Charles Carleton Coffin | Page 5

four pence ha'penny to spend. Federal currency was not plentiful in those days, and the people still used the old nomenclature, of pounds, shillings, and pence, which was Teutonic even before it was English or American. Rejoicing in his orange, his stick of candy, and his supply of seed cakes, young Carleton, from the window of the old North Meeting House, saw the military parade and the hero of New Orleans. With thin features and white hair, Jackson sat superbly on a white horse, bowing right and left to the multitude. Martin Van Buren was one of the party.
Another event, long to be remembered by a child who had never before been out late at night, was when, with a party of boys seven or eight in number, he went a-spearing on Great Pond. In the calm darkness they walked around the pond down the brook to the falls. With a bright jack-light, made of pitch-pine-knots, everything seemed strange and exciting to the boy who was making his first acquaintance of the wilderness world by night. His brother Enoch speared an eel that weighed four pounds, and a pickerel of the same weight. The party did not get home till 2 A. M., but the expedition was a glorious one and long talked over. The only sad feature in this rich experience was in his mother's worrying while her youngest child was away.
This was in April. On the 20th of August, just after sunset, in the calm summer night, little Carleton looked into his mother's eyes for the last time, and saw the heaving breast gradually become still. It was the first great sorrow of his life.
CHAPTER III.
THE DAYS OF HOMESPUN.
Carleton's memories of school-days have little perhaps that is uncommon. He remembers the typical struggle between the teacher and the big boy who, despite resistance, was soundly thrashed. Those were the days of physical rather than moral argument, of punishment before judicial inquiry. Once young Carleton had marked his face with a pencil, making the scholars laugh. Called up by the man behind the desk, and asked whether he had done it purposely, the frightened boy, not knowing what to say, answered first yes, and then no. "Don't tell a lie, sir," roared the master, and down came the blows upon the boy's hands, while up came the sense of injustice and the longing for revenge. The boy took his seat with tingling palms and a heart hot with the sense of wrong, but no tears fell.
It was his father's rule that if the children were punished at school, they should have the punishment repeated at home. This was the sentiment of the time and the method of discipline believed to be best for moulding boys and girls into law-abiding citizens. In the evening, tender-hearted and with pain in his soul, but fearing to relax and let down the bars to admit a herd of evils, the father doomed his son to stay at home, ordering as a punishment the reading of the narrative of Ananias and Sapphira.
From that hour throughout his life Carleton hated this particular scripture. He had told no lie, he did not know what he had said, yet he was old enough to feel the injustice of the punishment. It rankled in memory for years. Temporarily he hated the teacher and the Bible, and the episode diminished for awhile his respect for law and order.
The next ten years of Carleton's life may be told in his own words, as follows:
"The year of 1830 may be taken as a general date for a new order of social life. The years prior to that date were the days of homespun. I remember the loom in the garret, the great and small spinning-wheels, the warping bars, quill wheel, reels, swifts, and other rude mechanisms for spinning and weaving. My eldest sister learned to spin and weave. My second sister Mary and sister Elvira both could spin on the large wheel, but did not learn to weave. I myself learned to twist yarn on the large wheel, and was set to winding it into balls.
"The linen and the tow cloths were bleached on the grass in the orchard, and it was my business to keep it sprinkled during the hot days, to take it in at night and on rainy days, to prevent mildew. In those days a girl began to prepare for marriage as soon as she could use a needle, stitching bits of calico together for quilts. She must spin and weave her own sheets and pillow-cases and blankets.
"All of my clothes, up to the age of fourteen, were homespun. My first 'boughten' jacket was an olive green broadcloth,--a remnant which was bought cheap because it was a remnant. I wore it at an evening party given by