Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

From Seven to Seventy

❦

Edward Simmons: in 1893

FROM
SEVEN TO SEVENTY
Memories of a Painter and a Yankee

By Edward Simmons

With an Interruption by

OLIVER HERFORD

FULLY ILLUSTRATED

Publishers

HARPER & BROTHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

FROM SEVEN TO SEVENTY

Copyright, 1922

By Harper & Brothers

Printed in the U. S. A.

C-Y

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Interruption

If some curious reader, chancing upon this foreword to the narrative of the life of Edward Simmons, should require my reason for calling it an Interruption instead of an Introduction, I might reply with the obvious evasion that so distinguished a painter as Edward Simmons needs no introduction.

The recipient of medals innumerable, and the most flattering mention in every European capital, surely should need no introduction even in his own country, many of whose public buildings and galleries are enriched by examples of his work in decoration, portraiture, or genre.

But this, as I have said, would be an evasion and not my true reason for calling my preface an interruption, and since the curiosity that can drive a reader to the perusal of matter that is essentially deterrent, wholly superfluous, and probably dull must be of a persistence that will brook no gainsay, I will make a virtue of compulsion and narrate for that reader’s private enlightenment a story of a very personal nature concerning Mr. Simmons, the telling of which I had rather hoped to avoid.

The story, in so far as it is related to the title of this preface, speaks for itself, and since it bears upon a personal characteristic of the painter, inherited, I am told, from generations of oratorical forebears, a characteristic which also speaks for itself, I must ask the reader to regard it as strictly confidential and to allow it to go no further.

Picture then, Curious Reader, a Boston dinner party at which Mr. Edward Simmons as guest of honor is exercising without let or hindrance the lingual accomplishment bequeathed to him by generations of eloquent forebears, and demonstrating to a fresh audience that the supposed “lost art of conversation” was not so much lost as cornered.

A dinner party, however, even a Boston dinner party, has in addition to its social and intellectual side a practical, alimentary aspect not to be ignored by anyone, particularly an artist. And since the act of obtaining nourishment employs the function of swallowing, and the function of swallowing cannot be successfully synchronized with that of speech, there were of necessity occasional brief pauses in the flow of oratory.

It was at the moment of one of these unavoidable pauses that a lady (to be remembered, as was the “clergyman” who interrupted Dr. Johnson, only by her temerity) seized the opportunity to get a word in edgewise.

Now the traffic laws that regulate the respective movements of the human pharynx and larynx are as inexorable as those that govern our public highways, and at the same instant that the lady opened her mouth to speak, the Edwardian larynx resumed its right of way.

“Oh, pardon me, Mr. Simmons, I interrupted you,” was all she could manage to gasp.

“Madam,” replied Simmons, with the Chesterfieldian smile the gift of which many an Academician would give all his decorations to possess—“madam, no one can speak without interrupting me!”

And that is why I have chosen to call my impertinent preface to a narrative which for human interest can (to my thinking) be compared only to that of Benvenuto Cellini, an—  But pardon me, Mr. Simmons, I am interrupting you!

Oliver Herford.

Introduction
A Yankee Heritage

For years I have wanted to make two cartoons—the first, dated 1800, to be simply a lovely woman holding a baby, and called, “New England with Her Child America.” In the second, dated 1900, the mother, New England, is grown old and, clad in a poke bonnet and mitts, is sitting in a carriage with her son, America, who is now a bearded man smoking a black cigar. He is driving, the horse is running away, and she is trying to grab the reins. He yells:

“Ma, if you don’t stop that there will be trouble!”

I was born in the middle of the last century, when this bearded man was still a youth, and I have watched his struggles throughout the years, until, without his mother’s realizing it, he has slipped quietly from home to go out and mingle with the rest of the world, leaving her, a toothless and old grandma, to sit by the fire and dream that she is still the young mother of the cartoon.

My ancestors were the Pilgrims, that first group of adventurers who embarked upon the Mayflower in search of a far-off land where they might worship in peace. They had not the qualities of the Puritans who came later. The Pilgrims were the impractical dreamers, and in one year were lectured by their backers because they spent too much time in prayer and too little in trade. The blood of nineteen different people who made that voyage flows in my veins and, try as hard as I may, I have never been able to find that this pure English lineage had been broken during the first hundred years in America and certainly not for centuries before that in the old country.

From them has come to me a want of deference, bred in them by a hatred of kings; a lack of rhythm—the nasal twang began by a desire to ridicule the Mother Church and ended by becoming a virtue; and an intense hatred of restraint in any form.

From my father I must have received whatever artistic leanings I possess, although I believe them to be only a form of Yankee handicraftsman-ship. He was a better carpenter than a preacher, and his sketch book is filled with careful copies of many old masters which he saw abroad. I owe a deep debt to some one for curbing his imagination in one instance, however, for he wrote to an intimate friend on the day of my birth: “I have waited to reply to your letter that I might announce the name we had chosen for the bouncing boy whose voice I can now hear upstairs. But, since this year they have seen fit to take from us Daniel Webster and the Duke of Wellington, I think I shall name him Duke Webster.”

My father died before I was old enough to know him, but I got quite a vivid picture of his side of the family from a distant relative whom I met by accident one day. He said: “The Simmonses have always been a long-legged set of lazy galoots. We have had great success with the other sex. We have been able to do one thing a little better than other folks and stick to it until we have about a thousand dollars—then we sit down and loaf until it is gone.”

Mother was different. When she was a girl she had a serious talk with her dad, telling him it was foolish for her to study piano or music of any kind.

“What is your ambition?” he asked.

“To scrub a kitchen floor better than anyone else,” she replied; and he succumbed, his New England nature realizing that, after all, it might be well to have one practical person in the family. Mother’s thrifty streak came in very useful, for a young widow with four lusty children to feed did not have an easy time in those days. The sun never rose upon her asleep and her small economies were ever her own pride and the butt of our selfish derision. After her day’s work was over, it was my delight—little brute that I was—to lie in bed and listen to her voice, reading to me from some story of delicious adventure. When her head drooped and the book fell from her hands, I, still wide awake, would whine and finally yell, until she pulled herself together and went on. Mother’s day was an endless round of doing something for others.

From the land where these first American ancestors of mine settled so long ago, I get the shape of my body and the contour of my face. I look more like an Iroquois Indian than an Englishman. Some historian has remarked that the change in the Yankee is due to intermarriage with the redskins. Imagine the spectacle of a staid Governor Bradford wedded to an Indian squaw! Two hundred years of the same climate, the same food, and the same life produced the same type, that’s all.

From Seven to Seventy

“Mon verre n’est pas grand

Mais je bois dans mon verre.”

Alfred de Musset

Chapter I: Making My Early History
Concord, Massachusetts

There may have been much distinction in living in Concord, Massachusetts, in the ’fifties, but to me, as a boy, the whole town was only a delightful playground and the people who lived there merely “home folks.” To be sure, I invested some of the great ones with halos of romance. This was not because I knew anything about their literary or artistic attainments, but rather because of the lack of heroic characters in the town. Had there been a Jesse James or a Charlie Chaplin anywhere round, I should probably have woven my dreams of adventure about them. But the jail was always singularly empty, and the movies had not been invented. I was forced, therefore, to pin my youthful imaginings upon a Hawthorne, an Emerson, or a Thoreau! I have always felt I was greatly cheated.

I lived in the Old Manse, from which Hawthorne plucked his mosses. It was built in 1760 by the Rev. William Emerson, the grandfather of Ralph Waldo, and was a delightful house for a boy to grow up in. There was a long hallway running from east to west, and from the stairway a line of grisly divines, framed in black, looked down. They were mostly ancestors, and they gave a terrible air of austerity to the interior; but below and above were many redeeming features.

One was the swing shelf in the basement, always covered with fascinating goodies. Here on Saturday night one might cut with one’s jackknife a hunk of juicy meat roasted ready for Sunday’s dinner, and wash it down with cream from the shining pan of milk next to it. Here were preserves, jellies, cakes, and pies just cooling from the oven; while over in the corner barrels of apples were stored away for winter consumption. I shall never forget the delights of the swing shelf.

The Old Manse was built in the manner of the eighteenth century—entirely of wood, the oaken timbers being held together with oaken plugs. We boys found it quite easy to draw these from place, and we used them for tholepins in our dory. Fortunately, the grown-ups got on to us or I believe the house would have eventually collapsed.

There was a gabled roof with chimneys at both ends, and, of course, all sorts of wonderful nooks and crannies to hide away in. It was up in this attic that my grandmother Ripley was found by a caller rocking a cradle with her foot and holding a book in her hand which she was intently reading. It was written in Sanskrit! She apologized because she needed a dictionary to read this language. This was not so of Latin and Greek, as she read them fluently; but she used to say, “I cannot think in Sanskrit.”

She whom the name, “Peasant Princess,” fits better than any other, was the wife of Emerson’s father’s half-brother, and therefore older than Emerson. He used to spend a great deal of his time with her at the Old Manse, and she had much to do with influencing his life. One can see this from his letters as a boy.

THE OLD MANSE AT CONCORD
At the window—Edward Simmons’s mother; Under the umbrella—his sister Elizabeth; Standing—his first cousin, Sarah Alden (Thayer) Ames; Seated—one of his cousins of the Bradford branch.

My grandmother’s sitting room was the delight of my life. There was a broad chimney shelf, and low down on the left-hand side a framed bit of handwriting, an invitation to Lieutenant Bradford to dine with General Washington. Over that was a big hornet’s nest, a stuffed owl, and, strangest of all, a copy of the “Beatrice Cenci” and Titian’s “Tribute Money,” brought back from Italy by my father. I always thought, as a child, that the head of Christ was a family portrait and that the Jew with the tribute money was a tradesman. Why the tradesman was giving one of us money instead of vice versa, I did not know.

Here in this room I used to dream until most likely interrupted by some caller upon grandmother. Then I would retire to the corner and listen to their conversation about antislavery, human freedom, states’ rights, etc.—understanding not a word, but fascinated by the fervor of the speakers. I have seen gathered together in this parlor Emerson, Frank Sanborn, Charles Sumner, and John Brown, the last short and squat, his great beard upon his breast, and spreading his coat tails before the fire like a pouter pigeon.

Something that occurred years later, when I was a student at Harvard, made me appreciate my grandmother more than ever. Prof. Asa Gray, a man of seventy, and the first botanist of the world at that time, met me in the Yard one day and stopping me said:

“I understand that your name is Simmons and that you are the grandson of Mary Bradford Ripley?”

I replied that I was.

He took off his skull cap and bowed low to the ground, saying, “Allow me to do honor to the offspring of one of the ablest botanists I have ever known.”

I remember her looks well. Her features were very marked and her nose big and straight. Her hair was then white and she had blue-gray eyes. There is a photograph of her sitting under a grape arbor, looking very absent-minded, with the little finger of her left hand hooked in the corner of her mouth—a habit of my sister and both of my boys!

Grandfather’s salary as a Unitarian clergyman was the munificent sum of six hundred dollars a year, and on this my grandmother managed to bring up a large family of children—doing all the cooking and sewing herself—marry off three of the girls, and send the two boys through college. “As big as Sam Ripley” was the saying throughout the countryside, and, although he was lusty and hail, my grandfather died when he was in his prime—in fact, before I was born. The circumstances of his death, which I heard when a youngster, made a deep impression upon me.

It was the day before Thanksgiving. The Old Manse was full of guests and relatives when he took his daughter Elizabeth and, filling his buggy with goodies, drove out to distribute them to his poor parishioners. The last gift delivered, they turned upon the road home, he remarking that the Widow Hall would certainly enjoy the two chickens he had left her. It was a rainy, bleak November night and Lizzie, snuggling into the robes, almost went to sleep, when, looking down, she noticed the reins were slipping. She spoke to him, but he did not answer. Even then she could not realize what the matter was, until, reaching to gather in the lines, she felt his hand cold beneath hers. He was already dead.

I often used to think of that drive—the tragedy of the young girl guiding the horse over miles of muddy road in a blinding rain, and the arrival at the brightly lighted house, full of laughter and merriment, with the sad burden by her side. How did she tell them? Did she call from the road, or did she leave him there and go into the house? How could one tell what to do under such circumstances? Perhaps the joyous crowd ran out to meet her and there was a great hush—they never told me that part. But I liked to believe that it was my grandmother Ripley, who, all alone, was watching from the doorway, and knowing intuitively that something was wrong, took the whole situation into her strong, capable hands.

Like all boys, I was intensely interested in birds and animals. One day I was playing in the grass in front of the Old Manse, when I suddenly looked up to see a short man with a blond beard leaning over me.

“What have you there, Eddie?”

“A great crested flycatcher’s egg,” I replied.

This was a very rare find.

He wanted me to give it to him, but I would not. Then he proposed a swap.

“If you will give it to me, I will show you a live fox,” he said. This was too much to resist. We made a rendezvous for the next Sunday.

Although descended from a line of parsons, I had already learned that Sunday was, for me, merely a holiday, and it was evidently the same for him. This man was Henry D. Thoreau.

Accordingly, the following Sabbath I trudged down to his place at Walden Pond, and he, who had “no walks to throw away on company,” proceeded to devote his entire afternoon to a boy of ten. After going a long way through the woods, we both got down on our bellies and crawled for miles, it seemed to me, through sand and shrubbery. But Mr. Fox refused to show himself—and worse luck than all, I never got my egg back! I have always had a grudge against Thoreau for this.

Concord was a town utterly without crime. There was no gazing into the jail windows to catch a glimpse of the hideous offenders against the law. I never really heard of but one prisoner in my life, and he was so mild that he hardly made an impression. During my time this man was the only inhabitant of the jail and, technically, he did not belong there. A number of years before he had been imprisoned for some offense, and, after being released, returned and begged to be taken in again, as he was lonely and had gotten used to the place. So, one could see him ’most any summer evening sitting out on the steps of the jail. He was a great pet of the Emerson family, and was hired to play the violin for all the dances.

One of my memories of the Old Manse is that of the Thursday-afternoon visits of Ellery Channing, the poet. I never saw anything written by him until I left the town. He was always asked to supper and always stayed, becoming thereby a part of the mental furniture of the place. He was old, fattish, disorderly, absent-minded, and to me so unæsthetic, that I knew he could not be a good poet. I don’t believe he was. A humbler than Thoreau, who practically occupied the same position in the estimation of the Emersons. I remember with what was then for me horror, but now extreme sympathy, that years before, his wife had left him because she had insisted upon his having a carpet in his study. This he kept patiently removing until, returning from a camping trip, he found it firmly nailed to the floor; so he pulled it up, tore it in strips, and hurled it out of the window, thereby ruining the carpet and both their tempers.

Another frequent caller upon our family was Charles Sumner. I remember him most vividly upon one occasion. He had come in for luncheon. Mother, who left the intellectual part of the life to others and always said, “I find philosophers have just as hearty an appetite as other people—especially for pie,” was in the kitchen, making this delectable dish. I was playing upon the sitting-room floor. Suddenly I felt a hand upon my head.

“My boy,” he said, “when you grow up you’ll find out two things. One is that all men have mothers, but I don’t think you will ever meet any other man who has ever had a mother like yours.”

My father died when I was three years old and I had always taken mother more or less for granted, and I thought him very silly at the time.

I once asked mother how she came to be married. My father, who had almost been tarred and feathered in the South for his antislavery sermons, had fled North and finally became the fashionable young preacher of Boston. Mother was one of five sisters, and said she was astounded when he asked her to marry him, as she always supposed it was Lizzie he wanted—Lizzie being the intellectual one. It was that way with mother. Brought up in an intellectual atmosphere where learning was considered the only thing of account, she was always surprised when anyone showed a preference for her—a woman who would rather scrub a kitchen floor than write an essay!

Mother’s democratic tendencies spread in every direction. There was a pew in church that was supposed to be reserved for the poor. “No one in the poorhouse is any poorer than we are,” said mother, and marched us into it every Sunday. The Old Manse pew was farther up the aisle, and, besides, one had to pay for that.

Although she was such a housewife, she had a great independence of thought. A woman had come to Concord, with no husband, and given birth to a child. This, for New England at that time, was a terrible scandal. The boy was my age and went to school. All the other boys whispered behind his back as if he had been in jail, although by this time his mother was properly married to a young farmer up on Barret’s Hill. No one ever spoke to her in church or bowed. My mother, very quietly, every summer, put on her best clothes and walked the mile or more up the hill to call.

To me Hawthorne always typified the haughty Southerner. I did not know what haughty Southerners were like, but I had heard them talked about and supposed they were very superior creatures—an idea my worthy relatives would have promptly squelched had they known it. Hawthorne was a hero to me, and whenever I read a romance, such as Ivanhoe or the “Iliad,” I pictured the conqueror as tall, broad, dark, and spare, with a dark mustache. This was the way Hawthorne looked to me.

I would never have dared speak to him, and do not remember having seen him at the house; but, of course, the Old Manse was filled with memories of his presence.

I remember staring for hours at a time at the words he wrote on the window of the dining room, and wondering how he did it. It read:

“On this day my daughter Una was born, while the trees are all glass chandeliers.”

What a sentence for a boy to dream about! It is still there, and there are many other windows with his name only.

I had never seen any diamond rings; none of my womenfolk wore rings, and it seemed strange to me how anyone could write on a pane of glass!

Hawthorne, contrary to public opinion, did not own the Old Manse, but only rented it from the Ripleys. In fact, he lived there only a year or more. It was a great disillusion to find later that the grown-ups of my family did not consider him a great hero, and in fact thought his writing on the windows a horrible defacement of the house—especially as they had had some difficulty in collecting the rent.

My most vivid memory of Hawthorne is during the time I was attending the intermediate school. In front of the building was the town square, separated from the school by an iron fence. Here we boys used to play baseball, and upon going home, I, forgetful as always, would invariably leave behind my dinner pail or my jacket. I was invariably sent back to fetch it.

By this time the shadows had begun to fall, and very often I saw Hawthorne and his wife pass by, arm in arm, she in white and he dark—dark as the coming night. They spoke in low tones and seemed to be oblivious of any passers-by. I was told that he went out only at night, and this made him all the more romantic to me. The truth was that he was very shy, and so, in the daytime, went only into the woods in back of his house. He was a great lover of children, but so fearful of meeting them that he concealed himself in a hollow tree in order to see the festival that the school gave once a year.

Mr. Channing told me that once he was rowing with Hawthorne on the Assabet River, the north branch of the Concord. He remarked that the reflection of the hemlocks in the water was unusual.

“Which is the reflection?” said Hawthorne, pointing first to the hemlocks and then to the picture in the water. This seems to me to be very characteristic of Hawthorne’s method of thought.

Concord was an historical spot, and in the summer was overrun with tourists, who, not content with viewing the scene of the “shot heard round the world,” etc., would invade the Old Manse. These gangs were allowed to go all over the house in which Hawthorne once lived, much to the discomfort and derision of the occupants. One day, when I was still quite a young man, there was a party of people upstairs nosing around, and my uncle Gore (Judge Ripley) and I were in the sitting room. My sister had brought in, not long before, a long, draggly bit of Spanish moss and put it on the chimney shelf. While the tourists were upstairs, my uncle rose and, taking the moss, went to the front door, where, climbing upon a chair, he hung it. It trailed down three or four feet. When the party came down and started to go out, the moss was evidently in the way. Lifting it up so that the door would open without catching it, my uncle bowed and with his best manner as chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, remarked:

“The moss—of which he wrote!”

SARAH ALDEN (BRADFORD) RIPLEY
Grandmother of Edward Simmons
(From a pencil drawing by Edward Simmons)

Every jaw fell; their eyes rolled upward and in dead silence they marched to their carryall.

A little old woman with mitts and poke bonnet appeared at the Emerson house one day and begged for a piece of “your dear father’s clothing.”

“I am making a rag carpet of poets’ garments,” she said.

She was refused.

“Is that field yours?” she asked, pointing across the way. She was told it was.

“Do you mind if I trespass? You see, I am also making a collection of crickets from poets’ homes.”

I should like to have seen the crickets stuck up in a row on their pins, but I fancy the rag carpet would have been more amusing. Imagine walking on Mr. Longfellow’s red flannel shirt!

Every remembrance of my boyhood seems permeated with the Civil War. It is hard for me to remember when it began or when it ended. We were always having holidays at school, either for a victory or for a defeat. The flag was constantly up or at half mast at the town pump, giving us the idea of “goin’ fishin’ or somethin’.”

There comes before my mind a ghastly figure (bearded) in a box in the church. A dead man! The first I had ever seen! He had been shot in the South.

One day under the red dogwood bush in the Southeast corner of our place, I found the cap and jacket of a conscript. After escaping, he had evidently changed there. I pictured him “shot at dawn” if caught, so I never told.

I have heard that the Old Manse was an underground station for slaves, but I never saw any evidence of it myself. I remember that Frank Sanborn stayed at our house for awhile when he escaped from the Southern people, who tried to carry him away out of the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. If there were negroes there, I should have known as much about it as I did about childbirth—always being sent away on the latter occasions. In fact, I had never seen but one negro in my life. He was an escaped slave, very old, who took care of our garden, cow, etc. He limped badly from rheumatism, and my uncle Charles had given him some liniment. One day I heard my uncle ask:

“John, did you really try that liniment?”

“Oh, yes sah!” said John.

“Did it do you any good?”

John assured him that it did, but uncle Charles was not quite convinced that he was telling the truth, so he persisted:

“Did it turn your knee black, John?”

“No blackah dan it was befo’, sah.”

Suddenly, I realized that John’s legs were the same color as his face!

It seemed to me that every day after school I was nailed by my grandmother and a bunch of old women and made to sing war songs. I can see them now, sitting round in a circle, pulling lint and crying (for invariably some one they cared for had just died) and listening to me bellow:

Say, darkies, hab you seen de massa wif de muschaf on his face

Go long de road sometime dis mornin’ like he gwine to leab de place?

He seen de smoke way up de ribber whar de Lincum gunboats lay

An’ he took his hat an’ lef’ very sudden, like he gwine t’ run away.

“Oh, de massa run, ha! ha! De darkies stay, ho! ho!

For it mus’ be now de Kingdom’s comin’;

It’s de year ob jubilo!”

I tried to enlist at the age of ten as a drummer boy. I was told I would be taken when I had learned to beat a tattoo on a drum. Delighted, I ran home to tell the news, only to find that the orderly had been sent up the back street to tell my mother, and instead of being received as a hero I was severely reprimanded. This only increased my disgust with the war.

One of the most picturesque figures of Concord in those days was A. Bronson Alcott. I knew him well as a friend of the family, but on looking back I visualize him in two places. He was very long, slab sided and lean, and what you would call pasty faced, with hair that fell to his shoulders. I can see him sitting in his abominable rustic chairs—with a disease that happens to trees making lumps all over them. He made this furniture himself and used to be very proud of it, but I used to run by like mad for fear of being asked to go in and sit on one of those benches, which I felt might make lumps all over me.

The other picture is Mr. Alcott sitting beside our teacher, a woman, at school. It was one of those first afternoons of spring when all outdoors is calling to boyhood and you can think of a thousand interesting things to do. But this strange creature took up a whole afternoon in reading Bunyan to us! Needless to say, I have sidestepped Bunyan ever since.

They tell a story of Mr. Alcott being accosted, in his youth, by a farmer in Bellows Falls, who asked:

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Alcott?”

“I write.”

“Hell! What?”

“Thoughts.”

“What for?”

“For posterity.”

Exit farmer.

I have always thought that if the good Bronson had lived in the twentieth century he would almost certainly have belonged to that colony which inhabits the district west of Washington Square.

Louisa looked very much like her father—pasty and lean, with a very large nose. To me, as a child, she seemed a very unattractive and a most unkissable person, probably because she was quite a masculine type. Her sister May was very different. She was tall and good-looking, with lots of beautiful blond hair. She painted, and later went to Paris to study. It seemed to me she was always lying in a hammock, being rocked and read to by my brother or Julian Hawthorne. Louisa may have been impressed with this picture, as May is the Amy of Little Women, and these two boys are supposed to be a composite hero. I have been told I was the little boy who rolled downstairs in his nightgown, in the story of the Pickwick Club entertainment, but do not remember the actual occurrence.

Louisa was evidently quite awkward, and in many ways not house broke; also absent-minded and careless, as is the traditional author. It seems that her manners at table were commented upon once too often by other members of her family. She decided not to stand it. So one morning she managed to be the first at breakfast, and when the remainder of the family turned up in the dining room they were greeted with a strange sight. Louisa had pinned the New York Tribune around her head and was wearing it like a great helmet. The pages reached the table and completely covered her plate. Only her hands were visible. At intervals they would come out, take something, and retire behind the paper again. For weeks she kept this up and no amount of pleading would stop her, until there was a general abject apology from the whole family.

None of the second generation appreciated the Concord atmosphere. Louisa tells of her astonishment, when grown, to learn that no society was so fine or intellectual as that of her childhood.

The saddest results of this strangely intellectual atmosphere was the number of spinsters it produced. The Misses Blood were always a curious sight to me. Their house, way up in the woods, was chair to chair and bureau to bureau, completely around the rooms, with priceless old Colonial furniture, but their economies were a revelation. Every Sunday they would stop in front of the Old Manse at the foot of the avenue and, retiring into a niche in the trees, put on their shoes and stockings, which they had carried during the three-mile walk. They always stayed for second service, and one of my amusements, when the sermon was dull, was to watch them begin their lunch, which generally consisted of Bent’s water crackers. In and out, in and out went the hard, round objects, in their attempts to bite with their one or two remaining back teeth. The sight almost hypnotized me.

Their death, which occurred after I was grown up, was one of the unspoken tragedies of life. One day a farmer passed and noticed there was no smoke coming from their chimney. He went in and found one of the sisters dead at the bottom of the cellar stairs, having fallen down and broken her leg. The other sister, who had become paralyzed and deaf, was sitting in a chair upstairs, also dead. The one had not been able to move after her fall, and the other could not hear her cries. Both had died from starvation.

I was brought up as a young duke—without the estates!—and I was never allowed to earn money. I recall being severely reprimanded by my mother and made to walk back three miles to return a nickel a man had given me for running an errand. I was told I should have been glad to do it for nothing. I remember my surprise, years later, when I was in Europe, to hear that Americans were “commercial.” The desire for great material gain was either astonishingly developed in one generation, or did it, as I suspect, creep in a little as the emigration from the Old World increased? Certainly there was none of it in that truly American town of Concord, Massachusetts.

EDWARD SIMMONS
At the age of seven

In Concord it was no disgrace to be poor—nearly everyone was—and until I was nearly grown I never had a new suit of clothes. My brother’s and my breeches were made from the old army uniforms, the cloth having a wearing quality that was almost like iron and would pull a nail out of anything rather than tear. We were called “Blue Legs” until we were quite grown up.

My cousins, the Emersons, represented affluence, in my childish mind. Their house was a square wooden one, set among trees, mostly pines and chestnuts. There was a solemn, gravelike quality to it. I remember going down alone on errands, and always had a feeling of awe upon approaching it. I think this was because the trees were so close to the house that the grass would not grow and everything was damp around it. The door was always open, and Mr. Emerson generally came into the hall when anyone approached. This was a wonderful relief to me, as I was terrified by the women and servants. The inside gave me the impression of wealth and spaciousness. It may have been the reflection of the talk I heard at home, but it seemed very impressive and august.

No amount of grown-up talk could make me fear Mr. Emerson, however, or feel the slightest embarrassment in his presence. He seemed, like my grandmother, to be a perfect example of serenity. He received me as an equal and entertained me as if I were a young prince. He had reached that extreme height of simplicity where he could be interesting to a boy, and, while I preferred him to any of the others, I was quite sure he did not count for as much.

Mr. Emerson’s study was to the right of the hall. There was a large fireplace, and what were to me magnificent red-velvet chairs on either side. There must have been hangings of the same material, as I got the feeling of crimson everywhere. From the floor to the ceiling, the walls were lined with books—books that had been read and reread until the bindings were very much worn.

Of my early memories of Mr. Emerson, two are most vivid. The first in his garden, where he often took me, walking slowly about and telling me of each flower and plant as if it were a particular friend. I never read his Days that I do not visualize him in his “pleached garden,” showing me his pear trees.

The second memory is of Thanksgiving time. Every year on this day there was a gathering of the clan at the Emersons. There were the Thayers, Jacksons, Emersons, Simmonses, Bradfords, and Ripleys, but no others. The dinner was the traditional New England affair, the table heaped with food; and the conversation consisted of the usual family gossip. I remember there was always a discussion among the women as to whether one said Mr. Emerson or Cousin Waldo.

As soon as dessert was served and the nuts and fruit brought on, there was a little ceremony that was invariably performed. Mr. Emerson would look down from the head of the table and, pretending not to see me, say:

“Where is that little boy who likes figs?”

This was my cue to march up to him, and, taking me on his knee, he would pop into my mouth, one by one, these delightful and expensive fruits, until I could not contain another one. Of course, my mother protested all the time, but he paid not the slightest attention.

After dinner, in the evening, we played all sorts of games such as dumb crambo, and then everyone had to perform. It was a pet theory of Mr. Emerson’s that everyone should learn self-expression, and he demanded a recitation from the children of four and five up to those of the marriageable age. There was absolutely no way to get out of this.

Despite the protests of the women, Mr. Emerson would have his after-dinner cigar. In fact, he almost always got his way, although he was never dictatorial. Sometimes it was with a gentle remark. When his wife asked him if she could have a spiritualistic meeting in the front parlor, he answered her with Hotspur’s words:

“Certainly, for well I know thou willst not utter what thou dost not know and so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate!”

On another occasion, when Aunt Mary was visiting the family, he happened to be in Boston. Aunt Mary slept in her coffin. She was very small, so purchased it before her death to be sure she had the right size and would not rattle! Mr. Emerson wrote to his wife in Concord, telling her he was going to bring some notables home for a visit, and begged her to persuade Aunt Mary not to wear her shroud at breakfast.

Emerson’s sense of honor and justice were two of his most important qualities. The farmers used to come to him to settle their legal quarrels. Whatever difference of religious opinion the community held, they refused to allow him to be criticized in any way. When the Rev. Grindell Reynolds—an excellent but limited divine—got up in the Unitarian church and referred to the street upon which Emerson lived as “Atheist Lane,” the congregation rose in a body and filed out.

Another instance of his very highly developed sense of justice is the case of General Loring, who was supposed to be a traitor to the antislavery movement. The lesser minds raved and swore they would never speak to him again. Whittier wrote a poem about him. Emerson gave no tongue, but one evening after a Lyceum lecture in Salem he saw the general in line with those who wished to congratulate and shake hands with him. Speaking very distinctly so that everyone about could hear, he said, taking the proffered hand:

“General Loring, if what I hear of you be true—I shake hands with you under protest.”

The last time I saw Mr. Emerson was in 1879. I was in my twenty-seventh year, had just returned from California, and was spending some time in Concord before going abroad. Charles H. Davis, the painter, was visiting me at the Old Manse, and we both went over and supped with him. He seemed much older, but was still that example of perfect serenity I had known as a boy. His memory was beginning to fail him, which made him a bit querulous, but his daughter Ellen supplied it whenever she could. For example, he forgot that he had ever seen Tom Taylor’s tribute, or apology, to Lincoln, in Punch—in spite of the fact that it is included in the Parnassus—and read it to us, at my request, with astonishment and delight. He read beautifully, and his voice retained all of its old hypnotic quality.

While his memory failed in the detail of names and places, he still retained, in most cases, his fascinating mode of expression, and the process of thought was still there. He said the night Davis and I were there—

“Last week, it was the day ... the day that ... who was it was here? Ellen, can you remember? Oh! It was our religious friend.” He referred to Whittier.

He asked, upon going out for a walk, “Where is that thing everybody borrows and no one ever returns.” He meant an umbrella and had forgotten the name.

This story was told me by my mother. They knew (the women) that Emerson’s opinion of Longfellow was the same as theirs—the Bromides—and that the two men, of course, loved and admired each other—which they did not. Of course, Mr. Emerson must go to the funeral of the poet. Accordingly, the poor man was pulled up, himself more dead than alive, and brought down to Cambridge. He sat at the church, seemingly unconscious of the raison d’être of it all. Then he rose (holding on to his coat tails was not effective) and joined the procession about the body.

On crossing the Cambridge Common later, he suddenly stopped, faced around toward the church, and then looking at them, said:

“I do not remember the name of our friend we have just buried, but he had a beautiful soul.”

In some people the loss of memory can be a blessed thing.

I cannot write a biography, and my opinion is of no value, but Emerson was one of the supermen I have met. He seemed to glorify everything with which he came into contact. Like all great men, he was surrounded with a lot of worshipers, most of them inferiors, and, as Henry James says, these Concord figures were not so interesting in themselves as that Emerson thought them so. He was the kind of man who “rendered the commonplace sacred.”

He was always a teacher or a preacher, whether he remained in the Church or not. He spoke of Shakespeare as “our man” and Homer as the “old man,” showing that by training his mind he stood with one mental foot on Homer and the other, with us, on Shakespeare. He could have been a great lyricist, but, as Henry Adams remarks, there is no rhythm in New England; the climate will not permit it. Emerson was ashamed of his love of beauty, rhythm, and lyricism, as being not quite true to New England. Like Renan, he blossomed the more fully when surrounded by beautiful women. He married two. To me he seems a very shrewd Yankee. Look at the depth of his thought in “Lovers, preserve your strangeness.”

It was because he talked to a great number of his own ilk that he penetrated America’s thought so easily. I agree with Matthew Arnold that Emerson was the first essayist of the nineteenth century.

MARY EMERSON (RIPLEY) SIMMONS

The Concord literati are gone, the town has completely changed, but the Old Manse is still there, holding many secrets. Not the least interesting of these was uncovered in about ’81, when the house was torn up to put a bow window in the corner of the southeast parlor. The wall paper, undoubtedly hideous in color when placed there, had mellowed to a lovely Whistlerian tone. This, of course, had to be removed. To the astonishment of everyone, it was discovered that the pattern had been printed upon the back of French newspapers of the period of the Revolution. (This economy in paper will be understood by our experience in the last war.) There were editions with the speeches of Mirabeau and many other of the patriots of the time. Think of Frank Sanborn, my uncle George Bradford, and Mr. Emerson, to say nothing of my grandmother Ripley and John Brown, gathered about the fireplace in this room, discussing the problems of the Civil War, while from the walls cried out to them Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Danton:

“CON-CITOYENS!—CON-CITOYENS!”

Chapter II: Finding My Wings
Harvard College

When I passed the examination for Harvard I had a French turned-up nose, two spindle legs, and weighed only 114 pounds. Everyone called me a “barrel on straws,” until I cried myself to sleep night after night for fear I was going to be a little runt.

I developed very late and very quickly; I did not shave until I was eighteen years old, yet only one year later I measured six feet in height and weighed 165 pounds.

My mind was as undeveloped as my body, and my proudest brag was that I knew the name of everyone who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, and that I hadn’t an enemy in the world.

I had no taste whatever—if I had been crushed under the tongue, I would have given out nothing. I was proud of the first nicknames they gave me, most of them being “Wimba,” “Wambat,” “Winnie”—all of them being derived from that flattering title, “Wamba, son of Witless.” I was proud, also, of being able to make a louder noise than anyone else, due to my training in the public school, where we were taught to go to the back of the room and shout one another down.

It never occurred to me to refuse to go to college. I went because I was told to, and had no particular desires about it one way or another. My expenses of something under nine hundred dollars each year were furnished me by my family and again I never gave a thought as to where or how they were obtained. Money, I was taught, I should not work for, but gifts were to be freely taken—probably this was due in some measure to the inherited ideas of parsons, who are always supported. I could easily have led my class, but I saw no reason for excelling. I was considered a pretty second-rate person at home; they didn’t expect anything from me, and to win, for my own sake, things I had been surrounded with ad nauseam as a child, held no attraction for me. In fact, I had not really learned to care for books as such, and college opened up nothing new to me except in the line of English and botany. My power of judgment was poor, as I had not been required to use it before. I was conditioned in algebra, in which I was expert, because I devoted nearly all of the time allotted to it in the examination to Greek composition, and could not finish the answers to the questions in algebra on time.

Holworthy Hall, the old Colonial building, was as full of inconveniences then as it is to-day, but the rooms were just as much sought after. The old-fashioned grates; the window seats whose yearly coats of paint formed a covering over an inch thick, of a lovely ivory color; the leaky plumbing and general disrepair—gave an interesting atmosphere, and the traditions hung round about as thick as the cobwebs on the walls. My suite, a sitting room and two bedrooms, was given me by Professor Cutler for my service rendered the parietal committee who governed the private acts of the students. In this capacity I was called the “Last of the Parietals,” as the next year the summonses were sent through the mails. I do not remember much about my duties except that I had to report to the committee every morning to see if there were any papers to be served that day. The freshmen and sophs generally took the summons kindly enough, but the upper classmen were sometimes rather disdainful of the messenger, and I remember only once being treated in an undignified manner. I had to order a senior who had disregarded the rule about snowballing to appear before the committee. He was very rude to me, seemed to blame me personally, and at last tried to kick me down the stairs. I told my chum about it that night.

“Who was the chap?” he asked.

“I think his name is Cabot Lodge,” I replied.

“Oh, you must be mistaken!” he laughed. “I know Cabot Lodge, and he would never have the nerve to kick you downstairs.”

The pranks of those days took the same forms as they do to-day—lawlessness, vandalism, and kicks against authority in general. The Commons, where we boarded for the munificent sum of five dollars a week, was run by the students; and sometimes they showed a surprising lack of originality (or was it extravagance?) in the choice of food. I couldn’t stand the meals from the first; but when we had mutton every day for a week the whole crowd struck and, rising at a signal and holding our plates in our right hands, we deposited the contents on the floor, singing:

“Oh, Lord of love, look from above

Upon this leg of mutton;

Once it was sweet and fit to eat,

But now, good God, it is rotten!”

Any jokes on the authorities were allowed to pass if put over in the right way. Old Doctor Peabody, who was the clergyman in the chapel when the pulpit was not occupied by a visiting preacher, was given a class in ethics to teach. It was considered the thing to worry this large, plain, worthy divine whenever we could, and putting asafetida down the radiator, causing a nauseous stink to permeate the room, was the act of some student’s fertile brain. If the intention was to bother the doctor, however, this act failed of its purpose, as he took pains to announce to all the class that he was entirely lacking in a sense of smell.

The old doctor led prayers each morning, and it was a tradition of the college that if the bell failed to ring we could plead ignorance of the time and not appear. Alas! the man whose duty it was to call chapel was far too reliable for that to happen. He had been ringing the bell for years and had grown old and white in the service—incidentally, he was beloved of all of us, and our friend.

One morning, however, there was great silence. Nobody went to prayers, and as the bell did not even ring for classes, of course we stayed away. It seems that some brave student had climbed up on to the metal rod that joined the roofs of Hollis and Harvard Halls and, managing in some way to haul up a bucket of water, turned the bell over, fastening the clapper to a beam, and filled it with the liquid. When the bell ringer pulled the rope, nothing happened. The water had frozen and it was some four hours before he managed to thaw it out.

Sometimes the pranks took the form of really righteous criticism. Outside the college boundaries, and in the town, was a huge statue of a soldier, a memorial of the Civil War. He was clothed in a uniform and trappings, including an overcoat with cape, but, incongruous to us, he wore no hat. A student passing a shop saw an enormous gold hat—it must have been three feet in width—placed outside as an advertisement. The next morning, to the amusement of the townspeople, the soldier appeared no longer bareheaded, but wore a chapeau that came way down over his ears, completely covering his face. The police tried to get it down, with no result except a great slipping and sliding on the sides of the monument. We boys formed a cordon around it and did all we could to impede the recovery of the trophy. At last the fire department had to be called out with hook and ladder, and amid much good-natured joshing brought down the hat, which we promptly pounced upon and bore away. The police would not be satisfied until we told them how it got there. A student, who was a Texan, threw a lasso over the statue’s head, and one of the boys climbed up hand over hand. We never heard anything from the sculptor, so our criticism must have gone home.

Even President Eliot was not free from gibes and witticisms. He is a tall man and has a large red birthmark on one side of his face which, instead of disfiguring him, really adds much distinction to his looks. Of course, this was the cause of the origin of many nicknames. I remember the visit of Duke Alexis of Russia, the uncle of the late Tsar. Doctor Eliot, in showing him the college, brought him to my room. Of course, I was excited, and after they left I watched them from the window until they disappeared from sight. The duke was the most magnificent male I ever saw—six foot two or three, blond beard, dazzling uniform of white; he represented the ideal type of warrior. Beside him was our president, lean, sharp faced, almost as tall, walking with not quite so military a tread, but holding his own in a remarkable fashion. The students who had come out to watch them drew back—you can always trust them to behave, if necessary—but a crowd of “townies” followed on behind. Then two little “micks” with shirt tails flying, detached themselves from the crowd and one yelled to the other:

“Say, Tommie, which is the juke—the feller in white or the feller with the red face?”

One day a grinning boy presented himself at my door and asked if I would take him for a roommate. I had two bedrooms and was glad to have a companion. We became the heads of the sign-stealing crowd. The police commissioner of Cambridge had announced that he would jail the next offender in this line, and this was enough to set us madly at it. We stole business signs and street signs, tore the name plates off doors, wagons, and horse cars. My roommate’s father was horrified to see on the outside of our door, when he visited us on Class Day, the sign, “H. H. Crocker and Co.,” which had been missing from his place of business for four years. When I came home from Europe in ’91, my mother asked me to throw away some trophies. Among them were eighteen signs of ground glass upon which was printed in black “Harvard Street,” and a policeman’s badge which I had been very proud of getting in a fight.

I always hated to lie; but at that time was content if I kept to the letter of the truth and disregarded the spirit. I was afraid of flunking a certain examination, and knew I could pass if I only had more time to work up the subject. Thinking up every kind of excuse, I finally decided that only a physical disability would let me off. Consequently, I did something that required more courage for one who has always been afraid of physical pain than it is easy to imagine. Making a deep gash in my thumb, I told the professor I couldn’t hold a pen, as I had “cut myself with a razor”—which was perfectly true. Of course, he let me off.

Out of our poverty and desire for a good time grew some interesting things. A crowd of us who cared for cheap vaudeville went in weekly, on Mondays, to the Howard Athenæum, incidentally the smuttiest and most improper show I have ever seen anywhere—and this in Boston! We pledged ourselves to spend only fifty cents on the evening’s entertainment, and this sum was generally divided as follows——ten cents for car fare, thirty-five cents for a standee ticket, and five cents for a beer, making it necessary to walk back if we failed to beat our way on the street car.

Whenever anyone had what we called a “find”—earned something or had a check outside his allowance—we allowed him to treat, never otherwise. The feed generally consisted of a barrel of beer and several dozen oysters which we put in the coals of the fireplace, and, as they popped open, threw in salt and pepper, and then squeezed their noses together when they were ready to serve.

From this we began dining together once a month, and somehow came to be known as “The Ring.” There were James Duane Lowell (nephew of the poet), Ned Higginson, Ned Walker, Frank Childs Faulkner, Waldo Reed, and others I can’t recall; but although many sought to join us, we never increased our number, and I think therein lay our success. We met each time in a different member’s room, the host of the occasion providing two roast chickens and bread and butter. The others contributed something strictly limited to a dollar in price, which usually turned out to be a bottle of whisky. Each one of us could bring in his chum as a guest, and as we sat around the table, our bellies full and the alcohol sending a glow over our beings, the songs and stories that passed around that board would have been epoch making, could we have preserved them.

Indeed, a desire to keep some of them did crop up, and it was here, at one of these dinners, that the Harvard Crimson was born. We called it the Magenta then, as the Civil War was too recent for cochineal to be cheap, and crimson was not to be had. The Advocate was the college paper of those days, and we decided it was much too stuffy and needed a rival.

I was entirely too crazy to be allowed an editorship, so had to be content with sundry contributions. I remember being received at home with freezing looks after publishing my first—and last—“poetry,” a translation of one of the Odes of Anacreon. The family objected to:

When I drink wine, etc.

In my curving arm I hold a maiden.

No one at home referred to it. The art of it had no appeal to them whatsoever, and they were ashamed of me. If I had had any Swinburnean tendency, or like Keats, who gave out eighteen-year-old slush of appalling indecency, I would have been squelched.

Another group of us—August Belmont, Herbert Wadsworth, etc., who cared for paintings—started the Art Club. There was money in this crowd, and I was taken in only because they thought I could draw and could be useful. This was the first indication of a desire for the fine arts in the college. I was much disappointed when I got back from Europe in ’91 to find that all the first books, records, and lists of members that I, as secretary, had started, had been either lost or destroyed. But the club had increased in outward show, even if it had lost its traditions, and had housed itself quite fittingly.

A club to which I did not belong and one of which the membership was kept strictly secret was the Med. Fac. It was supposed to have originated as a take-off on the medical faculty and to it were ascribed all the very foolish pranks that were committed around the yard. The authorities could never get hold of them, and I do not believe any one of them was ever punished, although some of their antics were dangerous to human life and only the pleas of youth could have excused them. One man placed a stick of dynamite down the sewer, fortunately resulting in no harm; and in my own case a skyrocket suddenly went off between my legs one dark night. This made me think my chum was a member of the crowd, but, of course, I never could prove it. It is said that the Med. Fac. once sent a letter to the Tsar of Russia announcing his election to the organization. He, thinking to add one more honor to his already numerous ones, took the invitation au serieux and sent them a present of a very beautiful set of surgical instruments.

There are one or two pleasing incidents or traditions of Harvard that I like to remember—things that help one to a greater appreciation of humanity in general. One was told me by my uncle by marriage. When he was a student in the college he was given fifty dollars by an old “grad” who like him had struggled through poverty to get his education, and told to buy himself an overcoat, the man saying:

“It isn’t I who give it to you, but a former graduate who gave it to me; and when you get out in the world and make good on your own, you are asked to pass it on.”

No one knew the identity of the first donor and only one person will know whether it is going on to-day; but I do hope that some mischance has not occurred to break the chain—the recipient being too unsuccessful, or dying before he could return it.

Another pleasing occurrence of a quite different character happened during Commencement. At this time the authorities chose certain men, who had distinguished themselves during their course, and gave them “parts.” I remember Fenollosa of my class, who afterward became the Imperial Commissioner of Arts for the Japanese government, was one of these selected, and delivered an essay on Leibnitz. The students always held fake Commencement and caricatured the parts. A boy can be disrespectful or irreverent, and a thing is generally no good if he does not make fun of it; but every now and then something hits him and he is serious. One of the students, Frank Low, had made himself so beloved by his fellows that they did not guy him, and I shall never forget how his mock part ran:

Frank to all,

Low in his own esteem.

I wonder if this is not the kind of a mock part that America would write for Theodore Roosevelt?

Arthur Bartlett Maurice, a Princeton graduate, once contradicted my statement that Harvard played the first game of intercollegiate football in America, claiming that honor for his own college. As Mr. Maurice is a much younger man than I, and must have it on hearsay, I am going to doubt his knowledge. Besides, I like my own story better. It was in my sophomore year, in 1872. Previous to this time, my class had started what later developed into the modern college yell. Each class had a cheer, generally ending with the usual, “Hip, hip, hurrah!” But, we being very personal, decided to give ours in a different way. So we would begin the following slowly, gradually increasing the speed and making it staccato at the end:

Whoop her up for ’74

Whoop her up, whoop her up,

Whoop her up for ’74

Whoop her up, whoop her up,

Whoop her up for ’74

Whoop her up, whoop her up,

Whoop her up for ’74—

Rah! Rah! Rah!

Hurrah became “rah,” and in order that the men should keep together, one of us would beat time, which I believe was the origin of the “yell leader.”

Returning from the athletic field one day, Harry Grant, Coe Taylor (captain of the baseball team), a man named Herrick, Harry Morse, myself, and others saw a crowd of Cambridgeport boys—hoodlums—kicking a football about. We took it away from them and started kicking it ourselves. Some one suggested that it would be fun to have a real football—this was a round rubber one—so we all subscribed and sent into Boston for an egg-shaped one made of leather. To our consternation, we found we could not handle it at all. However, we were interested; some one found a book of rules and gradually we learned the game.

Then it was a question of finding a team to play against. No college in America knew the game at the time, so we sent a challenge to McGill in Canada, and to our surprise we beat them to death. They came down for a return match, and we beat them again. Swiftness of foot was of more importance than strength then, and I was allowed to be one of the team, but could not go to Canada, as everyone paid his own expenses and I did not have the money.

I did not realize that our amateur attempts had amounted to anything, and when I came to America in 1891 I asked a young woman I met about the Harvard baseball scores. She seemed rather vague on the subject and, looking at me as if I were an antediluvian, said:

“Oh, baseball is old-fashioned. Football is the thing.”

There is a tradition in Harvard that, although football was not actually born until 1872, the first seeds were planted long before the Civil War. The sophomores and freshmen—always enemies—used to take this round rubber ball out on the field as an excuse for a fight. By 1859 this resulted in so many minor accidents, that finally, when one boy’s leg was broken, the authorities stopped it altogether.

One evening after this rule was enforced, a queer gathering of people proceeded to the Delta (athletic field). It had the air of a mediæval funeral procession with its priests carrying tall candles, chanting solemnly, and preceding a small bier borne by draped figures and followed by mourners of every description, weeping and wailing their sorrow at the departure of a loved one. In this case the dear departed was a football, red in color and looking suspiciously like a large toy balloon, which rested lightly in its casket. With all the ceremony of a real funeral, it was solemnly interred.

Three nights after, a very different procession went forth along the same way. There was a clash of cymbals, bright lights, music, gayly decorated banners, and maidens dancing joyously. Again they proceeded to the burial ground where, after curious incantations had been performed over the grave—to the astonishment of everyone who saw it—the soul of the football detached itself from its resting place and rose grandly and sedately to the heavens!

It seems to me that we cannot overestimate the importance of eating and drinking, for out of these desires of the human body have come most of the clever ideas of the world. Conviviality stimulates the brain, and, while the viands may be of ever so simple a quality, the atmosphere in which they are partaken means everything to sensitive genius. From a general poverty of purse, if not of mind, sprang the Stomach Club of Paris, and likewise, if I may compare them, the Hasty Pudding Club of Harvard. It began when two or three clever men found it necessary to economize, and they made up their minds to live on that delectable New England dish—cornmeal mush. Probably, having only one kind of food to cook, they became proficient in the art, for in my day it was certainly good to eat. The three or four men had developed into a large number, and the meetings came to have a very different purpose from that of the economy of food; but never had they varied in any degree from their first idea, and not a single dish was added to their fare of—hasty pudding.

A certain quality of cohesion is necessary to make a crowd of fellows stick together through so many years, so gradually, a number of tests came into being, and a novice must pass these before becoming a full-fledged member. As these tests vary in every case, but all are based on great principles of truth, honor, and manhood, I am not giving away the secrets of the organization if I tell a few of the amusing incidents of my initiation into the Hasty Pudding Club.

For two weeks before his final acceptance, the candidate is required to run everywhere he goes, and he must not speak a single word to anyone except the member appointed to be his keeper. I had faithfully kept this rule of silence—hard as it was for me—when one night at dinner I tried to attract the waitress’s attention, with no result.

“Speak to her just this once. I won’t tell,” said Ned Higginson, who was my keeper.

I argued I mustn’t, but he assured me it would be all right, so I did. When it came to the final reckoning and he was asked if I had kept the rules, he told on me. I don’t believe I was ever so righteously angry in my life. Disregarding the fact that it was a formal party and I was in evening clothes, I turned and would have knocked him down had they not held me. Then I heard laughs and cries of:

“Yes, he’s the kind of a man we want.”

You must be the type who trusts your friends by doing (while blindfolded) anything that he swears on his honor he has done before you, but if it is proven that that friend has deliberately gone back on you, you must show that you resent it. For example, my anger at Ned was pardoned; but a son of one of the generals in the Civil War went through all the requirements until he refused to put on some article of clothing which seemed to him filthy (his eyes being bandaged), in spite of the fact that all of the others swore they had gone through the same experience without harm. He never became a member of the Hasty Pudding Club.

One of the requirements is an essay which is taken very seriously by the patient neophyte, but is really of no importance. Mine, on the subject of “Public Insane Asylums vs. Private Mad Houses,” was never read, for the reason that it was stolen by a ring within the club who called themselves “Owls of the Night” and thought it very funny to reduce the size of the new man’s head by destroying his work whenever possible. I was sure I had hidden my essay where no one would find it—in the bottom of the spittoon, covered with layers of newspapers, then melted candle grease, and lastly, the remaining space filled with water and cigar butts. But my roommate told; and I had to lie, when asked for it, so as not to go back on the gang.

One of the most interesting possessions of the club was the Crocodile Book, or the record kept by the secretary since the beginning. At the end of one of the chapters was a charming drawing by Washington Allston, of a fat boy gobbling mush from a pot. I used to stare at this and wonder about the man who did it. Alas! when I went back, some twenty years later, there was no trace of the drawing and no one could be found who had ever heard of it.

These acts of vandalism are found more often among the educated classes than otherwise. I often think of the clergyman who was found with a hammer in his hand, having just knocked a piece off a tomb in Westminster Abbey, which dated back to the days of Edward the Confessor—the only one that had never been cracked or harmed! The judge very wisely did not punish him, but left him to the tender mercies of the newspaper reporters. He is still running. We have not the right to destroy the labor of some one else. The beautiful things of Greece, the wisdom of Rome, music of Germany, and the Cathedrals of France and Italy have been inherited from the past, and if we deface them we are defacing our own property.

I have my small triumphs. One occurred in the Hasty Pudding Club. When I went back for a visit after coming home from Europe, I was shown a fine building, positively shaming the rooms we had had in Stoughton Hall. I went in with a somewhat bewildered manner, feeling like a stranger in a strange land. Then something struck my eye. Where had I seen it before? There at the end of a hall was a drawing—a playbill for a performance of “The Rivals”—of two cocks, one black and the other of the yellow barnyard type, fighting over a little white hen. Looking in the corner, I saw it was signed with my name!

It is better than money, family, or friends when a whole generation embraces you. My personality was not there; neither is that of the man who made the Venus di Milo—but she’s there. There are contests as to who wrote the plays we ascribe to Shakespeare, but there are no contests over Hamlet. It’s great to see that what you have tried to do has been kept.

There is a poem by Arthur Macy (probably not published) about a Common Councilman who in walking down the street and, happening to look up at the Boston Public building, sees a shield and upon it the design by Saint-Gaudens, of two little naked boys. It runs something like this:

What nameless horror meets his modest eyes?

· · · · ·

There, reared aloft in perfect equipoise,

Two very small, unexpurgated boys.

Hurrying down to the meeting hall, he has the Council pass a bill that after this “boys shall be born in pants.” The only difference in the opinion of my rival fraternity at college—namely, the Alpha Delta Phis—would have been that they should be born clothed; but after talking it over, they would have decided it should be in “trousers.” This substitution of a good old Anglo-Saxon word for one of Latin slang would have been due to the influence of our beloved Professor Child, whom we all called “Stubby.”

“Stubby” Child represented a natural revolt against Bostonianism—the practice of putting pantalettes on piano legs. To him his language was a faith or a religion, and I know that all America would speak and write much worse English to-day were it not for the disciples that this man scattered throughout the country. The secret of his influence was that he cared, and therefore he produced a result. He was unimportant to look at, had no voice to speak of, and exercised no hypnotism, but he managed to imbue us all with a permanent love of our own language. I am sure he would as soon have thought of using a foreign word in place of an Anglo-Saxon word or its derivative, as he would of dishonoring his own mother. His influence was more powerful, because it was subtle, and although he does not seem to be well known, I have met men in many parts of the world who immediately fell on my neck when I said I had been the the pupil of “Stubby” Child.

My grandmother said, “The law of love is higher than the law of truth,” and I think she was right, for love is unalterable and truth changes. Christ’s statements may not be true to us to-day; Einstein with his “relativity” may have upset Newton’s theory of gravity; but these men remain just as great as they ever were, for in them we see their passionate love for what they thought to be true.

Somehow, I can never think of Harvard that I don’t see “Stubby” Child, with that row of yellow curls around his head like a halo, hurling a copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales out of the window and shouting to the class:

“This man is an Oxford graduate and, according to England, is a scholar, and yet he has substituted the nauseating adjectives ‘gay’ and ‘blithesome’ in that immortal description of the Friar in the line which runs:

“As hoot he was and lecherous as a sparwe.”

Chapter III. In Search of a Career
Out West

Harvard had taught me this—that I did not know a thing—not even the meaning of human life. Somehow I think a college education is of benefit to two classes of people only—those who desire to acquire a social position and those who want to get training in a certain subject. I have not the battle instinct and could never see any use in competition. If I had not come of good people I might have wanted to fight to get with good people, and that is about all college can give. I can remember getting only one real thrill to go out in the world and do something, and that was after a sort of valedictory talk by old Doctor Grey. I had always cared for the out of doors and it appears I stood well in botany. When the venerable professor told us that it takes fifty years to make a nutmeg orchard, and that a million dollars was waiting anyone who would walk into Boston with him the next day and prove to certain capitalists that he could tell the difference between the male and female nutmeg, my commercial instinct was aroused and a gleam of ambition came to me for the first time. I resolved to find out about the male and the female nutmeg.

There was no way to learn anything about beauty in Harvard—no instruction in it and no honors for it. Taking their cue from the Pilgrim Fathers and, since then, the Church, they did not believe in the value of any of the senses of the body, but only in the quality of the human mind and the power to ratiocinate. Any expression or feeling for beauty, except that made by sacred music, was common, vulgar, and to be repressed. If Harvard could manage to produce one Corot, one Beethoven, or one Michael Angelo, her name would be known longer in future ages than it will be for all the small imitation Shakespeares she has sent out over the country. Even Mr. Emerson, in my opinion, was half ashamed of his lyrical gift; and the elder Story, the sculptor, is more honored in Boston for a law book he wrote, before thirty, than for any of his statues.

One day in Mr. Story’s studio, in Europe, was a group of American business men who always made it more or less one of their loafing places. Of course, they had all been well bred enough to wander around and see what the old man had been working at lately, but it was not long before they were settled down over their cigars, discussing the business of stocks and bonds—what they were all thinking about and all they really cared about. Story stood it as long as he could, walking nervously up and down in silence. Finally he whirled, saying:

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen, Phidias built the Parthenon. Who in hell were the stockholders?”

After my graduation, it was a question of a career. I had spent four years to find out that I did not know anything, and was to spend three more to find out what I wanted to do. All my ancestors had lived by talk. I had inherited the “gift of gab,” but there seemed to be no market for it in my generation. It had turned from the pulpit to the stage and novels, in order to get an audience. Rhetoric and fiery oratory is not an honest way to teach, as it hypnotizes the listeners. Reading a speech coolly the next morning in the newspaper is the only fair way to judge it. My father felt this and changed his preaching into a dry, matter-of-fact style, not caring to influence by his personality. He immediately lost his audience.

Groping for an occupation, I went to New York and, with a half-formulated idea to become an architect, called on Russel Sturgis. He was a blond-headed young man, about thirty-five, and seemed to me to be quite old and efficient. Looking at me very keenly, he said:

“Do you know anything about the bearing power of bricks?”

“No.”

“Do you care anything?”

“No.”

“Have you any rich relatives to back you?”

“No.”

“You don’t want to be an architect. You want to be a painter.”

This quite astonished me, for I rather thought I did, although I had never formulated the desire in my mind. Besides, to be a painter was not an occupation—but rather on par with a strolling player, a tinker, or a mountebank. Mr. Sturgis told me that my ideas were all wrong and that the painters of the day were real people and, furthermore, making a lot of money. Of course, I could not start in then, but resolved to hold the thought in the back of my mind. In the meantime, my New England coat was feeling so tight as almost to burst the seams if I did not get out of it. I wanted to get away from something. I knew not what. But freedom lay away from home, so, starting out with two hundred and fifty dollars, I went as far as I dared, which was Cincinnati, Ohio.

There was a Boston colony in Cincinnati and I landed among friends, keeping the plunge from being as bad as it might have been. I remember nothing of the trip out except the foundries of Pittsburgh. This wonderful display of great columns of fire, shooting up to the sky, seemed to represent, as I had never seen it before, the Spirit of Flame. Upon arrival, I was seized by Jim Perkins and not allowed to spend a night in a hotel. His brother was married to a relative of close friends of ours on Milton Hill near Boston, and this was enough introduction for him to take me into his home. Afterward, I lived with Chap Dwight, whose mother had been an intimate friend of my father’s, and it was here that I got my first taste of a European influence. He was a wealthy bachelor and lived like one, but had very cosmopolitan ideas of life—a new change for me.

My first job was an agent for an oil firm which had its main office in Pittsburgh. It may have been the only one I could get, but I rather imagine that my droolings and dreamings over the wondrous flames of the foundries of Pittsburgh invested the work (in my mind) with romance and took away (in the minds of my relatives) the sting of my having to be called a salesman. The first month I made one sale. Overjoyed at getting an order for a thousand barrels of oil, I signed a contract to deliver them at a certain time f. o. b.—Cincinnati. Harvard College had taught me many things, but had neglected to give me any idea whatever of those letters, “f. o. b.” My salary was fifty dollars a month, the freight was sixty, so I quit at the end of the month, owing my boss ten dollars.

I considered the matter closed and that I had learned a good lesson; but, unfortunately, I had had a large amount of business stationery printed. Thinking my young cousins could use it to draw on and desiring never to see it again, I sent it home. But I had reckoned without my dear mother’s sense of economy. For years I was forced to receive letters from her with

EDWARD SIMMONS

Agent —— Oil Co.

at the head of the page.

After this not very profitable occupation I turned my attention to tutoring, fitting a boy for West Point, and another for the Yale Scientific School. The former was the son of an ignorant Irishman and had got a limited amount of information at the Jesuit school. I taught him geography, history of the country and states, of which he knew nothing, and I made him learn the Declaration of Independence and simple mathematics. He went in with flying colors.

I found that my business career did not interfere in any way with my social life in Cincinnati. I was still anxious to be an artist and was painting in my bedroom every night. The city was, even at that time, beginning to be an art center for the Middle West. Nicholas Longworth, grandfather of the husband of Miss Alice Roosevelt, had shown a particular aptitude for making money and a better one for spending it the right way. As a young man he had climbed the hills of the town and, looking from them across the water, decided it would be impossible for the city to extend in but one way. Accordingly, he put his savings into land, always keeping one lap ahead of the spread of population. Caring for beautiful things, he began to encourage the fine arts, and it was at his home that I saw my very first collection of oil paintings. Concord was the home of the steel engraving, and the copies of oils that my father had brought back with him from Europe and hung up in the Old Manse swore at everything else in the house. The Longworth collection was mostly German pictures—by Koeck-Koeck, Meyer von Bremen, and two by Lessing of the life of Huss, the martyr, which were evidently worthless, but so aroused my decorative instinct that I remembered them for years after.

Wandering up the main street of Cincinnati one evening, I saw a name plate on a doorway—one I had never heard—and after it the magic word “Artist.” I was thrilled. There was actually some one in this town living and having his being and spending his time painting. I used to pass back and forth before this sign, which was at the bottom of a stairway, like a dentist’s or a photographer’s; and finally, one evening just at dusk, I got the courage to go up. Knocking timidly on the door, I was greeted with loud roars of “Come in.” The dingy room was a holy of holies to me—I had never seen an artist’s studio before. In the far corner was a man in a khaki apron, using the blackest of soft soap to wash what were, in my eyes, enormous brushes. Heretofore, my own experiments in oil painting had been made with the usual small brushes and a tin box used by maiden ladies. The bigness and boldness of this establishment took my breath away.

When I got the courage to look about I saw that, besides this big Norse viking with the tumbled hair, there was a sculptor in the corner, modeling—think of the daring!—a figure in the nude! I must have presented a ridiculous figure, for there was a laugh behind my back, and, turning, I saw a woman almost naked, sitting on a stool! They asked me why I had wanted to come in, and I told them I tried to paint, but that I had never seen a studio before. I looked with wonder at the big canvases on the wall, and even then realized that here was a sense of color altogether different from that of the German artists, and that the capacity for brushwork was a marvel—for this painter was none other than Frank Duveneck, who had just returned from Munich.

When I went up to West Walnut Hills and told them that I had found a real artist in Cincinnati, I was laughed at in a very pitying way; but later on, when this same Duveneck gave a showing of his work in Boston and was hailed as the “new American Velásquez,” I felt a great satisfaction, although I was no longer in Cincinnati and could not enjoy my triumph.

After an experience as a casket maker’s assistant, where I was expected to board with him and sleep in the manufactory, and eventually—great stress was laid on this—become a partner in the business, I decided to accept an offer my cousins had made me to go farther west and become a clerk in a department store they had started in San Francisco. I had previously received a proposition to become a salesman of cheap jewelry, for, so this man told me, my line of talk would be a sure-fire success for making sales to “servant girls at the back door.”

My ticket as far as Chicago was given me by Chap Dwight, who was connected with railways, and for the rest of the way I paid for a first-class fare and no Pullman—in those days it was possible to sit up in the smoker. This I did as far as Cheyenne, where my troubles began. I was told that the train would stop for an hour, so I alighted to take a look about the town and get some dinner. The only thing that aroused my interest was a sign marked “Simmons” over a doorway with steps leading down to it and quite evidently a dive. There were two baize doors above which shone bright lights, with reams of smoke rising above the heads of men. I went down and started to push open the door, but just at that moment loud voices were raised inside and something whizzed by my head. I looked up, and, not six inches from my outstretched hand was a clean bullethole through the door. I never opened it.

Trying not to hurry, I made my way back to my train and started to get aboard, searching in every pocket for my ticket. It was gone. I begged clemency from the conductor and tried to make him remember that I had got on at Chicago, but I had no berth, and there were too many deadbeats trying to get to California in those days for him to have any pity whatsoever for me. In desperation, I spoke to the baggageman. He advised me to go as far as my money would take me and then telegraph home for more. Anything was better than being left at midnight in this city of careless bullets. Out to Rawlins, Wyoming, was as far as my pocketbook would take me, and I would have two dollars and fifty cents left for a bed and telegram.

Imagine a town eight thousand feet above the sea, freezing cold, again the middle of the night. How I got off the train and over to the hotel, where shown the only light, I do not know. I do know, however, that I put a chair under the handle of the door, candle and matches and my pistol beside the bed, before I went to sleep. Daylight showed no improvement, but only took away the air of dark mystery and bared to the eye a bleakness indescribable. To have been told that there was no telegraph office would not have surprised me a bit, but to learn that it was “not a money order station” was almost worse. Sitting on a stone in front of the hotel, I tried to think out my problem. The temperature was twenty or thirty below zero, nothing grew in the ground, and all the ice and snow was blown away by the terrible winds as soon as it fell. That morning two men had been found frozen stiff within a hundred yards of the hotel. They had not seen the light, which was on the other side of the house, and had simply lain down and decided to stop. To see the dead bodies of these men who had given in a hundred yards from safety was one of the greatest lessons I ever learned—NEVER STOP!

I soon became acquainted with the population, which consisted of mine host and his Chinese cook, the storekeeper and sheriff, two hundred men in the roundhouse, and two women who earned their living in a questionable manner at night and spent the daylight hours sewing and mending for the workmen. Although these women were undoubtedly under thirty, they looked aged and worn, and their hands were calloused from the needle. Every vestige of attraction had departed long ago, and I wondered how they could be so kindly and cheerful amid such surroundings of hopelessness.

At last I formulated a plan and, going to the storekeeper, who was sure to have cash on hand, I asked him if he ever lent money and at what per cent? He said, “yes,” but what security could I give? Two or three hundred tramps passed through the town every day, and my word that it would be sent to him was no good whatever. Again I went out to my stone.

A Yankee is seldom in so tight a place that he can’t wiggle out, and I knew if I could only think hard enough I could solve the problem. Going back, I said to my friend, the storekeeper:

“If you knew that there was a sum of money deposited in your name in a certain bank in Cincinnati, would you give it to me?”

He answered, “Yes.”

I telegraphed to my friend Harrison, who must have sensed that I would have trouble on the way and had told me to be sure to call on him for anything whatever.

“Place one hundred dollars to the credit of Sam Atkins in the First National Bank of Cincinnati.”

He understood, for after a cashier’s confirmation for the careful Mr. Atkins, I received my hundred, less five per cent, and was on my way again.

We were in the real West now. All along, beside the tracks, were huts built of piled-up abandoned railway ties. Here men had tried to spend the night crawling in over a fire, many having been burned to death this way. It was surely an example of the survival of the fittest. Constantly, from the car window, could be seen the former emigrant wagon trail, and everywhere were the bleached bones of bison and oxen. Every time a hill rose high enough to count, there was a little white cross, marking the graves of a baby or perhaps a wife whose ashes were scattered, like those of the engine, God knows where. No calvary could have shown more evidences of pain and suffering than the trail of these first argonauts across the plains.

A fat man on the train took an interest in me, and it flattered me greatly. I have since met his type all over the world: he is what is called in gambling parlance, a “capper.” I was dressed well and he probably thought I was wealthy, for he turned and asked me if I did not want to get off with him in Green River and go to a place where we could get beer and free lunch (then unknown to me) for one “bit.” This idea pleased me, as the meals at the stations, which included bear meat and all sort of luxuries, were one dollar. The town was nothing but sagebrush and hills, with one little straight street down to a dive.