We were allowed sixpence a week spending-money at Mr. Greene’s, two cents, or a penny, being deducted for a bad mark. Sometimes I actually got a full week’s income; once I let it run on up to 25 cents, but this was forbidden, it not being considered advisable that the boys should accumulate fortunes. A great deal of my money went for cheap comic literature, which I carefully preserved. In those days there were Crockett’s almanacs (now a great fund of folk-lore), and negro songs and stories were beginning to be popular. It is very commonly asserted that the first regular negro minstrel troupe appeared in 1842. This is quite an error. While I was at Mr. Greene’s, in 1835, there came to Dedham a circus with as regularly-appointed a negro minstrel troupe of a dozen as I ever saw. I often beheld the pictures of them on the bill. Nor do I think that this was any novelty even then. The Crockett almanacs greatly stimulated my sense of American humour (they do indeed form collectively a very characteristic work), and this, with some similar reading, awoke in me a passion for wild Western life and frontier experiences, which was fully and strangely gratified in after years, but which would certainly have never happened had it not been for this boyish reading.
For I beg the reader to observe that it is a very deeply-seated characteristic that whatever once takes root in my mind invariably grows. This comes from the great degree to which I have always gone over, reviewed, and reflected on, or nursed everything which ever once really interested me. And as I have thus far written, and shall probably conclude this work without referring to a note, the reader will have ample opportunity of observing how very strangely in all cases the phases of my life were predetermined long before by the literary education which I gave myself, aided very much by hereditary or other causes quite beyond my control. Now, as the object of a Life is to understand every cause which created it, and as mine was to a very unusual degree created by reading and reflecting, even in infancy, I beg the reader not to be impatient with me for describing so much in detail the books which made my mind at different times. That is, I pray this much allowance and sympathy from possible readers and critics, that they will kindly not regard me as vain or thinking over-much of, or too much over, myself. For to get oneself forth as one really is requires deep investigation into every cause, and the depicting all early characteristics, and the man never lived who ever did this truly and accurately without much egoism, or what the ill-disposed may treat as such. And I promise the possible reader that when this subjective analysis shall be fairly disposed of, there will be no lack of mere incident or event of objective nature and more general interest.
My first winter at Jamaica Plains was the terrible one of 1835, during which I myself saw the thermometer at 50 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, and there was a snow-bank in the play-ground from October till May. The greatest care possible was taken of us boys to keep us warm and well, but we still suffered very much from chilblains. Water thrown into the air froze while falling. Still there were some happy lights and few shadows in it all. The boys skated or slid on beautiful Jamaica Pond, which was near the school. There was a general giving of sleds to us all; mine broke to pieces at once. I never had luck with any plaything, never played ball or marbles, and hardly ever had even a top. Nor did I ever have much to do with any games, or even learn in later years to play cards, which was all a great pity. Sports should be as carefully looked to in early education as book-learning. I had also a pair of dear gazelle-skates given to me with the rest, but they also broke up on first trial, and I have never owned any since. Destiny was always against me in such matters.
The boys built two large snow-houses, roofed in or arched over with hard snow. One was ingeniously and appropriately like an Eskimo hut, with a rather long winding passage leading into it. Of these I wrote in the spring, when the sun had begun to act, “one is almost annihilated, and of the other not a vestage remains.” I found the letter by chance many years later.
There lived in Boston some friends of my mother’s named Gay. In the family was an old lady over eighty, who was a wonderfully lively spirited person. She still sang, as I thought, very beautifully, to the lute, old songs such as “The merry days of good Queen Bess,” and remembered the old Colonial time as if it were of yesterday. One day Mr. Gay came out and took me to his house, where I remained from Saturday until Monday; during which time I found among the books, and very nearly read through, all the poems of Peter Pindar or Doctor Wolcott. Precious reading it was for a boy of eleven, yet I enjoyed it immensely. While there, I found in the earth in the garden an oval, dark-green porphyry pebble, which I, moved by a strange feeling, preserved for many years as an amulet. It is very curious that exactly such pebbles are found as fetishes all over the world, and the famous conjuring stone of the Voodoos, which I possess, is only an ordinary black flint pebble of the same shape. Negroes have travelled a thousand miles to hold it in their hands and make a wish, which, if uttered with faith, is always granted. Its possession alone entitles any one to the first rank as master in the mysteries of Voodoo sorcery. Truly I began early in the business! I may here say that since I owned the Voodoo stone it has been held in several very famous and a few very beautiful hands.
While I was at Mr. Greene’s I wrote my first poem. I certainly exhibited no great precocity of lyrical genius in it, but the reader must remember that I was only a foolish little boy of ten or eleven at the time, and that I showed it to no one. It was as follows:
“As a long-bearded Sultan, an infidel Turk,
Who ne’er in his life had done any work,
Rode along to the bath, he saw Hassan the black,
With two monstrous water-skins high on his back.
“ ‘Ho, Hassan, thou afreet! thou infidel dog!
Thou son of a Jewess and eater of hog!
This instant, this second, put down thy skin jugs,
And for my sovereign pleasure remove both the plugs!’
“The negro obeyed him, put both on the ground,
And opened the skins and the water flew round;
The Sultan looked on till he laughèd his fill;
Then went on to the bath, feeling heated and ill.
“When arrived at the bath, ‘Is all ready?’ he cries.
‘Indeed it is not, sire,’ the bath-man replies;
‘For to fetch the bath-water black Hassan has gone,
And your highness can’t have it till he shall return.’ ”
In after years my friend, Professor E. H. Palmer, translated this into Arabic, and promised me that it should be sung in the East. It is not much of a poem, even for a boy, but there is one touch true to life in it—which is the cursing. This must have come to me by revelation; and in after years in Cairo I never heard a native address another as “Afrit! Ya-hinzeer—wa Yahud—yin uldeen ak?”—“curse your religion!”—but I thought how marvellous it was that I, even in my infancy, had divined so well how they did it! However, now I come to think of it, I had the year before read Morier’s “Haji-Baba” with great admiration, and I doubt not that it was the influence of that