Читать книгу The Gentleman from Everywhere - James Henry Foss - Страница 9

It seems but yesterday, although more than a half century ago, that I, a puny boy, stood on the hilltop and looked for the first time upon this, the earliest home of which I have any vivid recollection. It was a fair scene of rustic tranquillity, where a contented mind might delight to spend a lifetime mid hum of bees and low of kine.

Along the eastern horizon's rim loomed the blue sea beyond the sandy dunes of old Plum Island; the lazy river born in babbling brooks and bubbling springs flowing languidly mid wooded islands, and picturesque stacks of salt hay, representing the arduous toil of farmers and dry-as-dust fodder for reluctant cows. Nearer, the two church spires of the little village, striving to lift the sordid minds of the natives from earthly clods to the clouds, and where beckoning hands strove vainly to inspire them with heavenly hopes; around them, glistening in the sunlight, the marble slabs where sleep the rude forefathers of the hamlet, some mute inglorious Miltons who came from England in the early sixties, whose tombstones are pierced by rifle bullets fired at the maraudering red skins. These are the cities of the dead, far more populous than the town of the living.

Nearer, the willowy brook that turns the mill; to the south the dense pine woods, peopled in our imaginations, with fairy elves, owls, and hobgoblins—now, alas, owing to the rapacity of the sawmills, naught but a howling wilderness of stumps and underbrush.

Directly below me, stands our half-century old house with its eaves sloping to the ground, down which generations of boys had ruined their pants in hilarious coasting; near by, the ancient well-swipe, and the old oaken bucket which rose from the well; beyond this, of course, as usual, the piggery and hennery to contaminate the water and breed typhoid fever, and in the house cellar, the usual dampness from the hillside to supply us all with rheumatism and chills.

There existed apparently in the early dawn of the nineteenth century, an unwritten law which required the farmers to violate all the laws of sanitation, and then to ascribe all ills the flesh is heir to, to the mysterious will of an inscrutable Providence whose desire it was to make the heart better by the sorrows of the countenance, and to save the soul from hell by the punishment of the body. Vegetables were allowed to rot in the cellars, and to make everybody sick with their noxious odors so that we might not be too much wedded to this transitory existence. Pork, beans, and cabbage must be devoured in enormous quantities just before going to bed for the purpose of inspiring midnight groans and prayers to be delivered from the pangs of the civil war in the inner man.

This moralizing is inspired by the pessimism of disenchanted age; but on that beautiful morning of the long ago, naught occurred to me save the wedlock of earth and heaven: I was near to nature's heart, listening to the ecstatic songs of the robins, the orioles and sweetest of all the bobolink.

"Oh, winged rapture, feathered soul of spring:

Blithe voice of woods, fields, waters, all in one,

Pipe blown through by the warm, mild breath of June,

Shepherding her white flocks of woolly clouds,

The bobolink has come, and climbs the wind

With rippling wings that quiver not for flight

But only joy, or yielding to its will

Runs down, a brook of laughter through the air."

After the charm of the novelty of the scene had vanished, I descended from my perch to explore this sleepy hollow: the barn door hung suspended on a single hinge, like a bird with but one unbroken wing to soar upon. The swallows twittered their love-songs under the eaves; chipmunks scolded my intrusion and threw nuts at my head from the beams; a lone, lorn hen proclaimed her triumph over a new laid egg, and then, with fiery eyes, assaulted me with profanity as I filled my hat with her choicest treasures. A litter of pigs scampered away, wedging themselves into a hole in the wall, and hung there kicking and squealing, while their indignant mother chased me up a ladder where she hurled at me the vilest imprecations; a solitary Phoebe bird wailed out her plaintive "pee wee, pee wee, pee whi itt," and a newly-married pair of sandpipers chanted their song of the sea on the edge of a mud puddle in the yard.

At last the infuriated sow went to liberate her wedged-in offspring, leaving me to flee to the house where I cooked my eggs and some ancient potatoes in the ashes of a fire smoldering in the wide old fireplace. I have since eaten royal dinners in palatial hotels, but nothing has ever tasted half as good as this extemporized lunch of my boyhood.

Here the rest of the family found me later when they came bringing their household goods; here I might have laid, broad and deep, the foundations of a useful life, had I possessed even a modicum of the stick-to-itiveness so essential to success.

A limited amount of discontent is a powerful stimulus to more strenuous endeavor; but when you have intensity without continuity of mental action, beware of imitating my example of progressing along the lines of the least resistance; for if you do you will never attain to that persistency of effort which can come only from overcoming obstacles.

When my father gave me a moderate task of weeding onions, I soon became tired of crawling on hands and knees under a scorching sun, inundating the earth with perspiration and tears, so I substituted a hoe for fingers, tearing up onions with the weeds that I might the sooner secure unlimited rheumatism by bathing in the brook. Had my father given me what he earnestly desired, and what I richly deserved—a sound spanking, and more weeding to do—I might have developed much needed perseverance, but spanking was never allowed by my fond mother, and I became a shirk.

I was set to picking berries to replenish the family larder; but this soon became monotonous, and I appropriated the old grain-sieve, placing it beside the bushes, and pounding the huckleberries into it with a stick; the result was a heterogeneous conglomeration of worms, leaves, bugs, and crushed berries; but I succeeded in eliminating the refuse by throwing the whole mass into a tub of water, and skimming off the risings. I would then descant to buyers upon the freshness of the berries wet with the dews of heaven, but my ruse was soon discovered, and people refused to purchase such mucilaginous pulp.

Our widowed hired woman was possessed of a baby, and I was assigned the task of rocking the cradle; but I soon sighed for the apple blossoms and songs of birds—we had no English sparrows then—so I drove a nail into the cradle, tied to it the clothes-line, and went out of doors and began pulling at the cord. Soon agonizing screams were heard, and baby was found on the floor with the cradle pounding on top of him.

I was sent to drive home the cows from pasture, but left the task to the dog, who chased them over the wall into the corn-field where they devastated the crop, and ruined the milk by devouring green apples, while I, skylarking in a neighbor's pasture, was treed by an angry bull, who kept me in the branches until I caught a violent cold and became for weeks a family burden.

I was set to milking the cows, but I tied their tails to the beams, applied a lemon-squeezer to their udders until everybody was aroused by the bellowings of the infuriated beasts, and the milk and myself were found carpeting the dirty floor.

At last all patience was exhausted, and as I was born on Sunday, and was good for nothing else my parents, good, pious church-members, concluded I must become a minister, consequently they sent me to school. School! What memories come back to us over the arid wastes of life at the very mention of this magic word! There is the place where immortal minds are filled with loathing at the very sight of books, or where the torch of learning is kindled, which burns on with ever-increasing brightness forever more, and when I think of some of the teachers of my youth I am reminded of what the wise pastor said to a "stupid lunk-head" who had conceived the preposterous idea that he was called to be a preacher. "What, you be a minister?"

"Yes," said the dunce, "are we not commanded in the holy book to preach the gospel to every critter?"

"Verily," was the reply; "but every critter is not commanded to preach the gospel."

So long as percentages obtained after "cramming" for examinations are the criterions which decide the accepting or rejecting of candidates for teaching positions, we must expect "critters" for the school guides of our children, who, like some of my own tutors, will

"Ram it in, cram it in—

Children's heads are hollow;

Rap it in, tap it in—

Bang it in, slam it in

Ancient archaeology,

Aryan philology,

Prosody, zoology,

Physics, climatology,

Calculus and mathematics,

Rhetoric and hydrostatics.

Stuff the school children, fill up the heads of them,

Send them all lesson-full home to the beds of them;

When they are through with the labor and show of it,

What do they care for it, what do they know of it?"