TH INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER CHIEFLY PERSONAL HAT sturdy old British dogmatist, Dr. Samuel Johnson, used to maintain stoutly that no man in his senses ever read a book through from beginning to end. His own method was to glance rapidly through the pages, read only the parts that interested him, and "skip" all the rest. Dr. Johnson's plan might be wisely followed in the case of this introductory chapter of mine, for it contains very little about Engravings and Etchings, and, I fear, far too much about the present writer. But at the age of sixty-five an old campaigner like myself may be pardoned if he is, at times, a little garrulous, seeing that he began his campaigning at the age of thirteen; and so I feel somewhat like Oliver Goldsmith's old soldier, who shouldered his crutch and showed how Fields were won," although I shall pass very gently over the occasions when some of my own "fields lost. were A kindly English cynic has said that before an old man actually falls into his dotage there intervenes a sort of mellow Indian Summer which may be called his anec-dotage, and this I take to be my own position now. But having fairly warned the reader that this first chapter is of a rambling and scattered character, I add the promise that throughout the remainder of the book I shall stick closely to my subject. As in the case of so many other men, the career which I had planned for myself proved to be very unlike that which my actual life-work has been. From early boyhood I had resolved to be a farmer. I loved the country and everything pertaining to it, the domestic animals and birds, the wild creatures, the vegetation in all its forms. In the year 1862 my father and mother, with their eight children, were residing in Liverpool, England, and although he had a comfortable competence, my father deliberately came to the conclusion that North America was a better country than England for the future career of his boys and girls, and to America the whole family came. But my father, being a stanch British Tory, had a very poor opinion of these United States, and so we settled in Canada. There I worked very contentedly on a farm for about two years, and I would probably have remained a Canadian farmer to the present hour were it not that I sustained a hurt which nearly killed me and which put an end to every species of work which required physical strength and endurance. It was haying time on the farm. My own work was to drive a team of horses to the meadow, where the hay was ready for housing in the barn, to build the load on the wagon and to drive the horses home. The men who pitched the hay up to me were too lazy or too careless to carry their pitchforks to the barn, so they threw them up on the top of the high load. I started my horses, but an axle broke, the load toppled over, and I fell heavily on the prongs of a fork which pierced my lungs deeply. When the doctor saw me his opinion amounted to just this: "If he lives he'll live, and if he dies he'll die." Well, I lived - but my farming days were forever at an end. Next after farming I think I loved books best, and so I made my way to New York and engaged in that most interesting business, a bookseller's. To finish this brief account of my family in Canada, I will mention that when each one of my brothers attained the age when he could safely disobey parental authority he quit Canada and settled in the United States, and not long afterward the old couple joined us in New York, where they lived happily to the ages of seventysix and eighty-four respectively. My old father soon became an enthusiastic American. He was especially proud of a letter which he received from the President of the United States, General Grant; and I well remember his pronouncement after he had read every word of the famous Beecher trial. He flung down his newspaper, and exclaimed (in allusion to the old British custom of starving a jury so as to compel them to agree on a verdict) "Well, if I were on that jury I'd eat my shoes before I'd convict that man!" But how did I become a printseller, forty years |