in the last chapter i intended to write about the district school; but i lingered so long over old remembrances that i could not get to school in time, so now i will go straight there without delay.
the first school that i remember was not in the little town near which we lived, but about half a mile away in the opposite direction. our house must have stood just outside the limits of the little village; at any rate, i was sent to the country school. every morning we children were given a dinner-pail packed full of pie and cake, and now and then a piece of bread and butter (which i always let the other children eat), and were sent off to school. as we passed along the road we were joined by other little boys and girls, and by the time we reached the building our party contained nearly all the children on the road travelling 44in the direction from which we came. we were a boisterous, thoughtless crowd,—that is, the boys; the girls were generally quieter and more reserved, which we called “proud.”
almost as soon as the snow was off the ground in the spring, we boys took off our shoes (or, rather, boots) and went barefooted to the school. it was hard for us to wait until our parents said the ground was warm enough for us to take off our boots; we felt so light and free, and could run so fast barefooted, that we always begged our mother to let us leave them off at the very earliest chance. the chief disadvantage was that we often stubbed our toes. this was sometimes serious, when we were running fast and would bring them full tilt against a stone. most of the time we managed to have one or more toes tied up in rags; and we always found considerable occupation in comparing our wounds, to see whose were the worst, or which were getting well the fastest. the next most serious trouble connected with going barefoot was the necessity for washing our feet every night before we went to bed. this seemed a grievous hardship; sometimes we would forget it, when we could, 45and i remember now and then being called up out of bed after i thought i had safely escaped and seemed to be sound asleep, and when my feet were clean enough without being washed.
it seemed to us children that our mother was unreasonably particular about this matter of washing our feet before we went to bed. she always required it when we had been barefoot through the day, even though it had been raining and we had wiped our feet in the grass. still the trouble of washing our feet was partly compensated by our not being obliged to put on or take off our stockings and our boots. this was a great relief, especially in the morning; for this part of our toilet took longer than all the rest, and when the time came around to go barefoot we had only to get up and jump into a few clothes and start away.
in the summer-time it took a long while for us children to travel the short half-mile to the district school. no matter how early we left home, it was nearly always past the hour of nine when we reached the door. for there were always birds in the trees and stones in the road, and no child ever knew any pain except his own. there were little fishes in the creek 46over which we slid in winter and through which we always waded in the summer-time; then there were chipmunks on the fences and woodchucks in the fields, and no boy could ever manage to go straight to school, or straight back home after the day was done. the procession of barefoot urchins laughed and joked, and fought, and ran, and bragged, and gave no thought to study or to books until the bell was rung and they were safely seated in the room. then we watched and waited eagerly for recess; and after that, still more anxiously for the hour of noon, which was always the best time by far of all the day, not alone because of the pie and cake and apples and cheese which the more prudent and obedient of us saved until this time, but also because of the games, in which we always had enough boys to go around.
in these games the girls did not join to any great extent; in fact, girls seemed of little use to the urchins who claimed everything as their own. in the school they were always seated by themselves on one side of the room, and sometimes when we failed to study as we should we were made to go and sit with them. this was when we were very young. as we grew older, this form of punishment seemed less and less severe, until some other was substituted in its stead. most of the boys were really rather bashful with the girls,—those who bragged the loudest and fought the readiest somehow never knew just what to say when they were near. we preferred rather to sit and look at them, and wonder how they could be so neat and clean and well “fixed up.” i remember when quite a small boy how i used to look over toward their side of the room, especially at a little girl with golden hair that was always hanging in long curls about her head; and it seemed to me then that nothing could ever be quite so beautiful as this curly head; which may explain the fact that all my life nothing has seemed quite so beguiling as golden hair,—unless it were black, or brown, or some other kind.
to the boys, school had its chief value, in fact its only value, in its games and sports. of course, our parents and teachers were always urging us to work. in their efforts to make us study, they resorted to every sort of means—headmarks, presents, praise, flattery, 48christmas cards, staying in at recess, staying after school, corporal punishment, all sorts of persuasion, threats, and even main force—to accomplish this result. no like rewards or punishments were required to make us play; which fact, it seems to me, should have shown our teachers and parents that play, exercise, activity, and change are the law of life, especially the life of a little child; and that study, as we knew it, was unnatural and wrong. still, nothing of this sort ever dawned upon their minds.
i cannot remember much real kindness between the children of the school; while we had our special chums, we never seemed to care for them, except that boys did not like to be alone. there were few things a boy could do alone, excepting tasks, which of course we avoided if we could. on our way to and from the school, or while together at recess and noon, while we played the ordinary games a very small matter brought on a quarrel, and we always seemed to be watching for a chance to fight. in the matter of our quarrels and fights we showed the greatest impartiality, as boys do in almost all affairs of life.
49while our books were filled with noble precepts, we never seemed to remember them when we got out of doors, or even to think that they had any application to our lives. in this respect the boy and the grown-up man seem wonderfully alike.
but really, school was not all play. our teachers and parents tried their best to make us learn,—that is, to make us learn the lessons in the books. the outside lessons we always seemed to get without their help,—in fact, in spite of their best endeavors to prevent our knowing what they meant.
the fact that our teachers tried so hard to make us learn was no doubt one of the chief reasons why we looked on them as our natural enemies. we seldom had the same teacher for two terms of school, and we always wondered whether the new one would be worse or better than the old. we always started in prepared to find her worse; and the first kind words we ever had for our teacher were spoken after she was gone and we compared her with the new one in her place. our teachers seemed to treat us pretty well for the first few days. they were then very kind and sweet; they hardly ever brought switches to the school until the second week, but we were always sure that they would be called into service early in the term. no old-time teacher would have dreamed that she could get through a term of school without a whip, any more than a judge would believe that society could get along without a jail. the methods that were used to make us learn, and the things we were taught, seem very absurd as i look back upon them now; and still, i presume, they were not different from the means employed to-day.
most of us boys could learn arithmetic fairly well,—in this, indeed, we always beat the girls. still, some parts of arithmetic were harder than the rest. i remember that i mastered the multiplication-table up to “twelve times twelve,” backwards and forwards and every other way, at a very early age, and i fancy that this knowledge has clung to me through life; but i cannot forget the many weary hours i spent trying to learn the tables of weights and measures, and how much vexation of spirit i endured before my task was done. however, after weary weeks and 51months i learned them so well that i could say them with the greatest ease. this was many, many years ago; since that time i have found my place in the world of active life, but i cannot now remember that even once have i had occasion to know or care about the difference between “troy weight” and “apothecaries’ weight,” if, in fact, there was any difference at all. and one day, last week i think it was, for the first time in all these endless years i wished to know how many square rods made an acre, and i tried to call back the table that i learned so long ago at school; but as to this my mind was an utter blank, and all that i could do was to see the little girl with the golden locks sitting at her desk—and, by the way, i wonder where she is to-day. but i took a dictionary from the shelf, and there i found it plain and straight, and i made no effort to keep it in my mind, knowing that if perchance in the uncertain years that may be yet to come i may need to know again, i shall find it there in the dictionary safe and sound.
and all those examples that i learned to cipher out! i am sure i know more to-day 52than the flaxen-haired barefoot boy who used to sit at his little desk at school and only drop his nibbled slate-pencil to drive the flies away from his long bare legs, but i could not do those sums to-day even if one of my old-time teachers should come back from her long-forgotten grave and threaten to keep me in for the rest of my life unless i got the answer right.
and then the geography! how hard they tried to make us learn this book, and how many recesses were denied us because we were not sure just which river in siberia was the longest! of course we knew nothing about siberia, or whether the rivers ran water or blood; but we were forced to know which was the largest and just how long it was. and so all over the great round world we travelled, to find cities, towns, rivers, mountain ranges, peninsulas, oceans, and bays. how important it all was! i remember that one of the ways they took to make us learn this book was to have us sing geography in a chorus of little voices. i can recall to-day how one of those old tunes began, but i remember little beyond the start. the song was about the capitals of 53all the states, and it began, “state of maine, augusta, is on the kennebec river,” and so on through the whole thirty-three or four, or whatever the number was when i was a little child. well, many, many years have passed away since then, and i have wandered far and wide from my old-time country home. there are few places in the united states that i have not seen, in my quest for activity and change. i have even stood on some of the highest peaks of the alps, and looked down upon its quiet valleys and its lovely lakes; but i have never yet been to augusta on the kennebec river in the state of maine, and it begins to look as if i never should. still, if fortune ever takes me there, i shall be very glad that i learned when yet a child at school that augusta was the capital of maine and on the kennebec river. so, too, i have never been to siberia, and, not being a russian, i presume that i shall never go. and in fact, wherever i have wandered on the earth i have had to learn my geography all over new again.
but, really, grammar made me more trouble than any other study. somehow i never could learn grammar, and it always made me angry 54when i tried. my parents and teachers told me that i could never write or speak unless i learned grammar, and so i tried and tried, but even now i can hardly tell an adverb from an adjective, and i do not know that i care. when a little boy, i used to think that if i really had anything to tell i could make myself understood; and i think so still. the longer i live the surer i am that the chief difficulty of writers and speakers is the lack of interesting thoughts, and not of proper words. certainly grammar was a hideous nightmare to me when a child at school. of all the parts of speech the verb was the most impossible to get. i remember now how difficult it was to conjugate the verb “to love,” which the books seemed always to put first. how i stumbled and blundered as i tried to learn that verb! i might possibly have mastered the present tense, but when it came to all the different moods and various tenses it became a hopeless task. i am much older now, but somehow that verb has never grown easier with the fleeting years. the past-perfect tense has always been well-nigh impossible to learn. i never could tell when it left off, or whether 55it ever left off or not. neither have i been able to keep it separate from the present, or, for that matter, from the future. a few years after the district school, i went for a brief time to the academy on the hill, where i studied latin; and i remember that this same verb was there, with all the old complications and many that were new, to greet me when i came. to be sure, it had been changed to “amo, amas, amat,” but it was the old verb just the same, and its various moods and tenses caused me the same trouble that i had experienced as a little child. my worry over this word has made me wonder whether this verb, in all its moods and tenses, was not one of the many causes of the downfall of the roman republic, of which we used to hear so much. at any rate, i long since ceased trying to get it straight or keep it straight; indeed, i am quite sure that it was designed only to tangle and ensnare.
