Concord was a town utterly without crime. There was no gazing into the jail windows to catch a glimpse of the hideous offenders against the law. I never really heard of but one prisoner in my life, and he was so mild that he hardly made an impression. During my time this man was the only inhabitant of the jail and, technically, he did not belong there. A number of years before he had been imprisoned for some offense, and, after being released, returned and begged to be taken in again, as he was lonely and had gotten used to the place. So, one could see him ’most any summer evening sitting out on the steps of the jail. He was a great pet of the Emerson family, and was hired to play the violin for all the dances.
One of my memories of the Old Manse is that of the Thursday-afternoon visits of Ellery Channing, the poet. I never saw anything written by him until I left the town. He was always asked to supper and always stayed, becoming thereby a part of the mental furniture of the place. He was old, fattish, disorderly, absent-minded, and to me so unæsthetic, that I knew he could not be a good poet. I don’t believe he was. A humbler than Thoreau, who practically occupied the same position in the estimation of the Emersons. I remember with what was then for me horror, but now extreme sympathy, that years before, his wife had left him because she had insisted upon his having a carpet in his study. This he kept patiently removing until, returning from a camping trip, he found it firmly nailed to the floor; so he pulled it up, tore it in strips, and hurled it out of the window, thereby ruining the carpet and both their tempers.
Another frequent caller upon our family was Charles Sumner. I remember him most vividly upon one occasion. He had come in for luncheon. Mother, who left the intellectual part of the life to others and always said, “I find philosophers have just as hearty an appetite as other people—especially for pie,” was in the kitchen, making this delectable dish. I was playing upon the sitting-room floor. Suddenly I felt a hand upon my head.
“My boy,” he said, “when you grow up you’ll find out two things. One is that all men have mothers, but I don’t think you will ever meet any other man who has ever had a mother like yours.”
My father died when I was three years old and I had always taken mother more or less for granted, and I thought him very silly at the time.
I once asked mother how she came to be married. My father, who had almost been tarred and feathered in the South for his antislavery sermons, had fled North and finally became the fashionable young preacher of Boston. Mother was one of five sisters, and said she was astounded when he asked her to marry him, as she always supposed it was Lizzie he wanted—Lizzie being the intellectual one. It was that way with mother. Brought up in an intellectual atmosphere where learning was considered the only thing of account, she was always surprised when anyone showed a preference for her—a woman who would rather scrub a kitchen floor than write an essay!
Mother’s democratic tendencies spread in every direction. There was a pew in church that was supposed to be reserved for the poor. “No one in the poorhouse is any poorer than we are,” said mother, and marched us into it every Sunday. The Old Manse pew was farther up the aisle, and, besides, one had to pay for that.
Although she was such a housewife, she had a great independence of thought. A woman had come to Concord, with no husband, and given birth to a child. This, for New England at that time, was a terrible scandal. The boy was my age and went to school. All the other boys whispered behind his back as if he had been in jail, although by this time his mother was properly married to a young farmer up on Barret’s Hill. No one ever spoke to her in church or bowed. My mother, very quietly, every summer, put on her best clothes and walked the mile or more up the hill to call.
To me Hawthorne always typified the haughty Southerner. I did not know what haughty Southerners were like, but I had heard them talked about and supposed they were very superior creatures—an idea my worthy relatives would have promptly squelched had they known it. Hawthorne was a hero to me, and whenever I read a romance, such as Ivanhoe or the “Iliad,” I pictured the conqueror as tall, broad, dark, and spare, with a dark mustache. This was the way Hawthorne looked to me.
I would never have dared speak to him, and do not remember having seen him at the house; but, of course, the Old Manse was filled with memories of his presence.