The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I | Page 5

then an institution of grave importance to the community, as the practice of obligatory inoculation prevailed, and all the young people of the colony had to go up in classes to the hospital and pass the ordeal. Her mother's death left her the matron of the hospital and caretaker of her sister and brothers, and the stories of her life at that time, which she told me now and then, showed that, with the position, she assumed the effective authority, and ruled her brothers with a severity which my own experience of her maturer years enables me to understand. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was the maxim which flamed in the air before every father and mother of that New England, and my mother's physical vigor at sixty, when her conception of authority began to relax,--I being then a lad six feet high and indisposed to physical persuasion,--satisfied me that when her duty had required her to assume the responsibility bequeathed her by her mother, she was fully competent to meet it.
Accustomed to the hardest life, the most rigid economy in the household, and without servants, for, except rare and lately emancipated negro slaves, there was then no servile class in that colony, the children had to perform all the duties pertaining to the daily life, official or private, and my mother was able to pull an oar or manage the sail-boat with her brothers, and catch the horses and ride them bareback from pasture, when necessary for the daily work, which was not insignificant, for Newport was really the seaport of that section of the State, and as it was on an island of importance, the intercourse with the mainland called for sea and land service. The boys were all fishermen, for a large part of the subsistence of the family came from the fishing-grounds outside the harbor, and, as the oldest brother took early to the sailor's life, my mother had to assume a larger share of all the harder services. The hospital was also the quarantine station, and received all the cases of smallpox which came to the port, and they must have been many and fatal, for I have heard her say that she had to go the rounds of the hospital at night, and that there would sometimes be five or six dead in the dead-room at once.
The first acquaintance of my parents with each other was made in the inoculating class, my father being resident in Westerly, a town of Rhode Island on the borders of Connecticut. The marriage must have taken place about two years later, on the second marriage of my grandfather Maxson to the daughter of Samuel Ward, one of the leading delegates from Rhode Island to the convention which drew up and promulgated the Declaration of Independence[1]. Their early days of married life must have been passed in an extreme frugality, for my father was one of a large number of children, and, brought up on a farm, learned the trade of ship-carpenter, which he alternated, as was generally the habit of the young men of the New England coast, with fishing on the banks of Newfoundland in the cod-fishing season. Having, in addition, a share of the Yankee inventiveness, he became interested in the perfecting of a fulling-machine, to introduce which into what was then the West, he made a temporary residence in New York State, at the old Dutch town of Schenectady, at that time the entrep?t of commerce between the Eastern cities and New York, and the Northwest. Utica was then a frontier settlement, Buffalo an outpost in the wilderness, and, the country having barely recovered from the war of 1812-15 between the United States and England, enterprise and exploration had just begun to push through the thin lines of settlements along the valleys of the Mohawk and upper Hudson, westward by Buffalo and the great lakes to Ohio (then the Far West), and northward to the valley of the St. Lawrence. Schenectady was the distributing point of this wagon-borne commerce and movement until the completion of the Erie Canal, which, down to my own period of recollection, was the quickest channel of communication westward, with its horse "packets," traveling at the creditable speed of four miles an hour, the traffic barges making scarcely more than two.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Ward died just before the signing of the Declaration, so that his name does not figure in the list of signers.]
Hardly established in what was intended for a temporary visit, the residence of the family became fixed at Schenectady, owing to the partner of my father, left to manage the business at Westerly, becoming involved in personal embarrassments which brought on the bankruptcy of the firm and the seizure of all my father's little property, and,