“Who knows the inscrutable design? 
        Blest He who took and He who gave! 
      Why should your mother, Charles, not mine,
        Be weeping at her darling’s grave? 
      We bow to heaven that willed it so,
        That darkly rules the fate of all,
      That sends the respite or the blow,
        That’s free to give or to recall.”

CHARLES FARRAR BROWNE (ARTEMUS WARD)

(1834-1867)

BY CHARLES F. JOHNSON

Charles Farrar Brown, better known to the public of thirty years ago under his pen-name of Artemus Ward, was born in the little village of Waterford, Maine, on the 26th day of April, 1834.  Waterford is a quiet village of about seven hundred inhabitants, lying among the foot-hills of the White Mountains.  When Browne was a child it was a station on the western stage-route, and an important depot for lumbermen’s supplies.  Since the extension of railroads northerly and westerly from the seaboard, it has however shared the fate of many New England villages in being left on one side of the main currents of commercial activity, and gradually assuming a character of repose and leisure, in many regards more attractive than the life and bustle of earlier days.  Many persons are still living there who remember the humorist as a quaint and tricksy boy, alternating between laughter and preternatural gravity, and of a surprising ingenuity in devising odd practical jokes in which good nature so far prevailed that even the victims were too much amused to be very angry.

[Illustration:  Charles F. Browne]

On both sides, he came from original New England stock; and although he was proud of his descent from a very ancient English family, in deference to whom he wrote his name with the final “e,” he felt greater pride in his American ancestors, and always said that they were genuine and primitive Yankees,—­people of intelligence, activity, and integrity in business, but entirely unaffected by new-fangled ideas.  It is interesting to notice that Browne’s humor was hereditary on the paternal side, his father especially being noted for his quaint sayings and harmless eccentricities.  His cousin Daniel many years later bore a strong resemblance to what Charles had been, and he too possessed a kindred humorous faculty and told a story in much the same solemn manner, bringing out the point as if it were something entirely irrelevant and unimportant and casually remembered.  The subject of this sketch, however, was the only member of the family in whom a love for the droll and incongruous was a controlling disposition.  As is frequently the case, a family trait was intensified in one individual to the point where talent passes over into genius.