THE world that we lived in when I was a child would seem silent and empty to this generation. There were no railways in it, no automobiles or trolleys, no telegraphs, no sky-scraping houses. Not a single man in the country was the possessor of huge accumulations of money such as are so common now. There was not, from sea to sea, a trust or a labor union. Even the names of those things had not yet been invented.

The village in Virginia which was our home consisted of two sleepy streets lined with Lombardy poplars, creeping between a slow-moving river and silent, brooding hills. Important news from the world outside was brought to us when necessary by a man on a galloping horse.

But such haste seldom was thought necessary. Nobody was in a hurry to hear the news. Nobody was in a hurry to do anything, least of all to work or to make money. It mattered little then whether you had money or not. If you were born into a good family, and were “converted,” you were considered safe for this world and the next.

Incomes were all small alike. Indeed, among gentlefolk it was considered vulgar to talk of money at all - either to boast that you had it, or to complain of your lack of it. This was a peculiar trait of the times, and, I suspect, grew out of one dogma of the religious training which then was universal. Every child was taught from his cradle that money was Mammon, the chief agent of the flesh and the devil. As he grew up it was his duty as a Christian and a gentleman to appear to despise filthy lucre, whatever his secret opinion of it might be.

Besides, the country was so new, so raw, that there were few uses for wealth. You must remember that in the early thirties Philadelphia, New York, and Boston were in the same condition as to population, wealth, and habits of life as the fourth-rate country town of to-day. Richmond and St. Louis boasted loudly of their eight thousand inhabitants. San Francisco was a bear den, and Chicago a hamlet. The majority of Americans, both men and women, were then busy with farming or other manual labor, and the so-called gentry had no operas, no art galleries, no yearly trips to Europe to drain their thin incomes.

Between the small towns scattered over the continent stretched the wilderness, broken here and there by the farms of squatters. Through this wilderness the rivers, canals, and one solitary road carried travelers and trade.

Our village was built on the Ohio River, and was a halting place on this great national road, then the only avenue of traffic between the South and the North. Every morning two stage-coaches with prancing horses and shrill horns dashed down the sleeping streets to the wharf, full of passengers from the East, who hurried on board the steamboats bound for St. Louis or New Orleans. Huge vans often passed, laden with merchandise for the plantations or with bales of cotton for the Northern mills. Now and then a white-topped Conestoga wagon drawn by eight horses, each carrying a chime of bells, came through the streets, bearing an emigrant family to the West. The mother and children peeped out of the high front, and the father, carrying a gun, walked with his dog. These emigrants often were from Norway or Poland or Germany, and wore their national costumes, as European peasants still did then. They put on their velvet jackets and high caps when they came near the town, and went about begging, in order to save the little hoard of money which they had brought with them until they reached “the Ohio,” as the whole West was then vaguely called.

These wagons were full of romance to us children. They came up with these strange people out of far-off lands of mystery, and took them into the wilderness, full of raging bears and panthers and painted warriors, all to be fought in turn. We used to look after the children peeping out at us with bitter envy; for, naturally, as we never left home, the world outside of our encircling hills was a vast secret to us. Boys and girls now usually rush in the course of every year through a dozen states, to the mountains or the seacoast. Most of them have been to Europe. Every morning before breakfast they can read what happened yesterday in Korea or South Africa.

But with us, after a presidential election, a month often passed before the man on a galloping horse brought us the name of the successful candidate.

Honest old Timothy Flint, in his “Account of the United States,” published at that time, boasts that “the immense number of fifteen hundred newspapers and periodicals are now published in this country.” Of these I only remember two, the “United States Gazette” and the “Gentleman's Monthly Magazine,” which was always expurgated for my use by pinning certain pages together.

You may guess from these hints how isolated and calm life was in that time. The development of a child then was as different a process from the same work now, as is the growth of an acorn which falls in a forest and slowly thrusts out its root and leaf into earth and sun, from the culture of a thousand seedlings massed and tended in a hothouse.

My easy-going generation did not push the world's work on very far perhaps; we did not discover wireless telegraphy, nor radium. But neither did we die of nerve prostration.

Certain things were close and real to us then, as children, which to boys and girls now are misty legends. What do they care for the Revolution or the Indian wars?

But then, the smoke of the battles of Monmouth and Yorktown was still in the air. The old Indian forts were still standing in the streets. It was part of your religion to hate the British. It was your own grandfather who, when he was ten years old, had gone into the swamp, killed the huge beast that had threatened the settlement, and so won the proud title of Panther Jim. He showed you the very sword which he had carried at Valley Forge. It was your own grandmother who had danced with Lafayette, and who hinted that “Lady Washington” had an ugly habit of loudly scolding her husband and of boxing Nelly Custis's ears, which was hardly befitting a gentlewoman.

These things made you feel that you had rocked the cradle of the new-born nation with your own hand. It was your duty to hate the British.

Another odd peculiarity of that time, which I never have seen noticed, was our familiarity with the heathen gods and goddesses. If you talked of war you said Mars, of a beautiful woman you called her Venus; you accused your rhyming neighbor of “courting the Nine.” Sermons, letters, and ordinary talk were larded with scraps of Latin and Greek, which now would be laughed at. The reason is plain. Then, the educated boy and girl, first of all, must study the classics. Science, geography, even the history of their own people, were but secondary matters. Jupiter, Juno, and Cæsar still held the stage. The rest of the world as yet were behind the curtain.

But perhaps if I tell you some trifling incidents of my own childhood, they will show you more clearly the difference between life then and now. These little happenings are quite true except in the names of persons and places.

The house in which we children lived may have seemed very plain and homely to other people, but it had certain mysterious peculiarities which put it, for us, alongside of Macbeth's Castle Glamis or the witch-haunted stronghold in Sintram. We know now that they were not mysteries, but they still give a certain significance to the old house which was then the background of our lives.

I don't remember now what taxes were paid on it, nor what was the condition of the plumbing, nor even how many chambers it had - but these things I always shall remember: -

In each room was a huge fire of bituminous coal. The black soot hung and swayed in the great chimneys like a mass of sable mosses, and, beneath, yellow and red and purple flames leaped up from an inky base of coal to reach them, while on this base, black and shining as jet, was a gray lettering that incessantly formed itself almost into words and then crumbled away. You knew that the words, if you could read them, would tell you the secret of your life, and you would watch them late into the night, until you fell asleep and woke to watch again. But the words always crumbled away before you could read them.

These flames and gray ashes have burned always in my memory, and made the wood-fires, of which poets talk so much, seem thin and meaningless to me.

Then there were the hillocks in the garden, on which melons grew in summer, but which, in winter, turned into the Alps sheeted with glaciers. We always “made the ascent” just at dusk, equipped with alpenstocks and with bottles of spruce beer and brown jumbles. The alpenstocks and the cakes and the beer all were made with her own hands by our good Angel (though we called her by a better name than that): it was She who packed the cakes and little bottles into bags hung to our waists, and gave us our staffs and shut us out into the twilight to make our perilous journey, setting a candle in the window to light us home again across the icy mountain wastes.

The old house had its historic points, too. There were the big wooden chairs on which the three Indian chiefs had sat when they stopped to see my father on their way to Washington. These warriors were in state dress, their faces painted in scarlet streaks; they wore crowns of eagle feathers and robes embroidered with beads and quills. They were live horrors to remember for years, and to shiver over when you were in bed and the candles were out and you pulled the clothes over your head.

She urged us to come and welcome them and not to be outdone in good-breeding by savages. So we went into the room and sat on a row of chairs, stiff with terror when they laughed and grunted “papoose.” One of us even carried a plate of our own jumbles to them, and the big warrior dumped cakes, plate and all, into the corner of his robe and carried them away. When they were going they turned on the threshold and the great chief made a farewell speech. The meaning of that oration always remained a family mystery. Had he pronounced a curse or a blessing on us? Even at this late day I should really like to know what he did say.

Then there was that green field with its old trees at the right of the house in which - Something - had wailed and made moans the night when one of us lay dead. The night was clear, the moon being full. Every one of the family heard the strange sobbing and cries. But there was no living thing in the field, - nothing but the voice. No stranger not of our blood heard it.

But this we never talked of.

But of all the mysteries in that house the most real was Monsieur Jean Crapeaud.

There was a narrow high closet cut into the side of the dining-room chimney, of which the door was always kept locked. There were six shelves in it. On the lower three were medicines, almanacs, all the odds and ends of an orderly housekeeper's treasures; then came two shelves, empty, because they were too high for even grown folks to reach. And on the dark upper shelf which nobody could touch even by standing on the highest chair dwelt Monsieur Crapeaud.

I don't know who first told us of him or his history. We seemed to have known him always. He was an old nobleman, and had been driven out of France by Napoleon. Every day now he went forth for adventures. We were sure that there was no place in the world where fighting was going on that Monsieur Jean would not be found, in full armor, mounted on a gray steed, carrying a drawn sword and a banner blazoned with the lilies of France. But at night he always came home to his quarters on the top shelf. That was, of course, only the entrance to his citadel. Who could tell how many gilded salons and high towers and dungeons for his enemies he had there, back of the chimney? He was, we believed, but twelve inches high, and we saw no difficulty in his entertaining many guests in his small quarters. Naturally, the size of these nobles of France - émigrés - would have shrunken with their fortunes. Barbara, our nurse, boasted that she had often seen them, and described them as perpetually busy with eating frogs' legs and smoking corn-cob pipes. We said nothing, but secretly we did not believe Barbara's story. That statement about cob pipes such as the negroes smoked lacked common-sense. We could not be taken in by it.

When we had anything especially good to eat, such as taffy or black cake, we would throw bits of it up to the upper shelf, and when the evening readings touched on wars or deeds of derring-do, we opened the closet door that Monsieur Jean might hear. I remember that in the midst of the great tournament in “Ivanhoe” somebody gasped in a whisper, “Maybe he was there!” The idea was so tremendous that we had to stop reading that night to think it over.

Nobody had ever seen Jean, and there was only one person in the house to whom he would speak. It was very seldom that we could persuade this friend of the exiled nobleman to seek an audience. When he consented, how our hearts throbbed and our feet grew cold as he would rise, lay down his cigar, and gravely unlock the closet door.

Three little taps. “Monsieur!”

Silence. Other taps. “Monsieur, will you permit the children to bid you good-evening?”

“Oui - oui! ” in a shrill little voice, thin and sharp as the stab of a penknife. It came from the closet, from the floor, from the open window, and our blood ran cold as we listened.

“What would they ask of poor Jean Crapeaud?”

“Go on. Speak!” the interpreter would say, nodding solemnly to us.

That was the awful moment!

Usually the boldest boy would gasp, “Where did you fight to-day, General?”

Sometimes the answer was “With the Indians,” or “Against the Turks,” or, most blood-curdling of all, “In Africa, with lions.” But he always quickly added: “I am tired now with the fight. I go to sleep. Bon soir, mes enfants” - the shrill pipe of a voice retreating up and up into the air.

“Bon soir, Monsieur,” we would shout in chorus. Oh, the fearful joy and relief as the last thin “Adieu” died out and the interpreter locked the door, invariably coughing violently.

I see now that the village was a picturesque old place. On a bluff by the river were the ruins of the fort in which the first settlers took shelter from the Indians. One of these first settlers was still living, long past eighty, and each year used to give a ball in his barnlike house, when he would appear in an old Continental uniform and bare feet. The descendants of these old hunters and surveyors then made up the rich class of most of the settlements. The pay of a surveyor in Washington's day usually was as much land as he could ride around in a given time. During the first century land appreciated rapidly in value. Many of the most influential families in the South and Middle West to-day might adopt a galloping pony as their crest with accuracy.

In some of our old houses lived quiet folk, who frowned upon balls and card parties. In each of their households were a few slaves, some family portraits and plate, a shelf or two of Latin and English classics - and very little money. The owners stood as serenely secure on their pedigree as though they traced their blood back through nobles of Castile for fifty generations. They had a fine simplicity and gentleness of speech which I remember as I do songs heard in my childhood. Father Vaughan, the Catholic priest, was one of them, and Doctor Morris, the old Episcopal minister, who christened and married and buried us all - was another. The two men used to meet sometimes in our house, but they were formal and stately to each other as to nobody else, and neither man ever spoke of religion when the other was by.

In the largest of the old houses lived Colonel Richard Stuart. The colonel was the only man I ever saw who wore knee breeches and a queue. Mistress Stuart, too, when she came to drink tea with us, wore a velvet gown with ruby buttons, and a lawn turban folded above her whiter hair. They were a most simple-minded, gentle old couple, and, being childless, were happy when we visited them, and they could stuff us with plum-cake and syllabub. Yet we always felt that they were not quite real human beings, but had come down from that far-off age where everything was old, where George Washington was the father of his country and Elijah was carried off to heaven in a fiery chariot.

Suddenly a mysterious disaster befell the old people. It never was explained to us. Even now I can but guess at the facts.

There was in the village a certain Squire Hiram McCall, our one man of business. The town was proud of him. We children used to hear men boast that “Hiram was a financier known from New York to St. Louis.” “Hiram could hold his own on any exchange in the country.” He was a loud-voiced, hook-nosed, keen-eyed man. We knew that he had a Bank and Capital. We used to hear him bragging on the street corners of his plans to make his fellow citizens rich. He never spoke to us, but would stumble over us and push us out of his way.

One day the whole town whispered together as at a funeral. Many of the women cried. We listened, of course, wherever we could. Some of the men we found “had gone on McCall's paper” - whatever that might be - “and were ruined. But the ruin of old Dick Stuart,” they said, “was the most complete of all.”

We hurried at once to the Stuart place and peeped through the fence. What was ruin? Were our old friends dead? No, there they were on the porch, and my mother was with them. Her face was pale and her eyes burned. She was urging them to take the benefit of some bankrupt law which Henry Clay had made for the help of poor debtors.

“Are you to starve in your old age,” we heard her say, “to pay the debts of that villain?”

“I signed my name. I gave my word,” was all that the old man said.

We thought it wiser to go home. She might look at the fence. But we were satisfied. If she and Henry Clay had taken the matter in hand it was all right.

There is a blur of time. Then came a day of horror. The Stuarts had nothing. The old man gave up houses, money, land - all; there was a terrible rumor that even the velvet gowns and ruby buttons were sent to Philadelphia and sold.