A BOY WITH A HEART.
Spring came early to the forests and prairies of southern Indiana. In
March the maples began to burn, and the tops of the timber to change,
and to take on new hues in the high sun and lengthening days. The birds
were on the wing, and the banks of the streams were beginning to look
like gardens, as indeed Nature's gardens they were.
The woodland ponds were full of turtles or terrapins, and these began to
travel about in the warm spring air.
There was a great fireplace in Crawford's school, and, as fuel cost
nothing, it was, as we have said, well fed with logs, and was kept
almost continually glowing.
It was one of the cruel sports of the boys, at the noonings and recesses
of the school, to put coals of fire on the backs of wandering terrapins,
and to joke at the struggles of the poor creatures to get to their homes
in the ponds.
Abraham Lincoln from a boy had a tender heart, a horror of cruelty and
of everything that would cause any creature pain. He was merciful to
every one but the unmerciful, and charitable to every one but the
uncharitable, and kind to everyone but the unkind. But his nature made
war at once on any one who sought to injure another, and he was
especially severe on any one who was so mean and cowardly as to
disregard the natural rights of a dumb animal or reptile. He had in this
respect the sensitiveness of a Burns. All great natures, as biography
everywhere attests, have fine instincts--this chivalrous sympathy for
the brute creation.
Lincoln's nature was that of a champion for the right. He was a born
knight, and, strangely enough, his first battles in life were in defense
of the turtles or terrapins. He was a boy of powerful strength, and he
used it roughly to maintain his cause. He is said to have once exclaimed
that the turtles were his brothers.
The early days of spring in the old forests are full of life. The Sun
seems to be calling forth his children. The ponds become margined with
green, and new creatures everywhere stir the earth and the waters. Life
and matter become, as it were, a new creation, and one can believe
anything when he sees how many forms life and matter can assume under
the mellowing rays of the sun. The clod becomes a flower; the egg a
reptile, fish, or bird. The cunning woodchuck, that looks out of his
hole on the awakening earth and blue sky, seems almost to have a sense
of the miracle that has been wrought. The boy who throws a stone at him,
to drive him back into the earth, seems less sensible of nature than he.
It is a pleasing sight to see the little creature, as he stands on his
haunches, wondering, and the brain of a young Webster would naturally
seek to let such a groundling have all his right of birth.
One day, when the blue spring skies were beginning to glow, Abraham went
out to play with his companions. It was one of his favorite amusements
to declaim from a stump. He would sometimes in this way recite long
selections from the school Reader and Speaker.
He had written a composition at school on the defense of the rights of
dumb animals, and there was one piece in the school Reader in which he
must have found a sympathetic chord, and which was probably one of those
that he loved to recite. It was written by the sad poet Cowper, and
began thus:
"I would not enter on my list of friends
(Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
An inadvertent step may crush the snail,
That crawls at evening in the public path;
But he that has humanity, forewarned,
Will tread aside, and let the reptile live."
As Abraham and his companions were playing in the warm sun, one said:
"Make a speech for us, Abe. Hip, hurrah! You've only to nibble a pen to
make poetry, and only to mount a stump to be a speaker. Now, Abe, speak
for the cause of the people, or anybody's cause. Give it to us strong,
and we will do the cheering."
Abraham mounted a stump in the school-grounds, on which he had often
declaimed before. He felt something stirring within him, half-fledged
wings of his soul, that waited a cause. He would imitate the few
preachers and speakers that he had heard--even an old Kentucky preacher
named Elkins, whom his own mother had loved, and whose teachings the
good woman had followed in her short and melancholy life.
He began his speech, throwing up his long arms, and lifting at proper
periods his coon-skin cap. The scholars cheered as he waxed earnest. In
the midst of the speech a turtle came creeping into the grounds.
"Hello!" said one of the boys, "here's another turtle come to school!
He, too, has seen the need of learning."
The terrapin crawled along awkwardly toward the house, his head
protruding from his shell, and his tail moving to and fro.
At this point young Abraham grew loud and dramatic. The boys raised a
shout, and the girls waved their hoods.
In the midst of the enthusiasm, one of the boys seized the turtle by the
tail and slung it around his head, as an evidence of his delight at the
ardor of the speaker.
"Throw it at him," said one of the scholars. "Johnson once threw a
turtle at him, when he was preachin' to his sister, and it set him to
runnin' on like a minister."
Abraham was accustomed to preach to the young members of his family. He
would do the preaching, and his sister the weeping; and he sometimes
became so much affected by his own discourses that he would weep with
her, and they would have a very "moving service," as such a scene was
called.
The boy swung the turtle over his head again, and at last let go of it
in the air, so as to project it toward Abraham.
The poor reptile fell crushed at the foot of the stump and writhed in
pain.
Abraham ceased to speak. He looked down on the pitiful sight of
suffering, and his heart yearned over the helpless creature, and then
his brain became fired, and his eyes flashed with rage.
"Who did that?" he exclaimed. "Brute! coward! wretch!" He looked down
again, and saw the reptile trying to move away with its broken shell.
His anger turned to pity. He began to expostulate against all such
heartlessness to the animal world as the scene exhibited before him. The
poor turtle again tried to move away, his head just protruding, looking
for some way out of the world that would deny him his right to the
sunshine and the streams. The young orator saw it all; his lip curled
bitterly, and his words burned. He awakened such a sympathy for the
reptile, and such a feeling of resentment against the hand which had
ruined this little life, that the offender shrank away from the scene,
calling out defiantly:
"Come away, and let him talk. He's only chicken-hearted."
The scholars knew that there was no cowardice in the heart of Lincoln.
They felt the force of the scene. The boys and girls of Andrew
Crawford's school never forgot the pleas that Abraham used to make for
the animals and reptiles of the woods and streams.
Nearly every youth exhibits his leading trait or characteristic in his
school-days.
"The tenor of our whole lives," said an English poet, "is what we make
it in the first five years after we become our masters"; and a wiser
than he has said, "The thing that has been is, and God requireth the
past." Columbus on the quays of Genoa; Zinzendorf forming among his
little companions the order of the "Grain of Mustard-Seed"; the poets
who "lisped in numbers"; the boy statesmanship of Cromwell; and the
early aspiration of nearly every great leader of mankind--all showed the
current of the life-stream, and it is the current alone that knows and
prophesies the future. When Abraham Lincoln fell, the world uncovered
its head. Thrones were sorrowful, and humanity wept. Yet his earliest
rostrum was a stump, and his cause the natural rights of the voiceless
inhabitants of the woods and streams. The heart that throbbed for
humanity, and that won the heart of the world, found its first utterance
in defense of the principles of the birds'-nest commandment. It was a
beginning of self-education worthy of the thought of a Pestalozzi. It
was a prophecy.
As the young advocate of the rights and feelings of the dumb creation
was ending his fiery discourse, the buttonless Tunker, himself a
disciple of Pestalozzi, came into the school-grounds and read the
meaning of the scene. Jasper saw the soul of things, and turned always
from the outward expressions of life to the inward motive. He read the
true character of the boy in buckskin breeches, human heart, and fluent
tongue. He sat down on the log step of the school-house in silence, and
Mr. Crawford presently came out with a quill pen behind his ear, and sat
down beside him.
"That boy has been teaching what you and I ought first to teach," said
Jasper.
"What is that?" asked Mr. Crawford.
"The heart! What is head-learning worth, if the heart is left
uneducated? As Pestalozzi used to say, The soul is the true end of all
education. Religion itself is a failure, without right character."
"But you wouldn't teach morals as a science, would you?"
"I would train the heart to feel, and the soul to love to be just and do
right, and make obedience to the moral sense the habit of life. This
can best be done at the school age, and I tell you that this is the
highest education. A boy who can spell all the words in the
spelling-book, and bound all the countries in the world, and repeat all
the dates of history, and yet who could have the heart to crush a
turtle, has not been properly educated."
"Then your view is that the end of education is to make a young person
do right?"
"No, my good friend, pardon me if I speak plain. The end of education is
not to _make_ young people do right, but to train the young heart to
love to do right; to make right doing the nature and habit of life."
"How would you begin?"
"As that boy has begun. He has made every heart on the ground feel for
that broken-shelled turtle. That boy will one day become a leader among
men. He has a heart. The head may make friends, but only the heart can
hold them. It is the heart-power that serves and rules. The best thing
that can be said of any one is, 'He is true-hearted.' I like that boy.
He is true-hearted. His first client a turtle, it may not be his last.
Train him well. He will honor you some day."
The boys took the turtle to the pond and left him on the bank. Jasper
watched them. He then turned to the backwoods teacher, and said:
"That, sir, is the result of right education. First teach character;
second, life; third, books. Let education begin in the heart, and
everybody made to feel that right makes might."