66 DEATH OF

PICKIE."

369 Meantime, another daughter was given to us, and, after six months, withdrawn; and still another born, who yet survives; and he had run far into his sixth year without one serious illness. His mother had devoted herself to him from his birth, even beyond her intense consecration to the care of her other children; had never allowed him to partake of animal food, or to know that an animal was ever killed to be eaten; had watched and tended him with absorbing love, till the perils of infancy seemed fairly vanquished; and we had reason to hope that the light of our eyes would be spared to gladden our remaining years.

It was otherwise decreed. In the Summer of 1849, the Asiatic cholera suddenly reappeared in our city, and the frightened authorities ordered all swine, etc., driven out of town,- that is, above Fortieth street,whereas our home was about Forty-eighth street, though no streets had yet been cut through that quarter. At once, and before we realized our danger, the atmosphere was polluted by the exhalations of the swinish multitude thrust upon us from the densely peopled hives south of us, and the cholera claimed its victims by scores before we were generally aware of its presence.

Our darling was among the first; attacked at 1 A. M. of the 12th of July, when no medical attendance was at hand; and our own prompt, unremitted efforts, reënforced at length by the best medical skill within reach, availed nothing to stay the fury of the epidemic, to which he succumbed about 5 P. M. of that day, one of the hottest, as well as quite the longest, I have ever known. He was entirely sane and conscious till near the last; insisting that he felt little or no pain and was well, save that we kept him sweltering under clothing that he wanted to throw off, as he did whenever he was permitted. When at length the struggle ended with his last breath, and even his mother was convinced that his eyes would never again open on the scenes of this world, I knew that the Summer of my life was over, that the chill breath of its Autumn was at hand, and that my future course must be along the downhill of life.

Yet another son (Raphael Uhland) was born to us two years afterward; who, though more like his father and less like a poet than Arthur, was quite as deserving of parental love, though not so eminently fitted to evoke and command general admiration. He was with me in France and Switzerland in the Summer of 1855; spending, with his mother and sister, the previous Winter in London and that subsequent in Dresden; returning with them in May, '56, to fall a victim to the croup the ensuing February. I was absent on a lecturing tour when apprised of his dangerous illness, and hastened home to find that he had died an hour before my arrival, though he had hoped and striven to await my return. He had fulfilled his sixth year and twelve days over when our home was again made desolate by his death.

Another daughter was born to us four weeks later, who survives; so that we have reason to be grateful for two children left to soothe our decline, as well as for five who, having preceded us on the long journey, await us in the Land of Souls.

My life has been busy and anxious, but not joyless. Whether it shall be prolonged few or more years, I am grateful that it has endured so long, and that it has abounded in opportunities for good not wholly unim proved, and in experiences of the nobler as well as the baser impulses of human nature. I have been spared to see the end of giant wrongs, which I once deemed invincible in this century, and to note the silent upspringing and growth of principles and influences which I hail as destined to root out some of the most flagrant and pervading evils that yet remain. I realize that each generation is destined to confront new and peculiar perils, to wrestle with temptations and seductions unknown to its predecessors; yet I trust that progress is a general law of our being, and that the ills and woes of the future shall be less crushing than those of the bloody and hateful past. So, looking calmly, yet humbly, for that close of my mortal career which cannot be far distant, I reverently thank God for the blessings vouchsafed me in the past; and, with an awe that is not fear, and a consciousness of demerit which does not exclude hope, await the opening before my steps of the gates of the Eternal World.

Mr. Greeley's taste as to home adornments has been indicated in the preceding pages. He cared little, perhaps nothing, for display. His furniture was not of the finest. But in his European travels, he had met with paintings and sculptures which he liked, and though inclined to "bare walls,” his home became somewhat crowded with paintings and statuary. He had a number of really excellent paintings, and a statuette or two by Powers, with many another gem of beauty in art. There was a rustic air ever about Mr. Greeley's home; an air of rustic elegance. There was the sweet, pure, wholesome zephyrs of the country murmuring evermore through apartments of unostentious refinement and the beautiful simplicity of the elder time.

Indeed, Mr. Parton in his biography remarks with great truth, that in manner Mr. Greeley continued to be a rustic; that the metropolis had been able to make only little impression upon him; and that he lived amid the million of his fellow-citizens, in their various uniforms, an unassimilated man. Men of the world, happily named, for they are invariably at bottom of the earth earthy, men of the world are never unsophisticated. I think they call it "green." Wise men are always "green," and often fail to "ripen " during the whole course of their lives. Socrates sober and Alcibiades

drunk, would be a fine picture and an instructive. Men of the world would inevitably take off their hats to the wrong man. Carlyle was wise, but it was very "green" in him to say that "courtesy is the due of man to man, not of suit-ofclothes to suit-of-clothes."

Horace Greeley was "green." As we have quoted from Mr. Parton, he lived in a city of a million souls an unassimilated man. In many respects city life rasped harshly, almost cruelly, upon his nature. It was something like undertaking to make Rob Roy stamp a Broadway pavement, exclaiming, "I tread my native heath, and my name is MacGregor!" He longed for the free air, the green woods,-for room in which to breathe freely. Nothing could have been more natural, therefore, or a more proper thing for him to do, than to become a farmer. Accordingly, he bought a farm.

CHAPTER XXI.

HORACE GREELEY, THE FARMER.

His Love of Rural Life-But Not of Ox-Life-His Wife's Judgment Principally Consulted as to The Farm Site-Chappaqua- A Description of the Place - The First Forest Home There - Mr. Greeley's Mode of Improving the Place - His Practical Farming - The Later Home - General Facts as to his Farmer-Life - His Work Entitled "What I Know of Farming "- The Subject of Innumerable Jests-Their Effect Upon Him.

"I SHOULD have been a farmer," says Mr. Greeley. "All my riper tastes incline to that blessed calling whereby the human family and its humbler auxiliaries are fed. Its quiet, its segregation from strife, and brawls, and heated rivalries, attract and delight me." And he goes on to say that, though content with his lot, and grateful for the generosity wherewith his labours had been rewarded, yet would he choose to earn his bread by cultivating the soil, were he to begin life anew. "Blessed is he," he exclaims, "whose day's exertion ends with the evening twilight, and who can sleep unbrokenly and without anxiety till the dawn awakens him, with energies renewed and senses brightened, to fresh activity and that fulness of health and vigour which are vouchsafed to those only who spend most of their waking hours in the free, pure air and renovating sunshine of the open country."1

Mr. Greeley thus thought, in 1868, when these words were written, that he not only should have been a farmer, on account of abounding love of rural life, but he also asserted that he would have devoted his life to that calling, had any science of farming been known to those among whom his earlier boyhood was passed. Whilst he loved the country,-was passionately devoted to it, in fact, he fairly loathed, as we have seen in the early part of his work, the mindless pursuit of farming

1 Recollections of a Busy Life, p. 295.

as farming was when he was a boy. It was, he long afterwards said, a work for oxen; and for him the life of an ox had no charms. He had abandoned farm life because, though he had perceived all there was in the farmer's calling, as then conducted, he had not really learned much more of it, as it should be, "than a good plough-horse ought to understand."

It was a quarter of a century after he gave up farm life to learn the trade of a printer, that he felt able to buy a farm. Earlier than this he had been a small farmer on his rented place of some eight acres opposite Blackwell's Island, hereinbefore described. While on this little farm, he says that "one fine Spring morning, a neighbour called and offered to plough for $5 my acre of tillage not cut up by rows of box and other shrubs; and I told him to go ahead. I came home next evening, just as he was finishing the job, which I contemplated most ruefully. His plough was a pocket edition; his team a single horse; his furrows at most five inches deep. I paid him, but told him plainly that I would have preferred to give the money for nothing. He insisted that he had ploughed for me as he had ploughed for others all around me. I will tell you,' I rejoined, 'exactly how this will work. Throughout the Spring and early Summer, we shall have frequent rains and moderate heat: thus far my crops will do well. But then will come hot weeks, with little or no rain; and they will dry up this shallow soil and everything planted thereon.' The result signally justified my prediction. We had frequent rains and cloudy, mild weather, till the 1st of July, when the clouds vanished, the sun came out intensely hot, and we had scarcely a sprinkle till the 1st of September, by which time my corn and potatoes had about given up the ghost." 2

The fancy farming at Turtle Bay gave way to city life again, and the famous Chappaqua farm, his final and successful venture, was bought in 1853. The purchase of this property is thus described by Mr. Greeley himself:

The choice was substantially directed by my wife, who said that she insisted on but three requisites,-1. A peerless spring of pure, soft, living

What I know of Farming, pp. 87-8.