Looking Back on Girlhood
In giving this brief account of my childhood, or, to speak exactly, ofthe surroundings which have affected the course of my work as awriter, my first thought flies back to those who taught me to observe,and to know the deep pleasures of simple things, and to be interestedin the lives of people about me.With its high hills and pine forests, and all its ponds and brooks anddistant mountain views, there are few such delightful country towns inNew England as the one where I was born. Being one of the oldestcolonial settlements, it is full of interesting traditions and relicsof the early inhabitants, both Indians and Englishmen. Two largerivers join just below the village at the head of tide-water, andthese, with the great inflow from the sea, make a magnificent stream,bordered on its seaward course now by high-wooded banks of dark pinesand hemlocks, and again by lovely green fields that slope gently tolong lines of willows at the water's edge.There is never-ending pleasure in making one's self familiar with sucha region. One may travel at home in a most literal sense, and bealways learning history, geography, botany, or biography--whatever onechooses.I have had a good deal of journeying in my life, and taken greatdelight in it, but I have never taken greater delight than in my ridesand drives and tramps and voyages within the borders of my nativetown. There is always something fresh, something to be traced ordiscovered, something particularly to be remembered. One grows rich inmemories and associations.I believe that we should know our native towns much better than mostof us do, and never let ourselves be strangers at home. Particularlywhen one's native place is so really interesting as my own!Above tide-water the two rivers are barred by successive falls. Youhear the noise of them by night in the village like the sound of thesea, and this fine water power so near the coast, beside a greatsalmon fishery famous among the Indians, brought the first Englishsettlers to the town in 1627. I know some families who still live uponthe lands which their ancestors bought from the Indians, and theirsingle deed bears the queer barbaric signatures.There are many things to remind one of these early settlers beside theold farms upon which they and their descendants have lived for six orseven generations. One is a quaint fashion of speech which survivesamong the long-established neighborhoods, in words and phrases commonin England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.One curious thing is the pronunciation of the name of the town:Berwick by the elder people has always been called Barvik, after thefashion of Danes and Northmen; never Berrik, as the word has so longbeen pronounced in modern England.The descendants of the first comers to the town have often beendistinguished in the affairs of their time. No village of its size inNew England could boast, particularly in the early part of the presentcentury, of a larger number of men and women who kept themselves moreclosely in touch with "the best that has been thought and said in theworld."As I write this, I keep in mind the truth that I have no inheritancefrom the ancient worth and dignity of Berwick--or what is now NorthBerwick--in Maine. My own people are comparatively late comers. I wasborn in a pleasant old colonial house built near 1750, and bought bymy grandfather sixty or seventy years ago, when he brought hishousehold up the river to Berwick from Portsmouth.He was a sea-captain, and had run away to sea in his boyhood and led amost adventurous life, but was quite ready to forsake seafaring in hisearly manhood, and at last joined a group of acquaintances who wereengaged in the flourishing West India trade of that time.For many years he kept and extended his interests in shipping,building ships and buying large quantities of timber from thenorthward and eastward, and sending it down the river and so to sea.This business was still in existence in my early childhood, and themanner of its conduct was primitive enough, the barter system stillprevailing by force of necessity. Those who brought the huge sticks ofoak and pine timber for masts and planks were rarely paid in money,which was of comparatively little use in remote and sparsely settleddistricts. When the sleds and long trains of yoked oxen returned fromthe river wharves to the stores, they took a lighter load in exchangeof flour and rice and barrels of molasses, of sugar and salt andcotton cloth and raisins and spices and tea and coffee; in fact, allthe household necessities and luxuries that the northern farms couldnot supply.They liked to have a little money with which to pay their taxes andtheir parish dues, if they were so fortunate as to be parishioners,but they needed very little money besides.So I came in contact with the up-country people as well as with thesailors and shipmasters of the other side of the business. I used tolinger about the busy country stores, and listen to the graphiccountry talk. I heard the greetings of old friends, and their minutedetails of neighborhood affairs, their delightful jokes andMunchausen-like reports of tracts of timber-pines ever so many feetthrough at the butt.When the great teams came in sight at the head of the village street,I ran to meet them over the creaking snow, if possible to mount andride into town in triumph; but it was not many years before I began tofeel sorry at the sight of every huge lopped stem of oak or pine thatcame trailing along after the slow-stepping, frosted oxen. Such treesare unreplaceable. I only know of one small group now in all this partof the country of those great timber pines.My young ears were quick to hear the news of a ship's having come intoport, and I delighted in the elderly captains, with their sea-tannedfaces, who came to report upon their voyages, dining cheerfully andheartily with my grandfather, who listened eagerly to their excitingtales of great storms on the Atlantic, and winds that blew themnorth-about, and good bargains in Havana, or Barbadoes, or Havre.I listened as eagerly as any one; this is the charming way in which Iwas taught something of a fashion of life already on the wane, and ofthat subsistence upon sea and forest bounties which is now almost aforgotten thing in my part of New England.Much freight still came and went by the river gundelows and packetslong after the railroad had made such changes, and every village alongits line lost its old feeling of self-sufficiency.In my home the greater part of the minor furnishings had come over inthe ships from Bristol and Havre. My grandfather seemed to be acitizen of the whole geography. I was always listening to stories ofthree wars from older people--the siege of Louisburg, the Revolution,in which my father's ancestors had been honest but mistaken Tories,and in which my mother's, the Gilmans of Exeter, had taken a noblerpart.As for the War of 1812, "the last war," as everybody called it, it wasa thing of yesterday in the town. One of the famous privateer crewswas gathered along our own river shore, and one member of the crew, inhis old age, had been my father's patient.The Berwick people were great patriots, and were naturally proud ofthe famous Sullivans, who were born in the upper part of the town, andcame to be governors and judge and general.I often heard about Lafayette, who had made an ever-to-be-rememberedvisit in order to see again some old friends who lived in the town.The name of a famous Colonel Hamilton, the leader in the last centuryof the West India trade, and the histories of the old Berwick housesof Chadbourn and Lord were delightfully familiar, and one of thetraditions of the latter family is more than good enough to be toldagain.There was a Berwick lad who went out on one of the privateers thatsailed from Portsmouth in the Revolution. The vessel was taken by aBritish frigate, and the crew put in irons. One day one of the Englishmidshipmen stood near these prisoners as they took their airing ondeck, and spoke contemptuously about "the rebels."Young Lord heard what he said, and turned himself about to say boldly,"If it were not for your rank, sir, I would make you take that back!""No matter about my rank," said the gallant middy. "If you can whipme, you are welcome to."So they had a "capital good fight," standing over a tea-chest, asproud tradition tells, and the Berwick sailor was the better fighterof the two, and won.The Englishman shook hands, and asked his name and promised not toforget him--which was certainly most handsome behavior.When they reached an English port all the prisoners but one were sentaway under guard to join the other American prisoners of war; but theadmiral sent for a young man named Nathan Lord, and told him that hisGrace the Duke of Clarence, son of his Majesty the King, begged forhis pardon, and had left a five-pound note at his disposal.This was not the first or last Berwick lad who proved himself of goodcourage in a fight, but there never was another to whip a future Kingof England, and moreover to be liked the better for it by that finegentleman.My grandfather died in my eleventh year, and presently the Civil Warbegan.From that time the simple village life was at an end. Its provincialcharacter was fading out; shipping was at a disadvantage, and therewere no more bronzed sea-captains coming to dine and talk about theirvoyages, no more bags of filberts or oranges for the children, orgreat red jars of olives; but in these childish years I had come incontact with many delightful men and women of real individuality andbreadth of character, who had fought the battle of life to goodadvantage, and sometimes against great odds.In these days I was given to long, childish illnesses, and it must behonestly confessed, to instant drooping if ever I were shut up inschool. I had apparently not the slightest desire for learning, but myfather was always ready to let me be his companion in long drivesabout the country.In my grandfather's business household, my father, unconscious oftonnage and timber measurement, of the markets of the WindwardIslands or the Mediterranean ports, had taken to his book, as oldpeople said, and gone to college and begun that devotion to the studyof medicine which only ended with his life.I have tried already to give some idea of my father's character in mystory of "The Country Doctor," but all that is inadequate to the giftsand character of the man himself. He gave me my first and bestknowledge of books by his own delight and dependence upon them, andruled my early attempts at writing by the severity and simplicity ofhis own good taste."Don't try to write about people and things, tell them just as theyare!"How often my young ears heard these words without comprehending them!But while I was too young and thoughtless to share in an enthusiasmfor Sterne or Fielding, and Smollett or Don Quixote, my mother andgrandmother were leading me into the pleasant ways of "Pride andPrejudice," and "The Scenes of Clerical Life," and the delightfulstories of Mrs. Oliphant.The old house was well provided with leather-bound books of a deeplyserious nature, but in my youthful appetite for knowledge, I couldeven in the driest find something vital, and in the more entertainingI was completely lost.My father had inherited from his father an amazing knowledge of humannature, and from his mother's French ancestry, that peculiarly Frenchtrait, called gaiete de coeur. Through all the heavy responsibilitiesand anxieties of his busy professional life, this kept him young atheart and cheerful. His visits to his patients were often madeperfectly delightful and refreshing to them by his kind heart, and thecharm of his personality.I knew many of the patients whom he used to visit in lonely inlandfarms, or on the seacoast in York and Wells. I used to follow himabout silently, like an undemanding little dog, content to follow athis heels.I had no consciousness of watching or listening, or indeed of anyspecial interest in the country interiors. In fact, when the time camethat my own world of imaginations was more real to me than any other,I was sometimes perplexed at my father's directing my attention tocertain points of interest in the character or surroundings of ouracquaintances.I cannot help believing that he recognized, long before I did myself,in what direction the current of purpose in my life was setting. Now,as I write my sketches of country life, I remember again and again thewise things he said, and the sights he made me see. He was onlyimpatient with affectation and insincerity.I may have inherited something of my father's and grandfather'sknowledge of human nature, but my father never lost a chance of tryingto teach me to observe. I owe a great deal to his patience with aheedless little girl given far more to dreams than to accuracy, andwith perhaps too little natural sympathy for the dreams of others.The quiet village life, the dull routine of farming or mill life,early became interesting to me. I was taught to find everything thatan imaginative child could ask, in the simple scenes close at hand.I say these things eagerly, because I long to impress upon every boyand girl this truth: that it is not one's surroundings that can helpor hinder--it is having a growing purpose in one's life to make themost of whatever is in one's reach.If you have but a few good books, learn those to the very heart ofthem. Don't for one moment believe that if you had differentsurroundings and opportunities you would find the upward path anyeasier to climb. One condition is like another, if you have not thedetermination and the power to grow in yourself.I was still a child when I began to write down the things I wasthinking about, but at first I always made rhymes and found prose sodifficult that a school composition was a terror to me, and I do notremember ever writing one that was worth anything. But in course oftime rhymes themselves became difficult and prose more and moreenticing, and I began my work in life, most happy in finding that Iwas to write of those country characters and rural landscapes to whichI myself belonged, and which I had been taught to love with all myheart.I was between nineteen and twenty when my first sketch was accepted byMr. Howells for the Atlantic. I already counted myself as by nomeans a new contributor to one or two other magazines--Young Folksand The Riverside--but I had no literary friends "at court."I was very shy about speaking of my work at home, and even sent it tothe magazine under an assumed name, and then was timid about askingthe post-mistress for those mysterious and exciting editorial letterswhich she announced upon the post-office list as if I were a strangerin the town.
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