As school and college declamations, these have seldom, if ever, been surpassed. Vivid in description, stirring in sentiment, alive with action, dramatically portraying concrete deeds of heroism, they are especially attractive to school and college boys. Nearly all of these, it will be noticed, deal with ancient characters and events. From the time Mr. Kellogg began to prepare for college in his father’s study, he was exceedingly fond of the ancient classics. He had in his library at the time of his death 235 volumes of the classics of Greece and Rome. Well versed in Greek and Roman history and mythology, he could fittingly extol the patriotism of Leonidas and Decius; bewail the woes of the Roman debtor; incite the gladiators to revolt; and appeal to the Roman legions, or curse the Carthaginians through the mouth of Icilius or Regulus.
With the exception of a few bits of verse written while he was an undergraduate and printed in the college paper, _The Bowdoin Portfolio_, “Spartacus” was the first of Mr. Kellogg’s writings to be published. During the twenty-three years between 1843, when he became pastor of the church at Harpswell, Maine, and 1866, when he resigned as pastor of the Mariners’ Church in Boston, he wrote very little that was printed: “Regulus,” an ode for the celebration of Bowdoin’s semi-centennial in 1852, and a sermon, “The Strength and Beauty of the Sanctuary,” preached at the dedication of the Congregation Chapel, St. Lawrence Street, Portland, Maine, in 1858. After 1866, after Mr. Kellogg was more than fifty years old, came that rather remarkable period of story-writing. Uncommon is it for a story-writer not to begin his career until after he has lived two score years and ten. That Mr. Kellogg could tell a tale, however, in a way to interest boys, his college mates discovered during his undergraduate days; for those well acquainted with him in college, as they have recorded their recollections of young Kellogg, seldom fail to mention that “he was very fluent in talk, exceedingly interesting as a conversationalist, and an excellent story-teller.”
For some time before his resignation from the pastorate of the Mariners’ Church he had been thinking of trying his hand at a boys’ story, and in January, 1867, the first chapter of his first story was printed in _Our Young Folks_, a magazine published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields. This story, “Good Old Times,” at once became popular with the young readers of this magazine. It is one of the best stories that Mr. Kellogg ever wrote. It is largely a narrative of facts--the story of Hugh and Elizabeth McLellan, the great-grandfather and great-grandmother of Elijah Kellogg, in their struggle at the beginning of the eighteenth century to cut a home for themselves out of the forest wilderness of Narragansett No. 7, where the town of Gorham, Maine, now is. Of Scotch-Irish descent, young, brave, and resolute, “strong of limb, strong in faith, strong in God,” this couple left their home in the north of Ireland to escape persecution, poverty, and famine. They braved the terrors of the sea and the savages to found a home in the new country. Accustomed as they had been in Ireland to regard a landowner as the most fortunate of men, they deemed it a rare privilege to secure land in Narragansett No. 7, by paying “but little money and the balance in blood and risk and hardship.” They gladly dared the privations of a savage wilderness to obtain some soil they could call their own.