Old Hundredand I were taking our Saturday afternoon walk in the country—that is, in such suburbanized country as we could achieve in the neighborhood of New York. We had passed innumerable small boys and not a few small girls, but save for an occasional noisy group on a base-ball diamond none of them seemed to be playing any definite games.
“Did we use to wander aimlessly round that way?” asked Old Hundred.
“We did not,” said I. “If it wasn't marbles in spring or tops in autumn it was duck-on-the-rock or stick-knife or——”
“Only we didn't call it stick-knife,” said Old Hundred, “we called it mumblety-peg.”
“We called it stick-knife,” said I.
“Your memory is curiously bad,” said Old Hundred. “You are always forgetting about these important matters. It was mumblety-peg.”
“My memory bad!” I sniffed. “I suppose you think I've forgotten how I always licked you at stick-knife?”
Old Hundred grinned. Old Hundred's grin, to-day as much as thirty years ago, is a mask for some coming trouble. He always grinned before he sailed into the other fellow, which was an effective way to catch the other fellow off his guard. I presume he grins now before he cross-questions a witness. “I'll play you a game right now,” he said softly.
“You're on,” said I.
We selected a spot of clean, thin turf behind a roadside fence. It was in reality a part of somebody's yard, but it was the best we could do. I still carry a pocket-knife of generous proportions, to whittle with when we go for a walk, and this I produced and opened, handing it to Old Hundred. “Now begin,” said I, as we squatted down.
He held the knife somewhat gingerly, first by the blade, then by the handle. “Wha—what do you do first?” he finally asked.
“Do?” said I. “Don't you remember?”
“No,” he replied, “and neither do you.”
“Give me the knife,” I cried. I relied on the feel of it in my hand to awaken a dormant muscular memory to help me out. But no muscular memory was stirred. Old Hundred watched me with a smile. “Begin, begin!” he urged.
“Let's see,” said I, “I think you took it first by the tip of the blade, this way, and made it stick up.” I threw the knife. It stuck, but almost lay upon the ground.
“You've got to get two fingers under it,” said Old Hundred. He tried, but there wasn't room. “You fail,” he cried. “There's a point for me.”
“Not till you've made it stick,” said I.
We grew interested in our game. We threw the knife from our nose and chin, we dropped it from our forehead, we jumped it over our hand, we half-closed the blade and tossed it that way, and finally, when the talley was reckoned up in my favor, I began to look about for a stick to whittle into the peg.
Old Hundred rose and dusted his clothes. “Here,” I cried. “You're not done yet!”
“Oh, yes I am!” he answered.
“Quitter, quitter, quitter!” I taunted.
“That may be,” said he, “but a learned lawyer of forty-five with a dirty mug is rather more self-conscious than a boy of ten. I'll buy you a dinner when we get to town.”
“Oh, very well,” said I, peevishly, “but I didn't think you'd so degenerated. I'll let you off if you'll admit it was stick-knife.”
“I'll admit it,” said Old Hundred. “I suppose in a minute you'll ask me to admit that prisoners'-base was relievo.”
“Whatwasrelievo, by the way?” I asked.
“Relievo—relievo?” said Old Hundred. “Why that was a game we played mostly on the ice, up on Birch Meadow, don't you remember? When we got tired of hockey, weall put our coats and hockey sticks in a pile, one man was It, and the rest tried to skate from a distant line around the pile and back. It the chap who was It tagged anybody before he got around, that chap had to be It with him, and so on till everybody was caught. Then the first one tagged had to be It for a new start.”
“I remember that game,” said I. “I remember how Frank White, who could skate like a fiend, used to be the last one caught. Sometimes he'd get around a hundred boys, ducking and dodging and taking half a mile of ice to do it, but escaping untouched. Sometimes, if there weren't many playing, he'd go around backwards, just to taunt us. But I don't think that game was relievo. That doesn't sound like the name to me.”
“What was it, then?” said Old Hundred.
“I don't know,” I answered. “It's funny how you forget things.”
By this time we were strolling along the road again. “Speaking of Birch Meadow,” said Old Hundred, “what glorious skating we kids used to have there! I never go by Central Park in winter without pitying the poor New York youngsters, just hobbling round and round on a half-acre pond where the surface is cut up into powder an inch thick, and the crowd is so dense you can scarcely see the ice. Shall you ever forget that mile-long pond in the woods, notdeep enough to drown in anywhere, and frozen over with smooth black ice as early as Thanksgiving Day? How we used to rush to it, up Love Lane, as soon as school was out!”
“Do you remember,” said I, “how we passed it last year, and found the woods all cut and the water drained off?”
“Don't be a wet blanket,” said Old Hundred, crossly. “The country has to grow.”
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. The mood of memory was on him. I repented of my speech. “Yes,” I answered. “No doubt the country has to grow. The colleges now play hockey on ponds made by the fire department. But there isn't that thrilling ring to your runners nor that long-drawn echo from the wooded shores when a crack crosses the ice.”
“I can see it all this minute,” said Old Hundred. “I can see my little self like a different person [which, indeed, he was!] as one of the crowd. We had chosen up sides—ten, twenty, thirty on a side. Stones, dragged from the shores, were put down for goals. Most of us had hockey sticks we had cut ourselves in the woods, hickory, with a bit of the curved root for the blade. You were one of the few boys who could afford a store stick. We had a hard rubber ball. Bobbie Pratt was always one goal because he had big feet. And over the black ice, against the sombre background of those cathedral aisles ofwhite pine, we chased that ball, charging in solid ranks so that the ice sagged and protested under the rush of our runners, wheeling suddenly, darting in pursuit of one boy who had snaked the ball out from the maze of feet and was flying with it toward the goal, all rapid action, panting breath, superb life. It really must have been a beautiful sight, one of those hockey games. I can still hear the ring and roar of the runners as the crowd swept down in a charge!”
I smiled. “And I can still feel the ice when somebody's stick got caught between my legs. 'Hi, fellers, come look at the star Willie made!' I can hear you shouting, as you examined the spot where my anatomy had been violently super-imposed on the skating surface.”
Old Hundred smiled too. “Fine little animals we were!” he said. “I suppose one reason why we don't see more games nowdays is because we live in the city. Even this suburbanized region is really city, dirtied all over with its spawn. Lord, Bill, think if we'd been cramped up in an East Side street, or reduced to Central Park for a skating pond! A precious lot of reminiscences we'd have to-day, wouldn't we? They build the kids what they call public play-grounds, and then they have to hire teachers to teach 'em how to play. Poor beggars, think of having to be taught by a grown-up how to play a game! They all have a rudimentary idea of base-ball;the American spirit and the sporting extras see to that. But I never see 'em playing anything else much, not even out here where the suburbs smut an otherwise attractive landscape.”
“Perhaps,” I ventured, “not only the lack of space and free open in the city has something to do with it, but the fact that the seasons there grow and change so unperceived. Games, you remember, go by a kind of immutable rotation—as much a law of childhood as gravitation of the universe. Marbles belong to spring, to the first weeks after the frost is out of the ground. They are a kind of celebration of the season, of the return to bare earth. Tops belong to autumn, hockey to the ice, base-ball to the spring and summer, foot-ball to the cold, snappy fall, and I seem to remember that even such games as hide-and-seek or puss-in-the-corner were played constantly at one period, not at all at another. If you played 'em out of time, they didn't seem right; there was no zest to them. Now, most of these game periods were determined long ago by physical conditions of ground and climate. They stem us back to nature. Cramp the youngsters in the artificial life of a city, and you snap this stem. My theory may be wild, all wrong. Yet I can't help feeling that our games, which we accepted and absorbed as a part of the universe, as much as our parents or the woods and fields,werea part of that nature which surroundedus, linking us with the beginnings of the race. Most kids' games are centuries upon centuries old, they say. I can't help believing that for every sky-scraper we erect we end the life, for thousands of children, of one more game.”
Old Hundred had listened attentively to my long discourse, nodding his head approvingly. “No doubt, no doubt,” he said. “I shall hereafter regard the Metropolitan Tower as a memorial shaft, which ought to bear an inscription, 'Hic jacet, Puss-in-the-corner.' Yet I saw some poor little duffers on the East Side the other day trying to play soak with a tattered old ball, which kept getting lost under the push carts.”
“They die hard,” said I.
We had by this time come on our walk into a group of houses, the outskirts of a town. Several small boys were, apparently, aimlessly walking about.
“Why don't theydosomething,” Old Hundred exclaimed, half to himself. “Don't they know how, even out here?”
“Suppose you teach 'em,” I suggested.
Again Old Hundred grinned. He walked over among the small boys, who stopped their talk and regarded him silently. “Ever play duck-on-the-rock?” he asked, with that curiously embarrassed friendliness of the middle-aged man trying to make up to boyhood. After a certain period,most of us unconsciously regard a small boy as a kind of buzz-saw, to be handled with extreme care.
The boys looked at one another, as if picking a spokesman. Finally one of them, a freckle-faced, stocky youngster who looked more like a country lad than the rest, replied. “They dunno how,” he said. “They're afraid the stones'll hurt 'em. We used to play it up State all the time.”
“There's your theory,” said Old Hundred in an aside to me.
“You're a liar,” said one of the other boys. “We ain't afraid, are we Bill?”
“Naw,” said Bill.
“Who's a liar?” said the first speaker, doubling his fists. “I'll knock your block off in about a minute.”
“Ah, come on an' do it, Rube!” taunted the other.
Old Hundred hereupon interfered. “Let's not fight, let's play,” he said. “If they don't know how, we'll teach 'em, eh Rube? Want to learn, boys?”
They looked at him for a moment with the instinctive suspicion of their class, decided in his favor, and assented. Like all men, Old Hundred was flattered by this mark of confidence from the severest critics in the world. He and Rube hunted out a large rock, and placed it on the curb. Each boy found his individual duck,Old Hundred tried to count out for It, couldn't remember the rhyme, and had to turn the job over to Rube, who delivered himself of the following:
“As I went up to Salt LakeI met a little rattlesnake,He'd e't so much of jelly cake,It made his little belly ache.”
“As I went up to Salt LakeI met a little rattlesnake,He'd e't so much of jelly cake,It made his little belly ache.”
When It was thus selected, automatically and poetically, Old Hundred drew a line in the road, parallel to the curb, It put his duck on the rock, and the rest started to pitch. Suddenly one demon spotted me, a smiling by-stander. “Hi,” he called, “Old Coattails ain't playin'.”
“Quitter, quitter, quitter!” taunted Old Hundred.
I started to make some remark about the self-consciousness of a learnedlitterateurof forty-five, but my speech was drowned in a derisive howl from the buzz-saws. I meekly accepted the inevitable, and hunted myself out a duck.
After ten minutes of madly dashing back to the line pursued by those supernaturally active young cubs, after stooping again and again to pick up my duck, after dodging flying stones and sometimes not succeeding, I was quite ready to quit. Old Hundred, flushed and perspiring, was playing as if his life depended on it. When he was tagged, he took his turn as It without amurmur. He was one of the kids, and they knew it. But finally he, too, felt the pace in his bones. We left the boys still playing, quite careless of whether we went or stayed. We were dusty and hot; our hands were scratched and grimed. “Ah!” said Old Hundred, looking back, “I've accomplished something to-day and had a good time doing it! The ungrateful little savages; they might have said good-bye.”
“Yet you wouldn't pull up the mumblety-peg for me,” I said.
“My dear fellow,” he replied, “that is quite different. To take a dare from a man is childish. Not to take a dare from a child is unmanly.”
“You talk like G. K. Chesterton,” said I.
“Which shows that occasionally Chesterton is right,” said he. “Speaking of dares, I'd like to see a gang of kids playing dares or follow-your-leader right now. Remember how we used to play follow-your-leader by the hour? You had to do just what he did, like a row of sheep. When there were girls in the game, you always ended up by turning a somersault, which was a subtle jest never to be too much enjoyed.”
“And Alice Perkins used to take that dare, too, I remember,” said I.
“Alice never could bear to be stumped,” he mused. “She's either become a mighty fine woman or a bad one. She was the only girl we ever allowed to perform in the circuses upin your backyard. Often we wouldn't even admit girls as spectators. Remember the sign you painted to that effect? She was the lady trapeze artist and bareback rider. You were the bareback, as I recall it—or was it Fatty Newell? Anyhow, one of her stunts was to hang by her legs and drink a tumbler of water.”
I felt my muscles. “I wonder,” said I, “if I could still skin the cat?”
“I'll bet I can chin myself ten times,” said Old Hundred.
We cast about for a convenient limb. There was an apple-tree beside the road, with a horizontal limb some eight feet above the ground. I tried first. I got myself over all right, till I hung inverted, my fountain-pen, pencil, and eyeglass case falling out of my pocket. But there I stuck. There was no strength in my arms to pull me up. So I curled clean over and dropped to the ground, very red in the face, my clothes covered with the powdered apple-tree bark. Old Hundred grasped the limb to chin himself. He got up once easily, he got up a second time with difficulty, he got up a third time by an heroic effort, the veins standing out on his forehead. The fourth time he stuck two inches off the ground.
“'You are old, Father William,'” I quoted.
He rubbed his biceps sadly. “I'm out of practice!” he said with some asperity. But we tried no more stunts on the apple-tree.
Beyond the orchard was a piece of split-rail fence, gray and old, with brambles growing at the intersections—one of the relics of an elder day in Westchester County. Old Hundred looked at it as he put on his coat.
“There ought to be a bumblebees' nest in that fence,” he said. “If we should poke the bees out we'd find honey, nice gritty honey, all over rotted wood from our fingers.”
“Are you looking for trouble?” I asked. “However, if you hold your breath, a bee can't sting you.”
“I recall that ancient superstition—with pain,” he smiled. “Why does a bee have such a fascination for a boy? Is it because he makes honey?”
“Not at all; that's a secondary issue. It's because he's a bee,” I answered. “Don't you remember the fun of stoning those gray hornets' nests which used to be built under the school-house eaves in summer? We waited till the first recess to plug a stone through 'em, and nobody could get back in the door without being stung. It was against the unwritten law to stone the school-house nests in vacation time!”
“Recess!” mused Old Hundred. “Do you know, sometimes in court when the judge announces a recess (which he pronounces with the accent on the second syllable, a manifest error), those old school-days come back to me, and my case drops clean out of my head for the moment.”
“I should think that would be embarrassing,” said I.
“It isn't,” he said, “it's restful. Besides, it often restores my mislaid sense of humor. I picture the judge out in a school-yard playing leap-frog with the learned counsel for the prosecution and the foreman of the jury. It makes 'em more human to see 'em so.”
“A Gilbertian idea, to say the least,” I smiled. “Why not set the whole court to playing squat-tag?”
“There was step-tag, too,” said Old Hundred. “Remember that? The boy or girl who was It shut his eyes and counted ten. Then he opened his eyes suddenly, and if he saw any part of you moving you became It. On 'ten' you tried to freeze into stiffness. We must have struck some funny attitudes.”
“Attitudes,” said I, “that was another game. Somebody said 'fear' or 'cat' or 'geography,' and you had to assume an attitude expressive of the word. The girls liked that game.”
“Oh, the girls always liked games where they could show off or get personal attention,” replied Old Hundred. “They liked hide-and-seek because you came after them, or because you took one of 'em and went off with her alone to hide behind the wood-shed. They liked kissing games best, though—drop-the-handkerchief and post-office.”
“Those weren't recess games,” I amended. “Those were party games. You played them when you had your best clothes on, which entirely changed your mental attitude, anyhow. When a girl dropped the handkerchief behind you, you had to chase her and kiss her if you could, and when you got a letter in post-office you had to go into the next room and be kissed. Everybody tittered at you when you came back.”
“Well, soak and scrub were recess games, anyhow. I can hear that glad yell, 'Scrub one!' rising from the first boy who burst out of the school-house door. Then there were dare-base, and foot-ball, which we used to play with an old bladder, or at best a round, black rubber ball, not one of these modern leather lemons. We used to kick it, too. I don't remember tackling and rushing, till we got older and went to prep school—or you and I went to prep school.”
“I'd hate to have been tackled on the old school playground,” said I. “It was hard as rocks.”
“Itwasrocks,” said Old Hundred. “You could spin a top on it anywhere.”
“Could you spin a top now?” I asked.
“Sure!” said Old Hundred. “And pop at a snapper, too.”
“It's wicked to play marbles for keeps,” said I impressively. “Only the bad boys do that.”
“Poor mother!” said Old Hundred. “Remember the marble rakes we used to make? We cut a series of little arches in a board, numbered 'em one, two, three, and so on, and stood the board up across the concrete sidewalk down by Lyceum Hall. The other kids rolled their marbles from the curb. If a marble went through an arch, the owner of the rake had to give the boy as many marbles as the number over the arch. If the boy missed, the owner took his marble. It was very profitable for the owner. And my mother found out I had a rake. That night it went into the kitchen fire, while I was lectured on the awful consequences of gambling.”
“I know,” said I. “It was almost as terrible as sending 'comic valentines.' Remember the 'comics'? They were horribly colored lithographs of teachers, old maids, dudes, and the like, with equally horrible verses under them. They cost a penny apiece, and you bought 'em at Damon's drug store. They were so wicked that Emily Ruggles wouldn't sell 'em.”
“Emily Ruggles's!” exclaimed Old Hundred. “Shall you ever forget Emily Ruggles's? It was in Lyceum Hall building, a little dark store up a flight of steps—a notion store, I guess they called it. To us kids it was just Emily Ruggles's. It was full of marbles, tops, 'scholars' companions,' air-guns, sheets of paper soldiers, valentines,fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for slingshots, spools, needles and yards of blue calico with white dots, which hung over strings above the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed spinster with a booming bass voice and a stern manner, and when you crept, awed and timid, into the store she glared at you and boomed out, 'Which side, young man?' Yet her store was a kid's paradise. I have often wondered since whether she didn't, in her heart, really love us youngsters, for all her forbidding manner.”
“Of course she loved us,” said I. “She loved her country, too. Don't you remember the story of how she paid for a substitute in the Civil War, because she couldn't go to the front and fight herself? Poor woman, she took the only way she knew to show her affection for us. She stocked her little shop with a delectable array which kept a procession of children pushing open the door and timidly yet joyfully entering its dark recesses, where bags of marbles and bundles of pencils gleamed beneath the canopies of calico. Nowadays I never see such shops anymore. I don't know whether there are any tops and marbles on the market. One never sees them. Certainly one never sees nice little shops devoted to their sale. Children are not important any longer.”
Old Hundred sighed. We walked on in silence, toward the brow of a hill, and presentlythe Hudson gleamed below us, while across its misty expanse the hills of New Jersey huddled into the sinking sun. Old Hundred sat down on a stone.
“I'm weary,” he said, “and my muscles ache, and I'm stiff and sore and forty-five. Bill, you're getting bald. Wipe your shiny high-brow. You look ridiculous.”
“Shut up,” said I, “and don't get maudlin just because you can't chin yourself ten times. Remember, it's because you're out of practice!”
“Out of practice, out of practice!” he said viciously. “A year at Muldoon's wouldn't bring me back the thoughtless joy of a hockey game, would it? No, nor the delight of playing puss-in-the-corner, or following a paper trail through the October woods, or yelling 'Daddy on the castle, Daddy on the castle!' while we jumped on Frank Swain's veranda and off again into his mother's flower-bed!”
“I trust not,” said I. “Just what are you getting at?”
“This,” answered Old Hundred: “that I, you, none of us, go into things now for the sheer exuberance of our bodies and the sheer delight of playing a game. We must have some ulterior motive—usually a sordid one, getting money or downing the other fellow; and most of the time we have to drive our poor, old rackety bodies with a whip. About the time a man begins tovote, he begins to disintegrate. The rest of life is gradual running down, or breaking up. The Hindoos were right.”
“Old Hundred,” said I, “you are something of an idiot. Those games of ours were nature's school; nature takes that way to teach us how to behave ourselves socially, how to conquer others, but mostly how to conquer ourselves. We were men-pups, that's all. For Heaven's sake, can't you have a pleasant afternoon thinking of your boyhood without becoming maudlin?”
“You talk like a book by G. Stanley Hall,” retorted Old Hundred. “No doubt our games were nature's way of teaching us how to be men, but that doesn't alter the fact that the process of being taught was better than the process of putting the knowledge into practice. I hate these folks who rhapsodize sentimentally over children as 'potential little men.' Potential fiddle-sticks! Their charm is because theyain'tmen yet, because they are still trailing clouds of glory, because they are nice, mysterious, imaginative, sensitive, nasty little beasts. You! All you are thinking of is that dinner I owe you! Well, come on, then, we'll go back into that monstrous heap of mortar down there to the south, where there are no children who know how to play, no tops, no marbles, no woods and ponds and bees' nests in the fences, no Emily Ruggleses; where every building is, as you say, the gravestoneof a game, and the only sport left is the playing of the market for keeps!”
He got up painfully. I got up painfully. We both limped. Down the hill in silence we went. On the train Old Hundred lighted a cigar. “What do you say to the club for dinner?” he asked. “I ought to go across to the Bar Association afterward and look up some cases on that rebate suit. By Jove, but it's going to be a pretty trial!”
“That pleases me all right,” I answered. “I've got to meet Ainsley after the theatre and go over our new third act. I think you are going to like it better than the old.”
At the next station Old Hundred went out on the platform and hailed a newsboy. “I want to see how the market closed,” he explained, as he buried himself in his paper.
Ihavejust been to a barber shop,—not a city barber shop, where you expect tiled floors and polished mirrors and a haughty Venus by a table in the corner, who glances scornfully at your hands as you give your hat, coat, and collar to a boy, as much as to say, “Manicures himself!”—but a country barber shop, in a New England small town. I rather expected that the experience would repay me, in awakened pleasant memories, for a very poor hair-cut. Instead, I got a very good hair-cut, and no pleasant memories were awakened at all; not, that is, by the direct process of suggestion. I was only led to muse on barber shops of my boyhood because this one was so different. Even the barber was different. He chewed gum, he worked quickly, he used shaving powder and took his cloths from a sterilizer, and finally he held a hand-glass behind my head for me to see the result, quite like his city cousins. (By the way, was ever a man so brave as to say the cutwasn'tall right, when the barber held that hand-glass behind his head? Andwhat would the barber say if he did?) No, this shop was antiseptic, and uninteresting. There was not even a picture on the walls!
But, to the barber's soothing snip, snip, snip, and the gentle tug of the comb, I dreamed of the barber shops of my boyhood, and of Clarkie Parker's in particular. Clarkie's shop was in Lyceum Hall block, one flight up—a huge room, with a single green upholstered barber's chair between the windows, where one could sit and watch the town go by below you. The room smelled pungently of bay rum. Barber shops don't smell of bay rum any more. Around two sides were ranged many chairs and an old leather couch. The chair-arms were smooth and black with the rubbing of innumerable hands and elbows, and behind them, making a dark line along the wall, were the marks where the heads of the sitters rubbed as they tilted back. Nor can I forget the spittoons,—large shallow boxes, two feet square,—four of them, full of sand. On a third side of the room stood the basin and water-taps, and beside them a large black-walnut cabinet, full of shelves. The shelves were full of mugs, and on every mug was a name, in gilt letters, generally Old English. Those mugs were a town directory of our leading citizens. My father's mug was on the next to the top shelf, thirdfrom the end on the right. The sight of it used to thrill me, and at twelve I began surreptitiously to feel my chin, to see if there were any hope of my achieving a mug in the not-too-distant future.
Above the chairs, the basin, the cabinet, hung pictures. Several of those pictures I have never seen since, but the other day in New York I came upon one of them in a print-shop on Fourth Avenue, and was restrained from buying it only by the, to me, prohibitive price. I've been ashamed ever since, too, that I allowed it to be prohibitive. I feel traitorous to a memory. It was a lurid lithograph of a burning building upon which brave firemen in red shirts were pouring copious streams of water, while other brave firemen worked the pump-handles of the engine. The flames were leaping out in orange tongues from every window of the doomed structure (which was a fine business block three stories high), but you felt sure that the heroes would save all adjoining property, in spite of the evident high wind. Another picture in Clarkie's shop showed these same firemen (at least, they, too, wore red shirts) hauling their engine out of its abode; and still another displayed them hauling it back again. On this latter occasion it was coated with ice, and I used to wonder if all these pictures depictedthe same fire, because the trees were in full leaf in the others. There also hung on the walls a truly superb engraving of the loss of the Arctic. Her bow (or was it her stern?) was high in air, and figures were dropping off it into the sea, like nuts from a shaken hickory. This was a very terrible picture, and one turned with relief to Maude S. standing before a bright green hedge and looking every inch a gentle champion, or the stuffed pickerel, twenty-four inches long, framed under glass, with his weight—a ponderous figure—printed on the frame.
Clarkie Parker was in reality a barber by avocation. The art he loved was angling. Patience with a rod and line, the slow contemplation of rivers, was in his blood, and in his fingers. It took him a long time to cut your hair, even when, on the first hot day of June, you bade him, “take it all off with the lawn-mower.” (Do any boys have their heads clean-clipped in summer any more?) But while he cut, he talked of fishing. You listened as to one having authority. He knew every brook, every pool, every pond, for miles around. You went next day where Clarkie advised. And there was no use expecting a hair-cut or a shave on the first of April, when “the law went off on trout.” Clarkie's shop was shut. If the day happened to be Saturday,many a pious man in our village had to go to church upon the morrow unshaven or untrimmed.
I know not what has become now of Clarkie or his shop. Doubtless they have gone the way of so many pleasantly flavored things of our vanished New England. I only know that I still possess a razor he sold me when my downy face had begun to arouse public derision. I shall always cherish that razor, though I never shave with it. I never could shave with it! But I love Clarkie just the same. He only proved himself thereby the ultimate Yankee.
“Haveyou,” said I, “anything like the ones left?”—and I held out to my wife a shirt just back from the laundry, and minus a strategic button.
“I'll look in my button box and see,” she answered, taking the shirt.
Her button box! I did not know she had one, and followed her into her retreat to see it. But alas! it was a grievous disappointment, being nothing but a drawer set in some sort of a fancy contraption of chintz-covered pasteboard, like a toy bureau, which stood on her work table. No doubt it contained buttons, and was serviceable. But a button box! To call it that were to libel a noble institution of an elder day.
As I waited for the restoration of my shirt I thought tenderly of the button box of my childhood. It was no dinky six-by-four-inch pasteboard drawer, not two inches deep—no, sir! It was a cylindrical wooden box of the substantial and finished workmanship which went into even such humble things as a butter box a century ago, for mother had inherited it from her mother.It must once have contained ten pounds of butter, but all traces of its original service had long disappeared. The drum, of very thin, tough wood, which had kept its shape uncracked, had been polished a dark nut brown by countless hands. The bottom and cover, of pine, were darkened, too, but without polish. This box dwelt on the second shelf of the old what-not, which, in turn, stood in the closet passage underneath the stairs. When any accident befell our garment fastenings, “Go and get the button box,” mother said, as she reached for her needle. Or, on rainy days, when we grew more and more restless and all other devices failed, “You may go and get the button box,” mother would say, and we were solaced till supper time.
No modern patent sewing-table receptacle could possibly hold one quarter of the contents of that button box, the accumulation of at least three generations. It was heavy, and having no handles, you had to grasp it with open palms on either side—hence the polish. It rattled when taken down from its shelf, and the very first thing you did when the lid was off was to plunge your two hands down into the mass, and let fistfuls of buttons trickle through your fingers.
Sometimes we played it was a treasure chest, and these buttons were Spanish doubloons. Sometimes we trickled them just for the cool feel of it, the sound of the rattle, the sensation of plungingfingers into the oddly liquid mass. There were great steel buttons, little pearl buttons, white bone buttons, black suspender buttons, cloth buttons, silk buttons, crocheted buttons, elongated crystal buttons (which we held to the light “to make prisms”), lovely agate buttons, brass military buttons with the U. S. eagle upon them, wooden buttons, either once covered or yet to be covered, shoe buttons (which invariably were in practical demand and invariably had sunk to the bottom of the box), strange great buttons from some long-forgotten garment of grandmother's, familiar buttons from some newly remembered garment of our own.
It seems odd, when I think of it now, the endless delight we children got just from the contemplation and discussion of those buttons. Sometimes, of course, we picked out the suitable ones, and strung them in long chains. Sometimes we used them for counters in games. But often we just turned them over and over, or tipped them out on a paper spread on the floor, and from the hints they gave us reconstructed ancient garments or recalled forgotten clothes of our own.
“Oh, that one used to be on my winter jacket!”
“Look, here's one of papa's pants buttons—it says 'Macullar and Parker' on it!”
“Hi, there's my old brown overcoat!”
“Oh, dear, I wish I still had that pretty gray suit, with those steel buttons on it!”
The silly talk of children—and how like some conversations the propinquity of piazzas has since forced me to listen to!
To find just the button she wanted was sometimes a long task for mother, and father, it must be admitted, had varied the proverbial needle simile for our domestic establishment, to read, “like hunting for a button in your mother's button box.” But still the odd buttons continued to go in, and only the ones needed came permanently out. You never could tell, to be sure, when the most unlikely button would come in handy. Sometimes there were days when the village dress-maker arrived after breakfast and remained till almost supper time, converting the upstairs front chamber into a maze of threads and snippings, and requisitioning the button box in long searches for “a set of six”. That was a fine game! Sometimes it was easy. Sometimes only five could be found of the type she particularly desired. But never did the box fail completely; always there were enough ofsomebutton that, she said, without dropping the pins from her mouth, would do, “though it ain't quite what I wanted.”
All this flashed through my memory as I waited for my wife to reëstablish connections on my shirt. As she finally finished, and pushed in her silly little drawer, I said:
“Do you call that thing a button box? Why don't you have a real one?”
“That's quite large enough when you have to find a match,” said she, “and too large when you drop it.”
Women are practical creatures; there is no sentiment in them. Their alleged possession of it is the most spurious of all the arguments against equal suffrage.
Ihavejust purchased a little bag of peppermints, and returned with them to my rooms above the Square. I did not purchase them at the promptings of a sweet tooth, but of a hungry heart. They take me back into the forgotten Aprils of my life, where I often love to loiter, not from any resentment that I have been unable to emulate Peter Pan and remain a boy forever, but because this great town is drab and dusty and imprisoning, and it is sweet to escape down the green lanes of April, even if only in a memory. A physical sensation—the sound of a voice, a hand patting us to the rhythm of “Tell Aunt Rhody”, an odor—can plunge us deeper and swifter down to the buried places of our memory than any process of deliberate recollection. No robin sings against my window of a morning here—only the noisy sparrows twitter and quarrel, reminding me of the curb market. No lilac sheds its perfume on the still air. I am perforce reduced to peppermints. The taste of peppermints on my tongue, the pungent fragrance of them in my nostrils, have the power,however, to transport me far from this maze of mortared cañons, back across the years, to a land where the robins sang against the spacious sky and a little boy dreamed great dreams.
So now I am sitting high up above the Square, with my little bag of peppermints before me (somewhat diminished in quantity already), and think, between slow, sipping nibbles, of that little boy.
In his day, in the land where he came from, peppermints were almost a symbol of life's best things—of grandmothers and other dear old ladies who kept cookies in cool stone crocks in sweet-smelling “butt'ries” (sometimes foolishly called pantries by those who put on airs); of Christmastides when to the joy of peppermint sticks was added the unspeakable delight of sucking barley toys,—red dogs, golden camels that lost their humps and elephants that lost their trunks as the tongue went succulently 'round and 'round them; of the wonderful village “notion” store, presided over by a terrible female person with a deep bass voice, who asked you over the counter as you entered, “Which side, young man?” It was bad enough to be called “Bubbie”, but to be called “young man” in this ironic bass was almost insufferable. Yet you bore it nobly, for the sake of the pound of shot for your air-gun or the blood-alley or the great pink and white peppermints, two for a cent, that reposedin a glass jar on the left side of the shop. Was Miss Emily so terrible a person, I wonder now? She was always looked upon a little askance by the ladies of our village because she was “so masculine”. But if she did not conceal a softness for children under her stern exterior why did she keep a stock of so many things dear to the childish heart, from paper soldiers (purchased by the yard) to sleds and shot? Perhaps that fantastic stock of hers was her curious expression of the Eternal Motherly. After she died, every year on the 30th of May the “Vet'rans,” as they marched two by two in annually dwindling lines about the cemetery, placed a fresh print flag and a basket of geraniums on her grave, because she had sent a substitute to the War. To us youngsters this substitute used to explain why she kept shot for sale; she was by nature a bellicose person, and, we were sure, her great grief was her sex.
In my own family peppermints were directly connected, by legend, with feminine attractiveness. A great grandmother on my mother's side had been in her day a famous beauty. And when asked the secret of her charm, as she frequently was (to my infant imagination she appeared as a superhumanly radiant vision who walked about the streets in a hoop-skirt with an admiring throng in her wake, constantly being forced to explain why she was beautiful), she did not utter testimonials for anybody's soap, nor for a patentdietary system, nor even for outdoor exercise. She replied simply, “Peppermints”. Great grandmamma died when my mother was a girl, and to mother fell the task of going through the old lady's possessions. She says it was a task; probably it was a privilege. At any rate, my mother records that she found peppermints everywhere, in every kind of wrapper, stowed in the different receptacles, in boxes, bags, trunks, in bureau drawers and writing desks and “secretaries”. They were among letters and laces, in the folds of silk gowns and even the table linen. Some of the peppermints had crumbled and almost evaporated. Some had “ossified”, as mother says. “And,” she used to add, telling the tale to large-eyed, hungry-mouthed little me, “I have not seen so many peppermints outside a candy shop since that day.”
“But did the peppermints really make great grandmamma beautiful?” I would ask.
“She always said so,” my mother would reply, “and she was certainly very beautiful.”
“Is that why you eat peppermints?” I then inquired, on a day when I had detected her with a bag of the confection.
At this point there was a masculine chuckle from the armchair by the bookcase. Also, a peppermint was promptly produced for my personal consumption. I had a great fondness for the memory of my beautiful ancestor.
Peppermints, too, are intimately connected with the religious experiences of my childhood; or, perhaps I should say, with the religious observances of my childhood. Our minister's whiskers always interested me more than his discourses. As I nibble a peppermint from the bag before me—lingeringly, for the supply is being fast depleted—and the frail yet pungent odor fills my nostrils, I am once more in that half-filled church, on a Sabbath morning in early Spring, dozing through the sermon, with my head tumbling sleepily now and then against my father's shoulder. Slowly the scene comes back, in every least detail, the smallest sights and sounds of that morning all here, but all thin and faint and frail, spun of the gossamer web of memory. Can I hold them till they are set down? I shall have to eat another precious white lozenge from my bag.
My cheek had bumped my father's shoulder again when I caught a sudden whiff of peppermint drops and raised my head just in time to see an old lady across the aisle whisk her dress down over her petticoat pocket. For a few moments I watched her in envy, for her mouth was moving ever so little and I could fancy the delicious taste. But how could she enjoy the candy and not make her mouth go more than that, I wondered. I did not shut my eyes again, but sat very still against my father's arm and let my eyes wander around the church.
Ours was one of the “new” churches. The beautiful old “meeting house” at the head of the village green, with its exquisite white spire and its pillard pulpit and windows of “common” glass, purpling with age, was the property of the Methodists—which in some manner I could not then understand (and do not clearly yet) was always a source of resentment in our congregation. Our church had stained windows, a chocolate brown field with white stars in the centre and around the edges tiny squares of many colors, atrocious reds, blues and yellows. These windows were opened a little at the top, and through the openings came soft sounds of Spring, the wind racing among the budding branches, the sudden call of a bird, and occasionally the crooning, sleepy cackle of hens from a distance. Now and then a cloud drifted by, across the sun, dimming the interior for a moment, so that the minister's voice seemed to come from farther off. The sunlight through the stained glass projected colored splotches here and there. I wondered if the people knew how homely they looked with those splotches on their faces, like great birth-marks. That suggested a pastime to relieve the monotony.
Starting with the choir (which consisted of four people, boxed in before the organ at the right of the pulpit) I began to count people with colored spots. First there was the tenor with a purple spot on his left cheek and on hissandy hair and beard. But the organist and soprano were splashed with scarlet. Then I forget to count, because I noticed that the 'alto had a new violet hat, which eclipsed the soprano's old green one. I wondered whether she had gone to Boston to buy it, or had “patronized home industries”—a phrase I had just discovered with pride in our local paper. The bass was nodding and letting his hymn book slip toward a fall. I hoped slily that it would fall, and braced my nerves for the crash. But he woke with a funny jerk, like my jack-in-the-box, just in time to catch it, and began listening intently to the sermon as if he had been awake all the while. The soprano smiled at someone in the congregation, whispered to the tenor, and then sat silent again.
My gaze wandered to the minister's pleasant face, with its great square-cut gray beard, which always suggested to me—why, I don't know—one of the minor prophets; and then past him to the gilded cross that was painted on the apsidal wall behind him. I knew that if I looked at this cross, with its gilded rays spreading out in all directions, long enough the rays would begin to melt together and then to turn 'round and 'round in a kind of dizzy dance. So I looked steadily, till I had to shake the sleep out of my eyes with a great effort. Then I fell to speculating on the tablets painted at the left of the pulpit, to balance the organ. These tablets wereencased in a design that suggested a twin tombstone. On one of them were the words, “God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth,” a sentence which had always given me great difficulty. But this morning I interpreted it at last to my satisfaction. It meant, I decided, that a man must first die and become a ghost, a spirit, before he could tell what church he really ought to go to. I wondered if, in that spirit region, there would be any Methodists.
Directly below the tablets, in a front pew, sat Miss Emily, she of a bass voice and the “notion” store. Her Paisley shawl was folded tightly around her broad, bony shoulders, and made the lower half of a diamond down her back, the pattern exactly in the middle. If the pattern had not been exactly in the middle I am sure the service would have stopped automatically, till it was adjusted. She sat very straight and looked with partly turned head, showing her masculine profile, sternly at the minister, as if defying him to be unorthodox. I tried to picture her askinghim, as he entered her shop, “Which side, old man?” Would she dare, I wondered? And what would he reply? A few pews behind Miss Emily sat “the spilled-over old lady”. My sister had first called her the spilled-over old lady, because she seemed to have been crowded out by the six old ladies in the pew behind, and to have beenpermanently soured by the slight. Her hair was done up in a tight, emphatic pug, her profile suggested vinegar—or perhaps it was her complexion. At any rate, when I looked at her I thought of vinegar. I wondered if she ever ate peppermints, and if they tasted the same to her as to other people.
Presently I leaned forward and extracted a hymn book from the rack attached to the back of the pew in front. This rack contained, besides hymn books, a pair of old gloves done into a wad wrong side out, two fans, “leaflets” of all sorts, and little envelopes for the collection. Most of the “leaflets” were appeals for charity, I fancy. At any rate, many of them were full of pictures of poor little city children suffering from all sorts of diseases, and oppressed me horribly. But I could always rely on the hymn book. My first consciousness that there is any difference between prose and poetry except in the matter of rhyme came from reading the hymn book, from Whittier's,—