* I call your attention to the chaste beauty of this line,
and the imperative necessity of the chord of the diminished
seventh for the word “rose.” Also “school-house” in the
last line must be very loud and staccato. Snap it off.
If the audience will kindly come forward and occupy the vacant seats
in the front of the hall, the entertainment will now begin. The male
quartet will first render an appropriate selection and then.... Can't
you see them from where you are? Let me assist you in the visualization.
The first tenor, the gentleman on the extreme left, is a stocky little
man, with a large chest and short legs conspicuously curving inward. He
has plenty of white teeth, ash-blonde hair, and goes smooth-shaven for
purely personal reasons. His round, dough-colored face will never look
older (from a distance) than it did when he was nine. The flight of
years adds only deeper creases in the multitude of fine wrinkles, and
increasing difficulty in hoisting his tiny, patent-leather foot up on
his plump knee.
The second tenor leans toward him in a way to make another man anxious
about his watch, but the second tenor is as honest as the day. He is
only “blending the voices.” He works in the bank. He is going to be
married in June sometime. Don't look around right away, but she's the
one in the pink shirt-waist, the second one from the aisle, the one...
two... three... the sixth row back. See her? Say, they've got it bad,
those two. What d' ye think? She goes down by the bank every day at
noon, so as to walk up with him to luncheon. She lives across the
street, and as soon as ever she has finished her luncheon, there she is,
out on the front porch hallooing: “Oo-hoo!” How about that? And if he so
much as looks at another girl--m-M!
The first bass is one of these fellows with a flutter in his voice.
No, I don't mean a vibrato. It's a flutter, like a goat's tail. It is
considered real operatic.
The second bass has a great, big Adam's apple that slides up and down
his throat like a toy-monkey on a stick. He is tall, and has eyebrows
like clothes-brushes, and he scowls fit to make you run and hide under
the bed. He is really a good-hearted fellow, though. Pity he has the
dyspepsia so bad. Oh, my, yes! Suffers everything with it, poor man.
He generally sings that song about “Drink-ing! DRINK-ang! Drink-awng!”
though he's strictly temperate himself. When he takes that last low
note, you hold on to your chair for fear you'll fall in too.
But why bring in the male quartet?
Because “The Little Old Red School-house” is more than a mere
collocation of words, accurately descriptive. It is what Mat King would
call a “symblem,” and as such requires the music's dying fall to lull
and enervate a too meticulous and stringent tendency to recollect that
it wasn't little, or old, or red, or on a hill. It might have been
big and new, and built of yellow brick, right next to the Second
Presbyterian, and hence close to the “branch,” so that the spring
freshets flooded the playground, and the water lapped the base of the
big rock on which we played “King on the Castle,”--the big rock so
pitifully dwindled of late years. No matter what he facts are. Sing 'of
“The Little Old Red Schoolhouse On the Hill” and in everybody's heart
a chord trembles in unison. As we hear its witching strains, we are all
lodge brethren, from Maine to California and far across the Western Sea;
we are all lodge brethren, and the air is “Auld Lang Syne,” and we are
clasping hands across, knitted together into one living solidarity;
and this, if we but sensed it, is the real Union, of which the federal
compact is but the outward seeming. It is a Union in which they have
neither art nor part whose parents sent them to private schools, so as
not to have them associate with “that class of people.” It is the
true democracy which batters down the walls that separate us from each
other--the walls of caste distinction, and color prejudice, and national
hatred, and religious contempt, all the petty, anti-social meannesses
that quarrel with
“The Union of hearts, the Union of hands,
And the flag of our Union forever.”
Old Glory has floated victoriously on many a gallant fight by sea
and land, but never do its silver stars glitter more bravely or its
blood-red stripes curve more proudly on the fawning breeze than when it
floats above the school-house, over the daily battle against ignorance
and prejudice (which is ignorance of our fellows), for freedom and for
equal rights. It is no mere pretty sentimentality that puts the flag
there, but the serious recognition of the bed-rock principle of our
Union: That we are all of one blood, one bounden duty; that all these
anti-social prejudices are just as shameful as illiteracy, and that they
must disappear as soon as ever we shall come to know each other well.
Knowledge is power. That is true. And it is also true: A house divided
against itself cannot stand.
“The Flag of our Union forever!” is our prayer, our heart's desire for
us and for our children after us. Heroes have died to give us that,
heroes that with glazing eyes beheld the tattered ensign and spent their
latest breath to cheer it as it passed on to triumph. “We who are about
to die salute thee!” The heart swells to think of it. But it swells,
too, to think that, day by day, thousands upon thousands of little
children stretch out their hands toward that Flag and pledge allegiance
to it. “We who are about to LIVE salute thee!”
It is no mere chance affair that all our federal buildings should be so
ugly and so begrudged, and that our school-houses should be so beautiful
architecturally--the one nearest my house is built from plans that took
the first prize at the Paris Exposition, in competition with the
whole world--so well-appointed, and so far from being grudged that the
complaint is, that there are not enough of them.
That So-and-so should be the President, and such-and-such a party
have control is but a game we play at, amateurs and professionals; the
serious business is, that in this country no child, how poor soever it
may be, shall have the slightest let or hindrance in the equal chance
with every other child to learn to read, and write, and cipher, and do
raffia-work.
It is a new thing with us to have splendid school-houses. After all, the
norm, as you might say, is still “The Old Red School-house.” You must
recollect how hard the struggle is for the poor farmer, with wheat only
a dollar a bushel, and eggs only six for a quarter; with every year
or so taxes of three and sometimes four dollars on an eighty-acre farm
grinding him to earth. It were folly to expect more in rural districts
than a tight box, with benches and a stove in it. Never-the-less, it is
the thing signified more than its outward seeming that catches and holds
the eye upon the country school-house as you drive past it. You count
yourself fortunate if, mingled with the creaking of the buggy-springs,
you hear the hum of recitation; yet more fortunate if it is recess time,
and you can see the children out at play, the little girls holding to
one another's dress-tails as they solemnly circle to the chant:
“H-yar way gow rand tha malbarry bosh,
Tha malbarry bosh, tha malbarry bosh,
H-yar way gow rand tha malbarry bosh
On a cay-um and frasty marneng.”
The boys are at marbles, if it is muddy enough, or one-old-cat, or
pom-pom-peel-away, with the normal percentage of them in reboant
tears--that is to say, one in three.
But even this is not the moment of illumination, when it comes upon you
like a flood how glorious is the land we live in, upon what sure and
certain footing are its institutions, when we know by spiritual insight
that whatsoever be the trial that awaits us, the people of these United
States, we shall be able for it! Yes. We shall be able for it.
If you would learn the secret of our nation's greatness, take your stand
some winter's morning just before nine o'clock, where you can overlook a
circle of some two or three miles' radius, the center being the Old Red
School-house. You will see little figures picking their way along the
miry roads, or ploughing through the deep drifts, cutting across the
fields, all drawing to the school-house, Bub in his wammus and his
cowhide boots, his cap with ear-laps, a knitted comforter about his
neck, and his hands glowing in scarlet mittens; and little Sis, in a
thick shawl, trudging along behind him, stepping in his tracks. They
chirrup, “Good-morning, sir!” As far as you can see them you have to
watch them, and something rises in your throat. Lord love 'em! Lord love
the children!
And then it comes to you, and it makes you catch your breath to think of
it, that every two or three miles all over this land, wherever there are
children at all, there is the Old Red Schoolhouse. At this very hour a
living tide, upbearing the hopes and prayers of God alone knows how many
loving hearts, the tide on which all of our longed-for ships are to come
in, is setting to the school-house. Oh, what is martial glory, what is
conquest of an empire, what is state-craft alongside of this? Happy is
the people that is in such a case!
The city schools are now the pattern for the country schools: but in
my day, although a little they were pouring the new wine of frothing
educational reform into the old bottles, they had not quite attained the
full distention of this present. We still had some kind of a good
time, but nothing like the good times they had out at the school near
grandpap's, where I sometimes visited. There you could whisper! Yes,
sir, you could whisper. So long as you didn't talk out loud, it was all
right. And there was no rising at the tap of the bell, forming in line
and walking in lock-step. Seemingly it never entered the school-board's
heads that anybody would ever be sent to state's prison. They left the
scholars unprepared for any such career. They have remedied all that in
city schools. Now, when a boy grows up and goes to Sing Sing, he knows
exactly what to do and how to behave. It all comes back to him.
But what I call the finest part of going to school in the country was,
that you didn't go home to dinner. Grandma had a boy only a few years
older than I was, and when I went a-visiting, she fixed us up a “piece.”
They call it “luncheon” now, I think--a foolish, hybrid mongrel of a
word, made up of “lump,” a piece of bread, and “noon,” and “shenk,”
a pouring or drink. But the right name is “piece.” What made this
particular “piece” taste so wonderfully good was that it was in a
round-bottomed basket woven of splints dyed blue, and black and red,
and all in such a funny pattern. It was an Indian basket. My grandma's
mother, when she was a little girl, got that from the squaw of old Chief
Wiping-Stick.
The “piece” had bread-and-butter (my grandma used to let me churn
for her sometimes, when I went out there), and some of the slices had
apple-butter on them. (One time she let me stir the cider, when it was
boiling down in the big kettle over the chunk-fire out in the yard. The
smoke got in my eyes.) Sometimes there was honey from the hives over by
the gooseberry bushes--the gooseberries had stickers on them--and we had
slices of cold, fried ham. (I was out at grandpap's one time when they
butchered. They had a chunk-fire then, too, to heat the water to scald
the hogs. And say! Did your grandma ever roast pig's tails in the ashes
for you?) And there were crullers. No, I don't mean “doughnuts.” I mean
crullers, all twisted up. They go good with cider. (Sometimes my grandma
cut out thin, pallid little men of cruller dough, and dropped them into
the hot lard for my Uncle Jimmy and me. And when she fished them out,
they were all swelled up and “pussy,” and golden brown).
And there was pie. Neither at the school nooning nor at the table did
one put a piece of pie upon a plate and haggle at it with a fork. You
took the piece of pie up in your hand and pointed the sharp end toward
you, and gently crowded it into your face. It didn't require much
pressure either.
And there were always apples, real apples. I think they must make apples
in factories nowadays. They taste like it. These were real ones, picked
off the trees. Out at grandpap's they had bellflowers, and winesaps, and
seek-no-furthers, and, I think, sheep-noses, and one kind of apple that
I can't find any more, though I have sought it carefully. It was the
finest apple I ever set a tooth in. It was the juiciest and the spiciest
apple. It had sort of a rollicking flavor to it, if you know what I
mean. It certainly was the ne plus ultra of an apple. And the name of it
was the rambo. Dear me, how good it was! think I'd sooner have one right
now than great riches. And all these apples they kept in the apple-hole.
You went out and uncovered the earth and there they were, all in a big
nest of straw; and such a gush of perfume distilled from that pile of
them that just to recollect it makes my mouth all wet.
They had a big red apple in those days that I forget the name of. Oh, it
was a whopper! You'd nibble at it and nibble at it before you could
get a purchase on it. Then, after you got your teeth in, you'd pull and
pull, and all of a sudden the apple would go “tock!” and your head would
fly back from the recoil, and you had a bite about the size of your
hand. You “chomped” on it, with your cheek all bulged out, and blame
near drowned yourself with the juice of it.
Noon-time the girls used to count the seeds:
“One I love, two I love, three my love I see;
Four I love with all my heart, and five I cast away.
Six he loves; seven she loves; eight... eight...”
I forget what eight is, and all that follows after. And then the others
would tease her with, “Aw, Jennie!” knowing who it was she had named
the apple for, Wes. Rinehart, or 'Lonzo Curl, or whoever. And you'd
be standing there by the stove, kind of grinning and not thinking of
anything in particular when somebody would hit you a clout on your back
that just about broke you in two, and would tell you “to pass it on,”
and you'd pass it on, and the next thing was you'd think the house was
coming down. Such a chasing around and over benches, and upsetting the
water-bucket, and tearing up Jack generally that teacher would say,
“Boys! boys! If you can't play quietly, you'll have to go out of doors!”
Play quietly! Why, the idea! What kind of play is it when you are right
still?
Outdoors in the country, you can whoop and holler, and carry on, and
nobody complains to the board of health. And there are so many things
you can do. If there is just the least little fall of snow you can make
a big wheel, with spokes in it, by your tracking. I remember that it was
called “fox and geese,” but that's all I can remember about it. If there
was a little more snow you tried to wash the girls' faces in it, and
sometimes got yours washed. If there was a good deal of wet snow you had
a snowball fight, which is great fun, unless you get one right smack dab
in your ear--oh, but I can't begin to tell you all the fun there is at
the noon hour in the country school, that the town children don't know
anything about. And when it was time for school to “take up,” there
wasn't any forming in line, with a monitor to run tell teacher who
snatched off Joseph Humphreys' cap and flung it far away, so he had to
get out of the line, and who did this, and who did that--no penitentiary
business at all. Teacher tapped on the window with a ruler, and the boys
and girls came in, red-faced and puffing, careering through the aisles,
knocking things off the desks with many a burlesque, “oh, exCUSE me!”
and falling into their seats, bursting into sniggers, they didn't know
what at. They had an hour and a half nooning. Counting that it took five
minutes to shovel down even grandma's beautiful “piece,” that left an
hour and twenty-five minutes for roaring, romping play. If you want to
know, I think that is fully as educational and a far better preparation
for life than sitting still with your nose stuck in a book.
In the city schools they don't think so. Even the stingy fifteen
minutes' recess, morning and afternoon, has been stolen from the
children. Instead is given the inspiriting physical culture, all making
silly motions together in a nice, warm room, full of second-hand air.
Is it any wonder that one in every three that die between fifteen and
twenty-five, dies of consumption?
You must have noticed that almost everybody that amounts to anything
spent his early life in the country. The city schools have great
educational advantages; they have all the up-to-date methods, but the
output of the Old Red Schoolhouse compares very favorably with that of
the city schools for all that. The two-mile walk, morning and evening,
had something to do with it, not only because it and the long nooning
were good exercise, but because it impressed upon the mind that what
cost so much effort to get must surely be worth having. But I think I
know another reason.
If the city child goes through the arithmetic once, it is as much as
ever. In the Old Red School-house those who hadn't gone through the
arithmetic at least six times, were little thought of. In town, the last
subject in the book was “Permutation,” to which you gave the mere look
its essentially frivolous nature deserved. It was: “End of the line. All
out!” But in the country a very important department followed. It was
called “Problems.” They were twisters, able to make “How old is Ann?”
look like a last year's bird's nest. They make a big fuss about the
psychology of the child's mind nowadays. Well, I tell you they couldn't
teach the man that got up that arithmetic a thing about the operation of
the child's mind. He knew what was what. He didn't put down the answers.
He knew that if he did, weak, erring human nature, tortured by suspense,
determined to have the agony over, would multiply by four and divide by
thirteen, and subtract 127--didn't, either. I didn't say “substract.” I
guess I know they'd get the answer somehow, it didn't matter much how.
In the country they ciphered through this part, and handed in their sums
to Teacher, who said she'd take 'em home and look 'em over; she didn't
have time just then. As if that fooled anybody! She had a key! And when
you had done the very last one on the very last page, and there wasn't
anything more except the blank pages, where you had written, “Joe Geiger
loves Molly Meyers,” and, “If my name you wish to see, look on page
103,” and all such stuff, then you turned over to the beginning, where
it says, “Arithmetic is the science of numbers, and the art of computing
by them,” and once more considered, “Ann had four apples and her brother
gave her two more. How many did she then have?” There were the four
apples in a row, and the two apples, and you that had worried over
meadows so long and so wide, and men mowing them in so many days and
a half, had to think how many apples Ann really did have. Some of the
fellows with forked hairs on their chins and uncertain voices--the big
fellows in the back seats, where the apple-cores and the spit-balls come
from knew every example in the book by heart.
And there is yet another reason why the country school has brought forth
men of whom we do well to be proud. At the county-seat, every so often,
the school commissioners held an examination. Thither resorted many, for
the most part anxious to determine if they really knew as much as they
thought they did. If you took that examination and got a “stiff kit”
for eighteen months, you had good cause to hold your head up and step
as high as a blind horse. A “stiff kit” for eighteen months is no small
thing, let me tell you. I don't know if there is anything corresponding
to a doctor's hood for such as win a certificate to teach school for
two years hand-running; but there ought to be. A fellow ought not to
be obliged to resort to such tactics as taking out a folded paper and
perusing it in the hope that some one will ask him: “What you got there,
Calvin?” so as to give you a chance to say, carelessly, “Oh, jist a
'stiff-kit' for two years.”
(When you get as far along as that, you simply have to take a term in
the junior Prep. Department at college, not because there is anything
left for you to learn, but for the sake of putting a gloss on your
education, finishing it off neatly.)
And then if you were going to read law with Mr. Parker, or study
medicine with old Doc. Harbaugh, and you kind of run out of clothes, you
took that certificate and hunted up a school and taught it. Sometimes
they paid you as high as $20 a month and board, lots of board, real
buckwheat cakes (“riz” buckwheat, not the prepared kind), and real maple
syrup, and real sausage, the kind that has sage in it; the kind that you
can't coax your butcher to sell you. The pale, tasteless stuff he gives
you for sausage I wouldn't throw out to the chickens. Twenty dollars a
month and board! That's $4 a month more than a hired man gets.
But it wasn't alone the demonstration that, strange as it might seem,
it was possible for a man to get his living by his wits (though that
has done much to produce great men) as it was the actual exercise of
teaching. Remember the big boys on the back seats, where the apple-cores
and the spit-balls come from. The school-director that hired you gave
you a searching look-over and said: “M-well-l-l, I'm afraid you haint
hardly qualified for our school--oh, that's all right, sir; that's all
right. Your 'stiff-kit' is first-rate, and you got good recommends, good
recommends; but I was thinkin'--well, I tell you. Might's well out with
it first as last. I d' know's I ort to say so, but this here district
No. 34 is a poot' tol'able hard school to teach. Ya-uss. A poot-ty
tol'able hard school to teach. Now, that's jist the plumb facts in the
matter. We've had four try it this winter a'ready. One of 'em stuck it
out four weeks--I jimminy! he had grit, that feller had. The balance of
'em didn't take so long to make up their minds. Well, now, if you're a
mind to try it--I was goin' to say you didn't look to me like you had
the heft. Like to have you the worst way. Now, if you want to back
out.... Well, all right. Monday mornin', eh? Well, you got my
sympathies.”
I believe that some have tried to figure out that St. Martin of Tours,
ought to be the patron saint of the United States. One of his feast-days
falls on July 4, and his colors are red, white and blue. But I rather
prefer, myself, the Boanerges, the two sons of Zebedee. When asked: “Are
ye able to drink of this cup?” they answered: “We are able.” They didn't
in the least know what it was; but they knew they were able for anything
that anybody else was, and, perhaps, able for a little more. At any
rate, they were willing to chance it. That's the United States of
America, clear to the bone and back again to the skin.
You ask any really great man: “Have you ever taught a winter term in a
country school?” If he says he hasn't, then depend upon it he isn't
a really great man. People only think he is. The winter term breeds
Boanerges--sons of thunder. Yes, and of lightning, too. Something struck
the big boys in the back seats, as sure as you're a foot high; and if it
wasn't lightning, what was it? Brute strength for brute strength, they
were more than a match for Teacher. It was up to him. It was either
prove himself the superior power, or slink off home and crawl under the
porch.
The curriculum of the Old Red School-house, which was, until lately, the
universal curriculum, consisted in reading, writing, and arithmetic or
ciphering. I like the word “ciphering,” because it makes me think of
slates--slates that were always falling on the floor with a rousing
clatter, so that almost always at least one corner was cracked. Some
mitigation of the noise was gained by binding the frame with strips of
red flannel, thus adding warmth and brightness to the color scheme. Just
as some fertile brain conceived the notion of applying a knob of rubber
to each corner, slates went out, and I suppose only doctors buy them
nowadays to hang on the doors of their offices. Maybe the teacher's
nerves were too highly strung to endure the squeaking of gritty pencils,
but I think the real reason for their banishment is, that slates invited
too strongly the game of noughts and crosses, or tit-tat-toe, three in
a row, the champion of indoor sports, and one entirely inimical to the
study of the joggerfy lesson. But if slates favored tit-tat-toe, they
also favored ciphering, and nothing but good can come from that. Paper
is now so cheap that you need not rub out mistakes, but paper and pencil
can never surely ground one in “the science of numbers and the art of
computing by them.” What is written is written, and returns to plague
the memory, but if you made a mistake on the slate, you could spit on it
and rub it out with your sleeve and leave no trace of the error, either
on the writing surface or the tables of the memory. What does the hymn
say?
“Forget the steps already trod,
And onward urge thy way.”
The girls used to keep a little sponge and some water in a discarded
patchouli bottle with a glass stopper, to wash their slates with; but it
always seemed to me that the human and whole-hearted way was otherwise.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic,--these three; and the greatest of
these three is arithmetic. Over against it stands grammar, which may be
said to be derived from reading and writing. Show me a man that, as
a boy at school, excelled in arithmetic and I will show you a useful
citizen, a boss in his own business, a leader of men; show me the boy
that preferred grammar, that read expressively, that wrote a
beautiful hand and curled his capital S's till their tails looked like
mainsprings, and I will show you a dreamer and a sentimentalist--a man
that works for other people. While I have breath in me, I will maintain
the supereminence of arithmetic. There is no room for disputation in
arithmetic, no exceptions to the rule. Twice two is four, and that's
all there is about it: but whether there be pronunciations, they shall
cease; whether there be rules of grammar, they shall vanish away. Why,
look here. It's a rule of grammar, isn't it, that the subject of a
sentence must be put in the nominative case? Let it kick and bite, and
hang on to the desks all it wants to, in it goes and the door is slammed
on it. You think so? What is the word “you?” Second person, plural
number, objective case. Oh, no; the nominative form is “ye.”
Don't you remember it says: “Woe unto you, ye lawyers”? Those who fight
against: “Him and me went down town,” fight against the stars in
their courses, for the objective case in every language is bound and
determined to be The Whole Thing. Arithmetic alone is founded on a rock.
All else is fleeting, all else is futile, chaotic--a waste of time. What
is reading but a rival of morphine? There are probably as many men in
prison, sent there by Reading, as by Rum.
“Oh, not good Reading!” says the publisher.
“Not good Rum, either,” says the publican.
Fight it out. It's an even thing between the two of you; Literature and
Liquor, Books and Booze, which can take a man's mind off his business
most effectually.
Still, merely as a matter of taste, I will defend the quality of
McGuffey's School Readers against all comers. I don't know who McGuffey
was; but certainly he formed the greatest intellects of our age,
present company not excepted. The true test of literature is its eternal
modernity. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. It always seems of the
age in which it is read. Now, almost the earliest lection in McGuffey's
First Reader goes directly to the heart of one of the greatest of modern
problems. It does not palter or beat about the bush. It asks right out,
plump and plain: “Ann, how old are you?”
Year by year, until we reached the dizzy height of the Sixth Reader,
were presented to us samples of the best English ever written. If you
can find, up in the garret, a worn and frayed old Reader, take it
down and turn its pages over. See if anything in these degenerate days
compares in vital strength and beauty with the story of the boy that
climbed the Natural Bridge, carving his steps in the soft limestone with
his pocket knife. You cannot read it without a thrill. The same inspired
hand wrote “The Blind Preacher,” and who that ever can read it can
forget the climax reached in that sublime line: “Socrates died like a
philosopher, but Jesus Christ like a god!”
Not long ago I walked among the graves in that spot opposite where Wall
Street slants away from Broadway, and my feet trod on ground worth, in
the market, more than the twenty-dollar gold pieces that would cover
it. My eye lighted upon a flaking brownstone slab, that told me Captain
Michael Cresap rested there. Captain Michael Cresap! The intervening
years all fled away before me, and once again my boyish heart thrilled
with that incomparable oration in McGuffey's Reader, “Who is there
to mourn for Logan? Not one.” Captain Cresap was the man that led the
massacre of Logan's family.
And there was more than good literature in those Readers. There was one
piece that told about a little boy alone upon a country road at
night. The black trees groaned and waved their skinny arms at him.
The wind-torn clouds fitfully let a pale and watery moonlight stream
a little through. It was very lonely. Over his shoulder the boy saw
indistinct shapes that followed after, and hid themselves whenever he
looked squarely at them. Then, suddenly, he saw before him in the gloom,
a gaunt white specter waiting for him--waiting to get him, its arms
spread wide out in menace. He was of our breed, though, this boy. He did
not turn and run. With God knows what terror knocking at his ribs, he
trudged ahead to meet his fate, and lo! the grisly specter proved to be
a friendly guide-post to show the way that he should walk in. Brother
(for you are my kin that went with me to public school), in the life
that you have lived since you first read the story of Harry and the
Guide-post, has it been an idle tale, or have you, too, found that what
we dreaded most, what seemed to us so terrible in the future has, after
all, been a friendly guide-post, showing us the way that we should walk
in?
McGuffey had a Speller, too. It began with simple words in common use,
like a-b ab, and e-b eb, and i-b, ib, proceeding by gradual, if not by
easy stages to honorificatudinibility and disproportionableness, with
a department at the back devoted to twisters like phthisic, and
mullein-stalk, and diphtheria, and gneiss. We used to have a fine old
sport on Friday afternoons, called “choose-up-and-spell-down.” I don't
know if you ever played it. It was a survival, pure and simple, from the
Old Red School-house. There was where it really lived. There was
where it flourished as a gladiatorial spectacle. The crack spellers of
District Number 34 would challenge the crack spellers of the Sinking
Spring School. The whole countryside came to the school-house in wagons
at early candle-lighting time, and watched them fight it out. The
interest grew as the contest narrowed down, until at last there were the
two captains left--big John Rice for District Number 34, and that wiry,
nervous, black-haired girl of 'Lias Hoover's, Polly Ann. She married
a man by the name of Brubaker. I guess you didn't know him. His folks
moved here from Clarke County. Polly Ann's eyes glittered like a
snake's, and she kept putting her knuckles up to the red spots in her
cheeks that burned like fire. Old John, he didn't seem to care a cent.
And what do you think Polly Ann missed on? “Feoffment.” A simple little
word like “feoffment!” She hadn't got further than “pheph--” when she
knew that she was wrong, but Teacher had said “Next!” and big John took
it and spelled it right. She had a fit of nervous crying, and some were
for giving her the victory, after all, because she was a lady. But big
John said: “She missed, didn't she? Well. And I spelled it right, didn't
I? Well. She took her chances same as the rest of us. 'Taint me you got
to consider, it's District Number 34. And furthermore. AND FURTHERMORE.
Next time somebuddy asts her to go home with him from singin'-school,
mebby she won't snigger right in his face, and say 'No! 's' loud 'at
everybuddy kin hear it.”
It's quite a thing to be a good speller, but there are people who can
spell any word that ever was, and yet if you should ask them right quick
how much is seven times eight, they'd hem and haw and say: “Seven tums
eight? Why--ah, lemme see now. Seven tums--what was it you said? Oh,
seven tums eight. Why--ah, seven tums eight is sixty-three--fifty-six I
mean.” There's nothing really to spelling. It's just an idiosyncrasy.
If there was really anything useful in it, you could do it by
machinery--just the same as you can add by machinery, or write with a
typewriter, or play the piano with one of these things with cut paper
in it. Spelling is an old-fashioned, hand-powered process, and as such
doomed to disappear with the march of improvement.
One Friday afternoon we chose up and spelled down, and the next Friday
afternoon we spoke pieces. Doubtless this accounts for our being a
nation of orators. I am far from implying or seeming to imply that this
is anything to brag of. Anybody that can be influenced by a man with a
big mouth, a loud voice, and a rush of words to the face--well, I've got
my opinion of all such.
Oratory and poetry--all foolishness, I say. Better far are
drawing-lessons, and raffia-work, and clay-modeling than: “I come not
here to talk,” and “A soldier of the Legion lay dying at Algiers,” and
“Old Ironsides at anchor lay.” (I observe that these lines are more or
less familiar to you, and that you are eager to add selections to the
list, all of them known to me as well as you.) That children, especially
boys, loathe to speak a piece is a fact profoundly significant. They
know it is nothing in the world but foolishness; and if there is one
thing above another that a child hates, it is to be made a fool in
public. That's what makes them work their fingers so, and gulp, and
stammer, and tremble at the knees. That is what sends them to their
seats, after all is over, mad as hornets. This is something that I know
about. It happened that, instead of getting funny pieces to recite as I
wanted to, discerning that one silly turn deserves another, my parents,
well-meaning in their way, taught me solemn things about: “O man
immortal, live for something!” and all such, and I had to humiliate
myself by disgorging them in public. The consequence was, that not only
on Friday afternoons but whenever anybody came to visit the school, I
was butchered to make a Roman holiday. Teacher was so proud of me, and
the visitors let on that they were tickled half to death, but I knew
better. I could see the other scholars look at one another, as much
as to say: “Well, if you'll tell me why!” Even in my shame and anger
I could see that. But there is one happy memory of a Friday afternoon.
Determined to show my friends and fellow-citizens that I, too, was born
in Arcadia, and was a living, human boy, I announced to Teacher: “I got
another piece.”
“Oh, have you?” cried she, sure of an extra O-man-immortal intellectual
treat. “Let us hear it, by all means.”
Whereupon I marched up to the platform and declaimed that deathless
lyric:
“When I was a boy, I was a bold one. My mammy made me a new shirt out o'
dad's old one.”
All of it? Certainly. Isn't that enough? That was the only distinctly
popular platform effort I ever made. I am proud of it now. I was proud
of it then. But the news of my triumph was coldly received at home.
I don't know whether it has since gone out of date, but in my day
and time a very telling feature of school exhibitions was reading in
concert. The room was packed as full of everybody's ma as it could be,
and yet not mash the children out of shape, and a whole lot of young
ones would read a piece together. Fine? Finest thing you ever heard. I
remember one time teacher must have calculated a leetle mite too close,
or else one girl more was in the class than she had reckoned on; but on
the day, the two end girls just managed to stand upon the platform and
that was all. They recited together:
“There was a sound of revelry by night
And Belgium's capital....”
I forget the rest of it. Well, anyhow, they were supposed to make
gestures all together. Teacher had rehearsed the gestures, and they all
did it simultaneously, just as if they had been wound up with a spring.
But, as I said, the two end girls had all they could do to keep on the
platform, and it takes elbow room for: “'T is but the car rattling
over the stony street,” and one girl--well, she said she stepped off on
purpose, but I didn't believe her then and I don't now. We had our laugh
about it, whichever way it was.
We had our laugh.... Ah, life was all laughter then. That was before
care came to be the shadow at our heel. That was before black Sorrow
met us in the way, and would not let us pass unless we gave to her our
dearest treasure. That was before we learned that what we covet most
is, when we get it, but a poor thing after all, that whatsoever chalice
Fortune presses to our lips, a tear is in the bottom of the cup. In
those happy days gone by if the rain fell, 't was only for a little
while, and presently the sky was bright again, and the birds whistled
merrily among the wet and shining leaves. Now “the clouds return after
the rain.”
It can never be with us again as once it was. For us the bell upon the
Old Red School-house calls in vain. We heed it not, we that
hearkened for it years ago. The living tide of youth flows toward the
school-house, and we are not of it. Never again shall we sit at those
old desks, whittled and carved with rude initials, and snap our fingers,
eager to tell the answer. Never again shall we experience the thrill of
pride when teacher praised us openly. Never again shall we sit trembling
while the principal, reads the note, and then scowls at us fiercely
with: “Take off your coat, sir!” Ah, me! Never again, never again.
Well, who wants it to be that way again? We're men and women now. We've
duties and responsibilities. Who wants to be a child again? Not I. Let
me stick just at my present age for about a hundred years, and I'll
never utter a word of complaint.