Part 15

There was quiet amusement in the neighborhood, I remember, because Mrs. C., who was distressingly timid about riding behind a horse (she could never be induced to get into a carriage unless the animal were “old as Time and slow as cold molasses”), saw no danger in this automobile on runners, which traveled at the rate of a mile a minute, more or less, with nothing between its occupants and sudden death except the strength and skill of the amateur steersman, who must keep his own seat and steer the heavy load behind him. So it is. A man goes into battle with a cheer, but turns pale at finding himself number thirteen at the dinner-table.

Sliding down-hill was such sport as no language can begin to describe; but skating was unspeakably better. Those first skates! I wish I had them still, though I would show them with caution, lest the irreverent should laugh. They would be a spectacle. How voluminously the irons curled up in front! And how gracefully as well! A piece of true artistry. And how comfortably they were cut off short behind, so that you could stop “in short metre,” no matter what speed you had on, by digging your heels into the ice. And what a complicated harness of straps was required to keep them in place. Those straps had much to answer for in the way of cold feet, to say nothing of the passion we were thrown into when one of them broke; and we a mile or two from home, with the ice perfection--“a perfect glare”--and the fun at its height. This was before the day of “rockers,” of which I had a pair later,--and a proud boy I was. Pretty treacherous we found them to start with, or rather to stop with; but for better or worse we got the hang of their peculiarities before our skulls were irreparably broken.

Skating then was like whist-playing now,--an endless study. You thought you were fairly good at it till a new boy came along and showed you tricks such as you had never dreamed of; just as you thought, perhaps, that you could play whist till you sat opposite a man who asked, in a tone between bewilderment and asperity, why on earth you led him a heart at a certain critical stage, or why in the name of common sense you didn’t know that the ten of clubs was on your left. Art is long. It was true then, as it is now. But what matter? We skated for fun, as we did everything else (out of school), except to shovel paths and saw wood. Those things were work. And work was longer even than art. Work was never done. So it seemed. And how bleak and comfortless the weather was while we were doing it! A cruel world, and no mistake. But half an hour afterward, on the hillside or the pond, the breeze was just balmy, and life--there was no time to think how good we found it. No doubt it is true, as the poet said,--

“There’s something in a flying horse, There’s something in a huge balloon;”

but there’s more, a thousand times over, in being a boy.

“DOWN AT THE STORE”

I talked, a week ago, as if, in my time as a boy, we lived out-of-doors every day, and all day long, regardless of everything that winter could do to hinder us. That was an exaggeration. Now and then there came a time when the weather shook itself loose, as it were, and bore down upon us with banners flying. Then the strong man bowed himself, and even the playful boy took to his burrow. The pond might be smooth as glass, but he did not skate; the hill-track might be in prime condition, but he did not slide. He sang low, and waited for a change.

Not that he stayed at home from school. Let no degenerate reader, the enfeebled victim of modern ideas, think that. The day of coddling had not yet dawned upon New England. There was no bell then to announce a full holiday, or “one session,” because of rain or snow. And as truly as “school kept,” so truly the boy was expected to be there. No alternative was so much as considered. But on such a morning as we now have in mind he went at full speed, looking neither to right nor left, and he thanked his stars when he came in sight of the village store. That, whether going or coming, he hailed as a refuge. Possibly he had a cent in his pocket, a real “copper,” and felt it in danger of burning through; but cent or no cent, he went in to warm his fingers and his ears, and incidentally to listen to the talk of the assembled loafers.

I can see them now, one perched upon a barrel-head, one on a pile of boxes, three or four occupying a long settee, and one, wearing a big light-colored overcoat, who came every day, sitting like a lord in the comfortable armchair in front of the cylinder stove. This last man was not rich; neither was he in any peculiar sense a social favorite; he said little and bought less; but he always had the chief seat. I used to wonder what would happen if some day he should come in and find it occupied. But on that point it was idle to speculate. As well expect a simple congressman to drop into the Speaker’s chair, leaving that functionary to dispose of his own corporeal dignity as best he could. Prescription, provided it be old enough, is the best of titles. What other has the new king of Great Britain and Ireland?

If it was shortly before schooltime, on one of those mornings when the weather seemed to be laying itself out to establish a record, the talk was likely to be of thermometers.

“My glass was down to nineteen below,” one man would say, by way of starting the ball.

“Mine touched twenty at half-past six,” the next one would remark.

And so the topic would go round, the mercury dropping steadily, notch by notch. As I said a week ago, winter was winter in those days. It may have occurred to me, sometimes, that the man who managed to speak last had a decided moral advantage over his rivals. He could save the honor of his thermometer at the least possible expense of veracity.

So far things were not very exciting, though on the whole rather more so, perhaps, than studying a geography lesson (as if it were anything to me which were the principal towns in Indiana!); but now, not unlikely, the conversation would shift to hunting exploits. This was more to the purpose. Wonderful game had been shot, first and last, down there in the Old Colony; almost everything, it seemed to a listening boy, except lions and elephants. If Mr. Roosevelt had lived in those times, he need not have gone to the Rocky Mountains in search of adventure.

I listened with both ears. There never was a boy who did not like to hear of doings with a gun. I remember still one of my very early excitements in that line. I was on my way home at noon when a flock of geese flew directly over the street, honking loudly. At that moment a shoemaker ran out of his little shop, gun in hand, and aiming straight upward, let go a charge. Nothing dropped, to my intense surprise and no small disappointment; but I had seen the shot fired, and that was something--as is plain from the fact that I remember it so vividly these many years afterward. The names of the principal towns of Indiana long ago folded their tents like the Arabs and silently stole away, but I can still see that shoemaker running out of his shop.

It was a common practice, I was to learn as I grew older, for shoemakers to keep a loaded gun standing in a corner, ready for such contingencies. There was a tradition in the town that a certain man (I have forgotten his name, or I would bracket it with Mr. Roosevelt’s) had once brought down a goose in this way. It is by no means impossible; for flocks of geese were an everyday sight in the season (I am sure I have seen twenty in an afternoon), and sometimes, in thick weather, they almost grazed the chimney-tops. Geese (of that kind) have grown sadly fewer since then, and perhaps have learned to fly higher.

After the hunting reminiscences would likely enough come a discussion of fast horses, Flora Temple and others--including “Mart” So-and-So’s of our village; or possibly (and this I liked best of all, I think), the conversation would flag, and old Jason Andcut would begin whistling softly to himself. Then I was all ears. Such a tone as he had, especially in the lower register! And such trills and bewitching turns of melody! Why, it was almost as good as the Weymouth Band, which in those days was every whit as famous as the Boston Symphony Orchestra is now. When it played the “Wood-up Quickstep” or “Departed Days,” the whole town was moved, and one boy that I knew was almost in heaven.

In fact, ours was a musical community. The very man who now occupied the armchair in front of the stove (how plainly he comes before me as I write, taking snuff and reading the shopkeeper’s newspaper of the evening before) had acquired the competency of which he was supposed to be possessed by playing the flute (or was it the clarinet?) in a Boston theatre orchestra; and at this very minute three younger men of the village were getting rich in the same sure and easy manner. As for whistling, there was hardly a boy in the street but was studying that accomplishment, though none of them could yet come within a mile of Jason Andcut. His was indeed “a soft and solemn-breathing sound,” as unlike the ear-piercing notes which most pairs of puckered lips gave forth as the luscious fruit of his own early pear tree (“Andcut’s pears,” we always called them) was unlike certain harsh and crabbed things that looked like pears, to be sure, but tied your mouth up in a hard knot if, in a fit of boyish hunger, you were ever rash enough to set your teeth in one. The good man! I should love to hear his whistle now; I believe I should like it almost as well as Mr. Longy’s oboe; but the last of those magical improvisations was long ago finished. I have heard good whistling since (not often, but I have heard it, both professional and amateur), but nothing to match that soliloquistic pianissimo, which I stole close to the man’s elbow to get my fill of. Was the prosperity of the music partly in the boyish ear that heard it?

That corner-grocery gathering was one of our institutions; I might almost say the chief of them--casino and lyceum in one. If somebody once called the place a “yarn factory,” that was only in the way of a joke. On a rainy holiday it was a great resource. There were always talkers and listeners there,--the two essentials,--and the talk was often racy, though never, so far as I know, unfit for a boy’s hearing. The town supported no local newspaper, nor did we feel the need of any. You could get all the news there was, and more too, “down at the store.” If the regular members of the club failed to bring it in, the baker or the candy peddler would happen along to supply the lack. And after all, say what you will, word of mouth is better than printers’ ink.

And while you listened to the talk, you could be eating a stick of barber’s-pole candy or a cent’s worth of dates, or, if your wealth happened to admit of such extravagance, you could enjoy, after the Cranford fashion, quite unembarrassed by Cranford pudicity, a two-cent orange. Those were the days of small things. Dollars did not grow on every bush. Seven-year-old boys, at all events, were not yet accustomed to go about jingling a pocketful of silver. Once, I remember, I saw a little chap sidle up to the counter and look long at the jack-knives and other temptations displayed in the showcase. By and by the shopkeeper espied a possible customer, and came round to see what was wanted.

“How much are those tops?” asked the boy, pointing with his finger.

“Ten cents,” was the answer.

The boy was silent. He was thinking it over. Then he said: “I’ll take two cents’ worth of peanuts.”

Poor fellow! I have seen many a grown man since then who was obliged to content himself with the same kind of philosophy. And who shall say it is not a good one? If you cannot spend the summer in Europe, take a day at the seashore. If you miss of an election to Congress, bid for a place on the school committee. If you cannot write ten-thousand-dollar novels, write--well, write a weekly column in a newspaper. There is always something within a capable man’s reach, though it be only “two cents’ worth of peanuts.”

BIRDS AT THE WINDOW

The winter has continued birdless, not only in eastern Massachusetts, but, as far as I can learn, throughout New England. Letters from eastern Maine, the White Mountain region, and western Massachusetts all bring the same story: no birds except the commonest--chickadees and the like. Crossbills, redpolls, and pine grosbeaks have left us out in the cold.

The only break in the season’s monotony with me has been a flock of six purple finches, seen on the 29th of January. I was nearing home, in a side street, thinking of nothing in particular, when I heard faint conversational notes close at hand, and stopping to look, saw first one and then another of the bright carmine birds; for five of the six were handsome adult males. All were eating savin berries, and conversing in their characteristic soft staccato. It was by all odds the brightest patch of feathers of the new century. The birds must be wintering not far away, I suppose; but though I have been up and down that road a dozen times since February came in, I have seen nothing more of them. Within a month they will be singing, taking the winds of March with music. No more staccato then, but the smoothest of fluency.

Much the birdiest spot known to me just now is under our own windows--under them and against them, as shall presently be explained. Indeed, we may be said to be running a birds’ boarding-house, and we are certainly doing an excellent business. “Meals at all hours,” our signboard reads. We “set a good table,” as the trade expression is, and our guests, who, being experienced travelers, know a good thing when they see it, have spread the news. There is no advertisement so effective as a satisfied customer.