Part 11
They had not gone far up the stream before another discovery was made, and two baby snails joined the clam on the seat. Then a crawfish was seen scuttling over the gravel and was added to the collection. By this time the boy was bubbling over with interest and enthusiasm, but when, rounding a bend in the stream, a turtle was discovered sunning himself on a bit of drift-wood, it was evident that the wonders of this wonderful stream had reached their climax. Cautiously the boat was moved toward the turtle’s resting-place, but just before he was reached he quietly slid off into the water. It would not do to leave the lad in such an ocean of disappointment as swallowed him up when that turtle disappeared, so, with landing net in hand, they watched for his reappearance. It seemed hours to the boy before the beady eyes of the turtle were seen looking up at them from the moss where he had found a hiding-place. Then a careful manipulation of the net, a sudden scoop, and the turtle was scrambling about in the bottom of the boat.
“See him snap! Will he bite me? Look at the markings of his shell! How old do you suppose he is? What do turtles eat? I’m going to take him home!”
Questions and exclamations crowded and jostled each other as the eager lad studied his latest prize.
When the captives had been carried to the cabin and duly admired by other members of the family, the question arose as to what should be done with them. Throw them back? Eager protests from their owner. When he was finally convinced that they were not altogether adapted to serve as pocket pieces, he proposed an aquarium, and aquarium it was. An ancient and discarded dish-pan was found, the holes filled with rags, water and rocks supplied, and clams, crawfish, snails and turtles were compelled to live in seeming amity, whatever their personal feelings may have been. Later on other turtles were added to the collection, and a yellow lizard with a blue tail gave the finishing touch to this conglomerate of animal life.
How shall we educate the young? This question, holding first place in the hearts of parents and lovers of children, elicits clamorous and often contradictory answers. The advocate of “cultural” studies finds a sturdy antagonist in the defender of “vocational” training, and school boards make frantic efforts to please everybody, and succeed, as is common in such cases, in pleasing nobody. Meanwhile, our children are the helpless and unfortunate victims of a series of experiments, as the school authorities try out different educational theories.
Far be it from the writer to propose a solution of the difficulty or to proffer any panacea for our educational ills; but in all humility he ventures to suggest the desirability of making it possible for the child to know something about the world in which he lives. Book-learning, essential as it is, is not enough if we would fit the child to live the larger and more joyous life. When we have studied literature and art and philosophy and science, when we have become familiar with the great cities with their bewildering sights and distracting sounds, the finest things remain to be discovered, and these discoveries must be made as we stand open-eyed in the presence of God’s workmanship.
Hills and streams, woods and flowers, bees and birds and butterflies, the flora and fauna of this earth where we have our home for a little time, should, somehow, be brought into the life of the child. The boy who grows up into manhood without being privileged to know the world of nature by personal contact has been robbed. He may be intelligent in many things and a useful member of society, but he has missed out of life some of its deepest satisfactions and purest joys. Indeed, such an one is not symmetrically educated, and is quite likely to be put to shame as the years pass. A story is told of a young woman, able to order her breakfast in six different languages, who, spending some days in the home of a farmer, made most mortifying mistakes concerning the common things of country life. When, coming down to breakfast one morning she discovered a plate of honey on the table, she felt that the time had come for a display of her knowledge and for the discomfiture of those who had laughed at her mistakes, and exclaimed, “Ah! I see that you keep a bee.”
Take the witness box! Yes, I am speaking to you, middle-aged man, city-dweller, slave to business, familiar with paved streets and great buildings, the honk of automobile horns and the love songs of vagrant cats.
“Were you born in the country?”
“Yes.”
“Have you forgotten your boyhood?”
“Forgotten it! Sometimes I can think of nothing else, and always something out of that boyhood is popping up even in the midst of my business undertakings.”
“Do you regret that you were not born in the city?”
“Regret it? Say, you are fooling. I wouldn’t trade the recollections of my boyhood on the farm for the best business block in this city.”
“But it can’t be worth anything to you in a business way. Life in the country doesn’t train one to manufacture gas engines.”
“Well, I’ve never stopped to consider what I owe in the matter of business success to my boyhood in the country, but now that you raise the question, I’m inclined to believe that it gave me pretty good training in some ways for the business in which I am engaged.
“When I came into this business at the age of twenty I was given a place in the shipping department at a salary of seven dollars per week. Now I am at the head of the firm, while many of the fellows who were with me in those days are still working on salary. You see I had the advantage of the city boys in being accustomed to work. On the farm I had my regular tasks. Why, when I was a little chap I wiped the dishes for mother, and when I grew older I had to keep the wood-box filled and go after the cows and pick up potatoes and--but you know what a lot of things there are to do on a farm where ‘a boy can help.
“Now that I think of it, I imagine that I was learning application, industry and self-control--big assets in business. The city-bred boy has never had that schooling. He has not been trained to hold himself to hard and continued effort. It is not his fault, and I do not know that his parents are to be blamed. I have two boys of my own born in the city, and one of the questions which perplexes me most is how to provide them with regular tasks that shall develop their sense of responsibility and cultivate habits of industry and application. Although I could afford to have a man to take care of the lawn and attend to the furnace, I have the boys do this work for their own sakes. It is good as far as it goes, but I am afraid it does not go far enough. They have too much time to spend in doing nothing, and habits of idleness formed in boyhood are likely to stick when one comes to manhood. I do not believe in manufacturing tasks or setting them at work which is not real, for boys are keen observers and you cannot fool them into believing that they are doing something worth while when compelled to take wood from one corner of the cellar and pile it in another corner, and then shift it back again. The man who devises some way of supplying real tasks for the boys of the well-to-do city families will be a public benefactor.
“Now, that you have started the discussion of this subject, how about the physical health and strength that I brought from my country life to the work which I am doing? Of course, we have our sleeping porches and playgrounds and medical inspection in the public schools, and are doing what we can to build sound bodies for our city children, but I suspect that the out-door life of the country boy and his regular exercise and plain food furnish a far and away better physical preparation for the strenuous work of business life than anything we are able to devise for our children in the city.
“You never saw my old home, did you? Well, the house stood at the foot of a hill and close by a little stream. In the summer time the wild strawberries in the meadow above the orchard were so thick that I remember picking a bushel there one day. For raspberries and blackberries we usually went some three or four miles to Babcock Hollow, but once there you could fill a ten-quart pail in no time at all, and they were the sweetest, most luscious berries you ever tasted. Then, in the fall, came apple picking and potato digging and corn cutting and nut gathering. There were dozens of butternut trees in the pasture-lot through which the creek ran, and on Button Hill you could get all the chestnuts you wished. Did you ever gather beechnuts? They are so little that picking them up by hand is slow work. We used to take three or four sheets, spread them under a beech tree, after the first frost had opened the burrs, and then one of the boys would climb the tree and pound the limbs, sending the nuts down upon the sheets in showers.
“But the winters! When there was a good crust on the snow you could start on your sled at the patch of woods on the top of the hill, nearly a mile away, and ride right into our barnyard. I’ve done it many a time. Skating! We could go almost straight away for miles on the river. One night when Jim Gilbert’s people were away from home I got permission to stay all night with him.
I took my skates along and after supper we came down to the river and skated. The moon was full and it was almost as light as day. I must have been careless, for I skated too near an open place and broke through. Jim was just behind me, and, before he could stop or change his course, he had stubbed his toe on me and in he went, head first. The water was shallow, so there was no danger, but we had a mile to walk in our wet clothes, and all the way up hill. I remember that our clothes were frozen stiff when we reached Jim’s house. We built a roaring fire, stripped off our wet clothes and put on some that were dry, and then sat up until one o’clock eating chestnuts and popcorn and talking about what we would do when we were men. Jim had an idea that he would be a lawyer, but the last time I saw him he was selling tooth paste at the county fair.
“In some ways spring in the country is not remarkably attractive. The fields are brown and bare and soggy, and the winds cannot fairly be called zephyrs. As the frost leaves the ground the roads become rivers of mud, and some of the “sinkholes” seem bottomless. Early spring is easily the most unlovely time of the year in the country, but even then life has its brighter side. With the first breath of the south wind the sap begins to leave the roots of the hard maples and the sugar season begins.
“Did you ever work in a sugar-bush? No? Poor fellow! You’ve missed something worth while out of your life. I understand that nowadays they evaporate the sap in shallow pans; we used to boil it in a big iron kettle. We did not have many maples on our place, so I sometimes worked for Deacon Bouton, who had the next farm west of ours. He had a big sugar-bush, and we carried the pails of sap on neck-yokes. When we had a big run of sap we had to boil all night as well as during the day. I’ll never forget one night when we had a feast. There were two boys besides myself: Ed Bouton, the deacon’s son, and John Hammond. Ed had brought forty-five hen’s eggs and John added five goose eggs. We boiled the eggs in the sap, and the three of us ate those forty-five hen’s eggs and started on the goose eggs. For some reason we did not relish them. Possibly the hen’s eggs had taken the keen edge from our appetites.
“But how I’m running on! Regret being born in the country? Do you know that I can shut my eyes and see the hills and meadows and orchard, fairer than any ever put in colours on the canvas? I can see the oriole’s nest swinging from a branch of the big elm in the corner of our yard and the nest of the pewee under the bridge. Just across the road in the meadow are glorious masses of violets, and mother’s peonies and sweet pinks beat anything I’ve ever seen since. When I’m dog-tired from the day’s work it rests me just to think of the quiet and calm and beauty of the old home among the hills.
“And there’s another thing that I want to tell you: when I go into the country I can enjoy it. One of my best friends, born in the city, is bored almost to death every time he tries to take a vacation in the country. He doesn’t know the difference between a hard maple and a tamarack, and asked me once if a woodchuck was likely to attack a human being if not angered. He’s afraid of bees and garter snakes, and even a friendly old “daddy-long-legs” gives him a nervous shock. He can’t enjoy the fields and flowers, for he was brought up on people and bricks. I’d like to be back there at the old place this minute. I’ll bet I could find some raspberries on the bushes that grow in the fence corners along the west road. We used to string them on timothy stalks as we came home from school, and I’ve never tasted any such berries since.”
The witness is through with his testimony and we’ll submit the case to the jury without argument. What do you say, fathers and mothers of the city? Shall your children have a chance to learn nature’s secrets at first hand? Will you give them some time in the open every year, where the work of man has not elbowed the work of God into a corner and out of sight? More, will you help to send the children of the poor, children whose playground is the city street, and to whom the stories of green fields and limpid streams and flowers that belong to any who will gather them, sound like fairy tales--will you give to these children of the tenement and the slums days where the sunshine is not filtered through a bank of smoke and all the ministry of God’s unspoiled work strengthens them for the coming days of toil?
```_But should you hire from his
````dark haunt, beneath the
`````tangled roots
```Of pendent trees, the monarch of
`````the brook,
```Behooves you then to ply your
`````finest art.
```At last, while haply o’er the shaded sun
```Passes a cloud, he desperate takes the death,
```With sullen plunge. At once he darts
`````along,
```Deep-struck, and runs out all the length-
`````ened line;
```And flies aloft, and flounces round the pool,
```Indignant of the guile. With yielding
`````hand,
```That feels him still, yet to his furious
`````course
```Gives way, you, now retiring, following
`````now
```Across the stream, exhaust his idle rage;
```Till, floating broad upon his breathless side,
```And to his fate abandoned, to the shore
```You gayly drag your unresisting prize._
`````--James Thomson,
`````_The Seasons._
XVIII. THE BULLY OF THE UPPER OSWEGATCHIE
F the sucker had gone twenty feet farther up the little brook on his foraging expedition this story would not have been written. However, by the time he had appropriated some ten thousand trout eggs, the hunger which had urged him into the mouth of the brook deserted him, and, as the water was too cold for his liking, he made his way back to the river where he could take a siesta in the pool that he had left that morning.
Just above the spot where the sucker turned about was a bend in the stream, and, passing that, you came upon a reach of shallow water running over the most beautiful bed of gravel in that whole section. It was here that the Bully was born, in the afternoon of the very day when destruction in the form of a predatory sucker came so near to him. Not that he appeared much like a bully in those first hours of conscious existence. In fact he looked more like an animated sliver with a sack suspended from underneath. He moved slowly about the stream in company with a hundred or so other little fellows until the sack had disappeared, and then it was easy to see that he had the advantage of all his comrades in the matter of size at least.
When they began feeding upon the tiny forms of life found in the creek, the Bully soon gained a reputation for pugnaciousness. He did not hesitate to crowd his best friend away from a larva, and, before he was an inch long, he had bitten the left pectoral fin from one of his comrades who had ventured to resist the Bully’s attempt to rob him of a luscious little snail that he had discovered. One day when the Bully was yet a fingerling he joined battle with a chub twice his size, and, although he lost a part of his tail in the fray, and all the spectators thought he was whipped before the conflict had fairly begun, the thought of giving up never occurred to him, and he fought until his foe turned tail and fled into the river, a quarter of a mile away.
He was still living in the brook and had come to be almost four inches in length when he had an experience that shook his nerves somewhat. As he was resting beside a sod a little worm, all bent out of shape, but undeniably of the vermes family, came floating down the stream and he promptly grabbed it. Then came a sharp prick in his lip and something was pulling him out from under the sod. He braced and twisted and threshed about, but all in vain. Up he went out of the water, all the time doing fancy somersaults such as he had never attempted before. A moment later he struck the water with a splash and was soon safely hidden under the sod again. From his hiding-place he watched that worm come floating past him again and yet again, but he had learned caution. Now that he looked closely, he saw that the worm was fastened to the end of a string, and a little later he discovered that this string was tied to a stick which was in the possession of some creature that walked along the bank of the stream. Later on he learned that this strange animal was a small boy and that all members of this species were his enemies. Whether or not he ever realized that he owed his life to the fact that the boy had lost the last of his store hooks and was using a bent pin that day, no one knows.
All that summer the Bully lived in the brook; but when the days grew shorter and it began to freeze he moved with his friends into the river. That winter, when the river was frozen over except in shallow places where the current was swift, he had a narrow escape from a mink. He was talking with a trout much older and larger than himself about the comparative merits of worms and flies as food when a dark form darted towards them with open jaws, and, with one snap, his neighbour was captured and carried away. This foray caused great excitement in the trout colony, and the Bully learned for the first time of the existence of rapacious animals frequenting the banks of the river which made their living by capturing unwary trout.
The following summer he spent in exploring the river above the point where the brook joined it. Here there were hills crowding close in on either side of the river, and rapids were numerous and strong. Practice in rushing up the swift water brought his muscles to such a state of development that every now and then he would spend half an hour in jumping out of the water as far as he could. In fact he entered a jumping contest held under the auspices of the Hemlock Point Trout Club late in July, and carried off the first prize, an enormous blue-bottle fly. The judges on this occasion decided that his jump was two and a half times his own length which would probably make it some twelve inches. It was during this summer that he became expert in taking game on the wing. There is a tradition among the Oswegatchie trout that on one occasion, with a favourable start, he pulled down a “devil’s darning-needle” that was flying eighteen inches above the surface of the water and going at the rate of sixty miles an hour. N. B.--This is merely a tradition and is unsupported by trustworthy historical evidence.
The bullying tendencies waxed strong during this second summer. One dislikes to set it down, but it was about this time that he entered upon those cannibalistic practices in which he persisted for the rest of his life. One dark and chilly day, when all the millers and bugs and flies seemed to have gone into retreat, noon came and found him with a gnawing pain in his stomach which made him almost beside himself. Unfortunately when his hunger was at its height a little trout that was playing tag with some of its fellows happened to jostle him. In his anger the Bully snapped at and swallowed him. For a moment he was conscience-stricken, and then, when he realized what a delicious morsel he had taken to himself, he turned to and grabbed up fifteen other little members of his family without stopping to take breath. Henceforth he was looked upon as a social outcast by the best people in troutdom and his only intimacies were among the tough and lawless members of the community. Doubtless he brooded over this ostracism, and grew bitter as he realized the evident contempt in which he was held. At any rate, he waxed more and more cantankerous and disagreeable as he grew bigger and stronger.
A record of all the experiences through which the Bully passed would fill a volume. Only a few of the many can be set down in this brief biography, and those the more important ones. When he was three years old he was recognized as the boss of the river above the brook. For some time stories had come up stream of the prowess of a big trout living five miles down the stream in a mill pond. Confident in his ability to whip anything that wore fins, the Bully started down stream one May morning bent upon challenging this far-famed warrior to mortal combat. He had gone about one-half the distance and had stopped to rest for a little in a riffle, head up stream, when a strange looking fly came hopping and dancing across the water. It was many coloured, but that which attracted him most strongly was its body, which shone like burnished silver. Without the least hesitation, he made a grab for it only to feel that same stinging in the lip which followed upon his experience with the crooked worm when he was a little fellow. Fortunately for him he had touched the fly lightly, and, while he felt a pull for an instant, it was only in the skin of his lip, and that, for some strange reason, was torn. Fie started down stream vowing that never again would he snap at a fly with a silver body.
By the second morning he had reached the pond, and found himself among strangers. It did not take long for him to become involved in a scrap with a trout of about his own size from which he quickly emerged triumphant. Had the pond not furnished seemingly unlimited supplies of fat chubs he would have proceeded to give free rein to his cannibalistic inclinations; but as it was less trouble to catch the chubs than his own blood relations, he filled himself with the former, and then took a nap under the shadow of a big stump, the top of which stood a little way out of the water.
A little before sundown, when he was quite refreshed and had begun to think of taking a little turn about the pond in search of adventure, he heard the sound of many voices, and, looking out from his hiding-place, saw a company of trout moving in his direction. In the lead was his foe of the morning. There, surrounded by an admiring crowd, came the biggest trout that Bully had ever seen. His under jaw projected far beyond its mate and had an ugly upward curve. He was broad across the back and thick through and moved with all the pride of a conquering hero. “Where is he? Show him to me. I’ll make mincemeat of the insolent intruder.” The booming voice of the big fellow left the Bully in no doubt as to the identity of the approaching monster. It was the fighter of whom he was in search.