The Gentleman from Everywhere | Page 7

to wash your dirty dishes?" I was driven from the
house at the point of the boot. That daughter is to-day shaking and
twitching with St. Vitus's dance, a physical and mental wreck from
overstudy, causing nervous exhaustion and despair.
Hundreds of girls throughout our country who might have been good
housekeepers, are to-day useless invalids, made so by what is called
"higher education." Hundreds of boys, who might have become
successful farmers and mechanics, are now dissipating in beer shops
while waiting in vain for lily-fingered positions as bookkeepers or
teachers. In scores of New England towns, one man, employed to fill
the heads of a reluctant few with the dead languages, receives more
salary than all the other teachers combined.
It seems to require a surgical operation to get the fact through our thick
heads, that our school system demands radical reform from top to
bottom to the end that hands as well as heads may receive technical
bread-and-butter, practical education.
I was a victim of this elective-study craze, and with the usual stupidity
displayed by a child when left to decide what he shall do, I chose Latin

as my principal study in this common district school, because I fancied
it smacked of erudition.
The teacher, knowing no more than myself of the language, set me to
committing to memory the whole of Andrews' Latin Grammar. I gained
the important information that "_sto, fido, confido, assuesco_, and
_preditus_" govern the ablative, and other valuable lore; but when I
asked the teacher where the Latin vernacular came in, she replied that
that would come to me later--that I must "open my mouth and shut my
eyes while she gave me something to make me wise." A solemn awe
not unmixed with envy pervaded the schoolroom as I, parrot-like,
rattled off this valueless jargon of a people dead for hundreds of years.
As this study possessed no interest for me, I naturally dropped into
mischief, and being caught one day with a distorted picture of the
teacher on my slate with the following suggestive poem lines beneath
it:--"Savage by name and savage by nature, I hope the Lord will take
your breath before you lick us all to death,"--I was chased about the
room by the angry pedagoguess until I leaped through the back window,
and the hole made in the bank by my head is pointed out to this day as
a warning to recalcitrant pupils.
[Illustration: "Floating 'Neath the Trees of Mill River."]
I refused to return to this temple of wisdom, and digging a hole into the
haymow, secreted myself therein, pulling the hole in after me. Here I
would remain during school hours, watching through a crevice cut in
the side of the barn, my father who made the air resound with threats of
what he would do if I did not at once return to my education mill. Here
I was often joined by a congenial spirit, and we played cards which
were regarded as the emissaries of Satan by my religious parents; then
we would sally forth with masked faces and wooden guns, and inspired
by dime novels, overthrow the walls of children's playhouses, throw
rocks against the schoolhouse, bully the small boys almost into fits,
hook the neighbors' eggs, corn, melons and apples, which we devoured
at leisure in a hidden hut in the woods.
When the spirit moved, we would "swipe" a neighbor's skiff and go

floating and paddling beneath the overarching trees of Mill River,
lazily watching the muskrats sliding down the banks and sporting in the
water or building their huts of mud, sticks and leaves; the fish-hawk,
plunging beneath the surface and emerging with a struggling victim in
his talons which he bore away to a tree-top to tear and eat; then a timid
wood duck casting suspicious glances as it glided across a cove,
secreting her little ones in the swamp; then a crane standing on one
long leg motionless as a statue, watching with half-closed eyes for a
mud-eel for its dinner.
Then we would imitate those animal murderers, by catching some fish
which we broiled to satisfy our carnivorous appetites. It was delightful
to float in that tiny boat, gazing through the green canopy of leaves at
the great white clouds sailing over like ships upon the sea, listening to
the ecstatic trilling of the orioles, and the flute-like melodies of the
mockingbird of the north.
We would watch the delicate traceries of the water gardens through
which the mild-eyed stickle-backs sailed serenely, having implicit
confidence in the protection of their sharp spinacles, presenting to all
enemies an impervious array of bayonets; the shark-like pickerel
endeavoring to swallow every living thing; the lazy barvel,
everlastingly sucking his sustenance from the animalculae around him;
the turtles, snapping at