A Far Country | Page 5

make compromises, was still a force in those days, inimical to
spontaneity and human instincts. And when I think of Calvinism I see,
not Dr. Pound, who preached it, but my father, who practised and
embodied it. I loved him, but he made of righteousness a stern and

terrible thing implying not joy, but punishment, the, suppression rather
than the expansion of aspirations. His religion seemed woven all of
austerity, contained no shining threads to catch my eye. Dreams, to him,
were matters for suspicion and distrust.
I sometimes ask myself, as I gaze upon his portrait now, the duplicate
of the one painted for the Bar Association, whether he ever could have
felt the secret, hot thrills I knew and did not identify with religion. His
religion was real to him, though he failed utterly to make it
comprehensible to me. The apparent calmness, evenness of his life
awed me. A successful lawyer, a respected and trusted citizen, was he
lacking somewhat in virility, vitality? I cannot judge him, even to-day.
I never knew him. There were times in my youth when the curtain of
his unfamiliar spirit was withdrawn a little: and once, after I had passed
the crisis of some childhood disease, I awoke to find him bending over
my bed with a tender expression that surprised and puzzled me.
He was well educated, and from his portrait a shrewd observer might
divine in him a genteel taste for literature. The fine features bear
witness to the influence of an American environment, yet suggest the
intellectual Englishman of Matthew Arnold's time. The face is
distinguished, ascetic, the chestnut hair lighter and thinner than my own;
the side whiskers are not too obtrusive, the eyes blue-grey. There is a
large black cravat crossed and held by a cameo pin, and the coat has
odd, narrow lapels. His habits of mind were English, although he
harmonized well enough with the manners and traditions of a city
whose inheritance was Scotch-Irish; and he invariably drank tea for
breakfast. One of my earliest recollections is of the silver breakfast
service and egg-cups which my great-grandfather brought with him
from Sheffield to Philadelphia shortly after the Revolution. His son, Dr.
Hugh Moreton Paret, after whom I was named, was the best known
physician of the city in the decorous, Second Bank days.
My mother was Sarah Breck. Hers was my Scotch-Irish side. Old
Benjamin Breck, her grandfather, undaunted by sea or wilderness, had
come straight from Belfast to the little log settlement by the great river
that mirrored then the mantle of primeval forest on the hills. So much
for chance. He kept a store with a side porch and square-paned
windows, where hams and sides of bacon and sugar loaves in blue
glazed paper hung beside ploughs and calico prints, barrels of flour, of

molasses and rum, all of which had been somehow marvellously
transported over the passes of those forbidding mountains,--passes we
blithely thread to-day in dining cars and compartment sleepers. Behind
the store were moored the barges that floated down on the swift current
to the Ohio, carrying goods to even remoter settlements in the western
wilderness.
Benjamin, in addition to his emigrant's leather box, brought with him
some of that pigment that was to dye the locality for generations a deep
blue. I refer, of course, to his Presbyterianism. And in order the better
to ensure to his progeny the fastness of this dye, he married the
granddaughter of a famous divine, celebrated in the annals of New
England,--no doubt with some injustice,--as a staunch advocate on the
doctrine of infant damnation. My cousin Robert Breck had old
Benjamin's portrait, which has since gone to the Kinley's. Heaven
knows who painted it, though no great art were needed to suggest on
canvas the tough fabric of that sitter, who was more Irish than Scotch.
The heavy stick he holds might, with a slight stretch of the imagination,
be a blackthorn; his head looks capable of withstanding many blows;
his hand of giving many. And, as I gazed the other day at this picture
hanging in the shabby suburban parlour, I could only contrast him with
his anaemic descendants who possessed the likeness. Between the
children of poor Mary Kinley,-- Cousin Robert's daughter, and the
hardy stock of the old country there is a gap indeed!
Benjamin Breck made the foundation of a fortune. It was his son who
built on the Second Bank the wide, corniced mansion in which to house
comfortably his eight children. There, two tiers above the river, lived
my paternal grandfather, Dr. Paret, the Breck's physician and friend;
the Durretts and the Hambletons, iron-masters; the Hollisters, Sherwins,
the McAlerys and Ewanses,--Breck connections,--the Willetts and
Ogilvys; in short, everyone of importance in the days between the
'thirties