Elijah Kellogg, the Man and His Work / Chapters from His Life and Selections from His Writings

by Unknown

For some time before his resignation from the pastorate of the Mariners’ Church he had been thinking of trying his hand at a boys’ story, and in January, 1867, the first chapter of his first story was printed in Our Young Folks, a magazine published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields. This story, “Good Old Times,” at once became popular with the young readers of this magazine. It is one of the best stories that Mr. Kellogg ever wrote. It is largely a narrative of facts—the story of Hugh and Elizabeth McLellan, the great-grandfather and great-grandmother of Elijah Kellogg, in their struggle at the beginning of the eighteenth century to cut a home for themselves out of the forest wilderness of Narragansett No. 7, where the town of Gorham, Maine, now is. Of Scotch-Irish descent, young, brave, and resolute, “strong of limb, strong in faith, strong in God,” this couple left their home in the north of Ireland to escape persecution, poverty, and famine. They braved the terrors of the sea and the savages to found a home in the new country. Accustomed as they had been in Ireland to regard a landowner as the most fortunate of men, they deemed it a rare privilege to secure land in Narragansett No. 7, by paying “but little money and the balance in blood and risk and hardship.” They gladly dared the privations of a savage wilderness to obtain some soil they could call their own.

Little wonder is it that the story of how they did this proves of interest to the boys of New England; it is the story of what their own grandfathers and great-grandfathers endured, enjoyed, and achieved. Here, to be sure, they read of no fairyland peopled with elves and sprites, with ogres and goblins; here is no fairy godmother with glass slippers and pumpkin coaches, but a land of flesh-and-blood men and women, of real boys and girls, of Indians with war-whoops, and tomahawks, and scalping-knives—all true, but all enchanted by the wand of the story-teller. What better fun for the boy reader than to join this resolute family as they set out from Portland, and go with them into the primeval forest; Elizabeth on horseback with a babe in her arms leading the way, little ten-year-old Billy just behind driving the cow, and Hugh with a pack on his back, a musket slung across his shoulders, and another child in his arms, acting as rear-guard. Here in the woods were hard work, peril, and poverty; but here, too, were all kinds of interesting things for a boy to see and do. To help build the log house, shingle it with hemlock bark, and stuff the chinks with clay and brush; to see Hugh make the big “drives” and prepare for the “burn,” an exciting and important event in the making of a forest home; to watch the fire as it rushed through the clearing, and to lie in wait, gun in hand, near the woods and watch the “raccoons, woodchucks, rabbits, skunks, porcupines, partridges, foxes, and field mice ’on the clean jump,’ all running for dear life to gain the shelter of the forest, while a great gray wolf, which had been taking a nap beneath the fallen trees, brought up the rear”—this was rare sport. To wear leggings and breeches of moosehide; to gather spruce gum and maple sap; on moonlight nights to shoot the coons that were stealing the corn; to see the men cut and haul the masts, those immense trees upon which the king’s commissioner had put the broad arrow, those trees so large that upon the stump of one of the largest, so said Grannie Warren, a yoke of oxen could turn without stepping off—this was fun indeed for little Billy. What boy, as he reads the story, does not wish that he were the son of a pioneer, even if the corn and meat did now and then get so scarce that the McLellans were obliged to dine upon hazelnuts, boiled beech leaves, and lily roots. In those good old times, men and boys were not forced to betake themselves to tents and camps to get away from our “modern conveniences,” to test their resourcefulness and ingenuity in devising ways and means to secure food and shelter. From the boy’s point of view that pioneer life was one long, glorious vacation of “camping out.”

And then there were the Indians, who, whatever else they did, kept the life of that day from becoming tame and commonplace. They furnished, when friendly, no end of entertainment for the youngsters. What fun the boys had playing beaver in Weeks’s brook, and how delicious the venison was when roasted by old Molly the squaw! Under the instruction of friendly Indians, Billy learned to give the war-whoop, to hurl the tomahawk, and to acquire great skill with the bow. If he could not, like Robin Hood, cleave a willow wand at a hundred yards, he could “knock a bumblebee off a thistle at forty.” And when Billy was fast coming to man’s estate, the Indians, instigated by the French, dug up the hatchet that had been buried for nineteen years; then there was a call for all the coolness, cunning, and heroism that this pioneer life had developed in boy or man; then Beaver, as the Indians called Billy, and his savage playmate, Leaping Panther, were compelled to pit against each other their prowess and cunning. Narragansett No. 7, right in the Indians’ trail, was the scene of many an encounter, often bloody and disastrous in those days, but more exciting than a Captain Kidd expedition when looked back upon through the eyes of the twentieth-century boy. Driving the oxen, with a gun resting on the top of the yoke, planting and reaping and every moment expecting to hear the war-whoop, creeping serpent-like through the grass and stealing noiselessly under an overhanging bank in order to discover an Indian ambush—the story of all this arouses the heroic in a boy’s nature.

After “Good Old Times,” from Mr. Kellogg’s pen the books came thick and fast,—the Elm Island stories, the Forest Glen, the Pleasant Cove, and the Whispering Pine series,—so that by 1883 there were twenty-nine in all.

While writing these books, the author lived in Boston, on Pinckney Street, during the winter, often supplying neighboring pulpits, and spent the summer at his Harpswell home. His favorite workshop was the Boston Athenæum. Here he often wrote from morning till evening. One of his college mates has said: “Kellogg when in college was strenuous and persistent in whatever he undertook. I remember when he was composing a poem or preparing an essay, he gave his whole soul to it; his demeanor showed that he was absorbed in it and absent-minded to everything else, until that one thing was done.” This power of concentration now stood him in good stead. Often he worked upon his stories fifteen hours a day. Upon his “Sophomores of Radcliffe” he spent a year and a half; but by making his days long and concentrating his thought upon the one task before him, he was sometimes able to turn out a book in three months.

The style in which these books are written is not faultless. The participles are sometimes“dangling” or “misrelated.” The uses of“most” and “quite,” of “and which” and the “historical present,” are not always according to the rhetorician’s rules. Flaws may also be picked with the way some of the characters are introduced, transitions made, and statements repeated. But considering the number of stories the author wrote in these sixteen years, such mistakes are surprisingly few. Mr. Kellogg had an ear sensitive to the flow of a sentence and a memory in which words stuck. The rhythm of his prose is noticeably good and his vocabulary excellent. Well acquainted alike with farmers and sailors, with mechanics and students, he could put fitting words into the mouth of each. The language of his characters does not stultify them: his carpenters are not fishermen; his sailors are not landlubbers; his farmers are not caricatures. He knew well the “down-east” vernacular. In the use of the dialect—if such it may be called—of rural New England, Tim Longley and Isaac Murch can give points even to Hosea Biglow.

All of these books are not of the same merit, and concerning them boys’ opinions differ. Next to “Good Old Times,” perhaps the Elm Island and the Pleasant Cove stories are most after a boy’s heart. An island far enough out at sea so that the dwellers thereon cannot easily supply their wants and consequently have to use inventiveness and daring, is an interesting element in any story, whether it be“Robinson Crusoe,” “Masterman Ready,” or “Lion Ben.” Although not a tropical land abounding in cocoanuts, turtles, and parrots, Elm Island affords abundant opportunity for boys’ play and boys’ work. “Does such an island really exist?” writes a mother to the author. “No,” he replied, “only in my own imagination.” And yet for many boys it does exist. There is no need to describe Elm Island to the boys of New England. They have trod every foot of it and know its every nook and cranny. They know that it is six miles from the Maine coast, “broad off at sea,” and that in the early days fishermen used to land there and make a fire on the rocks and take a cup of tea before going out to fish all night for hake. They have looked admiringly upon its rich coronal of spruce, fir, and hemlock, the large grove of elms on its southern end, and the big beech tree which often has in it as many as ten blue herons’ nests at one time. They can tell you of its precipitous shores, its remarkable harbor, its beautiful cove into which runs the little brook where come the frostfish and smelts, and where the wild geese, coots, whistlers, brants, and sea-ducks galore come to drink. That big rock where the waves roar hoarsely is White Bull; and this smaller one, white with the foaming breakers, is Little Bull.

They know that “it was a glorious sight to behold and one never to be forgotten in this world or the next, when the waves, which had been growing beneath the winter’s gale the whole breadth of the Atlantic, came thundering in on those ragged rocks, breaking thirty feet high, pouring through the gaps between them, white foam on their summits and deep green beneath, and—when a gleam of sunshine, breaking from a ragged cloud, flashed along their edges—displaying for a moment all the colors of the rainbow.... And how solemn to listen to that awful roar, like the voice of Almighty God!”