A Little Book of Western Verse | Page 3

gentle streams, the influences of a sturdy stock which
has sent so many good and brave men to the West for the upbuilding of
the country and the upholding of what is best in Puritan tradition, he

gladly acknowledged he owed much that was strong and enduring.
While he gloried in the West and remained loyal to the section which
gave him birth, and in which he chose to cast his lot, he was not the less
proud of his New England blood and not the less conscious of the
benefits of a New England training. His boyhood was similar to that of
other boys brought up with the best surroundings in a Massachusetts
village, where the college atmosphere prevailed. He had his boyish
pleasures and his trials, his share of that queer mixture of
nineteenth-century worldliness and almost austere Puritanism which is
yet characteristic of many New England families. The Sabbath was a
veritable day of judgment, and in later years he spoke humorously of
the terrors of those all-day sessions in church and Sunday-school,
though he never failed to acknowledge the benefits he had derived from
an enforced study of the Bible. "If I could be grateful to New England
for nothing else," he would say, "I should bless her forevermore for
pounding me with the Bible and the spelling-book." And in proof of the
earnestness of this declaration he spent many hours in Boston a year or
two ago, trying to find "one of those spellers that temporarily made me
lose my faith in the system of the universe."
It is easy at this day to look back three decades and note the
characteristics which appeared trivial enough then, but which, clinging
to him and developing, had a marked effect on his manhood and on the
direction of his talents. As a boy his fondness for pets amounted to a
passion, but unlike other boys he seemed to carry his pets into a higher
sphere and to give them personality. For each pet, whether dog, cat,
bird, goat, or squirrel--he had the family distrust of a horse--he not only
had a name, but it was his delight to fancy that each possessed a
peculiar dialect of human speech, and each he addressed in the
humorous manner conceived. He ignored the names in common use for
domestic animals and chose or invented those more pleasing to his
exuberant fancy. This conceit was always with him, and years
afterward, when his children took the place of his boyish pets, he
gratified his whim for strange names by ignoring those designated at
the baptismal font and substituting freakish titles of his own riotous
fancy. Indeed it must have been a tax on his imaginative powers. When
in childhood he was conducting a poultry annex to the homestead, each

chicken was properly instructed to respond to a peculiar call, and
Finnikin, Minnikin, Winnikin, Dump, Poog, Boog, seemed to recognize
immediately the queer intonations of their master with an intelligence
that is not usually accorded to chickens. With this love for animal life
was developed also that tenderness of heart which was so manifest in
my brother's daily actions. One day--he was then a good-sized boy--he
came into the house, and throwing himself on the sofa, sobbed for half
an hour. One of the chickens hatched the day before had been crushed
under his foot as he was walking in the chicken-house, and no murderer
could have felt more keenly the pangs of remorse. The other boys
looked on curiously at this exhibition of feeling, and it was indeed an
unusual outburst. But it was strongly characteristic of him through life,
and nothing would so excite his anger as cruelty to an animal, while
every neglected, friendless dog or persecuted cat always found in him a
champion and a friend.
In illustration of this humane instinct it is recalled that a few weeks
before he died a lady visiting the house found his room swarming with
flies. In response to her exclamation of astonishment he explained that
a day or two before he had seen a poor, half-frozen fly on the
window-pane outside, and he had been moved by a kindly impulse to
open the window and admit her. "And this," he added, "is what I get for
it. That ungrateful creature is, as you perceive, the grandmother of eight
thousand nine hundred and seventy-six flies!"
That the birds that flew about his house in Buena Park knew his voice
has been demonstrated more than once. He would keep bread crumbs
scattered along the window-sill for the benefit, as he explained, of the
blue jays and the robins who were not in their usual robust health or
were too overcome by the heat to make customary exertion. If the jays
were particularly noisy he