walk on the Sabbath day. “Blessed is the man that … keepeth the sabbath from polluting it.”
Father would reply from the New Testament, “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath“, and then go for a short walk, leaving mother weeping and protesting at home.
By six o’clock we sat down to a long grace and a short evening meal, and by seven we were all of us again at the Rev. Mr. Blank’s footstool, listening to his lurid word-pictures of our unspeakable depravity. He was supposed to have need of only an hour, but it was usually near nine o’clock when once more wewerehome. Then, after a pause, mother would say, “Now get the books”. Each of us – there were thirteen children – was equipped with a Bible and a hymn-book. After going through about a dozen hymns and the twenty-third Psalm, father would say, “Now we shall read from the word of God in Chapter” so-and-so. He would read two verses, and the next would read two, and so on twice around. After this all kneeled down once more, with our tired, sleepy little noses rubbed hard into the varnish of the chairs, while he read another long prayer and finished up with “Our Father”.
Then mother would say, “Now, children, to bed, and don’t forget your prayers”. Yes, another, with another chapter of the Bible, before we dared trust ourselves to our pillows.
When one is soaked in a conception or doctrine night and day, year in and year out, by parents of irreproachable character and sincerity, it surely must strike in; the dye must in some measure take. And it did in more than one of my nine brothers. I did not believe that every simple natural thing I wanted to do was evil; I did not love the Sabbath day that had been made hideous or the hell-fire texts and sermons. I did not see anything wrong in taking a walk to see birds and flowers on the Sabbath any more than on any other day. I wanted to be among the wild things of the woods; I loved birds and flowers more than churches and catechism. I got thrills of joy over a new bird, the track of a coon, or any evidence of the wild life all about us. I wanted to know more of these things, and was told that such trivialities were unworthy of a human being with an immortal soul to save. I had better mind my books, and keep my thoughts on the next world. What wonder that, being obviously an outcast, I was possessed of ever stronger repulsion?
When at length the inner rebellion shaped itself into action, I was up against stronger powers than my own, and I experienced a crushing defeat. When, therefore, at the age of eighteen a chance came to leave home, I gladly went as one who quits life in a cellar to walk in the open fields.
For a time I lived as a student alone in London, and there I found the library of the British Museum, there discovered the key to the world of wild things. I had not even dreamed that there were books full of the precious facts for which I hungered. But my real life began when I left London for the plains, and there in the wide spaces of the West, where everything was, ..text pokračuje
