Fifteen Days: An Extract from Edward Colvil's Journal

by Mary Lowell Putnam

"And yet he was always so tender of others' feelings, so ready to give up his pleasure for theirs, you might almost have thought him of too yielding a nature, unless you had seen him tried on some point where he found it worth while to be resolved."

The Doctor sat silent a little while, held by pleasant thoughts, and then began again:—

"There comes back to me now an earlier recollection of him than any I have given you. I witnessed once a contest of will between him and a person who was put over the nursery for a time in the absence of its regular head, and who was not thoroughly versed in the laws and customs of the realm she was to administer. Harry could not have been much more than two, I think, for he had hardly yet English enough for his little needs. He was inflexible on his side; the poor woman at first positive and then plaintive. She had recourse to the usually unfailing appeal,—'But, Harry, do you not want me to love you?' He held back the tears that were pressing to his eyes,—'I want all the peoples to love me.' But he did not give way, for he was in the right.

"Candor, however, obliges me to add that he did not always give way when he was in the wrong. Oh, I was in the right sometimes."—The Doctor laughed good-humoredly in answer to my involuntary smile.—"You may believe it, for Harry has admitted it himself later. Our debates were not always fruitless. I have known him come to me, three months, six months, after a discussion in which we had taken opposite sides, and say,—'I see now that you knew better about that than I did. I was mistaken.' On the other hand, some of his little sayings have worked on me with time, if not to the modification of my opinions, at least to that of my conduct, and sometimes in a way surprising to myself. For the rest, I liked to have him hold his ground well, and was just as content, when he did make a concession, that it was made out of deference, not to me, but to truth.

"I don't know whose opinion was authority with him. He did not respect even the wisdom of the world's ages as condensed in its proverbs, but coolly subjected them to the test of his uncompromising reason. I remember somebody's citing to him one day, 'A penny saved is a penny earned.' He considered it, and then rejected it decisively, proposing as a substitute,—'A penny spent is a penny saved.' I suppose that little word of his has spent me many a penny I might have saved,—but I don't know that I am the poorer.

"Another of his childish sayings passed into a by-word in the household. He was filling with apples for her grandchildren the tin kettle of an old family pensioner, whose eyes counted the rich, red spoil, as it rolled in. 'Enough!' says the conscientious gardener, who is looking on. 'Enough!' echoes the modest beneficiary. 'Enough is not enough!' gives sentence the little autocrat, and heaps the measure. I thought of this as he was walking beside me, grave and silent, over Harvey's well-ordered plantation. 'The child is father of the man.'"

The time was past when the Doctor had scruples in talking of Harry or I in asking. He forgot his flowers, and I my writing. Nothing more interesting to me than real stories of childhood. As a means of instruction, it seems to me the study of the early years of the human being has been strangely neglected by the wise. I listened well, then, whenever, after one of his contemplative pauses, the Doctor began again with a new "I remember."

"I remember being in the garden with him once when a barefooted boy came in and asked for shoes. Harry ran off, and presently reappeared with a fine, shining pair, evidently taken on his own judgment. A woman, who had been looking from the window, came hurrying out, and arrived in time to see the shoes walking out of the gate on strange feet. 'Why, Harry, those were perfectly good shoes!' 'I should not have given them to him, if they had not been good,' the child answered, tranquilly. The poor woman was posed. As for me, I ignored the whole affair, that I might not be obliged to commit myself. But I thought internally that we should not have had the saying, 'Cold as charity,' current in our Christian world, if all its neighborly love had been of the type of Harry's.