His recollections of the gallant Ulysses, the first
man in America to roll the lapels of his coat, were
much more vivid. After Henrietta Lebrune Patch
had “joined another choir,” as her widower
huskily remarked from time to time, father and son
lived up at grampa’s in Tarrytown, and Ulysses
came daily to Anthony’s nursery and expelled
pleasant, thick-smelling words for sometimes as much
as an hour. He was continually promising Anthony
hunting trips and fishing trips and excursions to
Atlantic City, “oh, some time soon now”;
but none of them ever materialized. One trip
they did take; when Anthony was eleven they went abroad,
to England and Switzerland, and there in the best hotel
in Lucerne his father died with much sweating and
grunting and crying aloud for air. In a panic
of despair and terror Anthony was brought back to
America, wedded to a vague melancholy that was to stay
beside him through the rest of his life.
PAST AND PERSON OF THE HERO
At eleven he had a horror of death. Within six
impressionable years his parents had died and his
grandmother had faded off almost imperceptibly, until,
for the first time since her marriage, her person held
for one day an unquestioned supremacy over her own
drawing room. So to Anthony life was a struggle
against death, that waited at every corner. It
was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination
that he formed the habit of reading in bed—it
soothed him. He read until he was tired and often
fell asleep with the lights still on.
His favorite diversion until he was fourteen was his
stamp collection; enormous, as nearly exhaustive as
a boy’s could be—his grandfather
considered fatuously that it was teaching him geography.
So Anthony kept up a correspondence with a half dozen
“Stamp and Coin” companies and it was
rare that the mail failed to bring him new stamp-books
or packages of glittering approval sheets—there
was a mysterious fascination in transferring his acquisitions
interminably from one book to another. His stamps
were his greatest happiness and he bestowed impatient
frowns on any one who interrupted him at play with
them; they devoured his allowance every month, and
he lay awake at night musing untiringly on their variety
and many-colored splendor.
At sixteen he had lived almost entirely within himself,
an inarticulate boy, thoroughly un-American, and politely
bewildered by his contemporaries. The two preceding
years had been spent in Europe with a private tutor,
who persuaded him that Harvard was the thing; it would
“open doors,” it would be a tremendous
tonic, it would give him innumerable self-sacrificing
and devoted friends. So he went to Harvard—there
was no other logical thing to be done with him.
