According to Thomas Carlyle, respectable people were those who kept a gig. In some towns the credential is that the family shall employ a "hired girl." In Fairhaven the condition was that you should have a washerwoman one day in the week. The soapy wash-water was saved for scrubbing purposes—this was in Massachusetts—and if the man of the house occasionally smoked a pipe he was requested to blow the smoke on the plants in the south windows, so as to kill the vermin. Nothing was wasted.
The child born into such a family where industry and economy are prized, unless he is a mental defective and a physical cripple, will be sure to thrive.
The father had made one trip in a whaler. He was gone three years and got a one-hundred-and-forty-seventh part of the catch. The oil market was on a slump, and so the net result for the father of a millionaire-to-be was ninety-five dollars and twenty cents. This happy father was a grocer, and later a clerk to a broker in whale-oil. Pater had the New England virtues to such a degree that they kept him poor. He was cautious, plus.
To make, you have to spend; to grow a crop, you have to plant the seed. Here's where you plunge—it is a gamble, a bet on the seed versus the eternal cussedness of things. It's you against the chances of a crop. If the drought comes, or the flood, or the chinch-bug, or the brown-tailed moth, you may find yourself floundering in the mulligatawney.
Aside from that one cruise to the whaling-grounds, Rogers Pere played the game of life near home and close to shore. The easy ways of the villagers are shown by a story Mr. Rogers used to tell about a good neighbor of his—a second mate on a whaler. The bark was weighing anchor and about to sail. The worthy mate tarried at a barroom over in New Bedford. "Ain't you going home to kiss your wife good-by?" some one asked. And the answer was: "What's the use? I'm only going to be gone two years."
Half of Fairhaven was made up of fishermen, and the rest were widows and the usual village contingent. The widows were the washerwomen.
Those who had the price hired a washerwoman one day in the week. This was not so much because the mother herself could not do the work, as it was to give work to the needy and prove the Jeffersonian idea of equality. The wash-lady was always seated with the family at table, and besides her wage was presented with a pie, a pumpkin, or some outgrown garment. Thus were the Christian virtues liberated.
Where the gray mare is the better horse, her mate always lets up a bit on his whiffletree and she draws most of the load. It was so here. The mother planned for the household. She was the economist, bursar and disburser. She was a member of the Congregational Church, with a liberal bias, which believed in "endless consequences," but not in "endless punishment." Later the family evolved into Unitarians by the easy process of natural selection. The father said grace, and the mother led in family prayers. She had ideas of her own and expressed them.
The family took the Boston "Weekly Congregationalist" and the Bedford "Weekly Standard." In the household there was a bookcase of nearly a hundred volumes. It was the most complete library in town, with the exception of that of the minister.
The house where H. H. Rogers was born still stands. Its frame was made in Sixteen Hundred Ninety—mortised, tenoned and pinned. In the garret the rafters show the loving marks of the broadax—to swing which musical instrument with grace and effectiveness is now a lost art.