Philip Winwood | Page 8

for
the deprivations incidental to his poverty. But, being keenly
sympathetic, he had a better sense of his mother's necessities than his
father had shown, and to the amelioration of her condition and his own,
he sacrificed his love of books so far as to be, when occasion offered,

an uncomplaining seller of those he liked, and a dealer in those he did
not like. His tastes were, however, broader than his father's, and he
joyfully lost himself in the novels and plays his father would have
disdained.
He read, indeed, everything he could put his hands on, that had, to his
mind, reason, or wit, or sense, or beauty. Many years later, when we
were in London, his scholarly yet modest exposition of a certain subject
eliciting the praise of a group in a Pall Mall tavern, and he being asked
"What university he was of," he answered, with a playful smile, "My
father's bookshop." It was, indeed, his main school of book-learning.
But, as I afterward told him, he had studied in the university of life also.
However, I am now writing of his boyhood in Philadelphia; and of that
there is only this left to be said.
In catering to his mind, he did not neglect bodily skill either. His early
reading of Plutarch and other warlike works had filled him with desire
to emulate the heroes of battle. An old copy of Saviolo's book on
honour and fence, written in the reign of Elizabeth, or James, I forget
which, had in some manner found its way to his father's shelves; and
from this Philip secretly obtained some correct ideas of
swordsmanship.[2] Putting them in practice one day in the shop, with a
stick, when he thought no one was looking, he suddenly heard a cry of
"bravo" from the street door, and saw he was observed by a Frenchman,
who had recently set up in Philadelphia as a teacher of fencing, dancing,
and riding. This expert, far from allowing Philip to be abashed,
complimented and encouraged him; entered the shop, and made friends
with him. The lad, being himself as likable as he found the lively
foreigner interesting, became in time something of a comrade to the
fencing master. The end of this was that, in real or pretended return for
the loan of Saviolo's book, the Frenchman gave Philip a course of
instruction and practice in each of his three arts.
To these the boy added, without need of a teacher, the ability to shoot,
both with gun and with pistol. I suppose it was from being so much
with his mother, between whom and himself there must have existed
the most complete devotion, that notwithstanding his manly and

scholarly accomplishments, his heart, becoming neither tough like the
sportsman's nor dry like the bookworm's, remained as tender as a
girl's--or rather as a girl's is commonly supposed to be. His mother's
death, due to some inward ailment of which the nature was a problem
to the doctors, left him saddened but too young to be embittered. And
this was the Philip Winwood--grave and shy from having been
deprived too much of the company of other boys, but with certain
mental and bodily advantages of which too much of that company
would have deprived him--who was taken into the house of the
Faringfields in the Summer of 1763.
The footing on which he should remain there was settled the very
morning after his arrival. Mr. Faringfield, a rigid and prudent man, but
never a stingy one, made employment for him as a kind of messenger
or under clerk in his warehouse. The boy fell gratefully into the new
life, passing his days in and about the little counting-room that looked
out on Mr. Faringfield's wharf on the East River. He found it dull work,
the copying of invoices, the writing of letters to merchants in other
parts of the world, the counting of articles of cargo, and often the
bearing a hand in loading or unloading some schooner or dray; but as
beggars should not be choosers, so beneficiaries should not be
complainers, and Philip kept his feelings to himself.
Mr. Faringfield was an exacting master, whose rule was that his men
should never be idle, even at times when there seemed nothing to do. If
no task was at hand, they should seek one; and if none could be found,
he was like to manufacture one. Thus was Phil denied the pleasure of
brightening or diversifying his day with reading, for which he could
have found time enough. He tried to be interested in his work, and he in
part succeeded, somewhat by good-fellowship with the jesting, singing,
swearing wharfmen and sailors, somewhat by dwelling often on the
thought that he was filling his small place in