Part 3

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THE OLD RED SCHOOL-HOUSE

Oh, the little old red school-house on the hill, (2d bass: On the hill.) Oh, the little old red school-house on the hill, (2d bass: On the hi-hi-hi-yull) And my heart with joy o'erflows, Like the dew-drop in the rose,* Thinking of the old red SCHOOL-HOUSE I o-o-on the hill, (2d tenor and 1st bass: The hill, the hill.)

THE MALE QUARTET'S COMPENDIUM.

* I call your attention to the chaste beauty of this line, and the imperative necessity of the chord of the diminished seventh for the word “rose.” Also “school-house” in the last line must be very loud and staccato. Snap it off.

If the audience will kindly come forward and occupy the vacant seats in the front of the hall, the entertainment will now begin. The male quartet will first render an appropriate selection and then.... Can't you see them from where you are? Let me assist you in the visualization.

The first tenor, the gentleman on the extreme left, is a stocky little man, with a large chest and short legs conspicuously curving inward. He has plenty of white teeth, ash-blonde hair, and goes smooth-shaven for purely personal reasons. His round, dough-colored face will never look older (from a distance) than it did when he was nine. The flight of years adds only deeper creases in the multitude of fine wrinkles, and increasing difficulty in hoisting his tiny, patent-leather foot up on his plump knee.

The second tenor leans toward him in a way to make another man anxious about his watch, but the second tenor is as honest as the day. He is only “blending the voices.” He works in the bank. He is going to be married in June sometime. Don't look around right away, but she's the one in the pink shirt-waist, the second one from the aisle, the one... two... three... the sixth row back. See her? Say, they've got it bad, those two. What d' ye think? She goes down by the bank every day at noon, so as to walk up with him to luncheon. She lives across the street, and as soon as ever she has finished her luncheon, there she is, out on the front porch hallooing: “Oo-hoo!” How about that? And if he so much as looks at another girl--m-M!

The first bass is one of these fellows with a flutter in his voice. No, I don't mean a vibrato. It's a flutter, like a goat's tail. It is considered real operatic.

The second bass has a great, big Adam's apple that slides up and down his throat like a toy-monkey on a stick. He is tall, and has eyebrows like clothes-brushes, and he scowls fit to make you run and hide under the bed. He is really a good-hearted fellow, though. Pity he has the dyspepsia so bad. Oh, my, yes! Suffers everything with it, poor man. He generally sings that song about “Drink-ing! DRINK-ang! Drink-awng!” though he's strictly temperate himself. When he takes that last low note, you hold on to your chair for fear you'll fall in too.

But why bring in the male quartet?

Because “The Little Old Red School-house” is more than a mere collocation of words, accurately descriptive. It is what Mat King would call a “symblem,” and as such requires the music's dying fall to lull and enervate a too meticulous and stringent tendency to recollect that it wasn't little, or old, or red, or on a hill. It might have been big and new, and built of yellow brick, right next to the Second Presbyterian, and hence close to the “branch,” so that the spring freshets flooded the playground, and the water lapped the base of the big rock on which we played “King on the Castle,”--the big rock so pitifully dwindled of late years. No matter what he facts are. Sing 'of “The Little Old Red Schoolhouse On the Hill” and in everybody's heart a chord trembles in unison. As we hear its witching strains, we are all lodge brethren, from Maine to California and far across the Western Sea; we are all lodge brethren, and the air is “Auld Lang Syne,” and we are clasping hands across, knitted together into one living solidarity; and this, if we but sensed it, is the real Union, of which the federal compact is but the outward seeming. It is a Union in which they have neither art nor part whose parents sent them to private schools, so as not to have them associate with “that class of people.” It is the true democracy which batters down the walls that separate us from each other--the walls of caste distinction, and color prejudice, and national hatred, and religious contempt, all the petty, anti-social meannesses that quarrel with

“The Union of hearts, the Union of hands, And the flag of our Union forever.”

Old Glory has floated victoriously on many a gallant fight by sea and land, but never do its silver stars glitter more bravely or its blood-red stripes curve more proudly on the fawning breeze than when it floats above the school-house, over the daily battle against ignorance and prejudice (which is ignorance of our fellows), for freedom and for equal rights. It is no mere pretty sentimentality that puts the flag there, but the serious recognition of the bed-rock principle of our Union: That we are all of one blood, one bounden duty; that all these anti-social prejudices are just as shameful as illiteracy, and that they must disappear as soon as ever we shall come to know each other well. Knowledge is power. That is true. And it is also true: A house divided against itself cannot stand.

“The Flag of our Union forever!” is our prayer, our heart's desire for us and for our children after us. Heroes have died to give us that, heroes that with glazing eyes beheld the tattered ensign and spent their latest breath to cheer it as it passed on to triumph. “We who are about to die salute thee!” The heart swells to think of it. But it swells, too, to think that, day by day, thousands upon thousands of little children stretch out their hands toward that Flag and pledge allegiance to it. “We who are about to LIVE salute thee!”

It is no mere chance affair that all our federal buildings should be so ugly and so begrudged, and that our school-houses should be so beautiful architecturally--the one nearest my house is built from plans that took the first prize at the Paris Exposition, in competition with the whole world--so well-appointed, and so far from being grudged that the complaint is, that there are not enough of them.

That So-and-so should be the President, and such-and-such a party have control is but a game we play at, amateurs and professionals; the serious business is, that in this country no child, how poor soever it may be, shall have the slightest let or hindrance in the equal chance with every other child to learn to read, and write, and cipher, and do raffia-work.

It is a new thing with us to have splendid school-houses. After all, the norm, as you might say, is still “The Old Red School-house.” You must recollect how hard the struggle is for the poor farmer, with wheat only a dollar a bushel, and eggs only six for a quarter; with every year or so taxes of three and sometimes four dollars on an eighty-acre farm grinding him to earth. It were folly to expect more in rural districts than a tight box, with benches and a stove in it. Never-the-less, it is the thing signified more than its outward seeming that catches and holds the eye upon the country school-house as you drive past it. You count yourself fortunate if, mingled with the creaking of the buggy-springs, you hear the hum of recitation; yet more fortunate if it is recess time, and you can see the children out at play, the little girls holding to one another's dress-tails as they solemnly circle to the chant:

“H-yar way gow rand tha malbarry bosh, Tha malbarry bosh, tha malbarry bosh, H-yar way gow rand tha malbarry bosh On a cay-um and frasty marneng.”

The boys are at marbles, if it is muddy enough, or one-old-cat, or pom-pom-peel-away, with the normal percentage of them in reboant tears--that is to say, one in three.

But even this is not the moment of illumination, when it comes upon you like a flood how glorious is the land we live in, upon what sure and certain footing are its institutions, when we know by spiritual insight that whatsoever be the trial that awaits us, the people of these United States, we shall be able for it! Yes. We shall be able for it.

If you would learn the secret of our nation's greatness, take your stand some winter's morning just before nine o'clock, where you can overlook a circle of some two or three miles' radius, the center being the Old Red School-house. You will see little figures picking their way along the miry roads, or ploughing through the deep drifts, cutting across the fields, all drawing to the school-house, Bub in his wammus and his cowhide boots, his cap with ear-laps, a knitted comforter about his neck, and his hands glowing in scarlet mittens; and little Sis, in a thick shawl, trudging along behind him, stepping in his tracks. They chirrup, “Good-morning, sir!” As far as you can see them you have to watch them, and something rises in your throat. Lord love 'em! Lord love the children!

And then it comes to you, and it makes you catch your breath to think of it, that every two or three miles all over this land, wherever there are children at all, there is the Old Red Schoolhouse. At this very hour a living tide, upbearing the hopes and prayers of God alone knows how many loving hearts, the tide on which all of our longed-for ships are to come in, is setting to the school-house. Oh, what is martial glory, what is conquest of an empire, what is state-craft alongside of this? Happy is the people that is in such a case!

The city schools are now the pattern for the country schools: but in my day, although a little they were pouring the new wine of frothing educational reform into the old bottles, they had not quite attained the full distention of this present. We still had some kind of a good time, but nothing like the good times they had out at the school near grandpap's, where I sometimes visited. There you could whisper! Yes, sir, you could whisper. So long as you didn't talk out loud, it was all right. And there was no rising at the tap of the bell, forming in line and walking in lock-step. Seemingly it never entered the school-board's heads that anybody would ever be sent to state's prison. They left the scholars unprepared for any such career. They have remedied all that in city schools. Now, when a boy grows up and goes to Sing Sing, he knows exactly what to do and how to behave. It all comes back to him.

But what I call the finest part of going to school in the country was, that you didn't go home to dinner. Grandma had a boy only a few years older than I was, and when I went a-visiting, she fixed us up a “piece.” They call it “luncheon” now, I think--a foolish, hybrid mongrel of a word, made up of “lump,” a piece of bread, and “noon,” and “shenk,” a pouring or drink. But the right name is “piece.” What made this particular “piece” taste so wonderfully good was that it was in a round-bottomed basket woven of splints dyed blue, and black and red, and all in such a funny pattern. It was an Indian basket. My grandma's mother, when she was a little girl, got that from the squaw of old Chief Wiping-Stick.

The “piece” had bread-and-butter (my grandma used to let me churn for her sometimes, when I went out there), and some of the slices had apple-butter on them. (One time she let me stir the cider, when it was boiling down in the big kettle over the chunk-fire out in the yard. The smoke got in my eyes.) Sometimes there was honey from the hives over by the gooseberry bushes--the gooseberries had stickers on them--and we had slices of cold, fried ham. (I was out at grandpap's one time when they butchered. They had a chunk-fire then, too, to heat the water to scald the hogs. And say! Did your grandma ever roast pig's tails in the ashes for you?) And there were crullers. No, I don't mean “doughnuts.” I mean crullers, all twisted up. They go good with cider. (Sometimes my grandma cut out thin, pallid little men of cruller dough, and dropped them into the hot lard for my Uncle Jimmy and me. And when she fished them out, they were all swelled up and “pussy,” and golden brown).

And there was pie. Neither at the school nooning nor at the table did one put a piece of pie upon a plate and haggle at it with a fork. You took the piece of pie up in your hand and pointed the sharp end toward you, and gently crowded it into your face. It didn't require much pressure either.

And there were always apples, real apples. I think they must make apples in factories nowadays. They taste like it. These were real ones, picked off the trees. Out at grandpap's they had bellflowers, and winesaps, and seek-no-furthers, and, I think, sheep-noses, and one kind of apple that I can't find any more, though I have sought it carefully. It was the finest apple I ever set a tooth in. It was the juiciest and the spiciest apple. It had sort of a rollicking flavor to it, if you know what I mean. It certainly was the ne plus ultra of an apple. And the name of it was the rambo. Dear me, how good it was! think I'd sooner have one right now than great riches. And all these apples they kept in the apple-hole. You went out and uncovered the earth and there they were, all in a big nest of straw; and such a gush of perfume distilled from that pile of them that just to recollect it makes my mouth all wet.