"Day before yesterday," he replied, with perfect nonchalance.
This is dangerous,--already I can see that Philip is to be, like his
illustrious namesake "the glass of fashion and the mold of form," and
that the younger boys, will be only too ready to omit disagreeable rites
if he does.
Poor Keats, who in the matter of beauty certainly lives up to his name,
really seems inconsolable. While he cleans the chicken-yard in the
mornings, my heart is wrung by hearing him chant the most dismal of
songs,
Oh bury me not, on the broad pa-ra-a-ree,
Where the wild ky-oats will holler over me!
and in the hour after supper, when the others play out of doors, he
sits with me, telling about Nervesty and the four little children at
home, and the spell of typhoid all the family had last year, when his
father and little sister Dicey died, and how "Me 'n' Nervesty and Hen"
have run the farm since then, tending fifteen acres of corn, besides
clearing new-ground, and other labors. Poor little man, it is the
knowledge that he is really needed at home, as much as homesickness,
that preys on his mind,--his mother is making a noble sacrifice to let
him stay in the school. It seems to comfort him somewhat to weep on a
sympathetic bosom. Peppermint candy, too, is not without its efficacy.
To-day came Taulbee Bolling, a dignified boy of thirteen, with a
critical eye, and later, Mr. Atkins again, with the "pure scholar" in
tow. Iry is a thin, puny-looking mite of ten, much too small for his
trousers. He said "Yes sir" and "No sir" most politely when speaking to
me, and carried an old blue-back speller under one arm. So great was my
curiosity that I opened the book at once. The result was
amazing,--"genealogical" and "irreconcilable" were child's-play to him,
"incomprehensibility," a bagatelle. It was interesting to see his scared
little face brighten as he climbed up and down the hard words and beheld
my growing astonishment.
[Illustration: "'Genealogical' and 'irreconcilable' were child's play to
him, 'incomprehensibility,' a bagatelle."]
This afternoon while I had the boys mending the back fence, Geordie, who
had been left to scrub my floor with carbolic acid solution, came back
to the stable-lot bringing a new boy, whom with a flourish of his brush
he introduced as follows:
"Here's the boy that fit the marshal that kilt his paw. And one time he
seed the world and rid on a railroad train. Killis Blair's the name he
goes by." Killis is a handsome blonde boy of twelve, not unaware of his
double importance.
To-night after study-hour there was another catechism by Geordie. "Tell
about ridin' on the railroad train!" he ordered.
Killis began: "The month before paw got kilt last spring, the officers
was a-watching him so clost he was afeared to sell any liquor round
about home, so me and him we tuck a barrel acrost the mountains to
Virginia, where there's mines, and it would fetch a good price. We
loaded fodder on top. The going was awful sorry, and the steers was
three days at it. When I got there, I seed men walking round with their
hats afire, and went down to the railroad-train and rid on the engine."
"What did it look like?" demanded Philip, breathlessly.
"Sort of like a saw-mill sot up on wheels."
"I'd sooner die as not to see one!" sighed Philip.
"I aim to see one when I'm a perfessor," remarked Taulbee.
"I bet I see a hundred when I go to be a soldier," said Nucky.
"I'd ruther see a railroad-train as to eat!" declared Geordie, and this
appeared to be the prevailing sentiment, except with Keats, who said
dismally that he didn't crave to see anything that would take him fifty
mile' from Nervesty and home. After reflection, Hen agreed with him.
"Listen at them two homesicks!" remarked Philip, cuttingly.
Geordie folded his fat hands. "Now you might tell about your paw gettin'
kilt," he said.
Killis said that the officers had been spying around on his "paw" a long
time for "stilling" liquor, but that he was too smart for them, and
moved the still about, and made liquor by night, and also frightened
them by sending word to the marshal he would never be taken alive. That
one night they had just "drug" the still up to a new place in the
hollow, and he and his father and uncles were sitting around the fire,
when there was a yell, and the marshal and a deputy burst in, shooting
as they came. That his uncles returned the fire, but before his father
could do so, he fell, with a dreadful wound through the stomach. That he
himself, when he saw his father fall, snatched a hunting-knife and cut
the marshal in the forearm with it as he was running out.
The last item he told without bragging, and quite as a matter of course.
The other boys gave him looks of approval and envy, all save Nucky. "By
Heck, I wouldn't have stopped with his arm," he declared.
"I haint," replied Killis, quietly.
Evidently I have two heroes on my hands!
_Saturday Night._
Moses and Zachariah, two more runaways, were returned this morning, and
this afternoon arrived my twelfth boy,--the last, since they cannot
sleep more than three in a bed! Jason is a beautiful child of seven,
very funny in his little long trousers. I wanted him at sight, but
hesitated on account of his youth. When I heard from his father,
however, that he had no mother now, I took him at once. Before leaving,
Mr. Wyatt said that Jason was right pyeert about learning, and, he added
candidly, about meanness too, and he hoped I would not spar' the rod.
The rod indeed,--I threw a protecting arm around the angelic-looking
child at the word.
Indeed, not a few of the parents have warned me against wild and warlike
tendencies in their offspring,--Mr. Marrs, for instance, said that Nucky
was a master scholar when he could leave off fighting long enough to
study his books, and others have admonished me to hold a tight rein.
Their warnings are needless,--everything so far has gone with surprising
smoothness, confirming my theory that in an atmosphere of love and
gentleness the martial traits will be atrophied.
To-day things were more tumultuous, Saturday being combined
wash-and-cleaning-day at the school, and a hard time for all hands. Ten
of the girls came over from the big house to our back yard, and there,
assisted by one of my boys, who kept up fires under the big kettles and
carried water from the well, did the washing for the entire school;
while in every building on the place cleaning, scrubbing and
window-washing were in full blast. I was sorry to have to punish little
Hen to-night for calling it a "hell of a day."