Chapter 45

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD OF WILLARD GLAZIER.

The infant stranger.--A mother's prayers.--"Be just before you are generous."--Careful training.--Willard Glazier's first battle.--A narrow escape.--Facing the foe.--The happy days of childhood.--"The boy is father to the man."

The Glazier Homestead, as we have said, is upon the main road leading from Little York to Fullerville. It is a substantial and comfortable farm-house, with no pretension to architectural beauty, but, nevertheless, is a sightly object in a pleasant landscape. Standing back two hundred feet from the road, in a grove of gigantic elms, with a limpid brook of spring water a short distance to the right, and rich fields of herd grass stretching off rearwards towards the waters of the Oswegatchie, which hurry along on their journey of forty miles to the St. Lawrence River, the old house is sure to attract the attention of the traveller, and to be long remembered as a picture of solid and substantial comfort.

In this old house, upon the morning of August twenty-second, 1841, to Ward Glazier and Mehitable, his wife, a son was born who was subsequently named Willard. The father and mother were by no means sentimental people--they were certainly not given to seeing the poetical side of life; they were plain, earnest people, rough hewn out of the coarse fibre of Puritanism, but the advent of this little child brought a joy to their hearts that had its softening influence upon the home in which he was to be reared.

The thoroughness of Ward Glazier's nature, that conscientiousness in excess which made him radical in all things, was of the _heart_ as well as of the head, and though not a demonstrative man, the intensity of his paternal love cropped out in many ways. As to his wife, hers was truly "mother's love." And what notes are there attuned to sacred music, in all the broad vocabulary of the English tongue, which gives any idea of the sentiment that links a woman to her babe, except the three simple syllables, "mother's love!" Brooding over the tiny stranger, ready to laugh or cry; exultant with hope and pride, despondent with fear, quivering with anguish if the "wind of heaven doth visit its cheek too roughly," and singing hosannas of joy when it lisps the simpler syllables that she so patiently has taught, covering it with the broad wing of her measureless affection, and lavishing upon it such "sighs as perfect joy perplexed for utterance, steals from her sister sorrow," there is nothing except God's own illimitable affection for his creatures, that can rival in depth and strength and comprehensiveness, a mother's love.

The heart of Ward Glazier's wife, at this time, blossomed in absolutely rank luxuriance with this feeling, and ran riot in the joy of its possession; but she determined within herself that it should be no blind or foolish worship. It grew, therefore, into a sober, careful, provident affection.

Quiet and unobtrusive in manner, her face always wore a look of gravity befitting one who felt that God had entrusted to her charge a fresh human soul to mould for good or evil. She fully realized the fact that her son would grow up with honor or sink down into ignominy just as she should guide or spoil him in his youth. She quite comprehended the stubborn truth, that while the father to some extent may shape the outward career of his son, the mother is responsible for the coloring of his inner life: and that

"All we learn of good is learned in youth, When passion's heat is pure, when love is truth."

Though of Puritan stock, though reared in the austere faith of John Knox, there was nothing hard or harsh in this mother's character, and still less was there anything of the materialist about her. She would have utterly scouted the doctrine of Cabanis and his school, which held that the physical was the whole structure of man; that all instincts, passions, thoughts, emanated from the body; that sensibility is an effect of the nervous system, that passion is an emanation of the viscera, that intellect is nothing more than a cerebral secretion, and "self-consciousness but a general faculty of living matter." She had drunk inspiration of a different kind from her infancy. In her New England home the very atmosphere was charged with religious influences. She was taught, or rather she had learned without a teacher, not only to see God in the flowers and in the stars, but to recognize his immediate agency in all things terrestrial.

Night after night, listening to the tremulous tones of her father as he read a lesson from the sacred page, not only to those of his own blood, but to his "man-servant, his maid-servant, and the stranger within his gates," she had felt the presence of a tangible God, and when, at last, she followed the fortunes of the chosen one of her heart far into the great North Woods, nature spoke to her from the forest and the cataract, deepening each early impression and intensifying each early belief, until she realized as a living fact that the "Lord was ever in his holy temple" and that his temple was the universe.

To a woman like this every act of life became a matter of conscience, and the training of her child of course became such to Mrs. Glazier. She had watched the pitfalls which the "world, the flesh and the devil"--that trinity of evil--provide for the feet of the unwary, and she determined that young Willard's steps, if she could prevent it, should never stray that way.

Her husband took life and its duties much more easily. He was less rigid in his sense of parental responsibility. While a man of great rectitude of purpose, he was good-natured to a fault--somewhat improvident, careless of money, ever ready to extend aid to the needy, and especially disinclined to the exercise of harshness in his home, even when the stern element of authority was needed. In short, he was one of those big-hearted men who are so brimful of the "milk of human kindness" that the greatest pain they ever feel is the pain they see others suffer. His plan therefore was, spare the rod even if you _do_ spoil the child.

But--perhaps fortunately for young Willard--Mrs. Glazier held different views. From his very infancy she endeavored to instil into his nature habits of truthfulness, industry and thrift. "Never waste and never lie" was her pet injunction. Her aim was not to make her son a generous, but a _just_ man. "One hour of justice is worth an eternity of prayer," says the Arabian proverb, but Mrs. Glazier, while she exalted justice as the greatest of the virtues, also believed that in order to make man's heart its temple, prayer was an absolutely necessary pre-requisite. She likewise endeavored from the first to habituate the boy's mind to reflect upon the value of money and the uses of economy. She would have "coined her blood for drachms" if that would have benefited her husband or her son. Her savings were not spent upon herself, but in the hard school of a bitter experience she had learned that money means much more than dollars and cents--that its possession involves the ability to live a life of honor, untempted by the sordid solicitations that clamor round the poor man's door and wring the poor man's heart.

The result was that as soon as he began to comprehend her words, young Willard had impressed upon his memory maxims eulogizing all who practise habits of sobriety, industry and frugality, and denunciatory of all who fail to do so.

His mother never wearied of teaching him such sayings of Dr. Franklin as these: "Time is money," "Credit is money," "Money begets money," "The good paymaster is lord of another man's purse," and "The sound of a man's hammer heard by his creditor at six o'clock in the morning makes him easy six months longer, while the sound of his voice heard in a tavern, induces him to send for his money the next day;" "Trifling items aggregate into large totals," while the text that ruled the house was that of the Scripture, "If any would not work neither should he eat."

The effect of the constant teaching of such lessons was not however perceptible in the lad's habits in very early life. He was no model little boy, no monster of perfection--he was like the boys that we see around us every day--not one of the marvels we read about. But the seed was sown in his soul which was destined to quicken into fruit in after life.

At the early age of four years his mother began to teach him to read and write, and under her loving tuition he acquired a knowledge of these two branches of culture quite rapidly.

Just about this time an incident occurred which came near finishing young Willard's career in a manner as sudden as it would have been singular.

The "Homestead Farm" was at that time pretty well stocked for a place only containing one hundred and forty acres, and among the cattle was a sturdy Alderney bull whose reputation for peace and quietness was unusually good.

On a certain morning, however, early in the spring of the year 1845, young Master Willard happened to overhear a conversation between two of the farm hands, in the course of which one of them declared that "old Blackface was tarin' round mighty lively." This statement interested the lad to such an extent that he concluded to go and see how this "tarin' round" was done.

Accordingly, taking advantage of a moment when his mother's attention was occupied, he started for the barnyard, into which Mr. Bull had been turned only a few moments before. Now as young Willard was somewhat smaller than the visitors our bovine friend was in the habit of receiving, such an unwarrantable intrusion was not to be tolerated for a moment. Accordingly, no sooner had Willard set his little feet within the enclosure of the barn-yard than the bull gave a roar of rage, and catching the boy on the tips of his horns, which fortunately were buttoned, sent him twenty feet up in the air, preparing to trample him out of existence when he should come down. Luckily some of the men were attracted to the scene, who secured his bullship and rescued the child. Willard was not seriously hurt, and the instant he regained his feet, he turned round, shook his tiny fist at the now retreating animal and shouted out in a shrill treble, "When I get to be a big man I'll toss you in the air!"

Having thus taken the bull by the horns in a literal as well as figurative sense, the lad began gradually to develop into that terrible embodiment of unrest--a boy. He exhibited no very marked peculiarities up to this time to distinguish him from other youths; but just grew into the conglomerate mass of good, bad and indifferent qualities which go to make up the ordinary flesh-and-blood boy--brimful of mischief and impatient of restraint.