What a character, for instance, was Uncle David Larcom! Among the old Puritans who were his ancestors, and among whom he was raised, what a constant surprise he must have been! Certainly no hero of a dime novel could have done more startling and audacious things. He ran off to sea in his youth and stayed away from the village for three years. During that time, he had seen and experienced enough to satisfy Tom Sawyer; he had messed with Indian Lascars and acquired a taste for curry and red pepper which he never lost. And with the love for stimulating diet he gained a love for stimulating stories, and could draw the very longest kind of an innocent bow, that carried far and never hurt anybody.
Who could forget his yarns of the sea serpent and his life on the old English Brig? "Has he got to the old English brig?" his waggish son would inquire, as he listened from an adjoining room.
He gave away a wonderful old mirror, beautifully carved, with a lion's head at the bottom, and a boy astride a goose at the top, with leaves and bunches of grapes at the sides, and glass, as it seems to me, almost an inch thick. It hangs now in the drawing room of its possessor restored to pristine beauty and bearing an inscription setting forth that it came from the wreck of the "Schooner Hesperus."
Uncle David told this yarn when he gave away the beautiful mirror. Nobody had ever before heard of this connection with the Schooner Hesperus. My own impression is that the mirror was brought to the old house, which I now own, by Aunt Betsey Larcom, the great grandmother of Elsie Doane. Dear old Uncle David! Sometimes his language was not choice, but how big his heart was!
After he uncoiled his sea legs and settled down to teaming, mildly flavored with farming was there ever a more generous or a more kindly neighbor?
People often cheated him, in fact, he almost seemed to like being cheated.
His patient wife once remarked that he always wanted to give his own things away, and buy things for more than people asked for them. He would match Uncle Toby's army in Flanders for profanity, but he would go miles to help a sick friend, or, (and this is to my mind, the last test of friendship in a horse owner) turn out his old "Bun" on the stormiest night that ever raged, to help a brother teamster up a hill. And when were ever his own rakes and plows and forks at home? Weren't they always lent out somewhere? What a reverence for all things sacred, way down in the bottom of his large heart he always had! How deferential to ministers he was! How angry he would be at any unnecessary breaking of the "Sah-bath" as he called it. How steadily he read, (though he wouldn't go to church) all day and all the evening of the Lord's Day—taking up his book at night, where he left it to feed his "critturs," and holding his sperm oil lamp in his hand as he finished his day of rest. Some of his expressions remain in my mind as, for instance "From July to Eternity," to indicate his weariness at something too much prolonged. He liked to exaggerate as well as Mark Twain did, as when he used to wish on a furiously stormy night, that he were way over on Half Way Rock, always being careful to have a tremendous fire going, and a pitcher of cider at hand, before he expressed the desire. The memory of his good, religious father was always with him, and when he was in a particularly genial frame of mind, he would sing snatches of the old tunes he had heard his father sing:—
"The Lord into his garden comes
The spices yield their rich "Perfooms"