The winter evenings of the farmer-boy in New England used not to be so
gay as to tire him of the pleasures of life before he became of age. A
remote farmhouse, standing a little off the road, banked up with sawdust
and earth to keep the frost out of the cellar, blockaded with snow,
and flying a blue flag of smoke from its chimney, looks like a besieged
fort. On cold and stormy winter nights, to the traveler wearily dragging
along in his creaking sleigh, the light from its windows suggests a
house of refuge and the cheer of a blazing fire. But it is no less a
fort, into which the family retire when the New England winter on the
hills really sets in.
The boy is an important part of the garrison. He is not only one of the
best means of communicating with the outer world, but he furnishes half
the entertainment and takes two thirds of the scolding of the family
circle. A farm would come to grief without a boy on it, but it is
impossible to think of a farmhouse without a boy in it.
“That boy” brings life into the house; his tracks are to be seen
everywhere; he leaves all the doors open; he hasn't half filled
the wood-box; he makes noise enough to wake the dead; or he is in a
brown-study by the fire and cannot be stirred, or he has fastened a grip
into some Crusoe book which cannot easily be shaken off. I suppose that
the farmer-boy's evenings are not now what they used to be; that he has
more books, and less to do, and is not half so good a boy as formerly,
when he used to think the almanac was pretty lively reading, and the
comic almanac, if he could get hold of that, was a supreme delight.
Of course he had the evenings to himself, after he had done the “chores”
at the barn, brought in the wood and piled it high in the box, ready to
be heaped upon the great open fire. It was nearly dark when he came from
school (with its continuation of snowballing and sliding), and he
always had an agreeable time stumbling and fumbling around in barn and
wood-house, in the waning light.
John used to say that he supposed nobody would do his “chores” if he
did not get home till midnight; and he was never contradicted. Whatever
happened to him, and whatever length of days or sort of weather was
produced by the almanac, the cardinal rule was that he should be at home
before dark.
John used to imagine what people did in the dark ages, and wonder
sometimes whether he wasn't still in them.
Of course, John had nothing to do all the evening, after his
“chores,”--except little things. While he drew his chair up to the table
in order to get the full radiance of the tallow candle on his slate
or his book, the women of the house also sat by the table knitting and
sewing. The head of the house sat in his chair, tipped back against the
chimney; the hired man was in danger of burning his boots in the fire.
John might be deep in the excitement of a bear story, or be hard at
writing a “composition” on his greasy slate; but whatever he was doing,
he was the only one who could always be interrupted. It was he who must
snuff the candles, and put on a stick of wood, and toast the cheese,
and turn the apples, and crack the nuts. He knew where the fox-and-geese
board was, and he could find the twelve-men-Morris. Considering that
he was expected to go to bed at eight o'clock, one would say that the
opportunity for study was not great, and that his reading was rather
interrupted. There seemed to be always something for him to do, even
when all the rest of the family came as near being idle as is ever
possible in a New England household.
No wonder that John was not sleepy at eight o'clock; he had been flying
about while the others had been yawning before the fire. He would like
to sit up just to see how much more solemn and stupid it would become as
the night went on; he wanted to tinker his skates, to mend his sled, to
finish that chapter. Why should he go away from that bright blaze, and
the company that sat in its radiance, to the cold and solitude of his
chamber? Why didn't the people who were sleepy go to bed?
How lonesome the old house was; how cold it was, away from that great
central fire in the heart of it; how its timbers creaked as if in the
contracting pinch of the frost; what a rattling there was of windows,
what a concerted attack upon the clapboards; how the floors squeaked,
and what gusts from round corners came to snatch the feeble flame of
the candle from the boy's hand. How he shivered, as he paused at the
staircase window to look out upon the great fields of snow, upon the
stripped forest, through which he could hear the wind raving in a kind
of fury, and up at the black flying clouds, amid which the young moon
was dashing and driven on like a frail shallop at sea. And his teeth
chattered more than ever when he got into the icy sheets, and drew
himself up into a ball in his flannel nightgown, like a fox in his hole.
For a little time he could hear the noises downstairs, and an occasional
laugh; he could guess that now they were having cider, and now apples
were going round; and he could feel the wind tugging at the house, even
sometimes shaking the bed. But this did not last long. He soon went away
into a country he always delighted to be in: a calm place where the
wind never blew, and no one dictated the time of going to bed to any one
else. I like to think of him sleeping there, in such rude surroundings,
ingenious, innocent, mischievous, with no thought of the buffeting he is
to get from a world that has a good many worse places for a boy than
the hearth of an old farmhouse, and the sweet, though undemonstrative,
affection of its family life.
But there were other evenings in the boy's life, that were different
from these at home, and one of them he will never forget. It opened
a new world to John, and set him into a great flutter. It produced a
revolution in his mind in regard to neckties; it made him wonder if
greased boots were quite the thing compared with blacked boots; and he
wished he had a long looking-glass, so that he could see, as he walked
away from it, what was the effect of round patches on the portion of his
trousers he could not see, except in a mirror; and if patches were
quite stylish, even on everyday trousers. And he began to be very much
troubled about the parting of his hair, and how to find out on which
side was the natural part.
The evening to which I refer was that of John's first party. He knew the
girls at school, and he was interested in some of them with a different
interest from that he took in the boys. He never wanted to “take it
out” with one of them, for an insult, in a stand-up fight, and he
instinctively softened a boy's natural rudeness when he was with them.
He would help a timid little girl to stand erect and slide; he would
draw her on his sled, till his hands were stiff with cold, without a
murmur; he would generously give her red apples into which he longed to
set his own sharp teeth; and he would cut in two his lead-pencil for
a girl, when he would not for a boy. Had he not some of the beautiful
auburn tresses of Cynthia Rudd in his skate, spruce-gum, and wintergreen
box at home? And yet the grand sentiment of life was little awakened
in John. He liked best to be with boys, and their rough play suited
him better than the amusements of the shrinking, fluttering, timid, and
sensitive little girls. John had not learned then that a spider-web is
stronger than a cable; or that a pretty little girl could turn him round
her finger a great deal easier than a big bully of a boy could make him
cry “enough.”
John had indeed been at spelling-schools, and had accomplished the feat
of “going home with a girl” afterwards; and he had been growing into the
habit of looking around in meeting on Sunday, and noticing how Cynthia
was dressed, and not enjoying the service quite as much if Cynthia was
absent as when she was present. But there was very little sentiment in
all this, and nothing whatever to make John blush at hearing her name.
But now John was invited to a regular party. There was the invitation,
in a three-cornered billet, sealed with a transparent wafer: “Miss C.
Rudd requests the pleasure of the company of,” etc., all in blue ink,
and the finest kind of pin-scratching writing. What a precious document
it was to John! It even exhaled a faint sort of perfume, whether of
lavender or caraway-seed he could not tell. He read it over a hundred
times, and showed it confidentially to his favorite cousin, who had
beaux of her own and had even “sat up” with them in the parlor. And from
this sympathetic cousin John got advice as to what he should wear and
how he should conduct himself at the party.