From the home-life of his boyhood he stepped into the fuller and richer home-life that followed his marriage. He married the sweetheart of his early youth, Miss Julia King, of Athens, and she remained his sweetheart to the last. The first pseudonym that he used in his contributions to the Constitution, “King Hans,” was a fanciful union of Miss King’s name with his, and during his service in Florida, long after he was married, he signed his telegrams “Jule.” In the office not a day passed that he did not have something to say of his wife and children. They were never out of his thoughts, no matter what business occupied his mind. In his speeches there are constant allusions to his son, and in his conversation the gentle-eyed maiden, his daughter, was always tenderly figuring. His home-life was in all respects an ideal one; ideal in its surroundings, in its influences, and in its purposes. I think that the very fact of his own happiness gave him a certain restlessness in behalf of the happiness of others. His writings, his speeches, his lectures—his whole life, in fact—teem with references to home-happiness and home-content. Over and over again he recurs to these things—always with the same earnestness, always with the same enthusiasm. He never meets a man on the street, but he wonders if he has a happy home—if he is contented—if he has children that he loves. To him home was a shrine to be worshiped at—a temple to be happy in, no matter how humble, or how near to the brink of poverty.
One of his most successful lectures, and the one that he thought the most of, was entitled “A Patchwork Palace: The story of a Home.” The Patchwork Palace still exists in Atlanta, and the man who built it is living in it to-day. Mr. Grady never wrote out the lecture, and all that can be found of it is a few rough and faded notes scratched on little sheets of paper. On one occasion, however, he condensed the opening of his lecture for the purpose of making a newspaper sketch of the whole. It is unfinished, but the following has something of the flavor of the lecture. He called the builder of the Palace Mr. Mortimer Pitts, though that is not his name:
Mr. Mortimer Pitts was a rag-picker. After a patient study of the responsibility that the statement carries, I do not hesitate to say that he was the poorest man that ever existed. He lived literally from hand to mouth. His breakfast was a crust; his dinner a question; his supper a regret. His earthly wealth, beyond the rags that covered him, was—a cow that I believe gave both butter-milk and sweet-milk—a dog that gave neither—and a hand-cart in which he wheeled his wares about. His wife had a wash-tub that she held in her own title, a wash-board similarly possessed, and two chairs that came to her as a dowry.
In opposition to this poverty, my poor hero had—first, a name (Mortimer Pitts, Esq.) which his parents, whose noses were in the air when they christened him, had saddled upon him aspiringly, but which followed him through life, his condition being put in contrast with its rich syllables, as a sort of standing sarcasm. Second, a multitude of tow-headed children with shallow-blue eyes. The rag-picker never looked above the tow-heads of his brats, nor beyond the faded blue eyes of his wife. His world was very small. The cricket that chirped beneath the hearthstone of the hovel in which he might chance to live, and the sunshine that crept through the cracks, filled it with music and light. Trouble only strengthened the bonds of love and sympathy that held the little brood together, and whenever the Wolf showed his gaunt form at the door, the white faces, and the blue eyes, and the tow-heads only huddled the closer to each other, until, in very shame, the intruder would take himself off.
Mr. Pitts had no home. With the restlessness of an Arab he flitted from one part of the city to another. He was famous for frightening the early market-maids by pushing his white round face, usually set in a circle of smaller white round faces, through the windows of long-deserted hovels. Wherever there was a miserable shell of a house that whistled when the wind blew, and wept when the rain fell, there you might be sure of finding Mr. Pitts at one time or another. I do not care to state how many times my hero, with an uncertain step and a pitifully wandering look—his fertile wife, in remote or imminent process of fruitage—his wan and sedate brood of young ones—his cow, a thoroughly conscientious creature, who passed her scanty diet to milk to the woeful neglect of tissue—and his dog, too honest for any foolish pride, ambling along in an unpretending, bench-legged sort of way,—I do not care to state, I say, how many times this pale and melancholy procession passed through the streets, seeking for a shelter in which it might hide its wretchedness and ward off the storms.
During these periods of transition, Mr. Pitts was wonderfully low-spirited. “Even a bird has its nest; and the poorest animal has some sort of a hole in the ground, or a roost where it can go when it is a-weary,” he said to me once, when I caught him fluttering aimlessly out of a house which, under the influence of a storm, had spit out its western wall, and dropped its upper jaw dangerously near to the back of the cow. And from that time forth, I fancied I noticed my poor friend’s face growing whiter, and the blue in his eye deepening, and his lips becoming more tremulous and uncertain. The shuffling figure, begirt with the rag-picker’s bells, and dragging the wobbling cart, gradually bended forward, and the look of childish content was gone from his brow, and a great dark wrinkle had knotted itself there.
And now let me tell you about the starting of the Palace.
One day in the springtime, when the uprising sap ran through every fibre of the forest, and made the trees as drunk as lords—when the birds were full-throated, and the air was woven thick with their songs of love and praise—when the brooks kissed their uttermost banks, and the earth gave birth to flowers, and all nature was elastic and alert, and thrilled to the core with the ecstasy of the sun’s new courtship—a divine passion fell like a spark into Mr. Mortimer Pitts’s heart. How it ever broke through the hideous crust of poverty that cased the man about, I do not know, nor shall we ever know ought but that God put it there in his own gentle way. But there it was. It dropped into the cold, dead heart like a spark—and there it flared and trembled, and grew into a blaze, and swept through his soul, and fed upon its bitterness until the scales fell off and the eyes flashed and sparkled, and the old man was illumined with a splendid glow like that which hurries youth to its love, or a soldier to the charge. You would not have believed he was the same man. You would have laughed had you been told that the old fellow, sweltering in the dust, harnessed like a dog to a cart, and plying his pick into the garbage heaps like a man worn down to the stupidity of a machine, was burning and bursting with a great ambition—that a passion as pure and as strong as ever kindled blue blood, or steeled gentle nerves was tugging at his heart-strings. And yet, so it was. The rag-picker was filled with a consuming fire—and as he worked, and toiled, and starved, his soul sobbed, and laughed, and cursed, and prayed.
Mr. Pitts wanted a home. A man named Napoleon once wanted universal empire. Mr. Pitts was vastly the more daring dreamer of the two.
I do not think he had ever had a home. Possibly, away back beyond the years a dim, sweet memory of a hearthstone and a gable roof with the rain pattering on it, and a cupboard and a clock, and a deep, still well, came to him like an echo or a dream. Be this as it may, our hero, crushed into the very mud by poverty—upon knees and hands beneath his burden—fighting like a beast for his daily food—shut out inexorably from all suggestions of home—embittered by starvation—with his faculties chained down apparently to the dreary problem of to-day—nevertheless did lift his eyes into the gray future, and set his soul upon a home.