school in his life, and who had no more relish of literature or learning
in him than the open fields, or the warm air of an early spring day. I
dare say it was a sense of his kinship with Nature that took my boy with
him, and rested his soul from all its wild dreams and vain imaginings.
He was like a piece of the genial earth, with no more hint of toiling or
spinning in him; willing for anything, but passive, and without force or
aim. He lived in a belated log-cabin that stood in the edge of a
cornfield on the river-bank, and he seemed, one day when my boy went to
find him there, to have a mother, who smoked a cob-pipe, and two or
three large sisters who hulked about in the one dim, low room. But the
boys had very little to do with each other's houses, or, for that
matter, with each other's yards. His friend seldom entered my boy's
gate, and never his door; for with all the toleration his father felt
for every manner of human creature, he could not see what good the boy
was to get from this queer companion. It is certain that he got no harm;
for his companion was too vague and void even to think evil. Socially,
he was as low as the ground under foot, but morally he was as good as
any boy in the Boy's Town, and he had no bad impulses. He had no
impulses at all, in fact, and of his own motion he never did anything,
or seemed to think anything. When he wished to get at my boy, he simply
appeared in the neighborhood, and hung about the outside of the fence
till he came out. He did not whistle, or call "E-oo-we!" as the other
fellows did, but waited patiently to be discovered, and to be gone off
with wherever my boy listed. He never had any plans himself, and never
any will but to go in swimming; he neither hunted nor foraged; he did
not even fish; and I suppose that money could not have hired him to run
races. He played marbles, but not very well, and he did not care much
for the game. The two boys soaked themselves in the river together, and
then they lay on the sandy shore, or under some tree, and talked; but
my boy could not have talked to him about any of the things that were in
his books, or the fume of dreams they sent up in his mind. He must
rather have soothed against his soft, caressing ignorance the ache of
his fantastic spirit, and reposed his intensity of purpose in that lax
and easy aimlessness. Their friendship was not only more innocent than
any other friendship my boy had, but it was wholly innocent; they loved
each other, and that was all; and why people love one another there is
never any satisfactory telling. But this friend of his must have had
great natural good in him; and if I could find a man of the make of that
boy I am sure I should love him.
My boy's other friends wondered at his fondness for him, and it was
often made a question with him at home, if not a reproach to him; so
that in the course of time it ceased to be that comfort it had been to
him. He could not give him up, but he could not help seeing that he was
ignorant and idle, and in a fatal hour he resolved to reform him. I am
not able to say now just how he worked his friend up to the point of
coming to school, and of washing his hands and feet and face, and
putting on a new check shirt to come in. But one day he came, and my
boy, as he had planned, took him into his seat, and owned his friendship
with him before the whole school. This was not easy, for though
everybody knew how much the two were together, it was a different thing
to sit with him as if he thought him just as good as any boy, and to
help him get his lessons, and stay him mentally as well as socially. He
struggled through one day, and maybe another; but it was a failure from
the first moment, and my boy breathed freer when his friend came one
half-day, and then never came again. The attempted reform had spoiled
their simple and harmless intimacy. They never met again upon the old
ground of perfect trust and affection. Perhaps the kindly earth-spirit
had instinctively felt a wound from the shame my boy had tried to brave
out, and shrank from their former friendship without quite knowing why.
Perhaps it was my boy who learned to realize that there could be little
in common but their common humanity between them, and could not go back
to that. At any rate, their friendship declined from this point; and it
seems to me, somehow, a pity.
Among the boys who were between my boy and his brother in age was one
whom all the boys liked, because he was clever with everybody, with
little boys as well as big boys. He was a laughing, pleasant fellow,
always ready for fun, but he never did mean things, and he had an open
face that made a friend of every one who saw him. He had a father that
had a house with a lightning-rod, so that if you were in it when there
was a thunder-storm you could not get struck by lightning, as my boy
once proved by being in it when there was a thunder-storm and not
getting struck. This in itself was a great merit, and there were
grape-arbors and peach-trees in his yard which added to his popularity,
with cling-stone peaches almost as big as oranges on them. He was a
fellow who could take you home to meals whenever he wanted to, and he
liked to have boys stay all night with him; his mother was as clever as
he was, and even the sight of his father did not make the fellows want
to go and hide. His father was so clever that he went home with my boy
one night about midnight when the boy had come to pass the night with
his boys, and the youngest of them had said he always had the nightmare
and walked in his sleep, and as likely as not he might kill you before
he knew it. My boy tried to sleep, but the more he reflected upon his
chances of getting through the night alive the smaller they seemed; and
so he woke up his potential murderer from the sweetest and soundest
slumber, and said he was going home, but he was afraid; and the boy had
to go and wake his father. Very few fathers would have dressed up and
gone home with a boy at midnight, and perhaps this one did so only
because the mother made him; but it shows how clever the whole family
was.
It was their oldest boy whom my boy and his brother chiefly went with
before that boy who knew about _Monte Cristo_ came to learn the trade in
their father's office. One Saturday in July they three spent the whole
day together. It was just the time when the apples are as big as walnuts
on the trees, and a boy wants to try whether any of them are going to be
sweet or not. The boys tried a great many of them, in an old orchard
thrown open for building-lots behind my boy's yard; but they could not
find any that were not sour; or that they could eat till they thought of
putting salt on them; if you put salt on it, you could eat any kind of
green apple, whether it was going to be a sweet kind or not. They went
up to the Basin bank and got lots of salt out of the holes in the
barrels lying there, and then they ate all the apples they could hold,
and after that they cut limber sticks off the trees, and sharpened the
points, and stuck apples on them and threw them. You could send an apple
almost out of sight that way, and you could scare a dog almost as far as
you could see him.
On Monday my boy and his brother went to school, but the other boy was
not there, and in the afternoon they heard he was sick. Then, toward the
end of the week they heard that he had the flux; and on Friday, just
before school let out, the teacher--it was the one that whipped so, and
that the fellows all liked--rapped on his desk, and began to speak very
solemnly to the scholars. He told them that their little mate, whom they
had played with and studied with, was lying very sick, so very sick that
it was expected he would die; and then he read them a serious lesson
about life and death, and tried to make them feel how passing and
uncertain all things were, and resolve to live so that they need never
be afraid to die.
Some of the fellows cried, and the next day some of them went to see the
dying boy, and my boy went with them. His spirit was stricken to the
earth, when he saw his gay, kind playmate lying there, white as the
pillow under his wasted face, in which his sunken blue eyes showed large
and strange. The sick boy did not say anything that the other boys could
hear, but they could see the wan smile that came to his dry lips, and
the light come sadly into his eyes, when his mother asked him if he knew
this one or that; and they could not bear it, and went out of the room.
In a few days they heard that he was dead, and one afternoon school did
not keep, so that the boys might go to the funeral. Most of them walked
in the procession; but some of them were waiting beside the open grave,
that was dug near the grave of that man who believed there was a hole
through the earth from pole to pole, and had a perforated stone globe on
top of his monument.
III
GAMES AND PASTIMES
MARBLES
In the Boy's Town they had regular games and plays, which came and went
in a stated order. The first thing in the spring, as soon as the frost
began to come out of the ground, they had marbles which they played till
the weather began to be pleasant for the game, and then they left it
off. There were some mean-spirited fellows who played for fun, but any
boy who was anything played for keeps: that is, keeping all the marbles
he won. As my boy was skilful at marbles, he was able to start out in
the morning with his toy, or the marble he shot with, and a commy, or a
brown marble of the lowest value, and come home at night with a
pocketful of white-alleys and blood-alleys, striped plasters and
bull's-eyes, and crystals, clear and clouded. His gambling was not
approved of at home, but it was allowed him because of the hardness of
his heart, I suppose, and because it was not thought well to keep him up
too strictly; and I suspect it would have been useless to forbid his
playing for keeps, though he came to have a bad conscience about it
before he gave it up. There were three kinds of games at marbles which
the boys played: one with a long ring marked out on the ground, and a
base some distance off, which you began to shoot from; another with a
round ring, whose line formed the base; and another with holes, three or
five, hollowed in the earth at equal distances from each other, which
was called knucks. You could play for keeps in all these games; and in
knucks, if you won, you had a shot or shots at the knuckles of the
fellow who lost, and who was obliged to hold them down for you to shoot
at. Fellows who were mean would twitch their knuckles away when they saw
your toy coming, and run; but most of them took their punishment with
the savage pluck of so many little Sioux. As the game began in the raw
cold of the earliest spring, every boy had chapped hands, and nearly
every one had the skin worn off the knuckle of his middle finger from
resting it on the ground when he shot. You could use a knuckle-dabster
of fur or cloth to rest your hand on, but is was considered effeminate,
and in the excitement you were apt to forget it, anyway. Marbles were
always very exciting, and were played with a clamor as incessant as that
of a blackbird roost. A great many points were always coming up: whether
a boy took-up, or edged, beyond the very place where his toy lay when he
shot; whether he knuckled down, or kept his hand on the ground, in
shooting; whether, when another boy's toy drove one marble against
another and knocked both out of the ring, he holloed "Fen doubs!" before
the other fellow holloed "Doubs!" whether a marble was in or out of the
ring, and whether the umpire's decision was just or not. The gambling
and the quarrelling went on till the second-bell rang for school, and
began again as soon as the boys could get back to their rings when
school let out. The rings were usually marked on the ground with a
stick, but when there was a great hurry, or there was no stick handy,
the side of a fellow's boot would do, and the hollows for knucks were
always bored by twirling round on your boot-heel. This helped a boy to
wear out his boots very rapidly, but that was what his boots were made
for, just as the sidewalks were made for the boys' marble-rings, and a
citizen's character for cleverness or meanness was fixed by his walking
round or over the rings. Cleverness was used in the Virginia sense for
amiability; a person who was clever in the English sense was smart.
RACES
When the warm weather came on in April, and the boys got off their shoes
for good, there came races, in which they seemed to fly on wings. Life
has a good many innocent joys for the human animal, but surely none so
ecstatic as the boy feels when his bare foot first touches the breast of
our mother earth in the spring. Something thrills through him then from
the heart of her inmost being that makes him feel kin with her, and
cousin to all her dumb children of the grass and trees. His blood leaps
as wildly as at that kiss of the waters when he plunges into their arms
in June; there is something even finer and sweeter in the rapture of the
earlier bliss. The day will not be long enough for his flights, his
races; he aches more with regret than with fatigue when he must leave
the happy paths under the stars outside, and creep into his bed. It is
all like some glimpse, some foretaste of the heavenly time when the
earth and her sons shall be reconciled in a deathless love, and they
shall not be thankless, nor she a stepmother any more.
[Illustration]
About the only drawback to going barefoot was stumping your toe, which
you were pretty sure to do when you first took off your shoes and before
you had got used to your new running weight. When you struck your toe
against a rock, or anything, you caught it up in your hand, and hopped
about a hundred yards before you could bear to put it to the ground.
Then you sat down, and held it as tight as you could, and cried over it,
till the fellows helped you to the pump to wash the blood off. Then, as
soon as you could, you limped home for a rag, and kept pretty quiet
about it so as to get out again without letting on to your mother.
A MEAN TRICK
There were shade-trees all along the street, that you could climb if you
wanted to, or that you could lie down under when you had run yourself
out of breath, or play mumble-the-peg. My boy distinctly remembered that
under one of these trees his elder brother first broached to him that
awful scheme of reform about fibbing, and applied to their own lives the
moral of _The Trippings of Tom Pepper_; he remembered how a conviction
of the righteousness of the scheme sank into his soul, and he could not
withhold his consent. Under the same tree, and very likely at the same
time, a solemn conclave of boys, all the boys there were, discussed the
feasibility of tying a tin can to a dog's tail, and seeing how he would
act. They had all heard of the thing, but none of them had seen it; and
it was not so much a question of whether you ought to do a thing that on
the very face of it would be so much fun, and if it did not amuse the
dog as highly as anybody, could certainly do him no harm, as it was a
question of whose dog you should get to take the dog's part in the
sport. It was held that an old dog would probably not keep still long
enough for you to tie the can on; he would have his suspicions; or else
he would not run when the can was tied on, but very likely just go and
lie down somewhere. The lot finally fell to a young yellow dog belonging
to one of the boys, and the owner at once ran home to get him, and
easily lured him back to the other boys with flatteries and caresses.
The flatteries and caresses were not needed, for a dog is always glad to
go with boys, upon any pretext, and so far from thinking that he does
them a favor, he feels himself greatly honored. But I dare say the boy
had a guilty fear that if his dog had known why he was invited to be of
that party of boys, he might have pleaded a previous engagement. As it
was, he came joyfully, and allowed the can to be tied to his tail
without misgiving. If there had been any question with the boys as to
whether he would enter fully into the spirit of the affair, it must have
been instantly dissipated by the dogs behavior when he felt the loop
tighten on his tail, and looked round to see what the matter was. The
boys hardly had a chance to cheer him before he flashed out of sight
round the corner, and they hardly had time to think before he flashed
into sight again from the other direction. He whizzed along the ground,
and the can hurtled in the air, but there was no other sound, and the
cheers died away on the boys' lips. The boy who owned the dog began to
cry, and the other fellows began to blame him for not stopping the dog.
But he might as well have tried to stop a streak of lightning; the only
thing you could do was to keep out of the dog's way. As an experiment it
was successful beyond the wildest dreams of its projectors, though it
would have been a sort of relief if the dog had taken some other road,
for variety, or had even reversed his course. But he kept on as he
began, and by a common impulse the boys made up their minds to abandon
the whole affair to him. They all ran home and hid, or else walked about
and tried to ignore it. But at this point the grown-up people began to
be interested; the mothers came to their doors to see what was the
matter. Yet even the mothers were powerless in a case like that, and the
enthusiast had to be left to his fate. He was found under a barn at
last, breathless, almost lifeless, and he tried to bite the man who
untied the can from his tail. Eventually he got well again, and lived
to be a solemn warning to the boys; he was touchingly distrustful of
their advances for a time, but he finally forgot and forgave everything.
They did not forget, and they never tried tying a tin can to a dog's
tail again, among all the things they tried and kept trying. Once was
enough; and they never even liked to talk of it, the sight was so awful.
They were really fond of the dog, and if they could have thought he
would take the matter so seriously, they would not have tried to have
that kind of fun with him. It cured them of ever wanting to have that
kind of fun with any dog.
TOPS
As the weather softened, tops came in some weeks after marbles went out,
and just after foot-races were over, and a little before swimming began.
At first the boys bought their tops at the stores, but after a while the
boy whose father had the turning-shop on the Hydraulic learned to turn
their tops, and did it for nothing, which was cheaper than buying tops,
especially as he furnished the wood, too, and you only had to get the
metal peg yourself. I believe he was the same boy who wanted to be a
pirate and ended by inventing a steam-governor. He was very ingenious,
and he knew how to turn a top out of beech or maple that would outspin
anything you could get in a store. The boys usually chose a firm, smooth
piece of sidewalk, under one of the big trees in the Smith neighborhood,
and spun their tops there. A fellow launched his top into the ring, and
the rest waited till it began to go to sleep--that is, to settle in one
place, and straighten up and spin silently, as if standing still. Then
any fellow had a right to peg at it with his top, and if he hit it, he
won it; and if he split it, as sometimes happened, the fellow that owned
it had to give him a top. The boys came with their pockets bulged out
with tops, but before long they had to go for more tops to that boy who
could turn them. From this it was but another step to go to the shop
with him and look on while he turned the tops; and then in process of
time the boys discovered that the smooth floor of the shop was a better
place to fight tops than the best piece of sidewalk. They would have
given whole Saturdays to the sport there, but when they got to holloing
too loudly the boy's father would come up, and then they would all run.
It was considered mean in him, but the boy himself was awfully clever,
and the first thing the fellows knew they were back there again. Some
few of the boys had humming-tops, but though these pleased by their
noise, they were not much esteemed, and could make no head against the
good old turnip-shaped tops, solid and weighty, that you could wind up
with a stout cotton cord, and launch with perfect aim from the flat
button held between your forefinger and middle finger. Some of the boys
had a very pretty art in the twirl they gave the top, and could control
its course, somewhat as a skilful pitcher can govern that of a baseball.
KITES
I do not know why a certain play went out, but suddenly the fellows who
had been playing ball, or marbles, or tops, would find themselves
playing something else. Kites came in just about the time of the
greatest heat in summer, and lasted a good while; but could not have
lasted as long as the heat, which began about the first of June, and
kept on well through September; no play could last so long as that, and
I suppose kite-flying must have died into swimming after the Fourth of
July. The kites were of various shapes: bow kites, two-stick kites, and
house kites. A bow kite could be made with half a barrel hoop carried
over the top of a cross, but it was troublesome to make, and it did not
fly very well, and somehow it was thought to look babyish; but it was
held in greater respect than the two-stick kite, which only the
smallest boys played with, and which was made by fastening two sticks in
the form of a cross. Any fellow more than six years old who appeared on
the Commons with a two-stick kite would have been met with jeers, as a
kind of girl.
The favorite kite, the kite that balanced best, took the wind best, and
flew best, and that would stand all day when you got it up, was the
house kite, which was made of three sticks, and shaped nearly in the
form of the gable of a gambrel-roofed house, only smaller at the base
than at the point where the roof would begin. The outline of all these
kites was given, and the sticks stayed in place by a string carried taut
from stick to stick, which was notched at the ends to hold it; sometimes
the sticks were held with a tack at the point of crossing, and sometimes
they were mortised into one another; but this was apt to weaken them.
The frame was laid down on a sheet of paper, and the paper was cut an
inch or two larger, and then pasted and folded over the string. Most of
the boys used a paste made of flour and cold water; but my boy and his
brother could usually get paste from the printing-office; and when they
could not they would make it by mixing flour and water cream-thick, and
slowly boiling it. That was a paste that would hold till the cows came
home, the boys said, and my boy was courted for his skill in making it.
But after the kite was pasted, and dried in the sun, or behind the
kitchen stove, if you were in very much of a hurry (and you nearly
always were), it had to be hung, with belly-bands and tail-bands; that
is, with strings carried from stick to stick over the face and at the
bottom, to attach the cord for flying it and to fasten on the tail by.
This took a good deal of art, and unless it were well done the kite
would not balance, but would be always pitching and darting. Then the
tail had to be of just the right weight; if it was too heavy the kite
kept sinking, even after you got it up where otherwise it would stand;
if too light, the kite would dart, and dash itself to pieces on the
ground. A very pretty tail was made by tying twists of paper across a
string a foot apart, till there were enough to balance the kite; but
this sort of tail was apt to get tangled, and the best tail was made of
a long streamer of cotton rags, with a gay tuft of dog-fennel at the
end. Dog-fennel was added or taken away till just the right weight was
got; and when this was done, after several experimental tests, the kite
was laid flat on its face in the middle of the road, or on a long
stretch of smooth grass; the bands were arranged, and the tail stretched
carefully out behind, where it would not catch on bushes. You unwound a
great length of twine, running backward, and letting the twine slip
swiftly through your hands till you had run enough out; then you seized
the ball, and with one look over your shoulder to see that all was
right, started swiftly forward. The kite reared itself from the ground,
and swaying gracefully from side to side, rose slowly into the air, with
its long tail climbing after it till the fennel tuft swung free. If
there was not much surface wind you might have to run a little way, but
as soon as the kite caught the upper currents it straightened itself,
pulled the twine taut, and steadily mounted, while you gave it more and
more twine; if the breeze was strong, the cord burned as it ran through
your hands; till at last the kite stood still in the sky, at such a
height that the cord holding it sometimes melted out of sight in the
distance.