be drowned, some of the people had gone up to his mother's cabin to
prepare her for the worst. She did not seem to understand exactly, and
she kept round getting breakfast, with her old clay pipe in her mouth;
but when she got it through her head, she made an awful face, and
dropped her pipe on the door-stone and broke it; and then she threw her
check apron over her head and sat down and cried.
But it took so long for her to come to this that the people had not got
over comforting her and trying to make her believe that it was all for
the best, when Blue Bob came up through the bars with his hand on Jim's
shoulder, and about all the boys in town tagging after them.
Jim's mother heard the hurrahing and pulled off her apron, and saw that
Jim was safe and sound there before her. She gave him a look that made
him slip round behind Blue Bob, and she went in and got a table-knife,
and she came out and went to the pear-tree and cut a sucker.
She said, "I'll learn that limb to sleep in a cow-barn when he's got a
decent bed in the house!" and then she started to come toward Jim
Leonard.
II
LIFE IN A BOY'S TOWN
THE TOWN
I call it a Boy's Town because I wish it to appear to the reader as a
town appears to a boy from his third to his eleventh year, when he
seldom, if ever, catches a glimpse of life much higher than the middle
of a man, and has the most distorted and mistaken views of most
things.... Some people remain in this condition as long as they live,
and keep the ignorance of childhood, after they have lost its innocence;
heaven has been shut, but the earth is still a prison to them. These
will not know what I mean by much that I shall have to say; but I hope
that the ungrown-up children will, and that the boys of to-day will like
to know what a boy of forty years ago was like, even if he had no very
exciting adventures or thread-bare escapes; perhaps I mean hair-breadth
escapes; but it is the same thing--they have been used so often. I shall
try to describe him very minutely in his daily doings and dreamings, and
it may amuse them to compare these doings and dreamings with their own.
For convenience, I shall call this boy, my boy; but I hope he might have
been almost anybody's boy; and I mean him sometimes for a boy in
general, as well as a boy in particular.
[Illustration: THE FIRST LOCK]
It seems to me that my Boy's Town was a town peculiarly adapted for a
boy to be a boy in. It had a river, the great Miami River, which was as
blue as the sky when it was not as yellow as gold; and it had another
river, called the Old River, which was the Miami's former channel, and
which held an island in its sluggish loop; the boys called it The
Island; and it must have been about the size of Australia; perhaps it
was not so large. Then this town had a Canal, and a Canal-Basin, and a
First Lock and a Second Lock; you could walk out to the First Lock, but
the Second Lock was at the edge of the known world, and, when my boy was
very little, the biggest boy had never been beyond it. Then it had a
Hydraulic, which brought the waters of Old River for mill-power through
the heart of the town, from a Big Reservoir and a Little Reservoir; the
Big Reservoir was as far off as the Second Lock, and the Hydraulic ran
under mysterious culverts at every street-crossing. All these streams
and courses had fish in them at all seasons, and all summer long they
had boys in them, and now and then a boy in winter, when the thin ice
of the mild Southern Ohio winter let him through with his skates. Then
there were the Commons: a wide expanse of open fields, where the cows
were pastured, and the boys flew their kites, and ran races, and
practised for their circuses in the tan-bark rings of the real circuses.
EARLIEST MEMORIES
Some of my boy's memories reach a time earlier than his third year, and
relate to the little Ohio River hamlet where he was born, and where his
mother's people, who were river-faring folk, all lived. Every two or
three years the river rose and flooded the village; and his
grandmother's household was taken out of the second-story window in a
skiff; but no one minded a trivial inconvenience like that, any more
than the Romans have minded the annual freshet of the Tiber for the last
three or four thousand years. When the waters went down the family
returned and scrubbed out the five or six inches of rich mud they had
left. In the mean time it was a godsend to all boys of an age to enjoy
it; but it was nothing out of the order of Providence. So, if my boy
ever saw a freshet, it naturally made no impression upon him. What he
remembered was something much more important, and that was waking up one
morning and seeing a peach-tree in bloom through the window beside his
bed; and he was always glad that this vision of beauty was his very
earliest memory. All his life he has never seen a peach-tree in bloom
without a swelling of the heart, without some fleeting sense that
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy."
Over the spot where the little house once stood a railroad has drawn its
erasing lines, and the house itself was long since taken down and built
up brick by brick in quite another place; but the blooming peach-tree
glows before his childish eyes untouched by time or change. The tender,
pathetic pink of its flowers repeated itself many long years afterward
in the paler tints of the almond blossoms in Italy, but always with a
reminiscence of that dim past, and the little coal-smoky town on the
banks of the Ohio.
Perversely blended with that vision of the blooming peach is a glimpse
of a pet deer in the kitchen of the same little house, with its head up
and its antlers erect, as if he meditated offence. My boy might never
have seen him so; he may have had the vision at second hand; but it is
certain that there was a pet deer in the family, and that he was as
likely to have come into the kitchen by the window as by the door. One
of the boy's uncles had seen this deer swimming the Mississippi, far to
the southward, and had sent out a yawl and captured him, and brought him
home. He began a checkered career of uselessness when they were ferrying
him over from Wheeling in a skiff, by trying to help wear the pantaloons
of the boy who was holding him; he put one of his fore-legs in at the
watch-pocket; but it was disagreeable to the boy and ruinous to the
trousers. He grew very tame, and butted children over, right and left,
in the village streets; and he behaved like one of the family whenever
he got into a house; he ate the sugar out of the bowl on the table, and
plundered the pantry of its sweet cakes. One day a dog got after him,
and he jumped over the river-bank and broke his leg, and had to be shot.
HOME LIFE
The house gave even to him a sense of space unknown before, and he could
recall his mother's satisfaction in it. He has often been back there in
dreams, and found it on the old scale of grandeur; but no doubt it was a
very simple affair. The fortunes of a Whig editor in a place so
overwhelmingly Democratic as the Boy's Town were not such as could have
warranted his living in a palace; and he must have been poor, as the
world goes now. But the family always lived in abundance, and in their
way they belonged to the employing class; that is, the father had men to
work for him. On the other hand, he worked with them; and the boys, as
they grew old enough, were taught to work with them, too. My boy grew
old enough very young; and was put to use in the printing-office before
he was ten years of age. This was not altogether because he was needed
there, I dare say, but because it was part of his father's Swedenborgian
philosophy that every one should fulfil a use; I do not know that when
the boy wanted to go swimming, or hunting, or skating, it consoled him
much to reflect that the angels in the highest heaven delighted in uses;
nevertheless, it was good for him to be of use, though maybe not so much
use.
If his mother did her own work, with help only now and then from a hired
girl, that was the custom of the time and country; and her memory was
always the more reverend to him, because whenever he looked back at her
in those dim years, he saw her about some of those household offices
which are so beautiful to a child. She was always the best and tenderest
mother, and her love had the heavenly art of making each child feel
itself the most important, while she was partial to none. In spite of
her busy days she followed their father in his religion and literature,
and at night, when her long toil was over, she sat with the children and
listened while he read aloud.
The first book my boy remembered to have heard him read was Moore's
_Lalla Rookh_, of which he formed but a vague notion, though while he
struggled after its meaning he took all its music in, and began at once
to make rhymes of his own. He had no conception of literature except the
pleasure there was in making it; and he had no outlook into the world of
it, which must have been pretty open to his father. The father read
aloud some of Dickens' Christmas stories, then new; and the boy had a
good deal of trouble with the _Haunted Man_. One rarest night of all,
the family sat up till two o'clock, listening to a novel that my boy
long ago forgot the name of, if he ever knew its name. It was all about
a will, forged or lost, and there was a great scene in court, and after
that the mother declared that she could not go to bed till she heard the
end. His own first reading was in history. At nine years of age he read
the history of Greece, and the history of Rome, and he knew that
Goldsmith wrote them. One night his father told the boys all about Don
Quixote; and a little while after he gave my boy the book. He read it
over and over again; but he did not suppose it was a novel. It was his
elder brother who read novels, and a novel was like _Handy Andy_, or
_Harry Lorrequer_, or the _Bride of Lammermoor_. His brother had another
novel which they preferred to either; it was in Harper's old "Library of
Select Novels," and was called _Alamance; or, the Great and Final
Experiment_, and it was about the life of some sort of community in
North Carolina. It bewitched them, and though my boy could not afterward
recall a single fact or figure in it, he could bring before his mind's
eye every trait of its outward aspect.
All this went along with great and continued political excitement, and
with some glimpses of the social problem. It was very simple then;
nobody was very rich, and nobody was in want; but somehow, as the boy
grew older, he began to discover that there were differences, even in
the little world about him; some were higher and some were lower. From
the first he was taught by precept and example to take the side of the
lower. As the children were denied oftener than they were indulged, the
margin of their own abundance must have been narrower than they ever
knew then; but if they had been of the most prosperous, their bent in
this matter would have been the same. Once there was a church festival,
or something of that sort, and there was a good deal of the provision
left over, which it was decided should be given to the poor. This was
very easy, but it was not so easy to find the poor whom it should be
given to. At last a hard-working widow was chosen to receive it; the
ladies carried it to her front door and gave it her, and she carried it
to her back door and threw it into the alley. No doubt she had enough
without it, but there were circumstances of indignity or patronage
attending the gift which were recognized in my boy's home, and which
helped afterward to make him doubtful of all giving, except the
humblest, and restive with a world in which there need be any giving at
all.
THE RIVER
It seems to me that the best way to get at the heart of any boy's town
is to take its different watercourses and follow them into it.
The house where my boy first lived was not far from the river, and he
must have seen it often before he noticed it. But he was not aware of it
till he found it under the bridge. Without the river there could not
have been a bridge; the fact of the bridge may have made him look for
the river; but the bridge is foremost in his mind. It is a long, wooden
tunnel, with two roadways, and a foot-path on either side of these;
there is a toll-house at each end, and from one to the other it is about
as far as from the Earth to the planet Mars. On the western shore of the
river is a smaller town than the Boy's Town, and in the perspective the
entrance of the bridge on that side is like a dim little doorway. The
timbers are of a hugeness to strike fear into the heart of the boldest
little boy; and there is something awful even about the dust in the
roadways; soft and thrillingly cool to the boy's bare feet, it lies
thick in a perpetual twilight, streaked at intervals by the sun that
slants in at the high, narrow windows under the roof; it has a certain
potent, musty smell. The bridge has three piers, and at low water
hardier adventurers than he wade out to the middle pier; some heroes
even fish there, standing all day on the loose rocks about the base of
the pier. He shudders to see them, and aches with wonder how they will
get ashore. Once he is there when a big boy wades back from the middle
pier, where he has been to rob a goose's nest; he has some loose silver
change in his wet hand, and my boy understands that it has come out of
one of the goose eggs. This fact, which he never thought of questioning,
gets mixed up in his mind with an idea of riches, of treasure-trove, in
the cellar of an old house that has been torn down near the end of the
bridge.
The river had its own climate, and this climate was of course much such
a climate as the boys, for whom nature intended the river, would have
chosen. I do not believe it was ever winter there, though it was
sometimes late autumn, so that the boys could have some use for the
caves they dug at the top of the bank, with a hole coming through the
turf, to let out the smoke of the fires they built inside. They had the
joy of choking and blackening over these flues, and they intended to
live on corn and potatoes borrowed from the household stores of the boy
whose house was nearest. They never got so far as to parch the corn or
to bake the potatoes in their caves, but there was the fire, and the
draught was magnificent. The light of the red flames painted the little,
happy, foolish faces, so long since wrinkled and grizzled with age, or
mouldered away to dust, as the boys huddled before them under the bank,
and fed them with the drift, or stood patient of the heat and cold in
the afternoon light of some vast Saturday waning to nightfall.
The river-climate, with these autumnal intervals, was made up of a
quick, eventful springtime, followed by the calm of a cloudless summer
that seemed never to end. But the spring, short as it was, had its great
attractions, and chief of these was the freshet which it brought to the
river. They would hear somehow that the river was rising, and then the
boys, who had never connected its rise with the rains they must have
been having, would all go down to its banks and watch the swelling
waters. These would be yellow and thick, and the boiling current would
have smooth, oily eddies, where pieces of drift would whirl round and
round, and then escape and slip down the stream. There were saw-logs and
whole trees with their branching tops, lengths of fence and hen-coops
and pig-pens; once there was a stable; and if the flood continued, there
began to come swollen bodies of horses and cattle. This must have meant
serious loss to the people living on the river-bottoms above, but the
boys counted it all gain. They cheered the objects as they floated by,
and they were breathless with the excitement of seeing the men who
caught fence-rails and cord-wood, and even saw-logs, with iron prongs at
the points of long poles, as they stood on some jutting point of shore
and stretched far out over the flood. The boys exulted in the turbid
spread of the stream, which filled its low western banks and stole over
their tops, and washed into all the hollow places along its shores, and
shone among the trunks of the sycamores on Delorac's Island, which was
almost of the geographical importance of The Island in Old River. When
the water began to go down their hearts sank with it; and they gave up
the hope of seeing the bridge carried away. Once the river rose to
within a few feet of it, so that if the right piece of drift had been
there to do its duty, the bridge might have been torn from its piers and
swept down the raging tide into those unknown gulfs to the southward.
Many a time they went to bed full of hope that it would at least happen
in the night, and woke to learn with shame and grief in the morning that
the bridge was still there, and the river was falling. It was a little
comfort to know that some of the big boys had almost seen it go,
watching as far into the night as nine o'clock with the men who sat up
near the bridge till daylight: men of leisure and public spirit, but not
perhaps the leading citizens.
SWIMMING
There must have been a tedious time between the going down of the flood
and the first days when the water was warm enough for swimming; but it
left no trace. The boys are standing on the shore while the freshet
rushes by, and then they are in the water, splashing, diving, ducking;
it is like that; so that I do not know just how to get in that period of
fishing which must always have come between. There were not many fish in
that part of the Miami; my boy's experience was full of the ignominy of
catching shiners and suckers, or, at the best, mudcats, as they called
the yellow catfish; but there were boys, of those who cursed and swore,
who caught sunfish, as they called the bream; and there were men who
were reputed to catch at will, as it were, silvercats and river-bass.
They fished with minnows, which they kept in battered tin buckets that
they did not allow you even to touch, or hardly to look at; my boy
scarcely breathed in their presence; when one of them got up to cast his
line in a new place, the boys all ran, and then came slowly back. These
men often carried a flask of liquid that had the property, when taken
inwardly, of keeping the damp out. The boys respected them for their
ability to drink whiskey, and thought it a fit and honorable thing that
they should now and then fall into the river over the brinks where they
had set their poles. But they disappear like persons in a dream, and
their fishing-time vanishes with them, and the swimming-time is in full
possession of the river, and of all the other waters of the Boy's Town.
[Illustration]
The swimming-holes in the river were the greatest favorites. My boy
could not remember when he began to go into them, though it certainly
was before he could swim. There was a time when he was afraid of getting
in over his head; but he did not know just when he learned to swim, any
more than he knew when he learned to read; he could not swim, and then
he could swim; he could not read, and then he could read; but I dare say
the reading came somewhat before the swimming. Yet the swimming must
have come very early, and certainly it was kept up with continual
practise; he swam quite as much as he read; perhaps more. The boys had
deep swimming-holes and shallow ones; and over the deep ones there was
always a spring-board, from which they threw somersaults, or dived
straight down into the depths, where there were warm and cold currents
mysteriously interwoven. They believed that these deep holes were
infested by water-snakes, though they never saw any, and they expected
to be bitten by snapping-turtles, though this never happened. Fiery
dragons could not have kept them out; gallynippers, whatever they were,
certainly did not; they were believed to abound at the bottom of the
deep holes; but the boys never stayed long in the deep holes, and they
preferred the shallow places, where the river broke into a long ripple
(they called it riffle) on its gravelly bed, and where they could at
once soak and bask in the musical rush of the sunlit waters. I have
heard people in New England blame all the Western rivers for being
yellow and turbid; but I know that after the spring floods, when the
Miami had settled down to its summer business with the boys, it was as
clear and as blue as if it were spilled out of the summer sky. The boys
liked the riffle because they could stay in so long there, and there
were little land-locked pools and shallows, where the water was even
warmer, and they could stay in longer. At most places under the banks
there was clay of different colors, which they used for war-paint in
their Indian fights; and after they had their Indian fights they could
rush screaming and clattering into the riffle. When the stream had
washed them clean down to their red sunburn or their leathern tan, they
could paint up again and have more Indian fights.
I wonder what sign the boys who read this have for challenging or
inviting one another to go in swimming. The boys in the Boy's Town used
to make the motion of swimming with both arms; or they held up the
forefinger and middle-finger in the form of a swallow-tail; they did
this when it was necessary to be secret about it, as in school, and when
they did not want the whole crowd of boys to come along; and often when
they just pretended they did not want some one to know. They really had
to be secret at times, for some of the boys were not allowed to go in at
all; others were forbidden to go in more than once or twice a day; and
as they all _had_ to go in at least three or four times a day, some sort
of sign had to be used that was understood among themselves alone. Since
this is a true history, I had better own that they nearly all, at one
time or other, must have told lies about it, either before or after the
fact, some habitually, some only in great extremity. Here and there a
boy, like my boy's elder brother, would not tell lies at all, even about
going in swimming; but by far the greater number bowed to their hard
fate, and told them. They promised that they would not go in, and then
they said that they had not been in; but Sin, for which they had made
this sacrifice, was apt to betray them. Either they got their shirts on
wrong side out in dressing, or else, while they were in, some enemy came
upon them and tied their shirts. There are few cruelties which public
opinion in the boy's world condemns, but I am glad to remember, to their
honor, that there were not many in that Boy's Town who would tie shirts;
and I fervently hope that there is no boy now living who would do it. As
the crime is probably extinct, I will say that in those wicked days, if
you were such a miscreant, and there was some boy you hated, you stole
up and tied the hardest kind of a knot in one arm or both arms of his
shirt. Then, if the Evil One put it into your heart, you soaked the knot
in water, and pounded it with a stone.
I am glad to know that in the days when he was thoughtless and senseless
enough, my boy never was guilty of any degree of this meanness. It was
his brother, I suppose, who taught him to abhor it; and perhaps it was
his own suffering from it in part; for he, too, sometimes shed bitter
tears over such a knot, as I have seen hapless little wretches do,
tearing at it with their nails and gnawing at it with their teeth,
knowing that the time was passing when they could hope to hide the fact
that they had been in swimming, and foreseeing no remedy but to cut off
the sleeve above the knot, or else put on their clothes without the
shirt, and trust to untying the knot when it got dry.
There must have been a lurking anxiety in all the boys' hearts when they
went in without leave, or, as my boy was apt to do, when explicitly
forbidden. He was not apt at lying, I dare say, and so he took the
course of open disobedience. He could not see the danger that filled the
home hearts with fear for him, and he must have often broken the law and
been forgiven, before Justice one day appeared for him on the river-bank
and called him away from his stolen joys. It was an awful moment, and
it covered him with shame before his mates, who heartlessly rejoiced, as
children do, in the doom which they are escaping. That sin, at least, he
fully expiated; and I will whisper to the young people here at the end
of the chapter that somehow, soon or late, our sins do overtake us, and
insist upon being paid for. That is not the best reason for not sinning,
but it is well to know it, and to believe it in our acts as well as our
thoughts. You will find people to tell you that things only happen so
and so. It may be; only, I know that no good thing ever happened to
happen to me when I had done wrong.
SKATING