In a little saucer-like valley of the lower Berkshires, where the hills stand about in a wide circle, lies that most beautiful of Connecticut villages, Litchfield. Here Harriet Beecher Stowe was born. There was not a day when she and her brothers and sisters did not run to the window to see that blue rim of hills, and even when they were grown into women and men they did not forget the charm of their early home in the mountains. From the door of the house where they lived there was an extended view. Here Harriet often stood and looked over to the distant horizon, where Mt. Tom reared its round, blue head against the sky, and the Great and Little Ponds gleamed out amid a steel-blue expanse of distant pine groves. Turning to the west, she saw a rounded height called Prospect Hill, and many a pensive, wondering hour she sat on the stone threshold of that doorway, watching the splendor of the sunsets that burned themselves out beyond that hill. Harriet often said that her home was at the precise point of the country where the hills were most inspiring and vivacious, reminding one of the Psalm, “The little hills rejoice on every side.” Mountains are grand, she thought, and sometimes even dreary; but these half-grown hills uplift one like the waves of the sea.

Once when Harriet returned by stage-coach from a visit to her relatives down in Guilford, she could not restrain her raptures on beholding her mountains again. As the quaint old coach went lumbering along the winding road, the keen-eyed little girl leaned out of the window, peering in every direction, determined to let no bluebird’s flight escape her and no columbine flower pass unadmired. She took in all the sweeping bends of the beautiful brown river and watched the curves of water as they flowed over the shining rocks. After a while the coach wound up amid hemlock forests whose solemn shadows were all aglow with pink clouds of blossoming laurel. Presently they entered into great vistas of mountains whose cloudy, purple heads stretched and veered around the path like moving forms in a dream. There were the hills which meant home. Writing about this years afterward, she cried out, “Can there be anything on earth as beautiful as these mountain rides in New England?” So she gave to her childhood’s home the name of Cloudland, and its inheritance of clear air and height and spaciousness became a part of her nature.

Any one would have loved the quiet village in 1811, the year when Harriet Beecher was born, with the large Green in the center on which stood the meeting-house where her honored father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, preached. From here extended to the four points of the compass the four spacious avenues, North, South, East, and West Streets, all of them thickly planted with double rows of fine elm trees, through which one could see the stately colonial mansions that had been there since before the days of the Revolution.

These mansions had looked upon many a thrilling scene, for in those Revolutionary days the town of Litchfield had been a place of great activity. The direct state road from Boston across to West Point and thence down the river to the city of New York passed at that time through the town, making connection with the station for military stores that were kept there. So on training days there would be dramatic episodes on the ample Green, while on many a dark night that great message-bearer, Paul Revere, would ride swiftly and mysteriously through the town.

In fact, the town of Litchfield, in the days of the Beecher family, fairly bristled with traditions of that ancient, eventful era. It is certain that the little Harriet would be told about the time when the service of war had claimed all the men in the patriotic township of Litchfield except eight, who were too old or too young to go out and fight. It must also have been impressed upon her that the women of her native town shared in an especial degree this lofty patriotism, for it is related that when the leaden statue of King George was knocked off its pedestal in Bowling Green, in New York City, the shattered pieces were conveyed to the military storehouse at Litchfield and there hidden away. Then when the great need arose, the aristocratic ladies of Litchfield melted the broken fragments of that rejected statue and with their own hands molded the lead into bullets. Harriet’s heart swelled with pride as she heard this story or as she passed the very house where the lead was molded over or perhaps was shown the precious memorandum that indicated how many thousand bullets each helper had made. Litchfield, indeed, a very storehouse of patriotic tradition, was a fitting home for Harriet Beecher Stowe whose soul was to be a perfect flame of patriotic feeling by virtue of which she was to perform a great and permanent work.

In Harriet’s own childhood, too, Litchfield was a very busy place. There were some forty mills along the streams, not one of which remains to-day, and there was a famous law school, the first one in America, and a celebrated school for young ladies. The society in the village was singularly good; it was a place where piety, intelligence, and refinement were united. Mrs. Stowe, remembering the history that lay back of it in Colonial and Revolutionary days, spoke of it as “burning like live coals with all the fervid activity of an intense, newly kindled, peculiar and individual life.”

Perhaps one would realize this somewhat better on a Sunday than on a week day. Then from the fine old residences that adorned the principal street the families of comfortable means and impressive traditions proceeded in a dignified manner and solemnly entered the little church. From the outlying population for miles around came also processions of wagons, bearing the well-dressed wives, stalwart sons and blooming daughters of the well-to-do farmers, all punctual as a clock to the ringing of the second-bell. They were alert-minded, independent people; it was a highly intelligent audience that gathered to hear Dr. Beecher expound problems of theology, which his hearers were quite ready to debate with him if they thought he bent a little too far to the one side or to the other in some hair-splitting argument.

The parsonage where Dr. Beecher lived, and where seven of his thirteen children were born, was a roomy edifice that seemed to have been built by a succession of afterthoughts. It was first a model New England house, built around a great brick chimney which ran up like a lighthouse in the center of the square roof; but various bedroom additions had been gradually made and a new kitchen had been built on, and out of the kitchen a sinkroom, and out of the sinkroom a woodhouse, and out of the woodhouse a carriage house, and so on through a gradually lessening succession of out-buildings, until it might seem as if the house has been constructed on the model of a telescope. And besides all this, there were four great attics! What a wonderful house in which to play tag or blind-man’s bluff!

The house stood at the highest point on North Street in the midst of a colony of noble elms that gathered about the plain, old-fashioned parsonage like classic pillars, giving it a grand air of scholarly retirement. The surroundings of this rambling old house were delightful. There was the tall well-sweep, and a gate that swung with a chain and a great stone. From the pantry window could be seen a whole neighborhood of purple-leaved beets and feathery parsnips; the gooseberry bushes were rolled up by the fence in billows, and here and there stood an aristocratic quince tree. Far off in one corner a little patch penuriously devoted to ornament flamed with marigolds, poppies, snappers and four-o’clocks. Then there was a little box by itself with one rose geranium in it, which looked around the garden in a frightened way, as much a stranger as a French dancing master would be in a Yankee meeting-house. The little foreigner, however, received delicate attention at the hands of Harriet’s beauty-loving mother.

But, although the house was a big one, there was not too much room for the Beecher family. Besides the father and mother, there were, when the last arrival completed the magic number, thirteen children in all. Then there was sometimes an aunt, or a grandmother, or a cousin; there were generally a number of students as boarders, and these, together with one Rachel and one Zillah, both black, completed the household circle.

Rich in children was this New England family, but not in other wealth. Economy in the Beecher family was a necessity, but economy was also a law of New England life. Dr. Beecher in one of his reminiscences tells of an old parishioner of his who was so steeped in the prevailing spirit of economy that he boasted of having kept all of his accounts for thirty years with one quill pen; that he knew exactly how to lean his arm on the table so as not to take the nap off the sleeve; and how to set down his foot with the least possible wear to the sole of his shoe. It stands to reason that when the minister has to deal with such deacons as this the minister’s wife will turn a dress several times, and must be forgiven if she requires even the smallest children of her family to overcast the long seams of the linen sheets and to hem interminable towels. This is what the little Harriet had to do, and perhaps it did not cause her any harm.

In spite of this rather narrowed way of living, the children in this family did not feel poor. Once there was sent from Boston to the Litchfield parsonage a barrel of dishes embellished with figures which you could worship without worshiping the image of anything either in the heaven or upon earth—so Henry said; but the children thought them the very embodiment of beauty. When the barrel was unpacked, one of the boys said, “Oh, mother, what rich people we must be to have such wonderful dishes!” Wealth, it seems, consists more in the way one feels than in what one really possesses.

An establishment such as this, as any one may see, afforded occupation for a number of hands. Little Harriet was a great worker. Her brother wrote that before he was ten years old he had learned to sew, knit, scour knives, wash dishes, set and clear the table, cut and split and bring in wood, break tumblers and—earn whippings! There can be no doubt that his sister next older shared these exercises with him—except the last! We are not going to believe that Harriet ever deserved that.

Harriet Beecher said once that work, thrift and industry are the incessant steam-power of Yankee life; certainly none of her family seems to have been in any degree scared by the prospect of hard work. Harriet’s brother Edward makes light of the labor in a very jolly letter which he sent in 1821 to his stepmother. “And what shall I say more? Shall I speak of our orchard, from which the gale blew off apples enough for twenty barrels of cider, and whereon are yet cider and winter apples without number? Or of our cellar wherein are barrels small and great, moreover bins, boxes, cupboards, which I have arranged, having cleansed the cellar with bezom, rake, and wheelbarrow? Or of our garden, in which were weeds of various kinds, particularly pig; yea, also beets, carrots, parsnips and potatoes, the like of which was never seen?”1 And Dr. Beecher himself, writing to one of the boys in July, 1819, tells how he has weeded the parsnips and beets, has planted potatoes in the orchard, plowed the yard and carried out the stones. With some help he has got out in two days a pile of stones as big as the salt mountain in Louisiana! After that they set to and tore down a useless eighty-year-old barn. The garden, he went on to say, was waving with corn, canteloupes, cabbages and pumpkins. The peas were some of them big enough to eat but had politely waited for the younger brethren around them to come to maturity so that they might all have the pleasure of being eaten together! The raspberries were so thick that one could not see between them, nor even stick between them a sharp-pointed knife. “Can you not find out by algebra,” he asks, “how many there will be?” So he goes on through the list—lettuce, radishes, pepper-grass, carrots, etc. “The garden gates shut,” he continues, “as regularly as they open, and no creature can get in except the hens, which are now about tired of coming, as they are sure to be saluted quite unexpectedly with a charge of powder, ‘speaking terror from the gun muzzle.’ Do you know,” he asks his son, “from whom the quotation is made? Some poet, you perceive.” So the wise father mixed instruction with gossip and made a game of work.

He was an interesting man, gifted with tremendous enthusiasm and untiring energy. And he had an individual way of doing things and a salty wit which can only be described as Beecher-ish. He knew instinctively just when to praise and when to blame. When he and the boys were splitting wood and carrying it into the shed, he sometimes said, “I wish, Harriet, that you were a boy, for, if you had been, you would have done more than any of them.” Then would Harriet run and put on a little black coat she had, and work like all possessed to outdo the others in her enthusiasm. The clever suggestion to Harriet also glanced sidewise and hit the lagging boys, who then bestirred themselves until the wood was all split and piled in the woodshed and the chips swept up. To make the work go faster and more cheerfully, Dr. Beecher sometimes made the children vie with each other to see who could tell the most Bible stories, or name the most Bible characters; or he started a discussion on some theological question, often taking the weaker or wrong side himself and telling the children what point to bring forward, saying, the argument is thus and so! Now, if you will take this position, you will be able to trip me up! So he strengthened their reasoning powers.

The task done, the reward was a fishing excursion or a nutting party. Here again the father challenged the children in feats of climbing the trees and of gathering the nuts. Although not a man of special physical strength himself, he came from a line celebrated for vigor. His grandfather had been six feet tall and could easily lift a barrel of cider and drink from the bung. His father, not quite so tremendous, had been only strong enough to lift a barrel of cider and toss it easily into the cart! The descendant of these giant-like men was more celebrated for his intellectual feats than for his merely physical exploits. But no Highlanders ever gloried more proudly in the prowess of their chief than did the Beecher children in that of their father! The most difficult trees were climbed by the Doctor himself; sometimes to reach a branch that hung out over the cliff, he endangered his life to get the fruit. They were certain that no tree grew in so exalted a place that he could not climb it. Oh, those were great days! At noon a fire was made and the abundant luncheon was spread on a broad flat rock around which a white foam of moss made a soft seat. And here again the father was the hero, for around the fire no companion could be more jolly than he. It is not strange that the children remembered their father rather as a playmate than as a stern disciplinarian.

Yet discipline in this home circle there must have been to keep order in so large and intensely active a family. Aunt Esther sometimes found a want of subordination among the troops. The very cleverness of the children made the problem great. For instance, if she told the boys that they should not be so boisterous, they would be likely to answer by complaining that she did not also try to keep the girls from being so girlsterous. And under cover of this witticism the boys would escape punishment. At one time she wrote to one of the children in a merry mood, “Your father and mother have been gone a fortnight and the crew at home are beginning to grow somewhat mutinous, and I am not sure but I shall be obliged to condemn and hang a half score of them before the return of your father.” In February, 1822, while Harriet was visiting her aunt at Guilford, her older sister, Catherine, wrote to her: “We all want you home very much, but hope you are now where you will learn to stand and sit straight and hear what people say to you, and sit still in your chair, and learn to sew and knit well, and be a good girl in every particular; and if you don’t learn this while you are with your Aunt Harriet, I am afraid you never will.” Then, to offset this rather strenuous piece of advice, Catherine, in relenting mood, added, very much as her father might have done: “Old Puss is very well and sends his respects to you; and Mr. Black Trip has come out of the barn to live, and says that if you ever come into the kitchen he will jump up and lick your hand and pull your frock, just as he serves the rest of us.” This elder sister of Harriet’s was so full of fun that she was the life and joy of the house. Writing to their brother Edward in 1819, she said: “Apropos—last week we interred Tom, Junior, with funeral honors, by the side of old Tom of happy memory. What a fatal mortality there is among the cats of the parsonage! Our Harriet is chief mourner always at their funerals. She has asked for what she calls an ‘epithet’ for the gravestone of Tom, Junior, which I gave as follows:

Catherine’s father must have been looking over his daughter’s shoulder as she wrote this, for he added a postscript saying that, as every man must eat his pound of dirt, so he supposed every one must write his quire of nonsense, but that he hoped that soon none but letters so solid and weighty as to earn their postage would be passing to and fro. After this Catherine put on still another postscript and said: “Never mind this, Ned, for Papa loves to laugh as well as any of us, and is quite as much tickled at nonsense as we are.”

There was, then, a merry side in the life at Litchfield Parsonage. Catherine wrote at one time, quite seriously, that her little sister was a very good girl, had been to school all summer and had learned to read very fluently, and that she had committed to memory twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters in the Bible; that she had a remarkably retentive memory and would make a very good scholar. Still, considering the spirit of fun that races through every book Harriet wrote, we cannot believe she was always sitting still in a chair, learning to sew and knit well, and being a good girl in every particular. We think of her also as having something in her of the fascinating little Tina in “Oldtown Folks,” one of Mrs. Stowe’s most powerful stories of New England life. We can even believe it to have been as difficult in Harriet’s case as it was in Tina’s to get her to go to bed at the proper hour. As night drew on, the little one’s tongue no doubt ran on with increasing fluency, and her powers of entertainment waxed more dazzling. On a drizzling, freezing night when the wind howled lonesomely around the corners of the house, who could have the heart to extinguish the candle at exactly eight or even at nine? Then little Harriet was ballet and opera to the household group, mimicking the dog, the cat, the hens, and the tom-turkey, or talking and flying about the room in lively imitation of some member of the family. She stirred up butter and exclaimed, “Pshaw!” just like one of the grown-ups; she invented imaginary scenes and conversations and improvised unheard-of costumes out of strange old things she rummaged out of the garret, until nine o’clock sounded inexorably from the old family timepiece and put a stop to the fun for that night.