Years of My Youth

Whenever I visit the region of a famous man's youth I have the feeling that I ought to discover there some clue to the secret of his greatness; for I cannot help fancying that t...

He seems to have come to America with money enough to lose a good deal in his removals from Boston to Poughkeepsie, from Poughkeepsie to New York City, from New York to Virginia...

Much in the environment was abhorrent to him, and he fought the local iniquities in his paper, the gambling, the drunkenness that marred the mainly moral and religious complexio...

I used to sit a good deal on the hurricane-deck or in the pilot-house, where there was often good talk among the pilots or the boat's officers, and where once I heard with fasci...

The cabin, rude as it was, was not without its sophistications, its concessions to the spirit of modern luxury. The logs it was built of had not been left rounded, as they grew,...

In the summer evenings, after her long hard day's work was done, my mother sometimes strolled out upon the island with my father, and loitered on the bank to look at her boys in...

The diary is much more palpable than the emotions of the diarist, and is a large, flat volume of foolscap paper, bound in marbled boards, somewhat worn with use and stained with...

It may have been only a theory of his; it may have been a joke. He had a great many theories and a great many jokes, and together they always kept life interesting and sunshiny...

If my mother was the heart, he was the soul of our family life. In those young days when he did so much of his newspaper work at home he would always turn from it to take part i...

Probably he would not have understood my forsaking the law, and I evaded the explanation he once sought of me when we met in the street, dreading the contempt which I might well...

That winter of my editorship wore away to the adjournment of the legislature and my father's return home, after J. W.'s withdrawal into the vague of Wisconsin. But now another b...

The winter of 1856-57 passed without my knowing more of the capital than its official world. Even the next year, when I began to make some acquaintance with the social world, it...

We aspired at least tacitly to a metropolitan character in our journalism; there were no topics of human interest which we counted alien to us anywhere in the range of politics,...

In that day of lingering intolerance, intolerance which can scarcely be imagined in this day, and which scarcely stopped short of condemning the mild latitudinarianism of the _A...

We young men of that time were mostly Republicans, but some of us were Democrats and some of us were Southerners, or derivatively Southern. I have said how little society with u...

He was then reading law, and sometime in my middle years at Columbus he left us to begin his law practice farther West. In noticing his departure as a friendly journalist should...

What account I gave of the experience in print I cannot say after the lapse of fifty-seven years, but no doubt I tried to make merry over it, with endeavor for the picturesque a...

I was not only again at congenial work, but I was in the place that I loved best in the world, though as well as I can now visualize the town which had so great charm for me the...

Their endeavor was respectable, but there was no change in the civic conditions except from bad to worse. In the social conditions, or the society conditions, everything was for...

Our first camp was in our pretty Goodale Park, where I used to walk and talk with the sculptor Ward, and try the athletic feats in which he easily beat me. Now the pine sheds co...