Charles Carleton Coffin: War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman. William Elliot Griffis
and bringing it to the house alive. The boy baby standing in the doorway, all the family being in the yard, always remembered looking at what he called "a hen with a crooked bill." Carleton's recollection of the freshet of August, 1826, when the great slide occurred at the White Mountains, causing the death of the Willey family, was more detailed. This event has been thrillingly described by Thomas Starr King. The irrepressible small boy wanted to "go to meeting" on Sunday. Being told that he could not, he cried himself to sleep. When he awoke he mounted his "horse,"—a broomstick—and cantered up the road for a half mile. Captured by a lady, he resisted vigorously, while she pointed to the waters running in white streams down the hills through the flooded meadows and telling him he would be drowned.
Meanwhile the hired man at home was poling the well under the sweep and "the old oaken bucket," thinking the little fellow might have leaned over the curb and tumbled in. Shortly afterwards he came near disappearing altogether from this world by tumbling into the water-trough, being fished out by his sister Mary.
In the old kitchen, a pair of deer's horns fastened into the wall held the long-barrelled musket which his grandfather had carried in the campaign of 1777. A round beaver hat, bullet, button, and spoon moulds, and home-made pewter spoons and buttons, were among other things which impressed themselves upon the sensitive films of the child's memory.
Following out the usual small boy's instinct of destruction, he once sallied out down to the "karsey" (causeway) to spear frogs with a weapon made by his brother. It was a sharpened nail in the end of a broomstick. Stepping on a log and making a stab at a "pull paddock," he slipped and fell head foremost into the mud and slime. Scrambling out, he hied homeward, and entering the parlor, filled with company, he was greeted with shouts of laughter. Even worse was it to be dubbed by his brother and the hired man a "mud lark."
Carleton's first and greatest teachers were his mother and father. After these, came formal instruction by means of letters and books, classes and schools. Carleton's religious and dogmatic education began with the New England Primer, and progressed with the hymns of that famous Congregationalist, Doctor Watts. When five years old, at the foot of a long line of boys and girls, he toed the mark—a crack in the kitchen floor—and recited verses from the Bible. Sunday-school instruction was then in its beginning at Boscawen. The first hymn he learned was:
"Life is the time to serve the Lord."
After mastering
"In Adam's fall
We sinned all,"
the infantile ganglions got tangled up between the "sleigh" in the carriage-house, and the act of pussy in mauling the poor little mouse, unmentioned, but of importance, in the couplet:
"The cat doth play,
And after slay."
Having heard of and seen the sleigh before learning the synonym for "kill," the little New Hampshire boy was as much bothered as a Chinese child who first hears one sound which has many meanings, and only gradually clears up the mystery as the ideographs are mastered.
From the very first, the boy had an ear sensitive to music. The playing of Enoch Little, his first school-teacher, and afterwards his brother-in-law, upon the bass viol, was very sweet. Napoleon was never prouder of his victories at Austerlitz than was little Carleton of his first reward of merit. This was a bit of white paper two inches square, bordered with yellow from the paint-box of a beautiful young lady who had written in the middle, "To a good little boy."
The first social event of importance was the marriage of his sister Apphia to Enoch Little, Nov. 29, 1829, when a room-full of cousins, uncles, and aunts gathered together. After a chapter read from the Bible, and a long address by the clergyman, the marital ceremony was performed, followed by a hymn read and sung, and a prayer. Although this healthy small boy, Carleton, had been given a big slice of wedding cake with white frosting on the top, he felt himself injured, and was hotly jealous of his brother Enoch, who had secured a slice with a big red sugar strawberry on the frosting. After eating voraciously, he hid the remainder of his cake in the mortise of a beam beside the back chamber stairs. On visiting it next morning for secret indulgence, he found that the rats had enjoyed the wedding feast, too. Nothing was left. His first toy watch was to him an event of vast significance, and he slept with it under his pillow. When also he had donned his first pair of trousers, he strutted like a turkey cock and said, "I look just like a grand sir." Children in those days often spoke of men advanced in years as "grand sirs."
The boy was ten years old when President Andrew Jackson visited Concord. Everybody went to see "Old Hickory." In the yellow-bottomed chaise, paterfamilias Coffin took his boy Carleton and his daughter Elvira, the former having four pence ha'penny to spend. Federal currency was not plentiful in those days, and the people still used the old nomenclature, of pounds, shillings, and pence, which was Teutonic even before it was English or American. Rejoicing in his orange, his stick of candy, and his supply of seed cakes, young Carleton, from the window of the old North Meeting House, saw the military parade and the hero of New Orleans. With thin features and white hair, Jackson sat superbly on a white horse, bowing right and left to the multitude. Martin Van Buren was one of the party.
Another event, long to be remembered by a child who had never before been out late at night, was when, with a party of boys seven or eight in number, he went a-spearing on Great Pond. In the calm darkness they walked around the pond down the brook to the falls. With a bright jack-light, made of pitch-pine-knots, everything seemed strange and exciting to the boy who was making his first acquaintance of the wilderness world by night. His brother Enoch speared an eel that weighed four pounds, and a pickerel of the same weight. The party did not get home till 2 A. M., but the expedition was a glorious one and long talked over. The only sad feature in this rich experience was in his mother's worrying while her youngest child was away.
This was in April. On the 20th of August, just after sunset, in the calm summer night, little Carleton looked into his mother's eyes for the last time, and saw the heaving breast gradually become still. It was the first great sorrow of his life.[Back to Content]
CHAPTER III.
THE DAYS OF HOMESPUN.
Carleton's memories of school-days have little perhaps that is uncommon. He remembers the typical struggle between the teacher and the big boy who, despite resistance, was soundly thrashed. Those were the days of physical rather than moral argument, of punishment before judicial inquiry. Once young Carleton had marked his face with a pencil, making the scholars laugh. Called up by the man behind the desk, and asked whether he had done it purposely, the frightened boy, not knowing what to say, answered first yes, and then no. "Don't tell a lie, sir," roared the master, and down came the blows upon the boy's hands, while up came the sense of injustice and the longing for revenge. The boy took his seat with tingling palms and a heart hot with the sense of wrong, but no tears fell.
It was his father's rule that if the children were punished at school, they should have the punishment repeated at home. This was the sentiment of the time and the method of discipline believed to be best for moulding boys and girls into law-abiding citizens. In the evening, tender-hearted and with pain in his soul, but fearing to relax and let down the bars to admit a herd of evils, the father doomed his son to stay at home, ordering as a punishment the reading of the narrative of Ananias and Sapphira.
From that hour throughout his life Carleton hated this particular scripture. He had told no lie, he did not know what he had said, yet he was old enough to feel the injustice of the punishment. It rankled in memory for years. Temporarily he hated the teacher and the Bible, and the episode diminished for awhile his respect for law and order.
The next ten years of Carleton's life may be told in his own words, as follows:
"The year of 1830 may be taken as a general date for a new order of social life. The years prior to that date were the days of homespun.