_First Monday in September._
Four weeks to-day since I acquired my family of sons, and now it seems
as if I had had them always. So far from being ready to leave now my
month is out, wild horses could not drag me away. The hours, once so
leaden, pass with lightning swiftness; there is never any time for
depression, or for looking into a desolate and dreaded future; my days
are crammed with human interest, exciting as a dime novel. Besides,
although I see no evidence that the boys care much for me, I care a
great deal for them, and would not willingly leave them.
Geordie brought back with him from our walk yesterday a large bundle of
elder-poles. This morning, mumble-peg went out, and pop-guns came in,
like a clap of thunder, and I heard that Geordie was selling lengths of
elder to the boys for two cents, or a satisfactory equivalent. It was
impossible this afternoon to get manure hauled to the new
flower-borders,--every time a barrow would get out of sight, the wheeler
would sit down on it and go to whittling a pop-gun. After being scolded
a third time, Philip complained bitterly to me,
"If you never wanted us to have pop-guns, whyn't you take them poles
away from Geordie yesterday? Dad burn my looks, we git all the blame,
and he gits all the gain,--he's a making it hand over fist."
"He was the only one who thought of putting the elder to use," I said.
"I suppose he has a right to his gains."
Philip sadly admitted the justice of this view. "Dag gone _me_," he
sighed, "I wisht I was a born trader and forelooker like him! Good
thing I haint aiming to be no preacher, I'd starve to death the first
week. But Geordie he's cut out for it."
"I'm afraid I don't see the connection between trading and preaching," I
said.
"Well, preachers can't take no money for preaching--it would be a
sin--and they haint got much time for tending craps and such, and less'n
they good traders they mighty apt to starve. Geordie he haint never
going to run out of wheat-flour, let alone corn meal. Gee! if you could
see the things he's got in that locked box of his!"
"What has he?" I asked.
"Oh, _I_ haint never seed 'em,--nobody haint; but any minute in the day
he can run his hand in and pull out something a boy'll think he's
pine-blank bound to have or die!"
When I heard to-night that Keats's tooth-brush, Jason's blue necktie I
gave him, Hen's fine-comb and pencil, Iry's "gallusses," and Nucky's
only handkerchief, were among the articles traded for pop-gun material,
I was moved to wrath with Geordie; but when he displayed to me the small
and apparently worthless things he had accepted from other boys,--a torn
woolen comforter from Taulbee, Killis's holey mittens, Joab's worn-out
yarn socks, and a handful of rusty horse-shoe nails from Hosea, it
seemed to me that, on the whole, there had not been such exorbitant
exchanges for the joy of a pop-gun, and I softened my reprimand.
_Thursday._
Mrs. Salyer rode in to-day to see her boys, a watermelon in one
saddle-pocket, a lot of fine pawpaws in the other. Oh the joy of the
"two homesicks"! Before leaving, she said that her cousin Emmeline's
funeral occasion was set for the fourth Saturday and Sunday in October,
and she hoped her boys might be permitted to come home at that time and
pay their respects to Emmeline, adding that she would be pleased to
have me come with them. In answer to my puzzled inquiries--for I failed
to see how Emmeline's death could be so nicely calculated in
advance--she explained that funerals are never held in this country at
the time of burial, when it is usually impossible to get a preacher, but
that they are conducted in deliberate and appropriate style a year or
two after the death.
This is to be the little Salyers' first visit home--we think it best
they shall not go until then--and never, I suppose, was a
funeral-occasion the subject of such desire and rejoicing.
_Sunday Night._
For two weeks we have been reading Hawthorne's Wonder Tales; and this
afternoon on our walk the boys, led by Nucky, searched hopefully in
caves, coal-banks and rock-dens for gorgons, minotaurs and dragons,
finding nothing worse, however, than a few rattlesnakes and
copperheads,--a tame substitute and an old story. But the value of
drawing their minds to foes in the abstract is already apparent,--they
fight less, and traits other than martial are coming to the front. Nucky
has been giving his energies to learning, with results that astonish.
His teacher says she has never seen such mental alertness. She has
already put him up two grades, and says if he keeps on he may go up
another this half-term. Iry, too, is proving his right to his title of
"pure scholar."
To-night when we began again on the Wonder Book, Nucky said, "I can tell
you a story that beats them,--all about a man by the name of Christian,
that fit with devils, and come near being et up by a giant ten times as
big as him."
There were loud cries of, "Tell it, Trojan!"; and he launched forth into
a most graphic version of Pilgrim's Progress, the other boys listening
absorbed throughout the evening. When all started off to bed, I called
Nucky back. "Where did you learn that story?" I asked him.
"I have knowed it sence allus-ago," he said; "Maw she used to read it to
me out of a book with pictures."
It is the first time he has spoken of his mother,--I hear from the other
boys that he lost her quite recently.
"Then your mother had learning?" I inquired.
"She never got any inside a school-house," he replied; "but her
great-grandpaw he had a sight of learning, and when he was a' old man,
too feeble to do anything but set by the fire, he teached her how to
read and write and figger, and was so proud of her being a scholar that
when he come to die he left her what books he had,--there is several,
all yallow and crumbly. One is a Bible; but the one I like is this-here
about Christian and the devils. I used to lay and look at it by the
hour, and learnt to read a-trying on it."
This is most interesting as being another proof that the early settlers
of this country were men of an education impossible to their
descendants. It also helps to account for Nucky's remarkable mentality.
He grasps a thing almost before it is spoken, has only to read over his
lessons once, and remembers the stories I tell and read with surprising
minuteness.
_Wednesday._
I suppose I might have expected some ill effects from the hero-tales.
When I went down to inspect the stable-lot this morning, I found three
barn cats writhing in their death agonies, and Jason galloping off on a
stick-horse, brandishing a shinny-bat. His explanation that he was
Bellerophon, the stick Pegasus, and the cats the three heads of the
Chimaera failed to mollify me. I gave him his first taste of "the rod,"
and did not "spar'" it. Evidently the child has a poetic imagination,
which must not be permitted to run riot.
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