Boy's Town, Page 4

  I.

  EARLIEST EXPERIENCES.

  I CALL it a Boy's Town because I wish it to appear to the reader as atown appears to a boy from his third to his eleventh year, when heseldom, if ever, catches a glimpse of life much higher than the middleof a man, and has the most distorted and mistaken views of most things.He may then indeed look up to the sky, and see heaven open, and angelsascending and descending; but he can only grope about on the earth, andhe knows nothing aright that goes on there beyond his small boy's world.Some people remain in this condition as long as they live, and keep theignorance of childhood, after they have lost its innocence; heaven hasbeen shut, but the earth is still a prison to them. These will not knowwhat I mean by much that I shall have to say; but I hope that theungrown-up children will, and that the boys who read _Harper's YoungPeople_ will like to know what a boy of forty years ago was like, evenif he had no very exciting adventures or thread-bare escapes; perhaps Imean hair-breadth escapes; but it is the same thing--they have been usedso often. I shall try to describe him very minutely in his daily doingsand dreamings, and it may amuse them to compare these doings anddreamings with their own. For convenience, I shall call this boy, myboy; but I hope he might have been almost anybody's boy; and I mean himsometimes for a boy in general, as well as a boy in particular.

  THE "FIRST LOCK."]

  It seems to me that my Boy's Town was a town peculiarly adapted for aboy to be a boy in. It had a river, the great Miami River, which was asblue as the sky when it was not as yellow as gold; and it had anotherriver, called the Old River, which was the Miami's former channel, andwhich held an island in its sluggish loop; the boys called it TheIsland; and it must have been about the size of Australia; perhaps itwas not so large. Then this town had a Canal, and a Canal-Basin, and aFirst Lock and a Second Lock; you could walk out to the First Lock, butthe Second Lock was at the edge of the known world, and, when my boy wasvery little, the biggest boy had never been beyond it. Then it had aHydraulic, which brought the waters of Old River for mill power throughthe heart of the town, from a Big Reservoir and a Little Reservoir; theBig Reservoir was as far off as the Second Lock, and the Hydraulic ranunder mysterious culverts at every street-crossing. All these streamsand courses had fish in them at all seasons, and all summer long theyhad boys in them, and now and then a boy in winter, when the thin ice ofthe mild Southern Ohio winter let him through with his skates. Thenthere were the Commons; a wide expanse of open fields, where the cowswere pastured, and the boys flew their kites, and ran races, andpractised for their circuses in the tan-bark rings of the real circuses.

  There were flocks of wild ducks on the Reservoirs and on Old River,and flocks of kildees on the Commons; and there were squirrels in thewoods, where there was abundant mast for the pigs that ran wild in them,and battened on the nuts under the hickory-trees. There were no othernuts except walnuts, white and black; but there was no end to the small,sweetish acorns, which the boys called chinquepins; they ate them, but Idoubt if they liked them, except as boys like anything to eat. In thevast corn-fields stretching everywhere along the river levels there werequails; and rabbits in the sumac thickets and turnip patches. There wereplaces to swim, to fish, to hunt, to skate; if there were no hills forcoasting, that was not so much loss, for there was very little snow, andit melted in a day or two after it fell. But besides these naturaladvantages for boys, there were artificial opportunities which the boystreated as if they had been made for them; grist-mills on the river andcanal, cotton-factories and saw-mills on the Hydraulic, iron-founderiesby the Commons, breweries on the river-bank, and not too manyschool-houses. I must not forget the market-house, with its publicmarket twice a week, and its long rows of market-wagons, stretching oneither side of High Street in the dim light of the summer dawn or thecold sun of the winter noon.

  The place had its brief history running back to the beginning of thecentury. Mad Anthony Wayne encamped on its site when he went north toavenge St. Clair's defeat on the Indians; it was at first a fort, and itremained a military post until the tribes about were reduced, and a fortwas no longer needed. To this time belonged a tragedy, which my boy knewof vaguely when he was a child. Two of the soldiers were sentenced to behanged for desertion, and the officer in command hurried forward theexecution, although an express had been sent to lay the case before thegeneral at another post. The offence was only a desertion in name, andthe reprieve was promptly granted, but it came fifteen minutes too late.

  I believe nothing more memorable ever happened in my Boy's Town, as thegrown-up world counts events; but for the boys there, every day was fullof wonderful occurrence and thrilling excitement. It was really a verysimple little town of some three thousand people, living for the mostpart in small one-story wooden houses, with here and there a brick houseof two stories, and here and there a lingering log-cabin, when my boy'sfather came to take charge of its Whig newspaper in 1840. It stretchedeastward from the river to the Canal-Basin, with the market-house, thecounty buildings, and the stores and hotels on one street, and a fewother stores and taverns scattering off on streets that branched from itto the southward; but all this was a vast metropolis to my boy's fancy,where he might get lost--the sum of all disaster--if he ventured awayfrom the neighborhood of the house where he first lived, on itssouthwestern border. It was the great political year of "Tippecanoe andTyler too," when the grandfather of our President Harrison was electedPresident; but the wild hard-cider campaign roared by my boy's littlelife without leaving a trace in it, except the recollection of hisfather wearing a linsey-woolsey hunting-shirt, belted at the waist andfringed at the skirt, as a Whig who loved his cause and honored the goodold pioneer times was bound to do. I dare say he did not wear it often,and I fancy he wore it then in rather an ironical spirit, for he was aman who had slight esteem for outward shows and semblances; but itremained in my boy's mind, as clear a vision as the long cloak of bluebroadcloth in which he must have seen his father habitually. This cloakwas such a garment as people still drape about them in Italy, and menwore it in America then instead of an overcoat. To get under its border,and hold by his father's hand in the warmth and dark it made around himwas something that the boy thought a great privilege, and that broughthim a sense of mystery and security at once that nothing else could evergive. He used to be allowed to go as far as the street corner, to enjoyit, when his father came home from the printing-office in the evening;and one evening, never to be forgotten, after he had long been teasingfor a little axe he wanted, he divined that his father had somethinghidden under his cloak. Perhaps he asked him as usual whether he hadbrought him the little axe, but his father said, "Feel, feel!" and hefound his treasure. He ran home and fell upon the woodpile with it, in azeal that proposed to leave nothing but chips; before he had gone far helearned that this is a world in which you can sate but never satisfyyourself with anything, even hard work. Some of my readers may havefound that out, too; at any rate, my boy did not keep the family infirewood with his axe, and his abiding association with it in after-lifewas a feeling of weariness and disgust; so I fancy that he must havebeen laughed at for it. Besides the surfeit of this little axe, he couldrecall, when he grew up, the glory of wearing his Philadelphia suit,which one of his grandmothers had brought him Over the Mountains, aspeople said in those days, after a visit to her Pennsylvania Germankindred beyond the Alleghanies. It was of some beatified plaid in gaycolors, and when once it was put on it never was laid aside for anyother suit till it was worn out. It testified unmistakably to the boy'sadvance in years beyond the shameful period of skirts; and no doubt itcommended him to the shadowy little girl who lived so far away as to beeven beyond the street-corner, and who used to look for him, as hepassed, through the palings of a garden among hollyhocks andfour-o'clocks.

  The Young People may have heard it said that a savage is a grown-upchild, but it seems to me even more true that a child is a savage. Likethe savage, he dwells on an earth round which the whole solar systemrevolves, and he is himself the centre of all life o
n the earth. It hasno meaning but as it relates to him; it is for his pleasure, his use; itis for his pain and his abuse. It is full of sights, sounds, sensations,for his delight alone, for his suffering alone. He lives under a law offavor or of fear, but never of justice, and the savage does not make acrueller idol than the child makes of the Power ruling over his worldand having him for its chief concern. What remained to my boy of thatfaint childish consciousness was the idea of some sort of supernal Beingwho abode in the skies for his advantage and disadvantage, and madewinter and summer, wet weather and dry, with an eye single to him; of afamily of which he was necessarily the centre, and of that far, vast,unknown Town, lurking all round him, and existing on account of him ifnot because of him. So, unless I manage to treat my Boy's Town as a partof his own being, I shall not make others know it just as he knew it.

  Some of his memories reach a time earlier than his third year, andrelate to the little Ohio River hamlet where he was born, and where hismother's people, who were river-faring folk, all lived. Every two orthree years the river rose and flooded the village; and hisgrandmother's household was taken out of the second-story window in askiff; but no one minded a trivial inconvenience like that, any morethan the Romans have minded the annual freshet of the Tiber for the lastthree or four thousand years. When the waters went down the familyreturned and scrubbed out the five or six inches of rich mud they hadleft. In the meantime, it was a godsend to all boys of an age to enjoyit; but it was nothing out of the order of Providence. So, if my boyever saw a freshet, it naturally made no impression upon him. What heremembered was something much more important, and that was waking up onemorning and seeing a peach-tree in bloom through the window beside hisbed; and he was always glad that this vision of beauty was his veryearliest memory. All his life he has never seen a peach-tree in bloomwithout a swelling of the heart, without some fleeting sense that

  "Heaven lies about us in our infancy."

  Over the spot where the little house once stood, a railroad has drawnits erasing lines, and the house itself was long since taken down andbuilt up brick by brick in quite another place; but the bloomingpeach-tree glows before his childish eyes untouched by time or change.The tender, pathetic pink of its flowers repeated itself many long yearsafterwards in the paler tints of the almond blossoms in Italy, butalways with a reminiscence of that dim past, and the little coal-smokytown on the banks of the Ohio.

  "THE PASSENGER IS A ONE-LEGGED MAN."]

  Perversely blended with that vision of the blooming peach is a glimpseof a pet deer in the kitchen of the same little house, with his head upand his antlers erect, as if he meditated offence. My boy might neverhave seen him so; he may have had the vision at second hand; but it iscertain that there was a pet deer in the family, and that he was aslikely to have come into the kitchen by the window as by the door. Oneof the boy's uncles had seen this deer swimming the Mississippi, far tothe southward, and had sent out a yawl and captured him, and brought himhome. He began a checkered career of uselessness when they were ferryinghim over from Wheeling in a skiff, by trying to help wear the pantaloonsof the boy who was holding him; he put one of his fore-legs in at thewatch-pocket; but it was disagreeable to the boy and ruinous to thetrousers. He grew very tame, and butted children over, right and left,in the village streets; and he behaved like one of the family wheneverhe got into a house; he ate the sugar out of the bowl on the table, andplundered the pantry of its sweet cakes. One day a dog got after him,and he jumped over the river-bank and broke his leg, and had to be shot.

  Besides the peach-tree and the pet deer there was only one other thingthat my boy could remember, or seem to remember, of the few years beforehe came to the Boy's Town. He is on the steamboat which is carrying thefamily down the Ohio River to Cincinnati, on their way to the Boy'sTown, and he is kneeling on the window-seat in the ladies' cabin at thestern of the boat, watching the rain fall into the swirling yellow riverand make the little men jump up from the water with its pelting drops.He knows that the boat is standing still, and they are bringing off apassenger to it in a yawl, as they used to do on the Western rivers whenthey were hailed from some place where there was no wharf-boat. If theywere going down stream, they turned the boat and headed up the river,and then with a great deal of scurrying about among the deck-hands, andswearing among the mates, they sent the yawl ashore, and bustled thepassenger on board. In the case which my boy seemed to remember, thepassenger is a one-legged man, and he is standing in the yawl, with hiscrutch under his arm, and his cane in his other hand; his family must bewatching him from the house. When the yawl comes alongside he tries tostep aboard the steamboat, but he misses his footing and slips into theyellow river, and vanishes softly. It is all so smooth and easy, and itis as curious as the little men jumping up from the rain-drops. Whatmade my boy think when he grew a man that this was truly a memory wasthat he remembered nothing else of the incident, nothing whatever afterthe man went down in the water, though there must have been a great andpainful tumult, and a vain search for him. His drowning had exactly thevalue in the child's mind that the jumping up of the little men had,neither more nor less.