Wilmot Brookings Mitchell

“If the gods would give me the desire of my heart,” exclaims Thackeray in The Roundabout Papers, “I should write a story which boys would relish for the next few dozen of centuries.” This is a glorious immortality which Thackeray desires for his boys’ story. Generously have the gods dealt with that author whose writings for boys have been relished even a quarter of a century.

Of the stories and declamations of Elijah Kellogg the past at least is secure. What boy reader did not relish “Good Old Times” and “Lion Ben”? What schoolboy has not“met upon the arena every shape of man or beast that the broad empire of Rome could furnish, and yet never has lowered his arm”? The schoolboy of the future will be of different stuff from the schoolboy of the past if, when declaiming to his mates on a Friday afternoon, he does not begin in subdued tones and stand, like Regulus, “calm, cold, and immovable as the marble walls around him,” and end in guttural tones and in a fine frenzy with “the curse of Jove is on thee—a clinging, wasting curse.” “Spartacus to the Gladiators,” the first of Mr. Kellogg’s eleven declamations, was written, as has already been said,[4] in 1842, for one of the rhetorical exercises at Andover Seminary. At this exercise there was present a Phillips Academy boy, John Marshall Marsters. Some years afterward, when Marsters was to take part in the Boylston Prize Speaking at Harvard College, he secured from Mr. Kellogg a copy of “Spartacus.” In this, as in many similar competitions, it proved a prize-winner; and it so won the admiration of Mr. Epes Sargent, one of the judges, that he first published it, in 1846, in his “School Reader.” Since then no school or college speaker has been deemed complete unless it included“Spartacus to the Gladiators.”

“Regulus to the Carthaginians” Mr. Kellogg wrote at Harpswell for his friend, Stephen Abbott Holt, then a student at Bowdoin College, who first declaimed it in the Junior Prize Speaking, August 25, 1845; and it was first published in 1857 in Town and Holbrook’s Reader. Most of his other declamations were written for Our Young Folks, and similar magazines.

As school and college declamations, these have seldom, if ever, been surpassed. Vivid in description, stirring in sentiment, alive with action, dramatically portraying concrete deeds of heroism, they are especially attractive to school and college boys. Nearly all of these, it will be noticed, deal with ancient characters and events. From the time Mr. Kellogg began to prepare for college in his father’s study, he was exceedingly fond of the ancient classics. He had in his library at the time of his death 235 volumes of the classics of Greece and Rome. Well versed in Greek and Roman history and mythology, he could fittingly extol the patriotism of Leonidas and Decius; bewail the woes of the Roman debtor; incite the gladiators to revolt; and appeal to the Roman legions, or curse the Carthaginians through the mouth of Icilius or Regulus.

With the exception of a few bits of verse written while he was an undergraduate and printed in the college paper, The Bowdoin Portfolio, “Spartacus” was the first of Mr. Kellogg’s writings to be published. During the twenty-three years between 1843, when he became pastor of the church at Harpswell, Maine, and 1866, when he resigned as pastor of the Mariners’ Church in Boston, he wrote very little that was printed: “Regulus,” an ode for the celebration of Bowdoin’s semi-centennial in 1852, and a sermon, “The Strength and Beauty of the Sanctuary,” preached at the dedication of the Congregation Chapel, St. Lawrence Street, Portland, Maine, in 1858. After 1866, after Mr. Kellogg was more than fifty years old, came that rather remarkable period of story-writing. Uncommon is it for a story-writer not to begin his career until after he has lived two score years and ten. That Mr. Kellogg could tell a tale, however, in a way to interest boys, his college mates discovered during his undergraduate days; for those well acquainted with him in college, as they have recorded their recollections of young Kellogg, seldom fail to mention that “he was very fluent in talk, exceedingly interesting as a conversationalist, and an excellent story-teller.”

For some time before his resignation from the pastorate of the Mariners’ Church he had been thinking of trying his hand at a boys’ story, and in January, 1867, the first chapter of his first story was printed in Our Young Folks, a magazine published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields. This story, “Good Old Times,” at once became popular with the young readers of this magazine. It is one of the best stories that Mr. Kellogg ever wrote. It is largely a narrative of facts—the story of Hugh and Elizabeth McLellan, the great-grandfather and great-grandmother of Elijah Kellogg, in their struggle at the beginning of the eighteenth century to cut a home for themselves out of the forest wilderness of Narragansett No. 7, where the town of Gorham, Maine, now is. Of Scotch-Irish descent, young, brave, and resolute, “strong of limb, strong in faith, strong in God,” this couple left their home in the north of Ireland to escape persecution, poverty, and famine. They braved the terrors of the sea and the savages to found a home in the new country. Accustomed as they had been in Ireland to regard a landowner as the most fortunate of men, they deemed it a rare privilege to secure land in Narragansett No. 7, by paying “but little money and the balance in blood and risk and hardship.” They gladly dared the privations of a savage wilderness to obtain some soil they could call their own.

Little wonder is it that the story of how they did this proves of interest to the boys of New England; it is the story of what their own grandfathers and great-grandfathers endured, enjoyed, and achieved. Here, to be sure, they read of no fairyland peopled with elves and sprites, with ogres and goblins; here is no fairy godmother with glass slippers and pumpkin coaches, but a land of flesh-and-blood men and women, of real boys and girls, of Indians with war-whoops, and tomahawks, and scalping-knives—all true, but all enchanted by the wand of the story-teller. What better fun for the boy reader than to join this resolute family as they set out from Portland, and go with them into the primeval forest; Elizabeth on horseback with a babe in her arms leading the way, little ten-year-old Billy just behind driving the cow, and Hugh with a pack on his back, a musket slung across his shoulders, and another child in his arms, acting as rear-guard. Here in the woods were hard work, peril, and poverty; but here, too, were all kinds of interesting things for a boy to see and do. To help build the log house, shingle it with hemlock bark, and stuff the chinks with clay and brush; to see Hugh make the big “drives” and prepare for the “burn,” an exciting and important event in the making of a forest home; to watch the fire as it rushed through the clearing, and to lie in wait, gun in hand, near the woods and watch the “raccoons, woodchucks, rabbits, skunks, porcupines, partridges, foxes, and field mice ’on the clean jump,’ all running for dear life to gain the shelter of the forest, while a great gray wolf, which had been taking a nap beneath the fallen trees, brought up the rear”—this was rare sport. To wear leggings and breeches of moosehide; to gather spruce gum and maple sap; on moonlight nights to shoot the coons that were stealing the corn; to see the men cut and haul the masts, those immense trees upon which the king’s commissioner had put the broad arrow, those trees so large that upon the stump of one of the largest, so said Grannie Warren, a yoke of oxen could turn without stepping off—this was fun indeed for little Billy. What boy, as he reads the story, does not wish that he were the son of a pioneer, even if the corn and meat did now and then get so scarce that the McLellans were obliged to dine upon hazelnuts, boiled beech leaves, and lily roots. In those good old times, men and boys were not forced to betake themselves to tents and camps to get away from our “modern conveniences,” to test their resourcefulness and ingenuity in devising ways and means to secure food and shelter. From the boy’s point of view that pioneer life was one long, glorious vacation of “camping out.”

And then there were the Indians, who, whatever else they did, kept the life of that day from becoming tame and commonplace. They furnished, when friendly, no end of entertainment for the youngsters. What fun the boys had playing beaver in Weeks’s brook, and how delicious the venison was when roasted by old Molly the squaw! Under the instruction of friendly Indians, Billy learned to give the war-whoop, to hurl the tomahawk, and to acquire great skill with the bow. If he could not, like Robin Hood, cleave a willow wand at a hundred yards, he could “knock a bumblebee off a thistle at forty.” And when Billy was fast coming to man’s estate, the Indians, instigated by the French, dug up the hatchet that had been buried for nineteen years; then there was a call for all the coolness, cunning, and heroism that this pioneer life had developed in boy or man; then Beaver, as the Indians called Billy, and his savage playmate, Leaping Panther, were compelled to pit against each other their prowess and cunning. Narragansett No. 7, right in the Indians’ trail, was the scene of many an encounter, often bloody and disastrous in those days, but more exciting than a Captain Kidd expedition when looked back upon through the eyes of the twentieth-century boy. Driving the oxen, with a gun resting on the top of the yoke, planting and reaping and every moment expecting to hear the war-whoop, creeping serpent-like through the grass and stealing noiselessly under an overhanging bank in order to discover an Indian ambush—the story of all this arouses the heroic in a boy’s nature.

After “Good Old Times,” from Mr. Kellogg’s pen the books came thick and fast,—the Elm Island stories, the Forest Glen, the Pleasant Cove, and the Whispering Pine series,—so that by 1883 there were twenty-nine in all.

While writing these books, the author lived in Boston, on Pinckney Street, during the winter, often supplying neighboring pulpits, and spent the summer at his Harpswell home. His favorite workshop was the Boston AthenÆum. Here he often wrote from morning till evening. One of his college mates has said: “Kellogg when in college was strenuous and persistent in whatever he undertook. I remember when he was composing a poem or preparing an essay, he gave his whole soul to it; his demeanor showed that he was absorbed in it and absent-minded to everything else, until that one thing was done.” This power of concentration now stood him in good stead. Often he worked upon his stories fifteen hours a day. Upon his “Sophomores of Radcliffe” he spent a year and a half; but by making his days long and concentrating his thought upon the one task before him, he was sometimes able to turn out a book in three months.

The style in which these books are written is not faultless. The participles are sometimes“dangling” or “misrelated.” The uses of“most” and “quite,” of “and which” and the “historical present,” are not always according to the rhetorician’s rules. Flaws may also be picked with the way some of the characters are introduced, transitions made, and statements repeated. But considering the number of stories the author wrote in these sixteen years, such mistakes are surprisingly few. Mr. Kellogg had an ear sensitive to the flow of a sentence and a memory in which words stuck. The rhythm of his prose is noticeably good and his vocabulary excellent. Well acquainted alike with farmers and sailors, with mechanics and students, he could put fitting words into the mouth of each. The language of his characters does not stultify them: his carpenters are not fishermen; his sailors are not landlubbers; his farmers are not caricatures. He knew well the “down-east” vernacular. In the use of the dialect—if such it may be called—of rural New England, Tim Longley and Isaac Murch can give points even to Hosea Biglow.

All of these books are not of the same merit, and concerning them boys’ opinions differ. Next to “Good Old Times,” perhaps the Elm Island and the Pleasant Cove stories are most after a boy’s heart. An island far enough out at sea so that the dwellers thereon cannot easily supply their wants and consequently have to use inventiveness and daring, is an interesting element in any story, whether it be“Robinson Crusoe,” “Masterman Ready,” or “Lion Ben.” Although not a tropical land abounding in cocoanuts, turtles, and parrots, Elm Island affords abundant opportunity for boys’ play and boys’ work. “Does such an island really exist?” writes a mother to the author. “No,” he replied, “only in my own imagination.” And yet for many boys it does exist. There is no need to describe Elm Island to the boys of New England. They have trod every foot of it and know its every nook and cranny. They know that it is six miles from the Maine coast, “broad off at sea,” and that in the early days fishermen used to land there and make a fire on the rocks and take a cup of tea before going out to fish all night for hake. They have looked admiringly upon its rich coronal of spruce, fir, and hemlock, the large grove of elms on its southern end, and the big beech tree which often has in it as many as ten blue herons’ nests at one time. They can tell you of its precipitous shores, its remarkable harbor, its beautiful cove into which runs the little brook where come the frostfish and smelts, and where the wild geese, coots, whistlers, brants, and sea-ducks galore come to drink. That big rock where the waves roar hoarsely is White Bull; and this smaller one, white with the foaming breakers, is Little Bull.

They know that “it was a glorious sight to behold and one never to be forgotten in this world or the next, when the waves, which had been growing beneath the winter’s gale the whole breadth of the Atlantic, came thundering in on those ragged rocks, breaking thirty feet high, pouring through the gaps between them, white foam on their summits and deep green beneath, and—when a gleam of sunshine, breaking from a ragged cloud, flashed along their edges—displaying for a moment all the colors of the rainbow.... And how solemn to listen to that awful roar, like the voice of Almighty God!”

This island and the neighboring mainland Mr. Kellogg peopled with likable and interesting characters. Strong, good-natured Joe Griffin, beneath whose hat is ever hatching a practical joke, Uncle Isaac Murch, full of Indian lore, skilled in the use of tools, always able to look at things from a boy’s point of view, Captain Rhines, John Rhines, Charlie Bell, and old Tige Rhines are dear to many a boy’s heart. And Lion Ben, powerful, overgrown, agile, slow-tempered, warm-hearted Lion Ben! Almost as soon could a boy forget Leather-Stocking as forget Lion Ben.

Situated as was Narragansett No. 7 some ten miles inland, in “Good Old Times” Mr. Kellogg had but little to say of sailors and the sea. But Elm Island and its sea-loving people afforded him large opportunity to use the knowledge of ships and seamen gained during the three years he had sailed before the mast, or the twenty he had ministered to sailors in Harpswell and Boston. He knew all the pleasures which the sea and shore afford inventive, resourceful boys like John Rhines and Charlie Bell. Fishing and swimming, making kelp siphons, spearing flounders, shooting coot and geese, building boats and sailing them into the teeth of the gale—no author has told of these more entertainingly. Mr. Kellogg loved the sea dearly and knew the words and ways of sailors well. “Here,” says a reviewer, “is an author who knows just what he is writing about. He never orders his sailors to lower the hatch over the stern or coil the keelson in the forward cabin.” He liked nothing better than to build an “Ark” or a “Hard-Scrabble,” load her with lumber and farm produce, man her with Griffins and Rhineses, a snappy crew of home boys, who would “scamper up the rigging racing with each other for the weather earing,” and sail away to the West Indies. Through hurricanes, blockades, or pirates, they would sail with colors flying, reach their port in safety, sell their cargo for a handsome profit, and come back laden with coffee, molasses, and Spanish dollars to gladden the hearts of the dwellers on Elm Island and in Pleasant Cove.

The Wolf Run stories depict characters and events similar to those in “Good Old Times.” They tell of the way a handful of Scotch-Irish settlers in the mountain gorge of Wolf Run on the western frontier of Pennsylvania, about the middle of the eighteenth century, built up their homes; and of the “fearful ordeals through which they passed in consequence of their deliberate resolve never with life to abandon their homesteads won by years of toil from the wilderness.” Here, as in “Good Old Times,” is a scattered community of a few families, frugal and hardy, hating injustice and loving righteousness, to whom food and shelter of the rudest kind are luxuries, and life itself is often at stake. These stories are full of vivid pictures of frontier life, making the “birch” and the “dug-out,” devising ingenious makeshifts for tools and furniture, trapping the wolf and beaver, building and defending the stockade. Here are many enlivening accounts of Indian battles, ambushes, midnight attacks, hair-breadth escapes, and long, hard chases on the trail of the Mohawks or the Delawares. Across the pages of these stories walk sinewy men of oak, in moccasins, buckskin breeches and coonskin caps, ready to fight or fall, keen of eye and lithe of limb, skilled in forest lore, tireless on the chase, sagacious in finding or covering a trail, keen marksmen, “delicate in nothing but the touch of the trigger.” Sam Summerford, Ned Honeywood, Seth and Israel Blanchard, Bradford Holdness, Black Rifle,—twin brother of Cooper’s Long Rifle,—are characters which live in a boy’s memory. These are stories of strong lights and dark shades; but they are true to the life of that day, and show well “what the heritage of the children has cost the fathers.”

In the Whispering Pine stories the author relates the struggles, achievements and pranks of a group of students in Bowdoin College. In these books he has given us a good look into the lives of students in a small college in the first half of the nineteenth century, and has preserved in the amber of his story many Bowdoin customs.

He pictures vividly the early Commencement, when nearly the whole District of Maine kept holiday. From far and near people came in carryalls and stages, on horseback, in packets and pleasure boats, to join in the college merry-making. Hundreds of carriages bordered the yard, and barns and sheds were filled with horses; hostlers were hurrying to and fro sweating and swearing, and every house was crammed with people. To Commencement came not only the beauty, wit, and wisdom of the district, but also those who cared little for art or learning. With dignified officials, sober matrons, and gay belles and beaux came also horse-jockeys, wrestlers, snake-charmers, gamblers, and venders of every sort. The college yard was dotted with booths where were sold gingerbread, pies, egg-nog, long-nine cigars, beers small, and, alas! too often, for good order, beers large. While Seniors in the church were discoursing on “Immortality,” jockeys outside were driving sharp trades and over-convivial visitors engaging in free fights.

In his “Sophomores of Radcliffe” Mr. Kellogg tells us of the Society of Olympian Jove, whose customs perhaps sprang partly from the author’s imagination and partly from his experience. In those days the initiate was made to rush through the pines and ford the dark Acheron, and was carefully taught the signals of distress—signals which James Trafton, with work unprepared, the morning after his initiation, much to the merriment of the class, proceeded to give to the irritated professor by squinting at him through his hand.

Perhaps the most interesting of the early Bowdoin customs described in these books is the “Obsequies of Calculus.” This custom was in vogue many years, and a headstone can yet be seen upon the campus marking the spot where the sacred ashes were consigned to dust. At the end of Junior year when Calculus was finished, the Junior class gathered in the mathematical room and there deposited their copies of Calculus in a coffin. The coffin was then borne sorrowfully to the chapel, where amid wailing and copious lachrymation a touching eulogy was pronounced. The orator was wont to discourse of the “gigantic intellect of the deceased, his amazing powers of abstraction, his accuracy of expression, his undeviating rectitude of conduct,” his strict observance of the motto that, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” Then came the elegy in Latin; after which, amid the grief-convulsed mourners, the coffin was placed upon a vehicle called by the vulgar a dump cart, and the noble steed Isosceles, which “fed upon binomial theorems, parabolas, and differentials, and every bone of whose body and every hair of whose skin was illustrative of either acute or obtuse angles,” drew the sacred load to its last resting-place. The funeral procession, consisting of the college band, Bowdoin artillery, the eulogist and elegist, and the Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior classes, moved slowly down Park Row, through the principal streets of the village to the rear of the college yard. Here the books were “placed upon the funeral pyre and burned with sweet odors, the solemn strains of the funeral dirge mingling with the crackling of flames.

The ashes were collected, placed in an urn, and enclosed in the coffin. A salute was then fired by the college artillery. The epitaph, like that upon the grave of the three hundred who fell at ThermopylÆ, was brief but full of meaning, having on the tablet at the head,—

CALCULUS,

on that at the foot,—

dx/dy = 0.”

But the Whispering Pine books were written for other purposes than simply to depict the life of the college or to let us into the escapades of the students. The dictum that “all art must amuse” did not go far enough for Mr. Kellogg. With all his fun and “frolic temper” he was too much of a Puritan to make amusement the chief end of his writing. All of his stories were written with the avowed purpose of making boys more robust and genuine and manly, of giving them redder blood and broader chests and larger biceps, and at the same time making them hate gloss and chicanery and love straightforward, courageous, Christian dealing. So imbued was the author with this purpose that he wrote his books, as he expressed it, “while upon his knees.” Often at first he felt that he should be preaching rather than writing stories; and it was not until letters came to him from all over the country that he realized he was reaching more boys with his pen than he could possibly have reached with his voice.

Although written with a purpose, it is noticeable that his books are not of the wishy-washy type. His boys are not Miss Nancies and plaster saints. They do not die young and go to heaven; they live and make pretty companionable kind of men. Mr. Kellogg was too much of a story-teller and too strong a believer in truth to distort life for ethical purposes.

One does not have to delve deep, however, to find the lessons which this author would teach. To college boys his advice is, choose your chums well. College is not simply a place where learning is bought and sold, where you pay so much money and get so much Greek or so much philosophy. Not all college lessons are in your books, neither are they all taught in the class-rooms. You will learn them on the college paths, in your sports, in your dormitories; and generally it is your chums who teach them to you. The set of fellows with whom you cast your lot may make or mar you. College ties are strong. The boys with whom you eat and sleep, those with whom you solve the difficult problems and pick out the tangles in Greek and Latin, with whom you stroll of an evening to the falls or a Wednesday afternoon to the shore, to whom you tell your future plans, your love affairs, and your religious doubts, whose sympathies mingle with yours “like the interlacing of green, summer foliage,” those fellows are going to mould your ideals and determine your character.

Again, he believed that boys must not be afraid to lock horns with an obstacle. A difficult job may be their greatest blessing. Richardson coddled at home feels himself a weakling by the side of Morton whom difficulties have made self-reliant. William Frost, who begins a business career with good looks, good clothes, and parental influence, returns to his home in disgrace because he “disregards the claims of others, esteems labor drudgery, and expects recompense without service rendered”; while Arthur Lennox, who sets out from his Fryeburg home barefoot and penniless, his only inheritance “a strong arm and a mother’s blessing,” wins success by unflinching toil. “Hardship,” said Mr. Kellogg, “is a wholesome stimulant to strong natures, quickening slumbering energies, compelling effort, and by its salutary discipline reducing refractory elements.” The boy who is always dodging difficulties will make a gingerbread man. Only by grappling can we gain power to achieve. Only by having tough junks to split can we learn “to strike right in the middle of the knot.”

The value and dignity of labor is the ever recurring burden of these stories. They teach boys to work as well as to play. Through them all resounds the merry music of labor. The ring of the axe, the crack of the whip, the song of the teamster, the screech of the plane, the ring of the anvil, the swish of the scythe, the chirp of the tackle, the creak of the windlass, the shout of the stevedore—all in these books make a happy harmony and witness that man’s primal curse has become his choicest blessing. Mr. Kellogg believed with Carlyle that all work is divine, that to labor is to pray. Especially did he wish to get out of boys’ minds the false notion that only mental work is honorable. He thought that often it is as honorable to sweat the body as to sweat the brain. As honorable and as necessary; for he believed that it is only by keeping the lungs full of fresh air, and the pores open by perspiration, and the limbs strong by activity, that a man can keep his vision from being distorted. “The essence of hoe handle, if persistently taken two hours a day,” would, he believed, cure many diseases of the mind and heart. The devils of fretfulness and fault-finding are not always to be cast out with prayer and fasting. Often it requires labor in the fresh open air,—a good pull against the tide, a long ride on horseback, or an hour’s chopping with the narrow axe. Many a disheartened preacher who now mopes in his study and who “takes all his texts out of Jeremiah,” would get “Sunday’s harness-marks erased from the brain,” and preach glad tidings of great joy if he would only start the perspiration by healthful, outdoor exercise. Mr. Kellogg thought a boy should learn to work with his hands as well as with his brain. All wisdom, he knew well, is not in school and college. He appreciated the value of book learning; but democrat as he was and well acquainted with common people, he knew that an illiterate Jerry Williams or an Uncle Tim Longley can teach scores of valuable lessons to many a schoolman. The boy who is too lazy to do some of the practical duties of life, who thinks it disgraceful to work with his hands, can have no part or lot in his kingdom. His boys are always able “to cut their own fodder.” His ideal college boy is Henry Morton, who is a keen debater, a good writer, a lover of the classics and a lover of nature, but who, at the same time, can hew straight to the line, cut the corners of many a farmer, and take the heart of a tree from many a woodsman.

Elijah Kellogg gave to the boys of America, at a time when they needed them most, fresh, wholesome, stirring stories of out-of-door life. With these stories he both entertained and taught the boys,—entertained them so well that they never suspected they were being taught,—taught them endurance, pluck, integrity, self-sacrifice. He stimulated them to effort, inspired them with a respect for labor, taught them to despise effeminacy, showed them that “the manly spirit, like Dannemora iron, defies the fury of the furnace, and even beneath the hammer gathers temper and tenacity,” that “pure motives, warm affections, trust in God, are by no means incompatible with the greatest enterprise and the most undaunted courage.” Such was his work as an author, and it was a work worth while.