frequented mainly that mile-long stretch of it between the bridge and
the dam, beyond which there was practically nothing for many years;
afterwards they came to know that this strange region was inhabited.
Just above the bridge the Hydraulic emptied into the river with a
heart-shaking plunge over an immense mill-wheel; and there was a cluster
of mills at this point, which were useful in accumulating the waters
into fishing-holes before they rushed through the gates upon the wheel.
The boys used to play inside the big mill-wheel before the water was
let into the Hydraulic, and my boy caught his first fish in the pool
below the wheel. The mills had some secondary use in making flour and
the like, but this could not concern a small boy. They were as simply a
part of his natural circumstance as the large cottonwood-tree which hung
over the river from a point near by, and which seemed to have always an
oriole singing in it. All along there the banks were rather steep, and
to him they looked very high. The blue clay that formed them was full of
springs, which the boys dammed up in little ponds and let loose in
glassy falls upon their flutter-mills. As with everything that boys do,
these mills were mostly failures; the pins which supported the wheels
were always giving way; and though there were instances of boys who
started their wheels at recess and found them still fluttering away at
noon when they came out of school, none ever carried his enterprise so
far as to spin the cotton blowing from the balls of the cottonwood-tree
by the shore, as they all meant to do. They met such disappointments
with dauntless cheerfulness, and lightly turned from some bursting
bubble to some other where the glory of the universe was still mirrored.
The river shore was strewn not only with waste cotton, but with drift
which the water had made porous, and which they called smoke-wood. They
made cigars for their own use out of it, and it seemed to them that it
might be generally introduced as a cheap and simple substitute for
tobacco; but they never got any of it into the market, not even the
market of that world where the currency was pins.
The river had its own climate, and this climate was of course much such
a climate as the boys, for whom nature intended the river, would have
chosen. I do not believe it was ever winter there, though it was
sometimes late autumn, so that the boys could have some use for the
caves they dug at the top of the bank, with a hole coming through the
turf, to let out the smoke of the fires they built inside. They had the
joy of choking and blackening over these flues, and they intended to
live on corn and potatoes borrowed from the household stores of the boy
whose house was nearest. They never got so far as to parch the corn or
to bake the potatoes in their caves, but there was the fire, and the
draft was magnificent. The light of the red flames painted the little,
happy, foolish faces, so long since wrinkled and grizzled with age, or
mouldered away to dust, as the boys huddled before them under the bank,
and fed them with the drift, or stood patient of the heat and cold in
the afternoon light of some vast Saturday waning to nightfall.
The river-climate, with these autumnal intervals, was made up of a
quick, eventful springtime, followed by the calm of a cloudless summer
that seemed never to end. But the spring, short as it was, had its great
attractions, and chief of these was the freshet which it brought to the
river. They would hear somehow that the river was rising, and then the
boys, who had never connected its rise with the rains they must have
been having, would all go down to its banks and watch the swelling
waters. These would be yellow and thick, and the boiling current would
have smooth, oily eddies, where pieces of drift would whirl round and
round, and then escape and slip down the stream. There were saw-logs and
whole trees with their branching tops, lengths of fence and hen-coops
and pig-pens; once there was a stable; and if the flood continued, there
began to come swollen bodies of horses and cattle. This must have meant
serious loss to the people living on the river-bottoms above, but the
boys counted it all gain. They cheered the objects as they floated by,
and they were breathless with the excitement of seeing the men who
caught fence-rails and cord-wood, and even saw-logs, with iron prongs at
the points of long poles, as they stood on some jutting point of shore
and stretched far out over the flood. The boys exulted in the turbid
spread of the stream, which filled its low western banks and stole over
their tops, and washed into all the hollow places along its shores, and
shone among the trunks of the sycamores on Delorac's Island, which was
almost of the geographical importance of The Island in Old River. When
the water began to go down their hearts sank with it; and they gave up
the hope of seeing the bridge carried away. Once the river rose to
within a few feet of it, so that if the right piece of drift had been
there to do its duty, the bridge might have been torn from its piers and
swept down the raging tide into those unknown gulfs to the southward.
Many a time they went to bed full of hope that it would at least happen
in the night, and woke to learn with shame and grief in the morning that
the bridge was still there, and the river was falling. It was a little
comfort to know that some of the big boys had almost seen it go,
watching as far into the night as nine o'clock with the men who sat up
near the bridge till daylight: men of leisure and public spirit, but not
perhaps the leading citizens.
There must have been a tedious time between the going down of the flood
and the first days when the water was warm enough for swimming; but it
left no trace. The boys are standing on the shore while the freshet
rushes by, and then they are in the water, splashing, diving, ducking;
it is like that; so that I do not know just how to get in that period of
fishing which must always have come between. There were not many fish in
that part of the Miami; my boy's experience was full of the ignominy of
catching shiners and suckers, or, at the best, mudcats, as they called
the yellow catfish; but there were boys, of those who cursed and swore,
who caught sunfish, as they called the bream; and there were men who
were reputed to catch at will, as it were, silvercats and river-bass.
They fished with minnows, which they kept in battered tin buckets that
they did not allow you even to touch, or hardly to look at; my boy
scarcely breathed in their presence; when one of them got up to cast his
line in a new place, the boys all ran, and then came slowly back. These
men often carried a flask of liquid that had the property, when taken
inwardly, of keeping the damp out. The boys respected them for their
ability to drink whiskey, and thought it a fit and honorable thing that
they should now and then fall into the river over the brinks where they
had set their poles.
But they disappear like persons in a dream, and their fishing-time
vanishes with them, and the swimming-time is in full possession of the
river, and of all the other waters of the Boy's Town. The river, the
Canal Basin, the Hydraulic and its Reservoirs, seemed all full of boys
at the same moment; but perhaps it was not the same, for my boy was
always in each place, and so he must have been there at different times.
Each place had its delights and advantages, but the swimming-holes in
the river were the greatest favorites. He could not remember when he
began to go into them, though it certainly was before he could swim.
There was a time when he was afraid of getting in over his head; but he
did not know just when he learned to swim, any more than he knew when he
learned to read; he could not swim, and then he could swim; he could not
read, and then he could read; but I dare say the reading came somewhat
before the swimming. Yet the swimming must have come very early, and
certainly it was kept up with continual practice; he swam quite as much
as he read; perhaps more. The boys had deep swimming-holes and shallow
ones; and over the deep ones there was always a spring-board, from which
they threw somersaults, or dived straight down into the depths, where
there were warm and cold currents mysteriously interwoven. They believed
that these deep holes were infested by water-snakes, though they never
saw any, and they expected to be bitten by snapping-turtles, though this
never happened. Fiery dragons could not have kept them out;
gallynippers, whatever they were, certainly did not; they were believed
to abound at the bottom of the deep holes; but the boys never stayed
long in the deep holes, and they preferred the shallow places, where the
river broke into a long ripple (they called it riffle) on its gravelly
bed, and where they could at once soak and bask in the musical rush of
the sunlit waters. I have heard people in New England blame all the
Western rivers for being yellow and turbid; but I know that after the
spring floods, when the Miami had settled down to its summer business
with the boys, it was as clear and as blue as if it were spilled out of
the summer sky. The boys liked the riffle because they could stay in so
long there, and there were little landlocked pools and shallows, where
the water was even warmer, and they could stay in longer. At most
places under the banks there was clay of different colors, which they
used for war-paint in their Indian fights; and after they had their
Indian fights they could rush screaming and clattering into the riffle.
When the stream had washed them clean down to their red sunburn or their
leathern tan, they could paint up again and have more Indian fights.
I do not know why my boy's associations with Delorac's Island were
especially wild in their character, for nothing more like outlawry than
the game of mumble-the-peg ever occurred there. Perhaps it was because
the boys had to get to it by water that it seemed beyond the bounds of
civilization. They might have reached it by the bridge, but the temper
of the boys on the western shore was uncertain; they would have had to
run the gauntlet of their river-guard on the way up to it; and they
might have been friendly or they might not; it would have depended a
good deal on the size and number of the interlopers. Besides, it was
more glorious to wade across to the island from their side of the river.
They undressed and gathered their clothes up into a bundle, which they
put on their heads and held there with one hand, while they used the
other for swimming, when they came to a place beyond their depth. Then
they dressed again, and stretched themselves under the cottonwood-trees
and sycamores, and played games and told stories, and longed for a gun
to kill the blackbirds which nested in the high tops, and at nightfall
made such a clamor in getting to roost that it almost deafened you.
My boy never distinctly knew what formed that island, but as there was a
mill there, it must have been made by the mill-race leaving and
rejoining the river. It was enough for him to know that the island was
there, and that a parrot--a screaming, whistling, and laughing parrot,
which was a Pretty Poll, and always Wanted a Cracker--dwelt in a pretty
cottage, almost hidden in trees, just below the end of the island. This
parrot had the old Creole gentleman living with it who owned the island,
and whom it had brought from New Orleans. The boys met him now and then
as he walked abroad, with a stick, and his large stomach bowed in front
of him. For no reason under the sun they were afraid of him; perhaps
they thought he resented their parleys with the parrot. But he and the
parrot existed solely to amuse and to frighten them; and on their own
side of the river, just opposite the island, there were established some
small industries for their entertainment and advantage, on a branch of
the Hydraulic. I do not know just what it was they did with a
mustard-mill that was there, but the turning-shop supplied them with a
deep bed of elastic shavings just under the bank, which they turned
somersaults into, when they were not turning them into the river.
I wonder what sign the boys who read this have for challenging or
inviting one another to go in swimming. The boys in the Boy's Town used
to make the motion of swimming with both arms; or they held up the
forefinger and middle-finger in the form of a swallow-tail; they did
this when it was necessary to be secret about it, as in school, and when
they did not want the whole crowd of boys to come along; and often when
they just pretended they did not want some one to know. They really had
to be secret at times, for some of the boys were not allowed to go in at
all; others were forbidden to go in more than once or twice a day; and
as they all _had_ to go in at least three or four times a day, some
sort of sign had to be used that was understood among themselves alone.
Since this is a true history, I had better own that they nearly all, at
one time or other, must have told lies about it, either before or after
the fact, some habitually, some only in great extremity. Here and there
a boy, like my boy's elder brother, would not tell lies at all, even
about going in swimming; but by far the greater number bowed to their
hard fate, and told them. They promised that they would not go in, and
then they said that they had not been in; but Sin, for which they had
made this sacrifice, was apt to betray them. Either they got their
shirts on wrong side out in dressing, or else, while they were in, some
enemy came upon them and tied their shirts. There are few cruelties
which public opinion in the boys' world condemns, but I am glad to
remember, to their honor, that there were not many in that Boy's Town
who would tie shirts; and I fervently hope that there is no boy now
living who would do it. As the crime is probably extinct, I will say
that in those wicked days, if you were such a miscreant, and there was
some boy you hated, you stole up and tied the hardest kind of a knot in
one arm or both arms of his shirt. Then, if the Evil One put it into
your heart, you soaked the knot in water, and pounded it with a stone.
I am glad to know that in the days when he was thoughtless and senseless
enough, my boy never was guilty of any degree of this meanness. It was
his brother, I suppose, who taught him to abhor it; and perhaps it was
his own suffering from it in part; for he, too, sometimes shed bitter
tears over such a knot, as I have seen hapless little wretches do,
tearing at it with their nails and gnawing at it with their teeth,
knowing that the time was passing when they could hope to hide the fact
that they had been in swimming, and foreseeing no remedy but to cut off
the sleeve above the knot, or else put on their clothes without the
shirt, and trust to untying the knot when it got dry.
There must have been a lurking anxiety in all the boys' hearts when they
went in without leave, or, as my boy was apt to do, when explicitly
forbidden. He was not apt at lying, I dare say, and so he took the
course of open disobedience. He could not see the danger that filled the
home hearts with fear for him, and he must have often broken the law and
been forgiven, before Justice one day appeared for him on the river-bank
and called him away from his stolen joys. It was an awful moment, and it
covered him with shame before his mates, who heartlessly rejoiced, as
children do, in the doom which they are escaping. That sin, at least, he
fully expiated; and I will whisper to the Young People here at the end
of the chapter, that somehow, soon or late, our sins do overtake us, and
insist upon being paid for. That is not the best reason for not sinning,
but it is well to know it, and to believe it in our acts as well as our
thoughts. You will find people to tell you that things only happen so
and so. It may be; only, I know that no good thing ever happened to
happen to me when I had done wrong.
IV.
THE CANAL AND ITS BASIN.
THE canal came from Lake Erie, two hundred miles to the northward, and
joined the Ohio River twenty miles south of the Boy's Town. For a time
my boy's father was collector of tolls on it, but even when he was old
enough to understand that his father held this State office (the canal
belonged to the State) because he had been such a good Whig, and
published the Whig newspaper, he could not grasp the notion of the
distance which the canal-boats came out of and went into. He saw them
come and he saw them go; he did not ask whence or whither; his wonder,
if he had any about them, did not go beyond the second lock. It was hard
enough to get it to the head of the Basin, which left the canal half a
mile or so to the eastward, and stretched down into the town, a sheet of
smooth water, fifteen or twenty feet deep, and a hundred wide; his sense
ached with, the effort of conceiving of the other side of it. The Basin
was bordered on either side near the end by pork-houses, where the pork
was cut up and packed, and then lay in long rows of barrels on the
banks, with other long rows of salt-barrels, and yet other long rows of
whiskey-barrels; cooper-shops, where the barrels were made, alternated
with the pork-houses. The boats brought the salt and carried away the
pork and whiskey; but the boy's practical knowledge of them was that
they lay there for the boys to dive off of when they went in swimming,
and to fish under. The water made a soft tuck-tucking at the sterns of
the boat, and you could catch sunfish, if you were the right kind of a
boy, or the wrong kind; the luck seemed to go a good deal with boys who
were not good for much else. Some of the boats were open their whole
length, with a little cabin at the stern, and these pretended to be for
carrying wood and stone, but really again were for the use of the boys
after a hard rain, when they held a good deal of water, and you could
pole yourself up and down on the loose planks in them. The boys formed
the notion at times that some of these boats were abandoned by their
owners, and they were apt to be surprised by their sudden return. A
feeling of transgression was mixed up with the joys of this kind of
navigation; perhaps some of the boys were forbidden it. No limit was
placed on their swimming in the Basin, except that of the law which
prohibited it in the daytime, as the Basin was quite in the heart of the
town. In the warm summer nights of that southerly latitude, the water
swarmed with laughing, shouting, screaming boys, who plunged from the
banks and rioted in the delicious water, diving and ducking, flying and
following, safe in the art of swimming which all of them knew. They
turned somersaults from the decks of the canal-boats; some of the boys
could turn double somersaults, and one boy got so far as to turn a
somersault and a half; it was long before the time of electric lighting,
but when he struck the water there came a flash that seemed to illumine
the universe.
I am afraid that the Young People will think I am telling them too much
about swimming. But in the Boy's Town the boys really led a kind of
amphibious life, and as long as the long summer lasted they were almost
as much in the water as on the land. The Basin, however, unlike the
river, had a winter as well as a summer climate, and one of the very
first things that my boy could remember was being on the ice there, when
a young man caught him up into his arms, and skated off with him almost
as far away as the canal. He remembered the fearful joy of the
adventure, and the pride, too; for he had somehow the notion that this
young fellow was handsome and fine, and did him an honor by his
notice--so soon does some dim notion of worldly splendor turn us into
snobs! The next thing was his own attempt at skating, when he was set
down from the bank by his brother, full of a vainglorious confidence in
his powers, and appeared instantly to strike on the top of his head.
Afterwards he learned to skate, but he did not know when, any more than
he knew just the moment of learning to read or to swim. He became
passionately fond of skating, and kept at it all day long when there was
ice for it, which was not often in those soft winters. They made a very
little ice go a long way in the Boy's Town; and began to use it for
skating as soon as there was a glazing of it on the Basin. None of them
ever got drowned there; though a boy would often start from one bank and
go flying to the other, trusting his speed to save him, while the thin
sheet sank and swayed, but never actually broke under him. Usually the
ice was not thick enough to have a fire built on it; and it must have
been on ice which was just strong enough to bear that my boy skated all
one bitter afternoon at Old River, without a fire to warm by. At first
his feet were very cold, and then they gradually felt less cold, and at
last he did not feel them at all. He thought this very nice, and he told
one of the big boys. "Why, your feet are frozen!" said the big boy, and
he dragged off my boy's skates, and the little one ran all the long mile
home, crazed with terror, and not knowing what moment his feet might
drop off there in the road. His mother plunged them in a bowl of
ice-cold water, and then rubbed them with flannel, and so thawed them
out; but that could not save him from the pain of their coming to: it
was intense, and there must have been a time afterwards when he did not
use his feet.
His skates themselves were of a sort that I am afraid boys would smile
at nowadays. When you went to get a pair of skates forty or fifty years
ago, you did not make your choice between a Barney & Berry and an Acme,
which fastened on with the turn of a screw or the twist of a clamp. You
found an assortment of big and little sizes of solid wood bodies with
guttered blades turning up in front with a sharp point, or perhaps
curling over above the toe. In this case they sometimes ended in an
acorn; if this acorn was of brass, it transfigured the boy who wore that
skate; he might have been otherwise all rags and patches, but the brass
acorn made him splendid from head to foot. When you had bought your
skates, you took them to a carpenter, and stood awe-strickenly about
while he pierced the wood with strap-holes; or else you managed to bore
them through with a hot iron yourself. Then you took them to a saddler,
and got him to make straps for them; that is, if you were rich, and your
father let you have a quarter to pay for the job. If not, you put
strings through, and tied your skates on. They were always coming off,
or getting crosswise of your foot, or feeble-mindedly slumping down on
one side of the wood; but it did not matter, if you had a fire on the
ice, fed with old barrels and boards and cooper's shavings, and could
sit round it with your skates on, and talk and tell stories, between
your flights and races afar; and come whizzing back to it from the
frozen distance, and glide, with one foot lifted, almost among the
embers.
Beyond the pork-houses, and up farther towards the canal, there were
some houses under the Basin banks. They were good places for the
fever-and-ague which people had in those days without knowing it was
malaria, or suffering it to interfere much with the pleasure and
business of life; but they seemed to my boy bowers of delight,
especially one where there was a bear, chained to a weeping-willow, and
another where there was a fishpond with gold-fish in it. He expected
this bear to get loose and eat him, but that could not spoil his
pleasure in seeing the bear stand on his hind-legs and open his red
mouth, as I have seen bears do when you wound them up by a keyhole in
the side. In fact, a toy bear is very much like a real bear, and safer
to have round. The boys were always wanting to go and look at this bear,
but he was not so exciting as the daily arrival of the Dayton packet. To
my boy's young vision this craft was of such incomparable lightness and
grace as no yacht of Mr. Burgess's could rival. When she came in of a
summer evening her deck was thronged with people, and the captain stood
with his right foot on the spring-catch that held the tow-rope. The
water curled away on either side of her sharp prow, that cut its way
onward at the full rate of five miles an hour, and the team came
swinging down the tow-path at a gallant trot, the driver sitting the
hindmost horse of three, and cracking his long-lashed whip with loud
explosions, as he whirled its snaky spirals in the air. All the boys in
town were there, meekly proud to be ordered out of his way, to break and
fly before his volleyed oaths and far before his horses' feet; and
suddenly the captain pressed his foot on the spring and released the
tow-rope. The driver kept on to the stable with unslackened speed, and
the line followed him, swishing and skating over the water, while the
steersman put his helm hard aport, and the packet rounded to, and swam
softly and slowly up to her moorings. No steamer arrives from Europe now
with such thrilling majesty.
The canal-boatmen were all an heroic race, and the boys humbly hoped
that some day, if they proved worthy, they might grow up to be drivers;
not indeed packet-drivers; they were not so conceited as that; but
freight-boat drivers, of two horses, perhaps, but gladly of one. High or
low, the drivers had a great deal of leisure, which commended their
calling to the boyish fancy; and my boy saw them, with a longing to
speak to them, even to approach them, never satisfied, while they amused
the long summer afternoon in the shade of the tavern by a game of skill
peculiar to them. They put a tack into a whiplash, and then, whirling it
round and round, drove it to the head in a target marked out on the
weather-boarding. Some of them had a perfect aim; and in fact it was a
very pretty feat, and well worth seeing.