es, with here and there a brick house
of two stories, and here and there a lingering log-cabin, when my boy's
father came to take charge of its Whig newspaper in 1840. It stretched
eastward from the river to the Canal-Basin, with the market-house, the
county buildings, and the stores and hotels on one street, and a few
other stores and taverns scattering off on streets that branched from it
to the southward; but all this was a vast metropolis to my boy's fancy,
where he might get lost--the sum of all disaster--if he ventured away
from the neighborhood of the house where he first lived, on its
southwestern border. It was the great political year of "Tippecanoe and
Tyler too," when the grandfather of our President Harrison was elected
President; but the wild hard-cider campaign roared by my boy's little
life without leaving a trace in it, except the recollection of his
father wearing a linsey-woolsey hunting-shirt, belted at the waist and
fringed at the skirt, as a Whig who loved his cause and honored the good
old pioneer times was bound to do. I dare say he did not wear it often,
and I fancy he wore it then in rather an ironical spirit, for he was a
man who had slight esteem for outward shows and semblances; but it
remained in my boy's mind, as clear a vision as the long cloak of blue
broadcloth in which he must have seen his father habitually. This cloak
was such a garment as people still drape about them in Italy, and men
wore it in America then instead of an overcoat. To get under its border,
and hold by his father's hand in the warmth and dark it made around him
was something that the boy thought a great privilege, and that brought
him a sense of mystery and security at once that nothing else could ever
give. He used to be allowed to go as far as the street corner, to enjoy
it, when his father came home from the printing-office in the evening;
and one evening, never to be forgotten, after he had long been teasing
for a little axe he wanted, he divined that his father had something
hidden under his cloak. Perhaps he asked him as usual whether he had
brought him the little axe, but his father said, "Feel, feel!" and he
found his treasure. He ran home and fell upon the woodpile with it, in a
zeal that proposed to leave nothing but chips; before he had gone far he
learned that this is a world in which you can sate but never satisfy
yourself with anything, even hard work. Some of my readers may have
found that out, too; at