My father’s father and two of my father’s great uncles I remember in part by direct memory, for they lived, one at least, till I was nearly ten. But as a baby I was danced on the knee of each of them, and how much of what is in my mind about them I have by memory and how much by personal tradition I cannot be sure.

They had been seafaring men and in the revolutionary war martial [114] men, both ashore and afloat, and their brother captured on a privateer died in the prison ship in the Wallabout. My grandfather himself regarded one of his living brothers as a hero and told me something of an action in which the British sloop of War Ostrich of [16] guns, Captain [Peter Rainier] had been compelled to lower her colors to a French letter of Marque of which my uncle (Captain Gid. he was called) though but a guest on board and serving in the action as a volunteer, was at the moment in command, the French master and every commissioned officer having been killed or sent below disablingly wounded.

Of his own adventures I do not seem to have ever been able to get any account from my grandfather and the impression he left with me was that though he had been to the most distant parts of the world his life had been quiet and devoid of interest.

Once I had heard an account read from a book of the winter’s march through the wilds of Maine of the expedition sent to capture Quebec and I was told that my grandfather had been in it. I wanted to hear more particulars of the matter from him and plied him with questions more than I often dared. I remember only that when I asked if, when they were in a starving condition, he cut the leather off the tops of his boots and fried it, he laughed heartily and called my grandmother to tell her of it.

There was a single exception to his inability, for I do not think it was indisposition, to tell of what he had done and seen. One day I was lying with my head between the roots of a lofty elm, looking up at its swaying boughs and leafage, when he came out of the house and hobbled toward me. It must have been a Sunday or holiday, for he was dressed in his best. His best, although he was in straitened circumstances, was finer than anything we see now. Ruffles on his bosom and wrists; small clothes, stockings and silver buckled shoes; a long silver headed Malacca cane as a walking stick in his hands (I have it now), his gray hair in a queue with a bow of broad black ribband at the end. There was an old cocked hat in the garret with a quadrant, charts, bunting, and small matters of cabin furniture, but I never saw it in his hand. He wore a hat of the then common fashion of real beaver fur.

I rose as he approached and he asked, looking up, did I not think it a fine tree? Then he told me that he himself had planted this tree when a boy. Others near by he had helped to plant, but this one was all his own, and he described to me how he had dug it in the swamp and had brought it on his shoulder and been allowed to plant it all by himself. It came to me after a time as he went on talking about it that there had been nothing in all his long life of which he was so frankly proud and in which he took such complete pleasure as the planting and the beautiful growth of this tree.

Shortly after this I heard a tree spoken of as a Honey-locust, and I got a pod from it and tried to eat the bitter meat I found in it, in order that I might better realize what hard fare that was that poor John the Baptist had to [115] live upon in the wilderness. The seeds, which I could eat no more than the pods, I planted in my garden and a year afterwards I imagined that a sprig of leaves that I found among the weeds then growing had sprung from this seed and I set a stake by it and watched it and it really turned out to be a little honey locust tree and I was proud to show it and call it mine. When I was twelve years old I dug it up and replanted it in another place, a very suitable place in respect of soil and it flourished. Forty years afterwards I went to look at it and thought it the finest honey locust I ever saw. Lately I went again and it had been felled. After a moments thought I was glad of it, for its individual beauty was out of key with the surrounding circumstances and its time had fully come.

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I can see that my pleasure began to be affected by conditions of scenery at an early age; long before it could have been suspected by others from any thing that I said and before I began to mentally connect the cause and effect of enjoyment in it. It occurred too, while I was but a half grown lad that my parents thought well to let me wander as few parents are willing their children should.

Within thirty miles of where they lived there were a score of houses of their kindred and friends at which I was always welcome. They were mostly farm houses and had near them interesting rivers, brooks, meadows, rocks, woods or mountains. Those less rural had pleasant old gardens. Of the people, two only shall be referred to particularly. One a poor scholar who, after a deep affliction, lived in seclusion with no occupation but that of reading good old books to which he had formed an attachment in happier days. One of his favorite authors was Virgil, and he took pleasure in reading and translating him to me. He was quaintly mild, courteous, and ceremonious, of musing and contemplative habits, and in this and other respects so different from most men whom I knew that as he commanded my respect and affectionate regard, I recognize him to have had a notable influence in my education.

The other had inherited a moderate competence and been brought up to no regular calling. He lived in an unusually fine old village house with an old garden, was given to natural science, had a cabinet, a few works of art and a notable small library. He was shy and absorbed and I took little from him directly, but he was kind and not so careful of his treasures that I could not cautiously use them as playthings and picture books. He introduced me to Isaac Walton. He had no man servant—indeed no servants, his handmaids being of the order then called help, and he was on precisely the terms with them as it now seems to me that he might have been with helpful sisters, though they did not sit at table with him.

A man came from without the household for the heavier work of [116]

the place, giving but a small part of his time to it, and there was a boy to do the light chores who received no wages but worked for his board, books and schooling. One of the boys who thus became my play fellow afterwards made his way through college, studied law, and came to be a member of Congress and Governor of a state. For the rest my kinsmen and friends were plain, busy, thrifty people, mostly farmers and good citizens.

If in my rambling habits I did not come home at night it was supposed that I had strayed to some of these other homes where I would be well taken care of, and little concern was felt at my absence; but it several times occurred before I was twelve years old that I had been lost in the woods and finding my way out after sunset had passed the night with strangers and had been encouraged by my father rather than checked in the adventurousness that led me to do so.

It was my fortune also at this period to be taken on numerous journeys in company with people neither literary, scientific nor artistic, but more than ordinarily susceptible to beauty of scenery and who with little talking about it, and none for my instruction, plainly shaped their courses and their customs with reference [to] the enjoyment of it. As a small boy I made four such journeys, each of a thousand miles or more, two behind my father’s [117]

horses and two mostly by stage coach and canal boat. Besides these, many shorter ones. When fourteen I was laid up by an extremely virulent sumach poisoning, making me for some time partially blind, after which, and possibly as a result, I was troubled for several years with a disorder of the eyes and the oculists advised that I should be kept from study.

It followed that at the time my schoolmates were entering college I was nominally the pupil of a topographical engineer but really for the most part given over to a decently restrained vagabond life, generally pursued under the guise of an angler, a fowler or a dabbler on the shallowest shores of the deep sea of the natural sciences.

A hardly conscious exercise of reason in choosing where I should rest and which way I should be going in these vagrancies, a little musing upon the question what made for or against my pleasure in them, led me along to a point at which when by good chance the books fell in [my] way I was sufficiently interested to get some understanding of what such men as Price, Gilpin, Shenstone and Marshall thought upon the subject.

Rural tastes at length led me to make myself a farmer. I had several years of training on widely separated farms, then bought a small farm for myself which I afterwards sold in order to buy a larger and upon this I lived [118] ten years. I was a good farmer and a good neighbor, served on the school committee, improved the highways, was secretary of a local farmer’s club and of the County Agricultural Society, took prizes for the best crops of wheat and turnips and the best assortment of fruits; imported an English machine and in partnership with a friend established the first cylindrical drainage tile works in America.

But during this period also I managed to make several long and numerous short journeys, generally paying my expenses by writing on rural topics for newspapers. As it would have been an extravagance otherwise, however, I first crossed the Atlantic in the steerage of a sailing vessel and nearly always travelled frugally. In all these tours I took more interest than most travellers do in the arrangement and aspects of homesteads and generally in what may be called the sceneric character of what came before me.

The word sceneric flows from my pen unbidden and I venture to let it stand. Some writers of late are using scenic for the purpose it serves, but this is confusing, scenic having been so long used with regard exclusively to affairs of the drama.

All this time interest in certain modest practical applications of what I was learning of the principles of landscape architecture was growing with me. Applications I mean, for example, to the choice of a neighborhood, of the position and aspect of a homestead, the placing, grouping and relationships with the dwelling of barns, stables and minor outbuildings, the planning of a laundry yard and of conveniences for bringing in kitchen supplies and carrying away kitchen wastes, for I had found that even in frontier log cabins a good deal was lost or gained of pleasure according to the ingenuity and judgement used in such matters. Applications also to the seemly position of a kitchen garden, of a working garden, for flowers to be cut for the indoor enjoyment of them, to fixed outer flower and foliage decorations, to the determination of lines of out-look and of in-look and the removal or planting accordingly of trees, screens, bridges, windbreaks and so on, with some consideration for unity of foreground, middle ground and back ground, some consideration for sceneric effect from without as well as from within the field of actual operations. I planted several thousand trees on my own land and thinned out and trimmed with my own hand with reference to future pleasing effects a small body of old woodland and another well-grown copse wood.

Never the slightest thought till I was more than thirty years old had entered my mind of practicing landscape gardening except as any fairly well-to-do, working farmer may, and in flower gardening or of any kind of decorative or simply ornamental gardening—any gardening other than such as I have indicated—I was far from being an adept.

But I gradually came to be known among my neighbors and friends as a man of some special knowledge, inventiveness and judgement in such affairs as I have mentioned and to be called on for advice about them. At [119] length, growing out of such little repute, I was unexpectedly invited to take a modest public duty and from this by promotions and successive unpremeditated steps was later led to make Landscape Architecture my calling in life.