as i look back upon my childhood, it seems as if the world were an illusion and as if everything were magic that passed before my eyes. true, we children learned our lessons in our arithmetics and geographies and readers, but we only learned by rote and said them from our lips; they had no application to our lives,—they were only tasks which we must get through before our foolish parents and unkind teachers would leave us free to live. we seem to have breathed an enchanted air, and to see nothing as it really was. and still, can i be sure of this? are the heartbeats of the young less natural and spontaneous than those of later life? are the vision and hearing and emotions of youth less trustworthy than the dulled faculties and feelings of maturer years? certain it is we children lived in a world that was all our own,—a world into which grown-up people could not come, from which in fact they had long since passed out never to return.
but we had our illusions and our dreams. time and distance and proportion did not exist for us. time is ever illusive to young and old alike; it is no sooner come than it is gone. the past is regretted, the present disappointing; the future alone is trusted, and thought to be worth our pains. childhood is the happiest time of life, because the past is so wholly forgotten, the present so fleeting, and the future so endlessly long. but how little i really knew of time, of youth and of age, when i was young! we children thought that old age lay just beyond the time when childish sports would not amuse. we could see nothing in life beyond thirty that would make it worth living, excepting for a very few who were the conquerors of the world. true, we dreamed of our future great achievements, but these were still far off, and to be reached in strange fantastic ways. the present and the near future were only for our childish joys. we looked at older people half in pity, half in fear. i distinctly remember that when a child at the 146district school i thought the boys and girls at the academy were getting old.
as to my parents, they always seemed old; and when i was not vexed about things they would not let me do, i felt sad to think their days of sport were past and gone. i well remember the terrible day when they laid my mother in her grave, and the one consolation i felt was that she had lived a long life and that her natural time had come. even now, as i look back on the vague remembrances of my mother, i have no thought of any time when she was not old. yet last year i went to see the little headstone that marks her modest grave. i read her name, and the commonplace lines that said she had been a good wife and a loving mother; and this i have no doubt was true, even though i found it on a churchyard stone. poor soul! she never had a chance to be anything else or more. but when i looked to see her age, i felt a shock as of one waking from a dream; for there, chiselled in the marble stone and already growing green with moss, i read that she had died at forty-eight. and here i stood looking at my old mother’s grave, and my last birthday was my forty-sixth. was my mother then so young when she lay down to sleep?—and all my life i had thought that she was old! i felt and knew, as i sadly looked upon the stone, that my career was all before me still, and that i had only been wandering and blundering in a zigzag path through childhood and youth, to begin the career i was about to run. true, as i drew close to the marble slab to read the smaller letters that told of the virtues of the dead, i put on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses to spell the chiselled words. and these glasses were my second pair! only a few days before, i had visited an oculist and told him that my old ones somehow did not focus as they should, but warned him not to give me a new pair that magnified the letters any more than the ones i had. after several trials he found a pair through which i could see much clearer than before, and he assured me on his honor that they were no stronger than the ones i was about to lay aside,—only they were ground in a different way. and although i had lived on the earth for six and forty years, i believed he told the truth. i remembered, too, that only a few days before an impudent college 148football hero gave me a seat in the street-car while he stood up. but then college boys were always thoughtless and ill-mannered, and boastful of their strength. i recovered from the shock that came upon me as i realized that my mother had died while she was really young; and then my mind recalled a day that had been buried in oblivion for many, many years,—a day when i rested upon the same spot where i was sitting now, and when the tremendous thought of eternal sleep dawned upon my mind. no doubt it was my mother’s stone that so long ago awakened me to conscious life. i remember that on that far-off day i was fifteen years of age, and that i consoled myself by thinking that at any rate i should live until i was sixty, which was so far away that i could not even dream that it would ever come. and now i was here again, and forty-six. well, my health was good, my ancestors were long-lived,—all except my mother, who came to an untimely grave,—and i should live to be ninety at the very least. and then—there might be another world. no one can prove that there is not.
but i am lingering too long around the old graveyard of my childhood home, and if i do not go out into the living, moving world, no one will ever read my book. and still i fancy that i am like all the other men and women who were ever born; we eat and drink, and laugh and dance, and go our way along the path of life, and join the universal conspiracy to keep silent on the momentous final event that year by year draws closer to our lives.
distance was as vague and illusive and as hard to realize as time. a trip to the next town, four miles away, awoke in my mind all the feeling of change and travel and adventure that a voyage across the sea can bring to-day. i recall one great event that stands out clearly in my childhood days. for months and months i had been promised a long trip with my older sister to visit my aunt jane. she lived miles and miles away, and we must take a railroad train to reach her home. for weeks i revelled in the expectation of that long-promised trip. i wondered if the train would really stop at our station long enough for me to get on board; if there would be danger of falling out if i should raise the window of the car; and what would happen if we should be carried past the 150town, or the train should run off the track. i am always sure of a fresh emotion when i think of the moment that we were safely seated in the car and the train began to move away. how i watched and wondered as the houses and telegraph poles flew past in our mad flight! and how i stored my mind with facts and fancies to tell the wondering boys when i returned! if indeed i ever should. i remember particularly how i pleaded with the train conductor to let me keep the pasteboard ticket that had been handed to me through the hole in the little window at the station when i took the train. i felt that this would be a souvenir of priceless worth, but the conductor regretfully told me that he must deny my wish. it seems even now as if i journeyed across a continent, there were so many things to see that were wholly new and strange. and yet my aunt jane lived only twenty miles away, and the trip must have been made in one short hour or less. many times since then i have boarded a train to cross half the continent. i have even stood on the platform of the orient express in paris, and waited for the signal to start on the long journey across 151europe to constantinople; but i have never felt such emotions as stirred my soul when the train actually moved away to take me to see aunt jane.
men and their works are indeed inconsistent. the primitive savage who dwelt at home went to a foreign land when he moved his tent or paddled his log canoe across the stream; but civilized man, with his machines, inventions, and contrivances, has brought the world into such close connection that we must journey almost around the earth to find something new and strange.
not time and space alone, but also men and women, were illusive to our young minds. my sunday-school teacher, a fat asthmatic woman, who always held her lesson-paper between her stiff thumb and finger covered with a black glove, seemed a wonderful personage to me. how was it possible she could know so much about palestine and jerusalem and judæa and the dead sea? surely she had never visited these mythical realms, for there was no way to go. as easily might she have gone to the moon, or to some of the fixed stars; and still 152she talked of these things with the familiarity with which she would have spoken of a neighboring town. i never had any idea that she was like a common woman, until one day when i went to her house and found her with her sleeves rolled up and a great apron reaching clear around her dress, and she was washing clothes. after that, the spell was broken. how could anyone wash clothes if she really knew about paul and john the baptist and the river jordan?
all the grown-up men seemed strange and unreal to my mind, and to have nothing in common with the boys. no matter what we did, we thought that if any man should come around he had a right promptly to make us stop. most of the men never seemed to notice us, unless to forbid our doing certain things, or to ask us to turn a grindstone while they sharpened an axe or a scythe; and there were only a very few who even knew our names. once in a long while some man would call me “that smith boy,” but even then he seemed a little doubtful who i really was. if now and then a grown-up man took a friendly interest in our sports, or called us by our first names, we liked him, and would have voted for him for president of the united states if we could have had the chance.
i well remember deacon cole. i used always to see him in one of the front pews at church. every sunday morning he drove by our home, and he was usually the very first to pass. he wore a ruffled shirt, a long black coat, and a collar that almost hid his chin. his face was long and sad, and he never looked to the right or left during the services at the church. i had no doubt he was a very holy man. he always took up the collection just before the benediction had been said, and his boots would creak as he tiptoed from pew to pew. i did not know just what a deacon was, or how anyone ever happened to be a deacon. i remember i once asked my father; and although he could tell me all about cæsar and plato and herodotus, he could never make it clear how mr. cole ever became “deacon cole.” but one day when i was down at the mill, a farmer drove up to the door with a load of corn. he wore overalls, an old patched coat, and a big straw hat. i looked at him closely before i could believe that he was deacon cole, and then slowly another illusion was dissolved. i found that a deacon was a man just like my father and other men that i had known.
