Part 1 (2/2)

My authority informed me that there were among the boarders in the house two remarkable men, one of whom often petted me as a babe, and took a fancy to me. He was a Swedish Count, who had pa.s.sed, it was said, a very wild life as pirate for several years on the Spanish Main. He was identified as the Count Bruno of Frederica Bremer's novel, ”The Neighbours.” The other was the famous philologist, Dufief, author of ”Nature Displayed,” a work of such remarkable ability that I wonder that it should have pa.s.sed into oblivion.

My mother had been from her earliest years devoted to literature to a degree which was unusual at that time in the United States. She had been, as a girl, a special _protegee_ of Hannah Adams, the author of many learned works, who was the first person buried in the Mount Auburn Cemetery of Boston. She directed my mother's reading, and had great influence over her. My mother had also been very intimate with the daughters of Jonathan Russell, the well-known diplomatist. My maternal grandfather was Colonel G.o.dfrey, who had fought in the war of the Revolution, and who was at one time an aide-de-camp of the Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts. He was noted for the remarkable gentleness of his character. I have heard that when he went forth of a morning, all the animals on his farm would run to meet and accompany him. He had to a miraculous degree a certain sympathetic power, so that all beings, men included, loved him. I have heard my mother say that as a girl she had a tame crow who was named Tom, and that he could distinctly cry the word ”What?” When Tom was walking about in the garden, if called, he would reply ”What?” in a perfectly human manner.

When I was one month old, General Lafayette visited our city and pa.s.sed in a grand procession before the house. It is one of the legends of my infancy that my nurse said, ”Charley shall see the General too!” and held me up to the window. General Lafayette, seeing this, laughed and bowed to me. He was the first gentleman who ever saluted me formally. When I reflect how in later life adventure, the study of languages, and a French Revolution came into my experiences, it seems to me as if Count Bruno, Dufief, and Lafayette had all been premonitors of the future.

I was a great sufferer from many forms of ill-health in my infancy.

Before my second birthday, I had a terrible illness with inflammation of the brain. Dr. Dewees (author of a well-known work on diseases of women and children), who attended me, said that I was insane for a week, and that it was a case without parallel. I mention this because I believe that I owe to it in a degree whatever nervousness and tendency to ”idealism” or romance and poetry has subsequently been developed in me.

Through all my childhood and youth its influence was terribly felt, nor have I to this day recovered from it.

I should mention that my first nurse in life was an old Dutch woman named Van der Poel. I had not been born many days before I and my cradle were missing. There was a prompt outcry and search, and both were soon found in the garret or loft of the house. There I lay sleeping, on my breast an open Bible, with, I believe, a key and knife, at my head lighted candles, money, and a plate of salt. Nurse Van der Poel explained that it was done to secure my rising in life--by taking me up to the garret. I have since learned from a witch that the same is still done in exactly the same manner in Italy, and in Asia. She who does it must be, however, a _strega_ or sorceress (my nurse was reputed to be one), and the child thus initiated will become deep in darksome lore, an adept in _occulta_, and a scholar. If I have not turned out to be all of this _in majoribus_, it was not the fault of my nurse.

Next door to us lived a family in which were four daughters who grew up to be famous belles. It is said that when the poet N. P. Willis visited them, one of these young ladies, who was familiar with his works, was so overcome that she fainted. Forty years after Willis distinctly recalled the circ.u.mstance. Fainting was then fas.h.i.+onable.

Among the household friends of our family I can remember Mr. John Vaughan, who had legends of Priestley, Berkeley, and Thomas Moore, and who often dined with us on Sunday. I can also recall his personal reminiscences of General Was.h.i.+ngton, Jefferson, and all the great men of the previous generation. He was a gentle and beautiful old man, with very courtly manners and snow-white hair, which he wore in a queue. He gave away the whole of a large fortune to the poor. Also an old Mr.

Crozier, who had been in France through all the French Revolution, and had known Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier Tinville, &c. I wish that I had betimes noted down all the anecdotes I ever heard from them. There were also two old ladies, own nieces of Benjamin Franklin, who for many years continually took tea with us. One of them, Mrs. Kinsman, presented me with the cotton quilt under which her uncle had died. Another lady, Miss Louisa Nancrede, who had been educated in France, had seen Napoleon, and often described him to me. She told me many old French fairy-tales, and often sang a ballad (which I found in after years in the works of Cazotte), which made a great impression on me--something like that of ”Childe Roland to the dark tower came.” It was called _Le Sieur Enguerrand_, and the refrain was ”_Oh ma bonne j'ai tant peur_.”

That these and many other influences of culture stirred me strangely even as a child, is evident from the fact that they have remained so vividly impressed on my memory. This reminds me that I can distinctly remember that when I was eight years of age, in 1832, my grandmother, Mrs. Oliver Leland, told my mother that the great German poet Goethe had recently died, and that they bade me remember it. On the same day I read in the _Athenaeum_ (an American reprint of leading articles, poems, &c., from English magazines, which grandmother took all her life long) a translation of Schiller's ”Diver.” I read it only once, and to this day I can repeat nearly the whole of it. I have now by me, as I write, a silver messenger-ring of King Robert, and I never see it without thinking of the corner of the room by the side-door where I stood when grandmother spoke of the death of Goethe. But I antic.i.p.ate.

My father was a commission merchant, and had his place of business in Market Street below Third Street. His partner was Charles S. Boker, who had a son, George, who will often be mentioned in these Memoirs. George became in after life distinguished as a poet, and was Minister for many years at Constantinople and at St. Petersburg.

From Mrs. Rodgers' my parents went to Mrs. s.h.i.+nn's, in Second Street. It also was a very old-fas.h.i.+oned house, with a garden full of flowers, and a front doorstep almost on a level with the ground. The parlour had a large old fireplace, set with blue tiles of the time of Queen Anne, and it was my delight to study and have explained to me from them the story of Joseph and his brethren and AEsop's fables. Everything connected with this house recurs to me as eminently pleasant, old-fas.h.i.+oned, and very respectable. I can remember something very English-like among the gentlemen-boarders who sat after dinner over their Madeira, and a beautiful lady, Mrs. Stanley, who gave me a sea-sh.e.l.l. Thinking of it all, I seem to have lived in a legend by Hawthorne.

There was another change to a Mrs. Eaton's boarding-house in Fifth Street, opposite to the side of the Franklin Library. I can remember that there was a very good marine picture by Birch in the drawing-room.

This was after living in the Was.h.i.+ngton Square house, of which I shall speak anon. I am not clear as to these removals. There were some men of culture at Mrs. Eaton's--among them Sears C. Walker, a great astronomer, and a Dr. Brewer, who had travelled in Italy and brought back with him pieces of sculpture. We were almost directly opposite the State House, where liberty had been declared, while to the side, across the street, was the Library founded by Dr. Franklin, with his statue over the door.

One of his nieces often told me that this was an absolutely perfect likeness. The old iron railing, now removed--more's the pity!--surrounded the Square, which was full of grand trees.

It was believed that the spirit of Dr. Franklin haunted the Library, reading the books. Once a coloured woman, who, in darkey fas.h.i.+on, was scrubbing the floor after midnight, beheld the form. She was so frightened that she fainted. But stranger still, when the books were removed to the New Library in Locust Street, the ghost went with them, and there it still ”spooks” about as of yore to this day, as every negro in the quarter knows.

In regard to Franklin and his apparition, there was a schoolboy joke to this effect: that _whenever_ the statue of Franklin over the Library door heard the clock strike twelve at night, it descended, went to the old Jefferson Wigwam, and drank a gla.s.s of beer. But the sell lay in this, that a statue cannot hear.

And there was a dim old legend of a colony of Finns, who, in the Swedish time, had a village all to themselves in Wiccacoe. They were men of darksome lore and magic skill, and their women were witches, who at tide and time sailed forth merrily on brooms to the far-away highlands of the Hudson, where they held high revel with their Yankee, Dutch, and Indian colleagues of the mystic spell. David MacRitchie, in a recent work, has made a note of this curious offshoot of the old Philadelphia Swedes.

And I can also remember that before a marble yard in Race Street there were two large statues of very grim forbidding-looking dogs, of whom it was said that when there was any one about to die in the quarter, these uncanny hounds came down during a nightly storm and howled a death duet.

And when I was very young there still lingered in the minds of those invaluable living chronicles (whether bound in sheepskin or in calf), the oldest inhabitants, memories from before the Revolution of the Indian market, when on every Sat.u.r.day the natives came from their rural retreats, bringing pelts or skins, baskets, moccasins, _mocos_ or birch boxes of maple-sugar, feathers, and game for sale. Then they ranged themselves all along the west side of Independence Square, in tents or at tables, and sold--or were sold themselves--in bargains. Even now the Sunday-child, or he who is gifted to behold the departed, may see the ghostly forms of Red-men carrying on that weekly goblin market. Miss Eliza Leslie's memory was full of these old stories, which she had collected from old people.

As for the black witches, as there were still four negro sorcerers in Philadelphia in 1883 (I have their addresses), it may be imagined to what an extent _Voodoo_ still prevailed among our Ebo-ny men and brothers. Of one of these my mother had a sad experience. We had a black cook named Ann Lloyd, of whom, to express it mildly, one must say that she was ”no good.” My mother dismissed her, but several who succeeded her left abruptly. Then it was found that Ann, who professed to be a witch, had put a spell of death on all who should take her place. My mother learned this, and when the last black cook gave warning she received a good admonition as to a Christian being a slave to the evil one. I believe that this ended the enchantment. There is or was in South Fifth Street an African church, over the door of which was the charming inscription, ”Those who have walked in Darkness have seen a great light.” But this light has not even yet penetrated to the darksome depths of Lombard or South Streets, if I may believe the strange tales which I have heard, even of late, of superst.i.tion there.

Philadelphia was a very beautiful old-fas.h.i.+oned city in those days, with a marked character. Every house had its garden, in which vines twined over arbours, and the magnolia, honeysuckle, and rose spread rich perfume of summer nights, and where the humming-bird rested, and scarlet tanager or oriole with the yellow and blue bird flitted in suns.h.i.+ne or in shade.

Then swallows darted at noon over the broad streets, and the mighty sturgeon was so abundant in the Delaware that one could hardly remain a minute on the wharf in early morn or ruddy evening without seeing some six-foot monster dart high in air, falling on his side with a plash. In the winter-time the river was allowed to freeze over, and then every schoolboy walked across to Camden and back, as if it had been a pilgrimage or religious duty, while meantime there was always a kind of Russian carnival on the ice, oxen being sometimes roasted whole, and all kinds of ”fakirs,” as they are now termed, selling doughnuts, spruce-beer, and gingerbread, or tempting the adventurous with thimblerig; many pedestrians stopping at the old-fas.h.i.+oned inn on Smith's Island for hot punch. Juleps and cobblers, and the ”one thousand and one American fancy drinks,” were not as yet invented, and men drank themselves unto the devil quite as easily on rum or brandy straight, peach and honey, madeira and punch, as they now do on more varied temptations. Lager beer was not as yet in the land. I remember drinking it in after years in New Street, where a German known as _der d.i.c.ke Georg_ first dealt it in 1848 to our American public. Maize-whisky could then be bought for fifteen cents a gallon; even good ”old rye” was not much dearer; and the best Havanna cigars until 1840 cost only three cents a-piece. As they rose in price they depreciated in quality, and it is now many years since I have met with a really aromatic old-fas.h.i.+oned Havanna.

It was a very well-shaded, peaceful city, not ”a great village,” as it was called by New Yorkers, but like a pleasant English town of earlier times, in which a certain picturesque rural beauty still lingered. The grand old double houses, with high flights of steps, built by the Colonial aristocracy--such as the Bird mansion in Chestnut Street by Ninth Street--had a marked and pleasing character, as had many of the quaint black and red-brick houses, whose fronts reminded one of the chequer-board map of our city. All of this quiet charm departed from them after they were surrounded by a newer and noisier life. I well remember one of these fine old Colonial houses. It had been the old Penington mansion, but belonged in my early boyhood to Mr. Jones, who was one of my father's partners in business. It stood at the corner of Fourth and Race Streets, and was surrounded on all sides by a garden.

There was a legend to the effect that a beautiful lady, who had long before inhabited the house, had been so fond of this garden, that after death her spirit was often seen of summer nights tending or watering the flowers. She was a gentle ghost, and the story made a great impression on me. I still possess a pictured tile from a chimney-piece of this old mansion.

<script>