[p ii]
A BOY I KNEW
AND FOUR DOGS
By Laurence Hutton
Profusely Illustrated
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1898
By LAURENCE HUTTON.
LITERARY LANDMARKS OF ROME. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 00.
LITERARY LANDMARKS OF FLORENCE. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 00.
LITERARY LANDMARKS OF VENICE. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 00.
LITERARY LANDMARKS OF JERUSALEM. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, 75 cents.
LITERARY LANDMARKS OF LONDON. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 75.
LITERARY LANDMARKS OF EDINBURGH. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 00.
PORTRAITS IN PLASTER. Illustrated. Printed on Large Paper with Wide Margins. 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $6 00.
CURIOSITIES OF THE AMERICAN STAGE. Illustrated. Crown 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $2 50.
FROM THE BOOKS OF LAURENCE HUTTON. With Portrait. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 00. (In “Harper’s American Essayists.”)
OTHER TIMES AND OTHER SEASONS. With Portrait. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 00. (In “Harper’s American Essayists.”)
EDWIN BOOTH. Illustrated. 32mo, Cloth, 50 cents.
NEW YORK AND LONDON:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.
Copyright, 1898, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
H. C. Bunner, in “Rowen.”
[p vii]
ILLUSTRATIONS
| THACKERAY AND THE BOY | Frontispiece | |
| THE BOY’S MOTHER | Facing p. | 4 |
| ST. JOHN’S CHAPEL AND PARK | " | 6 |
| THE BOY’S UNCLE JOHN | " | 8 |
| THE BOY IN KILTS | " | 10 |
| THE BOY PROMOTED TO TROUSERS | " | 12 |
| “CRIED, BECAUSE HE HAD BEEN KISSED” | " | 14 |
| “GOOD-MORNING, BOYS” | " | 16 |
| PLAYING “SCHOOL” | " | 18 |
| THE BOY’S SCOTCH GRANDFATHER | " | 20 |
| THE HOUSE OF THE BOY’S GRANDFATHER—CORNER OF HUDSON AND NORTH MOORE STREETS | " | 22 |
| “ALWAYS IN THE WAY” | " | 24 |
| READY FOR A NEW-YEAR’S CALL | " | 26 |
| A NEW-YEAR’S CALL | " | 28 |
| TOM RILEY’S LIBERTY-POLE | " | 30 |
| THE BOY ALWAYS CLIMBED OVER | " | 32 |
| THE CHIEF ENGINEER | " | 34 |
| “MRS. ROBERTSON DESCENDED IN FORCE UPON THE DEVOTED BAND” | " | 36 |
| THE BOY AS VIRGINIUS | " | 38 |
| JOHNNY ROBERTSON | " | 40 |
| JANE PURDY | " | 42 |
| JOE STUART | " | 44 |
| [p viii] BOB HENDRICKS | " | 46 |
| MUSIC LESSONS | " | 48 |
| THE BOY’S FATHER | " | 56 |
| WHISKIE | " | 62 |
| PUNCH | " | 64 |
| MOP AND HIS MASTER | " | 68 |
| ROY AND HIS MASTER | " | 74 |
| ROY | " | 76 |
| “HE TRIES VERY HARD TO LOOK PLEASANT” | " | 80 |
| ROY | " | 82 |
| THE WAITING THREE | " | 84 |
| MOP | 87 | |
[p ix]
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The papers upon which this volume is founded—published here by the courtesy of The Century Company—appeared originally in the columns of St. Nicholas. They have been reconstructed and rearranged, and not a little new matter has been added.
The portraits are all from life. That of The Boy’s Scottish grandfather, facing page 20, is from a photograph by Sir David Brewster, taken in St. Andrews in 1846 or 1847. The subject sat in his own garden, blinking at the sun for many minutes, in front of the camera, when tradition says that his patience became exhausted and the artist permitted him to move. The Boy distinctly remembers the great interest the picture excited when it first reached this country.
Behind the tree in the extreme left of the view of
The Boy’s Scottish-American grandfather’s house in
New York, facing page 22, may be seen a portion of
the home of Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in 1843 or
1844, some years earlier than the period of “The
[p x]
Story of a Bad Boy.” Warm and constant friends—as
men—for upwards of a quarter of a century, it
is rather a curious coincidence that the boys—as
boys—should have been near neighbors, although
they did not know each other then, nor do they remember
the fact.
The histories of “A Boy I Knew” and the “Four Dogs” are absolutely true, from beginning to end; nothing has been invented; no incident has been palliated or elaborated. The author hopes that the volume may interest the boys and girls he does not know as much as it has interested him. He has read it more than once; he has laughed over it, and he has cried over it; it has appealed to him in a peculiar way. But then, he knew The Dogs, and he knew The Boy!
L. H.
[p 1]
A BOY I KNEW
[p 3]
A BOY I KNEW
He was not a very good boy, or a very bad boy, or a very bright boy, or an unusual boy in any way. He was just a boy; and very often he forgets that he is not a boy now. Whatever there may be about The Boy that is commendable he owes to his father and to his mother; and he feels that he should not be held responsible for that.
His mother was the most generous and the most
unselfish of human beings. She was always thinking
of somebody else—always doing for others. To her
it was blessèd to give, and it was not very pleasant
to receive. When she bought anything, The Boy’s
stereotyped query was, “Who is to have it?” When
anything was bought for her, her own invariable
remark was, “What on earth shall I do with it?”
When The Boy came to her, one summer morning,
she looked upon him as a gift from Heaven;
and when she was told that it was a boy, and
not a bad-looking or a bad-conditioned boy, her
[p 4]
first words were, “What on earth shall I do with
it?”
She found plenty “to do with it” before she got through with it, more than forty years afterwards; and The Boy has every reason to believe that she never regretted the gift. Indeed, she once told him, late in her life, that he had never made her cry! What better benediction can a boy have than that?
The Boy’s father was a scholar, and a ripe and
good one. Self-made and self-taught, he began the
serious struggle of life when he was merely a boy
himself; and reading, and writing, and spelling, and
languages, and mathematics came to him by nature.
He acquired by slow degrees a fine library, and out
of it a vast amount of information. He never bought
a book that he did not read, and he never read a book
unless he considered it worth buying and worth keeping.
Languages and mathematics were his particular
delight. When he was tired he rested himself by the
solving of a geometrical problem. He studied his
Bible in Latin, in Greek, in Hebrew, and he had no
small smattering of Sanskrit. His chief recreation,
on a Sunday afternoon or on a long summer evening,
was a walk with The Boy among the Hudson River
docks, when the business of the day, or the week, was
over and the ship was left in charge of some old
quartermaster or third mate. To these sailors the
father would talk in each sailor’s own tongue, whether
[p 5]
it were Dutch or Danish, Spanish or Swedish, Russian
or Prussian, or a patois of something else, always
to the great wonderment of The Boy, who to this
day, after many years of foreign travel, knows little
more of French than “Combien?” and little more of
Italian than “Troppo caro.” Why none of these
qualities of mind came to The Boy by direct descent
he does not know. He only knows that he did inherit
from his parent, in an intellectual way, a sense
of humor, a love for books—as books—and a certain
respect for the men by whom books are written.
It seemed to The Boy that his father knew everything. Any question upon any subject was sure to bring a prompt, intelligent, and intelligible answer; and, usually, an answer followed by a question, on the father’s part, which made The Boy think the matter out for himself.
The Boy was always a little bit afraid of his father, while he loved and respected him. He believed everything his father told him, because his father never fooled him but once, and that was about Santa Claus!
When his father said, “Do this,” it was done.
When his father told him to go or to come, he went
or he came. And yet he never felt the weight of his
father’s hand, except in the way of kindness; and, as
he looks back upon his boyhood and his manhood, he
cannot recall an angry or a hasty word or a rebuke
[p 6]
that was not merited and kindly bestowed. His
father, like the true Scotchman he was, never praised
him; but he never blamed him—except for cause.
The Boy has no recollection of his first tooth, but he remembers his first toothache as distinctly as he remembers his latest; and he could not quite understand then why, when The Boy cried over that raging molar, the father walked the floor and seemed to suffer from it even more than did The Boy; or why, when The Boy had a sore throat, the father always had symptoms of bronchitis or quinsy.
The father, alas! did not live long enough to find out whether The Boy was to amount to much or not; and while The Boy is proud of the fact that he is his father’s son, he would be prouder still if he could think that he had done something to make his father proud of him.
From his father The Boy received many things
besides birth and education; many things better than
pocket-money or a fixed sum per annum; but, best
of all, the father taught The Boy never to cut a
string. The Boy has pulled various cords during his
uneventful life, but he has untied them all. Some
of the knots have been difficult and perplexing, and
the contents of the bundles, generally, have been of
little import when they have been revealed; but he
saved the strings unbroken, and invariably he has
found those strings of great help to him in the proper
[p 7]
fastening of the next package he has had occasion
to send away.
The father had that strong sense of humor which Dr. Johnson—who had no sense of humor whatever—denied to all Scotchmen. No surgical operation was necessary to put one of Sydney Smith’s jokes into the father’s head, or to keep it there. His own jokes were as original as they were harmless, and they were as delightful as was his quick appreciation of the jokes of other persons.
A long siege with a certain bicuspid had left The Boy, one early spring day, with a broken spirit and a swollen face. The father was going, that morning, to attend the funeral of his old friend, Dr. McPherson, and, before he left the house, he asked The Boy what should be brought back to him as a solace. Without hesitation, a brick of maple sugar was demanded—a very strange request, certainly, from a person in that peculiar condition of invalidism, and one which appealed strongly to the father’s own sense of the ridiculous.
When the father returned, at dinner-time, he carried
the brick, enveloped in many series of papers, beginning
with the coarsest kind and ending with the finest
kind; and each of the wrappers was fastened with
its own particular bit of cord or ribbon, all of them
tied in the hardest of hard knots. The process of
disentanglement was long and laborious, but it was
[p 8]
persistently performed; and when the brick was
revealed, lo! it was just a brick—not of maple sugar,
but a plain, ordinary, red-clay, building brick which
he had taken from some pile of similar bricks on his
way up town. The disappointment was not very
bitter, for The Boy knew that something else was
coming; and he realized that it was the First of
April and that he had been April-fooled! The something
else, he remembers, was that most amusing
of all amusing books, Phœnixiana, then just published,
and over it he forgot his toothache, but not
his maple sugar. All this happened when he was
about twelve years of age, and he has ever since
associated “Squibob” with the sweet sap of the
maple, never with raging teeth.
It was necessary, however, to get even with the
father, not an easy matter, as The Boy well knew;
and he consulted his uncle John, who advised patient
waiting. The father, he said, was absolutely devoted
to The Commercial Advertiser, which he read
every day from frontispiece to end, market reports,
book notices, obituary notices, advertisements, and
all; and if The Boy could hold himself in for a
whole year his uncle John thought it would be
worth it. The Commercial Advertiser of that date
was put safely away for a twelvemonth, and on the
First of April next it was produced, carefully folded
and properly dampened, and was placed by the side
[p 9]
of the father’s plate; the mother and the son making
no remark, but eagerly awaiting the result. The
journal was vigorously scanned; no item of news or
of business import was missed until the reader came
to the funeral announcements on the third page.
Then he looked at the top of the paper, through his
spectacles, and then he looked, over his spectacles, at
The Boy; and he made but one observation. The
subject was never referred to afterwards between
them. But he looked at the date of the paper, and
he looked at The Boy; and he said: “My son, I see
that old Dr. McPherson is dead again!”
The Boy was red-headed and long-nosed, even from the beginning—a shy, introspective, self-conscious little boy, made peculiarly familiar with his personal defects by constant remarks that his hair was red and that his nose was long. At school, for years, he was known familiarly as “Rufus,” “Red-Head,” “Carrot-Top,” or “Nosey,” and at home it was almost as bad.
His mother, married at nineteen, was the eldest of
a family of nine children, and many of The Boy’s
aunts and uncles were but a few years his senior, and
were his daily, familiar companions. He was the
only member of his own generation for a long time.
There was a constant fear, upon the part of the elders,
that he was likely to be spoiled, and consequently the
rod of verbal castigation was rarely spared. He was
never praised, nor petted, nor coddled; and he was
[p 10]
taught to look upon himself as a youth hairily and
nasally deformed and mentally of but little wit. He
was always falling down, or dropping things. He
was always getting into the way, and he could not
learn to spell correctly or to cipher at all. He was
never in his mother’s way, however, and he was
never made to feel so. But nobody except The Boy
knows of the agony which the rest of the family,
unconsciously, and with no thought of hurting his
feelings, caused him by the fun they poked at his
nose, at his fiery locks, and at his unhandiness. He
fancied that passers-by pitied him as he walked or
played in the streets, and he sincerely pitied himself
as a youth destined to grow up into an awkward,
tactless, stupid man, at whom the world would laugh
so long as his life lasted.
An unusual and unfortunate accident to his nose
when he was eight or ten years old served to accentuate
his unhappiness. The young people were
making molasses candy one night in the kitchen of
his maternal grandfather’s house—the aunts and
the uncles, some of the neighbors’ children, and The
Boy—and the half of a lemon, used for flavoring
purposes, was dropped as it was squeezed by careless
hands—very likely The Boy’s own—into the boiling
syrup. It was fished out and put, still full of the
syrup, upon a convenient saucer, where it remained,
an exceedingly fragrant object. After the odor had
[p 11]
been inhaled by one or two of the party, The Boy
was tempted to “take a smell of it”; when an uncle,
boylike, ducked the luckless nose into the still
simmering lemonful. The result was terrible. Red-hot
sealing-wax could not have done more damage
to the tender, sensitive feature.
The Boy carried his nose in a sling for many weeks, and the bandage, naturally, twisted the nose to one side. It did not recover its natural tint for a long time, and the poor little heart was nearly broken at the thought of the fresh disfigurement. The Boy felt that he had not only an unusually long nose, but a nose that was crooked and would always be as red as his hair.
He does not remember what was done to his uncle. But the uncle was for half a century The Boy’s best and most faithful of friends. And The Boy forgave him long, long ago.
The Boy’s first act of self-reliance and of conscious
self-dependence was a very happy moment in his
young life; and it consisted in his being able to step
over the nursery fender, all alone, and to toast his
own shins thereby, without falling into the fire. His
first realization of “getting big” came to him about
the same time, and with a mingled shock of pain
and pleasure, when he discovered that he could not
walk under the high kitchen-table without bumping
his head. He tried it very often before he learned
[p 12]
to go around that article of furniture, on his way
from the clothes-rack, which was his tent when he
camped out on rainy days, to the sink, which was
his oasis in the desert of the basement floor. This
kitchen was a favorite playground of The Boy, and
about that kitchen-table centre many of the happiest
of his early reminiscences. Ann Hughes, the cook,
was very good to The Boy. She told him stories,
and taught him riddles, all about a certain “Miss
Netticoat,” who wore a white petticoat, and who
had a red nose, and about whom there still lingers a
queer, contradictory legend to the effect that “the
longer she stands the shorter she grows.” The Boy
always felt that, on account of her nose, there was a
peculiar bond of sympathy between little Miss Netticoat
and himself.
As he was all boy in his games, he would never
cherish anything but a boy-doll, generally a Highlander,
in kilts and with a glengarry, that came off!
And although he became foreman of a juvenile hook-and-ladder
company before he was five, and would
not play with girls at all, he had one peculiar feminine
weakness. His grand passion was washing and
ironing. And Ann Hughes used to let him do all
the laundry-work connected with the wash-rags and
his own pocket-handkerchiefs, into which, regularly,
every Wednesday, he burned little brown holes with
the toy flat-iron, which would get too hot. But
[p 13]
Johnny Robertson and Joe Stuart and the other
boys, and even the uncles and the aunts, never knew
anything about that—unless Ann Hughes gave it
away!
The Boy seems to have developed, very early in
life, a fondness for new clothes—a fondness which
his wife sometimes thinks he has quite outgrown. It
is recorded that almost his first plainly spoken words
were “Coat and hat,” uttered upon his promotion
into a more boyish apparel than the caps and frocks
of his infancy. And he remembers very distinctly
his first pair of long trousers, and the impression they
made upon him, in more ways than one. They were
a black-and-white check, and to them was attached
that especially manly article, the suspender. They
were originally worn in celebration of the birth
of the New Year, in 1848 or 1849, and The Boy
went to his father’s store in Hudson Street, New
York, to exhibit them on the next business-day
thereafter. Naturally they excited much comment,
and were the subject of sincere congratulation. And
two young clerks of his father, The Boy’s uncles,
amused themselves, and The Boy, by playing with
him a then popular game called “Squails.” They
put The Boy, seated, on a long counter, and they slid
him, backward and forward between them, with
great skill and no little force. But, before the
championship was decided, The Boy’s mother broke
[p 14]
up the game, boxed the ears of the players, and carried
the human disk home in disgrace; pressing as
she went, and not very gently, the seat of The Boy’s
trousers with the palm of her hand!
He remembers nothing more about the trousers, except the fact that for a time he was allowed to appear in them on Sundays and holidays only, and that he was deeply chagrined at having to go back to knickerbockers at school and at play.
The Boy’s first boots were of about this same era. They were what were then known as “Wellingtons,” and they had legs. The legs had red leather tops, as was the fashion in those days, and the boots were pulled on with straps. They were always taken off with the aid of the boot-jack of The Boy’s father, although they could have been removed much more easily without the use of that instrument. Great was the day when The Boy first wore his first boots to school; and great his delight at the sensation he thought they created when they were exhibited in the primary department.
The Boy’s first school was a dame’s school, kept
by a Miss or Mrs. Harrison, in Harrison Street, near
the Hudson Street house in which he was born. He
was the smallest child in the establishment, and
probably a pet of the larger girls, for he remembers
going home to his mother in tears, because one of
them had kissed him behind the class-room door.
[p 15]
He saw her often, in later years, but she never tried
to do it again!
At that school he met his first love, one Phœbe Hawkins, a very sweet, pretty girl, as he recalls her, and, of course, considerably his senior. How far he had advanced in the spelling of proper names at that period is shown by the well-authenticated fact that he put himself on record, once as “loving his love with an F, because she was Feeby!”
Poor Phœbe Hawkins died before she was out of her teens. The family moved to Poughkeepsie when The Boy was ten or twelve, and his mother and he went there one day from Red Hook, which was their summer home, to call upon his love. When they asked, at the railroad-station, where the Hawkinses lived and how they could find the house, they were told that the carriages for the funeral would meet the next train. And, utterly unprepared for such a greeting, for at latest accounts she had been in perfect health, they stood, with her friends, by the side of Phœbe’s open grave.
In his mind’s eye The Boy, at the end of forty years, can see it all; and his childish grief is still fresh in his memory. He had lost a bird and a cat who were very dear to his heart, but death had never before seemed so real to him; never before had it come so near home. He never played “funeral” again.
[p 16]
In 1851 or 1852 The Boy went to another dame’s
school. It was kept by Miss Kilpatrick, on Franklin
or North Moore Street. From this, as he grew in
years, he was sent to the Primary Department of the
North Moore Street Public School, at the corner of
West Broadway, where he remained three weeks,
and where he contracted a whooping-cough which
lasted him three months. The other boys used to
throw his hat upon an awning in the neighborhood,
and then throw their own hats up under the awning
in order to bounce The Boy’s hat off—an amusement
for which he never much cared. They were
not very nice boys, anyway, especially when they
made fun of his maternal grandfather, who was a
trustee of the school, and who sometimes noticed
The Boy after the morning prayers were said. The
grandfather was very popular in the school. He
came in every day, stepped upon the raised platform
at the principal’s desk, and said in his broad Scotch,
“Good morning, boys!” to which the entire body of
pupils, at the top of their lungs, and with one voice,
replied, “G-o-o-d morning, Mr. Scott!” This was considered
a great feature in the school; and strangers
used to come from all over the city to witness it.
Somehow it made The Boy a little bit ashamed; he
does not know why. He would have liked it well
enough, and been touched by it, too, if it had been
some other boy’s grandfather. The Boy’s father
[p 17]
was present once—The Boy’s first day; but when he
discovered that the President of the Board of Trustees
was going to call on him for a speech he ran
away; and The Boy would have given all his little
possessions to have run after him. The Boy knew
then, as well as he knows now, how his father felt;
and he thinks of that occasion every time he runs
away from some after-dinner or occasional speech
which he, himself, is called upon to make.
After his North Moore Street experiences The Boy was sent to study under men teachers in boys’ schools; and he considered then that he was grown up.
The Boy, as has been said, was born without the
sense of spell. The Rule of Three, it puzzled him,
and fractions were as bad; and the proper placing
of e and i, or i and e, the doubling of letters in the
middle of words, and how to treat the addition of a
suffix in “y” or “tion” “almost drove him mad,”
from his childhood up. He hated to go to school,
but he loved to play school; and when Johnny
Robertson and he were not conducting a pompous,
public funeral—a certain oblong hat-brush, with a
rosewood back, studded with brass tacks, serving as
a coffin, in which lay the body of Henry Clay, Daniel
Webster, or the Duke of Wellington, all of whom
died when Johnny and The Boy were about eight
years old—they were teaching each other the three
[p 18]
immortal and exceedingly trying “R’s”—reading,
’riting, and ’rithmetic—in a play-school. Their favorite
spelling-book was a certain old cook-book, discarded
by the head of the kitchen, and considered
all that was necessary for their educational purpose.
From this, one afternoon, Johnnie gave out “Dough-nut,”
with the following surprising result. Conscious
of the puzzling presence of certain silent consonants
and vowels, The Boy thus set it down: “D-O, dough,
N-O-U-G-H-T, nut—doughnut!” and he went up
head in a class of one, neither teacher nor pupil perceiving
the marvellous transposition.
All The Boy’s religious training was received at home, and almost his first text-book was “The Shorter Catechism,” which, he confesses, he hated with all his little might. He had to learn and recite the answers to those awful questions as soon as he could recite at all, and, for years, without the slightest comprehension as to what it was all about. Even to this day he cannot tell just what “Effectual Calling,” or “Justification,” is; and I am sure that he shed more tears over “Effectual Calling” than would blot out the record of any number of infantile sins. He made up his youthful mind that if he could not be saved without “Effectual Calling”—whatever that was—he did not want to be saved at all. But he has thought better of it since.
It is proper to affirm here that The Boy did not
[p 19]
acquire his occasional swear-words from “The
Shorter Catechism.” They were born in him, as
a fragment of Original Sin; and they came out
of him innocently and unwittingly, and only for
purposes of proper emphasis, long before the days
of “Justification,” and even before he knew his
A, B, C’s.
His earliest visit to Scotland was made when he was but four or five years of age, and long before he had assumed the dignity of trousers, or had been sent to school. His father had gone to the old home at St. Andrews hurriedly, upon the receipt of the news of the serious illness of The Boy’s grandmother, who died before they reached her. Naturally, The Boy has little recollection of that sad month of December, spent in his grandfather’s house, except that it was sad. The weather was cold and wet; the house, even under ordinary circumstances, could not have been a very cheerful one for a youngster who had no companions of his own age. It looked out upon the German Ocean—which at that time of the year was always in a rage, or in the sulks—and it was called “Peep o’ Day,” because it received the very first rays of the sun as he rose upon the British Isles.
The Boy’s chief amusement was the feeding of
“flour-scones” and oat-cakes to an old goat, who
lived in the neighborhood, and in daily walks with
his grandfather, who seemed to find some little
[p 20]
comfort and entertainment in the lad’s childish prattle.
He was then almost the only grandchild; and the
old man was very proud of his manner and appearance,
and particularly amused at certain gigantic
efforts on The Boy’s part to adapt his own short legs
to the strides of his senior’s long ones.
After they had interviewed the goat, and had watched the wrecks with which the wild shore was strewn, and had inspected the Castle in ruins, and the ruins of the Cathedral, The Boy would be shown his grandmother’s new-made grave, and his own name in full—a common name in the family—upon the family tomb in the old kirk-yard; all of which must have been very cheering to The Boy; although he could not read it for himself. And then, which was better, they would stand, hand in hand, for a long time in front of a certain candy-shop window, in which was displayed a little regiment of lead soldiers, marching in double file towards an imposing and impregnable tin fortress on the heights of barley-sugar. Of this spectacle they never tired; and they used to discuss how The Boy would arrange them if they belonged to him; with a sneaking hope on The Boy’s part that, some day, they were to be his very own.
At the urgent request of the grandfather, the
American contingent remained in St. Andrews until
the end of the year; and The Boy still remembers
vividly, and he will never forget, the dismal failure
[p 21]
of “Auld Lang Syne” as it was sung by the family,
with clasped hands, as the clock struck and the New
Year began. He sat up for the occasion—or, rather,
was waked up for the occasion; and of all that family
group he has been, for a decade or more, the only
survivor. The mother of the house was but lately
dead; the eldest son, and his son, were going, the
next day, to the other side of the world; and every
voice broke before the familiar verse came to an end.
As The Boy went off to his bed he was told that his grandfather had something for him, and he stood at his knee to receive—a Bible! That it was to be the lead soldiers and the tin citadel he never for a moment doubted; and the surprise and disappointment were very great. He seems to have had presence of mind enough to conceal his feelings, and to kiss and thank the dear old man for his gift. But as he climbed slowly up the stairs, in front of his mother, and with his Bible under his arm, she overheard him sob to himself, and murmur, in his great disgust: “Well, he has given me a book! And I wonder how in thunder he thinks I am going to read his damned Scotch!”
This display of precocious profanity and of innate patriotism, upon the part of a child who could not read at all, gave unqualified pleasure to the old gentleman, and he never tired of telling the story as long as he lived.
[p 22]
The Boy never saw the grandfather again. He
had gone to the kirk-yard, to stay, before the next
visit to St. Andrews was made; and now that kirk-yard
holds everyone of The Boy’s name and blood
who is left in the town.
The Boy was taught, from the earliest awakening
of his reasoning powers, that truth was to be told
and to be respected, and that nothing was more
wicked or more ungentlemanly than a broken promise.
He learned very early to do as he was told, and
not to do, under any consideration, what he had said
he would not do. Upon this last point he was almost
morbidly conscientious, although once, literally,
he “beat about the bush.” His aunt Margaret, always
devoted to plants and to flowers, had, on the
back stoop of his grandfather’s house, a little grove of
orange and lemon trees, in pots. Some of these were
usually in fruit or in flower, and the fruit to The
Boy was a great temptation. He was very fond of
oranges, and it seemed to him that a “home-made”
orange, which he had never tasted, must be much better
than a grocer’s orange; as home-made cake was
certainly preferable, even to the wonderful cakes made
by the professional Mrs. Milderberger. He watched
those little green oranges from day to day, as they
gradually grew big and yellow in the sun. He promised
faithfully that he would not pick any of them,
but he had a notion that some of them might drop
[p 23]
off. He never shook the trees, because he said he
would not. But he shook the stoop! And he hung
about the bush, which he was too honest to beat.
One unusually tempting orange, which he had known
from its bud-hood, finally overcame him. He did
not pick it off, he did not shake it off; he compromised
with his conscience by lying flat on his back
and biting off a piece of it. It was not a very good
action, nor was it a very good orange, and for that
reason, perhaps, he went home immediately and told
on himself. He told his mother. He did not tell
his aunt Margaret. His mother did not seem to be
as much shocked at his conduct as he was. But, in
her own quiet way, she gave him to understand that
promises were not made to be cracked any more
than they were made to be broken—that he had
been false to himself in heart, if not in deed, and
that he must go back and make it “all right” with
his aunt Margaret. She did not seem to be very
much shocked, either; he could not tell why. But
they punished The Boy. They made him eat the
rest of the orange!
He lost all subsequent interest in that tropical glade, and he has never cared much for domestic oranges since.
Among the many bumps which are still conspicuously
absent in The Boy’s phrenological development
are the bumps of Music and Locality. He
[p 24]
whistled as soon as he acquired front teeth; and he
has been singing “God Save the Queen” at the St.
Andrew’s Society dinners, on November the 30th,
ever since he came of age. But that is as far as his
sense of harmony goes. He took music-lessons for
three quarters, and then his mother gave it up in
despair. The instrument was a piano. The Boy
could not stretch an octave with his right hand, the
little finger of which had been broken by a shinny-stick;
and he could not do anything whatever with
his left hand. He was constantly dropping his bass-notes,
which, he said, were “understood.” And
even Miss Ferguson—most patient of teachers—declared
that it was of no use.
The piano to The Boy has been the most offensive of instruments ever since. And when his mother’s old piano, graceful in form, and with curved legs which are still greatly admired, lost its tone, and was transformed into a sideboard, he felt, for the first time, that music had charms.
He had to practise half an hour a day, by a thirty-minute
sand-glass that could not be set ahead; and
he shed tears enough over “The Carnival of Venice”
to have raised the tide in the Grand Canal. They
blurred the sharps and the flats on the music-books—those
tears; they ran the crotchets and
the quavers together, and, rolling down his cheeks,
they even splashed upon his not very clean little
[p 25]
hands; and, literally, they covered the keys with
mud.