Fairview

	Fairview home. Undated photo. Courtesy of Judith Palache Gregory.

We went there in 1879 I think. The only vivid memories of the place as it was are two. The pear orchard with its decaying fruit and the clouds of butterflies, especially Mourning-cloaks, which fed on it. The picture comes back every Fall when our pears begin to fall and the smell of the fermenting fruit fills the air. The other our first meeting with the Garber children. As I recall it we met at the rail fence under the walnut trees in the corner of the orchard and all of us sat on the top rail and talked—What about I wonder?  Then soon after we were introduced to their preparations for playing Alice-in-Wonderland of which I think none of us had ever heard. They were then living of course in the cottage under the big pine tree and I think I can remember that already then the banksia rose was trailing through the trees.

It must have been early in our living there before much had been done to the house that the great northerly gale came which stands out in my memory most vividly of all storms.  Mother and, I think, everyone else but Father was away from home and I slept with him in the front room, upstairs. I say slept but there was little sleep. The gale kept on ever more violently. The front wall of the room was of boards, no studding, and as the waves of wind surged against it a picture that hung on the wall swung forward as the wall curved in. Each moment it seemed that the wall must crash in. We both read and the book I was reading was a fitting accompaniment to the gale—The Wreck of the Grosvenor by W. Clark Russell—one of the most vivid and most gruesome sea stories ever penned. I never read it again and it may be that the story gained fifty percent from the environment in which I read it. I suppose I must finally have fallen asleep but have no memory of doing so.

	View from Fairview home. Undated photo. Courtesy of Judith Palache Gregory.

I cannot bring any sequence into my recollections of the happy days I spent there. When was the apricot orchard planted? I remember particularly laying out the stakes with Robert and Whit; getting all the lines exact and then sighting as the whips of trees were planted to get them just in place. Did Whit and I make the curbing for the circular beds in front? Sometime we must have laid some for I remember sawing the grooves in the back of the board and the fascination of seeing the curve take form as we bent it around the stakes. Of all the hours and weeks I must have worked in the garden with Mother I only recall the care with which I laid out the incredible horns-of-plenty and other curved forms in which I planted bulbs; and the endless labor of watering the roses along the long drive. Calendulas to this day have but one association. When I tore my right thumb in the cogs of the hay-cutter, and after the loose flesh had been sewn in place by the doctor Mother kept it in a poultice of hot-steeped calendula flowers and the smell of it comes back to me whenever I pick one. I can still see the big ledger in which I learned to write under Mother's patient direction. I never could make the copy look like the model for all her care. The long hours spent in the Thornberg garden with the gardener (was his name John Marden?) are still vivid. The chickens are a hateful memory I know I did not have much to do with them until we had been there a good while but later I did and I hope Mother did not know how I despised the work of cleaning the houses and especially the killing of the creatures. When we came to this place in Jaffrey I made a stipulation with Helen that whatever live-stock we had here, and I hoped we would not have any, chickens should not be among them.

I am sure I know when or rather where I learned to use an axe. It was when we cut down the row of eucalyptus trees that lay along the line dividing our place from the Coburn place. The night when that house burned down is a vivid memory. It is the only fire at which I have actually been one of those trying to save things from the blaze.

After we went to Berkeley Mother continued to take me to Dr. Trenkle to have my eyes treated. He was a kindly old man as I remember him and used to give me a candied almond when I allowed him to put the drops in ay eyes without a struggle.

Schools.

Miss Mary Hyde was the name of the lady who conducted the Dame's school on the street next north of Dwight Way to which I first went with Joe Garber. It must have been a pretty poor school. Anyway I learned one thing there. We opened school with a song of which I still remember one verse:

Oh say have you heard geography sung

For if you've not 'tis on my tongue

About the earth in air that’s hung

All covered with green little islands.

So at least began my lessons in geography.

	Charles Palache. Undated photo. Courtesy of Judith Palache Gregory.

Of my short stay at the lower school of The Berkeley Gymnasium I remember absolutely nothing as to schooling or lessons. But I do remember the games in the school yard where large boys and small played together. And how I was knocked breathless by collision, when I was trying to free a prisoner in Prisoner's Case, I think by Gay Wilkinson, but certainly by a boy twice my size.

I forgot to mention my chief sport at the earlier school. It was building dams on the little creek that ran down the hill back of the Dornin place; and of my profound disbelief in the tale I was told that if you put a piece of horse hair in such a pool as we made, it would turn into one of the slender wire-worms we found in the muddy water. If I am not mistaken my first attempt at experiment was doing that very thing. Of course I never could tall whether it worked or not—the experiment was not controlled.

Of the Berkeley High School I remember principally the teachers. The inconceivably bad principal of the school was Veghte. A little red-haired man who knew at least nothing of the one subject he taught us, Physics. Be had no laboratory and the only experiment a we ever saw were conducted by little Joe Le Conte, one of the pupils of the course, who would make the apparatus himself at home, bring it to school and show the rest of the class how it worked. Joe had a little shop in a house back of his home and a lathe, and I remember watching him, with fascinated interest, make a small steam-engine which worked beautifully.

Miss Kendall was a fine woman but incapable of controlling the big room in which all three classes sat together. If a pupil did anything cut of order all he had to do to escape punishment was to play some monkey trick or other which would make her laugh and then she did nothing about it. Miss MaLean was made of sterner metal. She taught us English and both kept order and made us work and like it. I was fortunate in my English teachers for Professor Bradley in College was one of the finest teachers I ever had in any subject.

We used to eat our lunches on the bank of Strawberry Creek behind the School; I remember Mother's horror when she somehow learned from me that I was in the habit of extending the lunch she prepared for me by buying some sort of pie and eating the whole of it. I still recall how long the walk seemed after school let out at 4 p.m.  I was generally alone and after the hay was cut would cut across the big field that lay south of Dwight Way between College Avenue and the car line. Then up through the lower part of the Garber field, often stopping to munch a big carrot on the way. Queer, inadequate memories.

Collections. Beer bottle labels—butterflies—bird's eggs —minerals—stamps. What order did they come in?  I do not know but recall very well pursuing the butterflies in the orchard and in the Thornberg place and that must have been one of the earliest activities. What joy I had when Father brought me those two glass-fronted thread cases and some cork to put in their bottoms so I could pin the specimens in. How or where I first got long pins or learned to make boards to mount the butterflies on I cannot imagine. But I remember making those boards. I brought the two cases of specimens to Cambridge but the beetles got at them years ago. The sheet cork is still in the Cambridge basement. Why did I not collect birds as well as their nests and eggs? I used to Watch Joe LeConte skinning birds, and thought I could never learn the art. Nor did I ever try. It may have been the result of my dislike of killing the creatures which was undoubtedly the reason why I never cared for hunting. My chief haunt for bird’s nesting was the short stretch of our Canyon creek below the Thornberg place and down to the Dean place. I had it all to myself except for the cow that grazed in the little patch of grass on both sides and the pack-rats that lived in the big laurel trees. One stammer there were I seem to remember ten kinds of birds nesting in that little stretch of land. In 1930 I sat in the barber shop opposite the Berkeley Tennis Club and thought now much changed for the worse was that now over-busy spot as compared with my old memory of it.

My first mineral collecting I can surely place. When we were digging the holes for the apricot trees to be planted I first noticed the almond-shaped pebbles in the soil and found when I broke some open that they were lined with agate and bright quartz crystals. A far cry from the topaz pocket I have just been digging out up in Maine.

I afterwards found the rock ledge from which these amygdules came up at the head of Telegraph Canyon. I still have a drawer fall of these specimens which I use in my lectures. They are perfect examples of this particular form of mineral formation. Was it the gift of Uncle Dan's specimens of minerals which determined Mother to give Whit and me a room for our books and my numerous collections? Certainly it was a grand place for boys to have to themselves. What a thrill it was when Whit and I had finished the shelves with their glass doors and could arrange the specimens in them. Or did I really do any of the carpentry myself? I seem to remember it a joint labor. I know I watched those specimens with a jealous eye when any of the various children came out later to read or to look at them. I see I have forgotten plants and shells among my collections. How little I really knew about my collections from the scientific point of view. Perhaps it was just as well. At any rate it did not trouble me much at the time.

I have a vivid recollection of walks with the Rev. E. L. Green of unhappy memory, collecting flowers. And of how hard I tried to ever learn anything about them, either their names or classification, from him. Always he would tell me to look it up in my book—and I had no adequate book.

The plants are still in the Cambridge home but sadly faded and in part eaten by insects.

The shell collection was of later date. It seems to me I gathered most of them in one intensive season at Pacific Grove after graduation at College. The collection was given to the Pacific Grove local Museum I believe when the “study” (what did I call it?) was abandoned.

I have some curious early associations with music. After the long north room was added and the piano stood at the far end of the room I used to sit on the couch at the other end of the room or out on the porch and listen to the girls practicing while reading. It must have been during one of the no-school periods when I was reading any and everything I could find in the library. Indelible associations of a queerly illogical sort resulted. There is a symphony by Haydn which, when I hear, at once carries me away to the plains of Patagonia for I was reading a story in Young Folks Magazine called Gasper the Gaucho and I at once see the wild horsemen racing over the plains, throwing the bolas at the rheas or ostriches of that country. I heard it over the radio not long since and there was no mistaking the piece but I can not place the Symphony by number. The girls were playing it four-handed at the piano. A sonata of Liszt in the same way takes me to the Greek trenches in front of Troy for I was reading the Iliad in Bryant's terrible metrical translation, when I went on my first camping trip with Whit and his college mates, one night when we were in camp in the Calaveras Grove of Big Trees, Whit sang one of the great arias from Il Trovatore while the flames of the camp fire leaped up in the dark shadows of the forest. I never heard the opera until years later in Boston, and when the baritone came strutting out on the stage and sang that song the old memory came back so strongly that I wanted to leave the theatre then and there.

	Fairview home. Undated photo. Courtesy of Judith Palache Gregory.

I wonder if anyone else remembers my first attempt to put some of my chemical knowledge to practical application? The greenhouse on the back porch had become infested with flies which clustered at night in a black mass on the ceiling. Mother was at a loss how to get rid of them and I at once volunteered to help her. I burned a lot of sulphur on a shovel and filled the greenhouse with fumes which killed every thing in it except the flies. Her woe and my deep chagrin were things to remember indeed.

Does any one ever see any more those fascinating little frogs that used to live in that greenhouse and leap after the flies on the window panes? The wonder never ceased how they managed to catch their prey and at the same time secure their new hold on the vertical glass. They were certainly charming creatures.

The trip to the Sierra in 1885 when I was allowed to go along as Whit's “kid brother” was a great experience for me in out-of-doors living. As I now recall the incidents the party vas characterized by an almost total ignorance of cooking or camping out and at first we did not live any too well. Mother had insisted that we start out with a cooked ham to use until we got well used to cooking and I think and I think that ham saved our lives. The friendship which I began then with Jim Moffatt was peculiar in that although we rarely renewed our contacts in later life, whenever we did we both felt the bond of those experiences together. He had with me a love of flowers; he certainly developed with me a hatred of donkeys. I can still picture two incidents of the trip—three in fact associated with burros. First the start in Mokalumne Hill when one of our purchases kicked his way down the main street, disturbing his pack, none too securely put on, through its length. We had to sell that one and replace him. Next, going in to Calaveras Grove in front of Sperry's Hotel, the procession halted while Whit went to the hotel to ask where we might camp. I see Jim and myself at least—probably the others helped—running from one to the other burro trying to prevent their lying down in the road with the packs, all which antics were much to the amusement of the guests of the hotel porch. Third, we made camp on the shore of Lake Tahoe lat at night when it was too dark to see just where we were. In the morning we found a bit no trespass sign right near the camp; and for fear the owner should be aroused by their braying, Jim kept leaping from one beast to the other trying to throttle or beat him out of his morning salute.

I do not think I tried to help him but rather nearly died of laughing at him. We were not discovered until we had moved camp to open ground. To lighten the packs we had taken no change of clothing. So when Whit decided that we had beat leave the party at Tahoe and return by train we had to travel in our rags. I think we had just enough money to buy tickets from Truckee and a little left for food. Anyway I remember a terribly hot and long ride to 16th Street and then walking up from the station in Berkeley by the most secluded ways; finally appearing before a horrified Mother who could hardly recognize her sons in the two hungry and dusty tramps. I never made another hiking trip in the Sierra but did so ten years later on the Monterey coast.