Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 8.djvu/118

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��Charles Carleton Coffin.

��was as energetic and patriotic as he. In August, 1777, everyl^ody, old and young, turned out to defeat Burgoyne. One soldier could not go, because he had no shirt. It was this energetic woman, with a babe but three weeks old, who cut a web from the loom and sat up all night to make a shirt for the soldier. August came, the wheat was ripe for the sickle. Her husband was gone, the neighbors also. Six miles away was a family where she thought it possible she might obtain a harvest hand. Mounting the mare, taking the babe in her arms, she rode through the forest only to find that all the able-bodied young men had gone to the war. The only help to be had was a barefoot, hatless, coadess boy of fourteen.

"He can go but he has no coat," said the mother of the boy.

" I can make him a coat," was the reply.

The boy leaped upon the pillion, rode home with the woman — went out with his sickle to reap the bearded grain, while the house wife, taking a meal bag for want of other material, cutting a hole in the bottom, two holes in the sides, sewing a pair of her own stock- ings on for sleeves, fulfilled her promise of providing a coat, then laid her babe beneath the shade of a tree and bound the sheaves.

It is a picture of the trials, hardships and patriotism of the people in the most trying hour of the revolutionary struggle.

The babe was Thomas Coffin — father of the subject of this sketch, Charles Carleton Coffin, who was born on the old homestead in Boscawen, July 26, 1823, — the youngest of nine children, three of whom died in infancy.

The boyhood of the future journalist, correspondent and author was one of toil rather than recreation. The max- ims ot Benjamin Franklin in regard to idleness, thrift and prosperity were household words.

��" He who would thrive must rise at five."

In most farm-houses the fire was klr>- dled on the old stone hearth before that hour. The cows were to be milked and driven to the pasture to crop the green grass before the sun dis- patched the beaded drops of dew. They must be brought home at night.

In the planting season, corn and po- tatoes must be put in the hill. The youngest boy must ride the horse in fur- rowing, spread the new-mown grass, stow away the hay high up under the roof of the bam, gather stones in heaps after the wheat was reaped, or pick the apples in the orchard. Each member of the family must commit to memory the verses of Dr. Watts :

" Then what my hands shall find to do Let me with all my might pursue. For no device nor work is found Beneath the surface of the ground."

The great end of life was to do some- thing. There was a gospel of work, thrift and economy continually preached. To be idle was to serve the devil.

" The devil finds some mischief still for idle hands to do."

Such teaching had its legitimate effect, and the subject of this sketch in com- mon with the boys and girls of his gen- eration made work a duty. What was accepted as duty became jileasure.

Aside from the district school he at- tended Boscawen Academy a few terms. The teaching could not be called first- class instruction. The instructors were students just out of college, who taught for the stipend received rather than with any high ideal of teaching as a profes- sion. A term at Pembroke Academy in 1843 completed his acquisition of knowledge, so far as obtained in the schools.

The future journalist was an omnivo- rous reader. Everything was fish that came to the dragnet of this New Hampshire boy — from "Sinbad" to

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