Years of My Youth

by William Dean Howells

In the summer evenings, after her long hard day’s work was done, my mother sometimes strolled out upon the island with my father, and loitered on the bank to look at her boys in the river; one such evening I recall, and how sad our gay voices were in the dim, dewy air. My father had built a flatboat, which we kept on the smooth waters of our dam, and on Sunday afternoons the whole family went out in it. We rowed far up, till we struck a current from the mill above us, and then let the boat drift slowly down again. It does not now seem very exciting, but then to a boy whose sense was open to every intimation of beauty, the silence that sang in our ears, the stillness of the dam where the low uplands and the fringing sycamores and every rush and grass-blade by the brink perfectly glassed themselves with the vast blue sky overhead, were full of mystery, of divine promise, and holy awe.

I recollect the complex effort of these Sunday afternoons as if they were all one sharp event; I recall in like manner the starry summer nights, and there is one of these nights that remains single and peerless in my memory. My brother and I had been sent on an errand to some neighbor’s—for a bag of potatoes or a joint of meat; it does not matter—and we had been somehow belated, so that it was well after twilight when we started home, and the round moon was high when we stopped to rest in a piece of the lovely open woodland of that region, where the trees stood in a parklike freedom from underbrush, and the grass grew dense and rich among them. We took the pole, on which we had slung the bag, from our shoulders, and sat down on an old long-fallen log, and listened to the densely interwoven monotonies of the innumerable katydids, in which the air seemed clothed as with a mesh of sound. The shadows fell black from the trees upon the smooth sward, but every other place was full of the tender light in which all forms were rounded and softened; the moon hung tranced in the sky. We scarcely spoke in the shining solitude, the solitude which for once had no terrors for the childish fancy, but was only beautiful. This perfect beauty seemed not only to liberate me from the fear which is the prevailing mood of childhood, but to lift my soul nearer and nearer to the soul of all things in an exquisite sympathy. Such moments never pass; they are ineffaceable; their rapture immortalizes; from them we know that, whatever perishes, there is something in us that cannot die, that divinely regrets, divinely hopes.

XI

Our log cabin stood only a stone’s-cast from the gray old weather-tinted grist-mill, whose voice was music for us by night and by day, so that on Sundays, when the water was shut off from the great tub-wheels in its basement, it was as if the world had gone deaf and dumb. A soft sibilance prevailed by day over the dull, hoarse murmur of the machinery; but late at night, when the water gathered that mysterious force which the darkness gives it, the voice of the mill had something weird in it like a human moan.

It was in all ways a place which I did not care to explore alone. It was very well, with a company of boys, to tumble and wrestle in the vast bins full of tawny wheat, or to climb the slippery stairs to the cooling-floor in the loft, whither the little pockets of the elevators carried the meal warm from the burrs, and the blades of the wheel up there, worn smooth by years of use, spread it out in an ever-widening circle, and caressed it with a thousand repetitions of their revolution. But the heavy rush of the water upon the wheels in the dim, humid basement, the angry whirr of the millstones under the hoppers, the high windows, powdered and darkened with the floating meal, the vague corners festooned with flour-laden cobwebs, the jolting and shaking of the bolting-cloths, had all a potentiality of terror in them that was not a pleasure to the boy’s sensitive nerves. Ghosts, against all reason and experience, were but too probably waiting their chance to waylay unwary steps there whenever two feet ventured alone into the mill, and Indians, of course, made it their ambush.

With the sawmill it was another matter. That was always an affair of the broad day. It began work and quitted work like a Christian, and did not keep the grist-mill’s unnatural hours. Yet it had its fine moments, when the upright saw lunged through the heavy oak log and gave out the sweet smell of the bruised woody fibers, or then when the circular saw wailed through the length of the lath we were making for the new house, and freed itself with a sharp cry, and purred softly till the wood