it, though a sherry-glass full of it cost a fip, and it ought to have
been good for such a sum as that. Later in life, he sometimes went to
the saloon where it was sold in the town, and bashfully gasped out a
demand for a glass, and ate it in some sort of chilly back-parlor. But
the boys in that town, if they cared for such luxuries, did not miss
them much, and their lives were full of such vivid interests arising
from the woods and waters all about them that they did not need public
amusements other than those which chance and custom afforded them. I
have tried to give some notion of the pleasure they got out of the daily
arrival of the packet in the Canal Basin; and it would be very unjust if
I failed to celebrate the omnibus which was put on in place of the
old-fashioned stage-coaches between the Boy's Town and Cincinnati. I
dare say it was of the size of the ordinary city omnibus, but it looked
as large to the boys then as a Pullman car would look to a boy now; and
they assembled for its arrivals and departures with a thrill of civic
pride such as hardly any other fact of the place could impart.
My boy remembered coming from Cincinnati in the stage when he was so
young that it must have been when he first came to the Boy's Town. The
distance was twenty miles, and the stage made it in four hours. It was
this furious speed which gave the child his earliest illusion of trees
and fences racing by while the stage seemed to stand still. Several
times after that he made the journey with his father, seeming to have
been gone a long age before he got back, and always so homesick that he
never had any appetite at the tavern where the stage stopped for dinner
midway. When it started back, he thought it would never get off the city
pave and out from between its lines of houses into the free country. The
boys always called Cincinnati "The City." They supposed it was the only
city in the world.
[Illustration: "MY BOY REMEMBERS COMING FROM CINCINNATI IN THE STAGE."]
Of course there was a whole state of things in the Boy's Town that the
boys never knew of, or only knew by mistaken rumors and distorted
glimpses. They had little idea of its politics, or commerce, or religion
that was not wrong, and they only concerned themselves with persons and
places so far as they expected to make use of them. But as they could
make very little use of grown persons or public places, they kept away
from them, and the Boy's Town was, for the most part, an affair of
water-courses, and fields and woods, and the streets before the houses,
and the alleys behind them.
Nearly all the houses had vegetable gardens, and some of them had
flower-gardens that appeared princelier pleasaunces to my boy than he
has ever seen since in Europe or America. Very likely they were not so
vast or so splendid as they looked to him then; but one of them at least
had beds of tulips and nasturtiums, and borders of flags and pinks, with
clumps of tiger-lilies and hollyhocks; and in the grassy yard beside it
there were high bushes full of snow-balls, and rose-trees with
moss-roses on them. In this superb domain there were two summer-houses
and a shed where bee-hives stood; at the end of the garden was a
bath-house, and you could have a shower-bath, if you were of a mind
to bring the water for it from the pump in the barn-yard. But this was
all on a scale of unequalled magnificence; and most of the houses, which
were mostly of wood, just had a good big yard with plum-trees and
cherry-trees in it; and a vegetable garden at one side that the boy
hated to weed. My boy's grandfather had a large and beautiful garden,
with long arbors of grapes in it, that the old gentleman trimmed and
cared for himself. They were delicious grapes; and there were black
currants, which the grandfather liked, because he had liked them when he
was a boy himself in the old country, but which no Boy's Town boy could
have been induced to take as a gracious gift. Another boy had a father
that had a green-house; he was a boy that would let you pull pie-plant
in the garden, and would bring out sugar to let you eat it with in the
green-house. His cleverness was rewarded when his father was elected
governor of the state; and what made it so splendid was that his father
was a Whig.
Every house, whether it had a flower-garden or not, had a woodshed,
which was the place where a boy mostly received his friends, and made
his kites and wagons, and laid his plots and plans for all the failures
of his life. The other boys waited in the woodshed when he went in to
ask his mother whether he might do this or that, or go somewhere. A boy
always wanted to have a stove in the woodshed and fit it up for himself,
but his mother would not let him, because he would have been certain to
set the house on fire.
Each fellow knew the inside of his own house tolerably well, but seldom
the inside of another fellow's house, and he knew the back-yard better
than the front-yard. If he entered the house of a friend at all, it was
to wait for him by the kitchen-door, or to get up to the garret with him
by the kitchen-stairs. If he sometimes, and by some rare mischance,
found himself in the living-rooms, or the parlor, he was very unhappy,
and anxious to get out. Yet those interiors were not of an oppressive
grandeur, and one was much like another. The parlor had what was called
a flowered-carpet or gay pattern of ingrain on its floor, and the other
rooms had rag-carpets, woven by some woman who had a loom for the work,
and dyed at home with such native tints as butternut and foreign colors
as logwood. The rooms were all heated with fireplaces, where wood was
burned, and coal was never seen. They were lit at night with
tallow-candles, which were mostly made by the housewife herself, or by
lard-oil glass lamps. In the winter the oil would get so stiff with the
cold that it had to be thawed out at the fire before the lamp would
burn. There was no such thing as a hot-air furnace known; and the fire
on the hearth was kept over from day to day all winter long, by covering
a log at night with ashes; in the morning it would be a bed of coals.
There were no fires in bedrooms, or at least not in a boy's bedroom, and
sometimes he had to break the ice in his pitcher before he could wash;
it did not take him very long to dress.
I have said that they burned wood for heating in the Boy's Town; but my
boy could remember one winter when they burned ears of corn in the
printing-office stove because it was cheaper. I believe they still
sometimes burn corn in the West, when they are too far from a market to
sell it at a paying price; but it always seems a sin and a shame that in
a state pretending to be civilized food should ever be destroyed when
so many are hungry. When one hears of such things one would almost think
that boys could make a better state than this of the men.
XX.
TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.
IN the Boy's Town a great many men gave nearly their whole time to the
affairs of the state, and did hardly anything but talk politics all day;
they even sat up late at night to do it. Among these politicians the
Whigs were sacred in my boy's eyes, but the Democrats appeared like
enemies of the human race; and one of the strangest things that ever
happened to him was to find his father associating with men who came out
of the Democratic party at the time he left the Whig party, and joining
with them in a common cause against both. But when he understood what a
good cause it was, and came to sing songs against slavery, he was
reconciled, though he still regarded the Whig politicians as chief among
the great ones, if not the good ones, of the earth. When he passed one
of them on the street, he held his breath for awe till he got by, which
was not always so very soon, for sometimes a Whig statesman wanted the
whole sidewalk to himself, and it was hard to get by him. There were
other people in that town who wanted the whole sidewalk, and these were
the professional drunkards, whom the boys regarded as the keystones, if
not corner-stones, of the social edifice. There were three or four of
them, and the boys held them all, rich and poor alike, in a deep
interest, if not respect, as persons of peculiar distinction. I do not
think any boy realized the tragedy of those hopeless, wasted, slavish
lives. The boys followed the wretched creatures, at a safe distance, and
plagued them, and ran whenever one of them turned and threatened them.
That was because the boys had not the experience to enable them to think
rightly, or to think at all about such things, or to know what images of
perdition they had before their eyes; and when they followed them and
teased them, they did not know they were joining like fiends in the
torment of lost souls. Some of the town-drunkards were the outcasts of
good homes, which they had desolated, and some had merely destroyed in
themselves that hope of any home which is the light of heaven in every
human heart; but from time to time a good man held out a helping hand to
one of them, and gave him the shelter of his roof, and tried to reclaim
him. Then the boys saw him going about the streets, pale and tremulous,
in a second-hand suit of his benefactor's clothes, and fighting hard
against the tempter that beset him on every side in that town; and then
some day they saw him dead drunk in a fence corner; and they did not
understand how seven devils worse than the first had entered in the
place which had been swept and garnished for them.
Besides the town-drunkards there were other persons in whom the boys
were interested, like the two or three dandies, whom their splendor in
dress had given a public importance in a community of carelessly dressed
men. Then there were certain genteel loafers, young men of good
families, who hung about the principal hotel, and whom the boys believed
to be fighters of singular prowess. Far below these in the social scale,
the boys had yet other heroes, such as the Dumb Negro and his family.
Between these and the white people, among whom the boys knew of no
distinctions, they were aware that there was an impassable gulf; and it
would not be easy to give a notion of just the sort of consideration in
which they held them. But they held the Dumb Negro himself in almost
superstitious regard as one who, though a deaf-mute, knew everything
that was going on, and could make you understand anything he wished. He
was, in fact, a master of most eloquent pantomime; he had gestures that
could not be mistaken, and he had a graphic dumb-show for persons and
occupations and experiences that was delightfully vivid. For a dentist,
he gave an upward twist of the hand from his jaw, and uttered a howl
which left no doubt that he meant tooth-pulling; and for what would
happen to a boy if he kept on misbehaving, he crossed his fingers before
his face and looked through them in a way that brought the jail-window
clearly before the eyes of the offender.
The boys knew vaguely that his family helped runaway slaves on their way
North, and in a community that was for the most part bitterly
pro-slavery these negroes were held in a sort of respect for their
courageous fidelity to their race. The men were swarthy, handsome
fellows, not much darker than Spaniards, and they were so little afraid
of the chances which were often such fatal mischances to colored people
in that day that one of them travelled through the South, and passed
himself in very good company as a Cherokee Indian of rank and education.
As far as the boys knew, the civic affairs of the place were transacted
entirely by two constables. Of mayors and magistrates, such as there
must have been, they knew nothing, and they had not the least notion
what the Whigs whom they were always trying to elect were to do when
they got into office. They knew that the constables were both Democrats,
but, if they thought at all about the fact, they thought their Democracy
the natural outcome of their dark constabulary nature, and by no means
imagined that they were constables because they were Democrats. The
worse of the two, or the more merciless, was also the town-crier, whose
office is now not anywhere known in America, I believe; though I heard a
town-crier in a Swiss village not many years ago. In the Boy's Town the
crier carried a good-sized bell; when he started out he rang it till he
reached the street corner, and then he stopped, and began some such
proclamation as, "O, yes! O, yes! O, yes! There will be an auction this
evening at early candle-light, at Brown & Robinson's store! Dry goods,
boots and shoes, hats and caps, hardware, queen's ware, and so forth,
and so forth. Richard Roe, Auctioneer! Come one, come all, come
everybody!" Then the crier rang his bell, and went on to the next
corner, where he repeated his proclamation. After a while, the constable
got a deputy to whom he made over his business of town-crier. This
deputy was no other than that reckless boy who used to run out from the
printing-office and shoot the turtle-doves; and he decorated his
proclamation with quips and quirks of his own invention, and with
personal allusions to his employer, who was auctioneer as well as
constable. But though he was hail-fellow with every boy in town, and
although every boy rejoiced in his impudence, he was so panoplied in the
awfulness of his relation to the constabulary functions that, however
remote it was, no boy would have thought of trifling with him when he
was on duty. If ever a boy holloed something at him when he was out with
his crier's bell, he turned and ran as hard as he could, and as if from
the constable himself.
The boys knew just one other official, and that was the gauger, whom
they watched at a respectful distance, when they found him employed with
his mysterious instruments gauging the whiskey in the long rows of
barrels on the Basin bank. They did not know what the process was, and I
own that I do not know to this day what it was. My boy watched him with
the rest, and once he ventured upon a bold and reckless act. He had so
long heard that it was whiskey which made people drunk that at last the
notion came to have an irresistible fascination for him, and he
determined to risk everything, even life itself, to know what whiskey
was like. As soon as the gauger had left them, he ran up to one of the
barrels where he had seen a few drops fall from his instrument when he
lifted it from the bunghole, and plunged the tip of his little finger
into the whiskey, and then put it to his tongue. He expected to become
drunk instantly, if not to end a town-drunkard there on the spot; but
the whiskey only tasted very disgusting; and he was able to get home
without help. Still, I would not advise any other boy to run the risk he
took in this desperate experiment.
There was a time not long after that when he really did get drunk, but
it was not with whiskey. One morning after a rain, when the boys were
having fun in one of those open canal-boats with the loose planks which
the over-night shower had set afloat, a fellow came up and said he had
got some tobacco that was the best kind to learn to chew with. Every boy
who expected to be anything in the world expected to chew tobacco; for
all the packet-drivers chewed; and it seemed to my boy that his father
and grandfather and uncles were about the only people who did not chew.
If they had only smoked, it would have been something, but they did not
even smoke; and the boy felt that he had a long arrears of manliness to
bring up, and that he should have to retrieve his family in spite of
itself from the shame of not using tobacco in any form. He knew that his
father abhorred it, but he had never been explicitly forbidden to smoke
or chew, for his father seldom forbade him anything explicitly, and he
gave himself such freedom of choice in the matter that when the boy with
the tobacco began to offer it around, he judged it right to take a chew
with the rest. The boy said it was a peculiar kind of tobacco, and was
known as molasses-tobacco because it was so sweet. The other boys did
not ask how he came to know its name, or where he got it; boys never ask
anything that it would be well for them to know; but they accepted his
theory, and his further statement that it was of a mildness singularly
adapted to learners, without misgiving. The boy was himself chewing
vigorously on a large quid, and launching the juice from his lips right
and left like a grown person; and my boy took as large a bite as his
benefactor bade him. He found it as sweet as he had been told it was,
and he acknowledged the aptness of its name of molasses-tobacco; it
seemed to him a golden opportunity to acquire a noble habit on easy
terms. He let the quid rest in his cheek as he had seen men do, when he
was not crushing it between his teeth, and for some moments he poled his
plank up and down the canal-boat with a sense of triumph that nothing
marred. Then, all of a sudden, he began to feel pale. The boat seemed
to be going round, and the sky wheeling overhead; the sun was dodging
about very strangely. Drops of sweat burst from the boy's forehead; he
let fall his pole, and said that he thought he would go home. The fellow
who gave him the tobacco began to laugh, and the other fellows to mock,
but my boy did not mind them. Somehow, he did not know how, he got out
of the canal-boat and started homeward; but at every step the ground
rose as high as his knees before him, and then when he got his foot high
enough, and began to put it down, the ground was not there. He was
deathly sick, as he reeled and staggered on, and when he reached home,
and showed himself white and haggard to his frightened mother, he had
scarcely strength to gasp out a confession of his attempt to retrieve
the family honor by learning to chew tobacco. In another moment nature
came to his relief, and then he fell into a deep sleep which lasted the
whole afternoon, so that it seemed to him the next day when he woke up,
glad to find himself alive, if not so very lively. Perhaps he had
swallowed some of the poisonous juice of the tobacco; perhaps it had
acted upon his brain without that. His father made no very close inquiry
into the facts, and he did not forbid him the use of tobacco. It was not
necessary; in that one little experiment he had got enough for a whole
lifetime. It shows that, after all, a boy is not so hard to satisfy in
everything.
There were some people who believed that tobacco would keep off the
fever-and-ague, which was so common then in that country, or at any rate
that it was good for the toothache. In spite of the tobacco, there were
few houses where ague was not a familiar guest, however unwelcome. If
the family was large, there was usually a chill every day; one had it
one day, and another the next, so that there was no lapse. This was the
case in my boy's family, after they moved to the Faulkner house, which
was near the Basin and its water-soaked banks; but they accepted the
ague as something quite in the course of nature, and duly broke it up
with quinine. Some of the boys had chills at school; and sometimes,
after they had been in swimming, they would wait round on the bank till
a fellow had his chill out, and then they would all go off together and
forget about it. The next day that fellow would be as well as any one;
the third day his chill would come on again, but he did not allow it to
interfere with his business or pleasure, and after a while the ague
would seem to get tired of it, and give up altogether. That strange
earth-spirit who was my boy's friend simply beat the ague, as it were,
on its own ground. He preferred a sunny spot to have his chill in, a
cosy fence-corner or a warm back door-step, or the like; but as for the
fever that followed the chill, he took no account of it whatever, or at
least made no provision for it.
The miasm which must have filled the air of the place from so many
natural and artificial bodies of fresh water showed itself in low
fevers, which were not so common as ague, but common enough. The only
long sickness that my boy could remember was intermittent fever, which
seemed to last many weeks, and which was a kind of bewilderment rather
than a torment. When it was beginning he appeared to glide down the
stairs at school without touching the steps with his feet, and
afterwards his chief trouble was in not knowing, when he slept, whether
he had really been asleep or not. But there was rich compensation for
this mild suffering in the affectionate petting which a sick boy always
gets from his mother when his malady takes him from his rough little
world and gives him back helpless to her tender arms again. Then she
makes everything in the house yield to him; none of the others are
allowed to tease him or cross him in the slightest thing. They have to
walk lightly; and when he is going to sleep, if they come into the room,
they have got to speak in a whisper. She sits by his bed and fans him;
she smooths the pillow and turns its cool side up under his hot and
aching head; she cooks dainty dishes to tempt his sick appetite, and
brings them to him herself. She is so good and kind and loving that he
cannot help having some sense of it all, and feeling how much better she
is than anything on earth. His little ruffian world drifts far away from
him. He hears the yells and shouts of the boys in the street without a
pang of envy or longing; in his weakness, his helplessness, he becomes a
gentle and innocent child again; and heaven descends to him out of his
mother's heart.
XXI.
LAST DAYS.
I HAVE already told that my boy's father would not support General
Taylor, the Whig candidate for President, because he believed him, as
the hero of a pro-slavery war, to be a friend of slavery. At this time
he had a large family of little children, and he had got nothing beyond
a comfortable living from the newspaper which he had published for eight
years; if he must give that up, he must begin life anew heavily
burdened. Perhaps he thought it need not come to his giving up his
paper, that somehow affairs might change. But his newspaper would have
gone to nothing in his hands if he had tried to publish it as a Free
Soil paper after the election of the Whig candidate; so he sold it, and
began to cast about for some other business; how anxiously, my boy was
too young to know. He only felt the relief that the whole family felt
for a while at getting out of the printing business; the boys wanted to
go into almost anything else: the drug-business, or farming, or a
paper-mill, or anything. The elder brother knew all the anxiety of the
time, and shared it fully with the mother, whose acquiescence in what
the father thought right was more than patient; she abode courageously
in the suspense, the uncertainty of the time; and she hoped for
something from the father's endeavors in the different ways he turned.
At one time there was much talk in the family of using the fibre of a
common weed in making paper, which he thought he could introduce;
perhaps it was the milk-weed; but he could not manage it, somehow; and
after a year of inaction he decided to go into another newspaper. By
this time the boys had made their peace with the printing business, and
the father had made his with the Whig party. He had done what it must
have been harder to do than to stand out against it; he had publicly
owned that he was mistaken in regard to Taylor, who had not become the
tool of the slaveholders, but had obeyed the highest instincts of the
party and served the interests of freedom, though he was himself a
slaveholder and the hero of an unjust war.
It was then too late, however, for the father to have got back his old
newspaper, even if he had wished, and the children heard, with the
elation that novelty brings to all children, old or young, that they
were going away from the Boy's Town, to live in another place. It was a
much larger place and was even considered a city, though it was not
comparable to Cincinnati, so long the only known city in the world.