This island and the neighboring mainland Mr. Kellogg peopled with likable and interesting characters. Strong, good-natured Joe Griffin, beneath whose hat is ever hatching a practical joke, Uncle Isaac Murch, full of Indian lore, skilled in the use of tools, always able to look at things from a boy’s point of view, Captain Rhines, John Rhines, Charlie Bell, and old Tige Rhines are dear to many a boy’s heart. And Lion Ben, powerful, overgrown, agile, slow-tempered, warm-hearted Lion Ben! Almost as soon could a boy forget Leather-Stocking as forget Lion Ben.
Situated as was Narragansett No. 7 some ten miles inland, in “Good Old Times” Mr. Kellogg had but little to say of sailors and the sea. But Elm Island and its sea-loving people afforded him large opportunity to use the knowledge of ships and seamen gained during the three years he had sailed before the mast, or the twenty he had ministered to sailors in Harpswell and Boston. He knew all the pleasures which the sea and shore afford inventive, resourceful boys like John Rhines and Charlie Bell. Fishing and swimming, making kelp siphons, spearing flounders, shooting coot and geese, building boats and sailing them into the teeth of the gale—no author has told of these more entertainingly. Mr. Kellogg loved the sea dearly and knew the words and ways of sailors well. “Here,” says a reviewer, “is an author who knows just what he is writing about. He never orders his sailors to lower the hatch over the stern or coil the keelson in the forward cabin.” He liked nothing better than to build an “Ark” or a “Hard-Scrabble,” load her with lumber and farm produce, man her with Griffins and Rhineses, a snappy crew of home boys, who would “scamper up the rigging racing with each other for the weather earing,” and sail away to the West Indies. Through hurricanes, blockades, or pirates, they would sail with colors flying, reach their port in safety, sell their cargo for a handsome profit, and come back laden with coffee, molasses, and Spanish dollars to gladden the hearts of the dwellers on Elm Island and in Pleasant Cove.
The Wolf Run stories depict characters and events similar to those in “Good Old Times.” They tell of the way a handful of Scotch-Irish settlers in the mountain gorge of Wolf Run on the western frontier of Pennsylvania, about the middle of the eighteenth century, built up their homes; and of the “fearful ordeals through which they passed in consequence of their deliberate resolve never with life to abandon their homesteads won by years of toil from the wilderness.” Here, as in “Good Old Times,” is a scattered community of a few families, frugal and hardy, hating injustice and loving righteousness, to whom food and shelter of the rudest kind are luxuries, and life itself is often at stake. These stories are full of vivid pictures of frontier life, making the “birch” and the “dug-out,” devising ingenious makeshifts for tools and furniture, trapping the wolf and beaver, building and defending the stockade. Here are many enlivening accounts of Indian battles, ambushes, midnight attacks, hair-breadth escapes, and long, hard chases on the trail of the Mohawks or the Delawares. Across the pages of these stories walk sinewy men of oak, in moccasins, buckskin breeches and coonskin caps, ready to fight or fall, keen of eye and lithe of limb, skilled in forest lore, tireless on the chase, sagacious in finding or covering a trail, keen marksmen, “delicate in nothing but the touch of the trigger.” Sam Summerford, Ned Honeywood, Seth and Israel Blanchard, Bradford Holdness, Black Rifle,—twin brother of Cooper’s Long Rifle,—are characters which live in a boy’s memory. These are stories of strong lights and dark shades; but they are true to the life of that day, and show well “what the heritage of the children has cost the fathers.”
In the Whispering Pine stories the author relates the struggles, achievements and pranks of a group of students in Bowdoin College. In these books he has given us a good look into the lives of students in a small college in the first half of the nineteenth century, and has preserved in the amber of his story many Bowdoin customs.
He pictures vividly the early Commencement, when nearly the whole District of Maine kept holiday. From far and near people came in carryalls and stages, on horseback, in packets and pleasure boats, to join in the college merry-making. Hundreds of carriages bordered the yard, and barns and sheds were filled with horses; hostlers were hurrying to and fro sweating and swearing, and every house was crammed with people. To Commencement came not only the beauty, wit, and wisdom of the district, but also those who cared little for art or learning. With dignified officials, sober matrons, and gay belles and beaux came also horse-jockeys, wrestlers, snake-charmers, gamblers, and venders of every sort. The college yard was dotted with booths where were sold gingerbread, pies, egg-nog, long-nine cigars, beers small, and, alas! too often, for good order, beers large. While Seniors in the church were discoursing on “Immortality,” jockeys outside were driving sharp trades and over-convivial visitors engaging in free fights.
In his “Sophomores of Radcliffe” Mr. Kellogg tells us of the Society of Olympian Jove, whose customs perhaps sprang partly from the author’s imagination and partly from his experience. In those days the initiate was made to rush through the pines and ford the dark Acheron, and was carefully taught the signals of distress—signals which James Trafton, with work unprepared, the morning after his initiation, much to the merriment of the class, proceeded to give to the irritated professor by squinting at him through his hand.
Perhaps the most interesting of the early Bowdoin customs described in these books is the “Obsequies of Calculus.” This custom was in vogue many years, and a headstone can yet be seen upon the campus marking the spot where the sacred ashes were consigned to dust. At the end of Junior year when Calculus was finished, the Junior class gathered in the mathematical room and there deposited their copies of Calculus in a coffin. The coffin was then borne sorrowfully to the chapel, where amid wailing and copious lachrymation a touching eulogy was pronounced. The orator was wont to discourse of the “gigantic intellect of the deceased, his amazing powers of abstraction, his accuracy of expression, his undeviating rectitude of conduct,” his strict observance of the motto that, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” Then came the elegy in Latin; after which, amid the grief-convulsed mourners, the coffin was placed upon a vehicle called by the vulgar a dump cart, and the noble steed Isosceles, which “fed upon binomial theorems, parabolas, and differentials, and every bone of whose body and every hair of whose skin was illustrative of either acute or obtuse angles,” drew the sacred load to its last resting-place. The funeral procession, consisting of the college band, Bowdoin artillery, the eulogist and elegist, and the Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior classes, moved slowly down Park Row, through the principal streets of the village to the rear of the college yard. Here the books were “placed upon the funeral pyre and burned with sweet odors, the solemn strains of the funeral dirge mingling with the crackling of flames.
‘Old Calculus has screwed us hard,