John Albee

“ How to make twenty-five cents take me into all was beyond my arithmetic; so I contented myself with spending ten cents on an exhibition of Albino children, white-haired, ivory-skinned and pink-eyed. Another ten cents admitted me to a collection of dwarfs and giants, the dwarfs mounted on the shoulders or heads of the giants. The remaining five cents let me into the best show of all, a learned pig that played cards and performed amusing tricks. For a good while I wished for nothing so much as a learned pig. But now my money was gone, and I was hungry as only a boy on a holiday can be. ”

“ Providence provides temporary bridges through life which commonly fall to pieces after we pass over them and are forgotten. It is not so with me; one bridge remains whole and more beautified by time—that on which I return to my native town. I require no daylight or lantern for the journey. Some men can number their happy days; I more often count my happy nights, when I soothe myself to repose by recalling the sweet and tender joys of childhood. I travel the roads and pastures or wade the brook hand in hand with Launa Probana.
There was no gate out of Bellingham in my childhood. ”

“ I believe that the Creator was thinking, when He planned it, as much of little boys and girls and poets as of the husbandman and craftsman. Echo loves to imitate our voice as much as we love to hear it; and shadows love to caricature our forms that we may laugh and even assist them; for if you stretch an arm between the sun and a snowbank shadow aids you with its comic pencil. It is no wonder the sad ghosts throw no shadow; there must be sunshine, life and joy or you cannot even living cast a pleasant one. I sometimes more admire the shadows in a painting than the figures or the scene. ”

“ It was an impossible undertaking to keep a coal alive on a walk of eight miles. Wrapping a piece of cotton cloth tightly about a small stick he ignited one end at his neighbor's hearth, and like an humble Prometheus carried the smouldering gift to his little world and its belated breakfast.
The kitchen was the favorite gathering place of humble New England families and it was there they were best seen and understood; there the spinning wheel hummed while the pot was boiling or the bannock baking; there stockings and boots were dried by the open fire and the latter daily greased. ”

“ There is no human experience more acutely painful than when one awakens to the fact that he is a person, an ego, unrelated to people or things, with no real claim to assert save that of habit or associations. The sense of isolation and loneliness is at first overpowering, and vainly does he try to attach himself to former objects and environment. The awakening may come in mature years, it may come in youth; but at what time it appears, the old heavens and the old earth crumble and the soul faces its own destiny and recognizes that it must walk alone. ”

“ How many trifles one carries through life from childhood days, by no effort of his own, things of the senses mostly, when these were unwritten tablets and blank for the first impressions. Upon these tablets are indelibly retained a certain box, a spool, a pair of stairs, the smell of a neighbor's house, when, with all my efforts, I cannot recover my father's voice and countenance, nor many another thing that would make a golden treasury of memory. Instead, it is more like the lumber of an old attic, or the contents of a boy's pocket. ”

“ Six marching clothes-pins are his army and conquer the world in an afternoon.
The dog still slept as I left the store, the merchant returned to his chair, the sun shone on in noontide splendor. No shadow fell from the Penniman mansion; it looked more lifeless and larger than ever. It seemed too large to me to live in and like a meeting-house. Not a leaf stirred on the great elm; the trim spires of the Lombardy poplars had folded their limbs upward to rest, as sometimes one does his arms. ”

“ When thrust back upon myself, defeated, hopeless, I have retreated to the scenes of my childhood where I could be triumphant and happy in possessions, of which I cannot be deprived, and that are beyond my own power to alienate. But that time is far in the future and I am contented with the walls of my present world now expanded to the hills of Mendon. Between them and me flows the Charles stream. It is impassible as far as I can see, yet I have heard and been warned of a bridge full of peril. It is, however, an incredible distance to that bridge—as much as a quarter of a mile. ”

“ Before cities and factories had begun to stir the ambition and attract the young by opportunities for fortune and fame, Bellingham was the home of an intelligent, liberty-loving people; a community self-sufficing, sharing its abundance with those less abounding. It was thus the best place in the world to be born about the first third of the last century—to be explicit, in eighteen hundred and thirty-three. And I wish that I and the companions of my childhood could have imitated Plutarch who said "I live in a little town and choose to live there lest it should become smaller." ”

“ A poor soil is usually porous, admitting more wholesome air and sunshine, and it is through these vital forces that trees and men grow taller and hardier. Thus do I like to compensate the sterile fields of my native place by their stalwart, thin, straight-backed citizens, all bone and muscle, living with undimmed eyes and ears to ripe old age, mowing their meadows to the last summer of their lives and dying conveniently in some winter month when work was slack.
The dial of my childhood marked none but sunny days; the dry air and drier earth of Bellingham gave me health and strength. ”

“ No weeds grew in his corn or rye; and his made hay seldom was wet. He scented a shower from as far away as the Mendon hills. He first taught me to notice the sweet perfume which a summer shower drives before it from afar, the combined perfume of wild flowers, trees and new mown grass.
There was always the promise held out that, after haying or the first hoeing, we should go a-fishing on Beaver Pond, and sometimes the promise was kept. He was a masterful trailer for pickerel; he put into it the same energy as into his axe and scythe. ”

“ I knew not then that shadows were the scoffing synonym for all unsubstantial vanities and day-dreams, or that other mystic conception that substance itself is but the shadow and reflection of the power which created it, or that light itself is but the adumbration of God. How good it is that the child is ignorant of so many things. It leaves room for the existence and growth of a mind, of an imagination which, in time, shall lead rather than follow the processes of reason ”

“ My sister returning home for her summer vacation, I continued to tease and coax until she consented to my wishes. My small trunk, covered with hairy cow hide, was packed with my few belongings, and with a gay heart I left the town and my mother's door never to return permanently, and as blind as a stone to what I was going away for; I was going—that was all that concerned me. There was no future; time does not exist for children; yesterdays are faint, tomorrows undreamed, today endless. Arriving in Norwich, at once, I felt at home. ”

“ Shall the squirrel hunt for nuts and the little sons of men be forbidden, just to save a new pair of breeches, or an old jacket? But the woes of country boyhood are naught in comparison to its joys, and a day in a berry field, or a morning among the chestnut trees, under the blue sky and a west wind, with merry companions, is a memory that outshines all the purchased pleasures of later life. ”

“ I had been as far as Mendon and found that the world did not end there, nor were there any hills even. They had moved themselves to the next horizon whitherto my fancies had flown. Disillusions increased with my height. A yardstick no longer measured to the top of my head; the score is now marked upon the jambs of the cellar door, and sometimes I cheat with yarn balls in the heels of my boots. I cannot grow fast enough to keep pace with my ambition. When I am larger, when I am a man, then I shall—could one but recover the predicate of those phrases! ”

“ I have heard closer speech, more sententious, more convincing and in more direct and forcible language in town meeting than from any other forum. Men are not so much ambitious of eloquence as they are to carry their point. There is often more fun, wit and sarcasm as well as logic than goes with more pretentious and popular rostrums. When the town-meeting is abolished freedom will have lost her humble but most powerful ally. When the town grows to a city all is lost; for our freedom and individual rights depend on direct and individual participation in public affairs. ”

“ In returning now, I find naught but the graves of my family, the elm of my childhood, fallen to the ground, its bleached trunk and larger limbs reminding me of a skeleton, the well filled with stones, and the Red House converted into a woodshed. The river still flows by; one great pine still murmurs and wonders what has become of the children once playing in its shade; the pond, the arched bridge which spanned its outflow are unchanged. ”

“ An unconscious feeling for beauty in things of earth began to draw me away from houses and children and to make me lonely. I found playthings I could not carry in my pocket. These have remained with me all my life. The path we leave behind us is the one we oftenest tread. One little brook still flows through my heart. I feel it, I hear its smothered ripple, not meant for hearing, and I smell its meadowy fragrance.
I treated matter with the perfect frankness and credulity which passes away with childhood ”

“ And although I have no wish to relieve myself of responsibility for my course of life, still less to apologize for it, destiny, in form of a woman, my mother, has directed my life in spite of reason, the persuasion of friends or the allurements of the world—the world which inflicts its just penalties upon him who refrains from becoming an actor, who persists in being a spectator. The paradox of my nature is that I love my kind as much as I love solitude and silence. ”

“ No road to me is attractive that is not bounded by such walls and fringed with berry bushes, brush and wild apple trees, from among which peer forth the cymes of the wayfaring bush and sweet scented clusters of the traveller's joy. Let England have her trim, hawthorne lanes and pleached gardens of fruit and flower, and Italy her olive and orange; for me the New England wilding roadside, interrupted only now and then by a farmhouse and littered yard, is dearer. ”

“ I was now behind the counter, and although there was nothing in a dry goods shop to interest me as in the country store, with its varied assortment of goods, tools, crockery and candies, I felt rather proud of my position, especially when permitted to wait on a customer. He seemed an inferior sort of a person, and I had no idea at first of conciliating him and making a sale. It was not then the custom to observe a fixed price and simply show the goods; but clerks were expected and instructed to use persuasion, to expatiate on quality and beauty, and to take less than they first asked. ”

“ SHADOWS AND ECHOES
Two things in nature impressed me more than any others in my childhood. One was the apparent motion of the moon, when I tried to walk or run away from it. To see it keep an equal pace with me, moving when I moved, stopping when I stopped, sometimes vexed me and more often amused me. The heavens are young when we are, close and companionable; they come down to the earth not more than two miles from where we stand. ”

“ As one climbs the sides of a mountain it lowers its crest, but the view becomes extended. The hills of Mendon diminished as often as I climbed other hills or succeeded in reaching the topmost spires of taller trees. They were no longer so lofty, so distant, so infatuating. The walls of my world were expanded on two sides, the south and the west. All unknown lands were on the north. China was there, which to me was a place where they did nothing but fly kites; so much I remembered from my geography book; there too was Boston, merely a place where we sold our huckleberries in summer. ”

“ Thus becoming familiar with and possessing the pleasures which wealth can furnish a boy, I knew not what a fall I was preparing for myself when the thread of my destiny should lead me back into its narrow and tortuous path. How is any one responsible for such passages in his life which carry him into situations and form in him tastes and propensities that must be relinquished with much sorrow or maintained with peril? ”

“ What nothings we wrote! With what pains and searchings of the brain for words! Still I filled my bit of paper while Launa wrote only three words, yet her name signed in the tiniest letters satisfied me. With that name in my vest pocket I felt her near me, fixed my attention upon my book again, and learned my lessons more easily. I was conscious that she watched all my movements out of the corner of her eye, and at recitations it was she, who, when I hesitated and was lost, bending her head down so as not to be observed by the teacher, whispered softly the right word and saved me from shame. ”

“ I dwell much on the recollections of the doings of the day, but the nights had also their joys, none greater than the rain on the roof and the exquisite, semi-conscious moments when sleep began to overtake body and soul, gently extinguishing them in a soothing, delicious languor. The low country attic is the true house of dreams, where the good, the strange or the fearful spirits play over the subjected and helpless will. ”

“ As I have already said unchangeableness is the characteristic of Bellingham, and I repeat it, that I may add that it is the counterpart of something in myself. I have been swept on with my race and my time and while sharing all their tendencies, at heart what I value most, that which is most native and dearest to me is the simple undisturbed life, full of friendliness, piety and humble amusements into which I was born. What this life was, as reflected in a happy childhood, a neglected youth and idealised by its irrecoverable loss the following pages attempt to portray. ”