THE DISTRICT SCHOOL
In the last chapter I intended to write about the district school; but I
lingered so long over old remembrances that I could not get to school in
time, so now I will go straight there without delay.
The first school that I remember was not in the little town near which
we lived, but about half a mile away in the opposite direction. Our
house must have stood just outside the limits of the little village; at
any rate, I was sent to the country school. Every morning we children
were given a dinner-pail packed full of pie and cake, and now and then a
piece of bread and butter (which I always let the other children eat),
and were sent off to school. As we passed along the road we were joined
by other little boys and girls, and by the time we reached the building
our party contained nearly all the children on the road travelling in
the direction from which we came. We were a boisterous, thoughtless
crowd,—that is, the boys; the girls were generally quieter and more
reserved, which we called “proud.”
Almost as soon as the snow was off the ground in the spring, we boys
took off our shoes (or, rather, boots) and went barefooted to the
school. It was hard for us to wait until our parents said the ground was
warm enough for us to take off our boots; we felt so light and free, and
could run so fast barefooted, that we always begged our mother to let us
leave them off at the very earliest chance. The chief disadvantage was
that we often stubbed our toes. This was sometimes serious, when we were
running fast and would bring them full tilt against a stone. Most of the
time we managed to have one or more toes tied up in rags; and we always
found considerable occupation in comparing our wounds, to see whose were
the worst, or which were getting well the fastest. The next most serious
trouble connected with going barefoot was the necessity for washing our
feet every night before we went to bed. This seemed a grievous hardship;
sometimes we would forget it, when we could, and I remember now and then
being called up out of bed after I thought I had safely escaped and
seemed to be sound asleep, and when my feet were clean enough without
being washed.
It seemed to us children that our mother was unreasonably particular
about this matter of washing our feet before we went to bed. She always
required it when we had been barefoot through the day, even though it
had been raining and we had wiped our feet in the grass. Still the
trouble of washing our feet was partly compensated by our not being
obliged to put on or take off our stockings and our boots. This was a
great relief, especially in the morning; for this part of our toilet
took longer than all the rest, and when the time came around to go
barefoot we had only to get up and jump into a few clothes and start
away.
In the summer-time it took a long while for us children to travel the
short half-mile to the district school. No matter how early we left
home, it was nearly always past the hour of nine when we reached the
door. For there were always birds in the trees and stones in the road,
and no child ever knew any pain except his own. There were little fishes
in the creek over which we slid in winter and through which we always
waded in the summer-time; then there were chipmunks on the fences and
woodchucks in the fields, and no boy could ever manage to go straight to
school, or straight back home after the day was done. The procession of
barefoot urchins laughed and joked, and fought, and ran, and bragged,
and gave no thought to study or to books until the bell was rung and
they were safely seated in the room. Then we watched and waited eagerly
for recess; and after that, still more anxiously for the hour of noon,
which was always the best time by far of all the day, not alone because
of the pie and cake and apples and cheese which the more prudent and
obedient of us saved until this time, but also because of the games, in
which we always had enough boys to go around.
In these games the girls did not join to any great extent; in fact,
girls seemed of little use to the urchins who claimed everything as
their own. In the school they were always seated by themselves on one
side of the room, and sometimes when we failed to study as we should we
were made to go and sit with them. This was when we were very young. As
we grew older, this form of punishment seemed less and less severe,
until some other was substituted in its stead. Most of the boys were
really rather bashful with the girls,—those who bragged the loudest and
fought the readiest somehow never knew just what to say when they were
near. We preferred rather to sit and look at them, and wonder how they
could be so neat and clean and well “fixed up.” I remember when quite a
small boy how I used to look over toward their side of the room,
especially at a little girl with golden hair that was always hanging in
long curls about her head; and it seemed to me then that nothing could
ever be quite so beautiful as this curly head; which may explain the
fact that all my life nothing has seemed quite so beguiling as golden
hair,—unless it were black, or brown, or some other kind.
To the boys, school had its chief value, in fact its only value, in its
games and sports. Of course, our parents and teachers were always urging
us to work. In their efforts to make us study, they resorted to every
sort of means—headmarks, presents, praise, flattery, Christmas cards,
staying in at recess, staying after school, corporal punishment, all
sorts of persuasion, threats, and even main force—to accomplish this
result. No like rewards or punishments were required to make us play;
which fact, it seems to me, should have shown our teachers and parents
that play, exercise, activity, and change are the law of life,
especially the life of a little child; and that study, as we knew it,
was unnatural and wrong. Still, nothing of this sort ever dawned upon
their minds.
I cannot remember much real kindness between the children of the school;
while we had our special chums, we never seemed to care for them, except
that boys did not like to be alone. There were few things a boy could do
alone, excepting tasks, which of course we avoided if we could. On our
way to and from the school, or while together at recess and noon, while
we played the ordinary games a very small matter brought on a quarrel,
and we always seemed to be watching for a chance to fight. In the matter
of our quarrels and fights we showed the greatest impartiality, as boys
do in almost all affairs of life.
While our books were filled with noble precepts, we never seemed to
remember them when we got out of doors, or even to think that they had
any application to our lives. In this respect the boy and the grown-up
man seem wonderfully alike.
But really, school was not all play. Our teachers and parents tried
their best to make us learn,—that is, to make us learn the lessons in
the books. The outside lessons we always seemed to get without their
help,—in fact, in spite of their best endeavors to prevent our knowing
what they meant.
The fact that our teachers tried so hard to make us learn was no doubt
one of the chief reasons why we looked on them as our natural enemies.
We seldom had the same teacher for two terms of school, and we always
wondered whether the new one would be worse or better than the old. We
always started in prepared to find her worse; and the first kind words
we ever had for our teacher were spoken after she was gone and we
compared her with the new one in her place. Our teachers seemed to treat
us pretty well for the first few days. They were then very kind and
sweet; they hardly ever brought switches to the school until the second
week, but we were always sure that they would be called into service
early in the term. No old-time teacher would have dreamed that she could
get through a term of school without a whip, any more than a judge would
believe that society could get along without a jail. The methods that
were used to make us learn, and the things we were taught, seem very
absurd as I look back upon them now; and still, I presume, they were not
different from the means employed to-day.
Most of us boys could learn arithmetic fairly well,—in this, indeed, we
always beat the girls. Still, some parts of arithmetic were harder than
the rest. I remember that I mastered the multiplication-table up to
“twelve times twelve,” backwards and forwards and every other way, at a
very early age, and I fancy that this knowledge has clung to me through
life; but I cannot forget the many weary hours I spent trying to learn
the tables of weights and measures, and how much vexation of spirit I
endured before my task was done. However, after weary weeks and months I
learned them so well that I could say them with the greatest ease. This
was many, many years ago; since that time I have found my place in the
world of active life, but I cannot now remember that even once have I
had occasion to know or care about the difference between “Troy weight”
and “Apothecaries’ weight,” if, in fact, there was any difference at
all. And one day, last week I think it was, for the first time in all
these endless years I wished to know how many square rods made an acre,
and I tried to call back the table that I learned so long ago at school;
but as to this my mind was an utter blank, and all that I could do was
to see the little girl with the golden locks sitting at her desk—and, by
the way, I wonder where she is to-day. But I took a dictionary from the
shelf, and there I found it plain and straight, and I made no effort to
keep it in my mind, knowing that if perchance in the uncertain years
that may be yet to come I may need to know again, I shall find it there
in the dictionary safe and sound.
And all those examples that I learned to cipher out! I am sure I know
more to-day than the flaxen-haired barefoot boy who used to sit at his
little desk at school and only drop his nibbled slate-pencil to drive
the flies away from his long bare legs, but I could not do those sums
to-day even if one of my old-time teachers should come back from her
long-forgotten grave and threaten to keep me in for the rest of my life
unless I got the answer right.
And then the geography! How hard they tried to make us learn this book,
and how many recesses were denied us because we were not sure just which
river in Siberia was the longest! Of course we knew nothing about
Siberia, or whether the rivers ran water or blood; but we were forced to
know which was the largest and just how long it was. And so all over the
great round world we travelled, to find cities, towns, rivers, mountain
ranges, peninsulas, oceans, and bays. How important it all was! I
remember that one of the ways they took to make us learn this book was
to have us sing geography in a chorus of little voices. I can recall
to-day how one of those old tunes began, but I remember little beyond
the start. The song was about the capitals of all the States, and it
began, “State of Maine, Augusta, is on the Kennebec River,” and so on
through the whole thirty-three or four, or whatever the number was when
I was a little child. Well, many, many years have passed away since
then, and I have wandered far and wide from my old-time country home.
There are few places in the United States that I have not seen, in my
quest for activity and change. I have even stood on some of the highest
peaks of the Alps, and looked down upon its quiet valleys and its lovely
lakes; but I have never yet been to Augusta on the Kennebec River in the
State of Maine, and it begins to look as if I never should. Still, if
Fortune ever takes me there, I shall be very glad that I learned when
yet a child at school that Augusta was the capital of Maine and on the
Kennebec River. So, too, I have never been to Siberia, and, not being a
Russian, I presume that I shall never go. And in fact, wherever I have
wandered on the earth I have had to learn my geography all over new
again.
But, really, grammar made me more trouble than any other study. Somehow
I never could learn grammar, and it always made me angry when I tried.
My parents and teachers told me that I could never write or speak unless
I learned grammar, and so I tried and tried, but even now I can hardly
tell an adverb from an adjective, and I do not know that I care. When a
little boy, I used to think that if I really had anything to tell I
could make myself understood; and I think so still. The longer I live
the surer I am that the chief difficulty of writers and speakers is the
lack of interesting thoughts, and not of proper words. Certainly grammar
was a hideous nightmare to me when a child at school. Of all the parts
of speech the verb was the most impossible to get. I remember now how
difficult it was to conjugate the verb “to love,” which the books seemed
always to put first. How I stumbled and blundered as I tried to learn
that verb! I might possibly have mastered the present tense, but when it
came to all the different moods and various tenses it became a hopeless
task. I am much older now, but somehow that verb has never grown easier
with the fleeting years. The past-perfect tense has always been
well-nigh impossible to learn. I never could tell when it left off, or
whether it ever left off or not. Neither have I been able to keep it
separate from the present, or, for that matter, from the future. A few
years after the district school, I went for a brief time to the Academy
on the hill, where I studied Latin; and I remember that this same verb
was there, with all the old complications and many that were new, to
greet me when I came. To be sure, it had been changed to “Amo, Amas,
Amat,” but it was the old verb just the same, and its various moods and
tenses caused me the same trouble that I had experienced as a little
child. My worry over this word has made me wonder whether this verb, in
all its moods and tenses, was not one of the many causes of the downfall
of the Roman Republic, of which we used to hear so much. At any rate, I
long since ceased trying to get it straight or keep it straight; indeed,
I am quite sure that it was designed only to tangle and ensnare.