Revisiting the Earth Part 3

_Best When Most Catching_

All paths led to the exhibition as we have seen. Other studies were subordinated to the all absorbing preparation for it. Other branches suffered from eclipse. The taste for it became very great. It fixed the boy's bent. The men having a lyceum, the boys took the infection and even had a relapse. In our community they formed a lyceum, and among the questions discussed was this: Which is preferable, city or country life?

Having the stern rule that the less favored one must also stand up I was invited at the age of ten to share in the deliberations. I became so absorbed in some of the follies, presented by my opponents, and so lost sight of the occasion, that, when called upon by name, I was startled.

The boys took sides in the universal conflicts of opinion. n.o.body could find rest on a fence. It was a picket fence. The ground was the only safe place to stand on. As a regiment takes on the character of its colonel, so a school in a particular degree, reflects the teacher. I cannot tell how we all came out of the craze. When penmanship was the rage and writing became epidemic the scholars developed the villainous habit of scribbling always and everywhere. As stationery was not plentiful they used the leaves and margins, not only of their own books, but those of the others. They decorated the walls and desks. As the nights were extremely cold, the ink would be turned by the frost from a liquid to a solid state. Hence the bottles were placed on the stove for thawing purposes and would sometimes decorate the ceiling or empty their contents on the stove and floor, accompanied by a detonation like that of a pistol.

_The Love of Conquest_

Now this man Folsom understood human nature in its initial stages. His insight showed him that boys and girls crave some reward and recognition, so when he could approve a youngster's conduct and application, he would award him a diminutive ticket on which, in his beautiful writing, was the word Perfect. By touching up emulation he ruled the school. When ten small tickets were carefully acquired they would be proudly cashed up into a somewhat larger chromo with the same device. Before we call anyone lucky, who takes a prize, let us call him unlucky, who is without the desire to make the effort to win it. It is fine for him to contend to the uttermost for even the meanest prize that is within his reach, because by such strenuous contention, his nature grows and by lack of it, nature decays. A poor boy cannot rival the wealthy, in items of luxury, but in a school he finds himself in a little republic, where the prizes do not fall to the rich, because they are such. A boy out of an humble home may have lacked recognition and to receive it makes him a new creature. To find himself appreciated and well-liked touches a spring at the center of his being. A boy is often made over by the quickening thought that to him might fall one of the little early prizes of life.

_The Impulse From Incentive and Reward_

The fire and the force to do great things were slumbering in Senator Wilson's soul.... "His future course of life," his biographer says, was affected by Mrs. Eastman, who handed him, when he was eight years old, a little book. "Now carry it home with you and read it entirely through and you shall have it." A book he had never owned. To him it was a golden treasure. He hurried home to read it. He coveted the prize. In seven days he called to say that he had read it from end to end. This little book, a Testament, he kept all his living days, saying, that the presentation of it was the starting point in his intellectual life. The reason, as Sir Walter Scott believed, why the pa.s.sion for books so lifts up a poor boy, is that he makes himself a master of what he possesses, before he can acquire more. Queen Judith, a princess of rare accomplishment, promised a finely illuminated book of Saxon poems, to which, her son, Alfred the Great, when young had been listening with enthusiasm, to such of her sons as should the soonest be able to read them. The innate energy of those dormant talents of "the Darling of the English" was roused and he made his name the brightest that adorns Anglo-saxon history. He became the most ill.u.s.trious monarch that ever filled the English throne. He founded the University of Oxford, established trial by jury, and sought to emulate the deeds, to the recital of which he so early loved to listen. It is said that when this promise of the book was made, "Alfred returning to Queen Judith, eagerly inquired if she actually intended to give the book to the person who would soonest learn to read it?" His mother repeated the promise, with a smile of joy at the question; the young prince took the book, found out an instructor, and learned to read, and soon recited all its contents to her.

_The Fascination of Matching Abilities and Efforts_

Oh for some angel visitant to stir the waters of the Bethesda of self-improvement as it was once done by the use of this principle of emulation in our cla.s.s in spelling. Alphabetically the scholars were called out into a line, toeing a crack in the floor. Beginning at the head of the cla.s.s the master puts out the word and those who have studied their lesson pa.s.s above those who have not. It is an unequalled revelation for a boy's later life. How came I at the foot? When one boy has compet.i.tors and they attend to their business and he does not, he will gravitate downward. I had been trained in the catechism to believe that it was first Adam and then Eve, but this theory was upset, when we stood up to spell. I can still see one of those girls stick to the head of the cla.s.s. Blessed be the bad roads, "kind the storm" that housed the girl, for a day, as on her return she went to the foot. At length she modestly said to the master, "Put out any word in the book and I will spell it." With such proficiency we challenged the nearest district school to a spelling match.

_The Tug of War_

Before the interest began to flag, it was understood that as a final test, every body in the house should rise and spell down. With blushing honors, under the spell of emulation, this un.o.btrusive girl would rally her powers, and hold her timid self up to meet all comers by sheer force of a moral courage, unsurpa.s.sed by men who go over the top and look into the cannon's mouth. The audience grows breathless. She clings to her position like that which Oliver Wendell Holmes called The Last Leaf. Our best girl won. Our boys seeing any members of the defeated school would use their two palms for a trumpet and shout the pivotal word, on which our victory turned, "Phthisic." It was a great incitement to strive to equal or excel when a rival was seen to take a reward for doing what we might have done, but didn't. The name of the winner became a household word and was garlanded. I have felt depressed by my consciousness of the unworthiness of the response, that my life has made, to such an excellent instructor in penmanship and spelling. His name is embalmed in all our hearts. The terms of school soon ended. Beyond this we have no record of our eminent teacher's life and as Bunyan says of one of his characters "We saw him no more."

CHAPTER VI

WHERE WE PLAYED MUMBLE-THE-PEG

It is with diffidence that I name a suggestion that has been very much on my heart since retreading these streets and revisiting these early haunts. It is to get rich, not with dollars in the purse, but deposits in the bank of memory. No other human faculty can be more rapidly and strongly and surely developed than an ability to keep things in mind.

Yet many people are making use of methods that impoverish recollection.

Devices are increasing for memory-saving which have the effect of memory destroying. A faculty's development is arrested from want of use. The memory has not grown, but the habit of putting things down with a pencil has developed. Our schedule of work is not unfolded in the mind and committed to memory but is committed to little slips of paper. Things are not carried in the brain but in the pocket and are in danger of being laid off with one's apparel. We feel dependent on the memoranda.

Our best power, that likes to be trusted, that responds to discipline, has no growth, but wastes away instead, owing to defective nutrition, and lack of exercise. The memory falls into a stunted and partially disabled condition. That minister, the most widely read of any American clergyman, sharply points out, that a capacity falling into disuse, falls also into a dying process, and is extirpated and withdrawn. Any capacity kept under, allowed no range or play, suppressed, is soon stupefied and blunted. A man was endowed with a fine faculty, and has not turned it to account, "Take, therefore, the talent from him."

_Developing a Real and Fixed Deformity_

We once had to remember our errands but parents now hand to children a written list. Facts, stories, incidents are not stored in the intellect, but in a cabinet. Mental equipment, then, is all gone in the event of a fire. Instead of being thankful that the cabinet maker was preserved it would have been better to have saved the cabinet. There is more in that than in him.

In the intemperate man the better parts of his nature do not have fair play. His body is disordered, his brain confused, by a succession of trespa.s.ses. All diseases and abuses are self limited. Improvement would come, by a delivery from his baneful habit, and by strengthening his principles. Memory when respected, when it uses its wings and makes nothing of time or distance is an angel power. It is full of rural incidents and has a great deal of nature and of soul in it. The past is not altogether dead. It must be used to enable us to understand the real living history around us. Now look. Do you observe that every child has a health instinct? Intuitively it seeks the open air. A child is not fussy about the weather. Those have the best health that go out under all skies. Take notice that a child's birthright is freedom. When walking with his mother he seeks to unclasp his hand from hers and make a little detour in the gra.s.s along the way. His nature revolts at following, forever, when out for pleasure, a beaten path. Seeing real life reflected, you do not fail to notice, that in coasting, which in childhood could be called, The Great Joy, the girls take a prominent part, and there is no effort by the elders to play the spy nor block the sport. Here are boys and girls together, oblivious of s.e.x, like a family, in beautiful, healthful, animating sport. It is remarkable that coasting keeps first place, seeing that it involves climbing up as well as sliding down. The return walk, involving a change of position, an interchange of mind, a fine spirit of comradeship, a greatly increased intake of ozone became for a fact a cordial of incredible virtue. G.o.d sets all little children playing for this. He lays the necessity of play upon them, and the restless little fellows hunger and thirst for physical activities. On a holiday the city is emptied into the country to enjoy for a few hours the true conditions of a healthy physical condition.

_An Increased Reverence for the Human Organization_

The bashful athlete, as if by mere chance, takes hold of the rope just opposite to the pretty girl of the party, I mean to one of the pretty girls of the party, whose ear he wishes to command. As the boys owned the sleds, the spirit of gallantry greatly promoted proprietorship, in a double runner, which was vital to the social spirit of the sport. One that could fly was the ideal aimed at. It seemed animate. It was well shod. A heavy load gave momentum. It was guided with rare judgment, watched, compared with others, improved, made to look better, until its a.s.sociated owners prided themselves in it, as a thing of life and beauty and speed, as mariners do in a ship. Some people have to go abroad to find folks who seem eager for an excuse to get out, to even take their meals in the open air. The European seems chafed in his own house. He takes his supper with his family in the face of all the world, and enjoys the publicity. He walks about to see how other families are faring, and they do not resent it. It would not disturb him to take his dinner on the side-walk on Broadway. So in Southern California, n.o.body shuts a door. The weather, being about like our April, the barber shops and restaurants have no heat and often a strong current of air, that the natives would enjoy, came streaming in through wide-open doors and windows.

_The Open-door Policy_

Book stores were not warmed at all. One morning at breakfast I rose and put on my overcoat, and a visitor at the next table, at the conclusion of the meal said, What part of the country do you come from, that you have to put on your overcoat? The reason those people put their doctors out of business is not alone in the climate but in their becoming accustomed to living in G.o.d's great and good out-of-doors. We could live much colder than we do, and live more largely out of doors, and reap at least some of the benefits that people gain by going abroad.

In looking over the familiar places, when revisiting the earth, that were once the haunts of the idlers of the town, I was struck by the entire absence of whittling in which they formerly engaged. Who could reckon their indebtedness to the pine, which supplied the favorite material? Each man kept in pretty good order, if he owned nothing else, a fine piece of cutlery, with a history which he had made familiar to the minds of his easy-going a.s.sociates. To whittle with an edgeless knife is dull sport, hence at intervals, each loafer would lay his right foot upon his left knee, and upon the leather of his heavy boot characteristic of that day, would strop the blunt blade until he had put it again on edge.

_Our Knives Confiscated by Teachers_

Every loss is thought to have its compensation. If whittling is out of vogue, the benches before the boys at school are, for that reason, better preserved. A common present to a boy in that day was a pretty good knife. Boys are very imitative. They sought to whittle and would notch the school desks until their edges were serried into a semblance of a cross-cut saw. As the term of school wore on the teacher had made himself the custodian of most of the fancy hardware owned by the ingenious scholars. Not remote from the school-house door we turn aside and stand over the identical spot where we sat, with our heels wide apart, facing a chum, and played mumble-the-peg, or mumblety-peg, as the boys p.r.o.nounced it.

"The boys were playing some old game, beneath that same old tree; I have forgot the name just now,--you've played the same with me, On that same spot; 'twas played with knives, by throwing so and so; The loser had a task to do,--there, twenty years ago."

As the knives were thrown from a series of positions, the winner would show himself something of the savage still, for when the loser failed to make the knife blade stick in the ground, he would, with the heavy handle of the knife, drive a peg into the ground, by a certain number of blows, which the loser was compelled to draw out with his teeth. The severity of the penalty was not in using a long peg, like a wooden tooth-pick, but a short one that could still be struck a blow or two after it was below the surface of the soil. Thus the unskillful player had to root for it, while the boys, being called together, encircled him and jeered.

_Happy Hours by Living Streams_

The appearance and needs of this dirty-faced boy caused the whole bunch to hie away to the swimming-hole. The Romans seem always to have been looking out for places to bathe and always finding them. So with boys.

Where is the boy that did not strive to get to the water? Who is there that did not, in his youth, love some stream? Here is the landscape toward which the mind, during the interval of a generation, has fondly turned. Last summer I followed the same old path to exactly the same square foot of ground on the willow-lined sh.o.r.e from which I had a hundred times stepped into the stream. I could locate exactly the spot where a bigger boy, who wanted to race, raised an oar and told me to jump over to lighten the boat, which I had to do, and there in deep water, as it was sink or swim, survive or perish, I paddled the best I could and learned to swim in one short, self-taught lesson.

_Healing in the Pool_

This ill.u.s.trates again the health instincts of boys which they seek to obey without knowing the why and wherefore of the feeling that impels them to bathe often. Swedenborg had to have a revelation from heaven to enable him to catch a glimpse of his malady which he ought to have known by intuition. His nature was all the time complaining, and what an expression that is when men speak of their "complaints," when by pains, which are warnings, nature is reporting her grievances at head-quarters.

But the heavens were opened and Swedenborg went into ecstasy over the kindness of the angel whose message to him was a warning not to eat so much. The body shows divine workmanship as well as the soul. When young we follow nature and the result is a red-blooded, vigorous youngster, and if, as we went on in life, we had souls enough to appreciate the free air and sunlight with their health-giving properties, which are so lavishly bestowed upon us, we should better reverence the temple in which the spirit dwells. A recent a.s.sociation formed in Boston for the erection of a monument to Franklin, used in the picture, on their certificate of membership, the figure of Franklin with a kite leaning against him and a view of the telegraph. The kite employed by the philosopher in his experiment is a plaything of the young, while the experiment it served to make so successful, is the last word in science when applied to light, heat and transportation. The picture shows the connection between our sport and the great realities of life.

_And That Reminds Me_

Play underlies the future responsibilities and events of life.

Recreation has a direct relation to efficiency. I wish that some boys that I know would play a little more. To watch boys is to study their character. The story of a boy's life deserves to be written as well as the life of a man. A boy has been pointed out who on returning from school is seized and imprisoned in a back parlor with nothing to look at but his weary lessons. He is pining. His eye needs brightening. His blood wants reddening. An Oriental traveler, watching a game of cricket, was astonished to hear that some of those playing were rich. He asked why they did not pay some poor people to do it for them. The play will show itself in still greater riches when radical important work is undertaken and when an entire revolution in the world's methods is to be accomplished. Exercise, like mathematics, cannot be seized by might nor purchased by money. It is not true that every hour taken from a child's play is an hour saved. In some cases, where a boy is given a little time to play, it is done grudgingly. Thinking now of efficiency they hire, here, leaders to teach children to play. Vivacious representatives of the Young Women's Christian a.s.sociation sent word through the little villages along the Volga that there would be games for the Russian children on the village squares. These refugee children had seen so many sorrows that they had forgotten that they were young. Whole towns turned out. They looked on in wonder. "Have you brought us bread?" they asked, as the games were about to be started. The spirit of joy had forsaken them and needed to be recalled. Little games of compet.i.tion and emulation, that were mirth-producing and health-giving, gave the impression that "Some angels must have been at play." As Th.o.r.eau says of animals, so we may say of human beings, that their most important part is their anima, their vital spirit.

_One of Life's Schools_

When revisiting the earth I met on intimate terms a cla.s.smate. I was in and out of his place of business many times. He had plenty to do.

Indeed he had too much to do. The distinct impression he made upon me was, that he was being hurried, all the time, a little faster than he could well travel. Hurry, if continuous, becomes simply worry under another name. Let a person catechize his own experiences on this subject: it will have a salutary effect. He drew me into a confidential conversation, in which he said, that he was not earning a good living and asked me what I thought of his situation. I advised him at once to take a vacation and refresh his mind. He was working like a quarry slave. A person needs to stand away from a house to see it. He needed to readjust himself. His mind had lost its spring. A little recreation would do him more good, than the same time in the treadmill. Sometimes you see that a man made up what mind he has, when he was too tired; it was no proper expression of him.

_Loafing and Laboring_

What was once play has become work and what was once work in the garden, wood-yard, and barn may now become play. A person can stop work and yet not have any recreation. When a person after excessive physical exertion is resting he is not recreating. You do not say of persons at rest that "they shout for joy, they also sing." After sunset, the lonely twilight hours, with Jacob, represented the accepted, needed rest and after that came the pensive reverie, the dream and with it the ladder and the angel ministration. In his own person, every one must have noticed, that after a period of rest, often as late as Sabbath afternoon, come the holy influences of the hour, the music that is audible to the fine ear of thought, the stillness, the purity, the balm. A man, who is busy all the time or tired all the time, breaks the curfew law of G.o.d. The evening concentrates the retrospect, also the prospect of our lives. If you are communing with a confidential friend you do not like to have any body else talking in the room at the same time. You want to become attuned, like musicians, about to begin to play.

_Foibles of the Famous_