Breckie, his four years, 1914-1918

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Preface

In presenting this brief record of Breckie's four years to his friends and mine and a few others whom I revere as friends of childhood, I would like to call attention to the fact that much more of his short life was spent outdoors than in — something unusual I think in the annals of civilized infancy. For at least seven or eight months out of each year he spent about twenty hours of the twenty-four in the open air, and this was a tremendous factor in making his body sturdy and his nature sweet I reared him as carefully as I could by those scientific laws of child development whose discovery in recent years has revolutionized the care of little children in body and mind, and this partly explains his wholesomeness and the growing reasonableness of his third and fourth years. But Breckie was a creature of higher endowments than my own and I early recognized in our comradeship together that I led only in maturity, for his were the larger possibilities. He was not my little child only but my master as well, and the best friend I ever had.

It will help those who have so tenderly shared Breckie's loss with us, and to them this is especially addressed, to learn that recently I have had good news of him through a friend who is, unknown to all but a most limited circle, a psychic of unusual gifts. That I should have this news will be no surprise to those who have been following the work of the Society for Psychical Research and especially the astonishing progress of the last few years. It has been an inexpressible blessing to learn from old friends on the other side that Breckie is with his sister and impressing all who meet him over there, just as he did us, by the wonder of his expanding mind and the radiance reflected from his happy heart. In addition I know that I am often with vi PREFACE

him when I sleep and that the passing months are not so much severing as uniting us.

Now to all who loved Breckie, and they were many, and to those who love childhood who will see its pages, I dedicate this book. To those who have, like me, relinquished a loved child — whether to death or to human maturity — I especially dedicate it with the hope that in reading of Breckie they

". . . may chance to hear once more The little feet along the floor."

Washington, D. C.

August 1st, 1918.

FIRST YEAR

Out of the Everywhere into the Here.

— George MacDonald.

BRECKINRIDGE THOMPSON was bom at the home of his grandfather and grandmother Breckinridge in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on the night of the twelfth of January, 1914, at eleven thirty-five o'clock. His advent had been so difficult that he was three days and nights in arriving and presented quite a battered appearance to those who first saw him. There was a big bruise on his head and over one ear and bad cuts in the neck in which an infection settled which kept his life in the balance above two weeks. He was an eight pound baby, well formed with an exceptionally fine head — but so wrinkled that he looked as if he had just terminated a long and philosophic existence.

For hours after his birth Breckinridge's hold on this existence was of the feeblest. At first he seemed quite lifeless, and over an hour was spent in resuscitation by the doctor and two trained nurses before respiration could be established in even a tolerable manner, so they told me afterwards, but I was mercifully unconscious then.

In one of his books. Sir Oliver Lodge, speaking of the arrival of each new life in an embodied form, notes that there are always loving hearts waiting to receive it and eager preparations for its coming. Not always, Sir Oliver; I have myself attended confinements where no preparations had been made and no love awaited the baby's coming. But for Breckie's advent, the first child, the first grandchild, a host of loyal hearts stood by, and such was his welcome that the morning stars seemed singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.

The first two weeks after his birth were really the only hard ones Breckie ever knew, except the one preceding his death. While they lasted I Hved from one nursing to the next, when every third hour brought the little bandaged head, so hot to the touch, and the pressure of hot little hands against my breast. In a few days the wrinkled old-new face had given way to one baby-like and full, with a real hunger look thereon, and enormous eyes which seemed to me to harbor an expression like that of Rossetti's Blessed Damozel, for "the wonderment had hardly gone from that still look of his." Puzzled, he seemed, pondering, but "trailing clouds of glory," my little son.

Fortunately I had an abundance, a superabundance of milk and his appetite never flagged, so that at the end of the two weeks of fever he had gained in weight. His "immunizing fluid," the doctor called it; but you willed to live, my baby, and caught with mighty tugs at life.

The trained nurse who attended me was an old friend and classmate of mine from St. Luke's in New York, Breck's Aunty Biddle, and to her devoted care and the doctor's skill we owed Breck's life. It was two weeks after his birth before I could see other friends, even so dear a friend as his godmother, whom we called "Pansy." Nevertheless the friendship of many hearts there and elsewhere backed Breckie and me in our fight to pull through, and I wrote February third : "What would the world be without them ? Friendship it really is which makes the closeness in human relationships. We loved my mother so much as children because she entered into our lives as a friend and I trust that Breck will be my friend from his earliest conscious moments."

Before he was a month old the baby's superb appearance compensated us for all the anxiety we had gone through in his behalf. On February fourth I wrote my husband : "Before your last visit, when Breck's fever ran high, and I was especially anxious, I often thought of Frazier and of how his mother had nursed him through all his childish illnesses but to lose him when and as she did. But I thought too that each day of a child's life from the earliest ones is its own blessing, even if the sum total of them all were never garnered in — and I would have gone through what I did to have our baby for only one week of him at my breast, if that had been all I could keep. . . . But now you never saw such a lusty fellow."

Later in the month I gave details about him : "He is adorable

BRECKIE Age Six Weeks, with His Grandmother in his bath and likes it ... an exquisite baby, exquisitely clean, fragrant and well cared for." "He is a good baby — well trained that is — almost never frets at night — just wakens, nurses, and either goes right back to sleep or plays with his hands. He has never known what it is to be picked up and walked about, or rocked, and he doesn't expect it. His playing with his hands consists as yet in waving or sucking them." "He had his first real out-of-doors airing on the lawn in his carriage yesterday (Feb. 2ath) between one and two in the afternoon. Alice was proud indeed to take him. I watched them from the upstairs gallery, which is still my only out-doors."

On February twenty-eighth I wrote : "If you were here now you would delight in your son who has been lying for an hour in his cradle cooing and waving his hands, and asking attention of no one. . . . Here he fretted and I went to him. While I was with him he broke into one smile after the other, his fat little face creasing. I have left him smiling and waving his hands. He is the jolliest, merriest, heartiest, hungriest fellow of his age I ever saw. Alice says a gentleman came on the place yesterday and called him a whale. He was weighed yesterday — thirteen pounds and five ounces, a gain of fifteen ounces in the past week. That is prodigious. I keep his weight on a weight chart that records the normal weight line of the average infant up to fifty-two weeks. Our baby's weight is nearly four pounds more than this normal average for eight weeks."

In my journal I wrote : "He is my life indeed, and his father too worships him — my longed-for baby, my despaired-of baby, my love-life, my great man in embryo, for whom high deeds are now preparing and a noble death attending a career of lofty services. For these an all-unworthy but humbly eager mother must prepare you, Breckinridge, by seeking to foster in you those ideals which are the best of us, by keeping your young body healthy and your will in your own control."

On March nineteenth when Breckinridge was two months and one week old we left the home of his grandparents where he was born and carried him up into the Ozark mountains, to Crescent College at Eureka Springs where his father and I lived. With us went an old-fashioned negro woman, Aunt AUce,. his first nurse. I was glad that my boy's first months were lived under her kindly influence and in the spell of her traditions, for the old South was his inheritance and I wanted him to drink at that spring. In my journal of that period I find I have written:

"I want many things for him and dream his future as once I dreamed my own, and all, all that I can gather in to glorify it will be gathered with the growing years. He must know the ways of all the little creeping things, of trees and birds, and he must have a garden plot and chickens. He shall ride and swim, fish and hunt. As he grows older I will open up the wonders of the dear tales I loved from 'Alice in Wonderland' to 'Ivanhoe.' He shall not want Ruskin's 'Sesame,' but shall learn under the 'wise of old.' h>specially I want so to guide his growing tastes as to help him to develop himself — not to make him over ; and the brother and sisterhood without which he would miss the give and take of nursery days shall not be lacking if I am eciual to the bearing of them and Dick can make the money to feed and educate them. 'O, bonny brown sons and O, sweet little daughters' of my far dreams, I have realized one of you — and he is bonnier, better, dearer, than any I ever dreamed."

The chief characteristics of his first months were his immense appetite and his love of wind and fresh air. With the first warm nights we arranged a sleeping porch for him on a balcony oflF of my sitting room and he and I slept out there all summer, I on a mattress on the floor by his crib. Nearly all of his other hours were spent on the lawn in his carriage, or on the ground, tumbling about in grass and leaves. He grew brown as a nut and weighed at five months, naked, twenty pounds.

When he fretted he could nearly always be quieted by letting the wind blow on his face. Once on the sixteenth of April, when his nurse was ill with tonsilitis and his father in Little Rock, I left him, while I went to supper, with my friend Celia Brinson, later his devoted "B." He behaved well until just before I returned, when he suddenly seemed to believe himself deserted by his own people. He looked at "B", saw that the face was not one familiar to him, and burst into the most desolate of sobbings and tears. Even after I had taken him he still sobbed a little until I carried him out on to his little balcony, hung in mid-air, with the lights of the valley below and the stars of the sky above, and there, where the wind blew full on his face, he soon fell quietly asleep.

I find the following brief records of certain phases of his development :

On April twenty-second, aged three months and ten days, he first demanded his food from Alice's arms at fully a yard's distance. From so great a distance he had not noticed me before.

On April twenty-fourth he first took hold of and shook loudly his dog-faced rattle.

On May tenth, a warm Sunday afternoon, we put on his first short clothes. He lacked two days of being four months old but weighed eighteen pounds and ten ounces and looked so huge that the short clothes became him better than the long.

On May twenty-third he first succeeded, after repeated efforts, in sucking his toe.

In his second month he was smiling, but unfortunately I did not record the exact dates of the first smile and laugh. He fairly beamed with smiles every morning upon Alice when she came into my room to lift him from his crib. She told me that out of doors when groups of students or strangers approached his carriage he would turn a really appealing look at her, "as if. Miss Mary, as if he was sayin' 'Alice save me.' " Again and again she shook her white head and said to me: "Miss Mary, he's de smartest child to his age I ever see."

He was the lustiest I had ever seen, accustomed chiefly to the sickly specimens of my hospital days and the far from perfect type of our average civilization.

Dear old Alice had to leave me, when summer came, for her daughter's confinement. She sent me her niece Adella to take her place until her return — but in the autumn she was ill and the next spring she died. I kept the niece until I could go back to Fort Smith again, when Alice secured for me one of her friends — the "Mammy" of my baby's second and part of his third year. With Adella, because of her comparative inexperience, I rarely left the boy alone for even a couple of hours — although she seemed reliable and willing. I find this note in my journal :

"I nurse him, boil his water, watch his dress, sponge for the heat, sleep on the balcony by him at night, keep him four mornings a week entire while Adella washes and irons his clothes — but also I try to rest, exercise when it is not too hot, to carry him as little as possible, and so order my own life as to keep healthy and rested for him ; and to this end I am not with him always."

It was nearly a year after his birth before I had really regained my strength, but I nursed him entirely for nine months. Anticipating a little I will add that in his tenth month he received one bottle of suitable formula from Holt, at ten months two bottles, in the eleventh month three, and at one year exactly he gave up his last breast feeding and was completely weaned, having by that time begun also to munch on pieces of unsweetened zwieback and to eat every day a coddled egg and strained cereals. When he was eight months old I gave him orange juice once a day between feedings. Because there were no certified dairies in our locality I pasteurized his milk every day from the time of his first bottle feeding until his last illness.

His first tooth broke through the skin on the nineteenth of July when he was six months and one week old, and dentition proceeded satisfactorily thereafter.

On July seventeenth, on my large, old-fashioned tester bed, he did his first real creeping and succeeded in reaching and grabbing the object of his pursuit. Until then such progress as he had made was achieved mainly by rolling from side to side.

We spent the summer at Crescent, used in the season as a large hotel under a manager's care, and hard it was to suf-

BRECKIE Age Five Months, with His Mother and Tidy fer the intrusions of strangers everywhere out of doors on our family life. My mother and sister stopped with us on their way to Norway, where they were touring with my brother Carson when the great war thundered in upon a horrified world. I sat out of doors with my baby and read and thought of it until my mind reeled, and often I said: "Oh, little boy, what does the future hold for you and me — for would not the sword pierce through my own soul also ?" It was to pierce indeed, but not for him the wars of this world — only for me, for me.

My mother and sister stopped with us again on their way back to Fort Smith after they had returned from Europe. At that time the thing Breck most wanted to do was to throw a rock (the name by which we designate stones in Arkansas from pebbles to boulders), but he could not, in his eighth month, compass the act.

My little fox terrier Tidy fairly gloated over having rocks thrown for her to pick up and bring back. She seldom saw one of us sitting on the ground without bringing a rock, laying it down beside us, and then standing by with the fanatical light of a single-minded enthusiast in her eyes and an ingratiating wag of her stub tail. As we threw the rocks Breck watched us with intense earnestness, then he would pick up a rock himself, grasp it tight, and throw with his arm — but he never let go the rock, kept it clasped tight in his moist little hand, and thereupon appeared utterly puzzled as to why it didn't spin off into space like ours. He wanted desperately to throw it and tried his hardest, but could not let it go.

On August twenty-third he spoke his first word, with knowledge of its meaning. The day before his grandmother had spent much time in showing him his celluloid duck and saying: "Duck, duck." On the twenty-third, upon his being shown the duck again, he at once called out : " 'Uck, 'uck." In his eighth month he also began calling his father "daddy" and "dadda" and he knew Tidy by name but could not call her. Whenever he heard her called he tried to bark like her. He also waved "bye-bye" and shook his head solemnly sidewise at us when we said : "no, no."

lo BRECKIE

But his most characteristic and growing trait, even at eight months, was his ready humor for all situations, even a bump on the head — and when he laughed his whole face creased, his mouth expanded broadly, and his eyes actually snapped with joy. One day he was sitting on the lawn in his wooden pen when Tidy came up on the outside and began digging a hole with her forefeet. Breck watched her solemnly for a moment and then began to laugh and laughed so hard he had to hold to the sides of his pen for support.

We often took him driving during that summer, usually to a small body of water hid against the side of a mountain and surrounded by tall pines, called the Sanitarium Lake. There we had picnic suppers and I always carried along his rubber folding bath tub for him to lie in, well out of reach of chiggers and ticks. Afterwards we drove back in the cool of night under the stars or moon with him sleeping in my arms. In the warmest weather he wore only a gauze band and diaper, the Arnold knit style of diaper. He had socks and linen bootees as well as thin cotton shirts and nainsook dresses for cooler days with long silk stockings and light wraps for the coolest. Sometimes he and his father and I drove alone, just with Tidy, but often a dear cousin, Katherine, and a dear friend, Eleanor, spending the summer at Crescent, were with us, and once or twice another friend who bore Breck's name.

Breckinridge early began climbing about and at eight months fell out of his carriage, the carriage falling on him, bruising and cutting his left cheek. He had awakened and climbed down to the foot of his carriage and out before Adella, sitting by, was aware of his being awake. Soon after this I bought a strap for him that fastened around his waist and then to the sides of the carriage, allowing him to stand up in it without its being possible for him to fall out. From that time on he usually rode in his carriage standing upright until early in his second year, when he discarded it altogether.

I find the following notes on my daily life written in October when Breck was nine months old, and just before I began the gradual weaning of him : "My family have all gone aad I have u

BRECKIE II

settled into a fairly useful routine which centers chiefly around my boy. His schedule is planned first and I tuck in the odds and ends of the rest of my life about that. When I go out to him after my breakfast, while Adella takes hers, I generally carry with me a book. Lately it has been one of the English reviews, yesterday and for some days before the Nineteenth Century. Its every war note is an inspiration in the September issue. Babekins is taking his first daily nap as I read. Suddenly he wakes, sits bolt upright in his carriage and laughs at me, his sunburnt little face peering over the side. Then we go in and he has his strained orange juice, his bath, and then his nine thirty nursing. He is such an early bird that he has risen and nursed before six and gone outdoors at six thirty. Next on four mornings a week, while Adella washes and irons his clothes in the laundry, he and I go out in the grounds again with my old brown traveling rug, many times washed, where he plays with acorns and sticks and stones and mother watches lest some find their way into his mouth. In between watchings and calls of Here, here, Tidy, which he now says quite well himself, I read over something for my lectures on hygiene or I sew. When he has his second nap I give more attention to the study or the sewing. In the afternoons Adella has him after his one thirty nursing and I take a nap and then get out for a walk. Five thirty is baby's nursing time again, and after that to bed on his balcony, where he is now sleeping — my own lamb."

One morning I woke to find it raining and, running out to Breck's balcony, discovered him sitting up in his crib with the rain falling gently on him, while he tried to catch its drops in his hands.

One afternoon this same autumn, when his father and I with him and Tidy were all driving together he seized the reins and shook them, making sounds to the horses. Whereupon Tidy began to bark and seized them too, so that it looked for awhile as if the dog and the baby were to do all the driving, Dick straightened out the tangle, saying meanwhile to his son : "Boy, there isn't anything about you I would change if I could."

On the third of December we lost our little dog Tidy, poisoned by strychnine, and I wrote the following brief tribute to the memory of one of my baby's earliest friends:

"In connection with the death of our little fox terrier, 'Tidy,* I want to write a few words — but they are not intended for those who already know and love dogs (and the man who knows dogs and does not love them is too bad to be reached by words), but rather for those who have grown up and are living in ignorance of dogs. I should like to open some hearts towards these loyal, kindly creatures by telling briefly a few things about Tidy.

"This little animal was a member of our household, welcomed and fondly greeted by every teacher and student, to many of whom she paid frequent visits of social affability. In addition she was a member, on intimate terms, of our family circle and showed in a thousand endearing ways her affection for us. During the long months before my baby came, she seldom left my side, taking all my walks with me, and curbing her own desires (when I could not walk) to curl her active little body down near mine. Other friends had often to go about their several ways, but Tidy's ways were always mine. There was never an hour's slackening of her constant devotion.

"After our baby had come, she extended her affection for her family to include her family's baby, not a touch of jealousy or envy marring its single-minded purity. When the baby grew old enough to creep on the floor. Tidy was always his playfellow, tumbling about with him, but so gently, and suffering excruciating liberties to be taken with her eyes and ears. Her only retort would be to kiss over and over his barbarous little hands. His fondness for Tidy was the strongest moral force we could bring to bear in rearing him, for he tried to imitate her and learned nothing but good in doing so. Observing that Tidy was obedient and desisted from whatever she did when one of us said 'no,' the baby would also desist. Even when traveling on all fours towards the coveted coal scuttle, he would stop promptly when we spoke (as he had seen Tidy do), shake his head solemnly 'no, no' — and wave bye-bye to the coal scuttle. He likes to be called Tidy. We had hoped, as Tidy was young, for her help in training him for years to come. But the ready little paws have stiffened and the friendly eyes have closed in a sudden and violent death.

"The noblest minds of all ages have loved dogs, and the pages of those who wrote (Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, Mrs. Ewing — innumerable others and among the moderns Maeterlinck, Barrie and many more) are written large with the praises of them. But no love that we could bear him has ever equaled the love of the dog for us. From drowning, from death in banking snowdrifts, from desolation, from distress, in all the ways that he could compass the dog has aided man, has followed him living and guarded his corpse when dead — yes, and died of grief for him afterwards. The dog was never unfaithful to a love or trust. Such devotion as is his, such unconscious heroism, such fidelity, such gentleness to the weak and ferocity to the wicked, such utter forgetfulness of self, are elsewhere so rare that when we find them united in a man we call him godlike.

"And in return for the noblest attributes of the spirit, what material claims does the dog ask of life? Only 'the crumbs that fall from the master's table.' When we had folded up the blanket she slept on, put away her collar and brush, and emptied her bowl of drinking water, we had disposed of Tidy's worldly possessions.

"But we believe in the spirit of the ancients that she has gone to Sirius, the dog-star, 'the bright and happy star that gives good dwelling.' "

On December sixth, when he lacked a month and four days of being one year tfld, Breckinridge took his first two or three steps in the rotunda of Crescent College. On several previous occasions he had stood alone, but quite suddenly he decided on this particular day to cut loose from all his moorings and put out to sea by himself. It was some weeks later before he walked habitually in preference to creeping.

Before the Christmas holidays had begun Breckinridge and I went down to Fort Smith for a visit, and great was the amusement of every one over the luggage with which we traveled. Besides the trunks (one of which held the indispensable pasteurizer), and baby carriage, which were checked, there was my handbag, Breck's lightweight suit case, a Walker-Gordon zinc lined traveling milk container filled with Breck's tubes of milk, boiled water and orange juice, all packed in ice, his folding bath tub and his clothes rack. My mother brought her house man, Alice's son Walter, to meet the train and assume the bulk of our supplies.

We stayed in Fort Smith until after Breck's first birthday and saw again several times his dear nurse Aunt Alice, who marveled over his growth and bonny face. I had to carry him to her cottage, for she was dying and could not come to us. We got news of her every day through her son. She told me that since she could not come back to me again she was sending me her friend "Mammy Jennie" to be Breck's nurse and take her place with him. Mammy was a dark negress, delightfully old-fashioned and simple-hearted and, barring rheumatism in her feet, a perfect nurse for a little baby. She was willing, experienced, and faithful in overwhelming measure. Breck and I both became devoted to her. She had a way, if I kept him longer in the family circle than she approved, of coming after him, saying as she came : "Dis chile's tired of white folks. Come back to Mammy." Months later, when he could talk fairly well, he used to echo this complaint: "Mammy, baby's tired of white folks." She never got over his size and splendid appearance, saying often: "Miss Mary, dis is de biggest baby I ever see."