This craze could not last, of course, but it lasted beyond our stay in Columbus, which ended with the winter, when the Legislature adjourned, and my father’s employment ceased.  He tried to find some editorial work on the paper which had printed his reports, but every place was full, and it was hopeless to dream of getting a proprietary interest in it.  We had nothing, and we must seek a chance where something besides money would avail us.  This offered itself in the village of Ashtabula, in the northeastern part of the State, and there we all found ourselves one moonlight night of early summer.  The Lake Shore Railroad then ended at Ashtabula, in a bank of sand, and my elder brother and I walked up from the station, while the rest of the family, which pretty well filled the omnibus, rode.  We had been very happy at Columbus, as we were apt to be anywhere, but none of us liked the narrowness of city streets, even so near to the woods as those were, and we were eager for the country again.  We had always lived hitherto in large towns, except for that year at the Mills, and we were eager to see what a village was like, especially a village peopled wholly by Yankees, as our father had reported it.  I must own that we found it far prettier than anything we had known in Southern Ohio, which we were so fond of and so loath to leave, and as I look back it still seems to me one of the prettiest little places I have ever known, with its white wooden houses, glimmering in the dark of its elms and maples, and their silent gardens beside each, and the silent, grass-bordered, sandy streets between them.  The hotel, where we rejoined our family, lurked behind a group of lofty elms, and we drank at the town pump before it just for the pleasure of pumping it.

The village was all that we could have imagined of simply and sweetly romantic in the moonlight, and when the day came it did not rob it of its charm.  It was as lovely in my eyes as the loveliest village of the plain, and it had the advantage of realizing the Deserted Village without being deserted.

XI.  UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

The book that moved me most, in our stay of six months at Ashtabula, was then beginning to move the whole world more than any other book has moved it.  I read it as it came out week after week in the old National Era, and I broke my heart over Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as every one else did.  Yet I cannot say that it was a passion of mine like Don Quixote, or the other books that I had loved intensely.  I felt its greatness when I read it first, and as often as I have read it since, I have seen more and more clearly that it was a very great novel.  With certain obvious lapses in its art, and with an art that is at its best very simple, and perhaps primitive, the book is still a work of art.  I knew this, in a measure then, as I know it now, and yet neither the literary pride I was beginning to have in the perception of such things, nor the powerful appeal it made to my sympathies, sufficed to impassion me of it.  I could not say why this was so.  Why does the young man’s fancy, when it lightly turns to thoughts of love, turn this way and not that?  There seems no more reason for one than for the other.