It was amidst such surroundings that Charles Dudley Warner was born on the 12th of September, 1829.  His birthplace was the hill town of Plainfield, over two thousand feet above the level of the sea.  His father, a farmer, was a man of cultivation, though not college-bred.  He died when his eldest son had reached the age of five, leaving to his widow the care of two children.  Three years longer the family continued to remain on the farm.  But however delightful the scenery of the country might be, its aesthetic attractions did not sufficiently counterbalance its agricultural disadvantages.  Furthermore, while the summers were beautiful on this high table land, the winters were long and dreary in the enforced solitude of a thinly settled region.  In consequence, the farm was sold after the death of the grandfather, and the home broken up.  The mother with her two children, went to the neighboring village of Charlemont on the banks of the Deerfield.  There the elder son took up his residence with his guardian and relative, a man of position and influence in the community, who was the owner of a large farm.  With him he stayed until he was twelve years old, enjoying all the pleasures and doing all the miscellaneous jobs of the kind which fall to the lot of a boy brought up in an agricultural community.

The story of this particular period of his life was given by Warner in a work which was published about forty years later.  It is the volume entitled “Being a Boy.”  Nowhere has there been drawn a truer or more vivid picture of rural New England.  Nowhere else can there be found such a portrayal of the sights and sounds, the pains and pleasures of life on a farm as seen from the point of view of a boy.  Here we have them all graphically represented:  the daily “chores” that must be looked after; the driving of cows to and from the pasture; the clearing up of fields where vegetation struggled with difficulty against the prevailing stones; the climbing of lofty trees and the swaying back and forth in the wind on their topmost boughs; the hunting of woodchucks; the nutting excursions of November days, culminating in the glories of Thanksgiving; the romance of school life, over which vacations, far from being welcomed with delight, cast a gloom as involving extra work; the cold days of winter with its deep or drifting snows, the mercury of the thermometer clinging with fondness to zero, even when the sun was shining brilliantly; the long chilling nights in which the frost carved fantastic structures on the window-panes; the eager watching for the time when the sap would begin to run in the sugar-maples; the evenings given up to reading, with the inevitable inward discontent at being sent to bed too early; the longing for the mild days of spring to come, when the heavy cowhide boots could be discarded, and the boy could rejoice at last in the covering for his feet which the Lord had provided.  These and scores of similar descriptions fill up the picture of the life furnished here.  It was nature’s own school wherein was to be gained the fullest intimacy with her spirit.  While there was much which she could not teach, there was also much which she alone could teach.  From his communion with her the boy learned lessons which the streets of crowded cities could never have imparted.