Volume II Part 19 (2/2)
As a consequence of this union, social relations began to be established between the two schools. Mrs. Barker, of an occasional evening, wished to run down and visit her sister. If Mr. Barker was engaged in quarrying a page of Cicero out of some stony boy in whom nature had never made any Latin deposit, or had just put a fresh batch of offenders into the penal oven of untimely bed, and felt compelled to run up now and then to keep up the fire under them, by a harrowing description of the way their parents would feel if they knew of their behavior--an instrument dear to Mr. Barker as a favorite poker to a boss-baker in love with his profession--then, after a clucking noise, indicative of how much he would like to chuck her under the chin, but for the presence of company, Mr. Barker would coo to Mrs. Barker, ”Lovey, your pick, sweet!” waving his hand comprehensively over the whole school-room; or ”Dear, suppose we say Briggs, or Chunks, or Thirlwall,” as the case might be. The only difficulty about Briggs was clothes. That used to be obviated by a selection from the trunks of intimate friends; and Briggs was such a nice boy, that it was a real gratification to see him with your best jacket on. Many's the time the old fellow has said to Chunks or me, ”What a blessing that I grew! If I hadn't, how could I ever wear your trousers?” In process of time these occasional visits, as escort to Mrs.
Barker, expanded into an attendance of all the older boys (when not in bed for moral baking purposes) upon a series of bi-monthly soirees, given by the remaining Miss Moodle, with a superficial view to her pupils' attainment of ease in society; and a material substratum of sandwiches, which Miss Moodle preferred to see, through the atmosphere of refinement and intellectuality, as ”a simple repast.” To this was occasionally added a refreshment, which I have seen elsewhere only at Sunday-school picnics,--a mild tap of slightly sweetened water, which tasted as if lemons had formerly been kept in the pail it was made in;--only for Sunday-schools they make it strong at the outset, and add water during the hymns, with a vague but praiseworthy expectation that, in view of the sacredness of the occasion, there will be some miraculous interposition, as in the case of the widow's cruse, to keep the beverage up to proof; while Miss Moodle's liquor preserved throughout the evening a weakness of which generous natures scorned to take advantage beyond the first tumbler.
At this portion of my career I was dawned upon by Miss Tucker. From mature years I look back with a shudder upon the number of parchmenty sandwiches which I ate, the reservoirs of lemony water which I drank, in order to be in that lovely creature's society. I experienced agonies in thinking how much longer it might be before I could get a coat with tails, when I calculated how soon she would be putting up her back hair.
Her eyes were as blue as I was when I thought she liked Briggs; and she had a complexion compared with which strawberries and cream were nowhere. When she was sent to the piano, to show people what the Moodle system could do in the way of a musical education, I fell into a cataleptic state and floated off upon a flood of harmony. Miss Moodle and her mits, self and lemon kids, even the sleepless eye of Barker, watching for an indiscretion, upon the strength of which he might defensibly send somebody to bed the next Sat.u.r.day afternoon, all vanished from before me, swallowed up in a mild glory, which contained but two objects,--an angel with low neck and short sleeves, and an insensate hippopotamus of a piano, which did not wriggle all over with ecstasy when her white fingers tickled him.
At such moments I would gladly have gone down on all fours, and had a key-board mortised into my side at any expense of personal torture, if Miss Tucker could only have played a piece on me, and herself been conscious of the chords she was awakening inside my jacket. I loved her to that degree that my hair never seemed brushed enough when I beheld her; and I quite spoiled the shape of my best boots through an elevation of the instep, caused by putting a rolled-up pair of stockings inside each heel, to approximate the manly stature, at our bi-monthly meetings.
Even her friend, Miss Crickey, a mealy-faced little girl, with saffron hair, who had been pushed by Miss Moodle so far into the higher branches, that she had a look of being perpetually frightened to death with the expectation of hearing them crack and let her down from a great height,--seemed beautiful to me from the mere fact of daily breathing the same air with such an angel, sharing her liquorice-stick, and borrowing her sweet little thimble.
I had other reasons for prejudice in Miss Crickey's favor. She was the only person to whom I could talk freely regarding the depth of my pa.s.sion for Miss Tucker. Not even to the object of that tremendous feeling could I utter a syllable which seemed in any way adequate. With an overpowering consciousness how ridiculous it was, and not only so, but how far from original, I could give her papers of lemon Jackson-b.a.l.l.s, hinting simultaneously that, though plump as her cheeks, they were not half so sweet; and through a figure, whose correct name I have since learned to be periphrasis, I could suggest how much my soul yearned to expire on her ruby lips, by asking if she had ever played doorkeeper; regretting that the atmosphere of refinement and intellectuality did not admit of that healthful recreation at Moodle's, and begging her to guess whom I would call out if I were doorkeeper myself. When she opened her blue eyes innocently, and said, ”Miss Crickey?” the intimation was rejected with a melancholy dissatisfaction, which would have been disdain but for the character of my feelings to its source. And when, on my pressing her for the name of the favored mortal whom she would call out if she were doorkeeper, she slyly dropped her eyes and asked if Briggs sounded any thing like it, I savagely refused to consider the proposition at all, and for the rest of the evening ate sandwiches to that degree I wonder my life was not despaired of, and fled for relief to the lemony bowl. The result of this mad vortex having been colic and calomel, after my return to Barker's on that evening, I foreswore such dangerous excesses at the next bi-monthly; but putting a larger pair of stockings in each boot-heel, to impress Miss Tucker with a sense of what she had lost, I devoted myself during the earlier part of the evening to a growing young woman, of the name of Wagstaff, considerably older than myself and runing straight up and down from whatever side one might contemplate her. Her conversation was not entertaining, unless from the Chinese point of view, which, I understand, distinctly favors monosyllables, and she giggled at me so persistently that I feared Miss Tucker would think I must be making myself ridiculous; but, on her being sent to the piano, I stood and turned over her music with a consciousness that if I ever looked impressive it was then. All this I did in the effort to seem gay, although my heart was breaking. I had no comfort on earth save the thought that I had been brutal to Briggs, and that he sat in an obscure corner of the room among some little girls in Long Division, hiding, behind an a.s.sistant teacher's skirts, the whitey-brown toe which my blacking-brush refused to refresh, while I bore my grief upon a pair of new boots plentifully provided with squeak-leather. When Miss Tucker slipped a little piece of paper into my hand, as I made a hollow show of pa.s.sing her the sandwiches, I came very near dropping the plate; and when I had a chance to open it un.o.bserved, and read the words, ”Are you mad with me?” I could not occupy my cold and dreary pinnacle a moment longer, but sought an early opportunity of squeezing her hand two seats behind the voluminous asylum of Briggs's toes, and whispering, slightly confused by intensity of feeling, that if I had done any thing I was sorry for, I was willing to be forgiven. From that moment I was Miss Tucker's slave. Oh, woman, woman! The string on which you play us is as long as life; it ties your baby-bib; it laces your queenly bodice; and on its slenderest tag we dangle everywhere!--_Little Briggs and I._ (_From Little Brother and Other Genre Pictures_.)
SELECTIONS FROM A BRACE OF BOYS.
I am a bachelor uncle. That, as a mere fact, might happen to anybody; but I am a bachelor uncle by internal fitness. I am one essentially, just as I am an individual of the Caucasian division of the human race; and if, through untoward circ.u.mstances,--which Heaven forbid,--I should lose my present position, I shouldn't be surprised if you saw me out in the _Herald_ under ”Situations Wanted--Males.” Thanks to a marrying tendency in the rest of my family, I have now little need to advertise, all the business being thrown into my way which a single member of my profession can attend to....
I meander, like a desultory, placid river of an old bachelor as I am, through the flowery mead of several nurseries. I am detained by all the little roots that run down into me to drink happiness, but I linger longest among the children of my sister Lu.
Lu married Mr. Lovegrove. He is a merchant, retired with a fortune ama.s.sed by the old-fas.h.i.+oned, slow processes of trade, and regards the mercantile life of the present day only as so much greed and gambling Christianly baptized.... Lu is my favorite sister; Lovegrove an unusually good article of brother-in-law and I cannot say that any of my nieces and nephews interest me more than their two children, Daniel and Billy, who are more unlike than words can paint them. They are far apart in point of years; Daniel is twenty-two, Billy eleven. I was reminded of this fact the other day by Billy, as he stood between my legs, scowling at his book of sums.
”'A boy has eighty-five turnips, and gives his sister thirty,'--pretty present for a girl, isn't it?” said Billy, with an air of supreme contempt. ”Could _you_ stand such stuff,--say?”
I put on my instructive face and answered,--
”Well, my dear Billy, you know that arithmetic is necessary to you if you mean to be an industrious man and succeed in business. Suppose your parents were to lose all their property, what would become of them without a little son who could make money and keep accounts?”
”Oh,” said Billy, with surprise. ”Hasn't father got enough stamps to see him through?”
”He has now, I hope; but people don't always keep them. Suppose they should go by some accident, when your father was too old to make any more stamps for himself?”
”You haven't thought of brother Daniel--”
True; for n.o.body ever had, in connection with the active employments of life.
”No, Billy,” I replied, ”I forgot him; but then, you know, Daniel is more of a student than a business man, and--”
”O Uncle Teddy! you don't think I mean he'd support them? I meant I'd have to take care of father and mother, and him too, when they'd all got to be old people together. Just think! I'm eleven, and he's twenty-two so he is just twice as old as I am. How old are you?”
”Forty, Billy, last August.”
”Well, you aren't so awful old, and when I get to be as old as you, Daniel will be eighty. Seth Kendall's grandfather isn't more than that, and he has to be fed with a spoon, and a nurse puts him to bed, and wheels him round in a chair like a baby. That takes the stamps, I bet!
Well, I'll tell you how I'll keep my accounts; I'll have a stick, like Robinson Crusoe, and every time I make a toadskin I'll gouge a piece out of one side of the stick, and every time I spend one I'll gouge a piece out of the other.”
”Spend a _what_?” said the gentle and astonished voice of my sister Lu, who, unperceived, had slipped into the room.
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