A Certain Rich Man | Page 4

not appear again. As the mother read, the afternoon
waned, and when she looked up, she was astonished to see John
standing beside the rock, waist deep in a hole, trying to back down into
it. His face was covered with dirt, and his clothes were wet from the
falling water of the spring that was flowing into the hole he had opened.

In a jiffy she pulled him out, and looking into the hole, saw by the
failing sunlight which shone directly into the place that the child had
uncovered the opening of a cave. But they did not explore it, for the
mother was afraid, and the two came down the hill, the child's head full
of visions of a pirate's treasure, and the mother's full of the whims of
the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
The next day school began in Sycamore Ridge,--for the school and the
church came with the newspaper, Freedom's Banner,--and a new world
opened to the boy, and he forgot the cave, and became interested in
Webster's blue-backed speller. And thus another grown-up person,
"Miss Lucy," came into his world. For with children, men and women
generically are of another order of beings. But Miss Lucy, being John
Barclay's teacher, grew into his daily life on an equality with his dog
and the Hendricks boys, and took a place somewhat lower than his
mother in his list of saints. For Miss Lucy came from Sangamon
County, Illinois, and her father had fought the Indians, and she told the
school as many strange and wonderful things about Illinois as John had
learned from his mother about Haverhill. But his allegiance to the
teacher was only lip service. For at night when he sat digging the gravel
and dirt from the holes in the heels of his copper-toed boots, that he
might wad them with paper to be ready for his skates on the morrow, or
when he sat by the wide fireplace oiling the runners with the steel
curly-cues curving over the toes, or filing a groove in the blades, the
boy's greatest joy was with his mother. Sometimes as she ironed she
told him stories of his father, or when the child was sick and nervous,
as a special favour, on his promise to take the medicine and not ask for
a drink, she would bring her guitar from under the bed and tune it up
and play with a curious little mouse-like touch. And on rare occasions
she would sing to her own shy maidenly accompaniment, her voice
rising scarcely higher than the wind in the sycamore at the spring
outside. The boy remembered only one line of an old song she
sometimes tried to sing: "Sleeping, I dream, love, dream, love, of thee,"
but what the rest of it was, and what it was all about, he never knew;
for when she got that far, she always stopped and came to the bed and
lay beside him, and they both cried, though as a child he did not know
why.

So the winter of 1857 wore away at Sycamore Ridge, and with the
coming of the spring of '58, when the town was formally incorporated,
even into the boy world there came the murmurs of strife and alarms.
The games the boys played were war games. They had battles in the
woods, between the free-state and the pro-slavery men, and
once--twice--three times there marched by on the road real soldiers, and
it was no unusual thing to see a dragoon dismount at the town well and
water his horse. The big boys in school affected spurs, and Miss Lucy
brought to school with her one morning a long bundle, which, when it
was unwrapped, disclosed the sword of her father, Captain Barnes,
presented to him by his admiring soldiers at the close of the "Black
Hawk War." John traded for a tin fife and learned to play "Jaybird"
upon it, though he preferred the jew's-harp, and had a more varied
repertory with it. Was it an era of music, or is childhood the period of
music? Perhaps this land of ours was younger than it is now and sang
more lustily, if not with great precision; for to the man who harks back
over the years, those were days of song. All the world seemed
singing--men in their stores and shops, women at their work, and
children in their schools. And a freckled, barefooted little boy with
sunburned curly hair, in home-made clothes, and with brown bare legs
showing through the rips in his trousers, used to sit alone in the woods
breathing his soul into a mouth-organ--a priceless treasure for which he
had traded two raccoons, an owl, and a prairie dog. But he mastered the
mouth-organ,--it was called a French harp