A REMINISCENCE
A REMINISCENCE
Homer Dodge Martin, fourth child and youngest son of Homer Martin and Sarah Dodge, was born in Albany, N. Y., in a house on Park Street, October 28, 1836. That was my own native city, but although we must have lived for years in the same neighborhood, he was past twenty-two and I in my twenty-first year when we first became acquainted. But for the anti-slavery movement which split the Methodist body first into two great sections and then into minor subdivisions, we might have met much earlier, for, in our childhood, our parents had attended the same place of worship.
What I know, therefore, about his early years I learned chiefly from his mother. He was not of a reminiscent habit as a rule, and his recollections of childhood were not always pleasant. His father was one of the most upright and altogether the mildest-tempered of all the men that I have met. His mother was a woman of strong but uncultivated mind, keen wit, incisive speech and arbitrary will, from whom her son derived many of his own characteristics, including his innate bent toward pictorial expression. In her that inclination never took any but the crudest shape, but she had beyond all peradventure the instinct which under more propitious circumstances would have displayed itself more convincingly. Perhaps the very cramping of it in her was the cause of its appearance at so preternaturally early an age in him. She more than once told me that he began to draw as soon as he could hold a pencil, and that from his twentieth month to provide him with one and a piece of blank paper was the surest means of quieting his most turbulent outbreaks. Years afterward, not long before our marriage, his first schoolmistress sent me a spirited drawing of a horse which she said he had made for her when not more than five years old.