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 appet.i.tes. 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 inst.i.tution founded by the first Lieutenant-Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns till we shrieked with laughter; then he b.u.mped 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 cla.s.smates, 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 "p.r.o.ne 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 a.s.sistant teacher at the beginning of my senior year.
Then at once great dignity was a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sert 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 s.e.x, 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 a.s.sistance; 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 h.e.l.l 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."
CHAPTER V.
CAREER OF A DOMINIE-PEDAGOGUE.
Dear old fathers and mothers! Of all the people in this world, they look through the rubbish of our imperfections, and see in us the divine ideal of our natures, love in us not perhaps the men we are, but the angels we may be in the evolution of the "sweet by and by,"
like the mother of St. Augustine, who, even while he was wild and reckless, beheld him standing clothed in white a ministering priest at the right hand of G.o.d.
They see through us as Michel Angelo saw through the block of marble, declaring that an angel was imprisoned within it. They are soul artists. They can never acknowledge our faults, only our divine possibilities; so, when I left the academy, my parents, with strong yearning and with tears, entreated me to become a minister. I had not the heart to disappoint them and as one hypnotized, on a Sabbath morning during that summer, the clergyman immersed me in the river, while a wondering crowd watched from the sh.o.r.e. The very waters seemed to protest, for as I gasped for breath at the cold backward plunge, I imbibed copious draughts of the briny deep, and was well-nigh strangled. I survived the ordeal, and that afternoon preached in the church to nearly the entire population of the town on the "Final state of the impenitent dead."
Oh, the terrors of this my first sermon, horrors to preacher as well as to "preachees." As I sat in the pulpit beside our pastor, listening to the tremulous tones of the organ which followed the prayer, and gazing at the sea of upturned faces, they seemed taunting me with all the wild pranks of my boyhood, and crying "Oh fool and hypocrite."
All my schoolmates were there shaking with ill-concealed merriment.
Every pore poured forth perspiration, and my hair seemed to stand on end like quills upon the back of the fretful porcupine. I thought of the experience of the first sermon by a theological student which I had recently read in a comic paper, and I trembled lest history was to repeat itself.
This theologue, like many of his cloth, was possessed of the insane impression that he was gifted with the sublime inspiration of eloquence, and being invited to preach on his return to the old home for vacation, he selected the somewhat startling text "and the dumb a.s.s opened his mouth and spake." On this elevating theme he wrote a sensational sermon and committed it to memory in order that he might electrify his audience with eye power as well as by verbal flow of soul. The awful day arrived, but when the young apostle arose to preach, stage fright banished from his mind all but the thrilling text.
"My friends," said he, "we are informed by the holy book that this dumb a.s.s opened his mouth and spake." Then pulling his hair in desperation, he repeated the text several times, when he was interrupted by the disgusted pastor, who jumped to his feet and shouted:
"Well, friends, as the dumb a.s.s has nothing to say, let us pray."
This awful example well nigh converted me into another specimen of this historic animal, but at last the pent up cave of the winds was opened, and a gust of sound came forth which so stunned the listening ears of my hearers that they dazedly mistook it for eloquence.
I painted to them the picture of the incorrigible sinner "on flames of burning brimstone tossed, forever, oh forever lost." I did not intend to be a hypocrite; but drifted with the revival tide.
I discoursed often that summer to audiences that crowded the church to the doors. I was but fifteen years of age, and was called: "The wonderful boy preacher."
One Sunday the village crank came to hear me, honoring the occasion by wearing a new stove-pipe hat of prodigious proportions, which he deposited on the seat as he arose during prayer. When the amen was p.r.o.nounced, perhaps paralyzed by the fervor, he sat down upon said stove-pipe, crushing it to a pie, then leaped from the wreck uttering a blasphemous yell which convulsed the crowd with laughter, and thus broke up the meeting without the benediction and pa.s.sing of the contribution-box, much to the delight of all who "steal their preaching" on all possible occasions.
I soon found that however anxious people were to save their souls, they were unwilling to part with their "filthy lucre" to buy through tickets to the celestial city, consequently, that winter being impecunious, I was constrained to accept the offer of my cousin, the "prudential committee," to teach the district school in Barrington, N.H., for the generous stipend of $14 per month and what board I could secure by going from house to house of my pupils.
On arriving there I was ushered into the imposing presence of the Free-will Baptist minister for examination; then I was made aware that although I had plenty of Greek and Latin, I was woefully uninstructed in the rudiments of our mother tongue, and was saved only by the fact that my cousin was the largest contributor to the dominie"s salary.
The reverend superintendent had prepared an appalling array of "posers" in accordance with the laws of the state, but my cousin at my urgent request, a.s.sured him that I was an alumnus of one of the greatest inst.i.tutions in the world, that I was a clergyman of his own denomination, that it was a waste of time to examine so distinguished a scholar, that dinner was ready, and the hungry dominie was seduced to the table where he partook of so much solid and liquid good cheer, that he quite forgot his official duty, and gave me the required certificate: thus I was saved from utter destruction.
In this isolated country town the coming of the schoolmaster in his tour of boarding around, was the great social event of the year to each family in this Barrington, so called from the numerous children which the mothers bear. The fatted pig was invariably killed in his honor, and he was regaled with fried pork, roast pig, broiled hog, sausages, and doughnuts reeking with swine fat _ad nauseam_, galore.
The teacher was thus made bilious, dyspeptic and so ugly, that he tried to get even with his carnivorous tormentors by making it "as hot" as possible for their offspring.
At the opening of the school, this long and lank fifteen year old pedagogue faced sixty pupils from the "a, b, c, tot" to the brawny twenty-one-year-older, spoiling for a fight. When I a.s.sayed to take a seat, the half-sawed-off hind legs of the chair gave way, and I fell heels in air upon the dirty floor amid the yells and cat-calls of this tumultuous army; then the stalwart ringleader came forward to throw me into the snow bank, where my predecessor was nearly smothered with his head under the snow and his feet uplifted to heaven.