Читать книгу Looking Back: An Autobiography - Merrick Abner Richardson - Страница 23

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Father and mother did not marry until their home had been established, but they lost no time when they got started, for, thirteen years gave them a brood of eight children.

Father was a shrewd dealer in land and cattle, through which he gained enough to purchase about 350 acres of wild land and built a house and barn, while mother, as was customary for New England women, braided palm leaf hats for the slaves of the Southern planters, until she had saved enough to furnish the house. Then they got married.

Our living room was the big kitchen, where we warmed ourselves by the old-fashioned fireplace while the pots and kettles hung on the crane before us. Beside it was a brick oven, where mother baked the good things, especially on Thanksgiving Day, when we did not fill up with old common potatoes.

The parlor, which we were seldom allowed to enter, was to a little boy dazzling. Looking-glass, with gilded frame, paper of many colors, and high-shining brass andirons in the fireplace.

Sunday morning we all gathered there for family worship and one morning father gave us a lesson on "Inspiration," which has nerved me up to fight infidelity all my days.

He had quite a collection of books and one day he brought home a book on geology, from which, after studying it evenings, he declared that the creation of the world in science and the Bible exactly agreed.

That lesson and the surroundings on that sunny Sabath morning is one of the old landmarks in my memory to which I often return in moments of reflection.

"Now children," he began, "no one knows who wrote the first chapter of Genesis, which appears to have no connection with the other chapters. It may have been written by Moses, his sister, Miriam, or some other person along about that time, say four or five thousand years ago. The strange thing about it is that, according to their new geology, the writer revealed the secrets of that which transpired millions of years ago.

"People had supposed, until about one hundred years ago, that the first chapter of Genesis was a fable, or fairy tale, but now geology proves it to have been a true history of what the writer knew nothing about.

"It must have been that an angel who had lived all through the time the world was being made, sat right beside or in some way influenced the author to write the wonderful story of the creation. This is what I call real inspiration, don't you?

"Some folks think, and I would not wonder if it might be true, that fiction is a faint glimmer of inspiration, and that composers are often led along by the spirit of some person who once lived in this world. Let this be as it may, I wish one of you children might become a novelist, but you never will, you will be farmers just like all us New England mountaineers.

"Learned men have discovered, by digging in the rocky surface of the earth, that under certain conditions, oysters or other animals, will turn to stone. They call them fossils. Scientists have also learned that each kind, wherever found, represents the age in which the animal lived. So, the fossil, you see, is an animal which died and turned to stone, perhaps millions of years ago.

"By investigation they find that one kind of rock, called azoic, contains no fossils, so they know there was a day or age when there was no life in this world, and this is the first day in the Bible, which I have been reading to you.