Harper's Round Table, November 3, 1896

In sitting down to write a tale in which I myself am the central figure and most prominent actor, I cannot help at first feeling a fear that any one who perchance shall read all that is to follow (if I ever succeed in the finishing of it) will judge me a person whose opinion of himself is high in the extreme.

While possessing the proper self-respect, without which no man is ever truthful or successful, I do not claim to have accomplished anything for the reason that I am gifted beyond the ordinary. I am not. But circumstances of my early youth gave to me chances for adventure, and fate probably led me, under the guiding hand of Providence, through much that is outside of the usual walks of life.

Although, as I write, I am only in late middle age and hale and hearty, all that I intend to record seems long ago indeed. Yet truthfully, and in such ways as memory recalls it, do I intend to put it down. If I am discursive, it is because I am led away by the vividness with which my eye puts the scenes again before me; that is all there is to it.

In going over many events of the past in the half-waking hours at night--a habit I have long been prone to--I have felt, often, my heart-beats quicken, and more than once I have scarce restrained an inclination to speak or to cry aloud in accordance with my feelings. Perhaps the placing of all this upon paper may reduce the intensity with which I relive a life that is gone. And thus, to begin:

My earliest childhood's recollection is of a warm summer's day. I know it was warm, because the sand in which I was playing sparkled and shone as it ran through my fingers, and the long stretch of beach, whose whiteness dazzled my eyes, was hot to the touch of my bare feet. A great brown curly dog playing up and down the water's edge makes part of the picture, and an old colored mammy, crooning softly to herself, was shading my head with the green branch of a tree. Then a tall man with gray hair came and lifted me on his shoulder and carried me through a wood whose trees seemed to touch the clouds; then out of the shadows, by a path through a meadow (in which were some great fierce hogs that frightened me most dreadfully), up to a large house, where a beautiful woman took me in her arms and kissed me and called me pet names that I was glad to hear. This, I say, is the first day of all my life that I can remember--which is beginning at the beginning, and no mistake.

Gradually it came to me, so that I can remember it, that I began to love things. I loved my beautiful mother, who spoke to me in a language very different from that of the three old colored people whom I saw every day, namely, Aunt Sheba, Ann Martha, and Ol' Peter; and I loved them also, and I loved the dog.

I seemed to understand the two kinds of speaking very well (my mother's and the rest of the world's, I mean), although I did not know that one was French and the other darky English pure and simple.

The tall man, whom I sometimes called "_père_," and at others "daddy," was not always with us. Very often it was long months between his visits, and he generally remarked how I had grown and how much heavier I had become since last he had lifted me up on his shoulder.

Then came the time when I began to think--strange thoughts that were never answered, because for the most part I confided them to no one except, maybe, to the brown curly dog, who was called "Maréchal" by my mother, and "Maa'shal" by the colored people. Like myself, he seemed to understand either language perfectly, and replied to each in his own fashion.

I well remember the day I first began to wonder at the vastness of the world. It was upon an occasion when my father and Ol' Peter took me for a sail in a tremendous boat that they afterwards hauled up on the beach out at the mouth of the river--this is very clear in my mind--and the next morning after this excursion I went down with my mother to the end of the little wharf, and lo and behold! a great ship was lying at anchor in the broad stretch of water beyond the reedy point of land. My mother was crying softly, and my father kissed her, and me, too, over and over again. Then he stepped in a boat rowed by dark men with beards on their faces, and put off to the ship, spread her sails like a great bird and swept out into the bay.

When she had gone beyond the point, and we could no longer see a tall figure standing on the after-deck waving his hat, my mother burst out crying harder than ever, and we went back to the house. I never saw my father again.

I call him "my father," in thus looking back at the great spring-time, because I always think of him as such, and because I bear his name. Long years afterwards I learned much that this story will tell, if it goes on to the end, but it is now too early to indulge in explanations--I must relate things as they come to me.

Well, when I was six or seven years of age--when these first days I have touched on were even then but a memory--I began to enjoy life in new ways. I had never a play-mate but the dog, who had grown too old for romping; but my mother would read long and wonderful stories to me in her beautiful low voice, in French, of course, and I, listening, pictured the outside world as something strange and beautiful, and just waiting and yearning for my coming to see it and enjoy it.

The ships that sailed up and down the bay, long distances off, were all bound somewhere that only I knew, and my thoughts would follow them to enchanted islands where fairies and beautiful creatures lived, and where wonderful birds sang from the branches of wonderful trees. I had begun to study with my mother about this period. Dull work it often appeared to be, and I dare say many a rebellion had to be put down and many an outbreak silenced, although I can recollect no chastisements. But at last, before I was ten years old, I would take a book, and followed by the sedately plodding Maréchal, seek a shady spot down at the point, where I read myself to sleep often enough.

Of course now, by this time, I knew that the name of the river on which our plantation bordered was the Gunpowder, that the blue waters were the waters of Chesapeake Bay, that I lived on the shores of Maryland, and that the ships were bound not to fairy islands (except now and then when I wanted them to be), but to Baltimore and Annapolis and Havre de Grace, and to a dozen other places whose inhabitants sought their living by trading and sailing on the sea.

I had also heard from Ol' Peter that there had been a war between our country and another, named England, and that a great man named Washington had once stopped at this very house in which we lived. Ol' Peter described to me the surrender of Cornwallis (at which he had been present, according to accounts); but my mother's talk and all she read about was of France, that I gradually came to believe must have been the most beautiful country in the world. Yet my mother always spoke as if France were dead, which puzzled me not a little. Of a truth, there were many things that puzzled me in those days. I had so many times received the answer, "You will learn all some day--_On vous dira tout ça un de ces jours, mon petit_," that at last I learned to hold back my curiosity, or to answer with my own imagination.

Our neighbors, who were not very neighborly, lived at long distances from us. They had no children, and up to my tenth year I had never exchanged a thought with any one of my own age. To tell the truth I am afraid my mother did not encourage the people near us to be very friendly, and I suppose that they talked much, and perhaps said spiteful things about her. I can remember how I began to notice that she seldom walked farther than the rose-bush at the end of the garden path, and that she was growing thinner and thinner, yet more beautiful every day.

We led a very simple existence, living mostly on what we raised in the garden and what Ol' Peter brought back from the "cross-roads"--a collection of three houses five or six miles distant from our plantation.

But I was growing big and strong for my age--so strong, indeed, that I could handle the heavy oars when Peter and I went out on the river to tend the nets; and never shall I forget the first time I was allowed to fire the old fowling-piece that occasionally brought a fat canvas-back duck, lusciously reeking of wild celery, to grace our table.

The furnishings of the big house we lived in I can recall in detail; they were very rich, although there were no carpets in any of the rooms except in the room my mother slept in. But there were great nail-studded chairs, and two carved oak sideboards, and a wonderful clock, upon which, by-the-way, I took my first lesson in geography; it was shaped like a golden earth, with the hours marked upon its circumference, and a hand that pointed them out as each came around in turn.

The rooms upstairs were empty, except for some packing-cases and rubbish--all but one small chamber, to which my mother alone had the key, and which contained a great iron-bound chest that I stood much in awe of. In the wide hallway downstairs were three portraits; one before which my mother often used to stand and weep (I knew it to be he who had sailed away in the ship and used to carry me on his shoulder). The second was a handsome pale-faced man whose hair fell in long ringlets over his steel armor, and who looked forth, very proud and haughty, from his piercing gray eyes that would follow one even out of the door on to the piazza. (I have often peered around the corners to see if they would discover me, and they never failed in it.) The third was a beautiful one of a woman whom I thought to be my mother. One day she told me, however, that it was not--that it was her twin sister, at which I marvelled.