Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

The population was permanent, I suppose, as could have been found in any spot in Europe. Ninety-three of the inhabitants of the town, in 1654, signed a paper pledging their persons and estates to support the General Court in the contest with King Charles II. for the preservation of the Charter. Fourteen of their descendants, bearing the same names, were present at the Centennial Celebration in 1885, dwelling on the land which their ancestors occupied nearly 230 years before. There were 23 others whose descendants of the same name were dwelling at the time of the Centennial within the original limits of the town. A good many others were represented by female descendants. So that at least 50 of the 93 signers of the paper were represented in the assembly. A list of the names of the principal inhabitants of the town to-day would contain the names of a large number of the principal inhabitants of any generation since its foundation.

They were of good English stock. Many of them were of gentle blood and entitled to bear coat armor at home. It is interesting to observe how little the character of the gentleman and gentlewoman in our New England people is affected by the pursuit, for generations, of humble occupations, which in other countries are deemed degrading. Our ancestors, during nearly two centuries of poverty which followed the first settlement, turned their hands to the humblest ways of getting a livelihood, became shoemakers, or blacksmiths or tailors, or did the hardest and most menial and rudest work of the farm, shoveled gravel or chopped wood, without any of the effect on their character which would be likely to be felt from the permanent pursuit of such an occupation in England or Germany. It was like a fishing party or a hunting party in the woods. When the necessity was over, and the man or the boy in any generation got a college education, or was called to take part in public affairs, he rose at once and easily to the demands of an exalted station. What is true of New England people in this respect is, I suppose, true of the whole country.

I wrote, a few years ago, an account of so much of my boyhood as elapsed before I went to college. Through the kindness of the proprietors of The Youth's Companion, I am permitted to print it here. I think, on the whole, that is better than to undertake to tell the story in other phraseology adapted to maturer readers. Indeed, I am not sure that the best examples of good English are not to be found in books written for children. When we have to tell a story to a small boy or girl, we avoid little pomposities, and seek for the plainest, clearest and most direct phrase.

I believe that boys nowadays are more manly and mature than they were in my time. Perhaps this is partly because the boys show more gravity in my presence, now I am an old man, than they did when I was a boy myself. But in giving an account of the life of a boy sixty years ago, I must describe it as I saw it, even if it appear altogether childish and undignified.

The life and character of a country are determined in a large degree by the sports of its boys. The Duke of Wellington used to say that the victory at Waterloo was won on the playing- fields at Eton. That is the best people where the boys are manly and where the men have a good deal of the boy in them.

Perhaps all my younger readers do not know how much that makes up, not only the luxury, but the comfort of life, has first come in within the memory of persons now living. The household life of my childhood was not much better in those respects than that of a well-to-do Roman or Greek. It had not improved a great deal for two thousand years. There were no house- warming furnaces, and stoves were almost unknown. There were no double windows, and the houses were warmed by open fires. There were no matches.

There were no water-pipes in the houses, and no provision was made for discharging sewage. There were no railroads, telegraphs or telephones. Letter postage to New York from Boston was twenty-five cents. None of the modern agricultural machinery then existed, not even good modern plows. Crops were planted by hand and cultivated with the hoe and spade. Vegetables were dug with the hoe, and hay and grain cut with the sickle or scythe. There were no ice-houses. The use of ice for keeping provisions or cooling water was unknown.

My father was well-to-do, and his household lived certainly as well as any family in the town of Concord, where I was born. I have no doubt a Roman boy two hundred years before Christ, or an Athenian boy four hundred years before Christ, lived quite as well as I did, if not better.

The boy got up in the morning and dressed himself in a room into which the cold air came through the cracks in the window. If the temperature were twenty degrees below zero outside, it was very little higher inside. If he were big enough to make the fires, he made his way down-stairs in the dark of a winter morning and found, if the fire had been properly raked up the night before, a few coals in the ashes in the kitchen fireplace. The last person who went to bed the night before had done exactly what Homer describes as the practice in Ulysses's time, when he tells us that Ulysses covered himself with leaves after he was washed ashore in Phaiakia:

"He lay down in the midst, heaping the fallen leaves above, as a man hides a brand in a dark bed of ashes, at some outlying farm where neighbors are not near, hoarding a seed of fire to save his seeking elsewhere."