compositor, though he was still so small that he had to stand on a chair
to reach the case in setting type on Taylor's inaugural message. But
what he lacked in stature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he got
the name of "The Old Man" from the printers as soon as he began to come
about the office, which he did almost as soon as he could walk. His
first attempt in literature, an essay on the vain and disappointing
nature of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or
seventh year; and the printing-office was in some sort his home, as well
as his school, his university. He could no more remember learning to
set type than he could remember learning to read; and in after-life he
could not come within smell of the ink, the dusty types, the humid
paper, of a printing-office without that tender swelling of the heart
which so fondly responds to any memory-bearing perfume: his youth, his
boyhood, almost his infancy came back to him in it. He now looked
forward eagerly to helping on the new paper, and somewhat proudly to
living in the larger place the family were going to. The moment it was
decided he began to tell the boys that he was going to live in a city,
and he felt that it gave him distinction. He had nothing but joy in it,
and he did not dream that as the time drew near it could be sorrow. But
when it came at last, and he was to leave the house, the town, the boys,
he found himself deathly homesick. The parting days were days of gloom;
the parting was an anguish of bitter tears. Nothing consoled him but the
fact that they were going all the way to the new place in a canal-boat,
which his father chartered for the trip. My boy and his brother had once
gone to Cincinnati in a canal-boat, with a friendly captain of their
acquaintance, and, though they were both put to sleep in a berth so
narrow that when they turned they fell out on the floor, the glory of
the adventure remained with him, and he could have thought of nothing
more delightful than such another voyage. The household goods were piled
up in the middle of the boat, and the family had a cabin forward, which
seemed immense to the children. They played in it and ran races up and
down the long canal-boat roof, where their father and mother sometimes
put their chairs and sat to admire the scenery.
As my boy could remember very few incidents of this voyage afterwards, I
dare say he spent a great part of it with his face in a book, and was
aware of the landscape only from time to time when he lifted his eyes
from the story he was reading. That was apt to be the way with him; and
before he left the Boy's Town the world within claimed him more and
more. He ceased to be that eager comrade he had once been; sometimes he
left his book with a sigh; and he saw much of the outer world through a
veil of fancies quivering like an autumn haze between him and its
realities, softening their harsh outlines, and giving them a fairy
coloring. I think he would sometimes have been better employed in
looking directly at them; but he had to live his own life, and I cannot
live it over for him. The season was the one of all others best fitted
to win him to the earth, and in a measure it did. It was spring, and
along the tow-path strutted the large, glossy blackbirds which had just
come back, and made the boys sick with longing to kill them, they
offered such good shots. But the boys had no powder with them, and at
any rate the captain would not have stopped his boat, which was rushing
on at the rate of two miles an hour, to let them pick up a bird, if they
had hit it. They were sufficiently provisioned without the game,
however; the mother had baked bread, and boiled a ham, and provided
sugar-cakes in recognition of the holiday character of the voyage, and
they had the use of the boat cooking-stove for their tea and coffee. The
boys had to content themselves with such sense of adventure as they
could get out of going ashore when the boat was passing through the
locks, or staying aboard and seeing the water burst and plunge in around
the boat. They had often watched this thrilling sight at the First
Lock, but it had a novel interest now. As their boat approached the
lock, the lower gates were pushed open by men who set their breasts to
the long sweeps or handles of the gates, and when the boat was fairly
inside of the stone-walled lock they were closed behind her. Then the
upper gates, which opened against the dull current, and were kept shut
by its pressure, were opened a little, and the waters rushed and roared
into the lock, and began to lift the boat. The gates were opened wider
and wider, till the waters poured a heavy cataract into the lock, where
the boat tossed on their increasing volume, and at last calmed
themselves to the level within. Then the boat passed out through the
upper gates, on even water, and the voyage to the next lock began. At
first it was rather awful, and the little children were always afraid
when they came to a lock, but the boys enjoyed it after the first time.
They would have liked to take turns driving the pair of horses that drew
the boat, but it seemed too bold a wish, and I think they never proposed
it; they did not ask, either, to relieve the man at the helm.
They arrived safely at their journey's end, without any sort of
accident. They had made the whole forty miles in less than two days, and
were all as well as when they started, without having suffered for a
moment from seasickness. The boat drew up at the tow-path just before
the stable belonging to the house which the father had already taken,
and the whole family at once began helping the crew put the things
ashore. The boys thought it would have been a splendid stable to keep
the pony in, only they had sold the pony; but they saw in an instant
that it would do for a circus as soon as they could get acquainted with
enough boys to have one.
The strangeness of the house and street, and the necessity of meeting
the boys of the neighborhood, and paying with his person for his
standing among them, kept my boy interested for a time, and he did not
realize at first how much he missed the Boy's Town and all the familiar
fellowships there, and all the manifold privileges of the place. Then he
began to be very homesick, and to be torn with the torment of a divided
love. His mother, whom he loved so dearly, so tenderly, was here, and
wherever she was, that was home; and yet home was yonder, far off, at
the end of those forty inexorable miles, where he had left his life-long
mates. The first months there was a dumb heartache at the bottom of
every pleasure and excitement. There were many excitements, not the
least of which was the excitement of helping get out a tri-weekly and
then a daily newspaper, instead of the weekly that his father had
published in the Boy's Town. Then that dear friend of his brother and
himself, the apprentice who knew all about "Monte Cristo," came to work
with them and live with them again, and that was a great deal; but he
did not bring the Boy's Town with him; and when they each began to write
a new historical romance, the thought of the beloved scenes amidst which
they had planned their first was a pang that nothing could assuage.
During the summer the cholera came; the milkman, though naturally a
cheerful person, said that the people around where he lived were dying
off like flies; and the funerals, three and four, five and six, ten and
twelve a day, passed before the door; and all the brooding horror of the
pestilence sank deep into the boy's morbid soul. Then he fell sick of
the cholera himself; and, though it was a mild attack, he lay in the
Valley of the Shadow of Death while it lasted, and waited the worst with
such terror that when he kept asking her if he should get well, his
mother tried to reason with him, and to coax him out of his fear. Was he
afraid to die, she asked him, when he knew that heaven was so much
better, and he would be in the care of such love as never could come to
him on earth? He could only gasp back that he _was_ afraid to die; and
she could only turn from reconciling him with the other world to
assuring him that he was in no danger of leaving this.
I sometimes think that if parents would deal rightly and truly with
children about death from the beginning, some of the fear of it might be
taken away. It seems to me that it is partly because death is hushed up
and ignored between them that it rests such a burden on the soul; but if
children were told as soon as they are old enough that death is a part
of nature, and not a calamitous accident, they would be somewhat
strengthened to meet it. My boy had been taught that this world was only
an illusion, a shadow thrown from the real world beyond; and no doubt
his father and mother believed what they taught him; but he had always
seen them anxious to keep the illusion, and in his turn he clung to the
vain shadow with all the force of his being.
He got well of the cholera, but not of the homesickness, and after a
while he was allowed to revisit the Boy's Town. It could only have been
three or four months after he had left it, but it already seemed a very
long time; and he figured himself returning as stage-heroes do to the
scenes of their childhood, after an absence of some fifteen years. He
fancied that if the boys did not find him grown, they would find him
somehow changed, and that he would dazzle them with the light
accumulated by his residence in a city. He was going to stay with his
grandmother, and he planned to make a long stay; for he was very fond of
her, and he liked the quiet and comfort of her pleasant house. He must
have gone back by the canal-packet, but his memory kept no record of the
fact, and afterwards he knew only of having arrived, and of searching
about in a ghostly fashion for his old comrades. They may have been at
school; at any rate he found very few of them; and with them he was
certainly strange enough; too strange, even. They received him with a
kind of surprise; and they could not begin playing together at once in
the old way. He went to all the places that were so dear to him; but he
felt in them the same kind of refusal, or reluctance, that he felt in
the boys. His heart began to ache again, he did not quite know why; only
it ached. When he went up from his grandmother's to look at the Faulkner
house, he realized that it was no longer home, and he could not bear the
sight of it. There were other people living in it; strange voices
sounded from the open doors, strange faces peered from the windows.
He came back to his grandmother's, bruised and defeated, and spent the
morning indoors reading. After dinner he went out again, and hunted up
that queer earth-spirit who had been so long and closely his only
friend. He at least was not changed; he was as unwashed and as unkempt
as ever; but he seemed shy of my poor boy. He had probably never been
shaken hands with in his life before; he dropped my boy's hand; and
they stood looking at each other, not knowing what to say. My boy had on
his best clothes, which he wore so as to affect the Boy's Town boys with
the full splendor of a city boy. After all, he was not so very splendid,
but his presence altogether was too much for the earth-spirit, and he
vanished out of his consciousness like an apparition.
After school was out in the afternoon, he met more of the boys, but none
of them knew just what to do with him. The place that he had once had in
their lives was filled; he was an outsider, who might be suffered among
them, but he was no longer of them. He did not understand this at once,
nor well know what hurt him. But something was gone that could not be
called back, something lost that could not be found.
At tea-time his grandfather came home and gravely made him welcome; the
uncle who was staying with them was jovially kind. But a heavy
homesickness weighed down the child's heart, which now turned from the
Boy's Town as longingly as it had turned towards it before.
They all knelt down with the grandfather before they went to the table.
There had been a good many deaths from cholera during the day, and the
grandfather prayed for grace and help amidst the pestilence that walketh
in darkness and wasteth at noonday in such a way that the boy felt there
would be very little of either for him unless he got home at once. All
through the meal that followed he was trying to find the courage to say
that he must go home. When he managed to say it, his grandmother and
aunt tried to comfort and coax him, and his uncle tried to shame him,
out of his homesickness, to joke it off, to make him laugh. But his
grandfather's tender heart was moved. He could not endure the child's
mute misery; he said he must go home if he wished.
In half an hour the boy was on the canal-packet speeding homeward at the
highest pace of the three-horse team, and the Boy's Town was out of
sight. He could not sleep for excitement that night, and he came and
spent the time talking on quite equal terms with the steersman, one of
the canalers whom he had admired afar in earlier and simpler days. He
found him a very amiable fellow, by no means haughty, who began to tell
him funny stories, and who even let him take the helm for a while. The
rudder-handle was of polished iron, very different from the clumsy
wooden affair of a freight-boat; and the packet made in a single night
the distance which the boy's family had been nearly two days in
travelling when they moved away from the Boy's Town.
He arrived home for breakfast a travelled and experienced person, and
wholly cured of that longing for his former home that had tormented him
before he revisited its scenes. He now fully gave himself up to his new
environment, and looked forward and not backward. I do not mean to say
that he ceased to love the Boy's Town; that he could not do and never
did. But he became more and more aware that the past was gone from him
forever, and that he could not return to it. He did not forget it, but
cherished its memories the more fondly for that reason.
There was no bitterness in it, and no harm that he could not hope would
easily be forgiven him. He had often been foolish, and sometimes he had
been wicked; but he had never been such a little fool or such a little
sinner but he had wished for more sense and more grace. There are some
great fools and great sinners who try to believe in after-life that they
are the manlier men because they have been silly and mischievous boys,
but he has never believed that. He is glad to have had a boyhood fully
rounded out with all a boy's interests and pleasures, and he is glad
that his lines were cast in the Boy's Town; but he knows, or believes he
knows, that whatever is good in him now came from what was good in him
then; and he is sure that the town was delightful chiefly because his
home in it was happy. The town was small and the boys there were hemmed
in by their inexperience and ignorance; but the simple home was large
with vistas that stretched to the ends of the earth, and it was serenely
bright with a father's reason and warm with a mother's love.
THE END.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
Page 101, "unbotton" changed to "unbutton" (begins to unbutton)
Page 190, "laugher" changed to "laughter" (great a laughter)