In his reminiscence of the famous Commencement week, so faithfully described by Lowell, Holmes says, "I remember that week well, for something happened to me once at that time, namely, I was born." Many after-touches show us how the great week possessed for Holmes the same magic charm it held for Lowell. The wonders of the menagerie where he beheld for the first time a live tiger, the side-show where he enjoyed the delights of Punch and Judy, and gazed with awe at the biggest live fat boy known to showmen, and the marvels of the toy-counter, over which hung the inscription,
"Look, but handle not,"
shared honors with the Governor's parade, and Commencement exercises, and in fact far out-ranked them with Holmes, who confessed that he would willingly have stayed from morning till night viewing their delights, and declared that the sound of the tent-raising on the Common the night before the show began could be compared to nothing but the evening before Agincourt!
Holmes was born in August, when, he tells us in one of his charming essays, the meadows around Cambridge were brilliant with the cardinal flower, and blossoming buckwheat covered the fields, while the bayberry, barberry, sweetfern, and huckleberry made delightful retreats for the small boy of the neighborhood. In the same essay he describes the old garden of the parsonage, with its lilac-bushes, hyacinths, tulips, peonies, and hollyhocks, its peaches, nectarines, and white grapes, growing in friendly companionship with the beets, carrots, onions, and squashes, while the old pear-tree in the corner, called by Holmes "the moral pear-tree," because its fruit never ripened, taught him one of his earliest lessons. Bits of reminiscence like this scattered throughout the pages of Holmes enable us to reconstruct the scenes of his youth and to follow him from the time he was afraid of the masts of the sloops down by the bridge, "being a very young child," through all the years of his boyhood. The parsonage was an old-fashioned gambrel-roofed house, which Holmes recurs to again and again with loving remembrance. The rooms were large and light and had been the scenes of stirring events in other days.
On the study floor could still be seen the dents of the muskets stacked there in Revolutionary times, and an old family portrait in one of the upper rooms still bore the sword-thrusts of the British soldiers. A certain dark store-room contained a pile of tables and chairs, which to the child's fancy seemed to have rushed in there to hide, and tumbled against one another as people do when frightened. Another store-room held an array of preserve-jars containing delicious sweets; before the door of this room he would stand with one eye glued to the keyhole while his childish imagination revelled in the forbidden luxuries.
The house had also a ghostly garret about which clustered many legends, and these in connection with certain patches of sand bare of grass and vine and called the Devil's Footsteps, which might have been seen around the neighborhood, tended to make the bedtime hour a season of dread to the imaginative boy, who saw shadowy red-coats in every dark corner, and with every unfamiliar noise expected even more uncanny visitors.
Outside was the old garden, sweet and sunny, and close to it the friendly wall of a neighbor's house, up which climbed a honeysuckle which stretched so far back into memory that the child thought it had been there always, "like the sky and stars," and on the whole the atmosphere of the old home was most wholesome.
When Holmes was but a little child he was sent to Dame Prentice's school, where he studied the primer and spent his leisure moments in falling in love with his pretty girl schoolmates or playing with certain boyish toys which were always confiscated sooner or later by the school-mistress, and went to help fill a large basket which stood ready to receive such treasures. At ten years of age he began attendance at the Cambridgeport school, where he had for schoolmates Margaret Fuller and Richard Henry Dana, and where he remained for some years.
Holmes says that in these years of his childhood every possible occasion for getting a crowd together was made the most of—school anniversaries and town centennials; Election Day, which came in May, when everyone carried a bunch of lilacs and the small boys ate "election buns" of such size that the three regular meals had to be omitted; Fourth of July, a very grand holiday indeed, when the festivities were opened by the Governor; Commencement Week, with its glories of shows and dancing on the Common, were each in turn made seasons of joy for the youthful denizens of Cambridge and Boston. Perhaps the most gratifying of all the holidays was the old-fashioned Thanksgiving, when even the sermon, though of greater length than usual, "had a subdued cheerfulness running through it," which kept reminding the children of the turkey and oyster-sauce, the plum-pudding, pumpkin-pie, oranges, almonds, and shagbarks awaiting them at home, and the chink of the coin in the contribution-boxes was but a joyous prelude to the music of roasting apples and nuts.
Holmes left the Cambridgeport school to enter Phillips Academy, and has left us a charming account of this first visit to Andover, whither he went in a carriage with his parents, becoming more and more homesick as the time came for parting, until finally he quite broke down and for a few days was utterly miserable. But he had happy days at Andover, and revisiting the place in after years he describes himself as followed by the little ghost of himself, who went with him to the banks of the Showshine and Merrimac; to the old meeting-house, the door of which was bullet-riddled by the Indians; to the school-rooms where he had recited Euclid and Virgil; to the base-ball field, and to the great bowlder upon which the boys cracked nuts, proving such a faithful guide that when the day was over Holmes almost committed the folly of asking at the railroad office for two tickets back to Boston. Perhaps of all the celebrated men who have been pupils at the famous school no one held it more lovingly in his heart than he who turned back after so many years of success to pay this loving tribute to its memory.