In 1789, when the youngest child of this Revolutionary heroine was four months old, she was left a widow, with five children. Three were daughters, the eldest being sixteen; and two were sons, the elder being twelve. With rigid economy, thrift, and hard work, she reared her family. In working out the road tax she was allowed four pence halfpenny for every cart-load of stones dumped into miry places on the highway. She helped the boys fill the cart with stones. While the boy who became Carleton's father managed the steers, hauled and dumped the load, she went on with her knitting.
Of such a daughter of the Revolution and of a Revolutionary sire was Carleton's father born. When he grew to manhood he was "tall in stature, kind-hearted, genial, public-spirited, benevolent, ever ready to relieve suffering and to help on every good cause. He was an intense lover of liberty and was always true to his convictions." He fell in love with Hannah, the daughter of Deacon Eliphalet Kilborn, of Boscawen, and the couple lived in the old house built by his father. There, after other children had been born, Charles Carleton Coffin, her youngest child, entered this world at 9 A. M., July 26, 1823. From this time forward, the mother never had a well day. After ten years of ill health and suffering, she died from too much calomel and from slow starvation, being able to take but little food on account of canker in her mouth and throat. Carleton, her pet, was very much with her during his child-life, so that his recollections of his mother were ever very clear, very tender, and profoundly influential for good.
The first event whose isolation grew defined in the mind of "the baby new to earth and sky," was an incident of 1825, when he was twenty-three months old. His maternal grandfather had shot a hawk, breaking its wing, and bringing it to the house alive. The boy baby standing in the doorway, all the family being in the yard, always remembered looking at what he called "a hen with a crooked bill." Carleton's recollection of the freshet of August, 1826, when the great slide occurred at the White Mountains, causing the death of the Willey family, was more detailed. This event has been thrillingly described by Thomas Starr King. The irrepressible small boy wanted to "go to meeting" on Sunday. Being told that he could not, he cried himself to sleep. When he awoke he mounted his "horse,"—a broomstick,—and cantered up the road for a half mile. Captured by a lady, he resisted vigorously, while she pointed to the waters running in white streams down the hills through the flooded meadows and telling him he would be drowned.
Meanwhile the hired man at home was poling the well under the sweep and "the old oaken bucket," thinking the little fellow might have leaned over the curb and tumbled in. Shortly afterwards he came near disappearing altogether from this world by tumbling into the water-trough, being fished out by his sister Mary.
In the old kitchen, a pair of deer's horns fastened into the wall held the long-barrelled musket which his grandfather had carried in the campaign of 1777. A round beaver hat, bullet, button, and spoon moulds, and home-made pewter spoons and buttons, were among other things which impressed themselves upon the sensitive films of the child's memory.
Following out the usual small boy's instinct of destruction, he once sallied out down to the "karsey" (causeway) to spear frogs with a weapon made by his brother. It was a sharpened nail in the end of a broomstick. Stepping on a log and making a stab at a "pull paddock," he slipped and fell head foremost into the mud and slime. Scrambling out, he hied homeward, and entering the parlor, filled with company, he was greeted with shouts of laughter. Even worse was it to be dubbed by his brother and the hired man a "mud lark."
Carleton's first and greatest teachers were his mother and father. After these, came formal instruction by means of letters and books, classes and schools. Carleton's religious and dogmatic education began with the New England Primer, and progressed with the hymns of that famous Congregationalist, Doctor Watts. When five years old, at the foot of a long line of boys and girls, he toed the mark,—a crack in the kitchen floor,—and recited verses from the Bible. Sunday-school instruction was then in its beginning at Boscawen. The first hymn he learned was:
"Life is the time to serve the Lord."
After mastering
"In Adam's fall
We sinned all,"