My father's hand—not to relax quite yet my grasp on this sympathetic member—was more mechanical than his mind. His unsatisfactory experiments in cobbling and in1 cabinet-making proved this, showing that tools had no attraction for him. Printing, of course, is a mechanic art, and this he mastered; but it is of a simple sort, making but a small demand on ingenuity. His ambidextrousness abided with him to the end: he shaved himself2 with great facility, using either hand; at table he held his knife in his left. He was what would be called a handy man about the house, though not fertile in contrivances. He hung the window-shades and the pictures—the latter with a good eye to symmetry, squareness, and general effect. He helped in everything.
The town boy was quickly absorbed in the citizen, and my father, once a Bostonian, never coveted a return to rural life, though he enjoyed his suburban residence at Rockledge. Revisiting Brooklyn, Conn., in the summer of 1854, after an absence of fourteen years, he wrote to his Aunt Newell of the fine landscape, but added: “I could not long, however, be contented with the quietude of the country, unless I had withdrawn from public life.” Ms. Aug. 19, 1854. Yet a broad prospect was ever a delight to him, and to mark eligible house-sites as if for himself was his customary way of praising the scene before him. He had neither a scientific nor, strictly speaking, a poetic love of nature. He had no botanical knowledge whatever, and small cognizance of the varieties of trees or flowers.3 A solitary walk in the country could hardly have been congenial to him, at least as an habitual diversion. Though as a walker not easily fatigued, he is not to be described as a4
