The soil of the University town is divided into patches of sandy and of clayey ground.The Common and the College green, near which the old house stands, are on one of the sandy patches.Four curses are the local inheritance: droughts, dust, mud, and canker-worms.Icannot but think that all the characters of a region help to modify the children born in it.I am fond of making apologies for human nature, and I think I could find an excuse for myself if I, too, were dry and barren and muddy-witted and "cantankerous,"--disposed to get my back up, like those other natives of the soil.
I know this, that the way Mother Earth treats a boy shapes out a kind of natural theology for him.I fell into Manichean ways of thinking from the teaching of my garden experiences.Like other boys in the country, I had my patch of ground, to which, in the spring-time, Ientrusted the seeds furnished me, with a confident trust in their resurrection and glorification in the better world of summer.But Isoon found that my lines had fallen in a place where a vegetable growth had to run the gauntlet of as many foes and dials as a Christian pilgrim.Flowers would not Blow; daffodils perished like criminals in their cone demned caps, without their petals ever seeing daylight; roses were disfigured with monstrous protrusions "through their very centres,--something that looked like a second bud pushing through the middle of the corolla; lettuces and cabbages would not head; radishes knotted themselves until they looked like centenerians' fingers; and on every stem, on every leaf, and both sides of it, and at the root of everything that dew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part, and help order the whole attempt at vegetation.Such experiences must influence a child born to them.A sandy soil, where nothing flourishes but weeds and evil beasts of small dimensions, must breed different qualities in its human offspring from one of those fat and fertile spots which the wit whom I have once before noted described so happily that, if I quoted the passage, its brilliancy would spoil one of my pages, as a diamond breastpin sometimes kills the social effect of the wearer, who might have passed for a gentleman without it.Your arid patch of earth should seem to the natural birthplace of the leaner virtues and the abler vices,--of temperance and the domestic proprieties on the one hand, with a tendency to light weights in groceries and provisions, and to clandestine abstraction from the person on the other, as opposed to the free hospitality, the broadly planned burglaries, and the largely conceived homicides of our rich Western alluvial regions.Yet Nature is never wholly unkind.Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard as it was to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs and lupins, lady's delights,--plebeian manifestations of the pansy, --self-sowing marigolds, hollyhocks, the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs and syringas, --all whispered to' the winds blowing over them that some caressing presence was around me.
Beyond the garden was "the field," a vast domain of four acres or thereabout, by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by a fathomless chasm, --the ditch the base-ball players of the present era jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the south by a barren enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under its drapeau rouge, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable commune where all were alike, poor, mean, sour, and uninteresting; and on the west by the Common, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures, which make it look like a cattle-market.Beyond, as I looked round, were the Colleges, the meeting-house, the little square market-house, long vanished; the burial-ground where the dead Presidents stretched their weary bones under epitaphs stretched out at as full length as their subjects; the pretty church where the gouty Tories used to kneel on their hassocks; the district schoolhouse, and hard by it Ma'am Hancock's cottage, never so called in those days, but rather "tenfooter"; then houses scattered near and far, open spaces, the shadowy elms, round hilltops in the distance, and over all the great bowl of the sky.Mind you, this was the WORLD, as I first knew it; terra veteribus cognita, as Mr.Arrowsmith would have called it, if he had mapped the universe of my infancy:
But I am forgetting the old house again in the landscape.The worst of a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts.Iwatched one building not long since.It had no proper garret, to begin with, only a sealed interval between the roof and attics, where a spirit could not be accommodated, unless it were flattened out like Ravel, Brother, after the millstone had fallen on him.There was not a nook or a corner in the whole horse fit to lodge any respectable ghost, for every part was as open to observation as a literary man's character and condition, his figure and estate, his coat and his countenance, are to his (or her) Bohemian Majesty on a tour of inspection through his (or her) subjects' keyholes.
