The ships that sailed up and down the bay, long distances off, were all bound somewhere that only I knew, and my thoughts would follow them to enchanted islands where fairies and beautiful creatures lived, and where wonderful birds sang from the branches of wonderful trees. I had begun to study with my mother about this period. Dull work it often appeared to be, and I dare say many a rebellion had to be put down and many an outbreak silenced, although I can recollect no chastisements. But at last, before I was ten years old, I would take a book, and followed by the sedately plodding Maréchal, seek a shady spot down at the point, where I read myself to sleep often enough.
Of course now, by this time, I knew that the name of the river on which our plantation bordered was the Gunpowder, that the blue waters were the waters of Chesapeake Bay, that I lived on the shores of Maryland, and that the ships were bound not to fairy islands (except now and then when I wanted them to be), but to Baltimore and Annapolis and Havre de Grace, and to a dozen other places whose inhabitants sought their living by trading and sailing on the sea.
I had also heard from Ol' Peter that there had been a war between our country and another, named England, and that a great man named Washington had once stopped at this very house in which we lived. Ol' Peter described to me the surrender of Cornwallis (at which he had been present, according to accounts); but my mother's talk and all she read about was of France, that I gradually came to believe must have been the most beautiful country in the world. Yet my mother always spoke as if France were dead, which puzzled me not a little. Of a truth, there were many things that puzzled me in those days. I had so many times received the answer, "You will learn all some day—On vous dira tout ça un de ces jours, mon petit," that at last I learned to hold back my curiosity, or to answer with my own imagination.
Our neighbors, who were not very neighborly, lived at long distances from us. They had no children, and up to my tenth year I had never exchanged a thought with any one of my own age. To tell the truth I am afraid my mother did not encourage the people near us to be very friendly, and I suppose that they talked much, and perhaps said spiteful things about her. I can remember how I began to notice that she seldom walked farther than the rose-bush at the end of the garden path, and that she was growing thinner and thinner, yet more beautiful every day.
We led a very simple existence, living mostly on what we raised in the garden and what Ol' Peter brought back from the "cross-roads"—a collection of three houses five or six miles distant from our plantation.
But I was growing big and strong for my age—so strong, indeed, that I could handle the heavy oars when Peter and I went out on the river to tend the nets; and never shall I forget the first time I was allowed to fire the old fowling-piece that occasionally brought a fat canvas-back duck, lusciously reeking of wild celery, to grace our table.
The furnishings of the big house we lived in I can recall in detail; they were very rich, although there were no carpets in any of the rooms except in the room my mother slept in. But there were great nail-studded chairs, and two carved oak sideboards, and a wonderful clock, upon which, by-the-way, I took my first lesson in geography; it was shaped like a golden earth, with the hours marked upon its circumference, and a hand that pointed them out as each came around in turn.
The rooms upstairs were empty, except for some packing-cases and rubbish—all but one small chamber, to which my mother alone had the key, and which contained a great iron-bound chest that I stood much in awe of. In the wide hallway downstairs were three portraits; one before which my mother often used to stand and weep (I knew it to be he who had sailed away in the ship and used to carry me on his shoulder). The second was a handsome pale-faced man whose hair fell in long ringlets over his steel armor, and who looked forth, very proud and haughty, from his piercing gray eyes that would follow one even out of the door on to the piazza. (I have often peered around the corners to see if they would discover me, and they never failed in it.) The third was a beautiful one of a woman whom I thought to be my mother. One day she told me, however, that it was not—that it was her twin sister, at which I marvelled.
A score or so of books were in a great case in one of the bare front rooms, some of them bound in handsome leather bindings and filled with fine engravings. What would I not give to possess them now!