My Boyhood | Page 7

of us, but it is easy to
imagine how poor Mother must have been startled when she heard that
racket on the stairs and the chamber door suddenly burst open, spilling
two of her children, mixed up with the vinegar keg, out on the kitchen
floor. Jane was more than two years my senior, and should have known
better.
Vivid incidents make a lasting impression. I recall what might have
been a very serious accident had not my usual good luck attended me,
when I was a few years older. One autumn day I was with my older
brothers in the corn lot, where they had gone with the lumber wagon to
gather pumpkins. When they had got their load and were ready to start I
planted myself on the load above the hind axle and let my legs hang
down between the spokes of the big wheel. Luckily one of my brothers
saw my perilous position just as the team was about to move and
rescued me in time. Doubtless my legs would have been broken and
maybe very badly crushed in a moment more. But such good fortune
seems to have followed me always. One winter's morning, as I stooped
to put on one of my boots beside the kitchen stove at the house of a
schoolmate with whom I had passed the night, my face came in close
contact with the spout of the boiling tea kettle. The scalding steam
barely missed my eye and blistered my brow a finger's breadth above it.
With one eye gone, I fancy life would have looked quite different.
Another time I was walking along one of the market streets of New
York, when a heavy bale of hay, through the carelessness of some
workman, dropped from thirty or forty feet above me and struck the

pavement at my feet. I heard angry words over the mishap, spoken by
someone above me, but I only said to myself, "Lucky again!" I recall a
bit of luck of a different kind when I was a treasury clerk in
Washington. I had started for the seashore for a week's vacation with a
small roll of new greenbacks in my pocket. Shortly after the train had
left the station I left my seat and walked through two or three of the
forward cars looking for a friend who had agreed to join me. Not
finding him, I retraced my steps, and as I was passing along through the
car next my own I chanced to see a roll of new bills on the floor near
the end of a seat. Instinctively feeling for my own roll of bills and
finding it missing, I picked up the money and saw at a glance that it
was mine. The passengers near by eyed me in surprise, and I suspect
began to feel in their own pockets, but I did not stop to explain and
went to my seat startled but happy. I had missed my friend but I might
have missed something of more value to me just at that time.
A kind of untoward fate seems inherent in the characters of some
persons and makes them the victims of all the ill luck on the road. Such
a fate has not been mine. I have met all the good luck on the road.
Some kindly influence has sent my best friends my way, or sent me
their way. The best thing about me is that I have found a perennial
interest in the common universal things which all may have on equal
terms, and hence have found plenty to occupy and absorb me wherever
I have been. If the earth and the sky are enough for one, why should
one sigh for other spheres?
The old farm must have had at least ten miles of stone walls upon it,
many of them built new by Father from stones picked up in the fields,
and many of them relaid by him, or rather by his boys and hired men.
Father was not skilful at any sort of craft work. He was a good
ploughman, a good mower and cradler, excellent with a team of oxen
drawing rocks, and good at most general farm work, but not an adept at
constructing anything. Hiram was the mechanical genius of the family.
He was a good wall-layer, and skilful with edged tools. It fell to his lot
to make the sleds, the stone-boats, the hay-rigging, the ax helves, the
flails, to mend the cradles and rakes, to build the haystacks, and once, I
remember, he rebuilt the churning machine. He was slow but he hewed
exactly to the line. Before and during my time on the farm Father used
to count on building forty or fifty rods of stone wall