To-morrow is Hell-fire Day, that English holidayⒺexplanatory note which we have celebrated, every Fourth of July, for a century and a quarter in fire, blood, tears, mutilation and death, repeating and repeating and forever repeating these absurdities because neither our historians nor our politicians nor our schoolmasters have wit enough to remind the public that the Fourth of July is not an American holiday. However, I doubt if there is a historian, a politician, or a schoolmaster in the country that has ever stopped to consider what the nationality of that day really is. I detest that English holiday with all my heart; not because it is English, and not because it is not American, but merely because this nation goes insane on that day, and by the help of noise and fire turns it into an odious pandemoniumⒶtextual note. The nation calls it by all sorts of affectionate pet names, but if I had the naming of it I would throw poetry aside and call it Hell’s Delight.

But fortunately for us,Ⓐtextual note we are far from that pandemoniumⒶtextual note, and shall neither see nor hear anything of it. For a couple of weeks now we have been occupying the pleasant and comely and roomy Italian villa which John Howells has built for me on lofty ground surrounded by wooded hills and valleys, and secluded by generous distances from the other members of the human race. I call the house “Innocence at Home,” and I mean to provide the innocence myself, so that it shall be of an unchallengeableⒶtextual note quality. Thirty-five years ago, in Edinburgh, Mrs. Clemens and I came across an old carved oakⒶtextual note mantelpieceⒶtextual note in a kind of general junk-shop and hospital for disabled furniture, and Mrs. Clemens was greatly taken with it and wanted to own it and put it into the house which we were then building in Hartford, Connecticut. It was fourteen feet high and finely and symmetrically proportioned, and beautifully carved. The lower half of it was a hundred and fifty years old and the other half something more thanⒶtextual note a hundredⒺexplanatory note; it had been in a Scotch country mansion all that time and had now been on sale in that junk-shopⒶtextual note a couple of years. The man said he had never had an offer for it; he had never come across anybody that wanted it, and he would now like to get it off his hands, for it was taking up a good deal of room to no purpose. He said he would take twenty pounds for it. We bought it and shipped it to America at once. When we sold the Hartford house, several years agoⒺexplanatory note, Mrs. Clemens preserved the mantelpieceⒶtextual note and stored it away for future use. It is in this house now; it handsomely ornaments the living-room, which is forty-one feet long [begin page 240] by thirty-one wide—and I think that that room is just the right place for it. The lower half of it encloses the fireplace, and we have mortised the other half of it to the wall at the end of the room, where it fills the reserved space exactly; it looks as if it might have been originally designed for that place. In these thirty-five years that twenty-pound investment has done very well indeed commercially. If we should get this mantelpieceⒶtextual note duplicated to-day by the best carver in New York he would charge eight thousand dollars for his labor, and then his product would cover only half the value of this one, because it would lack the rich coloring which this old mantelpieceⒶtextual note has acquired by a century or so of exposure to the lightⒶtextual note and toⒶtextual note wood-smokeⒶtextual note and tobacco smoke, and other ennobling influences.

Also, thirty-five years ago, in Paris, Mrs. Clemens bought a number of old Oriental rugs; rugs which seemed to me a shabby and unpleasant property. Nobody was buying such things at that time, and nobody cared for them, but Mrs. Clemens’s instinct was right, and her taste not to be challenged by anybody, for nobody was competent to challenge it. Every now and then, as the years went by, she bought other old Oriental rugs, until long ago we were sufficiently equipped and needed no more. By that time other people were buying them all around and about Christendom, and the prices were advancing of course; they have continued to advance ever since. Those old rugs have turned out to be a good investment commercially. I remember the cost of the most of them and I think that the whole of them together cost about eight thousand dollars. Several experts, native and foreign, examined them in New York last year and pronounced their present value to be forty thousand dollars. That is just the value of the new house itself, as per the builder’s bills.Ⓐtextual note An early chapter of this Autobiography exposes the fact that every time I have invested money I have lost it; I ought to have reserved my commercial talent and employed Mrs. Clemens’s.

This house is now finished with the exception of one minor detail: some months ago citizensⒶtextual note of the Sandwich Islands wrote me and said they would like to contribute a mantelpieceⒶtextual note to this dwelling—a mantelpieceⒶtextual note to be made of samplesⒶtextual note of the beautiful woods that are native to the Islands. The architect sent the measurements and the fireplaceⒶtextual note is waiting for that ornamentⒺexplanatory note.Ⓐtextual note

Last Monday Albert Bigelow Paine personally conducted me to Boston, and next day to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to assist at the dedication of the Thomas Bailey Aldrich Memorial MuseumⒺexplanatory note. – – – – – – – At this point I desire to give notice to my literary heirs, assigns, and executors, that they are to suppress, for seventy-five years, what I am now about to say about that curious function. It is not that I am expecting to say anything that shall really need suppressing, but that I want to talk without embarrassment and speak with freedom—freedom, comfort, appetite, relish.

As text and basis I will here introduce a few simple statistics: theⒶtextual note late Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in his grandfather’s house in the little town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, seventy-two or seventy-three years agoⒺexplanatory note. His widow has lately bought that house and stocked it with odds and ends that once belonged to the child Tom Aldrich, [begin page 241] and to the schoolboyⒶtextual note Tom Aldrich, and to the old poet Tom Aldrich, and turned the place into a memorial museum in honor of Aldrich and for the preservation of his fame. She has instituted an Aldrich Museum Memorial Corporation under the laws of the State of New Hampshire, and has turned the museum over to this corporation which is acting for the City of Portsmouth, the ultimate heir of the benefaction, and she has injected the mayor of Portsmouth and other important people into that corporation to act as advertisement and directorsⒶtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note. A strange and vanity-devoured, detestable woman! I do not believe I could ever learn to like her except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.

The justification for an Aldrich Memorial Museum for pilgrims to visit and hallow with their homage may exist, but to me it seems doubtful. Aldrich was never widely known; his books never attained to a wide circulation; his prose was diffuse, self-conscious, and barren of distinction in the matter of style; his fame as a writer of prose is not considerable; his fame as a writer of verse is also very limited, but such as it is it is a matter to be proud of. It is based not upon his output of poetry as a whole but upon half a dozenⒶtextual note small poems which are not surpassed in our language for exquisite grace and beauty and finish. These gems are known and admired and loved by the one person in ten thousand who is capable of appreciating them at their just value. It is this sprinkling of people who would reverently visit the memorial museum if it were situated in a handy place. They would amount to one visitor per monthⒶtextual note, no doubt, if the museum were in Boston or New York, but it isn’t in those places—it is in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, an hour and three-quarters from Boston by the Boston and Maine Railway, which still uses the cars it employed in its early business fifty years ago; still passes drinking water around per tea-pot and tin cup, and still uses soft coal and vomits the gritty product of it into those venerable cars at every window and crack and joint. A memorial museum of George Washington relics could not excite any considerable interest if it were located in that decayed town and the devotee had to get to it over the Boston and Maine.

When it came to making fun of a folly, a silliness, a windy pretense, a wild absurdity, Aldrich the brilliant, Aldrich the sarcastic, Aldrich the ironical, Aldrich the merciless, was a master. It was the greatest pity in the world that he could not be at that memorial function in the Opera House at Portsmouth to make fun of it. Nobody could lash it and blight it and blister it and scarify it as he could do it. However, I am overlooking one important detail: he could do all this, and would do it with enthusiasm, if it were somebody else’s foolish memorial, but it would not occur to him to make fun of it if the function was in his ownⒶtextual note honor, for he had very nearly as extensive an appreciation of himself and his gifts as had the late Edmund Clarence StedmanⒺexplanatory note, who believed that the sun merely rose to admire his poetry and was so reluctant to set, at the end of the day, and lose sight of it, that it lingered and lingered and lost many minutes diurnally, andⒶtextual note was never able to keep correct time during his stay in the earth. Stedman was a good fellow; Aldrich was a good fellow;Ⓐtextual note but vain?—bunched togetherⒶtextual note they were as vain as I am myself, which is saying all that can be said under that head without being extravagant.

[begin page 242] For the protection of the reader I must confess that I am perhaps prejudiced. It is possible that I would never be able to see anything creditable in anythingⒶtextual note Mrs. Aldrich might do. I conceived an aversion for her the first time I ever saw her, which was thirty-nine years agoⒺexplanatory note, and that aversion has remained with me ever since. She is one of those people who is profusely affectionate, and whose demonstrations disorder your stomach. You never believe in them; you always regard them as fictions, artificialities, with a selfish motive back of them. Aldrich was delightful company, but we never saw a great deal of him because we couldn’t have him by himselfⒺexplanatory note. If anything was ever at any time needed to increase and crystallize and petrify and otherwise perpetuate my aversion to that lady, that lack was made up three years ago, at a time when I was to spend six days in Boston and could invent no plausible excuse for declining to visit the Aldriches at “Ponkapog,”Ⓐtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note a few miles out, a house and estate wheedled out of poor old Mr. Pierce years ago by that artful lady, a number of years before the old gentleman diedⒺexplanatory note. By the time he was ready to die, eleven years ago, she had very comfortably feathered the Aldrich nest in his will. He had already given them a great dwelling-house at 59 Mount Vernon streetⒶtextual note, Boston, and had built for them a small cottage at the seasideⒺexplanatory note; also he had already fed Mrs. Aldrich’s appetite for jimcrackⒶtextual note bric-à-bracⒶtextual note, at considerable expense to his purse; also he had long ago grown accustomed to having her buy pretty much anything she thought she wanted and instruct the tradesmen to send the bill to him; also he had long ago grown accustomed to feeding the Aldrich appetite for travelⒺexplanatory note, and had sent them in costly and sumptuous fashion all about the habitable globe at his expense. Once, in Europe, when I was a bankrupt and was finding it difficult to make both ends meet, Mrs. Aldrich entertained Mrs. Clemens and me by exploiting in a large way various vanities of hers,Ⓐtextual note in the presence of Aldrich and of poor old Mr. PierceⒺexplanatory note—they apparently approving.Ⓐtextual note She had projected a trip to Japan for Mr. Pierce, Mr. Aldrich and herself, and had been obliged to postpone it for a while because she was not able to secure anything better than the ordinary first-class accommodations in the steamer. She was full of a fine scorn for that kind of accommodation, and told how she madeⒶtextual note those steamer people to understand that they must do better than that if they wanted her further custom. She waited until they were able to sell her one of the two seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollarⒶtextual note suites on the promenade deck—a suite with beds for only two in it, but she didn’t explain what she did with Mr. Pierce. Shipped him in the steerage, I reckon. Then she got out half a dozenⒶtextual note gorgeous gowns, worth several hundred dollars each, and told how she gave Worth, the celebrated Parisian ladies’ tailorⒺexplanatory note, a piece of her mind regarding those gowns. She showed him that he was taking up too much of her time in fitting them and fussing at them, and she added that she had never asked him the price of a gown, she didn’t care what he charged, but she would not have her time wasted by his dalliances with the fitting of the things, and she told him quite plainly that her patience was exhausted and that he would never have any of her custom again.

Think of it!! Why damnation! she had been a pauper all her life, and here she was struttingⒶtextual note around on these lofty stilts.