Washington, D.C., March 20, 1861.
JUDGE not by appearances, for appearances are very deceptive,—as the old lady cholerically remarked when one, who was really a virgin unto forty, blushingly informed her that she was “just twenty-five this month.”
Though you find me in Washington now, I was born of respectable parents, and gave every indication, in my satchel and apron days, of coming to something better than this.
Slightly northward of the Connecticut river, where a pleasant little conservative village mediates between two opposition hills, you may behold the landscape on which my infantile New England eyes first traced the courses of future railroads.
Near the centre of this village in the valley, and a little back from its principal road, stood the residence of my worthy sire, and a very pretty residence it was. From the frequent addition of a new upper room here, a new dormer window there, and an innovating skylight elsewhere, the roof of the mansion had gradually assumed an alpine variety of juts and peaks somewhat confusing to behold. Local tradition related that, on a certain showery occasion, a streak of lightning was seen to descend upon that roof, skip vaguely about from one peak to another, and finally slink ignominiously down the water-pipe, as though utterly disgusted with its own inability to determine, where there were so many, which peak it should particularly perforate.
Such was the house in which I came to life a certain number of years ago, entering the world like a human exclamation point between two of the angriest sentences of a September storm, and adding materially to the uproar prevailing at the time.
Next to my parents, the person I can best remember, as I look back, was our family physician. A very obese man was he, with certain sweet-oiliness of manner, and never put out of patience. I think I can see him still, as he arose from his chair after a profound study of the case before him, and wrote a prescription so circumlocutory in its effect that it sent a servant half-a-mile to his friend the druggist for articles she might have found in her own kitchen, aqua pumpaginis and sugar being the sole ingredients required.
The doctor had started business in our village as a veterinary surgeon, but as the entire extent of his practice for six months in that line was a call to mend one of Colt’s revolvers, he finally turned his attention to the ailings of his fellows, and wrought many cures with sugar and water latinised.
At first, my father did not patronise the new doctor, having very little faith in the efficacy of sugar and water, without the addition of certain other composites often seen in bottles; but the doctor’s neat speech at a Sunday-school festival won his heart at last. The festival was held near a series of small water-falls just out of the village, and the doctor, who was an invited guest, was called upon for a few appropriate remarks. In compliance with the demand, he made a speech of some compass, ending with a peroration that is still quoted in my native place. He pointed impressively to the water-falls, and says he—
“All the works of nature is somewhat beautiful, with a good moral. Even them cataracts,” says he sagely, “have a moral, and seems eternally whispering to the young, that ‘those what err falls.’”