preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty,
her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart,
but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate
who fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two
down--click-click, click-click--and died all over the deck of the pirate
ship in the opening piece. This was called the _Beacon of Death_, and
the scene represented the forecastle of the pirate ship with a lantern
dangling from the rigging, to lure unsuspecting merchantmen to their
doom. Afterward the boy remembered nothing of the story, but a scrap of
the dialogue meaninglessly remained with him; and when the pirate
captain appeared with his bloody crew and said, hoarsely, "Let us go
below and get some brandy!" the boy would have bartered all his hopes
of bliss to have been that abandoned ruffian. In fact, he always liked,
and longed to be, the villain, rather than any other person in the play,
and he so glutted himself with crime of every sort in his tender years
at the theatre that he afterward came to be very tired of it, and
avoided the plays and novels that had very marked villains in them.
He was in an ecstasy as soon as the curtain rose that night, and he
lived somewhere out of his body as long as the playing lasted, which was
well on to midnight; for in those days the theatre did not meanly put
the public off with one play, but gave it a heartful and its money's
worth with three. On his first night my boy saw _The Beacon of Death_,
_Bombastes Furioso_, and _Black-Eyed Susan_, and he never afterward saw
less than three plays each night, and he never missed a night, as long
as the theatre languished in the unfriendly air of that mainly
Calvinistic community, where the theatre was regarded by most good
people as the eighth of the seven deadly sins. The whole day long he
dwelt in a dream of it that blotted out, or rather consumed with more
effulgent brightness, all the other day-dreams he had dreamed before,
and his heart almost burst with longing to be a villain like those
villains on the stage, to have a mustache--a black mustache--such as
they wore at a time when every one off the stage was clean shaven, and
somehow to end bloodily, murderously, as became a villain.
I dare say this was not quite a wholesome frame of mind for a boy of ten
years; but I do not defend it; I only portray it. Being the boy he was,
he was destined somehow to dwell half the time in a world of dreamery;
and I have tried to express how, when he had once got enough of villany,
he reformed his ideals and rather liked virtue.
THE WORLD OPENED BY BOOKS
Every boy is two or three boys, or twenty or thirty different kinds of
boys in one; he is all the time living many lives and forming many
characters; but it is a good thing if he can keep one life and one
character when he gets to be a man. He may turn out to be like an onion
when he is grown up, and be nothing but hulls, that you keep peeling
off, one after another, till you think you have got down to the heart,
at last, and then you have got down to nothing.
All the boys may have been like my boy in the Boy's Town, in having each
an inward being that was not the least like their outward being, but
that somehow seemed to be their real self, whether it truly was so or
not. But I am certain that this was the case with him, and that while
he was joyfully sharing the wild sports and conforming to the savage
usages of the boy's world about him, he was dwelling in a wholly
different world within him, whose wonders no one else knew. I could not
tell now these wonders any more than he could have told them then; but
it was a world of dreams, of hopes, of purposes, which he would have
been more ashamed to avow for himself than I should be to avow for him.
It was all vague and vast, and it came out of the books that he read,
and that filled his soul with their witchery, and often held him aloof
with their charm in the midst of the plays from which they could not
lure him wholly away, or at all away. He did not know how or when their
enchantment began, and he could hardly recall the names of some of them
afterward.
First of them was Goldsmith's _History of Greece_, which made him an
Athenian of Pericles' time, and Goldsmith's _History of Rome_, which
naturalized him in a Roman citizenship chiefly employed in slaying
tyrants; from the time of Appius Claudius down to the time of Domitian,
there was hardly a tyrant that he did not slay. After he had read these
books, not once or twice, but twenty times over, his father thought fit
to put into his hands _The Travels of Captain Ashe in North America_, to
encourage, or perhaps to test, his taste for useful reading; but this
was a failure. The captain's travels were printed with long esses, and
the boy could make nothing of them, for other reasons. The fancy
nourished upon
"The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome,"
starved amid the robust plenty of the Englishman's criticisms of our
early manners and customs. Neither could money hire the boy to read
_Malte-Brun's Geography_, in three large folios, of a thousand pages
each, for which there was a standing offer of fifty cents from the
father, who had never been able to read it himself.
But shortly after he failed so miserably with Captain Ashe, the boy came
into possession of a priceless treasure. It was that little treatise on
_Greek and Roman Mythology_ which I have mentioned, and which he must
literally have worn out with reading, since no fragment of it seems to
have survived his boyhood. Heaven knows who wrote it or published it;
his father bought it with a number of other books at an auction, and the
boy, who had about that time discovered the chapter on prosody in the
back part of his grammar, made poems from it for years, and appeared in
many transfigurations, as this and that god and demigod and hero upon
imagined occasions in the Boy's Town, to the fancied admiration of all
the other fellows. I do not know just why he wished to appear to his
grandmother in a vision; now as Mercury with winged feet, now as Apollo
with his drawn bow, now as Hercules leaning upon his club and resting
from his Twelve Labors. Perhaps it was because he thought that his
grandmother, who used to tell the children about her life in Wales, and
show them the picture of a castle where she had once slept when she was
a girl, would appreciate him in these apotheoses. If he believed they
would make a vivid impression upon the sweet old Quaker lady, no doubt
he was right.
There was another book which he read about this time, and that was _The
Greek Soldier_. It was the story of a young Greek, a glorious Athenian,
who had fought through the Greek war of independence against the Turks,
and then come to America and published the narrative of his adventures.
They fired my boy with a retrospective longing to have been present at
the Battle of Navarino, when the allied ships of the English, French,
and Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet; but it seemed to him that he
could not have borne to have the allies impose a king upon the Greeks,
when they really wanted a republic, and so he was able to console
himself for having been absent. He did what he could in fighting the war
over again, and he intended to harden himself for the long struggle by
sleeping on the floor, as the Greek soldier had done. But the children
often fell asleep on the floor in the warmth of the hearth-fire; and his
preparation for the patriotic strife was not distinguishable in its
practical effect from a reluctance to go to bed at the right hour.
Captain Riley's narrative of his shipwreck on the coast of Africa, and
his captivity among the Arabs, was a book which my boy and his brother
prized with a kind of personal interest, because their father told them
that he had once seen a son of Captain Riley when he went to get his
appointment of collector at Columbus, and that this son was named
William Willshire Riley, after the good English merchant, William
Willshire, who had ransomed Captain Riley. William Willshire seemed to
them almost the best man who ever lived; though my boy had secretly a
greater fondness for the Arab, Sidi Hamet, who was kind to Captain Riley
and kept his brother Seid from ill-treating him whenever he could.
Probably the boy liked him better because the Arab was more picturesque
than the Englishman. The whole narrative was very interesting; it had a
vein of sincere and earnest piety in it which was not its least charm,
and it was written in a style of old-fashioned stateliness which was not
without its effect with the boys.
Somehow they did not think of the Arabs in this narrative as of the same
race and faith with the Arabs of Bagdad and the other places in the
_Arabian Nights_. They did not think whether these were Mohammedans or
not; they naturalized them in the fairy world where all boys are
citizens, and lived with them there upon the same familiar terms as they
lived with Robinson Crusoe. Their father once told them that _Robinson
Crusoe_ had robbed the real narrative of Alexander Selkirk of the place
it ought to have held in the remembrance of the world; and my boy had a
feeling of guilt in reading it, as if he were making himself the
accomplice of an impostor.
He liked the _Arabian Nights_, but oddly enough these wonderful tales
made no such impression on his fancy as the stories in a wretchedly
inferior book made. He did not know the name of this book, or who wrote
it; from which I imagine that much of his reading was of the purblind
sort that ignorant grown-up people do, without any sort of literary
vision. He read this book perpetually, when he was not reading his
_Greek and Roman Mythology_; and then suddenly, one day, as happens in
childhood with so many things, it vanished out of his possession as if
by magic. Perhaps he lost it; perhaps he lent it; at any rate it was
gone, and he never got it back, and he never knew what book it was till
thirty years afterward, when he picked up from a friend's library-table
a copy of _Gesta Romanorum_, and recognized in this collection of old
monkish legends the long-missing treasure of his boyhood.
These stories, without beauty of invention, without art of construction
or character, without spirituality in their crude materialization, which
were read aloud in the refectories of mediaeval cloisters while the monks
sat at meat, laid a spell upon the soul of the boy that governed his
life. He conformed his conduct to the principles and maxims which
actuated the behavior of the shadowy people of these dry-as-dust tales;
he went about drunk with the fumes of fables about Roman emperors that
never were, in an empire that never was; and, though they tormented him
by putting a mixed and impossible civilization in the place of that he
knew from his Goldsmith, he was quite helpless to break from their
influence. He was always expecting some wonderful thing to happen to him
as things happened there in fulfilment of some saying or prophecy; and
at every trivial moment he made sayings and prophecies for himself,
which he wished events to fulfil. One Sunday when he was walking in an
alley behind one of the stores, he found a fur cap that had probably
fallen out of the store-loft window. He ran home with it, and in his
simple-hearted rapture he told his mother that as soon as he picked it
up there came into his mind the words, "He who picketh up this cap
picketh up a fortune," and he could hardly wait for Monday to come and
let him restore the cap to its owner and receive an enduring prosperity
in reward of his virtue. Heaven knows what form he expected this to
take; but when he found himself in the store, he lost all courage; his
tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could not utter a syllable
of the fine phrases he had made to himself. He laid the cap on the
counter without a word; the storekeeper came up and took it in his hand.
"What's this?" he said. "Why, this is ours," and he tossed the cap into
a loose pile of hats by the showcase, and the boy slunk out, cut to the
heart and crushed to the dust. It was such a cruel disappointment and
mortification that it was rather a relief to have his brother mock him,
and come up and say from time to time, "He who picketh up this cap
picketh up a fortune," and then split into a jeering laugh. At least he
could fight his brother, and, when he ran, could stone him; and he could
throw quads and quoins, and pieces of riglet at the jour printers when
the story spread to them, and one of them would begin, "He who
picketh--"
He could not make anything either of Byron or Cowper; and he did not
even try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil which
his father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the small
copper-plates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion to
him. Afterward he read Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_, and he formed a
great passion for Pope's _Pastorals_, which he imitated in their easy
heroics; but till he came to read Longfellow, and Tennyson, and Heine,
he never read any long poem without more fatigue than pleasure. His
father used to say that the taste for poetry was an acquired taste, like
the taste for tomatoes, and that he would come to it yet; but he never
came to it, or so much of it as some people seemed to do, and he always
had his sorrowful misgivings as to whether they liked it as much as they
pretended. I think, too, that it should be a flavor, a spice, a sweet, a
delicate relish in the high banquet of literature, and never a chief
dish; and I should not know how to defend my boy for trying to make long
poems of his own at the very time when he found it so hard to read other
people's long poems.
V
THE LAST OF A BOY'S TOWN
THE LAST OF A BOY'S TOWN
My boy was twelve years old, and was already a swift compositor, though
he was still so small that he had to stand on a chair to reach the case
in setting type on Taylor's inaugural message. But what he lacked in
stature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he got the name of "The
Old Man" from the printers as soon as he began to come about the office,
which he did almost as soon as he could walk. His first attempt in
literature, an essay on the vain and disappointing nature of human life,
he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or seventh year; and the
printing-office was in some sort his home, as well as his school, his
university. He could no more remember learning to set type than he could
remember learning to read; and in after-life he could not come within
smell of the ink, the dusty types, the humid paper, of a printing-office
without that tender swelling of the heart which so fondly responds to
any memory-bearing perfume: his youth, his boyhood, almost his infancy
came back to him in it. He now looked forward eagerly to helping on the
new paper, and somewhat proudly to living in the larger place the family
were going to. The moment it was decided he began to tell the boys that
he was going to live in a city, and he felt that it gave him
distinction. He had nothing but joy in it, and he did not dream that as
the time drew near it could be sorrow. But when it came at last, and he
was to leave the house, the town, the boys, he found himself deathly
homesick.
The parting days were days of gloom; the parting was an anguish of
bitter tears. Nothing consoled him but the fact that they were going all
the way to the new place in a canal-boat, which his father chartered for
the trip. My boy and his brother had once gone to Cincinnati in a
canal-boat, with a friendly captain of their acquaintance, and, though
they were both put to sleep in a berth so narrow that when they turned
they fell out on the floor, the glory of the adventure remained with
him, and he could have thought of nothing more delightful than such
another voyage. The household goods were piled up in the middle of the
boat, and the family had a cabin forward, which seemed immense to the
children. They played in it and ran races up and down the long
canal-boat roof, where their father and mother sometimes put their
chairs and sat to admire the scenery.
They arrived safely at their journey's end, without any sort of
accident. They had made the whole forty miles in less than two days, and
were all as well as when they started, without having suffered for a
moment from seasickness. The boat drew up at the tow-path just before
the stable belonging to the house which the father had already taken,
and the whole family at once began helping the crew put the things
ashore. The boys thought it would have been a splendid stable to keep
the pony in, only they had sold the pony; but they saw in an instant
that it would do for a circus as soon as they could get acquainted with
enough boys to have one.
The strangeness of the house and street, and the necessity of meeting
the boys of the neighborhood, and paying with his person for his
standing among them, kept my boy interested for a time, and he did not
realize at first how much he missed the Boy's Town and all the familiar
fellowships there, and all the manifold privileges of the place. Then he
began to be very homesick, and to be torn with the torment of a divided
love. His mother, whom he loved so dearly, so tenderly, was here, and
wherever she was, that was home; and yet home was yonder, far off, at
the end of those forty inexorable miles, where he had left his life-long
mates. The first months there was a dumb heartache at the bottom of
every pleasure and excitement.
After a while he was allowed to revisit the Boy's Town. It could only
have been three or four months after he had left it, but it already
seemed a very long time; and he figured himself returning as stage
heroes do to the scenes of their childhood, after an absence of some
fifteen years. He fancied that if the boys did not find him grown, they
would find him somehow changed, and that he would dazzle them with the
light accumulated by his residence in a city. He was going to stay with
his grandmother, and he planned to make a long stay; for he was very
fond of her, and he liked the quiet and comfort of her pleasant house.
He must have gone back by the canal-packet, but his memory kept no
record of the fact, and afterward he knew only of having arrived, and of
searching about in a ghostly fashion for his old comrades. They may have
been at school; at any rate, he found very few of them; and with them he
was certainly strange enough; too strange, even. They received him with
a kind of surprise; and they could not begin playing together at once in
the old way. He went to all the places that were so dear to him; but he
felt in them the same kind of refusal, or reluctance, that he felt in
the boys. His heart began to ache again, he did not quite know why;
only it ached. When he went up from his grandmother's to look at the
Faulkner house, he realized that it was no longer home, and he could not
bear the sight of it. There were other people living in it; strange
voices sounded from the open doors, strange faces peered from the
windows.
He came back to his grandmother's, bruised and defeated, and spent the
morning indoors reading. After dinner he went out again, and hunted up
that queer earth-spirit who had been so long and closely his only
friend. He at least was not changed; he was as unwashed and as unkempt
as ever; but he seemed shy of my poor boy. He had probably never been
shaken hands with in his life before; he dropped my boy's hand; and they
stood looking at each other, not knowing what to say. My boy had on his
best clothes, which he wore so as to affect the Boy's Town boys with the
full splendor of a city boy. After all, he was not so very splendid, but
his presence altogether was too much for the earth-spirit, and he
vanished out of his consciousness like an apparition.
After school was out in the afternoon, he met more of the boys, but none
of them knew just what to do with him. The place that he had once had in
their lives was filled; he was an outsider, who might be suffered among
them, but he was no longer of them. He did not understand this at once,
nor well know what hurt him. But something was gone that could not be
called back, something lost that could not be found.
At tea-time his grandfather came home and gravely made him welcome; the
uncle who was staying with them was jovially kind. But a heavy
homesickness weighed down the child's heart, which now turned from the
Boy's Town as longingly as it had turned toward it before.
They all knelt down with the grandfather before they went to the table.
There had been a good many deaths from cholera during the day, and the
grandfather prayed for grace and help amid the pestilence that walketh
in darkness and wasteth at noonday in such a way that the boy felt there
would be very little of either for him unless he got home at once. All
through the meal that followed he was trying to find the courage to say
that he must go home. When he managed to say it, his grandmother and
aunt tried to comfort and coax him, and his uncle tried to shame him,
out of his homesickness, to joke it off, to make him laugh. But his
grandfather's tender heart was moved. He could not endure the child's
mute misery; he said he must go home if he wished.
In half an hour the boy was on the canal-packet speeding homeward at the
highest pace of the three-horse team, and the Boy's Town was out of
sight. He could not sleep for excitement that night, and he came and
spent the time talking on quite equal terms with the steersman, one of
the canalers whom he had admired afar in earlier and simpler days. He
found him a very amiable fellow, by no means haughty, who began to tell
him funny stories, and who even let him take the helm for a while. The
rudder-handle was of polished iron, very different from the clumsy
wooden affair of a freight-boat; and the packet made in a single night
the distance which the boy's family had been nearly two days in
travelling when they moved away from the Boy's Town.
He arrived home for breakfast a travelled and experienced person, and
wholly cured of that longing for his former home that had tormented him
before he revisited its scenes. He now fully gave himself up to his new
environment, and looked forward and not backward. I do not mean to say
that he ceased to love the Boy's Town; that he could not do and never
did. But he became more and more aware that the past was gone from him
forever, and that he could not return to it. He did not forget it, but
cherished its memories the more fondly for that reason.
There was no bitterness in it, and no harm that he could not hope would
easily be forgiven him. He had often been foolish, and sometimes he had
been wicked; but he had never been such a little fool or such a little
sinner but he had wished for more sense and more grace. There are some
great fools and great sinners who try to believe in after-life that they
are the manlier men because they have been silly and mischievous boys,
but he has never believed that. He is glad to have had a boyhood fully
rounded out with all a boy's interests and pleasures, and he is glad
that his lines were cast in the Boy's Town; but he knows, or believes he
knows, that whatever is good in him now came from what was good in him
then; and he is sure that the town was delightful chiefly because his
home in it was happy. The town was small, and the boys there were hemmed
in by their inexperience and ignorance; but the simple home was large
with vistas that stretched to the ends of the earth, and it was serenely
bright with a father's reason and warm with a mother's love.
THE END