VI.
SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS.
MY boy had not a great deal to do with schools after his docilechildhood. When he began to run wild with the other boys he preferredtheir savage freedom; and he got out of going to school by most of thedevices they used. He had never quite the hardihood to play truant, buthe was subject to sudden attacks of sickness, which came on aboutschool-time and went off towards the middle of the forenoon or afternoonin a very strange manner. I suppose that such complaints are unknown atthe present time, but the Young People's fathers can tell them how muchsuffering they used to cause among boys. At the age when my boy wasbeginning to outgrow them he was taken into his father'sprinting-office, and he completed his recovery and his education there.But all through the years when he lived in the Boy's Town he hadintervals of schooling, which broke in upon the swimming and theskating, of course, but were not altogether unpleasant or unprofitable.
They began, as they are apt to do, with lessons in a private house,where a lady taught several other children, and where he possiblylearned to read; though he could only remember being set on a platformin punishment for some forgotten offence. After that he went to schoolin the basement of a church, where a number of boys and girls weretaught by a master who knew how to endear study at least to my boy.There was a garden outside of the schoolroom; hollyhocks grew in it, andthe boys gathered the little cheeses, as they called the seed-buttonswhich form when the flowers drop off, and ate them, because boys willeat anything, and not because they liked them. With the fact of thisgarden is mixed a sense of drowsy heat and summer light, and that isall, except the blackboard at the end of the room and a big girl doingsums at it; and the wonder why the teacher smiled when he read in one ofthe girls' compositions a phrase about forging puddings and pies; my boydid not know what forging meant, so he must have been very young. But hehad a zeal for learning, and somehow he took a prize in geography--ascience in which he was never afterwards remarkable. The prize was alittle history of Lexington, Mass., which the teacher gave him, perhapsbecause Lexington may have been his native town; but the history musthave been very dryly told, for not a fact of it remained in the boy'smind. He was vaguely disappointed in the book, but he valued it for theteacher's sake whom he was secretly very fond of, and who had no doubtwon the child's heart by some flattering notice. He thought it a greathappiness to follow him, when the teacher gave up this school, and tookcharge of one of the public schools; but it was not the same there; theteacher could not distinguish him in that multitude of boys and girls.He did himself a little honor in spelling, but he won no praise, and hedisgraced himself then as always in arithmetic. He sank into the commonherd of mediocrities; and then, when his family went to live in anotherpart of the town, he began to go to another school. He had felt that theteacher belonged to him, and it must have been a pang to find him soestranged. But he was a kind man, and long afterwards he had a friendlysmile and word for the boy when they met; and then all at once he ceasedto be, as men and things do in a boy's world.
The other school was another private school; and it was doubtless aschool of high grade in some things, for it was called the Academy. Butthere was provision for the youngest beginners in a lower room, and fora while my boy went there. Before school opened in the afternoon, thechildren tried to roast apples on the stove, but there never was time,and they had to eat them half raw. In the singing-class there was a boywho wore his hair so enviably long that he could toss it on his neck ashe wheeled in the march of the class round the room; his father kept astore and he brought candy to school. They sang "Scotland's burning!Pour on water" and "Home, home! Dearest and happiest home!" No doubtthey did other things, but none of them remained in my boy's mind; andwhen he was promoted to the upper room very little more was added. Hestudied Philosophy, as it was called, and he learned, as much from thepicture as the text, that you could not make a boat go by filling hersail from bellows on board; he did not see why. But he was chieflyconcerned with his fears about the Chemical Room, where I suppose somechemical apparatus must have been kept, but where the big boys weretaken to be whipped. It was a place of dreadful execution to him, andwhen he was once sent to the Chemical Boom, and shut up there, becausehe was crying, and because, as he explained, he could not stop cryingwithout a handkerchief, and he had none with him, he never expected tocome out alive.
In fact, as I have said, he dwelt in a world of terrors; and I doubt ifsome of the big boys who were taken there to be whipped underwent somuch as he in being merely taken to the place where they had beenwhipped. At the same time, while he cowered along in the shadow ofunreal dangers, he had a boy's boldness with most of the real ones, andhe knew how to resent an indignity even at the hands of the teacher whocould send him to the Chemical Room at pleasure. He knew what belongedto him as a small boy of honor, and one thing was, not to be tamely putback from a higher to a lower place in his studies. I dare say that boysdo not mind this now; they must have grown ever so much wiser since myboy went to school; but in his time, when you were put back, say fromthe Third Reader to the Second Reader, you took your books and leftschool. That was what the other boys expected of you, and it was theonly thing for you to do if you had the least self-respect, for you wereput back to the Second Reader after having failed to read the Third, andit was a public shame which nothing but leaving that school could wipeout. The other boys would have a right to mock you if you did not do it;and as soon as the class was dismissed you went to your desk ashaughtily as you could, and began putting your books and your slate andyour inkstand together, with defiant glances at the teacher; and thenwhen twelve o'clock came, or four o'clock, and the school was let out,you tucked the bundle under your arm and marched out of the room, withas much majesty as could be made to comport with a chip hat and barefeet; and as you passed the teacher you gave a twist of the head thatwas meant to carry dismay to the heart of your enemy. I note all theseparticulars carefully, so as to show the boys of the present day whatfools the boys of the past were; though I think they will hardly believeit. My boy was once that kind of fool; but not twice. He left schoolwith all his things at twelve o'clock, and he returned with them at one;for his father and mother did not agree with him about the teacher'sbehavior in putting him back. No boy's father and mother agreed with himon this point; every boy returned in just the same way; but somehow theinsult had been wiped out by the mere act of self-assertion, and a boykept his standing in the world as he could never have done if he had notleft school when he was put back.
The Hydraulic ran alongside of the Academy, and at recess the boys had agood deal of fun with it, one way and another, sailing shingles withstones on them, and watching them go under one end of the culvert andcome out of the other, or simply throwing rocks into the water. It doesnot seem very exciting when you tell of it, but it really was exciting;though it was not so exciting as to go down to the mills, where theHydraulic plunged over that great wheel into the Miami. A foot-bridgecrossed it that you could jump up and down on and almost make touch thewater, and there were happier boys, who did not go to school, fishingthere with men who had never gone. Sometimes the schoolboys venturedinside of the flour-mill and the iron-foundry, but I do not think thiswas often permitted; and, after all, the great thing was to rush over tothe river-bank, all the boys and girls together, and play with theflutter-mills till the bell rang. The market-house was not far off, andthey went there sometimes when it was not market-day, and played amongthe stalls; and once a girl caught her hand on a meat-hook. My boy had avision of her hanging from it; but this was probably one of those grislyfancies that were always haunting him, and no fact at all. The bridgewas close by the market-house, but for some reason or no reason thechildren never played in the bridge. Perhaps the toll-house man wouldnot let them; my boy stood in dread of the toll-house man; he seemed tohave such a severe way of taking the money from the teamsters.
Some of the boys were said to be the beaux of some of the girls. My boydid not know what that meant; in his own mind he could n
ot disentanglethe idea of bows from the idea of arrows; but he was in love with thegirl who caught her hand on the meat-hook, and secretly suffered much onaccount of her. She had black eyes, and her name long seemed to him themost beautiful name for a girl; he said it to himself with flushes fromhis ridiculous little heart. While he was still a boy of ten he heardthat she was married; and she must have been a great deal older than he.In fact he was too small a boy when he went to the Academy to rememberhow long he went there, and whether it was months or years; but probablyit was not more than a year. He stopped going there because the teachergave up the school to become a New Church minister; and as my boy'sfather and mother were New Church people, there must have been someintimacy between them and the teacher, which he did not know of. But heonly stood in awe, not terror, of him; and he was not surprised when hemet him many long years after, to find him a man peculiarly wise,gentle, and kind. Between the young and the old there is a vast gulf,seldom if ever bridged. The old can look backward over it, but theycannot cross it, any more than the young, who can see no thither side.
The next school my boy went to was a district school, as they called apublic school in the Boy's Town. He did not begin going there withoutsomething more than his usual fear and trembling; for he had heard freeschools and pay schools talked over among the boys, and sharplydistinguished: in a pay school the teacher had only such powers ofwhipping as were given him by the parents, and they were always strictlylimited; in a free school the teacher whipped as much and as often as heliked. For this reason it was much better to go to a pay school; but youhad more fun at a free school, because there were more fellows; you mustbalance one thing against another. The boy who philosophized the matterin this way was a merry, unlucky fellow, who fully tested the advantagesand disadvantages of the free-school system. He was one of thebest-hearted boys in the world, and the kindest to little boys; he wasalways gay and always in trouble, and forever laughing, when he was notcrying under that cruel rod. Sometimes he would not cry; but when he wascaught in one of his frequent offences and called up before theteacher's desk in the face of the whole school, and whipped over histhinly jacketed shoulders, he would take it without wincing, and gosmiling to his seat, and perhaps be called back and whipped more forsmiling. He was a sort of hero with the boys on this account, but he wastoo kind-hearted to be proud, and mingled with the rest on equal terms.One awful day, just before school took up in the afternoon, he andanother boy went for a bucket of drinking-water; it always took twoboys. They were gone till long after school began, and when they cameback the teacher called them up, and waited for them to arrive slowly athis desk while he drew his long, lithe rod through his left hand. Theyhad to own that they had done wrong, and they had no excuse but the onea boy always has--they forgot. He said he must teach them not to forget,and their punishment began; surely the most hideous and depraving sight,except a hanging, that could be offered to children's eyes. One of themhowled and shrieked, and leaped and danced, catching his back, his arms,his legs, as the strokes rained upon him, imploring, promising, andgetting away at last with a wild effort to rub himself all over all atonce. When it came the hero's turn, he bore it without a murmur, and asif his fortitude exasperated him, the teacher showered the blows moreswiftly and fiercely upon him than before, till a tear or two did stealdown the boy's cheek. Then he was sent to his seat, and in a few minuteshe was happy with a trap for catching flies which he had contrived inhis desk.
No doubt they were an unruly set of boys, and I do not suppose theteacher was a hard man, though he led the life of an executioner, andseldom passed a day without inflicting pain that a fiend might shrinkfrom giving. My boy lived in an anguish of fear lest somehow he shouldcome under that rod of his; but he was rather fond of the teacher, andso were all the boys. The teacher took a real interest in their studies,and if he whipped them well, he taught them well; and at most times hewas kind and friendly with them. Anyway, he did not blister your handwith a ruler, as some teachers did, or make you stand bent forward fromthe middle, with your head hanging down, so that the blood all ran intoit. Under him my boy made great advances in reading and writing, and hewon some distinction in declamation; but the old difficulties with thearithmetic remained. He failed to make anything out of the parts ofspeech in his grammar; but one afternoon, while he sat in his stockingfeet, trying to ease the chilblains which every boy used to have fromhis snow-soaked boots, before the days of india-rubbers, he foundsomething in the back of his grammar which made him forget all about thepain. This was a part called Prosody, and it told how to make verses;explained the feet, the accents, the stanzas--everything that hadpuzzled him in his attempts to imitate the poems he had heard his fatherread aloud. He was amazed; he had never imagined that such a scienceexisted, and yet here it was printed out, with each principle reduced topractice. He conceived of its reasons at the first reading, so that Isuppose nature had not dealt so charily with him concerning the rules ofprosody as the rules of arithmetic; and he lost no time in applying themin a poem of his own. The afternoon air was heavy with the heat thatquivered visibly above the great cast-iron wood stove in the centre ofthe schoolroom; the boys drowsed in their seats, or hummed sleepily overtheir lessons; the chilblains gnawed away at the poet's feet, but heavenhad opened to him, and he was rapt far from all the world of sense. Themusic which he had followed through those poems his father read was nolonger a mystery; he had its key, its secret; he might hope to wield itscharm, to lay its spell upon others. He wrote his poem, which wasprobably a simple, unconscious imitation of something that had pleasedhim in his school-reader, and carried it proudly home with him. Buthere he met with that sort of disappointment which more than any otherdismays and baffles authorship; a difference in the point of view. Hisfather said the verses were well made, and he sympathized with him inhis delight at having found out the way to make them, though he was notso much astonished as the boy that such a science as prosody shouldexist. He praised the child's work, and no doubt smiled at it with themother; but he said that the poem spoke of heaven as a place in the sky,and he wished him always to realize that heaven was a _state_ and not a_place_, and that we could have it in this world as well as the next.The boy promised that he would try to realize heaven as a state; but atthe bottom of his heart he despaired of getting that idea into poetry.Everybody else who had made poetry spoke of heaven as a place; they evencalled it a land, and put it in the sky; and he did not see how he wasto do otherwise, no matter what Swedenborg said. He revered Swedenborg;he had a religious awe of the seer's lithograph portrait in afull-bottom wig which hung in the front-room, but he did not see howeven Swedenborg could have helped calling heaven a place if he had beenmaking poetry.
The next year, or the next quarter, maybe, there was a new teacher; theyseem to have followed each other somewhat as people do in a dream; theywere not there, and then they were there; but, however the new one came,the boys were some time in getting used to his authority. It appeared tothem that several of his acts were distinctly tyrannical, and wereencroachments upon rights of theirs which the other teacher, with allhis severity, had respected. My boy was inspired by the common mood towrite a tragedy which had the despotic behavior of the new teacher forits subject, and which was intended to be represented by the boys in thehayloft of a boy whose father had a stable without any horse in it. Thetragedy was written in the measure of the "Lady of the Lake," which wasthe last poem my boy had heard his father reading aloud; it was veryeasy kind of verse. At the same time, the boys were to be dressed asRoman conspirators, and one of them was to give the teacher a petitionto read, while another plunged a dagger into his vitals, and stillanother shouted, "Strike, Stephanos, strike!" It seemed to my boy thathe had invented a situation which he had lifted almost bodily out ofGoldsmith's history; and he did not feel that his lines,
"Come one, come all! This rock shall flee From its firm base as soon as we,"
were too closely modelled upon Scott's lines,
"
Come one, come all! This rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I."
The tragedy was never acted. There may have been some trouble about thehayloft; for the boy whose father owned the stable was to have got theuse of it without his father's knowing it; and the poet found that theboys themselves scarcely entered into the spirit of his work. But afterthat there came a real tragedy, which most of them had part in withoutrealizing it, and that was their persecution of a teacher until he hadto give up the school. He must have come next after that usurper, but atany rate the word had been passed round, even before school took up thefirst morning he began, that he was to be resisted to the death. Hecould not have had any notion of what was in the air, for in thatopening speech to the school which a new teacher always used to make, hetalked to the boys in the friendliest manner, and with more sense andreason than they could feel, though I hope they felt some secret shamefor the way they meant to behave. He took up some old, dry rods, whichhe had lying on his desk, and which he said he had found in it, and hetold them he hoped never to use such a thing as a rod in that school,and never to strike any boy a blow. He broke the rods into small piecesand put them into the stove, and called the school to order for thestudies before it. But the school never came to order, either then orafterwards. As soon as the teacher took his seat, the whispering andgiggling, the scuffling and pushing began. The boys passed notes to thegirls and held up their slates with things written on them to make thegirls laugh; and they threw chewed-paper balls at one another. Theyasked to go out, and they stayed out as long as they pleased, and cameback with an easy air, as if they had done nothing. They would notstudy; they did not care how much they missed in the class, and theylaughed when they had to go to the foot. They made faces at the teacherand mocked him when his back was turned; they even threw paper wads athim.
It went on day after day till the school became a babel. The teachertried reasoning, and such mild punishment as standing up in the middleof the floor, and keeping in after school. One big boy whom he stood upwinked at the girls and made everybody titter; another whom he bade stayafter school grabbed his hat and ran out of the room. The fellows playedhookey as much as they wanted to, and did not give any excuse for beinglate, or for not coming at all. At last, when the teacher was drivendesperate, and got in a rod (which he said he was ashamed to use, butthey left him no hope of ruling them by reason), the big boys foughthim, and struck back when he began to whip them. This gentle soul hadnot one friend among all those little savages, whom he had given nocause to hate, but only cause to love him. None of them could have toldwhy they used him so ill, for nobody knew; only, the word had gone outthat you were not to mind him, but to mock him and fight him; nobodyknew where the word first came from.
Not even my boy, I grieve to say, was the poor man's friend, though hetoo had received only kindness from him. One day, when the teacher hadset him his copy, and found him doing it badly as he came by, he gavehim a slight tap on his head with his penknife, and addressed him somehalf-joking reproof. This fired my boy's wicked little heart withfurious resentment; he gathered up his books after school, and took themhome; a good many other boys had done it, and the school was dwindling.He was sent back with his books the next morning, and many other parentsbehaved as wisely as his. One of the leading men in the town, whose merepresence in the schoolroom sent a thrill of awe through the fellows,brought his son in after such an escapade, and told the teacher that hehad just given him a sound thrashing, and he hoped the teacher wouldgive him another. But the teacher took the hand of the snivellingwretch, and called him affectionately by name, and said they would tryto get along without that, and sent him to his seat forgiven. It oughtto have touched a heart of stone, but in that barbarous republic of boysthere was no gratitude. Sometimes they barred the teacher out bynailing the doors and windows; and at last he gave up the school.
But even then his persecution did not end. The word went out that youwere not to speak to him if you met him; and if he spoke to you, youwere not to say anything back. One day he came up to my boy where he satfishing for crawfish in the Hydraulic, with his bare legs dangling overthe edge of a culvert, and, unawed by this august figure, asked himpleasantly what luck he had. The boy made no sign of seeing or hearinghim, and he ignored some other kindly advances. I hope the teacherthought it merely his shyness. The boy went home and told, gleefully,how he had refused to speak to Old Manton; but here he met his reward.He was made to feel how basely rude he had been, and to tingle with awholesome shame. There was some talk of sending him to the teacher, toask his forgiveness; but this was given up for fear of inflicting painwhere possibly none had been felt. I wish now the boy could have gone tohim, for perhaps the teacher is no longer living.