For although we feel sure that without this we shall, after keeping company together a few evenings, exchange confidences and hearts with each other for life, yet to avoid needless suspicions,—mute and silent though they be,—and to obviate the hazards and discomforts of injurious side-glances, interrogative of my origin, person, parentage, education, and moral character,—which the paterfamilias may, and naturally would, cast upon a new teacher, who offers to take a place in his household, sit in one corner of the family room when the lamps are lit, and to sleep in the spare bedroom when they are turned down,—I propose to state at once who it is that comes with this friendly audacity, what are his intentions, and how he expects to behave himself in a relation at once so familiar and responsible, viz. that of a good-natured, equable, humorous companion and friend, indicating and painting facts in a pleasant, genial, and healthy way.
First, then, as to ourself. I say not myself; for this would be to roll immediately my complex egoism out of the manifold garments which a historian wears of course; but I say Ourself, that gathered, round Impersonation which may be well supposed to be a crystallized something, like a cunning frost-work on the long window-panes of history,—an armless hand writing Mene and other hieroglyphics on the wall, or a Briareus with his hundred hands, heads, and feet, running in a hundred different ways, staring through a hundred telescopes at the calm ages, and writing with a century of hands the doings, undoings, and misdoings of the race. This manifold, dignified mystery I mean to put on and wear after this chapter; but in order to insure the confidence which I now seek, I shall slip, for a few minutes, out of my state gear, and taking your hand,—now no longer withheld nor even hesitatingly given,—look trustingly into your eyes, and mention a few of those particulars of myself, which you have a gracious right to know, in order to judge of my standing in the world, my intellectual competency and fitness, and the plumptitude of my moral proportions.
I was born very early in life; so early, in fact, that although present, and making such an effort as befitted my first appearance, I was so inexpressibly interested in the matter, that I forgot my future office, that of recorder of passing events. The fact of my birth—a fact which is apt to happen to most people—is not perhaps so singular as that, being born in the United States, I contrived to live beyond the first five years, that fatal semi-decade. I ought, perhaps, now to add, in order to quiet any apprehensions after my last alarming remark, that “I still live”; and that, having survived the perils and plums of parental kindness in infancy, I hope to outlive the equally fatal neglect and indifference which marks our treatment of old age.
My parents, at the time I was given to the world, were poor, and, therefore, not respectable. They had been simple enough to marry young, and for love; and although they had mated each other well, they had failed to put a yoke upon the neck of fortune. These early struggles, however, stiffened in them the moral elements, and marbleized, so to speak, the soft woods of their country natures, making a substance very different from that thin, moral veneering which is upholstered from the beechen groves that timber the sunny slopes of life. Both of them were Presbyterians; always attending the Sunday services, sitting in a gallery seat, close to the pulpit, and so taking the brunt of the hard blows which were rightfully felt in, and—I sometimes thought—spent themselves upon, our uncushioned pew.
An offer from my father’s brother, who had become rich in mercantile business, drew my father and the family in my fifth year to the city of Philadelphia. With this change of base came sharper tactics against the army of poverty; and at last, by fighting it on the same line, although it took all the summer of his life, he achieved the victory. I was then sent to the best schools; took lessons at home in some branches from a private teacher; took—I own it now—lessons in other branches privately, out of the house, without my father’s knowledge, although at his expense for the tuition; and at last I went to college.
Hard study, matched by an irrepressible love of pranks at night; a knowledge of Euclid’s lines and clothes line; of belles-lettres and unlettered belles; of geometrical and other squares; of chemistry applied to known uses and to experiments for which there were no precedents in the books; prizes offered by the faculty, and prizes offered by Mrs. Green and Mrs. White in the persons of their handsome daughters,—these all braided together the threads of my university life into a pattern which, if not unusual, was made up principally of figures little admired at home.
My father was not at all pleased with the well-red bill I brought with me, and quite as little with the unsigned ones which followed me, from college; and, concluding that I might run my own face for a while, set his sharply against me.
I took to teaching; sounding over again the shallow depths of old studies, but often striking the lead on the rocky bottom of a temper too long indulged not to be stern when touched by children’s thoughtlessness.
My father’s death cast upon me responsibilities for my mother and the estate, which dropped the curtain upon my dream-life, and lifted it from the long perspective of actual work and business cares. Among my father’s papers I found the following original document, which I reproduce here, as showing his shrewdness of observation, and the character of the parent who helped to form some elements of my own.
“A New American Decalogue.