“ALWAYS IN THE WAY”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.Games, at parties, he enjoyed more than dancing, although he did not care very much for “Pillows and Keys,” until he became courageous enough to kneel before somebody except his maiden aunts. “Porter” was less embarrassing, because, when the door was shut, nobody but the little girl who called[p26]him but could tell whether he kissed her or not. All this happened a long time ago!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.READY FOR A NEW-YEAR’S CALL[p27]The Boy, if possible, kept his new overcoat until New Year’s Day—and he never left it in the hall when he called! He always wore new green kid gloves—why green?—fastened at the wrists with a single hook and eye; and he never took off his kid gloves when he called, except on that particular New Year’s Day when his aunt Charlotte gave him the bloodstone seal-ring, which, at first, was too big for his little finger,—the only finger on which a seal-ringcouldbe worn—and had to be made temporarily smaller with a piece of string.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.When The Boy met Johnny Robertson or Joe Stuart making calls, they never recognized each other, except when they were calling together, which did not often occur. It was an important rule in their social code to appear as strangers in-doors, although they would wait for each other outside, and compare lists. When theydidpresent themselves collectively in any drawing-room, one boy—usually The Boy’s cousin Lew—was detailed to whisper “T.[p28]T.” when he considered that the proper limit of the call was reached. “T. T.” stood for “Time to Travel”; and at the signal all conversation was abruptly interrupted, and the party trooped out in single file. The idea was not original with the boys. It was borrowed from the hook-and-ladder company, which made allitscalls in a body, and in two of Kipp and Brown’s stages, hired for the entire day. The boys always walked.The great drawbacks to the custom of making New-Year’s calls were the calls whichhadto 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 theymustcall 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.A NEW-YEAR’S CALLThe Boy was always getting lost. The very first time he went out alone he got lost! Told not to go off the block, he walked as far as the corner of Leonard Street, put his arm around the lamp-post,[p29]swung himself in a circle, had his head turned the wrong way, and marched off, at a right angle, along the side street, with no home visible anywhere, and not a familiar sign in sight. A ship at sea without a rudder, a solitary wanderer in the Great American Desert without a compass, could not have been more utterly astray. The Boy was so demoralized that he forgot his name and address; and when a kindly policeman picked him up, and carried him over the way, to the Leonard Street station-house for identification, he felt as if the end of everything had come. It was bad enough to be arrested, but how was he to satisfy his own conscience, and explain matters to his mother, when it was discovered that he had broken his solemn promise, and crossed the street? He had no pocket-handkerchief; and he remembers that he spoiled the long silk streamers of his Glengarry bonnet by wiping his eyes upon them. He was recognized by his Forty-second-plaid gingham frock, a familiar object in the neighborhood, and he was carried back to his parents, who had not had time to miss him, and who, consequently, were not distracted. He lost nothing by the adventure but himself, his self-respect, a pint of tears—and one shoe.He was afterwards lost in Greenwich Street, having gone there on the back step of an ice-cart; and once he was conveyed as far as the Hudson River Railroad Depot, at Chambers Street, on his sled, which he had[p30]hitched to the milkman’s wagon, and could not untie. This was very serious, indeed; for The Boy realized that he had not only lost himself but his sleigh, too. Aunt Henrietta found The Boy sitting disconsolately in front of Wall’s bake-shop; but the sleigh did not turn up for several days. It was finally discovered, badly scratched, in the possession of “The Head of the Rovers.”“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.”TOM RILEY’S LIBERTY POLEThere was also a band of unattached guerillaswho aspired to be, and often pretended to be, either “Hounds” or “Rovers”—they did not care which. They always hunted in couples, and if they met The Boy alone they asked him to which of the organizations he himself belonged. If he said he was a “Rover,” they claimed to be “Hounds,” and pounded him. If he declared himself in sympathy with the “Hounds,” they hoisted the “Rovers’” colors, and[p31]punched him again. If he disclaimed both associations, they punched him anyway, on general principles. “The Head of the Rovers” was subsequently killed, in front of Tom Riley’s liberty-pole in Franklin Street, in a fireman’s riot, and “The Chief of the Hounds,” who had a club-foot, became a respectable egg-merchant, with a stand in Washington Market, near the Root-beer Woman’s place of business, on the south side. The Boy met two of the gang near the Desbrosses Street Ferry only the other day; but they did not recognize The Boy.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.In the “Fifties,” and long before, it was a private park, to which only the property owners in its immediate neighborhood had access. It possessed fine old trees, winding gravel-walks, and meadows of grass. In the centre was a fountain, whereupon, in the proper season, the children were allowed to skate on both[p32]feet, which was a great improvement over the one-foot gutter-slides outside. The Park was surrounded by a high iron railing, broken here and there by massive gates, to which The Boy had a key. But he always climbed over. It was a point of etiquette, in The Boy’s set, to climb over on all occasions, whether the gates were unlocked or not. And The Boy, many a time, has been known to climb over a gate, although it stood wide open! He not infrequently tore his clothes on the sharp spikes by which the gates were surmounted; but that made no difference to The Boy—until he went home!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 ALWAYS CLIMBED OVERThe Boy did not fight much. His nose was too long. It seemed that he could not reach the end of it with his fists when he fought; and that the other fellows could always reach it with theirs, no matter[p33]how far out, or how scientifically, his left arm was extended. It was “One, two, three—and recover”—on The Boy’s nose! The Boy was a good runner. His legs were the only part of his anatomy which seemed to him as long as his nose. And his legs saved his nose in many a fierce encounter.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.”The old gardener, generally a savage defender of the place, who had no sense of humor as it was exhibited in boy nature, sometimes let the boys rake the dead leaves into great heaps and make bonfires of them, if the wind happened to be in the right direction. And then what larks! The bonfire was a house on fire, and the great garden-roller, a very heavy affair, was “Engine No. 42,” with which the boys ran to put the fire out. They all shouted as loudly and as unnecessarily as real firemen did, in those days; the foreman gave his orders through a real trumpet, and one boy had a real fireman’s hat[p34]with “Engine No. 42” on it. He was chief engineer, but he did not run with the machine: not because he was chief engineer, but because while in active motion he could not keep his hat on. It was his father’s hat, and its extraordinary weight was considerably increased by the wads of newspaper packed in the lining to make it fit. The chief engineer held the position for life on the strength of the hat, which he would not lend to anybody else. The rest of the officers of the company were elected,viva voce, every time there was a fire.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 CHIEF ENGINEERThe favorite amusements in the Park were shinny, baseball, one-old-cat, and fires. The Columbia Baseball Club was organized in 1853 or 1854. It had nine members, and The Boy was secretary and treasurer. The uniform consisted chiefly of a black leather belt with the initialsreversed C, B, reversed B, Cin white letters, hand-painted, and generally turned the wrong way.[p35]The first base was an ailantus-tree; the second base was another ailantus-tree; the third base was a button-ball-tree; the home base was a marble head-stone, brought for that purpose from an old burying-ground not far away; and “over the fence” was a home-run. A player was caught out on the second bounce, and he was “out” if hit by a ball thrown at him as he ran. The Boy was put out once by a crack on the ear, which put The Boy out very much.“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.Contemporary with the Columbia Baseball Club was a so-called “Mind-cultivating Society,” organized by the undergraduates of McElligott’s School, in Greene Street. The Boy, as usual, was secretary when he was not treasurer. The object was “Debates,” but all the debating was done at the business meetings, and no mind ever became sufficiently[p36]cultivated to master the intricacies of parliamentary law. The members called it a Secret Society, and on their jackets they wore, as conspicuously as possible, a badge-pin consisting of a blue enamelled circlet containing Greek letters in gold. In a very short time the badge-pin was all that was left of the Society; but to this day the secret of the Society has never been disclosed. No one ever knew, or will ever know, what the Greek letters stood for—not even the members themselves.The Boy was never a regular member of any fire-company, but almost as long as the old Volunteer Fire Department existed, he was what was known as a “Runner.” He was attached, in a sort of brevet way, to “Pearl Hose No. 28,” and, later, to “11 Hook and Ladder.” He knew all the fire districts into which the city was then divided; his ear was always alert, even in the St. John’s Park days, for the sound of the alarm-bell, and he ran to every fire at any hour of the day or night, up to ten o’clockP.M.He did not do much when he got to the fire but stand around and “holler.” But once—a proud moment—he helped steer the hook-and-ladder truck to a false alarm in Macdougal Street—and once—a very proud moment, indeed—he went into a tenement-house, near Dr. Thompson’s church, in Grand Street, and carried two negro babies down-stairs in his arms. There was no earthly reason why the[p37]babies should not have been left in their beds; and the colored family did not like it, because the babies caught cold! But The Boy, for once in his life, tasted the delights of self-conscious heroism.“MRS. ROBERTSON DESCENDED IN FORCE UPON THE DEVOTED BAND”When The Boy, as a bigger boy, was not running to fires he was going to theatres, the greater part of his allowance being spent in the box-offices of Burton’s Chambers Street house, of Brougham’s Lyceum, corner of Broome Street and Broadway, of Niblo’s, and of Castle Garden. There were no afternoon performances in those days, except now and then when the Ravels were at Castle Garden; and the admission to pit and galleries was usually two shillings—otherwise, twenty-five cents. His first play, so far as he remembers, was “The Stranger,” a play dismal enough to destroy any taste for the drama, one would suppose, in any juvenile mind. He never cared very much to see “The Stranger” again, but nothing that was a play was too deep or too heavy for him. He never saw the end of any of the more elaborate productions, unless his father took him to the theatre (as once in a while he did), for it was a strict rule of the house, until The Boy was well up in his teens, that he must be in by ten o’clock. His father did not ask him where he was going, or where he had been; but the curfew in Hubert Street tolled at ten. The Boy calculated carefully and exactly how many minutes it took him to[p38]run to Hubert Street from Brougham’s or from Burton’s; and by the middle of the second act his watch—a small silver affair with a hunting-case, in which he could not keep an uncracked crystal—was always in his hand. He never disobeyed his father, and for years he never knew what became of Claude Melnotte after he went to the wars; or if Damon got back in time to save Pythias before the curtain fell. The Boy, naturally, had a most meagre notion as to what all these plays were about, but he enjoyed his fragments of them as he rarely enjoys plays now. Sometimes, in these days, when the air is bad, and plays are worse, and big hats are worse than either, he wishes that he were forced to leave the modern play-house at nine-forty-five, on pain of no supper that night, or twenty lines of “Virgil” the next day.THE BOY AS VIRGINIUSOn very stormy afternoons the boys played theatre in the large garret of The Boy’s Hubert Street house; a convenient closet, with a door and a window, serving for the Castle of Elsinore in “Hamlet,” for the gunroom of the ship in “Black-eyed Susan,” or for the studio of Phidias in “The Marble Heart,” as the case might be. “The Brazilian Ape,” as requiring more action than words, was a favorite entertainment, only they all wanted to play Jocko the Ape; and they would have made no little success out of the “Lady of Lyons” if any of them had[p39]been willing to play Pauline. Their costumes and properties were slight and not always accurate, but they could “launch the curse of Rome,” and describe “two hearts beating as one,” in a manner rarely equalled on the regular stage. The only thing they really lacked was an audience, neither Lizzie Gustin nor Ann Hughes ever being able to sit through more than one act at a time. When The Boy, as Virginius, with his uncle Aleck’s sword-cane, stabbed all the feathers out of the pillow which represented the martyred Virginia; and when Joe Stuart, as Falstaff, broke the bottom out of Ann Hughes’s clothes-basket, the license was revoked, and the season came to an untimely end.Until the beginning of the weekly, or the fortnightly, sailings of the Collins line of steamers from the foot of Canal Street (a spectacle which they never missed in any weather), Joe Stuart, Johnny Robertson, and The Boy played “The Deerslayer” every Saturday in the back-yard of The Boy’s house. The area-way was Glimmer-glass, in which they fished, and on which they canoed; the back-stoop was Muskrat Castle; the rabbits were all the wild beasts of the Forest; Johnny was Hawk-Eye, The Boy was Hurry Harry, and Joe Stuart was Chingachgook. Their only food was half-baked potatoes—sweet potatoes if possible—which they cooked themselves and ate ravenously, with butter and salt, if Ann Hughes was[p40]amiable, and entirely unseasoned if Ann was disposed to be disobliging.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.JOHNNY ROBERTSONJohnny Robertson and The Boy had one great superstition—to wit, Cracks! For some now inexplicable reason they thought it unlucky to step on cracks; and they made daily and hourly spectacles of themselves in the streets by the eccentric irregularity of their gait. Now they would take long strides, like a pair of ostriches, and now short, quick[p41]steps, like a couple of robins; now they would hop on both feet, like a brace of sparrows; now they would walk on their heels, now on their toes; now with their toes turned in, now with their toes turned out—at right angles, in a splay-footed way; now they would walk with their feet crossed, after the manner of the hands of very fancy, old-fashioned piano-players, skipping from base to treble—over cracks. The whole performance would have driven a sensitive drill-sergeant or ballet-master to distraction. And when they came to a brick sidewalk they would go all around the block to avoid it. They could cross Hudson Street on the cobblestones with great effort, and in great danger of being run over; but they could not possibly travel upon a brick pavement, and avoid the cracks. What would have happened to them if theydidstep on a crack they did not exactly know. But, for all that, they never stepped on cracks—of their own free will!The Boy’s earliest attempts at versification were found, the other day, in an old desk, and at the end of almost half a century. The copy is in his own boyish, ill-spelled print; and it bears no date. The present owner, his aunt Henrietta, well remembers the circumstances and the occasion, however, having been an active participant in the acts the poem describes, although she avers that she had no hand in its composition. The original, it seems, was[p42]transcribed by The Boy upon the cover of a soap-box, which served as a head-stone to one of the graves in his family burying-ground, situated in the back-yard of the Hudson Street house, from which he was taken before he was nine years of age. The monument stood against the fence, and this is the legend it bore—rhyme, rhythm, metre, and orthography being carefully preserved:“Three little kitens of our old catWere berrid this day in this grassplat.They came to there deth in an old slop pale,And after loosing their brethThey 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.”At about this period The Boy officiated at the funeral of another cat, but in a somewhat more exalted capacity. It was the Cranes’ cat, at Red Hook—a Maltese lady, who always had yellow kittens. The Boy does not remember the cause of the cat’s death, but he thinks that Uncle Andrew Knox ran over her, with the “dyspepsia-wagon”—so called because it had no springs. Anyway, the cat died,[p43]and had to be buried. The grave was dug in the garden of the tavern, near the swinging-gate to the stable, and the whole family attended the services. Jane Purdy, in a deep crape veil, was the chief mourner; The Boy’s aunts were pall-bearers, in white scarves; The Boy was the clergyman; while the kittens—who did not look at all like their mother—were on hand in a funeral basket, with black shoestrings tied around their necks.JANE PURDYJane 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.When The Boy got as far as a room of his own, papered with scenes from circus-posters, and peopled by tin soldiers, he used to play that his bed was the bargeMayflower, running from Barrytown to the[p44]foot of Jay Street, North River, and that he was her captain and crew. She made nightly trips between the two ports; and by day, when she was not tied up to the door-knob—which was Barrytown—she was moored to the handle of the wash-stand drawer—which was the dock at New York. She never was wrecked, and she never ran aground; but great was the excitement of The Boy when, as not infrequently was the case, on occasions of sweeping, Hannah, the up-stairs girl, set her adrift.TheMayflowerwas 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!JOE STUARTBarrytown is the river port of Red Hook—a charming Dutchess County hamlet in which The Boy spent the first summer of his life, and in which he spent the better part of every succeeding summer for a quarter of a century; and he sometimes goes there yet, although many of the names he knows were carved, in the long-agoes, on the tomb. He always went up and down, in those days, on theMayflower, the real boat of that name, which was hardly more[p45]real to him than was the trundle-bed of his vivid, nightly imagination. They sailed from New York at five o’clockP.M., an hour looked for, and longed for, by The Boy, as the very beginning of summer, with all its delightful young charms; and they arrived at their destination about five of the clock the next morning, by which time The Boy was wide awake, and on the lookout for Lasher’s Stage, in which he was to travel the intervening three miles. And eagerly he recognized, and loved, every landmark on the road. Barringer’s Corner; the half-way tree; the road to the creek and to Madame Knox’s; and, at last, the village itself, and the tavern, and the tobacco-factory, and Massoneau’s store, over the way; and then, when Jane Purdy had shown him the new kittens and the little chickens, and he had talked to “Fido” and “Fanny,” or to Fido alone after Fanny was stolen by gypsies—Fanny was Fido’s wife, and a poodle—he rushed off to see Bob Hendricks, who was just his own age, barring a week, and who has been his warm friend for more than half a century; and then what good times The Boy had!Bob was possessed of a grandfather who could make kites, and swings, and parallel-bars, and things which The Boy liked; and Bob had a mother—and he has her yet, happy Bob!—who made the most wonderful of cookies, perfectly round, with sparkling[p46]globules of sugar on them, and little round holes in the middle; and Bob and The Boy for days, and weeks, and months together hen’s-egged, and rode in the hay-carts, and went for the mail every noon, and boosted each other up into the best pound-sweet-tree in the neighborhood; and pelted each other with little green apples, which weighed about a pound to the peck; and gathered currants and chestnuts in season; and with long straws they sucked new cider out of bung-holes; and learned to swim; and caught their first fish; and did all the pleasant things that all boys do.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.BOB HENDRICKS[p47]The Boy usually kept his promises, however, and he was known even to keep a candy-cane—twenty-eight inches long, red and white striped like a barber’s pole—for a fortnight, because his mother limited him to the consumption of two inches a day. But he could not keep any knees to his trousers; and when The Boy’s mother threatened to sew buttons—brass buttons, with sharp and penetrating eyes—on to that particular portion of the garment in question, he wanted to know, in all innocence, how they expected him to say his prayers!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.Bob remembers, too—what The Boy tries to forget—The Boy’s daily practice of half an hour on the piano borrowed by The Boy’s mother from Mrs. Bates for that dire purpose. Mrs. Bates’s piano is almost the only unpleasant thing associated with Red Hook in all The Boy’s experience of that happy village. It was pretty hard on The Boy, because, in[p48]The Boy’s mind, Red Hook should have been a place of unbroken delights. But The Boy’s mother wanted to make an all-round man of him, and when his mother said so, of course it had to be done or tried. Bob used to go with The Boy as far as Dr. Bates’s house, and then hang about on the gate until The Boy was released; and he asserts that the music which came out of the window in response to The Boy’s inharmonic touch had no power whatever to soothe his own savage young breast. He attributes all his later disinclination to music to those dreary thirty minutes of impatient waiting.The piano and its effect upon The Boy’s uncertain tempermayhave 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.MUSIC LESSONS[p49]It never happened again, dear Bob, and, please God, it never will!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!It has rather amused The Boy, in his middle age, to learn of the impressions he made upon Red Hook in his extreme youth. Bob, as has been shown, associates him with a little cart, and with a good deal of the concord of sweet sounds. One old friend remembers nothing but his phenomenal capacity for[p50]the consumption of chicken pot-pie. Another old friend can recall the scrupulously clean white duck suits which he wore of afternoons, and also the blue-checked long apron which he was forced to wear in the mornings; both of them exceedingly distasteful to The Boy, because the apron was a girl’s garment, and because the duck suit meant “dress-up,” and only the mildest of genteel play; while Bob’s sister dwells chiefly now upon the wonderful valentine The Boy sent once to Zillah Crane. It was so large that it had to have an especial envelope made to fit it; and it was so magnificent, and so delicate, that, notwithstanding the envelope, it came in a box of its own. It had actual lace, and pinkish Cupids reclining on light-blue clouds; and in the centre of all was a compressible bird-cage, which, when it was pulled out, like an accordion, displayed not a dove merely, but a plain gold ring—a real ring, made of real gold. Nothing like it had ever been seen before in all Dutchess County; and it was seen and envied by every girl of Zillah’s age between Rhinebeck and Tivoli, between Barrytown and Pine Plains.The Boy did an extensive business in the valentine line, in the days when February Fourteenth meant much more to boys than it does now. He sent sentimental valentines to Phœbe Hawkins and comic valentines to Ann Hughes, both of them written anonymously, and both directed in a disguised hand.[p51]But both recipients always knew from whom they came; and, in all probability, neither of them was much affected by the receipt. The Boy, as he has put on record elsewhere, never really, in his inmost heart, thought that comic valentines were so very comic, because those that came to him usually reflected upon his nose, or were illuminated with portraits of gentlemen of all ages adorned with supernaturally red hair.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.The Boy was asked, a year or two ago, to write a paper upon “The Books of his Boyhood.” And when he came to think the matter over he discovered, to his surprise, that the Books of his Boyhood consisted of but one book! It was bound in two twelvemogreen cloth volumes; it bore the date of 1850, and it was filled with pictorial illustrations of “The Personal History and Experiences of David Copperfield, the Younger.” It was the first book The Boy ever read, and he thought then, and[p52]sometimes he thinks now, that it was the greatest book ever written. The traditional books of the childhood of other children came later to The Boy: “Robinson Crusoe,” and the celebrated “Swiss Family” of the same name; “The Desert Home,” of Mayne Reid; Marryat’s “Peter Simple”; “The Leather Stocking Tales”; “Rob Roy”; and “The Three Guardsmen” were well thumbed and well liked; but they were not The Boy’s first love in fiction, and they never usurped, in his affections, the place of the true account of David Copperfield. It was a queer book to have absorbed the time and attention of a boy of eight or nine, who had to skip the big words, who did not understand it all, but who cried, as he has cried but once since, whenever he came to that dreadful chapter which tells the story of the taking away of David’s mother, and of David’s utter, hopeless desolation over his loss.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.When, in 1852, after his grandfather’s death, The[p53]Boy first saw London, it was not the London of the Romans, the Saxons, or the Normans, or the London of the Plantagenets or the Tudors, but the London of the Micawbers and the Traddleses, the London of Murdstone and Grinby, the London of Dora’s Aunt and of Jip. On his arrival at Euston Station the first object upon which his eyes fell was a donkey-cart, a large wooden tray on wheels, driven, at a rapid pace, by a long-legged young man, and followed, at a pace hardly so rapid, by a boy of about his own age, who seemed in great mental distress. This was the opening scene. And London, from that moment, became to him, and still remains, a great moving panorama of David Copperfield.He saw the Orfling, that first evening, snorting along Tottenham Court Road; he saw Mealy Potatoes, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, lounging along Broad Street; he saw Martha disappear swiftly and silently into one of the dirty streets leading from Seven Dials; he saw innumerable public-houses—the Lion, or the Lion and something else—in anyone of which David might have consumed that memorable glass of Genuine Stunning ale with a good head on it. As they drove through St. Martin’s Lane, and past a court at the back of the church, he even got a glimpse of the exterior of the shop where was sold a special pudding, made of currants, but dear; a two-pennyworth being no larger than a pennyworth of[p54]more ordinary pudding at any other establishment in the neighborhood. And, to crown all, when he looked out of his back bedroom window, at Morley’s Hotel, he discovered that he was looking at the actual bedroom windows of the Golden Cross on the Strand, in which Steerforth and little Copperfield had that disastrous meeting which indirectly brought so much sorrow to so many innocent men and women.This was but the beginning of countless similar experiences, and the beginning of a love for Landmarks of a more important but hardly of a more delightful character. Hungerford Market and Hungerford Stairs, with the blacking-warehouse abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, still stood near Morley’s in 1852; and very close to them stood then, and still stands to-day, the old house in Buckingham Street, Adelphi, where, with Mrs. Crupp, Trotwood Copperfield found his lodgings when he began his new life with Spenlow and Jorkins. These chambers, once the home of Clarkson Stanfield, and since of Mr. William Black and of Dr. B. E. Martin, became, in later days, very familiar to The Boy, and still are haunted by the great crowd of the ghosts of the past. The Boy has seen there, within a few years, and with his eyes wide open, the spirits of Traddles, of Micawber, of Steerforth, of Mr. Dick, of Clara[p55]Peggotty and Daniel, of Uriah Heep—the last slept one evening on the sofa pillows before the fire, you may remember—and of Aunt Betsy herself. But in 1852 he could only look at the outside of the house, and, now and then, when the door was open, get a glimpse of the stairs down which some one fell and rolled, one evening, when somebody else said it was Copperfield!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!Perhaps the event which gave him the greatest pleasure was a casual meeting with little Miss Moucher in a green omnibus coming from the top of Baker Street to Trafalgar Square. It could not possibly have been anybody else. There were the same large head and face, the same short arms. “Throat she had none; waist she had none; legs she had none, worth mentioning.” The Boy can still hear the pattering of the rain on the rattly windows of that lumbering green omnibus; he can remember every detail of the impressive drive; and Miss Moucher, and the fact of her existence in the flesh, and there present,[p56]wiped from his mind every trace of Mme. Tussaud’s famous gallery, and the waxworks it contained.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.
“ALWAYS IN THE WAY”
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.
Games, at parties, he enjoyed more than dancing, although he did not care very much for “Pillows and Keys,” until he became courageous enough to kneel before somebody except his maiden aunts. “Porter” was less embarrassing, because, when the door was shut, nobody but the little girl who called[p26]him but could tell whether he kissed her or not. All this happened a long time ago!
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.
READY FOR A NEW-YEAR’S CALL
[p27]The Boy, if possible, kept his new overcoat until New Year’s Day—and he never left it in the hall when he called! He always wore new green kid gloves—why green?—fastened at the wrists with a single hook and eye; and he never took off his kid gloves when he called, except on that particular New Year’s Day when his aunt Charlotte gave him the bloodstone seal-ring, which, at first, was too big for his little finger,—the only finger on which a seal-ringcouldbe worn—and had to be made temporarily smaller with a piece of string.
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.
When The Boy met Johnny Robertson or Joe Stuart making calls, they never recognized each other, except when they were calling together, which did not often occur. It was an important rule in their social code to appear as strangers in-doors, although they would wait for each other outside, and compare lists. When theydidpresent themselves collectively in any drawing-room, one boy—usually The Boy’s cousin Lew—was detailed to whisper “T.[p28]T.” when he considered that the proper limit of the call was reached. “T. T.” stood for “Time to Travel”; and at the signal all conversation was abruptly interrupted, and the party trooped out in single file. The idea was not original with the boys. It was borrowed from the hook-and-ladder company, which made allitscalls in a body, and in two of Kipp and Brown’s stages, hired for the entire day. The boys always walked.
The great drawbacks to the custom of making New-Year’s calls were the calls whichhadto 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 theymustcall 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.
A NEW-YEAR’S CALL
The Boy was always getting lost. The very first time he went out alone he got lost! Told not to go off the block, he walked as far as the corner of Leonard Street, put his arm around the lamp-post,[p29]swung himself in a circle, had his head turned the wrong way, and marched off, at a right angle, along the side street, with no home visible anywhere, and not a familiar sign in sight. A ship at sea without a rudder, a solitary wanderer in the Great American Desert without a compass, could not have been more utterly astray. The Boy was so demoralized that he forgot his name and address; and when a kindly policeman picked him up, and carried him over the way, to the Leonard Street station-house for identification, he felt as if the end of everything had come. It was bad enough to be arrested, but how was he to satisfy his own conscience, and explain matters to his mother, when it was discovered that he had broken his solemn promise, and crossed the street? He had no pocket-handkerchief; and he remembers that he spoiled the long silk streamers of his Glengarry bonnet by wiping his eyes upon them. He was recognized by his Forty-second-plaid gingham frock, a familiar object in the neighborhood, and he was carried back to his parents, who had not had time to miss him, and who, consequently, were not distracted. He lost nothing by the adventure but himself, his self-respect, a pint of tears—and one shoe.
He was afterwards lost in Greenwich Street, having gone there on the back step of an ice-cart; and once he was conveyed as far as the Hudson River Railroad Depot, at Chambers Street, on his sled, which he had[p30]hitched to the milkman’s wagon, and could not untie. This was very serious, indeed; for The Boy realized that he had not only lost himself but his sleigh, too. Aunt Henrietta found The Boy sitting disconsolately in front of Wall’s bake-shop; but the sleigh did not turn up for several days. It was finally discovered, badly scratched, in the possession of “The Head of the Rovers.”
“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.”
TOM RILEY’S LIBERTY POLE
There was also a band of unattached guerillaswho aspired to be, and often pretended to be, either “Hounds” or “Rovers”—they did not care which. They always hunted in couples, and if they met The Boy alone they asked him to which of the organizations he himself belonged. If he said he was a “Rover,” they claimed to be “Hounds,” and pounded him. If he declared himself in sympathy with the “Hounds,” they hoisted the “Rovers’” colors, and[p31]punched him again. If he disclaimed both associations, they punched him anyway, on general principles. “The Head of the Rovers” was subsequently killed, in front of Tom Riley’s liberty-pole in Franklin Street, in a fireman’s riot, and “The Chief of the Hounds,” who had a club-foot, became a respectable egg-merchant, with a stand in Washington Market, near the Root-beer Woman’s place of business, on the south side. The Boy met two of the gang near the Desbrosses Street Ferry only the other day; but they did not recognize The Boy.
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.
In the “Fifties,” and long before, it was a private park, to which only the property owners in its immediate neighborhood had access. It possessed fine old trees, winding gravel-walks, and meadows of grass. In the centre was a fountain, whereupon, in the proper season, the children were allowed to skate on both[p32]feet, which was a great improvement over the one-foot gutter-slides outside. The Park was surrounded by a high iron railing, broken here and there by massive gates, to which The Boy had a key. But he always climbed over. It was a point of etiquette, in The Boy’s set, to climb over on all occasions, whether the gates were unlocked or not. And The Boy, many a time, has been known to climb over a gate, although it stood wide open! He not infrequently tore his clothes on the sharp spikes by which the gates were surmounted; but that made no difference to The Boy—until he went home!
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 ALWAYS CLIMBED OVER
The Boy did not fight much. His nose was too long. It seemed that he could not reach the end of it with his fists when he fought; and that the other fellows could always reach it with theirs, no matter[p33]how far out, or how scientifically, his left arm was extended. It was “One, two, three—and recover”—on The Boy’s nose! The Boy was a good runner. His legs were the only part of his anatomy which seemed to him as long as his nose. And his legs saved his nose in many a fierce encounter.
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.”
The old gardener, generally a savage defender of the place, who had no sense of humor as it was exhibited in boy nature, sometimes let the boys rake the dead leaves into great heaps and make bonfires of them, if the wind happened to be in the right direction. And then what larks! The bonfire was a house on fire, and the great garden-roller, a very heavy affair, was “Engine No. 42,” with which the boys ran to put the fire out. They all shouted as loudly and as unnecessarily as real firemen did, in those days; the foreman gave his orders through a real trumpet, and one boy had a real fireman’s hat[p34]with “Engine No. 42” on it. He was chief engineer, but he did not run with the machine: not because he was chief engineer, but because while in active motion he could not keep his hat on. It was his father’s hat, and its extraordinary weight was considerably increased by the wads of newspaper packed in the lining to make it fit. The chief engineer held the position for life on the strength of the hat, which he would not lend to anybody else. The rest of the officers of the company were elected,viva voce, every time there was a fire.
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 CHIEF ENGINEER
The favorite amusements in the Park were shinny, baseball, one-old-cat, and fires. The Columbia Baseball Club was organized in 1853 or 1854. It had nine members, and The Boy was secretary and treasurer. The uniform consisted chiefly of a black leather belt with the initialsreversed C, B, reversed B, Cin white letters, hand-painted, and generally turned the wrong way.[p35]The first base was an ailantus-tree; the second base was another ailantus-tree; the third base was a button-ball-tree; the home base was a marble head-stone, brought for that purpose from an old burying-ground not far away; and “over the fence” was a home-run. A player was caught out on the second bounce, and he was “out” if hit by a ball thrown at him as he ran. The Boy was put out once by a crack on the ear, which put The Boy out very much.
“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.
Contemporary with the Columbia Baseball Club was a so-called “Mind-cultivating Society,” organized by the undergraduates of McElligott’s School, in Greene Street. The Boy, as usual, was secretary when he was not treasurer. The object was “Debates,” but all the debating was done at the business meetings, and no mind ever became sufficiently[p36]cultivated to master the intricacies of parliamentary law. The members called it a Secret Society, and on their jackets they wore, as conspicuously as possible, a badge-pin consisting of a blue enamelled circlet containing Greek letters in gold. In a very short time the badge-pin was all that was left of the Society; but to this day the secret of the Society has never been disclosed. No one ever knew, or will ever know, what the Greek letters stood for—not even the members themselves.
The Boy was never a regular member of any fire-company, but almost as long as the old Volunteer Fire Department existed, he was what was known as a “Runner.” He was attached, in a sort of brevet way, to “Pearl Hose No. 28,” and, later, to “11 Hook and Ladder.” He knew all the fire districts into which the city was then divided; his ear was always alert, even in the St. John’s Park days, for the sound of the alarm-bell, and he ran to every fire at any hour of the day or night, up to ten o’clockP.M.He did not do much when he got to the fire but stand around and “holler.” But once—a proud moment—he helped steer the hook-and-ladder truck to a false alarm in Macdougal Street—and once—a very proud moment, indeed—he went into a tenement-house, near Dr. Thompson’s church, in Grand Street, and carried two negro babies down-stairs in his arms. There was no earthly reason why the[p37]babies should not have been left in their beds; and the colored family did not like it, because the babies caught cold! But The Boy, for once in his life, tasted the delights of self-conscious heroism.
“MRS. ROBERTSON DESCENDED IN FORCE UPON THE DEVOTED BAND”
When The Boy, as a bigger boy, was not running to fires he was going to theatres, the greater part of his allowance being spent in the box-offices of Burton’s Chambers Street house, of Brougham’s Lyceum, corner of Broome Street and Broadway, of Niblo’s, and of Castle Garden. There were no afternoon performances in those days, except now and then when the Ravels were at Castle Garden; and the admission to pit and galleries was usually two shillings—otherwise, twenty-five cents. His first play, so far as he remembers, was “The Stranger,” a play dismal enough to destroy any taste for the drama, one would suppose, in any juvenile mind. He never cared very much to see “The Stranger” again, but nothing that was a play was too deep or too heavy for him. He never saw the end of any of the more elaborate productions, unless his father took him to the theatre (as once in a while he did), for it was a strict rule of the house, until The Boy was well up in his teens, that he must be in by ten o’clock. His father did not ask him where he was going, or where he had been; but the curfew in Hubert Street tolled at ten. The Boy calculated carefully and exactly how many minutes it took him to[p38]run to Hubert Street from Brougham’s or from Burton’s; and by the middle of the second act his watch—a small silver affair with a hunting-case, in which he could not keep an uncracked crystal—was always in his hand. He never disobeyed his father, and for years he never knew what became of Claude Melnotte after he went to the wars; or if Damon got back in time to save Pythias before the curtain fell. The Boy, naturally, had a most meagre notion as to what all these plays were about, but he enjoyed his fragments of them as he rarely enjoys plays now. Sometimes, in these days, when the air is bad, and plays are worse, and big hats are worse than either, he wishes that he were forced to leave the modern play-house at nine-forty-five, on pain of no supper that night, or twenty lines of “Virgil” the next day.
THE BOY AS VIRGINIUS
On very stormy afternoons the boys played theatre in the large garret of The Boy’s Hubert Street house; a convenient closet, with a door and a window, serving for the Castle of Elsinore in “Hamlet,” for the gunroom of the ship in “Black-eyed Susan,” or for the studio of Phidias in “The Marble Heart,” as the case might be. “The Brazilian Ape,” as requiring more action than words, was a favorite entertainment, only they all wanted to play Jocko the Ape; and they would have made no little success out of the “Lady of Lyons” if any of them had[p39]been willing to play Pauline. Their costumes and properties were slight and not always accurate, but they could “launch the curse of Rome,” and describe “two hearts beating as one,” in a manner rarely equalled on the regular stage. The only thing they really lacked was an audience, neither Lizzie Gustin nor Ann Hughes ever being able to sit through more than one act at a time. When The Boy, as Virginius, with his uncle Aleck’s sword-cane, stabbed all the feathers out of the pillow which represented the martyred Virginia; and when Joe Stuart, as Falstaff, broke the bottom out of Ann Hughes’s clothes-basket, the license was revoked, and the season came to an untimely end.
Until the beginning of the weekly, or the fortnightly, sailings of the Collins line of steamers from the foot of Canal Street (a spectacle which they never missed in any weather), Joe Stuart, Johnny Robertson, and The Boy played “The Deerslayer” every Saturday in the back-yard of The Boy’s house. The area-way was Glimmer-glass, in which they fished, and on which they canoed; the back-stoop was Muskrat Castle; the rabbits were all the wild beasts of the Forest; Johnny was Hawk-Eye, The Boy was Hurry Harry, and Joe Stuart was Chingachgook. Their only food was half-baked potatoes—sweet potatoes if possible—which they cooked themselves and ate ravenously, with butter and salt, if Ann Hughes was[p40]amiable, and entirely unseasoned if Ann was disposed to be disobliging.
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.
JOHNNY ROBERTSON
Johnny Robertson and The Boy had one great superstition—to wit, Cracks! For some now inexplicable reason they thought it unlucky to step on cracks; and they made daily and hourly spectacles of themselves in the streets by the eccentric irregularity of their gait. Now they would take long strides, like a pair of ostriches, and now short, quick[p41]steps, like a couple of robins; now they would hop on both feet, like a brace of sparrows; now they would walk on their heels, now on their toes; now with their toes turned in, now with their toes turned out—at right angles, in a splay-footed way; now they would walk with their feet crossed, after the manner of the hands of very fancy, old-fashioned piano-players, skipping from base to treble—over cracks. The whole performance would have driven a sensitive drill-sergeant or ballet-master to distraction. And when they came to a brick sidewalk they would go all around the block to avoid it. They could cross Hudson Street on the cobblestones with great effort, and in great danger of being run over; but they could not possibly travel upon a brick pavement, and avoid the cracks. What would have happened to them if theydidstep on a crack they did not exactly know. But, for all that, they never stepped on cracks—of their own free will!
The Boy’s earliest attempts at versification were found, the other day, in an old desk, and at the end of almost half a century. The copy is in his own boyish, ill-spelled print; and it bears no date. The present owner, his aunt Henrietta, well remembers the circumstances and the occasion, however, having been an active participant in the acts the poem describes, although she avers that she had no hand in its composition. The original, it seems, was[p42]transcribed by The Boy upon the cover of a soap-box, which served as a head-stone to one of the graves in his family burying-ground, situated in the back-yard of the Hudson Street house, from which he was taken before he was nine years of age. The monument stood against the fence, and this is the legend it bore—rhyme, rhythm, metre, and orthography being carefully preserved:
“Three little kitens of our old catWere berrid this day in this grassplat.They came to there deth in an old slop pale,And after loosing their brethThey 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.”
“Three little kitens of our old catWere berrid this day in this grassplat.They came to there deth in an old slop pale,And after loosing their brethThey 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.”
“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.”
At about this period The Boy officiated at the funeral of another cat, but in a somewhat more exalted capacity. It was the Cranes’ cat, at Red Hook—a Maltese lady, who always had yellow kittens. The Boy does not remember the cause of the cat’s death, but he thinks that Uncle Andrew Knox ran over her, with the “dyspepsia-wagon”—so called because it had no springs. Anyway, the cat died,[p43]and had to be buried. The grave was dug in the garden of the tavern, near the swinging-gate to the stable, and the whole family attended the services. Jane Purdy, in a deep crape veil, was the chief mourner; The Boy’s aunts were pall-bearers, in white scarves; The Boy was the clergyman; while the kittens—who did not look at all like their mother—were on hand in a funeral basket, with black shoestrings tied around their necks.
JANE PURDY
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.
When The Boy got as far as a room of his own, papered with scenes from circus-posters, and peopled by tin soldiers, he used to play that his bed was the bargeMayflower, running from Barrytown to the[p44]foot of Jay Street, North River, and that he was her captain and crew. She made nightly trips between the two ports; and by day, when she was not tied up to the door-knob—which was Barrytown—she was moored to the handle of the wash-stand drawer—which was the dock at New York. She never was wrecked, and she never ran aground; but great was the excitement of The Boy when, as not infrequently was the case, on occasions of sweeping, Hannah, the up-stairs girl, set her adrift.
TheMayflowerwas 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!
JOE STUART
Barrytown is the river port of Red Hook—a charming Dutchess County hamlet in which The Boy spent the first summer of his life, and in which he spent the better part of every succeeding summer for a quarter of a century; and he sometimes goes there yet, although many of the names he knows were carved, in the long-agoes, on the tomb. He always went up and down, in those days, on theMayflower, the real boat of that name, which was hardly more[p45]real to him than was the trundle-bed of his vivid, nightly imagination. They sailed from New York at five o’clockP.M., an hour looked for, and longed for, by The Boy, as the very beginning of summer, with all its delightful young charms; and they arrived at their destination about five of the clock the next morning, by which time The Boy was wide awake, and on the lookout for Lasher’s Stage, in which he was to travel the intervening three miles. And eagerly he recognized, and loved, every landmark on the road. Barringer’s Corner; the half-way tree; the road to the creek and to Madame Knox’s; and, at last, the village itself, and the tavern, and the tobacco-factory, and Massoneau’s store, over the way; and then, when Jane Purdy had shown him the new kittens and the little chickens, and he had talked to “Fido” and “Fanny,” or to Fido alone after Fanny was stolen by gypsies—Fanny was Fido’s wife, and a poodle—he rushed off to see Bob Hendricks, who was just his own age, barring a week, and who has been his warm friend for more than half a century; and then what good times The Boy had!
Bob was possessed of a grandfather who could make kites, and swings, and parallel-bars, and things which The Boy liked; and Bob had a mother—and he has her yet, happy Bob!—who made the most wonderful of cookies, perfectly round, with sparkling[p46]globules of sugar on them, and little round holes in the middle; and Bob and The Boy for days, and weeks, and months together hen’s-egged, and rode in the hay-carts, and went for the mail every noon, and boosted each other up into the best pound-sweet-tree in the neighborhood; and pelted each other with little green apples, which weighed about a pound to the peck; and gathered currants and chestnuts in season; and with long straws they sucked new cider out of bung-holes; and learned to swim; and caught their first fish; and did all the pleasant things that all boys do.
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.
BOB HENDRICKS
[p47]The Boy usually kept his promises, however, and he was known even to keep a candy-cane—twenty-eight inches long, red and white striped like a barber’s pole—for a fortnight, because his mother limited him to the consumption of two inches a day. But he could not keep any knees to his trousers; and when The Boy’s mother threatened to sew buttons—brass buttons, with sharp and penetrating eyes—on to that particular portion of the garment in question, he wanted to know, in all innocence, how they expected him to say his prayers!
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.
Bob remembers, too—what The Boy tries to forget—The Boy’s daily practice of half an hour on the piano borrowed by The Boy’s mother from Mrs. Bates for that dire purpose. Mrs. Bates’s piano is almost the only unpleasant thing associated with Red Hook in all The Boy’s experience of that happy village. It was pretty hard on The Boy, because, in[p48]The Boy’s mind, Red Hook should have been a place of unbroken delights. But The Boy’s mother wanted to make an all-round man of him, and when his mother said so, of course it had to be done or tried. Bob used to go with The Boy as far as Dr. Bates’s house, and then hang about on the gate until The Boy was released; and he asserts that the music which came out of the window in response to The Boy’s inharmonic touch had no power whatever to soothe his own savage young breast. He attributes all his later disinclination to music to those dreary thirty minutes of impatient waiting.
The piano and its effect upon The Boy’s uncertain tempermayhave 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.
MUSIC LESSONS
[p49]It never happened again, dear Bob, and, please God, it never will!
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!
It has rather amused The Boy, in his middle age, to learn of the impressions he made upon Red Hook in his extreme youth. Bob, as has been shown, associates him with a little cart, and with a good deal of the concord of sweet sounds. One old friend remembers nothing but his phenomenal capacity for[p50]the consumption of chicken pot-pie. Another old friend can recall the scrupulously clean white duck suits which he wore of afternoons, and also the blue-checked long apron which he was forced to wear in the mornings; both of them exceedingly distasteful to The Boy, because the apron was a girl’s garment, and because the duck suit meant “dress-up,” and only the mildest of genteel play; while Bob’s sister dwells chiefly now upon the wonderful valentine The Boy sent once to Zillah Crane. It was so large that it had to have an especial envelope made to fit it; and it was so magnificent, and so delicate, that, notwithstanding the envelope, it came in a box of its own. It had actual lace, and pinkish Cupids reclining on light-blue clouds; and in the centre of all was a compressible bird-cage, which, when it was pulled out, like an accordion, displayed not a dove merely, but a plain gold ring—a real ring, made of real gold. Nothing like it had ever been seen before in all Dutchess County; and it was seen and envied by every girl of Zillah’s age between Rhinebeck and Tivoli, between Barrytown and Pine Plains.
The Boy did an extensive business in the valentine line, in the days when February Fourteenth meant much more to boys than it does now. He sent sentimental valentines to Phœbe Hawkins and comic valentines to Ann Hughes, both of them written anonymously, and both directed in a disguised hand.[p51]But both recipients always knew from whom they came; and, in all probability, neither of them was much affected by the receipt. The Boy, as he has put on record elsewhere, never really, in his inmost heart, thought that comic valentines were so very comic, because those that came to him usually reflected upon his nose, or were illuminated with portraits of gentlemen of all ages adorned with supernaturally red hair.
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.
The Boy was asked, a year or two ago, to write a paper upon “The Books of his Boyhood.” And when he came to think the matter over he discovered, to his surprise, that the Books of his Boyhood consisted of but one book! It was bound in two twelvemogreen cloth volumes; it bore the date of 1850, and it was filled with pictorial illustrations of “The Personal History and Experiences of David Copperfield, the Younger.” It was the first book The Boy ever read, and he thought then, and[p52]sometimes he thinks now, that it was the greatest book ever written. The traditional books of the childhood of other children came later to The Boy: “Robinson Crusoe,” and the celebrated “Swiss Family” of the same name; “The Desert Home,” of Mayne Reid; Marryat’s “Peter Simple”; “The Leather Stocking Tales”; “Rob Roy”; and “The Three Guardsmen” were well thumbed and well liked; but they were not The Boy’s first love in fiction, and they never usurped, in his affections, the place of the true account of David Copperfield. It was a queer book to have absorbed the time and attention of a boy of eight or nine, who had to skip the big words, who did not understand it all, but who cried, as he has cried but once since, whenever he came to that dreadful chapter which tells the story of the taking away of David’s mother, and of David’s utter, hopeless desolation over his loss.
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.
When, in 1852, after his grandfather’s death, The[p53]Boy first saw London, it was not the London of the Romans, the Saxons, or the Normans, or the London of the Plantagenets or the Tudors, but the London of the Micawbers and the Traddleses, the London of Murdstone and Grinby, the London of Dora’s Aunt and of Jip. On his arrival at Euston Station the first object upon which his eyes fell was a donkey-cart, a large wooden tray on wheels, driven, at a rapid pace, by a long-legged young man, and followed, at a pace hardly so rapid, by a boy of about his own age, who seemed in great mental distress. This was the opening scene. And London, from that moment, became to him, and still remains, a great moving panorama of David Copperfield.
He saw the Orfling, that first evening, snorting along Tottenham Court Road; he saw Mealy Potatoes, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, lounging along Broad Street; he saw Martha disappear swiftly and silently into one of the dirty streets leading from Seven Dials; he saw innumerable public-houses—the Lion, or the Lion and something else—in anyone of which David might have consumed that memorable glass of Genuine Stunning ale with a good head on it. As they drove through St. Martin’s Lane, and past a court at the back of the church, he even got a glimpse of the exterior of the shop where was sold a special pudding, made of currants, but dear; a two-pennyworth being no larger than a pennyworth of[p54]more ordinary pudding at any other establishment in the neighborhood. And, to crown all, when he looked out of his back bedroom window, at Morley’s Hotel, he discovered that he was looking at the actual bedroom windows of the Golden Cross on the Strand, in which Steerforth and little Copperfield had that disastrous meeting which indirectly brought so much sorrow to so many innocent men and women.
This was but the beginning of countless similar experiences, and the beginning of a love for Landmarks of a more important but hardly of a more delightful character. Hungerford Market and Hungerford Stairs, with the blacking-warehouse abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, still stood near Morley’s in 1852; and very close to them stood then, and still stands to-day, the old house in Buckingham Street, Adelphi, where, with Mrs. Crupp, Trotwood Copperfield found his lodgings when he began his new life with Spenlow and Jorkins. These chambers, once the home of Clarkson Stanfield, and since of Mr. William Black and of Dr. B. E. Martin, became, in later days, very familiar to The Boy, and still are haunted by the great crowd of the ghosts of the past. The Boy has seen there, within a few years, and with his eyes wide open, the spirits of Traddles, of Micawber, of Steerforth, of Mr. Dick, of Clara[p55]Peggotty and Daniel, of Uriah Heep—the last slept one evening on the sofa pillows before the fire, you may remember—and of Aunt Betsy herself. But in 1852 he could only look at the outside of the house, and, now and then, when the door was open, get a glimpse of the stairs down which some one fell and rolled, one evening, when somebody else said it was Copperfield!
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!
Perhaps the event which gave him the greatest pleasure was a casual meeting with little Miss Moucher in a green omnibus coming from the top of Baker Street to Trafalgar Square. It could not possibly have been anybody else. There were the same large head and face, the same short arms. “Throat she had none; waist she had none; legs she had none, worth mentioning.” The Boy can still hear the pattering of the rain on the rattly windows of that lumbering green omnibus; he can remember every detail of the impressive drive; and Miss Moucher, and the fact of her existence in the flesh, and there present,[p56]wiped from his mind every trace of Mme. Tussaud’s famous gallery, and the waxworks it contained.
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.