Montaigne dwells with a chirping, senile complacency on the pains which his father took to make his childhood happy. Though, Arthur Holm, my honored parent took no pains at all about the matter, he so managed matters that his hopeful son—myself, Henry Holm, meaning—passed as delightful a boyhood and youth as ever the best son of the best gentleman of Perigord.

I will hang a veil over the infirmities of this loving old gentleman. His days and sometimes his nights were spent at the court-house—a term by which, in Carolina, the hamlet which contains the county tribunal is called—and those were days of high play and deep bowls, with a fiery dash of French brimstone, and sans-culotte theology.

The best and gentlest mother that man ever had was gone to her rest. “Mas’ Harry”—my aforesaid self, meaning—was left to wander at his own sweet will, and wander he did, with a witness, in all the byways of such reading as half-a-dozen gentlemen’s houses, and the parson’s study, afforded.

What ensued? I was five and forty before I ever knew that I was a pedant. German was not yet a language in which Americans sought literary gratification; but my neighbor, Marion Grieve, and I turned over many a volume of French—half comprehended, and I boggled through an odd volume of Don Quixote in Spanish, and several plays of Calderon. Verses of course—as an unavoidable excretion of the youthful brain—proceeded from me in large amount; not such as now emulate the measures of Beppo or Oriana, but imitations of Darwin and Miss Seward.

For delightful boyhood, I maintain the world has no clime comparable to the old States of the South. Wide stretches of country, open forests for hounds, interminable meads in some parts, blooded horses at command, ambrosial mornings, evenings made vocal by the mocking-bird, young comrades in great array, open doors on every estate—we say nothing of the “domestic institution,” and the conveniences of an ample retinue—develop any capacities for unstinted satisfaction, which a gay young master may possess. Something there may be of Horace’s sudavit et alsit, but chiefly in hard riding after a fox, or keeping up with a coach, full of damsels, going far to an assembly at the next town.

Very different is this from the similar stage in the case of the English boy, which I have considered, and which also has its manly discipline; but is marked by long separations from home, direful fagging at public schools, and the restraints of a conventionalism, which is only not Chinese. In looking back, I am very sure it was good for me to be taken away early from scenes of so much indulgence; and I would, if I knew how, subject my boys to a collar somewhat stiffer than that in which I spent my adolescence. Say what you will, young blood needs the pressure of a stern discipline, to induce self-denial, the germ of all self-command; so I can rejoice in hardships now they are over. Yet, in those days, it was but hypocritically that I hummed over the Olim meminisse juvabit.

I am writing among the same spring zephyrs, and gorgeous vegetation of the South, spectacles on nose, and my feet in list slippers; but I can leap over a long intercalation, and live over again the hours of the eighteenth century. My departure had, however, the bitterness of an exile.

——