The First White Man of the West | Page 5

every direction of the compass, flaxen-headed boys and girls, clad in homespun, brushing away the early dews, as they hied to the place, where the Hibernian, clothed in his brief authority, sometimes perpetrated applications of birch without rhyme or reason; but much oftener allowed his authority to be trampled upon, according as the severe or loving humor prevailed. This vacillating administration was calculated for any result, rather than securing the affectionate respect of the children. Scarcely the first quarter had elapsed, before materials for revolt had germinated under the very throne of the school-master.
Young Boone, at this time, had reached the second stage of teaching the young idea how to shoot. His satchel already held paper marked with those mysterious hieroglyphics, vulgarly called _pot-hooks_, intended to be gradually transformed to those clerkly characters, which are called hand-writing.
The master's throne was a block of a huge tree, and could not be said, in any sense, to be a cushion of down. Of course, by the time he had heard the first lessons of the morning, the master was accustomed to let loose his noisy subjects, to wanton and bound on the grass, while he took a turn abroad to refresh himself from his wearying duties. While he was thus unbending his mind, the observant urchins had remarked, that he always directed his walk to a deep grove not far distant. They had, possibly, divined that the unequal tempers of his mind, and his rapid transitions from good nature to tyrannical moroseness, and the reverse, were connected with these promenades. The curiosity of young Boone had been partially excited. An opportunity soon offered to gratify it.
Having one day received the accustomed permission to retire a few minutes from school, the darting of a squirrel across a fallen tree, as he went abroad, awakened his ruling passion. He sprang after the nimble animal, until he found himself at the very spot, where he had observed his school-master to pause in his promenades. His attention was arrested by observing a kind of opening under a little arbor, thickly covered with a mat of vines. Thinking, perhaps, that it was the retreat of some animal, he thrust in his hand, and to his surprise drew forth a glass bottle, partly full of whisky. The enigma of his master's walks and inequalities of temper stood immediately deciphered. After the reflection of a moment, he carefully replaced the bottle in its position, and returned to his place in school. In the evening he communicated his discovery and the result of his meditations to the larger boys of the school on their way home. They were ripe for revolt, and the issue of their caucus follows:
They were sufficiently acquainted with fever and ague, to have experimented the nature of tartar emetic. They procured a bottle exactly like the master's, filled with whisky, in which a copious quantity of emetic had been dissolved. Early in the morning, they removed the school-master's bottle, and replaced it by theirs, and hurried back to their places, panting with restrained curiosity, and a desire to see what results would come from their medical mixture.
The accustomed hour for intermission came. The master took his usual promenade, and the children hastened back with uncommon eagerness to resume their seats and their lessons. The countenance of the master alternately red and pale, gave portent of an approaching storm.
"Recite your grammar lesson," said he, in a growling tone, to one of the older boys.
"How many parts of speech are there?"
"Seven, sir," timidly answered the boy.
"Seven, you numscull! is that the way you get your lesson?" Forthwith descended a shower of blows on his devoted head.
"On what continent is Ireland?" said he, turning from him in wrath to another boy. The boy saw the shower pre-determined to fall, and the medicine giving evident signs of having taken effect. Before he could answer, "I reckon on the continent of England," he was gathering an ample tithe of drubbing.
"Come and recite your lesson in arithmetic?" said he to Boone, in a voice of thunder. The usually rubicund face of the Irishman was by this time a deadly pale. Slate in hand, the docile lad presented himself before his master.
"Take six from nine, and what remain?"
"Three, sir."
"True. That will answer for whole numbers, now for your fractions. Take three-quarters from an integer, and what remains?"
"The whole."
"You blockhead! you numscull!" exclaimed the master, as the strokes fell like a hail shower; "let me hear you demonstrate that."
"If I subtract one bottle of whisky, and replace it with one in which I have mixed an emetic, will not the whole remain, if nobody drinks it?"
By this time the medicine was taking fearful effect. The united acclamations and shouts of the children, and the discovery of the compounder of his medicament, in no degree