usually came in February. Then the boys began to go to the woods to get
sugar-water, as they called the maple sap, and they gave whole Saturdays
to it as long as the sap would run. It took at least five or six boys to
go for sugar-water, and they always had to get a boy whose father had an
auger to come along, so as to have something to bore the trees with. On
their way to the woods they had to stop at an elder thicket to get
elder-wood to make spiles of, and at a straw pile to cut straws to suck
the sap through, if the spiles would not work. They always brought lots
of tin buckets to take the sap home in, and the big boys made the little
fellows carry these, for they had to keep their own hands free to
whittle the elder sticks into the form of spouts, and to push the pith
out and make them hollow. They talked loudly and all at once, and they
ran a good deal of the way, from the excitement. If it was a good
sugar-day, there were patches of snow still in the fence corners and
shady places, which they searched for rabbit-tracks; but the air was so
warm that they wanted to take their shoes off, and begin going barefoot
at once. Overhead, the sky was a sort of pale, milky blue, with the sun
burning softly through it, and casting faint shadows. When they got
into the woods, it was cooler, and there were more patches of snow, with
bird-tracks and squirrel-tracks in them. They could hear the blue-jays
snarling at one another, and the yellowhammer chuckling; on some dead
tree a redheaded woodpecker hammered noisily, and if the boys had only
had a gun with them they could have killed lots of things. Now and then
they passed near some woodchoppers, whose axes made a pleasant sound,
without frightening any of the wild things, they had got so used to
them; sometimes the boys heard the long hollow crash of a tree they were
felling. But all the time they kept looking out for a good sugar-tree,
and when they saw a maple stained black from the branches down with the
sap running from the little holes that the sap-suckers had made, they
burst into a shout, and dashed forward, and the fellow with the auger
began to bore away, while the other fellows stood round and told him
how, and wanted to make him let them do it. Up and down the tree there
was a soft murmur from the bees that had found it out before the boys,
and every now and then they wove through the air the straight lines of
their coming and going, and made the fellows wish they could find a
bee-tree. But for the present these were intent upon the sugar-tree, and
kept hurrying up the boy with the auger. When he had bored in deep
enough, they tried to fit a spile to the hole, but it was nearly always
crooked and too big, or else it pointed downward and the water would not
run up through the spile. Then some of them got out their straws, and
began to suck the sap up from the hole through them, and to quarrel and
push, till they agreed to take turn-about, and others got the auger and
bunted for another blackened tree. They never could get their spiles to
work, and the water gathered so slowly in the holes they bored, and some
of the fellows took such long turns, that it was very little fun. They
tried to get some good out of the small holes the sap-suckers had made,
but there were only a few drops in them, mixed with bark and moss. If it
had not been for the woodchoppers, foraging for sugar-water would always
have been a failure; but one of them was pretty sure to come up with his
axe in his hand, and show the boys how to get the water. He would choose
one of the roots near the foot of the tree, and chop a clean, square
hole in it; the sap flew at each stroke of his axe, and it rose so fast
in the well he made that the thirstiest boy could not keep it down, and
three or four boys, with their heads jammed tight together and their
straws plunged into its depths, lay stretched upon their stomachs and
drank their fill at once. When every one was satisfied, or as nearly
satisfied as a boy can ever be, they began to think how they could carry
some of the sugar-water home. But by this time it would be pretty late
in the afternoon; and they would have to put it off till some other day,
when they intended to bring something to dip the water out with; the
buckets they had brought were all too big. Then, if they could get
enough, they meant to boil it down and make sugar-wax. I never knew of
any boys who did so.
The next thing after going for sugar-water was gathering may-apples, as
they called the fruit of the mandrake in that country. They grew to
their full size, nearly as large as a pullet's egg, some time in June,
and they were gathered green, and carried home to be ripened in the
cornmeal-barrel. The boys usually forgot about them before they were
ripe; when now and then one was remembered, it was a thin, watery, sour
thing at the best. But the boys gathered them every spring, in the
pleasant open woods where they grew, just beyond the densest shade of
the trees, among the tall, straggling grasses; and they had that joyous
sense of the bounty of nature in hoarding them up which is one of the
sweetest and dearest experiences of childhood. Through this the boy
comes close to the heart of the mother of us all, and rejoices in the
wealth she never grudges to those who are willing to be merely rich
enough.
There were not many wild berries in the country near the Boy's Town, or
what seemed near; but sometimes my boy's father took him a great way off
to a region, long lost from the map, where there were blackberries. The
swimming lasted so late into September, however, that the boys began to
go for nuts almost as soon as they left off going into the water. They
began with the little acorns that they called chinquepins, and that were
such a pretty black, streaked upward from the cup with yellow, that they
gathered them half for the unconscious pleasure of their beauty. They
were rather bitter, and they puckered your mouth; but still you ate
them. They were easy to knock off the low oaks where they grew, and they
were so plentiful that you could get a peck of them in no time. There
was no need of anybody's climbing a tree to shake them; but one day the
boys got to telling what they would do if a bear came, and one of them
climbed a chinquepin-tree to show how he would get out on such a small
limb that the bear would be afraid to follow him; and he went so far out
on the limb that it broke under him. Perhaps he was heavier than he
would have been if he had not been carrying the load of guilt which
must burden a boy who is playing hookey. At any rate, he fell to the
ground, and lay there helpless while the other boys gathered round him,
and shared all the alarm he felt for his life. His despair of now hiding
the fact that he had been playing hookey was his own affair, but they
reasoned with him that the offence would be overlooked in the anxiety
which his disaster must arouse. He was prepared to make the most of
this, and his groans grew louder as he drew near home in the arms of the
boys who took turns, two and two, in carrying him the whole long way
from Dayton Lane, with a terrified procession of alternates behind them.
These all ran as soon as they came in sight of his house and left the
last pair to deliver him to his mother. They never knew whether she
forgave him fully, or merely waited till he got well. You never could
tell how a boy's mother was going to act in any given case; mothers were
so very apt to act differently.
Red haws came a little before chinquepins. The trees grew mostly by the
First Lock, and the boys gathered the haws when they came out from
swimming in the canal. They did not take bags to gather haws, as they
did chinquepins; the fruit was not thought worthy of that honor; but
they filled their pockets with them and ate them on the way home. They
were rather nice, with a pleasant taste between a small apple and a rose
seed-pod; only you had to throw most of them away because they were
wormy. Once when the fellows were gathering haws out there they began to
have fun with a flock of turkeys, especially the gobblers, and one boy
got an old gobbler to following him while he walked slowly backward, and
teased him. The other boys would not have told him for anything when
they saw him backing against a low stump. When he reached it, his head
went down and his heels flew into the air, and then the gobbler hopped
upon him and began to have some of the fun himself. The boys always
thought that if they had not rushed up all together and scared the
gobbler off, he would have torn the boy to pieces, but very likely he
would not. He probably intended just to have fun with him.
The woods were pretty full of the kind of hickory-trees called pignuts,
and the boys gathered the nuts, and even ate their small, bitter
kernels; and around the Poor-House woods there were some shag-barks, but
the boys did not go for them because of the bull and the crazy people.
Their great and constant reliance in foraging was the abundance of black
walnuts which grew everywhere, along the roads and on the river-banks,
as well as in the woods and the pastures. Long before it was time to go
walnutting, the boys began knocking off the nuts and trying whether they
were ripe enough; and just as soon as the kernels began to fill out, the
fellows began making walnut wagons. I do not know why it was thought
necessary to have a wagon to gather walnuts, but I know that it was, and
that a boy had to make a new wagon every year. No boy's walnut wagon
could last till the next year; it did very well if it lasted till the
next day. He had to make it nearly all with his pocket-knife. He could
use a saw to block the wheels out of a pine board, and he could use a
hatchet to rough off the corners of the blocks, but he had to use his
knife to give them any sort of roundness, and they were not very round
then; they were apt to be oval in shape, and they always wabbled. He
whittled the axles out with his knife, and he made the hubs with it. He
could get a tongue ready-made if he used a broom-handle or a hoop-pole,
but that had in either case to be whittled so it could be fastened to
the wagon; he even bored the linchpin holes with his knife if he could
not get a gimlet; and if he could not get an auger, he bored the holes
through the wheels with a red-hot poker, and then whittled them large
enough with his knife. He had to use pine for nearly everything, because
any other wood was too hard to whittle; and then the pine was always
splitting. It split in the axles when he was making the linchpin holes,
and the wheels had to be kept on by linchpins that were tied in; the
wheels themselves split, and had to be strengthened by slats nailed
across the rifts. The wagon-bed was a candle-box nailed to the axles,
and that kept the front-axle tight, so that it took the whole width of a
street to turn a very little wagon in without upsetting.
[Illustration: FORAGING.]
When the wagon was all done, the boy who owned it started off with his
brothers, or some other boys who had no wagon, to gather walnuts. He
started early in the morning of some bright autumn day while the frost
still bearded the grass in the back-yard, and bristled on the fence-tops
and the roof of the wood-shed, and hurried off to the woods so as to get
there before the other boys had got the walnuts. The best place for them
was in some woods-pasture where the trees stood free of one another, and
around them, in among the tall, frosty grass, the tumbled nuts lay
scattered in groups of twos and threes, or fives, some still
yellowish-green in their hulls, and some black, but all sending up to
the nostrils of the delighted boy the incense of their clean, keen,
wild-woody smell, to be a memory forever. The leaves had dropped from
the trees overhead, and the branches outlined themselves against the
blue sky, and dangled from their outer stems clusters of the unfallen
fruit, as large as oranges, and only wanting a touch to send them
plumping down into the grass where sometimes their fat hulls burst, and
the nuts almost leaped into the boys' hands. The boys ran, some of them
to gather the fallen nuts, and others to get clubs and rocks to beat
them from the trees; one was sure to throw off his jacket and kick off
his shoes and climb the tree to shake every limb where a walnut was
still clinging. When they had got them all heaped up like a pile of
grape-shot at the foot of the tree, they began to hull them, with blows
of a stick, or with stones, and to pick the nuts from the hulls, where
the grubs were battening on their assured ripeness, and to toss them
into a little heap, a very little heap indeed compared with the bulk of
that they came from. The boys gloried in getting as much walnut stain on
their hands as they could, for it would not wash off, and it showed for
days that they had been walnutting; sometimes they got to staining one
another's faces with the juice, and pretending they were Indians.
The sun rose higher and higher, and burned the frost from the grass, and
while the boys worked and yelled and chattered they got hotter and
hotter, and began to take off their shoes and stockings, till every one
of them was barefoot. Then, about three or four o'clock, they would
start homeward, with half a bushel of walnuts in their wagon, and their
shoes and stockings piled in on top of them. That is, if they had good
luck. In a story, they would always have had good luck, and always gone
home with half a bushel of walnuts; but this is a history, and so I
have to own that they usually went home with about two quarts of walnuts
rattling round under their shoes and stockings in the bottom of the
wagon. They usually had no such easy time getting them as they always
would in a story; they did not find them under the trees, or ready to
drop off, but they had to knock them off with about six or seven clubs
or rocks to every walnut, and they had to pound the hulls so hard to get
the nuts out that sometimes they cracked the nuts. That was because they
usually went walnutting before the walnuts were ripe. But they made just
as much preparation for drying the nuts on the wood-shed roof whether
they got half a gallon or half a bushel; for they did not intend to stop
gathering them till they had two or three barrels. They nailed a cleat
across the roof to keep them from rolling off, and they spread them out
thin, so that they could look more than they were, and dry better. They
said they were going to keep them for Christmas, but they had to try
pretty nearly every hour or so whether they were getting dry, and in
about three days they were all eaten up.
I dare say boys are very different nowadays, and do everything they say
they are going to do, and carry out all their undertakings. But in that
day they never carried out any of their undertakings. Perhaps they
undertook too much; but the failure was a part of the pleasure of
undertaking a great deal, and if they had not failed they would have
left nothing for the men to do; and a more disgusting thing than a world
full of idle men who had done everything there was to do while they were
boys, I cannot imagine. The fact is, boys _have_ to leave a little for
men to do, or else the race would go to ruin; and this almost makes me
half believe that perhaps even the boys of the present time may be
prevented from doing quite as much as they think they are going to do,
until they grow up. Even then they may not want to do it all, but only a
small part of it. I have noticed that men do not undertake half so many
things as boys do; and instead of wanting to be circus-actors and
Indians, and soldiers, and boat-drivers, and politicians and robbers,
and to run off, and go in swimming all the time, and out hunting and
walnutting, they keep to a very few things, and are glad then if they
can do them. It is very curious, but it is true; and I advise any boy
who doubts it to watch his father awhile.
XV.
MY BOY.
EVERY boy is two or three boys, or twenty or thirty different kinds of
boys in one; he is all the time living many lives and forming many
characters; but it is a good thing if he can keep one life and one
character when he gets to be a man. He may turn out to be like an onion
when he is grown up, and be nothing but hulls, that you keep peeling
off, one after another, till you think you have got down to the heart,
at last, and then you have got down to nothing.
All the boys may have been like my boy in the Boy's Town, in having each
an inward being that was not the least like their outward being, but
that somehow seemed to be their real self, whether it truly was so or
not. But I am certain that this was the case with him, and that while he
was joyfully sharing the wild sports and conforming to the savage usages
of the boy's world about him, he was dwelling in a wholly different
world within him, whose wonders no one else knew. I could not tell now
these wonders any more than he could have told them then; but it was a
world of dreams, of hopes, of purposes, which he would have been more
ashamed to avow for himself than I should be to avow for him. It was all
vague and vast, and it came out of the books that he read, and that
filled his soul with their witchery, and often held him aloof with
their charm in the midst of the plays from which they could not lure
him wholly away, or at all away. He did not know how or when their
enchantment began, and he could hardly recall the names of some of them
afterwards. First of them was Goldsmith's "History of Greece," which
made him an Athenian of Pericles's time, and Goldsmith's "History of
Rome," which naturalized him in a Roman citizenship chiefly employed in
slaying tyrants; from the time of Appius Claudius down to the time of
Domitian, there was hardly a tyrant that he did not slay. After he had
read these books, not once or twice, but twenty times over, his father
thought fit to put into his hands "The Travels of Captain Ashe in North
America," to encourage, or perhaps to test, his taste for useful
reading; but this was a failure. The captain's travels were printed with
long esses, and the boy could make nothing of them, for other reasons.
The fancy nourished upon
"The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome,"
starved amidst the robust plenty of the Englishman's criticisms of our
early manners and customs. Neither could money hire the boy to read
"Malte-Brun's Geography," in three large folios, of a thousand pages
each, for which there was a standing offer of fifty cents from the
father, who had never been able to read it himself. But shortly after he
failed so miserably with Captain Ashe, the boy came into possession of a
priceless treasure. It was that little treatise on "Greek and Roman
Mythology" which I have mentioned, and which he must literally have worn
out with reading, since no fragment of it seems to have survived his
boyhood. Heaven knows who wrote it or published it; his father bought
it with a number of other books at an auction, and the boy, who had
about that time discovered the chapter on prosody in the back part of
his grammar, made poems from it for years, and appeared in many
transfigurations, as this and that god and demigod and hero upon
imagined occasions in the Boy's Town, to the fancied admiration of all
the other fellows. I do not know just why he wished to appear to his
grandmother in a vision; now as Mercury with winged feet, now as Apollo
with his drawn bow, now as Hercules leaning upon his club and resting
from his Twelve Labors. Perhaps it was because he thought that his
grandmother, who used to tell the children about her life in Wales, and
show them the picture of a castle where she had once slept when she was
a girl, would appreciate him in these apotheoses. If he believed they
would make a vivid impression upon the sweet old Quaker lady, no doubt
he was right.
There was another book which he read about this time, and that was "The
Greek Soldier." It was the story of a young Greek, a glorious Athenian,
who had fought through the Greek war of independence against the Turks,
and then come to America and published the narrative of his adventures.
They fired my boy with a retrospective longing to have been present at
the Battle of Navarino, when the allied ships of the English, French,
and Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet; but it seemed to him that he
could not have borne to have the allies impose a king upon the Greeks,
when they really wanted a republic, and so he was able to console
himself for having been absent. He did what he could in fighting the war
over again, and he intended to harden himself for the long struggle by
sleeping on the floor, as the Greek soldier had done. But the children
often fell asleep on the floor in the warmth of the hearth-fire; and his
preparation for the patriotic strife was not distinguishable in its
practical effect from a reluctance to go to bed at the right hour.
Captain Riley's narrative of his shipwreck on the coast of Africa, and
his captivity among the Arabs, was a book which my boy and his brother
prized with a kind of personal interest, because their father told them
that he had once seen a son of Captain Riley when he went to get his
appointment of collector at Columbus, and that this son was named
William Willshire Riley, after the good English merchant, William
Willshire, who had ransomed Captain Riley. William Willshire seemed to
them almost the best man who ever lived; though my boy had secretly a
greater fondness for the Arab, Sidi Hamet, who was kind to Captain Riley
and kept his brother Seid from ill-treating him whenever he could.
Probably the boy liked him better because the Arab was more picturesque
than the Englishman. The whole narrative was very interesting; it had a
vein of sincere and earnest piety in it which was not its least charm,
and it was written in a style of old-fashioned stateliness which was not
without its effect with the boys.
Somehow they did not think of the Arabs in this narrative as of the same
race and faith with the Arabs of Bagdad and the other places in the
"Arabian Nights." They did not think whether these were Mohammedans or
not; they naturalized them in the fairy world where all boys are
citizens, and lived with them there upon the same familiar terms as they
lived with Robinson Crusoe. Their father once told them that Robinson
Crusoe had robbed the real narrative of Alexander Selkirk of the place
it ought to have held in the remembrance of the world; and my boy had a
feeling of guilt in reading it, as if he were making himself the
accomplice of an impostor. He liked the "Arabian Nights," but oddly
enough these wonderful tales made no such impression on his fancy as the
stories in a wretchedly inferior book made. He did not know the name of
this book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of his
reading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do,
without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, when
he was not reading his "Greek and Roman Mythology;" and then suddenly,
one day, as happens in childhood with so many things, it vanished out of
his possession as if by magic. Perhaps he lost it; perhaps he lent it;
at any rate it was gone, and he never got it back, and he never knew
what book it was till thirty years afterwards, when he picked up from a
friend's library-table a copy of "Gesta Romanorum," and recognized in
this collection of old monkish legends the long-missing treasure of his
boyhood. These stories, without beauty of invention, without art of
construction or character, without spirituality in their crude
materialization, which were read aloud in the refectories of mediaeval
cloisters while the monks sat at meat, laid a spell upon the soul of the
boy that governed his life. He conformed his conduct to the principles
and maxims which actuated the behavior of the shadowy people of these
dry-as-dust tales; he went about drunk with the fumes of fables about
Roman emperors that never were, in an empire that never was; and, though
they tormented him by putting a mixed and impossible civilization in the
place of that he knew from his Goldsmith, he was quite helpless to break
from their influence. He was always expecting some wonderful thing to
happen to him as things happened there in fulfilment of some saying or
prophecy; and at every trivial moment he made sayings and prophecies for
himself, which he wished events to fulfil. One Sunday when he was
walking in an alley behind one of the stores, he found a fur cap that
had probably fallen out of the store-loft window. He ran home with it,
and in his simple-hearted rapture he told his mother that as soon as he
picked it up there came into his mind the words, "He who picketh up this
cap picketh up a fortune," and he could hardly wait for Monday to come
and let him restore the cap to its owner and receive an enduring
prosperity in reward of his virtue. Heaven knows what form he expected
this to take; but when he found himself in the store, he lost all
courage; his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could not
utter a syllable of the fine phrases he had made to himself. He laid the
cap on the counter without a word; the storekeeper came up and took it
in his hand. "What's this?" he said. "Why, this is ours," and he tossed
the cap into a loose pile of hats by the showcase, and the boy slunk
out, cut to the heart and crushed to the dust. It was such a cruel
disappointment and mortification that it was rather a relief to have his
brother mock him, and come up and say from time to time, "He who picketh
up this cap picketh up a fortune," and then split into a jeering laugh.
At least he could fight his brother, and, when he ran, could stone him;
and he could throw quads and quoins, and pieces of riglet at the jour
printers when the story spread to them, and one of them would begin, "He
who picketh--"
He was not different from other boys in his desire to localize, to
realize, what he read; and he was always contriving in fancy scenes and
encounters of the greatest splendor, in which he bore a chief part.
Inwardly he was all thrones, principalities, and powers, the foe of
tyrants, the friend of good emperors, and the intimate of magicians, and
magnificently apparelled; outwardly he was an incorrigible little
sloven, who suffered in all social exigencies from the direst
bashfulness, and wished nothing so much as to shrink out of the sight of
men if they spoke to him. He could not help revealing sometimes to the
kindness of his father and mother the world of foolish dreams one half
of him lived in, while the other half swam, and fished, and hunted, and
ran races, and played tops and marbles, and squabbled and scuffled in
the Boy's Town. Very likely they sympathized with him more than they let
him know; they encouraged his reading, and the father directed his taste
as far as might be, especially in poetry. The boy liked to make poetry,
but he preferred to read prose, though he listened to the poems his
father read aloud, so as to learn how they were made. He learned certain
pieces by heart, like "The Turk lay dreaming of the hour," and "Pity the
sorrows of a poor old man," and he was fond of some passages that his
father wished him to know in Thomson's "Seasons." There were some of
Moore's songs, too, that he was fond of, such as "When in death I shall
calm recline," and "It was noon and on flowers that ranged all around."
He learned these by heart, to declaim at school, where he spoke, "On the
banks of the Danube fair Adelaide hied," from Campbell; but he could
hardly speak the "Soldier's Dream" for the lump that came into his
throat at the lines,
"My little ones kissed me a thousand times o'er,
And my wife sobbed aloud in her fulness of heart.
"'Stay, stay with us! Stay! Thou art weary and worn!'
And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay;
But sorrow returned at the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away!"