There were worse things than sports in our public gatherings; even street fights—pugilistic fights, hand to hand. I have seen men thus engage, and that in bloody encounter, knocking one another down, and the fallen man stamped upon by his adversary. The people gathered round, not to interfere, but to see them fight it out. [21] Such a spectacle has not been witnessed in Sheffield, I think, for half a century. But as to sports and entertainments in general, there were more of them in those days than now. We had more holidays, more games in the street, of ball-playing, of quoits, of running, leaping, and wrestling. The militia musters, now done away with, gave many occasions for them. Every year we had one or two great squirrel-hunts, ended by a supper, paid for by the losing side, that is, by the side shooting the fewest. Almost every season we had a dancing-school. Singing-schools, too, there were every winter. There was also a small band of music in the village, and serenades were not uncommon. We, boys used to give them on the flute to our favorites. But when the band came to serenade us, I shall never forget the commotion it made in the house, and the delight we had in it. We children were immediately up in a wild hurry of pleasure, and my father always went out to welcome the performers, and to bring them into the house and give them such entertainment as he could provide.
The school-days of my childhood I remember with nothing but pleasure. I must have been a dull boy, I suppose, in some respects, for I never got into scrapes, never played truant, and was never, that I can remember, punished for anything. The instruction was simple enough. Special stress was laid upon spelling, and I am inclined to think that every one of my fellow-pupils [22] learned to spell more correctly than some gentlemen and ladies do in our days.
Our teachers were always men in winter and women in summer. I remember some of the men very well, but one of them especially. What pupil of his could ever forget Asa Day—the most extraordinary figure that ever I saw, a perfect chunk of a man? He could not have been five feet high, but with thews and sinews to make up for the defect in height, and a head big enough for a giant. He might have sat for Scott's "Black Dwarf;" yet he was not ill-looking, rather handsome in the face. And I think I never saw a face that could express such energy, passion, and wrath, as his. Indeed, his whole frame was instinct with energy. I see him now, as he marched by our house in the early morning, with quick, short step, to make the school-room fire; and a roaring one it was, in a large open fireplace; for he did everything about the school. In fact, he took possession of school, schoolhouse, and district too, for that matter, as if it were a military post; with the difference, that he was to fight, not enemies without, but within—to beat down insubordination and enforce obedience. And his anger, when roused, was the most remarkable thing. It stands before me now, through all my life, as the one picture of a man in a fury. But if he frightened us children, he taught us too, and that thoroughly.
In general our teachers were held in great [23] reverence and affection. I remember especially the pride with which I once went in a chaise, when I was about ten, to New Marlborough, to fetch the schoolma'am. No courtier, waiting upon a princess, could have been prouder or more respectful than I was.
To turn, for a moment, to a different scene, and to much humbler persons, that pass and repass in the camera obscura of my early recollections. The only Irishman that was in Sheffield, I think, in those days, lived in my father's family for several years as a hired man—Richard; I knew him by no other name then, and recall him by no other now—the tallest and best-formed "exile of Erin" that I have ever seen; prodigiously strong, yet always gentle in manner and speech to us children; with the full brogue, and every way marked in my view, and set apart from every one around him—"a stranger in a strange land." The only thing besides, that I distinctly remember of him, was the point he made every Christmas of getting in the "Yule-log," a huge log which he had doubtless been saving out in chopping the wood-pile, big enough for a yoke of oxen to draw, and which he placed with a kind of ceremony and respect in the great kitchen fireplace. With our absurd New England Puritan ways, yet naturally derived from the times of the English Commonwealth, when any observance of Christmas was made penal and punished with [24] imprisonment, I am not sure that we should have known anything of Christmas, but for Richard's Yule-log.
There was another class of persons who were frequently engaged to do day's work on the farm—that of the colored people. Some of them had been slaves here in Sheffield. They were virtually emancipated by our State Bill of Rights, passed in 1783. The first of them that sought freedom under it, and the first, it is said, that obtained it in New England, was a female slave of General Ashley, and her advocate in the case was Mr. Sedgwick, afterwards Judge Sedgwick, who was then a lawyer in Sheffield.
There were several of the men that stand out as pretty marked individualities in my memory, Peter and Caesar and Will and Darby; merry old fellows they seemed to be—I see no laborers so cheerful and gay now—and very faithful and efficient workers. Peter and his wife, Toah (so was she called), had belonged to my maternal grandfather, and were much about us, helping, or being helped, as the case might be. They both lived and died in their own cottage, pleasantly situated on the bank of Skenob Brook. They tilled their own garden, raised their own "sarse," kept their own cow; and I have heard one say that "Toah's garden had the finest damask roses in the world, and her house, and all around it, was the pink of neatness."
In taking leave of my childhood, I must say [25] that, so far as my experience goes, the ordinary poetic representations of the happiness of that period, as compared with after life, are not true, and I must doubt whether they ought to be true. I was as happy, I suppose, as most children. I had good health; I had companions and sports; the school was not a hardship to me—I was always eager for it; I was never hardly dealt with by anybody; I was never once whipped in my life, that I can remember; but instead of looking back to childhood as the blissful period of my life, I find that I have been growing happier every year, up to this very time. I recollect in my youth times of moodiness and melancholy; but since I entered on the threshold of manly life, of married and parental life, all these have disappeared. I have had inward struggles enough, certainly—struggles with doubt, with temptation—sorrows and fears and strifes enough; but I think I have been gradually, though too slowly, gaining the victory over them. Truth, art, religion—the true, the beautiful, the divine—have constantly risen clearer and brighter before me; my family bonds have grown stronger, friends dearer, the world and nature fuller of goodness and beauty, and I have every day grown a happier man.
To take up again the thread of my story, I pass from childhood to my youth. My winters, up to the age of about sixteen, were given to [26] school—the common district-school—and my summers, to assisting my father on the farm; after that, for a year or two, my whole time was devoted to preparing for college. For this purpose I went first, for one year, to a school taught in Sheffield by Mr. William H. Maynard, afterwards an eminent lawyer and senator in the State of New York. He came among us with the reputation of being a prodigy in knowledge; he was regarded as a kind of walking library; and this reputation, together with his ceaseless assiduity as a teacher, awakened among us boys an extraordinary ambition. What we learned, and how we learned it, and how we lost it, might well be a caution to all other masters and pupils. Besides going through Virgil and Cicero's Orations that year, and frequent composition and declamation, we were prepared, at the end of it, for the most thorough and minute examination in grammar, in Blair's Rhetoric, in the two large octavo volumes of Morse's Geography, every fact committed to memory, every name of country, city, mountain, river, every boundary, population, length, breadth, degree of latitude—and we could repeat, word for word, the Constitution of the United States. The consequence was, that we dropped all that load of knowledge, or rather burden upon the memory, at the very threshold of the school. Grammar I did study to some purpose that year, though never before. I lost two years of my childhood, I think, upon that study, absurdly [27] regarded as teaching children to speak the English language, instead of being considered as what it properly is, the philosophy of language, a science altogether beyond the reach of childhood.
Of the persons and circumstances that influenced my culture and character in youth, there are some that stand out very prominently in my recollection, and require mention in this account of myself.