I ought to remember far more about the Civil War than I do, for I was six years old when it was declared. On the nineteenth of November of the same year my mother, before dawn, received the inspiration of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, but I never heard of this till many years later. Two strong impressions of the wartime remain with me. Coming into the breakfast room one morning, I found my brother Harry standing on his chair, fluttering the newspaper over his head, the rest of the family waving their napkins and crying:
“Hurrah! Hurrah! Vicksburg has fallen!”
Harry was then going to Boston Latin School and held a commission in the school regiment.
I shall surely never forget a certain Sunday morning, when I was walking with my father across Boston Common, to get the mail from the post office. It was a lovely spring day; the elms on the Mall wore the softened look that just precedes the time of leafage. We had stopped to scatter some nuts for the squirrels, when a perfect stranger ran up to my father, grasped him by the arm and panted in his ear:
“Doctor Howe, they have killed the President!”
My father staggered as if he had been struck and sank down on a bench, with a cry:
“God Almighty!”
The anguish of his face and voice impressed me quite as much as the fact that President Lincoln had been murdered.
CHAPTER II
The Owls
Among my mother’s welcome visitors was Henry James the elder, father of Henry, the novelist, and of William, the philosopher. She thought Mr. James Senior a greater man than either of his more famous sons and was a little jealous for her old friend’s reputation. Henry, Junior, understood this and loved her for it.