Another serious trial to The Boy was dancing-school. In the first place, he could not turn round without becoming dizzy; in the second place, he could not learn the steps to turn round with; and in the third place, when he did dance he had to dance with a girl! There was not a boy in all Charraud’s, or in all Dodworth’s, who could escort a girl back to her seat, after the dance was over, in better time, or make his “thank-you bow” with less delay. His only voluntary terpsichorean effort at a party was the march to supper; and the only steps he ever took with anything like success were during the promenade in the lancers. In “hands-all-round” he invariably started with the wrong hand; and if in the set there were girls big enough to wear long dresses, he never failed to tear such out at the gathers. If anybody fell down in the polka it was always The Boy; and if anybody bumped into anybody else, The Boy was always the bumper, unless his partner could hold him up and steer him straight.

The only social function in which The Boy took any interest whatever was the making of New-Year’s calls. Not that he cared to make New-Year’s calls in themselves, but because he wanted to make more New-Year’s calls than were made by any other boy. His “list,” based upon last year’s list, was commenced about February 1; and it contained the names of every person whom The Boy knew, or thought he knew, whether that person knew The Boy or not, from Mrs. Penrice, who boarded opposite the Bowling Green, to the Leggats and the Faures, who lived near Washington Parade Ground, the extreme social limits of his city in those days. He usually began by making a formal call upon his own mother, who allowed him to taste the pickled oysters as early as ten in the morning; and he invariably wound up by calling upon Ann Hughes in the kitchen, where he met the soap-fat man, who was above his profession, and likewise the sexton of Ann Hughes’s church, who generally came with Billy, the barber on the corner of Franklin Street. There were certain calls The Boy always made with his father, during which he did not partake of pickled oysters; but he had pickled oysters everywhere else; and they never seemed to do him any serious harm.

When he received, the next New Year, new studs and a scarf-pin—all bloodstones, to match the ring—he exhibited no little ingenuity of toilet in displaying them both, because studs are hardly visible when one wears a scarf, unless the scarf is kept out of the perpendicular by stuffing one end of it into the sleeve of a jacket; which requires constant attention and a good deal of bodily contortion.

The great drawbacks to the custom of making New-Year’s calls were the calls which had to be made after the day’s hard work was supposed to be over, and when The Boy and his father, returning home very tired, were told that they must call upon Mrs. Somebody, and upon Mrs. Somebody-else, whom they had neglected to visit, because the husbands and the sons of these ladies had called upon the mother of The Boy. New Year’s Day was not the shortest day of the year, by any means, but it was absolutely necessary to return the Somebody’s call, no matter how late the hour, or how tired the victims of the social law. And it bored the ladies of the Somebody household as much as it bored the father and The Boy.

“The Hounds” and “The Rovers” were rival bands of boys, not in The Boy’s set, who for many years made out-door life miserable to The Boy and to his friends. They threw stones and mud at each other, and at everybody else; and The Boy was not infrequently blamed for the windows they broke. They punched all the little boys who were better dressed than they were, and they were even depraved enough, and mean enough, to tell the driver every time The Boy or Johnny Robertson attempted to “cut behind.”

The only spot where The Boy felt really safe from the interference of “The Hounds” and “The Rovers” was in St. John’s Square, that delightful oasis in the desert of brick and mortar and cobble-stones which was known as the Fifth Ward. It was a private enclosure, bounded on the north by Laight Street, on the south by Beach Street, on the east by Varick Street, and on the west by Hudson Street; and its site is now occupied by the great freight-warehouses of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad Company.

The Boy once had a fight in the Park, with Bill Rice, about a certain lignum-vitæ peg-top, of which The Boy was very fond, and which Bill Rice kicked into the fountain. The Boy got mad, which was wrong and foolish of The Boy; and The Boy, also, got licked. And The Boy never could make his mother understand why he was silly and careless enough to cut his under-lip by knocking it against Bill Rice’s knuckles. Bill subsequently apologized by saying that he did not mean to kick the top into the fountain. He merely meant to kick the top. And it was all made up.

The Boy first had daily admission to St. John’s Park after the family moved to Hubert Street, when The Boy was about ten years old; and for half a decade or more it was his happy hunting-ground—when he was not kept in school! It was a particularly pleasant place in the autumn and winter months; for he could then gather “smoking-beans” and horse-chestnuts; and he could roam at will all over the grounds without any hateful warning to “Keep Off the Grass.”

This entertainment came to an end, like everything else, when the gardener chained the roller to the tool-house, after Bob Stuart fell under the machine and was rolled so flat that he had to be carried home on a stretcher, made of overcoats tied together by the sleeves. That is the only recorded instance in which the boys, particularly Bob, left the Park without climbing over. And the bells sounded a “general alarm.” The dent made in the path by Bob’s body was on exhibition until the next snow-storm.

“The Hounds” and “The Rovers” challenged “The Columbias” repeatedly. But that was looked upon simply as an excuse to get into the Park, and the challenges were never accepted. The challengers were forced to content themselves with running off with the balls which went over the fence; an action on their part which made home-runs through that medium very unpopular and very expensive. In the whole history of “The Hounds” and “The Rovers,” nothing that they pirated was ever returned but The Boy’s sled.

They talked what they fondly believed was the dialect of the Delaware tribe, and they were constantly on the lookout for the approaches of Rivenoak, or the Panther, who were represented by any member of the family who chanced to stray into the enclosure. They carefully turned their toes in when they walked, making so much effort in this matter that it took a great deal of dancing-school to get their feet back to the “first position” again; and they even painted their faces when they were on the war-path. The rabbits had the worst of it!

The campaign came to a sudden and disastrous conclusion when the hostile tribes, headed by Mrs. Robertson, descended in force upon the devoted band, because Chingachgook broke one of Hawk-Eye’s front teeth with an arrow, aimed at the biggest of the rabbits, which was crouching by the side of the roots of the grape-vine, and playing that he was a panther of enormous size.

“Three little kitens of our old cat

Were berrid this day in this grassplat.

They came to there deth in an old slop pale,

And after loosing their breth

They were pulled out by the tale.

These three little kitens have returned to their maker,

And were put in the grave by The Boy,

Undertaker.”

Jane was supposed to be the disconsolate widow. She certainly looked the part to perfection; and it never occurred to any of them that a cat, with kittens, could not possibly have left a widow behind her.

The ceremony was most impressive; the bereaved kittens were loud in their grief; when, suddenly, the village-bell tolled for the death of an old gentleman whom everybody loved, and the comedy became a tragedy. The older children were conscience-stricken at the mummery, and they ran, demoralized and shocked, into the house, leaving The Boy and the kittens behind them. Jane Purdy tripped over her veil, and one of the kittens was stepped on in the crush. But The Boy proceeded with the funeral.

The Mayflower was seriously damaged by fire once, owing to the careless use, by a deck-hand, of a piece of punk on the night before the Fourth of July; this same deck-hand being nearly blown up early the very next morning by a bunch of fire-crackers which went off—by themselves—in his lap. He did not know, for a second or two, whether the barge had burst her boiler or had been struck by lightning!

At Red Hook they smoked their first cigar—half a cigar, left by uncle Phil—and they wished they hadn’t! And at Red Hook they disobeyed their mothers once, and were found out. They were told not to go wading in the creek upon pain of not going to the creek at all; and for weeks they were deprived of the delights of the society of the Faure boys, through whose domain the creek ran, because, when they went to bed on that disastrous night, it was discovered that Bob had on The Boy’s stockings, and that The Boy was wearing Bob’s socks; a piece of circumstantial evidence which convicted them both. When the embargo was raised and they next went to the creek, it is remembered that Bob tore his trousers in climbing over a log, and that The Boy fell in altogether.

One of Bob’s earliest recollections of The Boy is connected with a toy express-wagon on four wheels, which could almost turn around on its own axis. The Boy imported this vehicle into Red Hook one summer, and they used it for the transportation of their chestnuts and their currants and their apples, green and ripe, and the mail, and most of the dust of the road; and Bob thinks, to this day, that nothing in all these after years has given him so much profound satisfaction and enjoyment as did that little cart.

The piano and its effect upon The Boy’s uncertain temper may have been the innocent cause of the first, and only, approach to a quarrel which The Boy and Bob ever had. The prime cause, however, was, of course, a girl! They were playing, that afternoon, at Cholwell Knox’s, when Cholwell said something about Julia Booth which Bob resented, and there was a fight, The Boy taking Cholwell’s part; why, he cannot say, unless it was because of his jealousy of Bob’s affection and admiration for that charming young teacher, who won all hearts in the village, The Boy’s among the number. Anyway, Bob was driven from the field by the hard little green apples of the Knox orchard; more hurt, he declares, by the desertion of his ally than by all the blows he received.

Another trouble The Boy had in Red Hook was Dr. McNamee, a resident dentist, who operated upon The Boy, now and then. He was a little more gentle than was The Boy’s city dentist, Dr. Castle; but he hurt, for all that. Dr. Castle lived in Fourth Street, opposite Washington Parade Ground, and on the same block with Clarke and Fanning’s school. And to this day The Boy would go miles out of his way rather than pass Dr. Castle’s house. Personally Dr. Castle was a delightful man, who told The Boy amusing stories, which The Boy could not laugh at while his mouth was wide open. But professionally Dr. Castle was to The Boy an awful horror, of whom he always dreamed when his dreams were particularly bad. As he looks back upon his boyhood, with its frequent toothache and its long hours in the dentists’ chairs, The Boy sometimes thinks that if he had his life to live over again, and could not go through it without teeth, he would prefer not to be born at all!

In later years, when Bob and The Boy could swim—a little—and had learned to take care of themselves in water over their heads, the mill-pond at Red Hook played an important part in their daily life there. They sailed it, and fished it, and camped out on its banks, with Ed Curtis—before Ed went to West Point—and with Dick Hawley, Josie Briggs, and Frank Rodgers, all first-rate fellows. But that is another story.

How the book came into The Boy’s possession he cannot now remember, nor is he sure that his parents realized how much, or how often, he was engrossed in its contents. It cheered him in the measles, it comforted him in the mumps. He took it to school with him, and he took it to bed with him; and he read it, over and over again, especially the early chapters; for he did not care so much for David after David became Trotwood, and fell in love.

The Boy never walked along the streets of London by his father’s side during that memorable summer without meeting, in fancy, some friend of David’s, without passing some spot that David knew, and loved, or hated. And he recognized St. Paul’s Cathedral at the first glance, because it had figured as an illustration on the cover of Peggotty’s work-box!

This was the Book of The Boy’s Boyhood. He does not recommend it as the exclusive literature of their boyhood to other boys; but out of it The Boy knows that he got nothing but what was healthful and helping. It taught him to abominate selfish brutality and sneaking falsehood, as they were exhibited in the Murdstones and the Heeps; it taught him to keep Charles I., and other fads, out of his “Memorials”; it taught him to avoid rash expenditure as it was practised by the Micawbers; it showed him that a man like Steerforth might be the best of good fellows and at the same time the worst and most dangerous of companions; it showed, on the other hand, that true friends like Traddles are worth having and worth keeping; it introduced him to the devoted, sisterly affection of a woman like Agnes; and it proved to him that the rough pea-jacket of a man like Ham Peggotty might cover the simple heart of as honest a gentleman as ever lived.