 CHAPTER XV The Heart of New England It is a wonder that every New England boy does not turn out a poet or a missionary or a peddler, most of them used to. There is everything in the heart of the New England Hills to feed the imagination of the boy and excite his longing for strange countries. I scarcely know what the subtle influence is that forms him and attracts him in the most fascinating and aromatic of all lands, and yet urges him away from all the sweet delights of his home to become a romer in literature and in the world, a poet and a wanderer. There is something in the soil and the pure air, I suspect, that promises more romance than is forthcoming, that excites the imagination without satisfying it and begets the desire of adventure. And the prosaic life of the sweet home does not at all correspond to the boy's dreams of the world. In the good old days, I am told, the boys on the coast ran away and became sailors, the country boys waited till they grew big enough to be missionaries, and then they sailed away and met the coast boys in foreign ports. John used to spend hours in the top of a slender hickory tree that a little detached itself from the forest which crowned the brow of the steep and lofty pasture behind his home. He was sent to make war on the bushes that constantly encroached upon the pasture land, but John had no hostility to any growing thing, and a very little bushwhacking satisfied him. When he had grubbed up a few laurels and young tree sprouts he was wont to retire into his favorite post of observation and meditation. Perhaps he fancied that the wide-swing stem to which he clung was the mast of a ship, that the tossing forest behind him was the heaving waves of the sea, and that the wind which moaned over the woods and murmured in the leaves, and now and then sent him a wide circuit in the air, as if he had been a blackbird on the tip-top of a spruce, was an ocean gale. What life and action and heroism there was to him in the multitudinous roar of the forest, and what an eternity of existence in the monologue of the river which brawled far, far below him over its wide stony bed. How the river sparkled and danced and went on, now in a smooth amber current, now fretted by the pebbles, but always with that continuous, busy song. John never knew that noise to cease, and he doubted not if he stayed here a thousand years that same loud murmur would fill the air. On it went, under the wide spans of the old wooden-covered bridge, swirling around the great rocks on which the pier stood, spreading away below in shallows, and taking the shadows of a row of maples that lined the green shore. Save this roar, no sound reached him, except now and then the rumble of a wagon on the bridge, or the muffled far-off voices of some chanced passers on the road. Seen from this high perch, the familiar village, sending its brown roofs and white spires up through the green foliage, had a strange aspect, and was like some town in a book, say, a village nestled in the Swiss mountains or something in Bohemia, and there, beyond the purple hills of Bolzra, and not so far as the stony pastures of Zoha, whether John had helped drive the cults in young stock in the spring, might be perhaps Jerusalem itself. John had himself once been to the land of Canaan with his grandfather when he was a very small boy, and he had once seen an actual no-mistake Jew, a mysterious person, with uncut beard and long hair, who sold scythe-snaths in that region, and about whom there was a rumour that he was once caught and shaved by the indignant farmers, who apprehended in his long locks a contempt of the Christian religion. Oh, the world had vast possibilities for John. Away to the south, up a vast basin of forest, there was a notch in the horizon and an opening in the line of woods where the road ran. Through this opening John imagined an army might appear, perhaps British, perhaps Turks, and banners of red and of yellow advance, and a cannon-wheel about and point its long nose and open on the valley. He fancied the army after this salute, winding down the mountain road, deploying in the meadows and giving the valley to pillage and to flame, in which event his position would be an excellent one for observation and for safety. While he was in the height of this engagement, perhaps the horn would be blown from the back porch, reminding him that it was time to quit cutting brush and go for the cows, as if there were no better use for a warrior and a poet in New England than to send him for the cows. John knew a boy, a bad enough boy, I dare say, who afterwards became a general in the war and went to Congress and got to be a real governor, who also used to be sent to cut brush in the back pastures and hated it in his very soul, and by his wrong conduct forecast what kind of a man he would be. This boy, as soon as he had cut about one brush, would seek for one of several holes in the ground, and he was familiar with several, in which lived a white and black animal that must always be nameless in a book, but an animal quite capable of the most pungent defense of himself. This young aspirant to Congress would cut a long stick with a little crotch in the end of it and run it into the hole, and when the crotch was punched into the fur and skin of the animal, he would twist the stick round till it got a good grip on the skin, and then he would pull the beast out, and when he got the white and black just out of the hole so that his dog could seize him, the boy would take to his heels and leave the two to fight it out, content to scent the battle afar off. And this boy, who was in training for public life, would do this sort of thing all the afternoon, and when the son told him that he had spent long enough time cutting brush, he would industriously go home as innocent as anybody. There are a few such boys as this nowadays, and that is the reason why the New England Pastures are so much overgrown with brush. John himself preferred to hunt the pugnacious Woodchuck. He bore a special grudge against this clover-eater beyond the usual hostility that boys feel for any wild animal. One day on his way to school, a Woodchuck crossed the road before him, and John gave chase. The Woodchuck scrambled into an orchard and climbed a small apple-tree. John thought this a most cowardly and unfair retreat and stood under the tree and taunted the animal and stoned it. Thereupon the Woodchuck dropped down on John and seized him by the leg of his trousers. John was both enraged and scared by this dastardly attack. The teeth of the enemy went through the cloth and met, and there he hung. John then made a pivot of one leg and whirled himself around, swinging the Woodchuck in the air until he shook him off. But in his departure the Woodchuck carried away a large piece of John's summer trousers leg. The boy never forgot it, and whenever he had a holiday he used to expend an amount of labor and ingenuity in the pursuit of Woodchucks that would have made his fortune in any useful pursuit. There was a hill-pasture down on one side of which ran a small brook, and this pasture was full of Woodchuck holes. It required the assistance of several boys to capture Woodchuck. It was first necessary by patient watching to ascertain that the Woodchuck was at home. When one was seen to enter his burrow, then all the entries to it except one, there are usually three, were plugged up with stones. A boy and a dog were then left to watch the open hole while John and his comrades went to the brook and began to dig a canal to turn the water into the residence of the Woodchuck. This was often a difficult feat of engineering and a long job. Often it took more than half a day of hard labor with shovel and hoe to dig the canal, but when the canal was finished and the water began to pour into the hole, the excitement began. How long would it take to fill the hole and drown out the Woodchuck? Sometimes it seemed as if the hole was a bottomless pit, but sooner or later the water would rise in it and then there was sure to be seen the nose of the Woodchuck keeping itself on a level with the rising flood. It was piteous to see the anxious look of the hunted, half-drowned creature as it came to the surface and caught sight of the dog. There the dog stood at the mouth of the hole, quivering with excitement from his nose to the tip of his tail, and behind him were the cruel boys dancing with joy and setting the dog on. The poor creature would disappear in the water in terror, but he must breathe and out would come his nose again, nearer the dog each time. At last the water ran out of the hole as well as in and the soaked beast came with it and made a desperate rush, but in a trice the dog had him and the boy stood off in a circle with stones in their hands to see what they called fair play. They maintained perfect neutrality so long as the dog was getting the best of the Woodchuck, but if the latter was likely to escape they interfered in the interest of peace and the balance of power and killed the Woodchuck. This is a boy's notion of justice. Of course he'd no business to be a Woodchuck and unspeakable Woodchuck. I used the word aromatic in relation to the New England soil. John knew very well all its sweet aromatic pungent and medicinal products, and liked to search for the scented herbs and the wild fruits and exquisite flowers. But he did not then know, and few do know, that there is no part of the globe where the subtle chemistry of the earth produces more that is agreeable to the senses than a New England hill pasture and the green meadow at its foot. The poets have succeeded in turning our attention from it to the comparatively barren Orient as the land of sweet-smelling spices and odorous gums, and it is indeed a constant surprise that this poor and stony soil elaborates and grows so many delicate and aromatic products. John, it is true, did not care much for anything that did not appeal to his taste and smell and delight in brilliant color, and he trod down the exquisite ferns and the wonderful mosses without compunction. But he gathered from the crevices of the rocks, the Columbine, and the Eglentine, and the blue hair-bell. He picked the high-flavored alpine strawberry, the blueberry, the boxberry, wild currants and gooseberries, and fox grapes. He brought some armfuls of the pink and white laurel and the wild honeysuckle. He dug the roots of the fragrant sassafras and of the sweet flag. He ate the tender leaves of the wintergreen and its red berries. He gathered the peppermint and the spearmint. He gnawed the twigs of the black birch. There was a stout fern which he called break, which he pulled up and found that the soft end tasted good. He dug the amber gum from the spruce tree and liked to smell, though he could not chew, the gum of the wild cherry. It was his melancholy duty to bring home such medicinal herbs for the garret as the gold thread, the tansy and the loathsome bone set, and he laid in for the winter like a squirrel, stores of beech nuts, hazelnuts, hickory nuts, chestnuts, and butternuts. But that which lives most vividly in his memory and most strongly draws him back to the New England Hills is the aromatic sweet fern. He likes to eat its spicy seeds and to crush in his hands its fragrant leaves. Their odor is the unique essence of New England. Chapter 16 of Being a Boy by Charles Dudley Warner. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Mark Penfold. Chapter 16. John's Revival The New England country boy of the last generation never heard of Christmas. There was no such day in his calendar. If John ever came across it in his reading he attached no meaning to the word. If his curiosity had been aroused and he had asked his elders about it he might have got the dim impression that it was a kind of pop-ish holiday, the celebration of which was about as wicked as card-playing or being a Democrat. John knew a couple of desperately bad boys who were reported to play seven up in a barn on the haymow and the enormity of this practice made him shudder. He had once seen a pack of greasy playing cards and it seemed to him to contain the quintessence of sin. If he had desired to defy all divine law and outrage all human society he felt that he could do it by shuffling them and he was quite right. The two bad boys enjoyed in stealth their scandalous past time because they knew it was the most wicked thing they could do. If it had been as sinless as playing marbles they wouldn't have cared for it. John sometimes drove past a brown tumbled down farmhouse whose shiftless inhabitants it was said were card-playing people and it is impossible to describe how wicked that house appeared to John. He almost expected to see its shingles stand on end. In the old New England one could not in any other way so express his contempt of all holy and orderly life as by playing cards for amusement. There was no element of Christmas in John's life any more than there was of Easter and probably nobody about him could have explained Easter and he escaped all the demoralization attending Christmas gifts. Indeed he never had any presence of any kind either on his birthday or any other day. He expected nothing that he did not earn or make in the way of trade with another boy. He was taught to work for what he received. He even earned as I said the extra holidays of the day after the fourth and the day after Thanksgiving. Of the free grace and gifts of Christmas he had no conception. The single and melancholy association he had with it was the quaking hymn which his grandfather used to sing in a cracked and quavering voice, while shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground. The glory that shone around at the end of it, the doleful voice always repeating, and glory shone around, made John as miserable as hark from the tombs. It was all one dreary expectation of something uncomfortable. It was, in short, religion. You'd got to have it sometime, that John believed, but it lay in his unthinking mind to put off the hark from the tombs enjoyment as long as possible. He experienced a kind of delightful wickedness in indulging his dislike of hymns and of Sunday. John was not a model boy, but I cannot exactly define in what his wickedness consisted. He had no inclination to steal nor much to lie, and he despised meanness and stinginess and had a shovelless feeling toward little girls. Probably it never occurred to him that there was any virtue in not stealing and lying, for honesty and veracity were in the atmosphere about him. He hated work, and he got mad easily. But he did work, and he was always ashamed when he was over his fit of passion. In short, you couldn't find a much better wicked boy than John. When the Revival came, therefore, one summer, John was in a quandary. Sunday meeting in Sunday school he didn't mind. They were a part of regular life and only temporarily interrupted a boy's pleasures. But when there began to be evening meetings at the different houses, a new element came into affairs. There was a kind of solemnity over the community and a seriousness in all faces. At first, these twilight assemblies offered a little relief to the monotony of farm life, and John liked to meet the boys and girls, and to watch the older people coming in, dressed in their second best. I think John's imagination was worked upon by the sweet and mournful hymns that were discordantly sung in the stiffle parlors. There was a suggestion of Sunday, and sanctity too, in the odor of caraway seed that pervaded the room. The windows were wide open also, and the scent of June roses came in, with all the languishing sounds of a summer night. All the little boys had a scared look, but the little girls were never so pretty and demure, as in this their susceptible seriousness. If John saw a boy who did not come to the evening meeting but was wandering off with his sling down the meadow looking for frogs, maybe, that boy seemed to him a monster of wickedness. After a time, as the meetings continued, John fell also under the general impression of fright and seriousness. All the talk was of getting religion, and he heard over and over again that the probability was if he did not get it now, he never would. The chance did not come often, and if this offer was not improved, John would be given over to hardness of heart. His obstinacy would show that he was not one of the elect. John fancied that he could feel his heart hardening, and he began to look with a wistful anxiety into the faces of the Christians to see what were the visible signs of being one of the elect. John put on a good deal of a manner that he didn't care, and he never admitted his disquiet by asking any questions or standing up in meeting to be prayed for. But he did care. He heard all the time that all he had to do was to repent and believe, but there was nothing that he doubted, and he was perfectly willing to repent if he could think of anything to repent of. It was essential, he learned, that he should have a conviction of sin. This he earnestly tried to have. Other people, no better than he, had it, and he wondered why he couldn't have it. Boys and girls whom he knew were under conviction, and John began to feel not only panicky but lonesome. Cynthia Rudd had been anxious for days and days, and not able to sleep at night, but now she had given herself up and found peace. There was a kind of radiance in her face that struck John with awe, and he felt that now there was a great gulf between him and Cynthia. Everybody was going away from him, and his heart was getting harder than ever. He couldn't feel wicked all he could do. And there was Ed Bates, his intimate friend, though older than he, a wailing, noisy kind of boy, who was under conviction and sure he was going to be lost, how John envied him, and pretty soon Ed experienced religion. John anxiously watched the change in Ed's face when he became one of the elect, and a change there was, and John wondered about another thing. Ed Bates used to go trout fishing with a tremendously long pole in a meadowbrook near the river, and when the trout didn't bite right off, Ed would get mad, and as soon as one took hold he would give an awful jerk, sending the fish more than three hundred feet into the air, and landing it in the bushes the other side of the meadow, crying out, Go, Darnie, I'll learn ye, and John wondered if Ed would take the little trout out any more gently now. John felt more and more lonesome as one after another if his playmates came out and made a profession. Cynthia, she too was older than John, sat on Sunday in the singer's seat. Her voice, which was going to be a contralto, had a wonderful patos in it for him, and he heard it with a heartache. There she is, thought John, singing away like an angel in heaven, and I am left out. During all his afterlife a contralto voice was to John one of his most bitter and heart-ringing pleasures. It suggested the immaculate scornful, the melancholy unattainable. If ever a boy honestly tried to work himself into a conviction of sin, John tried, and what made him miserable was that he couldn't feel miserable when everybody else was miserable. He even began to pretend to be so. He put on a serious and anxious look like the others. He pretended he didn't care for play. He refrained from chasing chipmunks and snaring suckers, the songs of birds and the bright vivacity of the summer, time that used to make him turn handsprings, smote him as a discordant levity. He was not a hypocrite at all, and he was getting to be alarmed that he was not alarmed at himself. Every day and night he heard that the spirit of the Lord would probably soon quit striving with him and leave him out. The phrase was that he would grieve away the Holy Spirit. John wondered if he was not doing it. He did everything to put himself in the way of conviction, was constant at the evening meetings, were a grave face, refrained from play, and tried to feel anxious. At length he concluded that he must do something. One night as he walked home from a solemn meeting, at which several of his little playmates had come forward, he felt that he could force the crisis. He was alone on the sandy road. It was an enchanting summer night. The stars danced overhead, and by his side the broad and shallow river ran over its stony bed with a loud but soothing murmur that filled all the air within treaty. John did not then know that it's saying, but I go on forever. Yet there was in it for him something of the solemn flow of the eternal world. When he came in sight of the house, he knelt down in the dust by a pile of rails, and prayed. He prayed that he might feel bad and be distressed about himself. As he prayed he heard distinctly, and yet not as a disturbance, the multitudinous croaking of the frogs by the meadow-spring. It was not discordant with his thoughts. It had in it a melancholy patos as if it were a kind of call to the unconverted. What there is in this sound that suggests the tenderness of spring, the despair of the summer night, the desolateness of young love. Years after it happened to John to be at twilight at a railway station on the edge of the Ravenna marshes. A little way over the purple plain he saw the darkening towers and heard the sweet bells of Imola. The holy Pontiff Pius IX was born at Imola, and passed his boyhood in that serene and moist region. As the train waited, John heard from miles of marshes round about the evening song of millions of frogs, louder and more melancholy and intriguing than the vesper call of the bells. And instantly his mind went back for the association of sound is as subtle as that of odor. To the prayer, years ago, by the roadside, and the plaintiff appeal of the unheeded frogs, and he wondered if the little pope had not heard the like importunity, and perhaps when he thought of himself as a little pope, associated his conversion with this plaintive sound. John prayed, but without feeling any worse, and then went desperately into the house and told the family that he was in an anxious state of mind. This was joyful news to the sweet and pious household, and the little boy was urged to feel that he was a sinner, to repent, and to become that night a Christian. He was prayed over, and told to read the Bible, and put to bed with the injunction to repeat all the texts of Scripture and hymns he could think of. John did this, and said over and over the few texts he was master of, and tossed about in a real discontent now, for he had a dim notion that he was playing the hypocrite a little. But he was sincere enough in wanting to feel, as the other boys and girls felt, that he was a wicked sinner. He tried to think of his evil deeds, and one occurred to him, indeed it often came to his mind. It was a lie, a deliberate awful lie that never injured anybody but himself, John knew he was not wicked enough to tell a lie to injure anybody else. This was the lie. One afternoon at school, just before John's class was to recite in geography, his pretty cousin, a young lady he held in great love and respect, came in to visit the school. John was a favorite with her, and she had come to hear him recite. As it happened, John felt shaky in the geographical lesson of that day, and he feared to be humiliated in the presence of his cousin. He felt embarrassed to that degree that he couldn't have bounded Massachusetts. So he stood up and raised his hand and said to the school, Please ma'am, I've got the stomach ache, may I go home? And John's character for truthfulness was so high, and even this was ever a reproach to him, that his word was instantly believed and he was dismissed without any medical examination. For a moment John was delighted to get out of school so early, but soon his guilt took all the light out of the summer sky and the pleasantness out of nature. He had to walk slowly, without a single hop or jump as became a diseased boy. The sight of a woodchuck at a distance from his well-known hole tempted John, but he restrained himself lest somebody should see him and know that chasing a woodchuck was inconsistent with the stomach ache. He was acting a miserable part, but it had to be gone through with. He went home and told his mother the reason he had left school, but he added that he felt some better now. The some didn't save him. Genuine sympathy was lavished on him. He had to swallow a stiff dose of nasty, picra, the horror of all childhood, and he was put in bed immediately. The world never looked so pleasant to John, but to bed he was forced to go. He was excused from all chores, he was not even to go after the cows. John said he thought he ought to go after the cows, much as he hated the business usually, he would now willingly have wandered over the world after cows. And for this heroic offer in the condition he was, he got credit for a desire to do his duty, and this unjust confidence in him added to his torture. And he had intended to set his hooks that night for eels. His cousin came home and sat by his bedside and condoled with him. His school-ma'am had sent word how sorry she was for him. John was such a good boy. Oh, this was dreadful. He groaned in agony. Besides he was not to have any supper, it would be very dangerous to eat a morsel. The prospect was appalling. Never was there such a long twilight. Never before did he hear so many sounds outdoors that he wanted to investigate. Being ill without any illness was a horrible condition. And he began to have real stomach ache now, and it ached because it was empty. John was hungry enough to have eaten the New England primer. But by and by sleep came, and John forgot his woes in dreaming that he knew where Madagascar was, just as easy as anything. It was this lie that came back to John the night he was trying to be affected by the revival, and he was very much ashamed of it and believed he would never tell another. But then he fell thinking whether with the piqura and the going to bed in the afternoon and the loss of his supper he had not been sufficiently paid for it, and in this unhopeful frame of mind he dropped off in sleep. And the truth must be told that in the morning John was no nearer to realizing the terrors he desired to fill, but he was a conscientious boy and would do nothing to interfere with the influences of the season. He not only put himself away from them all, but he refrained from doing almost everything that he wanted to do. There came at that time a newspaper, a secular newspaper which had in it a long account of the Long Island races in which the famous horse Lexington was a runner. John was fond of horses, he knew about Lexington, and he had looked forward to the result of this race with keen interest. But to read the account of it how he felt might destroy his seriousness of mind and in all reverence and simplicity he felt it, be a means of grieving away the Holy Spirit. He therefore hid away the paper in a table drawer, intending to read it when the revival should be over. Weeks after when he looked for the newspaper it was not to be found and John never knew what time Lexington made nor anything about the race. This was to him a serious loss, but by no means so deep as another feeling that remained with him, for when his little world returned to its ordinary course and long after, John had an uneasy apprehension of his own separateness from other people in his insensibility to the revival. Perhaps the experience was a damage to him, and it is a pity that there was no one to explain that religion for a little fellow like him is not a scheme. CHAPTER XVII. Every boy who is good for anything is a natural savage. The scientists who want to study the primitive man and have so much difficulty in finding one anywhere in this sophisticated age couldn't do better than to devote their attention to the common country boy. He has the primal vigorous instincts and impulses of the African savage without any of the vices inherited from a civilization long ago decayed or developed in an unrestrained barbaric society. You want to catch your boy young and study him before he has either virtues or vices in order to understand the primitive man. Every New England boy desires, or did desire a generation ago before children were born sophisticated with a large library and with the word culture written on their brows, to live by hunting, fishing, and war. The military instinct, which is the special mark of barbarism, is strong in him. It arises not alone from his love of fighting, for the boy is naturally as cowardly as the savage, but from his fondness for display. The same that a corporal or a general feels in decking himself in tinsel and tawdry colors and strutting about in view of the female sex. Half the pleasure in going out to murder another man with a gun would be wanting if one did not wear feathers and gold lace and stripes on his pantaloons. The law also takes this view of it and will not permit men to shoot each other in plain clothes. And the world also makes some curious distinctions in the art of killing. To kill people with arrows is barbarous. To kill them with smooth bores and flintlock muskets is semi-civilized. To kill them with breech-loading rifles is civilized. That nation is the most civilized which has the appliances to kill the most of another nation in the shortest time. This is the result of six thousand years of constant civilization. By and by, when the nations cease to be boys, perhaps they will not want to kill each other at all. Some people think the world is very old, but here is an evidence that it is very young and in fact has scarcely yet begun to be a world. Then the volcanoes have done spouting and the earthquakes are quaked out and you can tell what land is going to be solid and keep its level twenty-four hours and the swamps are filled up and the deltas of the great rivers like the Mississippi and the Nile become terra firma and men stop killing their fellows in order to get their land and other property. Then perhaps there will be a world that an angel wouldn't weep over. Now one half the world are employed in getting ready to kill the other half, some of them by marching about in uniform and the others by hard work to earn money to pay taxes to buy uniforms and guns. John was not naturally very cruel and it was probably the love of display quite as much as a fighting that led him into a military life, for he in common with all his comrades had other traits of the savage. One of them was the same passion for ornament that induces the African to wear anklets and bracelets of hide and of metal and to decorate himself with tufts of hair and to tattoo his body. In John's day there was a rage at school among the boys for wearing bracelets woven of the hair of the little girls. Some of them were wonderful specimens of braiding and twist. These were not captured in war but were sentimental tokens of friendship given by the young maidens themselves. John's own hair was kept so short, as became a warrior, that you couldn't have made a bracelet out of it or anything except a paintbrush. But the little girls were not under military law and they willingly sacrificed their tresses to decorate the soldiers they esteemed. As the Indian is honored in proportion to the scalps he can display, at John's school the boy was held in highest respect who could show the most hair trophies on his wrist. John himself had a variety that would have pleased a mohawk, fine and coarse and of all colors. There were the flaxen, the faded straw, the glossy black, the lustrous brown, the dirty yellow, the undecided auburn, and the fiery red. Perhaps his pulse beat more quickly under the red hair of Cynthia Red than on account of all the other wristlets put together. It was a sort of gold-tried-in-the-fire color to John, and burned there with a steady flame. Now that Cynthia had become a Christian, this band of hair seemed a more sacred if less glowing possession, for all detached hair will fade in time. And if he had known anything about saints, he would have imagined that it was a part of the areole that always goes with a saint. But I am bound to say that while John had a tender feeling for this red string, his sentiment was not that of the man who becomes entangled in the meshes of a woman's hair, and he valued rather the number than the quality of these elastic wristlets. John burned with as real a military ardor as ever inflamed the breast of any slaughterer of his fellows. He liked to read of war, of encounters with the Indians, of any kind of wholesale killing in glittering uniform, to the noise of the terribly exciting fife and drum which maddened the combatants and drowned the cries of the wounded. In his future he saw himself a soldier with plume and sword and snug-fitting decorated clothes, very different from his somewhat roomy trousers and country-cut roundabout made by Aunt Ellis, the village Taylorus, who cut out clothes not according to the shape of the boy, but to what he was expected to grow to, going where Gloria waited him. In his observation of pictures it was the common soldier who was always falling and dying, while the officer stood unharmed in the storm of bullets and waved his sword in a heroic attitude. John determined to be an officer. It is needless to say that he was an ardent member of the military company of his village. He had risen from the great of Corporal to that of First Lieutenant. The captain was a boy whose father was captain of the grown militia company and consequently had inherited military aptness and knowledge. The old captain was a flaming son of Mars, whose nose, militia, war, general training, and New England rum had painted with the color of glory and disaster. He was one of the gallant old soldiers of the peaceful days of our country, splendid in uniform, a martinette in drill, terrible in oaths, a glorious object when he marched at the head of his company of flintlocked muskets, with the American banner full high advanced, and the clamorous drum defying the world. In this he fulfilled his duties of citizen, faithfully teaching his uniformed companions how to march by the left leg and to get reeling drunk by sundown. Otherwise he didn't amount to much in the community. His house was unpainted, his fences were tumbled down, his farm was a waste, his wife wore an old gown to meeting to which the captain never went. But he was a good trout fisher, and there was no man in town who spent more time at the country store and made more shrewd observations upon the affairs of his neighbors. Although he had never been in an asylum any more than he had been in war, he was almost as perfect a drunkard as he was soldier. He hated the British, whom he had never seen as much as he loved rum from which he was never separated. The company which his son commanded, wearing his father's belt and sword, was about as effective as the old company, and more orderly. It contained from thirty to fifty boys, according to the pressure of chores at home. And it had its great days of parade and its autumn maneuvers like the general training. It was an artillery company which gave every boy a chance to wear a sword, and it possessed a small mounted cannon which was dragged about and limbered and unlimbered and fired to the imminent danger of everybody, especially of the company. In point of marching with all the legs going together and twisting itself up and untwisting breaking into single file for Indian fighting, and forming platoons, turning a sharp corner and getting out of the way of a wagon, circling the town pump, frightening horses, stopping short in front of the tavern, with ranks dressed in eyes right and left, it was the equal of any military organization I ever saw. It contained better than the big company, and I think it did more good in keeping alive the spirit of patriotism and desire to fight. Its discipline was strict. If a boy left the ranks to jab a spectator or make faces at a window or go for a striped snake, he was hollered at no end. It was altogether a very serious business. There was no levity about the hot and hard marching, and as boys have no humor, nothing ludicrous occurred. John was very proud of his office and of his ability to keep the rear ranks closed up and ready to execute any maneuver when the captain hollered, which he did continually. He carried a real sword which his grandfather had worn in many a militia campaign on the village green, the rust upon which John fancied was Indian blood. He had various red and yellow insignia of military rank sewed upon different parts of his clothes, and though his cocked hat was of pasteboard, it was decorated with gilding and bright rosettes, and floated a red feather that made his heart beat with martial fury whenever he looked at it. The effect of this uniform upon the girls was not a matter of conjecture. I think they really cared nothing about it, but they pretended to think it fine, and they fed the poor boy's vanity the weakness by which women govern the world. The exalted happiness of John in this military service, I dare say, was never equaled in any subsequent occupation. The display of the company in the village filled him with the loftiest heroism. There was nothing wanting but an enemy to fight, but this could only be had by half the company staining themselves with elderberry juice, and going into the woods as Indians to fight the artillery from behind trees with bows and arrows, or to ambush it and tomahawk the gunners. This, however, was made to seem very like real war. Traditions of Indian cruelty were still fresh in Western Massachusetts. Behind John's house in the orchard were some old slayed tombstones, sunken and leaning, which recorded the names of Captain Moses Rice and Phineas Arms, who had been killed by Indians in the last century while at work in the meadow by the river, and who slept there in the hope of the glorious resurrection. Phineas Arms' martial name was long since dust, and even the mortal part of the great Captain Moses Rice had been absorbed in the soil, and passed, perhaps, with the sap up into the old but still blooming apple trees. It was a quiet place where they lay, but they might have heard, if here they could, the loud continuous roar of the deer field, and the stirring of the long grass on that sunny slope. There was a tradition that years ago an Indian, probably the last of his race, had been seen moving along the crest of the mountain, and gazing down into the lovely valley which had been the favorite home of his tribe, upon the fields where he grew his corn, and the sparkling stream whence he drew his fish. John used to fancy at times, as he sat there, that he could see that red specter gliding among the trees on the hill, and if the tombstone suggested to him the trump of judgment, he could not separate it from the war-woop that had been the last sound in the era Phineas Arms. The Indian always preceded murder by the war-woop, and this was an advantage that the artillery had in the fight with the elderberry Indians. It was war and in time. If there was no war-woop, the killing didn't count. The artillery man got up and killed the Indian. The Indian usually had the worst of it. He not only got killed by the regulars, but he got whipped by the home-guard at night for staining himself and his clothes with the elderberry. But once a year the company had a superlative parade. This was when the military company from the north part of the town joined the villagers in a general muster. This was an infantry company, and not to be compared with that of the village in point of evolutions. There was a great and natural hatred between the north town boys in the center. I don't know why, but no contiguous African tribes could be more hostile. It was all right for one of either section to lick the other if he could, or for half a dozen to lick one of the enemy if they caught him alone. The notion of honor as of mercy comes into the boy only when he is pretty well grown. To some, neither ever comes. And yet there was an artificial military courtesy, something like that existing in the feudal age, no doubt, which put the meeting of these two rival and mutually detested companies on a high plane of behavior. It was beautiful to see the seriousness of this lofty and studied condescension on both sides. For the time everything was under martial law. The village company being the senior, its captain commanded the united battalion in the march, and this put John temporarily into the position of captain, with the right to march at the head and holler, a responsibility which realized all his hopes of glory. I suppose there has yet been discovered by man, no gratification like that of marching at the head of a column in uniform on parade, unless perhaps it is marching at their head when they are leaving a field of battle. John experienced all the thrill of this conspicuous authority, and I dare say that nothing in his later life has so exalted him in his own esteem. Certainly nothing has since happened that was so important as the events of that parade day seemed. He satiated himself with all the delights of war. CHAPTER XVIII. COUNTRY SCENES. It is impossible to say at what age a New England country boy becomes conscious that his trouser legs are too short and is anxious about the part of his hair and the fit of his woman-made roundabout. These harrowing thoughts come to him later then to the city lad. At least a generation ago he served along apprenticeship with nature only for a master, absolutely unconscious of the artificialities of life. But I do not think his early education was neglected, and yet it is easy to underestimate the influences that, unconsciously to him, were expanding his mind and nursing in him heroic purposes. There was the lovely but narrow valley with its rapid mountain stream. There were the great hills which he climbed only to see other hills stretching away to a broken and tempting horizon. There were the rocky pastures and the wide sweeps of forest through which the winter tempests howled upon which hung the haze of summer heat over which the great shadows of summer clouds traveled. There were the clouds themselves, shouldering up above the peaks, hurrying across the narrow sky, the clouds out of which the wind came and the lightning and the sudden dashes of rain. And there were days when the sky was ineffably blue and distant, a fathomless vault of heaven where the hen-hawk and the eagle poised on outstretched wings and watched for their prey. Can you say how these things fed the imagination of the boy who had few books and no contact with a great world? Do you think any city lad could have written Thanatopsis at eighteen? If you had seen John in his short and roomy trousers and ill-used straw hat picking his barefooted way over the rocks along the riverbank of a cool morning to see if an eel had got on, you would not have fancied that he lived in an ideal world, nor did he consciously. So far as he knew he had no more sentiment than a jackknife. Although he loved Cynthia Rudd devotedly and blushed scarlet one day when his cousin found a lock of Cynthia's flaming hair in the box where John kept his fish-hooks, spruce-gum, flag-root, tickets of standing at the head, gimlet, bilet-du in blue ink, a vile liquid in a bottle to make fish-bite and other precious possessions, yet Cynthia's society had no attractions for him comparable to a day's trout-fishing. She was, after all, only a single and a very undefined item in his general ideal world, and there was no harm in letting his imagination play about her illumined head. Since Cynthia had got religion and John had got nothing, his love was tempered with a little awe and a feeling of distance. He was not fickle, and yet I cannot say that he was not ready to construct a new romance in which Cynthia should be eliminated. Nothing was easier. Perhaps it was a luxurious traveling carriage drawn by two splendid horses in plated harness driven along the sandy road. There were a gentleman and a young lad on the front seat, and on the back seat a handsome, pale lady with a little girl beside her. Behind, on the rack with a trunk, was a colored boy, an imp out of a storybook. John was told that the black boy was a slave and that the carriage was from Baltimore. Here was a chance for a romance. Beauty, beauty, wealth, haughtiness, especially on the part of the slender boy on the front seat, here was an opening into a vast realm. The high-stepping horses and the shining harness were enough to excite John's admiration, but these were nothing to the little girl. His eyes had never before fallen upon that kind of girl. He had hardly imagined that such a lovely creature could exist. Was it the soft and dainty toilet? Was it the brown curls or the large, laughing eyes or the delicate, finely cut features? Or the charming little figure of this fairy-like person? Was this expression on her mobile face merely that of amusement at seeing a country boy? Then John hated her. On the contrary, did she see in him what John felt himself to be? Then he would go the world over to serve her. In a moment he was self-conscious. His trousers seemed to creep higher up his legs, and he could fill his very ankles blush. He hoped that she had not seen the other side of him, for, in fact, the patches were not of the exact shade of the rest of the cloth. The vision flashed by him in a moment, but it left him with a resentful feeling. Perhaps that proud little girl would be sorry some day when he had become a general or written a book or kept a store to see him go away and marry another. He almost made up his cruel mind on the instant that he would never marry her, however bad she might feel. And yet he couldn't get her out of his mind for days and days, and when her image was present, even Cynthia in the singer's seat on Sunday looked a little cheap and common. Poor Cynthia. Long before John became a general or had his revenge on the Baltimore girl, she married a farmer and was the mother of children, red-headed. And when John saw her years after, she looked tired and discouraged, as one who has carried into womanhood none of the romance of her youth. Fishing and dreaming, I think, were the best amusements John had. The middle pier of the long-covered bridge over the river stood upon a great rock, and this rock, which was known as the Swimming Rock, whence the boys on summer evenings dove into the deep pool by its side, was a favorite spot with John when he could get an hour or two from the everlasting chores. Making his way out to it over the rocks at low water with his fish-pole, there he was content to sit and observe the world, and there he saw a great deal of life. He always expected to catch the legendary trout which weighed two pounds and was believed to inhabit that pool. He always did catch horned dace and shiners which he despised, and sometimes he snared a monstrous sucker a foot and a half long, but in the summer the sucker is a flabby fish, and John was not thanked for bringing him home. He liked, however, to lie with his face close to the water and watch the long fishes panting in the clear depths, and occasionally he would drop a pebble near one to see how gracefully he would scut away with one wave of the tail into deeper water. Nothing fears the little brown boy. The yellow bird slants his wings, almost touches the deep water before him, and then escapes away under the bridge through the east with a glint of sunshine on his back. The fish-hawk comes down with a swoop, dips one wing, and, his prey having darted under a stone, is away again over the still hill, high soaring on even poised pinions, keeping an eye perhaps upon the great eagle which is sweeping the sky in widening circles. But there is other life. A wagon rumbles over the bridge, and the farmer and his wife jogging along do not know that they have startled a lazy boy into a momentary fancy that a thunder-shower is coming up. John can see as he lies there on a still summer day, with the fishes and the birds for company, the road that comes down the left bank of the river, a hot, sandy, well-traveled road, hidden from view here and there by trees and brushes. The chief point of interest, however, is an enormous sycamore tree by the roadside and in front of John's house. The house is more than a century old, and its timbers were hewed and squared by Captain Moses Rice, who lies in his grave on the hillside above it, in the presence of the red man who killed him with arrow and tomahawk some time after his house was set in order. The gigantic tree, struck with a sort of leprosy, like all its species, appears much older and, of course, has its tradition. They say that it grew from a green stake which the first land-surveyor planted there for one of his points of sight. John was reminded of it years after when he sat under the shade of the decrepit lime-tree in Freeburg, and was told that it was originally a twig, which the breathless and bloody messenger carried in his hand when he dropped exhausted in the square with the word victory on his lips, announcing thus the result of the glorious battle of Morat, where the Swiss in 1476 defeated Charles the Bold. Under the broad but scanty shade of the great button-ball tree, as it was called, stood an old watering trough with its half-decade penstock and well-worn spout pouring forever, cold, sparkling water into the overflowing trough. It is fed by a spring nearby, and the water is sweeter and colder than any in the known world, unless it be the well Zem Zem, as generations of people and horses which have drunk of it would testify if they could come back. And if they could file along this road again, what a procession there would be riding down the valley. Antiquated vehicles, rusty wagons adorned with the invariable buffalo robe even in the hottest days, lean and long favored horses, frisky cults, drying generation after generation, the sober and pious saints that passed this way to meeting and to mill. What a refreshment is that water-spout. All day long there are pilgrims to it, and John likes nothing better than to watch them. Here comes a grey horse drawing a buggy with two men, cattle-buyers, probably. Out jumps a man, down goes the check-rain. What a good draft the nag takes. Here comes a long-stepping trotter in a sulky, man in a brown linen coat and wide-awake hat, disillute, horsey-looking man. They turn up, of course. Ah, there is an establishment, he knows well, a sorrel horse and an old chase. The sorrel horse sensed the water afar off, and begins to turn up long before he reaches the trough, thrusting out his nose in anticipation of the coot sensation. No check to let that down, he plunges his nose in nearly to his eyes in his haste to get at it. Two maiden-ladies, unmistakably such, though they appear neither anxious nor aimless, within the scoop-top smile benevolently on the sorrel back. It is the deacon's horse, a meeting going nag with a sedate leisurely jog as he goes, and these are two of the Salt of the Earth, the bravet rank of the women who stand in wait, going down to the village's store to dicker. There come two men in a hurry, horse-driven up smartly and pulled up short, but as it is rising ground and the horse does not easily reach the water with the wagon pulling back, the nervous man in the buggy hitches forward on his seat, as if that would carry the wagon a little ahead. Next, lumber wagon with load of boards, horse wants to turn up, and driver switches him and cries, Galang! and the horse reluctantly goes by, turning his head wistfully towards the flowing spout. Ah, here comes an equipage strange to these parts, and John stands up to look. An elegant carriage and two horses, trunks strapped on behind, gentlemen and boy on front seat and two ladies on back seat, city people. The gentleman descends, unchecks the horses, wipes his brow, takes a drink at the spout, and looks around, evidently remarking upon the lovely view as he swings his handkerchief in an explanatory manner, judicious travelers. John would like to know who they are, perhaps they are from Boston, whence come all the wonderfully painted peddler's wagons drawn by six stalwart horses, which the driver, using no rain, controls with his long whip and cheery voice. If so, great is the condescension of Boston, and John follows them with an undefined longing as they drive away toward the mountains of Zohar. Here is a footman, justy and tired, who comes with lagging steps. He stops, removes his hat, as he should to such a tree, puts his mouth to the spout, and takes a long pull at the lively water, and then he goes on, perhaps to Zohar, perhaps to a worse place. So they come and go all the summer afternoon, but the great event of the day is the passing down the valley of the majestic stagecoach, the vast yellow-bodied rattling vehicle. John can hear a mile off the shaking of chains, traces and whiffle trees, and the creaking of its leathered braces as the great bulk swings along piled high with trunks. It represents to John, somehow, authority, government, the right of way. The driver is an autocrat, everybody must make way for the stagecoach. It almost satisfies the imagination this royal vehicle. One can go in it to the confines of the world, to Boston and to Albany. There were other influences that I dare say contributed to the boy's education. I think his imagination was stimulated by a band of gypsies who used to come every summer and pitch a tent on a little roadside patch of green turf by the riverbank not far from his house. It was shaded by elms and butternut trees, and a long spit of sand and pebbles ran out from it into the brawling stream. Probably there were not a very good kind of gypsy, although the story was that the men drank and beat the women. John didn't know much about drinking, his experience of it was confined to sweet cider, yet he had already set himself up as a reformer and joined the cold water band. The object of this band was to walk in a procession under a banner that declared, So here we pledge perpetual hate to all that can intoxicate and wear a badge with this legend and above it the device of a well-curb with a long sweep. It kept John and all the little boys and girls from being drunkards till they were 10 or 11 years of age, though perhaps a few of them died, meantime, from eating loaf cake and pie and drinking ice-cold water at the celebrations of the band. The gypsy camp had a strange fascination for John, mingled of curiosity and fear. Nothing more alien could come into the New England life than this tattered demalian band. It was hardly credible that there were actually people who lived outdoors, who slept in their covered wagon or under their tent and cooked in the open air. It was a visible romance transferred from foreign lands in the remote times of the storybooks, and John took these city thieves who were on their annual foray into the country, trading and stealing horses and robbing Henrys and cornfields. For the mysterious race who for thousands of years have done these same things in all lands by right of their pure blood and ancient lineage. John was afraid to approach the camp when any of the scowling and villainous men were lounging about, pipes in mouth, but he took more courage when only women and children were visible. The swarthy black-haired women and dirty calico-frocks were anything but attractive, but they spoke softly to the boy and told his fortune, and weadled him into bringing them any amount of cucumbers and green corn in the course of the season. In front of the tent were planted in the ground three poles that met together at the top whence depended a kettle. This was the kitchen, and it was sufficient. The fuel for the fire was the driftwood of the stream. John noted that it did not require to be sawed into stove lengths, and in short that the chores about this establishment were reduced to the minimum, and an older person than John might envy the free life of these wanderers who paid neither rent nor taxes, and yet enjoyed all the delights of nature. It seemed to the boy that affairs would go more smoothly in the world if everybody would live in this simple manner, nor did he then know or ever after find out why it is that the world permits only wicked people to be Bohemians. THE END OF CHAPTER XIX This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Mark Penfold. CHAPTER XIX A CONTRAST TO THE NEW ENGLAND BOY One evening at Vespers in Genoa, attracted by a burst of music from the swinging curtain at the doorway, I entered a little church much frequented by the common people. An unexpected and exceedingly pretty sight rewarded me. It was all souls' day. In Italy almost every day is set apart for some festival, or belongs to some saint or another, and I suppose that when leap year brings around the extra day there is a saint ready to claim the 29th of February. Whatever the day was to the elders, the evening was devoted to the children. The first thing I noticed was that the quaint old church was lighted up with innumerable wax tapers. An uncommon sight, for the darkness of a Catholic church in the evening is usually relieved only by a candle here and there, and by a blazing pyramid of them on the high altar. The use of gas is held to be a vulgar thing all over Europe and especially unfit for a church or an aristocratic palace. Then I saw that each taper belonged to a little boy or girl, and the groups of children were scattered all about the church. There was a group by every side altar and chapel, all the benches were occupied by knots of them, and there were so many circles of them seated on the pavement that I could with difficulty make my way among them. There were hundreds of children in the church, all dressed in their holiday apparel, and all intent upon the illumination, which seemed to be a private affair to each one of them. And not much effect had their tapers upon the darkness of the vast vaults above them. The tapers were little spiral coils of wax, which the children unrolled as fast as they burned, and when they were tired of holding them they rested them on the ground and watched the burning. I stood sometime by a group of a dozen seated in a corner of the church. They had masked all the tapers in the center and formed a ring about the spectacle, sitting with their legs straight out before them and their toes turned up. The light shone full in their happy faces, and made the group enveloped otherwise in darkness like one of Correggio's pictures of children or angels. Correggio was a famous Italian artist of the sixteenth century who painted cherubs like children who were just going to heaven, and children like cherubs who had just come out of it. But then he had the Italian children for models, and they get the knack of being lovely very young. An Italian child finds it as easy to be pretty as an American child to be good. One could not but be struck with the patience these little people exhibited in their occupation and the enjoyment they got out of it. There was no noise, all conversed in subdued whispers and behaved in the most gentle manner to each other, especially to the smallest, and there were many of them so small that they could only toddle about by the most judicious exercise of their equilibrium. I do not say this by way of reproof to any other kind of children. These little groups, as I have said, were scattered all about the church, and they made with their tapers little spots of light which looked in the distance very much like Correggio's picture which is at Dresden, the holy family at night, and the light from the divine child blazing in the faces of all the attendants. Some of the children were infants in the nurse's arms, but no one was too small to have a taper and to run the risk of burning its fingers. There is nothing that a baby likes more than a lighted candle, and the church has understood this longing in human nature and found means to gratify it by this festival of tapers. The groups do not all remain long in place, you may imagine. There is a good deal of shifting about, and I see little stragglers wandering over the church like fairies lighted by fireflies. Occasionally they form a little procession and march from one altar to another, their lights twinkling as they go. But all this time there is music pouring out of the organ loft at the end of the church and flooding all its spaces with its volume. In front of the organ is a choir of boys, led by a round-faced and jolly monk who rolls about as he sings, and lets the deep bass noise rumble about a long time in his stomach before he pours it out of his mouth. I can see the faces of all of them quite well, for each singer has a candle to light his music-book. And next to the monk stands the boy, the handsomest boy in the whole world probably at this moment. I can see now his great liquid dark eyes and his exquisite face and the way he tossed back his long waving hair when he struck into his part. He resembled the portraits of Raphael when that artist was a boy, only I think he looked better than Raphael, and without trying, for he seemed to be a spontaneous sort of boy. And how that boy did sing. He was the soprano of the choir, and he had a voice of heavenly sweetness. When he opened his mouth and tossed back his head, he filled the church with exquisite melody. He sang like a lark, or like an angel. As we never heard an angel sing, that comparison is not worth much. I have seen pictures of angels singing. There is one by Jan and Hubert Van Eyck in the gallery at Berlin, and they open their mouths like this boy, but I can't say as much for their singing. The lark, which you very likely never heard either, for larks are as scarce in America as angels, is a bird that springs up from the meadow and begins to sing as he rises in a spiral flight, and the higher he mounts, the sweeter he sings, until you think the notes are dropping out of heaven itself, and you hear him when he is gone from sight, and you think you hear him long after all sound has ceased. And yet this boy sang better than a lark, because he had more notes and a greater compass and more volume, although he shook out his voice in the same glissom abundance. I am sorry that I cannot add that this ravishingly beautiful boy was a good boy. He was probably one of the most mischievous boys that was ever in an organ loft. All the time that he was singing the Vespers, he was skylarking like an imp. While he was pouring out the most divine melody, he would take the opportunity of kicking the shins of the boy next to him, and while he was waiting for his part, he would kick out behind at anyone who was incautious enough to approach him. There never was such a vicious boy. He kept the whole loft in a ferment. When the monk rumbled his base in his stomach, the boy cut up monkey shines that set every other boy into a laugh, or he stirred up a row that set them all at fisticuffs. And yet this boy was a great favorite. The jolly monk loved him best of all and bore with his wildest pranks. When he was wanted to sing his part and was skylarking in the rear, the fat monk took him by the ear and brought him forward. And when he gave the boy's ear a twist, the boy opened his lovely mouth and poured forth such a flood of melody as you never heard. And he didn't mind his notes. He seemed to know his notes by heart and could sing and look off like a nightingale on a bow. He knew his power, that boy, and he stepped forward to his stand when he pleased, certain that he would be forgiven as soon as he began to sing, and such spirit and life as he threw into the performance, rollicking through the Vespers with a perfect abandon of carriage, as if he could sing himself out of his skin if he liked. While the little angels down below were pattering about with their wax tapers, keeping the holy fire burning, suddenly the organ stopped. The monk shut his book with a bang, the boys blew out the candles, and I heard them all tumbling downstairs in a gale of noise and laughter. The beautiful boy I saw no more. About him plays the light of tender memory, but were he twice as lovely, I could never think of him as having either the simple manliness or the good fortune of the New England Boy. Penfold. Completed September 21, 2010, Lincoln, Nebraska.