Chapter 3

My parents were from Massachusetts, and every summer they returned to pass several months in or near Boston, generally with their relatives in Worcester county, in Dedham, in the "Hub" itself, or in Milford, Mendon, or Holliston, the home of my paternal grandfather, Oliver Leland. Thus I grew to be familiar with New England, its beautiful scenery and old-fashioned Yankee rural ways. Travelling was then by stage-coach, and it took two days to go from Philadelphia to Boston, stopping on the way overnight at Princeton, Perth Amboy, or Providence. This is to me a very interesting source of reminiscences. In Dedham, for three summers, I attended school. I remember that we stayed with Dr. Jeremy Stimson, who had married a sister of my mother. I studied French; and can recall that my cousins Caroline and Emily, who were very beautiful young ladies, generally corrected my exercises. I was then seven or eight years of age. Also that I was very much alone; that I had a favourite bow, made by some old Indian; that I read with great relish "Gil Blas" and "Don Quixote," and especially books of curiosities and oddities which had a great influence on me. I wandered for days by myself fishing, strolling in beautiful wild places among rocks and fields, or in forests by the River Charles. I can remember how one Sunday during service I sat in church unseen behind the organ, and read Benvenuto Cellini's account of the sorcerer in the Colosseum in Rome: I shall see his Perseus ten minutes hence in the Signoria of Florence, where I now write.

Then there were the quiet summer evenings in the drawing-room, where my cousins played the piano and sang "The Sunset Tree," "Alknoomuk," "I see them on the winding way," and Moore's melodies. _Tempi passati_--"'Tis sixty year's since." Caroline meantime married a Mr. Wight, who had passed most of his life in England, and was thoroughly Anglicised. There was also an English lady visiting America who stayed a while in Dedham to be with my cousin. She was _jeune encore_, but had with her a young English gentleman relative who _would_ call her "Mamma!" which we thought rather _niais_. From my reading and my few experiences I, however, acquired a far greater insight into life than most boys would have done, for I remembered and thought long over everything I heard or learned. Between my mother and cousins and our visitors there was much reading and discussion of literary topics, and I listened to more than any one noted, and profited by it.

I was always reading and mentally reviewing. If my mother made a call, I was at once absorbed in the first book which came to hand. Thus I can remember that one summer, when we came to Dr. Stimson's, during the brief interval of our being shown into the "parlour," I seized on a Unitarian literary magazine and read the story of Osapho, the Egyptian who trained parrots to cry, "Osapho is a god!" Also an article on Chinese acupuncture with needles to cure rheumatism; which chance readings and reminiscences I could multiply _ad infinitum_.

My cousin Caroline, whom I remember as very beautiful and refined, with a _distinguee_ manner, had a small work-box, on the cover of which was a picture of the Pavilion in Brighton. She spoke of the building as a rubbishy piece of architecture; but I, who felt it through the "Arabian Nights," admired it, and pitied her want of taste. _Now_ I have lived altogether three years in Brighton, but I never saw the Pavilion without recalling the little yellow work-box. In some mysterious way the picture seems to me to be grander than the original. Dickens has expressed this idea. I was too grave and earnest as a child to be called a cheerful or happy one, which was partly due to much ill-health; yet, by a strange contradiction not uncommon in America, I was gifted with a precociously keen sense of humour, and not only read, but collected and preserved every comic almanac and scrap of droll anecdote which I could get. Thus there came into my possession half-a-dozen books of the broadest London humour of the time, all of which entered into my soul; such things as:--

'"Ladies in furs and gemmen in spurs, Who lollop and lounge all day; The Bazaar in Soho is completely the go, Walk into the shop of Grimaldi."

Reader mine, you can have no conception how deeply I, as a mere little boy, entered into and knew London life and society from such songs, sketches, anecdotes, books, and caricatures as I met with. Others read and forget them, but I took such trifles deep into my soul and _dwelt_ on them. It is only of late years, since I have lived in England, that I have learned how extensively--I may say incredibly well--I was informed for my age as to many phases of English life. Few of us know what may be got out of reading the current light literature of the day, if we only read it _earnestly_ and get it by heart. This I did to a great extent, as my reminiscences continually awakened in England prove.

There was in Dedham a very old house of somewhat superior style, which had been built, if not in 1630, at least within a very few years after. It was inhabited by three sisters named Fairbanks, who were very peculiar indeed, and their peculiarity consisted in a strange devotion to the past, and above all to old _English_ memories of colonial times before the Revolution. Even in England this resistance can hardly be understood at the present day, and yet it may still be found alive in New England. In the house itself was a well, dug to supply water when besieged by Indians, and the old ladies used to exhibit an immense old gun once used by Puritans, and an ox-saddle and other relics. They had also a very ancient book of prayer of the Church of England, and an old Bible, and thereby hangs a tale. They were all still living in 1849 or 1850, when I visited them with my very pretty cousin Mary Elizabeth Fisher, and as I professed the Episcopal faith, and had been in England, the precious relics were shown to me as to one of the initiated. But they showed a marked aversion to letting Miss Fisher see them, as she was a Unitarian. So they went on, as many others did in my youth, still staunch adherents to England, nice old Tories, believers in the King or Queen, for whom they prayed, and not in the President. I remember that Miss Eliza Leslie told me in later years of just such another trio.

My grandfather in Holliston was, as his father and brothers and uncles had all been, an old Revolutionary soldier, who had been four years in the war and taken part in many battles. He had been at Princeton (where I afterwards graduated) and Saratoga, and witnessed the surrender of Burgoyne to Gates. I was principally concerned to know whether the conqueror had _kept the sword_ handed to him on this occasion, and was rather disappointed to learn that it was given back. Once I found in the garret a bayonet which my grandma said had been carried by grandfather in the war. I turned it with a broom-handle into a lance and made ferocious charges on the cat and hens.

This grandfather, Oliver Leland, exerted an extraordinary influence on me, and one hard to describe. He was great, grim, and taciturn to behold, yet with a good heart, and not devoid of humour. He was gouty, and yet not irritable. He continually recurs to me while reading Icelandic sagas, and as a kind of man who would now be quite out of the age anywhere. All his early associations had been of war and a half-wild life. He was born about 1758, and therefore in a rude age in rural New England. He, I may say, deeply interested me.

All boys are naturally full of the romance of war; the Revolution was to us more than the Crusades and all chivalry combined, and my grandfather was a living example and chronicle of all that I most admired. Often I sat on a little cricket at his feet, and listened to tales of battles, scoutings, and starving; how he had been obliged to live on raw wheat, which produced evil results, and beheld General Washington and other great men, and had narrow escapes from Indians, and been at the capturing of a fort by moonlight, and seen thousands of pounds' worth of stores destroyed. I frequently thought of old grandfather Oliver when "out" myself during the Civil War, and was half-starved and chilled when scouting, or when doing rough and tough in West Virginia.

My grandfather often told me such stories of the war, and others of his father and grandfather, who had fought before him in the old French war in Canada, and how the latter, having gone up to trade among the Indians one winter, endeared himself so much to them that they would not let him go, and kept him a captive until the next summer. I came across traces of this ancestor in an old Canadian record, wherein it appears that he once officiated as interpreter in the French and Indian tongues. Whereby critics may remark that learning French and Algonkin runs in our blood, and that my proclivity for Indians is legitimately inherited. I would that I knew all the folklore that my great-grandsire heard in the Indian wigwams in those old days!

I can remember seeing my grandfather once sitting and talking with five other veterans of the war. But I saw them daily in those times, and once several hundreds, or it may be thousands, of them in a great procession in Philadelphia in 1832. And here I may mention that in 1834 I often saw one named Rice, whose age, as authenticated by his pension papers, was 106, and that in 1835 I shook hands with Thomas Hughes, aged 95, who was the last survivor of the Boston Tea party. He had come to visit our school, and how we boys cheered the old gentleman, who was in our eyes one of the greatest men alive! But all the old folk in my boyhood could tell tales of the Revolution, which was indeed not very much older then than the Rebellion is to us now.

I can also recollect seeing Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, though my memory of the man is now confused with that of a very perfect portrait which belonged to his granddaughter, Mrs. Jackson, who was a next-door but one neighbour in after years in Walnut Street, Philadelphia. He was a very venerable- looking man.

My father served for a short time in the war of 1812, and I have heard him relate that when the startling news of peace arrived in Boston, where he was, he at once took a sleigh and fast horses and drove full speed, being the first to disseminate the news in the country. That was as good as Browning's "Ride to Ghent" in its way--_apropos_ of which Mr. Browning once startled me by telling me, "I suppose you know that it is an invention of mine, and not founded on any real incident." But my father's headlong sleigh-ride--he was young and wild in those days--was real and romantic enough in all conscience. It set bells to ringing, multitudes to cheering, bonfires a-blazing on hills and in towns, and also some few to groaning, as happened to a certain old deacon, who had invested his all in English goods, and said, when he heard the cheers caused by the news, "Wife, if that's war news, I'm saved; but if it's peace, I'm ruined!" Even so it befell me, in after years, to be the first person to announce in the United States, far in advance of any others, the news of the French Revolution of 1848, as I shall fully prove in the sequence.

It may be here remarked, that, though not "professionals," all of our family, without a break in the record, have successively taken turns at fighting, and earned our pay as soldiers, since time lost in oblivion; for I and my brother tried it on during the Rebellion, wherein he indeed, standing by my side, got the wound from a shell of which he eventually died; while there were none who were not in the old Indian wars or the English troubles of Charles the Second and First, and so on back, I dare say, to the days of Bussli de Leland, who laid all Yorkshire waste.

My grandfather, though not wealthy, owned a great deal of land, and I can remember that he one afternoon showed me a road, saying that he owned the land on each side for a mile. I myself, in after years, however, came to own in fee-simple a square mile of extremely rich land in Kansas, which I sold for sixteen hundred dollars, while my grandfather's was rather of that kind by which men's poverty was measured in Virginia--that is to say, the more land a man had the poorer he was considered to be. It is related of one of these that he once held great rejoicing at having got rid of a vast property by the ingenious process of giving some person one half of it to induce him to take the other. However, as there is now a large town or small city on my grandfather's whilom estate, I wish that it could have been kept. _Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan_, or the ducats of Panurge?

There was a "home-pasture," a great field behind my grandfather's house, where I loved to sit alone, and which has left a deep impression on my memory, as though it were a fairy-haunted or imagined place. It was very rocky, the stones being covered with clean, crisp, dry lichens, and in one spot there was the gurgling deep down in some crevice of a mysterious unseen spring or rivulet. Young as I was, I had met with a line which bore on it--

"Deep from their vaults the Loxian murmurs flow."

And there was something very voice-like or human in this murmur or chattering of the unseen brook. This I distinctly remember, that the place gave me not only a feeling, but a faith that it was haunted by something gentle and merry. I went there many a time for company, being much alone. An Indian would have told me that it was the _Un a games- suk_--the spirit-fairies of the rock and stream. These beings enter far more largely, deeply, and socially into their life or faith than elves or fairies ever did into those of the Aryan races, and I might well have been their _protege_, for there could have been few little boys living, so fond as I was of sitting all alone by rock and river, hill and greenwood tree. There are yet in existence on some of this land which was once ours certain mysterious walls or relics of heavy stone-work, which my friend Eben C. Horsford thinks were made by the Norsemen. I hope that they were, for I have read many a saga in Icelandic, old Swedish, and Latin, and the romance thereof is deep in my soul; and as my own name is Godfrey, it is no wonder that the god Frey and his Freya are dear to me. In my boyhood--and it may be still the case--the "Injuns" got the credit of having built these mysterious works.

Not far from Holliston is Mendon, where I had an uncle, Seth Davenport, who had a large, pleasant, old-fashioned New England farm, which was more productive than my grandfather's, since there were employed on it sixteen men, three of whom were Natick Indians of the old local stock. There were many of them when my mother was young, but I suppose that the last of the tribe has long since died. One of these Indians, Rufus Pease, I can recall as looking like a dark-ruddy gypsy, with a pleasant smile. He very was fond of me. He belonged to a well-known family, and had a brother--and thereby hangs a tale, or, in this case, a scalp-lock.

"Marm" Pease, the mother of Rufus, had on one occasion been confined, and old Doctor--I forget his name--who officiated at the birth, had been asked to give the infant a name. Now he was a dry wag, of the kind so dear to Dr. Holmes, and expressed much gratification and gratitude at such a compliment being paid to him. "He had long been desirous," he said, "of naming a child after his dear old friend, Dr. Green." So the name was bestowed, the simple Indians not realising for some time after the christening that their youngest bore the name of Green Pease. Whether he was ever called a duck, I know not.

Everything about Uncle Seth and Aunt Betsy was, as I remember, delightfully comfortable, old-fashioned, and in a way beautiful. There was their daughter Rebecca, who was pretty and gentle, so that several wild birds came every morning to feed from her hand and perch on her fingers. Uncle Seth himself wore a scarlet waistcoat, and, as I recall him, seemed altogether in figure to belong to the time of Cromwell, or to earlier days. There was a hall, hung round with many old family portraits in antique dresses, and an immense dairy--the pride of Aunt Betsy's heart--and a garden, in which I was once shown a humming-bird's nest; and cousin Rebecca's mantelpiece, over a vast old fireplace, heaped with mosses, birds' nests, shells, and such curiosities as a young girl would gather in the woods and fields; and the cider-press, in which Uncle Seth ground up the sixteen hundred bushels of apples which he had at one crop, and the new cider gushing in a stream, whereof I had a taste. It was a charming, quiet old homestead, in which books and culture were not wanting, and it has all to me now something of the chiaroscuro and Rembrandt colour and charm of the _Mahrchen_ or fairy-tale. The reality of this charm is apt to go out of life as that of literature or culture comes in. To this day I draw the deepest impression or sentiment of the _pantheism_ or subtle spiritual charm of Nature far more from these early experiences of rural life than from all the books, poetry included, which I have ever perused. Note this well, ye whose best feelings are only a _rechauffe_ of Ruskin and Browning--_secundem ordinem_--for I observe that those who do not think at second hand are growing rare.

In the town of Milford lived my uncle, William Godfrey, with my aunt Nancy, and of them and their home I have many pleasant memories. The very first of them all was not so pleasant to me at the time. My parents had just arrived, and had not been ten minutes in the house ere a tremendous squall was heard, and my mother, looking from the window, beheld me standing in the open barn-door holding a tiny chicken in my right hand, while an old hen sat on my head flapping her wings and pecking me in wrath. I, seeing the brood, had forthwith captured one, and for that was undergoing penance. It was a beautiful tableau, which was never forgotten! We went there on visits for many summers. Uncle William was a kind-hearted, "sportive" man, who took _Bell's Life_, and I can remember that there was a good supply of English reading in the house. My uncle had three sons, all much older than I. The eldest, Stearns, was said to have first popularised the phrase "posted up," to signify well-informed. The second, Benjamin, became in after years a great manufacturer and somewhat noted politician, and owner of a famous racehorse. The third, Samuel, went into business in Philadelphia, and crossed the Atlantic with me. He died quite young. All of them, like their father and grandfather, were very good-natured or gentle, and men of perfect integrity. The Lelands, however, were rather _dour_ and grim in their honesty, or more Northern than the Godfreys. This was accounted for by the fact, that while my father's family was Puritan of the purest, and only intermarried with Puritan stock, the Godfreys had in Rhode Island received an infusion of French Huguenot blood, which was indeed very perceptible in their faces and lively pleasant manner.

There was a strange tradition, to which my mother sometimes jestingly referred, that there had been among her Rhode Island ancestors a High German (_i.e._, not a Hollander) doctor, who had a reputation as a sorcerer or wizard. He was a man of learning, but that is all I ever heard about him. My mother's opinion was that this was a very strong case of atavism, and that the mysterious ancestor had through the ages cropped out again in me. Something tells me that this was the High German doctor who, according to Washington Irving, laid the mystic spell on Sleepy Hollow, which made of it such a pleasant, ancient, dreamy fairy- land. Whether his friendly spirit still watches over me, or whether I am the man himself, is a problem which I leave to my friend Francis Galton, who indeed personally often reminds me of Irving. High German sorcerers were not common in those days north of Pennsylvania, so that I trow mine was the very man referred to by Geoffrey Crayon. And it is true beyond all doubt that even in infancy, as I have often heard, there was a quaint uncanniness, as of something unknown, in my nature, and that I differed in the main totally from every relative, and indeed from any other little boy, known to anybody; though I was a perfect Godfrey in face when very young, as I am now a typical Leland. I was always given to loneliness in gardens and woods when I could get into them, and to hearing words in birds' songs and running or falling water; and I once appalled a visitor by professing seriously that I could determine for him some question as to what would happen to him by divination with a bullet in an Indian moccasin. We had two servants who spoke old Irish; one was an inexhaustible mine of legends, which she related to me--she surpassed Croker; the other, less versed, still knew a great deal, and told me how her own father, Jackey Mooney, had seen the fairies with his own eyes. Both of these sincerely and seriously regarded me as "gifted" or elfin- favoured, and the latter said in proof thereof, "Only listen to his voice; sure whin he spakes he'd while a burred aff a tree." For my uncanny ways made a deep impression on them, as also on the darkies.

Once I had a wonderful dream. I thought that I was in Dr. Furness's chapel, but that, instead of the gentle reverend clergyman, the devil himself was in the pulpit preaching. Feeling myself inspired, I went up into the pulpit, threw the Evil One out, and preached myself in his place. Now our nurse had a dream-book, and made some pretence to mystic fairy knowledge learned in Kilkenny, and she interpreted this dream as signifying that I would greatly rise in this world, and do strange things. But she was greatly struck with such a vision in such an infant.

Now, I was a great reader of Scripture; in fact, I learned a great deal too much of it, believing now that for babes and sucklings about one-third of it had better be expurgated. The Apocrypha was a favourite work, but above all I loved the Revelations, a work which, I may say by the way, is still a treasure to be investigated as regards the marvellous mixture of Neo-Platonic, later Egyptian (or Gnostic), and even Indian Buddhistic ideas therein. Well, I had learned from it a word which St. John applies (to my mind very vulgarly and much too frequently) to the Scarlet Lady of Babylon or Rome. What this word meant I did not know, but this I understood, that it was "sass" of some kind, as negroes term it, and so one day I applied it experimentally to my nurse. Though the word was not correctly pronounced, for I had never heard it from anybody, its success was immediate, but not agreeable. The passionate Irish woman flew into a great rage and declared that she would "lave the house." My mother, called in, investigated the circumstances, and found that I really had no idea whatever of the meaning of what I had said. Peace was restored, but Annie declared that only the divil or the fairies could have inspired such an infant to use such language.

I was very fond of asking my nurse to sing in old Irish or to teach me Irish words. This she did, but agreed with her sister Biddy that it was all very uncanny, and that there must have been a time when I was perfectly familiar with the owld language, as I had such unearthly fondness for it.