The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I | Page 9

She recognized the woman, who had come to our house with a story of a family of starving children, but as my mother's experienced eye assured her she had never been a mother, she refused her as a deceiver what the poor always got. "Why did you tell me you had children," mother asked her, "when you came to me yesterday?" "It was not true," said the dying woman, "but I was starving, and I thought you would be more willing to help me if you thought I had children." But from that day no beggar was turned from our door without food. Silently and in secret she did what good works came to her to be done, letting not her right hand know what her left hand was doing, but all the poor knew her and her works.
Silent too and undemonstrative in all her domestic relations she always was, and I question if to any other of her family than myself she ever confided her secret hopes or fears. And to me even she was so undemonstrative that I never remember her kissing me from a passing warmth; only when I went away on a journey or returned from one did she offer to kiss me, and this was the manner of the family. And her maintenance of family discipline was on the same rigorous level, dispassionate as the law. If I transgressed the commands of herself or of my father the punishment was inevitable, never in wrath, generally on the day after the offense, but inexorable; she never meant to spoil the child by sparing the rod, but flogged with tears in her eyes and an aching heart, often giving the punishment herself, to prevent my father from giving it, as he always flogged mercilessly and in anger, though if I could keep out of his sight till the next day he forgot all about it; she never forgot, and though the flogging might not come for a week, it was never omitted when promised. And her worst severity never raised a feeling of resentment in me, for I recognized it as deserved, while my father's floggings, inflicted in the unreasoning severity of anger, always made me rebellious. I remember only one occasion on which I was punished unjustly by my mother.
A neighboring farmer had asked me to go to his field and shake down the fruit from two apple-trees. It was in the hour before dinner, and the regulations of the family were very severe about being at meals, and unfortunately I had, in my glee at having a job of paying work to do, infringed on the dinnertime. In payment for my services I received from the farmer two huge pumpkins, charged with which I hastened home, looking forward to my mother's praise and pleasure, but was met by her in the hall, strap in hand, with which she administered a solid flogging, explaining that my father was so angry at my being out at dinner that she gave me the punishment to forestall his, which would be, as I well knew, much severer. It is more than sixty years since that punishment fell on my shoulders, but the astonishment with which I received the flogging instead of the thanks I anticipated for the wages I was bringing her, the haste with which my mother administered it lest my father should anticipate her and beat me after his fashion, are as vivid in my recollection as if it had taken place last year. This was a sample of the family discipline. I was forbidden to walk with other boys when I drove the cow to pasture; forbidden to bathe in the mill-pond near by except at stated times, to play with certain children, to amuse myself on the Sabbath, and other similar doings, all to my childish apprehension harmless in themselves, and the punishment never failed to follow the discovery of the transgression. Naturally I learned to lie, a thing contrary to my inclination and nature, and a torture to my conscience, but I had not the courage to meet the flogging, or the firmness to resist temptation and the persuasion of my young companions who rejoiced in a domestic freedom of which I knew nothing. My father's severity finally brought emancipation by its excess. He used to follow me to see if I obeyed his orders, and one day when I had been persuaded by some boys of our neighborhood to go and bathe in the forbidden hours, he found me in the pond, led me home, and, cutting two tough peartree switches about the thickness, at the butt, of his forefinger, he took me down into the cellar, and making me strip off my jacket, broke them up to the stumps over my back,