the Indians, was throwing the axe. The thrower caught the axe by the end
of the helve, and with a dextrous twirl sent it flying through the air,
and struck its edge into whatever object he aimed at--usually a tree.
Two of the Basin loafers were brothers, and they were always quarrelling
and often fighting. One was of the unhappy fraternity of town-drunkards,
and somehow the boys thought him a finer fellow than the other, whom
somehow they considered "mean," and they were always of his side in
their controversies. One afternoon these brothers quarrelled a long
time, and then the sober brother retired to the doorway of a pork-house,
where he stood, probably brooding upon his injuries, when the drunkard,
who had remained near the tavern, suddenly caught up an axe and flung
it; the boys saw it sail across the corner of the Basin, and strike in
the door just above his brother's head. This one did not lose an
instant; while the axe still quivered in the wood, he hurled himself
upon the drunkard, and did that justice on him which he would not ask
from the law, perhaps because it was a family affair; perhaps because
those wretched men were no more under the law than the boys were.
I do not mean that there was no law for the boys, for it was manifest to
their terror in two officers whom they knew as constables, and who may
have reigned one after another, or together, with full power of life and
death over them, as they felt; but who in a community mainly so peaceful
acted upon Dogberry's advice, and made and meddled with rogues as little
as they could. From time to time it was known among the boys that you
would be taken up if you went in swimming inside of the corporation
line, and for a while they would be careful to keep beyond it; but this
could not last; they were soon back in the old places, and I suppose no
arrests were ever really made. They did, indeed, hear once that Old
Griffin, as they called him, caught a certain boy in the river before
dark, and carried him up through the town to his own home naked. Of
course no such thing ever happened; but the boys believed it, and it
froze my boy's soul with fear; all the more because this constable was a
cabinet-maker and made coffins; from his father's printing-office the
boy could hear the long slide of his plane over the wood, and he could
smell the varnish on the boards.
I dare say Old Griffin was a kindly man enough, and not very old; and I
suppose that the other constable, as known to his family and friends,
was not at all the gloomy headsman he appeared to the boys. When he
became constable (they had not the least notion how a man became
constable) they heard that his rule was to be marked by unwonted
severity against the crime of going in swimming inside the corporation
line, and so they kept strictly to the letter of the law. But one day
some of them found themselves in the water beyond the First Lock, when
the constable appeared on the tow-path, suddenly, as if he and his horse
had come up out of the ground. He told them that he had got them now,
and he ordered them to come along with him; he remained there amusing
himself with their tears, their prayers, and then vanished again. Heaven
knows how they lived through it; but they must have got safely home in
the usual way, and life must have gone on as before. No doubt the man
did not realize the torture he put them to; but it was a cruel thing;
and I never have any patience with people who exaggerate a child's
offence to it, and make it feel itself a wicked criminal for some little
act of scarcely any consequence. If we elders stand here in the place of
the Heavenly Father towards those younger children of His, He will not
hold us guiltless when we obscure for them the important difference
between a great and a small misdeed, or wring their souls, fear-clouded
as they always are, with a sense of perdition for no real sin.
[Illustration: THE SIX-MILE LEVEL.]
[Illustration: "HE TOLD THEM THAT HE HAD GOT THEM NOW."]
V.
THE HYDRAULIC AND ITS RESERVOIRS.--OLD RIVER.
THERE were two branches of the Hydraulic: one followed the course of the
Miami, from some unknown point to the northward, on the level of its
high bank, and joined the other where it emptied into the river just
above the bridge. This last came down what had been a street, and it
must have been very pretty to have these two swift streams of clear
water rushing through the little town, under the culverts, and between
the stone walls of its banks. But what a boy mainly cares for in a thing
is _use_, and the boys tried to make some use of the Hydraulic, since it
was there to find what they could do with it. Of course they were aware
of the mills dotted along its course, and they knew that it ran them;
but I do not believe any of them thought that it was built merely to run
flour-mills and saw-mills and cotton-mills. They did what they could to
find out its real use, but they could make very little of it. The
current was so rapid that it would not freeze in winter, and in summer
they could not go in swimming in it by day, because it was so public,
and at night the Basin had more attractions. There was danger of cutting
your feet on the broken glass and crockery which people threw into the
Hydraulic, and though the edges of the culverts were good for jumping
off of, the boys did not find them of much practical value. Sometimes
you could catch sunfish in the Hydraulic, but it was generally too
swift, and the only thing you could depend upon was catching crawfish.
These abounded so that if you dropped a string with a bit of meat on it
into the water anywhere, you could pull it up again with two or three
crawfish hanging to it. The boys could not begin to use them all for
bait, which was the only use their Creator seemed to have designed them
for; but they had vaguely understood that people somewhere ate them, or
something like them, though they had never known even the name of
lobsters; and they always intended to get their mothers to have them
cooked for them. None of them ever did.
They could sometimes, under high favor of fortune, push a dog into the
Hydraulic, or get him to jump in after a stick; and then have the
excitement of following him from one culvert to another, till he found a
foothold and scrambled out. Once my boy saw a chicken cock sailing
serenely down the currant; he was told that he had been given brandy,
and that brandy would enable a chicken to swim; but probably this was
not true. Another time, a tremendous time, a boy was standing at the
brink of a culvert, when one of his mates dared another to push him in.
In those days the boys attached peculiar ideas of dishonor to taking a
dare. They said, and in some sort they believed, that a boy who would
take a dare would steal sheep. I do not now see why this should follow.
In this case, the high spirit who was challenged felt nothing base in
running up behind his unsuspecting friend and popping him into the
water, and I have no doubt the victim considered the affair in the right
light when he found that it was a dare. He drifted under the culvert,
and when he came out he swiftly scaled the wall below, and took after
the boy who had pushed him in; of course this one had the start. No
great harm was done; everybody could swim, and a boy's summer costume in
that hot climate was made up of a shirt and trousers and a straw hat; no
boy who had any regard for his social standing wore shoes or stockings,
and as they were all pretty proud, they all went barefoot from April
till October.
The custom of going barefoot must have come from the South, where it
used to be so common, and also from the primitive pioneer times which
were so near my boy's time, fifty years ago. The South characterized the
thinking and feeling of the Boy's Town, far more than the North. Most of
the people were of Southern extraction, from Kentucky or Virginia, when
they were not from Pennsylvania or New Jersey. There might have been
other New England families, but the boys only knew of one--that of the
blacksmith whose shop they liked to haunt. His children were heard to
dispute about an animal they had seen, and one of them said, "Tell ye
'twa'n't a squeerrel; 'twas a maouse;" and the boys had that for a
by-word. They despised Yankees as a mean-spirited race, who were stingy
and would cheat; and would not hit you if you told them they lied. A
person must always hit a person who told him he lied; but even if you
called a Yankee a _fighting_ liar (the worst form of this insult), he
would not hit you, but just call you a liar back. My boy long accepted
these ideas of New England as truly representative of the sectional
character. Perhaps they were as fair as some ideas of the West which he
afterwards found entertained in New England; but they were false and
stupid all the same.
If the boys could do little with the Hydraulic, they were at no loss in
regard to the Reservoirs, into which its feeding waters were gathered
and held in reserve, I suppose, against a time of drought. There was the
Little Reservoir first, and then a mile beyond it the Big Reservoir, and
there was nearly always a large flat boat on each which was used for
repairing the banks, but which the boys employed as a pleasure-barge. It
seemed in some natural way to belong to them, and yet they had a feeling
of something clandestine in pushing out on the Reservoir in it. Once
they filled its broad, shallow hold with straw from a neighboring
oatfield, and spent a long golden afternoon in simply lying under the
hot September sun, in the middle of the Reservoir, and telling stories.
My boy then learned, for the first time, that there was such a book as
the "Arabian Nights;" one of the other boys told stories out of it, and
he inferred that the sole copy in existence belonged to this boy. He
knew that they all had school-books alike, but it did not occur to him
that a book which was not a Reader or a Speller was ever duplicated.
They did nothing with their boat except loll in it and tell stories, and
as there was no current in the Reservoir, they must have remained pretty
much in the same place; but they had a sense of the wildest adventure,
which mounted to frenzy, when some men rose out of the earth on the
shore, and shouted at them, "Hello, there! What are you doing with that
boat?" They must have had an oar; at any rate, they got to the opposite
bank, and, springing to land, fled somewhere into the vaguest past.
The boys went in swimming in the Little Reservoir when they were not in
the River or the Basin; and they fished in the Big Reservoir, where the
sunfish bit eagerly. There were large trees standing in the hollow which
became the bed of the Reservoir, and these died when the water was let
in around them, and gave the stretch of quiet waters a strange, weird
look; about their bases was the best kind of place for sunfish, and even
for bass. Of course the boys never caught any bass; that honor was
reserved for men of the kind I have mentioned. It was several years
before the catfish got in, and then they were mud-cats; but the boys had
great luck with sunfish there and in the pools about the flood-gates,
where there was always some leakage, and where my boy once caught a
whole string of live fish which had got away from some other boy,
perhaps weeks before; they were all swimming about, in a lively way, and
the largest hungrily took his bait. The great pleasure of fishing in
these pools was that the waters were so clear you could see the fat,
gleaming fellows at the bottom, nosing round your hook, and going off
and coming back several times before they made up their minds to bite.
It seems now impossible that my boy could ever have taken pleasure in
the capture of these poor creatures. I know that there are grown people,
and very good, kind men, too, who defend and celebrate the sport, and
value themselves on their skill in it; but I think it tolerable only in
boys, who are cruel because they are thoughtless. It is not probable
that any lower organism
"In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great
As when a giant dies,"
but still, I believe that even a fish knows a dumb agony from the barbs
of the hook which would take somewhat from the captor's joy if he could
but realize it.
[Illustration: "THAT HONOR WAS RESERVED FOR MEN OF THE KIND I HAVE
MENTIONED."]
There was, of course, a time when the Hydraulic and the Reservoirs were
not where they afterwards appeared always to have been. My boy could
dimly recall the day when the water was first let into the Hydraulic,
and the little fellows ran along its sides to keep abreast of the
current, as they easily could; and he could see more vividly the tumult
which a break in the embankment of the Little Reservoir caused. The
whole town rushed to the spot, or at least all the boys in it did, and a
great force of men besides, with shovels and wheelbarrows, and bundles
of brush and straw, and heavy logs, and heaped them into the crevasse,
and piled earth on them. The men threw off their coats and all joined in
the work; a great local politician led off in his shirt-sleeves; and it
was as if my boy should now see the Emperor of Germany in his
shirt-sleeves pushing a wheelbarrow, so high above all other men had
that exalted Whig always been to him. But the Hydraulic, I believe, was
a town work, and everybody felt himself an owner in it, and hoped to
share in the prosperity which it should bring to all. It made the people
so far one family, as every public work which they own in common always
does; it made them brothers and equals, as private property never does.
Of course the boys rose to no such conception of the fact before their
eyes. I suspect that in their secret hearts they would have been glad to
have seen that whole embankment washed away, for the excitement's sake,
and for the hope of catching the fish that would be left flopping at the
bottom of the Reservoir when the waters were drained out, I think that
these waters were brought somehow from Old River, but I am not sure
how. Old River was very far away, and my boy was never there much, and
knew little of the weird region it bounded. Once he went in swimming in
it, but the still, clear waters were strangely cold, and not like those
of the friendly Miami. Once, also, when the boys had gone into the vast
woods of that measureless continent which they called the Island, for
pawpaws or for hickory-nuts, or maybe buckeyes, they got lost; and while
they ran about in terror, they heard the distant lowing and bellowing of
cattle. They knew somehow, as boys know everything, that the leader of
the herd, which ranged those woods in a half-savage freedom, was a
vicious bull, and as the lowing and bellowing sounded nearer, they
huddled together in the wildest dismay. Some were for running, some for
getting over a fence near by; but they could not tell which side of the
fence the herd was on. In the primitive piety of childhood my boy
suggested prayer as something that had served people in extremity, and
he believed that it was the only hope left. Another boy laughed, and
began to climb a tree; the rest, who had received my boy's suggestion
favorably, instantly followed his example; in fact, he climbed a tree
himself. The herd came slowly up, and when they reached the boys' refuge
they behaved with all the fury that could have been expected--they
trampled and tossed the bags that held the pawpaws or buckeyes or
hickory-nuts; they gored the trees where the boys hung trembling; they
pawed and tossed the soft earth below; and then they must have gone
away, and given them up as hopeless. My boy never had the least notion
how he got home; and I dare say he was very young when he began these
excursions to the woods.
In some places Old River was a stagnant pool, covered with thick green
scum, and filled with frogs. The son of one of the tavern-keepers was
skilled in catching them, and I fancy supplied them to his father's
table; the important fact was his taking them, which he did by baiting a
cluster of three hooks with red flannel, and dropping them at the end of
a fish-line before a frog. The fated croaker plunged at the brilliant
bait, and was caught in the breast; even as a small boy, my boy thought
it a cruel sight. The boys pretended that the old frogs said, whenever
this frog-catching boy came in sight, "Here comes Hawkins!--here comes
Hawkins! Look out!--look out!" and a row of boys, perched on a log in
the water, would sound this warning in mockery of the frogs or their
foe, and plump one after another in the depths, as frogs follow their
leader in swift succession. They had nothing against Hawkins. They all
liked him, for he was a droll, good-natured fellow, always up to some
pleasantry. One day he laughed out in school. "Was that you laughed,
Henry?" asked the teacher, with unerring suspicion. "I was only smiling,
Mr. Slack." "The next time, see that you don't smile so loud," said Mr.
Slack, and forgave him, as any one who saw his honest face must have
wished to do. They called him Old Hawkins, for fondness; and while my
boy shuddered at him for his way of catching frogs, he was in love with
him for his laughing eyes and the kindly ways he had, especially with
the little boys.
VI.
SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS.
MY boy had not a great deal to do with schools after his docile
childhood. When he began to run wild with the other boys he preferred
their savage freedom; and he got out of going to school by most of the
devices they used. He had never quite the hardihood to play truant, but
he was subject to sudden attacks of sickness, which came on about
school-time and went off towards the middle of the forenoon or afternoon
in a very strange manner. I suppose that such complaints are unknown at
the present time, but the Young People's fathers can tell them how much
suffering they used to cause among boys. At the age when my boy was
beginning to outgrow them he was taken into his father's
printing-office, and he completed his recovery and his education there.
But all through the years when he lived in the Boy's Town he had
intervals of schooling, which broke in upon the swimming and the
skating, of course, but were not altogether unpleasant or unprofitable.
They began, as they are apt to do, with lessons in a private house,
where a lady taught several other children, and where he possibly
learned to read; though he could only remember being set on a platform
in punishment for some forgotten offence. After that he went to school
in the basement of a church, where a number of boys and girls were
taught by a master who knew how to endear study at least to my boy.
There was a garden outside of the schoolroom; hollyhocks grew in it, and
the boys gathered the little cheeses, as they called the seed-buttons
which form when the flowers drop off, and ate them, because boys will
eat anything, and not because they liked them. With the fact of this
garden is mixed a sense of drowsy heat and summer light, and that is
all, except the blackboard at the end of the room and a big girl doing
sums at it; and the wonder why the teacher smiled when he read in one of
the girls' compositions a phrase about forging puddings and pies; my boy
did not know what forging meant, so he must have been very young. But he
had a zeal for learning, and somehow he took a prize in geography--a
science in which he was never afterwards remarkable. The prize was a
little history of Lexington, Mass., which the teacher gave him, perhaps
because Lexington may have been his native town; but the history must
have been very dryly told, for not a fact of it remained in the boy's
mind. He was vaguely disappointed in the book, but he valued it for the
teacher's sake whom he was secretly very fond of, and who had no doubt
won the child's heart by some flattering notice. He thought it a great
happiness to follow him, when the teacher gave up this school, and took
charge of one of the public schools; but it was not the same there; the
teacher could not distinguish him in that multitude of boys and girls.
He did himself a little honor in spelling, but he won no praise, and he
disgraced himself then as always in arithmetic. He sank into the common
herd of mediocrities; and then, when his family went to live in another
part of the town, he began to go to another school. He had felt that the
teacher belonged to him, and it must have been a pang to find him so
estranged. But he was a kind man, and long afterwards he had a friendly
smile and word for the boy when they met; and then all at once he ceased
to be, as men and things do in a boy's world.
The other school was another private school; and it was doubtless a
school of high grade in some things, for it was called the Academy. But
there was provision for the youngest beginners in a lower room, and for
a while my boy went there. Before school opened in the afternoon, the
children tried to roast apples on the stove, but there never was time,
and they had to eat them half raw. In the singing-class there was a boy
who wore his hair so enviably long that he could toss it on his neck as
he wheeled in the march of the class round the room; his father kept a
store and he brought candy to school. They sang "Scotland's burning!
Pour on water" and "Home, home! Dearest and happiest home!" No doubt
they did other things, but none of them remained in my boy's mind; and
when he was promoted to the upper room very little more was added. He
studied Philosophy, as it was called, and he learned, as much from the
picture as the text, that you could not make a boat go by filling her
sail from bellows on board; he did not see why. But he was chiefly
concerned with his fears about the Chemical Room, where I suppose some
chemical apparatus must have been kept, but where the big boys were
taken to be whipped. It was a place of dreadful execution to him, and
when he was once sent to the Chemical Boom, and shut up there, because
he was crying, and because, as he explained, he could not stop crying
without a handkerchief, and he had none with him, he never expected to
come out alive.
In fact, as I have said, he dwelt in a world of terrors; and I doubt if
some of the big boys who were taken there to be whipped underwent so
much as he in being merely taken to the place where they had been
whipped. At the same time, while he cowered along in the shadow of
unreal dangers, he had a boy's boldness with most of the real ones, and
he knew how to resent an indignity even at the hands of the teacher who
could send him to the Chemical Room at pleasure. He knew what belonged
to him as a small boy of honor, and one thing was, not to be tamely put
back from a higher to a lower place in his studies. I dare say that boys
do not mind this now; they must have grown ever so much wiser since my
boy went to school; but in his time, when you were put back, say from
the Third Reader to the Second Reader, you took your books and left
school. That was what the other boys expected of you, and it was the
only thing for you to do if you had the least self-respect, for you were
put back to the Second Reader after having failed to read the Third, and
it was a public shame which nothing but leaving that school could wipe
out. The other boys would have a right to mock you if you did not do it;
and as soon as the class was dismissed you went to your desk as
haughtily as you could, and began putting your books and your slate and
your inkstand together, with defiant glances at the teacher; and then
when twelve o'clock came, or four o'clock, and the school was let out,
you tucked the bundle under your arm and marched out of the room, with
as much majesty as could be made to comport with a chip hat and bare
feet; and as you passed the teacher you gave a twist of the head that
was meant to carry dismay to the heart of your enemy. I note all these
particulars carefully, so as to show the boys of the present day what
fools the boys of the past were; though I think they will hardly believe
it. My boy was once that kind of fool; but not twice. He left school
with all his things at twelve o'clock, and he returned with them at one;
for his father and mother did not agree with him about the teacher's
behavior in putting him back. No boy's father and mother agreed with him
on this point; every boy returned in just the same way; but somehow the
insult had been wiped out by the mere act of self-assertion, and a boy
kept his standing in the world as he could never have done if he had not
left school when he was put back.