Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/15

CHAPTER 1. CHILDHOOD – YOUTH 2 the Underground by means of which the escaped slaves were helped to Canada and freedom. A bewhiskered picture of John Brown hung in the parlor and I was ten years old before I knew the difference between God, Moses, and John Brown.

I was just as ignorant of my own origin as I was of God. Half a mile down the maple-lined road were three stumps. I was told that the doctor had found me in the first stump. My sister Julia was discovered in the second stump, and my brother Frank was hid in the third stump. We would often say, "I'll race you to my stump." As there were no more stumps there, the fiction for the other babies was that the doctor brought them in his satchel.

The house where I was born was a huge brick house built in 1838, each room had a small grate fireplace, for there was a coal mine on this 333-acre farm. About 100 acres of brush and woods surrounded this mine; blackberry bushes, hazelnut bushes, wild strawberries. Directly back of the house and about a mile up the hill was a lone pine tree which had been planted the day that Lincoln was shot; and thus this hill, down which we went with our sleds in winter, was called Lincoln Hill. Mr. Brown was the first farmer in that community to have purebred Jersey cows; I remember old Cato, a cow with horns like the handle bars of a bicycle. I used to sit on her neck and hold these horns to keep from falling. I never have been afraid of snakes, for in the spring they would emerge by the dozen from the huge ice house where ice packed in sawdust was kept. Then the hay-tedder would kick up countless copperheads as we were haying. Sloan's Liniment, the Modoc Oil that was sold in the medicine shows down by the river every winter, Peruna and Carter's Liver Pills were always handy, but for regular cuts and bruises a little tobacco juice, my father said, was the best remedy. He ought to know for had been chewing it since he was eight years of age.

My first memory is that of my Quaker great-grandmother in her bonnet sitting in the east room by her Franklin stove and telling my three-year-old sister Julia and myself of how the peaceful Quakers loved the Indians and were not hurt by them. In this Republican community my father was a Democrat. (I found out years later that when I was a baby he had been a Populist and my mother had baked ginger cookie for Coxey's Army as they encamped on the meadow near us. The reader had better begin to get used to my quick change of gears through these years, from time and place and subject, here and there.) A neighbor girl, Mable Clark, who helped my mother when my brother Frank was born in 1898 taught me on the piano the chorus of the only music which I can play today: "Mid camp fires gleaming; mid shot and shell; I will be dreaming of my own Bluebell." I shed tears because I had not been born in time to go to war. My first remembrance of money dates from the time in the 1900 campaign when I lost a quarter betting on Bryan. A lot of money for a kid then.

On rainy days we children climbed to the top hay loft and munched apples and salt and bran. A side door showed us Camp Bouquet, a mile away across the lower meadow where it rose several hundred feet high in the V where two creeks met. Indians had camped there for centuries and in the French and Indian War a certain General Bouquet had given his name to the place. Methodists