My mother sailed early in the spring of this year—1872—for England to hold her famous Peace Crusade, and until her return in August, my father and I were alone together. As usual I resented her absence, believing, with the egotism of youth, that I had a prior claim on every moment of both parents’ time, while holding myself perfectly free to give them as much or as little of my own company as I found convenient. As an illustration of the working of the law of compensation, those months brought me a close companionship with my father that only the solitude à deux can give. I date from this period my increased interest in world politics, for while my father was the most ardent American imaginable, his life had inevitably given him the wider outlook of world citizenship.
I remember something of his talk about the Boundaries and Fisheries dispute, which twenty years before had loomed so large among the questions of the day. He impressed it upon me that while our differences with Great Britain had all the acrimony of a family quarrel, when all was said and done, despite the behavior of a certain portion of the English people during the Civil War, despite Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets and other irritating utterances, Americans should recognize Great Britain as our nearest of kin in the family of nations, to whom we are bound by ties of blood, tradition, and a common language. I am thankful to have escaped the anti-British sentiment so carefully cultivated by certain interests in this country.
An anecdote touching the Boundary dispute seems worth preserving; it was told me years after the event by an Englishman.
At the time when the boundary between British Columbia and Washington Territory was under discussion by the two governments, a commission was sent out from England to report on the value of the land. One of the commissioners, a famous sportsman, made the following comment:
“This is a rotten country; the fish won’t rise to a fly!”
When I visited Washington State and saw the beautiful country awarded to us at that time, I wondered if the dictum of the young angler had carried much influence in the decision.
Perhaps the sharpest memory I have of this year of 1872 is that of the great fire, when sixty acres of buildings in the heart of the business quarter of Boston went up in smoke and flame. I watched the terrible conflagration from the window of the room in the Institution for the Blind, where eighteen years before I first saw the light. Hour after hour passed, as I sat at the open casement watching the flames devour whole blocks of the city. The crimson sky was reflected in the black waters of South Boston harbor; the white spire of Park Street Church was often threatened; over and over again we lost sight of it in the clouds of sooty smoke, the curtain of leaping flame. Each time that the wind blew back the smoke and fire, and I caught a glimpse of that white finger pointing heavenward, fresh hope sprang up; so long as the steeple stood, we knew that the fire had not crossed the Common, and that Beacon Hill and the State House were safe. At this time my Aunt and Uncle Wales had moved into their new house on Brimmer Street, their son Thomas living at his farm in Wayland. During the night my aunt more than once called her husband’s attention to the unusual noise in the streets, the constant ringing of the fire alarm, the toot of engines flying by. His only answer was:
“Be quiet. Go to sleep!”
The next morning, as Aunt and Uncle Wales sat at breakfast, Cousin Tom came in, bearing some large ledgers in his arms.
“What brings you to Boston so early?” demanded his father.