Читать книгу Revisiting the Earth - James Langdon Hill - Страница 24

Table of Contents

Among playthings my specialty was marbles. I specialized on three lines, blue clays, real agates, the handsomest of all marbles, and big glass center-pieces. I knew well just what I must hold to dominate the market and just how many of the common sort a boy would give for an alley taw, or tor, as we used to pronounce it. Taw is the line or limit from which the players shoot. Others would have returned from the visit to the old time school-house to the hotel. I knew a merchant well, who being delighted with his entertainment in Lucerne did not think it worth while to go out to the leaf-embowered pool to see Thorwaldsen's Lion. Naples has such outstanding beauty that the visitor is ready to "die" and thus omits any visit to Vesuvius, the most famous elevation in the world. But I went from the school-ground to the place, where the soil was once beaten to the hardness of a floor, by the village boys, who, each of them, placed one or two marbles in a ring and in turn shot at them and he who obtained most of them by beating them out of the ring was the winner. We were happy

"To kneel and draw

The chalky ring and knuckle down at taw."

Here in this trunk were my old club skates which I used to sharpen myself and tie on with strings and leathern thongs, and here was an old ball which, I, having first ravelled the yarn, wound myself and cut the cover out of an old boot top in the good democratic days of town-ball or of "Two-old-cat," when we chose up, for the ins, and did not leave the playing to a few, and half of them from out of town, when a "foul" and "daisy-cutter" were unknown terms. While one dear, sweet, not-to-be-valued-with-the-Gold-of-Ophir object remained among them, it has been hard for me to "put away childish things." Most people are extremely like one's self, and choosing among relics would be supposed to first take one of the sandals of Empedocles, fabled to have been cast forth by Aetna. This father of rhetoric, statesman, prophet, and reformer threw himself into that volcano to disappear and leave no trace and thus establish a belief that he was so beloved of the gods that he was translated. But the volcano would not stand for this imposition and threw out one of his sandals. But I am not interested in such a relic when it is compared with a little token that tells of the deep desire there is in every heart to be remembered.