232 page printout. Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship. This disk, it

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232 page printout. Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship. This disk, its printout, or copies of either are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold. This computerized book may be used for serious research as the line brakes, paragraphs, page brakes and page numbers in the text of this copy correspond to the original book, except for the header page, dedications, copyright page etc. that are separated by stars -- **** **** -- to conserve paper in printouts. Fine Print -- always takes away what the big print gives. Therefore we assume no responsibility for errors, omissions, goofs, etc. that may have crept in in spite of the careful manner we do our work. Also, in electronic files, the files may be corrupted by anyone whose hands they pass through. Entered into computer format 1994 by Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 **** **** FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT BEING THE STORY OF THE TRUTH SEEKER, WITH THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ITS THIRD EDITOR BY GEORGE E. MACDONALD VOLUME I Parts First and Second NEW YORK The Truth Seeker Company 1929 **** **** Copyrighted by George E. Macdonald, 1929. Printed in the U.S.A. **** **** To the Readers of The Truth Seeker **** **** Not adventitious therefore will the wise man regard the faith which is in him. The highest truth he sees he will fearlessly utter; knowing that, let what may come of it, he is thus playing his right part in the world. ... -- Herbert Spencer (First Principles, Par. 34). PREFACE THIS is the book of George Macdonald, hand, head and heart. It tells of his life and ac- tivities, first as a farm boy, later as a la- borer in the vineyard of Freethought. For up- wards of fifty years he has been a part of that movement, at once the oldest and the newest, which seeks to make clear the truth that the melioration of man's condition -- progress of any kind, in any degree -- lies in reliance upon his own powers of reason and initiative, and in nowise upon dispensation and authority. George E. Macdonald's own life peculiarly ex- emplifies this. Scarcely anybody ever gave him anything, except an opportunity to work. From his earliest years there has always been some- thing for George to do. How well he has done it shows in the vigorous survival of the paper upon which he has been engaged for half a cen- tury, a period during which journals of opinion have fallen leaf-like in shriveled hosts. The Truth Seeker, like its editor, is hale and hearty. Subscribers stoutly and repeatedly as- sure the one that the other is "better than ever." This, perhaps, is what accounts for the slight flush always to be found upon his cheeks and which beams forth again as the rays of a genial sun. The humor of The Truth Seeker is pro- verbial and has as much to do with its popularity as its more solid qualities. The chapters which follow appeared serially in The Truth Seeker during 1928 and 1929. The iv PREFACE paper's files for fifty years back record the his- tory of Freethought in detail, a moving pageant in which its three editors take active and promi- nent parts. The present editor's life is so inex- tricably bound up with this journal's history as not to be separated from it without damage to the account. This circumstance only has moved him to include in the story of The Truth Seeker somewhat of him hitherto known as "We." This work is intended to afford a reliable survey of the Rationalist movement in the United States for fifty years onward from 1875. That was the author's chief purpose in under- taking it. Its production has occupied all of the editor's spare time for nearly two years. For foundation he applied himself to the rereading of the fifty-five bound volumes of The Truth Seeker, light calisthenics for a man in his eighth decade. An equally valuable repository has been his mortmain memory, unassisted by diary or notes. A considerable correspondence, carried on without secretarial aid, was a third source. The subsigned, privileged to be his amanuensis in the preparation of the book, can certify that into it went enthusiasm and application, both unflagging, in equal parts. B.R. PART FIRST THE MINORITY OF ONE **** **** CONTENTS CHAPTER I -- Sullivan, N.H. -- A Soldier's Son -- Quaker and Scriptural Antecedents -- My Mother -- A Recruit for Lincoln ............................... 11 CHAPTER II -- Surry -- Echoes from the Schoolroom -- Girl Invaders -- My Life's One Scandal .............. 27 CHAPTER III -- My Uncle Clem -- Books and Min- strelsy -- I Go Out to Work -- A Woman of Simple Speech -- Surry South End ........................... 46 CHAPTER IV -- The Traveler's Ghost -- Moving On -- I Am Oppressed -- East Westmoreland -- Pat Advises Me About Churches ................................... 65 CHAPTER V -- The Deacon and I -- Albert Chicker- ing -- Remarks on Bundling -- Brother of the Ox -- My Station Rises ....................................... 83 CHAPTER VI -- The Girl Intrudes -- Rural New Hamp- shire -- The Puritans -- "New Morals for Old" -- Lan- guage -- Christmas Not Observed ..................... 105 CHAPTER VII -- I Take Leave of the Invisibles -- How I Came to New York -- The Truth Seeker and D.M. Bennett ....................................... 131 CHAPTER VIII -- Amongst the Idealists -- An Adven- ture of Which I Am the Mid-Victorian Hero -- Milady Agatha -- Through with Women .............. 150 CHAPTER IX -- Bennett's Wealth of Words --I First Behold Ingersoll -- The Paine Habit Formed -- Grant's Message to Congress ................................. 167 CHATTER X -- Life in The Truth Seeker Office -- Arrest Comes to Mr. Bennett -- Doris -- Through with Women -- Friends .................................... 185 CHAPTER XI -- Guests at 308 Third Avenue -- Hilda -- Catholic and Freethinking Girls -- Anyhow, I Was Through with Women -- The Bennett Prosecutions -- Split in the Liberal League -- Who Was Who in 1878? . 206 CHAPTER XII -- The jailing of D.M. Bennett -- In Albany Penitentiary -- What the Cat Brought In -- "New England and the People Up There" ............... 243 CHAPTER XIII -- Organizing a Political Party -- State Gatherings -- Bennett Liberated -- The Character of A. Comstock ............................................ 264 CHAPTER XIV -- Putnam Coming Forward -- The In- spired Assassin of Garfield -- I Join the Nonpareils. 292 CHAPTER XV -- Religions on Trial with Guiteau -- Ingersoll's Memorial Day Address -- Herndon and Lin- coln -- Bennett Around the World and Home -- Death and a Monument ...................................... 306 CHAPTER XVI -- I Am Assistant Editor -- Man with the Badgepin -- Monsignor Capel -- The Truth Seeker Company ............................................. 332 CHAPTER XVII -- Life in Third Avenue -- Spiritual- ists as Secularists -- Chainey Converted -- Blaine and Burchard ............................................ 352 CHAPTER XVIII -- Giordano Bruno -- Feminists -- Amrita Lal Roy -- The Dynamiters -- Death Among the Veterans -- I Interview Ingersoll -- The Haymarket Bomb -- Henry George's Canvass ...................... 371 CHAPTER XIX -- Economic and Labor Situation -- Dr. McGlynn -- Liberal, Mo. -- The Lucifer Match -- Death of S.P. Andrews ..................................... 393 CHAPTER XX -- Lecturers in the Field -- Chicago An- archists Hanged -- Reynolds Blasphemy Trial -- Mrs. Slenker's Arrest -- A "Globe" Story ................. 415 CHAPTER XXI -- San Francisco -- A Historic Printing Office -- Getting Married -- Death of Courtland Pal- mer -- A Temblor ................................... 435 CHAPTER XXII -- San Francisco Continued -- Organi- zation and Lectures -- Advent of Bellamy -- Topolo- bampo -- Death of Horace Seaver ..................... 470 CHAPTER XXIII -- Local Meetings -- Observations on the State -- Henry Replogle -- A Lick Incident -- The Chinese Press -- Prophecies of Disaster -- An Infant Son ................................................. 496 CHAPTER XXIV -- Putnam in Sacramento -- Jaums Barry of The Star -- Deaths: Bradlaugh, James Par- ton, J.R. Monroe -- Freethought Suspends ............ 524 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT CHAPTER I. 1 -- I APPEAR. WITH the consent of the reader, my story shall begin where and when I did, which was in Gardiner, Maine, April 11, 1857. It was the year they discovered the Neanderthal @@@@ (line drawing, baby and Neanderthal) (caption) CONTEMPORARIES man. My father, (Patrick) Henry Macdonald (b. Oct. 14, 1825), was known to all his acquaintances and to the check-list as Henry, since early in life he had dropped the Patrick -- though remembering 12 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT "Give me liberty or give me death" -- as calculated to furnish a wrong clue to his ancestry, which was Scotch, and to his religion, which was not Catho- lic. As to personality, his comrades in war and other scrapes told me that although not a big man, he was "able"; that, in fact, few men of his inches, unless "scienced," had any business to stand before him. Through this heredity, I early became seized of a deep respect for ability and science. A mechanic and millwright was Henry, and when I first learned to recognize him he was running a sawmill for Lanmon Nims on a small stream in East Sullivan, N.H., where he had lately come, with his wife and two boys, from Maine. Sullivan is among the least of towns, difficult to find or to recognize as a town when discovered; but she has a mighty history -- on paper. One of her sons, the Rev. Josiah Lafayette Seward, D.D., wrote that history in two weighty volumes compris- ing 1619 octave pages, capacious enough to con- tain a fair history of the civilized world ancient and modern. Everybody who lived in Sullivan from 1777 to 1917 is named in those tomes. My father, a resident of Sullivan at the breaking out of the Civil War, enlisting in Company E. 6th regiment, the New Hampshire volunteers, moved to Keene, the county seat, for convenience to the fair grounds where the troops were drilled. He went to the front in December, 1861, and fell in the second battle of Bull Run the following August. I possess as relics of him a leather wallet with a strap that goes all the way around it, and through loops; a letter (un- dated) in a fair round hand, sent from the front to FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 13 my brother, in which "we" is consistently spelled with two e's; and a glazed earthenware container of liquids made in the shape of a book but with a mouth and stopper (for the bottle was contraband in Maine as early as 1850). I have put a book label on it and marked it a best seller. (In his spelling of "wee" he merely may have been old-fashioned. His fathers spelled it that way before him.) I know little else about my father, except that his mother's name was Rebecca. My brother once met that old lady, whom I suppose to have been Scotch, and re- ported her speech to be so different from any he had ever heard that he could hardly understand her. He called the peculiarity of accent a "brogue"; it was probably a "burr." The name Macdonald was pronounced in our family as though the first syl- lable were spelled muck and the second one dough. The war records have it that Henry was a native of Palermo, Me., and that his father is unknown. 2 -- A SOLDIER'S LETTER. In 1887, when I took a vacation in New Hamp- shire, my cousin's wife, Addie Chickering Clement, handed me a letter, found among his father's papers, which she thought I should have if it interested me. Thus the writing ran: "An account of the death of Henry Macdonald, who enlisted in Company E, 6th Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers, and fell at the second Battle of Bull Run (Vir- ginia), August the 28th, 1862, in the War of the Great Rebellion. He was 36 years of age, having been born October the 14th, 1825. "By a Comrade. "FRIEND CLEMENT: You have probably heard various 14 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT accounts of our battle in the woods, where we suffered so severely; so I will attempt no description except of Mac donald's death. I was by his side; or, rather, we were facing each other, he with his left side to the enemy. We had fired, and were loading. We had reserved our fire somewhat, trying to see a good mark to sight. He fired first. After firing I stepped back close to him, He said, 'Did you see him?' I answered, 'Yes.' Said he, 'So did I.' The words were scarcely spoken, when Almon Nut- ting, who was forward, was struck on the head by a ball, inflicting a serious wound. At the same instant Mac- donald was hit just forward of the top of the ear, the ball passing squarely through the head, and coming out on the other side at the spot opposite. He fell on his back, his eyes set. He did not speak or recognize me. The wound bled very fast. He suffered none, and passed away feel- ing not the pains of death, nor its fears. He was as cool, and spoke as calmly, as though we had been shooting squirrels. I think it was the ball which wounded Nutting that killed him, as both were struck at the same moment. "After speaking to Nutting, I was obliged to leave, the regiment having moved forward and left us behind. I had no time to save Macdonald's money, or the clothing upon him. Indeed, the chance of my coming out myself was so small I did not think to do it. When we re- turned, it was by a different route, and on the double- quick, so he fell into the hands of the enemy, who were careful to carry away everything except the clothes. The shoes they took, if good. He was probably buried by our men, who went back for that purpose with a flag of truce. There will be no means of identifying the spot. His knap- sack, with contents, was left behind. H. TOWNE." The letter, which bore no date, appears to have been written soon after the "battle in the woods" (second Bull Run), August 28-29, 1862. The writer was Hosea Towne, afterwards appointed postmaster at Marlow, N.H. FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 15 This my father's picture is drawn from a painting @@@@ executed about 1880 by (a line drawing Madam Gherardi, sister of of a Civil War the admiral of that name. soldier along It was done out of her af- the full length fection for soldiers. For side of this page) "Copy" Madam Gherardi had an 1861 tintype, now lost; and tintypes are like a reflection in a mirror, an offset, which faces the sub- ject the other way. That is why this soldier is shown in an improper position for one standing at parade-rest, with his right hand next the muzzle of his piece and the right foot advanced. He was of that whisk- ered generation raised up before the Civil War and enduring so long after its close that we discover facial foliage on the earlier pro- fessional baseball players. Gradual modification by way of chin shaving, leav- ing only side-whiskers and moustache, produced the clean-shaven soldier of the World war. 16 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 3 -- "THE UNRETURNING BRAVE." Sullivan's memorial to her "unreturning brave," as described in a pamphlet "printed at the New Hamp- shire Sentinel Job Office, 1867," is "of the best Ital- ian marble, and is very beautiful in design and @@@@ finish. It stands near the (a line drawing meeting-house, on a spot of the monument fitted up with much labor is along the full and expense. The mound length of this side on which it stands is ele- of the page) vated eight feet above the level of the common, and the monument rises fifteen feet above the mound. The base is a three and a half feet square." The name of Henry Mac- donald, spelled McDonald, is at the top of the list on the front of the shaft. He may, then, have been the first of the unreturning brave of the Civil War whose name was thus pre- served on a town monu- ment. The history of Sullivan in the Chesire County Ga- zetteer, 1736-1885, says of FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 17 its soldiers who died: "All were honest, respectable, industrious, and reliable young men. There was no exception to this statement." Father lived only half the span the Bible allots to man, while I have been living on borrowed time ever since I began this history of the True Macdonald. But he missed the worse half, for one accumulates his pleasant memories in his first thirty-six years and regrets them in the next three or four decades. When an old man is heard talking to himself, he is muttering maledictions on remembered follies which be com- mitted before he was thirty-six. An enfeebled mem- ory allows him to forget the later ones. The people of the town of Sullivan were uncom- monly worked up over the war. They hanged in effigy a local "Copperhead," a poisonous sympathizer with the South and the institution of slavery: my mother writing his sentence, found pinned to the figure, judicially imposing the extreme penalty. The residents of this hamlet are said to have preceded all others in moving to erect a soldiers' monument. 4 -- HURRAH, AND GOODBY. The Sixth New Hampshire regiment entrained for the front at Keene, December 25, 1861. I was at the depot to see the men file aboard and the train go out. In his blue overcoat with a cape to it, father looked the ideal soldier. Twenty-eight years had passed when I contributed the following to Memorial Day verse: I see them bringing their flowers today To the spot where the heroes sleep, 18 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT And I think of an unmarked soldier's grave Where Virginia's breezes sweep. And I wonder if someone plucks a flower By the rivulet of Bull Run, And lays it above the dust of him Who made me a soldier's son. The days that are gone I live once more As I close my eyes and think, And the chain of memory stretches back And I follow it link by link. And spanning eight and a score of years I return to a Christmas day When the streets are filled with marching men, And the air with their banners gay. But I have sight that sees but one, A man with a bearded face And a kindly eye and a stalwart tread, Who walks in a forward place. I watch the train move out of town, With its smoke and its clanging bell, And the smoke takes form of clouds of war, And the clang is a funeral knell. He wore the blue as a soldier should, Was tender and true and brave: He gave his life for a nation's life, And his pay was a soldier's grave. A random shot, and above his corpse Sweeps forward the battle's tide; And when the stars shine out that night They bury him where he died. So I watch them strewing their flowers today On the spot where the heroes sleep, And I think of an unmarked soldier's grave Where Virginia's willows weep. FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 19 And I wonder if someone plucks a flower By the rivulet of Bull Run, And drops it above the dust of him Who made me a soldier's son. The verses have been heard in Sons of Veterans camps. When they had been written twenty years, I discovered that Capt. George Clymer of Glen Ridge, N.J., Grand Army Instructor in Patriotism, recited them to pupils in the public schools that he visited. 5 -- QUAKER AND SCRIPTURAL ANTECEDENTS. My mother was born in Unity, Maine, in June, 1830, the daughter of Esther Chase and Stephen Hussey, who named her Asenath. There were enough biblical names in my ancestry -- Rebecca, Esther, Asenath, and Stephen -- to produce a prophet. The Chases were Quakers. I was but five years old when, being taken down to Maine by my mother on a visit to her relatives in Unity, I attended a Quaker meeting and spent a week in the family of her Quaker cousin, Uncle John Chase. This short period was so dreary that I have been under the depression of it ever since. There is a certain risk in publishing the fact that one is a Chase by ancestry. Somebody is sure to offer you a book for a dollar containing your genealogy. The Macdonald family can be traced, through Scott's Tales of a Grandfather, to a gang of Highland cattle-thieves, who were all but ex- terminated by outraged neighbors whom they had 20 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT plundered. In that direction "mine ancient but ignoble blood hath run through scoundrels since the flood," but the Chases are all respectable, being elders or ministers or Quakers. The Husseys I suspect of being Puritans. Three brothers of them, from England, came to New England among the early arrivals. They were Stephen, Batchelder, and Sylvanus. Each of them made a practice of naming his sons after their uncles, and the three names came down to the last generation. I had an uncle Batchelder, and an uncle Sylvanus, a cousin Syl- vanus, and a cousin Stephen. Passing through the town of Houlton, Maine, forty years ago, I saw the name of Hussey everywhere -- on the signboards of doctors, lawyers, merchants, and -- I did not ex- amine the police record for the other class. My parents bestowed upon me the name of George Everett Hussey -- George for Washington, Everett for Edward Everett, and Hussey as a matter of course. I dropped the third one out at an early age, but the Testament I won by learning many verses of the seventh of Matthew has on its fly-leaf this inscription: "Presented to George E.H. Mac- donald by his Sabbath School Teacher, Keene, N. H., Jan. 21st, 1863." George E.H. sounds plebeian alongside my brother's name, which was Eugene Montague. I lower a hook into the well of memory to catch that teacher's name. It brings up "Miss Dunbar." If there is an old resident of Keene who ever went to Sunday school he may be able to cor- rect or confirm my guess. Yet more likely that old-timer, when found, will say there used to be a man named Dunbar that owned a horse he thought FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 21 could trot. And drove him onto the track at the fair grounds hitched to a sulky, and got run into and dished a wheel. Deaf man, he was; couldn't hear a dam' sound. His daughter maybe. 6 -- THE SMART ONE OF THE FAMILY. Asenath, my mother, coming at about the middle of ten or eleven children, was the only one of them who ever entertained "views." At thirteen she was teaching a school that had an algebra class in it, and on her way to her daily task waded through deep snow minus leg-garments worn by girls of a later day but now discarded largely, I perceive, as individual entities. She afterwards left home to learn a trade, that of stitching men's coats. The death of Henry, after their few years of married life, found her working in a peg-shop, making pegs for shoes, in Keene, N.H., and supporting two boys, 7 and 5 years of age. Our family doctor was named Twichell. On an occasion when an elderly woman patient (say Mrs. Carter) wanted a nurse, Dr. Twichell recommended mother. She proved so competent that the doctor advised her to prepare herself for nursing as a profession. There was then an advanced medical practitioner and reformer, named Dio Lewis, conducting a training school for nurses in Massachusetts, to whom she was recom- mended. Dio Lewis dressed his pupils in "gym" clothes and gave them physical training; and I re- member that when my mother, home on a vacation, told my aunt, with whom we were living, about this innovation in women's dress, my aunt replied that 22 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT the less said about it the better, especially in the presence of her daughter Ella, who was but 15 and wore skirts down to her instep. I have no likeness of mother. The last time I was in New Hampshire I asked this niece, Mrs. Ella Clement Priest, if there was any picture of her in the family. She replied: "No; I don't believe Aunt 'Sene ever kept still long enough to have one taken." As a trained nurse, and one of the first of that profession, Asenath commanded a wage larger than local patients would pay. She therefore looked abroad. She became nurse and companion to Mrs. Bierstadt, wife of the artist whose great picture of the Rocky Mountains won fame in those days. I received letters from her afterwards written on the stationery of the yacht Resolute, belonging to Banker Hatch, with a summer home at Navesink. Mrs. Hatch was her patient. Because I heard few other names, and little of anything else at that period, I am able to remember those of her em- ployers, Minturn, Wingate, and so on. Her pay was good and employment steady, so that with her widow's pension, and something extra on account of children, the problem of maintenance for her boys was solved. She also contributed to the sup- port of her sister's family and helped them buy the farm. As one of the earliest trained and profes- sional nurses, she was in at the close of the era when persons in moderate circumstances could be sick within their means. On my return to Keene, late in 1864, from a FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 23 stay with an uncle in Maine, who, having no boy of his own, proposed to adopt me and take me with him into the Aroostook (to which mother would not consent), we lived with this same sister's family a mile out of the town of Keene, on Marlborough street. Here I first began to understand what I heard my elders read from the newspapers. We took The Banner of Light, a Spiritualist paper that by a coincidence began publication in Boston on the day I was born, its first number being dated April 11, 1857. I have long survived my journal- istic twin. Mother and aunt read it aloud by turns, and I lay in bed and heard them. In spite of Spir- itualism in the family, the children went to the Uni- tarian Sunday school in Keene. The minister of this church, on the east side of Main street, was known as Priest White. The orthodox church stood at the head of the square. They called its minister Parson Barstow. 7 -- A RECRUIT FOR LINCOLN. Among the things the child of 5 or 6 does not comprehend is the fact of death. Accustomed to the absence of my father from the house during his ten hours a day as a mechanic, I had learned not to miss his presence. I now supposed he was just away. The tale of his death meant nothing to me, although I had seen my mother's burst of weeping, her head falling on her crossed aims at the bench where she worked in the peg-shop, when I accompanied the bearer to her of the news that father had fallen in battle. So, persuaded that he must be somewhere, 24 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT and that people were mistaken in saying I should not see him again, day after day I watched the road, which I could command for some distance each way, and all the men who passed underwent inspec- tion. This house on Marlborough street, where we lived with my mother's sister Louisa, who had mar- ried Benjamin Franklin Clement of Montville, Maine, was later made over and occupied by Frank Cole, son of a neighbor -- a baby when we moved away. We were there in the fall of 1864, and in the Lincoln canvass of that year I fought the Irish, who were trying to make the world safe for democ- racy by campaigning for McClellan. Surely they were time of terror for a non-pugnacious Lincoln boy. In those precincts he met the Irish boys in small gangs and was interrogated: "Be you an Irish feller?" "Be you for McClellan?" No. The fight opened with aggressions on the part of the gang. One with a snub nose not readily caused to bleed, and with an underpinning patterned after the fore- legs of an ox, for such was I, endured long with- out being put out or overthrown; and he was fired with a mighty cause. The reelection of Lincoln caused a general belief to pass from parents to children that the country was saved. Months later, when the news of his assassination reached my aunt, I saw the color leave her face. She gasped "What will become of us?" as though we had been passengers on a ship with a mutinous element in the crew, the captain overboard, and no one left who understood navigation. FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 25 8 -- BACK TO THE LAND. While we were in the Marlborough street house my uncle Clement came back from the war. Thence in the fall of 1865 we moved to a farm in Surry, which I was to think of when homesick for the next ensuing ten years. And those ten years are @@@@ (a line drawing of a house and yard) crowded with so many distinct memories they seem to cover the principal part of my life. The days were interminably long. Our family must have been classed as poor, though we never were needy, and together the breadwinners had purchased an equity in the house that they now traded for the farm. The war had made living expensive -- butter fifty cents a pound, flour ten dollars a barrel. Women wore "print," or calico, and men wore shoddy. I heard my aunt murmur: 26 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT "Butter and cheese is fifty cents a pound, An' everything else is accordin', Before next spring we'll all be on the town Or landed on the other side of Jordan." We came upon the farm late in the fall. There was no fruit to pick, and butter was short because of one farrow cow. Pork and potatoes, pork and beans, and pork fat for the enrichment of salt cod- fish mixed with potato; pork fat on slices of brown- bread, pork fat and Porto Rico molasses (with slivers of cane in it) on hot biscuits -- that was the diet on which I throve. Without butter, a condi- tion my aunt took pains to conceal, we could carry no bread for our school luncheons, lest its unbut- tered state should provoke comment. My aunt there- fore, made great sheets of gingerbread wherefrom she filled our dinner pails. Sometimes it froze on the two-and-a-half-mile carry and thawing in the warm school room turned glutinous when masticated, dropping into the stomach "kerlunker," as we said. The next season, with apples to stew and dry, ber- ries to can and a cow come in, brought better fare. Hardship is like romance -- always in the past. While being undergone it is unrecognized. Life was hap- py despite zero weather, drifts half-way to the roof, clothes that let in the snow to melt against the flesh and a ration not scientifically balanced. CHAPTER II. 1 -- SO THIS IS SURRY. SURRY (pop. 350) lies a little west of the geographical center of Chesire county, toward the southwest corner of the state. Over the southern boundary of the county you are in Massa- chusetts; over the western line, which is the Connecticut river, you are in Vermont. According to the way you view Surry, with its twenty square miles of territory, it is a valley town or a hill town, or both. It has hills east and west. The hills at one time met near the north end; but the Ashuelot river broke through and ran south along the foot of Surry mountain, on the east, which is fifteen hundred feet high and steep. That mountain guards the eastern side of the town. On the top of it there is a mys- terious pond, said to be fathomless, but white lilies float on its surface near the margin defended by tangled tree trunks, and can be gathered by swim- ming for them in the dark waters. The Ashuelot in its meanderings from immemo- rial time has created a valley half a mile wide, with a plateau for the village of a dozen houses, town hall, school, and church to be built upon. To the west the ground continues to rise until it reaches the summit of Surry Hill and the borders of the adjoin- 27 28 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT ing towns on that side. Surry once belonged to the towns lying east and west of it, but being inac- cessible from those directions on account of the height of land, it was allowed to take a name and "go it alone," as they say there. The smooth way to get into Surry is from the south, where the river has leveled the country and there are fewer ups and downs. The farm I called my home (1865-'75) lies two miles and a half southwest of the village, and is reached from there by a road which rises all the way. By a happy freak of nature, the ground the road runs on for half a mile in one direction from the house and a mile in the other, is level, but there is a half-mile hill at each end of this, the only level stretch on that so-called Old Walpole Road for eight miles. The arable acres of the farm, that have been cultivated for the past one hundred and twenty-five years, cover a long knoll, with the buildings at the south and sunny end. Men born and reared in Surry return when aged and prosper- ous and make show-places of the old homesteads, One could find no location there so well situated for the purpose as this one, which has even a spring and a pond on it. The hill back of the house rises by an abrupt acclivity to near a level with the top of Surry mountain, and looks it in the face two miles away. At the very peak of the hill there crops out a ledge, and on that ledge the last glacier to come through left standing, balanced on its smaller end, a rock fifteen feet high, of a formation not native to those parts. As a bare-footed boy I often climbed FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 29 it by inserting my toes into its fissures and crevices, and once at the top could see all the country from there to Mount Monadnock, fifteen miles south, in- cluding the city of Keene. I spent hours on that @@@@ (line drawing of a scenic view with the big rock in the fore- ground and a boy sitting atop it) (caption) VIEWING THE LANDSCAPE O'ER rock, viewing the landscape, while the address of William Tell to his native mountains ran in my mind. The last time I stood at the base of the big boulder, its summit appeared inaccessible except by means of an elevator; and I had then forgotten what William Tell said. How plainly voices from the road below carried up the side of that hill, especially the bell-like ac- cents of our not-distant neighbor, Mr. Reed, who sometimes drove by. One standing on its brow heard a woman in her doorway inquire after the health of Mr. Reed's family, and his reply: "Wal, not so very good. You see my boy Charlie stepped 30 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT on a scythe and cut his heel; my boy George is suf- fering from a boil on his hindermost sitdown; my wife has just had a baby; and I have been troubled with b-a-a-d Di-Or-Re-Or." My selection is not happy, but it is authentic; and this is a true book. Perhaps once a year, in the fall, a drover going south to Boston went through that road with a hundred head of cattle, gathered from all the way north to the Canadian line, or beyond -- a boy and a dog, footing it and a man riding in a buggy. When night overtook him, the drover paid for the privi- lege of turning his cattle into fields where there was fall feed. He furnished a topic of conversation for a week. Another notable to go by there once was Max Shinburn, the bank robber, on his way to commit a robbery in Walpole. Other days, hardly a team would pass. A team was any rig, single or double. Such as went that way were from further up the road, going to Keene. These were such reg- ular passersby that they were known before they came in sight by the familiar rhythm of the horses's feet beating on the ground, or by the peculiar rat- tle of the wagon or the "chuck" of the wheels on the axle. The horse could be recognized though a stran- ger might be driving it. In Keene, where we had lived, the street traffic, of considerable volume, was negligible as a spectacle; here, one left his work, if need be, so as not to miss anything moving past, man or animal. In Keene we ran only to "see the cars go by." Here we might catch the sound of a freight engine a mile or two off puffing on the up- grade to the Summit, but we saw no trains. The FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 31 sound of an axe falling on a tree would carry half a mile, and the chopper might have struck the next blow and the next before it got to us. If the man was working in sight, it seemed as if the axe made the noise when it was above his head. The silence, when you stopped to listen to it, was as distinctly audible as the roar of a city. The hill capped by the big rock was the cow pasture, covering eighty acres, with twenty of them wooded. The best feed for the cows grew farthest from the barn and around a water hole. That was a terrible land for me, when I got there after sun- down to drive the cows home; for, looking about me, I could see all of creation except the cows. Sheep would be plentiful, if you were not hunting for them, and the colts were either there or visible at a distance. The kine might have started for the barn by another route than the one I had taken in reaching the spot. If so, I must follow them down an old sled-road through the woods, where, pausing anon to hark for that cow bell, I should hear my- self discussed by the birds and insects that become garrulous and conversational as the shadows fall; or I might meet a questing hedgehog on his way to the cornfield for his grub. I might even, so my fears told me, encounter the bobcat or the bear lately reported in that neighborhood. A tree-toad would start his evensong almost at my ear. Perhaps I should scare up a partridge whose sudden whirr would for a second or two paralyze me with fright. The partridge's flight is always unexpected. He seems to start from between your feet, and he is 32 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT the bird that set the airplane an example in making a noise when taking off. But in the open the boy who stood still, listening for the bell, heard nothing but his own vital organs working, his heart thump- ing like a hydraulic pump, his ears "singing." He was a small speck in a big universe. This "chore" of combing eighty acres to find a few cows was all in the day's work. A girl might say she was afraid to go after the cows at night, but a boy wouldn't. A quarter of a century later than this experience of mine, I heard an elderly lady from Providence, R.I., ask a small boy, her "grand"- nephew, if he would not like to live with her in the city. He objected long, but finally came to terms. "I might go and live with you for a while," he said, "but I wouldn't go after the cows, by Jesus." Yet @@@@ (a line drawing of a boy with a saw and endless stacks of wood to be sawed) (caption) THERE WAS ALWAYS WOOD TO SAW hunting cows at night was only one pest of farm life. Weeds had to be pulled in summer days and FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 33 the wood-saw pushed in winter. It seemed to me that all the disagreeable duties fell to the youngest. 2 -- WHILE SCHOOL KEPT IT WAS VACATION. Schooldays came as a furlough. The cartoonists who comically portray the reluctance of the small boy at going back to school were never farmers' boys in my circumstances, nor was Shakespeare one either. I knew of at least one who took an early start and then crept not like a snail but ran. He did what looked most like creeping on the home stretch. To me the eight to sixteen weeks of school in the course of a year meant ease and playtime. They were my vacation. As regards my education, which was fragmentary, a dozen district schools contributed to it. To the first of these, in East Sullivan, I was conducted by Amanda Dunn -- later my aunt by marriage but then only a big girl -- with my mother's consent, not mine. As I was in my fourth year, I might have forgot- ten about that school by now, except that I took recess with a parcel of fresh girls, who, moved only by what I regarded as an unworthy curiosity, gath- ered about me at a time when all a man wanted was to be let alone. Followed Public School No. 2 in Keene, where I nearly got my head knocked off by the crank of a chain pump that reversed itself. I know no more than this about that school, for I was only 4, save that there I made the acquaintance of Ed. Kimball (he had a share of the stock when The Truth Seeker Company was organized) and Charlie and Jennie Sanger, who as residents of Boston turned out a dozen years later to he the grand- 34 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT children of Edmund Woodward of Surry, the farm- er that had me then for "hired man." Ed. Kimball's father Horatio served as mayor of Keene for a number of terms. Another Keene school, perhaps No. 1, for the street it stood on was named School Street, claimed me for a pupil. There the scholars sang Civil War songs when they were the latest successes. Then, at 5, I went to school in Unity, Maine, again attended by a large girl, one Amelia Webb. The teacher caused me to answer her with scorn by asking if I knew my, letters, whereas I could read. The Marlborough street school in Keene enrolled me the next year. The teacher, Miss Willard, had the odd front name of Bial. By the time I was out of school at 8 I knew Colburn's Mental Arithmetic, including the penultimate ex- ample about the farmer who, if he had as many geese and half as many more and two geese and a half, would have had a hundred. My schooling was continued at the Four Corners, half way between Keene and Surry Hill. My brother and cousin Stephen with me made the three-mile descent from the hill in the morning and climbed that grade again at night. I first noticed, then, the reading of the Bible in school. A large boy, hav- ing searched the scriptures, wrote biblical references on slips of paper and passed them to the girls. The countenance of a high-spirited girl, Sarah Darling by name, blazed with indignation when he lured her into looking up Romans iv, 19. I knew the Bible was inspired, because so informed by Sunday school teachers; yet at that I wondered why an inspired FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 35 work should contain so large an excess of suspended mud; for this industrious youth had been obliging enough to mark the low spots in most of the Bibles used in that school. Straight east from our Surry Hill house, across a mile and a half of rugged pasture land and wood- ed territory, the South End school invited. For a winter's term the three of us took it in, breaking our own path and wading depths of snow. Again, a mile off to the northwest of our home stood the Surry Hill schoolhouse, in a district once fairly populous. It opened for me during one term, the scholars numbering four. At this school we first had geog- raphies that contained pictures of prehistoric men and monsters, and possibly an outline of evolution. When snow made the schoolhouse inaccessible we stayed home, the teacher being a boarder, and held the school in our "other room," which suited us and was convenient for the neighbors' children. Now the schoolhouse has come down from the hill and set itself alongside the farmhouse. Two of these schools, namely the South End and Surry Village, were exceptional: I attended each more than one term. Going to whatever locality the farmer might happen to be in who wanted a boy, I in these in- stances returned to a district where I had been be- fore. There are four more to be named. From the first place where I lived as hired boy I attended the Walpole Hill school, and also the school in Christian Holler (Walpole). When I changed again to a school new to me, I found myself in the Lon- don district, East Westmoreland. My scholastic 36 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT training ended in Westmoreland village. Such learning as these dozen schools diffused, afforded me all I have ever needed of mathematics, made me a successful contender at spelling-schools, and grounded me safely in grammar. Even though at 18 I could have had a good-sized school to teach if I would take it, my ignorance on general subjects was profound. Knowledge has its limits, but igno- rance is measureless. Mine was total except for the look-in I had on a few subjects. It was all look-in; I had no outlook. 3 -- ECHOES FROM THE SCHOOL ROOM. The one-room district schools had advantages missed by separated pupils in graded schools. In them the attentive scholar could learn his own les- sons and the lessons of all the classes ahead of him by hearing them recite. Thus listening in, I learned the contents of books I had never possessed or opened. There was a large variety in these, for textbooks changed as often as I went from one district to another. A worn copy of the Weld & Quackenbos grammar book to which I clung in all my shifting about, would sometimes put me in a grammar class by myself. My mind not being chargeable with resistance to the intrusion of knowledge, I was apt at commit- ting words and recitations to memory. My con- temporaries will remember the appended fragments from readings and declarations. I heard them in the voices of large scholars when I was a small one: "Sir Ralph the Rover tore his hair, And cursed himself in his despair; FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 37 But the waves rush in on every side And the vessel sinks beneath the tide." "A verb used to denote an action or feeling by a subject or agent that passes over from the subject or agent to and terminates upon some person or thing as its object is a transitive verb." "And heralds shouted in his ear, 'Bow down, ye slave, bow down."' "'Make way for liberty!' he cried; Made way for liberty and died." "I will go to my tent and lie down in despair; I will paint me in black and sever my hair. I will sit on the shore when the hurricane blows, And reveal to the god of the tempest my woes." "Lords of creation indeed, and can't even take care of an umbrella. ..." "Pizzaro -- How now, Gomez, what bringest thou? "Gomez -- In yonder camp we have surprised an old Peruvian. Escape us by flight he could not, and we took him without resistance." "Not many years ago where you now stand, surrounded by all that exalts and embellishes civilized life, the rank thistle nodded in the wind, and the wild fox dug his hole unscared. ... Here too lived and loved another race of beings. ... dipped his paddle in yon sedgy lake .... beneath the same moon that smiles for you the Indian lover wooed his dusky mate." "The mounds of the western prairies are among the most interesting features of the country. They are so regular in form that they are generally supposed to have been work of human hands, but by whom they were reared or for what purpose is unknown." "The voyagers said we will wait until the line gales have done with their equinoctial fury. ... Death was the pilot that stood at the helm, but no one knew it. ... the ill-omened Vesta dealt her death stroke to the Arctic." 38 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT I am obliged to suspend. My notes made with a view to citing these and other quotations num- ber forty-one, and I desist. Having deleted thirty- odd reechoing ones, I retain the last of the ten re- maining because it started me on a line of inquiry that took me into skepticism. The excerpt, with errors and omissions, is from a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher on the Loss of the Arctic; but what was "equinoctial fury"? My aunt said that when the sun crosses the equator a storm is kicked up called the line gale, or the "equinoctial." If I would notice, there was always a storm when the sun crossed the line. Why? Because it makes the days and the nights of the same length, March 21 and September 23. I heard mention of the line gale all the days of my youth, but the gale never arrived on schedule time. Any storm within a fort- night answered for the name. The Weather Bureau has exploded the myth of the "equinoctial." The remains may be laid away with the ground hog and St. Swithin as weather breeders. Now, then, I believe I left myself some pages back, hunting cows on the summit of Surry Hill, with all creation (except the cows) in view just beyond the horizon. That landscape, the town of Surry, its village and its farms, lies spread before me still like a map, or better than any map, since I can see them all, every square acre of them, al- most, without looking. The old-growth pines that then were landmarks, a hundred feet high or more, went to the sawmill long ago, but they are still in this picture of mine that was never photographed. FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 39 4 -- SCANDALOUS DOINGS And Surry village! I never can forget that hamlet, for was it not the scene of the only scandal that has enriched my life? That scandal came early. I was no more than ten years old; and probably was but nine. From the farm on the Hill I went @@@@ (line drawing of a small building that was his school) (caption) THE SURRY VILLAGE SCHOOL HOUSE This is a late and defective picture. It does not show Sam Pool's blacksmith shop that stood at right. to the school house in the village, near the river and mountain, by walking the two and a half miles of lonesome road that lay between, with only one house on it. The school "kept" in summer for children too small to do farm work. That is how I know I was under eleven. I guess that the teacher that summer was Charlotte Ellis -- destined years later to become the wife of J.R. Holman of Hins- dale, who took The Truth Seeker. Did Mr. Holman indulge in any spacious remarks on the editorial 40 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT knowledge displayed in this paper, Charlotte could reply: "Your editor! I taught that boy all he knows."* Not more than twenty scholars came, mostly girls. Inside the schoolhouse the sexes were divided; outside they mingled and played the same games. In our young minds I doubt the dis- tinctions between us were recognized as sexual. Girls were only an inferior variety of boy, wearing different clothes and longer hair; they could run fast, but couldn't throw a stone, and were spiteful in a scuffle. Yet for all these serious disabilities, they were tolerated and admitted to games they could play, squat-tag and "high-spy" and maybe others. And then one day the boys deserted them -- disappeared without trace. To one of these bright lads it had occurred that we could dam the little brook in the hollow back of the schoolhouse and make a place to go in swimming. The erecting of the dam with small stones and pieces of sod con- sumed more than one noon hour. The second day saw the feat of engineering accomplished; on the third the swimming began; we stripped and went in. The expanse of water was all of ten feet long and nearly that wide; maximum depth 20 inches. One could swim three or four strokes before grounding. And how about the girls we left behind us? On the fourth day, when playing by themselves had lost its edge, a half dozen of *The thought is not original with me but adapted. When an old sailor under whom as a boy Morgan Robertson served an apprenticeship on the Great Lakes heard of him as an author, he exclaimed: "That feller writin' books' Hell, I learnt Morg 'Robertson all he ever know." FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 41 them followed us to the pond, the size and depth of which quite astonished them. The squeals they emitted, expressive of admiration, gratified our pride as builders, but when they took for granted their right to enter the water, they were sternly for- @@@@ (line drawing of a warer-hole with four nude little boys in the foreground, and a nude little girl emerging from the bushes to join the boys and swim in their better warer-hole) (caption) THE FEMALE PERIL. bidden and ordered to find a wading-place further upstream. They retreated to where the alders, meeting over the brook at the head of our pond, hid them from our view. They were noisy crea- tures, with their screaming and laughing, but what they found to excite them we were not interested to inquire. We learned soon enough anyhow. The water from our dam backed up beyond the alders and spread there into a fine place to wade. And that was not quite all they had to exclaim and giggle over, for they were taking off their dresses and leaving them ashore to keep the skirts dry. 42 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT One of them came into view promenading the bank with no dress on. She thereby rose in the estima- tion of a boy, for when a girl stepped out of her skirt in those days she revealed a garment that had the promise and possibilities of pants. I only record the feeling of gratification experienced at seeing this near approach of a girl to the human form. She was all right. So were the rest of them, who could now wade and wet no clothes. Yet those girls were not contented to let well enough alone. When we came out to dress we observed that they had progressed to complete immersion and were resuming underthings, as after a swim. They had kept quiet about it. The boys felt it was none of their business and said nothing. The girls, when picking up their clothes, politely faced the spectator. If they must turn the back they modestly covered the lower part with a garment. The idyllic scenes were repeated with no interference or trespass on either side until a later day, when consternation fell upon us to see the alders parted and one girl and then another come gliding down the brook between them. They moved forward with arms extended and feet far apart to keep their balance. The boys who saw stood paralyzed by the spectacle -- the cheek of those girls wanting to use the boys' pond when they had one of their own! The brother of the leading girl angrily ordered her back. She shamelessly stood her ground and said, "I won't." He swung back his hand, threatening. "Out of this or I'll splash you," and he struck the surface of the water, throwing a "wave" in her face. He FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 43 was joined by others, who went to it desperately, splashing and scooping water over the invaders -- all of whom most unexpectedly and successfully threw it back. Certain of their forces, unable to come through, had left the stream and deployed around the alders, entering the water behind us and making a rear attack. What was the use? They were too many for us. Our arms were weary. A truce fol- lowed. The bathing became established as mixed. Laughter and the spirit of play and comradeship pre- vailed. A man grown cannot quite get back to the reaction of the small boy toward the small girl. It is part wonder and part his dislike for what he can- not understand. He dismisses the subject from his mind lest his attitude toward her change to one of sympathy, which is girlish. There was among them a little freckle-face with long red curls or ringlets who pulled me by the hand and made me run along the bank and around about to dry. That girl had me gentled. In winter, when the game was playing horse, and the boys were lined up facing the school house for a "stable," and stood there pawing and whickering till the girls put on the reins and drove them away, I always knew whose horsey I was going to be. I heard from, her forty years later, when she sent word that she "remembered." Remembered what? If Freckle Face lives still, her ringlets are either bobbed or gray. She was a year older than I. 5 -- THE SCANDAL BREAKS But the scandal! The boys and girls went to their different dressing-places, and returned to school clothed and in their right minds, Drouth or 44 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT rain or change of temperature put an end in time to the bathing season. When it was all over and forgotten by the children, the scandal exploded among their elders. Girls were heard asking one another with grave faces what their mothers had said to them. I caught a ride part of the way home in the hind end of an open buggy driven by a woman. We were stopped by another woman, who came out of her house with an apron wound about her arms, and they discussed the matter in "blind" language that I understood perfectly. Both tried to look horrified. Each was afraid that the other would think she condoned such goings on, and I believe that both chuckled over it when alone. The woman in the buggy sighed: "Well, I suppose the less said the soonest mended." The woman with her arms in the apron said: "Yes, the more it is stirred the worse it will stink." I thought of the bright little girl, white and clean as a pond-lily, who led her mates between the alders and into the water where the boys were, and decided the mother should not have chosen that malodorous word. Later that village bad a real scandal. A girl of fifteen, who virtuously would have switched her little sister for going in swimming with boys, ex- perienced religion and joined the church. In less than a year something happened. Nobody told me just what, Those things are hidden from babes and revealed unto the wise and prudent; and I was only twelve. The officers of the church took action to expel the girl from the fold and turn her back again to "the world." I happened to hear the judg- FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 45 ment of "the world" on that proceeding. In the village store when I was there on an errand for Aunt Polly Abbott, who had me in her employ that winter, three of the most enlightened men of the town were met. There were William H. Porter, M.D., the village doctor; Holland Stevens, the village Spiritualist; and George K. Harvey, later a state senator. They took up the matter of the girl thrown back upon the world by the church, and in- quired if such things could be. Harvey questioned whether the church might land a damaged member on the world without the world's consent. Dr. Porter proposed that the three there present appoint themselves a committee on behalf of the world to take the affair under consideration. Holland Stev- ens contended ably that when anything lawfully in the possession of the world was taken from it by the unworldly, the world had a clear right to insist that, if returned, the article should be in as good order as before. "For instance," he said, to illustrate, "if I get a piece of goods from Marsh Britton here" (Marshall Britton kept the store), "and keep it awhile and then carry it to him all mussed up, Marsh ain't under any obligation to take it back." George Harvey voted Aye to that, and Dr. Porter said: "Holland, I deputize you, then, as representing this Committee of the World, to wait on these church people and tell them the world declines to receive this girl except with the guarantee that she is in as good condition in all respects as when they took her in, damn 'em." CHAPTER III. 1 -- MY UNCLE CLEM. IN this account of my childhood I have said that when mother was widowed and her two boys orphaned (1862), she placed my brother Eugene and me in the care of her sister, Louisa, Mrs. Benjamin Clement, and went out to service as a nurse. I suspect my uncle, Ben Clement, of distaste for sustained labor. I certainly heard neighbors and others call him shiftless -- judgments that were perhaps unfair, since he shortly drew a pension as a veteran disabled by heart disease con- tracted during the war in the performance of duty at the front. But one member of his regiment, being drunk, declared in my hearing that "Clem" never got to the front and was never in any action of the war. The attacks of heart disease came on as the regiment approached the scene of conflict and Clem fell out of the ranks. So, although he was in the same company, he was not in the fight at Bull Run where my father fell, but was lying under an ambu- lance or other wagon suffering from palpitation of the heart. Army life irked my uncle. He told me Plainly that when they brought to him the news that Henry (my father) had fallen, he repined that he was not in Henry's restful place under the sod 46 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 47 and the dew. I am sure I shared his regrets if it meant my own father's survival in his place. On demobilization he joined the Invalid Corps and spent a term at Gallops Island. By trade my uncle was a carpenter and joiner, also called a mechanic. The tools of a carpenter then required a lumber wagon to move them. They included planes from eight inches to four feet long, a raft of them for smoothing, matching, join- ing, beading, grooving; chisels of all measurements, including one that rode in the bottom of the chest and reached from end to end. The big plane was a long jointer; the chisel a jimmyslick. With the smaller chisels he could mortise a window sash; with the larger ones great beams for the frame of a barn. There were gimlets and bits, augers and pod-augers; files flat, half round and round, and three cornered; a battery of saws running from large dimensions down to keyhole size. He could make window frames, doors and trim, and cut his own beads and moldings. The carpenter might lay a stone foundation, build the house on it, and lath, plaster and paint, for all which operations he carried the tools in his chest. Today carpenters are seen going to their jobs bearing only a hand tool- chest smaller than a portable typewriter case, with saw and steel square protruding. But though Clem could do these things, he worked discontinuously; perhaps it was his health, perhaps a dull labor market. It was merely my bad luck that my uncle looked upon "flogging" and "the rod" as essential to a 48 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT boy's deportment; therefore he presented me with whippings on the same principle that my aunt ad- ministered sulphur and molasses, for treatment and precaution. Aunt had a kind heart that disap- proved of the horsewhip for boys. She would not let him touch her own boy Stephen except over her body. I heard her plead with him on a day I was to be thrashed, and still thank her for her futile "O Benjamin, don't," though he thrust her back through the doorway into the house. He was whal- ing me at the moment for going in swimming all summer without his consent. An eccentric if not crazy character in the neighborhood named Bill Mason, reputed to possess extraordinary strength, warned my uncle that if he ever whipped me again he would cut some withes and twist them and give him a trimming. His heart attacks never seized him when duty called him to wallop me. A friendly chap, Riley Kenney by name, who lived back over the hill, hearing that I was "gented" to pick up a half acre of potatoes in a day or take a flogging at sundown, came to help me, if needed, in the middle of the afternoon. By wasting no time straighten- ing my back or looking at the sun, which is the farmer's clock, I had gathered the potatoes into baskets and borne them to a cart. Yet my uncle was a tolerably kind man when not bound by the dictum of Solomon on the virtues of the rod of correction. He had no understanding of boys. He believed they should learn to work with poor tools, dull axes and saws. "The bad work- man complains of his tools," he said. When I mur- FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 49 mured he quoted: "If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength." I aspired to grow up and return one of his thrashings, but on a Fourth of July, the annual @@@@ (line drawing of a covered bridge over a streem and nude boys swiming) (caption) THE OLD BRIDGE STILL STANDS. go-in-swimming day, I saved his son from drowning and called the account square. Although it was a rule for a boy to remain on the home farm as long as the old man could lick him, my deportment passed from his control in 1870, when I was 13. Eugene, being more than two years my senior, had already tried for two seasons the life of a farmer's hired boy. The hire was board, school, and washing. Although an advanced scholar always, in build he was slight; in childhood he was rather 50 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT pindling. I passed him in bulk when I was five and he seven, and he never caught up. He looked for lighter work than farm labor. People say that a boy raised on a farm sets out in life with a good constitution. He does. He has a good constitu- tion if he survives. Mother took Eugene to a New York printer for a time, thus fitting him for a few years' work on a Keene newspaper. But he was back in New York at 19, printer on The Truth Seeker for five years, running the paper in the proprietor's absence for three years, ('79-82), then editor for a quarter of a century. 2 -- BOOKS AND MINSTRELSY. I will say in behalf of our Surry home that it sheltered the only bookish or reading family for miles around. It established connection with a library that provided us with the books of the day, which my aunt read aloud to the other members gathered around the table. The shaded kerosene lamp stood between her eyes and the pages of the book. The authors were Trowbridge, Farjeon, Capt. mayne Reid, and whoever wrote the Life of Isaac Tatem hopper (grandfather of DeWolf). Add to these "The Man with the Broken Ear," by Edmond About, and "The Dove in the Eagle's Nest," by Charlotte M. Yonge. The New England Farmer brought a story every week for her to read to us. This paper also carried the advertisement of a merchant who expressed himself through the medi- um of poetry. He soared to lofty heights: FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 51 "The planets as they roll around In the vast realm, of space, Will all be found, if traced with care, Fixed in their proper place." And then came down to business: "The proper place to buy boys' clothes -- Hats, caps, pants, coat and shoes complete -- Is at the store of George Fenno's, Corner of Beech and Washington Streets." Josh Billings and the Danbury News Man were writing; so was Petroleum V. Nasby. The "Rollo" books were dated for me in my sixth year. Give me now one of Beadle's Dime Novels and let me read of Old Rube the Trailer. Better it were for a boy to read Beadle's Dime Novels than not to read at all. Farmers called at each other's houses winter even- ings for no purpose but to talk. They kept their hats on. Nor were we without minstrelsy. Uncle Billy Wright went from house to house, arriving preferably at meal time, carrying his fiddle in a green bag, and scraping it while he sang. His songs had stories in them, or they celebrated his- torical events, like this: "The tenth of September let us all remember As long as this globe on its axis rolls round, Our tars and marines on Lake Eric were seen To pull the proud flag of Great Britain come down." 52 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT He knew all of George Washington's preference, "The Darby Ram," the last line being very daring. One of his songs contained the splendid stanza: "Then on to the table Jack he rolled Five hundred guineas in bright gold. Said he: 'I am your lover bold, For I am Jack the Sailor'." Jack had come back rich beyond the dreams of salesmanship, and so dolled up that the girl and her parent, who wouldn't have her marrying a penni- less sailor, never knew him until he revealed him- self in this dramatic fashion. One song of Billy Wright's developed an intrigue, wherein the hus- band, surprising the lover, who went out of the (line drawing of an old man playing a fiddle and stomping his foot) (caption) THE MINSTRAL. window, was recompensed and revenged on finding himself in possession of "more than a hundred pounds and a glorious pair of breeches. Tol, lolly dingdong, doddle O day, and A glorious pair of breeches." So the cash balance was on the side of virtue. Let it ever be thus. FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 53 Uncle Billy sang with pathos, while his fiddle made a harmonious noise: "Oh, my name was Robert Kidd, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, Oh, my name was Robert Kidd, as I sail'd; My sinful footsteps slid, God's laws they did forbid; But still wickedly I did, as I sail'd. I'd a Bible in my hand, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, I'd a Bible in my hand, as I sail'd; I'd a Bible in my hand by my father's great command, And I sunk it in the sand, as I sail'd. I murdered William Moore, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, I murdered William Moore, as I sail'd; I murdered William Moore, and I left him in his gore, Not many leagues from shore, as I sail'd." The refrain "As I sailed, as I sailed" haunted the reverie of men as that other ghost "Long, long ago, long ago" troubled the subconscious state of women. I have heard a woman do her whole morning's work to that dolorous monotony; and if "As I sailed" got into a man's head it would stay until there was a change of weather. Other characters seen no more on those roads are the pack peddler, the codger, and the man who drove the tincart. The minstrel with his stringed in- strument and the peddler with his fardel had sur- vived from the middle ages. The codger gave way to the tramp who jumped freight trains. The tin- cart, like the wooden Indian in front of the cigar stores, disappeared for some subtle reason I cannot name. The junkman still goes his rounds in the sub- urbs and in the residence sections of cities. I believe that my old neighborhood changed more in the few 54 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT years after I left it than it had prior to then in all the decades since the Revolution. 3 -- I GO OUT TO WORK. In April, 1870, I went definitely out to work. A young farmer who had got land and a house and taken a wife, wanted a boy and came for me. Since that spring I have never been jobless, never applied for work, never had the experience nor the feeling of being unemployed. Except for Sundays, holi- days, and a half dozen vacations, a day's work has always been ahead of me when I arose. This place, in the edge of Walpole, was three miles away from Clement's and some hundreds of feet higher up, and even that was not the, "height of land," for wherever you go in New Hampshire there is more altitude just beyond. This able-bodied, handsome and intelligent young agriculturist, my employer, idled his evenings playing with a cat in his lap. At my former home we had rushed for a book when supper was over, but in this house there was no book. The Youth's Companion that came to the young wife I saw only when she enlisted my help to work out the charades. She called me into, the house sometimes from a distance if her husband was away, and asked me the names of authors, rivers, cities, and so on, not occurring to her. I en- joyed these hours and worked faster to make up for them when I got back to the field. Here was a mismated couple that should have had a trial mar- riage first, or at least have followed the custom of their forebears who sampled knowledge before they FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 55 became life subscribers. They had been different- ly nurtured, he on a rough hill farm, and she in a home at the outskirts of a city where there was plenty of "company" and a division of household duties. Here, where her married life began, was a lonely place, no neighbor within call, and all the work to do that was known to a farmer's wife -- washing, baking, churning, sweeping, getting to- gether a "mess of vittles" three times a day, and answering a call into the field occasionally in haying time. And he worked harder than she did. When- ever a horse was free from the team, she fretted to go visit her parents five miles away, pref- erably Saturday night and over Sunday, with her husband left at home. She was unsocial with him: one saw her evading him by day, and heard her angry outcries at night. Things went to smash the first year. Some would not say it was lucky, but so it appears to me, that the teacher of the fall school came to board with them -- a fine big girl who had lure and desire. She fell in love with the little wife. (The wife was so diminutive that when she took a husband they said he would have to shake the sheets to find her.) And the husband fell in love with the school teacher, and she reciprocated there also. That would have been an ideal match, for they were a couple of mated birds. There was need no longer for the wife to evade him, nor occasion for her noc- turnal murmurings. However, a woman can be jealous if she can't be loving. Except in the love game, persons who have rejected a proffered art- icle are indifferent who gets it. My employer's wife, 56 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT on the contrary, begrudged this girl -- who always managed to put herself in line to be held for a hug or chased for a kiss -- the possession of the husband she herself did not appear to want. The girl be- came an eyesore and a bore, while the husband's evident content was more than the wife could bear. She went home to her mother and stayed until the teacher, seeing it was improper for her to remain without another woman in the house, went some- where else to board. Happily, the breach was mended before it got too bad for repair. Some wise woman must have given the wife valuable counsel, for in a few months she returned to her spouse; and whereas there had previously been no child or prospect of one, now there was one within the year, and others followed closely. The teacher married. It would not surprise me if she rejoiced in the thought that she had united man and wife, as was the fact, and had fun herself while performing that benevolent deed. Three marriages are known to man -- the trial marriage, the companionate marriage, and marriage; and yet there are not three marriages, but one, and that is a trial marriage no matter what you call it. I have observed, living together, couples who were married and also couples who were not. All mani- fested the same devotion on an average, the excess of it, if any, being on the side of the unwedded. And they all had the same troubles. 4 -- A WOMAN OF SIMPLE SPEECH. A strange lady lived nearby, there in Walpole -- one known to a considerable distance abroad -- if I FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 57 may use the words of Howells, characterizing a cer- tain piece by Mark Twain -- for her "breadth of parlance." Mrs. Chandler Wilbur, she was, an ex- ponent of the four-letter words. In our sophisti- cated speech, when speaking about the things of the flesh, we use words of three or four syllables, and of as many letters as may be needed to spell them. Mrs. Wilbur, in such emergencies, used no more than four letters and one syllable. Mrs. Angela T. Heywood, a Massachusetts woman of the past cen- tury, wrote much in advocacy of a return to these simple forms, and even ventured to print one of the least innocent of them. Mrs. Heywood may not have employed the terms in social intercourse, but this Walpole lady did, and they added piquancy to her conversation, unrestrained as it was by the presence of mixed company, young or old, friends or strangers. This foe of euphemism and verbal artificialities was a good woman withal, and the mother of men. The neighborhood contained no prettier or more modest girl than her little grand- daughter. Regarding Mrs. Heywood and her simplified vo- cabulary I find the following from the pen of Stephen Pearl Andrews in The Truth Seeker of August 11, 1883, more than a dozen years after Mrs. Wilbur had pointed the way to freedom from the babyish and silly restrictions against which the Princeton lady rebelled. Having visited the Hey- wood home and had conversation with Angela, Mr. Andrews wrote as follows: "Mrs. Heywood is in a very high degree mediumistic, in- spirational, and prophetic. Much of what she says and 58 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT does merely flows through her as an instrument of some power which seems determined to break up the babyish and silly prudery of the people, and so lead the way to the free discussion of all physiological and sex questions, although, still, she is herself in full harmony with her in- spirations. She is again utterly destitute of the sense of fear. She laughs and rollicks over what seems to the on- looker the edge of a fearful precipice. She would sooner see her beautiful home ruthlessly sacked, her children scat- tered, and be herself driven, as a drudge, into somebody's else kitchen than she would back down an inch from her full claim to the right to say her full thought in her own words." Mrs. Wilbur made no claim to being inspired, and only the affiliation of her form of speech to that of revelation warrants us in attributing to its splen- dors an occult source. The unlawfulness of the four-letter word where a sesquipedalian polysyllable might be used was the discovery of some one undoubtedly the enemy of direct speech. Had we not evidence of the fact in the existence of the various vice societies could we ever believe that the choice of one word instead of another might adversely affect a man's life, liber- ty, and prosperity? The thing is beyond reason. The long substitute word will inevitably in process of time become coarse. How, then, will careful talkers express themselves when education shall have made their now refined terms the familiar idiom of the vulgar? The Walpole lady's aforesaid breadth of par- lance was no sample of the verbal tastes and habits of the New England women of her generation or the next. The contrast is beyond description. The FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 59 women affected a niceness that embarrassed them and cramped their powers of expression. It was ungenteel, for example, for one of them to say bull. I heard my cousin Stephen's wife speak of the male Holstein in her husband's herd as "the animal." My aunt Louisa, who in a flash of temper used a biblical word, felt so bad over the slip that she went away and cried. Sensitiveness to all that is revolt- (line drawing of an old woman smoking a pipe and knitting.) (caption) MY GRANDMOTHER PREFERRED A PIPE. ing ran in the family, my grandmother being so afflicted, even though she indulged the now unfem- inine habit of smoking a pipe, which I often lit with pieces of split shingle kept on a shelf over the fireplace for that purpose. But when grandmother's mind decayed at the age of 95, what a change took place! All the repressions of a lifetime were un- loosed, and she chatted affably and familiarly on forbidden themes. Told one day that the minister was calling, she asked not to be left alone with him, 60 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT as she not only questioned the safety of any woman in his presence, but doubted he was sound. All this being true of my respectable old grandmother, it might be true of all the saints who happen not to have liberated their thoughts while with us. Do they ponder life, then, and the things of the flesh in terms they permit themselves not to utter? And if the mind is the soul, what a load the unexpur- gated one must carry to the blest abode! 5 -- I LEARN OF UNCLE ELIPHAZ FIELD. Before the season ended in Walpole I knew that my next place was to be with Uncle Eliphaz and Aunt Lucia Field in the South end of Surry. Un- cle Eliphaz was grandfather to the children of two families in the neighborhood, and Lucia was the spinster aunt. One of the younger set, Sarah Ellis, dwelt with them and taught the school I attended in the little building just beyond the garden fence. The old gentleman was older than the Constitution of the United., States, having been born but one decade after Independence. Any man above the age of seventy used to be spoken of as a "link" be- tween the present century and the, last. Uncle Eli- phaz, having seen and admired the world so wide, found pleasure in relating his reminiscences for my benefit, while I equally rejoiced to hear them. When company came Aunt Lucia warned me not to start her father agoing. Visitors from Boston surrounded the table on a day I call to mind when he was moved to give his experiences among the Indians. Now I had seen Indians in Maine in 1863. They were FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 61 basketmakers, to be met on the road, shouldering to market a bunch of baskets half the size of a load of hay and scaring horses into the ditch. But my con- ception of the noble red man had been drawn from the books published by Mr. Beadle. The word In- dians brought to my vision brave and dignified war- riors of lofty mien, wearing eagle feathers from the top of the head down the back, bearing a bow, and sporting blankets and moccasins picturesquely beaded. As I wished this impression confirmed I asked him how his Indians were dressed. Imme- diately I knew it was a social error, for he replied: "Some of the younger ones didn't wear nothin'," and he mentioned the consequent exposures of both kinds. Aunt Lucia looked at me in pain and be- wilderment, as if it were beyond her to understand why boys should be so indiscreet and untimely in asking for information. That winter was a round of doing chores, and going to school. The following summer, working for Henry T. Ellis, brother-in-law of Aunt Lucia, and on the same farm, I actually earned wages -- no less than $25 for the season. Mr. Ellis was a thinking man with an intellectual curiosity about things, one of the few my boyhood knew, and together we discussed weighty subjects as we worked. He used to pooh- pooh the pieties I brought from Sunday school and from the reading of religious papers; but he noted my advancement at school; told me to come around when I reached college age, and he would help me to see how far I could go. But instead of going to college I went into a printing-office. 62 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT The winter following we buried Uncle Eliphaz, who died one day at 88, just after I had filled and lit his last pipe. It was the first time I had come personally into touch with the hour and article of death. The Unitarian "Priest" White of Keene preached the sermon, standing in the doorway be- tween two big rooms of the old farmhouse that was built generations before for a tavern. He read that all the days of man were three score years and ten, or if by reason of strength he be four score, and so on. And then I went out and did the chores and life went on without Uncle Eliphaz. The family was Unitarian. There had once been a Unitarian society in Surry, and this old house held the rem- nants of its small library. The books were too dry for me. 6 -- REMINDERS OF MORTALITY. On the road that ran back of this house, and close by the schoolhouse, the forefathers had walled in a small graveyard, where perhaps fifty of them lay buried. The dates on the slate-colored stones, along with comic 'sculptured angels, ran back into the seventeenth century and seemed to me as remote as creation. One, emigrant was there -- "Samuel Mc- Curdy, born in the north of Ireland, in the county of Antrim and the parish of Abobel." Verses were inscribed appropriate to young and old. For a young woman: "When blooming youth is snatched away By death's resistless hand, We to the dust the tribute pay That pity doth command." FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 63 And the visitor was reminded of his mortality: "As you are now, so once was I" -- Words to humble the proud and to show them they were common clay. The graveyard bank on the side next to the road had been washed by a century of rains, till at least one grave was un- covered, and the small bones came to the surface. @@@@ (line drawing showing a skull in a wall where a stone had been remived and a boy sitting and looking at it.) (caption) THE SKULL IN THE WALL. In time a skull followed, and rather than that it should lie there exposed, all the privacy of the grave invaded, I unearthed the skull completely and placed it in a hole in the wall where a stone had fallen out. While I remained in the neighborhood I went of- ten to visit with that poor Yorick and to muse on what and when he might have been in life. Some- body, doubtless the doctors, had sawed off the top of his head, just as the stem-end of a pumpkin is excised to put in the candle for a jack-lantern. The sawn-off piece was there and could be lifted for a view of the brain cavity. 64 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT On that farm lived a little girl named Mary Ellis, of my own age, who, with her features that were classical except for a nose which naturally turned up a bit, giving her a haughty air in the presence of boys, was a little beauty. But her soft eyes never lit up for me. In the year 1928, like myself, she is living on borrowed time, according to what Priest White read from the Bible at the funer- al of her grandfather. Well, years later Mary took the skull of Poor Yorick from the hole in the wall, put it in a box, and sent it to me in New York. Until I left for San Francisco in '87 it stood on the top of my desk, labeled, "He was a Good Man, but he would talk to the editor." It had disappeared when I returned from the West. What, I wonder, is the social or affective implication of a Skull sent by a young lady to a young man? CHAPTER IV. 1 -- THE TRAVELER'S GHOST. SWINBURNE'S three wreckers, "marriage and death and division," ended my stay with this excellent family. Uncle Eliphaz Field no longer sat in the sunny doorway, holding his cane upright in one hand while by its bent handle he turned it 'round and 'round with the other. He had read nothing, thought time wasted on "printing," and forbid me a candle when I had nothing to do but read. His death was the first break in the house- hold. Then Sarah, his granddaughter, got married and took Aunt Lucia to live with her in Brattleboro, Vermont. An abandoned house in that neighborhood had not been lived in for many years. When last occu- pied, by a family of strangers or foreigners, so the elder people said, a traveler passing that way had taken lodging in the house at nightfall, and had never been seen again. The family soon moved away. That the traveler may have been murdered in his bed, at first a suspicion, grew into a theory and a legend and then was accepted as a fact. Every- body that could deny it had died. Inevitably the ghost of the dead man took possession of the prem- ises; it had indeed been seen at night wandering 65 66 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT through the vacant rooms by the light of a candle carried in its hand. At length, as nobody would live in the house, it was taken down and the lum- ber piled or carried off. But the barn on the prem- ises they left standing, and rather than give up the ghost, the believers averred that the traveler done away with in the house now occupied the barn, as his candle, to be seen shining through the cracks between the boards, proved aplenty. When I stayed in the employ of Uncle Eliphaz, or with his daughter Lucia, they sometimes sent me to the village on an errand, after supper and the chores were over. The village lay a mile and a half away, and the walk there and back took an hour. I enjoyed it greatly. Every boy likes to go to the village. But in the fall, when the days were shortening, it began to be dark before I got home, and I had to pass this "haunted" barn, walking on the other side of the road, of course, yet keeping an eye on the building to see the light the ghost carried. And one night I saw it before I got within ten rods of the place. I had not much courage, day or night, but I had curiosity. I felt willing to see a ghost or anything else if it did not see me first. So I crossed the road, ducked under the rail that was laid across the gap in the stone wall where the "Pair of bars" used to be, and, making no sound with my bare feet, got close to the barn-doors and looked through the crack between them. Then I saw that the light was but a lantern, standing on a box; and seated beside it, on a milking-stool, was an old fellow I knew, husking corn. Well, I had been that kind of a ghost myself, husking corn by FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 67 lantern-light, and I felt cheap. If I had ran away without looking I should have been a believer in ghosts at least until daylight the next morning. 2 -- MOVING ON. But already my next home was in view -- with Aunt Polly Abbott, widow of Daniel, and her in- valid daughter Mary Ann, in a large house a few moments' walk north of Surry village. Aunt Polly, aged and obese, needed a boy to build the fire in the morning, supply the stove with wood, and run her errands. That was about all. There was no continuous work for me, and I went to school. The invalidism of Mary Ann originated in a broken heart. The young man whom she was engaged to marry fell in the Civil War, which seemed to me farther away then than it does now, and left her a maiden forlorn. But Mary Ann was in my opinion the victim of her own romantic ideas that had become a possessive mania and a chronic disease. She was extremely religious; had the minister there to pray with her every week. A modern doctor would have had her out of that bed in a month, and maybe an enterprising minister would have had her in another. The piety of the house- hold found its outward and visible sign in my at- tendance at church, prayer-meetings, and Sunday school, where I made my best record as a student of the New Testament. The teacher of the boys' class, named Herman Streator, asked us to answer this one: "How was it possible for four different men, unacquainted with one another's work, to write the four gospels and make their statements 68 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT agree perfectly?" He was obliged to give the an- swer himself, and he did it perhaps reverently, anyhow under his breath, as though it had been something improper but which a boy ought to know: "It was inspiration. The writers of the gospels were inspired." I trust he spoke in ignorance of the gospels' many inconsistencies. I now feel that I should have liked to put John Remsburg's "The Christ" into his hands, and then, naming four pupils after the evangelists, let him ask questions while the boys answered them according to their gospels. 3 -- I SUFFER OPPRESSION. The life I led at Aunt Polly's was physically enervating. All it meant to me was sawing a little wood, shoveling a good deal of snow, and going for the milk, groceries, and mail. Her devotion to the cooking habit provided me with more food than any boy needs. She had two or three prosperous sons, one of them a big man in the county. Their ad- vice to me when they visited their mother negatived too much exertion in the form of work -- an ob- vious sarcasm unless they referred to my endeavors at the table. Slowly as time passes with the young, those days of ease came at length to an end. A close neighbor named Britton got, that spring, the idea that he could save money by having a boy to do a hired man's work, and he elected me for the experiment. In his barn there was a forty-foot tie-up, with fif- teen bovines to feed, eight of them cows to milk. Cleaning out the stable every morning caused me to FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 69 shovel nigh a cartload of green and very heavy manure. Just ahead loomed the sugaring to be done, and the summer's wood to be sawed. Brit- ton's interests took him much from home, early and late, which signified that Georgie did the chores. Has a boy of 14 the right to milk eight cows? some of them calling for a squeeze that would crack the nib on a scythe snath; others so holding out on him that it was like trying to strip milk from a rope's end? I stayed for the sugaring, wading in deep snow and guiding an ox sled to where the tapped maples dripped their sap into twelve-quart buckets. The days thawed and the nights froze. My @@@@ (line drawing of boy in a shirt and his pants standing alone) (caption) THE BOY WITH THE FROZEN PANTS. trousers, hung on the bedpost when I took them off, would stand alone in the morning. Shoving bare legs into those icy garments -- for that was before I had learned to wear underclothes -- imparted a chill to the nether members. Stockings and boots were never dry. The room I retired to at night by 70 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT the light of a candle showed bare walls except for one work of art, a picture, in pink and green, of a boy, with his surviving parent, visiting his mother's grave beneath a willow tree that wept over it. I hated that damned boy heartily with his trousers tied down and his little plug hat. At this place the food served to me was, for the first time in my life, inferior to that distributed to the rest of the family. Hitherto there had been none of that discrimination, or if so I had been insensible of it. Living, in those environs, was arranged on the principle that one man or woman was as good as another, as regards station. There were no ser- vants, male or female. The male employee on the farm rated as hired man, the female as hired girl, by the old-fashioned called a maid. The man and maid sat at the table, or in the "other room," with the family and with the family's company, being formally and ceremoniously introduced to the lat- ter. The girl would be a neighbor's daughter or the man a neighbor's son. They were never ob- seqtuous, no more than tractable, and at a word of fault-finding they quit. The claim of the undistinguished American that he was as good as anyone else loses its apparent egotism by reason of the American's admission that any other man is as good as he. "To good Ameri- cans," said the Chinese diplomat, Wu Tingfang, "not only are the citizens of America born equal, but the citizens of the world are also born equal." An exception as to station was the "bound" boy. A boy might be hound out to a farmer, working for his keep until he was of age, when FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 71 custom allowed that the man he lived with should give him a hundred dollars and a suit of clothes. While he automatically got his "time" and became his own master at twenty-one, he might forfeit the bonus and have his time earlier. Nobody bothered to treat him differently from the unbound, yet the distinction could be observed. They had an ances- tral repugnance for servitude. Some boys got their time from their fathers instead of waiting for their majority. The old man in that case put a para- graph in the papers saying he would no longer col- lect the boy's wages or be responsible for his debts. One fellow I knew said he wished his dad had done this for him, because, he grumbled, "I was married before I'd got to be twenty-one, and so I never really had my time." An elderly woman, in the position of an aunt and a dependent, took sides with me against an overload of work, here at Britton's, and coming to me sur- reptitiously when I was sawing wood, advised me to "cut stick and run." I cut the stick I was work- ing on, and then, feeling sorry for myself, began to blubber. With that spell of weeping I took leave of my childhood, even as I took leave of Mr. Britton. 4 -- JUST KEEPING STEADY AT IT. As always, a place was provided for me and Wait- ing, and as one liberated from servitude I went. I had been a misfit in that environment. From my stay there I cannot recover a single incident to be recreated as a pleasant recollection. Such is not 72 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT true of the others, and I would delight to go back to any of them if I could. That Britton proposi- tion was like the illustrious cold potato with no warm side. I dropped down the road a mile or two and worked that season out for Edmund Wood- ward, a solid and sedate old agriculturist with a gem of a farm. Nothing there dimmed the bright visions of one who took life for a picnic. The old man required only that, having started to work for him, I should "keep steady at it." He observed hours of labor, as was not the rule on farms. He began the day at 5 o'clock in the morning and ended it by knocking off at 6 P.M., two hours before sundown in summer time. At this house, when days were long, there was "baiting," that is, eating between meals. Mrs. Woodward shot food aboard the table in a way to make the eyes stick out first, and then the waistband -- good food, well cooked, and plenty of it. Mr. Woodward called her Mother. About the house he conducted himself like an obedient boy. I conceived she needed correction for scraping iron cooking utensils with a silver spoon that had got worn out of its original ovoid form by such usage; but no man ever changed a woman's way of doing her work. Mrs. Woodward said "Humph!" and that was all. She kept on scraping the cooking utensils with her thin silver spoons. If her silverware passed to any of her descendants, they will know why one edge of her spoons is straight. They said of Mr. Woodward that he was saving of his money, yet for a New Hampshire farmer saving is a defensive instinct. He was just to me, if not generous. His birthday FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 73 fell on the Fourth of July. No one would believe he gave me the day and bought me the powder to celebrate the anniversary of independence, and technically he did not. When I told him I wanted to celebrate his birthday, he bought me the powder. It followed that, with a double-barreled shotgun of large caliber, I awoke the countryside at earliest dawn. While he was not quite a link with the past century, Mr. Woodward remembered the cold sum- mer of 1817, when the hands in the hayfield shel- tered themselves from the chilling winds by sitting on the sunny side of a bank to eat their baiting. Woodward, with his tuning-fork and his musical "do," pitched the tune for the church choir. An- other hand working for him awhile that summer was Joe Jolly, who divertingly turned handsprings @@@@ (line drawing of two boys, one doing handsprings) (caption) JOE TURNED HANDSPRINGS. on his way to the hayfield or did horizontal bar work on the pole across the big barndoors. I simply 74 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT revered him. And yet Joe never was a mere gym- nast. "No," he said, "when I followed the circus I was the Chandelier." I assumed a Chandelier might be an Entertainer, perhaps a Vocalist. He indeed had a song which he sang with feeling: "The spring had come, the flowers had bloomed, The birds sang out their lay; Down by the littul running brook, I first saw Maggie May. . . . Singing all the day How I loved her none can tell Littul Maggie May." In after years I inquired of another ex-circus man what duties went with the title or decoration of Chandelier. He replied that the Chandelier took care of the lamps and hauled them up the center pole, of the tent to illuminate an evening's per- formance. Here, to the house of Woodward, his grandfather, came by coincidence the Sanger boy and his sister, now of Boston, who had been schoolmates with me ten years before. Their cousin, a large fat girl, took her vacation with the old folks at the same time. I stared at the girls without lighting a re- ciprocating eye. The boy came to me one day with the story that the girls were dressed in boys' clothes, the Sanger girl in her brother's, and the other, I supposed, in my Sunday suit, which young Sanger intimated she overflowed. Unhappily, I missed sight of that innocent masquerade, and the regret I nour- ished has never been assuaged. Today a fat girl poured into a pair of trousers, or knickers, is no sight that a man or boy would go far out of his FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 75 way to view. All things come to him who waits, though they may not come up to expectations, for age never compensates the lost opportunities of youth. I learn that the Sanger boy is now a resi- dent of Jamaica Plain, Boston. 5 -- OVER THE HILL TO EAST WESTMORELAND. My wages that summer were $10 per month. Having seen Mr. Woodward pay the money to my uncle, and then forgotten it, I light-heartedly trav- eled five miles in a westerly direction to earn $25 more by working over winter for Deacon Jonathan Shelley of the London district in East Westmore- land. It was hilly country. The early farmers anywhere near the Connecticut settled on the hills to avoid contact with the Indians, who made expe- ditions up and down the river. Here I gained some schooling also while school kept, with Millie Aldrich for teacher. I think of the able Millie with re- spect; for it fell out that on that day when I got into a fight with Wallace Keyser, a boy of my own age and size, and a tough nut at that, and was on the point of going to the floor with him, Millie grabbed one of us in each hand and flung Wallace one way and me the other. Wallace grinned as we recovered ourselves; but Millie was pouting and her mouth wore a smile on only one side; for on putting forth whatever horse power per minute she registered, she had ripped a sleeve of her dress at the armpit. That school is one of the considerable number of those country institutions where I spent a few weeks with my books that have long since been 76 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT abandoned and let fall into decay, or have entirely disappeared, leaving none but a few gray heads, apart from fading maps and records, to retain the knowledge they imparted, or to testify to the fact that they ever existed. Jonathan Shelley happened to be the first deacon I had ever worked for, and the last. He was a tremendously long-armed and long-legged individ- ual, with a short backbone and a rather small head at the top of it. His church, Christian by denomi- nation -- the first syllable pronounced Christ, the same as when that name is used alone -- stood in the Flat, down the hill less than half a mile away, and had as settled pastor the Rev. Jehiel Claflin. I enjoyed the religious privileges of that sanctuary. The deacon conducted family worship in the front room of his house every Sunday morning, and often on rainy days. He always read substan- tially the same scriptures, selecting that chapter of the book of Matthew which says that these shall go away into everlasting life and those into eternal damnation. The chapter treats of the occasion when Jesus shall sit as a coroner over the spiritual remains of mortals who are divided upon his right hand and upon his left, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. Those on the left were the goats. Having thus segregated them, Jesus said to the sheep on the one hand: "Come, ye blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world"; and to the other moiety: "Depart from me, ye cussed [so pronounced by Deacon Shelley], into everlastin' fire prepared for the devils and his anngels." (He said ann.) FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 77 The deacon seldom got out of this chapter. And having read the scriptures he knelt and prayed, with his elbows in the chair where his seat had been. He looked a good deal like a capital Z turned around and pushed up to the chair, save and except that his feet were larger in proportion than the serifs at the end of that letter. He thanked the Lord that we were still alive and on praying grounds and interceding terms for mercy. "We thank thee," he would say, "that thou hast so far spared our un- profitable lives that we live to see the comin' of another of thy Sabbath mornin's. We thank thee that while others have been stretched upon beds of sickness, we have been permitted to enjoy a tollable degree of health. ... Hear us in these our feeble supplications. Grant us each favor as we ask it as far as is consistent with thy will; and finally save us in thy comin' kingdom, there to praise God and the lamb, world without end. Amen." Those phrases were his reliance. In the course of the prayer he asked God to bless "our wife" and urged the merciful Christ to delay his judgment on the recreant youth there present who was carelessly putting off acceptance of the begotten son of God as his personal savior. Out of curiosity I once asked Deacon Shelley if he thought I should go to hell, and he gave me to understand that he was quite certain of it. Deacon Shelley had a workshop where, in earlier times, he had made ox bows, casks, buckets, and piggins. A piggin is a small wooden bucket, of capacity from two quarts to a gallon, with one stave sticking up far enough to be used as a handle. His 78 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT chief output in my day was axe helves and hammer handles, his steady market being the Cheshire Rail- road. The helves and handles used in that vicinity bore his brand, "J.S.", or "C.W.", which latter stood for Chandler Wilbur, husband of the Walpole lady addicted to four-letter words. Choppers gravely discussed the reasons for preferring the J.S. or the C.W. axe-helve. Reeving, hewing, shav- ing, scraping, and sandpapering these articles was rainy-day and evening work. By such creative in- dustry I earned what Deacon Shelley paid me for allowing him to board me and send me to school. The various handles I made were so like his that no one could tell the difference. I sledded the bolts for them from a distance; went with him into an adjacent swamp to cut the black-ash saplings to be split into barrel hoops. While gathering the little black ashes I came near witnessing the fall from grace of Deacon Shelley; for I knew and he knew that we were poaching on Daniel Aldrich's prem- ises; and more than that, in cutting the little trees so low that the stumps would not appear, he chopped into a rock with his best axe, and uttered the oath, "By heavens!" 6 -- NEW AND TRUE LIGHT ON CHURCHES. The church at the Flat had its large day when a preacher named Emerson Andrews came from somewhere "below." Points south were below, and going to Massachusetts was "going down below." This man came and conducted the services, and none of the congregation remained away. A circus could FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 79 scarcely have drawn better than this eccentric preacher. From the time and place of its origin I have calculated that, he belonged to the same family as Stephen Pearl Andrews of New York, who was raised in Hinsdale. An excellent farmer's wife named Andrews in that locality had sons who were approaching manhood sixty or seventy years ago, or so the story goes; and when she was asked about their prospects, she replied that the outlook for all but one of them was far from bright for only the oldest was worth anything on the farm. The next oldest son threw his time away reading books, an- other had begun clerking in a lawyer's office with small promise of making anything of himself; the third sawed on a fiddle from morning till night, and the fourth, expecting to be a minister, was calling worthless sinners to repentance already. So she had but the one promising son out of the "passle," the son who stayed at home and worked the land. The rest of the story of this Andrews family tells that the bookish boy became the presi- dent of a university (E. Benjamin Andrews); the law clerk governor of Connecticut; the fiddler a great musician known in Europe and America; and the one with a hortatory complex, if the story is authentic, might be identified as this Emerson An- drews who preached at the Flat. I listened to him, but don't remember a word he said. What I dis- tinctly recollect is that he sat in the pulpit before the afternoon meeting began and sang: 80 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT "Blow ye the trumpet, blow, The gladly solemn sound; Let every nation know, To earth's remotest bound, The year of jubilee has come, Return, ye ransomed sinners, home." That was more than half a century ago, and the hymn may have been sung for half a century be- fore then. There was no sign of the jubilee that season, nor has any been seen since. It was a false alarm. There was no observable correspondence between the subjective order of thought and the objective order of phenomena; but in religious things there never is. In that town of Hinsdale, pronounced Hensdil, whence the preacher came, a mill or factory stood beside the Ashuelot river. One of its hands, a young woman deriving her inspiration from the turbulent stream, turned out a quite well known poem while employed there. The poem began: "Over the river they beckon to me, Loved ones who've crossed to the farther side: The gleam of their snowy robes I see, But their voices are lost in the rushing tide." The river which was the Ashuelot ran downhill rapidly at that point, in a hurry to empty its waters into the Connecticut, and was indeed noisy enough to interrupt conversation. No trace of Catholicism appeared in any of the places where I lived, outside of Keene; but Keene was a city, and all degraded forms of humanity gather in those haunts of iniquity. However, at the Flat was an Irish section hand (employed by FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 81 the Cheshire Railroad), who knew all about it and could tell me how "these here Prodestant churches" stood as compared with the true one. He had asked whether I ever had been baptized, and learning I had not, shook his head sadly and repeated, "Too bad, too bad, too bad!" Of course I asked why. "I will tell you, said this man, whose name I dis- remember except that it was Pat. "Ye see, it is this way. The Catholic church is the spouse of Jasus Christ, and Jasus is no Mormon to have more than one wife. Yer mother was yer father's wife, wasn't she, and what would other women be if he had 'em? They'd be just what all the churches be except the true one -- they're all hoors." Residents of those rural areas knew of Catholicism as "the Irish religion," distinguishing it from Christianity. George Patten of Westmoreland more than once uttered the prediction that if there was ever another war in this country, it would be, by Godfrey, be- tween these two, Christianity and Catholicism. This man George Patten at times fell into profane and unlicensed anecdotes and speech. He was, I think, the author of a story about the deathbed of Ethan Allen. Anyhow, he told it. As it ran, the minister said comfortingly to the dying man: "The angels are waiting for you, Colonel Allen." And the hero of Ticonderoga shot at the ghostly coun- sellor the last beam of his closing eye as he re- sponded: "Well, God damn 'em, let 'em wait." Colonel Allen lived to utter a few more mild cuss words, and then passed to his reward. Knowledge of the institution of the papacy had escaped my inquiring mind until I was ten years 82 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT old. The geography used in the school that sum- mer asked the question, "For what is the city of Rome distinguished?" The pupils who answered said: "As the residence of the Pope." That word "pope" raised a laugh. None of us had intent to show disrespect toward the sovereign pontiff, what- ever he might be, but that word pope was irresist- ibly funny. The fellow wearing the title vaguely existed in my thought for a moment as a superior kind of magician, an entertainer, because he gave audiences, which idea was again obscure to me; or a man rather more like God than the ringmaster at the circus with his high hat and swallowtail coat. Hence, when a year or two later the Vatican council affirmed the dogma of the pope's infallibility and my mother sent to the New Hampshire Sentinel some comments on that subject, I must suffer in silence while the ribald made merry over the locu- tion "infallibility of the pope," which seemed to me just letters of the alphabet spilt on paper. CHAPTER V. 1 -- THE DEACON AND I. DEACON SHELLEY stimulated a boy's en- ergies and accelerated production at his hands by praising him. Mrs. Shelley be- lieved that the more a boy ate the more work he would do. I trust I justified their methods. I knew not then what it meant to be tired after a day's work. One might be tired while working; but when a man complained, "I'm tired tonight," after work was over, I missed the sense of the remark. Tired, and doing nothing! It was too much for me. Work and weariness went together, but they ended at the same time. The deacon, when chores were done, could doze in his chair; I craved diversion, excite- ment, and found both at Thompson's general store down to the Flat, where men and boys gathered for exchange of thoughts and competition in feats of strength and agility. Deacon Shelley viewed this dissipation as the beginning of the downward path towards perdition; yet as all hired men were sup- posed to have their liberty evenings, he lacked au- thority to forbid my going there or even my atten- ding a dancing school on Mutton Hill; tuition 25 cents a lesson; music by Ambrose & Higgins's Orchestra. That was a one-piece orchestra; the performer, Am- brose Higgins, fiddler. The Deacon refused me an 83 85 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT advance of two dollars for lessons, on the ground that it would make him party to a form of frivolity if not of sin. Still, I found the money where some- one had put it, on the lightstand by my bed, and asked no questions. The pupils at the dancing school were young. The girls, slender and uncor- seted, seemed too soft and fragile for rough hands to grab in the hurried turning of partners and cor- ners. There were, however, no injuries among them traceable to that cause. Having been raised sister- less, I had no familiar knowledge of the nature of girls. Thoughts were engendered in my mind by hearing one say to her partner: "I don't like to be swung off my feet -- not clear off, only almost, not quite." As to girls without their encircling bar- ricades, I doubt they donned them at that time as young as they now put on the next-to-nothing cor- set. On a vacation ten years later, I went to town with a farmer who had a daughter of 16 or 17. While he did his trading at the store, I asked him to suggest some useful gift of remembrance I might send home to his folks. Falling in with the idea as a good one, he remembered that the little girl had been talking lately about a pair of corsets, so long as other girls of her age were wearing them; hence he concluded, "I dunno but what they'd suit better'n anything else you could buy." I bought em, along with a bag of candy, binding him to say only the candy was my contribution to the happiness of his little girl. The town spelling schools were held there on Mutton Hill. A school teacher, two ministers, and FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 85 a doctor went down at the one I contested, and left me spelling words selected from the familiar Latin and French phrases in the back part of the book. @@@@ (photo-engraving of a serious looking young man) (caption) COMING SIXTEEN AND SPELLING GOOD. "Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back that brow? Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? The term with Deacon Shelley went far enough into the spring of 1873 for me to help him shingle his wagon shed, a half-roofed building annexed to the barn. The job had a thrilling finish. The dea- con nailed on the last course of shingles, tied them with a narrow board beveled and nailed down, and had unshipped all the staging but one bracket toed into the shingles, when his feet escaped from be- neath him and he sprawled face downward on the 86 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT roof, catching hold of that last bracket to save him- self from going over the eaves. At the moment this befell, I was some distance away, carrying the old shingles into the woodshed. I heard his yell; saw what had happened, and slowly moved toward the scene. The ladder, which he repetitiously ordered me to fetch, was leaning against the eaves a dozen, feet from where those large extremities of his were waving in an impossible attempt to reach it. As there seemed to be no immediate danger that he would let go of the bracket, and as he was per- fectly safe while he held on, I continued to move with moderation. I sensed that I was in the pres- ence of a situation promising much that could be communicated to the neighbors with advantage to my reputation, as a recounter. The faculty of ob- servation and description which afterwards was to help me as reporter, then and there began to de- velop. I lingered to fix in my mind such features of this occasion as I thought would be most appre- ciated by Uncle Lewis Aldrich and old Zeke Wood- ward, who lived up the street and were prone to draw me out on the traits and peculiarities of Uncle Jock (for so they called my employer). Meanwhile the Deacon on the roof demanded the ladder with his voice and searched for it with his feet. Hav- ing placed the ladder where it touched him, I leis- urely ascended it, noting by the way how the view off toward Mount Gilboa and Albert Chickering's place improved as I gained altitude. Then, arriv- ing at the proper height, I assembled Uncle Jock's feet and put them on the nearest round. Now the FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 87 doubt arose in his mind that he could let go his hold on the bracket and not slide against the ladder with enough impetus to tip it over backwards. He referred the question to my judgment. One could see, I reflected, that the factors of the problem were force, motion, and equilibrium. If in sliding to the eaves he gathered force enough to impart motion to the ladder, disturbing its equilibrium and carrying it past its center, then its top, with him on it, would describe an arc over the lane and above the wall on the other side and land him in the Greening tree, when he could come down out of its top in the way we did last fall when we picked the apples. "Consarn yon, you young tyke," said the Deacon, "you go to work and shore up the ladder with one of them long boards." I did better by bringing a trace-chain and making the ladder fast to a tie-ring stapled to the corner of the building. With his feet on the ground again he sent me up to pry the bracket off the roof. He had the impulse, he owned, to carry off the ladder and leave me up there. 2 -- A DIGRESSION. When I wrote the name of Albert Chickering a few moments ago, my mind strayed far from the incident then being related. Yes, over west across the valley, off the Gully road, on the brow of Mount Gilboa, lived Albert Chickering, a most substantial citizen, who had more cattle, they said, than he ever stopped to count, and owned, as they also said, "all the land that joined him." Does the unpredictable 88 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT occur? Does it? About fifteen years later I was in line to be Albert's son-in-law, and silk for the wedding gown was in hand when the lure of pub- lishing a paper in San Francisco put the breadth of a continent between me and a very sweet girl who had courage stronger than her family's confi- dence in my future. She would almost have been a man's fortune in herself, for the Chickerings were thrifty and forehanded property-acquiring people. The girls taught school and invested their pay. This one married in due time, raised a family of bright children and died some years ago. One of her boys and one of mine were fellow gobs in the navy in 1917. They called each other cousin. When Albert Chickering was an old man (he lived past ninety), he went to hear Ingersoll lecture. I judged that the lecture to which he had listened was "Which Way?" the one that closes with a vis- ion of the future and a picture of the present, thus: "I see a world at war, and in the storm and chaos of the deadly strife thrones crumble,, altars fall, chains break creeds change. The highest peaks are touched with holy light. The dawn has blossomed. I look again. I see discoverers sailing across mys- terious seas. I see inventors cunningly enslave the forces of the world. I see the houses being built for schools. Teachers, interpreters of nature, slowly take the place of priests. Philosophers arise, thinkers give the world their wealth of brain and lips grow rich with words of truth." When asked how these sentiments fell in with his habit of thought, Mr. Chickering answered: FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 89 "Gosh! Bob Ingersoll said just what I've been saying all my life; and darned if he didn't say it in the same words." 3 -- IT SAVED FIREWOOD, ANYHOW. Uncle Lewis Aldrich who is mentioned above as one who drew amusement from hearing of the notional ways of "Uncle Jock," was kin, probably uncle, to Nelson Aldrich, the Rhode Island poli- tician who, having in time got into the United States Senate, provided some place such as doorkeeper for another nephew, one Wes Aldrich, then our neigh- bor. In the days of the Fourth New York Liberal League I read before that society a paper on "New England and the People Up There." Into that youthful forensic effort I introduced the story how, when I drew the cider one evening there at Deacon Shelley's, and when melted tallow, dropping from the candle into the piggin, floated on the surface of the cider, an old fellow said to me: "I wish the next time you would bring the cider in one thing and the tarler in another, and let me mix 'em to suit myself." That was Uncle Lewis. All the old fellows were uncles or aunts to young and aged. He spent many a winter evening in Aunt Nancy Shelley's kitchen, 'droning over the topics of the times, past and present. I was reading a book by "Boz" (be- hind which name Dickens had concealed from me his authorship of the work) and I looked up at hear- ing Uncle Lewis's comment on Aunt Nancy's re- mark that a baby just born in the neighborhood 90 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT was "a long time coming" -- two or three years after the parents were married to each other. Uncle Lewis had said to Aunt Nancy: "It's different now to what it was. There ain't a man on this road but what didn't have his wife in a thrivin' way be- fore he married her." Mrs. Shelley smiled at the stocking she was darning. The deacon didn't smile at anything. I promptly asked: "How about Uncle Daniel Abbott, over in Surry? He lived on this road when he was married." Uncle Lewis waved his hand: "Same as the rest." The answer surprised and disappointed me. I didn't believe it. I had heard Aunt Polly go on about such doings; and I told Uncle Lewis I guessed if he knew what she said of girls that set the neigh- bors to talking about them, he would think differ- ent. For to tell the truth Aunt Polly said, "The sluts!" whereat her daughter Mary Ann would turn wide-open eyes on me as being present, and check her with an admonitory "Mother!" But Aunt Polly was only doing her duty. How could the old edify the young except by pointing out that their conduct is unprecedented? But the method isn't infallible, since the young, by reading or thinking, find out that their respected elders, now so ready to give advice, were once at the less blessed receiving end them-selves. Parents who inform their children they didn't carry on like that when they were young, mean only that they were told they shouldn't. To all young girls among my descendants who may be picked on I bequeath this: FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT 91 Take heart, dear child; or should you chance to stumble, While contrite toward yourself, don't be too humble When parents are severe and elders grumble: "Such things weren't done by lassies with their laddies When we were young -- such holding and such petting!" They tell it thus, conveniently forgetting What cut-ups were the grandmas and grand- daddies. I ran over mentally, the names of the elder off- spring begotten of this custom of their sires to which Uncle Lewis had recurred. They were then from fifty to sixty years old, setting back their births to 1820 and earlier. Aunt Polly's animadver- sions on the growing-up girls proclaimed her one in habit and sentiment with all generations before and since. No generation can grant anything to the crop of youngsters it is raising. Listen to this! In one of the plays of Vanbrugh (b. 1664) the vir- tuous Mrs. Cloggit exclaims: "Look you there now; to see what the youth of this age are come to." The lady was speaking of the youth of the seven- teenth century -- the century of our Puritan fore- fathers. And another of the same date protested: "Girls were not wont to do such things when I was young." Uncle Lewis, whose age linked him with the pre- vious century, had knowledge of an old custom practiced in rural New England, and divulged to 92 FIFTY YEARS OF FREETHOUGHT him partly by his forebears and somewhat by obser- vation, called "bundling." Theodore Schroeder, who has written much useful matter tracing the erotogenesis of religion, thinks this practice relig- ious in its origin. It may be, and yet one can see how easily it might arise out of the conditions, the