XXIII • A PARENT'S VIGIL *$%

XXIV • A SON AT THE FRONT %66

XXV ' BROKEN BARRIERS %j6

XXVI • NEW IMPACTS a86

XXVII • THE TURBULENT TWENTIES .... 199

XXVIII • CRISIS 312

XXIX • RING IN THE NEW 3»4-

XXX ' LAST PILGRIMAGE 336

XXXI • A HOUSE IN ORDER 147

THE LATE GEORGE APLEY

A FOREWORD AND APOLOGY

A Necessary Ex-position of

Circumstances Permitting a Certain Incorreci

Liberty in the Penning of

This Memoir

GEORGE WILLIAM APLEY was born in the house of his maternal grandfather, William Leeds Hancockj on the steeper part of Mount Vernon Street, on Beacon Hill, on January 25, 1866. He died in his own house, which overlooks the Charles River Basin and the Esplanade, on the water side of Beacon Street, on December 13, 1933. This was the frame in which his life moved, and the frame which will surround his portrait as a man. He once said of himself: "I am the sort of man I am, because environment prevented my being anything else."

It is now my task, to which I have agreed under somewhat unusual circumstances, to depict the life of this valued friend of mine through his own writings. I can think of no more suitable way of beginning than by resorting to an explanation which is, in a measure, personal. It has been my privilege many times in the past to edit the notes and letters of other prominent Bostonians under the advice of the family. In this

case, as is usual in such matters, the advice of the family stands first. In this case, however, the advice is not usual.

Shortly after I read the obituary notice of George William Apley at the annual meeting of the Berkley Club, when our departed members for the year are customarily remembered, — a work which was welcome to me because of our friendship, — I was surprised by the following comment from his son, John Apley: —

Dear Mr. Willing:—

I did not have time to thank you the other night for the appreciation which you read of my father at the Berkley Club. As I might have expected, you did yourself and the old man proud. I only had this one criticism to offer: As I sat back in the dim part of the room watching you stand on the stage beside the secretary with your papers, I could not avoid thinking of all the other lives which I had heard read out from that platform in sonorous, periodic sentences. Perhaps I had had a touch too much of champagne at the dinner downstairs, but if so I think it only sharpened my perceptions, or did it make me see more than double? At any rate, I seemed to see, through the passage of the years, a string of members with their medals and their colored seniority waistcoats rising from the darkness on the floor and possibly stumbling over somebody's glass, as they walked one by one up to the platform with their papers in their hands. I seemed to hear the lives of all our fellow members read out with the usual comments, and those comments were always similar. You made Father seem like all the others, Mr. Willing. You shaded over the affair of Attorney O'Reilly and some other things we know. You talked about the Historical Society and about the fight against the electric signs around

the Common, but you did not mention his feud with Moore and Fields J you told what he had done for the Art Museum, but you did not tell how the New York dealer gypped him on the pre-Han bronzes. You mentioned his graciousness as a host at those Sunday luncheons at Milton and when the Monday Club had its meetings at our place on Beacon Street. Do you remember the gold chairs in the two upper rooms and the creamed oysters and coffee waiting in the dining-room downstairs when the speaker for the evening was finished? You mentioned all these things, but not a word of how Eleanor and I disappointed him and Mother.

Perhaps you were right, given the time and place, but I wonder if Father would have liked it? You can answer that better than I can, because you knew him better. Personally, I think he would like the truth for once. I hope so because I was rather fond of him. He was kind to me when I was a kidj he was swell when we used to go camping and I shall never forget the picnics on the beach, and the days of the Harvard-Yale game.

Naturally Father always kept up his fagade. Naturally we never quarrelled actively even inside the family, but I remember one thing he said to me once. It sticks, when so much of his advice eddied into one ear and out the other. He was angry at the time and bitterly disappointed with me, because I would not go into the firm of Apley and Reid, thus changing it to Apley, Reid, and Apley. This is what he said: "I'm the only father you'll ever have, and you're the only son I'll ever have. Let us try not to forget it."

With this in mind — and I know this letter must seem rambling to anyone with your eye and your sense of style — I come to my purpose in writing you. You may have guessed already that it involves your capacity as a compiler of distinguished pasts. You are now Boston's Dean of Letters, Mr.

Willing, and now that the mantle has descended upon you, the earnest request of another dutiful son follows that mantle, if the simile is not too involved. I, and the rest of the family, would be very proud and grateful if you could find the time and inclination to take in hand my father's notes and letters. You know he was getting them together himself shortly before his death.

My Aunt Amelia has probably spoken to you already of this project, as Aunt Amelia has somehow taken upon herself the conviction that she is the head of the family, and the custodian of its heirlooms and documents. Nevertheless, my request will be different from hers in its essentials j or perhaps it is not a request, but rather a humble suggestion. Do you not think it would be possible to edit and comment upon my father's letters and papers so that the result would be more distinctive than your exposition before the Berkley Club? How would it be if these letters should tell the truth about him? Not that I insinuate that you do not always tell the truth — I mean that on this occasion you leave matters in the record which your conscience and loyalty might otherwise blot out. Do you think it would do any real harm, provided we put a limit on the copies of this book, say fifteen, for circulation among only the immediate members of the family? This might, of course, be hard for you in that you would be denied the customary public acclaim which your skill so well deserves. But I should insist on paying you, of course, as, though the work were to have a wide circulation, and also you might have the artist's satisfaction, rare, as I have heard you say, for one who must earn a living by letters, to deal with your subject veraciously. This seems to me your chance and mine to do a last piece of justice to Father, and I have an idea that Father would appreciate it. Will you think it

over, Mr. Willing? I'll be glad to consult with you at length, if you should care to have me.

My main preoccupation is that this thing should be real. Y ou know, and I know, that Father had guts.

As ever yours,— John.

I may say frankly that I was challenged by John Apley*s letter, although its style has made me wonder what there is which is wrong with a Harvard and Groton education. Any graduate of any English Public School, any British journalist, is so much more familiar with the structure of his language. It is disconcerting to find John Apley, the product of the two best educational institutions which I believe America can oflFer, standing against a background which has prized culture for many generations, resorting finally to the monosyllable "guts" in order to define his meaning. It may be a small matter, but it is one which I think is important. The answer lies somewhere in the perpetual revolt of youth from tradition. Considering the matter broad-mindedly, I believe that George Apley had something more than this in his character. He had the essential, undeviating discipline of background, which the letter of his son has given me the incentive to display.

Certain aspects, which I might ordinarily have eliminated in dealing with a portrait to be painted by the subject's own words and interpreted by mine, I shall now allow to stand in deference to his son's request.

And now arises a final question and one which has perplexed many another biographer. What is truth in a life? In order to delineate character there must be an artistic stressing

of certain qualities — but are these the vital qualities? Who has the right to say?

Like many other families imbued with the Puritan tradition, the Apleys have not been in the habit of destroying letters or papers. As a fortunate consequence of this, John Apley has been able to deliver to me a surprisingly complete dossier of his father's life, beginning with the letters which were scrawled out in his boyhood to his father, Thomas, and to his mother, Elizabeth Apley. The letters continue through his life stream, notes to relatives and friends, notes to business associates, and conventionally composed pieces of correspondence, such as those relating to the widening of the Esplanade and to the display of electric signs across the Common. Besides these, George Apley has preserved portions of his own works such as his address to his class on its fortieth anniversary, his paper at the Centenary celebration of his Harvard undergraduate Club, and the papers which he read at intervals before the Monday Club and the Historical Society.

To a casual observer, from another section than our own, these works may not seem worth preserving. Taken individually this may be so, but collectively they reveal the spirit of the man and his influence on the life around him. They reveal too, I think, the true spirit of our city and of our time, since Apley was so essentially a part of both.

CHAPTER //

THE FAMILY BACKGROUND

Afley^s Ovon Account of Antecedentsy

Which Must Definitely Motivate the Life of

Any Man with a Family

BIOGRAPHY, like every other branch of art, must have its form and its conventions. Conventionally one starts with ancestral roots in order to answer the question: What made the man? In this instance we are so fortunate as to be able to supply the answer, given by the man himself in one of his random papers. One cannot do better than to let him speak in his own words of the Apley family, as set forth in a memorandum written to his son John and his daughter Eleanor from his Beacon Street library in the year 1912. I have spent many an evening with him there in that snug room situated at the head of his stairs on the second floor of the Beacon Street house, walled in by the leather backs of good books, with the prints of sailing ships above the shelves and his collection of shaving mugs just below them. His interests may have been varied but his discrimination, undeviating.

Dear John and Eleanor: —

The other evening when I was seated here in the library I had the door half open for the sake of ventilation. You

know how the wind whips up across the Basin on a winter night, making it impossible to open the window even a crack. That was why my door was open, not from any desire to pry into the affairs of another generation.

It may not occur to you how distinctly voices carry up our stairs, particularly the voices with the Apley enunciation, and you two, I am pleased to observe, have the Apley voice. I heard you talking to the Burrage boys about your Uncle William. Don't think that I mind that. You were speaking about his plumbing and his stair carpet in Fairfield Street. You were suggesting that, with his income, your Uncle William might make certain renovations. It may seem strange to you that the idea surprised me in that it was new to me.

Your Great-Uncle William's house has always seemed to me a part of him and, therefore, not subject to change. The plainness of its furnishings, the draughtiness of its halls, the worn tines of the forks on his dining table, and the darns in his table linen have been to me an expression of his character and an intimation of inherent worth. Your Great-Uncle William, if he wished, could live with the ostentation of the nowveau rkhe; but he does not wish it. He has a dislike for external show, which is shared by others accustomed to money. He still goes to his place of business in the trolley cars. He buys perhaps one suit a year, as I heard you both observing. In commenting on this you must not forget his generosity to others. You have seen the row of Rembrandts he has given to the Art Museum, but you do not know that he contributed anonymously three million dollars to the South Boston playgrounds, and that he has supported our family charity, the Apley Sailors' Home, for the last twenty -years.

I do not object to your laughing at Uncle William, for I have done so myself in my time. The only thing that sur-

prises me is your belief that he should change, when his care in living is a part of his philanthropy. From the time of the Roman Empire down, indulgence in the externals of wealth has never benefited a community. Your uncle realizes that there are more important things than modern plumbing} I pray that you two will come to that realization in time. I wonder if you will. Besides, William Apley is a lover of music, and owns one of the largest and best Chinese porcelain galleries in America. You have heard of the Rockefeller Hawthornes? Ask Uncle William to show you his.

From your comment on your relative the drift of your conversation trended naturally to families, particularly to Boston families. I heard you laughing at the pride which certain of our connections take in the family tree, and I could almost have laughed with you, although this is a Boston joke that was vieux jeu even in my day. I heard you say that we all came from yeoman stock, small English shopkeepers and farmers. You were quite right in this. I was only surprised that you had not discovered the fact before. The simplicity of our beginnings makes for your Uncle William's simplicity, but do not forget that these ancestors of yours had their beliefs and convictions.

I have heard certain things about the Apley family passed down by word of mouth which I shall pass to you now in writing, for there'll be a day, perhaps, when you may wish to be identified with a family.

The Apleys have lived in the town of Totswold-Fearing in Sussex as far back as there are any parish records. There are Apleys there still, as I found out for myself during the last trip which your Mother and I took through rural England. The first American Apley, Thomas, known in the town records as "Goodman Apley," settled in Roxbury in the year 1636.

If you recall your early American history, this date coincides with the great period of emigration from the Mother Country, not of persons struggling to find a new home because of poverty, like the starving Irish who overwhelmed us in the middle of the last century, but of solid citizens, many with substantial properties, who desired to take up a new abode because of conscience. It is true that few gentlemen entitled to a coat of arms were engaged in this adventure j but there was good society in Salem, Roxbury, and Watertown, as SewalPs diary bears witness — a far more cultivated society, I believe, than any which existed in the early Plymouth Colony. I, personally, do not think that persons who boast of ancestors coming over on the Mayflower have very much of which to be proud, but this is beside the point.

Thomas Apley at his death in 1672 left two dwelling houses, fifteen acres of land, and rights in the Common pasture for forty cattle j two feather beds, two silver tankards, and an Indian slave named Tomfrey, who had probably been captured in some of the troubles with the Narragansetts that led to King Philip's War. During his career in this country he had three wives and twenty children, half of whom died in infancy. None of those surviving appears to have made a name for himself except your ancestor John Apley, second son by the second marriage, who was selected by his father for the clergy. John Apley attended Harvard, graduating with the class of 1662, and I may add there has been an Apley at Harvard since in each succeeding generation.

This John Apley, whose life has been touched upon by Cotton Mather in his "Magnalia Christi Americana," became, after his ordination, one of the ministers in the township of Barnstable on Cape Cod. He was influential there in converting the Indians, and is known to have delivered a ser-

mon to them in their own language on an occasion when these people met in great numbers on the beach to play a game which has been called "football." I have never been able to determine what sort of a game this "football" was except that several hundred Indians took part in it, but I am often pleased to think that John Apley interested himself in football, as the game has always fascinated me. You must remember that the position of an ordained minister in the days of Massachusetts Bay was a very high one, socially, in the community. Thus it is not strange that John Apley should have allied himself with Martha Dudley, not a direct connection of the able Thomas or of his arrogant son, Joseph, but from a collateral branch which many believe is better.

In consequence their eldest son, Nathaniel Apley, took his place in Boston as a young man of some cultivation and fashion. You may have seen his portrait by Dummer, the Essex County silversmith, which was presented by your great-grandfather to the Boston Athenaeum. The picture, which hangs to-day in the oval Trustees' Room opposite the case of volumes from George Washington's library, shows a thin young man in a blue coat and a brown wig. In the Harvard Catalogue of 1687 Nathaniel Apley is listed as "Mr." — an accurate indication of his social position in those days of gentlemen and commoners. Presumably because of his relationship to Governor Dudley he seems to have left for England during the troubled period two years later, but returned shortly to marry Maria Gookin, a daughter of that family which can honestly claim as great distinction and gentility as any in the early Commonwealth.

Nathaniel engaged in trading ventures with the West Indies, bartering fish and lumber for sugar, and I suspect investing in shipments of blacks to the Carolinas. In those days the slave trade was strictly honourable. He prospered in this

business and bought himself a dwelling house on the north end of Boston Peninsula. You may see his house marked on Bonner's famous map of Boston. His stone is in the King's Chapel burying ground.

His son, Joseph, from whom we are descended, was in the Harvard class of 1733, but was expelled for using profane language in Massachusetts Hall. On a business visit to the town of Portsmouth he wooed and won the local belle, Elizabeth Pringle, in the old Pringle homestead now fortunately preserved by the Colonial Dames of America. Her picture in the dining-room downstairs probably does not do her justice, since it was painted by one of those journeyman artists who travelled up and down the Eastern seacoast.

Their son John graduated from Harvard with the class of 1757 and I have two of his pamphlets in my possession, dealing with arguments in favour of the Writs of Assistance. His portrait, painted by Copley when John Apley was eighty-seven, fell to your Aunt Amelia when your grandfather's estate was divided. Before that time it used to hang directly above the sideboard in the dining-room at Hillcrest in Milton — where I personally believe it should have been left, if only out of sentiment to your grandfather's memory. Your Aunt Amelia thought differently, however, and the portrait now has its place among her Burne-Jones pictures in her front parlour in Louisburg Square. Even in these Pre-Raphaelite surroundings the features of our famous ancestor reveal the deadly reality of Copley and his pitiless and seldom complimentary probing of character. For Copley, as you know, probably because of his plain beginnings, did not have the politeness or the graceful tradition of either Stuart or Blackburn. The features of our ancestor in this Copley — and I have heard Charlie Jones and Briggs Dan forth and other leading instructors from the Museum Art School say

that this is Copley at his finest — have the wintry grey whiteness of old age, with just a touch of pink at the cheekbones that verges into purple. The left hand, beautifully executed, is clutching at a faded, purplish brocaded dressing gown.

Although in the pre-Revolution days John Apley's sentiments appear to have been distinctly Royalist even down to the time of the Boston Massacre, his name is mentioned among those who contributed secretly a sum for powder and arms at the eve of the Bunker Hill battle. Yet when the Revolutionary War was over, we find him deploring the anarchy of the times, and some of his letters suggest the advisability of a monarchical form of government. I can remember when I was ten years old hearing my Great-Aunt Jane, then in her ninety-second year, speak of him with affection.

"You will never know," my Aunt Jane said to me, "how very close we come to being nobility. In a sense, indeed, we are nobility."

My great-aunt was not the only one whom I have heard speak in this vein. It amuses me to think of her in these days when pandering politicians in Bulfinch's State House are discussing such socialistic nonsense as an income tax and old age insurance.

I have never discovered why John Apley quarrelled with his son George and cut him off in his will with a shilling, except that George married out of his social sphere. At the age of sixteen he became enamoured of a Maria Cabot from Beverly. Her family at that time were people of good plain stock, engaged in coastal shipping, but only in a small way. When young George persisted he was turned incontinently out of doors and communications between him and his father came to an abrupt and permanent termination. I imagine that certain distant branches of the Apley family are sorry for

this to-day J for the Apley ability went with George and his young wife, Maria, to the farming community of Sudbury where the young couple occupied a farm of some eighty acres near the marshes of the Sudbury River, lived in great want, and were blessed with a family of five sons.

The early days of the Reconstruction Era — so aptly termed by my dear late friend, John Fiske, "The Critical Period of American History" — found these five boys and their parents wresting a meagre living from the soil. I have told you that the Apleys were plain people, but this short account of mine is evidence enough that good stock will not entirely disappear.

At this point George Apley's narrative breaks off abruptly, and the memorandum certainly never went farther than his desk. The life and customs of Colonial days were a source of deep interest and of not a little amusement to him in his late middle age. He gradually acquired from collateral branches of the Apley family various heirlooms of his early ancestors, including a magnificent pair of silver tankards by Hurd, which are now on loan in the American Wing of the Art Museum. It must be added in all fairness that George Apley's attitude in ancestral matters was not always the same as that reflected in the foregoing paper. In this connection it may be as well to insert a portion of a letter which he wrote in 1902 to his classmate, Henry Schuyler Wilkie, after a visit to New York.

Dear Schuy: —

Seeing you in the modern Sodom and Gomorrah did your poor friend Ap a good deal of good. Of course, no one from my cautious part of the world is entirely at home in New York. The lights of the theatres and the noise of the traffic around Twenty-third Street upset us, but I hope I did my

best once I caught the spirit of it. I shan't forget for quite a while the race we had in hansom cabs through the Park.

Now I am back in the land where the gold grasshopper swings above Faneuil Hall to the bidding of a damp east wind. I have had family dinned in my ears ever since I have been able to think. My life has been governed by the rigours of blue-nosed bigots who have been in their graves for a century. . . .

Such erratic changes in his mood as these, although they became less frequent in George Apley's later life, were a part of his character which endeared him to many friends. Several years after he composed this first memorandum he evidently discovered it in going through his desk, for we have a continuation, penned in 1916, from exactly where he had left off.

Dear John and Eleanor: —

I may as well finish this, though I shall probably destroy it before you read it. It is a bad habit to break things off halfway.

Moses Apley left the farm at the age of fourteen (your great-grandfather) to enter the Derby countinghouse in Salem. This position, as far as we know, was obtained for the boy through the intercession of the Cabot connection. Moses Apley's own autobiography, which I must say reveals very little, is now in the library as I write. His other letter-books and business papers have been loaned, quite properly, to the Essex Institute in Salem. Moses Apley appeared at one of those rare times in the history of the world when wars were besetting civilization. At the age of fifteen he sailed as a clerk on the Derbv brig Stella for the Baltic. At the age of eighteen he was master of the Derby brig Good Hofe bound for Madagascar and China with a cargo valued at

fifteen thousand dollars. This, as you see, was the beginning of our commerce with the Orient. At Madagascar, on hearing of the outbreak of war between France and England, this boy — somehow boys in this part of the world matured more quickly then, in spite of there not being a Harvard Business School — contrived to sell his cargo for three times its value and place the proceeds in currency, which itself doubled its value, before the Good Hofe left port three months later. Finally at Canton, he contrived to put aboard a cargo of tea purchased at panic prices. This was due to the fortunate suicide of the agent of the British firm of French and Daniels at the Canton Factories. Returning by way of the Cape of Good Hope your Great-Grandfather Moses touched at the vicinity of Fernando Po on the African coast and was able to trade a consignment of rum, which he had purchased in Canton from a New England shipmaster who was dying of flux, for ivory tusks. These had been accumulating for some time at a Portuguese factory on the Fernando Po coast} and owing to unsettled world conditions, and an ocean thick with privateers, there seemed little chance that this ivory could reach a market. These details are treated with meticulous accuracy in your great-grandfather's autobiography, and I only mention the superficial aspects here to show why Moses Ap-ley, through his determination and judgment, ended his life as one of the richest shipping men in Boston, the beloved and respected friend of the houses of Peabody and Perkins. When the brig Good HofSy after eluding a French privateer and a British sloop of war, finally returned to the Derby wharf in Salem at the end of a two years' voyage, Moses Ap-ley, not yet in his legal majority, was able to present the Derby countinghouse with a cargo valued at well over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. His own share of this, as Master, was sufficient for him to purchase a vessel of hia

own, the brig Pretty Pearl, then building at the yards in Essex. The name, as you may suspect, was sentimental. She was named for Pearl Frear, of the Frear family in Salem, who was later to become your great-grandmother. Though it has been said that your great-grandfather was somewhat relentless in his later dealings, no one has questioned his uprightness or his probity. His two-hundred-thousand-dollar endowment of the Apley Sailors' Home, an immense sum in those days, is proof enough of his charitable instincts.

There is one story about him which you may not have heard, but one which seems to me worth repeating. Moses Apley was summoned to his father's bedside when George Apley was dying in the Sudbury farmhouse j the old man was in his bed, well toward the end of his last illness, and he was troubled in his mind. He had willed his farm and his personal possessions to the remaining four brothers, leaving Moses out of the estate. He wished Moses to understand that his only motive in making this testament was because he had heard that Moses had done well in business.

"Father," your great-grandfather said to him, "don't worry. A vessel of mine has just come alongside the wharf with a cargo which can buy the whole town of Sudbury."

The old man groaned and turned his face to the wall.

"To think," he said, "that I must die and know my son a liar."

We will leave your great-grandfather now. I have only known him from his portrait in the parlour, for he died before I was born, leaving a family of seven children, but we have Moses Apley to thank that we are financially comfortable to-day. What little we have is due to Moses Apley, and I think that we may be proud of him with reason. His house, in what is now our business district, was torn down even before the Boston fire; but there is a drawing of it in your

great-uncle's hall, just by the hatrack near the stairs. The next time you go to see Uncle William ask Bridget to turn up the gas a little j explain to her that you want to see the picture. She will understand you, if you shout at her loudly enough. It is well worth looking at.

THE PARENTS

Continuing Our Subject^s Own Account of the Early Struggles of Thomas and Elizabeth Afley

YOUR great-grandfather's estate, though large, suffered somewhat during the decline of Boston shipping and from a fire on the waterfront. Yet even when it was divided my father, Thomas Apley, was comfortably off. His own business acumen was responsible for conserving and enlarging his estate so that it amounts to the little we have to-day. During his entire life your grandfather, who might have lived upon his income, rose at five-thirty every morning j at nine o'clock each evening he took his candle and went upstairs. He had been educated for the law at Harvard, as I have been, but his proclivities were always those of a businessman. He and your Uncle William, when they formed a partnership to administer their and their brothers' and sisters' share of the Moses Apley estate, turned instinctively from the sea. In those grim days of depression before the Civil War they understood that New England's future was essentially industrial.

The mills in the town of Apley Falls on the upper Merrimack River are the direct results of their vision. The success of our family venture, the Apley Mills, has been due in its

broader aspects to the more mature mind of your grandfather. It was he who arranged the financing and for the useful employment and the suitable accommodation of labourers from the great horde of Irish then pouring into the port of Boston. The aspersions cast upon the living conditions of the mill hands at Apley Falls by certain propagandists of the South were always a source of pain to your grandfather, as well as one of just indignation. The Southern apologists for their "peculiar institution" of slavery published reports in Richmond and Norfolk papers to the effect that a slave on the average Southern plantation had better food, better care, and greater prospects for happiness than the workers in the Apley Mills. My father contended to the last days of his life that no more untrue or unjust comparison was ever made.

These Irish peasants, coming from a land of starvation where they had existed beneath absentee landlords in a situation little better than serfdom, were given good brick houses at Apley Falls, steady labour to keep them out of mischief, and a wage equal to that which they might have obtained elsewhere. Their children received the benefits of common schooling, and they themselves, though nearly all illiterate, had the blessings of free thought and action.

More than this, these people were grateful for it, as I know myself. When I was a boy of seven, on a visit to your Uncle William at Apley Falls I remember walking (between him and your grandfather) up a street made up of these long brick rows of millworkers' cottages. The evening^s work was done J the men and their womenfolk were seated placidly on their porches with nothing before them but the prospect of a comfortable supper and a working wage the next day. Their looks of pleasure and affection were certainly not purposely assumed when Uncle William and my father walked by. I can see them still, the women bobbing and curtsying, the

men pulling their forelocks. They regarded my uncle and my father each as their friend and protector who gave them shelter and livelihood, and advice and assistance in family difficulties. There was no such thing as labour trouble in those days at Apley Falls, because there were no such things as unsound ideas, and no desire for shoddy luxuries. There was no desire for luxuries because there were none, and I wish it were the same to-day.

My father was responsible for the broader policies of this venture. Your Great-Uncle William, still a boy in his teens, had the direct charge of the enterprise and lived at Apley Falls and worked as hard as, if not harder than, any labourer in the Mills, and carried the burden of his responsibility home with him at night. This responsibility must have been enor^ mous, for nearly the entire capital of the family estate was involved in the infant textile industry and it is only due to the unfaltering assiduity for work, the abstemiousness, the watchfulness, and the acumen of these two men that we are as comfortable as we are to-day.

Considering their responsibilities, both for family and employees, I think it is natural that they were not greatly in sympathy with the agitators of the time. The Abolitionist Movement was anathema to my father, who saw, as so many other solid businessmen also saw, the blind folly of a political war between the North and South. It must have been hard on my father to take this position, for in many ways he was a liberal and stood firmly for the freedom of human initiative j also in his leisure he was interested in the arts. I have often heard him speak with affection and pride of that fine flowering of New England genius, the Transcendentalist Colony at Concord. He always spoke with deep respect of the works of Mr. Emerson and of many of Channing's sermons. He was particularly amused and delighted with the vagaries of

Thoreau. He had the deepest respect for the views of our essayists, and even of our novelists, although he felt, I think rightly, that fiction was the most trivial and ephemeral of all the arts. While maintaining this interest, he had no great patience for the unsound, radical inclinations which always seem to be tied up with a literary society. He stated his views to me once in terms which are as sound to-day as the rest of his philosophy.

"Your poet," he said, "your minister, your essayist, is not a man of affairs. He is completely unsuccessful almost invariably in the realms of banking and business. Being unsuccessful, it is beyond me why his views on economics and politics should be given the slightest attention."

At the time of the outbreak of the Civil War your grandfather had been married for a year to Elizabeth Hancock, a good match for both of them, based primarily on love but also on a community of friends and interests. As a young husband who was about to become a father, and as the head of an important business enterprise, upon which hundreds depended for their daily bread, my father, although as staunch a Unionist as anyone in Boston, when the fatal die was cast, could not fight in the Civil War. At the time of the Draft Act he was obliged, much to his own regret, to hire a substitute. Clarence Corcoran, the head gardener of his country place at Hillcrest, took your grandfather's place in the ranks, receiving the usual bounty and with it the promise that his little family should be cared for comfortably in case of any accident. I once saw some letters that my father wrote to Clarence at the time of the Wilderness Campaign—letters of affection and good cheer, each with a financial enclosure.

It is gratifying to add that Clarence came back safely and that a friendship existed between him and my father which endured even after Clarence was obliged to leave Hillcrest,

on account of drunkenness and an unfortunate infatuation for your grandmother's maid. Clarence and the Corcorans have been pensioners of the family ever since, even down to his grandson, John Apley Corcoran, whose tuition I paid myself in Boston University and later in the Suffolk Law School.

Your grandfather bought and improved the place at Hill-crest when its former owners were faced with hard times. In his later days he felt a deep affection, which I have inherited, for every stick and stone of it. I have often stood with him, as a child, on a spring evening, watching the purple and white festoons of the wistaria against the columns of the veranda. When one of the elm trees sickened on the driveway circle, his concern was as great as if one of us had been dying. Your grandfather, also, bought this house on Beacon Street when the Back Bay was filled in, and this leads me to a single amusing instance of his unfailing business foresight.

Shortly before he purchased in Beacon Street he had been drawn, like so many others, to build one of those fine bow-front houses around one of these shady squares in the South End. When he did so nearly everyone was under the impression that this district would be one of the most solid residential sections of Boston instead of becoming, as it is to-day, a region of rooming houses and worse. You may have seen those houses in the South End, fine mansions with dark walnut doors and beautiful woodwork. One morning, as Tim, the coachman, came up with the carriage, to carry your aunt Amelia and me to Miss Hendrick's Primary School, my father, who had not gone down to his office at the usual early hour because he had a bad head cold, came out with us to the front steps. I could not have been more than seven at the time, but I remember the exclamation that he gave when he observed the brownstone steps of the house across the street.

"Thunderation," Father said, "there is a man in his shirt

sleeves on those steps." The next day he sold his house for what he had paid for it and we moved to Beacon Street. Your grandfather had sensed the approach of change j a man in his shirt sleeves had told him that the days of the South End were numbered.

I shall not speak at length of my mother, not because I could not but because of the tenderness of my memories and my admiration for her. These make me shy and self-conscious even with my children. Beneath the discipline of my father the routine of our family life was very strict, but I do not think too strict. Through it all my mother was a cheerful, loving wife and a kind friend to everyone who knew her, firm in her convictions, but charitable to weakness. Her love of literature and music and of painting was very great, but she did not over-indulge herself in any of these directions. I think that she feared that such an interest would overbalance her responsibility to her home. Even when her mind failed in the latter years of her life, she still felt that responsibility very keenly. You remember her in her wheel chair at Hill-crest, knitting mufflers on the porch. Your Great-Aunt Jane,, of course, you may remember better, but your grandmother, though quieter, had all your Aunt Jane's determination.

I have gone on with this longer than I had intended but it has given me a pleasant evening, so pleasant that I am afraid I have not achieved the purpose I undertook when I began. It was my intention to give you something of our family background, that you both might understand the character of the people from whom you spring. You were right in believing that they are simple but there is an importance in their simplicity which you must not forget. I think there IS no reason why you should not be proud of the Apleys, as proud as any Virginian is of his own ancestry. The other day I heard your Aunt Amelia say: "When I am depressed I re-

member I am an Apley." At the time I was amused by the remark. Her self-importance often exasperates and amuses me. Yet, granted that her remark was poorly phrased, so that it was silly, the fact remains that it is worth while for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest, hard-working ancestry.

This memorandum is necessarily short. Its author has left out many important facts, but in its essentials it conveys some impression of George Apley's point of view. Pride in family, place, and tradition were inherent with the manj his realization of their importance grew with the years, until many of his activities became centered about genealogical research.

Nevertheless, it must be remembered that this is a later development of his character. Time changes all things.

CHAPTER IV

THE BOYHOOD SCENE

A Hasty Evaluation of the

Background and Philosofhy of a Golden Era,

M.uch of Which Fortunately Still Survives

HAVING dealt briefly with the family background, our next task is inevitably a reconstruction of the scene upon which George Apley's eyes first opened. It will be the panorama of the Boston known to George Apley, the child, the boy, and the youth. I shall try to give this background clearly in the earnest hope that such a reconstruction is possible, for in it must lie my interpretation of George Apley's character. At the age of thirty-two, George Apley once wrote to a friend: —

I move along a narrow groove. With the exception of two months in Europe when I was twenty, ten trips to New York and one to Washington, I do not believe that I have been farther away from Boston than Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to the North, Lenox to the West, or Providence to the South.

It is painfully trite to say that the Boston of the early seventies is vastly different from the Metropolitan Boston of the present J yet if one lists some of the changes which have occurred since then, the difference is so immense that this trite-

ness is overpowered by significance. At no time in the history of the world have such material changes occurred as those in George Apley's life span. The impact of these changes upon the mind of an individual must necessarily be portentous and immense. Let us sum it up in a single homely detail that may convey an impression better than reverberating facts. Let us start, without any wish to appear humorous, with the mud-scrapers on the houses of Beacon Hill.

In the constantly shifting American scene the appurtenances essential to another generation are only too apt to be swept away by the ruthless hand of what is so incorrectly called "progress." It is to the credit of Boston that these changes have occurred slowly, and only after a struggle with the sounder element. There is still a decorous pause between innovations, although this pause is admittedly briefer than it was. In the midst of this haste for tearing down much of what is fine, it is not unpleasant for one of the writer's age to be able to walk peacefully through a part of his city, there to observe a few vistas which have not changed greatly since the days of his boyhood. One can turn the clock back without great difficulty as one ascends Mt. Vernon Street toward the State House, or turns left, through Louisburg Square, up the even steeper paths of Pinckney.

Here the brick sidewalks are still at such an an^le that sev-eral pedestrians each winter suffer from broken hips after an easterly sleet storm. With but few exceptions the hitching posts have been removed from the curbs of these sidewalks, but here and there an iron ring set in the curbing is a silent reminder of the days of the horse, when a child might coast down Mt. Vernon Street. The covered allevways and the lanes which lead from Mt. Vernon toward Beacon Street are

still extant, and the property deeds still include their clauses for the right to lead through these lanes one or more cows for pasturage on the Common. Such matters as these, of course, were curiosities — like the purple windowpanes in some of the Beacon Street houses — even in the early seventies. But this was not so with the iron scrapers on the Cape Ann granite steps. They stand alone on Beacon Hill as memorials to a muddier Boston, a Boston of blacksmiths and cobblestones. The details of these bits of ironwork vary in design, and, if one observes them closely, one may detect something of the spare grace of line which is so manifest in the doorways and fagades above them. Given the time for research, a highly informative paper might be written about this ironwork.

At the time of Apley's birth, although his parents were better than comfortably off, the Apley establishment was sensibly rigorously simple. The summers were spent at the country estate of Hillcrest in Milton, then a considerable distance from town, a large estate with driveways under arching elms, with a rambling house dating from the forties. The Apley children, when at Hillcrest, were under their mother's serene and careful guidance. It was she who gave them their taste for literature and directed their attention to the saner beauties of country life. It was there that they began to form friendships and associations which remained with them as an unaltering legacy. The Calders with their five children dwelt upon the right, and the Bromfield children on the left, so that, altogether, these three families made a noisy group of boys and girls who wandered over their common acres in a rare childhood kingdom.

All who knew her have united in the opinion that Elizabeth Apley, the young mistress of Hillcrest, was a person of outstanding character. Not alone a competent and practical house-

keeper, whose calm hand controlled every branch of the establishment, from the stables and kitchen to the nursery, she was careful as well to cultivate the leisure, to continue the de^ velopment of a painstaking education. Her sensibility to literature was very marked. Several of her poems, among them "Blue Hill at Eventide" found their way into print in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, and show the accuracy of her keen reaction to the New England landscape. "Blue Hill at Eventide" is the description of Blue Hill in that hour just before the twilight of cool October. It speaks of that clarity of air and of the local perfection of silence through which the faintest noises of the southern-going bird come so distinctly to the ear. The simplicity and finality of her last line is peculiarly effective: "And may our voices, too, rise up so true to God."

The accomplishments of the young mother were not solely confined to verse. Hunt himself has spoken highly of her skill at water-color sketching, and several of these works of hers, in the hall at Hillcrest, prove that he did not wholly exaggerate. Also, she never gave up her music. George Apley has often spoken of the hour before his bedtime, as a child, when the notes of the piano directed by his mother's fingers winged through the house. Religion, pure Unitarianism, was also a part of the Hillcrest life, for both the Apleys and the Hancocks had been converted to its New England intellectualism. It was to be expected, with such a mother, that conversation should have been on a high plane, but her interests did not end there. She was careful also that each of her children should engage in a practical avocation. Each child at Hillcrest had a small square of garden, devoted not only to flowers, but to vegetables, and each child was held strictlv accountable for the

care of his or her garden plot. This was probably the reason for George Apley's interest in flowers, which brought him finally to the vice-presidency of the Boston Horticultural Society.

The clear tranquil beauty of Elizabeth Hancock Apley, combined with her unvarying graciousness as a hostess, with her never-failing interest in the affairs of others, and with the charm which she could give to a world seen through her own intelligence, made her parlor throughout her life a meeting ground for exceptional men and women. A Sunday afternoon would customarily find the best conversation of Boston around her tea table. Dr. Horsford would frequently be there, embroidering on his interesting theory regarding the settlement made by Leif Ericson at Norumbega on the Charles River. The fine face of Charles Eliot Norton was often seen, and Child and Shaler of Harvard, and Celia Thaxter, the poetess, and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe whose "Battle Hymn of the Republic" trumpets down the corridors of time. By her magic Mrs. Apley could cause the peculiar talent of each to be given forth for the benefit of all with no other stimulation than the cup that cheers but does not inebriate. Her capacity for friendship, which drew so many around her, drew among others Nathan Pettingill, the brilliant young minister of the local Unitarian Church. From the association of these two eager intelligences a friendship finally blossomed and was terminated only by death, one of those friendships of the spirit, rare in other parts of the world, but with many parallels in this congenial atmosphere. The character and understanding of the husband, Thomas Apley, concealed from so many beneath a cool and somewhat austere exterior, manifested itself in the complete trust and comprehension, akin to a deep pride, with

which he observed the activities of his wife. Modest always of his own attainments, in spite of the weight which his word was given in State Street, Thomas Apley would sit, during such afternoons, an intent and generally a silent listener.

The Apley children, two little girls in their new white pinafores, and young George in a tight brown jacket — the style of their dress is apparent from an early photograph — were encouraged to share such occasions with their parents. In the democracy of this family there was no barrier of age, and so the children were led into the drawing-room of a Sunday afternoon, where, after shaking hands and exchanging remarks with whoever might be present, they were placed in a silent row upon the sofa, obeying the maxim that "children should be seen and not heard." It was Elizabeth Apley's oft-expressed belief that their offspring should assume with the parents a part of the responsibility for the teatime entertainment. Thus, at some propitious moment during the afternoon, the mother might call upon one of the little daughters for a snatch of song, which she herself accompanied sympathetically at the piano. On other occasions, little George would be called to render some dramatic recitation, perhaps a few humorous lines of Lowell, or again, Burke's famous speech on the American Revolution, ending on the ringing words "You cannot conquer America!" This declamation was taught him by his father, painstakingly, with the appropriate gestures. George Apley has contributed a brief account of one of these scenes, which gives something of their flavor.

It is no small ordeal for a boy of seven to stand up before his elders and to deliver a declamation. How my voice would shake at the beginning! And I can remember the attentive silence which greeted me. Father would sit watching me.

stroking his black side-whiskers. Mother would watch me, too, now and then exchanging a glance with Mr. Pettingill, whom we called "Uncle Nathaniel." There is one occasion which sticks in my mind as though it were yesterday. I had eaten very heavily of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and was not feeling well, when Father said: "George, stand up ajid give Burke's Speech." I started out mechanically, but when I got to the part about the savages I stopped and my stomach seemed to turn about. Father rose quietly and took my hand. "George," he said, "come with me." As I went upstairs I told him I felt sick. Father's reply was the right one. "You must learn to do a great many things that you don't want," he said. "Now let us go over this so that you may get the end correctly."

Other more informal hours were spent at Hillcrest in the company of Tim, the coachman. His learning consisted almost entirely of Irish folktales, concerned with black ghosts and white ghosts and banshees. Sometimes in the kitchen Bridget, the cook, would sing snatches of ballads. One in particular dealt with a fiery-tempered young man who went walking with the girl of his choice down an Irish lane. For some reason which George Apley could not understand, this young man suddenly hit his sweetheart over the head with a club, and threw her body behind the thorn hedge. Later, on his return home, the girl's sister had him tried for murder, and the ballad ended "And well she might, for she knew the night, when I took her sister out." Since this ballad-narrative puzzled young George he went to the one source he knew, where the puzzle might be resolved: his mother. After listening carefully, Elizabeth Apley brought him to the library, where his father was arranging books, and there George repeated the story. Thomas

Apley also listened carefully and made no comment, but Bridget thereafter lost her gift of song.

These details of the life at Hilkrest may seem of small importance, but out of such trivial incidents are woven the fabric of a life. This is proved by George Apley's own letters to his friend Rhodora Calder, which he wrote her some forty years later. Despite the lapse of time, they give a vivid picture, sometimes grave and sometimes gay, of the fine froe life which a child could lead. We cannot leave the Hillcrest days without including a few excerpts.

Dear Rhodora: —

Hester tells me that you are not feeling well, and so your old friend Georgie Porgie writes you. I remember a girl he kissed who did not cry, behind the hedge, near the hotbeds and the brook, after we had been playing "Deerfield Massacre." You had been frightened when Joe Bromfield scalped you, do you remember? I think of those days a good deal now, and I wish I might get as far as Mattapoisett so that you and Charles and I might laugh at them together. How closely our little crowd has always stuck to each other! I think that is one of the fine things about Milton — the way childhood friendships last. Dear me, it doesn't seem so long ago. Do you remember the suppers in the nursery when you used to come to play dolls with Amelia and Jane? Do you remember the games of hide-and-seek we used to play in the upper hall, and the time Grandmama hid me behind her dress when she sat in her rocker, knitting? Poor old lady, I had been forbidden to go in there, because she was not well, you know. She called me "Little Tom," she thought I was my father. And do you remember your good old Newfoundland, Tony? The way his tongue lolled out of his black muzzle, like a piece of red flannel j and Wash, your colored coachman —

do you remember how he used to sing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" when he sat in the harness-room?

Are children always like our crowd, do you suppose? It seems a little ironical how much of our culture seemed to come from the stable and the kitchen when we had such opportunities to meet the greatest figures of our time. But grown-ups were something else, weren't they? The dark gods who ruled the world, but our world was not theirs. . . .

Dear Rhodora: —

Your answer to my scrawl of the other day bearing with it your own impressions of that distant time has blazed a path far backward in my memory. To plagiarize from Emerson: the daughters of time, the hypocritic Days, have taken my hand and led me backward down that path to the old Milton, of which you and I are really the most pleasant exponents. No wonder that Milton absorbs so much of the thoughts of everyone who was brought up there. The shadow of Blue Hill lies deeper than the charm of Brookline. The Thayers may have their Lancaster and the Storrows their Lincoln, and all the rest their other favourite bits of domain, but we Apleys and Bromfields and Calders know they are not Milton.

Yes, I remember very well the day I ran away from my nurse, Norah. I stood on my own two legs that day until Corcoran, the gardener, finally found me, catching polliwogs in the swamp. Yes, Rhodora, I remember how we got kerosene over ourselves in the lamp roomj and I remember Sundays too — they were not as pleasant at our house as they were at yours. We were all more afraid of Father on Sunday than on any other day of the week. He was larger and more silent then. Father could laugh loudly enough, he could even play, on weekdays, but not on Sunday and neither could we

children. After breakfast Father would summon me to the library. He would want to know everything which I had done and learned during the week, and then would talk to me on some interesting subject on which I suspect he had prepared himself the night before. Perhaps it would be Mr. Darwin's Theory of Evolution, or again a snatch of Roman History. When all this was over. Mother and the girls and Father and I would mount in the carryall for the ride to the Church at Milton Corners. The hour and a half at Church was a period of complete quiescence and, must I say it frankly, an interval of such boredom as I have never known since.

You must have felt it too, Rhodora, because I remember you across the aisle, and I remember that Church smell. What made it, do you suppose? I think it had something to do with the building which had been closed during the week. There was that aura rising from pew cushions and hymn books mingling with the scent of flowers about the pulpit and lavender and camphor from the clothing of the congregation. Do you remember how the silk dresses rustled when everyone stood up with a sound something like the leaves in autumn? — without the wildness of the leaves. Do you remember the hats and bustles? I used to wish that Mr. Pettingill would not keep making us jump up to sing the hymns and make responses. Every time we were comfortably settled it would be his pleasure to make us move. Then there was a period of standing close to Mother's skirts, but not so close as to step on them, while all the dark people of the grown-up world stood talking. Then there was the drive home again, and Sunday dinner with Sunday guests. Oh well, so much for Sunday, and now I come to the strangest thing about it — I would give half of what I possess to be back at Hillcrest on one of those Sundays if I could have the assurance of living into a Monday morning. How I have run on! Your letter is

to blame for it, Rhodora. It has given me the will of speech. You must get well soon and join us at Hillcrest. Catherine has just come in this minute from her dressing room, and has asked me to whom I am writing. She joins her love with mine and her hope with me that all is well with you. . . .

The feelings expressed in this letter are such as have no lasting significance. For the last twenty years of his life, George Apley was a pewholder in King's Chapel, where he attended services regularly each winter.

"There is nothing," he once wrote to his son, "like the discipline of Church. It is a fine thing for the spirit. I cannot see why you do not understand this."

The scenes and the hours of Hillcrest, which were to play such a continued part in George Apley's life, were occasionally interrupted in his boyhood by visits to other members of the family, particularly to his Aunt Jane Brent, who lived of course in that charming community of the Brents, on Pachogue Neck on Buzzards Bay. The theater of his life was already broadening, and with it the field of his human contacts. One gains a sense of this and an impression of a boy's naive enthusiasm in a letter which he wrote to his mother from his Aunt and Uncle Brent's in the summer of 1874. This is among the earliest of George Apley's letters. It is done in the careful, copybook hand that speaks well for the discipline of Hobson's School in Boston.

Dear Mamma: —

I am very well. I hope you are well. I have brushed my teeth every night and said my prayers. I play all day with all my cousins. I like the sea. Uncle Horatio has a sailboat. He has a dog, too, and a goat that pulls a cart. We press

flowers in the dictionary. Can Father send me ten cents? With love ...

This letter was evidently referred to Thomas Apley, for his reply has been kept with it.

My dear little man: —

Here is your ten-cent piece and do not forget that this is a good deal of money. Think of it this way: it can buy ten lead pencils or two tops and a string, or enough candy to make you very ill. Please try to think carefully exactly what you want, before you spend it, because there is no satisfaction as great as spending wisely, and few annoyances as great as feeling that money has been wasted. I am glad you like the sea. . . .

On other occasions he was sent to visit the family of his maternal uncle, Henry Hancock, at Nahant, and again we have a letter, written in the summer of 1876.

jDear Mamma: —

I hope you are well. I hope everybody is well. I am well. I like Uncle Henry. He makes me laugh. I like Aunt Mabel, too. She is fat. My Cousin Tom and I go fishing off the rocks. Uncle Henry plays cards. When is Father coming to get me? With love . . .

This letter was answered by Elizabeth Hancock Apley.

My dearest little son: —

You are getting to be a big boy now. You must grow used to seeing some things of which your parents do not entirely approve. If your Uncle Henry plays cards you know he has a perfect right, I have not the slightest objection except I think

that card playing is a waste of time. That is why your Father and I do not play cards. I am glad your Uncle Henry makes you laugh. There is nothing like a good joke. There is only one thing in your letter I am sorry for. It is not right to make remarks on the appearance of other people, particularly of your dear relations. Your Aunt Mabel would be very sorry if she were to think that you had written of her stoutness. Your dear father will come to take you home in the steam cars on Monday. . . .

BEACON STREET AND SCHOOL DAYS

Further Glimpses

Toward the Broadening Horizon of

Custom and Environment

THUS ONE sees that the world of George Apley is already growing broader. This correspondence opens vicariously, to the reader, a quiet world of mind and order. Already this world was reaching for George Apley, as it has reached for all its children, tying him by invisible bonds to this person and to that, directing him in his tastes and his associations, and offering him a particular position which was his by right of birth.

To those of us who know it and are a part of it there is nothing unnatural in the preoccupation of a Bostonian with his environment J for order — so lamentably lacking in other cities — tends to make him so completely at home and so contented with his social group that he is unhappy in any other. Starting with the nucleus of the family and its immediate friends, and next to it the school attended by these same contemporaries, he finally reaches the dancing class, and then the Thursday afternoons, and next the Friday evenings. A young girl will be introduced into society and will join the Sewing Circle of

her year J a boy will be taken into his father's Club at Harvard-There is a simplicity in this procedure which emanates, I think, from the laudable similarity of ideas which makes up Boston life. These ideas have their foundation on the firm substratum of common sense which runs back to the beginnings of our colonial founders. This common sense, combined with an appreciation of what is truly fine, has given us a stability and a genuine society in a chaotic, nervous nation. If this society has moulded an individual in conformation to its principles, I, for one, cannot see why this is a deplorable situation, as every human being must conform to the social demands of his group, whatever that group may be. If George Apley failed to meet certain challenges, let us admit that we all have failed in some respects, and let us remember that we stand together peculiarly as one large family. Collectively, in habits and ideals, our group is a family group where kinship, however distant, stretches into the oddest corners.

In the winter home of Thomas Apley the boy George found himself exposed, however indirectly, to the events surrounding the active life of his father, which differed from the cultivated leisure of Hillcrest. By regular habits of life he was made to feel his own responsibility and he was aware, though vaguely, of the unsettled events of that period so aptly named by the recent writer, Claude Bowers, "The Tragic Era." The unpleasant affair of the Credit Mobilier and the "Black Friday" on the New York Stock Exchange could not help being reflected, to an observant boy, in his father's face and manner. Thomas Apley, like every other New England industrialist, was piloting his craft through difficult financial waters, where politics not infrequently were lashed to banking. Thus it was George Apley's privilege to meet, during his boyhood at his

BEACON STREET AND SCHOOL DAYS 43

father's house in Beacon Street, figures from the world of practical affairs and politics — who differed in some essentials from the leaders of scholarship and letters who sought the companionship of his mother.

"I wish," he once wrote, "that I could better have appreciated the value of these side-whiskered gentlemen in their tall silk hats. I can only recall most of them as tall, heavy-set strangers, whose faces shared the stern resolution of my father's own expression. Yet vague though they seem to me to-day, they had a vitality which I cannot forget. They are a type which is not seen in Boston at present. I often wonder where their kind has gone."

As is true with nearly every man of property, the political convictions of Thomas Apley were essentially conservative, and of a sort which confined themselves principally to the needs of the textile industry and to the industrial growth and prosperity of New England. He was, from the course of events, an ardent Protectionist, particularly for leather and textile products. Although he never coveted any political office, his influence — which was greater than many knew — was always thrown on the side which he considered would best further New England development j and thus he was a liberal contributor to the Republican Campaign Fund. His eminent good sense in these matters is illustrated by an extract from a letter to his brother William.

You appear worried for the aptitude shown here by "Paddy" in politics. I cannot share this alarm 5 instead I am quite willing that he should interest himself in municipal affairs as long as there is a firm hand at the top, which is I am sure the case at present. What concerns me more is your account of an element in Apley Falls that is giving wrong ideas to our mill

labour. I hope you will soon get the names of the moving spirits and send them packing.

Referring to this further issue of stock, I think matters are going very nicely, but I beg you to leave the arrangement entirely to me. If these Wall Street men press any further demands, I think they will be sorry. I have, by the way, purchased a few thousand shares in young Agassiz's copper mine. This was partly out of friendship to the family of the great naturalist — for, as you know, I do not think much of mining speculation. However, it has elements which might interest you.

I am seeing H. to-morrow and G. and I am confident that everything will go well in that direction. That block of holdings is absolutely sound, an insurance for the future, and I think we would be wrong in entertaining any offer, however attractive. . . .

This is a glimpse, perhaps too intimate, into the lifework of one of the most active and respected men of his generation. It displays excellently the serene, practical capability of the father and throws an amusing sidelight on the early history of the Calumet and Hecla mines, which were to do so much for the prosperity of Boston. The astuteness of Agassiz was eminently congenial to Apley, and reminds me of a story which Thomas Apley once told his son George and myself when we called at his house one Sunday.

On an occasion some Harvard students went to great pains to construct an insect for a naturalist which had never been seen on earth, air, or water. They used the thorax of one species, the wings of another, the legs of a third, and the antennas of ji fourth. When the professor was confronted with the final result, and was asked what it might be, he smiled.

BEACON STREET AND SCHOOL DAYS 45

"I think," he said, "that it is called the humbug." This story is an example of Thomas Apley in one of his lighter moods, which have perhaps been too much neglected. One must not forget that life in those days had its own modicum of robust gayety. One may obtain a glimpse of it, if one is interested, from the pages of the little book entitled "Rollo in Cambridge," published at that time, a satire which is full of laughter. Nor must we forget Lucretia Hale's inimitable satire of the time, the "Peterkin Papers," which deal with the mirth-making vagaries of the Peterkin family — which were surely parodies of her own flesh and blood — and the practical Lady from Philadelphia, who rescued them from so many difficult situations. Yes, the generation of the seventies had its moments of rollicking amusement. Their own long friendships with each other, dating also from childhood, enabled them to unbend at times and to be almost children again. Parties of charades, dealing with abstruse words amazingly acted, and games of quotations did more than test their intellectual skill of an evening. On such occasions there was an undertone of carefree merriment and friendliness that we youngsters now growing old have never been able to recapture. Then there were the outdoor days, the afternoons of skating on Jamaica Pond and the afternoons of coasting on some friendly hill. I have seen with my own eyes Elizabeth Apley, dressed in her grandmother's made-over woolens, coasting down the slope at Hillcrest boy-fashion, and enjoying it as much as the rest of us. George Apley himself has spoken of long peals of mirth coming through the closed doors of the dining-room when his father and his guests sat alone after dinner. Thomas Apley was in his office frequently at seven in the morning, and did not return home until the children's bed-

time J thus kis real impression on the family must have been shadowy, as George Apley has suggested — but it was an all-embracing shadow.

His ninth year saw George Apley established at Hobson's School on Marlborough Street, that institution which so many of us have to thank for our early education. In it he met the scions of his own social class, in it he cemented many of the friendships which were to endure through life. It was there that the present writer himself met George Apley.

It may be well to give a brief description of Hobson's School, for it is an institution which I regret to say is passing. I regret, because it had so many of the essentials of high thought and plain living. It had few playgrounds and not much fresh air, but these were replaced by wholesome, undeviating discipline. The school was housed in the two lower floors in Mr. Hobson's own dwelling, in rooms bare except for desks and blackboards. The presiding genius was Mr. Hobson himself, — "Old Hobby," we called him, — a stiff, melancholy man, with black sideburns and stern gray eyes. His dress was unvaried, a black Prince Albert coat, black cravat, and a pair of noiseless Congress boots. He had two assistants who had recently graduated from Harvard J one, a Mr. Weems, had the first two classes under his particular charge. This Weems was somewhat of a dandy J to our simple and censorious eyes his cravats and his waistcoats had a dash of immorality, and of a Saturday afternoon ne would ride a high-wheeled bicycle. The second master seemed to us a tall, fine giant because he had rowed on the Harvard crew. Later, he had attended Oxford for a year, and this had given him an accent and a manner which excited our secret amusement — especially as we considered, so incorrectly, that the British were our hereditary enemies. In the savage

BEACON STREET AND SCHOOL DAYS 47

humor of childhood we nicknamed this master "John Bull Godfrey" and secretly used to imitate his voice and walk.

George Apley shared with the rest of us the perpetual mis-chievousness of boyhood, though not an unwholesome mis-chievousness. A sprightly, likeable force in George Apley, perhaps suppressed at home, had a freer rein in Mr. Hobson's school and gained for him among the rest of the pupils a distinct degree of respect. In his dealing with constituted authority he was a past master of sophistry, and possessed a very accurate sense of that difficult limit where transgressions cannot be overlooked but must be punished. This writer, his schoolboy friend, is able to recall a single amusing instance.

Mr. Hobson, during the hours of school, had laid down the law that there must be no whistling or disturbance on the stairs or halls as the boys walked from one classroom to another. On one occasion when George and I were walking up the stairs, George began to whistle. The ubiquitous Mr. Hobson, as was his custom on such occasions, descended upon us out of nowhere.

"Apley," he said, "I heard you whistling."

"No, Mr. Hobson," George answered, "I was not whistling, I was sissUng. I know that It Is wrong to whistle In the hall, but no one had told me that it was wrong to sissle."

As one views Mr. Hobson from the perspective of age, it is Interesting to reflect what his real reaction must have been to this remark.

It is such encounters as these, I verily believe, absurd as they may be to the ears of an adult, that play an important part in the triumphs of a boy. Such adventures add to his self-confidence and to his knowledge of human nature. There is another, of which George Apley himself speaks, in a paper

which he once read before the Monday Club, not very origi nally entitled "Memories of a Boston Boyhood."

There is one adventure in Mr. Hobson's school in which I can take no pride, and to which I have not alluded for a great many years, although it sometimes returns still to my thoughts in the watches of the night.

Once a week at Mr. Hobson's school there would come before us a being who had never obtruded into our ken until that time. He was a wanderer upon our shores, a Frenchman whose name had been anglicized to "Mr. Treete," who gave us lessons in his language. I do not know what there is about a Frenchman which seems invariably to amuse young Anglo-Saxon savages. I only know that Mr. Treete's tight waist and dainty leather shoes, his difficulties with our idiom, his unvarying politeness and his volatile temperament, made most of us giggle and laugh and play, as did the children who saw the lamb that followed Mary to school. Poor Mr. Treete possessed no powers of discipline, and we soon had an instinctive sense of this defect, so that every scholar in Mr. Hobson's school set out to make the life of this poor polite scion of a cultivated nation as miserable as possible. To my greatest shame I must confess that I was a leader in this movement. With the skill of a Chinese torturer I would think of ways to goad the poor man to the limit of his endurance, and finally I drove him beyond the limit. 1 did so by the composition of a little poem, the doggerel of which still is with me —

Mr. Treete, he has big feet, And all he eats is boiled wheat.

This for some reason reacted so strongly on Mr. Treete that he drew me out of my chair, dragged me before the class, and boxed my ears. This humiliation was richly deserved, but it

BEACON STREET AND SCHOOL DAYS 49

occurred at an unpropitious moment. Just as Mr. Treete's hand descended on my ear the door of the classroom opened, disclosing Mr. Hobson and my father, who had come to honour the school with a visit. The frown on my father's face was like that on the brow of Jove before he cast a thunderbolt.

"What is this man doing with George, Mr. Hobson?" he inquired.

I shall draw the veil over the final explanations. When they were over, Father sent me home in the carriage with orders to go to bed, and when I returned to school, it was to discover that Mr. Treete was no longer with us.

The same afternoon Father sent for me to visit him at his office on State Street, the first time that I had ever laid eyes on this establishment. I remember the clerks standing at their ledgers and the huge safe and the great iron letterpresses and Father's private offices, distinguished by a fine soft coal fire in the grate and, save the mark! a large brass cuspidor — for visitors I am sure, because my father never chewed.

"George," my father said, "your mischief has caused a great deal of trouble and misfortune. Mr. Treete, of course, has been obliged to leave Mr. Hobson's school j you have cost him his position. I hope you are very sorry." Truthfully, I had never been so sorry in my life for anything. I did not see why Mr. Treete had been obliged to leave, and I told Father so. His answer was characteristic of the older generation to the younger. "You are too young to understand," he said, and that was all. I can still only conjecture j I still do not understand.

Thus it is that a childhood life is filled full of imponderables. There are many things which a child does not understand, and I am not sure that the attitude of our fathers, of refusing to discuss certain matters with their young, was not fully as whole-

some as the frank and detailed explanations which are retailed to the child of the present. It must be an open question, which is the more confusing to a young mind, the explanation or the silence. Personally I prefer the latter j George Apley, like the rest of us, was obliged to cope with the silence and to put his trust into the maturer knowledge of another generation. At any rate boys were no different in our days from what they are at present.

The accusation of snobbery has been leveled at a certain section of our society so frequently that one is reminded of the proverb that where there is smoke there must be fire. It is true that a stranger coming to Boston, without the proper introductions or family connections, unless he is an Englishman or a Frenchman is apt to receive a somewhat perfunctory reception. Nevertheless, this noticeable trait, of which one hears so many strangers complain loudly, is due neither to pride in family nor to pride in intellectual attainments. We have alluded before to that final factor which, one must admit, does tend to close the door of careless social facility. It is the intense congeniality of our own society which has its inception in a unique community of ideas resulting in a common attitude toward life. When the individuals of one group find a complete peace and happiness and fulfillment in the association with one another, why should they look farther? This, I think, explains an evident but completely wholesome element of our self-satisfaction. It explains also our many marriages between our childhood friends and cousins. It explains why so many residents of Boston flock together when abroad, instinctively seeking the relaxation gained from each other when confronted with an alien environment — why Boston has her own hotel in New York City and In London and on the right bank of the Seine.

BEACON STREET AND SCHOOL DAYS 51

Yet, let us repeat, this congeniality bears in it no element of superiority toward or of dislike for the world around it.

Once admittance is gained inside this circle, one encounters the democracy of trust and friendship in its finest flower. It is manifested by a serene assurance that discounts the externals of dress and, indeed, of income. This explanation — tedious though it may be, and one already consciously felt, if not consciously analyzed, by all who read these pages — is an explanation for the unusual emphasis one places on George Apley's boyhood acquaintances, for these must inevitably become the friends of youth, the pillars of manhood, and the props of declining years. It furnishes also an explanation for the intimacy of nomenclature, and why the nickname of the school day has followed so many of us down the sunset path.

Unlike Gaul, the pupils attending Mr. Hobson's school may be divided into two groups: those who shared our background, and those who did not. We will concern ourselves with this first group primarily J and chief among them I shall mention George Apley's friend and contemporary, Winthrop Vassal. The name in itself describes his family — the Loyalist branch of the Tory Vassals, so many of whom left Boston for Halifax at the time of the Revolutionary War. Let us hasten to add that distinguished ancestors did not turn Winthrop's head, then or on any other occasion. He was a snub-nosed, reddish-haired, freckle-faced schoolboy who never lost the divine merriment of his youth. "Winty" Vassal, the life of our class and our Club at Harvard, the toastmaster and inimitable story teller at our class reunions, has ever maintained that fresh interest in youth. His imitation of the Irish conductor in the Brookline car, slightly mellowed by potations, is as side-splitting to the youngsters to-day as it is to us oldsters.

p THE LATE GEORGE APLEY

"Chick" Chickering was another of our group, musical even then, who has since distinguished himself for his studies in the art of English bell-ringing. Indeed, as one looks back at Mr. Hobson's school, one may take a pardonable pride in the later accomplishments of so many of our friends. "Tweaker" Sewall, who could catapult a spitball more surreptitiously and accurately than any boy at school, is Sewall, the surgeon, who developed a new and successful technique for the removal of the gall bladder. The voice of Tom Partridge, whom we knew for no good reason as "Daisy," has been heard for many years in pleadings before the Supreme Court at Washington. Geoffrey Broughton, whom George Apley once referred to as "Bookworm" Broughton, a name which was later contracted to "Wormy," is now known for his exhaustive study "The Massachusetts Fishing Fleet Before the Civil War." We may mention also George Apley's cousin, Horatio Brent, whose advice and loyalty have done so much to ensure the success of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and his second cousin Nathaniel Apley, the collector of the "North of Boston Colonial Letters," which this writer had the pleasure of publishing and editing.

These were our particular intimates at Mr. Hobson's school, and we have stayed together ever since as a little band. There were others — not many — who, I regret to say, have been less fortunate. Kindness compels one to skip briefly over the subsequent career of Jonas Walker, whom we knew in our school days as "Mike," and who later was fullback on our Harvard football team. His lurid affair with one of the dancing girls in "Floradora" is still a matter of talk as is his disappearance to Chicago and his return thence to New York. Yet through all these vicissitudes George Apley remained his stead-

BEACON STREET AND SCHOOL DAYS 53

fast friend, ready always to defend old "Mickey" from what he considered, wrongly, unjust censure. One must include in this same category the most brilliant, though erratic of our companions, Henry Joyce, the head boy at Hobson's, who was the first of his class to enter the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard. What might have been a brilliant and successful career has been clouded by an unbalanced preoccupation over social injustices. Garrison-like, he has dissipated his notable abilities in an unbalanced espousal of various lost causes, which led to his arrest while picketing the State House in the unfortunate Sacco-Vanzetti dispute, and again while assisting the agitator Mencken in his struggle against the Watch and Ward Society. These brief sketches, treated more frankly and informally than they would be in another type of work, and with the complete confidence that they will be read only by friendly eyes, may serve to show that the personnel of Mr. Hobson's school was an adequate cross-section of our world. If one could adjust oneself to this environment, it was surely safe to assert that afterlife would not present the problem which it might have had one's life been more sheltered. In this instance George Apley's efforts at adjustment appear to have been easy and natural, as excerpts from his diary illustrate. This was one of the sporadic diaries which he kept at the Instance of his mother, who offered him a tangible reward for making regular entries. She realized, as she said herself, that the discipline and perspective gained by even the brief jotting-down of the day's events were valuable to character.

"I know," she once wrote to her son, while pleading with him to continue his diary during his Freshman year at Harvard, "that a diary may have its disadvantages. It may be an unpleasant breeder of egotism, my dear, though I like to think

that egotism is not strong in your father's family or in mine. Yet if one recognizes this difficulty, it will surely conquer itself. A diary will make you able to "know thyself." Furthermore, when your mother reads it she will not be so far away from the interests of her own dear son."

Boston, Mondayy iSjg. Damp, chilly, rainy. I went to school. I missed in Latin. I wish I had a football. Amelia got mad this afternoon. Father put a blot of ink on her nose when she came home, he says it is the way to punish girls. I wish he would punish me that way.

Tuesday. Sunny and cold. Going home from school there were some toughs. Mike fought one of them. Then Jane and I played "lotto." There are too many girls, I wish I had a brother.

Saturday. No school. Horatio and I played in his back yard. We started walking back-yard fences. You can go a long way on fences. Old Mrs. Burridge opened a window and told us to get off. In the afternoon "Tweaker" came over to see me. We made such a noise that Father came out of the library and told us to stop.

Sunday. Father talked to me about Romulus and Remus, then we went to church, then Dr. Holmes and a professor from Harvard, I don't know his name, and some other people came to dinner. Amelia and I got giggling and she had to leave the room. Then Great-Aunt Jane came to tea, and she gave me ten cents. And that is all, except the Bible Game.

Wednesday. Snowing. We go to Hillcrest to-morrow for Thanksgiving.

In keeping with the Puritan tradition, one is not surprised to find that the Apley family, like so many others of the Cal-vinist extraction, observed Thanksgiving with a greater punc-

BEACON STREET AND SCHOOL DAYS ss

tiliousness than Christmas, that former "Popish holiday" once so inveighed against in Boston. One finds, indeed, that only community pressure finally weaned Thomas Apley away from the good old custom of his fathers — the giving of gifts on the New Year instead of on the Yuletidej but always through his lifetime that essentially New England day, Thanksgiving, was the high festival of the year, combining as it did pious thanks for plenty which the year had bestowed and a refurbishing of family ties. The group around the Hillcrest board was sometimes forty strong, composed of many branches of the Apley line whose members would not appear at Hillcrest for another year. Near the head of the board, in George Apley's childhood, would be seated his father's surviving brothers and sisters — with the exception of Edward Apley, whom an unfortunate nervous complaint, bordering on hallucination, prevented from attending the family function. Until her death in 1875, George Apley's grandmother, for whom the brig Pretty Pearl had been named so long ago, occupied the seat of honor at her son's right hand, and a toast of cider for the youngsters and ^Madeira for the grown-ups was always drunk to her, standing. Though the old lady's mind was failing in these latter vears, she invariably enjoyed these family meetingsj and one has the picture of her, in her neat lace cap, beaming down the length of the dining-room table, and out to the smaller tables in the parlor beyond. It has been said that the plenty of the feast sometimes disturbed her to the extent of her asking her son, Thomas, if he was quite sure that he could afford this extravagant outlay, and often she cautioned those near her to be sparing in the use of sugar. There is a story told of her on one of these festive occasions that displays the vagaries of a dear old lady's mind as it groped through the dark avenues of the past.

Once, it is said, when the Reverend Nathaniel Pettingill, who always attended these dinners to ask the blessing, was assisting her upstairs, she turned to him with this remark: —

"Young man, should you ever go blackbirding, be sure to select Negroes that are brought down from the mountains, they are stronger and healthier than the Blacks from the coast."

Where she may have picked up this stray bit of information was sometimes an interesting source of speculation in the more intimate family circle. But Thomas Apley assured his son George, and once assured the writer, that the remark was germane to certain incidents in old Salem shipping days but had little or nothing to do with the Apleys' former mercantile interests.

Close beside this "last leaf on the tree" there sat her sister, Jane, a brown-eyed, determined old lady, whose wit was pungent and quick and who was credited with a predilection for ':ertain bits of scandalous gossip which had better have gone ivith their subjects to the grave. Once, in later years, she shocked the table with an incredible tale of illegitimacy and a forced marriage in a distant branch of the family, which caused a pall of surprise and embarrassment to hover over the entire table. In all justice, one must add that such indiscretions were of the rarest. The younger generation, quite surprising in its numbers, occupied small tables in the parlor, where merriment sometimes rose to a pitch that obliged Thomas Apley to take a hand.

Such is a glimpse of another childhood scene, which must be dear to all that boast a New England heritage. The gastronomic demands of this single day were at times immense, for family obligations frequently obliged guests to look in on other dinners of collateral branches, so that the sight of that noble

BEACON STREET AND SCHOOL DAYS 57

bird the turkey, and his attendant collection of pies, was frequently anathema for weeks thereafter.

These childhood diaries of George Apley, of which we have given a brief sample only to show their quality, are obviously not worthy of quotation in themselves, except in so far as they give a light of reminiscence.

December 75. Went to dancing school and had to sit with the girls. i

Here is truly a segment of boyhood, which cannot fail but hold memories, fond or otherwise, for all of George Apley's contemporaries, for Papanti's Dancing School was as much a part of the life of the time as the lectures and the evening class. It was to Signor Papanti's that George Apley and the rest of us repaired, whether we would or no, to be taught the graceful intricacies of the waltz, so different from and so superior to the negroid steps and the drum-beat rhythm of the present. Mr. Papanti, whom we all must remember as a graceful Italian gentleman, had a power of discipline over his young charges, perhaps as a result of early military training, far superior to that of the unfortunate Mr. Treete. A stern look from Signor Papanti's dark eyes, and several sharp raps of his bow upon his fiddle, were sufficient to quell the exuberancies of the wildest rebel j yet now and then revolt would break out in some small way.

George Apley, in his "Memories of a Boston Boyhood," already quoted, alludes to certain reluctant youths who would persist in hiding behind the greatcoats in the boys' dressing room, rather than mount the stairs of the Tremont Street hail to join the fairer sex. These malingerers, when they were dis covered, were ushered upstairs by the agile dancing master hirt^

self and were obliged to walk across the floor from the boys' row to the girls' row amidst subdued tittering.

There was one girl [George Apley writes, to quote from his very quotable paper] by the name of Elizabeth Freer, the sister of Jimmy Freer, whose family dwelt on Chestnut Street, the same Jimmy who was the Harvard halfback. Elizabeth was prone to burst into unreasonable fits of giggles at Papanti's, which at times she was unable to suppress. When I discovered this weakness, I regret to say that I abetted it by every means in my power, and found that a few simple changes of facial expression would frequently throw the unfortunate child into convulsions. . . . "Poor girl," as Whittier so aptly says, "the grasses on her grave have forty years been growing."

It was here at Papanti's, as George Apley once confided to me, that he first set eyes on Catharine Bosworth, one of the Bosworths who dwelt near the corner of Mt. Vernon and Walnut Streets, another instance of how attachments ripen early in our environment. It is not difficult to perceive that these early days at Papanti's leave behind their train of friendly memories. Many a romance had its inception in this atmosphere, particularly at the more grown-up series of evening dances which we attended later. The auspices were always suitable for the meeting of young people, as the list of those attendant was under careful scrutiny and represented the best of our group.

REVEALING MEMORIES

A Few Instances

In Which Afley Meets Life in Its

More Challenging As-pects

A LETTER to his elder sister, Amelia, written in the middle of his fourteenth year, evidently when Miss Apley was on a visit to New York, sets another mark to the broadening of George Apley's horizon.

Dear Am: —

I hope you are having a good time and going to lots of parties. What do you think — Father took me to the theatre — the first time I've ever been to a real theatre. We went to the Museum to see a play called "So Lies the Dew, or A Confession of Conscience." I wish you would dress like Miss Jane-way. They tried to pretend that she was only a poor governess when she was really the heiress to Lord Roxbridge. . . .

The rest of the letter, which we will refrain from quoting here, indicates a boy's enthusiasm for the dramatic arts, as well as a dawning understanding of life, which has caused the writer to repair to the dramatic shelves of the Boston Athenasum in order to refresh his memory on the details of this production.

"So Lies the Dew," one recalls, was a highly successful and popular piece in its day, written by the actor-author George Willoughby, who played the part of the villain, Hugo Sayre. Admitting that the plot has not aged well, there is none the less a sparkle to Mr. Willoughby's dialogue which explains the great popularity of the piece. The theme was one of a genuine moral significance, which probably explains why young George was allowed to see a production which furnished much discussion around Boston teatables. Briefly stated, this drama was designed to show that deceit and covetousness meet their own retribution when facing the impregnable front of integrity. The three virtues of Tennyson — faith, hope, and chastity — are quite accurately unveiled in the action of five acts, centering around the dramatic question of whether a forgotten heiress will lose both her virtue and her inheritance. It may be added that the dialogue concerning this former attribute was couched in terms probably vague enough to be above the head of a boy of fourteen years, and at best was a minor element. Though the oversophisticated youth of the present may well laugh at the artificiality of the plot and the ridiculous contrivances of concealment in "So Lies the Dew," one shrewdly suspects that this drama in its reticences will prove in the course of time no more outmoded than the bald, inaccurate, and unintelligent realism of the present theater.

This drama is only mentioned here as an illustration of a new side of life which was confronting George Apley and which a boy of his generation was obliged to meet single-handed, with little or no explanation from his elders. The practice of ignoring many basic facts of relationship between the sexes, which was prevalent in George Apley's boyhood, one must repeat again was probably no more dangerous or absurd than

the franker expositions which are now presented to confused and uninterested youth. If a boy in those days was permitted to find out about such matters for himself, he generally did so quite accurately and with no great harm. As a schoolboy grew older there were certain parts of Boston which he was generally forbidden to visit, and needless to say he visited them.

It was in such localities in our late 'teens that we boys heard bits of conversation quite different from the talk in our parents' parlors J and yet, on the whole, perhaps this was not detrimental. Youth has its own capacity to absorb surprises, and the natural conservatism of a proper home environment put these surprises for a healthy boy in a suitable perspective.

George Apley and his boyhood group were now reaching that interesting, if difficult, period of adolescence when a curtain rises which has obscured the stage of life partially from the accurate but unsophisticated eyes of childhood, and when life, seemingly overnight, assumes a new significance that reveals the characters of those about us. For some this revelation, close to religion in its sudden illumination, brings in its train an awkward tongue-tied silence and an introspection, particularly on religious matters 3 and with George Apley this was partially the case, though we find him also developing that capacity for tolerant observation which will prove one of his outstanding and lifelong characteristics, and which stood him in such good stead over trying intervals.

In the summer of George Apley's fifteenth year he encountered an adventure which could not but have a profound effect upon his viewpoint in that it brought to him very vividly the presence of impending death. He had been sent from Hill-crest on one of those customary visits to the country estate of his uncle, Horatio Brent, which as we have already mentioned

is situated at Pachogue Neck on Buzzards Bay. Horatio Brent, who was the founder of Brent and Company, the banking house on Congress Street, was from boyhood an ardent sportsman whose collection of early shotguns still betrays his avidity. His windswept acres on Buzzards Bay were a haven for duck and quail shooters, and already he had interested George Apley in the sport by presenting the boy with a fine, light Parker on his birthday. It was here, also, on Pachogue Neck, as well as on the John Apley estate at Hamilton, that young George had his first experience in riding. But, more than these interests, sailing held him spellbound.

"When I am aboard a boat," George Apley once wrote, "tending the sheet myself, I am away from everything. I have always felt this to be true."

George Apley, already growing large and endowed with the wiry Apley physique, was allowed that summer to share one of those broad-beamed twenty-foot Cape catboats with his cousin, Horatio Brent, Junior. At five o'clock one summer afternoon, while they were off the South Rip Shoals some five miles off Pachogue Neck, they encountered a sudden thunder squall. Boylike, neither of them visualized the force of the gale behind its curtain of steamy water until it struck them suddenly with its full weight. They jibed, and the boat turned over. Fortunately, as it was discovered later, her ballast broke loose, and thus she floated, bottom up, affording the two boys a precarious hold. They remained clinging to the bottom, and encountering a high but warm sea, for some two hours, feeling their strength gradually ebbing away and their desire for life ebbing with it.

It was fortunate for the boys that Horatio Brent, disturbed by the suddenness of the storm, was on the lookout on the

veranda on Pachogue Neck. When the squall lifted he saw the bottom of the capsized boat and put out at once, with a local lobster fisherman to the rescue. Arriving, he found that George Apley had managed to get a piece of rope under the arms of Brent's half-unconscious son Horatio, and was thus preventing his cousin from being washed away. This is a matter of which George Apley has never spoken, and it may not be known to many of his family.

hetter from George Afley to his sister Amelia.

Dear Am: —

I had a chill when they took me off and Uncle Horatio made me take a glass of whisky. I felt better when I had the whisky. I seem to know a lot more. I am going to take that boat out again just as soon as I get up. I do not want anyone to think that I am afraid. . . .

Whether rightly or wrongly, this last wish was not gratified, at least in its entirety, as is shown by a letter from Thomas Apley which the writer found among George Apley's papers.

Dear George: —

Under no circumstances will you sail again this summer unless you are accompanied by a competent boatman, preferably the elder Nickerson from Beach Road. You were careless in handling that boat. You should have let down the peak and allowed her to ride it out. Instead, you allowed the full force of the squall to hit square on your sail. You have caused your mother a very great deal of worry and anguish. She was unable to attend the meeting of her Sewing Circle yesterday afternoon and has been in bed this morning with a severe headache. You are growing old enough now to remember that your actions have a direct effect upon all those who are interested in

you. I am enclosing my check for five dollars which I wish you to present personally to the lobsterman who was instrumental in getting you off that capsized boat. . . .

There is a further sequel to this incident which may not be known to the family but which reveals itself in a letter from Elizabeth Apley to her son. Normally it would not be quoted, and it is done so here at the risk of delicacy, to fulfill the writer's promise of holding nothing back in the life of the boy whose character as a man the writer has always revered: —

It is very dear of your cousin Henrietta to be taking such good care of you and naturally, George, you are very grateful to her. Being two years older than you, she must be a delightful and sympathetic companion and it must be at some sacrifice to her that she gives you so much of her time, though of course she is a sweet girl who has much of her mother's outgiving nature. Now, George dear, I am going to add a word of caution, because your happiness and your development are my greatest interest. It is hard for me to realize that my little boy is growing up to an age when he can take a different view of girls. You are close to the age when you may grow attached to someone a few years your senior. Mind you, nothing is more wholesome than cousinly friendship, but for your own peace of mind remember that anything else may result in un-happiness.

And, George, I do not need to tell you to revere womanhood, for that reverence is a part of the code of any gentleman. Reverence of womanhood, or at least a deep respect, is the cornerstone of life's structure. Give my dear love to Cousin Henrietta and all your other cousins.

Tragically enough, the experience of elders can seldom be translated to youth. That eminently sane advice of Elizabeth

Apley, one has reason to believe, went unheeded. The evidence of this is contained in several poems in one of the boy's stray notebooks which were probably never placed before the eyes for which they were intended. A few lines from one of them, entitled "To Henrietta," will be quoted here, if only because they reveal an attitude of chivalry which George Apley never lost. To the boy and to the man, the good woman was a creature of another world, to be protected at all costs.

There are things I dare not do, Henrietta

I would like to say, I love you, Henrietta,

I would like to touch your hand, but would you understand,

My love for you is true, Henrietta?

Though one may suspect that these lines came partially from the songs which George Apley heard rendered by his sisters and their swains around the piano in the Beacon Street parlor, they have, in spite of their triteness, a sad sort of beauty. To one who sees them scrawled on the yellowing pages of a notebook, they speak a little sadly of a boy's first love. They tell of the glamour and the beauty of an early comprehension of the world. They foreshadow the inevitable tragedy, and with it the half-ludicrous disillusion, of a boy's first lovej but in spite of disillusion George Apley remained throughout his life steadfast in his attitude, which was one of chivalry and restraint. This thought may be best expressed — before leaving the subject — in a letter which George Apley once wrote to his son John, and which is now in the hands of the writer.

You must not be shocked to discover, as I was in my early 'teens, that there are two kinds of women in this world, good women and bad women. The latter class you must learn to

treat somewhat differently from the former, as they concern your life only indirectly. But always remember this: Treat them all respectfully. You may be amazed to learn how much good there is in the very worst. At any rate, if will please you in later years to know that you have always been a gentleman, and, believe me, that is something.

Until now we have been describing the background of George Apley, important because it furnished the mainsprings of his character. But now the stage is set. Before George Ap-ley's eyes, his own sisters and parents, his school friends, his masters, the Brents, the Hancocks of Nahant and the John Apleys at Hamilton, and many others in the family circle, were beginning to assume a new and more rounded relationship. They will now step forth on these pages as people seen through a young man's eyes.

George Apley and the present writer and other members of his school group were graduated from Mr. Hobson's school in the spring of 1883. Having passed his preliminary examinations that same spring and his final examinations that autumn, George Apley became a member of the Harvard class of 1887, for the first time actually launched into a larger world. A letter of his father's at the time contained some common-sense admonitions. The letter was dated from New York.

Your examination marks, which are before me, while not of the highest, are on the whole satisfactory as far as I can judge by comparing them with the results achieved by the sons of my other friends. The radical views of Charles Eliot are changing Harvard into a place which I no longer wholly understand. Nevertheless, I feel that some views of mine, those of an old "fogey" if you wish to call me so, still have a certain

pertinence. You have always seen wine upon our table. You have seen it used, not abused. If you wish to drink moderately at meals, it is now your right. As for smoking, although I have enjoyed a cigar after dinner for many years I had rather that you avoided the habit. As for women, I mean to talk to you sometime, George, about this matter. You may now and then fall in with a "fast" crowd5 you may be subjected to temptations. My great hope is that your bringing-up will cause you to see them in a sensible light. I have no objection to your taking part in the various college sports now becoming so fashionable, nor has your mother any objection. I only wish you to remember that you are primarily at Harvard to broaden and to improve your mind and I want you to remember that how you behave reflects both on your parents and your family. I do not think I need say any more, because you are my son. While I am anxious you should live comfortably in keeping with your position, I do not wish you to live on the scale of the "swells." There is nothing more ill-bred than the over-lavish spending of money. Your allowance, above your living expenses and a reasonable amount for books, will be fifty dollars a month, I think a generous sum. Out of this you must dress and amuse yourself.

Business will keep me here for another two weeks. Your mother will settle you in your rooms and I shall hope to hear a good report from you at our first Sunday lunch together at Hillcrest.

CHAPTER VII

HARVARD DAYS

**About these halls there has always been aft

aroma of high feeling not to be found or lost

in science or Greek — not to be -jixedy

yet all-feruading^*

THERE are certain persons of whom it has been said, partly in jest though partly in earnest, that their clock struck twelve while they were undergraduates at Harvard and that in the interval remaining to them between youth and the grave their personalities underwent no further change. This is an indictment, though the writer does not believe it wholly a fair one, which may be leveled against a number of his contemporaries. It might be more suitable to consider it not an indictment but rather a tribute to Boston and Cambridge that so many of her sons succeed in staying perennially young in spirit, that by some magic the scenes of their youth and the triumphs of their youth remain indelibly before them. Considering that George Apley^s preparation for his college years had a peculiar adequacy, it is not strange that he should have been one of that happy band who derived much inspiration from college life. By tradition and position George Apley^s group, of which the writer was one, was truly fitted for a college career.

The friendship with the leading spirits of our class was open to us by right, as were the doors of the best houses during many events of the social season.

It is not strange, therefore, as one attempts to reveal the thoughts and actions of his most intimate friends through the "shortest, gladdest" years of his life — a line unfortunately written by a Yale man, but none the less true — that one feels a certain thrill of anticipation. Even the stupidest, least observant of us were confronted with a certain something at Harvard, indescribable but unmistakable, which could not fail to add to our stature and our manner. It is an attribute which has best been described by the late Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior, the soldier and the jurist, in his answer to a toast at the Commencement of 1884.

"It has been one merit of Harvard College that it has never quite sunk to believing that its only function was to carry a body of specialists through the first stage of their preparation. About these halls there has always been an aroma of high feeling not to be found or lost in science or Greek — not to be fixed, yet all-pervading."

Our task will now be to show how George Apley, like so many another son of New England, took to himself a portion of this feeling and how his Harvard associations formed him, in spite of a single interlude which was to test his character, into a high-minded gentleman.

The present writer, in an article "Harvard in the Eighties," which received much favorable comment at the time of its publication in Harfer^s magazine, has described something of the life of the period with its swift change of taste and fashion, and perhaps a portion of it may be quoted here as the setting for the new scene of George Apley's activities.

The Harvard of our day was undergoing a great transition which reflected the material growth of the country. This change largely expressed itself in the form of bricks and mortar, and its cycle may be marked by many fine contributions to the older building groups. The architectural triumph of the towering Memorial Hall, the informal yet important fagade of the Hemenway gymnasium, the Gothic of Gore, the pleasantly sculptured cornices of Gray's and Matthew's Halls, are some of the more interesting examples which this Harvard has passed on to posterity. Although the present may criticize the architecture of Richardson it bears witness to an undeniable intellectual vigor which has its prototype in many of the figures who adorned the Harvard scene, the scholars whose personality formed the taste of succeeding Harvard generations, the Childs, the Shalers, the Hills, and the Nortons. Harvard was more truly the repository of the best of New England culture than it has perhaps ever been since. Cambridge was emerging with this Harvard from the status of a small university town into something that was larger.

These impressions may be supplemented by some of George Apley's own, given in a letter which he sent the writer on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of their class.

Cambridge is indeed growing a dizzy place since we were there. Will, but I'll warrant some of the old landmarks are left. There is the livery stable at Inn Street, for instance, where I kept my horse and trap. Cousin Jane lent me the money for it, you remember? There is Bow Street where we had our Club Table; that old house is still there, frowning upon the sybaritic magnificence of Beck Hall, and there are a number of tobacco shops and billiard parlors about the Square, suspiciously like those we once frequented, and the old Lamfoon rooms on Holyoke Street, and the house where the Club had its quarters.

The new building to which we have all contributed is certainly more in keeping with its dignity, but I like the old one better. What a gay place Cambridge was! Full of light and laughter — "Sweet college years with pleasure rife" — we may not have learned much, Willj we may have had our heartburnings and our jealousies, but we had a high old time. I'll tell you something confidentially. Although I don't understand it myself, I seemed to be standing a good deal more on my own two feet out there than I am to-day in spite of everything. I wonder why — what's happened to us. Will?

Even to the writer that question is sometimes haunting and disturbing, for there are certain enigmas in the past. The truth was that we were much the favored few, moving in an exclusive circle that was the envy of many less fortunately situated.

The pictures of George Apley at this period might well be those of the typical Harvard man. There is one before me as I write, taken with the rest of the Club Table. It shows him a muscular, rangy, sharp-nosed youth, with thick yellow hair and a hint of laughter at the corners of his mouth, wearing a striped blazer and boasting a wisp of mustache on the upper lip. Besides this picture, there is also a word portrait of him by his friend, Dr. Sewall, in a letter of reminiscence now in the author's pc^-session.

I think the one in our crowd who had the best time of all was George Apley. George was quite a figure in those days in our little world. Once he was away from home he blossomed out, though perhaps all of us blossomed out in that congenial atmosphere. George was never a wild rake, like Mike Walker, but he was full of honest fun. We all know how he won the middleweight sparring his Freshman year, in the Hemenway gymnasium. But more than that, he applied himself to his

work — not that George burned the midnight oil. You and George were the literary ones in our crowd, Will, though of course you have gone much farther. Your magic gift of words, to bear such fine fruit in the later world of letters, was getting you on the Lamfoon already, but George honestly applied himself to writings he was sensible, too, most of the time, a good influence on the rest of us. Except for one lapse we all know of, George was a steady boy, but there must have always been that erratic strain. He had a bit of the rebel in himj the Apleys are too high-strung.

This picture may serve, although it is not accurate in all of its essentials. Though lacking perhaps in brilliance, George Apley was endowed with a peculiar gift for friendship and with a certain generosity which even caused him to espouse the interests of others who were not in his own circle. He had a way of making many acquaintances among eccentrics who could do him no great good j and this tendency, we shall see, grew more pronounced during his undergraduate career, causing him to go against the sound sense and expostulations of his father and of many of his friends. This leads one to mention a single instance, brought out by the following correspondence.

Extract from- a letter to his fatherj December 1883.

I am studying very hard and I have been taken on the tug-of-war team. I am also going out for the debating society and I have written a few "bits" which the editors of the Lamfoon think are quite good. I have only been to Boston one night all week and that was to the Barrows' dance. Several of us rode home in a cab. In case you have heard some talk about it, I want to assure you that it was not our fault that the horse ran away. Yes, I am making a number of friends. There is one

here whom I like very much (his name is Henry Alger) who sits beside me in English. His family come from Springfield and I should like very much to bring him home some Sunday for lunch.

Letter from Thomas Afley,

Dear George: —

Your mother and I were both somewhat worried by your letter. We neither of us can understand why you did not stop to see us if you came to Boston to the Barrows' dance. Surely you might have given us a moment of your time. I hope that excessive drinking did not cause the horse to run away, and your mother hopes so too. Your account of your many activities indicates to us both that you are spreading yourself very thinly over too large a surface.

What worries me more is a fear that you are not meeting the right people. The Westcotts, who were kind enough to agree to keep an eye on you, have told me you have declined two of their invitations to tea. No doubt you have more important business, but nothing is more important than social consideration. You must bear in mind that the friendships and associations which you are now making at Harvard will be with you for the rest of your life. In my experience there is no truer axiom than that "a man is known by the company he keeps." Besides this, the connections you are now forming are of definite importance to your subsequent career, both in college and in business.

It is the fondest hope of your mother and me that you will be taken into the Club which has had an Apley for a member for many generations. But, your worthiness to be one of its members depends to a certain extent upon yourself. You must be sure to see the right people, which should not be difficult for you, as you have been born among them. Your mother and

I have been greatly worried by your mention of this fellow-student named Alger. It is all very well to be democratic and pleasant to an acquaintance who sits beside you in the classroom, by an alphabetical accident. I have no wish to limit your circle of acquaintance, as acquaintances are valuable and instructive, but you must learn as soon as possible that friendship is another matter. Friends must be drawn from your own sort of people, or difficulty and embarrassment are very apt to be the result. Who is this man, Alger? Though I have not heard of any Algers in Springfield, my acquaintance there is not large. I simply want to feel that he will be a useful and congenial friend. . . .

'Letter to Thomas Afley.

Don^t worry, Harry Alger is first rate. We box every afternoon in the gymnasium. He says his father knows you. His father owns the West Springfield Yarn Company. , . .

Letter from Thomas Afley,

Dear George: —

That is capital. I remember Mr. Alger now, and I am very glad that you know young Harry. Have him around to lunch by all means. Your mother and the girls will be glad to see him. The West Springfield Yarn Company is a very sound organization. . . .

Between the lines of this correspondence one who has been a parent may readily read and sympathize with the anxious solicitude for the welfare of a son who is leaving the family roof and entering the world. This desire to control the destinies of one's offspring is a difficult one to check, for it contains all that is best in instinctive parenthood. If the anxiety of Thomas

and Elizabeth Apley for their son's welfare may have been too great, they may have had their own reasons for anxiety which they never communicated to the world at large.

'Letter from Elizabeth Afley, December 5, i88S'

My dearest George: —

Your life in Cambridge sounds like a very happy one, though it is far removed from mine. Sometime we must have a good long talk about it. I was sorry we could not have done this last Sunday at teatime, but my guests made it impossible and then you, yourself, had to hurry back to do your lessons. I don't want you to overdo your studying, George. So many have ruined their eyes from overwork and I was worried at your appearance at Sunday luncheon. Both Amelia and Jane were worried too. Your eyes looked badly and you did not have a hearty appetite. Don't sit up too late studying another Saturday night but arrange it so that your Saturdays can be the beginning of a healthful relaxation before a day of rest.

Yesterday I saw dear Mrs. Westcott, who told me that you had been in to tea and that my George spoke well and intelligently about his courses of study. I am so pleased that you have seen the Westcotts and that you may nov.' and then have a bit of home life during the week. I have heard from the Bos-worths, too, that you attended their party of evening games. I am so pleased that you like them. I suppose you think me an old lady now, but I still love charades and I do think that Catharine is turning into such a sweet girl. You may not realize it as I do, because you two have played together for so many summers in Milton, but you will realize it some day. Some day you will know that there is a beauty of the soul that is more important than worldly beauty. Remember this when you see worldly beauty. . . .

Though this sort of admonition and encouragement could not but have a definite result, George Apley had patently reached a stage where youth must make its own adjustment, and must do so by the painful system of trial and error. With the world at one's feet, adventurous youth must explore its lights and shadows. In the following college theme, which evidently formed a part of his exercises in Freshman English, one suspects that there is more than a little firsthand experience. If so, it will serve to add to the veracity of George Apley's portrait. If not, it will do no harm. Although this early attempt at composition deals with a social problem not frequently mentioned, it must not be forgotten that every man has faced this problem in some one of its forms. The theme is entitled "A Night of Regret."

The two young men had been drinking more than was good for them. They did so because they wished to prove proper companions for the older members of the party and they learned their lesson. When it was suggested that everyone should go to Mrs. Bryant's, Hugo said he did not know the lady and was afraid that he might not be in a fit condition to go anywhere. He was surprised that the others laughed heartily at his remark, assuring him, at the same time, that Mrs. Bryant would not mind. Next, this thoughtless party was in a cab, headed for a part of Boston out of the fashionable district. They stopped before a large house whose hall was lighted dimly. The hour was late, but Mrs. Bryant seemed glad to see them. Hugo had never seen anyone like Mrs. Bryant j she was richly dressed and spoke with an Irish brogue, but she was most hospitable. She said the girls were in the parlour. Hugo's ignorance was such, or perhaps his condition, that the painted cheeks and carmined lips of the crea-

tures in that close, heavily scented, brilliantly lighted room gave him no message of warning. It was not until one of these jingled him out and signified her profession in a way he could not doubt that Hugo knew he was in a house of ill fame. The knowledge shocked him to sobriety. He saw then where a thoughtless man might be led by heedless companions and he left the place at once, filled with fear and loathing and tortured by remorse. Such are the pitfalls that lie around us in ft great city.

This exercise, the rest of which is not worth quoting, was given the deservedly low mark of C-minus, but it shows something of George Apley's sensibility.

It is only fair to add that the extra-curricular activities of our set led only a few of its members on such expeditions more than once. There was little incentive, with the opportunity so freely offered to meet girls of one's own class at the social assemblies of the Boston season. Though the laws of chaperonage were strict in our day, it was possible for young people to meet, skating on Jamaica Pond or walking in the suburbs. These casual meetings which occurred now and again afforded enough of wholesome romance and were protected usually by an honorable reticence. There was also the wholesome outlet of vigorous competitive sport 5 the important connection between a sane mind and a healthy body was fully realized in the Harvard of that day. Somewhat light for the hard scrimmage of the football field, George Apley's attention was directed to sparring, then a very popular pastime. At the winter meeting in the Hemenway gymnasium, much to his surprise, he found that he was proficient in the manly art and actually outclassed the University titleholder of his weight — Higgins, a senior. This triumph could not help but have a profound effect in George

Apley's college world. It not only gave him a new confidence in relation to his fellows but a new respect for himself. He suddenly became deservedly popular with the athletic set. In a letter which he wrote much later to his classmate, Chickering, he speaks amusingly of his own reactions at that time — probably, as he said, one of the most important periods in his life.

I suppose I must have been quite insufferable for a while, but I don't believe that the rest of you fellows at the Club table ever knew what that triumph in the Hemenway gymnasium meant to me. I felt that I was somebody in my own right. I think I stood up straighter after that and did not back down so readily in an argument, but I must have been insufferable. . . .

If he was, it was a phase which the writer does not remember. As a matter of fact, George Apley's prowess was causing him to be considered favorably in other directions. The editors of the Harvard Lam-poon, the little group which is brought together by its own merry humor as much as by its literary capacity, began to find in George Apley a congenial companion. Toward the end of the year, he was made a member of the Board j and also, greatly to his own pleasure but somewhat to his father's alarm, he was made a member of an organization, now defunct, known as the Racquet Club, whose membership was composed of an element known to some of us as "fast."

The chief function of the Racquet Club was to spend a day each spring in a Tally-Ho coach on a country party. George Apley, who was able to handle the ribbons himself, acquitted himself well on such occasions, but perhaps what he enjoyed most were evening meetings in the rooms of his friends, where certain musical spirits raised their voices in choruses that per-

haps may still be heard beneath the College elms: "A Health to King Charles," "Seeing Nellie Home," "After the Ball Is Over." The approval of his class was finally accorded George Apley by his selection as one of the first ten of the D.K.E. Society, and Thomas Apley, himself, was keenly aware of the importance of this honor.

Letter jrotn Thomas Afley.

Dear George: —

This last bit of news is capital. I am very, very proud. So are your mother and your sisters, and many of the doubts which I have felt about the wisdom of your course in college are now favorably resolved. I do not believe that you know, yourself, the importance of what has befallen you. The approval of your classmates so expressed will, in a sense, be yours for life, and we need no longer have any fear about your election to the Club early in your Sophomore year. Again, I say that this is capital and I am sending you my check for fifty dollars, with only a single word of caution. Remember, though you have justly earned it, this honour comes to you in a sense because of your family's position. Thus, we feel honoured with you. . . .

Although the mantel in George Apley's study at Gray's was now beginning to bear its burden of athletic trophies, and its walls the medals of the clubs, the study lamp upon the rosewood desk which his mother had given him was not entirely dimmed. He was already laying the foundations of his later tastes, but for these he was also under obligation to the sensitive discrimination of Elizabeth Apley. It was she who guided him away from much that was trivial and valueless, and so we find him years later saying, in a letter to his son: "My mother

taught me one important thing about reading, which I shall now hand on to you. It is simply this: Distrust the book which reads too easily because such writing appeals more to the senses than to the intellect. Hard reading exercises the mind."

This bit of Puritan tradition did not, however, blind George Apley to the lighter side of letters, for one often found him at Gray's laughing over his Dickens and his Thackeray j and his marks in the final examinations of his Freshman year, though they set him only in the middle of his class, were not at all discreditable.

Early in his Sophomore year, as his father predicted, George Apley was taken into the Club and joined that band which links each member in its peculiar brotherhood, no matter how far from kindred this meeting may take place. Once in this Club, much of George Apley's period of experimentation was over and his interests necessarily became centered in the Club itself. Though his acquaintance with outside members of the student body continued, he could not help but feel the weight of his added responsibilities which he gracefully expressed in a toast at one of our annual dinners: —

"All things which are worth while demand vigilance and sacrifice. To be a good Clubmate requires these attributes, for one's first effort must be for the Club. Critics have said that this is a narrowing of interest, but the reward is proportionately great."

It must not be supposed, however, that the Club limited George Apley's student activities, as this was far from being its purpose or its spirit. He had put on weight in the summer of his Freshman year, so that in the next season he offered himself for the varsity crew and rowed at Number Six for the next two successive seasons.

He appeared also in his Junior and Senior years in two musical extravaganzas of the Hasty Pudding Club, the lyrics of which were written by the present author and the music by Chickering. The writer well remembers the nights of vigil and the weeks of nervous suspense while the first of these efforts was in rehearsal, for upon its success depended in a great measure his own personal vindication. The knowledge that there would be present many graduates well known in the literary world, and that most of Boston society would occupy the stalls when the curtain rose, did nothing to assuage his doubts and fears. A glance at the old score now reminds him that the action took place in a Balkan palace, where, by a really ingenious twist of circumstances, the princess changed places with the lady's maid, little realizing that a handsome duke from another kingdom, madly in love with this heiress to the throne, had already insinuated himself into the palace as "boots boy."

Amazed by his sudden infatuation for the little lady's maid, this duke is about to resign all to follow the path of his love, when the old king, who has fortunately been hiding under the bed, emerges, deeply moved by the entire scene, in time to explain that the pretty little menial is, after all, the princess. At several of the rehearsals the more serious-minded members of the cast questioned the advisability of laying the scene in the King's bedroom, feeling that its implications might be misunderstood j but one and all agreed to risk it on account of its mirth-provoking qualities. The author's word is not necessary for assuring the reader that the whole production was an immense success. The critic from the Boston Advertiser was kind enough to write the next morning: "We have a true dramatist in our midst. His name is Willing. . . . George Apley as the prince interpreted his role magnificently, and Edgar Sleed aa

the princess, though somewhat muscular, was on the whole a dainty sprite in lace and muslin." When George Apley, in an apron smeared with shoe blacking, sang the song "My Heart Is in My Boots," the author knew for the first time how really good his words were. Many still rank them with that classic "Odd Fellows' Hall," and they have been revived at least ten times in entertainments before the Berkley Club.

Such triumphs as these, though not sedate, have a way of exercising a peculiar importance through the years. Whenever those of us who have joined in that boyish merrymaking get together, memory binds us and lends an unconscious mellowness to our conversation that is as sound as a good rare wine. Back to our minds come a hundred pictures, made dear because we shared them together, and we know that the bravery of youth is recaptured and indeed that it has never left us. It is before me now, in a paper which George Apley read at the dinner celebrating his forty-second birthday.

Do you remember the fishing trip we took to Lynn in a four-in-hand one spring? I think that every one of us here around the table was in that party, which outdid the escapades of the boys in Wister's "Philosophy 4," to my mind one of the most perfect stories ever written of college life. It was Mike Walker's idea to hire the trap and drive to Lynn, there to produce poles and to start fishing in Lynn Square. I wish that (ve were setting out for Lynn again to-night, instead of sitting around this Beacon Street table.

Such examples of the serious and the gay college life give an indication, one hopes, of George Apley's development, without there being need to cite many others. They show a normal progression from boyhood to manhood, and an enthusiasm and a

loyal spirit. From his contact with Harvard democracy and with the cross-section of the world which was presented to him there, George Apley was emerging, as a type perhaps, but a type of which Harvard may be definitely proud. He adhered to the strict conventions of youth loyally, on the whole j but now and then something in his spirit was irked at these conventions. If this occasional impatience lent him a certain instability, those who loved George Apley will all admit that the instability made him human. With this in mind, the writer must now turn reluctantly to a difficult incident in George Apley's private life, which he still feels should be eliminated, in spite of the insistence of George's son, John Apley, that it be aired.

1

F»'

CHAPTER VIII

INTERLUDE

Dealing with a Subject

Which Would Not Ordinarily Be Discussed in a

Work of This Nature

IT SHOULD be stated at the outset that nothing which will be published regarding a youthful lapse discussed in this chapter reflects to the discredit of our subject. It serves rather to illustrate that anyone at a certain stage of life may be beset by vagaries which must not be considered seriously. It must be remembered that through it all George Apley remained an outstanding success, not only in his Harvard class, but in society. That he did so, speaks well for his tradition and for his self-control.

As one approaches the age for marriage there are many of both sexes who find it difficult to settle their lives finally in the direction where their real emotions and convictions should lead them. If it is so with George Apley, others of us have faced the same problem. The solicitude of his parents at this time is manifest by the correspondence which was kept intact — as may be illustrated by these extracts from a few letters.

Extract from a Letter from Elizabeth Afley.

You are probably too modest, George darling, and too preoccupied with your Club and your College activities to know what a swathe you are cutting here in Boston, This makes me very proud, within limits, but you must not use that attractiveness, George, as a means of playing fast and loose. I do not need to say any more, because I know that you will be the gallant knight.

I think it is time for you to realize, though, now that you are in the middle of your Senior year, that there is a certain young thing, and a very sweet one, who is taking you quite seriously. Your father and I are very glad and very much approve, because the Bosworths are quite our type of person. Catharine Bosworth has what my dear Jane Austen would call both "sense and sensibility." She has been brought up as you have been, to know that true happiness in life, such as your dear father and I have shared, is not based on external show. I think it would be very nice if you were to pay Catharine some little particular attention the next time you come into town. You and she have so much in common.

Letter from George A'pley to Catharine Bosworth.

Dear Catharine: —

Mother is coming up to my room for tea on Thursday afternoon, after the meeting at the Hemenway gymnasium. She and I would both like it very much if you and your mother would drop in afterwards at Gray's. . . .

Letter from Elizabeth A-pley.

Dear George: —

I enjoyed the little tea party. I thought that dear Catharine looked very beautiful. Mrs. Bosworth could not help but say

how well you two dear children looked walking across the Yard together. . . .

hetter from Thomas Afley.

Dear George: —

The portion of your grandmother's estate which came to you under her will makes a small but comfortable sum that under certain circumstances is enough to start life on, modestly. I am holding it in trust for you, as the will directs, using the income for your further education. I am also conserving a part for another contingency, in case you wish to speak to me about it. . . .

These beginnings, so Intimately connected with George Ap-ley's future happiness, had an unforeseen and erratic interruption. This takes the form to-day of a bundle of letters, taped and sealed, with a superscription in Thomas Apley's handwriting, which reads as follows: "To be given to my son, George, at my death, with my request that he burn them." It is the writer's opinion that they should have been burned, either by George Apley or by his son, and this suggestion was made when this work reached the present stage. The reply of John Apley to the writer's request, which is appended here, is his authority for delving into a painful and needless detail.

Dear Mr. Willing: —

I have been over these letters very carefully myself and cannot see the harm in them. That you do only makes me feel how different your and Father's world must have been from mine. My one desire is to see Father depicted as a human being. Having read what you have written up to date, and it is phrased as only you yourself could phrase it, I think this busi-

ness is a good deal to his credit. It must have required a good deal of initiative on his part to go as far as he did. . . .

We will, therefore, continue in the light of this advice. The letters begin on May i, 1887.

Letter to Miss Mary Monahan.

Dear Mary: —

It is eleven o'clock at night. My roommate has gone to bed, so naturally I am sitting writing to you, because my mind keeps going back over every minute we have been together. I believe in fate now, I believe in destiny. Why should I have been in Cambridge Port, and why should you have been there? When I picked up your handkerchief and we looked at each other, I remember every shade of violet in your eyes and every light in the black of your hair. You called me a "Back Bay dude!" Do you remember? You said we shouldn't be seen together but you met me that Sunday on Columbus Avenue. You make me see things as I have never seen them. I am not what you think me, Mary, and now I am going to show you. I am going down to Worcester Square to call on you next Sunday. If your brother Mike doesn't like it, it's time he knew better. I'd be glad to see Mike any time. . . .

For reasons too obvious to be specified, any letters which George Apley may have received from the young woman, Mary Monahan, are not at present in existence, but information gathered from conversation and correspondence with members of the family and friends gives one a glimpse of this young woman who appears so abruptly in Apley's life. This glimpse, it must be admitted, reflects favorably on George Apley's taste, granting the impossible elements of this esca-