From the Bottom Up | Page 2

floor was hard, dried mud.

There was a wide, open fireplace. Several holes made in the wall by
displacing of bricks here and there contained my father's old pipes. A
few ornaments, yellow with the smoke of years, adorned the
mantelpiece. At the front window sat my father, and around him his
shoemaking tools. Beside the window hung a large cage, made by his
own hands, and in which singing thrushes had succeeded one another
for twenty years. The walls were whitewashed. There was a little
partition that screened the work-bench from the door. It was made of
newspapers, and plastered all over it were pictures from the illustrated
weeklies. Two or three small dressers contained the crockery ware. A
long bench set against the wall, a table, several stools, and two or three
creepies constituted the furniture. There was not a chair in the place.
[Illustration: Mr. Irvine's Birthplace. There are four different houses in
the picture. The third door from the left is that of the house in which he
was born.]
There was a fascination about the winter evenings in that cottage.
Scarcely a night passed that did not see some man or woman sitting in
the corner waiting for shoes. A candlestick about three feet high, in
which burned a large tallow candle, was set in front of my father. My
mother was the only one in the house who could read, and she used to
read aloud from a story paper called The Weekly Budget. We were
never interested in the news. The outside world was shut off from us,
and the news consisted of whatever was brought by word of mouth by
the folks who had their shoes cobbled; that was interesting. In those
long winter evenings, I sat in the corner among the shoes and lasts. On
scraps of leather I used to imitate writing, and often I would quietly
steal up to my mother and show her these scratchings, and ask her
whether they meant anything or not. I thought somehow by accident I
would surely get something. My mother merely shook her head and
smiled. She taught me many letters of the alphabet, but it took me years
to string them together.
My mother had acquired a taste, indeed, it was a craving, for strong
drink; and, even from the very small earnings of my father, managed to
satisfy it in a small measure, every day, except Sunday. On Sunday

there was a change. The cobbler's bench was cleared away, and my
mother's beautiful face was surrounded with a halo of spotless, frilled
linen.
My father's Sunday mornings were spent in giving the thrush an outing
and in cleaning his cage. Neither my father nor mother made any
pretensions to religion; but they were strict Sabbatarians. My father
never consciously swore, but, within even the limitations of his small
vocabulary, he was unfortunate in his selection of phrases. I bounced
into the alley one Sunday morning, whistling a Moody and Sankey
hymn.
"Shut up yer mouth!" said my father.
"It's a hymn tune," I replied.
"I don't care a damn," replied my father. "It's the Lord's day, and if I
hear you whistlin' in it I'll whale the hell out o' ye!"
That was his philosophy, and he lived it. Saturday nights when the
town clock struck the hour of midnight, he removed his leather apron,
pushed his bench back in the corner, and the work of the week was
over--and if any one was waiting for his shoes, so much the worse for
him. He would wait until the midnight clock struck twelve the next
night or take them as they were.
The first tragedy in my life was the death of a pet pigeon. I grieved for
days over its disappearance; but one Sunday morning the secret slipped
out. Around that neighbourhood there was a custom among the very
poor of exchanging samples of their Sunday broth. Three or four
samples came to our cottage every Sunday morning. We had meat once
a week, and then it was either the hoofs or part of the head of a cow, or
the same parts of a sheep or a calf. On this particular occasion, I knew
that there was something in our broth that was unusual, and I did not
rest until I learned the truth. They had grown tired of nettle broth, and
made a change on the pigeon.
There was a pigsty at the end of our alley against the gable of our house;

but we never were rich enough to own a pig. One of my earliest
recollections is of extemporizing out of the pigsty one of the most
familiar institutions in our town--a pawn shop. If anything was missing
in the house, they could usually find it in pawn.