Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920 -- Childhood and youth
Most of his father's fortune had somehow gone to other sons, but,
whether rich or poor, their generation seemed to be of a like
religiosity. One of them lived in worldly state at Bristol before coming
to America, and was probably of a piety not so insupportable as I found
him in the memoir which he wrote of his second wife, when I came to read
it the other day. Him I never saw, but from time to time there was one
or other of his many sons employed in my grandfather's store, whom I
remember blithe spirits, disposed to seize whatever chance of a joke
life offered them, such as selling Young's _Night Thoughts_ to a
customer who had whispered his wish for an improper book. Some of my
father's younger brothers were of a like cheerfulness with these lively
cousins, and of the same aptness for laughter. One was a physician,
another a dentist, another in a neighboring town a druggist, another yet
a speculative adventurer in the regions to the southward: he came back
from his commercial forays once with so many half-dollars that when
spread out they covered the whole surface of our dining-table; but I am
quite unable to report what negotiation they were the spoil of. There
was a far cousin who was a painter, and left (possibly as a pledge of
indebtedness) with my dentist uncle after a sojourn among us a picture
which I early prized as a masterpiece, and still remember as the
charming head of a girl shadowed by the fan she held over it. I never
saw the painter, but I recall, from my father's singing them, the lines
of a "doleful ballad" which he left behind him as well as the picture:
A thief will steal from you all that you havye,
But an unfaithful lovyer will bring you to your grave.
The uncle who was a physician, when he left off the practice of medicine
about his eightieth year, took up the art of sculpture; he may have
always had a taste for it, and his knowledge of anatomy would have
helped qualify him for it. He modeled from photographs a head of my
father admirably like and full of character, the really extraordinary
witness of a gift latent till then through a long life devoted to other
things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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