think more of him and his bananas than you do of the bursting, throbbing
heart of poor Paul. As yet Dream-life does not take hold on love. A
little maturity of heart is wanted to make up what the poets call
sensibility. If love should come to be a dangerous, chivalric matter, as
in the case of Helen Mar and Wallace, you can very easily conceive of
it, and can take hold of all the little accessories of male costume and
embroidering of banners; but as for pure sentiment, such as lies in the
sweet story of Bernardin de St. Pierre, it is quite beyond you.
The rich, soft nights, in which one might doze in his hammock, watching
the play of the silvery moonbeams upon the orange-leaves and upon the
waves, you can understand; and you fall to dreaming of that lovely Isle
of France, and wondering if Virginia did not perhaps have some relations
on the island, who raise pine-apples, and such sort of things, still?
----And so with your head upon your hand in your quiet garret-corner,
over some such beguiling story, your thought leans away from the book
into your own dreamy cruise over the sea of life.
II.
_School-Dreams._
It is a proud thing to go out from under the realm of a schoolmistress,
and to be enrolled in a company of boys, who are under the guidance of a
master. It is one of the earliest steps of worldly pride, which has
before it a long and tedious ladder of ascent. Even the advice of the
old mistress, and the ninepenny book that she thrusts into your hand as
a parting gift, pass for nothing; and her kiss of adieu, if she tenders
it in the sight of your fellows, will call up an angry rush of blood to
the cheek, that for long years shall drown all sense of its kindness.
You have looked admiringly many a day upon the tall fellows who play at
the door of Dr. Bidlow's school; you have looked with reverence--second
only to that felt for the old village church--upon its dark-looking,
heavy brick walls. It seemed to be redolent of learning; and stopping at
times to gaze upon the gallipots and broken retorts at the second-story
window, you have pondered in your boyish way upon the inscrutable
wonders of Science, and the ineffable dignity of Dr. Bidlow's brick
school!
Dr. Bidlow seems to you to belong to a race of giants; and yet he is a
spare, thin man, with a hooked nose, a large, flat, gold watch-key, a
crack in his voice, a wig, and very dirty wristbands. Still you stand in
awe at the mere sight of him,--an awe that is very much encouraged by a
report made to you by a small boy, that "Old Bid" keeps a large ebony
ruler in his desk. You are amazed at the small boy's audacity; it
astonishes you that any one who had ever smelt the strong fumes of
sulphur and ether in the Doctor's room, and had seen him turn red
vinegar blue, (as they say he does,) should call him "Old Bid!"
You however come very little under his control; you enter upon the proud
life, in the small boy's department, under the dominion of the English
master. He is a different personage from Dr. Bidlow: he is a dapper
little man, who twinkles his eye in a peculiar fashion, and who has a
way of marching about the schoolroom with his hands crossed behind him,
giving a playful flirt to his coat-tails. He wears a pen tucked behind
his ear; his hair is carefully set up at the sides and upon the top, to
conceal (as you think later in life) his diminutive height; and he steps
very springily around behind the benches, glancing now and then at the
books,--cautioning one scholar about his dog's-ears, and startling
another from a doze by a very loud and odious snap of his forefinger
upon the boy's head.
At other times he sticks a hand in the armlet of his waistcoat; he
brandishes in the other a thickish bit of smooth cherry-wood, sometimes
dressing his hair withal; and again giving his head a slight scratch
behind the ear, while he takes occasion at the same time for an oblique
glance at a fat boy in the corner, who is reaching down from his seat
after a little paper pellet that has just been discharged at him from
some unknown quarter. The master steals very cautiously and quickly to
the rear of the stooping boy, dreadfully exposed by his unfortunate
position, and inflicts a stinging blow. A weak-eyed little scholar on
the next bench ventures a modest titter, at which the assistant makes a
significant motion with his ruler,--on the seat, as it were, of an
imaginary pair of pantaloons,--which renders the weak-eyed boy on a
sudden very insensible to the recent joke.
You meantime profess to be very much engrossed with your grammar--turned
upside-down; you think it must have hurt, and are only sorry that it did
not happen to a tall, dark-faced boy, who cheated you in a swop of
jackknives. You innocently think that he must be a very bad boy, and
fancy--aided by a suggestion of the old nurse at home on the same
point--that he will one day come to the gallows.
There is a platform on one side of the schoolroom, where the teacher
sits at a little red table; and they have a tradition among the boys,
that a pin properly bent was one day put into the chair of the English
master, and that he did not wear his hand in the armlet of his waistcoat
for two whole days thereafter. Yet his air of dignity seems proper
enough in a man of such erudition, and such grasp of imagination, as he
must possess. For he can quote poetry,--some of the big scholars have
heard him do it; he can parse the whole of "Paradise Lost," and he can
cipher in Long Division, and the Rule of Three, as if it was all Simple
Addition; and then, such a hand as he writes, and such a superb capital
B! It is hard to understand how he does it.
Sometimes lifting the lid of your desk, where you pretend to be very
busy with your papers, you steal the reading of some brief passage of
"Lazy Lawrence," or of the "Hungarian Brothers," and muse about it for
hours afterward to the great detriment of your ciphering; or, deeply
lost in the story of the "Scottish Chiefs," you fall to comparing such
villains as Menteith with the stout boys who tease you; and you only
wish they could come within reach of the fierce Kirkpatrick's claymore.
But you are frighted out of this stolen reading by a circumstance that
stirs your young blood very strangely. The master is looking very sourly
on a certain morning, and has caught sight of the little weak-eyed boy
over beyond you, reading "Roderick Random." He sends out for a long
birch rod, and having trimmed off the leaves carefully,--with a glance
or two in your direction,--he marches up behind the bench of the poor
culprit,--who turns deathly pale,--grapples him by the collar, drags him
out over the desks, his limbs dangling in a shocking way against the
sharp angles, and having him fairly in the middle of the room, clinches
his rod with a new, and, as it seems to you, a very sportive grip.
You shudder fearfully.
"Please don't whip me," says the boy, whimpering.
"Aha!" says the smirking pedagogue, bringing down the stick with a
quick, sharp cut,--"you don't like it, eh?"
The poor fellow screams, and struggles to escape; but the blows come
faster and thicker. The blood tingles in your finger-ends with
indignation.
"Please don't strike me again," says the boy, sobbing, and taking
breath, as he writhes about the legs of the master; "I won't read
another time."
"Ah, you won't, sir,--won't you? I don't mean you shall, sir;" and the
blows fall thick and fast, until the poor fellow crawls back, utterly
crestfallen and heartsick, to sob over his books.
You grow into a sudden boldness; you wish you were only large enough to
beat the master; you know such treatment would make you miserable; you
shudder at the thought of it; you do not believe he would dare; you
know the other boy has got no father. This seems to throw a new light
upon the matter, but it only intensifies your indignation. You are sure
that no father would suffer it; or, if you thought so, it would sadly
weaken your love for him. You pray Heaven, that it may never be brought
to such proof.
----Let a boy once distrust the love or the tenderness of his parents,
and the last resort of his yearning affections--so far as the world
goes--is utterly gone. He is in the sure road to a bitter fate. His
heart will take on a hard, iron covering, that will flash out plenty of
fire in his after contact with the world, but it will never--never melt!
There are some tall trees, that overshadow an angle of the schoolhouse;
and the larger scholars play some very surprising gymnastic tricks upon
their lower limbs: one boy, for instance, will hang for an incredible
length of time by his feet with his head down; and when you tell Charlie
of it at night, with such additions as your boyish imagination can
contrive, the old nurse is shocked, and states very gravely that it is
dangerous, and that the blood all runs to the head, and sometimes bursts
out of the eyes and mouth. You look at that particular boy with
astonishment afterward, and expect to see him some day burst into
bleeding from the nose and ears, and flood the schoolroom benches.
In time however you get to performing some modest experiments yourself
upon the very lowest limbs, taking care to avoid the observation of the
larger boys, who else might laugh at you; you especially avoid the
notice of one stout fellow in pea-green breeches, who is a sort of
"bully" among the small boys, and who delights in kicking your marbles
about very accidentally. He has a fashion too of twisting his
handkerchief into what he calls a "snapper," with a knot at the end, and
cracking at you with it, very much to the irritation of your spirits and
of your legs.
Sometimes, when he has brought you to an angry burst of tears, he will
very graciously force upon you the handkerchief, and insist upon your
cracking him in return; which, as you know nothing about his effective
method of making the knot bite, is a very harmless proposal on his part.
But you have still stronger reason to remember that boy. There are
trees, as I said, near the school; and you get the reputation, after a
time, of a good climber. One day you are well in the tops of the trees,
and being dared by the boys below, you venture higher--higher than any
boy has ever gone before. You feel very proudly, but just then catch
sight of the sneering face of your old enemy of the snapper; and he
dares you to go upon a limb that he points out.
The rest say,--for you hear them plainly,--"It won't bear him." And
Frank, a great friend of yours, shouts loudly to you not to try.
"Pho," says your tormentor,--"the little coward!"
If you could whip him, you would go down the tree, and do it willingly;
as it is, you cannot let him triumph; so you advance cautiously out upon
the limb; it bends and sways fearfully with your weight; presently it
cracks; you try to return, but it is too late; you feel yourself going;
your mind flashes home--over your life, your hope, your fate--like
lightning; then comes a sense of dizziness, a succession of quick blows,
and a dull, heavy crash!
You are conscious of nothing again, until you find yourself in the great
hall of the school, covered with blood, the old Doctor standing over you
with a phial, and Frank kneeling by you, and holding your shattered arm,
which has been broken by the fall.
After this come those long, weary days of confinement, when you lie
still through all the hours of noon, looking out upon the cheerful
sunshine only through the windows of your little room. Yet it seems a
grand thing to have the whole household attendant upon you. The doors
are opened and shut softly, and they all step noiselessly about your
chamber; and when you groan with pain, you are sure of meeting sad,
sympathizing looks. Your mother will step gently to your side and lay
her cool, white hand upon your forehead; and little Nelly will gaze at
you from the foot of your bed with a sad earnestness, and with tears of
pity in her soft hazel eyes. And afterward, as your pain passes away,
she will bring you her prettiest books, and fresh flowers, and whatever
she knows you will love.
But it is dreadful when you wake at night from your feverish slumber,
and see nothing but the spectral shadows that the sick-lamp upon the
hearth throws aslant the walls; and hear nothing but the heavy breathing
of the old nurse in the easy-chair, and the ticking of the clock upon
the mantel! Then silence and the night crowd upon your soul drearily.
But your thought is active. It shapes at your bedside the loved figure
of your mother, or it calls up the whole company of Dr. Bidlow's boys
and weeks of study or of play group like magic on your quickened vision;
then a twinge of pain will call again the dreariness, and your head
tosses upon the pillow, and your eye searches the gloom vainly for
pleasant faces; and your fears brood on that drearier, coming night of
Death--far longer, and far more cheerless than this.
But even here the memory of some little prayer you have been taught,
which promises a Morning after the Night, comes to your throbbing brain;
and its murmur on your fevered lips, as you breathe it, soothes like a
caress of angels, and woos you to smiles and sleep.
As the days pass, you grow stronger; and Frank comes in to tell you of
the school, and that your old tormentor has been expelled; and you grow
into a strong friendship with Frank, and you think of yourselves as a
new Damon and Pythias, and that you will some day live together in a
fine house, with plenty of horses, and plenty of chestnut-trees. Alas,
the boy counts little on those later and bitter fates of life, which
sever his early friendships like wisps of straw!
At other times, with your eye upon the sleek, trim figure of the Doctor,
and upon his huge bunch of watch-seals, you think you will some day be a
Doctor; and that with a wife and children, and a respectable gig, and
gold watch, with seals to match, you would needs be a very happy fellow.
And with such fancies drifting on your thought, you count for the
hundredth time the figures upon the curtains of your bed; you trace out
the flower-wreaths upon the paper-hangings of your room; your eyes rest
idly on the cat playing with the fringe of the curtain; you see your
mother sitting with her needle-work beside the fire; you watch the
sunbeams, as they drift along the carpet, from morning until noon; and
from noon till night you watch them playing on the leaves, and dropping
spangles on the lawn; and as you watch--you dream.
III.
_Boy Sentiment._
Weeks and even years of your boyhood roll on, in the which your dreams
are growing wider and grander,--even as the Spring, which I have made
the type of the boy-age, is stretching its foliage farther and farther,
and dropping longer and heavier shadows on the land.
Nelly, that sweet sister, has grown into your heart strangely; and you
think that all they write in their books about love cannot equal your
fondness for little Nelly. She is pretty, they say; but what do you care
for her prettiness? She is so good, so kind, so watchful of all your
wants, so willing to yield to your haughty claims!
But, alas! it is only when this sisterly love is lost forever,--only
when the inexorable world separates a family, and tosses it upon the
waves of fate to wide-lying distances, perhaps to graves,--that a man
feels, what a boy can never know,--the disinterested and abiding
affection of a sister.
All this that I have set down comes back to you long afterward, when
you recall with tears of regret your reproachful words, or some swift
outbreak of passion.
Little Madge is a friend of Nelly's,--a mischievous, blue-eyed hoiden.
They tease you about Madge. You do not of course care one straw for her,
but yet it is rather pleasant to be teased thus. Nelly never does this;
oh no, not she. I do not know but in the age of childhood the sister is
jealous of the affections of a brother, and would keep his heart wholly
at home, until, suddenly and strangely, she finds her own wandering.
But after all Madge is pretty, and there is something taking in her
name. Old people, and very precise people, call her Margaret Boyne. But
you do not: it is only plain Madge; it sounds like her, very rapid and
mischievous. It would be the most absurd thing in the world for you to
like her, for she teases you in innumerable ways: she laughs at your big
shoes, (such a sweet little foot as she has!) and she pins strips of
paper on your coat-collar; and time and again she has worn off your hat
in triumph, very well knowing that you--such a quiet body, and so much
afraid of her--will never venture upon any liberties with her gypsy
bonnet.
You sometimes wish in your vexation, as you see her running, that she
would fall and hurt herself badly; but the next moment it seems a very
wicked wish, and you renounce it. Once she did come very near it. You
were all playing together by the big swing; (how plainly it swings in
your memory now!) Madge had the seat, and you were famous for running
under with a long push, which Madge liked better than anything
else;--well, you have half run over the ground when, crash! comes the
swing, and poor Madge with it! You fairly scream as you catch her up.
But she is not hurt,--only a cry of fright, and a little sprain of that
fairy ankle; and as she brushes away the tears and those flaxen curls,
and breaks into a merry laugh,--half at your woe-worn face, and half in
vexation at herself,--and leans her hand (such a hand!) upon your
shoulder, to limp away into the shade, you dream your first dream of
love.
But it is only a dream, not at all acknowledged by you; she is three or
four years your junior,--too young altogether. It is very absurd to talk
about it. There is nothing to be said of Madge, only--Madge! The name
does it.
It is rather a pretty name to write. You are fond of making capital M's;
and sometimes you follow it with a capital A. Then you practise a little
upon a D, and perhaps back it up with a G. Of course it is the merest
accident that these letters come together. It seems funny to you--very.
And as a proof that they are made at random, you make a T or an R before
them, and some other quite irrelevant letters after it.
Finally, as a sort of security against all suspicion, you cross it
out,--cross it a great many ways, even holding it up to the light to see
that there should be no air of intention about it.
----You need have no fear, Clarence, that your hieroglyphics will be
studied so closely. Accidental as they are, you are very much more
interested in them than any one else.
----It is a common fallacy of this dream in most stages of life, that a
vast number of persons employ their time chiefly in spying out its
operations.
Yet Madge cares nothing about you, that you know of. Perhaps it is the
very reason, though you do not suspect it then, why you care so much for
her. At any rate she is a friend of Nelly's, and it is your duty not to
dislike her. Nelly too, sweet Nelly, gets an inkling of matters,--for
sisters are very shrewd in suspicions of this sort, shrewder than
brothers or fathers,--and, like the good, kind girl that she is, she
wishes to humor even your weakness.
Madge drops in to tea quite often: Nelly has something _in particular_
to show her, two or three times a week. Good Nelly! perhaps she is
making your troubles all the greater. You gather large bunches of grapes
for Madge--because she is a friend of Nelly's--which she doesn't want at
all, and very pretty bouquets, which she either drops or pulls to
pieces.
In the presence of your father one day you drop some hint about Madge
in a very careless way,--a way shrewdly calculated to lay all
suspicion,--at which your father laughs. This is odd; it makes you
wonder if your father was ever in love himself.
You rather think that he has been.
Madge's father is dead, and her mother is poor; and you sometimes dream
how--whatever your father may think or feel--you will some day make a
large fortune, in some very easy way, and build a snug cottage, and have
one horse for your carriage and one for your wife, (not Madge, of
course--that is absurd,) and a turtleshell cat for your wife's mother,
and a pretty gate to the front yard, and plenty of shrubbery; and how
your wife will come dancing down the path to meet you,--as the Wife does
in Mr. Irving's "Sketch-Book,"--and how she will have a harp in the
parlor, and will wear white dresses with a blue sash.
----Poor Clarence, it never occurs to you that even Madge may grow fat,
and wear check aprons, and snuffy-brown dresses of woollen stuff, and
twist her hair in yellow papers! Oh, no, boyhood has no such dreams as
that!
I shall leave you here in the middle of your first foray into the world
of sentiment, with those wicked blue eyes chasing rainbows over your
heart, and those little feet walking every day into your affections. I
shall leave you, before the affair has ripened into any overtures, and
while there is only a sixpence split in halves, and tied about your neck
and Maggie's neck, to bind your destinies together.
If I even hinted at any probability of your marrying her, or of your not
marrying her, you would be very likely to dispute me. One knows his own
feelings, or thinks he does, so much better than any one can tell him.
IV.
_A Friend made and Friend lost._
To visit, is a great thing in the boy calendar;--not to visit this or
that neighbor,--to drink tea, or eat strawberries, or play at
draughts,--but to go away on a visit in a coach, with a trunk, and a
great-coat, and an umbrella--this is large!
It makes no difference that they wish to be rid of your noise, now that
Charlie is sick of a fever: the reason is not at all in the way of your
pride of visiting. You are to have a long ride in a coach, and eat a
dinner at a tavern, and to see a new town almost as large as the one you
live in; and you are to make new acquaintances. In short, you are to see
the world: a very proud thing it is to see the world!
As you journey on, after bidding your friends adieu, and as you see
fences and houses to which you have not been used, you think them very
odd indeed: but it occurs to you that the geographies speak of very
various national characteristics, and you are greatly gratified with
this opportunity of verifying your study. You see new crops too, perhaps
a broad-leaved tobacco-field, which reminds you pleasantly of the
luxuriant vegetation of the tropics, spoken of by Peter Parley, and
others.
As for the houses and barns in the new town, they quite startle you with
their strangeness: you observe that some of the latter, instead of
having one stable-door have five or six,--a fact which puzzles you very
much indeed. You observe further that the houses many of them have
balustrades upon the top, which seems to you a very wonderful adaptation
to the wants of boys who wish to fly kites, or to play upon the roof.
You notice with special favor one very low roof, which you might climb
upon by a mere plank, and you think the boys whose father lives in that
house are very fortunate boys.
Your old aunt, whom you visit, you think, wears a very queer cap, being
altogether different from that of the old nurse, or of Mrs.
Boyne,--Madge's mother. As for the house she lives in, it is quite
wonderful. There are such an immense number of closets, and closets
within closets, reminding you of the mysteries of "Rinaldo Rinaldini."
Beside which there are immensely curious bits of old furniture--so black
and heavy, and with such curious carving!--and you think of the old
wainscot in the "Children of the Abbey". You think you will never tire
of rambling about in its odd corners, and of what glorious stories you
will have to tell of it when you go back to Nelly and Charlie.
As for acquaintances, you fall in the very first day with a tall boy
next door, called Nat, which seems an extraordinary name. Besides, he
has travelled; and as he sits with you on the summer nights under the
linden-trees, he tells you gorgeous stories of the things he has seen.
He has made the voyage to London; and he talks about the ship (a real
ship) and starboard and larboard, and the spanker, in a way quite
surprising; and he takes the stern-oar in the little skiff, when you row
off in the cove abreast of the town, in a most seaman-like way.