Years of My Youth

by William Dean Howells

touched it again, and it broke again into its shrill lament. The warm sawdust in the pit below was almost as friendly to bare feet as the warm meal; and it was splendid to rush down the ways on the cars that brought up the logs or carried away the lumber.

It was in the early part of the second winter that it was justly thought fit I should leave these delights and go to earn some money in a printing-office in X——, when the foreman of the printing-office appeared one day at our cabin and asked if I could come to take the place of a delinquent hand. There was no question with any one but myself but I must go. For me, a terrible homesickness fell instantly upon me—a homesickness that already, in the mere prospect of absence, pierced my heart and filled my throat.

The foreman wanted me to go back with him in his buggy, but a day’s grace was granted me, and then my elder brother took me to X——, where he was to meet my father at the railroad station on his return from Cincinnati. It had been snowing, in the soft Southern Ohio fashion, but the clouds had broken away, and the evening fell in a clear sky, apple-green along the horizon as we drove on. This color of the sky must always be associated for me with the despair which then filled my soul and which I was constantly swallowing down with great gulps. We joked, and got some miserable laughter out of the efforts of the horse to free himself from the snow that balled in his hoofs, but I suffered all the time an anguish of homesickness that now seems incredible. I had every fact of the cabin life before me; what each of the children was doing, especially the younger ones, and what, above all, my mother was doing, and how she was looking; and I saw the wretched little phantasm of myself moving about among them.

The editor to whom my brother delivered me over could not conceive of me as tragedy; he received me as if I were the merest commonplace, and delivered me in turn to the good man with whom I was to board. There were half a dozen school-girls boarding there, too, and their gaiety, when they came in, added to my desolation. The man said supper was about ready, and he reckoned I would get something to eat if I looked out for myself. Upon reflection I answered that I thought I did not want any supper, and that I must go to find my brother, whom I had to tell something. I found him at the station and told him I was going home with him. He tried to reason with me, or rather with my frenzy of homesickness; and I agreed to leave the question open till my father came; but in my own mind it was closed.

My father suggested, however, something that had not occurred to either of us: we should both stay. This seemed possible for me; but not at that boarding-house, not within the sound of the laughter of those girls! We went to the hotel, where we had beefsteak and ham and eggs and hot biscuit every morning for breakfast, and where we paid two dollars apiece for the week we stayed. At the end of this time the editor had found another hand, and we went home, where I was welcomed as from a year’s absence.

Again I was called to suffer a like trial, the chief trial of my boyhood, but it came in a milder form, and was lightened to me not only by the experience of survival from it, but by kindly circumstance. This time I went to Dayton, where my young uncle somehow learned the misery I was in, and bade me come and stay with him while I remained in the town. I was very fond of him, and of the gentle creature, his wife, but for all that, I was homesick still. I fell asleep with the radiant image of our log cabin before my eyes, and I woke with my heart like lead in my breast.

I did not see how I could get through the day, and I began it with miserable tears. I had found that by drinking a great deal of water at my meals I could keep down the sobs for the time being, and I practised this device to the surprise and alarm of my relatives, who were troubled at the spectacle of my unnatural thirst. But I could not wholly hide my suffering, and I suppose that after a while the sight of it became intolerable. At any rate, a blessed evening came when I returned from my work and found my brother waiting for me at my uncle’s house; and the next morning we set out for home in the keen, silent dark before the November dawn.

We were both mounted on the italic-footed mare, I behind my brother, with my arms round him to keep on better; and so we rode out of the sleeping town, and into the lifting shadow of the woods. They might have swarmed with ghosts or Indians; I should not have cared; I was going home. By and by, as we rode on, the birds began to call one another from their dreams, the quails whistled from the stubble fields, and the crows clamored from the decaying tops of the girdled trees in the deadening; the squirrels raced along the fence-rails, and, in the woods, they stopped half-way up the boles to bark at us; the jays strutted down the shelving branches to offer us a passing insult and defiance.

Sometimes, at a little clearing, we came to a log cabin; the blue smoke curled from its chimney, and through the closed door came the low hum of a spinning-wheel. The red and yellow leaves, heavy with the cold dew, dripped round us; I was profoundly at peace, and the homesick will understand how it was that I was as if saved from death. At last we crossed the tail-race from the island, and turned up, not at the old log cabin, but at the front door of the new house. The family had flitted during my absence, and now they all burst out upon me in exultant welcome, and my mother caught me to her heart. Doubtless she knew that it would have been better for me to have conquered myself; but my defeat was dearer to her than my triumph could have been. She made me her honored guest; I had the best place at the table, the tenderest bit of steak, the richest cup of her golden coffee; and all that day I was “company.”

It was a great day, which I must have spent chiefly in admiring the new house. It was so very new yet as not to be plastered; they had not been able to wait for that; but it was beautifully lathed in all its partitions, and the closely fitted floors were a marvel of carpentering. I roamed through the rooms, and up and down the stairs, and freshly admired the familiar outside of the house as if it were as novel as the interior, where open wood fires blazed upon the hearths and threw a pleasant light of home upon the latticed walls.