often made a question with him at home, if not a reproach to him; so
that in the course of time it ceased to be that comfort it had been to
him. He could not give him up, but he could not help seeing that he was
ignorant and idle, and in a fatal hour he resolved to reform him. I am
not able now to say just how he worked his friend up to the point of
coming to school, and of washing his hands and feet and face, and
putting on a new check shirt to come in. But one day he came, and my
boy, as he had planned, took him into his seat, and owned his friendship
with him before the whole school. This was not easy, for though
everybody knew how much the two were together, it was a different thing
to sit with him as if he thought him just as good as any boy, and to
help him get his lessons, and stay him mentally as well as socially. He
struggled through one day, and maybe another; but it was a failure from
the first moment, and my boy breathed freer when his friend came one
half-day, and then never came again. The attempted reform had spoiled
their simple and harmless intimacy. They never met again upon the old
ground of perfect trust and affection. Perhaps the kindly earth-spirit
had instinctively felt a wound from the shame my boy had tried to brave
out, and shrank from their former friendship without quite knowing why.
Perhaps it was my boy who learned to realize that there could be little
in common but their common humanity between them, and could not go back
to that. At any rate, their friendship declined from this point; and it
seems to me, somehow, a pity.
Among the boys who were between my boy and his brother in age was one
whom all the boys liked, because he was clever with everybody, with
little boys as well as big boys. He was a laughing, pleasant fellow,
always ready for fun, but he never did mean things, and he had an open
face that made a friend of every one who saw him. He had a father that
had a house with a lightning-rod, so that if you were in it when there
was a thunder-storm you could not get struck by lightning, as my boy
once proved by being in it when there was a thunder-storm and not
getting struck. This in itself was a great merit, and there were
grape-arbors and peach-trees in his yard which added to his popularity,
with cling-stone peaches almost as big as oranges on them. He was a
fellow who could take you home to meals whenever he wanted to, and he
liked to have boys stay all night with him; his mother was as clever as
he was, and even the sight of his father did not make the fellows want
to go and hide. His father was so clever that he went home with my boy
one night about midnight when the boy had come to pass the night with
his boys, and the youngest of them had said he always had the nightmare
and walked in his sleep, and as likely as not he might kill you before
he knew it. My boy tried to sleep, but the more he reflected upon his
chances of getting through the night alive the smaller they seemed; and
so he woke up his potential murderer from the sweetest and soundest
slumber, and said he was going home, but he was afraid; and the boy had
to go and wake his father. Very few fathers would have dressed up and
gone home with a boy at midnight, and perhaps this one did so only
because the mother made him; but it shows how clever the whole family
was.
It was their oldest boy whom my boy and his brother chiefly went with
before that boy who knew about "Monte Cristo" came to learn the trade in
their father's office. One Saturday in July they three spent the whole
day together. It was just the time when the apples are as big as walnuts
on the trees, and a boy wants to try whether any of them are going to be
sweet or not. The boys tried a great many of them, in an old orchard
thrown open for building-lots behind my boy's yard; but they could not
find any that were not sour; or that they could eat till they thought of
putting salt on them; if you put salt on it, you could eat any kind of
green apple, whether it was going to be a sweet kind or not. They went
up to the Basin bank and got lots of salt out of the holes in the
barrels lying there, and then they ate all the apples they could hold,
and after that they cut limber sticks off the trees, and sharpened the
points, and stuck apples on them and threw them. You could send an apple
almost out of sight that way, and you could scare a dog almost as far as
you could see him.
On Monday my boy and his brother went to school, but the other boy was
not there, and in the afternoon they heard he was sick. Then, towards
the end of the week they heard that he had the flux; and on Friday, just
before school let out, the teacher--it was the one that whipped so, and
that the fellows all liked--rapped on his desk, and began to speak very
solemnly to the scholars. He told them that their little mate, whom they
had played with and studied with, was lying very sick, so very sick that
it was expected he would die; and then he read them a serious lesson
about life and death, and tried to make them feel how passing and
uncertain all things were, and resolve to live so that they need never
be afraid to die.
Some of the fellows cried, and the next day some of them went to see the
dying boy, and my boy went with them. His spirit was stricken to the
earth, when he saw his gay, kind playmate lying there, white as the
pillow under his wasted face, in which his sunken blue eyes showed large
and strange. The sick boy did not say anything that the other boys could
hear, but they could see the wan smile that came to his dry lips, and
the light come sadly into his eyes, when his mother asked him if he knew
this one or that; and they could not bear it, and went out of the room.
In a few days they heard that he was dead, and one afternoon school did
not keep, so that the boys might go to the funeral. Most of them walked
in the procession; but some of them were waiting beside the open grave,
that was dug near the grave of that man who believed there was a hole
through the earth from pole to pole, and had a perforated stone globe on
top of his monument.
XVII.
FANTASIES AND SUPERSTITIONS.
MY boy used to be afraid of this monument, which stood a long time, or
what seemed to him a long time, in the yard of the tombstone cutter
before it was put up at the grave of the philosopher who imagined the
earth as hollow as much of the life is on it. He was a brave officer in
the army which held the region against the Indians in the pioneer times;
he passed the latter part of his life there, and he died and was buried
in the Boy's Town. My boy had to go by the yard when he went to see his
grandmother, and even at high noon the sight of the officer's monument,
and the other gravestones standing and leaning about, made his flesh
creep and his blood run cold. When there were other boys with him he
would stop at the door of the shed, where a large, fair German was
sawing slabs of marble with a long saw that had no teeth, and that he
eased every now and then with water from a sponge he kept by him; but if
the boy was alone, and it was getting at all late in the afternoon, he
always ran by the place as fast as he could. He could hardly have told
what he was afraid of, but he must have connected the gravestones with
ghosts.
[Illustration: "HE ALWAYS RAN BY THE PLACE AS FAST AS HE COULD."]
His superstitions were not all of the ghastly kind; some of them related
to conduct and character. It was noted long ago how boys throw stones,
for instance, at a tree, and feign to themselves that this thing or
that, of great import, will happen or not as they hit or miss the tree.
But my boy had other fancies, which came of things he had read and half
understood. In one of his school-books was a story that began, "Charles
was an honest boy, but Robert was the name of a thief," and it went on
to show how Charles grew up in the respect and affection of all who knew
him by forbearing to steal some oranges which their owner had set for
safe-keeping at the heels of his horse, while Robert was kicked at once
(there was a picture that showed him holding his stomach with both
hands), and afterwards came to a bad end, through attempting to take
one. My boy conceived from the tale that the name of Robert was
necessarily associated with crime; it was long before he outgrew the
prejudice; and this tale and others of a like vindictive virtuousness
imbued him with such a desire to lead an upright life that he was rather
a bother to his friends with his scruples. A girl at school mislaid a
pencil which she thought she had lent him, and he began to have a morbid
belief that he must have stolen it; he became frantic with the mere
dread of guilt; he could not eat or sleep, and it was not till he went
to make good the loss with a pencil which his grandfather gave him that
the girl said she had found her pencil in her desk, and saved him from
the despair of a self-convicted criminal. After that his father tried to
teach him the need of using his reason as well as his conscience
concerning himself, and not to be a little simpleton. But he was always
in an anguish to restore things to their owners, like the good boys in
the story-books, and he suffered pangs of the keenest remorse for the
part he once took in the disposition of a piece of treasure-trove.
This was a brown-paper parcel which he found behind a leaning gravestone
in the stone-cutter's yard, and which he could not help peeping into. It
was full of raisins, and in the amaze of such a discovery he could not
help telling the other boys. They flocked round and swooped down upon
the parcel like birds of prey, and left not a raisin behind. In vain he
implored them not to stain their souls with this misdeed; neither the
law nor the prophets availed; neither the awful shadow of the prison
which he cast upon them, nor the fear of the last judgment which he
invoked. They said that the raisins did not belong to anybody; that the
owner had forgotten all about them; that they had just been put there by
some one who never intended to come back for them. He went away
sorrowing, without touching a raisin (he felt that the touch must have
stricken him with death), and far heavier in soul than the hardened
accomplices of his sin, of whom he believed himself the worst in having
betrayed the presence of the raisins to them.
He used to talk to himself when he was little, but one day his mother
said to him jokingly, "Don't you know that he who talks to himself has
the devil for a listener?" and after that he never dared whisper above
his breath when he was alone, though his father and mother had both
taught him that there was no devil but his own evil will. He shuddered
when he heard a dog howling in the night, for that was a sign that
somebody was going to die. If he heard a hen crow, as a hen sometimes
unnaturally would, he stoned her, because it was a sign of the worst
kind of luck. He believed that warts came from playing with toads, but
you could send them away by saying certain words over them; and he was
sorry that he never had any warts, so that he could send them away, and
see them go; but he never could bear to touch a toad, and so of course
he could not have warts. Other boys played with toads just to show that
they were not afraid of having warts; but every one knew that if you
killed a toad, your cow would give bloody milk. I dare say the far
forefathers of the race knew this too, when they first began to herd
their kine in the birthplace of the Aryan peoples; and perhaps they
learned then that if you killed a snake early in the day its tail would
live till sundown. My boy killed every snake he could; he thought it
somehow a duty; all the boys thought so; they dimly felt that they were
making a just return to the serpent-tribe for the bad behavior of their
ancestor in the Garden of Eden. Once, in a corn-field near the Little
Reservoir, the boys found on a thawing day of early spring knots and
bundles of snakes writhen and twisted together, in the torpor of their
long winter sleep. It was a horrible sight, that afterwards haunted my
boy's dreams. He had nightmares which remained as vivid in his thoughts
as anything that happened to him by day. There were no poisonous snakes
in the region of the Boy's Town, but there were some large blacksnakes,
and the boys said that if a blacksnake got the chance he would run up
your leg, and tie himself round your body so that you could not breathe.
Nobody had ever seen a blacksnake do it, and nobody had ever seen a
hoop-snake, but the boys believed there was such a snake, and that he
would take his tail in his mouth, when he got after a person, and roll
himself along swifter than the fastest race-horse could run. He did not
bite, but when he came up with you he would take the point of his tail
out of his mouth and strike it into you. If he struck his tail into a
tree, the tree would die. My boy had seen a boy who had been chased by a
hoop-snake, but he had not seen the snake, though for the matter of that
the boy who had been chased by it had not seen it either; he did not
stop to see it. Another kind of snake that was very strange was a
hair-snake. No one had ever seen it happen, but every one knew that if
you put long horsehairs into a puddle of water and let them stay, they
would turn into hair-snakes; and when you drank out of a spring you had
to be careful not to swallow a hair-snake, or it would remain in your
stomach and grow there.
When you saw a lizard, you had to keep your mouth tight shut, or else
the lizard would run down your throat before you knew it. That was what
all the boys said, and my boy believed it, though he had never heard of
anybody that it happened to. He believed that if you gave a chicken-cock
burnt brandy it could lay eggs, and that if you gave a boy burnt brandy
it would stop his growing. That was the way the circus-men got their
dwarfs, and the India-rubber man kept himself limber by rubbing his
joints with rattlesnake oil.
A snake could charm a person, and when you saw a snake you had to kill
it before it could get its eye on you or it would charm you. Snakes
always charmed birds; and there were mysterious powers of the air and
forces of nature that a boy had to be on his guard against, just as a
bird had to look out for snakes. You must not kill a granddaddy-long-legs,
or a lady-bug; it was bad luck. My boy believed, or was afraid he
believed, that
"What you dream Monday morning before daylight
Will come true before Saturday night,"
but if it was something bad, you could keep it from coming true by not
telling your dream till you had eaten breakfast. He governed his little,
foolish, frightened life not only by the maxims he had learned out of
his "Gesta Romanorum," but by common sayings of all sorts, such as
"See a pin and leave it lay
You'll have bad luck all the day,"
and if ever he tried to rebel against this slavery, and went by a pin in
the path, his fears tormented him till he came back and picked it up. He
would not put on his left stocking first, for that was bad luck; but
besides these superstitions, which were common to all the boys, he
invented superstitions of his own, with which he made his life a burden.
He did not know why, but he would not step upon the cracks between the
paving-stones, and some days he had to touch every tree or post along
the sidewalk, as Doctor Johnson did in his time, though the boy had
never heard of Doctor Johnson then.
While he was yet a very little fellow, he had the distorted, mistaken
piety of childhood. He had an abject terror of dying, but it seemed to
him that if a person could die right in the centre isle of the
church--the Methodist church where his mother used to go before she
became finally a New Churchwoman--the chances of that person's going
straight to heaven would be so uncommonly good that he need have very
little anxiety about it. He asked his mother if she did not think so
too, holding by her hand as they came out of church together, and he
noticed the sort of gravity and even pain with which she and his father
received this revelation of his darkling mind. They tried to teach him
what they thought of such things; but though their doctrine caught his
fancy and flattered his love of singularity, he was not proof against
the crude superstitions of his mates. He thought for a time that there
was a Bad Man, but this belief gave way when he heard his father
laughing about a certain clergyman who believed in a personal devil.
The boys said the world was going to be burned up some time, and my boy
expected the end with his full share of the trouble that it must bring
to every sinner. His fears were heightened by the fact that his
grandfather believed this end was very near at hand, and was prepared
for the second coming of Christ at any moment. Those were the days when
the minds of many were stirred by this fear or hope; the believers had
their ascension robes ready, and some gave away their earthly goods so
as not to be cumbered with anything in their heavenward flight. At home,
my boy heard his father jest at the crazy notion, and make fun of the
believers; but abroad, among the boys, he took the tint of the
prevailing gloom. One awful morning at school, it suddenly became so
dark that the scholars could not see to study their lessons, and then
the boys knew that the end of the world was coming. There were no
clouds, as for a coming storm, but the air was blackened almost to the
dusk of night; the school was dismissed, and my boy went home to find
the candles lighted, and a strange gloom and silence on everything
outside. He remembered entering into this awful time, but he no more
remembered coming out of it than if the earth had really passed away in
fire and smoke.
He early heard of forebodings and presentiments, and he tried hard
against his will to have them, because he was so afraid of having them.
For the same reason he did his best, or his worst, to fall into a
trance, in which he should know everything that was going on about him,
all the preparations for his funeral, all the sorrow and lamentation,
but should be unable to move or speak, and only be saved at the last
moment by some one putting a mirror to his lips and finding a little
blur of mist on it. Sometimes when he was beginning to try to write
things and to imagine characters, if he imagined a character's dying,
then he became afraid he was that character, and was going to die.
Once, he woke up in the night and found the full moon shining into his
room in a very strange and phantasmal way, and washing the floor with
its pale light, and somehow it came into his mind that he was going to
die when he was sixteen years old. He could then only have been nine or
ten, but the perverse fear sank deep into his soul, and became an
increasing torture till he passed his sixteenth birthday and entered
upon the year in which he had appointed himself to die. The agony was
then too great for him to bear alone any longer, and with shame he
confessed his doom to his father. "Why," his father said, "you are in
your seventeenth year now. It is too late for you to die at sixteen,"
and all the long-gathering load of misery dropped from the boy's soul,
and he lived till his seventeenth birthday and beyond it without further
trouble. If he had known that he would be in his seventeenth year as
soon as he was sixteen, he might have arranged his presentiment
differently.
XVIII.
THE NATURE OF BOYS.
I TELL these things about my boy, not so much because they were peculiar
to him as because I think they are, many of them, common to all boys.
One tiresome fact about boys is that they are so much alike; or used to
be. They did not wish to be so, but they could not help it. They did not
even know they were alike; and my boy used to suffer in ways that he
believed no boy had ever suffered before; but as he grew older he found
that boys had been suffering in exactly the same way from the beginning
of time. In the world you will find a great many grown-up boys, with
gray beards and grandchildren, who think that they have been different
their whole lives through from other people, and are the victims of
destiny. That is because with all their growing they have never grown to
be men, but have remained a sort of cry-babies. The first thing you have
to learn here below is that in essentials you are just like every one
else, and that you are different from others only in what is not so much
worth while. If you have anything in common with your fellow-creatures,
it is something that God gave you; if you have anything that seems quite
your own, it is from your silly self, and is a sort of perversion of
what came to you from the Creator who made you out of himself, and had
nothing else to make any one out of. There is not really any difference
between you and your fellow-creatures; but only a seeming difference
that flatters and cheats you with a sense of your strangeness, and makes
you think you are a remarkable fellow.
There is a difference between boys and men, but it is a difference of
self-knowledge chiefly. A boy wants to do everything because he does not
know he cannot; a man wants to do something because he knows he cannot
do everything; a boy always fails, and a man sometimes succeeds because
the man knows and the boy does not know. A man is better than a boy
because he knows better; he has learned by experience that what is a
harm to others is a greater harm to himself, and he would rather not do
it. But a boy hardly knows what harm is, and he does it mostly without
realizing that it hurts. He cannot invent anything, he can only imitate;
and it is easier to imitate evil than good. You can imitate war, but how
are you going to imitate peace? So a boy passes his leisure in
contriving mischief. If you get another fellow to walk into a wasp's
camp, you can see him jump and hear him howl, but if you do not, then
nothing at all happens. If you set a dog to chase a cat up a tree, then
something has been done; but if you do not set the dog on the cat, then
the cat just lies in the sun and sleeps, and you lose your time. If a
boy could find out some way of doing good, so that he could be active in
it, very likely he would want to do good now and then; but as he cannot,
he very seldom wants to do good.
Or at least he did not want to do good in my boy's time. Things may be
changed now, for I have been talking of boys as they were in the Boy's
Town forty years ago. For anything that I really know to the contrary,
a lot of fellows when they get together now may plot good deeds of all
kinds, but when more than a single one of them was together then they
plotted mischief. When I see five or six boys now lying under a tree on
the grass, and they fall silent as I pass them, I have no right to say
that they are not arranging to go and carry some poor widow's winter
wood into her shed and pile it neatly up for her, and wish to keep it a
secret from everybody; but forty years ago I should have had good reason
for thinking that they were debating how to tie a piece of her
clothes-line along the ground so that when her orphan boy came out for
an armload of wood after dark, he would trip on it and send his wood
flying all over the yard.
This would not be a sign that they were morally any worse than the boys
who read _Harper's Young People_, and who would every one die rather
than do such a cruel thing, but that they had not really thought much
about it. I dare say that if a crowd of the _Young People_'s readers,
from eight to eleven years old, got together, they would choose the best
boy among them to lead them on in works of kindness and usefulness; but
I am very sorry to say that in the Boy's Town such a crowd of boys would
have followed the lead of the worst boy as far as they dared. Not all of
them would have been bad, and the worst of them would not have been very
bad; but they would have been restless and thoughtless. I am not ready
to say that boys now are not wise enough to be good; but in that time
and town they certainly were not. In their ideals and ambitions they
were foolish, and in most of their intentions they were mischievous.
Without realizing that it was evil, they meant more evil than it would
have been possible for ten times as many boys to commit. If the half of
it were now committed by men, the United States would be such an awful
place that the decent people would all want to go and live in Canada.
I have often read in stories of boys who were fond of nature, and loved
her sublimity and beauty, but I do not believe boys are ever naturally
fond of nature. They want to make use of the woods and fields and
rivers; and when they become men they find these aspects of nature
endeared to them by association, and so they think that they were dear
for their own sakes; but the taste for nature is as purely acquired as
the taste for poetry or the taste for tomatoes. I have often seen boys
wondering at the rainbow, but it was wonder, not admiration that moved
them; and I have seen them excited by a storm, but because the storm was
tremendous, not because it was beautiful.