Charles Carleton Coffin | Page 4

had shot a hawk,
breaking its wing, and bringing it to the house alive. The boy baby

standing in the doorway, all the family being in the yard, always
remembered looking at what he called "a hen with a crooked bill."
Carleton's recollection of the freshet of August, 1826, when the great
slide occurred at the White Mountains, causing the death of the Willey
family, was more detailed. This event has been thrillingly described by
Thomas Starr King. The irrepressible small boy wanted to "go to
meeting" on Sunday. Being told that he could not, he cried himself to
sleep. When he awoke he mounted his "horse,"--a broomstick,--and
cantered up the road for a half mile. Captured by a lady, he resisted
vigorously, while she pointed to the waters running in white streams
down the hills through the flooded meadows and telling him he would
be drowned.
Meanwhile the hired man at home was poling the well under the sweep
and "the old oaken bucket," thinking the little fellow might have leaned
over the curb and tumbled in. Shortly afterwards he came near
disappearing altogether from this world by tumbling into the
water-trough, being fished out by his sister Mary.
In the old kitchen, a pair of deer's horns fastened into the wall held the
long-barrelled musket which his grandfather had carried in the
campaign of 1777. A round beaver hat, bullet, button, and spoon
moulds, and home-made pewter spoons and buttons, were among other
things which impressed themselves upon the sensitive films of the
child's memory.
Following out the usual small boy's instinct of destruction, he once
sallied out down to the "karsey" (causeway) to spear frogs with a
weapon made by his brother. It was a sharpened nail in the end of a
broomstick. Stepping on a log and making a stab at a "pull paddock,"
he slipped and fell head foremost into the mud and slime. Scrambling
out, he hied homeward, and entering the parlor, filled with company, he
was greeted with shouts of laughter. Even worse was it to be dubbed by
his brother and the hired man a "mud lark."
Carleton's first and greatest teachers were his mother and father. After
these, came formal instruction by means of letters and books, classes
and schools. Carleton's religious and dogmatic education began with

the New England Primer, and progressed with the hymns of that
famous Congregationalist, Doctor Watts. When five years old, at the
foot of a long line of boys and girls, he toed the mark,--a crack in the
kitchen floor,--and recited verses from the Bible. Sunday-school
instruction was then in its beginning at Boscawen. The first hymn he
learned was:
"Life is the time to serve the Lord."
After mastering
"In Adam's fall We sinned all,"
the infantile ganglions got tangled up between the "sleigh" in the
carriage-house, and the act of pussy in mauling the poor little mouse,
unmentioned, but of importance, in the couplet:
"The cat doth play, And after slay."
Having heard of and seen the sleigh before learning the synonym for
"kill," the little New Hampshire boy was as much bothered as a
Chinese child who first hears one sound which has many meanings, and
only gradually clears up the mystery as the ideographs are mastered.
From the very first, the boy had an ear sensitive to music. The playing
of Enoch Little, his first school-teacher, and afterwards his
brother-in-law, upon the bass viol, was very sweet. Napoleon was never
prouder of his victories at Austerlitz than was little Carleton of his first
reward of merit. This was a bit of white paper two inches square,
bordered with yellow from the paint-box of a beautiful young lady who
had written in the middle, "To a good little boy."
The first social event of importance was the marriage of his sister
Apphia to Enoch Little, Nov. 29, 1829, when a room-full of cousins,
uncles, and aunts gathered together. After a chapter read from the Bible,
and a long address by the clergyman, the marital ceremony was
performed, followed by a hymn read and sung, and a prayer. Although
this healthy small boy, Carleton, had been given a big slice of wedding

cake with white frosting on the top, he felt himself injured, and was
hotly jealous of his brother Enoch, who had secured a slice with a big
red sugar strawberry on the frosting. After eating voraciously, he hid
the remainder of his cake in the mortise of a beam beside the back
chamber stairs. On visiting it next morning for secret indulgence, he
found that the rats had enjoyed the wedding feast, too. Nothing was left.
His first toy watch was to him an event of vast significance, and he
slept with it under his pillow. When also he had donned his first pair