A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs Part 1

A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs.

by Laurence Hutton.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The papers upon which this volume is founded--published here by the courtesy of The Century Company--appeared originally in the columns of _St. Nicholas_. They have been reconstructed and rearranged, and not a little new matter has been added.

The portraits are all from life. That of The Boy's Scottish grandfather, facing page 20, is from a photograph by Sir David Brewster, taken in St.

Andrews in 1846 or 1847. The subject sat in his own garden, blinking at the sun for many minutes, in front of the camera, when tradition says that his patience became exhausted and the artist permitted him to move.

The Boy distinctly remembers the great interest the picture excited when it first reached this country.

Behind the tree in the extreme left of the view of The Boy's Scottish-American grandfather's house in New York, facing page 22, may be seen a portion of the home of Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in 1843 or 1844, some years earlier than the period of "The Story of a Bad Boy."

Warm and constant friends--as men--for upwards of a quarter of a century, it is rather a curious coincidence that the boys--as boys--should have been near neighbors, although they did not know each other then, nor do they remember the fact.

The histories of "A Boy I Knew" and the "Four Dogs" are absolutely true, from beginning to end; nothing has been invented; no incident has been palliated or elaborated. The author hopes that the volume may interest the boys and girls he does not know as much as it has interested him. He has read it more than once; he has laughed over it, and he has cried over it; it has appealed to him in a peculiar way. But then, he knew The Dogs, and he knew The Boy!

L. H.

A BOY I KNEW

He was not a very good boy, or a very bad boy, or a very bright boy, or an unusual boy in any way. He was just a boy; and very often he forgets that he is not a boy now. Whatever there may be about The Boy that is commendable he owes to his father and to his mother; and he feels that he should not be held responsible for that.

His mother was the most generous and the most unselfish of human beings.

She was always thinking of somebody else--always doing for others. To her it was blessed to give, and it was not very pleasant to receive.

When she bought anything, The Boy's stereotyped query was, "Who is to have it?" When anything was bought for her, her own invariable remark was, "What on earth shall I do with it?" When The Boy came to her, one summer morning, she looked upon him as a gift from Heaven; and when she was told that it _was_ a boy, and not a bad-looking or a bad-conditioned boy, her first words were, "What on earth shall I do with it?"

She found plenty "to do with it" before she got through with it, more than forty years afterwards; and The Boy has every reason to believe that she never regretted the gift. Indeed, she once told him, late in her life, that he had never made her cry! What better benediction can a boy have than that?

The Boy's father was a scholar, and a ripe and good one. Self-made and self-taught, he began the serious struggle of life when he was merely a boy himself; and reading, and writing, and spelling, and languages, and mathematics came to him by nature. He acquired by slow degrees a fine library, and out of it a vast amount of information. He never bought a book that he did not read, and he never read a book unless he considered it worth buying and worth keeping. Languages and mathematics were his particular delight. When he was tired he rested himself by the solving of a geometrical problem. He studied his Bible in Latin, in Greek, in Hebrew, and he had no small smattering of Sanskrit. His chief recreation, on a Sunday afternoon or on a long summer evening, was a walk with The Boy among the Hudson River docks, when the business of the day, or the week, was over and the ship was left in charge of some old quartermaster or third mate. To these sailors the father would talk in each sailor's own tongue, whether it were Dutch or Danish, Spanish or Swedish, Russian or Prussian, or a _patois_ of something else, always to the great wonderment of The Boy, who to this day, after many years of foreign travel, knows little more of French than "_Combien?_" and little more of Italian than "_Troppo caro_." Why none of these qualities of mind came to The Boy by direct descent he does not know. He only knows that he did inherit from his parent, in an intellectual way, a sense of humor, a love for books--as books--and a certain respect for the men by whom books are written.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BOY'S MOTHER]

It seemed to The Boy that his father knew everything. Any question upon any subject was sure to bring a prompt, intelligent, and intelligible answer; and, usually, an answer followed by a question, on the father's part, which made The Boy think the matter out for himself.

The Boy was always a little bit afraid of his father, while he loved and respected him. He believed everything his father told him, because his father never fooled him but once, and that was about Santa Claus!

When his father said, "Do this," it was done. When his father told him to go or to come, he went or he came. And yet he never felt the weight of his father's hand, except in the way of kindness; and, as he looks back upon his boyhood and his manhood, he cannot recall an angry or a hasty word or a rebuke that was not merited and kindly bestowed. His father, like the true Scotchman he was, never praised him; but he never blamed him--except for cause.

The Boy has no recollection of his first tooth, but he remembers his first toothache as distinctly as he remembers his latest; and he could not quite understand _then_ why, when The Boy cried over that raging molar, the father walked the floor and seemed to suffer from it even more than did The Boy; or why, when The Boy had a sore throat, the father always had symptoms of bronchitis or quinsy.

The father, alas! did not live long enough to find out whether The Boy was to amount to much or not; and while The Boy is proud of the fact that he is his father's son, he would be prouder still if he could think that he had done something to make his father proud of _him_.

From his father The Boy received many things besides birth and education; many things better than pocket-money or a fixed sum per annum; but, best of all, the father taught The Boy never to cut a string. The Boy has pulled various cords during his uneventful life, but he has untied them all. Some of the knots have been difficult and perplexing, and the contents of the bundles, generally, have been of little import when they have been revealed; but he saved the strings unbroken, and invariably he has found those strings of great help to him in the proper fastening of the next package he has had occasion to send away.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. JOHN'S CHAPEL AND PARK]

The father had that strong sense of humor which Dr. Johnson--who had no sense of humor whatever--denied to all Scotchmen. No surgical operation was necessary to put one of Sydney Smith's jokes into the father's head, or to keep it there. His own jokes were as original as they were harmless, and they were as delightful as was his quick appreciation of the jokes of other persons.

A long siege with a certain bicuspid had left The Boy, one early spring day, with a broken spirit and a swollen face. The father was going, that morning, to attend the funeral of his old friend, Dr. McPherson, and, before he left the house, he asked The Boy what should be brought back to him as a solace. Without hesitation, a brick of maple sugar was demanded--a very strange request, certainly, from a person in that peculiar condition of invalidism, and one which appealed strongly to the father's own sense of the ridiculous.

When the father returned, at dinner-time, he carried the brick, enveloped in many series of papers, beginning with the coa.r.s.est kind and ending with the finest kind; and each of the wrappers was fastened with its own particular bit of cord or ribbon, all of them tied in the hardest of hard knots. The process of disentanglement was long and laborious, but it was persistently performed; and when the brick was revealed, lo! it was just a brick--not of maple sugar, but a plain, ordinary, red-clay, building brick which he had taken from some pile of similar bricks on his way up town. The disappointment was not very bitter, for The Boy knew that something else was coming; and he realized that it was the First of April and that he had been April-fooled! The something else, he remembers, was that most amusing of all amusing books, _Phoenixiana_, then just published, and over it he forgot his toothache, but not his maple sugar. All this happened when he was about twelve years of age, and he has ever since a.s.sociated "Squibob" with the sweet sap of the maple, never with raging teeth.

It was necessary, however, to get even with the father, not an easy matter, as The Boy well knew; and he consulted his uncle John, who advised patient waiting. The father, he said, was absolutely devoted to _The Commercial Advertiser_, which he read every day from frontispiece to end, market reports, book notices, obituary notices, advertis.e.m.e.nts, and all; and if The Boy could hold himself in for a whole year his uncle John thought it would be worth it. _The Commercial Advertiser_ of that date was put safely away for a twelvemonth, and on the First of April next it was produced, carefully folded and properly dampened, and was placed by the side of the father's plate; the mother and the son making no remark, but eagerly awaiting the result. The journal was vigorously scanned; no item of news or of business import was missed until the reader came to the funeral announcements on the third page.

Then he looked at the top of the paper, through his spectacles, and then he looked, over his spectacles, at The Boy; and he made but one observation. The subject was never referred to afterwards between them.

But he looked at the date of the paper, and he looked at The Boy; and he said: "My son, I see that old Dr. McPherson is dead again!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BOY'S UNCLE JOHN]

The Boy was red-headed and long-nosed, even from the beginning--a shy, introspective, self-conscious little boy, made peculiarly familiar with his personal defects by constant remarks that his hair _was_ red and that his nose _was_ long. At school, for years, he was known familiarly as "Rufus," "Red-Head," "Carrot-Top," or "Nosey," and at home it was almost as bad.

His mother, married at nineteen, was the eldest of a family of nine children, and many of The Boy's aunts and uncles were but a few years his senior, and were his daily, familiar companions. He was the only member of his own generation for a long time. There was a constant fear, upon the part of the elders, that he was likely to be spoiled, and consequently the rod of verbal castigation was rarely spared. He was never praised, nor petted, nor coddled; and he was taught to look upon himself as a youth hairily and nasally deformed and mentally of but little wit. He was always falling down, or dropping things. He was always getting into the way, and he could not learn to spell correctly or to cipher at all. He was never in his mother's way, however, and he was never made to feel so. But n.o.body except The Boy knows of the agony which the rest of the family, unconsciously, and with no thought of hurting his feelings, caused him by the fun they poked at his nose, at his fiery locks, and at his unhandiness. He fancied that pa.s.sers-by pitied him as he walked or played in the streets, and he sincerely pitied himself as a youth destined to grow up into an awkward, tactless, stupid man, at whom the world would laugh so long as his life lasted.

An unusual and unfortunate accident to his nose when he was eight or ten years old served to accentuate his unhappiness. The young people were making mola.s.ses candy one night in the kitchen of his maternal grandfather's house--the aunts and the uncles, some of the neighbors'

children, and The Boy--and the half of a lemon, used for flavoring purposes, was dropped as it was squeezed by careless hands--very likely The Boy's own--into the boiling syrup. It was fished out and put, still full of the syrup, upon a convenient saucer, where it remained, an exceedingly fragrant object. After the odor had been inhaled by one or two of the party, The Boy was tempted to "take a smell of it"; when an uncle, boylike, ducked the luckless nose into the still simmering lemonful. The result was terrible. Red-hot sealing-wax could not have done more damage to the tender, sensitive feature.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BOY IN KILTS]

The Boy carried his nose in a sling for many weeks, and the bandage, naturally, twisted the nose to one side. It did not recover its natural tint for a long time, and the poor little heart was nearly broken at the thought of the fresh disfigurement. The Boy felt that he had not only an unusually long nose, but a nose that was crooked and would always be as red as his hair.

He does not remember what was done to his uncle. But the uncle was for half a century The Boy's best and most faithful of friends. And The Boy forgave him long, long ago.

The Boy's first act of self-reliance and of conscious self-dependence was a very happy moment in his young life; and it consisted in his being able to step over the nursery fender, all alone, and to toast his own shins thereby, without falling into the fire. His first realization of "getting big" came to him about the same time, and with a mingled shock of pain and pleasure, when he discovered that he could not walk under the high kitchen-table without b.u.mping his head. He tried it very often before he learned to go around that article of furniture, on his way from the clothes-rack, which was his tent when he camped out on rainy days, to the sink, which was his oasis in the desert of the bas.e.m.e.nt floor. This kitchen was a favorite playground of The Boy, and about that kitchen-table centre many of the happiest of his early reminiscences.

Ann Hughes, the cook, was very good to The Boy. She told him stories, and taught him riddles, all about a certain "Miss Netticoat," who wore a white petticoat, and who had a red nose, and about whom there still lingers a queer, contradictory legend to the effect that "the longer she stands the shorter she grows." The Boy always felt that, on account of her nose, there was a peculiar bond of sympathy between little Miss Netticoat and himself.

As he was all boy in his games, he would never cherish anything but a boy-doll, generally a Highlander, in kilts and with a glengarry, that came off! And although he became foreman of a juvenile hook-and-ladder company before he was five, and would not play with girls at all, he had one peculiar feminine weakness. His grand pa.s.sion was washing and ironing. And Ann Hughes used to let him do all the laundry-work connected with the wash-rags and his own pocket-handkerchiefs, into which, regularly, every Wednesday, he burned little brown holes with the toy flat-iron, which _would_ get too hot. But Johnny Robertson and Joe Stuart and the other boys, and even the uncles and the aunts, never knew anything about that--unless Ann Hughes gave it away!

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BOY PROMOTED TO TROUSERS]

The Boy seems to have developed, very early in life, a fondness for new clothes--a fondness which his wife sometimes thinks he has quite outgrown. It is recorded that almost his first plainly spoken words were "Coat and hat," uttered upon his promotion into a more boyish apparel than the caps and frocks of his infancy. And he remembers very distinctly his first pair of long trousers, and the impression they made upon him, in more ways than one. They were a black-and-white check, and to them was attached that especially manly article, the suspender. They were originally worn in celebration of the birth of the New Year, in 1848 or 1849, and The Boy went to his father's store in Hudson Street, New York, to exhibit them on the next business-day thereafter. Naturally they excited much comment, and were the subject of sincere congratulation. And two young clerks of his father, The Boy's uncles, amused themselves, and The Boy, by playing with him a then popular game called "Squails." They put The Boy, seated, on a long counter, and they slid him, backward and forward between them, with great skill and no little force. But, before the championship was decided, The Boy's mother broke up the game, boxed the ears of the players, and carried the human disk home in disgrace; pressing as she went, and not very gently, the seat of The Boy's trousers with the palm of her hand!

He remembers nothing more about the trousers, except the fact that for a time he was allowed to appear in them on Sundays and holidays only, and that he was deeply chagrined at having to go back to knickerbockers at school and at play.

The Boy's first boots were of about this same era. They were what were then known as "Wellingtons," and they had legs. The legs had red leather tops, as was the fashion in those days, and the boots were pulled on with straps. They were always taken off with the aid of the boot-jack of The Boy's father, although they could have been removed much more easily without the use of that instrument. Great was the day when The Boy first wore his first boots to school; and great his delight at the sensation he thought they created when they were exhibited in the primary department.

The Boy's first school was a dame's school, kept by a Miss or Mrs.

Harrison, in Harrison Street, near the Hudson Street house in which he was born. He was the smallest child in the establishment, and probably a pet of the larger girls, for he remembers going home to his mother in tears, because one of them had kissed him behind the cla.s.s-room door.

He saw her often, in later years, but she never tried to do it again!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "CRIED, BECAUSE HE HAD BEEN KISSED"]

At that school he met his first love, one Phoebe Hawkins, a very sweet, pretty girl, as he recalls her, and, of course, considerably his senior.

How far he had advanced in the spelling of proper names at that period is shown by the well-authenticated fact that he put himself on record, once as "loving his love with an F, because she was Feeby!"