My Boyhood in a Parsonage

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SOME dozen years gone by, I chanced to find myself in the capital of Korea. Keijo it was then, though now again Seoul. Needing guidance, I looked about me in the hotel. but only a single foreigner did I see who seemed a primary source of knowledge, and lie w as a Frenchman whose critical manner showed he preferred his own society. That even ng as I sat down at a large table he took the opposite seat and reached for one of the pens such as hotels are generous with. Throwing it down, he took another and another. At the third failure I rose. I bowed, and offered my extra fountain pen.

The courtesy acted as a solvent. We talked Ynd, the next morning, grew friendly. “You are evidently wary of Americans,” I remarked. He laughed. “I’ll be frank,” he said, “I am an expert in ceramics in the Louvre. The American crowds ballyhooing through the galleries and along the boulevards were all I knew about your country, They were — what shall I say? — impossible. They were Americans by the hundred, Americans by the million, I could not bear. I crossed your continent with the curtains drawn. Then on the steamer for Yokohama, seated in my deck chair I heard, day after day, two Americans talking, such wise, knowledgeable generous talk! Such a sense of individuality! Each day I listened. It was wonderful. It transformed my idea of America.”

“And who were these Americans?” “Ah, that I cannot say. All I know is they used playful names, names I have heard in the American bar near the Opéra, Tom and Jerry.”I cried aloud in delight. “Jerry Smith and Tom Lamont! Oh, if all Americans were like them!”

This true tale jumps into my recollection as I read the story of My Boyhood in a Parsonage. Here is the same Lamont, the very same, with all the delight and wonder that is the beginning of wisdom and the end of it. As he writes, he seems to be less remembering than living again those frugal, earnest, exuberant years. In the succession of emaciated parsonages, where bread, milk, and applesauce made an ample supper, piety like that of The Cotter’s Saturday Night never shut out the boisterous joys of childhood nor the delights of ranging family talk. For all the narrow strength of his Methodism, his father’s sympathies were wide as Christianity; his delightful mother was only incidentally a saint; and as for his elder brother, Hammond would have been the inspiration of any group. But the hero of the piece is Uncle William Henry, the Covenanter with scriptural words of wrath upon his tongue, an Irish heart in his bosom, and a plug hat of thirty years’ wearing with “William Henry’s Golgotha” printed on the sweatband within, just as though it could belong to anyone else!

Such a family would educate anybody, but from without came the influence of the historic Hudson on whose bank the successive parsonages stood, with its legendary background of American heroes and the war which made them free.

Exeter came later and at Harvard the little brook of influences became a river, but it was the parsonage which put its everlasting stamp upon a man’s character — and but for that I think my French friend in Korea would not have revised his opinion as to what an American’s personality might be.

ELLERY SEDGWICK