My Boyhood | Page 9

me as I recall those long-gone days.
Two years ago I hunted up one of those schoolmates in California
whom I had not seen for over sixty years. She was my senior by seven
or eight years, and I had a boy's remembrance of her fresh sweet face,
her kindly eyes and gentle manners. I was greeted by a woman of
eighty-two, with dimmed sight and dulled hearing, but instantly I
recognized some vestiges of the charm and sweetness of my elder
schoolmate of so long ago. No cloud was on her mind or memory and
for an hour we again lived among the old people and scenes.
What a roomful of pupils, many of them young men and women, there
was during those winters, thirty-five or forty each day! In late years

there are never more than five or six. The fountains of population are
drying up more rapidly than are our streams. Of that generous roomful
of young people, many became farmers, a few became business men,
three or four became professional men, and only one, so far as I know,
took to letters; and he, judged by his environment and antecedents, the
last one you would have picked out for such a career. You might have
seen in Jay Gould's Jewish look, bright scholarship, and pride of
manners some promise of an unusual career; but in the boy of his own
age whom he was so fond of wrestling with and of having go home
with him at night, but whose visits he would never return, what was
there indicative of the future? Surely not much that I can now discover.
Jay Gould, who became a sort of Napoleon of finance, early showed a
talent for big business and power to deal with men. He had many
characteristic traits which came out even in his walk. One day in New
York, after more than twenty years since I had known him as a boy, I
was walking up Fifth Avenue, when I saw a man on the other side of
the street, more than a block away, coming toward me, whose gait
arrested my attention as something I had known long before. Who
could it be? I thought, and began to ransack my memory for a clew. I
had seen that gait before. As the man came opposite me I saw he was
Jay Gould. That walk in some subtle way differed from the walk of any
other man I had known. It is a curious psychological fact that the two
men outside my own family of whom I have oftenest dreamed in my
sleep are Emerson and Jay Gould; one to whom I owe so much, the
other to whom I owe nothing; one whose name I revere, the other
whose name I associate, as does the world, with the dark way of
speculative finance. The new expounders of the philosophy of dreams
would probably tell me that I had a secret admiration for Jay Gould. If I
have, it slumbers deeply in my sub-conscious self and awakens only
when my conscious self sleeps.
But I set out to talk of the work on the farm. The threshing was mostly
done in winter with the hickory flail, one shock of fifteen sheaves
making a flooring. On the dry cold days the grain shelled easily. After a
flooring had been thrashed over at least three times, the straw was
bound up again in sheaves, the floor completely raked over and the
grain banked up against the side of the bay. When the pile became so
large it was in the way, it was cleaned up, that is, run through the

fanning mill, one of us shovelling in the grain, another turning the mill,
and a third measuring the grain and putting it into bags, or into the bins
of the granary. One winter when I was a small boy Jonathan Scudder
threshed for us in the barn on the hill. He was in love with my sister
Olly Ann and wanted to make a good impression on the "old folks."
Every night at supper Father would say to him, "Well, Jonathan, how
many shock today?" and they grew more and more, until one day he
reached the limit of fourteen and he was highly complimented on his
day's work. It made an impression on Father, but it did not soften the
heart of Olly Ann. The sound of the flail and the fanning mill is heard
in the farmers' barns no more. The power threshing machine that travels
from farm to farm now does the job in a single day--a few hours of
pandemonium, with now and then a hand or an arm crushed in place of
the days of leisurely swinging of the hickory flail.
The first considerable