Chapter 7 of Father and Son. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Eugene Smith. Father and Son by Edmund Goss Chapter 7 In the history of an infancy so cloistered and uniform as mine, such a real adventure as my being publicly and successfully kidnapped cannot be overlooked. There were several innocents in our village, harmless eccentrics who had more or less unquestionably crossed the barrier which divides the sane from the insane. They were not discouraged by public opinion, indeed several of them were favored beings suspected by my father of exaggerating their mental density in order to escape having to work like dogs who, as we all know, could speak as well as we do, were they not afraid of being made to fetch and carry. Miss Mary Flaw was not one of these imbeciles. She was what the French call a detraque. She had enjoyed good intelligence and an active mind, but her wits had left the rails and were careening about the country. Miss Flaw was the daughter of a retired Baptist minister, and she lived with, I remember not what relations, in a little solitary house high up at Barton Cross, whither Mary Grace and I would sometimes struggle when our pastoral duties were over. In later years, when I met with those celebrated verses in which the philosopher expresses the hope in the downhill of life when I find I'm declining, may my lot no less fortunate be than a snug elbow chair can afford for reclining and a cot that overlooks the wide sea. My thoughts returned instinctively and they still return to the high abode of Miss Flaw. There was a porch at her door, both for shelter and shade, and it was covered with jasmine. But the charm of the place was a summerhouse close by and containing a table encrusted with cowrie shells and seats from which one saw the distant waters of the bay. At the entrance to this grotto, there was always set a snug elbow chair, destined I suppose for the Reverend Mr. Flaw, or else left there in pious memory of him, since I cannot recollect whether he was alive or dead. I delighted in these visits to Mary Flaw. She always received us with a fusion, tripping forward to meet us and leading us, each by a hand held high, with a dancing movement which I thought infinitely graceful, to the cowrie shell bower, where she would regale us with Devonshire cream and with small hard biscuits that were like pebbles. The conversation of Mary Flaw was a great treat to me. I enjoyed its irregularities, its waywardness. It was like a tune that wandered into several keys. As Mary Grace Bermington put it, one never knew what dear Mary Flaw would say next, and that she did not herself know, added to the charm. She had become crazed, poor thing, in consequence of a disappointment in love, but of course I did not know that, nor that she was crazed at all. I thought her brilliant and original, and I liked her very much. In the light of coming events, it would be affectation were I to pretend that she did not feel a similar partiality for me. Miss Flaw was, from the first, devoted to my father's administrations, and it was part of our odd village indulgence that no one ever dreamed of preventing her from coming to the room. On Sunday evenings, the bulk of the audience was arranged on forms with backs to them, set in the middle of the floor with a passage round them, while other forms were placed against the walls. My father preached from a lectern, facing the audience. If darkness came on in the course of the service, Richard Moxhay, glimmering in his cream white corduroys, used to go slowly around, lighting groups of tallow candles by the help of a box of lucifers. Mary Flaw always assumed the place of honor, on the left extremity of the front bench, immediately opposite my father. Miss Marks and Mary Grace, with me ensconced and almost buried between them, occupied the right of the same bench. While the lighting proceeded, Miss Flaw used to direct it from her seat silently, by pointing out to Moxhay, who took no notice, what groups of candles he should light next. She did this just as the clown in the circus directs the grooms how to move the furniture. And Moxhay paid no more attention to her than the grooms do to the clown. Miss Flaw had another peculiarity. She silently went through a service exactly similar to ours, but much briefer. The course of our evening service was this. My father prayed, and we all knelt down, then he gave out a hymn, and most of us stood up to sing. Then he preached for about an hour, while we sat and listened, then a hymn again, in prayer, and the valediction. Mary Flaw went through this ritual, but on a smaller scale. We all knelt down together, but when we rose from our knees, Miss Flaw was already standing up and was pretending, without a sound, to sing a hymn. In the midst of our hymn, she sat down, opened her Bible, found a text, and then leaned back, her eyes fixed in space, listening to an imaginary sermon, which our own real one soon caught up, and coincided with for about three quarters of an hour. Then while our sermon went peacefully on, Miss Flaw would rise and sing in silence, if I'm permitted to use such an expression, her own visionary hymn. Then she would kneel down and pray, then rise, collect her belongings, and sweep in fairy majesty out of the chapel. My father still rounding his periods from the pulpit. Nobody ever thought of preventing these movements, or of checking the poor creature and her innocent flightiness, until the evening of the great event. It was all my own fault. Mary Flaw had finished her imaginary service earlier than usual. She had stood up alone with her hymn book before her. She had flung herself on her knees alone, in the attitude of devotion. She had risen, she had seated herself for a moment to put on her loves, and to collect her Bible, her hymn book, and her pocket handkerchief, and her reticule. She was ready to start, and she looked around her with a pleasant air. My father, all undisturbed, booming away, meanwhile, over our heads. I know not why the maneuvers of Miss Flaw especially attracted me that evening, but I leaned out across Miss Mark's, and I caught Miss Flaw's eye. She nodded, I nodded. And the amazing deed was done, I hardly know how. And Miss Flaw, with incredible swiftness, flew along the line, plucked me by my coat color from between my paralyzed protectresses, darted with me down the chapel, and out into the dark, before anyone had time to say, Jack Robinson. My father gazed from the pulpit, and the stream of exhortation withered on his lips. No one in the body of the audience stirred. No one but himself had clearly seen what had happened. Vague rows of saints with gaping countenances stared up at him, while he shouted, Will nobody stop them? As we whisked out through the doorway. Fourth into the moist night we went, and up the lampless village, where, a few minutes later, the swiftness of the congregation, with my father at their head, found us sitting on the doorstep of the butcher's shop. My captor was now quite quiet, and made no objection to my quitting her, without a single kiss or a goodbye, as the poet says. Although I had scarcely felt frightened at the time, doubtless my nerves were shaken by this escapade, and it may have had something to do with the recurrence of the distressing visions from which I had suffered as a very little child. These came back with a force and expansion due to my increased maturity. I had hardly laid my head down on the pillow, then, as it seemed to me, I was taking part in a mad gallop through space, some force which had tight hold of me, so that I felt myself an atom in its grasp, was hurrying me on over an endless slender bridge, under which, on either side, a loud torrent rushed at a vertiginous depth below. At first our helpless flight, where I was bound hand and foot like my zippa, proceeded in a straight line. Presently it began to curve, and we raced and roared along in what gradually became a monstrous vortex, reverberant with noises, loud with light, while, as we proceeded, enormous concentric circles engulfed us, and wheeled above and about us. It seemed as if we, by that is, and the undefined force which carried me, were pushing feverishly on towards a goal which our whole concentrated energies were bent on reaching, but which a frenzied despair in my heart told me we never could reach, yet the attainment of which, alone, could save us from destruction. Far away, in the pulsation of the great luminous worlds, I could just see that goal, a ruby-colored point, waxing and waning, and it bore, or to be exact, it consisted of the letters of the word Karman. This agitating vision recurred night after night and filled me with inexpressible distress. The details of it altered very little, and I knew what I had to expect when I crept into bed. I knew that for a few minutes I should be battling with the chill of the linen sheets and trying to keep awake, but that then, without a pause, I should slip into that terrible realm of storm and stress in which I was bound hand and foot and sent galloping through infinity. Often I awakened, with unutterable joy, to find my father in this marks whom my screams had disturbed, standing one on each side of my bed. They could release me from my nightmare, which seldom assailed me twice a night, but how to preserve me from its original attack past their understanding. My father, in his tenderness, thought to exercise the demon by prayer. He would appear in the bedroom, just as I was first slipping into bed, and he would kneel at my side. A light from a candle on the mantel shelf streamed down upon his dark head of hair while his face was buried in the cover lid, from which a loud voice came up, a little muffled, begging that I might be preserved against all the evil spirits that walk in darkness and that the deep might not swallow me up. This little ceremony gave a distraction to my thoughts and may have been useful in that way, but it led to an unfortunate circumstance. My father began to enjoy these horizons at my bedside and to prolong them. Perhaps they lasted a little too long, but I can try to keep a weight through them, sometimes by a great effort. On one unhappy night, however, I gave even worse offense than slumber would have given. My father was praying aloud in the attitude I had described, and I was half sitting, half lying in bed, with the clothes sloping from my chin. Suddenly, a rather large insect, dark and flat, with more legs than a self-respecting insect ought to need, appeared at the bottom of the counterpane and slowly advanced. I think it was nothing worse than a beetle. It walked successfully past my father's sleek black ball of a head and climbed straight up at me, nearer, nearer, until it seemed all a twinkle of horns and joints. I bore it in silent fascination until it almost tickled my chin, and then I screamed, Papa, Papa! My father rose in great dudgeon, removed the insect, what were insects to him, and then gave me a tremendous lecture. The sense of desperation which this incident produced, I shall not easily forget. Life seemed really to be very harassing when, to visions within and beetles without, it was joined the consciousness of having grievously offended God by an act of disrespect. It is difficult for me to justify to myself the violent jobeation which my father gave me in consequence of my scream, except by attributing to him something of the human weakness of vanity. I cannot help thinking that he liked to hear himself speak to God in the presence of an admiring listener. He prayed with fervor and animation, impure John Soniaan English, and I hope I am not undudiful if I add my impression that he was not displeased with the sound of his own devotions. My cry for help had needlessly, as he thought, broken in upon his holy and seemly performance. You, the child of a naturalist, he remarked in awesome tones, you to pretend to feel terror at the advance of an insect. It could be but a pretext, he declared, for avoiding the testimony of faith in prayer. If your heart were fixed, if it panted after the Lord, it would take more than the movements of a beetle to make you disturb oral supplication at his footstool.   He liked the word, which I suppose he used in an antiquated sense. He was accustomed to tell the saints at the room, in a very genial manner, and smiling at them as he said it, I am jealous over you, my beloved brothers and sisters, with a godly jealousy. I know that this was interpreted by some of the saints, for I heard Mary Gray say so to Miss Marks, as meaning that my father was resentful because some of them attended the service at the Wesleyan Chapel on Thursday evenings. My father was utterly incapable of such littleness as this, and when he talked of jealousy, he met a lofty solicitude, a careful watchfulness. He meant that their spiritual honor was a matter of anxiety to him. No doubt when he used to tell me to remember that our God is a jealous God, he meant that my sins and shortcomings were not matters of indifference to the divine being. But I think looking back, it was very extraordinary for a man so instructed and so intelligent as he to dwell so much on the possible anger of the Lord rather than on his pity and love. The theory of extreme puritanism can surely offer no quainter example of its fallacy than this idea that the omnipotent Jehovah could be seriously offended and could stoop to revenge because a little nervous child of nine had disturbed a prayer by being frightened at a beetle. The fact that the word Carmen appeared as the goal of my visionary pursuits is not so inexplicable as it may seem. My father at this time was producing numerous watercolor drawings of minute and even of microscopic forms of life. These he executed in the matter of miniature with an amazing fidelity of form and with a brilliancy of color which remains unfaded after 50 years. By far the most costly of his pigments was the intense crimson which is manufactured out of the very spirit and essence of cochineal. I had lately become a fervent imitator of his works of art and I was allowed to use all of his colors except one. I was strictly forbidden to let a hair of my paintbrush touch the little broken mass of Carmen, which was all that he possessed. We believed, but I do not know whether this could be the fact, that Carmen of this superlative quality was sold at a guinea cake. Carmen, therefore, became my shibboleth of self-indulgence. It was a symbol of all that taste and art and wealth could combine to produce. I imagine, for instance, that at Balchazar's feast the loftiest eppern of gold surrounded by flowers and jewels carried the monarch's proudest possession a cake of Carmen. I knew of no object in the world of luxury more desirable than this and its obsession in my waking hours is quite enough, I think, to account for Carmen having been the torment of my dreams. The little incident of the beetle displays my father's mood at this period in its worst blight. His severity was not very creditable, perhaps, to his good sense, but without a word of explanation it may seem even more unreasonable than it was. My father might have been less stern to my lapses from high conduct and my own mind at the same time less armored against his arrows if our relations had been those which exist in an ordinary religious family. He would have been more indulgent and my own affections might nevertheless have been more easily alienated if I had been treated by him as a common place child, standing as yet outside the pale of conscious Christianity. But he had formed the idea and cultivated it assiduously that I was an am diggit, a being to whom mysteries of salvation had been divinely revealed and by whom they had been accepted. I was, to his partial fancy, one in whom the Holy Ghost had already performed a real and permanent work. Hence, I was inside the pale. I had attained that inner position which divided, as we used to say, the sheep from the goats. Another little boy might be very well behaved, but if he had not consciously laid hold on Christ, his good deeds so far were absolutely useless, whereas I might be a very naughty boy and require much chastisement from God and man. But nothing, so my father thought, could invalidate my election. And sooner or later, perhaps even after many stripes, I must inevitably be brought back to the state of grace. The paradox between this unquestionable sanctification by faith and my equally unquestionable naughtiness occupied my father greatly at this time. He made it a frequent subject of intercession at family prayers, not caring to hide from the servants misdemeanors of mine, which he spread out with a melancholy unction before the Lord. He cultivated the belief that all my little ailments, all my aches and pains were sent to correct my faults. He carried this persuasion very far, even putting this exhortation before, instead of after, an instant relief of my sufferings. If I burned my finger with a sulfur match or pinched the end of my nose in the door, to mention the two sorrows that recur to my memory, my father would solemnly ejaculate, oh, may these afflictions be much sanctified to him before offering any remedy for my pain, so that I almost longed under the pressure of these pangs to be a godless child who had never known the privileges of saving grace, since I argued that such a child would be subjected to none of the sufferings which seemed to assail my path. What the ideas or conduct of another child might be, I had, however, at this time, no idea. For as strange as it may sound, I had not, until my 10th year was far advanced, made acquaintance with any such creature. The saints had children, but I was not called upon to cultivate their company, and I had not the slightest wish to do so. But early in 1859, I was allowed, at last, to associate with a child of my own age. I do not recall that this permission gave me any rapture. I accepted it philosophically, but without that delighted eagerness which I might have been expected to show. My earliest companion then was a little boy of almost exactly my own age. His name was Benny, which no doubt was short for Benjamin. His surname was Jeffries. His mother, I think he had no father, was a solemn and shadowy lady of means who lived in a villa, which was older and much larger than ours on the opposite side of the road. Going to play with Benny involved a small public excursion, and this I was now allowed to make by myself, an immense source of self-respect. Everything in my little memories seems to run askew. Obviously, I ought to have been extremely stirred and broadened by this earliest association with a boy of my age, yet I cannot truly say that it was so. Benny's mother possessed what seemed to me a vast domain of lawns winding among broad shrubberies and a kitchen garden with aged fruit trees in it. The ripeness of this place, most and leafy, was gratifying to my senses, on which the rawness of our own bald garden jarred. It was an old brick wall between the two divisions, upon which it was possible for us to climb up, and from this we gained pisgah views, which were a prodigious pleasure. But I had not the faintest idea how to play. I had never learned, had never heard of any games. I think Benny must have lacked initiative almost as much as I did. We walked about and shook the bushes and climbed along the wall. I think that was almost all we ever did do. And sadly enough, I cannot recover a phrase from Benny's lips nor an action nor a gesture, although I remember quite clearly how some grown-up people of that time looked and the very words they said. For example, I recollect Miss Wilkes very distinctly since I studied her with great deliberation and with a suspicious watchfulness that was above my ears. And Miss Wilkes, a type that had hitherto been absolutely unfamiliar to us, obtruded upon our experience. In our eveless Eden, woman, if not exactly Hirsuta et Horida, had always been of a certain age. But Miss Wilkes was a comparatively young thing, and she advanced not by any means unconscious of her charms. Always feminine, always impulsive about Miss Wilkes. Every gesture seemed eloquent with girlish innocence and the playful dawn of life. In actual years, I fancy she was not so extremely youthful since she was the responsible and trusted headmistress of a large boarding school for girls. But in her heart, the joy of life ran high. Miss Wilkes had a small round face with melting eyes and when she lifted her head, her ringlets seemed to vibrate and shiver like the bells of a pagoda. She had a charming way of clasping her hands and holding them against her bodice, while she said, oh, but really no. In a manner inexpressibly engaging. She was very earnest and she had a pleading way of calling out, oh, but aren't you teasing me? Which would have brought a tiger fawning to her crinoline. After we had spent a full year without any social distractions, it seems that our circle of acquaintances had now begun to extend in spite of my father's unwillingness to visit his neighbors. He was a fortress that required to be stormed, but there was considerable local curiosity about him so that by and by escalating parties were formed, some of which were partly successful. In the first place, Charles Kingsley had never hesitated to come from the beginning ever since our arrival. He had reason to visit our neighboring town rather frequently and on such occasions, he always marched up and attacked us. It was extraordinary how persistent he was. For my father must have been a very trying friend. I vividly recollect that a sort of cross-examination of would-be communicants was going on in our half furnace drawing room one weekday morning when Mr. Kingsley was announced. My father, instantorian tones, replied, "'Tell Mr. Kingsley that I am engaged "'in examining scripture with certain of the Lord's children.'" And I, a little later, kneeling at the window while the candidates were being dismissed with prayer, watched the author of Hypatia, nervously careening about the garden, very restless and impatient, yet preferring this ignominy to the chance of losing my father's company altogether. Kingsley, a daring spirit, used sometimes to drag us trawling with him in Torbay. And although his hawks, beak, and rattling voice frightened me a little, his was always a jolly presence that brought some refreshment to our seriousness. But the other visitors who came in Kingsley's wake and without his excuse, how they disturbed us. We used to be seated, my father at his microscope, I, with my map or book, in the downstairs room we called a study. They would be a hush around us in which you could hear a sea anemone sigh. Then abruptly would come a ring at the front door. My father would bend at me a corrugated brow and murmur under his breath, "'What's that?' And then, at the sound of footsteps, would bolt into the veranda and around the garden into the potting shed. If it was no visitor more serious than the postman or the tax-gatherer, I used to go forth and coax the timid wanderer home. If it was a caller, above all a female caller, it was my privilege to pervaricate, remarking innocently that Papa is out. Into a paradise so carefully guarded, I know not how that serpent Miss Wilkes could penetrate, but there she was. She broke bread with the brethren at the adjacent town from which she carried on strategical movements which were, up to a certain point, highly successful. She professed herself deeply interested in microscopy and desired that some of her young ladies should study it also. She came attended by an unimportant man and by pupils to whom I had sometimes very unwillingly to show our natural objects. They would invade us in all our quietness with clattering noise. I could bear none of them that I was singularly drawn to Miss Marks by finding that she disliked them too. By whatever art she worked, Miss Wilkes certainly achieved a certain ascendancy. When the knocks came at the front door, I was now instructed to see whether the visitor were not she, before my father bolted to the potting shed. She was an untiring listener and my father had a genius for instruction. Miss Wilkes was never weary of expressing what a revelation of the wonderful works of God in creation her acquaintance with us had been. She would gaze through the microscope at awful forms and would persevere until the silver rim which marked the confines of the drop of water under inspection, would ripple inwards with a flash of light and vanish because the drop itself had evaporated. Well, I can only say how marvelous are thy doings. Was a frequent ejaculation of Miss Wilkes and one that was very well received. She learned the Latin names of many of the species and it seems quite pathetic to me looking back to realize how much trouble the poor woman took. She hung, as the expression is, upon my father's every word. In one instance of this led to a certain revelation. My father, who had an extraordinary way of saying anything that came into his mind, stated one day, the fashions I must suppose being under discussion, that he thought white the only becoming color for a lady's stockings. The stockings of Miss Wilkes had up to that hour been of a deep violet, but she wore white ones in future whenever she came to our house. This delicacy would have been beyond my unaided infant observation, but I heard Miss Marks mention the matter in terms of which they supposed to be secret to her confidant, and I verified it at the ankles of the lady. Miss Marks continued by saying in confidence and quite as between you and me, dear Mary Grace, that Miss Wilkes was a minx. I had the greatest curiosity about words and as this was a new one, I looked it up in our large English dictionary. But there the definition of the term was this. Minx, a female of Minnock, a pert wanton. I was as much in the dark as ever. Whether she was the female of a Minnock, whatever that may be, or whether she was only a very well-meaning school mistress, desirous of enlivening a monotonous existence, Miss Wilkes certainly took us out of ourselves a great deal. Did my father know what danger he ran? Was the opinion of Miss Marks and of Mary Grace that he did not? And in the back kitchen, a room which served those ladies as a private oratory in the summertime, much prayer was offered up that his eyes might be opened ere it was too late. But I am inclined to think that they were open all the time that at all events, they were what the French called Entrouvert. That enough light for practical purposes came sifted in through his eyelashes. At a later time, being reminded of Miss Wilkes, he said with a certain complacence, ah, yes, she proffered much entertainment during my widowed years. He used to go down to her boarding school, the garden of which had been the scene of a murder and was romantically situated on the edge of a quarried cliff. He always took me with him and kept me at his side all through these visits, not withstanding Miss Wilkes' solicitude that the fatigue and excitement would be too much for the dear child's strength unless I rested a little on the parlor sofa. About this time, the question of my education came up for discussion in the household, as indeed it well might. Miss Marks had long proved practically inadequate in this respect, her slender requirements evaporating, I suppose, like the drops of water under the microscope while the field of her general duties became wider. The subjects in which I took pleasure and upon which I possessed books, I sedulously taught myself. The other subjects, which formed the vast majority, I did not learn at all. Like a roarly, I brushed with extreme flounce the circle of the universe, especially zoology, botany, and astronomy, but with the explicit exception of geology, which my father regarded as tending directly to the encouragement of infidelity. I copied a great quantity of maps and read all the books of travels that I could find, but I acquired no mathematics, no languages, no history, so I was in danger of gross illiteracy in these important departments. My father grudged the time, but he felt it a duty to do something to fill up these deficiencies, and we now started Latin in a little 18th century reading book out of which my grandfather had been taught. It consisted of strings of words and of grim arrangements of conjunction and declension, presented in a manner appallingly unattractive. I used to be set down in the study under my father's eye to learn a solid page of this compilation while he wrote or painted. The window would be open in summer and my seat would be close to it. Outside, a bee was shaking the climata's blossom or a red admiral butterfly was opening and shutting his wings on the hot concrete of the veranda or a blackbird was racing across the lawn. It was almost more than human nature could bear to have to sit holding up to my face a dreary little Latin book with its sheepskin cover that smelled of mildewed paste. But out of this strength there came an unexpected sudden sweetness. The exercise of hearing me repeat my strings of nouns and verbs had revived in my father his memories of the classics. In the old solitary years a long time ago by the shores of Canadian rapids on the edge of West Indian swamps his Virgil had been an inestimable solace to him. To extremely devout persons there was something objectionable in most of the great writers of antiquity. Horace, Lucretius, Terence, Catullus, Juvenile. In each there is one quality or another definitely repulsive to a reader who was determined to know nothing but Christ and him crucified. From time immemorial however it has been recognized in the Christian church that the subjection does not apply to Virgil. He is the most evangelical of the classics. He is the one who can be enjoyed with least to explain away and least to excuse. One evening my father took down his Virgil from an upper shelf and his thoughts wandered away from surrounding things. He traveled in the past again. The book was a dolphin edition of 1798 which had followed him in all his wanderings. There was a great scratch on the sheepskin cover that a thorn had made in a forest of Alabama.  To Tyre, to Patuli, Recuban's sub-tubmini-fagi he warbled and I stopped my play and listened to it as if to a nightingale until he reached to Tyre lentus in umbra for Mosan Rezernare Doki's Amarilida Sylvan. Oh Papa, what is it? I could not prevent myself from asking. He translated the verses, he explained their meaning but his exposition gave me little interest. What to me was beautiful, Amarilis. She and her lovesick to Tyre's awakened no image, whatever in my mind. But a miracle had been revealed to me the incalculable, the amazing beauty which could exist in the sound of verses. My prosodical instinct was awakened quite suddenly that dim evening as my father and I sat alone in the breakfast room after tea serenely accepting the hour for once with no idea of exhortation or profit. Verse, a breeze made blossoms play as Coleridge says, descended from the roses as a moth might have done and the magic of it took hold of my heart forever. I persuaded my father who was a little astonished at my insistence to repeat the lines over and over again. At last my brain caught them and as I walked in Benny's garden or as I hung over the tidal pools at the edge of the sea all my inner being used to ring out with the sound of, for Mosan Rezernare Doki's Amarilida Sylvan. End of chapter seven. Chapter eight of Father and Son. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Eugene Smith. Father and Son by Edmund Goss, chapter eight. In the previous chapter, I have dwelt on some of the lighter conditions of our life at this time. I must now turn to it in a less frivolous aspect. As my tenth year advanced, the development of my character gave my father, I will not say anxiety, but matter for serious reflection. My intelligence was now perceived to be taking a sudden start. Visitors drew my father's attention to the fact that I was coming out so much. I grew rapidly in stature, having been a little shrimp of a thing up to that time. And I no longer appeared much younger than my years. Looking back, I do not think that there was any sudden mental development, but that the change was mainly a social one. I had been reserved, timid and taciturn. I had disliked the company of strangers. But with my tenth year, I certainly unfolded so far as to become sociable and talkative. And perhaps I struck those around me as grown clever, because I said the things which I had previously only thought. There was a change, no doubt, yet I believe it was mainly physical rather than mental. My excessive fragility, or apparent fragility, for I must have been always wiry, decreased. I slept better, and therefore grew less nervous. I ate better, and therefore put on flesh. If I preserved a delicate look, people still used to say in my presence, that dear child is not long for this world. It was inconsequence of a sort of habit into which my body had grown. It was a transparency which did not speak of what was in store for me, but of what I had already passed through. The increased activity of my intellectual system now showed itself in what I behoved to be a very healthy form, direct imitation. The rage for what is called originality is pushed to such a length in these days that even children are not considered promising unless they attempt things preposterous and unparalleled. From his earliest hour, the ambitious person is told that to make a road where none has walked before, to do easily what it is impossible for others to do at all, to create new forms of thought and expression are the only recipes for genius. And in trying to escape on all sides from every resemblance to his predecessors, he adopts at once an air of eccentricity and pretentiousness. This continues to be the accepted view of originality, but in spite of this conventional opinion, I hold that the healthy sign of an activity of mind and early youth is not to be striving after unheard of miracles, but to imitate closely and carefully what is being said and done in the vicinity. The child of a great sculptor will hang about the studio and will try to hammer ahead out of a waste piece of marble with a nail. It does not follow that he too will be a sculptor. The child of a politician will sit in committee with a row of empty chairs and will harangue an imaginary senate from behind the curtains. I, the son of a man who looked through a microscope and painted what he saw there, would fair observe for myself and paint my observations. It did not follow, alas, that I was built to be a miniature painter or a savant, but the activity of a childish intelligence was shown by my desire to copy the results of such energy as I saw nearest at hand. In a secular direction, this now took the form of my preparing little monographs on seaside creatures, which were arranged, tabulated and divided as exactly as possible on the pattern of those which my father was composing for his Actinologia Britannica. I wrote these out upon sheets of paper of the same size as his printed page and I adorned them with watercolor plates, meant to emulate his precise and exquisite illustrations. One or two of these ludicrous pastiches are still preserved and in glancing at them now, I wonder not at any skill that they possess, but at the perseverance and the patience, the evidence of close and persistent labor. I was not set to these tasks by my father, who in fact did not much approve of them. He was touched too with the originality heresy and exhorted me not to copy him, but to go out into the garden or the shore and describe something new in a new way. This was quite impossible. I possessed no initiative, but I can now well understand why my father, very indulgently and good-temperedly, deprecated these exercises of mine. They took up and, as he might well think, wasted an enormous quantity of time. And they were, moreover, parodies, rather than imitations of his writings. For I invented new species with sapphire spots and crimson tentacles and amber bands, which were close enough to his real species to be disconcerting. He came from conscientiously shepherding the flocks of ocean and I do not wonder that my ring-straight, speckled and spotted varieties put him out of countenance. If I had not been so innocent and solemn, he might have fancied I was mocking him. These extraordinary excursions into science, falsely so-called, occupied a large part of my time. It was a little spare room at the back of our house, dedicated to lumber and to empty portmanteau. There was a table in it already and I added a stool. This cheerless apartment now became my study. I spent so many hours here in solitude and without making a sound that my father's curiosity, if not his suspicion, was occasionally aroused and he would make a sudden raid on me. I was always discovered, doubled up over the table with my pen and ink or else my box of colors and tumbler of turbid water by my hand, working away like a Chinese student, shut up in his matriculating box. It might have been done for a wager, if anything so simple had ever been dreamed of in our pious household. The apparatus was slow and labored in order to keep my uncouth handwriting in bounds. I was obliged to rule not lines only, but borders to my pages. The subject did not lend itself to any flow of language and I was obliged incessantly to borrow sentences word for word from my father's published books. Discouraged by everyone around me, daunted by the laborious effort needed to carry out the scheme, it seems odd to me now that I persisted in so strange and weary semi-employment but it became an absorbing passion and was indulged in to the neglect of other lessons and other pleasures. My father, as the spring advanced, used to come up to the box room, as my retreat was called, and hunt me out into the sunshine. But I soon crept back to my mania. It gave him much trouble and this Marx, who thought at sheer idleness, was vociferous in objection. She would gladly have torn up all my writings and paintings and have sent me to a useful task. My father, with his strong natural individualism, could not take this view. He was interested in this strange freak of mine and he could not wholly condemn it. But he must have thought it a little crazy and it is evident to me now that it led to the revolution and domestic policy by which he began to encourage any acquaintance with other young people as much as he had previously discouraged it. He saw that I could not be allowed to spend my whole time in a little stuffy room making solemn and ridiculous imitations of papers read before the Linnaean society. He was grieved, moreover, at the badness of my pictures, for I had no native skill and he tried to teach me his own system of miniature painting as applied to natural history. I was forced, in deep depression of spirits, to turn from my grotesque monographs and paint under my father's eye and from a finished drawing of his a gorgeous, tropic bird in flight aided by my habit of imitation. I did, at length, produce something which might have shown promise if it had not been wrung from me, touch by touch, pigment by pigment under the orders of a task master. All this had its absurd side but I seem to perceive that it had also its value. It is surely a mistake to look too near at hand for the benefits of education. What is actually taught in early childhood is often that part of training which makes least impression on the character and is of the least permanent importance.   Moreover, it gave me the habit of going on with any piece of work I had in hand, not flagging because the interest or a picturesqueness of the theme had declined but pushing forth towards a definite goal well foreseen and limited beforehand. For almost any intellectual employment in later life, it seems to me that this discipline was valuable. I am, however, not the less conscious how ludicrous was the mode in which in my 10th year I obtained it. My spiritual condition occupied my father's thoughts very insistently at this time. Closing, as he did, most of the doors of worldly pleasure and energy upon his conscience, he had continued to pursue his scientific investigations without any sense of sin. Most fortunate it was that the collecting of marine animals and the tidal pools and the description of them in pages which were addressed to the wide scientific public at no time occurred to him as in any way inconsistent with his holy calling. His conscience was so delicate and often so morbid in its delicacy that if it had occurred to him, he would certainly have abandoned his investigations and have been left without an employment. But happily, he justified his investigation by regarding it as a glorification of God's created works. In the introduction of his Actinologia Britannica, written at the time which I have now reached in this narrative, he sent forth his labors with a phrase which I should think unparalleled in connection with a learned and technical biological treatise. He stated concerning that book that he published it as one more tribute humbly offered to the glory of the triune God who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working. Scientific investigations sincerely carried out in that spirit became a kind of weekday interpretation of the current creed of Sundays. The development of my faculties of which I have spoken extended to the religious sphere no less than to the secular. Here also as I look back, I see that I was extremely imitative. I expanded in the warmth of my father's fervor and on the whole in a manner that was satisfactory to him. He observed the richer hold that I was now taking on life. He saw my faculties branching in many directions and he became very anxious to secure my maintenance and grace. In earlier years, certain sides of my character had offered a sort of passive resistance to his ideas. I had let what I did not care to welcome pass over my mind in the curious density that children adopt in order to avoid receding impressions, blankly, dumbly, achieving by stupidity what they cannot achieve by argument. I think that I had frequently done this that he had been brought up against the dead wall, although on other sides of my nature I had been responsive and docile. But now in my 10th year, the imitative faculty got the upper hand and nothing seemed so attractive as to be what I was expected to be. If there was a doubt now, it lay in the other direction. It seemed hardly normal that so young a child should appear so receptive and so apt. My father believed himself justified at this juncture in making a tremendous effort. He wished to secure me finally exhaustively before the age of puberty could dawn, before my soul was fettered with the love of carnal things. He thought that if I could now be identified with the saints and could stand exactly on their footing, a habit of conformity would be secured. I should meet the paganizing tendencies of advancing years with security. If I could be forearmed with all the weapons of a sanctified life, he wished me in short to be received into the community of the brethren on the terms of an adult. There were difficulties in the way of carrying out this scheme and they were urged upon him more or less courageously by the elders of the church, but he overbore them. What the difficulties were and what were the arguments which he used to sweep those difficulties away, I must now explain. For in this lay the center of our future relations as father and son. In dealing with the peasants around him, among whom he was engaged in an active propaganda, my father always insisted on the necessity of conversion. There must be a new birth and being, a fresh creation in God. This crisis he was accustomed to regard as manifesting itself in a sudden and definite upheaval. There might have been prolonged practical piety, deep and true contrition for sin, but these, although the natural and suitable prologue to conversion were not conversion itself. People hung on at the confines of regeneration, often for a very long time. My father dealt earnestly with them, the elders ministered to them with explanation, exhortation and prayer. Such persons were in a gracious state, but they were not in a state of grace. If they should suddenly die, they would pass away in an unconverted condition. And all that could be said in their favor was a vague expression of hope that they would benefit from God's uncovenanted mercies. But on some day, at some hour and minute, if life was spared to them, the way of salvation would be revealed to these persons in such an aspect that they would be enabled instantaneously to accept it. They would take it consciously as one takes a gift from the hand that offers it. This act of taking was the process of conversion. And the person who so accepted was a child of God now, although a single minute ago, he had been a child of wrath. The very root of human nature had to be changed. And in the majority of cases, this change was sudden, patent, and palpable. I have just said in the majority of cases because my father admitted the possibility of exceptions. The formula was, if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. As a rule, no one could possess the Spirit of Christ without a conscious and full abandonment of the soul. And this, however carefully led up to and prepared for with tears and renunciations, was not, could not be made except at a set moment of time. Faith, in a necessary and almost symbolic sense, was necessary and could not be a result of argument, but was a state of heart. In these opinions, my father departed in no ways from the strict evangelical doctrine of the Protestant churches, but he held it in a mode and with a severity peculiar to himself. Now it is plain that this state of heart, this voluntary deed of acceptance, presuppose a full and rational consciousness of the relations of things. It might be clearly achieved by a person of humble cultivation, but only by one who is fully capable of independent thought, in other words, by a more or less adult person. The man or woman claiming the privileges of conversion must be able to understand and to grasp what his religious education was aiming at. It is extraordinary what trouble it often gave my father to know whether he was justified in admitting to the communion people of very limited powers of expression. A harmless, humble, laboring man would come with a request to be allowed to break bread. It was only by the use of strong leading questions that he could be induced to mention Christ as the ground of his trust at all. I recollect an elderly agricultural laborer being closeted for a long time with my father, who came out at last in a sort of dazed condition and replied to our inquiries with a shrug of his shoulders as he said it. I was obliged to put the name and blood and work of Jesus into his very mouth. It is true that he assented cordially at last, but I confess I was grievously daunted by the poor intelligence. But there was, or there might be, another class of persona whom early training, separation from the world and the care of godly parents had so familiarized with the acceptable calling of Christ that their conversion had occurred unperceived and therefore unrecorded at an extraordinarily early age. It would be in vain to look for a repetition of the phenomenon in those cases. The heavenly fire must not be expected to descend the second time. Lips are touched with the burning coal once and once only. If, accordingly, these precociously selected spirits are to be excluded because no new birth is observed in them at a mature age, they must continue outside in the cold since the phenomenon cannot be repeated. When, therefore, there is not possible any further doubt of their being in possession of salvation, longer delay is useless and worse than useless. The fact of conversion, though not recorded nor even recollected, must be accepted on the evidence of confession of faith. And as soon as the intelligence is evidently developed, the person not merely may, but should, be accepted into communion, although still immature in body, although in years still even a child. This, my father believed to be my case. And in this rare class, did he fondly persuade himself to station me. As I have said, the congregation, although docile and timid and little able as units to hold their own against their minister, behind his back were faintly hostile to this plan. None of their own children had ever been so much as suggested for membership, and each of themselves in ripe years had been subjected to severe cross-examination. I think it was rather a bitter pill for some of them to swallow that a pert little boy of 10 should be admitted as a grown-up person to all the hard-won privileges of their order. Mary Grace Bermington came back from her visits to the cottagers, reporting disaffection here and there, rumblings in the rank and file. But quite as many, especially of the women, enthusiastically supported my father's wish, gloried aloud in the manifestations of my early piety, and professed to see in it something of miraculous promise. The expression, another infant Samuel, was widely used. I became quite a subject of contention. A war of the sexes threatened to break out over me. I was a disturbing element at cottage breakfasts. I was mentioned at public prayer meetings, not indeed by name, but in the extraordinary elusive way customary in our devotions as one amongst us of tender years, or as a sapling in the Lord's vineyard. To all this, my father put a stop in his own high-handed fashion. After the morning meeting one Sunday in the autumn of 1859, he desired the attention of the saints to a personal matter, which was perhaps not unfamiliar to them by rumor. That was, he explained, the question of the admission of his beloved little son to the communion of saints in the breaking of bread. He allowed, and I sat there in evidence, palely smiling at the audience, my feet scarcely touching the ground, that I was not what is styled adult. I was not, he frankly admitted, a grown-up person. But I was adult in a knowledge of the Lord. I possessed an insight into the plan of salvation, which many a hurry had by envy for its fullness, its clearness, its conformity with scripture doctrine. This was a palpable hit at more than one stumbler and fumbler after the truth, and several hoary heads were bowed. My father then went on to explain very fully the position which I have already attempted to define. He admitted the absence, in my case, of a sudden apparent act of conversion, resulting upon conviction of sin. But he stated the grounds of his belief that I had in still earlier infancy been converted. And he declared that, if so, I ought no longer to be excluded from the privileges of communion. He said, moreover, that he was willing on this occasion to waive his own privilege as a minister, and that he would rather call on Brother Fox and Brother Beer, the leading elders, to examine the candidate in his stead. This was a masterstroke where Brothers Fox and Beer had been suspected of leading the disaffection and this threw all the burden of responsibility on them. The meeting broke up in great amiability, and my father and I went home together in the very highest of spirits. I indeed, in my pride, crossed the verge of indiscretion by saying, when I have been admitted to fellowship, Papa, shall I be allowed to call you beloved brother? My father was too well pleased with the morning's work to be critical. He laughed and answered, that my love, though strictly correct, would hardly, I fear, be thought judicious. It was suggested that my 10th birthday, which followed this public announcement by a few days, would be a capital occasion for me to go through the ordeal. Accordingly, after dark, where our new lamp was lighted for the first time in honor of the event, I withdrew alone into our drawing room, which had just at length been furnished and which looked, I thought, very smart. Hither came to me, first brother Fox by himself, then brother Beer by himself, and then both together, so that you may say, if you are pedantically inclined, that I underwent three successive interviews. My father, out of sight somewhere, was, of course, playing the part of stage manager. I felt not at all shy, but so highly strung that my whole nature seemed to throb with excitement. My first examiner, on the other hand, was extremely confused. Fox, who was a builder in a small business of his own, was short and fat. His complexion, which were a deeper and more uniform rose color than usual, I observed to be starred with dew drops of nervous emotion, which he wiped away at intervals with a large bandana handkerchief. He was so long in coming to the point that I was obliged to lead him to it myself, and I sat up on the sofa in the full lamp light and testified my faith in the atonement with a fluency that surprised myself.  Beer, the carpenter, a long, thin and dry man with a curiously immobile eye, did not fall so easily a prey to my fascinations. He put me through my paces very sharply, for he had something of the temper of an attorney mingled with his religiousness. However, I was equal to him, and he too, though he held his own head higher, was not less impressed than Fox had been by the surroundings of the occasion. Neither of them had ever been in our drawing room since it was furnished, and I thought that each of them noticed how smart the wallpaper was. Indeed, I believe I drew their attention to it. After the two solitary examinations were over, the elders came in again, as I have said, and they prayed for a long time. We all three knelt at the sofa, eye between them, but by this time, to my great exultation of spirits, I had succeeded in equally dismal depression. It was my turn now to weep, and I dimly remember my father coming into the room, and my being carried up to bed in a state of collapse and fatigue by the silent and kindly Miss Marks. On the following Sunday morning, I was the principal subject which occupied an unusually crowded meeting. My father, looking whiter and yet darker than usual, called upon Brother Fox and Brother Beer to state to the assembled saints what their experiences had been in connection with their visits to one who desired to be admitted to the breaking of bread. It was tremendously exciting to me to hear myself spoken of with this impersonal publicity that I had no fear of the result. Events showed that I had no need of fear. Fox and Beer were sometimes accused of a rivalry which indeed broke out a few years later and gave my father much anxiety and pain, but on this occasion, their unanimity was wonderful. Each strove to exceed the other in the tributes which they paid to my piety. My answers had been so full and clear. My humility, save the mark, had been so sweet. My acquaintance with scripture so amazing. My testimony to all the leading principles of salvation so distinct and exhaustive that they could only say that they had felt confounded and yet deeply cheered and led far along their own heavenly path by hearing such accents fall from the lips of a babe and a suckling. I did not like being described as a suckling, but every lot has its crumpled rose leaf and in all other aspects, the report of the elders was a triumph. My father then clenched the whole matter by rising and announcing that I had expressed an independent desire to confess the Lord by the act of public baptism immediately after which I should be admitted to communion as an adult. Emotion ran so high at this that a large portion of the congregation insisted on walking with us back to our garden gate to the stupefaction of the rest of the villagers. My public baptism was the central event of my whole childhood. Everything since the earliest dawn of consciousness seemed to have been leading up to it. Everything afterwards seemed to be leading down and away from it. The practice of immersing communicants on the sea beach at Oticum had now been completely abandoned, but we possessed as yet no tank for a baptismal purpose in our own room. The room in the adjoining town, however, was really quite a large chapel and it was amply provided with the needful conveniences. It was our practice therefore at this time to claim the hospitality of our neighbors. Baptisms were made an occasion for friendly relations between the two congregations and led to pleasant social intercourse. I believe that the ministers and elders of the two meetings arranged to combine their forces at these times and to baptize communicants from both congregations. The minister of the town meeting was Mr. S, a very handsome old gentleman, a venerable and powerful appearance. He had snowy hair and a long white beard, but from under shaggy eyebrows, there blazed out great black eyes, which warned the beholder that the snow was an ornament and not a sign of decrepitude. The eve of my baptism at length grew near. It was fixed for October 12, almost exactly three weeks after my 10th birthday. I was dressed in old clothes and a suit of smarter things was packed up in a carpet bag. After nightfall, this carpet bag, accompanied by my father, myself, this marks and merry grace was put in a four-wheeled cab and driven a long way in the dark to the chapel of our friends. There we were received in a blaze of lights with a pressure of hands, with a murmur of voices, with ejaculations and even with tears and were conducted amid unspeakable emotion to places of honor in the front row of the congregation. The scene was one which would have been impressive, not merely to such hermits as we were, but even to worldly persons accustomed to life and to its curious and variegated experiences. To me, it was dazzling beyond words, inexpressibly exciting, an initiation to every kind of publicity and glory. There were many candidates, but the rest of them, mere grown-up men and women, gave thanks aloud that it was their privilege to follow where I led. I was the acknowledged hero of the hour. Those were days when newspaper enterprise was scarcely in its infancy and the event owed nothing to journalistic effort. In spite of that, the news of this remarkable ceremony, the immersion of a little boy of 10 years old as an adult had spread far and wide through the county in the course of three weeks. The chapel of our hosts was, as I have said, very large. It was commonly too large for their needs, but on this night it was crowded to the ceiling and the crowd had come, as every soft murmur assured me, to see me. There were people there who had traveled from Exeter, from Dartmouth, from Totnes, to witness so extraordinary a ceremony. There was one old woman of 85 who had come, my neighbors whispered to me, all the way from Morton, Hampstead, on purpose to see me baptized. I looked at her crumpled countenance with amazement, for there was no curiosity, no interest, visible in it. She sat there perfectly listless, looking at nothing, but chewing between her toothless gums, what appeared to be a jujube. In the center of the chapel floor, a number of planks had been taken up and revealed a pool, which might have been supposed to be a small swimming bath. We gazed down into this dark square of mysterious waters, from the tepid surface of which faint swirls of vapor rose. The whole congregation was arranged, tear above tear, about the four straight sides of this pool. Every person was able to see what happened in it, without any unseemly struggling or standing on forums. Mr. S. now rose, an impressive hieratic figure, commanding attention and imploring perfect silence. He held a small book in his hand, and he was preparing to give out the number of a hymn, when an astounding incident took place. There was a great splash, and a tall young woman was perceived to be in the baptismal pool, her arms waving above her head, and her figure held upright in the water by the inflation of the air underneath her crinoline, which was blown out like a bladder, as in some extravagant old-fashioned plate. Whether her feet touched the bottom of the font, I cannot say, but I suppose they did so. An indescribable turmoil of shrieks and cries followed on this extraordinary apparition. A great many people excitedly called upon other people to be calm, and an instance was given of the remark of James Smith, that he who, in quest of quiet silence hoots, is apt to make the hubbub he imputes. The young woman, in a more or less fainting condition, was presently removed from the water and taken into the sort of tent which was prepared for candidates. It was found that she herself had wished to be a candidate and had earnestly desired to be baptized, but that this had been forbidden by her parents. On the supposition that she fell in by accident, a pious coincidence was detected in this affair. The Lord had preordained that she should be baptized in spite of all opposition, but my father, in his shrewd way, doubted. He pointed out to us next morning that in the first place, she had not in any sense been baptized, as her head had not been immersed, and that in the second place, she must have deliberately jumped in since, had she stumbled and fallen forward, her hands and face would have struck the water whereas they remained quite dry. She belonged, however, to the neighbor congregation and we had no responsibility to pursue the inquiry any further. Decorum being again secured, Mr. Ass, with unimpaired dignity, proposed to the congregation a hymn which was long enough to occupy them during the preparations for the actual baptism. He then retired to the destry, and I, for I was to be the first to testify, was led by Ms. Marks and Mary Grace into the species of tent of which I had just spoken. Its pale sides seemed to shake with the jubilant singing of the saints outside while part of my clothing was removed and I was prepared for immersion. A sudden cessation of the hymn warned us that the minister was now ready and we emerged into the glare of lights and faces to find Mr. S already standing in the water, up to his knees. Feeling as small as one of our microscopic specimens, almost in a tessimally tiny as I descended into his titanic arms, I was handed down the steps to him. He was dressed in a kind of long surplus underneath which, as I could not, even in that moment, help observing, the air gathered in long bubbles which he strove to flatten out. The end of his noble beard he had tucked away, his shirt sleeves were turned up at the wrist. The entire congregation was now silent, so silent that the uncertain splashing of my feet as I descended seemed to deafen one. Mr. S, a little embarrassed by my short stature, succeeded at length in securing me with one palm on my chest and the other between my shoulders. He said, slowly, in a loud, sonorous voice that seemed to enter my brain and empty it, I baptize thee, my brother, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Having intoned this formula, he then gently flung me backwards until I was wholly under the water. And then, as he brought me up again and tenderly steadied my feet on the steps of the font, and delivered me, dripping and spluttering into the anxious hands of the women who hurried me to the tent, the whole assembly broke forth in a thunder of song, a peon of praise to God for this manifestation of his marvelous goodness and mercy. So great was the enthusiasm that it could hardly be restrained so as to allow the other candidates, the humdrum adults who followed in my wet and glorious footsteps, to undergo a ritual about which, in their case, no one in the congregation pretended to be able to take even the most languid interest.  His sternness melted into a universal complacence. He laughed and smiled. He paid to my opinions the tribute of the gravest considerations. He indulged, utterly unlike his want, in shy and furtive caresses. I could express no wish that he did not attempt to fulfill and the only warning which he cared to give me was one very gently expressed against spiritual pride. This was certainly required for I was puffed out with a sense of my own holiness. I was religiously confidential with my father, condescending with Ms. Marks, who I think had given up trying to make it all out, haughty with the servants and insufferably patronizing with those young companions of my own age with whom I was now beginning to associate. I would fame close this remarkable episode on a key of solemnity, but alas, if I'm to be loyal to the truth, I must record that some of the other little boys presently complained to Mary Grace that I put out my tongue at them in mockery during the service in the room to remind them that I now broke bread as one of the saints and that they did not. End of chapter eight.


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