Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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I have said that my first recollection of Lincoln was the impression made by the tragedy of his death. That this was so was not for the lack of material on him in our household. My father was an ardent Republican. Back in ’56 he had written from his river trip, “Hurrah for Frémont and Dayton.” As soon as he had had more money than the actual needs of the family required, he had subscribed to Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Monthly, the New York Tribune, began to buy books. Of all of these I remember only the Weekly and Monthly. My brother and I used to lie by the hour flat on our stomachs, heels in the air, turning over the exciting pages of the War numbers; but none of it went behind my eyes—none concerned me. Only now when I go back to the files of those old papers there is a whispering of something once familiar.

Of the Monthly I have more distinct recollections. It was in these that I first began to read freely. Many a private picnic did I have with the Monthly under the thorn bushes on the hillside above Oil Creek, a lunch basket at my side. There are still in the family storeroom copies of Harper’s Monthly stained with lemon pie dropped when I was too deep into a story to be careful. Here I read my first Dickens, my first Thackeray, my first Marian Evans, as George Eliot then signed herself. My first Wilkie Collins came to me in the Weekly. Great literature—all pirated, I was to learn much later. My friend Viola Roseboro tells me that at this time she was reading Harper’s pirated paper-bound copies of Dickens. It was much later that they came my way.