thoughtful man cling fast to life.
In all the country round, no man knew so much of books as he, and no man knew less of life. The old parson and the doctor were almost the only neighbors who seemed able even to understand the language that he spoke. I remember now, when his work was done, how religiously he went to his little study with his marvellous books, and worked and read far into the night, stopping only to encourage and help his children in the tasks that they were ever anxious to neglect and shirk. My bedroom, with its two beds and generally four occupants, opened directly from his study door; and no matter how often I went to sleep and awakened in the night, I could see a little streak of lamplight at the bottom of the door that opened into his room, which showed me that he was still dwelling in the fairy-lands of which his old volumes told. He was no longer there in the morning, and this was usually the first time that I missed him in my waking moments after I had gone to bed. Often, too, he wrote, sometimes night after night for weeks together; but I never knew what it was that he put down,—no doubt his hopes and dreams and loves and doubts and fears, as men have ever done since time began, as they will ever do while time shall last, and as I am doing now; but these poor dreams of his were never destined to see the light of day. Perhaps, with no one to tell him that they were good, he despaired about their worth, as so many other doubting souls have done before and since. It is not likely, indeed, that any publisher could have been found ready to transform his poor cramped writing into print. Whatever may have been the case, if I could only find the pages that he wrote I would print them now with his name upon the title-page, and pay for them myself.
I cannot remember when I learned to read. I seem always to have known how. I am sure that I learned my letters from the red and blue blocks that were always scattered on the floor. Of course, I did not know what they meant; I only knew that A was A, and was content with that. Even when I learned my first little words, and put them into simple sentences, I fancy that I knew no more of what they meant than the poor caged parrot that keeps saying over and over again, “Polly wants a cracker,” when he really wants nothing of the kind. I fancy that I knew nothing of what they meant, for as I read to-day many of the brave lessons learned even in my later life I cannot imagine that I had any thought of their meaning such as the language seems now to hold.
But I know that I learned my letters quickly and early,—though not so early as an elder brother who was always kept steadily before my eyes. It must be that my father gave me little chance to tarry long from one simple book to another, for I remember that at a very early age I was told again and again that John Stuart Mill began studying Greek when he was only three years old. I thought then, as I do to-day, that he must have had a cruel father, and that this unnatural parent not only made miserable the life of his little boy, but of thousands of other boys whose fathers could see no reason why their sons should be outdone by John Stuart Mill. I have no doubt that my good father thought that all his children ought to be able to do anything that was ever accomplished by John Stuart Mill; and so he did his part, and more, to make us try.