THE BOY.
A boy is an inverted man. Small things seem to him great and great ones
small. Trifling troubles move him to tears and serious ones pass
unnoticed. To snare a few worthless suckers in the meadow brook is to
the country boy of more importance than the gathering of a field of
grain. To play hooky and go nutting is far better than to study and fit
himself for earning a livelihood. He works at his play and makes play of
his work. He disdains boyhood and longs for manhood. In spite of his
inverted position I would rather be a boy than a man, and a country boy
than a city-bred one.
The country boy has so much the greater chance for enjoyment and is not
so soon warped by restrictions and tarnished by the sewers of vice. He
has deep forests, wide meadows and pure brooks to play in; and if his
feet grow broad from lack of shoes, he hears the song of birds, the
whispers of winds in the trees, and knows the scent of new-mown hay and
fresh water lilies, the beauty of flowers, green fields and shady woods.
He learns how apples taste eaten under the tree, nuts cracked in the
woods, sweet cider as it runs from the press, and strawberries picked in
the orchard while moist with dew. All these delights are a closed book
to the city boy. The country boy is surrounded by pure and wholesome
influences and grows to be a better man for it. The wide range of forest
and field, pure air, sweet water, plenty of sun and rain are all his,
and worth ten times the chance for life, health, enjoyment and a good
character than ever comes to the city boy. He may sooner learn to smoke
or gather a choice selection of profane and vulgar words; he may have
smaller feet and better clothes, but he often fails in attaining a
healthy body and pure mind and never knows what a royal, wide-open
chance for enjoying boyhood days he has missed. He never knows the
delight of wading barefoot down a mountain brook where the clear water
leaps over mossy ledges and where he can pull trout from every
foam-flecked pool! He never realizes the charming suspense of lying upon
the grassy bank of a meadow stream and snaring a sucker, or what fun it
is to enter a chestnut grove just after frost and rain have covered the
ground with brown nuts, or setting traps, shaking apple trees, or
gathering wild grapes! He never rode to the cider-mill on a load of
apples and had the chance to shy one at every bird and squirrel on the
way; or when winter came, to slide down hill when the slide was a
half-mile field of crusted snow! All these and many other delights he
never knows; but one thing he does know, and knows it early, and that is
how much smarter, better dressed and better off in every way he is than
the poor, despised greeny of a country boy! He may, it is true, go early
to the theatre and look at half-nude actresses loaded with diamonds, but
he never sees a twenty-acre cedar pasture just after an ice storm when
the morning sun shines fair upon it!
True to his inverted comprehension, the country boy, and our boy
especially, sees and feels all his surroundings and all the voices of
nature from a boy's standpoint. He feels that his hours of work are long
and hard, and that the countless chores are interspersed through his
daily life on the farm for the sole purpose of preventing him from
having a moment he can call his own. He has a great many pleasant hours,
however, and does not realize why they pass so quickly. His little
world seems large to him and all his experiences great in their
importance. A ten-acre meadow appears like a boundless prairie, and a
half-mile wide piece of woods an unbounded forest.
On one side of the farm is a clear stream known as Ragged Brook, that,
starting among the foothills of a low mountain range, laughs and
chatters, leaps and tumbles, down the hills, through the gorges and over
the ledges as if endowed with life. Since he is not blessed with
brothers or sisters, this, together with the woods, the birds and
squirrels, becomes his companion. The first trout he ever catches in
this brook seems a monster and never afterward does one pull quite so
hard. Isolated as he is, and having none but his elders for company, he
talks to the creatures of the field and forest as if they could
understand him, and he watches their ways and habits and tries to make
them his friends. He is a lonely boy, and seldom sees others of his age,
so that perhaps when he does they make a more distinct impression on his
mind.
One day he is allowed to go to the mill with his father, and it is an
event in his life he never forgets. The old brown mill with its big
wheel splashing in the clear water; the millstones that rumble so
swiftly; the dusty miller who takes the bags of grain--all interest him,
and especially so does the pond above the mill that is dotted with white
lilies and where there is a boat fastened to a willow by a chain. On the
way back, and a mile from home, his father stops to chat with a man in
front of a large house with tall pillars, and two immense maples on
either side of the gate. Standing beside the man and holding onto one of
his hands with her two small ones is a little girl who looks at the boy
with big, wondrous eyes. He wants to tell her about the mill and ask her
if she ever saw the great wheel go around, but he is afraid to. He hears
the man call her "Liddy," and wonders if she ever caught a fish.
Then his world grows larger as the months pass one by one, until he is
sent to a little brown schoolhouse a mile away and finds a small crowd
of boys and girls, only two or three of whom he ever saw before. One of
them is the girl who looked wonderingly at him a year previous. He tells
her he knows what her name is, and feels a little hurt because that fact
does not seem to interest her. He studies his lessons because he is told
he must, and plays hard because he enjoys it. He feels no special
attraction toward any of his schoolmates until one winter day this same
little blue-eyed girl asks him for a place on his sled. He shares it
with her as a well-behaved boy should, and so begins the first faint
bond of feeling that like a tiny rill on the hillside slowly gathers
power, until at last, a mighty river, it sweeps all other feelings
before it.
How slowly that rippling rill of feeling grew during the next few years
need not be specified. Like other boys of his age, he feels at times
ashamed of caring whether she notices him or not, and again the
incipient pangs of jealousy, because she notices other boys. In a year
he begins to bring her flag-root in summer, or big apples in winter, and
although her way home is different from his, he occasionally feels
called upon to accompany her, heedless of the fact that it costs him an
extra half-mile and fault-finding at being late home. He passes unharmed
through the terrors of speaking pieces on examination day, and when St.
Valentine's day comes he conquers the momentous task of inditing a verse
where "bliss" rhymes with "kiss" upon one of those missives which he has
purchased for five cents at the village store, and timidly leaves it
where this same girl will find it, in her desk at school.
On two occasions during the last summer at the district school,
he--quite a big boy now--joins the older boys and girls under a large
apple tree that grows near the schoolhouse, and plays a silly game, the
principal feature of which consists in his having to choose some girl to
kiss. As he knows very well whom he prefers, and has the courage to kiss
her when his turn comes, that seems a most delightful game; and although
he and other boys who were guilty of this proceeding are jeered at by
the younger ones, the experience makes such an impression on him that he
lies awake half the first night thinking about it.
But all too soon to him comes the end of schooldays and especially the
charming companionship of this particular fair-haired girl. On the last
day she asks him to write in her album, and he again indulges in rhyme
and inscribes therein a melancholy verse, the tenor of which is a hope
that she will see that his grave is kept green, as such an unhappy duty
must, in the near future, devolve upon some one. She in turn writes him
a farewell note of similar tone, and encloses a lock of her hair tied
with a blue ribbon. He has planned to walk home with her when the last
day ends, and perhaps participate in a more tender leave-taking, but she
rides home with her parents, and so that sweet scheme is foiled. With a
heavy heart he watches her out of sight and then, feeling that possibly
he may never see her again, takes his books and turns away from the dear
old brown schoolhouse for the last time. He locks the curl of hair and
her note up in a tin box where he keeps his fish-hooks, and resumes his
unending round of hard work and chores. His horizon has enlarged a good
deal, for he is now twelve years old--but it does not yet include Liddy.
It is over a year before he sees her again, though once, when given a
rainy half-day to fish in Ragged Brook, he, like a silly boy, deserts
that enticing stream for an hour and cuts across lots near her home in
hopes that he may see her again, but fails.
Then one summer day a surprise comes to him. Half a mile from his home,
and in the direction his thoughts often turn, is a cedar pasture where
blackberries grow in plenty, and here he is sent to pick them. It is
here, and while unconscious what Fate has in store for him, that he
suddenly hears a scream, and running toward him, down the path comes a
girl in a short dress with a calico sun-bonnet flying behind her, until
almost at his feet she stumbles and falls and there, sprawling on the
grass, is--Liddy.
In an instant he is at her side, and how glad he is of the chance to
help her up and soothe her fears no one but himself ever knows. She,
too, has been picking berries, and has come suddenly upon a monster
snake just gliding from a cedar bough almost over her head. When her
fright subsides he at once hunts for and kills that reptile with far
more satisfaction than he ever felt in killing one before. It is an
ungrateful return, for although the boy knew it not, the snake has done
him a greater kindness than he ever realized. Then when all danger is
removed, how sweet it is to sit beside her in the shade and talk over
schooldays while he looks into her tender blue eyes. And how glad he is
to fill her pail with berries which he has picked, and when the sun is
almost down how charming it is to walk home with her along the
maple-shaded lane! He even hopes that he will see another snake so that
he can kill that also, and show her how brave a boy is. But no more
snakes come to his aid that day and only the gentlest of breezes rustles
the spreading boughs that shade their pathway. When she thanks him at
parting, a little look of gratitude makes her blue eyes seem more
tender than ever to him and her voice sound like sweetest music.
His world has enlarged wonderfully now, for Liddy has entered into it.