THREE GENERATIONS

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THREE GENERATIONS

CHAPTER I

The Twilight of the Gods

Love and friendship, a treasure piled high as the rafters of the house of life. To be of any value, an accounting must be honest; this I shall remember in taking my account of stock and in telling how I acquired it.

I was born near midday on the ninth of November, 1854, in a large room in the apartment familiarly known as “Doctor’s Part”, at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, South Boston. My first friend, Mrs. Margaret MacDonald, familiarly called D.D., presided at this, my earliest introduction to society.

“Your mother was out walking. Much as ever she got up the long Institution steps before you came, sooner than we expected you. Your little clothes had not come home, so I wrapped you up, first along, in an old flannel petticoat of your mother’s.”

If I am somewhat of a vagrant in habit and overfond of wandering, haven’t I a good warrant for it? From my first hour I was wrapped in a fragment of my mother’s garment. If her mantle cannot truthfully be said to have fallen upon me, I have at least contrived to creep under a corner of it, and it has kept me warm all my days!

“You were lying in a green cardboard box in papa’s arms the first time I saw you. ‘Come and see little sister Polly,’ he called to us in the nursery.” This, from sister Laura, is corroborative evidence that I hurried into this world sooner than I was looked for, without even giving them time to get the old cradle down from the attic.

On hearing of my birth, Theodore Parker rode post-haste to the Institution to see my father. Their conversation was, in substance, as follows:

“Another little girl?”

“So it seems.”

“A fourth daughter, a fifth child! You and Julia have your hands full already. Give the baby to my wife and me; we’ll bring her up as our own, call her Theodora, and make her our heir!”

“My dear fellow, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

When the proposal was repeated to my mother, she exclaimed:

“Parker certainly can have no idea what it means to have a child!”

What an escape! If they could have given me to any one, it would have been to this beloved friend, who longed, above all else, for a child of his own. He put this catechism daily to his wife:

Question. What are you?

Answer. A bear.

Question. What must this bear do to be saved?

Answer. Have pups.

The pups, alas, never came to the poor “bear”, remembered as far more like a dove.

My first home was a public institution, but I had more right to it than most of those who lived there, for the Perkins Institution was founded and built by my father, Samuel Gridley Howe.

The Institution was a large brick building, with a classic façade and big white Doric columns. It stood on an elevated plateau above Broadway. Its windows looked out over Boston Harbor; you could see the Cunard steamers as they started on their trips to Europe, or returned, their red smokestacks covered with snow and icicles, after a winter passage. Strangers, noticing the blind boys and girls pacing up and down the wide piazzas that faced seaward, often spoke of the irony of fate that gave the school for the blind such a view. The rooms were large and well proportioned, with extra high ceilings. The corridors were paved with squares of gray and white marble. An imposing staircase rose, circling round and round a deep central well, to the giddy height of five tall stories; it still remains to me a triumph of architectural splendor. There was a polished mahogany handrail; to the daring, no sport was comparable to “sliding down the banisters.” This was of course strictly forbidden. It was held among us that a slip must prove fatal; one would fall down, down, and crash horribly upon that cold marble pavement at the bottom.

Till little Sam was born, I was the youngest of five children; during his short life of less than four years there were six of us: Julia, called Romana, in memory of her birthplace, Rome; Florence, named for our parents’ friend, Florence Nightingale; Henry Marion, in memory of our many times great-uncle, General Francis Marion of the Revolution; Laura, for Laura Bridgman; and little Sam, for his father. My name was given me for no better reason than that my mother fancied it. There had been a deal of discussion about the matter; when Tennyson’s Maud was published, my mother clinched it by naming me for the heroine of the poem, a fashion her friends, the William Hunts, followed by naming their first and second daughters Elaine and Enid.

The first distinct memory I have of my father is of waking one Christmas morning and finding myself lying in the big mahogany bed in his room. I knew I had gone to sleep in my black walnut crib, drawn close beside my mother’s bed in the next room. He came dancing in, with a small bundle of clothes in his arms.

“Here is a little monkey for your Christmas present,” he cried.

The little monkey was my brother Sammy, born soon after midnight, Christmas morning. Until his advent, I had always slept close to my mother. I remember now the chill of disappointment, if I ever, on waking in the dimly-lighted room, put out my hand to feel for her and found her bed empty and cold, as on some night when she had stayed out late. The desolate sense of her absence at first overwhelmed me; than came a shiver of fear of the dark corners of the room, inhabited by a strange breed of nocturnal foxes.

I did not speak till I was two years old, never so much as saying “mama”; then suddenly I pronounced a complete sentence, “See that little dog.” To help me learn to tell the time, my father contrived a large white cardboard dial with movable hands, like the face of a clock. This soon solved the mystery of hours. It must have been at about this period that some malicious governess taught me a bitter adage, which to this day I repeat, as a penitent plies the scourge on his lacerated back:

Neither of my parents believed in the saying, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” They had both been rather strictly brought up and, as so often happens, in avoiding the extreme of severity they themselves had known, they perhaps went to the other extreme of indulgence with their children. On second thought, and to be quite honest, I was the only spoilt child in the family; the charge cannot fairly be brought against the others. When the youngest child dies, and the next youngest becomes the baby, as in my case, everybody knows what happens! Not only the parents but the older children are as wax in those baby hands.

Of the little anecdotes every mother treasures about every child, the following was the one that Mama liked best to tell of her “stormy petrel.” One day, in that blessed period of silence before I had begun to talk, she found me eating the wild cherries that grew at Lawton’s Valley. Taking the forbidden fruit from me, she showed me a little stick and said:

“If you eat those cherries again, I shall slap your hands with this stick.”

The next day I came up to her, at about the same hour, one hand grasping a fistful of wild cherries, the other holding the switch. Looking her squarely in the eyes, I put the cherries in my mouth, handed her the stick, and held out my hand. The whipping? She only caught, kissed, and hugged me to her bosom.

My earliest friends were all more or less connected with the Institution, where my first years were passed. My father was a good judge of character, and the teachers and attendants he chose to help him in his great task were all rather exceptional people.

Daniel Bradford, the Institution steward, was my father’s right-hand man, and my most intimate friend. When young, he had been a ship’s carpenter; the flavor of the sea was in his talk, the roll of it in his legs. He was a short, stout man, full of a merry friendship for all mankind. On Sundays he wore a gorgeous, flowered velvet waistcoat, a full set of false teeth, and the most brazen scratch wig I ever saw. On week days he was frankly bald and toothless as a new-born baby.

“Bradford, come and make the rounds!” my father called out one morning, looking into the office, where the steward sat, laboriously making up his accounts.

They started on their tour of inspection, my father striding ahead, Braddie trotting after him, two steps to his one, and I tagging on behind. I kept very close to them that day, for Braddie needed my sympathy. Had he not that very morning confided in me?

“Old Turk, I’m going to get married. The Doctor’ll take on like the Old Scratch. You get your Ma to put in a word for me.”

I told my mother; she looked grave.

“Yes, your father will feel the loss of his faithful Sancho Panza.”

“Braddie’s not going away,” I protested; “they’ll live right on here—”

“It won’t be the same; he can’t be ready at five minutes’ notice to start for the ends of the earth at any hour of the day or night!”

There was a good deal of “taking on” about the lady who had “caught” the old steward, and in order to get it over and done with, the marriage was promptly arranged. It took place in our rooms and I was one of the wedding party. There was another guest, Laura Bridgman, my father’s famous pupil. I can see her white intense face, the sightless eyes hidden by a green silk shade, the delicate fingers—that saw more than some eyes—touching the bridal gifts, hear her plaintive cry of pleasure, like the note of some forest bird, as she felt the large blue cut-glass vase that she and I admired far more than such useful presents as butter knives and pickle forks.

“Laura Bridgman—and who was she?” some one is sure to ask.

Who could have believed then that such a question would be possible? In those days her name was known all over the civilized world. Laura was the blind deaf mute for whom my father devised the marvelous scheme of education which redeemed her from the awful loneliness of her isolation, taught her language, and made her a happy and useful member of the human family. Her education was hailed as a miracle all over Europe, and to this day teachers and thinkers are still amazed by the patience and ingenuity of the man to whom Helen Keller and scores of other educated blind deaf mutes owe their deliverance from a living tomb.

Thursday was always “Exhibition Day” at the Institution. Boston people took great pride in their School for the Blind, and by eleven o’clock the visitors’ seats were filled. The pupils, dressed in their best, gathered in the great hall, the boys on one side of the big organ, the girls on the other. They occupied benches placed in tiers, one above the other, so that you saw their faces rising row behind row; between them shone the tall gold organ pipes, with the name of the donor on a blue scroll: “The Gift of George Lee.” A blind musician sat at the organ; sometimes it was my friend, Joel Smith, and sometimes William Reeves, the leader of the band. The exercises opened with an organ solo, while the visitors settled themselves in their places, facing the pupils. As the deep organ tones thundered through the hall, Laura Bridgman sounded her little ecstatic note of pleasure. She felt the vibration from the organ and was thrilled by what she called “hearing the music.” The exercises included reading aloud from the raised type of books, printed in our own press; singing, violin and piano solos by the most gifted scholars; and “selections” by our brass band, made up of the larger boys. The finale was a chorus of all the scholars. The organist struck a soaring melody, the blind boys and girls rose to their feet, their young passionless voices ringing out:

If there were a stranger present—there usually was—he was sure to be deeply moved, often to tears. Music, their greatest earthly pleasure, brings to the blind a supreme delight, whose reflection can be caught in the rapture of those upturned faces.

My father’s was a restless temperament; as far back as I can remember, our family life was diversified by frequent “movings.” “Green Peace”, our own home, was only five minutes’ walk from the Institution in which we lived part of the time; in these early days I am trying to recall, we moved perhaps every six months from one habitat to the other. There was, besides, the regular hegira to our summer home, Lawton’s Valley, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. At that time few Boston people moved out of town before July. I can date our own summer flitting by the fact that it immediately followed the Fourth. I find a confusion of the most exquisite memories connected with this day, beginning with an early waking to the sound of bells, whistles, guns, and firecrackers. The bells were our own South Boston bells; the guns, from Fort Independence, which we felt in some special sense belonged to us. Next comes a dim memory of the procession of the “Antiques and Horribles” and the dreadful fright produced by those grotesque masks. I was allowed all the torpedoes I wanted, but forbidden firecrackers—vainly forbidden, alas! I have the feel of them yet in my fingers—those small, furry scarlet crackers with their white string fuses—and smell the good acrid smell of the gunpowder, as they popped, popped, in those early morning hours, when Papa was taking his ride, and Mama slept beside the baby that had kept her awake till all hours. After these early adventures of the pearly dawn came scorching midday hours on the wide yellow sanded paths of Boston Common. Here we bought bunches of fragrant water lilies, holding their long cool stems in our hot little hands, as we stood watching the parade of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company.

The drum major struts like a glorified turkey cock, swinging his great staff. The band! Oh! the band! How our spirits rise to the crisp notes of “Yankee Doodle”; how our hearts melt within us as the gay tune changes to a minor air:

It is afternoon. We have moved with the crowd to the lower end of the Common, just above the old cow path, where men I have known remember driving their fathers’ cattle along the way now called “Charles Street.” The balloon ascension is set for five o’clock; we are in good time, together with hundreds of other eager spectators. We catch our breath as the immense pink silk globe, in its coffee-colored network, sways above our heads, the daring aëronaut striking an attitude in the car, a straw basket which hangs four or five feet below.

“He’s off!”

No attitudinizing now. Very carefully the gallant aëronaut lowers the grapnel over the side of the car, as the great balloon rises slowly, slowly, into the burning blue. We watch it until it becomes a speck over our heads. I am so filled with forebodings about the perilous journey that my nurse seeks out a man who has helped prepare the balloon for the ascension.

“This little girl,” she says, “is afraid that Mr. Wise will never come down alive.”

“Not a mite o’ danger, miss, on a day like this. Didn’t you see all them bags of ballast? And the valve rope? When he wants to go up, he chucks out a few of the sandbags. When he wants to come down, he pulls that there valve-string and lets out the gas, see? Just you look in the Boston Advertiser to-morrow morning and that will tell you where the balloon landed.”

There is an interval between this thrilling experience and the final rapture of the day. I am in the house of my Uncle and Aunt Wales, on Boylston Street, opposite the Public Gardens, where I am put to sleep in a big four-poster and later fed upon strawberries and sponge cake. This quiet interlude between the excitements of the day seems a sad waste of time. At half-past eight, thanks to the rest, I am fresh and eager for the crowning event, “Fireworks on the Common.” I can hear now the hiss of the rockets, the long-drawn “Ah!” of the multitude that follows each fresh display. How clear it all is! Our elders’ fear of the crowd is a slight shadow on our ecstatic happiness.

“Don’t let go the child’s hand!” seems a useless warning—the crowd is so friendly, so cheerful, so full of an almost solemn excitement. How we cheer the portraits of George and Martha Washington! When the last set piece goes off, the final bouquet flares above the elms of the mall, how quickly the great crowd melts and flows off in dark currents and eddies, and how tightly now I cling to my nurse’s hand, lest I be swept away and lost!

How cleverly Papa marshals us out of the crowd and down the side street, where Billy Glass, our coachman, waits with the carryall to drive us home, a tired happy crew of young patriots, who have survived the dangers of firecrackers, giant torpedoes, and skyrockets. The latter fear was ever present with Mama, who shuddered at the thought that one of us might be blinded by a falling rocket stick. Papa made light of her terrors with the epitaph:

It was not by accident that Papa kept us in Boston over the Fourth. He must have longed, as elders do to-day, to be out of the hot city on Independence Day. He knew the risks of city streets to his “young barbarians”, and made it his business to minimize those risks, because he also knew the value of those early impressions upon a child’s imagination. Whatever his children might or might not turn out to be, he took good care that they should all grow up red-hot patriots.

Looking back upon the first six or seven years of my life, I find myself in a dim enchanted land, which I have come to think of as “The Twilight of the Gods”, for the figures that peopled it were, indeed, heroes and demigods. They drop easily apart into two groups, Mama’s friends and Papa’s friends. Mama’s friends—we called them “The Owls”—were poets, philosophers, and theologians, speculative men who sat long and discussed abstract things. Papa’s friends were statesmen, soldiers, militant philanthropists, men of action whose time was too precious for long visits, but who came and went with a certain tense purpose in strong contrast to those others. Such scraps of their talk as one overheard one understood more or less; one at least had some idea of “what they were driving at”, whereas the Owls talked rank nonsense, “about objectivity and subjectivity, Kant and ‘Dant’ and all the rest of them!”

Theodore Parker with his “hammer of Thor” was friend to both parents. I cannot remember him; he lives for me in a sort of dim limbo behind the Twilight of the Gods, peopled by men and women whom my parents had known before I was born and of whom I had heard them talk. Here lives Lafayette, who had signed himself in a letter to Papa (still preserved) “your forever friend”, and Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, Maria Edgeworth, Florence Nightingale, and a host of others. To this day I am linked to these great shadows by my parents’ friendship, as with some subtlest bond of sympathy and understanding. If I ever meet them, I shall surely know them.

John Brown is perhaps the most real of all these shadowy figures. My mother tells in her Reminiscences of her first meeting with him. My father had warned her of his coming to our house, with these words: “Do you remember that man of whom I spoke to you—the one who wished to be a saviour for the negro race? That man will call here this afternoon; you will receive him.”

The old house at Green Peace holds no more vivid memory than of that visitor who must be secretly admitted by its mistress lest some gossipy servant whisper. She stands, a slight gracious figure at the threshold, gazing earnestly at the stranger, “A Puritan of the Puritans, forceful, self-contained, with hair and beard of amber streaked with gray.”

In “The First Martyr”, one of the best of her patriotic poems, my mother tells the story of an incident of which I have no memory, but which has had its influence upon me for all that.

Returning from a visit to John Brown’s wife, a few weeks before his execution by the Commonwealth of Virginia, my mother came into my nursery and took me on her knee, hoping to distract her thoughts by playing with me. Some sense of what she was suffering was borne in upon me, for I questioned her closely: Why was she so sad? Where had she been that afternoon? Who had she seen? Bit by bit, I got the story from her. The poem, from which I quote the following verses, may be found in “Later Lyrics”:

So it is something to be thankful for, that at the age of five I volunteered for active service, in the forlorn hope of rescuing John Brown.

Charles Sumner, dear as a brother to my father, is a very distinct figure in the Twilight of the Gods, towering in mind, character, and stature above other men.

Some ancestral trait of worldliness must have “got by” my parents (the most unworldly people I have ever known) and down to me, for I was rather a mundane youngster. I was much impressed by a certain dignified splendor in Mr. Sumner’s bearing and clothing, which, together with his single eyeglass, like those of “swells” in Punch, made me regard him as the social superior of most of our intimates.

What a contrast to Charles Sumner was John Albion Andrew, the great war governor of Massachusetts and one of Mr. Lincoln’s firm supporters in the darkest days of the Civil War! To me, he was “Edith Andrew’s father”, the cherubic, adorable parent of my intimate friend. The mention of his name evokes memories of the Andrew house at 110 Charles Street. The living room, with its worn leathern sofa where the children were always welcome, was on the ground floor next the dining room. The drawing-room was up one flight; it contained some fine old pieces of colonial furniture, some good pictures, a strong charcoal drawing by William Hunt, a brilliant painting of a troubadour by Babcock, a genre by Elihu Vedder, a number of Japanese cabinets and bibelots.

There were four Andrew children: Bessie, who looked like her father, a studious girl and a good musician; Forrester, a slender blond youth, who later married Hattie Thayer and died young, leaving two charming daughters; Edith, my friend and playmate, who looked like her pretty mother; and a younger son, Harry. Governor Andrew was short and stout, with very curly brown hair and a florid complexion. He had round eyeglasses, from behind which shone kind blue eyes like a baby’s. He wore a black soft felt hat and a black Inverness cape, with a military cord and tassel that took my fancy. I shared many privileges with the Andrew children, among them Sunday-morning excursions to the School Ship, a training ship for juvenile offenders, where we looked curiously at the young sailor boys and wished it was not forbidden to make friends with them. We had the run of the State House, where we spent happy hours romping in the Senate Chamber, under the big codfish. The Seal of State was familiar to us; and one long rainy afternoon, when we waited while the Governor and my father held an endless conference with other serious looking men, we made free with the official pencils and notepaper and made archaic drawings of men and horses. How lightly we flitted and frolicked about the halls and corridors! And yet we had a certain sense of the tense situations which every day faced the Governor and those who labored with him for State and country. Andrew had no easy task, for the pacifists were busy in those days as in these. A letter to “Frank” Bird from my father, written at the time when war was imminent but not declared, contains this sentence: