JOYS AND SORROWS OF SCHOOL-DAYS.
It was the custom in R----, and is now to quite an extent elsewhere,
to elect as school committee those especially noted for their
ignorance and unfitness for the duties, perhaps to keep them out of
the almshouse, or to educate them by the absorption process while
hearing pupils recite. These men were paid two dollars for each call
they made at schools, consequently they "called" early and often,
especially when the school ma'ams were young and pretty.
Here, as elsewhere, there was always a great fight at town-meetings
for these school board positions, especially when the school-book
agents became numerous, for these committees could secure from said
agents unlimited free books, and get high prices for all their
spavined horses, dried up cows, and sick pigs in return for voting for
rival text-books.
As the committees were often unequal to the task of making out a
course of study, pupils selected what studies they pleased, as
suicidal a policy as it would be if, when you were sick and went
to the physician for relief, he should point to a lot of different
medicines, and tell you to pay your money, and take your choice.
As there was a cramming machine close by called an academy, whose sole
object was to push students into Harvard College, of course the common
schools must be "crammers" for the academy, and the result was, that
we had no educational institutions whatever, and mental dyspepsia
was well-nigh universal, a smattering of everything, a knowledge of
nothing. As well might we pour food into the mouth by the peck, pound
it down with a ramrod, and expect healthful physical growth.
Hundreds of poor parents are working themselves to death to send their
children to such schools with a view to elevating them to "higher
positions" than they themselves occupy, and soon we will have none to
do the honest physical labor of life, but the world will be full of
kid-gloved hangers on for soft jobs, who regard working with the hands
to be a disgrace.
Well do I remember going to a neighbor, whose farm was mortgaged for
all it was worth to buy finery and pay tuition bills in said academy,
and begging for the services of the daughter to help my sick mother. I
was refused with insult and scorn. "Do you think," shrieked the irate
virago, "that I will allow my daughter who is studying French, Latin,
Greek, and German to wash your dirty dishes?" I was driven from the
house at the point of the boot. That daughter is to-day shaking and
twitching with St. Vitus's dance, a physical and mental wreck from
overstudy, causing nervous exhaustion and despair.
Hundreds of girls throughout our country who might have been good
housekeepers, are to-day useless invalids, made so by what is called
"higher education." Hundreds of boys, who might have become successful
farmers and mechanics, are now dissipating in beer shops while waiting
in vain for lily-fingered positions as bookkeepers or teachers. In
scores of New England towns, one man, employed to fill the heads of a
reluctant few with the dead languages, receives more salary than all
the other teachers combined.
It seems to require a surgical operation to get the fact through our
thick heads, that our school system demands radical reform from top to
bottom to the end that hands as well as heads may receive technical
bread-and-butter, practical education.
I was a victim of this elective-study craze, and with the usual
stupidity displayed by a child when left to decide what he shall do,
I chose Latin as my principal study in this common district school,
because I fancied it smacked of erudition.
The teacher, knowing no more than myself of the language, set me to
committing to memory the whole of Andrews' Latin Grammar. I gained
the important information that "_sto, fido, confido, assuesco_, and
_preditus_" govern the ablative, and other valuable lore; but when I
asked the teacher where the Latin vernacular came in, she replied that
that would come to me later--that I must "open my mouth and shut my
eyes while she gave me something to make me wise." A solemn awe not
unmixed with envy pervaded the schoolroom as I, parrot-like, rattled
off this valueless jargon of a people dead for hundreds of years.
As this study possessed no interest for me, I naturally dropped into
mischief, and being caught one day with a distorted picture of the
teacher on my slate with the following suggestive poem lines beneath
it:--"Savage by name and savage by nature, I hope the Lord will take
your breath before you lick us all to death,"--I was chased about the
room by the angry pedagoguess until I leaped through the back window,
and the hole made in the bank by my head is pointed out to this day as
a warning to recalcitrant pupils.
[Illustration: "Floating 'Neath the Trees of Mill River."]
I refused to return to this temple of wisdom, and digging a hole into
the haymow, secreted myself therein, pulling the hole in after me.
Here I would remain during school hours, watching through a crevice
cut in the side of the barn, my father who made the air resound
with threats of what he would do if I did not at once return to my
education mill. Here I was often joined by a congenial spirit, and
we played cards which were regarded as the emissaries of Satan by my
religious parents; then we would sally forth with masked faces and
wooden guns, and inspired by dime novels, overthrow the walls of
children's playhouses, throw rocks against the schoolhouse, bully the
small boys almost into fits, hook the neighbors' eggs, corn, melons
and apples, which we devoured at leisure in a hidden hut in the woods.
When the spirit moved, we would "swipe" a neighbor's skiff and go
floating and paddling beneath the overarching trees of Mill River,
lazily watching the muskrats sliding down the banks and sporting
in the water or building their huts of mud, sticks and leaves; the
fish-hawk, plunging beneath the surface and emerging with a struggling
victim in his talons which he bore away to a tree-top to tear and eat;
then a timid wood duck casting suspicious glances as it glided across
a cove, secreting her little ones in the swamp; then a crane standing
on one long leg motionless as a statue, watching with half-closed eyes
for a mud-eel for its dinner.
Then we would imitate those animal murderers, by catching some
fish which we broiled to satisfy our carnivorous appetites. It was
delightful to float in that tiny boat, gazing through the green canopy
of leaves at the great white clouds sailing over like ships upon
the sea, listening to the ecstatic trilling of the orioles, and the
flute-like melodies of the mockingbird of the north.
We would watch the delicate traceries of the water gardens through
which the mild-eyed stickle-backs sailed serenely, having implicit
confidence in the protection of their sharp spinacles, presenting to
all enemies an impervious array of bayonets; the shark-like pickerel
endeavoring to swallow every living thing; the lazy barvel,
everlastingly sucking his sustenance from the animalculae around him;
the turtles, snapping at everything in sight with impunity relying
upon the impregnable defense of their coats-of-mail.
On one of these occasions we were aroused from our Arcadian dream by
a frightful roar, and the destruction of all things seemed at hand. A
young cyclone had struck the fire over which we had cooked our fish,
fanning it into a furious conflagration. We climbed a tall oak, and
soon, as far as the eye could reach, all the hills and woodlands
seemed wrapped in flames. Frantic farmers were seen flagellating the
excited oxen and horses, who, with tails in air, were dragging the
ploughs, making furrows around the houses and barns, which were nearly
all located in pastures rendered dry as tinder by that extraordinary
summer's heat.
The cause of this disturbance was traced to us, and we barely escaped
coats of tar and feathers at the hands of the infuriated neighbors,
by the pleadings of our ever-loving mothers who promised we should go
every day to the academy and sin no more.
We were thoroughly sobered by our dangers, and commenced our careers
at this ancient institution founded by the first Lieutenant-Governor
of Massachusetts. Here reigned supreme a fiery autocrat, a fervent
admirer of Greek and Latin, a cordial hater of mathematics--my weakest
point--a D.D., LL.D., who was determined to drive everybody into
college. He had heard of my escapades, and was fully prepared to lay
upon my devoted head all the pranks of a restless fun-loving crowd of
students.
On the first day of my initiation, while the professor was invoking
the Divine blessing, the sight of a big dinner pail belonging to the
fat boy in front of me, proved too much of a temptation, and I hurled
it down the aisle, scattering pork, pickles, doughnuts, and so forth
in its wake, and ending with a loud bang against the platform. Of
course I was the suspect, and cutting off prayer abruptly, down he
rushed, and banged my head till I saw more stars than ever shone in
heaven.
My academy "_alma mater_" has graduated but few who have--
"Climbed fame's ladder so high
From the round at the top they have stepped to the sky,"
and it is sad to recall that many of the most gifted, acquired
in college secret societies the alcohol habit, and now sleep in
drunkards' graves.
Brilliant Charlie, my chum, who mastered languages and sciences as
easy as "rolling off a log." I saw him last summer, a wreck--wine and
bad women did it. The idolized son of pious parents, whose youth was
surrounded at home with the halo of Bible and prayer; but like Esau,
he "sold his birthright for a mess of pottage" and afterwards "found
no space for repentance, though he sought it earnestly and with many
tears."
It seems but yesterday that he and I were enjoying a game of
"pickknife," lacerating the top of a new desk, when in rushed the
"D.D." with his feet encased in the thinnest of slippers and with
which he gave me a kick which broke his toe, then clasping it in his
hand, danced on one leg, whooping unconsciously cuss word ejaculations
till we shrieked with laughter; then he bumped our heads together
until my big brother shook the dominie-pedagogue as a dog would a rat,
and threatened that if he ever struck my head again he would drown him
in the horsepond.
Dear, good brother, he always was, and is now my guardian angel,
although now he comes from heaven to shield me, for I am the last on
earth of my father's family.
Alas, how many of those academy classmates, each of whom was then the
soul of honor and the heart of truth, drowned their intellects in the
flowing bowl. _Eheu, Eheu, fugaces anni labuntur!_ But surely it was
only this morning oh, beautiful, star-eyed Harry, that you and I,
wearied with the frantic vain attempts of the unmathematical professor
to elucidate by appalling triangles and hieroglyphics on the
blackboard the perplexities of cube root, ousted each other from the
seat, sprawling upon the floor, and were chased by the LL.D. out of
doors, never to return until we apologized and promised "to do so no
more."
Although I had been as "prone to mischief" as the sparks to fly
upward--ringing the academy bell at midnight by means of a string tied
to the tongue, bringing the professor in his night shirt from his bed
to chase me, covering his chimney with a board till he was well-nigh
suffocated with smoke, hitching his horse to a boat in Mill River,
pillaging his coop and scattering his hens to the four winds of
heaven, crawling under his bed at night and nearly frightening him to
death with unearthly groans, catching him by the legs as he jumped out
and leaving him kicking on the floor as I leaped through the window
amid applauding students--I was appointed assistant teacher at the
beginning of my senior year.
Then at once great dignity was assumed by me which, being resented by
my former cronies, I secured order by licking them at recess one by
one, though I suffered from many "nasal hemorrhages" while engaged
in fistic rough and tumbles to assert my authority; I conquered, but
secured many black eyes and bedewed the campus with much "claret" for
the good of the order.
At length we were declared sufficiently crammed to enter college,
and on graduation day I discoursed in stentorian tones upon "True
Heroism," amid the applause of the fair sex, and convulsed the
audience with laughter by prancing, in my enthusiastic eloquence, upon
the sore toe of one of the reverend trustees on the stage who fairly
yelled with pain: "_Sic transit gloria mundi_."
Among the sins of my youth, which I confess with "shame and confusion
of face" were the pranks played by me and some fellow-sinners upon our
nearest neighbors. These worthies consisted of an old man and what
appeared to be his much older daughter, the two most unaccountable
cranks that dame nature ever presented to my notice.
The father was possessed of the insane hallucination that he was the
greatest poet that ever lived. Often I have seen him drop his hoe in
the potato field, and run for the house so that you could hardly see
his heels for dust, looking for all the world like an animated pair of
tongs. As he expressed it, "an idee had struck him," and all mankind
would die of intellectual starvation unless he at once embodied said
"idee" in a poem.
His greatest delight was to gather about him of an evening a crowd
of young folks and read to us his preposterous "lines." On such
occasions, some of us would quietly steal away up into his garret, and
roll down over the stairs, with a thunderous uproar, a huge gilded
ball which had decorated a post outside a tavern where he formerly
dispensed much "fire water," to the impoverishment of his customers
and to the enrichment of himself.
Then our host, with much profanity, would rush to the rescue armed
with an ancient bayonet and a fish trumpet which, like the bugle-horn
of Roderic Dhu, summoned all the neighbors to his assistance; but some
sympathizing friend would always upset the table holding the candle so
that they could never decide who were the guilty absentees.
At other times while the great poet was singing his sweetest songs, we
would seize his ancient roosters by their tails, and while they were
making night hideous with their lamentations, the angry couple would
bombard the hen-roosts with shovels, hoes and other weapons in the
hope of slaughtering the marauders. These pleasantries made much fun
for us, and varied the monotony of the lives of our entertainers.
The ancient daughter firmly believed that she possessed the fatal gift
of beauty, although her elongated face was of the thickness and color
of sole leather, and one eye was hideously closed, while the other was
of spotless green. It was wonderful to see her cork-screw curls and
languishing smirks when the young men took turns in pretending to
court her, while an admiring crowd gazed at their amours through the
window.
I can recall but two of the greatest of the poems of this man who
delighted in the full belief that Shakespeare could not "hold a candle
to him." These I take pleasure in handing down through the ages.
No. 1.
"A youth of parts, a witty blade
To college went and progress made
Sounding round his logick;
The prince of hell wide spread his net,
And caught him by one lucky hit
And dragged him down to tophet."
No. 2.
"In the year 1801
I, Enoch B----, was born
Without any shirt on."