|When winter came, Hiram Winthrop had less to do and more time to follow
the bidding of his own fancy. True, there was cordwood to split in
abundance; and splitting cordwood is no child's play along the frozen
shores of Lake Ontario. You go out among the snow in the wood-shed,
and take the big ice-covered logs down from the huge pile with numbed
fingers: then you lay them on a sort of double St. Andrew's cross, its
two halves supported by a thwart-piece, and saw them up into fit lengths
for the kitchen fireplace: and after that you split them in four with
a solid-headed axe, taking care in the process not to let your
deadened hands slip, so as to cut off the ends of your own toes with an
ill-directed blow glancing off the log sideways. Yes, splitting cordwood
is very serious work, with the thermometer at 40° below freezing; and
drawing water from the well when the rope is frozen and your skin clings
to the chill iron of the thirsty bucket-handle is hardly better: yet in
spite of both these small drawbacks, Hiram Winthrop found much more to
enjoy in his winters than in his summers. There was no corn to hoe, no
peas to pick, no weeding to do, no daily toil on farm and garden.
The snow had covered all with its great white sheet; and even the
neighbourhood of Muddy Creek Dépôt looked desolately beautiful in its
own dreary, cold, monotonous, Siberian fashion.
The flowers and leaves were gone too, to be sure; but in the low
brushwood by the blackberry bottom the hares had turned white to match
the snow; and the nut-hatches were answering one another in their
varying keys; and the skunks were still busy of nights beneath the
spreading walnuts; and the chickadees were tinkling overhead among the
snow-laden pine-needles of the far woodland. All the summer visitors had
gone south to Georgia and the gulf: but the snow-buntings were ever with
Hiram in the wintry fields: and the bald-headed eagles still prowled
around at times on the stray chance of catching a frozen-out racoon.
Above all there was ease and leisure, respite from the deacon's rasping
voice calling perpetually for Hiram here, and Hiram there, and Hiram
yonder, to catch the horses, or tend the harrow, or mind the birds, or
weed the tomatoes, or set shingles against the sun over the drooping
transplanted cabbages. A happy time indeed for Hiram, that long, weary,
white-sheeted, unbroken northern New York winter.
Sam Churchill was with the deacon still, but had little enough to do,
for there isn't much going on upon an American farm from November to
April, and the deacon would gladly have got rid of his hired help in
the slack time if he could have shuffled him off; but Sam had been well
advised on his first hiring, and had wisely covenanted to be kept on
all the year round, with board and lodging and decent wages during the
winter season. And Hiram initiated Sam into the mysteries of sliding on
a bent piece of wood (a homemade toboggan) down the great snowdrifts,
and skating on the frozen expansion of Muddy Creek, and building round
huts, Esquimaux fashion, with big square blocks of solid dry snow, and
tracking the white hare over the white fields by means of the marks he
left behind him, whose termination, apparently lengthening itself out
miraculously before one's very eyes, marked the spot where the hare
himself was hopping invisible to human vision. In return, Sam lent him a
few dearly-treasured books: books that he had brought from England with
him: the books that had first set the Dorsetshire peasant lad upon his
scheme of going forth alone upon the wide world beyond the ocean.
Hiram was equally delighted and astonished with these wonderful charmed
volumes. He had seen a few books before, but they were all of two types:
Cornell's Geography, Quackenboss's Grammar, and the other schoolbooks
used at the common school; or else Barnes's Commentary, Elder Coffin's
Ezekiel, the Hopkinsite Confession of Faith, and other like works of
American exegetical and controversial theology. But Sam's books, oh,
gracious, what a difference! There was Peter Simple, a story about a
real live boy, who wa'n't good, pertickler, not to speak of, but had
some real good old times on board a ship, somewhere, he did; and there
was Tom Jones (Hiram no more understood the doubtful passages in that
great romance than he understood the lucubrations of Philosopher Square,
but he took it in, in the lump, as very good fun for all that), Tom
Jones, the story of another real live boy, with, most delightful of all,
a reg'lar mean sneak of a feller, called Blifil, to act as a foil to
Tom's straightforward pagan flesh-and-bloodfulness; the Buccaneers of
the Caribbean Sea, a glorious work of fire and slaughter, whar some
feller or other got killed right off on every page a'most, you bet; Jake
the Pirate, another splendid book of the same description; and half a
dozen more assorted novels, from the best to the worst, all chosen alike
for their stirring incidents which went straight home to the minds
of the two lads, in spite of all external differences of birth and
geographical surroundings. Hiram pored over them surreptitiously, late
at nights, in the room that he and Sam occupied in common--a mere loft
at the top of the house and felt in his heart he had never in his life
imagined such delightful reading could possibly have existed. And they
were written by growed-up men, too! How strange to think that once upon
a time, somewhile and somewhere, there were growed-up men capable of
thus sympathising with, and reproducing the ideas and feelings of, the
natural mind of boyhood!
One evening, very late--eleven nearly--the deacon, prowling around after
a bottle or something, spied an unwonted light gleaming down from the
trap-door that led up to the loft where the lads ought at that moment
to have been sleeping soundly. Lights in a well-conducted farmhouse at
eleven o'clock was indeed incomprehensible: what on earth, the deacon
asked himself wonderingly, could them thar lads be up to at this hour?
He crept up the step-ladder cautiously, so as not to disturb them by
premonitions, and opened the trap-door in sedulous silence. Sam was
already fast asleep; but there was Hiram, sot up in bed, as quiet as a
'possum, 'pearin' as if he was a-readin' something. The deacon's eyes
opened with amazement! Hiram reading! Had his heart been touched, then,
quite sudden-like? Could he have took up the Hopkinsite Confession
in secret to his upper chamber? Was he meditatin' makin' a public
profession afore the Assembly?
The deacon glowered and marvelled. Creeping, still quite silently, up
to the bedhead, he looked with an inquiring glance over poor Hiram's
unsuspecting shoulder. A sea of words swam vaguely before his bewildered
vision; words, not running into long orthodox paragraphs, like the
Elder's Ezekiel, but cut up, oh horror, into distinct sentences, each
indicating a separate part in a conversation. The deacon couldn't
clearly make it all out; for it was a dramatic dialogue, a form of
composition which had not largely fallen in the good man's way: but he
picked up enough to understand that it was a low pothouse scene, where
one Falstaff was bandying improper language with a person of the name of
Prince (given name, Henry)--language that made even the deacon's sallow
cheek blush feebly with reflected and vicarious modesty. For a moment
he endeavoured, like a Christian man, to retain his wrath; and then
paternal feeling overcame him, and he caught Hiram such a oner on his
ears as he flattered himself that boy wouldn't be likely to forgit in
any very partickler hurry.
Hiram looked round, amazed and stunned, his ear tingling and burning,
and saw the gaunt apparition of his father, standing silent and
black-browed by the bare bed-head. For a moment those two glared at one
another mutely and defiantly.
At last Hiram spoke: 'Wal!' he said simply.
'Wal!' the deacon answered, with smothered wrath. 'Hiram, I am angry and
sin not. What do you go an' take them bad books up to read for? Who give
'em you? Whar did you get 'em? Oh, you sinful, bad boy, whar did you get
'em?' And he administered another sound cuff upon Hiram's other ear.
Hiram put his hand up to the stinging spot, and cried a minute silently:
then he answered as well as he was able: 'This aint a bad book: this is
called “The Complete Dramattic Works of William Shakespeare.” Sam lent
it to me, an' it's Sam's book, an' ther ain't no harm in it, anyhow.'
The deacon was plainly staggered for a moment, for even he had dimly
heard the name of William Shakespeare; and though he had never made
any personal acquaintance with that gentleman's works, he had always
understood in a vague, indefinite fashion that this here Shakespeare was
a perfectly respectable and recognised writer, whose books were read
and approved of even by Hopkinsite ministers edoocated at Bethabara
Seminary. So he took the volume in his hand incredulously and looked it
through casually for a few minutes. He glanced at a scene or two here
or there with a critical eye, and then he flung the volume from him
quickly, as a man might fling and crush some loathsome reptile. By this
time Sam was half-awake, and sat up in bed to inquire sleepily, what
all thik ther row could be about at thik time of evenin'?' The deacon
answered by going savagely to Sam's box, and taking out, one by one, for
separate inspection, the volumes he found there. He held up the candle
(stuck in an empty blacking-bottle) to each volume in succession, and,
as soon as he had finally condemned them each, he flung them down in
an untidy pile on the bare floor of the little bedroom. Most of them he
stood stoically enough; but the Vicar of Wakefield was at last quite
too much for his stifled indignation. Sitting down blankly on the bed
he fired off his volley at poor Hiram's frightened head, with terrible
significance.
'Hiram Winthrop,' he said solemnly, 'you air a son of perdition. You
air more a'most 'n I kin manage with. Satan's openin' the door for you
on-common wide, I kin tell you, sonny. It makes me downright scar't to
see you in company along of sech books. Your mother'll be awful took
back about it. I don't mind this 'ere about the Pirates of the Caribbean
Sea, so much; that's kinder hist'ry, that is, and mayn't do you
much harm: but sech things as this Peter Simple, an' Wakefield, and
Pickwick's Papers--why, I wonder the roof don't fall in on 'em an' crush
us in the lot altogether. I'm durned ef I could have thought you'd bin
wicked enough to read 'em, sech on-principled literatoor. I sha'n't
chastise you to-night, sonny; it's late, now, and we've read chapter:
but to-morrer, Hiram, to-morrer, you shall pay for them thar books, take
my word for it. You shall be chastened in the manner that's app'inted.
Ef I was you, I should spend the rest of the evenin' in wrestlin' for
forgiveness for the sin you've committed.'
And yet in the chapter the deacon had read at family worship that
evening there was one little clause which said: 'Quench not the Spirit.'
Hiram slept but little that night, with the vague terror of to-morrow's
whipping overshadowing him through the night watches. But he had at
least one comfort: Sam Churchill had got out and gathered up his books,
and locked them carefully in his box again.
'If the boss tries to touch they books again, I tell 'ee, Hiram,'
he said bi-lingually (for absorbent America was already beginning to
assimilate him), ''e'll vind 'isself a-lyin' longways on the vloor,
afore he do know it, I promise 'ee.' Hiram heard, and was partly
comforted. At least he would still have the books to read, somehow, at
some time. For in his own heart, unregenerate or otherwise, he couldn't
bring himself to believe that there could be really anything so very
wicked in Henry the Fourth or Peter Simple.