consisted in overhearing that he was an excellent disciplinarian. I was
afraid to ask what that meant, but on reflection concluded it to be a
geographical distinction, and, associating him with Mesopotamia or
Beloochistan, expected to find him a person of mild manners, who shaved
his head, wore a tall hat of dyed sheep's wool, and did a large business
in spices with people who visited him on camels in a front-yard
surrounded by sheds, and having a fountain that played in the middle.
Having read several books of travels, I was corroborated in my view when
I learned that Mr. Barker lived at the east, and still further, when on
going around point Judith on the steamboat with my father, I became very
sick at the stomach, as all the travellers had done in their first
chapter.
I need not say that the reality of Mr. Barker was a very terrible
awakening, which contained no lineament of my purple dream, save the
bastinado. Without distinction of age or season the youths who, as per
circular, enjoyed the softening influence of his refined Christian home,
rose to the sound of the gong at five A.M., which may have been very
nice in a home for the early Christians, but was reported among the boys
to have entirely stopped the growth of Little Briggs. This was a child,
whose mother had married again, and whose step-father had felt his duty
to his future too keenly to deprive him of the benign influences of
Barker at any time in the last six years. After rising, we had ten
minutes to wash our faces and hands,--a period by the experience of
mankind demonstrably insufficient, where the soap is of that kind very
properly denominated cast-steel (though purists have a different
spelling), and you have to break an inch of ice to get into the
available region of your water-pitcher. Chunks, who has since made a
large fortune on war-contracts, kept himself in peanuts and four-cent
pies for an entire winter session, by selling an invention of his own,
which consisted of soap, dissolved in water on the stove during the
day-time, put in bottles hooked from the lamp-room by means of a false
key, to be carried to bed and kept warm by boys, whose pocket-money and
desire for a prompt detergent in the morning were adequate to the
disbursement of half a dime a package. I myself took several violent
colds from having the glass next my skin during severe nights; but that
was nothing so bad as the case of Little Briggs, who from lack of the
half-dime, often came down to prayers with a stripe of yesterday's
pencil black on one side of his nose, and a shaving of soap, which, in
the frenzy of despair he had gouged out of his stony cake, on the other.
The state of mind consistent with such a condition of countenance did
not favor correct recitation of the tougher names in Deuteronomy; so, it
can be a cause of surprise to no one, that, when called on at prayers,
and prompted by a ridiculous neighbor, little Briggs sometimes asserted
Joshua to have driven out the Hivites and the Amorites, and the
Canaanites and the Jebusites, and the Hittites and the Perizzites, and
the Moabites and the Musquito-bites, for which he was regularly sent to
bed on Saturday afternoon, as he had no pocket-money to stop, his papa
desiring him to learn self-denial young, as he was intended for a
missionary; though goodness knows that there wasn't enough of him to go
round among many heathen.
From this specimen of discipline may be learned the entire Barkerian
system of training. I was about to say, "_ex uno disce omnes_," but, as
it's the only Latin I remember from the lot which got rubbed into--or
rather over--me at Barker's, I'm rather sparing of it, not knowing but I
can bring it in somewhere else with better effect. As with the Word of
God, so with that of man,--the grand Barkerian idea of how to fix it in
a boy's memory was to send him to bed, or excoriate his palm. If
religion and polite learning could have been communicated by sheets,
like chicken-pox, or blistered into one like the stern but curative
cantharides, Mr. Barker's boys would have become the envy of mankind and
the beloved of the gods; but not even Little Briggs died young from the
latter or any other cause, which speaks volumes for his constitution....
The two Misses Moodle came to establish a young ladies' seminary in the
village of Mungerville, on whose outskirts our own school was situated,
bringing along with them, as the county paper stated, "that charming
atmosphere of refinement and intellectuality in which they ever moved";
and, what was of more consequence, a capital of twenty girls to start
with. Professional politeness inspired Mr. Barker to make a call on the
fair strangers, which the personal fascinations of the younger Miss
Moodle induced him to repeat. The atmosphere of refinement and
intellectuality gradually acted on him in the nature of an intoxicating
gas, until at length, after twenty-five years of successfully intrenched
widowhood, he laid his heart in the mits of the younger Miss Moodle, and
the two became one Barker.
As a consequence of this union, social relations began to be established
between the two schools. Mrs. Barker, of an occasional evening, wished
to run down and visit her sister. If Mr. Barker was engaged in quarrying
a page of Cicero out of some stony boy in whom nature had never made any
Latin deposit, or had just put a fresh batch of offenders into the penal
oven of untimely bed, and felt compelled to run up now and then to keep
up the fire under them, by a harrowing description of the way their
parents would feel if they knew of their behavior--an instrument dear to
Mr. Barker as a favorite poker to a boss-baker in love with his
profession--then, after a clucking noise, indicative of how much he
would like to chuck her under the chin, but for the presence of company,
Mr. Barker would coo to Mrs. Barker, "Lovey, your pick, sweet!" waving
his hand comprehensively over the whole school-room; or "Dear, suppose
we say Briggs, or Chunks, or Thirlwall," as the case might be. The only
difficulty about Briggs was clothes. That used to be obviated by a
selection from the trunks of intimate friends; and Briggs was such a
nice boy, that it was a real gratification to see him with your best
jacket on. Many's the time the old fellow has said to Chunks or me,
"What a blessing that I grew! If I hadn't, how could I ever wear your
trousers?" In process of time these occasional visits, as escort to Mrs.
Barker, expanded into an attendance of all the older boys (when not in
bed for moral baking purposes) upon a series of bi-monthly soirees,
given by the remaining Miss Moodle, with a superficial view to her
pupils' attainment of ease in society; and a material substratum of
sandwiches, which Miss Moodle preferred to see, through the atmosphere
of refinement and intellectuality, as "a simple repast." To this was
occasionally added a refreshment, which I have seen elsewhere only at
Sunday-school picnics,--a mild tap of slightly sweetened water, which
tasted as if lemons had formerly been kept in the pail it was made
in;--only for Sunday-schools they make it strong at the outset, and add
water during the hymns, with a vague but praiseworthy expectation that,
in view of the sacredness of the occasion, there will be some miraculous
interposition, as in the case of the widow's cruse, to keep the beverage
up to proof; while Miss Moodle's liquor preserved throughout the evening
a weakness of which generous natures scorned to take advantage beyond
the first tumbler.
At this portion of my career I was dawned upon by Miss Tucker. From
mature years I look back with a shudder upon the number of parchmenty
sandwiches which I ate, the reservoirs of lemony water which I drank, in
order to be in that lovely creature's society. I experienced agonies in
thinking how much longer it might be before I could get a coat with
tails, when I calculated how soon she would be putting up her back hair.
Her eyes were as blue as I was when I thought she liked Briggs; and she
had a complexion compared with which strawberries and cream were
nowhere. When she was sent to the piano, to show people what the Moodle
system could do in the way of a musical education, I fell into a
cataleptic state and floated off upon a flood of harmony. Miss Moodle
and her mits, self and lemon kids, even the sleepless eye of Barker,
watching for an indiscretion, upon the strength of which he might
defensibly send somebody to bed the next Saturday afternoon, all
vanished from before me, swallowed up in a mild glory, which contained
but two objects,--an angel with low neck and short sleeves, and an
insensate hippopotamus of a piano, which did not wriggle all over with
ecstasy when her white fingers tickled him.
At such moments I would gladly have gone down on all fours, and had a
key-board mortised into my side at any expense of personal torture, if
Miss Tucker could only have played a piece on me, and herself been
conscious of the chords she was awakening inside my jacket. I loved her
to that degree that my hair never seemed brushed enough when I beheld
her; and I quite spoiled the shape of my best boots through an elevation
of the instep, caused by putting a rolled-up pair of stockings inside
each heel, to approximate the manly stature, at our bi-monthly meetings.
Even her friend, Miss Crickey, a mealy-faced little girl, with saffron
hair, who had been pushed by Miss Moodle so far into the higher
branches, that she had a look of being perpetually frightened to death
with the expectation of hearing them crack and let her down from a
great height,--seemed beautiful to me from the mere fact of daily
breathing the same air with such an angel, sharing her liquorice-stick,
and borrowing her sweet little thimble.
I had other reasons for prejudice in Miss Crickey's favor. She was the
only person to whom I could talk freely regarding the depth of my
passion for Miss Tucker. Not even to the object of that tremendous
feeling could I utter a syllable which seemed in any way adequate. With
an overpowering consciousness how ridiculous it was, and not only so,
but how far from original, I could give her papers of lemon
Jackson-balls, hinting simultaneously that, though plump as her cheeks,
they were not half so sweet; and through a figure, whose correct name I
have since learned to be periphrasis, I could suggest how much my soul
yearned to expire on her ruby lips, by asking if she had ever played
doorkeeper; regretting that the atmosphere of refinement and
intellectuality did not admit of that healthful recreation at Moodle's,
and begging her to guess whom I would call out if I were doorkeeper
myself. When she opened her blue eyes innocently, and said, "Miss
Crickey?" the intimation was rejected with a melancholy
dissatisfaction, which would have been disdain but for the character of
my feelings to its source. And when, on my pressing her for the name of
the favored mortal whom she would call out if she were doorkeeper, she
slyly dropped her eyes and asked if Briggs sounded any thing like it, I
savagely refused to consider the proposition at all, and for the rest of
the evening ate sandwiches to that degree I wonder my life was not
despaired of, and fled for relief to the lemony bowl. The result of this
mad vortex having been colic and calomel, after my return to Barker's on
that evening, I foreswore such dangerous excesses at the next
bi-monthly; but putting a larger pair of stockings in each boot-heel, to
impress Miss Tucker with a sense of what she had lost, I devoted myself
during the earlier part of the evening to a growing young woman, of the
name of Wagstaff, considerably older than myself and runing straight up
and down from whatever side one might contemplate her. Her conversation
was not entertaining, unless from the Chinese point of view, which, I
understand, distinctly favors monosyllables, and she giggled at me so
persistently that I feared Miss Tucker would think I must be making
myself ridiculous; but, on her being sent to the piano, I stood and
turned over her music with a consciousness that if I ever looked
impressive it was then. All this I did in the effort to seem gay,
although my heart was breaking. I had no comfort on earth save the
thought that I had been brutal to Briggs, and that he sat in an obscure
corner of the room among some little girls in Long Division, hiding,
behind an assistant teacher's skirts, the whitey-brown toe which my
blacking-brush refused to refresh, while I bore my grief upon a pair of
new boots plentifully provided with squeak-leather. When Miss Tucker
slipped a little piece of paper into my hand, as I made a hollow show of
passing her the sandwiches, I came very near dropping the plate; and
when I had a chance to open it unobserved, and read the words, "Are you
mad with me?" I could not occupy my cold and dreary pinnacle a moment
longer, but sought an early opportunity of squeezing her hand two seats
behind the voluminous asylum of Briggs's toes, and whispering, slightly
confused by intensity of feeling, that if I had done any thing I was
sorry for, I was willing to be forgiven. From that moment I was Miss
Tucker's slave. Oh, woman, woman! The string on which you play us is as
long as life; it ties your baby-bib; it laces your queenly bodice; and
on its slenderest tag we dangle everywhere!--_Little Briggs and I._
(_From Little Brother and Other Genre Pictures_.)
SELECTIONS FROM A BRACE OF BOYS.
I am a bachelor uncle. That, as a mere fact, might happen to anybody;
but I am a bachelor uncle by internal fitness. I am one essentially,
just as I am an individual of the Caucasian division of the human race;
and if, through untoward circumstances,--which Heaven forbid,--I should
lose my present position, I shouldn't be surprised if you saw me out in
the _Herald_ under "Situations Wanted--Males." Thanks to a marrying
tendency in the rest of my family, I have now little need to advertise,
all the business being thrown into my way which a single member of my
profession can attend to....
I meander, like a desultory, placid river of an old bachelor as I am,
through the flowery mead of several nurseries. I am detained by all the
little roots that run down into me to drink happiness, but I linger
longest among the children of my sister Lu.
Lu married Mr. Lovegrove. He is a merchant, retired with a fortune
amassed by the old-fashioned, slow processes of trade, and regards the
mercantile life of the present day only as so much greed and gambling
Christianly baptized.... Lu is my favorite sister; Lovegrove an
unusually good article of brother-in-law and I cannot say that any of my
nieces and nephews interest me more than their two children, Daniel and
Billy, who are more unlike than words can paint them. They are far apart
in point of years; Daniel is twenty-two, Billy eleven. I was reminded of
this fact the other day by Billy, as he stood between my legs, scowling
at his book of sums.
"'A boy has eighty-five turnips, and gives his sister thirty,'--pretty
present for a girl, isn't it?" said Billy, with an air of supreme
contempt. "Could _you_ stand such stuff,--say?"
I put on my instructive face and answered,--
"Well, my dear Billy, you know that arithmetic is necessary to you if
you mean to be an industrious man and succeed in business. Suppose your
parents were to lose all their property, what would become of them
without a little son who could make money and keep accounts?"
"Oh," said Billy, with surprise. "Hasn't father got enough stamps to
see him through?"
"He has now, I hope; but people don't always keep them. Suppose they
should go by some accident, when your father was too old to make any
more stamps for himself?"
"You haven't thought of brother Daniel--"
True; for nobody ever had, in connection with the active employments of
life.
"No, Billy," I replied, "I forgot him; but then, you know, Daniel is
more of a student than a business man, and--"
"O Uncle Teddy! you don't think I mean he'd support them? I meant I'd
have to take care of father and mother, and him too, when they'd all got
to be old people together. Just think! I'm eleven, and he's twenty-two
so he is just twice as old as I am. How old are you?"
"Forty, Billy, last August."
"Well, you aren't so awful old, and when I get to be as old as you,
Daniel will be eighty. Seth Kendall's grandfather isn't more than that,
and he has to be fed with a spoon, and a nurse puts him to bed, and
wheels him round in a chair like a baby. That takes the stamps, I bet!
Well, I'll tell you how I'll keep my accounts; I'll have a stick, like
Robinson Crusoe, and every time I make a toadskin I'll gouge a piece out
of one side of the stick, and every time I spend one I'll gouge a piece
out of the other."
"Spend a _what_?" said the gentle and astonished voice of my sister Lu,
who, unperceived, had slipped into the room.
"A toadskin, ma," replied Billy, shutting up Colburn with a farewell
glance of contempt.
"Dear, dear! Where does the boy learn such horrid words?"
"Why, ma, don't you know what a toadskin is? Here's one," said Billy,
drawing a dingy five-cent stamp from his pocket. "And don't I wish I had
lots of 'em!"
"Oh!" sighed his mother, "to think I should have a child so addicted to
slang! How I wish he were like Daniel!"
"Well, mother," replied Billy, "if you wanted two boys just alike you'd
oughter had twins. There ain't any use of my trying to be like Daniel
now, when he's got eleven years the start. Whoop! There's a dog-fight;
hear 'em! It's Joe Casey's dog,--I know his bark!"
With these words my nephew snatched his Glengarry bonnet from the table
and bolted downstairs to see the fun.
"What will become of him?" said Lu, hopelessly; "he has no taste for any
thing but rough play; and then such language as he uses! Why _isn't_ he
like Daniel?"
"I suppose because his Maker never repeats himself. Even twins often
possess strongly marked individualities. Don't you think it would be a
good plan to learn Billy better before you try to teach him? If you do,
you'll make something as good of him as Daniel though it will be rather
different from that model."
"Remember, Ned, that you never did like Daniel as well as you do Billy.
But we all know the proverb about old maid's daughters and old
bachelor's sons. I wish you had Billy for a month,--then you'd see."
"I'm not sure that I'd do any better than you. I might err as much in
other directions But I'd try to start right by acknowledging that he was
a new problem, not to be worked without finding out the value of X in
his particular instance. The formula which solves one boy will no more
solve the next one than the rule-of-three will solve a question in
calculus,--or, to rise into your sphere, than the receipt for
one-two-three-four cake will conduct you to a successful issue through
plum-pudding."
I excel in metaphysical discussion, and was about giving further
elaboration to my favorite idea, when the door burst open. Master Billy
came tumbling in with a torn jacket, a bloody nose, the trace of a few
tears in his eyes, and the mangiest of cur dogs in his hands.
"Oh my! my!! my!!!" exclaimed his mother.
"Don't you get scared, ma!" cried Billy, smiling a stern smile of
triumph; "I smashed the nose off him! He wont sass me again for nothing
_this_ while! Uncle Teddy, d'ye know it wasn't a dog-fight, after all?
There was that nasty, good-for-nothing Joe Casey, 'n Patsy Grogan, and a
lot of bad boys from Mackerelville; and they'd caught this poor little
ki-oodle and tied a tin pot to his tail, and were trying to set Joe's
dog on him, though he's ten times littler."
"You naughty, naughty boy! How did you suppose your mother'd feel to see
you playing with those ragamuffins?"
"Yes, I _played_ 'em! I polished 'em,--that's the play I did! Says I,
'Put down that poor little pup; ain't you ashamed of yourself, Patsy
Grogan?' 'I guess you don't know who I am,' says he. That's the way they
always say, Uncle Teddy, to make a fellow think they're some awful great
fighters. So says I again, 'Well, you put down that dog, or I'll show
you who I am'; and when he held on, I let him have. Then he dropped the
pup, and as I stooped to pick it up he gave me one on the bugle."
"_Bugle_! Oh! oh! oh!"
"The rest pitched in to help him; but I grabbed the pup, and while I was
trying to give as good as I got,--only a fellow can't do it well with
only one hand, Uncle Teddy,--up came a policeman, and the whole crowd
ran away. So I got the dog safe, and here he is!"
With that Billy set down his "ki-oodle," bid farewell to every fear, and
wiped his bleeding nose. The unhappy beast slunk back between the legs
of his preserver and followed him out of the room, as Lu, with an
expression of maternal despair, bore him away for the correction of his
dilapidated raiment and depraved associations. I felt such sincere pride
in this young Mazzini of the dog-nation, that I was vexed at Lu for
bestowing on him reproof instead of congratulation; but she was not the
only conservative who fails to see a good cause and a heroic heart
under a bloody nose and torn jacket. I resolved that if Billy was
punished he should have his recompense before long in an extra holiday
at Barnum's or the Hippotheatron.
You already have some idea of my other nephew, if you have noticed that
none of us, not even that habitual disrespecter of dignities, Billy,
ever called him Dan. It would have seemed as incongruous as to call
Billy William. He was one of those youths who never gave their parents a
moment's uneasiness; who never had to have their wills broken, and never
forget to put on their rubbers or take an umbrella. In boyhood he was
intended for a missionary. Had it been possible for him to go to
Greenland's icy mountains without catching cold, or India's coral
strand, without getting bilious, his parents would have carried out
their pleasing dream of contributing him to the world's evangelization.
Lu and Mr. Lovegrove had no doubt that he would have been greatly
blessed if he could have stood it....
Both she and his father always encouraged old manners in him. I think
they took such pride in raising a peculiarly pale boy as a gardener
does in getting a nice blanch on his celery, and so long as he was not
absolutely sick, the graver he was the better. He was a sensitive plant,
a violet by a mossy stone, and all that sort of thing....
At the time I introduce Billy, both Lu and her husband were much
changed. They had gained a great deal in width of view and liberality of
judgment. They read Dickens, and Thackeray with avidity; went now and
then to the opera; proposed to let Billy take a quarter at Dodworth's;
had statues in their parlor without any thought of shame at their lack
of petticoats, and did multitudes of things which, in their early
married life, they would have considered shocking.... They would greatly
have liked to see Daniel shine in society. Of his erudition they were
proud even to worship. The young man never had any business, and his
father never seemed to think of giving him any, knowing, as Billy would
say, that he had stamps enough to "see him through." If Daniel liked,
his father would have endowed a professorship in some college and given
him the chair; but that would have taken him away from his own room and
the family physician.
Daniel knew how much his parents wished him to make a figure in the
world, and only blamed himself for his failure, magnanimously forgetting
that they had crushed out the faculties which enable a man to mint the
small change of every-day society, in the exclusive cultivation of such
as fit him for smelting its ponderous ingots. With that merciful
blindness which alone prevents all our lives from becoming a horror of
nerveless self-reproach, his parents were equally unaware of their share
in the harm done him, when they ascribed to a delicate organization the
fact that, at an age when love runs riot in all healthy blood, he could
not see a Balmoral without his cheeks rivalling the most vivid stripe in
it. They flattered themselves that he would outgrow his bashfulness; but
Daniel had no such hope, and frequently confided in me that he thought
he should never marry at all.