good deal of fun with it, one way and another, sailing shingles with
stones on them, and watching them go under one end of the culvert and
come out of the other, or simply throwing rocks into the water. It does
not seem very exciting when you tell of it, but it really was exciting;
though it was not so exciting as to go down to the mills, where the
Hydraulic plunged over that great wheel into the Miami. A foot-bridge
crossed it that you could jump up and down on and almost make touch the
water, and there were happier boys, who did not go to school, fishing
there with men who had never gone. Sometimes the schoolboys ventured
inside of the flour-mill and the iron-foundry, but I do not think this
was often permitted; and, after all, the great thing was to rush over to
the river-bank, all the boys and girls together, and play with the
flutter-mills till the bell rang. The market-house was not far off, and
they went there sometimes when it was not market-day, and played among
the stalls; and once a girl caught her hand on a meat-hook. My boy had a
vision of her hanging from it; but this was probably one of those grisly
fancies that were always haunting him, and no fact at all. The bridge
was close by the market-house, but for some reason or no reason the
children never played in the bridge. Perhaps the toll-house man would
not let them; my boy stood in dread of the toll-house man; he seemed to
have such a severe way of taking the money from the teamsters.
Some of the boys were said to be the beaux of some of the girls. My boy
did not know what that meant; in his own mind he could not disentangle
the idea of bows from the idea of arrows; but he was in love with the
girl who caught her hand on the meat-hook, and secretly suffered much on
account of her. She had black eyes, and her name long seemed to him the
most beautiful name for a girl; he said it to himself with flushes from
his ridiculous little heart. While he was still a boy of ten he heard
that she was married; and she must have been a great deal older than he.
In fact he was too small a boy when he went to the Academy to remember
how long he went there, and whether it was months or years; but probably
it was not more than a year. He stopped going there because the teacher
gave up the school to become a New Church minister; and as my boy's
father and mother were New Church people, there must have been some
intimacy between them and the teacher, which he did not know of. But he
only stood in awe, not terror, of him; and he was not surprised when he
met him many long years after, to find him a man peculiarly wise,
gentle, and kind. Between the young and the old there is a vast gulf,
seldom if ever bridged. The old can look backward over it, but they
cannot cross it, any more than the young, who can see no thither side.
The next school my boy went to was a district school, as they called a
public school in the Boy's Town. He did not begin going there without
something more than his usual fear and trembling; for he had heard free
schools and pay schools talked over among the boys, and sharply
distinguished: in a pay school the teacher had only such powers of
whipping as were given him by the parents, and they were always strictly
limited; in a free school the teacher whipped as much and as often as he
liked. For this reason it was much better to go to a pay school; but you
had more fun at a free school, because there were more fellows; you must
balance one thing against another. The boy who philosophized the matter
in this way was a merry, unlucky fellow, who fully tested the advantages
and disadvantages of the free-school system. He was one of the
best-hearted boys in the world, and the kindest to little boys; he was
always gay and always in trouble, and forever laughing, when he was not
crying under that cruel rod. Sometimes he would not cry; but when he was
caught in one of his frequent offences and called up before the
teacher's desk in the face of the whole school, and whipped over his
thinly jacketed shoulders, he would take it without wincing, and go
smiling to his seat, and perhaps be called back and whipped more for
smiling. He was a sort of hero with the boys on this account, but he was
too kind-hearted to be proud, and mingled with the rest on equal terms.
One awful day, just before school took up in the afternoon, he and
another boy went for a bucket of drinking-water; it always took two
boys. They were gone till long after school began, and when they came
back the teacher called them up, and waited for them to arrive slowly at
his desk while he drew his long, lithe rod through his left hand. They
had to own that they had done wrong, and they had no excuse but the one
a boy always has--they forgot. He said he must teach them not to forget,
and their punishment began; surely the most hideous and depraving sight,
except a hanging, that could be offered to children's eyes. One of them
howled and shrieked, and leaped and danced, catching his back, his arms,
his legs, as the strokes rained upon him, imploring, promising, and
getting away at last with a wild effort to rub himself all over all at
once. When it came the hero's turn, he bore it without a murmur, and as
if his fortitude exasperated him, the teacher showered the blows more
swiftly and fiercely upon him than before, till a tear or two did steal
down the boy's cheek. Then he was sent to his seat, and in a few minutes
he was happy with a trap for catching flies which he had contrived in
his desk.
No doubt they were an unruly set of boys, and I do not suppose the
teacher was a hard man, though he led the life of an executioner, and
seldom passed a day without inflicting pain that a fiend might shrink
from giving. My boy lived in an anguish of fear lest somehow he should
come under that rod of his; but he was rather fond of the teacher, and
so were all the boys. The teacher took a real interest in their studies,
and if he whipped them well, he taught them well; and at most times he
was kind and friendly with them. Anyway, he did not blister your hand
with a ruler, as some teachers did, or make you stand bent forward from
the middle, with your head hanging down, so that the blood all ran into
it. Under him my boy made great advances in reading and writing, and he
won some distinction in declamation; but the old difficulties with the
arithmetic remained. He failed to make anything out of the parts of
speech in his grammar; but one afternoon, while he sat in his stocking
feet, trying to ease the chilblains which every boy used to have from
his snow-soaked boots, before the days of india-rubbers, he found
something in the back of his grammar which made him forget all about the
pain. This was a part called Prosody, and it told how to make verses;
explained the feet, the accents, the stanzas--everything that had
puzzled him in his attempts to imitate the poems he had heard his father
read aloud. He was amazed; he had never imagined that such a science
existed, and yet here it was printed out, with each principle reduced to
practice. He conceived of its reasons at the first reading, so that I
suppose nature had not dealt so charily with him concerning the rules of
prosody as the rules of arithmetic; and he lost no time in applying them
in a poem of his own. The afternoon air was heavy with the heat that
quivered visibly above the great cast-iron wood stove in the centre of
the schoolroom; the boys drowsed in their seats, or hummed sleepily over
their lessons; the chilblains gnawed away at the poet's feet, but heaven
had opened to him, and he was rapt far from all the world of sense. The
music which he had followed through those poems his father read was no
longer a mystery; he had its key, its secret; he might hope to wield its
charm, to lay its spell upon others. He wrote his poem, which was
probably a simple, unconscious imitation of something that had pleased
him in his school-reader, and carried it proudly home with him. But
here he met with that sort of disappointment which more than any other
dismays and baffles authorship; a difference in the point of view. His
father said the verses were well made, and he sympathized with him in
his delight at having found out the way to make them, though he was not
so much astonished as the boy that such a science as prosody should
exist. He praised the child's work, and no doubt smiled at it with the
mother; but he said that the poem spoke of heaven as a place in the sky,
and he wished him always to realize that heaven was a _state_ and not a
_place_, and that we could have it in this world as well as the next.
The boy promised that he would try to realize heaven as a state; but at
the bottom of his heart he despaired of getting that idea into poetry.
Everybody else who had made poetry spoke of heaven as a place; they even
called it a land, and put it in the sky; and he did not see how he was
to do otherwise, no matter what Swedenborg said. He revered Swedenborg;
he had a religious awe of the seer's lithograph portrait in a
full-bottom wig which hung in the front-room, but he did not see how
even Swedenborg could have helped calling heaven a place if he had been
making poetry.
The next year, or the next quarter, maybe, there was a new teacher; they
seem to have followed each other somewhat as people do in a dream; they
were not there, and then they were there; but, however the new one came,
the boys were some time in getting used to his authority. It appeared to
them that several of his acts were distinctly tyrannical, and were
encroachments upon rights of theirs which the other teacher, with all
his severity, had respected. My boy was inspired by the common mood to
write a tragedy which had the despotic behavior of the new teacher for
its subject, and which was intended to be represented by the boys in the
hayloft of a boy whose father had a stable without any horse in it. The
tragedy was written in the measure of the "Lady of the Lake," which was
the last poem my boy had heard his father reading aloud; it was very
easy kind of verse. At the same time, the boys were to be dressed as
Roman conspirators, and one of them was to give the teacher a petition
to read, while another plunged a dagger into his vitals, and still
another shouted, "Strike, Stephanos, strike!" It seemed to my boy that
he had invented a situation which he had lifted almost bodily out of
Goldsmith's history; and he did not feel that his lines,
"Come one, come all! This rock shall flee
From its firm base as soon as we,"
were too closely modelled upon Scott's lines,
"Come one, come all! This rock shall fly
From its firm base as soon as I."
The tragedy was never acted. There may have been some trouble about the
hayloft; for the boy whose father owned the stable was to have got the
use of it without his father's knowing it; and the poet found that the
boys themselves scarcely entered into the spirit of his work. But after
that there came a real tragedy, which most of them had part in without
realizing it, and that was their persecution of a teacher until he had
to give up the school. He must have come next after that usurper, but at
any rate the word had been passed round, even before school took up the
first morning he began, that he was to be resisted to the death. He
could not have had any notion of what was in the air, for in that
opening speech to the school which a new teacher always used to make, he
talked to the boys in the friendliest manner, and with more sense and
reason than they could feel, though I hope they felt some secret shame
for the way they meant to behave. He took up some old, dry rods, which
he had lying on his desk, and which he said he had found in it, and he
told them he hoped never to use such a thing as a rod in that school,
and never to strike any boy a blow. He broke the rods into small pieces
and put them into the stove, and called the school to order for the
studies before it. But the school never came to order, either then or
afterwards. As soon as the teacher took his seat, the whispering and
giggling, the scuffling and pushing began. The boys passed notes to the
girls and held up their slates with things written on them to make the
girls laugh; and they threw chewed-paper balls at one another. They
asked to go out, and they stayed out as long as they pleased, and came
back with an easy air, as if they had done nothing. They would not
study; they did not care how much they missed in the class, and they
laughed when they had to go to the foot. They made faces at the teacher
and mocked him when his back was turned; they even threw paper wads at
him.
It went on day after day till the school became a babel. The teacher
tried reasoning, and such mild punishment as standing up in the middle
of the floor, and keeping in after school. One big boy whom he stood up
winked at the girls and made everybody titter; another whom he bade stay
after school grabbed his hat and ran out of the room. The fellows played
hookey as much as they wanted to, and did not give any excuse for being
late, or for not coming at all. At last, when the teacher was driven
desperate, and got in a rod (which he said he was ashamed to use, but
they left him no hope of ruling them by reason), the big boys fought
him, and struck back when he began to whip them. This gentle soul had
not one friend among all those little savages, whom he had given no
cause to hate, but only cause to love him. None of them could have told
why they used him so ill, for nobody knew; only, the word had gone out
that you were not to mind him, but to mock him and fight him; nobody
knew where the word first came from.
Not even my boy, I grieve to say, was the poor man's friend, though he
too had received only kindness from him. One day, when the teacher had
set him his copy, and found him doing it badly as he came by, he gave
him a slight tap on his head with his penknife, and addressed him some
half-joking reproof. This fired my boy's wicked little heart with
furious resentment; he gathered up his books after school, and took them
home; a good many other boys had done it, and the school was dwindling.
He was sent back with his books the next morning, and many other parents
behaved as wisely as his. One of the leading men in the town, whose mere
presence in the schoolroom sent a thrill of awe through the fellows,
brought his son in after such an escapade, and told the teacher that he
had just given him a sound thrashing, and he hoped the teacher would
give him another. But the teacher took the hand of the snivelling
wretch, and called him affectionately by name, and said they would try
to get along without that, and sent him to his seat forgiven. It ought
to have touched a heart of stone, but in that barbarous republic of boys
there was no gratitude. Sometimes they barred the teacher out by
nailing the doors and windows; and at last he gave up the school.
But even then his persecution did not end. The word went out that you
were not to speak to him if you met him; and if he spoke to you, you
were not to say anything back. One day he came up to my boy where he sat
fishing for crawfish in the Hydraulic, with his bare legs dangling over
the edge of a culvert, and, unawed by this august figure, asked him
pleasantly what luck he had. The boy made no sign of seeing or hearing
him, and he ignored some other kindly advances. I hope the teacher
thought it merely his shyness. The boy went home and told, gleefully,
how he had refused to speak to Old Manton; but here he met his reward.
He was made to feel how basely rude he had been, and to tingle with a
wholesome shame. There was some talk of sending him to the teacher, to
ask his forgiveness; but this was given up for fear of inflicting pain
where possibly none had been felt. I wish now the boy could have gone to
him, for perhaps the teacher is no longer living.
VII.
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.
I SOMETIMES wonder how much these have changed since my boy's time. Of
course they differ somewhat from generation to generation, and from East
to West and North to South, but not so much, I believe, as grown people
are apt to think. Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of
the laws that govern grown-up communities, and it has its unwritten
usages, which are handed down from old to young, and perpetuated on the
same level of years, and are lived into and lived out of, but are
binding, through all personal vicissitudes, upon the great body of boys
between six and twelve years old. No boy can violate them without losing
his standing among the other boys, and he cannot enter into their world
without coming under them. He must do this, and must not do that; he
obeys, but he does not know why, any more than the far-off savages from
whom his customs seem mostly to have come. His world is all in and
through the world of men and women, but no man or woman can get into it
any more than if it were a world of invisible beings. It has its own
ideals and superstitions, and these are often of a ferocity, a
depravity, scarcely credible in after-life. It is a great pity that
fathers and mothers cannot penetrate that world; but they cannot, and it
is only by accident that they can catch some glimpse of what goes on in
it. No doubt it will be civilized in time, but it will be very slowly;
and in the meanwhile it is only in some of its milder manners and
customs that the boy's world can be studied.
The first great law was that, whatever happened to you through another
boy, whatever hurt or harm he did you, you were to right yourself upon
his person if you could; but if he was too big, and you could not hope
to revenge yourself, then you were to bear the wrong, not only for that
time, but for as many times as he chose to inflict it. To tell the
teacher or your mother, or to betray your tormentor to any one outside
of the boys' world, was to prove yourself a cry-baby, without honor or
self-respect, and unfit to go with the other fellows. They would have
the right to mock you, to point at you, and call "E-e-e, e-e-e, e-e-e!"
at you, till you fought them. After that, whether you whipped them or
not there began to be some feeling in your favor again, and they had to
stop.
Every boy who came to town from somewhere else, or who moved into a new
neighborhood, had to fight the old residents. There was no reason for
this, except that he was a stranger, and there appeared to be no other
means of making his acquaintance. If he was generally whipped he became
subject to the local tribe, as the Delawares were to the Iroquois in the
last century; if he whipped the other boys, then they adopted him into
their tribe, and he became a leader among them. When you moved away from
a neighborhood you did not lose all your rights in it; you did not have
to fight when you went back to see the boys, or anything; but if one of
them met you in your new precincts you might have to try conclusions
with him; and perhaps, if he was a boy who had been in the habit of
whipping you, you were quite ready to do so. When my boy's family left
the Smith house, one of the boys from that neighborhood came up to see
him at the Falconer house, and tried to carry things with a high hand,
as he had always done. Then my boy fought him, quite as if he were not a
Delaware and the other boy not an Iroquois, with sovereign rights over
him. My boy was beaten, but the difference was that, if he had not been
on new ground, he would have been beaten without daring to fight. His
mother witnessed the combat, and came out and shamed him for his
behavior, and had in the other boy, and made them friends over some
sugar-cakes. But after that the boys of the Smith neighborhood
understood that my boy would not be whipped without fighting. The home
instruction was all against fighting; my boy was taught that it was not
only wicked, but foolish; that if it was wrong to strike, it was just as
wrong to strike back; that two wrongs never made a right, and so on. But
all this was not of the least effect with a hot temper amid the trials
and perplexities of life in the Boy's Town.
There were some boys of such standing as bullies and such wide fame that
they could range all neighborhoods of the town not only without fear of
being molested, or made to pass under the local yoke anywhere, but with
such plenary powers of intimidation that the other boys submitted to
them without question. My boy had always heard of one of these bullies,
whose very name, Buz Simpson, carried terror with it; but he had never
seen him, because he lived in the unknown region bordering on the river
south of the Thomas house. One day he suddenly appeared, when my boy was
playing marbles with some other fellows in front of the Falconer house,
attended by two or three other boys from below the Sycamore Grove. He
was small and insignificant, but such was the fear his name inspired
that my boy and his friends cowered before him, though some of them were
no mean fighters themselves. They seemed to know by instinct that this
was Buz Simpson, and they stood patiently by while he kicked their
marbles out of the ring and broke up their game, and, after staying
awhile to cover them with ignominy and insult, passed on with his
retainers to other fields of conquest. If it had been death to resist
him, they could not have dreamed less of doing so; and though this
outrage took place under my boy's own windows, and a single word would
have brought efficient aid (for the mere sight of any boy's mother could
put to flight a whole army of other boys), he never dreamed of calling
for help.
That would have been a weakness which would not only have marked him
forever as a cry-baby, but an indecorum too gross for words. It would
have been as if, when once the boys were playing trip at school, and a
big boy tripped him, and he lay quivering and panting on the ground, he
had got up as soon as he could catch his breath and gone in and told the
teacher; or as if, when the fellows were playing soak-about, and he got
hit in the pit of the stomach with a hard ball, he had complained of the
fellow who threw it. There were some things so base that a boy could not
do them; and what happened out of doors, and strictly within the boy's
world, had to be kept sacredly secret among the boys. For instance, if
you had been beguiled, as a little boy, into being the last in the game
of snap-the-whip, and the snap sent you rolling head over heels on the
hard ground, and skinned your nose and tore your trousers, you could cry
from the pain without disgrace, and some of the fellows would come up
and try to comfort you; but you were bound in honor not to appeal to the
teacher, and you were expected to use every device to get the blood off
you before you went in, and to hide the tear in your trousers. Of
course, the tear and the blood could not be kept from the anxious eyes
at home, but even there you were expected not to say just what boys did
it.
They were by no means the worst boys who did such things, but only the
most thoughtless. Still, there was a public opinion in the Boy's Town
which ruled out certain tricks, and gave the boys who played them the
name of being "mean." One of these was boring a hole in the edge of your
school-desk to meet a shaft sunk from the top, which you filled with
slate-pencil dust. Then, if you were that kind of boy, you got some
little chap to put his eye close to the shaft, with the hope of seeing
Niagara Falls, and set your lips to the hole in the edge, and blew his
eye full of pencil-dust. This was mean; and it was also mean to get some
unsuspecting child to close the end of an elderwood tube with his thumb,
and look hard at you, while you showed him Germany. You did this by
pulling a string below the tube, and running a needle into his thumb. My
boy discovered Germany in this way long before he had any geographical
or political conception of it.
I do not know why, if these abominable cruelties were thought mean, it
was held lawful to cover a stone with dust and get a boy, not in the
secret, to kick the pile over with his bare foot. It was perfectly good
form, also, to get a boy, if you could, to shut his eyes, and then lead
him into a mud-puddle or a thicket of briers or nettles, or to fool him
in any heartless way, such as promising to pump easy when he put his
mouth to the pump-spout, and then coming down on the pump-handle with a
rush that flooded him with water and sent him off blowing the tide from
his nostrils like a whale. Perhaps these things were permitted because
the sight of the victim's suffering was so funny. Half the pleasure in
fighting wasps or bumble-bees was in killing them and destroying their
nests; the other half was in seeing the fellows get stung. If you could
fool a fellow into a mass-meeting of bumble-bees, and see him lead them
off in a steeple-chase, it was right and fair to do so. But there were
other cases in which deceit was not allowable. For instance, if you
appeared on the playground with an apple, and all the boys came whooping
round, "You know _me_, Jimmy!" "You know your uncle!" "You know your
grandfather!" and you began to sell out bites at three pins for a
lady-bite and six pins for a hog-bite, and a boy bought a lady-bite and
then took a hog-bite, he was held in contempt, and could by no means
pass it off for a good joke on you; it was considered mean.