Her ardent desire that her children should have a liberal education came to a climax on me, the last, born at the end of the period of child-bearing. She taught me my letters before I could articulate them, when I was two I could read, and at three I was put on a high stool to read the Bible for visitors, so that I cannot remember when I could not read, and when not more than five or six I used to be at the head of the spelling classes and spelling matches, in which all the boys and girls were divided into equal companies, and the school-teacher gave out the hardest words in the spelling-book to each side in turn, all who failed to spell their word sitting down, until the solitary survivor on one side or the other decided the victory, and even before I was seven I was generally that survivor. I read insatiably all the good story-books they would let me have, and I cannot recall the time at which there was anything even in the Bible new to me. With an incipient passion for nature and animal life, I read with delight all the books of natural history I could get, and I have heard in later years that in all the community of Sabbatarianism I was known as a prodigy. Fortunately I was saved from a probable idiocy in my later life by a severe attack of typhoid fever at seven, out of which attack I came a model of stupidity, and so remained until I was fourteen, my thinking powers being so completely suspended that at the dame's school to which I was sent I was repeatedly flogged for not comprehending the simplest things. I got through simple arithmetic as far as "Long Division," and there had to turn back to the beginning three times before I could be made to understand the principle of division by more than one figure.
In the humiliation of this period of my life, in which I came to consider myself as little better than a fool, my only consolation was the large liberty I enjoyed in the woods and fields with my father on Saturdays, or with my brothers Charles and Jacob on their long botanizing excursions, or in the moments of leisure when I was not wanted to turn the grindstone or blow the bellows in the workshop. Those long walks, in which I was indefatigable, and the days or nights when I went fishing with my brother Jacob, who was ten years older than myself, and who inherited the wandering and adventurous longings of my father, are the only things I can remember of this period which gave me any pleasure. I can see vividly the banks of the Mohawk, where we used to fish for perch, bream, and pike-perch; recall where, with my brother Charles, we found the rarer flowers of the valley, the cypripediums, the most rare wild-ginger, only to be found in one locality, the walking fern, equally rare, and the long walks in the pine forests, whose murmuring branches in the west wind fascinated me more than any other thing in nature.
Perhaps I mingle in recollection the nature-worship of the two septennates, for of the former was my first rapturous vision of the open sea, which comes back to me with the memory of the pines. I had gone with my father and mother to New York on a visit to my eldest brother, who had just then finished the engines of the steamer Diamond, which was the first that by her build was enabled to run through from New York to Albany, past the "overslough" or bar formed in the Hudson, which prevented the steamers of greater draught from getting up to the wharf at Albany; and he had profited by her first trip to visit home again and take us back with him. My brother pointed out to me the Clermont, Fulton's trial steamer, then disused and lying at Hoboken, but a cockboat to the Diamond, which was one of the greatest successes of the day. Machinery fascinated me, being of the mechanical breed, and I can recall the engines of the boat, which were of a new type, working horizontally, and so permitting larger engines in proportion to the draught of the steamer than had been before used. We all went one day to Coney Island, on the southern shore of Long Island, since a fashionable bathing place for New York, but then a solitary stretch of seashore, with a temporary structure where bathers might get refreshments, and a few bathing boxes. We drove out in my brother's buggy, and as, at a turn in the road, I caught a glimpse of the distant sea horizon, I rose in the buggy, shouting, "The sea! the sea!" and, in an uncontrollable frenzy, caught the whip from my brother's hand and slashed the horse in wild delirium, unconscious of what I was doing. The emotion remains uneffaceable after more than threescore years, one of the most vivid of my life. It was a rapture and an interesting case of heredity, for I had not before been within a hundred and fifty miles of the sea.
And how ecstatic was the sensation of the plunge into the breakers, holding fast to my mother's hand, and then the race up the beach before the next comber, trembling lest it should catch me, as if it were a living thing ready to devour me. They never come back, these first emotions of childhood; and though I have loved the sea all my life, I have never again felt the sight of it as then.
Of this first period, I remember very well the grand occasion of the opening of the Hudson and Mohawk Railroad, the first link in that line which is now the New York Central, and see vividly the curious old coaches,—three coach bodies together on one truck. This was in 1832, when I was four years old. The road was, I believe, the first successful passenger railway in America, and was sixteen miles long, with two inclined planes up which the trains were drawn, and down which they were lowered by cables. There was an opposition line of stagecoaches between Albany and Schenectady, running at the same price and making the same time.
Of the second period, that of nature worship, was my first trout, another delirium. My mother had taken me to visit one of her brothers, a farmer in the western section of New York, soon after made famous by the anti-rent war, in which my uncle was one of the "Indian Chiefs[1]," and there I went fishing in the brook that ran through his farm. I caught a small trout and did not know what fish it might be, till I saw the crimson spots on his side and remembered that the trout in books bore them, and then I threw him on the grass and danced a wild dance around him, a powwow as furious as a red Indian's scalp-dance, while he, poor little fingerling, jumped in the unkindly herb. Then I caught him up and raced to the house nearly half a mile, to show him, and put him in the trough under the pump, where he arrived still gasping but alive, and where he remained for all my recollection of his fate thereafter. But I remember that the beauty of the little creature gave me more pleasure than the capture.
[Footnote 1: The bands which carried on what became an actual insurrection against the civic authorities were led by men disguised as red Indians and called chiefs.]
About this time I began to try to draw, and especially birds and beautiful forms, though years before I had begun to color the wood-cuts in my books. And my mother, who had an utterly uncultivated but most tender love of art, gave up finally the oft-renewed ambition to see one of her boys in the pulpit, and made every opportunity for me to learn drawing,—I never quite understood why, for my abilities in that line were little more than nine boys out of ten show.
It was a fortunate thing for my after-life that I lived so near the forests that all my odd time was spent in them and in the surrounding fields, and I knew every apple-tree of early fruiting for miles, and every hickory-tree whose nuts were choice; and one of the joyous experiences of the time was running down a young gray squirrel in the woods, and catching him with my bare hands, and badly bitten they were. I took him home and tamed him perfectly, and was very happy with him, my first pet. He used to come and sleep in my pocket, and was never kept in a cage. My father one morning left the window of our room open, and "Bob" went out to explore, but, when he tried to find his way back again, a dog of the neighborhood, as a neighbor told us, chased him away, and to my intense grief he was shot by a hunter a few days after in the adjoining forest. I cannot to this day see a squirrel without emotion and affectionate remembrance of "Bob." The love of animals, which I inherited from my father, was one of the passions of my childhood, and I had an insatiate longing for pets.
Naturally my religious education during these early years was of the severest orthodox character, and my mother's sincere, fervent, and practical piety brought home to me, with the conviction of certainty, the persuasion of its divine authority. Hell and its terrors were always present to me, and she taught me that the wandering suggestions of childish imagination, the recurrence of profane expressions heard from others, and all forms of irreverent fantasies were the very whisperings of the devil, to her, as to me, consequently, an ever-present spirit, perpetually tempting me to repeat, and so make myself responsible for the wickedness in them. I remember with great vividness a caricature of Mrs. Trollope in a satirical illustrated edition of her travels in America, representing her sitting in a large armchair surrounded by negroes on their knees, one of whom was represented as saying, "De Lord lub Missee Trollope," an expression which my mother stigmatized as impious and not to be repeated, but which perhaps for that very reason would recur to me in thought, and which I set myself to pray against as the very whisper of the devil in my ears. And naturally, the more I tried to put it out of my head, the more it got fixed there, and it was long a source of great misery to me that I could not keep the devil away from my ears. I was never allowed a candle to go to bed with, and as I slept in the huge garret, covering the whole house, I used to shut my eyes when I left the kitchen, where we all sat in the evening, and groped my way to bed without ever again opening my eyes until the next morning, for fear of seeing the devil on my way. Awful spiritual presences haunted me always in the dark, when I passed a churchyard or an empty and solitary house. Such a house stood in the pasture where I used to drive the cow, and when it happened that she had not come home at nightfall, and I had to go to find her, the panic I endured from the necessity of searching around this old house no one can imagine but a boy naturally timid and accustomed to see ghosts and evil spirits in the dusk. But I kept my fears to myself and always made a conscientious search.