A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Scoville Samuel
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with very narrow and closely-grated windows.” But Mrs. Stowe wrote years ago: “One of my most vivid impressions of the family, as it was in my childish days, was of a great household inspired by a spirit of cheerfulness and hilarity, and of my father, although pressed and driven with business, always lending an attentive ear to anything in the way of life and social fellowship.”
The brother Charles, who was an almost inseparable companion for Henry in those days, says in a letter recently received: “The parental authority was pronounced but not very strict. That is, there was never any thought in the mind of the children of disobedience, but resort to corporal punishment was rare.
“Nor was brother Henry made to work very hard, nor was father very strait-laced or stern. Nor were we often switched, tho’ I dare say we deserved it. I only remember once distinctly, when Henry performed the gymnastics and I furnished the music (out in the barn). Fortunately for me, the switch was mostly used up on him as the elder—a birthright I did not envy—and I howled in sympathy, with a few cuts for Da Capo.
“The fact is, father was very fond of all his children and frolicked and romped with them. All the work there was to do (chores we called it) was to take care of a horse and cow, and in spring make garden, and, after wood-spell, carry in and pile up wood. I remember that we were told if we made the garden so and so, or did this or that, we should go fishing; and we used to go, the whole family of us, to Little Pond or Great Pond, and catch ‘Perchy, roachy, bullhead,’ as we sang it. One afternoon at Little Pond, where father had taken Henry and me in the chaise (‘one-hoss’), we were catching roach when the church-bell rang, and father remembered that it was Preparatory Lecture, and the way we scurried in the old vehicle may be imagined.”
Mrs. Stowe writes: “I remember when the wood was all in and piled and the chips swept up, then father tackled the horse into the cart and proclaimed a grand fishing party down to Little Pond; and how we all floated among the lily-pads in our boat, christened ‘The Yellow Perch,’ and every one of us caught a string of fish, which we displayed in triumph on our return.”
The father was very wise in directing the homely labors of the household, so that they became occasions of mental stimulus.
“I have the image of my father still, as he sat working the apple-peeler. ‘Come, George,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do to make the evening go off. You and I’ll take turns and see who’ll tell the most out of Scott’s novels’ (for those were the days when the ‘Tales of my Landlord’ and ‘Ivanhoe’ had just appeared); and so they took them novel by novel, reciting scenes and incidents, which kept the eyes of all the children wide open and made the work go on without flagging.
“Occasionally he would raise a point of theology on some incident narrated, and ask the opinion of one of his boys and run a sort of tilt with him, taking up the wrong side of the question for the sake of seeing how the youngster could practise his logic. If the party on the other side did not make a fair hit at him, however, he would stop and explain to him what he ought to have said: ‘The argument lies so, my son; do that and you’ll trip me up.’ Much of his teaching to his children was in this informal way.”
A kindly country life surrounded the minister’s family, that could not fail of stamping the impress of its plain sincerity upon all who were brought in contact with it. Once a year this came to its climax in the winter’s wood-spell, when all the farmers upon a given day added their contribution to the minister’s wood-pile—a festival of kindness and good cheer.
“The kind farmers wanted to see all the children, and we were busy as bees in waiting upon them. The boys heated the flip-irons and passed around the cider and flip, while Aunt Esther and the daughters were as busy in serving the doughnuts, cake, and cheese.”
Another influence we must not forget, and that was, being let alone. “I think,” he says, “that I was about as well brought up as most children, because I was let alone. My father was so busy and my mother had so many other children to look after that, except here and there, I hardly came under the parental hand at all. I was brought up in a New England village, and I knew where the sweet-flag was, where the hickory-trees were, where the chestnut-trees were, where the sassafras-trees were, where the squirrels were, where all things were that boys enterprise after, therefore I had a world of things to do, and so I did not come much in contact with family government.” “Nobody,” so says his sister, “thought much of his future, further than to see that he was safe and healthy, or even troubled themselves to inquire what might be going on in his life.”
Some of the reminiscences of this period now given in his own words are interesting, not only from the wide field which they cover, but from the revelation they make of the susceptibility of his nature to outside influences. Of “going to meeting” he discourses in this wise:
“The coming on of Saturday night was always a serious business with the youngsters. We had no stores of religious experience on which it is presumed the old folks meditated, and the prospect of a whole day without anything in it to interest us was not a little gloomy. On no night of the week did the frogs croak so dismally, or the tree toads whistle in a mood so melancholy, as on Saturday night.
“But those blazing summer mornings! What a wealth of light spread over that blessed old hill-top! What a wondrous silence dwelt in the great round heavens above our head! The birds sang on. The crows in the distance called out to each other in hoarse discourse. The trees stood in calm beauty—the great elm-trees, tall, pliant, graceful, the perfection of strength and beauty. All this we saw and heard while buttoning up our Sunday clothes by the side of the open window. For the cow and horse had been foddered, and the pigs fed, and all the barn chores done up, and a bountiful breakfast eaten, and our face and hands washed, and every article of apparel, from shoe to hat, had changed from a secular to a sacred use. Not the every-day hat, soft, shapeless, universal instrument, used as a liquid or solid measure; used now for the head, and now for a football; used for a net to catch butterflies or to throw at wasps—no, not this bag, pocket, hat, pouch, and magazine, but the Sunday hat, round, stiff, hard, and respectable.
“Although the new hat was always disagreeable to our head, yet we had a wonderful reverence for it, and spent no inconsiderable portion of our time in church in getting it dirty and then brushing it clean.
“Our jacket, too, was new. Only a handkerchief was then in the pocket; no knife, no marbles, no strings, no stones, no fishhooks or dried angle-worms. No; a boy’s Sunday pocket of the olden time was purged of all temptation. In meeting-time we often put our little hands down into our Sunday pocket with a melancholy wish, ‘Oh! if I only had my other clothes on!’
“As soon as we were dressed and mustered in the sitting-room an inspection was had. The collar was pulled up a little, the hair had a fresh lick from the brush, the mouth must be wiped with a wet towel, the shoestring tied, and, after being turned round and round, we were started off.
“ ‘Now, Henry, be a good boy.’
“ ‘Yes, ma’am.’
“ ‘You must not laugh, or tease Harriet.’
“ ‘No, ma’am.’
“ ‘Don’t stop on the road—go right in when you get to church.’
“ ‘Yes, ma’am.”
“Every word was sincerely promised, and efficaciously broken within ten minutes.
“Oh! how high the trees seemed! Oh! how bright the heavens were! Oh! how hard it was not to play with Chester Covington’s dog, that came running to us with bark and frolic, and seemed perplexed at our sturdy propriety.
“The old musical bell up in the open belfry was busy a-tolling. It was the only thing that was allowed to work on Sunday—the bell and the minister. That bell-rope was always an object of desire and curiosity to our young days. It ran up into such dark and mysterious spaces. What there was up in those pokerish heights in the belfry tower we did not know, but something that made our flesh creep. Once we ventured to pull that rope. It was a bold and venturesome thing, we knew. But a sorcery was on us. It came gently and easily to the hand. We pulled again. ‘Dong!