“To scrub a kitchen floor better than anyone else,” she replied; and he succumbed, his New England nature realizing that, after all, it might be well to have one practical person in the family. Mother’s thrifty streak came in very useful, for a young widow with four lusty children to feed did not have an easy time in those days. The sun never rose upon her asleep and her small economies were ever her own pride and the butt of our selfish derision. After her day’s work was over, it was my delight—little brute that I was—to lie in bed and listen to her voice, reading to me from some story of delicious adventure. When her head drooped and the book fell from her hands, I, still wide awake, would whine and finally yell, until she pulled herself together and went on. Mother’s day was an endless round of doing something for others. From the land where these first American ancestors of mine settled so long ago, I get the shape of my body and the contour of my face. I look more like an Iroquois Indian than an Englishman. Some historian has remarked that the change in the Yankee is due to intermarriage with the redskins. Imagine the spectacle of a staid Governor Bradford wedded to an Indian squaw! Two hundred years of the same climate, the same food, and the same life produced the same type, that’s all. From Seven to Seventy “Mon verre n’est pas grand Mais je bois dans mon verre.” ALFRED DE MUSSET Chapter I: Making My Early History _Concord, Massachusetts_ There may have been much distinction in living in Concord, Massachusetts, in the ’fifties, but to me, as a boy, the whole town was only a delightful playground and the people who lived there merely “home folks.” To be sure, I invested some of the great ones with halos of romance. This was not because I knew anything about their literary or artistic attainments, but rather because of the lack of heroic characters in the town. Had there been a Jesse James or a Charlie Chaplin anywhere round, I should probably have woven my dreams of adventure about them. But the jail was always singularly empty, and the movies had not been invented. I was forced, therefore, to pin my youthful imaginings upon a Hawthorne, an Emerson, or a Thoreau! I have always felt I was greatly cheated. I lived in the Old Manse, from which Hawthorne plucked his mosses. It was built in 1760 by the Rev. William Emerson, the grandfather of Ralph Waldo, and was a delightful house for a boy to grow up in. There was a long hallway running from east to west, and from the stairway a line of grisly divines, framed in black, looked down. They were mostly ancestors, and they gave a terrible air of austerity to the interior; but below and above were many redeeming features.