TALKING
The pleasantest part of the day, under this arrangement, was that
between five o’clock and bedtime.
The boys talked then, and talking is about the very best thing that
anybody ever does. It is by talk that we come to know those about us and
make ourselves known to them. It is by talk that we learn to like our
fellows, by learning what there is in them worth liking. And it is by
talk mainly that we find out what we think and correct our thinking.
Ed Lowry was reading a book one day, when suddenly he looked up and
said:--
“I say, fellows, this is good. Lord Macaulay said he never knew what he
thought about any subject until he had talked about it. Of course that’s
so with all of us, when you come to think of it.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Phil. “I often talk about things and don’t
know what I think about ’em even after I’ve talked. Here’s this big
bond robbery, for example. I’ve read all about it in the Cincinnati
newspapers and I’ve talked you fellows deaf, dumb, and blind concerning
it. Yet, I don’t know even now what I think about it.”
“I know what I think,” said Will Moreraud. “I think the detectives are
‘all off.’”
“How?” asked all the boys in chorus.
“Well, they’re trying to find the man who is supposed to be carrying the
plunder. It seems to me they’d better look for the other fellows first;
for if they were caught, they’d soon enough tell where the man that
carries it is. They wouldn’t go to jail and leave him with the stuff.”
“The worst of it is they’re publishing descriptions of the fellow and
even of what they’ve noticed concerning his clothes and beard, as if a
thief that was up to a game like that wouldn’t change his clothes and
part his hair differently and wear a different sort of beard, especially
after he’s been told what they’re looking for.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said Irving Strong, reading from one of Phil’s
Cincinnati newspapers:
“‘Red hair’--a man might dye that--‘parted on the left side and brushed
forward’--he might part it in the middle and brush it back, or have it
all cut off with one of those mowing machines the barbers use, just as
Jim Hughes does with his--”
“Now I come to think of it,” continued Irv, after a moment’s thought,
“Jim answers the description in several ways,--limps a little with his
left leg, has red hair when he permits himself to have any hair at all,
has lost a front tooth, and speaks with a slight lisp.”
“Oh, Jim Hughes isn’t a bank burglar,” exclaimed Will Moreraud. “He
hasn’t sense enough for anything of that sort.”
“Of course not,” said Irv. “I didn’t mean to suggest anything of the
kind. I merely cited his peculiarities to show how easily a detective’s
description might lead men into mistakes. Why, Jim might even be
arrested on that description.”
“But all that isn’t what Macaulay meant,” said Ed. “He meant that a man
never really knows what he thinks about any subject till he has put his
thought into words and then turned it over and looked at it and found
out exactly what it is.”
“I guess that’s so,” drawled Irv. “I notice that whenever I try to think
seriously--”
The boys all laughed. The idea of Irv Strong’s thinking seriously seemed
peculiarly humorous to them.
“Well, I do try sometimes,” said Irv, “and whenever I do, I put the
whole thing into the exactest words I can find. Very often, when I get
it into exact words, I find that my opinions won’t hang together and
I’ve got to reconstruct them.”
“Exactly!” said Ed Lowry. “And that is the great difficulty animals have
in trying to think. They haven’t any words even in their minds. They
can’t put their thoughts into form so as to examine them. It seems to me
that language is necessary to any real thinking, and that it is the
possession of language more than anything or everything else that makes
man really the lord of creation.”
“Yes,” said Phil. “Even Bre’r Rabbit and Bre’r Fox and all the rest of
them are represented as putting their thoughts into words.”
“Perhaps,” said Irv, “that’s the reason why educated people think more
soundly than uneducated ones. They have a nicer sense of the meaning of
words.”
“Of course,” said Ed. “I suppose that is what President Eliot of
Harvard meant when he said that ‘the object of education is to teach a
man to express his thought clearly in his own language.’”
“Very well,” said Phil. “My own thought, clearly expressed in my own
language, is that it’s time for supper. Come, stir your stumps, ye
philosophical pundits! Bring me the skillet and the frying-pan, the salt
pork to fry, and prepare the apples and potatoes and eggs to cook in the
fat thereof. In the classic language of our own time, get a move on you,
and don’t forget the coffeepot; nor yet the coffee that is to be steeped
therein!”
The boys were ready enough to respond. Their appetites, sharpened
by hard work in the open air, were clamorously keen. The supper
promised--fried pork, fried apples, fried eggs, and coffee with a
short-cake--seemed to them quite all that could be desired in the way of
luxury. They could eat it with relish, and sleep in entire comfort
afterward. Probably not one of my readers in a hundred could digest such
a supper at all. That is because not one reader in a hundred gives
himself a chance for robust health by working nine hours a day and
living almost entirely in the open air.
Jim came out when supper was ready and helped eat it there on the shore.
At other than mealtimes it was his custom to stay on board the flatboat,
and not only so, but to keep himself below decks, although the weather
was still very warm. He had got over his drunkenness, but he was still
moody, apparently in resentment of the rough-and-ready treatment he had
received at Phil’s hands.
He rarely talked at all; when he did talk, it was usually in the dialect
of an entirely uneducated person. But now and then he used expressions
that no such person would employ.
“He seems to slip into his grammar now and then,” was Irv Strong’s way
of putting it.