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[Illustration: Cover]
[Illustration: "ONE DAY HE CAME UP TO MY BOY WHERE HE SAT FISHING."
[See p. 66]]
A BOY'S TOWN
DESCRIBED FOR "HARPER'S YOUNG PEOPLE"
BY
W. D. HOWELLS
AUTHOR OF "THE SHADOW OF A DREAM" "APRIL HOPES" "A HAZARD OF NEW
FORTUNES" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
BOOKS BY W. D. HOWELLS
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HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
Copyright, 1890, by WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.
* * * * *
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. EARLIEST EXPERIENCES 1
II. HOME AND KINDRED 10
III. THE RIVER 24
IV. THE CANAL AND ITS BASIN 36
V. THE HYDRAULIC AND ITS RESERVOIRS.--OLD RIVER 45
VI. SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS 53
VII. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS 67
VIII. PLAYS AND PASTIMES 80
IX. CIRCUSES AND SHOWS 93
X. HIGHDAYS AND HOLIDAYS 110
XI. MUSTERS AND ELECTIONS 121
XII. PETS 133
XIII. GUNS AND GUNNING 148
XIV. FORAGING 161
XV. MY BOY 171
XVI. OTHER BOYS 183
XVII. FANTASIES AND SUPERSTITIONS 197
XVIII. THE NATURE OF BOYS 205
XIX. THE TOWN ITSELF 215
XX. TRAITS AND CHARACTERS 228
XXI. LAST DAYS 237
ILLUSTRATIONS.
"ONE DAY HE CAME UP TO MY BOY WHERE HE SAT FISHING" _Frontispiece._
THE "FIRST LOCK" _Facing p._ 2
"THE PASSENGER IS A ONE-LEGGED MAN" " 8
"RUN, RUN! THE CONSTABLE WILL CATCH YOU!" " 18
"HE TOLD THEM THAT HE HAD GOT THEM NOW" " 44
"THAT HONOR WAS RESERVED FOR MEN OF THE KIND I HAVE
MENTIONED" " 50
"A CITIZEN'S CHARACTER FOR CLEVERNESS OR MEANNESS
WAS FIXED BY HIS WALKING ROUND OR OVER THE RINGS" " 82
KITE TIME " 92
"THE BOYS BEGAN TO CELEBRATE IT WITH GUNS AND PISTOLS" " 110
THE "BUTLER GUARDS" " 122
"ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE" " 150
FORAGING " 168
"THE BEACON OF DEATH " " 180
"HE ALWAYS RAN BY THE PLACE AS FAST AS HE COULD" " 198
"THE ARTIST SEEMED SATISFIED HIMSELF" " 220
"MY BOY REMEMBERS COMING FROM CINCINNATI IN THE STAGE" " 224
A BOY'S TOWN.
I.
EARLIEST EXPERIENCES.
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.
He may then indeed look up to the sky, and see heaven open, and angels
ascending and descending; but he can only grope about on the earth, and
he knows nothing aright that goes on there beyond his small boy's world.
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 who read _Harper's Young
People_ 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.
There were flocks of wild ducks on the Reservoirs and on Old River,
and flocks of kildees on the Commons; and there were squirrels in the
woods, where there was abundant mast for the pigs that ran wild in them,
and battened on the nuts under the hickory-trees. There were no other
nuts except walnuts, white and black; but there was no end to the small,
sweetish acorns, which the boys called chinquepins; they ate them, but I
doubt if they liked them, except as boys like anything to eat. In the
vast corn-fields stretching everywhere along the river levels there were
quails; and rabbits in the sumac thickets and turnip patches. There were
places to swim, to fish, to hunt, to skate; if there were no hills for
coasting, that was not so much loss, for there was very little snow, and
it melted in a day or two after it fell. But besides these natural
advantages for boys, there were artificial opportunities which the boys
treated as if they had been made for them; grist-mills on the river and
canal, cotton-factories and saw-mills on the Hydraulic, iron-founderies
by the Commons, breweries on the river-bank, and not too many
school-houses. I must not forget the market-house, with its public
market twice a week, and its long rows of market-wagons, stretching on
either side of High Street in the dim light of the summer dawn or the
cold sun of the winter noon.
The place had its brief history running back to the beginning of the
century. Mad Anthony Wayne encamped on its site when he went north to
avenge St. Clair's defeat on the Indians; it was at first a fort, and it
remained a military post until the tribes about were reduced, and a fort
was no longer needed. To this time belonged a tragedy, which my boy knew
of vaguely when he was a child. Two of the soldiers were sentenced to be
hanged for desertion, and the officer in command hurried forward the
execution, although an express had been sent to lay the case before the
general at another post. The offence was only a desertion in name, and
the reprieve was promptly granted, but it came fifteen minutes too late.
I believe nothing more memorable ever happened in my Boy's Town, as the
grown-up world counts events; but for the boys there, every day was full
of wonderful occurrence and thrilling excitement. It was really a very
simple little town of some three thousand people, living for the most
part in small one-story wooden houses, with here and there a brick house
of two stories, and here and there a lingering log-cabin, when my boy's
father came to take charge of its Whig newspaper in 1840. It stretched
eastward from the river to the Canal-Basin, with the market-house, the
county buildings, and the stores and hotels on one street, and a few
other stores and taverns scattering off on streets that branched from it
to the southward; but all this was a vast metropolis to my boy's fancy,
where he might get lost--the sum of all disaster--if he ventured away
from the neighborhood of the house where he first lived, on its
southwestern border. It was the great political year of "Tippecanoe and
Tyler too," when the grandfather of our President Harrison was elected
President; but the wild hard-cider campaign roared by my boy's little
life without leaving a trace in it, except the recollection of his
father wearing a linsey-woolsey hunting-shirt, belted at the waist and
fringed at the skirt, as a Whig who loved his cause and honored the good
old pioneer times was bound to do. I dare say he did not wear it often,
and I fancy he wore it then in rather an ironical spirit, for he was a
man who had slight esteem for outward shows and semblances; but it
remained in my boy's mind, as clear a vision as the long cloak of blue
broadcloth in which he must have seen his father habitually. This cloak
was such a garment as people still drape about them in Italy, and men
wore it in America then instead of an overcoat. To get under its border,
and hold by his father's hand in the warmth and dark it made around him
was something that the boy thought a great privilege, and that brought
him a sense of mystery and security at once that nothing else could ever
give. He used to be allowed to go as far as the street corner, to enjoy
it, when his father came home from the printing-office in the evening;
and one evening, never to be forgotten, after he had long been teasing
for a little axe he wanted, he divined that his father had something
hidden under his cloak. Perhaps he asked him as usual whether he had
brought him the little axe, but his father said, "Feel, feel!" and he
found his treasure. He ran home and fell upon the woodpile with it, in a
zeal that proposed to leave nothing but chips; before he had gone far he
learned that this is a world in which you can sate but never satisfy
yourself with anything, even hard work. Some of my readers may have
found that out, too; at any rate, my boy did not keep the family in
firewood with his axe, and his abiding association with it in after-life
was a feeling of weariness and disgust; so I fancy that he must have
been laughed at for it. Besides the surfeit of this little axe, he could
recall, when he grew up, the glory of wearing his Philadelphia suit,
which one of his grandmothers had brought him Over the Mountains, as
people said in those days, after a visit to her Pennsylvania German
kindred beyond the Alleghanies. It was of some beatified plaid in gay
colors, and when once it was put on it never was laid aside for any
other suit till it was worn out. It testified unmistakably to the boy's
advance in years beyond the shameful period of skirts; and no doubt it
commended him to the shadowy little girl who lived so far away as to be
even beyond the street-corner, and who used to look for him, as he
passed, through the palings of a garden among hollyhocks and
four-o'clocks.
The Young People may have heard it said that a savage is a grown-up
child, but it seems to me even more true that a child is a savage. Like
the savage, he dwells on an earth round which the whole solar system
revolves, and he is himself the centre of all life on the earth. It has
no meaning but as it relates to him; it is for his pleasure, his use; it
is for his pain and his abuse. It is full of sights, sounds, sensations,
for his delight alone, for his suffering alone. He lives under a law of
favor or of fear, but never of justice, and the savage does not make a
crueller idol than the child makes of the Power ruling over his world
and having him for its chief concern. What remained to my boy of that
faint childish consciousness was the idea of some sort of supernal Being
who abode in the skies for his advantage and disadvantage, and made
winter and summer, wet weather and dry, with an eye single to him; of a
family of which he was necessarily the centre, and of that far, vast,
unknown Town, lurking all round him, and existing on account of him if
not because of him. So, unless I manage to treat my Boy's Town as a part
of his own being, I shall not make others know it just as he knew it.
Some of his 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 meantime, 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
afterwards 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.
[Illustration: "THE PASSENGER IS A ONE-LEGGED MAN."]
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 his head up
and his 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.
Besides the peach-tree and the pet deer there was only one other thing
that my boy could remember, or seem to remember, of the few years before
he came to the Boy's Town. He is on the steamboat which is carrying the
family down the Ohio River to Cincinnati, on their way to the Boy's
Town, and he is kneeling on the window-seat in the ladies' cabin at the
stern of the boat, watching the rain fall into the swirling yellow river
and make the little men jump up from the water with its pelting drops.
He knows that the boat is standing still, and they are bringing off a
passenger to it in a yawl, as they used to do on the Western rivers when
they were hailed from some place where there was no wharf-boat. If they
were going down stream, they turned the boat and headed up the river,
and then with a great deal of scurrying about among the deck-hands, and
swearing among the mates, they sent the yawl ashore, and bustled the
passenger on board. In the case which my boy seemed to remember, the
passenger is a one-legged man, and he is standing in the yawl, with his
crutch under his arm, and his cane in his other hand; his family must be
watching him from the house. When the yawl comes alongside he tries to
step aboard the steamboat, but he misses his footing and slips into the
yellow river, and vanishes softly. It is all so smooth and easy, and it
is as curious as the little men jumping up from the rain-drops. What
made my boy think when he grew a man that this was truly a memory was
that he remembered nothing else of the incident, nothing whatever after
the man went down in the water, though there must have been a great and
painful tumult, and a vain search for him. His drowning had exactly the
value in the child's mind that the jumping up of the little men had,
neither more nor less.
II.
HOME AND KINDRED.
AS the Boy's Town was, in one sense, merely a part of the boy, I think I
had better tell something about my boy's family first, and the
influences that formed his character, so that the reader can be a boy
with him there on the intimate terms which are the only terms of true
friendship. His great-grandfather was a prosperous manufacturer of Welsh
flannels, who had founded his industry in a pretty town called The Hay,
on the river Wye, in South Wales, where the boy saw one of his mills,
still making Welsh flannels, when he visited his father's birthplace a
few years ago. This great-grandfather was a Friend by Convincement, as
the Quakers say; that is, he was a convert, and not a born Friend, and
he had the zeal of a convert. He loved equality and fraternity, and he
came out to America towards the close of the last century to prospect
for these as well as for a good location to manufacture Welsh flannels;
but after being presented to Washington, then President, at
Philadelphia, and buying a tract of land somewhere near the District of
Columbia, his phantom rolls a shadowy barrel of dollars on board ship at
Baltimore, and sails back in the _Flying Dutchman_ to South Wales. I
fancy, from the tradition of the dollars, that he had made good affairs
here with the stock of flannels he brought over with him; but all is
rather uncertain about him, especially the land he bought, though the
story of it is pretty sure to fire some descendant of his in each new
generation with the wish to go down to Washington, and oust the people
there who have unrightfully squatted on the ancestral property. What is
unquestionable is that this old gentleman went home and never came out
here again; but his son, who had inherited all his radicalism, sailed
with his family for Boston in 1808, when my boy's father was a year old.
From Boston he passed to one Quaker neighborhood after another, in New
York, Virginia, and Ohio, setting up the machinery of woollen mills, and
finally, after much disastrous experiment in farming, paused at the
Boy's Town, and established himself in the drug and book business: drugs
and books are still sold together, I believe, in small places. He had
long ceased to be a Quaker, but he remained a Friend to every righteous
cause; and brought shame to his grandson's soul by being an abolitionist
in days when it was infamy to wish the slaves set free. My boy's father
restored his self-respect in a measure by being a Henry Clay Whig, or a
constitutional anti-slavery man. The grandfather was a fervent
Methodist, but the father, after many years of scepticism, had become a
receiver of the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg; and in this faith the
children were brought up. It was not only their faith, but their life,
and I may say that in this sense they were a very religious household,
though they never went to church, because it was the Old Church. They
had no service of the New Church, the Swedenborgians were so few in the
place, except when some of its ministers stopped with us on their
travels. My boy regarded these good men as all personally sacred, and
while one of them was in the house he had some relief from the fear in
which his days seem mostly to have been passed; as if he were for the
time being under the protection of a spiritual lightning-rod. Their
religion was not much understood by their neighbors of the Old Church,
who thought them a kind of Universalists. But the boy once heard his
father explain to one of them that the New Church people believed in a
hell, which each cast himself into if he loved the evil rather than the
good, and that no mercy could keep him out of without destroying him,
for a man's love was his very self. It made his blood run cold, and he
resolved that rather than cast himself into hell, he would do his poor
best to love the good. The children were taught when they teased one
another that there was nothing the fiends so much delighted in as
teasing. When they were angry and revengeful, they were told that now
they were calling evil spirits about them, and that the good angels
could not come near them if they wished while they were in that state.
My boy preferred the company of good angels after dark, and especially
about bedtime, and he usually made the effort to get himself into an
accessible frame of mind before he slept; by day he felt that he could
look out for himself, and gave way to the natural man like other boys. I
suppose the children had their unwholesome spiritual pride in being
different from their fellows in religion; but, on the other hand, it
taught them not to fear being different from others if they believed
themselves right. Perhaps it made my boy rather like it.
The grandfather was of a gloomy spirit, but of a tender and loving
heart, whose usual word with a child, when he caressed it, was "Poor
thing, poor thing!" as if he could only pity it; and I have no doubt
the father's religion was a true affliction to him. The children were
taken to visit their grandmother every Sunday noon, and then the father
and grandfather never failed to have it out about the New Church and the
Old. I am afraid that the father would sometimes forget his own
precepts, and tease a little; when the mother went with him she was
sometimes troubled at the warmth with which the controversy raged. The
grandmother seemed to be bored by it, and the boys, who cared nothing
for salvation in the abstract, no matter how anxious they were about the
main chance, certainly shared this feeling with her. She was a pale,
little, large-eyed lady, who always wore a dress of Quakerish plainness,
with a white kerchief crossed upon her breast; and her aquiline nose and
jutting chin almost met. She was very good to the children and at these
times she usually gave them some sugar-cakes, and sent them out in the
yard, where there was a young Newfoundland dog, of loose morals and no
religious ideas, who joined them in having fun, till the father came out
and led them home. He would not have allowed them to play where it could
have aggrieved any one, for a prime article of his religion was to
respect the religious feelings of others, even when he thought them
wrong. But he would not suffer the children to get the notion that they
were guilty of any deadly crime if they happened to come short of the
conventional standard of piety. Once, when their grandfather reported to
him that the boys had been seen throwing stones on Sunday at the body of
a dog lodged on some drift in the river, he rebuked them for the
indecorum, and then ended the matter, as he often did, by saying, "Boys,
consider yourselves soundly thrashed."
I should be sorry if anything I have said should give the idea that
their behavior was either fantastic or arrogant through their religion.
It was simply a pervading influence; and I am sure that in the father
and mother it dignified life, and freighted motive and action here with
the significance of eternal fate. When the children were taught that in
every thought and in every deed they were choosing their portion with
the devils or the angels, and that God himself could not save them
against themselves, it often went in and out of their minds, as such
things must with children; but some impression remained and helped them
to realize the serious responsibility they were under to their own
after-selves. At the same time, the father, who loved a joke almost as
much as he loved a truth, and who despised austerity as something
owlish, set them the example of getting all the harmless fun they could
out of experience. They had their laugh about nearly everything that was
not essentially sacred; they were made to feel the ludicrous as an
alleviation of existence; and the father and mother were with them on
the same level in all this enjoyment.
The house was pretty full of children, big and little. There were seven
of them in the Boy's Town, and eight afterwards in all; so that if there
had been no Boy's Town about them, they would still have had a Boy's
World indoors. They lived in three different houses--the Thomas house,
the Smith house, and the Falconer house--severally called after the
names of their owners, for they never had a house of their own. Of the
first my boy remembered nothing, except the woodpile on which he tried
his axe, and a closet near the front door, which he entered into one
day, with his mother's leave, to pray, as the Scripture bade. It was
very dark, and hung full of clothes, and his literal application of the
text was not edifying; he fancied, with a child's vague suspicion, that
it amused his father and mother; I dare say it also touched them. Of the
Smith house, he could remember much more: the little upper room where
the boys slept, and the narrow stairs which he often rolled down in the
morning; the front room where he lay sick with a fever, and was bled by
the doctor, as people used to be in those days; the woodshed where, one
dreadful afternoon, when he had somehow been left alone in the house, he
took it into his head that the family dog Tip was going mad; the window
where he traced the figure of a bull on greased paper from an engraving
held up against the light: none of them important facts, but such as
stick in the mind by the capricious action of memory, while far greater
events drop out of it. My boy's elder brother at once accused him of
tracing that bull, which he pretended to have copied; but their father
insisted upon taking the child's word for it, though he must have known
he was lying; and this gave my boy a far worse conscience than if his
father had whipped him. The father's theory was that people are more apt
to be true if you trust them than if you doubt them; I do not think he
always found it work perfectly; but I believe he was right.
My boy was for a long time very miserable about that bull, and the
experience taught him to desire the truth and honor it, even when he
could not attain it. Five or six years after, when his brother and he
had begun to read stories, they found one in the old _New York Mirror_
which had a great influence upon their daily conduct. It was called "The
Trippings of Tom Pepper; or, the Effects of Romancing," and it showed
how at many important moments the hero had been baulked of fortune by
his habit of fibbing. They took counsel together, and pledged themselves
not to tell the smallest lie, upon any occasion whatever. It was a
frightful slavery, for there are a great many times in a boy's life when
it seems as if the truth really could not serve him. Their great trial
was having to take a younger brother with them whenever they wanted to
go off with other boys; and it had been their habit to get away from him
by many little deceits which they could not practise now: to tell him
that their mother wanted him; or to send him home upon some errand to
his pretended advantage that had really no object but his absence. I
suppose there is now no boy living who would do this. My boy and his
brother groaned under their good resolution, I do not know how long; but
the day came when they could bear it no longer, though I cannot give
just the time or the terms of their backsliding. That elder brother had
been hard enough on my boy before the period of this awful reform: his
uprightness, his unselfishness, his truthfulness were a daily reproach
to him, and it did not need this season of absolute sincerity to
complete his wretchedness. Yet it was an experience which afterwards he
would not willingly have missed: for once in his little confused life he
had tried to practise a virtue because the opposite vice had been made
to appear foolish and mischievous to him; and not from any superstitious
fear or hope.
As far as I can make out, he had far more fears than hopes; and perhaps
every boy has. It was in the Smith house that he began to be afraid of
ghosts, though he never saw one, or anything like one. He never saw
even the good genius who came down the chimney and filled the children's
stockings at Christmas. He wished to see him; but he understood that St.
Nicholas was a shy spirit, and was apt to pass by the stockings of boys
who lay in wait for him. His mother had told him how the Peltsnickel
used to come with a bundle of rods for the bad children when the
Chriskingle brought the presents of the good ones, among his
grandmother's Pennsylvania German kindred; and he had got them all
somehow mixed up together. Then St. Nicholas, though he was so pleasant
and friendly in the poem about the night before Christmas, was known to
some of the neighbor boys as Santa Claus; they called it Centre Claws,
and my boy imagined him with large talons radiating from the pit of his
stomach. But this was all nothing to the notion of Dowd's spectacles,
which his father sometimes joked him about, and which were represented
by a pair of hollow, glassless iron rims which he had found in the
street. They may or may not have belonged to Dowd, and Dowd may have
been an Irishman in the neighborhood, or he may not; he may have died,
or he may not; but there was something in the mere gruesome mention of
his spectacles which related itself to all the boy had conceived of the
ghostly and ghastly, and all that was alarming in the supernatural; he
could never say in the least how or why. I fancy no child can ever
explain just why it is affected in this way or that way by the things
that are or are not in the world about it; it is not easy to do this for
one's self in after-life. At any rate, it is certain that my boy dwelt
most of his time amid shadows that were, perhaps, projected over his
narrow outlook from some former state of being, or from the gloomy
minds of long-dead ancestors. His home was cheerful and most happy, but
he peopled all its nooks and corners with shapes of doom and horror. The
other boys were not slow to find this out, and their invention supplied
with ready suggestion of officers and prisons any little lack of misery
his spectres and goblins left. He often narrowly escaped arrest, or
thought so, when they built a fire in the street at night, and suddenly
kicked it to pieces, and shouted, "Run, run! The constable will catch
you!" Nothing but flight saved my boy, in these cases, when he was
small. He grew bolder, after a while, concerning constables, but never
concerning ghosts; they shivered in the autumnal evenings among the tall
stalks of the corn-field that stretched, a vast wilderness, behind the
house to the next street, and they walked the night everywhere.
[Illustration: "RUN, RUN! THE CONSTABLE WILL CATCH YOU!"]
Yet nothing more tragical, that he could remember, really happened while
he lived in the Smith house than something he saw one bright sunny
morning, while all the boys were hanging on the fence of the next house,
and watching the martins flying down to the ground from their box in the
gable. The birds sent out sharp cries of terror or anger, and presently
he saw a black cat crouching in the grass, with half-shut eyes and an
air of dreamy indifference. The birds swept down in longer and lower
loops towards the cat, drawn by some fatal charm, or by fear of the
danger that threatened their colony from the mere presence of the cat;
but she did not stir. Suddenly she sprang into the air, and then darted
away with a martin in her mouth, while my boy's heart leaped into his
own, and the other boys rushed after the cat.
As when something dreadful happens, this seemed not to have happened;
but a lovely experience leaves a sense of enduring fact behind, and
remains a rich possession no matter how slight and simple it was. My
boy's mother has been dead almost a quarter of a century, but as one of
the elder children he knew her when she was young and gay; and his last
distinct association with the Smith house is of coming home with her
after a visit to her mother's far up the Ohio River. In their absence
the June grass, which the children's feet always kept trampled down so
low, had flourished up in purple blossom, and now stood rank and tall;
and the mother threw herself on her knees in it, and tossed and
frolicked with her little ones like a girl. The picture remains, and the
wonder of the world in which it was true once, while all the
phantasmagory of spectres has long vanished away.
The boy could not recall the family's removal to the Falconer house.
They were not there, and then they were there. It was a brick house, at
a corner of the principal street, and in the gable there were places for
mock-windows where there had never been blinds put, but where the
swallows had thickly built their nests. I dare say my boy might have
been willing to stone these nests, but he was not allowed, either he or
his mates, who must have panted with him to improve such an opportunity
of havoc. There was a real window in the gable from which he could look
out of the garret; such a garret as every boy should once have the use
of some time in his life. It was dim and low, though it seemed high, and
the naked brown rafters were studded with wasps' nests; and the rain
beat on the shingles overhead. The house had been occupied by a
physician, and under the eaves the children found heaps of phials full
of doctor's stuff; the garret abounded in their own family boxes and
barrels, but there was always room for a swing, which the boys used in
training for their circuses. Below the garret there were two unimportant
stories with chambers, dining-room, parlor, and so on; then you came to
the brick-paved kitchen in the basement, and a perfectly glorious
cellar, with rats in it. Outside there was a large yard, with five or
six huge old cherry-trees, and a garden plot, where every spring my boy
tried to make a garden, with never-failing failure.
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's 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 afterwards recall a single
fact or figure in it, he could bring before his mind's eye every trait
of its outward aspect. It was at this time that his father bought an
English-Spanish grammar from a returned volunteer, who had picked it up
in the city of Mexico, and gave it to the boy. He must have expected him
to learn Spanish from it; but the boy did not know even the parts of
speech in English. As the father had once taught English grammar in six
lessons, from a broadside of his own authorship, he may have expected
the principle of heredity to help the boy; and certainly he did dig the
English grammar out of that blessed book, and the Spanish language with
it, but after many long years, and much despair over the difference
between a preposition and a substantive.
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 afterwards to make him doubtful of all giving, except the
humblest, and restive with a world in which there need be any giving at
all.
III.
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.
On the bridge he first saw the crazy man who belongs in every boy's
town. In this one he was a hapless, harmless creature, whom the boys
knew as Solomon Whistler, perhaps because his name was Whistler, perhaps
because he whistled; though when my boy met him midway of the bridge, he
marched swiftly and silently by, with his head high and looking neither
to the right nor to the left, with an insensibility to the boy's
presence that froze his blood and shrivelled him up with terror. As his
fancy early became the sport of playfellows not endowed with one so
vivid, he was taught to expect that Solomon Whistler would get him some
day, though what he would do with him when he had got him his anguish
must have been too great even to let him guess. Some of the boys said
Solomon had gone crazy from fear of being drafted in the war of 1812;
others that he had been crossed in love; but my boy did not quite know
then what either meant. He only knew that Solomon Whistler lived at the
poor-house beyond the eastern border of the town, and that he ranged
between this sojourn and the illimitable wilderness north of the town on
the western shore of the river. The crazy man was often in the boy's
dreams, the memories of which blend so with the memories of real
occurrences: he could not tell later whether he once crossed the bridge
when the footway had been partly taken up, and he had to walk on the
girders, or whether he only dreamed of that awful passage. It was quite
fearful enough to cross when the footway was all down, and he could see
the blue gleam of the river far underneath through the cracks between
the boards. It made his brain reel; and he felt that he took his life in
his hand whenever he entered the bridge, even when he had grown old
enough to be making an excursion with some of his playmates to the farm
of an uncle of theirs who lived two miles up the river. The farmer gave
them all the watermelons they wanted to eat, and on the way home, when
they lay resting under the sycamores on the river-bank, Solomon Whistler
passed by in the middle of the road, silent, swift, straight onward. I
do not know why the sight of this afflicted soul did not slay my boy on
the spot, he was so afraid of him; but the crazy man never really hurt
any one, though the boys followed and mocked him as soon as he got by.