Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. | Page 6

only Irishman that was in Sheffield, I think, in those
days, lived in my father's family for several years as a hired
man,--Richard; I knew him by no other name then, and recall him by
no other now,--the tallest and best-formed "exile of Erin" that I have
ever seen; prodigiously strong, yet always gentle in manner and speech
to us children; with the full brogue, and every way marked in my view,
and set apart from every one around him,--"a stranger in a strange
land." The only thing besides, that I distinctly remember of him, was
the point he made every Christmas of getting in the "Yule-log," a huge
log which he had doubtless been saving out in chopping the wood-pile,
big enough for a yoke of oxen to draw, and which he placed with a kind
of ceremony and respect in the great kitchen fireplace. With our absurd
New England Puritan ways, yet naturally derived from the times of the
English Commonwealth, when any observance of Christmas was made
penal and punished with [24] imprisonment, I am not sure that we
should have known anything of Christmas, but for Richard's Yule-log.
There was another class of persons who were frequently engaged to do
day's work on the farm,--that of the colored people. Some of them had
been slaves here in Sheffield. They were virtually emancipated by our
State Bill of Rights, passed in 1783. The first of them that sought
freedom under it, and the first, it is said, that obtained it in New
England, was a female slave of General Ashley, and her advocate in the
case was Mr. Sedgwick, afterwards Judge Sedgwick, who was then a
lawyer in Sheffield.
There were several of the men that stand out as pretty marked
individualities in my memory, Peter and Caesar and Will and Darby;
merry old fellows they seemed to be,--I see no laborers so cheerful and

gay now,--and very faithful and efficient workers. Peter and his wife,
Toah (so was she called), had belonged to my maternal grandfather,
and were much about us, helping, or being helped, as the case might be.
They both lived and died in their own cottage, pleasantly situated on
the bank of Skenob Brook. They tilled their own garden, raised their
own "sarse," kept their own cow; and I have heard one say that "Toah's
garden had the finest damask roses in the world, and her house, and all
around it, was the pink of neatness."
In taking leave of my childhood, I must say [25] that, so far as my
experience goes, the ordinary poetic representations of the happiness of
that period, as compared with after life, are not true, and I must doubt
whether they ought to be true. I was as happy, I suppose, as most
children. I had good health; I had companions and sports; the school
was not a hardship to me,--I was always eager for it; I was never hardly
dealt with by anybody; I was never once whipped in my life, that I can
remember; but instead of looking back to childhood as the blissful
period of my life, I find that I have been growing happier every year,
up to this very time. I recollect in my youth times of moodiness and
melancholy; but since I entered on the threshold of manly life, of
married and parental life, all these have disappeared. I have had inward
struggles enough, certainly,--struggles with doubt, with
temptation,--sorrows and fears and strifes enough; but I think I have
been gradually, though too slowly, gaining the victory over them. Truth,
art, religion,--the true, the beautiful, the divine,--have constantly risen
clearer and brighter before me; my family bonds have grown stronger,
friends dearer, the world and nature fuller of goodness and beauty, and
I have every day grown a happier man.
To take up again the thread of my story, I pass from childhood to my
youth. My winters, up to the age of about sixteen, were given to [26]
school,--the common district-school,--and my summers, to assisting my
father on the farm; after that, for a year or two, my whole time was
devoted to preparing for college. For this purpose I went first, for one
year, to a school taught in Sheffield by Mr. William H. Maynard,
afterwards an eminent lawyer and senator in the State of New York. He
came among us with the reputation of being a prodigy in knowledge; he

was regarded as a kind of walking library; and this reputation, together
with his ceaseless assiduity as a teacher, awakened among us boys an
extraordinary ambition. What we learned, and how we learned it, and
how we lost it, might well be a caution to all other masters and pupils.
Besides going through Virgil and Cicero's Orations that year, and