Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 85.djvu/9

Rh of Scripture dialectics, and knew every text and its various interpretations, made a community of Bible disputants such as even Massachusetts could not show.

My mother was the eldest of a family of five, left motherless when she was sixteen. Her father was the director of the smallpox hospital in Newport, then an institution of grave importance to the community, as the practice of obligatory inoculation prevailed, and all the young people of the colony had to go up in classes to the hospital and pass the ordeal. Her mother's death left her the matron of the hospital and caretaker of her sister and brothers, and the stories of her life at that time which she told me now and then showed that with the position she assumed the effective authority, and ruled her brothers with a severity which my own experience of her maturer years enables me to understand. "Spare the rod, and spoil the child," was the maxim which flamed in the air before every father and mother of that New England, and my mother's physical vigor at sixty, when her conception of authority began to relax, I being then a lad six feet high and indisposed to physical persuasion, satisfied me that when her duty had required her to assume the responsibility bequeathed her by her mother she was fully competent to meet it.

Accustomed to the hardest life, the most rigid economy in the household, and without servants,—for except rare and lately emancipated negro slaves there was then no servile class in that colony,—the children had to perform all the duties pertaining to the daily life, official or private, and my mother was able to pull an oar or manage the sailboat with her brothers, and catch the horses and ride them bareback from pasture, when necessary, for the daily work, which was not insignificant; for Newport was really the seaport of that section of the state, and being on an island of importance, the intercourse with the mainland called for sea and land service. The boys were all fisherman, for a large part of the subsistence of the family came from the fishing grounds outside the harbor; and as the oldest brother took early to the sailor's life, my mother had to assume a larger share of all the harder services. The hospital was also the quarantine station, and received all the cases of smallpox which came to the port; and they must have been many and fatal, for I have heard her say that she had to go the rounds of the hospital at night, and that there would sometimes be more than one dead in the dead-room at once.

The first acquaintance of my parents with each other was made in the inoculating class, my father was being resident in Westerly, a town of Rhode Island, on the borders of Connecticut. The marriage must have taken place about two years later, on the second marriage of my grandfather Maxson to the daughter of Samuel Ward, one of the leading delegates from Rhode Island to the convention which drew up and promulgated the Declaration of Independence. The early days of their married life must have been passed in an extreme frugality. My father was one of a large number of children, and, after childhood on a farm, learned the trade of ship carpenter, which he alternated, as was often the habit of the young men of the New England coast, with voyages to the banks of Newfoundland in the codfishing season. Having in addition a share of Yankee inventiveness, he became interested in the perfecting of a fulling-machine, to introduce which into what was then the West he made a temporary residence in the state of New York at the old Dutch town of Schenectady, at that time an important entrepot of commerce between the Eastern cities and the state of New York, and the North-west. Utica was a frontier settlement, Buffalo an outpost in the wilderness.