Part 10

The conditions which were provided for the sensitive and highly strung boy during a part of his childhood were surely very delightful, and there can be little doubt that they served to determine his career. His grandfather Hall's home in Medford was situated on the border of the Middlesex Fells, a rough and rocky woodland, four thousand acres in extent, as wild and savage in many places as any primeval forest. The place is within eight miles of Boston, and it may be doubted if anywhere else can be found another such magnificent piece of wilderness so near to a great city. It needs only a stray Indian or two, with a few bears and wolves, to bring back for us the days when Winthrop's company landed on the shores of the neighbouring bay. In the heart of this shaggy woodland is Spot Pond, a lake of glorious beauty, with a surface of three hundred acres, and a homely name which it is to be hoped it may always keep,--a name bestowed in the good old times before the national vice of magniloquence had begun to deface our maps. Among the pleasure drives in the neighbourhood of Boston, the drive around Spot Pond is perhaps foremost in beauty. A few fine houses have been built upon its borders, and well-kept roads have given to some parts of the forest the aspect of a park, but the greater part of the territory is undisturbed, and will probably remain so. Seventy years ago the pruning hand of civilization has scarcely touched it. To his grandfather's farm, on the outskirts of this enchanting spot, the boy Parkman was sent in his eighth year. There, he tells us, "I walked twice a day to a school of high but undeserved reputation, about a mile distant, in the town of Medford. Here I learned very little, and spent the intervals of schooling more profitably in collecting eggs, insects, and reptiles, trapping squirrels and woodchucks, and making persistent though rarely fortunate attempts to kill birds with arrows. After four years of this rustication I was brought back to Boston, when I was unhappily seized with a mania for experiments in chemistry, involving a lonely, confined, unwholesome sort of life, baneful to body and mind." No doubt the experience of four years of plastic boyhood in Middlesex Fells gave to Parkman's mind the bent which directed him toward the history of the wilderness. This fact he recognized of himself in after life, while he recalled those boyish days as the brightest in his memory.

At the age of fifteen or so the retorts and crucibles were thrown away forever, and a reaction in favor of woodland life began; "a fancy," he says, "which soon gained full control over the course of the literary pursuits to which he was also addicted." Here we come upon the first mention of the combination of interests which determined his career. A million boys might be turned loose in Middlesex Fells, one after another, there to roam in solitude until our globe should have entered upon a new geological period, and the chances are against any one of them becoming a great historian, or anything else above mediocrity. But in Parkman, as in all men of genius, the dominant motive power was something within him, something which science has not data enough to explain. The divine spark of genius is something which we know only through the acts which it excites. In Parkman the strong literary instinct showed itself at Chauncy Hall School, where we find him, at fourteen years of age, eagerly and busily engaged in the study and practice of English composition. It was natural that tales of heroes should be especially charming at that time of life, and among Parkman's efforts were paraphrasing parts of the Æneid, and turning into rhymed verse the scene of the tournament in "Ivanhoe." From the artificial stupidity which is too often superinduced in boys by their early schooling he was saved by native genius and breezy woodland life, and his progress was rapid. In 1840, having nearly completed his seventeenth year, he entered Harvard College. His reputation there for scholarship was good, but he was much more absorbed in his own pursuits than in the regular college studies. In the summer vacation of 1841 he made a rough journey of exploration in the woods of northern New Hampshire, accompanied by one classmate and a native guide, and there he had a taste of adventure slightly spiced with hardship.

How much importance this ramble may have had one cannot say, but he tells us that "before the end of the Sophomore year my various schemes had crystallized into a plan of writing the story of what was then known as the 'Old French War,'--that is, the war that ended in the conquest of Canada; for here, as it seemed to me, the forest drama was more stirring, and the forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors, than in any other passage of our history. It was not until some years later that I enlarged the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict between France and England, or, in other words, the history of the American forest; for this was the light in which I regarded it. My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night." The way in which true genius works could not be more happily described.

When the great scheme first took shape in Mr. Parkman's mind, he reckoned that it would take about twenty years to complete the task. How he entered upon it may best be told in his own words:--

"The time allowed was ample; but here he fell into a fatal error, entering on this long pilgrimage with all the vehemence of one starting on a mile heat. His reliance, however, was less on books than on such personal experience as should in some sense identify him with his theme. His natural inclinations urged him in the same direction, for his thoughts were always in the forest, whose features, not unmixed with softer images, possessed his waking and sleeping dreams, filling him with vague cravings impossible to satisfy. As fond of hardships as he was vain of enduring them, cherishing a sovereign scorn for every physical weakness or defect, deceived moreover by a rapid development of frame and sinews which flattered him with the belief that discipline sufficiently unsparing would harden him into an athlete, he slighted the precautions of a more reasonable woodcraft, tired old foresters with long marches, stopped neither for heat nor rain, and slept on the earth without a blanket." In other words, "a highly irritable organism spurred the writer to excess in a course which, with one of different temperament, would have produced a free and hardy development of such faculties and forces as he possessed." Along with the irritable organism perhaps a heritage of fierce ancestral Puritanism may have prompted him to the stoical discipline which sought to ignore the just claims of the physical body. He tells us of his undoubting faith that "to tame the Devil, it is best to take him by the horns;" but more mature experiences made him feel less sure "of the advantages of this method of dealing with that subtle personage."

Under these conditions, perhaps the college vacations which he spent in the woods of Canada and New England may have done more to exhaust than to recruit his strength. In his Junior year, some physical injury, the nature of which does not seem to be known, caused it to be thought necessary to send him to Europe for his health. He went first to Gibraltar in a sailing ship, and a passage from his diary may serve to throw light upon the voyage and the man: "It was a noble sight when at intervals the sun broke out over the savage waves, changing their blackness to a rich blue almost as dark; while the foam that flew over it seemed like whirling snow wreaths on the mountain.... As soon as it was daybreak I went on deck. Two or three sails were set. The vessel was scouring along, leaning over so that her lee gunwale scooped up the water; the water in a foam, and clouds of spray flying over us, frequently as high as the main yard. The spray was driven with such force that it pricked the cheek like needles. I stayed on deck two or three hours, when, being thoroughly salted, I went down, changed my clothes, and read 'Don Quixote' till Mr. Snow appeared at the door with 'You are the man that wants to see a gale, are ye? Now is your chance; only just come up on deck.' Accordingly I went. The wind was yelling and howling in the rigging in a fashion that reminded me of a storm in a Canadian forest.... The sailors clung, half drowned, to whatever they could lay hold of, for the vessel was at times half inverted, and tons of water washed from side to side of her deck."

Mr. Parkman's route was from Gibraltar by way of Malta, to Sicily, where he travelled over the whole island, and thence to Naples, where he fell in with the great preacher Theodore Parker. Together they climbed Vesuvius and peered into its crater, and afterwards in and about Rome they renewed their comradeship. Here Mr. Parkman wished to spend a few weeks in a monastery, in order to study with his own eyes the priests and their way of life. More than once he met with a prompt and uncompromising refusal, but at length the coveted privilege was granted him; and, curiously enough, it was by the strictest of all the monastic orders, the Passionists, brethren addicted to wearing hair shirts and scourging themselves without mercy. When these worthy monks learned that their visitor was not merely a Protestant, but a Unitarian, their horror was intense; but they were ready for the occasion, poor souls! and tried their best to convert him, thereby doubtless enhancing their value in the historian's eyes as living and breathing historic material. This visit was surely of inestimable service to the pen which was to be so largely occupied with the Jesuits and Franciscans of the New World.

Mr. Parkman did not leave Rome until he had seen temples, churches, and catacombs, and had been presented to the Pope. He stopped at Florence, Bologna, Modena, Parma, and Milan, and admired the Lake of Como, to which, however, he preferred the savage wildness of Lake George. He saw something of Switzerland, went to Paris and London, and did a bit of sight-seeing in Edinburgh and its neighbourhood. From Liverpool he sailed for America; and in spite of the time consumed in this trip we find him taking his degree at Cambridge, along with his class, in 1844. Probably his name stood high in the rank list, for he was at once elected a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. After this he entered the Law School, but stayed not long, for his life's work was already claiming him. In his brief vacation journeys he had seen tiny remnants of wilderness here and there in Canada or in lonely corners of New England; now he wished to see the wilderness itself in all its gloom and vastness, and to meet face to face with the dusky warriors of the Stone Age. At this end of the nineteenth century, as already observed, such a thing can no longer be done. Nowhere now, within the United States, does the primitive wilderness exist, save here and there in shreds and patches. In the middle of the century it covered the western half of the continent, and could be reached by a journey of sixteen or seventeen hundred miles, from Boston to the plains of Nebraska. Parkman had become an adept in woodcraft and a dead shot with the rifle, and could do such things with horses, tame or wild, as civilized people never see done except in a circus. There was little doubt as to his ability to win the respect of Indians by outshining them in such deeds as they could appreciate. Early in 1846 he started for the wilderness with Mr. Quincy Shaw. A passage from the preface to the fourth edition of "The Oregon Trail," published in 1872, will here be of interest:--

"I remember, as we rode by the foot of Pike's Peak, when for a fortnight we met no face of man, my companion remarked, in a tone anything but complacent, that a time would come when those plains would be a grazing country, the buffalo give place to tame cattle, houses be scattered along the watercourses, and wolves, bears, and Indians be numbered among the things that were. We condoled with each other on so melancholy a prospect, but with little thought what the future had in store. We knew that there was more or less gold in the seams of those untrodden mountains; but we did not foresee that it would build cities in the West, and plant hotels and gambling houses among the haunts of the grizzly bear. We knew that a few fanatical outcasts were groping their way across the plains to seek an asylum from Gentile persecution; but we did not imagine that the polygamous hordes of Mormons would rear a swarming Jerusalem in the bosom of solitude itself. We knew that more and more, year after year, the trains of emigrant wagons would creep in slow procession towards barbarous Oregon or wild and distant California; but we did not dream how Commerce and Gold would breed nations along the Pacific, the disenchanting screech of the locomotive break the spell of weird, mysterious mountains, woman's rights invade the fastnesses of the Arapahoes, and despairing savagery, assailed in front and rear, veil its scalp locks and feathers before triumphant commonplace. We were no prophets to foresee all this; and had we foreseen it, perhaps some perverse regret might have tempered the ardour of our rejoicing.

"The wild tribe that defiled with me down the gorges of the Black Hills, with its paint and war plumes, fluttering trophies and savage embroidery, bows, arrows, lances, and shields, will never be seen again. Those who formed it have found bloody graves, or a ghastlier burial in the maws of wolves. The Indian of to-day, armed with a revolver and crowned with an old hat, cased possibly in trousers or muffled in a tawdry shirt, is an Indian still, but an Indian shorn of the picturesqueness which was his most conspicuous merit. The mountain trapper is no more, and the grim romance of his wild, hard life is a memory of the past."

This first of Parkman's books, "The Oregon Trail," was published in 1847, as a series of articles in the "Knickerbocker Magazine." Its pages reveal such supreme courage, such physical hardiness, such rapturous enjoyment of life, that one finds it hard to realize that even in setting out upon this bold expedition the writer was something of an invalid. A weakness of sight--whether caused by some direct injury, or a result of widespread nervous disturbance, is not quite clear--had already become serious and somewhat alarming. On arriving at the Indian camp, near the Medicine Bow range of the Rocky Mountains, he was suffering from a complication of disorders. "I was so reduced by illness," he says, "that I could seldom walk without reeling like a drunken man; and when I rose from my seat upon the ground the landscape suddenly grew dim before my eyes, the trees and lodges seemed to sway to and fro, and the prairie to rise and fall like the swells of the ocean. Such a state of things is not enviable anywhere. In a country where a man's life may at any moment depend on the strength of his arm, or it may be on the activity of his legs, it is more particularly inconvenient. Nor is sleeping on damp ground, with an occasional drenching from a shower, very beneficial in such cases. I sometimes suffered the extremity of exhaustion, and was in a tolerably fair way of atoning for my love of the prairie by resting there forever. I tried repose and a very sparing diet. For a long time, with exemplary patience, I lounged about the camp, or at the utmost staggered over to the Indian village, and walked faint and dizzy among the lodges. It would not do, and I bethought me of starvation. During five days I sustained life on one small biscuit a day. At the end of that time I was weaker than before, but the disorder seemed shaken in its stronghold, and very gradually I began to resume a less rigid diet." It did not seem prudent to Parkman to let the signs of physical ailment become conspicuous, "since in that case a horse, a rifle, a pair of pistols, and a red shirt might have offered temptations too strong for aboriginal virtue." Therefore, in order that his prestige with the red men might not suffer diminution, he would "hunt buffalo on horseback over a broken country, when without the tonic of the chase he could scarcely sit upright in the saddle."

The maintenance of prestige was certainly desirable. The Ogillalah band of Sioux, among whom he found himself, were barbarians of a low type. "Neither their manners nor their ideas were in the slightest degree modified by contact with civilization. They knew nothing of the power and real character of the white men, and their children would scream in terror when they saw me. Their religion, superstitions, and prejudices were the same handed down to them from immemorial time. They fought with the weapons that their fathers fought with, and wore the same garments of skins. They were living representatives of the Stone Age; for, though their lances and arrows were tipped with iron procured from the traders, they still used the rude stone mallet of the primeval world." These savages welcomed Parkman and one of his white guides with cordial hospitality, and they were entertained by the chieftain Big Crow, whose lodge in the evening presented a picturesque spectacle. "A score or more of Indians were seated around it in a circle, their dark, naked forms just visible by the dull light of the smouldering fire in the middle. The pipe glowed brightly in the gloom as it passed from hand to hand. Then a squaw would drop a piece of buffalo fat on the dull embers. Instantly a bright flame would leap up, darting its light to the very apex of the tall conical structure, where the tops of the slender poles that supported the covering of hide were gathered together. It gilded the features of the Indians, as with animated gestures they sat around it, telling their endless stories of war and hunting, and displayed rude garments of skins that hung around the lodge; the bow, quiver, and lance suspended over the resting place of the chief, and the rifles and powderhorns of the two white guests. For a moment all would be bright as day; then the flames would die out; fitful flashes from the embers would illumine the lodge, and then leave it in darkness. Then the light would wholly fade, and the lodge and all within it be involved again in obscurity." From stories of war and the chase the conversation was now and then diverted to philosophic themes. When Parkman asked what makes the thunder, various opinions were expressed; but one old wrinkled fellow, named Red Water, asseverated that he had always known what it was. "It was a great black bird; and once he had seen it in a dream swooping down from the Black Hills, with its loud roaring wings; and when it flapped them over a lake, they struck lightning from the water." Another old man said that the wicked thunder had killed his brother last summer, but doggedly refused to give any particulars. It was afterwards learned that this brother was a member of a thunder-fighting fraternity of priests or medicine men. On the approach of a storm they would "take their bows and arrows, their magic drum, and a sort of whistle made out of the wing bone of the war eagle, and, thus equipped, run out and fire at the rising cloud, whopping, yelling, whistling, and beating their drum, to frighten it down again. One afternoon a heavy black cloud was coming up, and they repaired to the top of a hill, where they brought all their magic artillery into play against it. But the undaunted thunder, refusing to be terrified, darted out a bright flash, which struck [the aforesaid brother] dead as he was in the very act of shaking his long iron-pointed lance against it. The rest scattered, and ran yelling in an ecstasy of superstitious terror back to their lodges."

One should read Mr. Parkman's detailed narrative of the strange life of these people, and the manner of his taking part in it: how he called the villagers together and regaled them sumptuously with boiled dog, and made them a skilful speech, in which he quite satisfied them as to his reasons for coming to dwell among them; how a warm friendship grew up between himself and the venerable Red Water, who was the custodian of an immense fund of folk lore, but was apt to be superstitiously afraid of imparting any of it to strangers; how war parties were projected and abandoned; how buffalo and antelope were hunted, and how life was carried on in the dull intervals between such occupations. If one were to keep on quoting what is of especial interest in the book, one would have to quote the whole of it. But one characteristic portrait contains so much insight into Indian life that I cannot forbear giving it. It is the sketch of a young fellow called the Hail-Storm, as Parkman found him one evening on his return from the chase: "his light graceful figure reclining on the ground in an easy attitude, while ... near him lay the fresh skin of a female elk which he had just killed among the mountains, only a mile or two from camp. No doubt the boy's heart was elated with triumph, but he betrayed no sign of it. He even seemed totally unconscious of our approach, and his handsome face had all the tranquillity of Indian self-control,--a self-control which prevents the exhibition of emotion without restraining the emotion itself. It was about two months since I had known the Hail-Storm, and within that time his character had remarkably developed. When I first saw him, he was just emerging from the habits and feelings of the boy into the ambition of the hunter and warrior. He had lately killed his first deer, and this had excited his aspirations for distinction. Since that time he had been continually in search for game, and no young hunter in the village had been so active or so fortunate as he. All this success had produced a marked change in his character. As I first remembered him, he always shunned the society of the young squaws, and was extremely bashful and sheepish in their presence; but now, in the confidence of his new reputation, he began to assume the airs and arts of a man of gallantry. He wore his red blanket dashingly over his left shoulder, painted his cheeks every day with vermilion, and hung pendants of shells in his ears. If I observed aright, he met with very good success in his new pursuits; still the Hail-Storm had much to accomplish before he attained the full standing of a warrior. Gallantly as he began to bear himself before the women and girls, he was still timid and abashed in the presence of the chiefs and old men; for he had never yet killed a man, or stricken the dead body of an enemy in battle. I have no doubt that the handsome smooth-faced boy burned with desire to flesh his maiden scalping knife, and I would not have encamped alone with him without watching his movements with a suspicious eye." Mr. Parkman once told me that it was rare for a young brave to obtain full favour with the women without having at least one scalp to show; and this fact was one of the secret sources of danger which the ordinary white visitor would never think of. Peril is also liable to lurk in allowing one's self to be placed in a ludicrous light among these people; accordingly, whenever such occasions arose, Parkman knew enough to "maintain a rigid, inflexible countenance, and wholly escaped their sallies." He understood that his rifle and pistols were the only friends on whom he could invariably rely when alone among Indians. His own observation taught him "the extreme folly of confidence, and the utter impossibility of foreseeing to what sudden acts the strange, unbridled impulses of an Indian may urge him. When among this people, danger is never so near as when you are unprepared for it, never so remote as when you are armed and on the alert to meet it at any moment. Nothing offers so strong a temptation to their ferocious instincts as the appearance of timidity, weakness, or security."

The immense importance of this sojourn in the wilderness, in its relation to Parkman's life work, is obvious. Knowledge, intrepidity, and tact carried him through it unscathed, and good luck kept him clear of encounters with hostile Indians, in which these qualities might not have sufficed to avert destruction. It was rare good fortune that kept his party from meeting with an enemy during five months of travel through a dangerous region. Scarcely three weeks after he had reached the confines of civilization, the Pawnees and Comanches began a systematized series of hostilities, and "attacked ... every party, large or small, that passed during the next six months."

During this adventurous experience, says Parkman, "my business was observation, and I was willing to pay dearly for the opportunity of exercising it." A heavy price was exacted of him, not by red men, but by that "subtle personage" whom he had tried to take by the horns, and who seems to have resented such presumption. Toward the end of the journey Parkman found himself ill in much the same way as at the beginning, and craved medical advice. It was in mid-September, on a broad meadow in the wild valley of the Arkansas, where his party had fallen in with a huge Santa Fé caravan of white-topped wagons, with great droves of mules and horses; and we may let Parkman tell the story in his own words, in the last of our extracts from his fascinating book. One of the guides had told him that in this caravan was a physician from St. Louis, by the name of Dobbs, of the very highest standing in his profession. "Without at all believing him, I resolved to consult this eminent practitioner. Walking over to the camp, I found him lying sound asleep under one of the wagons. He offered in his own person but indifferent evidence of his skill; for it was five months since I had seen so cadaverous a face. His hat had fallen off, and his yellow hair was all in disorder; one of his arms supplied the place of a pillow; his trousers were wrinkled halfway up to his knees, and he was covered with little bits of grass and straw upon which he had rolled in his uneasy slumber. A Mexican stood near, and I made him a sign to touch the doctor. Up sprang the learned Dobbs, and sitting upright rubbed his eyes and looked about him in bewilderment. I regretted the necessity of disturbing him, and said I had come to ask professional advice.

"'Your system, sir, is in a disordered state,' said he solemnly, after a short examination. I inquired what might be the particular species of disorder. 'Evidently a morbid action of the liver,' replied the medical man. 'I will give you a prescription.'

"Repairing to the back of one of the covered wagons, he scrambled in; for a moment I could see nothing of him but his boots. At length he produced a box which he had extracted from some dark recess within, and opening it presented me with a folded paper. 'What is it?' said I. 'Calomel,' said the doctor.

"Under the circumstances I would have taken almost anything. There was not enough to do me much harm, and it might possibly do good; so at camp that night I took the poison instead of supper."

After the return from the wilderness Parkman found his physical condition rather worse than better. The trouble with the eyes continued, and we begin to find mention of a lameness which was sometimes serious enough to confine him to the house, and which evidently lasted a long time; but from this he seems to have recovered. My personal acquaintance with him began in 1872, and I never noticed any symptoms of lameness, though I remember taking several pleasant walks with him. Perhaps the source of lameness may be indicated in the following account of his condition in 1848, cited from the fragment of autobiography in which he uses the third person: "To the maladies of the prairie succeeded a suite of exhausting disorders, so reducing him that circulation of the extremities ceased, the light of the sun became insupportable, and a wild whirl possessed his brain, joined to a universal turmoil of the nervous system which put his philosophy to the sharpest test it had hitherto known. All collapsed, in short, but the tenacious strength of muscles hardened by long activity." In 1851, whether due or not to disordered circulation, there came an effusion of water on the left knee, which for the next two years prevented walking.

It was between 1848 and 1851 that Parkman was engaged in writing "The Conspiracy of Pontiac." He felt that no regimen could be worse for him than idleness, and that no tonic could be more bracing than work in pursuance of the lofty purpose which had now attained maturity in his mind. He had to contend with a "triple-headed monster:" first, the weakness of the eyes, which had come to be such that he could not keep them open to the light while writing his own name; secondly, the incapacity for sustained attention; and thirdly, the indisposition to putting forth mental effort. Evidently, the true name of this triple-headed monster was nervous exhaustion; there was too much soul for the body to which it was yoked.

"To be made with impunity, the attempt must be made with the most watchful caution. He caused a wooden frame to be constructed of the size and shape of a sheet of letter paper. Stout wires were fixed horizontally across it, half an inch apart, and a movable back of thick pasteboard fitted behind them. The paper for writing was placed between the pasteboard and the wires, guided by which, and using a black lead crayon, he could write not illegibly with closed eyes. He was at the time absent from home, on Staten Island, where, and in the neighbouring city of New York, he had friends who willingly offered their aid. It is needless to say to which half of humanity nearly all these kind assistants belonged. He chose for a beginning that part of the work which offered fewest difficulties and with the subject of which he was most familiar; namely, the Siege of Detroit. The books and documents, already partially arranged, were procured from Boston, and read to him at such times as he could listen to them; the length of each reading never without injury much exceeding half an hour, and periods of several days frequently occurring during which he could not listen at all. Notes were made by him with closed eyes, and afterwards deciphered and read to him till he had mastered them. For the first half-year the rate of composition averaged about six lines a day. The portion of the book thus composed was afterwards partially rewritten.

"His health improved under the process, and the remainder of the volume--in other words, nearly the whole of it--was composed in Boston, while pacing in the twilight of a large garret, the only exercise which the sensitive condition of his sight permitted him in an unclouded day while the sun was above the horizon. It was afterwards written down from dictation by relatives under the same roof, to whom he was also indebted for the preparatory readings. His progress was much less tedious than at the outset, and the history was complete in about two years and a half."

The book composed under such formidable difficulties was published in 1851. It did not at once meet with the reception which it deserved. The reading public did not expect to find entertainment in American history. In the New England of those days the general reader had heard a good deal about the Pilgrim Fathers and Salem Witchcraft, and remembered hazily the stories of Hannah Dustin and of Putnam and the wolf, but could not be counted on for much else before the Revolution. I remember once hearing it said that the story of the "Old French War" was something of no more interest or value for Americans of to-day than the cuneiform records of an insurrection in ancient Nineveh; and so slow are people in gaining a correct historical perspective that within the last ten years the mighty world struggle in which Pitt and Frederick were allied is treated in a book entitled "Minor Wars of the United States"! In 1851 the soil was not yet ready for the seed sown by Parkman, and he did not quickly or suddenly become popular. But after the publication of the "Pioneers of France" in 1865 his fame grew rapidly. In those days I took especial pleasure in praising his books, from the feeling that they were not so generally known as they ought to be, particularly in England, where he has since come to be recognized as foremost among American writers of history. In 1879 I had been giving a course of lectures at University College, London, on "America's Place in History," and shortly afterwards repeated this course at the little Hawthorne Hall, on Park Street, in Boston. One evening, having occasion to allude briefly to Pontiac and his conspiracy, I said, among other things, that it was memorable as "the theme of one of the most brilliant and fascinating books that have ever been written by any historian since the days of Herodotus." The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I happened to catch sight of Mr. Parkman in my audience. I had not observed him before, though he was seated quite near me. I shall never forget the sudden start which he gave, and the heightened colour of his noble face, with its curious look of surprise and pleasure,--an expression as honest and simple as one might witness in a rather shy schoolboy suddenly singled out for praise. I was so glad that I had said what I did without thinking of his hearing me.

In May, 1850, while at work upon this great book, Mr. Parkman married Catherine, daughter of Jacob Bigelow, an eminent physician of Boston. Of this marriage there were three children,--a son, who died while an infant, and two daughters, who still survive. Mrs. Parkman died in 1858, and her husband never married again.

During these years, when his complicated ailments for a time made historical work impossible even to this man of Titanic will, he assuaged his cravings for spiritual creation by writing a novel, "Vassall Morton." Of his books it is the only one that I have never seen, and I can speak of it only from hearsay. It is said to be not without signal merits, but it did not find a great many readers, and its author seems not to have cared much for it. The main current of his interest in life was too strong to allow of much diversion into side channels.

"Meanwhile," to cite his own words, "the Faculty of Medicine were not idle, displaying that exuberance of resource for which that remarkable profession is justly famed. The wisest, indeed, did nothing, commending his patient to time and faith; but the activity of his brethren made full amends for this masterly inaction. One was for tonics, another for a diet of milk; one counselled galvanism, another hydropathy; one scarred him behind the neck with nitric acid, another drew red-hot irons along his spine with a view of enlivening that organ. Opinion was divergent as practice. One assured him of recovery in six years; another thought that he would never recover. Another, with grave circumlocution, lest the patient should take fright, informed him that he was the victim of an organic disease of the brain which must needs dispatch him to another world within a twelvemonth; and he stood amazed at the smile of an auditor who neither cared for the announcement nor believed it. Another, an eminent physiologist of Paris, after an acquaintance of three months, one day told him that from the nature of the disorder he had at first supposed that it must, in accordance with precedent, be attended with insanity, and had ever since been studying him to discover under what form the supposed aberration declared itself; adding, with a somewhat humorous look, that his researches had not been rewarded with the smallest success."

Soon after his marriage Mr. Parkman became possessor of a small estate of three acres or so in Jamaica Plain, on the steep shore of the beautiful pond. It was a charming place, thoroughly English in its homelike simplicity and refined comfort. The house stood near the entrance, and on not far from the same level as the roadway; but from the side and rear the ground fell off rapidly, so that it was quite a sharp descent to the pretty little wharf or dock, where one might sit and gaze on the placid, dreamy water. It is with that lovely home that Parkman is chiefly associated in my mind. Twenty years ago, while I was acting as librarian at Harvard University, he was a member of the corporation, and I had frequent occasion to consult with him on matters of business. At such times I would drive over from Cambridge or take a street car to Jamaica Plain, sure of a cordial greeting and a pleasant chat, in which business always received its full measure of justice, and was then thrust aside for more inspiring themes. The memory of one day in particular will go with me through life,--an enchanted day in the season of apple blossoms, when I went in the morning for a brief errand, taking with me one of my little sons. The brief errand ended in spending the whole day and staying until late in the evening, while the world of thought was ransacked and some of its weightiest questions provisionally settled! Nor was either greenhouse or garden or pond neglected. At such times there was nothing in Parkman's looks or manner to suggest the invalid. He and I were members of a small club of a dozen or more congenial spirits who now for nearly thirty years have met once a month to dine together. When he came to the dinner he was always one of the most charming companions at the table; but ill health often prevented his coming, and in the latter years of his life he never came. I knew nothing of the serious nature of his troubles; and when I heard the cause of his absence alleged, I used to suppose that it was merely some need for taking care of digestion or avoiding late hours that kept him at home. What most impressed one, in talking with him, was the combination of power and alertness with extreme gentleness. Nervous irritability was the last thing of which I should have suspected him. He never made the slightest allusion to his ill health; he would probably have deemed it inconsistent with good breeding to intrude upon his friends with such topics; and his appearance as always most cheerful. His friend (our common friend), the late Octavius Frothingham, says of him: "Again and again he had to restrain the impulse to say vehement things, or to do violent deeds without the least provocation; but he maintained so absolutely his moral self-control that none but the closest observer would notice any deviation from the most perfect calm and serenity." I can testify that until after Mr. Parkman's death I had never dreamed of the existence of any such deviation.

Garden and greenhouse formed a very important part of the home by Jamaica Pond. Mr. Parkman's love for Nature was in no way more conspicuously shown than in his diligence and skill in cultivating flowers. It is often observed that plants will grow for some persons, but not for others; one man's conservatory will be heavy with verdure, gorgeous in its colours, and redolent of sweet odours, while his neighbour's can show nothing but a forlorn assemblage of pots and sticks. The difference is due to the loving care which learns and humours the idiosyncrasies of each individual thing that grows, the keen observation of the naturalist supplemented by the watchful solicitude of the nurse. Among the indications of rare love and knowledge of Nature is marked success in inducing her to bring forth her most exquisite creations, the flowers. As an expert in horticulture Parkman achieved celebrity. His garden and greenhouse had extraordinary things to show. As he pointed out to me on my first visit to them, he followed Darwinian methods and originated new varieties of plants. The Lilium Parkmani has long been famous among florists. He was also eminent in the culture of roses, and author of a work entitled "The Book of Roses," which was published in 1866. He was President of the Horticultural Society, and at one time Professor of Horticulture in Harvard University. There can be no doubt as to the beneficial effects of these pursuits. It is wholesome to be out of doors with spade and trowel and sprinkler; there is something tonic in the aroma of fresh damp loam; and nothing is more restful to the soul than daily sympathetic intercourse with flowering plants. It was surely here that Parkman found his best medicine.