Produced by David Edwards, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) CONFESSIONS OF BOYHOOD By JOHN ALBEE BOSTON RICHARD G. BADGER THE GORHAM PRESS 1910 Copyright 1920 by John Albee All Rights Reserved The Gorham Press, Boston, U.S.A. CONTENTS Introduction The Walls of the World Shadows and Echoes Holidays The Amputation Country Funerals My Mother's Red Cloak My Uncle Lyman The Dorr War and Millerism Woods and Pastures Apprenticeships Home and Homesickness The Saw Mill Bootmaking Love and Luxury Shop Boy Pistol Maker The Awakening Student Life School Master Farm Hand Conclusion Ave Atgue Vale INTRODUCTION For so many years Bellingham has had its abode in my fancy that I find it hard to associate the town with a definite geographical location. I connect it rather with the places of dreams and wonderland; the lost cities of the Oxus and Hydaspes, the Hesperian Gardens and those visionary realms visited and named by poets. My birthplace grows unfamiliar when I take down an atlas and run my finger over the parti-colored divisions of the Norfolk County of Massachusetts and trace the perimeter which confines Bellingham to its oblong precinct, surrounded by those mythical lands of Mendon, Milford and Medway. They wear an authoritative appearance on the map; but for me they occupied no such positions in my childhood and stand as stubborn realities hindering my feet when I wish to return to the Red House of my fathers. Once there, memory and fact are no longer conflicting. I find, as of old, the gently undulating hills, the gently loitering stream. The legends concerning the founding of Bellingham are missing. I am sorry; for I could believe the most extravagant, feeling with Plutarch, that fortune, in the history of any town, often shows herself a poet. The Delphian Pythoness advised Theseus to found a city wherever in a strange land he was most sorrowful and afflicted. There at length he would find repose and happiness. Thus it happened when the wanderers from Braintree settled on the shores of the upper Charles. They brought their unhappy fortunes so far, and there, in due time, found comfort and contentment.