Tramping on Life | Page 3

rapidly growing city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great, flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one ... and a welter of strange people we then called the "low Irish" came to work in them, and our Mansion Avenue became "Kilkenny Row." And a gang of tough kids sprang up called the "Kilkenny Cats," with which my gang used to fight.
After the "Low Irish" came the "Dagoes" ... and after them the "Hunkies" ... each wilder and more poverty-stricken than the former.
* * * * *
The Industrial Panic of '95 (it was '95, I think) was on ... always very poor since the breaking up of our family, now at times even bread was scarce in the house.
I was going to school, scrawny and freckle-faced and ill-nourished. I had a pet chicken that fortunately grew up to be a hen. It used to lay an egg for me nearly every morning during that hard time.
* * * * *
My early remembrances of school are chiefly olfactory. I didn't like the dirty boy who sat next to me and spit on his slate, rubbing it clean with his sleeve. I loved the use of my yellow, new sponge, especially after the teacher had taught me all about how it had grown on the bottom of the ocean, where divers had to swim far down to bring it up, slanting through the green waters. But the slates of most of the boys stunk vilely with their spittle.
I didn't like the smell of the pig-tailed little girls, either. There was a close soapiness about them that offended me. And yet they attracted me. For I liked them in their funny, kilt-like, swinging dresses. I liked the pudginess of their noses, the shiny apple-glow of their cheeks.
It was wonderful to learn to make letters on a slate. To learn to put down rows of figures and find that one and one, cabalistically, made two, and two and two, four!
It always seemed an age to recess. And the school day was as long as a month is now.
We were ready to laugh at anything ... a grind-organ in the street, a passing huckster crying "potatoes," etc.
I have few distinct memories of my school days. I never went to kindergarten. I entered common school at the age of eight.
My grandfather, after his hegira from Mornington, left behind his library of travels, lives of famous American Statesmen and Business Men, and his Civil War books. Among these books were four treasure troves that set my boy's imagination on fire. They were _Stanley's Adventures in Africa_, Dr. Kane's Book of Polar Explorations, Mungo Park, and, most amazing of all, a huge, sensational book called Savage Races of the World ... this title was followed by a score of harrowing and sensational sub-titles in rubric. I revelled and rolled in this book like a colt let out to first pasture. For days and nights, summer and winter, I fought, hunted, was native to all the world's savage regions in turn, partook gleefully of strange and barbarous customs, naked and skin-painted. I pushed dug-outs and canoes along tropic water-ways where at any moment an enraged hippopotamus might thrust up his snout and overturn me, crunching the boat in two and leaving me a prey to crocodiles ... I killed birds of paradise with poison darts which I blew out of a reed with my nostrils ... I burned the houses of white settlers ... even indulged shudderingly in cannibal feasts.
The one thing that pre-eminently seized my imagination in Savage Races of the World was the frontispiece,--a naked black rushing full-tilt through a tropical forest, his head of hair on fire, a huge feather-duster of dishevelled flame ... somehow this appealed to me as especially romantic. I dreamed of myself as that savage, rushing gloriously through a forest, naked, and crowned with fire like some primitive sun-god. It never once occurred to me how it would hurt to have my hair burning!
* * * * *
When Aunt Millie was taken down with St. Vitus's dance, it afforded me endless amusement. She could hardly lift herself a drink out of a full dipper without spilling two-thirds of the contents on the ground.
Uncle Beck, the Pennsylvania Dutch country doctor who married Aunt Alice, came driving in from Antonville, five miles away, once or twice a week to tend to Millie, free, as we were too poor to pay for a doctor. I remember how Uncle Beck caught me and whipped me with a switch. For I constantly teased Aunt Millie to make her scream and cry.
* * * * *
"Granma," I used to call out, on waking in the morning....
"Yes, Johnnie darling, what is it?"
"Granma, yesterday ... in the woods back of Babson's barn, I killed