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[Illustration: _The waterside at Martin's Ferry. Near this spot stood
the little brick house in which Mr. Howells was born._]




                           YEARS OF MY YOUTH

                                  BY
                             W. D. HOWELLS

                  WITH INTRODUCTION AND ILLUSTRATIONS
                   FROM PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN EXPRESSLY
                   FOR THIS BOOK BY CLIFTON JOHNSON

                            [Illustration]

                     HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
                          NEW YORK AND LONDON

                           YEARS OF MY YOUTH

              Copyright, 1916, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
                Printed in the United States of America
                        Published October, 1917

                                  K-R




ILLUSTRATIONS


THE WATERSIDE AT MARTIN'S FERRY                         _Frontispiece_

THE OHIO RIVER AT WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA             _Facing p._  10

HAMILTON, OHIO, THE "BOY'S TOWN" OF MR. HOWELLS'S YOUTH      "     16

THE MIAMI CANAL AT HAMILTON                                  "     22

THE NOW ABANDONED CANAL AT DAYTON AS IT APPEARS
ON THE BORDERS OF THE CITY                                   "     40

THE LITTLE MIAMI RIVER AT EUREKA MILLS, TWELVE
MILES EAST OF DAYTON                                         "     44

OVERLOOKING THE ISLAND WHICH THE HOWELLS FAMILY CULTIVATED   "     54

THE VICINITY WHERE MR. HOWELLS LIVED HIS "YEAR
IN A LOG CABIN"                                              "     60

ONE OF THE LAST LOG HOUSES TO SURVIVE IN THE VICINITY
OF JEFFERSON                                                 "     82

THE FOUR-STORY OFFICE ERECTED BY MR. HOWELLS'S
FATHER                                                       "    116

THE OHIO STATE HOUSE AT COLUMBUS VIEWED FROM
HIGH STREET                                                  "    138

THE STATE HOUSE YARD ON THE STATE STREET SIDE                "    158

OLD-TIME DWELLINGS ON ONE OF THE COLUMBUS
STREETS THAT MR. HOWELLS USED TO FREQUENT                    "    170

THE MEDICAL COLLEGE AT COLUMBUS                              "    184

THE QUAINT DOORWAY OF THE MEDICAL COLLEGE
THROUGH WHICH MR. HOWELLS PASSED DAILY
WHILE HE ROOMED IN THE BUILDING                              "    224

LOOKING INTO THE STATE HOUSE GROUNDS TOWARD THE
BROAD FLIGHT OF STEPS BEFORE THE WEST FRONT
OF THE BUILDING                                              "    236




PREFACE BY THE ILLUSTRATOR


Whenever I visit the region of a famous man's youth I have the feeling
that I ought to discover there some clue to the secret of his greatness;
for I cannot help fancying that the environment must have molded him and
been an essential element in the development of his individuality and
power. It was with such expectations that I recently went to Ohio, just
as spring was verging into summer, to see the land where Mr. Howells
spent the years of which he has made so frank and appealing a record in
this volume. In the middle of the last century the State retained much
of the crude primitiveness of the frontier, and I wondered what stimulus
this could have offered in creating a genius so broad in his views and
so sensitive to impressions, and in whose expression there is such fine
imagination, humor, sympathy, and wisdom.

I began my journey in Mr. Howells's native State where he began his
life's journey eighty years ago, at Martin's Ferry. The place is two
miles up the Ohio River from Wheeling, West Virginia, on the western
bank of the stream. By the water-side are big, ugly factories belching
smoke and steam, and in their vicinity are railroad tracks, cinders, and
other litter, and dingy, ramshackle buildings, among which are numerous
forlorn little dwellings and occasional saloons. A sort of careless
prosperity is in evidence, but not much of the charm of neatness, or
concern for appearances. The rest of the town overspreads the steep
<DW72>s that border the river, and pushes back into the nooks among the
adjacent upheaval of big hills. It is rather chaotic, but improves in
quality the farther it recedes from the smoke and din of the
manufacturing strip along the river.

The small brick Howells house stood close to the stream, where grime and
squalor most abound at present. However, the railroad was not there
then, and Martin's Ferry was a village that had in some respects real
rural attraction.

During the period of about twenty-five years which this book covers the
Howells family lived in seven different places, many of them widely
separated, but all within the confines of Ohio; and they seldom stayed
long in any town without occupying more than one residence. Naturally,
there have been marked changes in the aspect of most of the places where
they dwelt. Perhaps Jefferson has changed least. In the old days it had
six hundred inhabitants. Now it has three or four times that number, but
it is still serenely rustic, and every one knows every one else, and the
wide, tree-shadowed streets and the rich, gently rolling farm country
that environ the town are delightful.

Hamilton, with which Mr. Howells has dealt so graphically in his _A
Boy's Town_, has increased in population from two thousand to
thirty-five thousand; Dayton from eleven thousand to one hundred and
twenty-five thousand, and Columbus from eighteen thousand to nearly a
quarter of a million. Of course, such a strenuous expansion means the
obliteration of landmarks of the past. Besides, some of the places have
been largely rebuilt after being nearly wiped off the map by floods.

On the other hand, the vicinity where Mr. Howells spent his _Year in a
Log Cabin_ is even more lonely than it was then. It had a name in the
long ago--Eureka Mills. But fire, which in our country is an even more
potent destroyer than floods of what men build, has razed the mills, the
dam has crumbled, the mill-race is a dry ditch choked with weeds and
brush, and the name is well-nigh forgotten. When I was there the only
man-dwelling was a vacant house that stood close to the site of the old
log cabin. I might have thought the locality entirely deserted if it had
not been for fences and cultivated fields and two cows grazing in a
pasture. The only person whom I saw on the highway while I loitered
about was a rural mail-carrier jogging along in his cart.

Round about were low, rounded hills, fertile and well-tilled for the
most part, with here and there patches of woodland and occasional snug
groups of farm buildings. It is a land flowing with milk and honey,
wonderfully productive and prosperous, and charming in its luscious
agricultural beauty. In Mr. Howells's youth it was wilder and more
forested, but I fancy that the stream, with its wooded banks, must be
essentially the same, and that the birds flitting and singing and the
other wild creatures of fields and woods are like those of old.

Log houses, once so common in the Ohio country within the memory of its
elderly people, are now rare, and I could learn of none within less than
a dozen miles of Eureka Mills. But I found one on the outskirts of
Jefferson which was intact and serviceable, though it no longer
sheltered a family; and both Jefferson and Dayton have a log cabin
preserved as a relic of the past.

Any place that has been Mr. Howells's home has reason to be proud of the
fact, for he has long been recognized as the foremost of living American
authors, and it seems safe to conclude that much of his work will have a
permanent place in our literature. Yet I got the impression that, as a
rule, the people in those Ohio communities with which he has been
associated are unaware of his existence. Others, however, not only are
familiar with his reputation, but regard him with enthusiasm and
affection. At Columbus Rev. Washington Gladden, the most notable of all
Ohio preachers, has made _Years of My Youth_ the subject of a Sunday
evening discourse; and it is particularly gratifying to find that _A
Boy's Town_ is a favorite book in Hamilton, and that the Boy Scouts
there call themselves the Boy's Town Brigade.

Hamilton, Dayton, and Columbus, in which places Mr. Howells spent so
much of his youth, are all important centers of trade and manufacture
where crowds and noisy traffic are ever present in the business
sections, and where a maze of residence streets spread out into the
country round about. At Hamilton, the only building I could discover
associated with Mr. Howells was the Baptist church where he attended
Sunday-school. But it is now a paint-shop, and the paint-man has adorned
the entire front with a scenic sample of his art, which makes the
structure more suggestive of a theater than a church. The Great Miami
River flows through the town as of old, and the tall buildings, towers,
and spires in the heart of the place are strikingly picturesque seen
from some points of vantage along the banks of the stream. But the most
charming feature of the past is the canal in which the boys used to swim
and fish, and which, doubtless, still serves for the same purposes. It
is no longer a thoroughfare for traffic, though the tow-path is used in
part by trams and pedestrians.

Dayton had its canal, too, but this, like the one at Hamilton, has been
abandoned, except as the mills make use of it.

At Columbus is what was the new State House in Mr. Howells's youth, the
Medical College in which he roomed, and a sprinkling of quiet old
residences that were there in his time. The college, which originally
was a castle-like structure with an upthrust of towers and turrets, has
had its sky-line somewhat straightened by the addition of an extra
story; but this has only marred, without destroying, its characteristic
quaintness.

Jefferson was the home of Mr. Howells's father for the most of his later
life, and of his older brother, Joseph, whom the people there like to
recall for his many fine qualities of head and heart, and as the printer
and editor of the "best weekly paper" ever published in Ashtabula
County.

This brother is referred to again and again in the chapters that follow.
His grave in the Jefferson cemetery has been marked with the
"imposing-stone