Bill's School and Mine Part 1

Bill's School and Mine.

by William Suddards Franklin.

PREFACE.

The greater part of the essay, _Bill's School and Mine,_ was written in 1903, but the t.i.tle and some of the material were borrowed from my friend and college mate William Allen White in 1912, when the essay was printed in the South Bethlehem _Globe_ to stimulate interest in a local Playground Movement.

The second essay, _The Study of Science,_ is taken from Franklin and Mac.n.u.tt's _Elements of Mechanics,_ The Macmillan Company, New York, 1908. I have no illusions concerning the mathematical sciences, for it is to such that the essay chiefly relates. Unquestionably the most important function of education is to develop personality and character; but science is impersonal, and an essay which attempts to set forth the meaning of science study must make an unusual demand upon the reader. Some things in this world are to be understood by sympathy, and some things are to be understood by serious and painful effort.

The third essay, _Part of an Education,_ was privately printed in 1903 under the t.i.tle _A Tramp Trip in the Rockies,_ and it is introduced here to ill.u.s.trate a phase of real education which is in danger of becoming obsolete. The school of hardship is not for those who love luxury, and to the poverty stricken it is not a school--it is a Juggernaut.

The five minor essays are mere splashes, as it were; but in each I have said everything that need be said, except perhaps in the matter of exhortation.

For the ill.u.s.trations I am under obligations to my cousin Mr. Daniel Garber of Philadelphia.

WILLIAM SUDDARDS FRANKLIN

SOUTH BETHLEHEM, PA., October 22, 1913.

To face page vi

SUPPLEMENT TO PREFACE.

Your attention is called especially to the five short essays, or splashes, on pages 25 {3}, 29 {4}, 59 {5}, 91 {8} and 95 {9}; each of these short essays fills about a page, and if you read them you will understand why the _Independent_ has called this little book A Package of Dynamite.

The first essay, ent.i.tled BILL'S SCHOOL AND MINE, is easy reading, and if one is not irredeemably literal in one's mode of thinking, it is very pleasant reading. The tall talk which is sprinkled throughout this essay and which reaches a climax on pages 19 {1} and 20 {2} is not intended to be actually fatal in its seemingly murderous quality!

Many contented city people in reading this essay should be prompted after the manner of cow-boy who in a spell of seemingly careless gun play says to his sophisticated friend "Smile, D---- You, Smile".

The essay on The Study of Science is somewhat of a "sticker", and if any particular reader does not like it he can let it alone, but there is an increasing number of young men in this world who must study science whether they like it or not. Indeed the object of this particular essay is to explain this remarkable and in some respects distressing fact. The essay relates primarily to the physical sciences, narrowly speaking, because the author's teaching experience has been wholly in physics and chemistry. One can get a fairly good idea of the author's point of view by reading the portions of the essay which stand in large print, but it is quite necessary to read the small print with more or less painful care if one is to get any fundamental idea of the matter under consideration. The reader will please consider thoughtfully the close juxta-position of this essay and the following short essay on The Discipline of Work.

The essay, Part of an Education, is the story of a tramp trip through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Wyoming, and it is an introduction to the little essay on The Uses of Hardship.

BILL'S SCHOOL AND MINE

It seems that the j.a.panese have domesticated nature.

LAFCADIO HEARNE.

I always think of my school as my boyhood. Until I was big enough to swim the Missouri River my home was in a little Kansas town, and we boys lived in the woods and in the water all Summer, and in the woods and on the ice all Winter. We trapped and hunted, we rowed and fished, and built dams, and cut stick horses, and kept stick-horse livery stables where the grapevines hung, and where the paw-paws mellowed in the Fall. We made mud slides into our swimming hole, and we were artists in mud-tattoo, painting face and body with thin black mud and sc.r.a.ping white stripes from head to foot. We climbed the trees and cut our names, we sucked the sap of the box elder and squashed poke berries for war paint. We picked wild grapes and gooseberries, and made pop-guns to shoot green haws. In the Autumn we gathered walnuts, and in the Spring we greeted the johnny-jump-ups, and the sweet williams as they peered through the mold.

Always, we boys were out of doors, as it seems to me; and I did the ch.o.r.es. It is something to learn the toughness of hickory under the saw, how easily walnut splits, how mean elm is to handle; and a certain dexterity comes to a boy who teaches a calf to drink, or slops hogs without soiling his Sunday clothes in the evening. And the hay makes acrobats. In the loft a boy learns to turn flip-flops, and with a lariat rope he can make a trapeze. My rings were made by padding the iron rings from the hubs of a lumber wagon and swinging them from the rafters.

Bill, little Bethlehem Bill, has a better school than I had; the house and the things that go with it. Bill's teachers know more accurately what they are about than did my teachers in the old days out West half a century ago. And, of course, Bill is getting things from his school that I did not get. But he is growing up with a woefully distorted idea of life. What does Bill know about the woods and the flowers?

Where in Bill's makeup is that which comes from browsing on berries and nuts and the rank paw paw, and roaming the woods like the Bander-log? And the crops, what does he know about them?

The silver-sides used to live in the pool under the limestone ledges by the old stone quarry where the snakes would sun themselves at noon.

The wild rose, with its cinnamon-scented flower and curling leaves, used to bloom in May for me--for me and a little brown-eyed girl who found her ink-bottle filled with them when the school bell called us in from play. And on Sat.u.r.days we boys roamed over the prairies picking wild flowers, playing wild plays and dreaming wild dreams--children's dreams. Do you suppose that little Bill dreams such dreams in a fifty-foot lot with only his mother's flowers in the window pots to teach him the great mystery of life?

Bill has no barn. I doubt if he can skin a cat, and I am sure he cannot do the big drop from the trapeze. To turn a flip-flop would fill him with alarm, and yet Jim Betts, out in Kansas, used to turn a double flip-flop over a stack of barrels! And Jim Betts is a man to look at. He is built by the day. He has an educated body, and it is going into its fifties with health and strength that Bill will have to work for. And Jim Betts and I used to make our own kites and n.i.g.g.e.r-shooters and sleds and rabbit traps.

Bill's school seems real enough, but his play and his work seem rather empty. Of course Bill cannot have the fringe of a million square miles of wild buffalo range for his out-of-doors. No, Bill cannot have that.

Never, again. And to imagine that Bill needs anything of the kind is to forget the magic of Bill's "make-believe!" A tree, a brook, a stretch of gra.s.s! What old-world things Bill's fancy can create there! What untold history repeat itself in Bill's most fragmentary play! Bill, is by nature, a conjuror. Give him but little and he will make a world for himself, and grow to be a man. Older people seem, however, to forget, and deprive Bill of the little that he needs; and it is worth while, therefore, to develop the contrast between Bill's school and that school of mine in the long-ago land of my boyhood out-of-doors.

The Land of Out-of-Doors! What irony there is in such glowing phrase to city boys like Bill! The supreme delight of my own boyhood days was to gather wild flowers in a wooded hollow, to reach which led across a sunny stretch of wild meadow rising to the sky; and I would have you know that I lived as a boy in a land where a weed never grew[A]. I wish that Bill might have access to the places where the wild flowers grow, and above all I wish that Bill might have more opportunity to see his father at work. A hundred years ago these things were within the reach of every boy and girl; but now, alas, Bill sees no other manual labor than the digging of a ditch in a cluttered street, or stunted in growth, he has almost become a part of the machine he daily tends, and Boyville has become a paved and guttered city, high-walled, desolate, and dirty; with here and there a vacant lot hideous with refuse in early Spring and overwhelmed with an increasing pestilence of weeds as the Summer days go by! And the strangest thing about it all is, that Bill accepts unquestioningly, and even with manifestations of joy, just any sort of a world, if only it is flooded with sunshine.

I remember how, in my boyhood, the rare advent of an old tin can in my favorite swimming hole used to offend me, while such a thing as a cast-off shoe was simply intolerable, and I wonder that Bill's unquenchable delight in outdoor life does not become an absolute rage in his indifference to the dreadful pollution of the streams and the universal pestilence of weeds and refuse in our thickly populated districts.

I cannot refrain from quoting an amusing poem of James Whitcomb Riley's, which expresses (more completely than anything I know) the delight of boys in outdoor life, where so many things happen and so many things lure; and you can easily catch in the swing of Riley's verse that wanton note which is ordinarily so fascinatingly boyish, but which may too easily turn to a raging indifference to everything that makes for purity in this troubled life of ours.

THREE JOLLY HUNTERS.

O there were three jolly youngsters; And a-hunting they did go, With a setter-dog and a pointer-dog And a yaller-dog also.

Looky there!

And they hunted and they hal-looed; And the first thing they did find Was a dingling-dangling hornets' nest A-swinging in the wind.

Looky there!

And the first one said, "What is it?"

Said the next, "Let's punch and see,"

And the third one said, a mile from there, "I wish we'd let it be!"

Looky there! (Showing the back of his neck.)

And they hunted and they hal-looed; And the next thing they did raise Was a bobbin bunnie cotton-tail That vanished from their gaze.

Looky there!

One said it was a hot baseball, Zippt thru the brambly thatch, But the others said 'twas a note by post Or a telergraph dispatch.

Looky there!

So they hunted and they hal-looed; And the next thing they did sight, Was a great big bull-dog chasing them, And a farmer hollering "Skite!"